Friday Five: Holiday Redux

RevGalBlogPal KJ has posted the questions for this week's Friday Five.  They're all about the holiday season.

1) What food item was one of your favorites this year - a definite keeper?  Mountain Mama came to visit in December and we made lefse.  My father has always claimed that you could eat anything wrapped in lefse.  This year I followed his lead and actually ate a hot dog wrapped in my favorite Norwegian flatbread made out of leftover mashed potatoes.  He's right!  It's good.  Much better than a cheap supermarket bun.  And for those of you who are offended by this, my grandmother saw street vendors in Oslo selling the same basic item.

2) Was there a meal or party or a gathering that stands out in your mind from this mose recent holiday season?  We had a lovely dinner of fondue with friends on Christmas Eve that ended prematurely when the BugMan said he needed to go.  While his system totally got the better of him on the way home, he did enjoy the Christmas meal the next day.  This was good!

3) Were you involved in a jaw-dropper gift? Were you the giver or recipient or an on-looker?  I'm skipping this one.  Not sure why, just skipping it.

4) Was there at least one moment where you experienced true worship?  Yes, on the 26th.  God is sneaky.

5) What is at least one thing you want to make sure you do next year?  Actually put decorations on the tree.  I managed to get the tree up, but no ornaments made it up out of the basement.  It was that kind of year at our house.

BONUS: What is something you absolutely must remember to do differently... or not at all!  Listen to the Chick when she advises me to let go of things that aren't that important.  Hold on to the things that are.

Friday Five: Pie!

Pie, pie, me oh my, nothing tastes better,
wet, salty and dry, all at once-
oh, well it's pie.

Apple and pumpkin and mince and black bottom,
I'll come to your place every day if you've got em.
Pie, me oh my, I love pie!

My friend Songbird posted the questions for this week's Friday Five on the RevGalBlogPals and it's all about pie. She was having some pie dilemmas at her house related to gluten and a lack of piecrust at her local Trader Joe's. People across the country offered to make crust for her and one good soul actually delivered a pie to her door. (I may try this strategy for scoring pie next year!) Without further ado, here are Songbird's questions and my answers related to pie.

1. Are pies an important part of a holiday meal? Well, yes they are! And in the home of my childhood, it was all about the pie, but not the pie you are imagining. In the days before food processors, we would ask my mom to make Cornish pasty for any and every holiday meal. It involved making six pie crusts, peeling and grating potatoes and grinding rutabegas and onions in an old fashioned meat grinder. Nowadays, making pasty is a lot easier, but it is still my idea of THE holiday meal. Sadly, the Bugman and the Chick think that Thanksgiving means turkey, Easter means ham and Christmas should be about beef and seafood. I usually manage to sneak in some pasty before the holiday weekend is over. As you can see from the picture, pasty is like a big turnover filled with ground beef, potatoes, rutabegas or carrots and a little onion. The recipe came from my mother's Aunt Effie who lived in mining country in northern Minnesota. Some crazy people think it needs gravy. Personally, I have found butter is the ONLY way to go! Oh! just to clarify my family's dedication to pie, when we were done with the pasty, I was asked for many years to bake Black Bottom Pie for dessert.
2. Men prefer pie; women prefer cake. Discuss. Cake baking is easier. Discuss.
3. Cherries--do they belong in a pie? I don't like cherries but the husband dreams of such things.
4. Meringue--if you have to choose, is it best on lemon or chocolate? Skip the meringue altogether. The Chick's favorite pie is French Silk Chocolate. (See top photo.) Notice there is NO meringue. We are all about the whipped cream at our house.
5. In a chicken pie, what are the most compatible vegetables? Anything you don't like to find in a chicken pie? Peas are nasty. I don't much like the cooked carrots either. I once made a chicken pie with potatoes, a little onion, lots of mushrooms and curry in the sauce. It was good! I might have to try that again.

Friday Five - Fireworks Edition

On the RevGalBlogPals Friday Five, Sally has this to say:

I have to admit that I am chuckling to myself a little; how strange it seems for me a Brit to be posting the Friday Five on 4th July! I realise that most of our revgals will be celebrating in some way today, but I hope that you can make a little room for Friday Five! From my short stay in Texas my memories of the celebrations are of fireworks and picnics, one year we went in to central Houston to watch the fireworks and hear the Symphony Orchestra play, we were welcomed and included, and that meant a lot!

So lets have a bit of fun:

1. Barbeque's or picnics ( or are they essentially the same thing?) Barbeque to me always means staying put- our house or someone else's. Picnics are for the park or in a family twist- a blanket on the living room floor eating pizza. The only exception is when we were kids. My parents would take us to the community pool and send us off to swim. While we were in the pool they would heat up the little hibachi grill they had brought along. Then it was hot dogs or burgers after our swim.

