Monthly Archives: April 2012

I’ll go ahead and tell you:

Slices of Bob Evans Natural Breakfast Sausage which I had slowly simmered in last night’s Whiskey Cream Sauce (I had to add a lot of cream to dilute the salt!) over Toasted Oatmeal Bread.

It was divine.

We washed it down with water mixed with caffeine shots, because I didn’t feel like making coffee.

If that wasn’t a Breakfast Of Champions, I don’t know what is.

I need to load up on energy boosters because Varmint’s first softball game of the season is today, and I am going to need to be in rare form.  I should probably ask Coach Wendy exactly how far I can go before I get thrown out of the game.

Wish us luck!

Love,

Mama

We went to Alexanders for Lunch last Wednesday.  I’ve never been there for lunch before.  Maybe because my lunch often consists of either:

• A wholly dis-satisfying Slimfast Shake
• A home-made Panini with more calories than my body needs in a week
• or, if I’m cranky, both.

But my brother, Graham, My Captain, and I decided it would be nice to take my mom out for lunch to celebrate her birthday some more.

I hadn’t been there in a few weeks; I was looking forward to it!

As soon as we sat down, we were served Chef Smallwood’s newest southern-type creation:  A watermelon Lemonade.

Um……YUM!    It was like sipping on the month of July itself.  I swear I could hear waves lapping when I drank it.

My mom got this wonderful barbecued shrimp salad. It was a lot of shrimp!  And, beautiful, too.

It’s hard to tell in this picture, but the shrimp are wrapped in bacon.

God Bless Chef Smallwood is all I have to say about THAT.

My Captain and My Brother, Graham, got the BLT sandwiches with fries.

Chef Smallwood smokes all of his own meats there on the premises.  If you haven’t had freshly smoked bacon, you are in for a serious treat.  Leave your veins and arteries at home, though.   They don’t want to watch.

Let me get you up close and personal with that baby.  Ohhhh Mama.  Look at that.  Is there anything more satisfying than a BLT?  (The answer is, “Yes.  A BLT with cheese on it.”  But please don’t get me started on that particular subject.)

And you know what your corpulent, but loveable Mama Boe ordered?

A salad.  A plain, ol’ salad.

Oh sure, it had enough bacon, egg, sautéed onion and cheddar croutons on it to kill a horse, but it was a salad just the same.  And that is very sad.  Very, very sad.  Mama Boe does not like to eat salads.  Mama Boe would much rather have ordered the Flying Dog Beer Battered Shrimp.

But order the salad she did.  Not because she wanted to.  No sirreee.  She ordered it because she has been told by her doctor to lose weight and SOOON.

How terribly pedantic of him.

Is it me, or has Mama Boe started speaking in the third person now?  How marvelous!  Weird, but marvelous.

So I saved my calories that I might have a bite of some of the newer desert creations:  Homemade Nutella Ice Cream:

Of which I took one bite because I have unbelievably strong will (and because Graham took it away from me.  I pouted.).

and then I had a bite of cake that had all kinds of marvelous liquors in the icing.

I can’t remember if it was only Kaluha or Baileys or what, all I remember is that I wanted more than one bite and that my family is mean.  Ok, ok, maybe they are trying to save my life by not letting me eat whatever I want, but it is still very mean-spirited of them to take cake from me.  My life is so hard.

Ok, I’m over it.

The very talented woman who is in charge of all the baking, whose name escapes me at the moment, but who I am going to dedicate an entire post to soon….very, very soon…also made a home-made whoopie pie cake.  It is Out. Of. This. World.  I will write about it, I promise.

Ordering lunch was tough on us.  There were so many wonderful choices.  Choosing gave My Captain a headache:

I kid.  I was the one who gave him the headache.  Something about my incessant flow of inane drivel.  But I’m not sure.  I wasn’t listening.

I made My Captain a Rib Eye steak in a Whiskey Cream Sauce today.  I found it in Ree Drummond’s cookbook “The Pioneer Woman Cooks”.

