Owing to a particular circumstance – that of Blondie’s boss having a pair of sons who were very into 4-H activities this past year, both of whom raised prize-winning pigs – our freezer is filled with the most delectable assortment of pork products. It seems that part of the whole scheme for students of the agricultural arts in raising such animals … is to partake of the resulting bounty. (Er… they are being raised to provide that sort of thing; ham, chops, bacon, the rest. The kids who do this are perfectly clear on the concept, as was my Granny Jessie, raised on a Pennsylvania farm at the beginning of the last century. Charlotte’s Web aside, farm pigs weren’t intended to be pets, as clever and endearing as they tend to be.)

Anyway, Blondie’s bosses’ family freezer quite overflowed with their share of two pigs, so a portion has been passed on to us, and oh, my! Chops, sausage, thick-cut cured bacon, ham slices, back ribs and a roast which we have already cooked in the slow cooker with two cans of Rotel tomatoes and green chilis for burritos. All of it delectable, succulent, flavorful… the sausage has very little fat in it and the ham? The ham is perfectly divine, unlike anything else I’ve ever eaten, although Honey-Baked does come close in hammy perfection. Believe me, all this will be portioned out and used in recipes which will show it all off to best effect. Should the house catch fire, mine and Blondie’s first thoughts will be for rescuing the pets, my computer, the Yoshida prints… and the contents of the freezer.

This is what the farm-raised stuff must have tasted like, and what the expensive, organic specialty ordered meats must be like, the stuff that I cannot afford, at least until “Adelsverein” and “Truckee’s Trail” are way, way farther up in the Amazon sales ranking than they are at present. In the early 19th century, pork was the meat of American choice, rather than beef – and now I know why. Food of the gods, people, food of the gods!

And if I thought the snails at NIOSA were dubious eats, I hadn’t had a chance to grok the full horror of the guacamole bird – it’s the third one down, here Found this through neo-neocon, here who was running a two-part Jello retrospective. Some of the recipes which Neo’s commenters recollected fondly don’t seem too bad at all – the salmon mousse here was especially savory

You see, there is Jello and there is just plain gelatin mixed with a variety of sweet or savory liquids and poured into an appropriate mold. There is the stuff whipped up by the staff of women’s home magazines trying to catch the eyeballs and not coincidently sell more Jello… and of late there is the parody stuff (like the famous brain mold), and a lot of bizarre things put together for contests; I have heard of Jello aquariums with lettuce for seaweed and Goldfish crackers as… er, gold fish swimming in the pale green lime depths.

And then there is stuff like my mother’s favorite – the wine-orange gelatin dessert, and my own yoghurt cream mold – I posted the recipe in January.

From Joy of Cooking, p. 745 “Wine Gelatin”

Soak 2 TBsp gelatin in ¼ cup cold water. Dissolve it in ¾ cup boiling water and stir in until dissolved, ½ cup sugar. Allow to cool and add 1 ¾ cup orange juice, 6 TBsp lemon juice and 1 cup well-flavored wine. Sugar amount may be adjusted if the orange juice and/or wine are sweet . Pour into sherbet glasses and chill until firm. Serve with cream, whipped cream or custard sauce. (It strikes me that this might be very nice with blood-orange juice and a nice rose wine)

Gelatin molds – not just for Lutheran church suppers!

On Friday night, Blondie and I daringly ventured into one of San Antonio’s most popular and certainly one of the most tasty – in the culinary sense – Fiesta events. Oh, dear, now I shall have to explain San Antonio’s yearly Fiesta to those who have not heard the legend; you may think of it as our peculiar version of Mardi Gras, but it has grown into something considerably more. My some-time employer, a San Antonio native, describes it as a city-wide, week-long block party, but it is a great deal more than that. One upon a time, in the 1890s, it started as a parade to commemorate the victory of the Battle of San Jacinto, where people rode around in carriages and threw flowers at each other. That was the humble beginning with the Battle of Flowers Parade. But everybody wanted to get into the act, and now Fiesta covers ten days, beginning to end and takes in just about every part of town and just about every socio-economic element.

There is a grand debutante coronation, where the two-dozen daughters of local elite wear gowns and trains crusted with about fifty pounds of rhinestones, sequins and metal-thread-embroidery (look, I am not making this up!), a raunchy variety show that sends up the whole concept (not making up that part, either!) , half a dozen elaborate parades – one of which is an evening torch-light parade, and anther is on flat-boats along the San Antonio River - an open-air oyster-bake on the grounds of a local private university and exhibitions, parties, open houses, athletic contests, pageants, shows and concerts all over the city, (schedule for this years’ events is here - one more day to party hearty, people!). It’s an excuse for people to dress up in strange costumes, eat, drink, party hearty and bash total strangers over the head with confetti-filled eggs. Like New Orleans Mardi Gras but on the whole, we like to think it is a bit more cooth. The crowds along the parade routes don’t yell at the girls on the floats to show their tits; they ask them to show their shoes. Under their ornate and gorgeous gowns, they are usually wearing running shoes, or crocs. One year, when rain threatened, one of the debutants was wearing swim fins, which earned her quite a lot of laugher and applause.

The culinary crown-jewel just might be NIOSA, or Night in Old San Antonio, a sprawling food-fest in La Villita, the old ‘Little Village’. It’s sponsored by the San Antonio Conservation Society and runs for four nights. My some-time employer has worked on the set-up for years, and knows practically everyone. He asked if Blondie and I would like to go, as his significant other had volunteered to dress up like a gypsy and work in the fortune-telling booth. I have to admit, Blondie was keener on this than I was. It was hot and sticky last night, thunderstorms threatened, and there would be dire traffic downtown, both coming and going. (Which there was – getting out of the parking garage afterwards was a lengthy agony; 45 minutes to get from where we parked to the exit!)

