Re: TiB Birthday Weekend [10/15/10] Fucking shit fantasy football weekend for me. I wasn't able to make the live draft and had a friend-of-a-friend do it for me. Bad news? I still can't figure out who my 1st round draft pick was. Good news? Kyle Orton off waivers. Whatever.
Re: TiB Birthday Weekend [10/15/10] This is the best political campaign ad ever. Campaign strategists can only dream of a line this good. "Sam Katz: He Kicks Children in the Face." You stay classy, Canadian municipal elections.
Re: TiB Birthday Weekend [10/15/10] Didn't get a chance to post this weekend . . . Happy Birthday TiB!
Re: TiB Birthday Weekend [10/15/10] On leave and loving it. I got completely trashed Saturday night, (bad hangover yesterday) and am probably going to go see some friends. I have to go back Friday, which is good enough for me. Another six months in Pensacola.
Flourless chocolate cake is in the oven. Making cake is delicious, and it's better when you're a grownup because you can lick the spatula all you fucking want. Well that's a coincidence (or as Freud would have it, not a coincidence). I'm making cake the eve of the idiot board's birthday. I've had plans on making this cake for weeks now, and I had just enough free time today to make it. Maybe I'll throw a candle on it for TiB's birthday.
You know, I'm kind of all done with the fancy chocolate cakes and shit. Remember when you could just get a fucking awesome Duncan Hines chocolate cake for desert at a restaurant? You know, the non-triple-death-by-chocolate kind? One that didn't have the density of fudge? One that was just a plain old chocolate cake, with chocolate frosting, without any cherries or raspberry jam or anything? The kind where the biggest decision you had to make was to have a scoop of ice cream with it or not? The kind that didn't come with a handful of gooseberries thrown on the side as garnish? I do. I miss those days. Mind you, probably the biggest, and arguably one of the best, culinary experiments I've done was when I'd mysteriously run out of instant frosting (seriously, who HASN'T dug into one of those things with a spoon at some point?), and all I had left was Nutella. What else is there to do, but frost a deep and delicious chocolate cake with the better part of a container of Nutella? I have to say, it was maybe just a little bit hazlenutty after a bit, but it was pretty fucking tasty. And the diabetic coma was SOOO worth it.
Whatever, old man. Just because your taste buds weren't raised on high fructose corn syrup doesn't mean the rest of us can't live while our insulin receptors are still sensitive. Sarcasm aside, I agree with the point. I don't want candy maraschino cherries, pectin, and FD&C Red #3 in the middle of my cake. Or, for that matter, pounds of heavy frosting. My grandmother used to make a cake that we called "cholesterol cake" which started with at least two dozen egg yolks. You wonder how they managed to live so long.
It was called Hard Work. My dad was raised on a farm, where they'd have 3 roasts of beef for LUNCH between 10 of them. My grandmother would spend all day making biscuits and pies and bread, and they'd drink whole milk by the gallon, and eat freshly churned butter. They'd also pig out on bread and gravy. Must have been 6k - 10k high-fat calories a day. But they were also working 3000 acres of a dairy and feed farm, and running a steam powered saw mill that used Clydesdales to haul the timber. It was also all fresh food right from their own farm.
What do they put in wedding cake to make it so delicious? And I am not talking all of the Cake Boss fondant molded into images of the couple shit, I am talking standard wedding cake. Now that is some good eating. Happy birthday TIB, I have neglected you lately, so I offer you this gift now
Didn't they all have heart attacks at about 60 too though? Or uncontrolled diabetes? Not your relatives in particular, but people similar to those you are speaking of.
I wasn't sure where to post this, I thought about starting a thread but I wasn't sure if there's an actual focus in there or not. At any rate, I saw this story on the news last night. There's a video on the link, but here's the run down: The fact that there are still dry counties seems weird enough to me, the fact that these people are going around stealing signs seems even dumber right? Not if the signs say "Let's Get Wet" and "Stay Dry" respectively. You can't make this shit up. Stay classy Arkansas.
I bet they walked to school 15 miles, in the snow, uphill both ways too...Oh wait, 15 kilometers/kilometres.
Hell, they hardly lived past 60 then, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to the lack of modern medicine vs the way they ate. Scares me to think of the number of older people I know that are all on a ton of medication. The worst part is that dad is still pretty set in his eating habits, which are pretty close to the same as they were then, but hasn't worked on a farm in decades. So yeah, he just had open heart surgery last Christmas, and isn't the healthiest eater even though he's coming up on 70. Oh well... what can you do?
Sorry to rain on the parade, but I am in healthcare, so I guess that is what I do. Guess it all catches up in the end
Nah, he's old enough that it was still miles, and Km/Metric crap wasn't introduced yet. It's kind of weird... he went to school in a one room school house (k-11 were all taught in one room, by one teacher), would take his new rifles to school for show and tell when he was in grade 8 or so, and had a pet owl that would ride on his shoulder while he biked/walked to school. He had a toe bitten off by a snapping turtle in the swimming hole beside the school where they'd swim at lunch. He used to snipe rabbits from his bedroom window with a .223 while my grandmother, his mother, had her quilting group over. My grandfather would make all of his Christmas toys, by hand. He still has the most incredible toy train set that was hand made by my grandfather from old soup and coffee cans. (My folks had an insurance adjuster drop by the house about 10 years ago, and he saw the old train set that was just sitting up on top of a book case, and he just about freaked out of his skin... turns out he's on some Royal Ontario Museum Curators group and his specialty was in that kind of thing, and he figures it's one of those Antiques Roadshow finds of a lifetime deal). When something broke on the farm, my dad and his dad would make a new one themselves. The craziest thing I've heard of is that they built a new piston for their John Deere steam engine, from scratch, because the spare part was going to take 3 weeks to get there. And the local cop was my dad's step-uncle, so when my dad and a few of his cousins got pulled over for being drunk off of their asses, driving my grandfather's new convertible, throwing empty beer bottles up in the air and shooting them with handguns, when they were 17, they got yelled at, their ammo was taken away, and they were told to drive home carefully and smarten up or next time they'd really get it. Crazy.
Who says white sausage gravy isn't a condiment? I want to meet this fool. You can take my gravy when you pry it from my cold, dead hands... around the time I'm 48. Actually, my uncle used to freeze leftover gravy, slice it, then make a sandwich out of it. Yeah, he's dead now.
Yeah, well my grandfather used to shoot raccoons with a shotgun from his upstairs bedroom window. Suffice it to say he did not live on a 3000 acre farm. If you tried that in the same place today, you'd have a SWAT team show up.