Worst Blogger Ever Returns

Hey there!  Yes, it has been 2 full weeks since I last posted anything.  Yes, I do realize I am in the Worst Blogger Ever category.  But, I have been really busy.  For reals.

My sweet little Rachel Pie is home and we have been busy staying up damn near all night long playing cards, drinking tea, drinking eggnog, crocheting, watching Christmas movies, you know, the usual.

Plus there have been many days of trudging through the grocery store to get everything we need to make:

A. Chex Party Mix.  It is not the holidays around here without tons and tons of Chex Party Mix. My s-i-l and I both make it and we go through that stuff like there's no tomorrow.

B. Tamales.  Tamales are a traditional thing to make for Christmas eve and we really try to make good ones and have enough to get through New Year's.

C. Christmas candy and treats to pass out to the neighbors.

D. Regular meals during all of this holiday shenanigans.

Now about the candy, let me tell you this, I got the recipe from the blog of someone else, and since I haven't asked her permission to send you over there, I won't do that just yet.  But if she tells me "yes, please send your 5 readers over here" I will do just that.  I got the recipe she calls Crock Pot Candy and thought it seemed like a really fun idea.  So I bought all the ingredients and did as it told me to layer them up in the crock pot and leave them for 3 hours.  DO NOT TOUCH OR STIR FOR THREE HOURS! And then you stir it all up and drop by spoonfulls into little miniature cupcake papers to set up.

I left it the requisite 3 hours and went in to find a 2 inch thick wall all the way around the inside of the crock pot of burnt all the way to charcoal mess.  It was horrendous.  You have never smelled anything so gross.  Not to mention it took days to soak, scrub and chisel that crap out of the crock pot and try to get rid of the burnt smell.

I got a few more ingredients and tried again.  I'm so brave, right?

This time I checked it after 1 hour and it was almost ready.  After 1 1/2 hours it was perfect.  My crock pot must run really hot in the low heat button.  I don't know what's up with it.  But half the time was just right for my crock pot.  I guess crock pots are like microwaves in that they are each a bit different and quirky.

So Rachel Pie and I got all the little shiny gold and silver papers ready and dropped all the ooey gooey goodness in to them and I added some crushed peppermint on top for festiveness.  We packaged these in little tins with gold tissue paper and passed them out to the neighbors.  And within an hour of returning home several of them had called to say how much they loved the candy.  Now I don't know about you, but when people come calling with treats I tend to put them on the holiday table to serve along with all my other goodies.  I don't generally open the package and scarf them down right there at the door.  But that is what they seemed to do, and they all loved them.  New recipe to add to the holiday repetoire.

Today is our 30th wedding anniversary.  Can you believe that?  Mr. Big Ed and I are officially old farts if we are that damn old.

Here's something else you aren't going to believe!  (Lisa Pie's blog, where you come to find the unbelieveable and be astounded)  Mr. Big Ed is known far and wide by his lack of the shopping and gifting gene.  The man just doesn't like to shop and is oblivious to gifts, getting or receiving.  It has taken a lot of years for him to get to the point where he is today.

In fairness, it has taken me a lot of years to learn to tone it down when gifting to him, because his not wanting a lot of stuff and a lot of fuss made over him is not a character flaw.

So when we exchanged our anniversary gifts, I almost fell out of my chair when I opened the box to find a 36 inch strand of Tahitian black pearls.

I'll just let that sentence stand alone and let that thought soak in.  Pearl is the traditional gift for 30 year anniversary.  Black pearls are one of the things that would be on my bucket list of things to acquire.

I may have toned down my gift giving just a tad too much, since all I got him was a cute little thing to heat up his towels for after the shower.  I am not saying it's a crap gift, but next to black pearls?  It didn't look all that awesome.  I hope he enjoys it as much as I will enjoy those pearls!

What's going on over here

I thought I would take a minute to let you know what has been going on with me.  I have been so irritated with the Christmas lights situation that it was completely ruining my holiday spirit.  I have a couple strings of the really old lights that use the big bulbs, you know the ones I mean.  But this house is so darn big out front that these strings would not really cover very much, so I have not been using them.  Anyhoo, all this is to say that there was a time when Christmas lights were made well.  Made to last, in fact.  Everyone knew the bulbs would burn out and that's why you bought spare bulbs.