La Villita was crammed with food booths – and the extraordinary thing is, all of it was pretty good, and not that expensive, even if Some-Time Employer basically comped stuff for us, from booths where his friends and buddies were in charge. It was all organized roughly by ethnic neighborhoods; Mexican foods all clustered together, regular American (mostly barbeque of various animal parts) a hugely popular booth with egg rolls and other orientalia, a French-Cajun section offering jambalaya and delicacies like…umm, snails, and the German neighborhood, who had cannily set up inside the biggest building, the assembly hall where they could benefit from the air conditioning. (Sausages, pretzels and cream-horns, but we were all pretty filled by then). The thing about the food is that many of the food booths have been run by the same set of volunteers for years, and they have done a lot of tinkering with the recipes, besides cooking it all from scratch. (One variant of meat-onna-stick is famous locally – this is one recipe for it, but apparently the original was done with beef hearts. It’s a Peruvian specialty; one of the volunteers adapted the recipe for American palates years ago with considerable success.)

And every third or fourth booth offered soft drinks, water and tasty adult beverages - sangria, wine and beer. We even dared to try escargot; snails to you. Having had a couple of cups of beer first helped. Three dark little wads of gelatinacous phlegm drenched in melted butter and garlic, served on a slice of baguette; which only goes to prove that if you throw enough melted butter and fresh garlic on anything, you have a chance of rendering it edible. Not appetizing, but at least edible. You could have done a whole fifteen-course dinner, just walking from booth to booth, grazing; appetizers, fish course, vegetable, entrée, salad, dessert- eating out of hand as you walked.

In the German area, Blondie and I talked to a re-enactor and local history fan all dressed up like a member of the 19th century Bavarian royal regiment. Blondie refrained from asking him earnestly why he had a feather-duster stuck on top of his hat – since he did have a sword, too. I passed out my ‘books and writers’ business card to a couple of people; I mean, why turn down a chance to network. Got home at nearly midnight, in the middle of a thunderstorm, which mercifully had held off until well after NIOSA closed for the evening. Good times – and I just may do it again, but I think I’ll pass on the snails, next time.

“You have curious things to eat…but I am fed on proper meat” - From R.L Stevensons’ Child’s Garden of Verses

My mother had a fairly open-minded attitude about what exactly constituted edible animal protein; if Dad’s paycheck could afford it, and it was available from any of the places providing our edibles in the 1960s, she would damn well have a go at making something tasty out of it. Beef-heart casserole and fried rabbit made appearances often; so did ground beef in any of a hundred different guises, as well as liver and onions – basically, if it didn’t look too awful and smelled good, we were prepared to be adventurous. Except where liver and onions were concerned, which smelled good but tasted revolting; and which Mom insisted we eat because it was A) cheap and B) good for us.

Generally, that attitude served me well ever since; overseas on Japan and Korea, in Greenland and across Europe. Roast chestnuts – good to go. Unidentified bits of chicken flesh on a skewer, brushed with some kind of soy-based sauce and grilled over a little charcoal brazier – excellent! Stir-fried noodles and strange vegetables – oh, yeah! Strange meaty stews with lots of potatoes, served up in a French youth hostel in the summer of 1970? My traveling friend, Esther Tutwyler and I cheerfully agreed that it probably was horse-meat and ate it anyway. We were hungry and on a budget – and when in Rome, or in this case, Paris – do as the Romans. We were generally baffled by the bread rolls, though – they went hard and inedible after a day or so, and every time we had had a bag-luncheon from whatever youth hostel kitchen was supplying our nutritional needs, there were at least two of them. What to do with the uneaten extras? Seemed kind of ungracious and wasteful to throw them away, but we had to eventually. There was that time we did have a game of kick-football with one, in the corridor of a subterranean hostel in Vienna’s Esterhazy Park, - until the roll skidded underneath the door of someone’s room. We always wondered what the occupant of that room thought the next day, finding a stale bread roll in the middle of the floor.

On the whole, youth hostel food was pretty much like my mothers – fairly edible and usually recognizable; cheap cuts of meat figured fairly highly, and always good sturdy bread. The breakfasts in Scandinavia were especially tasty, for the hostels generally set up a buffet table, with bins of different sliced bread, and every sort of condiment and bread topping imaginable. Kind of strange, we agreed, having salami for breakfast, but when in Rome, et cetera.

There was only one meal that left us completely baffled – coincidently, it was the evening meal in a Scandinavian hostel: Bergen, Norway, if memory serves. The main course at dinner was… well, we couldn’t tell exactly what it was. It appeared on our plates as opaque white gelatinous circles about three inches across and about half an inch thick, obviously sliced from a canned or extruded mass. It had a very faintly fibrous texture and feel in the mouth, but otherwise had no discernable taste at all, offering no clue as to its origin, animal, fish or vegetable. I mean, it tasted and smelt of precisely nothing. It was served with a dollop of almost equally tasteless béchamel sauce (milk gravy to Southerners) and formed a symphony of unappetizing white on each plate. At least we recognized béchamel sauce, but the stuff that it was on? It appeared almost as if the kitchen staff had just opened generic cans labeled “food” and gorped out a neat and faintly rubbery slice on each plate. I had never seen the like – and after fifteen years of Lutheran pot-luck lunches and dinners, and Mom’s cooking, I thought I had seen everything. We ate it – no one opting for seconds. By luck, none of the kitchen staff that evening seemed to understand English, so the mystery food remained a mystery.

