The Forgotten Videos

Whoa - guess who forgot to post a bunch of the videos from Halloween! Uh oh!! Well let's see - it's Thanksgiving day, so what better time to post Halloween videos than now? (Gee, should I save them for Christmas day!?)

Jamie and I were goofing around just before she left, and before you know it she was motorboating my chicken breasts!



We decided that was so funny, annnnd we weren't certain if the video took, so we had a second shot:



Now this one's really dark, but I still had to post it... Eric said he liked hot food, and so I had to challenge him with a couple fatalii peppers. The first one was green and small - and when Eric said it was ok and not too hot, I brought out the big guns - my last fully ripened, big and yellow fatalii. I wasn't let down! He was sweating, and even got a slight case of the hiccups (this happened to me too!).



We're all easily amused by other people's pain! ;-)

I don't remember if I posted this one before or not - here's Cindy rocking out with the Go Gos with Rock Band:



And then Grant had everyone in stitches with his Beastie Boys performance:



YouTube kept having problems with some of my video uploads when I was posting stuff from the front of the house....but here's one that succeeded. This was the view of the front of the house when we had Trick or Treaters come around Halloween night!



And you can see here how Brett set up the strobe in the dining room window. You can ALMOST make out the dripping blood and bloody handprints on the window in the video:



Hopefully I'll get more/better videos posted later...

Up close and personal

I hope you like dog pics. And I hope you don't mind LOOOOOTS of dog pics. Other than that, I really don't think there's much more for me to say with today's post - other than enjoy all the dog pics! ;-)

Bye!

For the birds

With fall here, and we're sliding right on in to winter, I need to start restocking the bird seed a bit more frequently... While they don't do much for Brett, the rest of us in the house get so much entertainment from the birds.

Here's a tufted titmouse, barely visible around the side of the birdfeeder. This is before I moved the new homemade suet to an easier place for the birds.

There's a black-capped chickadee on the left, and a goldfinch on the right. The goldfinches don't really eat from this style of birdfeeder normally - I actually have finchfeeders set up with thistle seed that they like.

A nice vibrant blue jay. Why is it the blue jays need to be SO messy. They flick out so many seeds just to find the perfect one. Oh well - there's enough birds (juncos, doves, etc) that'll actually eat all the seed that hits the ground...

Here's a downy woodpecker, going after a bit of the suet I made that I just scraped out on the edge of the feeder - this was before I nailed down the best way to shape the suet, and just needed to scrape some off a spatula. Check out how the woodpecker uses it's tail feather to brace against the feeder...

You can tell this is a female because there's no vibrant red splotch on the back of her head. I've started having hairy woodpeckers show up as well - they're like a slightly larger version of the downy woodpecker, and to me at least, appear to have whiter whites. They also have a longer, skinnier beak, while the downy woodpeckers have a shorter, stubbier beak. I've only just started seeing the hairy woodpecker (which finally clarified the visual differences between the two birds), and I hope to get a picture of one sometime. What would be really cool is to get both types on the feeder at the same time - I've only seen this happen once, and both are pretty skittish. Any movement in the house, and they take off.

The house finches are still here. These are the birds that kept building nests in the artificial Christmas trees on the front porch this past spring.

Alright, that's all for now... I'm sure there'll be plenty more bird pictures this fall and winter. I should take the storm screens out of the windows to improve the pictures!

Fresh from the garden

There's not much still coming out of the garden. I've still got kale, swiss chard, and these bright little guys!


They're really not all that big - and they've been in there since the spring! More often than not, they're just Doogie treats - I'll pull one up and toss it to him, and he'll snack on it in the yard, picking off the stem. For some reason, I just haven't had the best luck with getting really sweet carrots out of the garden... I understand that their sugars improve after we get some chilly weather, so I'll be taste testing these periodically to see if they get better now that fall's here...

Yard fun

Daylight hours are winding down, and yet the dog still needs fun time outside. So when I get home from work, I have to make sure I work to get him racing around outside sooner, rather than stalling til later in the evening. I mean, we're to the point where the sun's setting around 5pm!! Talk about depressing...

Doogie still LOOOOVES chasing frisbees or other toys around the backyard... You can see here there's the barely noticeable frisbee in the air as he races to intercept...

And here he's going airborne, and I think he's actually got the frisbee in his mouth!

Then we race back across the yard because, hey, there's a frisbee in the mouth!

Zooooom - SCREEEETCH! HIT THE BREAKS!! You obviously can't carry a frisbee around in your mouth TOO long without needing to stop and chew on it.

And what's been REALLY fun is having the veggie garden full of leaves I got from Dan down the street, and from Sharon and Andy. By the time this posting releases, I might've had a delivery of horse manure from a nearby farm, and then I'll be tilling it all in. But for now, it's fun fun fun to toss frisbees and dog toys into! Sometimes Doogie catches 'em before they disappear into the leaves...and sometimes not!

He knows it's down there somewhere!

