What's For Dinner?

WINGS!

I love me some wings, especially the Buffalo variety. I have several different ways that I make them, but I'm always looking for new ideas.

Last weekend, I got a new idea from Robin Miller on Food Network. She was making Halloween foods, and she called her wings "Bat Wings" (because she kept the tips on and spread them, and they allegedly looked like bats - I think they still looked like chicken, but I digress.)

Take your wings and toss them in a mixture of soy sauce, minced garlic, grated ginger, Asian five spice, Tabasco, salt and pepper. Roast them in a 450 degree oven for 25-30 minutes.

Not at all like Buffalo wings, but tasty none the less. We ate them with roasted corn on the cob and a baby spinach/hazelnut salad. I also made Robin's dipping sauce (sour cream, coarse ground mustard, and parsley) but I forgot to eat it. Newman.

NOTE: While typing this post, it came to my attention that we get the Food Network in high def. Oh my gosh. I might not leave the house again.

Presidential Press Conference

The Fourth Grade classes at Daniel's school did the COOLEST thing for their election studies this year. There are four classes, and each class pulled one of the four players out of a hat (McCain, Palin, Obama, and Biden). Daniel's class got Palin. So the girls got to audition to portray Sarah Palin during a press conference, and the boys got to audition to be Todd. Everyone else was either a member of the press, a supporter, or a secret service agent. The major players arrived in a motorcade, then went to the auditorium, where each candidate and spouse gave a speech. They all did a really, really good job (McCain promised to lower taxes and homework). Then the two presidential candidates took questions from the "press".

It was far cooler than anything I ever did in elementary school. Daniel got to be in the Secret Service. He arrived in a black Escalade, and guarded the door to the auditorium. There were no security threats, so I guess he did a good job.

Enjoy the pics!

The crowd gathers.

The motorcade arrives.

Agent D is in there somewhere.

The candidates wave to the crowd.

Don't mess with Agent D.

Don't mess with these guys either.

Obama gives his speech.

Mrs. Calhoun - the greatest fourth grade teacher of all time.

Todd and Sarah watch the crowd.

A not-so-flattering campaign poster.

Vote Republican. Because they rock, apparently.

Happy Anniversary!

Mark and I are celebrating our 14th wedding anniversary today! Apparently, 14 is the ivory anniversary, traditionally, but has become the gold jewelry anniversary in modern times. So to celebrate, we're going on an elephant hunt, and then getting our front teeth capped with some gold bling.

Not really. Actually, we're taking the day off, going to Starbuck's, going to an election program at Daniel's school, lunching at Olive Garden, and then taking in Quarantine. Good Times.

Happy Anniversary, Mark! Thank you for 14 wonderful years, and here's to 14 more!

Galaxy Loss

The Galaxy lost the semi-final game 2-0. They played HARD the whole game, and kept the other team from scoring for the entire first half. But they let two goals get past them, and that was that. The third place game is tomorrow night, so we get to play again, but it's not the same. It was a good season though - we enjoyed every minute.

I'm attaching a couple of pics one of the moms took on Saturday. I forgot my camera tonight, but it wouldn't have mattered - it was way too cold to take my hands out of my gloves.

Meet the Next Food Network Stars!

Two Guys Cooking promises to break new ground in the world of culinary entertainment! Ferdlings and Kyle (not their real names - yeah, they're using code names) specialize in alcohol and pork, with a little madness on the side. Throw in a kickin' soundtrack by Ronnie James Dio, and you've got fun for the whole family! Tune in tonight when Kyle stirs up a pot of something, and Ferdlings chops something else.

Sponsored by the Duke Sandwich Company.

Soccer Tourney - Game One

After a weird schedule, and a rain cancellation, Daniel finally had his first tournament game today. The Galaxy won 2-1 in a very close, very intense game. We play again in the semi-final game on Monday against the first-place team (a team that we played to a tie in the regular season).

I'm including a highlight reel for your enjoyment. Apparently, about five teams in our league went with the blue shirts/black shorts combo, so our team had to wear the red and yellow pennies. Daniel is #2, but with the penny, it's hard to tell. He's wearing a red one, if that helps. (And I didn't exactly get all the action - I'm just an amateur videographer, you know - I get easily distracted.)

