Orange you glad you have neighbors with too much produce?

It has happened again!

Our very nice neighbors left two big grocery bags packed with Valencia oranges on our doorstep. Juice! A half-gallon of fresh orange juice! And that's only the first bag of oranges!

And this happened just as my pitcher of orange juice from concentrate was down to its last swallow. Such good timing!

The bag that's left weighs 11 pounds. Another half-gallon of fresh juice is on its way.

A great start to another Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day!

It's off to a great start.

First, we had our espressos.

The coffee was recently roasted with The Roadster, ground in Rocky and brewed in Silvia (why don't I have any posts that really feature Rocky and Silvia?).

Jerry's is in a coffee mug. It has milk and sweetener that wouldn't fit in an espresso muglet. Since this is a holiday, we got an extra treat with our coffee. I made some bizcochito biscotti from a recipe in New Mexico Magazine.

Then we had breakfast.

(A lot of the following is a repeat from last year's thankfulness. We had about the same breakfast last year!)

The pancakes were made with:

• Wheat and oats that we milled this morning with our KitchenAid grain mill
• Vanilla made the BobBIE-Baby Way

On top of the pancakes we put:

• Peanut butter ground in our BlendTec Blender
• Pomegranate syrup made from juice from our bush

We swallowed our morning pills with:

• Pomegranate juice from our bush. The juice is cloudy since it was what was at the bottom of the pitchers where the juice settled (we wanted clear juice for the jelly I made).

I'm thankful that:

• We had a nice, wholesome, home-cooked meal and didn't get overfed
• There aren't a lot of dishes to take care of
• We have all our gadgets that make fairly healthful meals like this fun to make
• I have friends and family who humor me by reading these silly messages
• I have Jerry to take care of all the hard parts of Thanksgiving meals (and the rest of my life)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Now, we're off for an adventure (with picnic)!

Happy Birthday, Mombert!

As P-Doobie told us, we had a birthday party for Mombert where the dessert was a cheesecake with sparklers instead of candles. It was near the 4th of July, after all. I had my camera ready and took a little video of the festivities.

For your viewing pleasure, here's...

Birthday Cheesecake Flambée!

Now call the fire department.

---

Thanksgiving is off to a great start

Our home-cooked Thanksgiving meal this year was breakfast.

(food styling by Mr. Bears)

The pancakes were made with:

• Wheat and oats that we milled this morning with our KitchenAid grain mill
• Vanilla made the BobBIE-Baby Way

On top of the pancakes we put:

• Peanut butter ground in our BlendTec Blender
• Pomegranate syrup made from juice from our bush

I'm thankful that:

• We had a nice, wholesome, home-cooked meal and didn't get overfed
• There aren't a lot of dishes to take care of
• We have all our gadgets that make fairly healthful meals like this fun to make
• I have friends and family who humor me by reading these silly messages
• I have Jerry to take care of all the hard parts of Thanksgiving meals (and the rest of my life)

Happy Thanksgiving!

This hobby laid an egg

Chickens.

"Son, you want to raise chickens."

No, I didn't.

Another of Jack's hobby ideas was for me to be a chicken rancher. He was serious. He bought me books on the activity. This would be a 4-H project. I'd get a merit badge and he'd get eggs and chickens on the table.

An aside: I was in a 4-H club. Its focus was on electronics. I made a toolbox that was supposed to hold all of my electronics equipment. It was a simple plywood box with a hinged lid with a hasp we could lock it with. I never used it. It would have been pretty useless for tools. There was nothing in it to keep it organized.

I had mixed experiences in my 4-H career.

One year I went to a statewide 4-H competition where I demonstrated making an extension cord. To make things go smoothly, my 4-H leader had me precut the insulation at the proper places. In the demonstration I simply pantomimed the cutting. I removed the insulation from the wires on one end of the cord, fed it through the plug and tried to tie the Underwriter's knot that keeps the cord from being pulled out of the plug.

I tried and tried but the wires were too short for the knot. After struggling a long time (and after the judges told me to relax) I realized that I was working on the wrong end of the cord. Because there were different plugs on the ends of the cord, one end's wires needed to be shorter than the other's. I was working with the wrong end. I went well beyond my allotted time. I didn't win an award.

Electronics wasn't the only thing I did for 4-H.

I kept bees. For some reason, they gave me credit for entomology. I wasn't studying bugs. I would have thought that beekeeping would have been a 4-H category of its own.