2. The park/ the lake/ the beach or staying at home simply being? The Bug Man and Soda Chicky feel that if it's a summer holiday then we need to have ribs. Ribs means babysitting them for four to six hours while they slow roast in the oven before grilling them outside. A spice rub, basting with pineapple juice and a great sauce at the end. Yummy, messy, good eating!

3. Fireworks- love 'em or hate 'em? Love the fireworks. Hate the crowds, the sweaty heat and the bugs. There are enough local fireworks that we frequently sit in the yard and watch from afar.

4. Parades- have you ever taken part- share a memory... In my first parish in little town Missouri, our church took part in the local Memorial Day parade. We decorated a hay wagon with a large red bow and huge gift tag. On the float were our Sunday School kids in the Christmas program outfits. The gift of Jesus and his love were our entry in the parade.

5. Time for a musical interlude- if you could sum up holidays in a piece of music what would it be? No specifics but it is always fun to hear a brass band- often a military one- playing great marches for the holidays.

When I was a kid we weren't allowed to set off fireworks at home. Papa Joe saw a friend get seriously hurt when he was a kid, so he made sure his own kids were kept at a distance from such things. As an adult I visited friends in Southern California who had to stay home over the fourth in case their homes were hit by stray sparks. With wood shingles, there was a great risk of fire. I love the fireworks show, but here is hoping you and yours have a Fourth that's safe as well as fun!

Nine Dollars a Pack

This is it, people! I promised the Chick that when I got home from this trip, I would be a smoke free mother. While in the Windy City I bought my last pack at the hotel. It cost me nine dollars. The math says 45 cents a smoke. Yikes!

I have been away from blogging this week due to travels and having the cruddy laptop with me. Plus I forgot the wireless card at home. At least I think it's at home. While being gone a few interesting things (or at least interesting to me) happened.

• Spent some time with Adventure Girl. We went to the Tom Skillings' Tornado Seminar. I now know far more than I ever thought I would know about tornados. At some points, the speakers started to sound like Charlie Brown's teacher....
• Went to a couple of great restaurants: Carnivale for Peruvian food and Tuscany on Taylor. Both great places. Had yucca... still don't like it, but the paco paco and the sangria were great. Had veal with a white wine sauce, squares of gorgonzola and asparagus. Yummy!
• Spent time with Baby Sister and her gang of boys. Baby Sister convinced me to open a Facebook account. Not sure how dedicated I will be and Chatterbox said, "Mrs.. I am shocked you have a facebook!"
• My major project for this trip went great!
• I've slept in seven different beds in two weeks. Fell out of bed number six when the wake up call rang me awake. Have a carpet burn and a nasty bruise on my knee. Feel pretty goofy about it. My uber boss says it has happened to him when he has travelled. Felt goofy but better after that.
• Going home tomorrow. Hope the BugMan remembers to fetch me.
  

A Heavenly Friday Five

On the RevGalBlogPals, Singing Owl posted the Friday Five as a memorial of sorts to her dear sister who died this week of Alzheimer's. Singing Owl asked what is your idea of a heavenly (i.e. wonderful and perfect):

1. Family get-together: Some place where the grown ups could talk and relax while all the kids were having fun. The beach sounds good. Or a lake some place where it was not too warm and not cold.


2. Song or musical piece: Hmmm.... nothing immediately comes to mind. I like a lot of different kinds of music. A thrilling Bach postlude. A totally cool Marty Haugen hymn with guitars, piano, claves and flute. Little kids singing a sweet Sunday School tune.


3. Gift: Time with a dear friend for a good meal and good conversation. Time would be the gift.


4. You choose whatever you like-food, pair of shoes, vacation, house, or something else. Just tell us what it is and what a heavenly version of it would be. Tonight we watched Gordon Ramsay trying to turn around an Indian restaurant. It made me remember a stellar meal I had last Fall in Minneapolis. The restaurant was delicious to smell! The food was authentic and marvelous. The company great. The service good. I want to go back!


5. And for a serious moment, or what would you like your entrance into the next life to be like? Not too difficult for those who love me and all that Christ promises. What, from your vantage point now, would make Heaven "heavenly?" .When asked if there would be sex in heaven, C.S. Lewis once said that no, there wouldn't be sex in Heaven. But we wouldn't miss it because Heaven would be too wonderful for us to regret the loss of this important human connection. So I guess I think heaven must be beyond my imagination. And when I try to imagine it, I find that there are always faults with my notions. I am trusting that God has it well taken care of. And that is the most heavenly bit of all.

I wasn't really all that hungry!