Movie Quotes, Big Ferdlings Style

OK, so I've just about exhausted all my movie quote game ideas. The only quotes I keep coming back to are so obscure, I don't think any of you will get them. Except Ferdlings. He should get every one of these.

1. "Red, green, scarlet, pink - doesn't matter!!"
2. "Love that chicken pepperoni!"
3. "The T-Bones....."
4. "Do you have a dime? Do you have fifteen cents?"
5. "I'll handle Baron." (pronounced "Bawon")
6. "Why aren't you popular with the Chicago police department?"
7. "I would very much like to see you in it." (pronounced "vurry")
8. "Do you think he wants some cheese?"

Enjoy!

Thomas

At the urgent behest of one of my friends and my brother, I now have a Facebook account. And I am thoroughly enjoying myself. I have found lots of friends, and a few alumni groups.

One of the alumni groups that I joined last night is the Bethelwoods Camp and Conference Center alumni group. PC alums may remember Bethelwoods as the locale of Winter Conference every year. I worked as a counselor at Camp Bethelwoods during the summer of 1990. After joining the Facebook group, I was very pleased to get an email from one of my good friends from that summer, who also happens to be the admin of the group. He brought me up to speed on some of the people we worked with.

One of those people was a counselor named Thomas. Thomas was one of those people you noticed right away. He weighed a buck twenty soaking wet. He was balding, and the hair he did have was always flying in all directions. He also had the tiniest little mustache, but he was oh so proud of it. You could say he was wiry, and he got more energy into and out of that scrawny frame of his than anyone else on staff. He was very much like a squirrel.

Thomas was a little older than the rest of us. He worked in the school system during the year, and was a counselor at Bethelwoods for many summers. He loved working with the kids. LOVED it. He used to say his dream job was working at Disney World, being in the parades and making all the kids smile. One week, he organized a pageant for our last night festivities- all the kids made their own costumes (using little more than construction paper and cotton balls) and danced around the lodge singing Under the Sea. (The Little Mermaid was the only movie the camp had a copy of and we watched it every time it rained.) Thomas played Sebastian, and was the perfect master of ceremonies.

Thomas was also the creator of such Bethelwoods hits as The Ooga Booga Mud Tribe, and the Coon Family (he was Crazy Coon). He was always coming up with zany ideas that made no sense, but they just worked. He was very sassy, in a southern way, and would pretend to be really worked up about something, but would almost always crack himself up mid-tirade. It was his cracking himself up that made me laugh the hardest.

So my email brought the news that Thomas finally did fulfill his dream and worked at Disney World for a few years, making people smile. Then he got liver cancer, and passed away about five years ago.

I haven't seen Thomas in 18 years, but the world seems a little dimmer tonight.

Goodbye, my friend. Thank you for making me smile.

What I'm Reading Now

Islands, by Anne Rivers Siddons.

Siddons used to be one of my favorite authors. Colony, Peachtree Road, and The Outerbanks were fantastic books. I would read her books as soon as they hit the shelf. But after a while, she started to get a little "samey" - woman is trapped in a middle-aged rut, woman is taken out of her comfort zone, woman has extreme extra-marital affair, woman returns liberated and affirmed. (Sorry, I just don't see the extra-marital affair as the true road to wellville.) So I took a break, and haven't read one of her books in ages.

But this was on the sale rack, and I decided to give it a try. And I'm liking it. In fact, I did little else but read all afternoon, so I guess that's an endorsement of some kind. Mark and Ben went on a hike with the Scout Troop, and Daniel and I stayed in and read (he finished the second Harry Potter book and started the third.)

Islands is more for the sixty-something set, but I'm enjoying the Charleston/Sullivan's Island/Edisto Island setting. And I've got a hankering for seafood something awful.

I finished Becky - it was really good at times, really ho-hum at times. Becky was your classic, headstrong, southern heroine. She was borderline unlikeable, as she was in Tom Sawyer, and frankly, a bit of a tramp.

Saturday Baking

The King Arthur Flour Baker's Banter Blog has some pretty neat looking stuff. I've had the best of intentions to try some of their recipes for a while now, and today I finally did. They posted a recipe this week for Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies. The recipe adds canned pumpkin, spices, and walnuts to chocolate chip cookies to give them an autumn-spicy kind of feel. It reminded me of a Harvest Loaf Cake my mom makes (and I love), so I spent the afternoon giving them a whirl.