And I cooked. I won a blue ribbon in the county fair for the biscuits I entered in the 4-H category. That let me send some biscuits to the state fair. No ribbons came back to me.

Chickens.

I read the books on raising chickens. There were many unpleasant things about raising chickens.

For one thing, you had to kill them. I didn't look forward to that. Poor things.

And you got to be an amateur veterinarian. One activity in the book that looked like was in my future was caponizing the roosters-to-be. The thought of castrating the little chickens scared the heck out of me.

The chicken ranch was going to be in the back yard around the shed. I think that we were going to convert the shed into a chicken coop.

I don't know how close we came to rounding up the initial flock of chickens.

But Chris came first!

Jack had a friend who had a golden retriever. Karen was in love with that dog. The pooch became a parent (I can't remember whether it was the mother or the father). The friend gave us, well, gave Karen, one of the litter. This was around Christmas, 1968. He was named Golden Duke's Christmas (after his father). Chris for short.

Thank god for Chris.

He got the part of the yard that was going to be for the chickens.

NO CHICKENS!

Chris and Karen, January 1969

Thank you, Chris!

Food fit for a Queen

Jerry and I took a little vacation this week. We started the week by doing San Diego activities then headed north for a few days.

Here's what I ate on the road.

Our first stop was Laguna Beach where they have art galleries. We didn't buy anything except lunch. We ate at the Heidelberg Pastry Bistro.

I had the Spicy Heidelberg Wrap and iced tea. It wasn't terribly spicy. It was good.
This was across the street from the Pottery Shack that isn't there anymore. It's now The Old Pottery Place where they have a cafe, an art gallery, tchotchke shops, etc. I'll miss the Pottery Shack.

We then shopped for a while in the downtown part of Laguna Beach for a few hours then headed to our hotel in Long Beach.

Jerry comes up with fun vacations. We stayed on the Queen Mary for a couple of nights. For dinner the first night we ate in the Promenade Café.

I had fettuccine with vegetables. (I forgot to take the picture until I had eaten quite a bit of it. Sorry.)

The next morning we had breakfast in their coffee shop. We had bagels with cream cheese and caffè americano. (Again, I forgot to take the picture until after I had started eating. There's a bite missing from the bottom half.)

We then took the Catalina Express to Avalon on Santa Catalina Island. I don't know if the hotel upgraded us to the Commodore Lounge on the way to the island or if it was part of the package Jerry booked. (We were planning on taking the boat from the Queen Mary but that service gets turned off after Labor Day so we had to go to the downtown port. Maybe they upgraded us for our inconvenience.) Because we were in the Commodore Lounge, we got a cookie and a beverage.

Here's my chocolate chip cookie with the usual missing bite because I forgot to take my picture in time.

And my mimosa.

There's not much to do in Avalon. There are tourist junk shops. And restaurants. (There are tours around the island but that's another story.) We had lunch at a café on the water.

I had a mushroom veggie burger and fries. I forgot about taking a picture until I was finished. It's just as well, it wasn't terribly good. The mushrooms had no flavor and the burger was pretty flavorless, too, in spite of all the flavorful ingredients the menu said it contained. Don't bother with the Busy Bee Café when you visit Avalon. Jerry wasn't thrilled with his lunch, either.

Veggie burger and fries aftermath:

(As you can see I finished it anyway.)

Our return trip wasn't until 7:30 so we had dinner in Avalon. It was much better than lunch. Jerry enjoyed the aroma of the smoker cooking food at El Galleon and they had pasta primavera for the picky eater so that's where we ate.

My pasta primavera before even one bite was taken!
(We didn't keep what they called "souvenir glasses.")

We sat on the outside deck of the boat on our return to Long Beach. There was a beautiful sunset.

We had some shopping to do in Santa Monica so that's where we headed Friday morning. We got on the freeway and decided to stay in the carpool lane and held out till we got to the Santa Monica area for breakfast. We had bagels with cream cheese and americanos at Tanner's Coffee.
My Linux netbook wouldn't connect to their free WiFi service so I didn't get to check my email for the whole trip.

We were very successful in our shopping on Montana Avenue but you'll have to wait to hear about that adventure.

We then headed downtown to shop at Penzeys Spices. Jerry stocked up on spices. Later, you'll hear about some other fun stores we happened to run into.

We had lunch on the Third Street Promenade. I had a caprese sandwich. Yum.

We finished with our shopping and headed home. We were not ready to do any cooking. So we went off to another fine restaurant.

That's just a taste of our vacation. I'll tell you what we did between meals later.