Two or three years later, my high school had a Norwegian exchange student. I described the mysterious rubbery, tasteless white stuff to him, and he said it was fish pudding. A Norwegian national dish, apparently. Kind of like lutefisk, but without the rat poison.

With the very last insurance payment for the late lamented Mitsubishi coupe (totaled last spring in a collision at the I-35/Division off-ramp) which was not received until after we returned home, don’t ask for the long and involved explanation of how this came to pass – Blondie went straight to Lowes’ and bought a gas barbeque grill. Then she hied herself to the local Humongously-Enormous Big-Ass Grocery store for all the grill impedimenta to go with it – including one of those little stands for doing beer-can chicken, which I would swear was invented by one of the clients from the inventions-consultant that I was working at when I began blogging, yeah on many years ago. (five and half, if you want to get really technical – not quite the dark ages, but nearly there.) The beer-can chicken came out well, BTW, but last night we did something else, entirely.

To celebrate Blondie’s birthday, we had a sort of garden-party dinner; catching the weather at just the right moment. Yesterday was mild and only tenuously cloudy, and Blondie cleaned up the garden and adorned it with candles, lanterns and tea-lights from her vast collection gleaned at various yard-sales and the Extremely Marked Down shelves at various retail outlets. She invited her co-workers and I invited mine; making a nice mixed crowd, since some of them knew each other. Dave the Computer Genius has sorted out the computers at Blondie’s place of employment on a couple of occasions. There didn’t seem to be any of those awkward pauses, and there was very little leftover food. Always reassuring, that – even better, no one had to go to the emergency room for treatment of food poisoning. Look, that is always a worry, when you have people over and feed them. Projectile vomiting – not a memory to hold on to, although I seem to have retained mine for all those AFRTS food-safety spots.

Anyway, we did a very nice pasta salad, from one of the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, and a splendid barbequed chicken – also from the same source. My sister, Pippy is a fan, pointing out that the beauty of Ina Gartons’ cookbooks are that just about everything can be done in advance. All we had to do for the chicken was throw it on the grill. This is the recipe, and it was splendid! We have enough that we will do “pulled chicken BBQ” sandwiches tonight.
(more…)

So, we went to the radio station’s annual staff Christmas party last night; generously catered with comestibles supplied by some of San Antonio’s finest. There were also, as Blondie described it, a fine assortment of tasty adult beverages, but no – this is public radio, so the drunken revelry was at a fairly well-controlled level. I bored the socks off a couple of hapless spouses by telling them more than they possibly ever wanted to know about Republic-era Texas and the entrepreneurial scheme and the perils of POD publishing and book-marketing. Blondie renewed acquaintance with that handful of staff members who recalled her as a high-school student volunteer working in the phone room during pledge drives.

The nearest we all came to a riotously party-hearty atmosphere was during the gift exchange, which was the white-elephant gift “Bad Santa” exchange. Everyone brought something of small value and occasionally dubious taste, suitably gift-wrapped. At the height of the evening revels, we each took a turn and drew a gift from the pile. The hope is that you go home with something a little more desirable, or at least, not as hideous and/or useless as what you brought, but this is a chancy preposition.

The rules of Bad Santa are open to negotiation, but the general custom is that someone drawing a gift can exchange it, unopened, for something that someone already has opened. Sometimes there is a limit on how often a desirable gift can bounce from person to person – and there are occasionally rather desirable items salted in among the white-elephants, which can make for a very lively exchange. At one unit I belonged to which did this, a set of lottery tickets, and a pair of hearts and teddy-bear printed boxer shorts proved to be in demand… whereas an awful plant container of hand-painted cast plaster in the shape of a tree stump with a squirrel on it had been around the Christmas exchange block for five or six years in a row. The unlucky soul who got stuck with it, returned it for subsequent Bad Santa exchanges; for all I know, it may still be in circulation, unless someone struck a blow for good taste in decorating and smashed it into little tiny bits..

The most popular items last night was a game of Texas Monopoly, a pair of Lord of the Rings bookends and a universal remote in the shape of a calculator the size of a roofing shingle – yes sir, try and misplace that puppy sometime. Least popular? I’d guess that was the 2005 road atlas. Well, the rules do say ‘white elephant’… I lost two boxes of gourmet dog treats and came home with a metal bowl trimmed with antlered deer heads. Not the least sure what I will do with it, although it might make a jazzy pet dish for Weevil or Spike.

Blondie and I are heading out to California tomorrow to spend Christmas with Mom and Dad and the rest of the family. We’re taking Blondie’s laptop, but Mom and Dad are not anywhere near being in tune with the internet age. I may be able to check in from a wifi spot alleged to be located in the public library in Valley Center… or I may not. Have a Merry Christmas, happy New Year and all that. We’ll be back after New Years, at the Same Old, Same Old.

(In the meantime, could someone occasionally approve comments and empty out the spam queue? Thanks – Sgt Mom)

We watched “V for Vendetta” again a couple of weeks ago. Two of the characters in the movie make “eggs (eggies) in a basket” for Evey.

I think I’ve had that for breakfast about four times since then.

It’s simple, heat a fry pan with butter or butter flavored low fat spray, tear a hole in the middle of a piece of bread, put the bread in the hot butter/spray, crack an egg and put it in the hole. Fry until you can see the bottom of the egg get solid white. Flip. I add a piece of swiss cheese to the top and let it melt because there’s not enough in there that’s bad for your heart.

Simple, plain, good food. Ya can’t buy this anywhere and I wouldn’t want to.

