We had quite a nice party of mostly twenty-somethings over the weekend. The shoes and purses were piled up much higher than this at the peak of the party. We cooked hamburgers and hot dogs with very spicy guacamole on Sunday evening and and then quiche with Lorena’s special, extra spicy salsa on Monday morning. I do not think people got a whole lot of sleep, but the “kids” all seemed to have a nice time. We inaugurated or new fire pit and made gallons and gallons of coffee. We were thankful to have an extremely nice Canadian contingent (maybe that statement is a little bit redundant) and a strong showing from the very polished California young urban professional crowd. We are looking forward to doing it again next year.
Category: Cooking Page 3 of 6
Lorena checked the apples in our trees in the back yard and found that we probably could have (should have) been harvesting them for a couple of weeks now. She bought herself the business end of an apple picker pole and attached it to the end of the very long pole, Carolyn C. give to her as a gift about a decade ago. I have to tell you that has been about the most useful gift she has ever gotten. She has used it for a gazillion things and now it is receiving double duty both for apples and 
dusting of very high places. Now she is a state of high applesauce production mode. We need to get Bob over here soon because we have entirely too many of them. I think the pruning we had our yard crew perform in February really did the trick. So far we have gotten peaches (crazy sweet), pears–really small, but tasty, and now the apples. We really need to get set up to put a garden in which mostly just means we need to level out a spot, put up a really high fence to keep out the deer, and maybe put in a raised bed.
Grandma Sarah was a pharmacist. She loved to stay up on the state of knowledge in the medical field by reading the scholarly (and popular) literature and with the continuing education required to maintain her license. She always got a lot more continuing education hours than was required. Because our family has tended toward the fanatical end of the coffee drinking spectrum, maybe more in terms of quantity than quality, Grandma Sarah stayed abreast of the research on the ills and benefits of coffee drinking.
That all being said, it has been kind of shameful that the kids have had less than stellar coffee brewing equipment. We got them each a K-Cup coffee maker that can also perform single brewing from grounds. I am not sure these are the most brilliant coffee machines in history, but they are definitely adequate and are profoundly better than what Kelly and Christian had before. One thing that I had not figured out about the K-Cup thing is that they definitely compete with the traditional brewing of a carafe of coffee just because you never have to through away half a carafe because your coffee drinking ambition was moderated dramatically after your first three cups. And it is WAY cheaper than buying it at Starbucks.
The sole purpose of this post is to find some common ground with Cousin Merle and his apostate daughter, Trisha, who think it is OK to eat hot dogs with ketchup. It is not. That being said, I walked into the kitchen just now an found my dear wife Lorena eating hot dogs with extremely spicy Mexican salsa. I think ALL of us can agree that that is just wrong. In no known or unknown universe is that OK. I hate to air the family’s dirty laundry in a blog post, but wanted to show Merle and Trisha who offensive it is when they eat their hot dogs with ketchup in a public setting. At least keep it to yourself.
Christian flew in from Tempe on Monday night, then took Amtrak down from Seattle to Centralia with Kelly after she got off work on Tuesday. It will be a whirlwind trip because they have a friend flying into Seattle on Friday to hang out with them. Our time together has been very relaxed time with them and, as usually, has centered on cooking, food, conversation, reading, and music, not necessarily in that order. Exercise has been on hold for a couple of days which affects all of them, but (shame) me because they all work out at least five days a week while I give lip service to working out five days a week. Is there such a thing as a Fourth of July resolution?
Yesterday, Lorena and Kelly picked 15 pounds of blueberries while I worked on some stuff for my new job and Christian worked on his dissertation research and comprehensives preparation. We spent a lot of time doing similar things growing up so it was very nice and relaxed. As for the blueberries, my understanding is that there will be pie sometime before they get back on the train to head back to Seattle later tonight.
After the blueberries picking, we all headed off to Bible study in Olympia. It truly is a gift to be in that Bible study and with our new church community here in the Olympia-Centralia-Chehalis area. We really think this is a good place for us to be for the foreseeable future. God might have other ideas, but we are certainly happy with where we decided to settle in.
We got home at between 9:30 and 10:00 PM last night. The Centralia neighborhood fireworks that were so spectacular last year had already started, but I have to admit we were a little disappointed relative to the experience we had last year. Maybe it is because it was on a Wednesday night. We are hoping for more next year when it happens on a Thursday with a possibly a bridge day off for a four day weekend.