I did some substituting - I used white whole wheat flour (because I like it) instead of regular all-purpose, and I subbed cardamom and nutmeg for ginger (because I didn't have any ginger). Otherwise I followed the recipe.

My cookies didn't spread at all, nor did they get the yummy color they were in the picture. And they were a might bit dry. They were more cake-like than cookie-like - no crunch when you bite them. And without the icing, they aren't sweet at all. But with the icing, they are tasty, just not what I had in mind. I think I'll just stick with the Harvest Loaf Cake next time.

Daniel helped me ice them. (He didn't need to stand on the stool!)

The finished product. Compare to the picture on the King Arthur blog and you'll see why I was disappointed. :(

Hooray for Dollywood!

The boys are on Fall Break this week, so Mark and I took the day off and we spent the day at Dollywood. The weather was awesome, and the park wasn't crowded. (Well, actually there were quite a lot of old people there, but they weren't riding the rides, so it was all good.) Enjoy the pics of our day! And if you really want a good laugh, go over to Daniel's blog and check out his video of his first real roller coaster ride - it's hilarious!

There is something uniquely satisfying....

...about getting in a good day's work, spending a quiet evening with the fam, enjoying a warm bath followed by clean jammies and clean sheets, and then turning on the TV for a final send-off to your day, only to discover that the Red Sox are losing 11 - 1 to the Rays at Fenway Park in the ALCS. The RAYS! At Fenway! Ahhh....

Ben came in to watch a few innings with me, and maybe it was just the tired talking, but we got really giggly about the Red Sox folly. Big Papi squeezed a double into a triple and we said "Here it comes! Here comes the rally!" Then we looked at each other and cackled. When the much-hated Mike Timlin came in and gave up two more runs (for a total of 13, at this point) Ben said "You know, that just never gets old."

Now that it's coming down to the wire, and it looks like Joe Torre will be out of it, I have to say "Go Rays!" It would be really good for baseball for the Rays to win it all, proving once again, you really can't buy a world series title. The Rays have that intangible something that makes them play as a team, not a conglomeration of all-stars.

Go Rays indeed.

What's for Dinner?

Venetian Grilled Chicken with Marinara Sauce and Tri-Color Rotini.

For the first time in probably six years, I am not teaching a class on Sunday night. So for the last few weeks, we drop the boys off at church, Mark watches football, and I make "just us" dishes for supper. Last week it was the trout, this week it was another nostalgic meal.

In the early dating days, Mark and I ate at Olive Garden a lot. Mark almost always ordered the Venetian Grilled Chicken. They don't have it anymore - it was your garden-variety boneless chicken breast grilled up with Italian herbs. They served it with marinara sauce, and a side of spaghetti.

So tonight, I brined three chicken breasts for about an hour (the third one is for lunch next week). Then I topped them with salt and pepper, basil, and oregano and slapped them onto a hot grill pan until they had good grill marks on both sides. Then I finished them in a 400 degree oven for about twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, I took one can of diced tomatoes and thickened them with almost a whole can of tomato paste. I added ample sprinklings of basil and oregano, smaller sprinklings of garlic powder and onion powder, and finally a couple of dashes of red pepper. I heated it over low heat until the chicken was done.

I got the chicken out, let it rest, and made some rotini pasta. When the pasta was done, I sliced the chicken breasts, topped mine with the sauce, slapped some pasta on the side, and topped the whole plate with fresh-grated Parmesan cheese.

Pretty tasty, if I do say so myself. Mark loved it, but he didn't eat the sauce. Come to think of it, he never ate the sauce at Olive Garden either.

As a side note, all of the spices I used came from The Spice House. I am a BIG fan. I get everything from there now, except salt. Overall, you get more for your money, and you get a much better product than you would in the grocery store. The vanilla extract is phenomenal. Just keep a list of what you need and order everything at once to get the most for the shipping charge. And order more vanilla than you think you need. Once you smell it, you will want to bake things. Lots of things. Lots of vanilla things. It's that good.

A Tribute to Ferdlings

I have been so impressed, as I'm sure most of you have, with my brother's creative videos, that I have created a tribute of sorts to him in my sidebar. It allegedly feeds from Youtube, so we'll see if it works. At the very least it pulled four of his videos, so watch those if you haven't seen them already. Let me heartily recommend A Countdown to Edisto Beach for those of you unfamiliar with his work. It's a light-hearted, yet detailed look into his cinematic genius.