This is a recipe Beautiful Wife has been using for about 10 years. I know the holidays are coming when I start to smell this throughout the house.

Beautiful Wife’s Cranberry Chutney (Adopted from Father Pat’s Recipe and it may be exactly the same, but after 10 years, God only knows.)

4 Cups whole cranberries
1 2/3 Cup Sugar (Splenda works great for anyone cooking for a diabetic)
1 Tsp Fresh Ginger
½ Cup (1 Med) Chopped Onion
½ Cup Thinly Sliced Celery
½ Cup (1 Med) Apple (Peeled, Cored, Chopped)
1 Cup Seedless Raisins
1 Tblspn Ground Cloves
1 Cup Water

Combine cranberries, raisins, sugar, ginger, cloves and water in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Stir frequently. This is a good time to prep/chop the onion, celery and apple. When cranberries start to pop/split, stir in onion, apple and celery. Bring back to a boil, then lower to a simmer for 15 minutes.

If canned in sterilized jars and properly sealed can be stored on pantry shelf for quite a long time. Otherwise, refrigerate. Serve as you would with cranberry sauce, use as jelly, or as a marinade. Good with any meat, not just turkey. Great as a topping for oatmeal or on crackers with cream cheese.

Venomous Kate posted her stuffing recipe too.

Here’s a question…why do southerners think that their stuffing is the “authentic” kind? Didn’t yankees start the whole Thanksgiving thing?

Other recipes welcome.

If ever there was a movie that would give you the serious munchies, this is it. Ratatouille may not the first big foodie movie, but it is definitely the first animated foodie movie, and luscious on every level. Visually, it’s a feast; The Paris skyline cannot possibly look as beautiful in real life as it does here, in this tale of a young rat with dreams beyond his station in life.
Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) has a discriminating palate, and an unstoppable urge to be a chef, inspired by a cookbook “Anyone Can Cook” written by late five-star chef Auguste Gusteau and watching too many hours of the French version of the Food Network. When Remy and his whole rat-clan must depart their country home at speed, Remy is separated from the other rats. By chance, he finds his way through the sewers of Paris, and winds up in the holy of holies: Chef Gusteau’s restaurant kitchen, now run by his none-too-ethical senior, Chef Skinner (voiced by Ian Holm).

He teams up with the very junior Linguini (voice of Lou Romano), the garbage-boy, pot-washer and general help, desperately inept and just as desperate to keep his job. While Remy can understand Linguini and human speech in general, Linguini cannot understand him. But with practice, they work a means; Remy sits on his head and pulls at his hair; he is the chef, Linguini his means. Can they meet the exacting standards of the uber-restaurant-critic, Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O’Toole)? Well, of course… this is a movie with a happy ending, but how they do it, with the aid of Remy’s family is where the fun of it lies.

This is one of those animated movies with an absolutely painterly aesthetic, as complicated and gorgeous as one of those 19th century academic visions. The restaurant kitchen where much of the action takes place is a real, tactile place, and the action is non-stop. I am left to wonder if Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential had some influence, especially with the characters of the other kitchen staff. It would have been nice to for them to have had a little more of the action, but never mind. I am sure I missed most of the sight gags, on the first time through; not the send-ups of the cooking magazine covers that featured the late Chef Gusteau, though. This is another one of those rare and lovely movie treasures like Chicken Run, which adults and children can enjoy together… although they probably will be laughing at different things.

(crossposted at BNN, here)

So, we went to see Ratatouille this afternoon, and are still giggling. I will do a review tomorrow, when I am finished giggling.

Or, I may be giggling until next weekend. To tide you over, a recipe for “ratatouille”… in which no rats are harmed.

Combine in an 3-quart ovenproof casserole:

3 TBsp olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 clove minced garlic
1 1-lb eggplant, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 medium zucchini, cut in 1-inch slices
1 1-lb can whole tomatoes and their juice, chopping tomatoes roughly with a spoon
1 tsp basil leaves
1/2 tsp salt

Cover and bake in a 400 deg.oven for about two hours, until vegetables are very soft, uncovering and stirring once or twice. Serve garnished with parsley.

(from Sunset “French Cookbook” 1976 edition“)

As an aperitif, the website for the movie.

And I am still blegging for funds to cover printing and publicity for my next book, “To Truckee’s Trail.”

PS: The introductory short to this is a hoot, too!

I just returned a few days ago from Munich, having had to respond to a Summons for Oral Proceedings at the European Patent Office. It was quite an experience – much more formal than the equivalent process in the USPTO. The issue related to a patent application that has been wending its way through their system for several years, and has been repeatedly rejected for a lack of inventive step. After about 3 ½ hours of debating the topic they finally conceded that it was indeed patentable. We don’t win them all, but a victory in the EPO is particularly sweet.

I had planned on doing some blogging while there, but could not bring myself to pay an additional $25/day for broadband access. Watching TV was not much of an option either given that the only English language choice is CNN International. I am completely burned out on the left wing bias of US MSM, but it is nothing in comparison to the Hate America tone in Europe. The release of the UN study on global warming had the European media in a frenzy over US refusal to sign the Kyoto accords, particularly ironic given the concurrently running story of China bringing on something like 5,000 coal fired generation facilities over the next few years.

Oh well, the beer was good. Red Haired Girl asked me to get a souvenir to give to her (yikes!!) boyfriend. I had a craving for a decent burger and fries anyway, so I headed to the Hard Rock Café to kill two birds with one stone. While there I struck up a conversation with a group in the midst of travelling to thirty some-odd cities to collect HRC guitar pins. These people are passionate about their hobby. In any case, I persuaded them to help out with some free Daily Brief publicity. Hopefully at least the gentleman holding the sign will be a new reader.

