The Joy of Food

NaBloPoMo asks:

What food always makes you feel happy when you are eating it?

         There is nothing on God’s green earth that makes me happier than a monstrous sandwich or salad from Subway with all the fixings!  I could “eat fresh” until the veggies, meats, breads, and sauces were literally pouring out of my ears.  

         Whether I choose a foot long sub or all those amazing ingredients sliced and diced in a bowl and drizzled with chipotle sauce, onion sauce, and honey mustard, I am one happy camper if I am chowing down at Subway!

This month I am making December a little more joyful with NaBloPoMo!

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Super Bowl Sunday Haiku

super bowl frenzy

the Broncos versus Seahawks

commercials and food

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Food

 I am taking part in The Write Tribe Festival of Words 8th – 14th December 2013.

       Food is a major part of any celebration.  Whoever coined the phrase eat, drink, and be merry knew what they were talking about!  With the gluttony of Thanksgiving behind us and Christmas just around the corner I am eagerly anticipating another big holiday meal.  Since I am the cook, the extra work associated with preparing a huge feast is largely up to me. 

        Christmas is full of time honored traditions and rituals and what’s on the menu is no exception.  Every year I bake a ham for dinner.  There are an assortment of sides and usually a special dessert.  One dish that has become a tradition is cheesy hash brown casserole.  It is a dish I prepare every year which the whole family looks forward to with eager anticipation.  It is that good!   It simply wouldn’t be Christmas without it.  No more than it would be New Year’s Eve without steaks on the grill with baked potatoes drizzled with cheese sauce.  Holidays bring the plate of deviled eggs to the table and dessert.  I rarely make dessert for the every day.  Holiday meals demand it!!  What would Thanksgiving be without pumpkin pie piled high with whipped cream?

     So while food is a basic necessity needed to survive, it also plays a major role in our holiday celebrations because we like to eat, drink, and be merry.   Where people gather there will always be food.  Lots and lots of food!!

Cheesy Hash Brown Casserole

1       bag of frozen hash browns thawed

      ½   C butter melted

1       C  sour cream

1       C  French onion dip

2       C  shredded cheddar cheese

1       can cream of chicken soup

½ C chopped onion

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. pepper

Topping

  2 C cornflakes

 1/4 C butter melted

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix ½ cup butter, sour cream, French onion dip, cheese, soup, and onion in large baking dish.  Add potatoes and toss to coat.

Melt ¼ cup of butter then add cornflakes.   Toss to coat.  Top potato mixture with the cornflake mixture.

Bake for 1 hour.

The 4th and the Aftermath

    The fourth of July lived up to all my expectations.  It was a busy day here on the home front and we got a lot done from finally filling the swimming pool with water, setting up a volleyball net in the backyard so we could play volleyball or badminton, to my husband putting new brakes on our truck so we could come to a stop which is an important function to have.  You can’t just run into things to stop…you have to have brakes that work.  It seemed like we were doing something at every single moment!!

    I had special plans to barbecue chicken, cook corn on the cob, and make homemade potato salad and I managed to get that done too…although it happened kind of late in the day.  While that was going on I realized I had bought absolutely nothing to blow up.  I simply couldn’t have that.  I mean…it was the 4^th of July.  It is the one
day of the whole year that it is perfectly legal to blow shit up.  So we rushed out just before dark and bought a few fireworks to set off. 



        I was in my element!!  I was out there in my lawn chair with my camera in the dark focusing on the sky.  My camera has this “firework” setting that I had never tried before and last night was my chance to test it out.  I figured out in a big hurry it was like a time release drug.  You pressed the button…and then you waited crossing your fingers and your toes that you actually captured the burst of color before it disappeared from the night sky.  I honestly took more pictures last night than I did at Christmas!!

      All in all it was a holiday for the record books followed by a day of running about everywhere.  We went to the mall, Toys R Us, and Wal-Mart and did the look around.  We even hit my favorite store which is Barnes and Nobles.

        After all that looking about, we finished off the evening at the Golden Corral eating literally everything in sight!!  The best part was that they had cotton candy.  I thought I had literally died and went to heaven!!  I just know in my heaven they will have wall to wall cotton candy.  They even had a chocolate fondue fountain!!  My family dipped everything from strawberries to watermelon in that glorious chocolate and my son, to my disgust was marinated in chocolate in every available orifice when he was through.  I ordered my husband to the men’s room to hose him down and clean him up.  My husband wasn’t happy about doing it, but my son is 7 and had no intention of stepping into the ladies room.

      Speaking of clean up, I discovered the wildest thing in the toilet.  Actually it freaked me out a little.  I went and did my business and then after washing my hands hit the button to turn on the hand dryer.  Holy Shit!!  It was like unleashing a mini tornado with 100 mph winds.  It literally shook the skin on my hands!!!!  I felt a little better when it did the same to my daughter.  At least then I knew it wasn’t moving my skin in ripples because it was old and saggy baggy.  I thought that crazy thing was going to blow my skin off.  All in all it was an awesome day and I managed a blog after all.  Day 5 of the Ultimate Blogging Challenge is in the books!! 

     

I is for Irresistible

What do you find simply irresistible?

1. My husband…the love of my life.  

2. My kid’s sweet smiles.

3. Adorable puppies!

4. Cute cuddly kittens!

5. Blueberries!

6. Strawberries!






7. Pizza!

8. Beautiful flowers.






      While there are probably are other things that I could list…that pretty much sums it up!  What do you find irresistible?