I was disappointed that Driving Around and Singing, and The Shaving of the Beard did not appear. I will have to look into what happened there. Surely they have not been removed from Youtube. That would be a travesty.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ferdlings's early career, he directed a video in the late seventies shot at Cherry Grove called Cops and Robbers. He delved into acting in that short film, playing the part of the robber. I was honored to appear as the cop. It involved great use of props, and ferdlings even did his own stunts, including a fifteen foot jump off a deck into hot sand. Pirated copies of this video are selling for big bucks on ebay.

Who knew then the heights to which his genius would soar?

6 Quirky Things

OK, so I got tagged. My mission: share six quirky things about myself. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. When I eat Skittles, I sort them by color. I never mix colors.
2. I assign gender to letters and numbers. 1 is male, 2 and 3 are female, 4 is male, and so on. Likewise with the letters - A and B are female, C and D are male, E is female, F is male, etc, etc.
3. I have never had wisdom teeth.
4. I have to check that I set my alarm two or three times a night before falling asleep.
5. I have such extreme arches in my feet that I leave two footprints (a total of four, if you count both feet.)
6. I have an unusual fear of ground hogs.

Well, that was actually sort of fun. Good idea, Rick. Glad I played. And if you read this, consider yourself tagged.

What's for Dinner?

Parmesan breaded trout with a lemon-caper sauce.

Clearly, not our normal fare. There's a story here.

Mark and my favorite restaurant is the Troutdale Dining Room in Bristol, TN. It is the only five-star restaurant in the area. The original owners were a couple who moved here from the New York area, and were disappointed in the quality of local restaurants. So they set about to improve that. And improve it they did. The woman was in charge of the food, the man was in charge of PR. His name was Bruno. He had one of those thick Brooklyn accents, and he did a series of radio commercials. His tag line was "Come to the Troutdale Dining Room, where we make everyting but the buttah." And he wasn't kidding. When you arrive, your trout is swimming in a pond out back. Seriously.

Troutdale is one of those places you only go about once a year, and only on special occasions. (Unless you're obscenely rich, in which case, knock yourself out - go whenever you want to.) The food is phenomenal. Seriously. Their signature dish is the Parmesan breaded trout with a lemon-caper sauce. I honestly didn't know you could do something that wonderful to a fish. It is fantastic.

So dinner tonight was my attempt to recreate it. I did OK, but I made the classic blunder: I didn't let the oil get hot enough before dropping the fish in. It fell apart in the pan. But it was still tasty. I breaded rainbow trout in panko and grated Parmesan. The I pan-seared it in olive oil (except I botched the sear). I made the sauce with white wine and cream, then added lemon zest and capers. We ate it with lentils and baked sweet potatoes.

Troutdale's best dessert is something called Between the Sheets. It's a mousse served between two sheets of white chocolate, drizzled with raspberry sauce. We opted for Ben and Jerry's creme brulee ice cream for dessert tonight. Not the same, but tasty.

We haven't been to Troutdale in several years, and they've changed ownership since we were last there. I hear the food is just as good, and I hope we get to go again soon. Because while dinner tonight was good, it wasn't five-star good. If I'd paid thirty dollars a plate for what I made tonight, I'd be chapped.

What I'm Reading Now

Becky: The Life and Loves of Becky Thatcher, by Lenore Hart.

I love a book with a really creative concept. In this one, Becky Thatcher of Tom Sawyer fame is all grown up and telling her story. She is married to Tom's cousin Sid and they have two sons before he leaves to fight in the Civil War. She flashes back to her childhood a lot - running around with Tom and Huck and "little Sammy Clemens". ("Little Sammy Clemens" grew up and wrote a really famous book about all of them, but he didn't remember things quite the same way Becky did, apparently.)

I'm liking it so far. My only frustration is that I don't remember Tom Sawyer all that well, and I'm struggling to remember which parts actually happened in that book, and which parts this author is making up. But the later story - Becky on her own during the Civil War - is quite good. Huck Finn has made numerous appearances, as has Jim and old Judge Thatcher. We don't know what became of Tom yet, but he gets mentioned a lot, so I'm expecting him to show up any page now.