I will likely be travelling to Romania in the next several weeks, so I will try to get some new pictures with a vampire theme.

In the meantime, I am anxiously awaiting the onset of spring weather. There is a fine brisket in my freezer with an appointment with the smoker.

I’m sure they’re called something else. My Mom calls them “Cracker Candy” which I guess could translate to Redneck Toffee/Chocolate Bars but…

Face is, you’ve got a lot of leftover chocolate and brown sugar from your holiday cooking. Here’s a great way to get rid of some of it. Use the recipe down below as your guide.

Groceries:

1 Tube Saltine Crackers (WITH Salt)

6-10 Hershey’s Chocolate Bars

2 Sticks of Butter

1 Cup Light Brown Sugar

Pecans or Walnuts

Aluminum Foil

Preheat oven to 400.

Cover a cookie sheet (preferably the kind with a lip all around it) with aluminum foil.

Line a tube of Saltine Crackers, Salt Side Up, end to end on your cookie sheet.
Melt Butter over low heat. Add brown sugar slowly until it makes a caramel like mixture. Do NOT let the sugar carmalize, simple melt it into the butter until smooth.
Pour and spread the toffee over the crackers.

Bake for 5 minutes. The toffee mixture will drip into your oven if you don’t use a sheet with a lip all around and if you’re not familiar with the smell of burning sugar…well…let’s say it’s a great way to test your smoke alarms.
Cover the now bubbling crackers with the chocolate bars, “HERSHEY’S” side down.

Wait until the top of the chocolate appears wet and spread it around. Add nuts.
This time of year, stick it outside in your garage for about an hour, otherwise freeze for at least an hour.

When good and set, break it into bite sized pieces and keep in a airtight containers.

Don’t worry about a shelf-life. You won’t have any left over after a couple of days if you have ANYONE with a sweet tooth in your house.

Some few Christmases ago, when Blondie was still stationed at Camp Pendleton, and my personal economics allowed me to fly out to California to spend the holiday at Mom and Dads’ house, my daughter and youngest brother conceived a grand scheme to give them a large color TV for Christmas.

Blondie and Sander also wanted to surprise them, and a huge box under the Christmas tree, no matter how cunningly wrapped, just would not deliver the same element of surprise… no, my daughter and my little brother had worked out a cunning plan to remove the old television, which had been inherited from Granny Dodo’s estate, install the new one, and gift-wrap the remote in a little box which would be in Mom’s Christmas stocking. They could pull this off because the television normally resided on a shelf of its own in a wall of books and cupboards, with a pair of louvered shutters closed over the screen. It was one of Mom’s enduring standards about television; that it be out of sight when not actually being watched, if not out of the living room entirely.

Such was the plan, but for the maximum surprise to be achieved, several challenges had to be worked out: the installation would have to be done after we were all done watching television on Christmas Eve, and Mom and Dad would have to be out of the house. The old TV would need to be unhooked from the antenna and VCR, and the new one put into its place, and all the evidence removed. Blondie and Sander estimated they would need at least twenty minutes. The optimal time to perform this substitution would be while everyone was at midnight candle-light service, at a church in Escondido, about half an hours’ drive away. As soon as they were out of the way, Blondie and Sander would set it all up and follow the rest of us in his car; hopefully not missing too much of the service. After all, this was one of the two official times per year when Dad actually set foot in church.

On some pretext, Blondie and Sander would lag behind, while all the rest of us; Mom and Dad and I, Pippy and her husband and the children, and JP and I would head down the hill to church service in several cars. And Blondie had sworn me to secrecy; my part in the plot was to make sure that Mom and Dad left the house on time. The new television was outside in the back of Sanders’ car, having been hidden at a neighbors’ house… oh, yeah, everyone was in on this, except for Mom and Dad, and possibly the pastor and church council.

At about twenty to eleven, Mom began reminding us all to change into something suitable for the midnight service. Dad turned off the television and closed the shutter doors, an event we all noted with covert interest, before Blondie and I went to the guest room to change. Blondie was going to wear her dress uniform… this always went over well with Mom’s friends at church, who were heavily into competition on the grandchild front. And her excuse for lagging behind would be an inability to locate one of her dress pumps, which she had carefully hidden under the bed.

So, everyone was ready but Blondie, with one shoe in her hand and making a pretense of frazzlement as she looked for the other, Dad was looking at his watch, Pip and her husband had rounded up the children, and were herding them towards their vehicle out in the driveway. In accordance with the agreed-upon plan, I put on a bit of a frazzled look myself (really, I am a better actress than most people give me credit for) and announced that Blondie can’t find her shoe, and that we should leave now. Sander chimed in on cue: he would stay and help her look, and catch up with us in his car.
“Don’t you have another pair of shoes you can wear?” Mom asks.
“No, I only brought the one set of dress pumps,” Blondie answered. No one even suggested that she borrow a pair; for a start, she wears a size nine and a half.
“It must be in the guest room,” Dad said determinedly, “Five minutes, we’ll take everything apart and look for it.” He and Mom looked like they were about to drop everything and look for the damned shoe. It meant a lot to them to have Blondie show up in uniform.
“Give us another minute, we didn’t look under the bed.” Blondie and I retreated to the bedroom and close the door.
“You’re got to get them out of there!” Blondie hissed at me.
“Give me a minute… OK, got it.” Of course… how devious. Devious, but effective.” I put on my coat, and picked up my purse. Down the hall, Mom was fussing around with her own coat and scarf.
“Did Blondie find her shoe?” she asked, and I whispered, conspiratorially
“It’s not lost, it’s just an excuse for the two of them to stay behind and set up a surprise present for Dad. Forget about the shoe; just get Dad out of here.”
I found Dad pacing up and down in the solarium
“Did you find it?” he asked, and I lowered my voice again,
“It’s just a ruse, so Blondie and Sander can stay behind and bring in Mom’s surprise Christmas present… just get her out of here, so they can get to work.”
Dad looked amused; he has always liked this sort of intrigue and with a minimum of fuss, they both headed for the car, with me trailing after and congratulating myself on my efficiency and guile.