Last Friday, Sweet Girl, Scarecrow, the Bug Man and I were scheduled to go out for dinner. It took us several weeks of negotiation before we found a time when Sweet Girl didn't have internship stuff happening; Scarecrow didn't have youth group stuff happening; Bug Man didn't have to get up early to kill bugs; and as for me.... my schedule was pretty open.

Scarecrow is a foodie! There is no other way to explain it. He loves to cook. He loves excellent food and he refuses to pay good money for a meal he could have made at home. For more than a week he googled, contemplated and debated the best place for us to have dinner. Then we needed to figure out what to do with the kids. Should Soda Chicky watch Pseudo Grandbaby? Could we find another sitter for PGB? Should we find a place where the Chicky and PGB would be welcome?

Last Friday the Scarecrow changed the restaurant four times. He called me several times and silly me! I only remembered the converation up to restaurant number three. At 6:15, the Bug Man and I were 45 minutes early for our reservation. We sat in the car listening to the radio until we thought that might be bad for the car. Boy were we right! The car ceased to start. Only made a "click click click" noise. We decided to go in the restaurant in the hopes that absence would lead the car into a cheerier state of being.

We gave the hostess Scarecrow's name and she seemed to think that there was a misprint in her list. Like many Philly dining spots, this was a BYOB. So we drank half a bottle of wine and ate the tasty bread while watching people and the various plates of food go by. At 7:15 we began to be concerned for our friends. I didn't have my cell phone or their phone numbers. But we called Sweet Girl's dad (they were babysitting). The two were "on their way, must be caught in traffic." We waited ten more minutes until our server explained that we didn't have a reservation and that they needed our table. Sigh....

Three phone calls later we knew that I had forgotten we were going to restaurant number four, not number three. Sweet Girl and the Scarecrow were miles away drinking their own bottle of wine. Our car still wouldn't start and the Bug Man was starting to do "the potty dance" on the sidewalk next to our car.

Thankfully, Sweet Girl's dad was only fifteen minutes away and came to our rescue. He had jumper cables so we got the car started. We drove towards home only stopping at the WaWa to get sandwiches and so Bug Man could use the bathroom. (We took turns sitting in the car with the engine running.)

Needless to say, I have been teased quite a bit about all of this. I had a roast beef sandwich for dinner. Bug Man had pastrami. Scarecrow had oysters on the half shell and duckling. Sweet Girl said the Snapper Soup was delicious. We hope to go out sometime before PGB enters kindergarten.

It's beginning to look a lot like the Friday Five!

This week's Friday Five comes from Wills Mama. She says, " I know, I know.... pretty grumpy for November but why not get it out of our systems now so we are free to enjoy the rest of the festivities."

Please tell us your least favorite/most annoying seasonal....

1. dessert/cookie/family food: This would have to be any cookie that looks good, but tastes bad. Stale is bad. Hidden coconut is bad. Candied fruit is really bad. But the worst is something that should be a chocolate treat but turns out to be yucky tasting!


2. beverage (seasonal beer, eggnog w/ way too much egg and not enough nog, etc...) Real eggnog is kind of nasty in my book. On the other hand, the store bought kind with a little something to warm it up- good. And if you can mix it up with some good vanilla ice cream and a little warming agent- real good.


3. tradition (church, family, other) Sunday School Christmas Pageants when the kids are paraded around just for the Kodak moments. Or when the rehearsals involve middle aged women yelling at little kids who are BORED.


4. decoration: Santa and the baby Jesus in the same venue. Santa does not belong in the manger scene. Jesus should stay out of the sleigh.


5. gift (received or given) How could you have a least favorite gift? I sometimes wish they hadn't invented gift cards. I know that Soda Chicky likes the shopping part, but it means that the gift giver doesn't have to use their imagination. I like the creative part of gift giving. I love when the gift I've received reflects thought and care.
   
6. BONUS: SONG/CD that makes you want to tell the elves where to stick it: I really think that Santa should stop running over the reindeer. Also, I want sacred music to stay away from commercial products.

Oops! Grandma got run over by a reindeer! Thanks for helping me see the error of my ways, Songbird. As you will read in the comment below, I have Santa issues.

So that's my list. That wasn't too grumpy, was it?

Elvis has left the building!

Let me begin by saying that I am not making up any of this. It is too strange to be a fabrication!

In 1993, the Soda Chicky was only 6 weeks old. My family of origin had all arrived at the outskirts of St. Louis to celebrate the baptism of the Chick and her slightly older cousin. (Lil Sis #1's boy-child who is four months older.) We travelled one afternoon to Wright City, MO to have lunch at the Ruiz Castillo, home of some of the best green pork chili nachos you'll ever have. On the way to or from, Baby Sister noticed that there was possibly the tenth or eleventh wonder of the modern world in Wright City- The Elvis Is Alive Museum.