We were very grateful to have Kelly come visit us for Father’s Day this weekend. She rode Amtrak down on Saturday morning. She even packed the new pink pantsuit she bought on Friday so she could model it for us. Lorena is getting better at taking pictures. You will notice in this shot, she cut off the feet instead of the head–that is a marked improvement.
We did all the normal stuff. We went to Denny’s for breakfast (Now that I get the really good Senior discount there!), then just hung out and ate Lorena’s Zoodle Kung Pao chicken for dinner and Kelly’s fresh peach galette. On Sunday, we went to McDonald’s for a breakfast Egg McMuffin and then to Burgerville, USA for a lettuce wrap burger and my free Father’s Day strawberry sundae. Fine dining is always a major feature of the time we spend together as a family! Christian called to wish me happy Father’s Day and schedule a trip up here for a week later this summer. All that was really nice.
We talked a LOT about a LOT of stuff. It is a hard thing to realize that your kids really do not need you so much anymore. It is pretty nice when you realize their decisions (social, moral, spiritual, and financial) are often better than the decisions you might have made for them if it were yours to make. The good, but kind of melancholic reality is that it became obvious several years ago that neither is it my choice nor do I have to worry too much about this.
We liked our new coffee maker so well we decided to buy two more for our guest bedrooms. The original machine makes both a carafe or a single cup (with a K-Cup or just ground coffee). The bedroom machines are pretty much just the single cup side of the one we got for the kitchen. We got them cheaper at Walmart.com than at Amazon and they got here in just a couple of days. We were very pleased all the way around.
I had purchased a bunch of K-Cups and have to admit they are very handy. I also found they are pretty cheap if you buy them from eBay or Walmart.com. I was thinking we would be grinding our coffee and making the single servings that way. I am sure we will try that out, but the K-Cups are way less hassle and, in the end, we throw away a lot less coffee by making it a single cup at a time.
We were very sad that our new coffee maker was defective so we got on line and bought a different one from Walmart.com that arrived today. We can make a carafe or a cup of coffee at a time. The single cup maker allows for K-Cups and for granular coffee. Also, the new coffee maker is shorter so it is easier to pour in the water. It is amazing how happy such small pleasures can bring and will certainly get some serious use. While we were at it
Lorena bought a little device she uses to make long, spaghetti-like strings from zucchini. It is amazing. Last night she made Kung Pao chicken with the noodles so I had a low calorie Chinese dish that tasted just as good as the real thing. I think I could get into a very good rut, eating this kind of Chinese every night for the next long, long time.
We really liked our old coffee maker, but did not like the fact that there was no jar that could be carried over to the table or people in the living room to serve coffee. Rather, the coffee stayed in a reservoir in the coffeemaker and was served with a lever directly into cups there. That would have been fine if we could have easily transferred the coffee in the reservoir into a large coffee pitcher, but the device made room only for a cup. So Lorena went down to her favorite department store (Goodwill) and found a coffeemaker we really love. It can make coffee from grounds into a jar AND from single serving K-Cups. It also has a small receptacle that fits in the place of a K-Cup where you can do single servings from grounds. We really like it a lot. It is not one of those fancy espresso/coffee/mocha/latte automatic machines like our friends, the Douglas’s have in North Carolina, but it will have to do until (and if) we can ever afford one of those.
Christian has taken great care of us. Tonight he drove us all over Tempe and Chandler so we could replace Lorena’s Note 3 and my Note for with two Pixel 2 XL phones. We have had these phones for four years–a record for us. They are very nice. The weather has been insanely good since we have been here and Christian found the one true taco shop in all of Phoenix (Los Taquitos on Elliot Rd) and even though I can hardly believe I am saying it, they are on par or maybe even better than the one true taco shop (Tacos Regio Monterrey) in Lewisville, TX. That is really saying something.
We are enjoying Tempe a lot. Lorena went with Christian to buy new tires for his car and to do some other shopping. The thing we notice is how “alive” this place is–maybe it is the time of year and the amazing weather (not too hot), but we are glad to be here right now. Christian is taking us to a new taco place he just found that is authentic in the way we measure Mexican authenticity. He said he had the “street tacos.” What else would you order in a truly authentic Mexican restaurant–especially for the first visit–so you can have a common metric against which to compare other “authentic” Mexican restaurants. Can hardly wait.