And so it went according to plan… all except for Sander and Blondie getting to church after service had started, not knowing that they had locked the door into the sanctuary because of the late hour, and having to pound on the doors until the ushers let them in. The next morning, Mom unwrapped her first gift, and looked at the new TV remote with great bewilderment. Under all our expectant eyes Sander opened the doors to the TV cabinet with a great flourish… and Mom and Dad were both very, very surprised.

Merry Christmas… May all your surprises be the nice ones!!

We are ice cream junkies. I’ve managed to detox down to one (maybe two) pint(s) of Ben and Jerry’s a week. At one time I had a pint a day habit, I’m proud of myself for the reduction, don’t push it. I open a pint, I just toss the lid on the kitchen floor for Max to lick clean and tear apart. Beautiful Wife is the same way. Sometimes one of us will buy a gallon of Rocky Road or Bunny Tracks, and Boyo is a “Two scoops, in a bowl, when you get a chance please.” kind of guy. Vanilla. There is no other flavor as far as he’s concerned. He’s 10, give him a break.

I can’t count how many ice cream scoops we’ve gone through in our first four years of marriage. We’ve bought countless scoops that have a trigger or a lever that runs a band of steel through the scoop to release the ice cream. They’ve all broken. We’ve looked in cooking specialty shops, but I’m not paying $50.00 for an ice cream scoop, besides, most of them look like an amped up version of the ones you can get at Walmart or the Commissary and those are, as Pablo would say, “teh suck.” I’d rather not find myself heavily caffinated and armed in a Crate and Barrel demanding my $50.00 back.
Friends gave us this scoop ten years ago when we were in Germany. She was a Tupperware Lady and didn’t try to recruit Beautiful Wife, so…a REAL friend. We just had to replace it because we paid no attention to the note to not machine wash it and the finish was getting to be more like a bastard file than a slippery chrome. We didnt’ flinch at the $21.00 price. This is the BEST ice cream scoop I’ve ever used. If you don’t machine wash it, it will prolly last much longer than 10 years. Okay, eight years, we were lazy about replacing it, because even when it WAS rough it worked better than anything we’ve had before.
Why do I obsess about an ice cream scoop? Because, in case you missed it, I probably scoop at least two scoops of ice cream every single day of my life. Sometimes up to eight scoops a day. I scoop a LOT of ice cream. I like a scoop that scoops HARD ice cream as easily as soft. This one does.

With a great deal of tinkering and experimentation, Blondie and I have worked out a pretty damn good home-made pizza, starting with this lovely crust recipe, taken from a recipe for deep-dish Chicago pizza in Cuisine at Home Issue #53 (p.8)

Combine and proof (let sit until foamy)
¾ cup warm water
1 T sugar
1 pkg or 2 ¼ t dry yeast
2 T olive oil

Blondie usually adds a couple of T’s of chopped fresh or dried herbs to this: cilantro, rosemary, oregano, garlic to the yeast mixture. It gives the crust a certain oomph.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine:
2 cups all purpose flour (We use King Arthur bread flour)
1/3 cup yellow cornmeal
2 t kosher salt

Add the yeast mixture and knead on low speed for 10 minutes, or until smooth. Form into a ball and place in a lightly oiled bowl, turning once to cover with oil. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour. Punch down, roll into a ball again, return to bowl, cover and let rise again for another hour.

This makes enough dough for two 16-inch thin-crust pizzas or 2 9-10 inch deep-crust pizzas made in an iron skillet. (We have one of those patent pizza pans, with tiny holes drilled through. This would also work on a pizza stone.)The trick is to roll out the dough, and pre-bake for about 10 minutes in a 450 degree oven, on the bottom shelf. The other trick is to cover the baked dough with thin slices of mozzarella cheese (the original deep-dish recipe calls for a layer of very thin sliced deli ham) to keep the crust from getting all soggy. When the baked crust is lightly brown, take it out of the oven, and cover it with the insulating layer of cheese. Then, spread out about a cup of good bottled marinara sauce (Newmans’ is excellent!) over the top of each pizza— not to much, it will overflow, or make the crust soggy. Top with all the various toppings that you favor: thin-sliced onions, mushrooms, cooked crumbled sausage, pepperoni, etc. Don’t pile on too much, this will have to cook through, in a hot oven in a very short time. Top with shredded mozzarella, and sprinkles of whatever extra herbs you may like, but with the herbs in the dough, additions are not necessary. Bake again, in the 450 degree oven until cheese is just lightly melted.

(The dough can also be frozen, and thawed again, if you don’t have a need for two pizzas.)

Gift giving becomes a hassle when you don’t really know the person very well, and a gift of some sort is obligatory (bosses, co-workers) , or you know them really well but have given them practically everything they want/need on previous occasions (parents and siblings), or they already have everything already (grandparents.)
Books are a good fall-back for me, as far as gifting my nearest and dearest, but an even better all-purpose gift is something to eat, and I don’t mean a plate of rock-hard Christmas cookies or one of those little baskets from Swiss Colony with the triangular little packets of cheese-food that taste like a pair of cruddy gym-socks smell, or one of those lavish and overpriced catalogue numbers. (Although I love Harry & David fruit baskets, ever since we got one at the office one year: oh, yum. The office staff fought viciously over the apples and pears.) I mean a carefully constructed food basket, and no, you do not need Martha Stewarts’ skills…or her pocketbook.

