Roasted Chicken

Roasted chicken is one of my favorite meals. I got the recipe from the Barefoot Contessa. I LOVE it. A 4-5 lb chicken costs about $5 and feeds all four of us. You can beat that...

Start by brining the chicken overnight. About two and a quarter hours before you need to eat it, take it out of the brine, put it in a roasting pan, and let it come to room temp. (You don't have to do this, or do this completely if you're rushed, but it helps.)

Meanwhile, quarter a lemon and slice a head of garlic in half (so that each clove is sliced in two). Stuff the lemon and the garlic into the cavity and tie the legs together. Drizzle with olive oil (I brush it with a basting brush as well). Salt and pepper it. Cover loosely with tin foil.

Cook at 425 for thirty minutes. Remove the foil, and cook for another hour. Let it rest for 15-30 minutes before serving.

We eat it with mashed potatoes. Everyone is a fan. I have also subbed an onion for the garlic - it works as well. I don't worry with carving it perfectly - I just get the meat off the bone. It may not look all Southern Living and whatnot, but it tastes gooooooooooood.........

Just a Normal Friday Night at Our House

Mark and I are deep into Season 3 of Lost. Last night, we got the boys in bed, watched an episode, and called it a night.

About 2:00, I woke up. There was a noise in the corner of the room. It sounded like something rattling paper. We had a fan going, so I thought something might have gotten caught in the air flow. I gave it a minute. More rattling, then ZING! WHAP! The distinct sound of a mouse zipping across the floor and into the wall. Great, I'm thinking, I hope we have some D-Con under the sink - I can just put some out in the morning.....

Then I feel something fly very close to my head. I sit up. I hear more flapping sounds. I grab Mark. "Wake up! Something's flying around the room!"

Mark sits up. "Whah....." Silence in the room. He sits there stunned for a minute, then rolls over and goes back to sleep.

Now, in thirteen years of marriage, I have never woken Mark up in the middle of the night and sent him off after a noise. Not once. It's just not how I roll. And so it surprised me that he did not find anything alarming about my behavior. He just went back to sleep. Had I not been so scared, I might have smothered him with his pillow.

But I sat there, sure that our talking had frightened our guest and it would be on the move again if I was quiet long enough. I was right. I started hearing movement in the curtain by the bed. I smacked Mark and said "Wake up! Something's in here! I'm not making this up!" And I turned on the light.

We both saw a bird flying across the room. While I'm thinking "How in the heck did a bird get in here?", the bird turns upside down and hangs from its feet off the ceiling. Oh *&$#. Not a bird. A bat.

I learn something new about myself every day. Last night I learned that I am abnormally afraid of bats.

I wigged. I got down under the covers and started crying. "Whatarewegonnado Mark! Whatarewegonnado!" Mark cowered down there with me. Every now and then we would peek out, and that little bastard would be right there staring at us, or worse - flying at the bed. I was in hell.

Finally, Mark says "We've got to open a window and get him to fly out. If we open the bedroom door and he gets out into the house, we'll never get him out. So...go open your window."

"I'm not getting out of this bed. Why do I have to open the window? You open the &%$#&*! window!" I hear a smack behind my head. "What was that?!?!"

"He flew behind the headboard. I think he's under the bed." Needless to say, I got out of the bed.

We opened the window, but couldn't get the screen to budge. For some reason, there was a screwdriver on my nightstand, so we took turns trying to pry it loose. It's very difficult to concentrate on a task when you're constantly jerking your head back and forth, watching for flying bats.

I finally got it loose, pulled it out of the window, and leaned it against the wall by the bathroom. We yanked the bathroom door open, and hid in there while we waited for our plan to work.

Mark quickly realized that if we did not see the bat fly out the window, we would never know for sure he was gone, and we would have to sell the house. So he decides to go out there. "Give me something to hit it with. Just in case."

I gave him a big loofah on a stick. This was apparently not what he had in mind.

