Let's Pretend They Are Dead

I once joked that I am of the product of when two black sheep get together and breed. Not actual sheep but the figurative family sheep. Both of my parents are not in the slightest bit what one would call close to their siblings or other bits of immediate family other than possibly me. And the only reason we are close is because  I am one part science fiction mixed with two parts rum. (I might have my ratios off, because I think you muddle up some charm in there and serve it over ice, kind of like a Caipirinha, but I could be exaggerating.)

It isn't easy to find the family connection. In fact it take quite a bit of effort and cheek biting. However I found a way around it, that doesn't make me go cross eyed. All I needed to do was to go back further and try and find the beginning. I am not talking about the beginning where the family ties got frayed, but the beginning of the family itself.  My family has an unspoken motto "Let's Pretend They Are Dead".  If there is something that ruffles our delicate sensibilities, if becomes easier to pretend that they are dead and keep moving than to do the difficult thing and work it out. Nothing cuts like family, and sometimes the cuts never truly heal. 

This motto has worked marvelously in daily life, but has made genealogy quite interesting. I am constantly amazed at what I discover when doing genealogy. I find flawed people in the pages of history.  They are messy with their marriages, rural in their location and tend to spread out like molasses in the sun.  Despite common beliefs, not every one is dead. When you stumble across the living, it is awkward messy and sometimes really beautiful. I am amazed that I found a strong family connection in the headstones of graveyards, and among old census records.  In a time of divorce, remarriage and seven degrees of separation, the realization that the endurance of a blood line lies with in the very breathe you take, is remarkable and humbling.

I think that I found myself a sort of inner peace that I didn't was missing until I took up genealogy. My family is still complicated. It is still messy and incredibly hard to connect with my family, and it may never get better or it might. Connecting the lines between the generations  and solving the mystery of my lineage makes coping with the living a little less horrible.  Nothing is truly ever written in stone, until you are under the stone, and then it is all left up to interpretation.

If you are interested in taking up the rewarding adventure of genealogy, I would highly recommend using Familyseach.org. It is an easy to use site, that does not cost anything. It is a great site for those that can only do genealogy in their spare time. 

Turkey in Mole

Wedding gift 3 years ago!

I am under the belief that almost everything made in a crockpot can be turned into a burrito.  You just have to widen your perspective as to what a burrito can be.  The possibilities are endless.

The William Sonoma Slow Cooker Cookbook that I got as a wedding gift has some of the best burrito filling recipes I have ever tried.  Normally I only one recipe out of this cookbook and it is for the Chili Verde.  The Chili Verde is a fabulous recipe and it is one of my top five burrito fillings.  However, because I have used this Chili Verde recipe before I could not use it for The Challenge.  

We used Chicken. Shh!

Turkey Breast in Mole looked delicious and Mole is not something I make, mostly because it is supposed to take hours.  Slow Cooker takes hours to cook, so it seemed like a perfect match to create a Mole with in.  I feel like crockpots are perfect for the weekends. It allows me to make something hearty and filling without having to spend a huge amount of time fussing over prep work and dishes.

Roma tomatoes from the garden.

Using fresh tomatoes and peppers from my garden made my kitchen smell like salsa. I love salsa.  I also love chocolate, but have never had the ingenuity to combine the two together.  I am pretty sure that a mole is where you take all your favorite ingredients and combine them together into something that defies explanation.

We substituted an onion for a poblano. 

The assembly of everything was not difficult in the slightest, but it did take more dishes than anticipated. Once all the sauce ingredients were sautéed, they then went into a food processor.  My food processor is a jerk, and has a million pieces to it, and if all the pieces aren't put together, then it won't work.  It easily fills the top rack of the dishwasher.   Despite the jerk ways of my food processor, the mole sauce smelled and looked delicious.

This was awesome. 

Tossing everything into the crockpot, I turned it on and tried to forget about it for 5 hours.  It was not easy to forget about the mole, since it was incredibly aromatic. It was spicy and sweet, with a salty tang in the air. It was a beautiful smell.

Shredding the meat into the sauce made me think of everything a enchilada could be if it tried really hard.  If you flip a few pages in the William Sonoma Slow Cooker Cookbook, they had the same idea with using this Turkey Breast In Mole as a filling for enchiladas. I was incredibly pleased with this recipe and will be using is again in the future.

Tart, Pie or Custard?

 I was meeting some good friends for dinner on the grill and offered to bring a dessert. Other than having been raised to never show up empty handed, I wanted to knock out another cookbook from The Challenge.  I have a plethora of cookbooks from the Hermes House Publishing and I have slowly discovered that some of the recipes can be repeated from book to book depending on the theme. Looking into the Desserts cookbook, I decided on a recipe that made me think of macarons.