But over the last 5 years or so, maybe even 10 years, the lights (and I am speaking here mostly of the interior ones for going on the tree and such) are of lesser and lesser quality and don't seem to make it through more than one or two seasons.  Why is that?  Did people forget how to do it right?  Or is it more likely that there is some "cutting of corners" going on in the factories?  I am sure someone came up with the bright idea that they could make more money selling replacement strings of lights rather than a few bulbs.

But what happens to all these dead strings of lights?  Did no one ever consider where they go?  Or how will they break down?

On top of all THAT! a couple years ago I was testing and unwinding lights to put on the tree and happened to look down at the plastic tags attached near the plug end of the strand and it said something along the lines of "Warning!  light strings are coated in lead.  Be sure to not put your hands in your mouth and wash hands thoroughly after handling!  MADE IN CHINA"

Huh?

Wtf?

Lead?  Really?

So I started researching and found that the ones that say LED on the box are supposed to be a much better, and safer product.  Not only that they claim that they never burn out.  Now, that's a claim I can get behind!  And of course I expected to pay a lot more for this product.  Gradually, as my strings of lights kept burning out and I would very guiltily throw them in the trash, I was replacing them with the more expensive counterparts of LED lights.

And you know how they said "never burn out"??  That's a big, fat ass lie.  Not only do they go out, but there is no possible way to just replace that bulb and move on.  The whole damn expensive strand of lights is now expensive landfill that will probably leach toxic shit into the water.

I am just disgusted and irritated and totally out of the holiday spirit by now.  And I did what I always do when faced with this kind of situation.

I asked myself, "Self, what did people do BEFORE the strands of lights?"

I know, you are going to say candles, and that they are not safe.

But surely there was something in between the days of candles and burning down the house and today's life-threatening lead-coated pieces of crap???


And I remembered seeing something from the old days that I thought would fit my needs perfectly.

Yep, I have gone old school.

We here at Chez Lisa Pie will be rocking the aluminum tree with the color wheel!

The color wheel is an all metal item that is from the 1960s and is still working.  One thing to plug in rather than 6 inferior pieces of crap that will decide to quit working.

I am soooo excited to get this thing here!!

I will keep the crappy lights that I have now and do my best to keep them working until the day I have to send them to the landfill, but I have my way out of that consumer loop now.

I did try to post the pictures of my exact tree but couldn't.  So when it arrives I will photograph the whole process of opening  the box and each of the 151 branches that go on it.  Woot!!!

In other news, it was my birthday last week.  We went out last night to celebrate by eating at our favorite restaurant, Lüke and then going to The Majestic Theater to see Fiddler on the Roof.  Everything was first rate.  The food, the company, the wine, the weather, the show.  The evening could only have been made better by the participation of the precious Rachel Pie, who sadly will not be here with us until this coming Saturday.  Yay for Saturday!!  Yay for Rachel Pie coming home!!

Rachel Pie's lovely partner who has not given me permission to use her name so I will call her Partner of Pie will be going to spend Christmas with her family.  One of these days we will have to get all of Partner's family here with all of our family so no one has to pick and choose who to be with and who to leave.  Anyhoo, what that means is that I get Rachel Pie all to myself for a few days.  Oh, the slumber partying we will do!  All the snuggling!  The staying up really late playing cards!  All the tamale-making!  It's gonna be a fun time here at the house!  Yes, indeedy.  Maybe Rachel Pie and I will get really cute matching Mother-Daughter Christmas sweaters or something?

Yeah, like that would ever happen.  Hee!!!

Christmas Tamale-Making Tired

Yes, I am so tired I am Christmas Tamale-Making Tired.  And THAT, my friends, is t. i. r. e. d.

Little Rachel Pie and I have made this year's tamales.  We spent Wednesday at the store buying everything we needed and then soaking the beans and cooking the beans and also cooking the pork.  Basically, doing all the prep work we could ahead of time.

Then yesterday we started making the tamales.  Typically, I have a group of friends over and some neighbors drop by and my s-i-l and with a kitchen full of people we knock those babies out.  But since we didn't get this planned till the last second and my s-i-l is traveling, it ended up being just the two of us.