He went into the closet and came out with his racquetball racket. Not quite a weapon, but better than a big loofah. He goes back into the room. He runs back into the bathroom. "He's stuck in the screen. We knocked it over when we yanked the door open, and now he's trapped under it." We stand and look at each other, like two deranged fools. Mark says, "OK, I'll go back out and move the screen. Maybe he'll get loose and fly out."

Mark goes back into the bedroom. I hear the screen move. I hear sounds that are not at all human, but that have to be coming from Mark. Then I hear a loud THUNK. Mark says "I got him! I knocked the crap out of him. But I don't know where he is."

So Mark and I very gingerly tiptoe around the room, he with the racquetball racket and me with the big loofah, poised and ready to attack. Mark finds him. He's lying stunned just under the end of our bed. Mark slaps the racquetball racket down over him and traps him underneath. "Now what do we do?" Mark looks over at the nightstand. "Bring me the screwdriver," he says, calmly. Too calmly.

So Mark stabbed the bat with a Phillips-head screwdriver, twice, through the racquetball racket netting. When we were sure he had breathed his last, we scooped him up with the back of a magazine, threw him into a trash bag (double-bagged for safety) and tossed him outside in the garbage can. Game over, man. Game over.

We had too much adrenaline to go back to bed. So we watched another episode of Lost. It was the one where Hurley found the Sweet Pickles van and they miraculously got it running. Good times. Nothing like a quiet night in front of the TV with your spouse.

Carry Your Candle

At Ben's Graduation ceremony, they had a candlelighting ceremony. Each fifth grader with a younger sibling lit a candle, then the younger siblings came up and lit their candle from their brother/sister's candle, then the fifth grader's candle was blown out. It was symbolic of the fifth grader's impending doom in middle school, or something.

No, no, it was all about the passing of the torch and all that. I got it. And it was quiet lovely. But anytime you have a large number of children in a small place and open flame is involved, things don't always go poetically. Each fifth grader lit their candle from a central candle in the middle of the gym. As the kids went to their assigned spots, about half of the candles went out. Rather then turn and obtain flame from the person two inches away, they all went back to the central candle. Quite the log jam insued. Then the younger sibs descended on them like a swarm of locusts - elbows were thrown, I think two kids got trampled - it was rowdy.

But once all the candles were lit and everyone was in place, it all went off without a hitch. Well, almost:

It's hard to see, but Ben is standing to the left of a boy with glasses (the glasses reflect well, that's why I use him as a reference) and Daniel is in front of Ben in a striped shirt.

DP's Highlight Reel

As promised, I have spliced together three short portions of Daniel's class play. It was actually more of a collective dramatic reading....enjoy!

Ben Graduates Fifth Grade! Daniel Graduates Third!

As we do every year at this time, we went to lots of end of the year festivities at the school. Ben's was a little more in-depth this year, as he was "graduating". We attended a very nice, very heart-warming, very lengthy, graduation ceremony on Wednesday. Ben was recognized for getting a perfect score on the state writing exam, and for earning the most AR points in his class. He also won the Presidential Award for Academic Excellence, which is given to students who maintain straight A's from third grade up, and who scored "advanced" on their TCAP tests. That was quite an achievement for him! He is pictured above with his principal - I had to laugh - as each kid came up to get their "diploma", she bent over and whispered "Where's your parents?" and wherever the kid pointed, she turned and grinned for a picture.

Daniel (who I didn't get pics of, but did get a video of - I will post when I can get the time to edit it) performed the role of "Father", quite passionately, I might add, in a class play. He was given an award for his penmanship (cursive writing in third grade, and all that) and an Academic Excellence Award for straight A's.

We are very, VERY proud of our sixth grader, and our fourth grader. Can you believe they are that old? Where does the time go....