I love macarons. I am not talking about macaroons, which are the coconut and egg white things that are chewy and for the most part forgettable.  I am talking about french macarons, which are a delicate meringue almond sandwich cookies that are often filled with hopes and dreams, or possibly a jelly or ganache.  The Almond Custard that I found looked like it had all the ingredients that belonged in a macaron recipe.  I have made macarons a couple of times, and the reason that they are crafted from angel tears, is because it takes the patience of a saint to make them.  There is a lot of precision and timing involved in making macaron cookies. The Almond Custard looked a lot simpler to make, and if it tasted like a macaron with half the work, it would certainly be something that I would try again.

Following the instructions exact produced a dense tart-like pie thing. It would win no awards in the beauty department in the way that desserts would go, but it did taste good.  It is more of a custard than I would have expected given the amount of ground almonds that is in it. It is not a replacement for a macaron, but it was not bad.  My preconceived notion that this would taste  like a macaroon ruined some of my appreciation for this tart like pie custard.  I think that if you were looking to make something a little less fruity as a dessert and a bit rich, I would recommend this recipe.  The fruit is understated, because you only use about two tablespoons of what ever jelly you like and it adds a delightful texture to the custard.

Lesson has been learned. Just because the ingredients are mostly the same, it does not mean that the out come is going to be the same.   To me this was a lesson in being judgmental and I am going to try and have a more open mind in the future with recipes and I should probably me more open minded in general.

Dixit: My Rabbit Likes Mushrooms

Dixit is a beautiful game that if you had to compare it to other games, it would be a cross between Pictionary and Apples to Apples with rabbits mixed in for the fun of it.  I discovered Dixit by watching Table Top with Wil Wheaton. I would highly recommend you to check out the Dixit episode on Table Top if you are a visual learner, because  I am going to explain things quite horribly.  (Not intentionally horribly, but I have come to believe that I am one of those people that can over explain, and therefore half kill any interest in playing. Trust me, watch the video if the below doesn't make any sense to you.) 

Yellow Rabbit Forever!

At the beginning of the game, we picked our rabbits. They are cute little wooden rabbits painted various colors. We had a full six players playing so ever rabbit was utilized.  Part of my inner monologue wants to glue little google eyes on the rabbits, but I don't think they make google eyes that small.  The object is to get your rabbit around the board as many times as possible.  Sounds pretty easy. 

Yummy Mushrooms!

The game board is a pretty path full of flowers and mushrooms with little stepping stones to mark progress.  I think the fact that it is full of mushrooms is the key, because some of us that are not that great at the game have their rabbit sitting on a garden path, eating mushrooms. Wooden rabbits love painted mushrooms.  It is a little known board game fact. Or I just have no talent at having anyone pick my card.  I like to think that my rabbit just likes to eat the mushrooms. 

Vote for me!

The person thats turn it is will pick a card out of their hand and put it face down on the table. They give a clue as to what their card is. Every one else puts a card down for that clue. What ever clue is give, you want vague enough that not everyone will get it, but specific enough that someone will get it. You also have to gage your audience as to how literal they are going to take a clue. Once all the cards are gathered, every one but the clue giver gets to vote on which card they think it is.

Clue: Shinning Light

 For example if I gave the clue Shining Light, most people will put a card down that had to do with light.   The  cards in Dixit are beautiful complex works of art and depending on the clue, the players can put almost anything down.   Here are six random cards where put down for  Shining Light. Almost of all them have some sort of light in them and one of them has the absence of light.  The question for the voters is if the person giving the clue is being literal with the clue Shining Light.  

When playing this game, I find I do better if I don't count of my husband to guess my card.  Despite how well he knows me and I know him, we really suck at guessing each others cards. If it is supposed to be one of those old married people bonds, I might develop it in the next ten years, because these last ten years have done not accomplished it yet. He very rarely guesses my card. My suggestion is to try and model your clues to a friend. It took me half a game to figure that out and my rabbit spent a lot of time eating mushrooms on the path and not going anywhere, because I was giving clues that I thought only he would get, and he didn't and neither did anyone else.  

Literal Shining Light

My card I would have played to that clue would be the man in the clouds. I would figure that everyone would put down something that had a light in it, and putting down something the opposite would give the players a pause and would give me at least one vote, which is all I really needed to make any movement on the board. If every one voters for your card, you get no points because you were to specific. I could hope that one person would vote for my cloudy man,  while everyone else would vote for the  literal Shining Light, which a girl in a with a candle inside a light bulb or possibly hand with the torch. 

My Card

You want people to vote for your card, but not every one to vote for your card in order to get your rabbit to move.  This is a beautiful engaging game, that keeps all of the players involved to the very end.  I would highly recommend this game. It is easy to play and a lot of fun. I look forward to the next time I get to play Dixit and I have even ordered an expansion deck, so that I have more beautiful cards to work with in the future.  Until I receive the expansion deck, I will continue the mental debate on if I should glue google eyes on the rabbits. 