My favorite gift food-basket starts with a cookbook: any cookbook. Those tiny specialty cookbooks about the size of a Beatrix Potter book, the thin paper-bound books that used to be given away by companies, any of the Sunset cookbooks… really, anything that has some nice recipes in it that would appeal to the recipient. You do not want to build a basket around a cookbook of sweets for someone that is a diabetic, or a book of barbequed meats for a vegan. I score cookbooks of this kind at Half Price Books, but any source for literary overruns and overstocks is fine.

Pick a recipe out of the book, mark the recipe with a book mark, or a piece of ribbon… and measure out all the ingredients for it in appropriate containers, carefully labeled and packaged. I have bought little bottles and cellophane bags, and sheets of labels at the Container Store, or hobby shop, or at the local big-box import place. You can also purchase sheets of shrink-wrap, or shrink-wrap bags— the kind that you can use a hair-dryer to shrink over the basket when it is all finished, and excelsior or finely shredded packing materiel at the same place.

Really, you are only limited by your budget; there is nothing to stop you from building a basket around a whole meal— but if perishables are included, either assemble at the last minute, or keep refrigerated. Include in a bottle of wine, or a loaf of bakery bread, if you like, and any fancy accessories you can afford. I have done baskets based on a recipe for tea bread, and adorned it with a wooden spoon or an inexpensive metal whisk. I did a basket for the head of the firm I worked for two Christmases ago with the recipe for this soup and a copy of the book it was taken from. The finished basket was trimmed with a bunch of bay-leaves and whole garlic clove.

It’s not strictly required to stick to items for human consumption, either: I did a basket for some friends moving into a new house in the suburbs, filled with a bird feeder, a pound of bird-seed to fill it, and a little field guide to local birds. I also did a basket for the significant other last year, which included a spa-style shower head, some aromatherapy soaking salts and male-oriented toiletries, and a really nice cotton towel. It’s not even strictly necessary to use a basket, either; just some sort of appropriate container; say, a terracotta pot for a collection of gardening supplies, or one of those big tins for a collection of gourmet popcorns, with a popper and an oven mitt, for instance.

About the baskets, though; this is the embarrassing part. To buy an empty basket at retail price will likely make it the most expensive single element, which is counterproductive to my goal of a high-end one-off gift basket at an affordable price; Neiman-Marcus quality at a Walmart cost. And the best place to find a variety of attractive baskets…(hanging my head and blushing deeply) … is at the thrift store. Goodwill, Salvation Army, even yard sales will do. I usually pay only a dollar or two. They can be washed in mild soap and warm water, or even painted with spray paint, to match the color theme (if any) of the gift. And it’s not like anyone will really be looking at the basket; they’ll be looking at the contents anyway.

So there you are: stuck for a gift for someone you only know casually? Food is always gratefully received: trust me.

I did, on one single occasion, spend the entire Friday-after-Thanksgiving in the mall and department store. Not because I had a yen for joining the yearly Christmas-shopping exercise in masochism… but because I was working retail that year. I was on terminal leave, and job-hunting in a desultory fashion, and took a temp position in a department store which paid a salary plus commission on sales. (If nothing else, this arrangement will guarantee attentive sales staff… and besides, the employee discount was totally generous.) It was rather fun, at first; If you truly enjoy shopping, and hanging out with other women, and people-watching, who wouldn’t get a kick from hanging around a department store? But the day after Thanksgiving was all that and doing a sort of sales-floor triathlon; we were at top speed all that long day. Not much more than half an hour for lunch, no times when it slowed down long enough that you could sit down in the back room and put up your feet.
Dense crowds in the mall, cars slowly rotating the parking lots looking for that rare species, a parking place, long lines at every cash register, and workdays that stretched out so long that another sales associate lamented that the only place she could shop for Christmas, besides the store we worked in was Walmart, because it was open twenty four hours a day. I had my fill of holiday retail madness after that experience, and truth is, I usually don’t need to shop for Christmas presents during December.

That is because I am one of those tiresomely organized people who shop for Christmas throughout the year. I didn’t start out that way, honestly… it came about because of being overseas for so long. The mail deadline for sending parcels to the States, and getting them there by Christmas was routinely in October, which meant that I had to be done with shopping by the end of September. Sometimes opportunities to shop were limited, which stretched the shopping season out for a couple of months, and bumped back even thinking about what to get everyone to… oh, say early summer. Spring, even. This set the habit for me, of buying things with an eye towards Christmas… especially if they were on sale, whenever I saw them. “OOhhh, that would be perfect for (insert name here)!”, so add it to the collection in the box on the top shelf of the master suite closet. Christmas… it comes every year, just like April 15th. Putting off doing anything about buying gifts or doing the income tax return will not, will not make either of them go away. Trust me on this.

This has the advantage of being extremely easy on the pocketbook… as long as you remember who the heck you bought something for; a disadvantage with a large family. So, all I have to do during December’s retail madness is to take out the box with the gifts bought throughout the year, and wrap them… in the paper that I bought the week after Christmas of last year when it was marked down 70%.
And put up my feet and have another glass of Chablis. You’re welcome – I live to serve.

(next: Sgt. Mom’s specialty gift Christmas baskets)

No matter where you are, what your doing or how you feel about the Marine Corps: Happy Birthday nonetheless

The following will be read to the command on the 10th of November, 1921, and hereafter on the 10th of November of every year. Should the order not be received by the 10th of November, 1921, it will be read upon receipt.

