The Crab Chronicles

Valentine's Day

To me, the way to define a great holiday is with food. It's just not a holiday occasion without a special meal.

So my Valentine's Day gift to Mother and Michael was to fix a great dinner. We had lobster tails, fresh spinach, and french bread, a crusty baguette.

When I was driving home from the store the smell of the baguette was intoxicating.

I ate more than my share of the spinach.

In truth, it was an easy meal to fix. I just dumped the tails in some water with lemon juice and boiled them for a minute. The bread was buttered and put in the oven to warm. The spinach took a few minutes because I pull the stems off, but sauteeing it was a 2 minute deal. Olive oil, butter, garlic.

I was not in the mood to do a fancy dessert. So I relied on Publix excellent store brands of ice cream.

We had Otter Paw ice cream for dessert.

It's vanilla ice cream with chocolate covered pecans and caramel. Be still my heart.

Our movie was The Blind Side, which Mother hadn't seen before. We didn't finish it but we will.

It was a really hectic day - work, Mike had an orthodontist appt., then I took him to tennis. Bought groceries. Picked him up. Cooked dinner.

I am SO ready for a three day weekend.

Awesome Green Beans

When my brother was here at Christmas he made some green beans that were so very flavorful, and I made a pig of myself. I asked him about a recipe and he shrugged and said he didn't have one. There was soy sauce involved, and onions.

So I went scouting around on the internet and found this recipe for Asian-Style Fresh Green Beans. I chopped up a red onion and sauteed it until tender, then added the green beans, and that helped. I didn't have rice vinegar so I used apple cider vinegar. I didn't have sesame oil so I used garlic-infused olive oil, and added some butter.

I also added some beef tips, and made a pot of jasmine rice.

I am a horrible "food stylist" but trust me, everything was tasty.

That was the highlight of the day.

I also had to pick up Michael from tennis. He had worn some nice pants to school and didn't wear a belt. After school he had to walk very carefully to tennis practice [which is a few blocks away] because he didn't bother to find a different belt, and he didn't eat any lunch, so his pants were wanting to fall off.

"THAT is yet another reason you NEED to eat lunch!" I fussed at him.

He saves all his eating for night time.

After he ate quite a good dinner, he got out these cookies - which he said remind him of Kazakhstan, because he got them there, in the orphanage. He dunked quite a few before retiring to the sofa with me to watch the newer Total Recall.

I watched the movie and folded laundry at the same time.

A mother's work is never done...

Trouble With the Curve

We survived the wacky weather yesterday without incident. Driving home was not fun. The sky outside my office was pitch black, the winds were high, and the rain was pouring. I had been watching that storm roll in, from my window next to my desk.

I had to run by the bank and by CVS to pick up prescriptions for Mother.

Michael made the JV tennis team at Lakeside. Yay! I was supposed to go to a meeting of all the tennis parents last night but the meeting was postponed to tonight, which is just as well.

I made  spaghetti for dinner, and it was good, but not up to my usual standards. I didn't have a bottle of red wine opened and I added white wine. Just didn't give it the depth of flavor that's so terrific. I basically take a jar of Classico and add a lot of things, like chopped green pepper, a red onion, portobello muchrooms, fresh garlic. Then I add extra Italian seasoning, onion powder, etc.

Mike ate two huge bowls. That's one of his favorite meals.

After dinner we watched a terrific movie that I had wanted to see in the theater but didn't get a chance - the Clint Eastwood baseball movie Trouble With the Curve. What I really liked about that movie was that it was about human beings. Nothing blew up. No car chases. It centered on the relationship between a young woman and her father.  Eastwood plays old men with flint, not a "cuddly grandpa" kind of guy. During the entire movie he only hugged his daughter once. But that was true to the character.

