Day: May 26, 2009

Good food turns into great food when it’s been in the refrigerator for a day or two.  Take mom’s grilled salmon.  A delicious and nutritious fish, drizzled with lemon juice and garlic and grilled to perfection.  It’s wonderful when you eat it with some rice and asparagus, but it is even MORE wonderful when eaten cold.  There is nothing like cold salmon. I think it might even be my favorite food.  Other good  cold foods are pizza (#1 favorite breakfast food) and oatmeal.  Cold oatmeal has a slimy, lumpy sort of texture, but it is one of the best cold snacks out there IMHO. 

One cold food that is not very appetizing is macaroni.  There’s something about cold macaroni that is very, very unappealing to me.  Just made macaroni is wonderful though, especially if it’s made at convention. 🙂

Why all this food talk? Because that’s what’s been on my mind lately!  Friday night, the neighbor kids came over and we made all this:

If you’re interested, Jenna, Nathan, Christian and I made Baked Mac and Cheese (Joy of Cooking book), Salad (Lettuce and Tomatoes), Salad Dressing (Taste of Home), Green beans (Frozen), Biscuits (Bisquick), Pink Lemonade (Mix), and a chocolate cake (from a box, but we sprinkled coconut on top to make it look more homemade).  We had lots of fun doing that!!  Then on Memorial Day, Christian and I made shish kabobs!

The shish kabobs were the real deal this time, except for the pineapple (it was from a can). They had meat, mushrooms, pineapple chunks, tomatoes, red bell peppers, and onions on them.  We served those with rice and a salad.  That was also very fun!

We also went down to the history museum to check out the Knights of the Black Flag exhibit. It was very interesting.  Of course the whole pirate thing is really romanticized so I was expecting a bunch of stories that would shatter my stereotypes.  Well I can say that some of my illusions were shattered, but most were based in truth (if in fact the entire exhibit was not romanticized, but well researched, which I have no doubt that it was) Pirates were a dastardly, uncouth sort. They did dastardly uncouth things, and liked to wear red sashes and put up black skull and crossbones flags and other pirate-y sort of things. 

We encountered a couple of pirates there, but I expect they weren’t the real thing.  Their heads were much to small 🙂

We went to the North Carolina Museum of History yesterday. We parked a couple of blocks away and, as we walked down the mall between the History Museum and the Museum of Natural Sciences, we saw there was a Memorial Day celebration taking place in front of the North Carolina State Capitol Building across the street. We got there in time to watch the Marine Honor Guard march and listen to the National Anthem. It was very nice. There is a pirate exhibit at the History Museum that we wanted to see. When we went to the Outer Banks last year, we found that North Carolina was pretty much pirate central during the 1600’s and 1700’s. Blackbeard sailed his pirate ship Queen Anne’s Revenge along the Carolina coast for a good number of years. We learned lots of interesting things about how pirates lived, their insurance programs ($ for the loss of a limb or an eye), what they ate, how they came to be pirates (often because there were no legitimate sailing jobs when the world was between wars), and all kinds of other minutiae. There were lots of artifacts including what they believe was the silver plated skull of Blackbeard that was used as a drinking mug by some rich folks after his death. From one list, we saw of those sailors for which there is a record 1718 was a very bad year as many seemed to have been hanged that year.

On the way home, we decided the kids might like to make dinner for us so we stopped off at Food Lion to pick up some beef and veggies. Kelly and Christian made a whole mess of sheeshkabobs. They were awesome. After I ate myself silly and took a nap, I did some serious reading to Kelly and Christian from A Patriot’s History of the United States while they worked on their Betty Blonde comics. In the mean time, Lorena decided to reupholster an old chair we had from my college days. She got it about half torn apart and got a little discouraged with the project, but I think it could be really great. I talked to her this morning and she is back on track. I will try to take some before and after pictures of the chair as she works on it.