The people in the photo are not my relatives but they are standing at the place. We paid our money and went in. After all, it's not often one gets to see proof that the FBI, the CIA and Nixon were all in on some plot to fake the death of a rock and roll icon.

The museum was housed in a double wide trailer with an add on. It was hoaky, repetitive and silly. But this week the Associated Press actually reported that the museum was closing.

Bill Beeny, the 81-year-old proprietor of The Elvis is Alive Museum, said he has placed his Elvis Presley memorabilia on eBay in hopes that someone else will take up the cause. His collection includes photographs, books, FBI files, replicas of the Cadillac the King drove and of the casket and gravestone from his 1977 funeral, even a painted Elvis head.

Beeny, a self-described "western Kentucky hillbilly" Baptist minister who wound up in Missouri 50 years ago, is selling the contents of his roadside attraction, a transformed coin-operated laundry 55 miles west of St. Louis that he opened in 1990, to satisfy something else that drives him.

"I have a burden to help people," said Beeny, wearing the penciled dark mustache, long sideburns and slick black hair of an Elvis aficionado. "Someone else can run, will run, the museum. No one in the whole county is doing the job I intend to do."

Beeny wants to put his energy into serving the needy in rapidly growing Warren County by providing child care, senior services, a food pantry and counseling for the addicted.
Beeney said he'll miss Elvis, "but life has its changes. You have to let go."

He hopes someone will buy the collection and open a new museum dedicated to the theory that Elvis lives — although the look and feel of Beeny's place could be hard to duplicate.
Outside, a 16-foot sign of a rhinestone-belted Elvis holding a microphone dominates an otherwise humdrum small-town landscape. A replica of Elvis' old Cadillac that hasn't been started for years is parked out front.

Inside the small museum, signs in large, bold letters and exclamation points scream out, "FREE MUSEUM," "SEE FUNERAL ROOM," "10 REASONS WHY I BELIEVE ELVIS IS ALIVE!" and "DNA PROVES ELVIS IS ALIVE."

Visitors wind their way around a casket, complete with a mannequin that doesn't look anything like Elvis, hundreds of photographs and yellowed news clippings, and a poster of the famous photo of President Nixon and Presley from 1970.

Visitors can hear what is said to be a tape recording of Presley's voice, supposedly copied off a telephone answering machine six years after the funeral, as well as see piles of documents that Beeny said are FBI files proving Presley's involvement with federal authorities.
Beeny, who had been only a nominal fan of Elvis Presley, started to doubt his death when customers at Beeny's former 1950s Cafe in Wright City asked questions that couldn't be answered.

Beeny said he eventually showed that the tissue samples of Elvis he says he obtained from a Memphis doctor did not match samples he says were taken from the cadaver "purported to be Elvis." Beeny later wrote a book, "Elvis' DNA Proves He's Alive!"

He also claims Presley had good reason to disappear: He's in the federal Witness Protection Program for assistance he provided federal law enforcement authorities.

David Beckwith, a spokesman for Elvis Presley Enterprises, which manages Graceland, the King's estate and mansion in Memphis, Tenn., said the company has no comment.

So if you ever get to Wright City, Missouri- you can still stop at Ruiz Castillo and order the nachos. (They also make a great chile relleno.) But unfortunately, you won't be able to check out Bill Beeny's museum and his assertion that, Elvis is alive!

Hooray for the Big Burrito!

Back in the 1990's Little Sister #1 and I went to this little Mexican restaurant in Denver. It was kind of cute. Corrogated metal was on the walls. Stacks of supplies were part of the decor. There was very little seating available. We sat at a counter that faced an exterior window eating the hugest burritos I had ever seen. The food was great and the line for lunch went right out the door.

Fourteen years have passed since the first Chipotle Grill opened and now it is a huge chain. But up until now, there was no Chipotle in my city. This was not a crisis but I did experience withdrawal. In my last city, Adventure Girl and I would declare it was "big burrito day" at least once every ten days. This was especially important when the midweek children's ministry would be serving boxed macaroni and cheese or hot dogs cut and boiled to look like octopi. (It does nothing for the hot dogs, at all!)

Well, I am glad to announce that Chipotle has finally made it to the home of the Liberty Bell. Half way home I spotted the bright lights on a new location. I can hardly wait to step in the door to order a Carnitas burrito (pork seasoned with thyme, bay leaves, juniper berries and freshly cracked black pepper - seared, then braised for hours) with cilantro lime rice, black beans, cheese, sour cream and the medium heat corn salsa. Yummy!