Usually I like her recipes, but I have a small beef (ahem) with her about her use of the term “generously” as a definable amount.

You see, I was supposed to ‘generously’ salt the meat before I seared it.  And I was also to ‘generously’ season the whiskey sauce with salt and pepper as I reduced and thickened it.

But see, if nothing else, I’m a generous person.  I may be fat, I may be stupid, I may even, on occasion, be dorky, but miserly I most emphatically am not.  I am one of the most generous-hearted persons you will ever meet.

I have to be to make up for all the rest of those deficits above.

So when I sprinkled the salt on generously, man, I SPRINKLED IT ON.  I mean, I turned that Rib-Eye steak into salt-pork steak.  And my whiskey cream sauce was so salty, I made the dead sea look diluted. (Exaggeration is like a bizillion times more interesting than understatement, don’t you agree?)

It was horrific.  I could barely eat it, and I can eat just about anything.

And My Captain, the man who puts up with so much crap from me already, didn’t complain.  I apologized profusely as we sat down to our quiet candle-lit meal.  But you know what he said?

“It’s ok.  I needed to replace my electrolytes anyways.”

I guess if I’m not famously known for my smoke-producing casseroles, maybe I’ll get known far and wide for my electrolyte-replacing steak dinners. Like a new meat-flavored Gatorade.

I’ll find my own little niche in life yet, just you wait.

So my brother, Graham, came into town for my mother’s birthday this week.  My kids love their Uncle Graham.  He has a wicked sense of humor.  And he doesn’t get to come very often, so when he does make it down here, it’s a special occasion.

Put together Mom’s Birthday, and Uncle Graham visiting, and boy howdy is it a special day!  This calls for an extra-special dinner, so I rolled up my sleeves, and made a casserole with anything (read: everything) I could find, and copious amounts of butter and cream. We’re talking rice, chicken, ham, bacon, broccoli, cheese, ….all the things that make life happy.

Now, see, usually I’d put a cookie sheet under a casserole dish to catch any spills.  But this time it didn’t seem like the dish was so full that it would be necessary.

Yeah….that was a serious mis-calculation.

The smell told me so.

It also told me that maybe, perhaps, it was potentially possible that I might have used a slightly excessive amount of butter and cream.

You should have seen alarming amounts of smoke spewing out of the oven vents as that grease hit the bottom of the crankin’ hot oven.

I would like to take this moment to review the importance of the efficacy of oven fans.

But we don’t have time.

So let’s take stock of my situation:

• We have a strong smell of burning food.
• We have a heavy show of smoke.
• My husband is a firefighter.
• My brother is in town which happens like, once a year, so I’d like to impress him if at all possible.
• AND, my mother’s birthday meal is in question at this point.

What did I do?

Did I panic?  Did I cry?  Did I suggest we go out to dinner instead?

No sirree, Bob.

I acted like nothing was amiss, as if it was absolutely, totally normal to have the entire downstairs of the cottage filled with lung-choking smoke.  And God bless my family, they played along.  I don’t know if it was because they were being kind, or if it was an indictment of my cooking in general…. as if all of my meals do this.  But either way, they were just going on about their business, like “there is nothing to see here folks…move along.”

All, that is, except for Uncle Graham.  The funny one.

“The house isn’t burning down, right? We know this for sure, right?”

This of course was all the invitation Critter and Varmint needed to start snickering.  And Grandma was not far behind.

My Captain reached up and turned the kitchen ceiling fan up to high-speed.

(Let me insert here that I always, ALWAYS keep my kitchen ceiling fan on low, just to keep air moving comfortably.  So if there were, say, an ungodly build-up of dust, grease, and other indefinable particles on the fan, I would be ignorant of it.  That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.)