We had the fruit trees in the back yard pruned in February with the hope they might produce a better crop than we got last year. The reality is that it was not so bad last year–Bob brought his apple picker over and harvested a good amount of apples. Lorena made applesauce with her own apples for the very first time. The trees had not been pruned for a long, long time, so with this pruning we are hoping to see some improvement over last year. Now, all we have to do is get Bob to come back over with his apple picker…
I have been about 40 lbs. down from my high for over a month now since Jon W. and I first started our weight loss plan a little after Thanksgiving last year. It is good I am down and not going back up, but it is not so good I have been stuck for so long. I would like to say that I am on this plateau just because my metabolism has adjusted, but that would not be entirely true.
The reality is that, after three months of great progress, I am finding it hard to stay on my low calorie diet (I found I can lose weight if I stick to under 1200 calories). I keep falling off the wagon on the weekends. This is a very bad sign because I have a trip to Phoenix coming up followed by a trip to Canada for work after that and a trip to Mexico in early to mid summer which, given the family into which I married, will involve lots and lots of red meat. Based on my track record, none of these bode well for my diet.
I really and truly want to build on my current level of diet success. I have hit a new level of healthy blood pressure and cholesterol measurements, the reacquired abilities to put on my socks without asphyxiating myself and to actually cross one leg over the other when I am sitting down, and the ability to wear clothes I have not worn for years. I do not want to lose that. So, having succeeded in the past with a low carbohydrate diet, I have decided to switch to that for the next few months of barbecues, carnes asadas, and eating in restaurants.
The last thing I have decided is that, if Jon is game, I want to extend our battle plan to one with an indefinite end (maybe until death, but that is actually kind of definite). I was thinking if I did this until the end of the year, that would be good enough. Now though, even when I get down to my desired weight, I am pretty sure I am going to need to keep on keeping track.
We inaugurated the new grill last night. I must say I think it was a wild success. Lorena and I split the steak in the picture (3 oz. each) so I even stayed on track with the diet. Jon and I have both been in stasis on our diet for the last month due to (speaking for myself, not for Jon) a total lack of discipline in the face of ham dinners with scalloped potatoes and angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries for dessert. Nevertheless, we are both back in the saddle and ready to engage the battle one more time.
I am seventy percent of the way to where I need to be and it is actually getting easier because I have upped my calorie intake to something a little more reasonable (600/day to 1100/day) and I am still losing weight. The thing I have at the forefront of my mind is that when I actually get to a weight I want to sustain, I can kick my calories up a few hundred more per day.
I committed to Jon to stick out our tracking plan through at least the end of this year, but I think the thing to do might be to just start a new graph when we get to the end of the year.
After all the hullabaloo yesterday about getting the exact same grill as we had when we were in Albany, Lorena shows up with one that is half the size (and, thankfully, half the price)–the mind of a woman. Her thinking is that we need a smaller grill for the porch and if we need something bigger, we can run a gas line and put in an actual outdoor kitchen. And rightly so. It is a really nice grill by KitchenAid with only two burners. The reality is 99% of the time we are cooking for 6-7 people or less. Maybe we can talk Tio Lauro into building us one of those really nice mesquite asadores out of block when he come up to visit.
Lorena sent me this photo today. It is the same grill we had when we lived in Albany. Well, I am sure it has some revisions and upgrades. We loved that grill. We got one in North Carolina that was nice, but we did not like it nearly as much. This is kind of a big deal for us. We (and I am using the royal “we” in this case because I am really talking about just Lorena) LOVE to cook on the grill–even in the dead of winter when it is snowing. This is the grill that has five burners–four main burners and a side burner she used mostly to cook corn on the cob while grilling carne asada.
The back story is that she went to Costco because we are having company over on Sunday for lunch. The thing is on sale for around $200 off. I don’t know if I quite have the budget for it, but we will tighten our belts for a month or so to assure we have room. This will be great for future invites to the house. Hope we can get Bob, Gena, and Bonnie over to inaugurate the thing.
Lorena usually only makes tamales once per year. Yesterday was this year’s tamale day.
It is about as good as you gets if you are living in Seattle, but just happen to plan a weekend trip to San Francisco, the sun is shining , AND you decide to make pie, all the while it is raining and dismal in Seattle. The sad, sad part about this sorry saga is that we will not even get to try any of the pie.
All the guests are gone, Kelly has driven back up to Washington and Christian is set to fly out tomorrow. Thanksgiving was a great success. We had different groups over for meals and dessert on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It was really nice. I got to cook the turkey and make the turkey soup. Both of those are a 50/50 proposition for me, but we hit the lottery this year so we had a moist turkey that was cooked enough and soup that was neither too greasy nor too bland. I guess the stars were aligned. Even Kiwi got hit with that tryptophan snooze button this year. Here are a few more photos of the weekend (sorry we had none from Friday night).
