Tag Archives: Life is good.

Eating the Opponent: St. Louis

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If the Packers play the Rams often enough, I might be convinced to invest in a small home fryer for making fried ravioli. This time, though, we stuck with what we know we can make.

The neighborhood meat market had pork steaks on sale (coincidence? we think not), so Chuck grilled up a batch of St. Louis style pork steaks with an amazing marinade. He boiled up fresh corn from the farmers’ market and some of my freshly harvested carrots and parsnips. Oh, those veggies were good.

I made a St. Louis Mississippi Mud Cake – delicious. Absolutely delicious.

Frankly, between our menu and Aaron Rodgers’ arm, the Rams don’t stand a chance.

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Eating the Opponent goes Purple

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It was a day that wasn’t quite going right – a day to make the best of less-than-average situations. I decided to make our Eating the Opponent San Francisco from scratch instead of going to the store. We combined a home-made rice-a-roni style dish with a simple fish pan fried in butter to suggest Fisherman’s Wharf. I picked a few carrots, parsnips, and one turnip from the garden to enhance the rice-pasta dish. Rice and vegetables could cook well together, I thought.

The carrots were purple. The rice became purple, too.

Purple rice

Purple rice

It was delicious. After cooking in chicken broth, then adding a little maggi sauce, onion, garlic, and despite its hue, we enjoyed every bite.

I must remember these carrots when we play the Minnesota Vikings.

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Call the little girl with pigtails.

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I am a geek-type person. I work in a geek-type office full of people just like me. We’re not all alike, though, and sometimes there is a lack of understanding or odd communication.

Take our phones – please. The phones switched to a new provider with new highly-visual dial-pads. (That is a word. Dial-pads is a word. Hyphenated, even.) Here’s what it looks like.

Hello? Hello?

Hello? Hello?

I am a verbal-linguistic type. I would rather see an abbreviation on the phone or even a passcode to use the many features. As an example, it took me over a year to figure out how to transfer a call. On the old phones, I would put the caller on hold, dial the extension of the next person, and when that person answered, release the hold and let the two of them talk while I hung up and got back to work.

Deep sigh. I lost a few calls and I had to admit to more than a few parents that I didn’t know how to forward a call. I finally asked another teacher how to handle the task. She, another verbal-linguistic type, said:

  • Push the button with the little girl with pigtails on it.
  • Then push the button on the screen for the teacher you want.
  • Then push the little girl with pigtails again.

Got it! I responded. I had been messing up the process by using the hold button, the way we used to do it. Ahem. I can do this.

Which icon? Can you see the little girl?

Which icon? Can you see the little girl?

And then my verbal-linguistic friend and I found out we were interpreting the graphic all wrong. It’s actually three people. One person in front, with the outlines of two others behind him or her. Or it.

Readers, your opinions? What do you see — a group of people or a little girl with pigtails? I’m sure there’s deep meaning here. Let’s have an analysis party in the comments. Meanwhile, I’ll get back to work.

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Oooooooooh, tomatoes!

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There really ought to be a theme song for tomato season. We could sing it to the tune of Oklahoma.

But back to reality, I’ve had a lot of tomatoes become ripe and on the way to ripe. I pick most of them so we can eat them and the wild things in the neighborhood can not.

Tomatoes in the sun

Tomatoes in the sun

from left to right - ripening

from left to right – ripening

tomatoes for freezer

tomatoes for freezer

and last but not least, yellow pear.

and last but not least, yellow pear.

And there’s more where those came from, folks. Lots more.

Readers, do you have an abundance of tomatoes? What will you make with them? You can leave a comment here, and you can see more gardeners with an abundance of something on Harvest Monday at Daphne’s Dandelions.

 

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To Market, To Market – the Meat Market, that is

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Saturday’s usual downtown farmers’ market took a week off while the downtown held the fall festival we call Octoberfest. I dropped Amigo at his barbershop chorus’ booth where he volunteered as food prep, wrapping hot dog and hamburger buns in napkins. As we arrived, the guys already on site were singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to a young woman who had just bought a hamburger.

I left to the tune of “On, Wisconsin” played by the nearby polka band, and Chuck and I stopped at the neighborhood meat market. We love this place. We can wander back to the butcher’s counter and discuss our Eating the Opponent menus and ask for their advice. We came home with this.

Saturday Market

Saturday Market

Okay, I admit it. We didn’t just buy meat. We bought the meat for KC style chili, I picked up a container of hot beef and two mini-lasagnas for those days when I don’t have time or energy to cook. The bread, a good nuts & twigs variety, was day-old and on clearance. What else? Oh, ham salad for Chuck – he just had a tooth pulled, and he’s eating soft and smooth whenever he can.

No fresh vegetables – at least not from this market. My living room and dining room are full of tomatoes in various stages of ripeness. I predict salads and BLTs and anything else that uses tomatoes on our menus this week.