During one scene, I had a bizarre experience. I am watching Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake walk down a street, supposedly in North Carolina, and I realized it was a street in Athens, Georgia. I walked down that same street less than a year ago. I know, because there's a big sculpture of a frog there, and they walked past it and then past an optical store. I had sensed where they were, passing small storefronts, before I saw the frog, though. I lived in Athens for three years. Awesome place to live. Lovely downtown area.

I did a little research and read that they filmed the movie entirely in Georgia. Score!

One of the leads in the movie was played by a young actor named Scott Eastwood. He looks a lot like his dad. Did a good job.

One Step At a Time

I got in the shower this morning thinking, what am I going to blog about?? My life is not all that interesting. Then again, I am launching a new business The Write Rainmaker so there's a lot going on in my world.

[BTW, if you are on Facebook, please go to The Facebook page and click LIKE. Thanks!]

It's exciting and scary at the same time.

I've been writing for attorneys since 1985, but mostly work product - pleadings, letters, summaries of information. Most folks don't realize the sheer volume of information in lawsuits. I've gathered records from third parties, bates labeled thousands of pages, organized them, summarized them, etc. Actual "legal research" is only a fraction of what goes into most cases. 

Attorneys are [usually] really good at practicing law. They usually need help with marketing. The younger ones seem to intuitively know the value of it more than the older ones, which is to be expected.

However, if my mother, who is almost 80, can blog, I can prove that "old dogs CAN learn new tricks."

I can also write blogs and website materials for non-attorneys, too.

Here's an excerpt from a message I sent to some of my friends who have small businesses:

Whatever your business, whether it’s making cupcakes, selling flowers, or selling a service like fixing computers, I can help increase your business by writing a blog for you. The more your website shows up in a Google search, the more folks will want what you’re selling.  So if I blog for you once a week, you’ll get a lot more hits than if I blog for you once a month. If I Tweet about your blogs to your followers, you will get more business. Everything is about how much your business is on the internet now.

Now back to really important stuff: FOOD. We had some Aidell's bacon and pineapple sausages last night and WOW. SO so yummy. Our usual Sunday night grilled cheese dinner was really nice with the addition of the sausages. All the Aidell's products I've tried are wonderful. [No, they don't pay me to say that, either.] I pop some of those on the little George Foreman grill and less than 5 minutes later they are ready to go.

Made Michael some yummy breakfast cereal and let HIM mix it up, so he WILL eat it, I am sure. It's just a block of cream cheese [softened] plus a cup or so of vanilla yogurt, a carton of fresh blueberries, oatmeal, and some cinnamon and sugar. He will eat a ton of that and it's healthy for him.

The high today is in the upper 50's, so a typical end of January day in Hot-Lanta.

Have a great Monday y'all!

Cooking Kale

Unlike most southerners, I am not too fond of "greens." I remember when I was small my uncle Jake coming into the house carrying a paper grocery sack full of collards and asking Mom to cook them for him.

Mom was always a good sport about it. She recalls those days now every time we have greens of any kind. She grew up eating turnip greens, but Mamaw didn't cook collards.

I hated the smell of cooking collards. I would always spend a lot of time playing outside on those days when Mom cooked collards.

I Googled collard green recipes and found Paula Deen's collards but they don't involve vinegar. Strangely enough, I found the Guy Fieri recipe called Southern Collard Greens is closer to what I imagine Mother cooked. (I fled, remember, so I don't know what she put in there except I know about vinegar.)

On New Year's Day, a few weeks ago, I had spinach for my dinner, among other things. I like fresh spinach, sauteed in some bacon fat with onions, with some apple cider vinegar added. YUM.

Took me years before I would eat spinach.

When I was a kid, the only green leafy thing I'd eat was lettuce. I ate a LOT of lettuce. That's probably why I don't much care for it now, not iceberg anyway. I love buttery Boston Bibb lettuce in our good olive oil & lime juice dressing.

I've been hearing a lot about kale, and so the other day at Kroger I got a big bunch of curly kale. It's certainly attractive.