And do you think I was smart enough to think of taking my camera out and sharing the experience with you here?  No, I was not.  I actually thought of it TODAY!  A day late and a dollar short, as the saying goes.

So visualize this in your head:  both of us in our Christmas aprons.  Rachel Pie did NOT like her Christmas apron and kept calling it a Muu Muu.  Then it became a M-apron.  Then it was Muu-pron.  Which to me sounded like a prescription drug for e.d. or restless leg syndrome or something lame.

Anyhoo, back to the kitchen.  We had the big giant silver ice chest full of corn husks soaking in water.  We had all 5 giant tamale pots out and at the ready.  There were large pans of mashed beans, shredded and seasoned pork, corn, chopped roasted Hatch chiles, cheese, and bowls of mashed chipotles.  May I just interject here that one of my all-time pet peeves is MORONS who mispronounce CHI-PO-TLE.  It is not now, nor has it ever been CHI-POLE-TEE.  Please don't say this, it just makes you look like an idiot.  Or like Guy Fieri when he says BUH-SAL-MIC in place of the correct BAL-SAM-IC.  It is not that hard to say chi-po-tle.

Anyhoo, back to the kitchen again.  Picture the giant tupperware full of the masa.  And also picture the food processor and all the masa ingredients on the other section of the counter.  What I am saying here is that the kitchen was full of stuff and looked like a tamale bomb had gone off.  And we are clean-as-you-go people.  And it still looked that bad.

We ended up with 18 - 20 dozen tamales total.  Some were pork, some were bean and chipotle, and the rest were were corn, chile and cheese.  In other years we have added in other varieties, we do sweet ones, we mix pork and venison, sometimes we put bacon in the beans, cilantro in the corn, chile and cheese (which I like to call C 3 or C- cubed)  If we had cilantro it would have been C to the 4th power, which I have no clue how to do on my lovely computer.  But that's how we label them when packing away in the freezer.

There was no set rhyme or reason as to how many we made of each.  We just started with the pork and made them till we ran out of the pork.  Then the beans.  And finally the C 3.

In case you are interested in the specifics, we started with about 5 lbs of pork shoulder which I cooked overnight in the crock pot with a little bit of chicken stock and a ton of garlic.  The beans were a 4 lb. bag of pintos that I cooked all day long with a ton of garlic.  When they were cooked well, I added in salt, chile powder, cumin and a couple cans of Ro-Tel.

I bought Chile ancho, chile guajillo, and those little Chile de Arbol (those are the hot ones) and we seeded them and roasted them and then softened them in boiling water and then processed them with lots of garlic and salt and some of the soaking water till we had about a quart of chile puree'.  This mixture got blended into the pork, and each of the masa mixtures.  I vary the ingredients of the masa to better coordinate with the filling.  When making the pork tamales I use the rich pork drippings and mix with chicken broth and some of the chile puree', but with the bean ones I use the bean juice that I strained off before refrying the beans.  Just to add another layer of flavor.  Make sense?

After all the giant tamale steamer pots were done and cooling we still had to package up the tamales and label them. And find room for them in the freezers.

Time involved:  2 people at 12 hours each, plus 2 people shopping for 2 hours, plus 3 more hours prep work.  Total:  34 woman hours.

Money spent:  No clue.  I hate keeping up with that end of things.  Plus how do you account for the baking powder and salt that was already in the pantry and used 1 tsp at a time?  All I know is that people who bitch about buying tamales for $5 or $6 per dozen have never made them.  There is no way I would do all that work and sell my 20 dozen for $6 each.  That's $120 and if you divide that by 34 hours of labor it comes to $3.50 per hour.  Isn't that slave labor wages?

Whatever.

The point was not to belittle our efforts but to show that spending that time together and producing a quality traditional food that our family loves is truly a labor of love. What other reason could there be for doing all that work?

Love of family.  That's what motivates most of these customs.

Enjoy your Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with your family.  And notice your customs.  Do them with love in your heart and a song on your lips.  Holiday beverages help, if you have too many in-law outlaws hanging around your kitchen.  : )

You'll Shoot your eye out!

Poor Ralphie, all he wants is the Red Ryder BB Gun and the adults around him keep telling him "You'll shoot your eye out".

