My friend Roman threw a party last night and a few of us were outside looking at Mike’s new car while the guests were still arriving. As one of the guys walked up and we started talking, Tom pointed out to the new arrival that he had been Tom’s fake lacrosse coach his senior year of high school. It turns out that Tom’s senior year, around 20 guys faked being on the lacrosse team at Midway. Midway of course did not have a lacrosse team, but they ordered jerseys online and pretended to be on the lacrosse team all year in order to be in the yearbook. One of them did the morning announcements and would announce the scores from the previous day’s games. Another one of them was on the yearbook staff. I believe he said one of their dads was a football coach and just told people he was the lacrosse coach as well. For the actual team photo, which they took in someone’s backyard, the used the older brother of one of the players as the coach. He said by the end of the year everybody knew it was not real but they still went along with it. This is one of the most genius stunts I’ve ever heard of and I’m a little sad we didn’t think of this when I was in school.
Posted in Awesome |
Even I can make mistakes. It happened last night. What should have been a delicious meal ended up being… less than delicious. I cooked the chicken too long, used to much salt in mashed potatoes and the gravy was extremely thick. So with a few adjustments, this should be a much more palatable meal.
Herb chicken
chicken breast, boneless, skinless
parsley flakes
oregano leaves
basil leaves
black pepper
olive oil
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Tags: chicken, dinner, potatoes
Posted in Food |
For dinner tonight I wanted to try something new. As I was looking at a recipe for gnocchi and found this recipe for basil pesto. I thought that the pesto looked interesting but the gnocchi was not quite right for tonight’s dinner with my parents. It appears more suited to a multi-course dinner with a larger group of people. I started looking around for different recipes using pesto and saw one for grilled, stuffed chicken breasts. I went to HEB with the intent of making that for dinner but I decided to alter it slightly.
I had two slight adjustments to the pesto recipe. I could not find fresh Parmesan cheese so I settled for shredded Parmesan. Also, I have no idea where to get pine nuts. I substituted cashews. I followed the rest of the recipe completely. I picked up four skinless, boneless young chicken breasts. These looked like a better option to me and I decided to bake them instead of grill them. I covered both sides of the 3 chicken breasts with the pesto and then sprinkled some black pepper over them. While I was at the store I decided I should grab some Italian cut green beans to serve alongside the chicken. I also decided to make a salad for my parents, and not knowing anything about salads, I threw a bunch of stuff in a bowl and poured over some chopped garlic in olive oil. My parents said that it was good and a nice change of pace. So the recipes and pictures follow.
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Tags: chicken, dinner
Posted in Food |
Over the last few weeks I have failed miserably at eating a vegetarian only menu. Today for lunch though, given my aversion to microwave meals and instant soups, and my limited groceries, I found myself making a grilled cheese sandwich. As a child, my mom frequently would make grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken noodle soup. Her grilled cheeses were made almost exclusively with Kraft Singles. These work pretty well for quick sandwiches and nachos. They were thin and melt fairly easily. Usually the sandwich would be “lightly burned.” This was more the result of not paying attention than a signature style. Which leads me to one of the funnier food related memories from mom’s kitchens. Once as I was biting into the grilled cheese I discovered a filmy substance and soon figured out that mom had forgotten to unwrap one of the slices. It has been a running joke since then and a mistake that was never repeated, thankfully.
For today’s sandwich I wanted a little more than the Kraft Single so I pulled out the mozzarella and cheddar and started slicing. I watched a video on YouTube that suggested grating the cheese is the best for melting. I didn’t feel like getting the cheese grater dirty so I just sliced the pieces as thinly as possible and then chopped them up some more for good measure. I mixed some minced garlic into a dish with some room temperature butter to make a nice garlic butter. I coated both slices of bread with the garlic butter and preheated the pan on a medium heat. After it placing the first piece of bread in the pan I piled on the cheese and then started adding some extra herbs. Unfortunately I didn’t have any fresh herbs so I went to the spice rack. I added oregano, basil, ground cumin, and ground cayenne pepper. After putting the other slice of bread on the sandwich I covered the pan so trap the heat in and kick start the cheese melting. I also got that from the YouTube video. The sandwich ended up getting just a little burned but the cheese did melt all the way through. Overall it was a good sandwich, though I didn’t really get as much flavor as I was hoping for from the herbs and spices. Perhaps I’ll use more next time.
Tags: lunch, vegetarian
Posted in Food |
I’m going to try to be more ovo-vegetarian in my food choices. As my mom pointed out, veggies are cheaper than meat so it should be a more economical way of eating. Anyways, here is my first stab at this lifestyle in an omelet that I made today.