I Am All Ears

There is something magical about good food. It brings people together.  Memories happen, and stick with you in a way that you will never forget.  Recently I had the pleasure of making freezer corn.  Freezer corn is not where you buy the corn from the grocery store,  and toss it in bags and call it a day.  Freezer corn is so much more than that. Really good freezer corn is a taste of summer at its finest.

My friend Lizzy let me experience what it really means to make freezer corn happen.  We drove out to the middle of Amish Country, where I saw more horse and buggies than gas stations, and through some family connections, I found myself in a field of corn that was ready to meet its destiny.  I have never been in a corn field. I have lived near plenty of them, and remember them to be full of poison ivy and corn flowers.  They were a thing of beauty and danger to me. Mostly because I have a high allergy to poison ivy and think that cornflowers are pretty. This field had no poison ivy, and was full of ears.  The ears have probably heard it all. I know for a fact it heard me trying to figure out the best way to harvest corn. I may have plucked 25 out of the 200 ears that we left with.  I am absolutely amazed at the speed that some people can pick corn. All 200 ears were in the car with in 20 minutes.  Complete with corn bugs.


 When you have 200 ears to husk and silked, you learn to find a rhythm quickly. You also learn really quickly that corn is a sticky. Not a little sticky, but very sticky. The reason sweet corn is sweet, is because of the amount of sugar and starch at is nestled in each kernel.  I am pretty sure that if you were to juice corn, it would be a type of cement. They type of cement that you would never really be able to get off your hands with a single washing and multiple washing will only make your hands smooth. I wouldn't recommend using corn to smooth your hands. It is not an efficient way to exfoliate.

Once corn has been husked and silked, it gets cooked in a pot. Thirty ears of corn at a time, is still a lot of corn. Once the corn is cooked it had to be cooled. Not just on the out side, but all the way down to the hot molten core. If I had a portal that I could zap the steaming buckets of corn to the middle of the arctic tundra to cool it off faster.  Since I do not have a portal to transport corn to a cooler climate, I got well acquainted with well water. Well water is cold. Cold water and hot corn in a bucket doesn't make the corn cold immediately. Lots of water was used in cooling corn down and  a good bit of it got dumped in my shoe.

I think it might be a tool of magic that was used to take corn off the cob. It resembled a knife stuck in a piece of wood that you run the corn against it like a mandoline. Only there is a higher risk of chopping a finger off if you aren't paying attention.   After the kernels of corn are separated from the cob, you are left with the gold delicious taste of summer.  Tossing it in bags, labeling them and putting them in the freezer for the future, makes it worth all the work that was done.

I feel like I am a better person for having taken such time to put good food on the table, and I feel a lot more appreciative of the work that  it takes to get food to the table. I don't think that most people when they buy a bag of frozen sweet corn in the grocery store, truly know the amount of time it takes to get it there. I already looking forward to thawing a bag of corn in the middle of winter and enjoying of moment where summer dances across my taste buds and reminds me that with great work comes great pay off.

Sweet Sweet Nuts

I will admit that I have a sweet tooth. It is one of the reasons that I have a fair number of dessert cookbooks. Like many people I know, there was a barbecue that I was invited to attend over the Labor Day holiday. One of my esteemed co workers was  hosting and I was pretty excited to attend. Good educate demanded that I should contribute to the feast.  I needed something easy to transport and that wasn't missing a slice out of it. The pie I had made the day before was out of the question, despite how awesome it looked with the ninja battle on the crust, it was no match for the fork and knife battle. 

 Flipping through the You Deserve Dessert cookbook by The Cooking Club of America I settled on something that I knew I could handle making and would not get disgusting if it sat out for hours, or would crumble if I hit a bump to hard on the way there. Sugared Pecans  seemed like the best option.  I had pecans in the freezer and cinnamon and sugar didn't sound too dangerous.  It was probably about as dangerous as getting lost in the driveway. 

Truth be told there is some danger in melting the sugar and cinnamon together on the stove until all the sugar has liquified, however the real danger is not in sugary molten goodness, but in the end product.   Dividing the nuts between home and the barbecue it quickly became apparent that the pecans were pleasing to the palate. It was really easy to try just one or two and then go back for one or two more.   

I have a couple of books from the Cooking Club of America that I had some what been gifted. It was one of those gifts that you either pick something out or your get the entire collection. I did not need the entire collection, nor did I have room for it. I have four Cooking Club of America cookbooks, and sometimes that seems like too many.  Being well acquainted with Taste of Home cook books, the Cooking Club of America cookbooks have the same sort of feel to them. They are all member submissions and all of the recipes ranges from medium to easy cooking skill.  I almost feel like I cheated by using this recipe, because it was so simple, that if I actually thought about how to make Sugared Pecans, I  wouldn't have needed a recipe in the first place. I would not be surprised if I see the same recipes and possibly the same contributors in both of the publications. 

Challenge: 10 of 60 completed!