Ah ha!!! See how he comes flying out of there, with leaves still all over his head and his mouth? More often than not he'll come to a stop, drop the frisbee, and then work on spitting the dry leaves out of his mouth. Ok, I can't blame him - I wouldn't want all those dry leaves in my mouth either - gross! But he DOES enjoy digging around for his toys in them!

Blech

Yuck, this really doesn't look very promising...

Spaghetti pie

We'd recently had a couple dinners that involved pasta, and as always, I make more pasta than we need - you know, "just in case". I mean, what if the sauce-to-pasta ratio is off? What if we need leftovers for lunch, but eat all the pasta for dinner and have leftover sauce? What if there's a nuclear holocaust and we need food down in the basement?

Annnnyhow, we had both regular spaghetti AND whole wheat corkscrew pasta in the fridge. And lots of farm fresh eggs. Oh, and two packages of prosciutto from a Halloween dish I never got around to making, and they're only good for a couple more months. And lots of cheese. Hmm... Ok, I don't know why I was thinking of combining them all, but I did some hunting around for spaghetti pie recipes, but not ones that actually involved spaghetti sauce, lasagna-like ingredients, etc... I wanted something different. After some researching, I came up with my own sorta recipe - and here's how it looked when it came out of the oven.

Not too bad, eh?!?!

We had maybe a pound or less of cooked pasta (spaghetti and corkscrew) - both chilled. I combined them in a container, filled part way with water, and nuked it for four minutes to bring it back to life....

I mixed 5 eggs in a bowl, along with maybe a 1/2 cup of milk, salt, pepper, paprika, nutmeg, and some dried parsley. Then I added a package of prosciutto, which I'd torn up.

Over in the food processor I shredded miscellaneous chunks of cheese - mozzarella, cheddar and monteray jack. I also had some shredded parm. All of the parm and MOST of the rest of the cheeses got added to the egg mixture....I'd say maybe 3/4 - 1 cup of cheese got reserved for later.

I drained the pasta and added it to the egg mixture. Hm....didn't seem wet enough after stirring it together, so I added two more eggs, and then poured the whole sloppy mess into a Pam'd 10-inch pie pan.

This concoction baked for about 45 minutes at 375. The middle was just set, and the edges were getting crispy and brown.

I'd nuked broccoli florettes in a bit of water for 3 minutes, and then drained them and added them to the top of the "pie", and then added the remaining cheese and put the whole thing back in the oven for another 5 minutes.

This was pretty darn good!!! Brett said he would've rather had bacon than prosciutto - for the crunchier texture and saltiness. We both agreed bits of fried up taters would've been good in it, but I probably would've needed less pasta then. Oh, and I honestly think it would've benefited from having some sautéed onion in the mix. But overall it was really good, and was definitely a keeper "non-recipe"!! I'll be sure to post again if we make it with improvements. If you have a similar recipe - feel free to share!

Chip? Or Dale?

There's been a lot of new activity out on the deck lately. I'd put some pumpkin pulp/seeds out there hoping the birds would enjoy them, but they haven't touched it. That doesn't mean NO ONE'S eating the stuff...

Sometimes I'll be sitting in the living room, and realize it's awfully strange that I haven't had a cat passing through, making sure to walk ACROSS me in the process. And then I'll hear the swishing of a tail against the vinyl floor by the back door, back and forth, perhaps thumping against something. Sure enough, the cats are staring at their little buddy out on the deck...

Can-Can you tell Christmas is around the corner?

Straight No Chaser ALWAYS has great performances!

My little gymnast

With the new fencing (mostly) put up last weekend, I figured one way to test it's sturdiness was to put a very heavy object on it. Let's see how this goes:

Ooooh, dirty look - I guess he didn't appreciate the joke.

In all seriousness though, while assembling the fence I wanted to make sure that any rails that were along the top row were the ones that had flat-tops, just for this very reason - that way kitties could sit out on the fence and get a good view of the yard. Seems like Tucker likes it.

And of course, since it's something new, it needs to be marked...

And ALSO because he's outside in the fresh air, and with a new fence, it made him a little frisky/curious... "What is that piece of tech in your hands? I feel like I've seen it before..."

"I need to come smell it!"

"I'mmmmmm getting cloooooser! I'm gonnnnnna smellllll it!"

"Sniff. Sniff sniff."

"Oh. Nevermind - I know what that thing is..."

Tucker went back and forth between just sitting still on the fence, and then walking back and forth on it, tail twitching, super happy...

I was TRYING to get him on video as he was going to go over or around the posts separating the rails - only he was NOT cooperating. As you can see, Tucker's got a wee bit of "flab" - so maybe having him walk/balance on the fencing will be good exercise for him!

I figure in time he'll get more comfortable walking on the fence rails, and hopefully even to the point where he's ok with changing which "layer" of rails he's on. Right now he's a bit frustrated doing that. Doogie wasn't interested in the fence at all. Oh, and I don't know what got into Tucker...he'd hopped down and was just sitting there, and suddenly took off running to the house like he had demons on his back! Crazy cat...