I had heard a lot of noise about Kale Chips being so yummy. So I found a recipe and made it. Michael and I ate most of what I fixed, but I need to work on that recipe.

I washed the kale, dried it in my salad spinner, and put it in a bag with some olive oil, salt, and garlic powder. I put it on a cookie sheet in the oven at 350 for about 20 minutes. It certainly crisped up nicely, most of it.

The problem was that not all the leaves had the oil/seasoning mixture on them. I had put everything in a big plastic bag and I thought I had shaken it around enough, but clearly not.

Kale has tons of nutrients in it.

It's a great healthy recipe, though, so I will make it again. I just have to figure out the best way to season it and cook it for our family.

If you have a favorite way to cook kale, drop me an email or leave a comment and tell me about it.

Barbeque and Ghosts

Michael and I went to lunch yesterday at The Greater Good Barbeque and really enjoyed it. The atmosphere is casual and friendly. The little waitress was attentive. I had the barbeque sandwich and mac & cheese. The pork wasn't the most tasty ever, but I thought it was good. It was served on Texas toast, which I didn't eat [well, part of one piece] but I applaud trying to do something a little different with a BBQ sandwich.

Michael loves wings, and he had 8 smoked wings and slathered them with sauce. He said they were good. He also gave a thumbs up to the potato salad.

I got Mother a BBQ sandwich and a cup of Brunswick Stew, takeout. She is a connoisseur of Brunswick Stew. This looked more like really thick vegetable soup, with big chunks of tomatoes and unpeeled potatoes. She likes soft foods because she has teeth issues. Plus, her food wasn't piping hot, as I'd had to run by the library on the way home. I should have just put it in a bowl and stuck the immersion blender in it, but she wasn't that hungry anyway.

For dessert, Mike and I split a bread pudding with apples that was really tasty.

So overall, I thought the restaurant was nice and the food was good. I also liked that they played good music overhead, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Al Green, some pop songs from the 50's - not too loud and great singalong stuff. The TVs were not turned up.

Michael was invited by a friend to go to the movie and they saw Zero Dark Thirty. Mike said he enjoyed it. It wasn't his choice, but he went along with it. I think it's gotten several Oscar nominations. Definitely not one I care to see.

I want to see Les Miserables but I'd rather hear people with professionally trained voices sing the songs. I listened to Anne Hathaway and Russell Crowe on YouTube singing their songs and I thought they were doing well acting the songs, but as singers, um, nope. I'd rather hear Leah Salonga sing "I Dreamed a Dream" for instance. I love the song, when it's done right. I'm sure a lot of folks would disagree with me, but I studied voice for 5 years and I am pretty critical about vocal performing.

Michael wasn't out late last night, and when he came home we watched a Ghost Adventures that was somewhat different than the usual. It took place at the home of poet Robinson Jeffers, Tor House. What impressed me most was that the guys all took turns reading Jeffers' poetry, getting a handle on the man, who was obviously a fascinating individual. He built his home by himself, in the 1920's. He wrote a poem in 1962, the year he died, called "Ghost." He said his ghost would haunt the place in 50 years.

All that is interesting, but what I wanted to mention here is that after Zac read the poem, Mike looked at me and told me the poem sounded really "bitter." That's a pretty astute analysis of it. He pops out with stuff like that all the time, which proves to me he is a really smart guy.

I am so glad I got him switched to Advanced English this semester. He can handle it!

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If you want to read something both hilarious and sort of horrifying, check out Social Security Administration Takes Back Reprimand of Flatulent Worker. That's the ultimate "hostile atmosphere." LOL

A Community Cares

The older I get, the more I realize how important it is to be a part of a community, to really participate. I lived alone, in apartments, for years, and I never felt part of any community. I always wanted a house. I've had my house now since 2005, and since the heavy lifting of being a mom has slowed down a good bit, I want to explore more ways to get involved in the local community.