So My Captain reaches up and turns the kitchen ceiling fan on high.  Uncle Graham is standing next to me in the kitchen, he’s just made the joke about the house burning down as we choke on the grease smoke, and as the fan begins to speed up, all this CRAP (for lack of a better term) comes snowing down on us from the fan.  It was like our own Mt. St. Helen ash falling down all around us.

And not just a little bit.

It’s a good thing my family loves me, because they sure as hell don’t keep me around for my cooking and cleaning abilities.

Later on, the casserole DID taste yummy, and as we ate, I felt vindicated.

All was forgotten when that yummy goodness hit my tongue.  At least, until, with twinkling eyes, Uncle Graham reached over and plucked a piece of Mt. St. Helen ash out of my hair.

Did I mention that my family loves me?

I’d always thought of a Hardware store as a man’s domain.  Guy Turf.  Call me sexist.

I’ve been called worse.

You can tell its male-ness by the barely audible primal grunting coming from men as they walk through the door.  You won’t hear that from a woman, unless maybe she is in gastrointestinal distress.  (Mind you, I don’t include Loews or Home Depot in the category of Hardware store.  Any place that sells Martha Stewart brand anything is most emphatically NOT a manly-man hardware store.)

As the wife of a manly man, I don’t have much occasion to go to a Hardware store.  Grocery stores now sell a much wider range of goods; I can get picture hangers and duct tape and sink stoppers at the same time I’m buying milk, eggs and toilet paper.   And if there is a Starbucks in the same store, that doesn’t hurt, either. “Work smarter, not harder,” that’s what I always say.

Ok, I don’t usually say that.  But if I were the woman I wish I was, I would always say that.

So it was unusual for me to find myself in front of Poolesville Hardware store last week.  I needed potting soil; I was already in Poolesville for other reasons; I didn’t want to spend $4.00 per gallon of gasoline to drive down to Lowes; and I was distracted by the pansies they had just put out front on that beautifully sunny spring day.  A Mommy’s version of ‘Oh! Shiney Object!’

I walked in.

It smelled like a hardware store: metal, fertilizers, man-sweat.  There was no question that I was in a man’s domain.

But before I could recoil, I noticed the flower seeds on the right.  And the kitchen gadgets in the aisle in front of me.  And the toy rockets with colorful tails.  Without knowing it, I was pulled in farther, topsoil receding to the back of my mind as I nosed around….

What was in that corner?

Oh Cool!  I didn’t know I could buy that here!

Is that what I think it is?  I haven’t seen one of those in years!

Are those things still legal?

They still make those??

I was catapulted back to my childhood, holding my dad’s hand, asking him what this was for or what that was for and could I please have one of these?

There is rack of penny candy in the center of the room.

All it needed to make it fully Norman Rockwell was a potbelly Wood-burning stove, and a couple of grandpas smoking pipes, playing checkers in the corner with a dog curled up at their feet.

I asked the man behind the counter, who was busier than a tornado in a trailer park, how long Poolesville Hardware Store had been here.

Turns out the guy was the owner, John Speelman.  And he shared that as its present incarnation, the store had been around 25 years. Twenty Five stinkin’ years!  And I’d never stepped foot in the place before!  And I guess the place had been around as a hardware store under different ownership a long time before he took over.

We talked briefly about the sad demise of Selby’s grocery store, and he admitted due to the warm winter, he’d just experienced the worst 8 weeks in retail he’d ever seen.  But doggedly he persists, maintaining a promise to sell only U.S. Made products, and his philosophy of quality versus quantity.

He also shared with me that he is shifting the store to “Going Green”.   That has got to be difficult in a hardware store. I respect the fact that he would even try. Especially in this economy, when he is the witness to many other local stores closing their doors.

I felt three very poignant things:  1) Guilt for never having patronized that place and 2) Surety that I would be back to patronize it in the future, and 3) The urge to give a primal grunt.

But maybe that was just gastrointestinal distress.

Go visit them! Poolesville Hardware Store…even if you don’t need something, they have it there.