Is this the best Christmas movie ever made or what?  According to a list of the top Christmas movies, it is.

Well, hold on to your hats, people.  Because look what is new in Seattle.

And check this out as well: Ralphie's house is now restored to what it was for the movie and is right across the street from the Christmas Story Museum.

And!  If going to Cleveland to see the house and the museum or going to Seattle for this year's production of the musical weren't enough for you, each of these places has stores where you can buy your very own Leg Lamp, or pink bunny pajamas or any of the hats the boys all wore in the movie.  It's sooo exciting!

Year before last I bought my kids each their very own small ornament sized leg lamps that come in the crate marked "Fra-geee-lay". And last year my son got me my very own 18" leg lamp that holds a candle. It is very prominently displayed.  Love the leg lamp!

It is grocery shopping day and cooking the ingredients for the tamale making. Tamale making will take place tomorrow.  It is going to smell great around here in just a few hours.

Enjoy your day, whatever holiday preparations you are taking care of. And thanks for stopping by.

Holiday Traditions

Yesterday I was asked by one of my clients for suggestions that they could adopt as their own holiday meal traditions.  His family does the big turkey and all that stuff ( basically it's a rerun of Thanksgiving) while her home celebrated with a Mexican feast.  Now that they have their little one she was looking for something fun to try out this year as their own big Christmas meal.  We both went about our business and continued thinking about it and then said to each other at the same time "Paella!!"

In my house we have a big paella for Easter dinner.  We did it once and loved it so much that we have continued it and made it our family Easter tradition.  I don't think you can force a tradition into existence, but you have to start somewhere, right?

So I am writing down my recipe and loaning her my paella pan so they can try it out and see if they need to go buy a pan for next year.

Anyhoo, it did get me to thinking about our particular family traditions.  Traditions that Mr. Big Ed brought from his family, things that I do because my mom did them, or my aunt or one of my grandparents, and also the traditions that we have cobbled together over the long history of our marriage.

Mr. Big Ed's family was not big on stockings.  They were go to Midnight Mass people and then come home and eat the tamales that his Mom had worked on all day and then open presents.  I don't guess anyone felt the need to wake kids up early after all that to do stockings.

My family was HUGE on stockings.  We still are.  Our "stockings" are essentially large paper grocery sacks full of stuff with your stocking hanging on the front.  We totally over-do it.  It is an obscene display of over abundance is what it is.  We also did a big Christmas Eve thing with dips, pate', tamales, chili, and tons of cookies.  But we only got to open one gift on Christmas Eve.  Then Christmas morning we had our stockings, a special breakfast and then we got to open our gifts.

The holiday traditions that we have put together for our little family unit has grown and evolved and with each move to another country we added in something we picked up at each new place and also had to shed a few that were just not practical in the new place.

Our Christmas Eve and Christmas day is a real hybrid of what we each have brought and what feels right for us as we have grown.  For example, there were a number of years when 3 out of the 4 of us were vegetarian.  That right there will put a spin on your holiday menu.  And we try to work around what is important and a priority to each of us.

Being from Texas and having lived in Mexico for a number of years it is way up on the list of "Must Haves" that we make tamales for Christmas Eve.  Being from Texas it is equally important that we have the Velveeta/Ro-tel queso dip stuff.  From Mr. Big Ed's family we have onion dip with Ruffles.  Not just any onion dip, it needs to be the Borden brand store-bought stuff that you bring home and add a bunch of fresh black pepper and stir it up really well.  Lots of cookies and baked goods figure in.  And everyone loves the spicy roasted nuts.  This has gradually morphed into having cheese enchiladas, more tamales, guacamole and rice for Christmas dinner.

Usually for Christmas morning we will make a special drink.  Sometimes it is Bloody Marys or champagne and orange juice, but most times it is Mexican Hot Chocolate.  (Only Ybarra's not that crappy Abuelita's brand)  I either make a stuffed French toast or sometimes these ham cups that have either sauteed mushrooms or spinach in them and topped with eggs and then baked.  These are delicious.

I have cut way back on my giant bags-o-stocking stuffers.  No one wants all that much stuff.  I would rather buy one really fabulous bar of the best chocolate made than have 30 pieces of crappy candy.  So, that's kind of the way things are going for us.