Even though my mailing address is Atlanta, and I consider myself an Atlantan, I do most of my shopping in Tucker, which is 5 minutes down the road. There's less traffic and I like to feel part of a small community that's not so huge and impersonal as the city.I like to drive down Tucker's main street, which has been renovated to be more friendly. Lots of cute businesses there now.

Greater Good Barbeque recently opened in Tucker. I have not tried it yet, but I've been meaning to. Reviews have been mixed. I have been able to make really good barbeque at home, where we can eat in our pajamas and everyone can use the sauce they like. So eating at home is our favorite thing right now.

However, I will likely try Greater Good soon. Not necessarily for the food, either.

A couple of weeks ago, The Handy Ace Hardware burned to the ground. I liked shopping there, even though it couldn't compete with Home Depot prices. At Handy Ace, the employees actually wanted to help you. You could ask them stuff and they'd explain it. They carried everything from nails, to bird feeders, to hammock, doghouses, etc. Whenever I couldn't find any gifts for my brother, I'd go to Handy Ace and find at least a couple of small things I knew he'd like.

Now, the community of Tucker has rallied around the Handy Ace employees. I like this story in the Atlanta Journal, Hardware Store Finds World of Help After Fire. To quote from the story:

“It’s what I’d call a community hardware store where they just had a lot of stuff on the aisles,” said Larry Goldfinger of Stone Mountain, who took pictures of Ace’s remains the other day. “You could go in and just walk around for an hour and three or four people would offer help. I don’t know how many times in Home Depot or Lowe’s I’d have to walk up and down aisles to find somebody.”

Need advice on paint colors? Ask Alicia. Something in lawn and garden? Phillip was your man. Trouble finding that ancient piece of plumbing? Handy Ace was the place where even credit could be arranged for long-time customers.

This is what community is all about. The store was insured, but the employees are out in the cold until Handy Ace is rebuilt. That's why the fundraisers, to try and help the people that made the store special.

Isn't it ironic that a terrible fire actually has drawn together a community? The Lord works in mysterious ways.

This is a photo I took of Main Street, tucker, during a car show last summer.

The Last Day of 2012

I spent most of the day yesterday doing household chores and cooking. By 11:30 last night I was zonked out.I am too old to care about seeing the year change personally.

Michael got to play tennis yesterday afternoon for a couple of hours, which was good. The weather was really mild, sweater weather really.

I helped Mother get some cleaning done in her room, and did three loads of laundry. I went to Publix for last minute supplies.

And I cooked.

Mother likes pineapple upside down cake, so I made one for her. I hadn't had any in about 30 years. A family I used to babysit for when I was a teenager always had it, and I loved it. My grandmother also used to make it. It was my uncle Bobby's favorite. We got out the cast iron skillet to make it in, since it's our only skillet that can go from stove to oven.

I also made guacamole, crab cakes, and coleslaw. I washed some enormous scallops and Bruce made his specialty, bacon wrapped scallops. We had some homemade applesauce, and some homemade bread from the farmer's market.

And I put together a breakfast casserole.

By the time the meal was done, I was done.

Mother opened her presents and declared her birthday very nice.

Michael and his friend Bart, and Bruce, went in the backyard to watch fireworks. Folks around here get very enthusiastic about fireworks around the holidays.

I'm hoping 2013 will be a much better year than 2012.

Mother sent me the funny below, and despite having seen it numerous times, it made me chuckle.

A FUNNY: Learning to Cuss

A 6 year old and a 4 year old are raking the yard.The 6 year old asks, "You know what? I think it's about time we started cussing." The 4 year old nods his head in approval.The 6 year old continues,"When we go in for breakfast, I'm gonna say something with hell and you say something with ass." The 4 year old agrees with enthusiasm.

When the mother walks into the kitchen and asks the 6 year old what he wants for breakfast, he replies, "Aw, hell, Mom, I guess I'll have some Cheerios. WHACK! He flies out of his chair, tumbles across the kitchen floor, gets up,and runs upstairs crying his eyes out, with his mother in hot pursuit,slapping his rear with every step. His mom locks him in his room and shouts, "You can stay there until I let you
out!" She then comes back downstairs, looks at the 4 year old and asks with a stern voice, "And what do YOU want for breakfast, young man?"