In the Freezer

    My freezer is like everything else in my life.  It isn’t organized neatly.  It is organized chaos.  I keep my freezer packed full of stuff that my family will eat during the week.  By the next weekend, it has pretty much been emptied out and needs to be replenished.

     Lately butter pecan ice cream has been a frequent guest.  It is the culprit of my weight gain recently.  Dieting sucks. Let me just say that right off.  It is hard and having ice cream around is obviously stupid on my part…but it is so good and it calls me!!  Today I went to my freezer and discovered some asshole ate my ice cream.  I couldn’t be too mad though because the asshole was me.  The scale knows.  Even that little cocky Wii Fit board on my Wii Fit game knows.  On the upside, the butter pecan is gone but not forgotten.  It is one of my guilty pleasures.

      You will find chicken, steaks, hamburger, turkey, chops, and pork tenderloin in my freezer piled high in individual freezer bags.  On top of that you will surely find several loaves of bread frozen just waiting for when the current loaf has been used.  With my kids taking their lunches to school, we use a lot of bread around here! 

       Lately the kids are on a chicken nuggets kick, so you will usually find a bag of those in there too.  I also have quite the collection of half used and full bags of veggies.  Everything from Brussels sprouts to mixed assortments.  I am big on different shapes of ice too so you will find a tray that makes ice shaped fingers and bones, pumpkins, and skulls that I got for Halloween.  Although plain rectangles work, why would you want those when you could have bones floating in your drink?

       If you were to dig everything out of the freezer you might find some croaked over popsicles from summer’s past.  You will never find any questionable items in my freezer though.  No dead bodies.  No butcher paper wrapped packages marked “tail”, “liver”, “brains” , or “tongue”.  My grandma was big on that stuff and one time when we were watching her house while she and Grandpa were in Florida we found a whole slew of wild stuff like that in her freezer.  It made me think twice before having dinner at her house.  You never knew what you might be eating.  You were usually pretty safe on holidays, but other times who knew?

Hot and Cold

Welcome to day 22 of BlogFest 2012!!  Today’s writing prompt is brought to us today by Betty at Today’s Baker.  

    What can be hot and cold?  Well let’s see, men, women, the weather, food, women who are hormonal, and all the above.   Why do I feel like dancing and singing the heat and snow miser song and kicking up my heels??  Living in the heart of the Midwest I get my fill of one day hot and  the next day cold every fall.  This week in particular has been a great example of that.  Today it reached 75 degrees.  Tomorrow the forecast is on the opposite end of the spectrum with the high only expected to reach 51 degrees tops and a low temperature plummeting to 34 degrees.  It is quite the drastic difference, but fairly normal for this time of year.   You aren’t quite sure whether to run the air conditioner or the heat.  Course half the time I am not sure whether to wind my a$$ or my watch anyways so I wing it.   It is just enough temperature change to insure that most people will be sick as hell and death warmed over by Monday after a weekend of rollercoaster temperatures and living life to the max.  If they aren’t sick, they will be calling in to proclaim they are sick simply because if they didn’t catch the latest bug their kids have and they are sure to have it SOON.

 

     As far as the hormonal tidal waves of hot and cold go, I am approaching the golden age when I can expect to be hotter than the blazes of hell even if I am standing half naked in a$$ deep snow in sub zero temperatures.  On second thought, maybe I am already there!  I am the nut who has to have it cold in the bedroom to sleep and pay absolutely no never mind to traipsing out barefooted in the snow to dig up a dog leash in my nightgown.  A lot of that is because I am simply to lazy to be bothered with shoes, after all it isn’t that far to go and not that long I will be out in the elements so WHY waste my time with shoes and a coat?  Yeah, I am different that way.  Usually I am half asleep and half past give a $hit when I let the dogs out to whiz in the center of the night anyway.  A person can’t be expected to dress appropriately then, right?    Besides I can count the minutes until I will be snug as a bug and warm in my little bed once again.  My husband is paranoid about being seen, but I really don’t care.  With half the world women and the other half men, chances are you are one or the other so what’s the big deal?  Most people have seen it before.  Every now and then you will see someone that has all the parts, which is different and definitely a reason to stare, but if you are normal there really is no big deal.  Maybe you just got to air it out.

      I am going to go off on a tangent, so bear with me.  If I have to drink water it has got to be ice cold.  No other kind of water will do.  I don’t want to just wet my whistle.   I want to be refreshed.  In my world, soup was meant to be HOT.  It should always be hot, end of story.  One time I was staying at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island and they served cold cucumber soup for dinner in the dining room as a precursor to prime rib.  I remember it well.  When you stay at the Grand Hotel, they expect you to dress for dinner.  You can’t just waltz in wearing a t shirt and jeans.  They expect women in a dress and men to be in dress pants and a dinner jacket.  Seriously, I kid you not.  I waltzed in hungry enough to eat the a$$hole out of a skunk and they served me cold green soup.  Ewwww!!!  I thought they had FORGOT to cook it, then realized they MEANT to serve it that way.  Needless to say, after our expensive dinner we went back to the room, changed into normal vacation clothes (casual shirt and jeans) and walked to town and ate our fill of burgers and fries at a local bar.

      Considering I had absolutely no clue what I would write for this prompt letting my mind ramble has got me a blog written which is good enough for me until next time when I give you another glimpse into the life of a trucker’s wife.

Save Money on Vacation to San Antonio, Texas

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of SAVE for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

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