I see our traditions as more of a fluid, moving thing rather than a set-in-stone "this is how we have ALWAYS done it" sort of thing.

So, here's what I want to know:  What are your holiday traditions?  What are the most meaningful things you do that if everything else fell away, this is the thing you would try to keep?

Lemme hear from you!  And remember, it is most important to be relaxed and enjoy the time together.  So don't sweat the small stuff and the details.  It will be wonderful even if the cards aren't all sent on time.  It will be just the way it is meant to be whether or not those bows match or not.  Enjoy your selves.

And thank you for reading.  And even more thanks for commenting through this year.  It really means a lot to me and inspires me.  That's my present from you!

Me and Gregg Allman

What do I have in common with Gregg Allman?  Well, first off neither of us are angels.  And secondly, we both ramble.  He's a ramblin' man, and I have a ramblin' mind.  Ha!

Let's enjoy looking at the Gregg Allman of my youth, shall we?

I absolutely adored him when I was in 8th and 9th grade.  The very first t- shirt I ever bought that sported a picture of someone was Gregg Allman.  It was black.  Nowadays, the black has faded to a funky brown/purple/olive color.  How would I know this about a shirt made back in 1973?  Because I STILL have it!  It lived in my cedar chest with my favorite pair of torn-up, paint-spattered, worn-in, cool-patch wearin' Levis for many many years.  Then my teen-aged Rachel Pie person spied them and heisted them for her very own use.  So the Gregg Allman t-shirt is still in use.  All these years later.  One of these days I will dig out the shirt and the jeans and take pics for you.  Then you can say "Hey Lisa Pie, your ass used to fit in THOSE jeans?"  And I will say what every other person on the planet says, "Yes, it did.  And I will have you know that I thought I was fat and went on every flipping fad diet that came down the pike".  What the hell is wrong with girls that we all think we are fat when we are perfectly made and beautiful?

Anyhoo, the reason I woke up thinking about Ramblin' Man is because my mind was seriously all over the place.  So I will just start listing things as they occur to me.

1. You all know how much I adore Matt who dances badly around the world.  I have signed up to be notified if and when he shows up in my neck of the woods so I can gather people and go dance with him at some fabulous local sight.  And he is out right now filming for the next video!  And he is in this hemisphere!  The chances are good that this might be the year we get in!!

2. It's almost Thanksgiving.  Today is actually Nov. 12 and no one loves to decorate for Christmas more than I do, but I restrain myself until after Thanksgiving.  And last night I was driving home from Childbirth Ed class and what did my wandering eye spy?  One of the other homes in my neighborhood already had lights up.  And I thought "well maybe they aren't really Christmas lights.  Maybe they are just generic decorative lights."  I slowed down and looked and guess what?  There were not only lights on the house, but in the trees, bushes and . . . . .  

AND they also had 3 of those fake trees with lights and decorations in a cute little grouping in the yard!  Holy Way-to-jump-the-gun Batman!!!  Talk about early!

The good thing is, no matter what I do now, I wasn't the idiot who put my lights up first.  : )  Love that.

3. Thanksgiving Menu is made!  Shopping list is made and the to-do lists are being worked on.  This is all good.  And . . . .  I was able to get the group to agree to try some new recipes. I love it when that happens.  So I am here to share with you the cranberry recipe I am going to try.  Now, be forewarned that I have never made this.  But if I am willing to try this out on my family without test-driving it first, you should to.  : )

From the 2008 Bon Appetit Thanksgiving issue:

Cranberry Relish with Grapefruit and Mint

2 large pink grapefruits
1 cup sugar
2 1/2 cups cranberries (about 10 oz.)
2 Tbsp. fresh mint, chopped

Using vegetable peeler, remove peel (pink and yellow outer layer only) from 1 grapefruit in strips. Cut peel into 2-inch-long, 1/8-inch wide strips (about 1/2 cup). Squeeze grapefruits to get 1 cup juice.

Stir 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water in medium saucepan over medium heat until sugar dissolves. Add grapefruit peel; bring to boil. Reduce heat; simmer until peel is soft, about 15 minutes. Add grapefruit juice and cranberries; bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer until berries burst, about 10 minutes. Transfer to medium bowl. Stir in mint. Cover; chill until cold. Can be made 3 days ahead. Keep chilled.