(1) On November 10, 1775, a Corps of Marines was created by a resolution of Continental Congress. Since that date many thousand men have borne the name “Marine”. In memory of them it is fitting that we who are Marines should commemorate the birthday of our corps by calling to mind the glories of its long and illustrious history.

(2) The record of our corps is one which will bear comparison with that of the most famous military organizations in the world’s history. During 90 of the 146 years of its existence the Marine Corps has been in action against the Nation’s foes. From the Battle of Trenton to the Argonne, Marines have won foremost honors in war, and is the long eras of tranquility at home, generation after generation of Marines have grown gray in war in both hemispheres and in every corner of the seven seas, that our country and its citizens might enjoy peace and security.

(3) In every battle and skirmish since the birth of our corps, Marines have acquitted themselves with the greatest distinction, winning new honors on each occasion until the term “Marine” has come to signify all that is highest in military efficiency and soldierly virtue.

(4) This high name of distinction and soldierly repute we who are Marines today have received from those who preceded us in the corps. With it we have also received from them the eternal spirit which has animated our corps from generation to generation and has been the distinguishing mark of the Marines in every age. So long as that spirit continues to flourish Marines will be found equal to every emergency in the future as they have been in the past, and the men of our Nation will regard us as worthy successors to the long line of illustrious men who have served as “Soldiers of the Sea” since the founding of the Corps.

John A. Lejeune,
Major General Commandant

I learned a couple of months ago that a close colleague had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that apparently is somewhat advanced. He has been undergoing chemo and radiation therapy in the hopes of reducing the tumor to an operable size. He is a fairly young man in his thirties, and recently married to a wonderful woman with two children. She was previously married and involved, respectively, with two men not particularly stable spousal material.

In order to help with the expenses and reduced disability income, several people at work organized a benefit that RHG, Real wife and I attended last night. The festivities began with a Midwestern hog roast. Loyal Readers may recall that I am a great fan of New England clambakes, but a hog roast comes close (a real Texas barbecue is on my list of things to do). How can you beat a locally slaughtered whole hog cooked over an open fire served with homemade potato salad and baked beans? We then had about an hours worth of live music by a local band composed of forty and fifty something year old rockers. Other musicians of local notoriety shared the stage throughout the night – all very good. Yours truly demurred (all I can really play well is the opening riff of Over the Hills and Far Away). The band then took a break for a couple of hours and hundreds of donated items were auctioned. Loyal Readers may also recall that I am a sucker for auctions, having furnished much of my home at local antique sales. A silent auction was held throughout the evening for numerous other items. Then the band played on until about one a.m.

The person for whom the benefit was held, in cahoots with another colleague, started Hawaiian Shirt Friday a couple of years ago. I think that the original reason was to give our then-clueless management something to be paranoid about, although I cannot confirm that to have been the motivation. In any case, a dedicated group of us wear the most outrageously hideous Hawaiian shirts every Friday, winter included. I have a nice supply of Havana Jack silk shirts purchased at a Kohl’s clearance sale, although many of the guys have found that ebay offers the ugliest. In any case, Hawaiian shirts and leis were the attire of choice for the evening.

Attendance was, in a word, unbelievable. Fire department occupancy regulations were broken. Former colleagues came from as far as San Diego and North Carolina. Real Wife and I were fortunate in finding a table early with another couple, and there were plenty of other early and pre-teens for RHG to hang out with (thereby precluding the agony of hanging out with Mom and Dad). Real Wife was a little stressed about not being able to have a cigarette given the presence of her students, until I pointed out that the parking lot was a side door away. Given the upcoming auction, we limited our intake to two bottles each of Old Milwaukee Light (the beer of the gods); RHG had sufficient ID to drink Shirley Temples. As is usually the case, the auction brought some outrageous bidding, with a strawberry pie and can of Cool-Whip going for $500. The buyer, a former irreverent (I mean Monty Python irreverent) engineer now working in San Diego, then auctioned it again - offering his face as a target for said pie. Two hundred dollars later the offer was accepted and consummated. For my part, I bought a beautiful set of red-oak mission style end tables crafted by one of our more woodworking-gifted engineers. My friend who has cancer comes from a family of Midwestern dirt track racers (You may be familiar with the Outlaw genre – open cockpit with huge V-8s and lots of wing), so the organizers requested auction items from various NASCAR teams. Almost without exception they responded with t-shirts and hats which, in these parts, are considered uniform of the day. The number 8 is huge in these parts, and it brought the biggest money.

My friend was having a good day as far as the effects of the various therapies, and was therefore able to attend. You will never find a more self-effacing, kind, and true-hearted individual. His wife, when recently asked how she was holding up, replied that he saved her life, and now it was her duty to save his. Before I left, I caught a glimpse of him standing alone, worn and tired, but yet watching lovingly at the hundreds of people who had gathered to help him and his family. It was a moment of indescribable sadness for me, knowing that the odds do not favor him. Nonetheless, I admired him for the fact that he has led his life in such a manner that so many people would come from all over the country to support him. How many of us can lay claim to that?

What have I learned from my friend? Drink milk, be an optimist, listen to what others have to say, be anxious to learn what others would teach you, and finally, be an optimist.

Reader and fellow mil-blog webmaster Will Donaldson reminded me this week… as of Sgt/Cpl Blondie wouldn’t have done so already… that the USMC ball and anniversary celebrations are this week. More information on all matters USMC at this link!

A USMC ring-tone? Mmmm. OK.