Court of Honor

As promised, Troop 37 held their spring Court of Honor tonight. Ben was awarded the Tenderfoot Rank, as well as his Totin' Chip. (The Totin' Chip allows him to carry and use axes, saws, and pocketknives on scout outings. Scary stuff.)

I took a great photo of the back of some kid's head to commemorate the evening.

What I'm Reading Now

The Rosewood Casket, by Sharyn McCrumb.

My mom turned me on to Sharyn McCrumb. She lives in Virginia, but most of her books (the ones I've read at least) are set in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee. She always has a historical element running in tandem with a modern day story. I've read quite a few of her books now - my favorites being She Walks These Hills and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, although, I have to admit, many of them run together for me. They have the same modern day characters, whose stories progress in each book. The historical parts are easier to keep straight. The Rosewood Casket focuses on Daniel Boone and the Cherokee for the historical part, and some guy with, you guessed it, a rosewood casket in the modern day part. The two stories will eventually entertwine, I'm sure.

If I remember correctly, my mom bought me my copy of The Rosewood Casket, and Mark took it on a trip with him and left it on the plane. So Mom bought me another copy. Moms are good that way. In fact, I think Mom has bought all of my McCrumb books to date; oddly enough, she finds them easier to find in her local bookstores than I find them in mine. Something about a prophet and his hometown, I think.

Here's some trivia I bet you don't know: McCrumb's latest works revolve around the Nascar circuit (don't ask). The first in this series is called St. Dale, about a pilgrimage involving the one and only Dale Earnhart. In the hard copy (can't say for the paperback, as I haven't seen it) McCrumb lists a number of people whom she consulted in the writing of the book. One of them is none other than my mom! (Name misspelled, of course.) Mom had an email conversation with McCrumb about McCleod hospital - parking lot, ER, entrances, and exits, etc. St. Dale was taken to McLeod after piling it up in Darlington one year, and McCrumb wanted to get the details right without actually driving to Florence. Go Mom!

Easy Dinnertime Goodness

+
+
= Yum

Seriously, take your favorite beef roast, add the obligatory salt and pepper, and put it in the crock pot with a bottle of russian dressing. Let it cook on low 7-8 hours. Serve it over rice. Thank me later.

What I'm Reading Now

I'll Watch the Moon, by Ann Tatlock.

Another church lady bag book. Never heard of the book, never heard of the author. The publisher is a big name in the Christian fiction market, so I can only assume that it is considered "Christian Fiction", but nothing in the story itself has led me to that conclusion so far.

So far, it's set in the forties in Minnesota during a polio epidemic. The narrator's brother gets polio, and the house gets quarantined. By "house", I mean boarding house, which is where the narrator's family lives. They have an assortment of interesting characters boarding with them, which adds a lot to the story.

I wouldn't have guessed it, but the polio epidemic is fascinating reading. I asked mom about it this morning - she remembers not being able to go outside, and she thinks my dad was officially quarantined at one time.

I remember reading Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin, where she writes about her childhood in Brooklyn. I was jealous of the lifestyle she described - kids could wander around town all summer long, not worrying about freaks and pervs and the like. It seemed so much better then the scary world we live in now. And then, bam! some kid gets polio and the whole community shuts down. No one goes out, no one comes to visit. It made me realize that modern times aren't all bad.

It also makes me wonder what we fear today, that will be nothing in fifty years. Leukemia? Breast Cancer? Aids?

So if you like historical fiction, and you'd like to know more about iron lungs, try this one. I'm about half-way through and enjoying it.

The Peyton Manning Story

Ben reminded me of the Peyton Manning story last night - it still cracks me up. I only hope it plays as well in print...

Me and Mark and the boys are in the car. Mark is telling us about his buddy getting to meet Peyton Manning at a charity golf tournament. You get a foursome together, pay an entry fee, and play in the tourney. Manning stays at one tee box all day, and as the players come through, they get to tee off with him at this one hole. They take pictures, get autographs, etc. Most importantly, they get to tell all their buddies that they played golf with Peyton Manning. Good times for all.