Omelet
3 eggs
1/2 green bell pepper, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
~1/5 large onion, diced
black olives, sliced
green olives, sliced
cheddar cheese
2 tbsp lactose free milk (what can I saw, I’m not down with lactose)
1 tbsp butter
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Tags: breakfast, eggs
Posted in Food |
The first place we stopped was the Mall of America. Obviously this place has been one of the biggest tourist attractions in Minneapolis for a while. I’m positive we didn’t cover the whole thing even though we went back on Sunday for a more extensive tour. As soon as we landed, Eric told us that they were not picking us up and that we need to catch the light rail from the airport to the mall. Once there we would put our bags in his rental car and enjoy unlimited rides in the mall. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, since I didn’t really know that much about the mall. To put it simply, there is an amusement park in the middle of the mall. It is currently a Nickolodeon themed park; previously it was Camp Snoopy.
I’ve got to be honest with you, those were some fun rides. I’m not sure which one was my favorite but I did get a kick out torturing Robert with endless 360 degree spins in the Brain Surge ride. And the spinning Avatar airboard was pretty fun too. The most awkward moment though was on the Fairly Odd Coaster when Seth and I were forced to ride with two 16 yr old girls. They were talking until we sat down. I felt like saying something like, “So do you girls ride roller coasters very often?” but I resisted.
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Tags: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Posted in Awesome, Fun, Traveling |
We ate a a number of places over the weekend, and none of them were places that are available in Waco… or even outside of Minneapolis I think. Thursday night we ate at Pracna. It was a nice little pub with an assortment of local or semi local microbrews on tap. By the time we got there all that was still available was appetizers, but we made a meal of them. They had some special drinks that were stranger than I’ve seen in a while. There were three drinks, that each came with a 2″ diameter button, letting the world know which drink you had. I ordered The Big Pickle. It was a Bloody Mary that had a big pickle inserted into the side of the glass so that it was standing straight up. The Bloody Mary was a little… sediment-y for me.
Pracna
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Tags: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Posted in Beer, Food |
Instead of making one long post, I’m going to make a few posts about this weekend’s trip. The reason we went to Minneapolis was to go to our friends’ wedding. They are both from Minnesota, and although they’ve been in Texas for a while, their families are in Minnesota it made sense to have the wedding up there. None of us had ever been to Minneapolis so it was a new experience for us. Mike, Robert, Seth, Kyle, Candice, Beau, Roman and myself made up the guests from Texas (plus Kyle’s parents). We didn’t all arrive at the same time and weren’t together 24/7 so we all had different experiences. For example, Mike and I walked all around Minneapolis trying to find a place to buy some shoes for Mike. This took several hours but we saw a few interesting things.
The downtown area is very pretty and clean. There are several outside fountains and we saw interesting indoor fountain. This fountain had a ring suspended about 30-40 feet in the air that was just dripping water down to a fountain pond. It was very nice in the indoor courtyard of a shopping center with a glass ceiling so that the whole area was very picturesque.
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Tags: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Posted in Fun, Traveling |
This afternoon we went at it again, hoping to finish up the majority of the ceiling but, we fell a little short due to more of the same issues. We had some more problems with the joists not being spaced out in the way they should be; instead of each one being 16 inches they are 16 inches give or take a half inch. This means we have to make some awkward trims on the pieces of sheet rock. But we were able to get up 3 pieces today. Each of these we had to cut a little over 2 feet off of them lengthwise as well as one notch in a corner to allow for the fireplace. and a small corner brick had come loose some time ago which was more annoying than anything. It is at the top of the fireplace so at one point while positioning the sheet it just fell to the ground with a loud clunk. We opted to mess with that at some other time and installed that section without replacing the brick. We may end up surrounding the brick with sheet rock at which point the problem with the brick goes away.
Today in another effort to improve our efficiency I marked where the joists were on the wall below to make it easier to find them. On the second sheet today, dad remembered his chalk box. He’d been talking about it all day yesterday, but could not find it ever. Finally mom bought him a new one but by the time she got home we were done. We used it on the next two sheets and it worked great.
Tags: ceiling
Posted in Remodeling |
Well, after the frustrations we encountered on the first day of putting up the new sheet rock, dad was ready to hire somebody else to put it up. We looked at some more videos of people putting up sheet rock and again noted that they were really having a much easier time of screwing in the sheets. So dad borrowed a screw gun from a colleague. He also bought some course thread screws instead of fine thread screws. This combination made for a tremendous difference in the level of effort required to put up the sheets. The screw gun just flies up there without any effort at all. So dad rented the sheet rock jack again for the weekend and we were at it again after lunch today.Dad also decided to go ahead and add insulation to the rest of the ceiling as well as pipe insulation around the hot water pipes.
We learned a couple of important lessons today though.
1. Make a mark on the wall where the ceiling joists are so that you don’t have to stab blindly into the ceiling in the hopes of hitting something.
2. After doing number one, use a string or other device to stretch from end to end in order to keep from having to guess where the joists are located.
3. Just because the crappy scissors you are using won’t cut through the insulation very easily does not mean they won’t hesitate to cut your tape measure in half.
Posted in Remodeling |