Sweet dreams

What do puppies dream about?

I dunno, but with all the fuss Doogie's making, it sounds a little stressful!

This is typical dreaming for Doogie....whether we're in bed, or just watching tv - if he's passed out, he might start dreaming, and it almost always sounds like this. Sooooo cute, but we wonder if he's having a good dream or a bad dream. (Make sure you turn up your volume for the full "woof!" effect!)

Fun with beef products

Coworker and garden friend/addict Mary recently got a 1/4 cow order, and along with that came extra stuff - bones, fat/suet, etc. She asked if I wanted part of the bones and suet since she didn't need all of it. SURE! I'll give it a try... Mary told me how she'd prepared her suet, cooking it down, straining the solids out of the melted fat, and stirring it with birdseeds and peanut butter so she could set it out for the birds. Ok, sounds simple enough. She did warn me it smelled a bit. Hm....how bad could it be?

Not really reading up on it much first, I put the big lumps of suet fat in a pot, turned it on low, and let it go....wondering how soon it would turn into a bit pot of liquidy fat - as if I were melting Crisco or butter.

Yeah, um, that never happened.

Within 15 minutes the whole house STANK, and the fat was crackling and popping but definitely not "cooking down" or "rendering". I pulled it out of the pot to see what was going on.

Ok, yeah, I knew you could get "cracklins" or something like pork rinds (MMMM!) from doing this, and it looked like that was the direction I was heading in. There would be NO bird suet if I continued down this road.

I ran up to the computer, did some research, found a variety of suggestions, and combined what sounded like would work for me...

The suet got chopped up into chunks and tossed into the food processor, where I whizzed into basically the all-fat version of ground beef. Mmmmm - doesn't that look yummy?

All of that got scraped into the crock pot, which was then set down in a giant, high-sided roasting pan, and THAT was then set on the garage floor. NO WAY did I want 1) that smell in the house, or 2) to risk the fat all melting and overflowing if it expanded a bunch.

While that did it's merry little thing, I got to work on the bones.

The Joy of Cooking suggests roasting the bones until brown - ok, can do:

Once roasted, the bones and their meat/fat were added to a big pot, along with onions, carrots, celery, a bay leaf, peppercorns, cloves (interesting!), a can of tomatoes, and enough water to cover it all. That came to a boil and then was simmered allllll afternoon/evening. This is supposed to be one of those "low and slow" and "the longer the better" kinda things.

Ok, back to the suet. Wow - the new technique worked WONDERFULLY! The smell was barely noticeable in the supercold garage, there was no overflowing, and on high the fat rendered out almost completely in maybe 4 hours? There were still some chunks, and it was getting late, so I shut the heat off, left it where it was, and the next morning put it on low for a few hours. Once all the fat was melted, I took the whole thing out to the back deck (still not wanting the smell in the house), strained it, set a little of the melted fat aside for possible culinary uses, and started stirring stuff in. Bird seed. Sunflower seeds for birds. Peanuts for birds. Some about-to-expire sunflower butter I wasn't into. Some way past their expiration date dried cranberries, which I chopped up. Cornmeal. And quick cooking oats. (these are all ideas from various stuff I researched online). Stirred all that up into a thick gloppy mess, and spread it into several loaf pans:

My intention was to let it firm up, flip it out, slice like bread, and then slide the slices down into the suet holders on the bird feeder.

GREAT idea.

NOT gonna happen. Some of the suet stuck in the bottom (I should've heated the pans before flipping them out), and there's no way the stuff would slice - it crumbled instead.

Hm.

Ok.

Change of plans.

Turns out each pan's worth of suet/seeds fit nicely in a Pyrex mixing bowl I have, and after a minute thirty in the microwave, the stuff was melted down to liquid chock full of goodies. So that new batch of stuff was then poured into old Chinese soup and yogurt containers, some of which got a loop of string tucked down in them before they solidified.

Oh, and that fat that I poured off to set aside?

Looks almost like butter, doesn't it? I've since used a little of this, combined with butter, in a crust for a chicken pot pie (check back later for that!) - pretty good, but not very noticeable. I'll have to increase the suet to butter ratio next time.

Here's Tucker watching the birds IGNORE the new suet (see it hanging on it's string?). Seems the birds didn't feel they could land on it maybe? I've since got it up against the side of the bird feeder, and now the chickadees, downy woodpeckers and hairy woodpeckers are all sitting on the feeder and leaning over to peck at the suet! Yay - it works!

So here's the suet after it's been moved, and pulled up tight against the feeder. You can clearly see the birds have been enjoying it!

Oh yeah - don't forget the stock! So after that stuff cooked down all day, I set in the fridge over night. The next day I dumped it out into a giant bowl, and it was easy to scrape off the fat layer (plus any sediment from the bottom of the congealed stock), and then the rest of was split into three quart bags and stashed in the freezer. Let's hope this really "beefs up" some soup I'll make later! ;-)