Mid-way through the story, Ben breaks wind in the back seat. I neither hear it nor smell it. I have no idea this has happened.

So here's what Mark says: "Chad gets to the hole where Manning is and he shakes his hand and says 'I'm Chad So-and-So, I'm a big fan' and Manning says .....Dude! Did you bust one?!?!??! Gyyyahhhh.... "

I'm looking at Mark as he says this, and I'm thinking "What's worse? Meeting Peyton Manning and cracking one off, or having him call you out for it?"

Happy Birthday Kyle!

Best wishes to the Alcohol and Pork Fueled Mad-Man on his big day!

I Love This Guy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9m2FLHlEwA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM-HWkbnDfg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUU9CqrtFiU&feature=related

What I Just Finished Reading

The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom.

This one was such a quick read, I didn't even have time to blog in the middle of it.

I like Mitch Albom. He and Mike Lupica are the only Sports Reporters I can stand. I liked Tuesdays with Morrie. And I liked this one, but I don't think it did for me what it must have done for everyone else who read it. It was good, but it wasn't life-altering. It's been out for a while, and it's been a best-seller for a while, and people have been going on and on about it for a while. I was lucky enough to find it in my church-lady bag. And I did like it - it's a story about a man that dies, and meets five different people in heaven who are attached to his life in some way, but who represent a greater truth about his life.

It's such a short book, it's hard not to recommend it, because even if you hate it, you're only out about two hours of your life, and you can now talk about it at cocktail parties. So go ahead and read it.

Tis the Seasoning

It's that time again. Time to re-season all my cast iron, whether it needs it or not.

I got my first piece of cast iron cookware a few years back for Mother's Day. It was the Lodge 12" cast iron skillet. It was love at first cook. Not only can you kill an intruder with it, but you can cook just about anything you can think of in it. It retains and distributes heat like nothing else, and after several uses, it's virtually as non-stick as teflon. And since we're comparing it to teflon, cast iron wins because it is virtually indestructible and dirt cheap, two things you generally can't say about teflon. Retailing at a mere $19.95, my 12" skillet will still be here long after I am dead and gone. It is that one item of cookware that I would take with me if I were planning to be trapped on a deserted island not run by the Dharma Initiative.

Since the skillet, I have also added other Lodge cast iron items to my collection: a 12" square grill pan, an 8" skillet, and a 5-quart dutch oven. I love them all, but the 12" skillet is my baby.

And every year at this time (easy to remember what with the holiday and all), I re-season each and every piece. I just wrapped up the dutch oven last night. Not too much to ask of me, what with all they give me in return.

Cast iron. Don't cook without it.

This, Too, Shall Pass

It's just after midnight, and I think I'm passing a kidney stone. This one doesn't feel exactly like some others I've passed, but what else could it be. The pain is really low, so it can't be long now. Nothing to do but drink water and pray. I would add "walk around" to that list of possible remedies, but this one must be causing something to swell and put pressure on a nerve or something - my left leg is killing me. Walking is not an option. And so I blog.

I had a stone about two years ago, and I was up all night with it. Finally, about 4 AM, I couldn't take it anymore and got Mark to take me to the ER. They gave me a morphine drip almost as soon as I walked in the door. I remember lying there, looking up at nurse when that morphine kicked in and I said "Oh my gosh...I'm going to faint!" She looked at me and smiled and said "You're lying on table. Go ahead and faint."

I think about that a lot, as one of those metaphor-for-life moments. We get so focused on holding on to all of our baskets - we forget sometimes we can go ahead and faint.

People are fond of saying that God doesn't give you more than you can handle. Too bad that isn't scriptural. What the Bible actually says is God will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able to resist. Not at all the same thing.

I personally think God gives people more than they can handle all the time. But I find great comfort in knowing that God can't give me more than He can handle. So I can go ahead and faint when I need to. Like now.