A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

We're Back Home

Oh my Gawd, we have a bathroom floor, running water, and a living room again!

 

 

Happy Halloween!

While We're Waiting to Get Back into our House...

I was tagged for the Six RandomThings meme by Kimberly, mom of the beautiful former "preemie" Violet, at A Growing Violet.

Check out Kimberly's list of random things.  The "making people scream in a theater" cracked me up.  I did the same thing during Silence of the Lambs when Hannibal reached through the bars to take the file from Clarissa's hand.  I screamed. They all screamed. Then we all laughed nervously.

Just as an aside...does anyone else recognize Captain Stottlemeyer on Monk from Silence?  He's the crazy serial killer Buffalo Bill.  Now that's acting, my friends.

Okay, on to Six Random Things about me:

1.  I'm a  total Egyptophile.  Love everything about Egypt.  Ever since I was a kid I studied everything I can find about the country.  My dream vacation would be to travel the NIle and then head over into Saudi to see Petra and then up into Jerusalem. 

2.  I'm also a Titanic buff.  Not because of the morbid romance of the movie but because I think the Titanic tragedy is the perfect microcosm  to showcase real human nature, true chacacter in black and white.  I've often wondered who I would be in that situation.  Would I be John Astor who put on his tux and drank brandy and played cards until the ship went down, saying "I've lived as a gentleman. I'll die as a gentleman."  Or would I be Bruce Ismay who dressed up in women's clothing to sneak aboard the life boats and then took the biggest suite on the rescue ship, Carpathia, while other survivors shivered on the open decks all the way to New York? 

3.   My favorite holiday is Halloween.  LOVE IT!  This year we're all going to Auntie Miranda's since my house is truly a spook house but the family gathering and fun will still be the same! I've spent the day chasing around to find Sydney's puppy costume and get black fingernail polish and fun goth accessories for Jordan to play with.  Being in high school, she's not so hip to costume it but it's still fun to be a little wild and crazy.

4.  I didn't lose my virginity until well into my 20's because while my friends in high school were playing around I was terrified of getting knocked up and then living and dying in my own home town.  Not that there's anything wrong with that....but it amuses me now how motivated I was at the time.

5.  My favorite color is rich blood red.

6.  My favorite singer is...Barry Manilow.  Yep, I'm a familow.  Hee hee.  Have always loved his music. Will always love his music.  My favorite song ever of his is called "All the Time"  My favorite album is the jazz one, Paradise Cafe.

And that, my friends, is six random things about me.

Thanks,Kimberly!

At least the PLAN was simple...

We left town for a long weekend with friends, Jeff and Dee, and expected to come home to a beautifully remodeled bathroom done by our contractor friends, Ron and Lori.

This is what we left:

 

 

This is what we came home to:

 

That's the ground you're seeing.

There was so much mold in the walls and floor they had to literally gut it all.  It's actually looking pretty good now, all reframed.

Here''s the living room:

So....we're living in a hotel for the time being but I'll keep you updated.  You know, shit happens when your house is olderish. At least the mold problem is taken care of.

Gene's Birthday Weekend

...and then you get an email like this!

I have to share an email I received last week that really moved me.  Lonnie has since made it home to Arizona and is enjoying sitting at his own table eating his beautiful wife's cooking.

Ma'am,
 
Thank you so much for the pictures you posted on your site.  I am on my 4th tour in Iraq and miss home cooking so much.  Along with pictures of the house and kids, my wife sends me pictures of meals too.  That picture you posted of beef vegetable soup is taped up in one of our gun trucks.  I think it made a couple of us cry.
 
Counting the days,
 
TSgt L.B. Noah

 

Here's the link for the soup:Vegetable soup

Thank you, Lonnie!

 

 

Eureka Springs with Cindy--The Attractions Part 1

Poor Cindy.  I have this rule, you see. And this is when I ask anyone from visitors to my husband (just ask Gene) what they want to do, what they want to eat, or when they're hungry, if they say "I don't care" or "Whatever" they get to do or eat whatever I want.  Because hey, I asked.

So when Cindy said "I don't care" to the question of "What do you want to do?" she got to go to all the attractions around Eureka that I haven't been to in years but wanted to check up on (and I even managed to throw a foodie event in on her).

Quigley's Castle--

Not a castle in the huge rampart tradition but more in the vein of "my home is my castle", this is one of the coolest houses I've ever seen. Owned by the creator's granddaughter, Mrs. Quigley decided to build her own house during the depression and since she loved rocks and all things natural, she designed and built, with the help of her husband, this unique house with it's full glass panels and walls removed about 3 feet from the edges of the flooring to allow herself room to build a natural arboretum inside her own walls.  Then she ventured outside to surround the outside of the house building a koi pond, flower stands, bird baths, and "trees" of colored glass, some of which looked to be depression glass that's probably worth a little money.

I love both the beauty of the simple house and the idea behind it, that she saw it in her head as non-mainstream as it was, and created her dream.

 

Eureka Springs with Cindy--The Food

I've been gone all week on a mini-get away with my friend Cindy from Rhode Island.  She came here to work but one day of her assignment got cancelled so we grabbed the time to head down to one of my favorite Ozarks' towns, Eureka Springs, Arkansas.  I've blogged about Eureka Springs before but it's been a couple of years since Gene and I last visited and almost 15 years since we lived there. This is one of my favorite pics from the Balcony Restaurant of the Basin Park Hotel because it's not all glam.  It's a simple shot of one of the town's streets right before the sun set, after the shops had closed for the day, and the fog was rolling in off the hills.  It's the Eureka in October I remember from living there.

Part of me took Cindy there for the entertainment value. I wanted to see the look on Gene's "favorite Yankee's" face (Rhode Ilsander) when she was plunked down in the middle of Eureka.  Not that that's an insult to either one.  Anyone who's been to Eureka knows that the very best wonderful thing about the town is that everyone is welcome and everyone (within reason) gets along. The town is famous for being the transplanted home town for artisans of all kinds and there is more talent and more brains in those hills than anywhere else in the world (allow me the hyberbole--I'd move back in a second if we could). When Gene and I lived there we knew a banquet planner from Vegas who got tired of the city lights, several writers of all genres, an electrical engineer who got off the corporate ladder, a nuclear physicist who owns a Bed & Breakfast but travels all over the world for "think tanks" and some of the most artistically gifted people I've ever been in awe of anywhere.

Today I'll talk about the food. Tomorrow and over the weekend, I'll talk about the attractions and the Ghost Tour (awesome!) and how a ghost must have followed us back to our own historic hotel.

Food Quote for the Day

 

You can say this for ready-mixes - the next generation isn't going to have any trouble making pies exactly like mother used to make.  ~Earl Wilson

I'm back! Cooking up Filet in Puff Pastry and a Wonderfully Simple Salad

 

I've finally started feeling like cooking and eating again.  Boy, that sounds weird, eh? Never thought those words would come out of my mouth!  I've never not been in the mood to cook or eat but that gastritis thing really hit me hard.  I did lose some weight and ditched some of my bad habits (soda) so I'm not complaining about being sick.

So last night I felt like eating beef.  Not just beef, but BEEF, good beef.  And I wanted to play in the kitchen so I ended up making Gene and I a Beef Wellington of sorts, my version having not read a Beef Wellington recipe so I just called it Beef in Puff Pastry, teamed it with microwaved baked potatoes, and a simple, fresh, spicy salad.

Both dishes are really pretty simple.  I didn't use a recipe, per se, just whipped them together.  Here's how I did it.