cold days are best spent indoors

The world's blandest chili
Ingredients:

• 1 16oz can dark red kidney beans
• 1 16oz can mild chili beans
• 1 26oz can tomato soap
• 1 tbsp chili powder
• 1/2 tbsp Hungarian paprika
• 1/2 tsp red pepper
• 1/4 tsp allspice
• 1 lb ground chuck
• 1 8oz package shredded mild cheddar cheese
• 1/2 soup can of water
  

Brown ground chuck, drain grease. Add beans, add soup, add water. Stir. Add spices. Stir. Add generous handful of cheese. Stir until it melts. Serve garnished with cheese.

I'm sure this is full of calories and "bad" for me. But it's cold, and well, it's dinner. Plus, it's delicious, especially on a cold day in January.

I am the daughter of a craft project hoarder. My mother has hundreds of unfinished craft projects... and while I don't have hundreds, I do have a few. I did a bunch of paintings a few years ago for a project and just never got around to phase 2 of the project. So, they have been sitting in a pile in a cabinet in my office. They were sitting in a pile on a shelf in my office, but I "reorganized," so, yeah, they ended up in the cabinet... Not the greatest place to keep paintings.

So, I pulled them out, separated them from themselves... spent a morning with brushes and a bottle of alcohol and the exacto knife with the curved blade cleaning 'transfer' off their fronts (they're painted on illustration board; the backs are gessoed, the weight of the pile stuck blips of gesso onto the surface of the next painting...). I spent a morning scanning them (see last entry)... And yesterday I varnished them and signed them. Well, okay, there are still like 5 paintings I haven't scanned yet, but I got most of them.

So, now the place has that faint odor of varnish... I suppose I'll choose to think of that as the scent of accomplishment. It definitely feels more purposeful than shoveling the road out in front of the house - yes, it snowed again.

I'm ready for spring, how about you?

Autumn Leaves: more of my favorite maple

Please excuse my brevity and / or lack of posts this week. It is, as perhaps everyone knows, Thanksgiving week here in the States. I have to go procure a frozen turkey, get those last odds & ends for various family dinners that I haven't yet gotten, and then tomorrow I have to make a bunch of food... and then turn around and do it again on Friday. On top of that, by Thursday morning I will have worked 8 days in a row...

I would like to see a nap in my future.

Anyway, these are some more shots of my favorite maple...

Yeah, I took like 60 shots of this tree — hey, it was a cool looking tree.

Anyway, I hope you all have lovely Thanksgivings. Hopefully, there are no food catastrophes or mishaps.

If you enjoy cynicism or sarcasm: read on... otherwise, I am about to be snarky (it's working 8 days in a row with no days off coming up on a series of dinners that is making me neurotic)

This Thanksgiving my inner-cynic is hoping that some of the people on my Dad's side of the family + extended family will have sharpened up on their culinary skills. It's not that I'm a food snob, but if you're going to bring something to what is essentially a potluck, then it should be edible without hassle. When a steak knife with teeth is required to cut your "home-made" apple pie, this is a learning moment. You should feel a little embarrassed looking at the mess in the pie plate. You cannot add extra water to pie crust (whether it's regular or dutch) it just turns into cement.

I'm serious, this has actually happened multiple years in a row: apple pie that cannot be cut with an ordinary knife. And I sit there at the table and wonder how hard it could possibly be to make apple pie. And I say this as someone who has made a number of pies in my day (in fact, I have made apple pies). Because if we can't crack the crust of your pie with a regular knife, how the hell is a fork supposed to tackle this problem once its on my plate? Just ponder this with me for a moment (and laugh). I mean, there is no shame in walking into the grocery store and walking out either with a frozen pie shell or Betty Crocker pie crust mix in a box, and then following the directions. Hell, apple pie filling in a can - have at it.

I'm cynical, but honestly, I don't understand how I'm supposed to appreciate the "hand-made" effort that went into a food item that in the end is inedible, especially when it's apple pie of all things...

And then there's Grandma's new found recipe for "chocolate pie." I wish Grandma would lose the recipe for chocolate pie, or that someone would have the heart to tell her that it's terrible and that in her 70+ years on this planet she has made some excellent food items, but this is not one of them. You know, I like those frozen triangular patties of fish (the ones that come in the blue box) — but I also know they're 'horrible,' and I only buy about 4 boxes of them a year.

You might be thinking — chocolate pie — that sounds fabulous. Sure, it does. I mean, there's like chocolate cream pie, Boston cream pie, chocolate mousse pie, chocolate pudding pie, chocolate cheesecake... but this chocolate pie is none of these things. It's like if you could suck all the fun, taste, and chewy-deliciousness out of a brownie - and then throw that in a pie shell. It barely tastes like chocolate, it isn't chewy, it crumbles apart, and like the aforementioned apple pie - it's a mess to cut.

Every time we have an event and this "chocolate pie" thing appears, I want to run screaming in the other direction.

Don't get me wrong, I have made some terrible food blunders in my day... there was that time when I tried some recipe involving cake mix without making it as cake mix — it was terrible. It has not since re-appeared in my kitchen... So, yes, figuratively, my fingers are crossed that cement-crust apple pie and chocolate pie will not be appearing on Thanksgiving day.

Don't get me wrong, I am being snarky, but man, do I hope Thanksgiving goes off without the same weirdly annoying dessert blunders this year... and in the even that it doesn't, in spite of the fact that I'm working 8 days in a row - I am bringing a pie. All things left to chance, 1 out of 3 desserts will be sliced without turning into a mess and have an edible crust. How do I know this? Because my pie filling comes from a can, and because graham crackers + butter is pretty hard to screw up. When all is said and done, the thing that matters most about a food item is that it tastes good and you enjoyed eating it, without guilt, shame, hassle, or having to use inappropriate utensils to apportion it.

Yes, I am confident in my ability to follow the directions on the can.
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Anyway, on Friday is when I put on Thanksgiving. The menu is as follows:
• turkey
• bread stuffing (bread cubed, craisins, diced apple, onion, celery, sage, parsley, chicken broth)
• pink jello salad (strawberry jello, sour cream, whipped cream, pineapple + coconut)
• cranberry sauce salad (whole cranberry sauce, raspberry jello, diced apple, walnuts)
• Betty Crocker cheesy scalloped potatoes
• Betty Crocker cranberry-orangebread + cream cheese
• Pumpkin pie / cheese cake hybrid (garnished with walnuts) for dessert

Anyway, we'll be eating Turkey for the next week...
Enjoy your Thanksgiving — I hope your food is good and edible, and hassle free.