***My notes:  First off, I am completely irked by the title.  I have read enough cookbooks and recipes to know that a cranberry RELISH is one where you use them raw and grind them in the food processor with other ingredients.  Cranberry SAUCE is when you cook them and let them burst and thicken the mixture.  So if this is good and I deem this a keeper, I will change the name.  Other than that, how fabulous does this sound?  I swear I can smell it already just from the written word!  No pics necessary.


4. I sent off for Ernest T. Bass to have his DNA done and find out what mixture of breeds caused this particular dog.  He is such a handsome fellow, but everyone swears they see something different in him. So I thought I would spring for the test and find out.  And while I am patiently waiting, and patiently clicking on the website hourly to see if they have the results yet, I was perusing a dog breed website. In addition to pure breeds they also have a category of the new "Hybrid breeds".  These are like those purposely made Labradoodles, not just your average mutt dog.  And I came across the cutest picture of puppies ever.  Check this out:

Awwww.  Have you ever seen such cuteness?  Squishy, squishy, you must want to smoosh them!  These are called BaShar pups.  Half Basset hound, half Shar Pei.  Hilarious is what those are.  Absolutely precious.

Enjoy your weekend!

Christmas Came Too Fast

Between last week and today I needed a month rather than just a measly 7 days. I am so far behind, I can see myself! I hate being behind and not "on task".

Yesterday instead of going to the UPS store, wrapping a few last gifts, etc, etc, etc, I got up at the crack of dawn and stood in the kitchen all day making tamales. Not just me, Rachel Pie was there. My s-i-l was also there and then more guests/helpers arrived. It was a really good day and we made about 25 dozen of 4 different varieties. If I can trust the taster tamales we tried, these may be the best ones yet. Woo Hoo!!

I have been working on and tweaking the menus for tonight, tomorrow a.m. and p.m. Hopefully, we don't have to go back to the store. I am not looking forward to that little bit of excitement! We are having our usual fare of tamales, queso dip, onion dip and Ruffles, hot spiced cider and such tonight. Tomorrow we will have Mexican hot chocolate, and ham & egg cups for breakfast and then for dinner we have cheese enchiladas, beans, rice, and guacamole and any leftover tamales. If you want any recipes, just holler!

So far I have seen Love, Actually twice already! Woo Hoo! I am so glad to have that added in to the Christmas movie rotation. No Die Hard yet. Maybe later today? And then the TBS marathon of Ralphie comes on. 24 hours of Ralphie, the Old Man, the leg lamp, the Bumpus' dogs. I mean really, what more could you ask for? "Fa, Ra, Ra, Ra, Raaaaa, Ra, Ra, Ra, Raaaaaaahhh!!!" The BEST Christmas show e-ver.

My poor dogs and kitties were totally freaked out by a random storm that came up last night. One dog was having kaniptions. Ok, I know that isn't spelled right but my brain is in low gear due to the huge quantities of disgusting sinuses I am storing in my head where my brain used to be. How in the world DO you spell kaniption? Conniption? Kuniption? I got no clue right now. Don't judge me. And one of my kitty cats was outside next to the front door huddled up giving his best "Get me the hell outta here!" whiney meow when I ran to the door to see how many cats would come tumbling in. That's the way it is with us now. Something happens outside, we are running to check the door and counting small kitty heads to see who is in and who might be lost.

Anyhoo, after the thunder, and the rain came the wind. We have so damn much wind blowing it is insane! And my poor luminarias! They are laying catty-wampus, hither and thither. And that is just the ones that aren't blown all over the lawn! Please let the wind die down so I can straighten them all up before the sun goes down and lights come on! (and save me from over-using that darn excitement point!!!!!)

Have a merry, happy and relaxing Christmas. Jingle yourself all the way to your refrigerator for a snack and then ho, ho, ho yourself on over to the couch. Get a snuggie, a dog, and a cat or two and get comfy to watch the A Christmas Story marathon and just enjoy yourself. Any stressful stuff will still be there to deal with come Saturday. Or Monday. No biggie.