Okay, readers. Do you have a creative way to use tomatoes? I’ll take suggestions.

 

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Happiness – for gardeners & canning fiends

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Happiness, simple pleasures, you name it – it’s all in how you see it. For an avid gardener and one who cans, an autumn Sunday brings simple pleasures such as these.

Tomatoes - enough to make salsa

Tomatoes – enough to make salsa

canning jars in the perfect size and shape for salsa

canning jars in the perfect size and shape for salsa

Good coffee - for a good reason.

Good coffee – for a good reason.

A good reason to pick up Starbucks Pike Place blend coffee: Eating the Opponent, Seattle. Go! Pack! Go!

 

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Kindergarten, already?

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She now has a full head of hair. She speaks very articulately, for a five year old, which means she can hold her own in any conversation. Is she really old enough to go to kindergarten already? It seems just yesterday that we were celebrating her first birthday…

The best toys, of course, are the simple playthings.

A handful of curling ribbon.
A lap full of tissue.
Here, grandma, this is fun. Want to share?

Remember your first birthday, little sweetheart? We do.
And we’re watching your first days of kindergarten – days that will also go quickly, much too quickly.

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A Park full of Art

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A sizable park in the middle of our medium-sized city is within walking distance of the O.K. Chorale. This park, due to its location and size, plays host to a number of special events. Fundraiser Run/Walks sometimes start and end there. A nearby church hosts Bring Your Own Lawn Chair style worship services in the park. And at the end of each July, Art takes over the park in a big, big way.

Our routine is to leave the cars in the garage and walk the half mile or so to the Annual Art Fest. On-street parking reaching almost all the way to our home as it is. I throw a few collapsible shopping bags into my purse, load up my wallet at the ATM in advance, and as soon as the Artists open their booths, we’re there.

Here’s a taste of ceramics:

garden stakes posing with my hat

garden stakes posing with my hat

I have several others from this artist. Last year I suggested a few, and she made a list. The Thai Basil was one she made at my suggestion.

I hope I put the stake in the right pot.

I hope I put the stake in the right pot.

My wallet, my favorite in a long time, started wearing out last spring when the snap came off. It was still usable, so I made a plan to replace it at the same place I’d bought it: Art in the Park.

Left - new. Right - old, but still beautiful.

Left – new. Right – old, but still beautiful.

Hmong needlework is very precise and very beautiful. The wallet on the right has more traditional Hmong shapes and designs. The needlepoint flowers on the left just caught my eye right away. I knew it was my new wallet. It even has a change pocket, one feature lacking in the old one.

Oh, and by the way, the man at the booth smiled when I took out my old wallet to pay for the new. I think I’ve made purchases from his booth in the past.

We bought more – quite a bit more! Chuck carried the bag of purchases and the bag with our lunch in it (grilled pork sandwiches and egg rolls) while I carried my smoothie and the few things that fit in my purse. I can’t show you the other pieces, though. I’ll just say this: I’ve officially started my holiday shopping.

Readers, do you visit local and regional art festivals? What kind of art do you buy?

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Harvest Monday – beans

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Beans! 3 pounds of beans. I started picking a few and then just kept on picking until the bowl was close to overflowing. I weighed it on my tiny kitchen scale and found my first official bean harvest to measure just over 3 lb.

Beans! All from my backyard kitchen garden!

Beans! All from my backyard kitchen garden!

As for other clutter in the picture, the tomatoes were “scratch and dent” at the farmers’ market, and I wanted to make a scratch tomato sauce. Perfect. The odd looking green thing next to the cutting board is a lettuce cutter.

Here's the lettuce.

Here’s the lettuce. 

This is from the market. There’s more outside, ripe for the picking – literally. I picked about a pound of various lettuces Saturday; I smell BLTs in our future.

For more Harvest Monday, visit Daphne’s Dandelions. She has all the links for a productive week in more ways than one.

Note: Voter’s Voice will take its place on Tuesdays from here on out while I post my harvests on Mondays. Tomorrow: get reacquainted with Grandma Daisy, my alter-ego from the future who reflects oh so well on the past.

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ADA is 25 years old!

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I grew up with a minor hearing loss in an age where those with “special needs” were segregated from the masses. I wasn’t channeled into special education, thank goodness. I succeeded along with my friends. I even managed to earn a college degree in music, despite a certain professor who insisted that my hearing loss meant I shouldn’t be in a conservatory of music at all.

Years and years later, a principal at Amigo’s school glared at me and growled, “Don’t throw ADA at me; it makes me angry.” Angry or not, we threw IDEA at him and he had to follow the law.

What’s ADA? What’s IDEA? Why are they important to me and important to my family? I just posted on Connections Academy’s national blog. Read and enjoy!

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