"I don't know," he blubbers, "but you can bet your ass it won't be Cheerios!"

Projects Due

The wreckage continues. My computer speakers are now kaput. Oh well. At least that's something Michael can get me for Christmas...

Yesterday was yet another hectic day.

Michael informed me at 6:45 in the morning that he had a paper due in one of his classes. I had asked him all weekend, do you have homework? Let's work on it. He forgets about it until yesterday morning. Grrrr...

Then he won't eat. He isn't eating well right now. I hope he's not getting sick. Next week he has finals, so the pressure is on.

Colton came over last night and I thought good, now Michael will eat. See, I've noticed with more than one boy there's a bit of a contest going on to see who can eat more. Michael ate a decent dinner. Colton won, though. I had fixed a good dinner - marinara sauce over pasta with smoked sausage and shrimp. The diced smoked sausage and shrimp really make it delicioso.

I baked the last of my Rocks. Colton took some home, declaring them the best cookies ever.

Mother and I love to feed Colton. He's like a baby bird. Any sort of food item you poke toward him, he eats. And he's always complimentary.

Mike is more picky.

Today, we have to work on a project that's due tomorrow. Mike was told to write about a country in Asia. Naturally, he chose Kazakhstan.Seems incredible to me that this little guy is now my cute son...

If you want to see something amazing that will make you smile, check out these kids dancing the shag - just amazing -

Christmas Goodies

Every year I end up stressing about Christmas presents, but not the way you might think. I don't stress about Mother and Michael. They are not that tough to buy for.

As I've mentioned, I spend some teeth-gnashing moments trying to figure out what to get my brother. But that's not even what I stress about the most.

I stress about what to give the neighbors, and people I work with.

Should I make cookies? Brownies? Banana bread? Pumpkin bread?

The first year I lived here, I spent a lot of time baking about 4 different kinds of cookies and made huge, elaborate gift baskets for the people I worked with.That was 1993. I had a fairly large kitchen, despite the fact I lived in an apartment, and I had time to kill. Not so any more.

Last year I made up homemade herb dip for some folks, figuring people get tired of so many desserts around the holidays. That was well received. I also made us an Apricot Brandy pound cake. That's only for family because it's a pain in the butt to make.

So this year I am pondering the choices. I am powerfully tempted to make Snickerdoodles - a fairly simple little cookie, but so so yummy.I doubt any friends or colleagues would get ANY, though, after I plowed through them...

I am also thinking about how much my dad loved Rocks. These are spicy cookies made with nuts and raisins, and I've made literally thousands of rocks. They will keep for a long time in a tupperware container, so they are great for popping out when unexpected guests drop by.

Rocks

Recipe of Cephia Henderson Adkins, Courtesy of Diddy Thompson

 1 t. soda                                              1 t. cinnamon

2 egg yolks                                        1 t. cloves

3/4 c. butter                                      1 t. vanilla

1 1/2 c. flour                           1 t. to 1 T. water

1 1/2 c. sugar                                     1 box raisins

1 c. chopped nuts (preferably pecans)

 

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg yolks, well beaten. Sift flour, spices, and soda together, and blend well with butter and sugar. Add water, nuts, and raisins. Mix well. Drop by teaspoon on cookie sheet and bake in 350 degree oven for approximately 15 minutes. I use part butter and part margarine, and rarely add water unless the dough is too stiff after testing a few in the oven first.

My aunt Ceph never wanted to share the recipe, but my aunt Diddy found the recipe written down on a scrap of paper years ago.

 Speaking of nostalgia...

If I ever want to go right back to my childhood, in a happy way, I just listen to this song. I was in the car with michael the other day and it came on, and he got just as big a kick out of it as I always did: