Katie Joseph’s Blog

Lincoln is gorgeous in the fall, I think because there are so many nice, mature trees hanging over the street.  (Yes, I like old trees despite the fact that one of their number fell on our garage.)  The leaves above are from one of the trees in our front yard.

I love fall, and I love fall cooking.  We had chili for dinner (made with garden tomatoes) on Friday and I’m making “football stew” tonight.  For those of you who aren’t members of the Harr family, it’s basically a beef/vegetable Crockpot recipe that cooks for approximately the length of a football game.  It’s a very guess-friendly recipe and pretty tough to screw up.  That’s my kind of cooking.

We had biscuits and gravy this morning — I used the Joy of Cooking recipe and Bob Evans sausage, with regular old canned biscuits.  Get this: the sausage did not produce enough grease for gravy.  I had to supplement it with butter.  And to add to the unhealthiness of this dish, I accidentally got whole milk instead of skim last time I was at the store.

They changed the packaging of our hippie-organic milk, so I grabbed from the wrong end of the shelf.  When I poured it in the pan I thought their was something wrong with it … it was so opaque and not at all blue. What a decadent mistake.

Last but not least, a sale alert for Lincolnites: the new HyVee near 48th & O has some crazy sales going on.  Fresh, and I believe locally-grown, green beans are $1.18/pound.  I bought five pounds and blanched/froze four of them this morning.  Between that, tomatoes, and apples, our freezer is full; I need to either learn to can or get a deep freeze.

Time to go check on the stew.  Hope you’re all enjoying your weekends.

For those of you in Nebraska, today is your last chance to register in person to vote on 11/4.  Details on how are at http://maps.google.com/vote.

Our awesome CSA gave us a fall “bonus” box with sweet potatos, squash, and other goodies in it.  It contained a tromboncino squash, which is quite possibly the strangest vegetable I have ever seen.  It’s shown here, with a cat for scale:

This one was one of the less-crazy tromboncinos available.  It’s supposed to cook up just like zuchini.  Very large, curvy zuchini.  Will post results once I work up the courage.  It might make a nice Thanksgiving centerpiece as-is…

I’m going to visit Julee at the end of the month.  It’ll be the first time I’ve flown in over a year, and I’m dreading airport security.  It’s a generally unpleasant experience, but this go-round I’ll have to negotiate a long line, juggling my carry-ons, and removing and replacing my shoes with an ankle that’s still rather delicate.  I may revert to the boot or borrow a cane just to be on the safe side.

I wouldn’t mind the hassle and the invasion of my privacy if airport security actually worked, but the sad truth is that it’s a complete joke.  I’ve been reading Bruce Schneier’s blog for a while now, and the TSA is one of his favorite targets. He recently helped a writer from the Atlantic Monthly evade security (The Things He Carried on the Atlantic’s website).  The article reminded me of our airport experience in semi-rural Brazil.   I’m pretty sure they x-rayed our checked luggage, and they did run our carry-ons through a scanner, but aside from that, security consisted of them asking, “Do you have any bombs?  No?  Well then, have fun on the plane.”  No repeated ID checks, no taking off one’s shoes, no confiscation of liquids.  It was downright pleasant, and a stark contrast to the Lincoln airport (a place where you almost need a court order to get photographic film inspected by hand.  Because, you know, somebody might try to sneak extra lotion in using film canisters, and there’s nothing more dangerous than a set of properly-moisturized hands.)

I’m all worked up now.  Lest I begin a rant on how we’ve gradually ceded more and more of our privacy for a false sense of safety, I’d better hang this one up.  I wonder when the CLEAR program will come to Nebraska…

Saturday afternoon

I’ll admit it: I enjoy having an an excuse to be lazy on the weekends.  Garden gone crazy?  Shucks.  Can’t do anything about it.  I’m just out of my broken ankle boot and don’t want to overdo it.  My favorite sloth enabler is shown in this photo as well.  No, not the husband.  The dog.

I like the hound part of Hank the best.  It’s made him prematurely old.  He sleeps a lot and makes old man noises when he yawns.  While he still has his crazy-dingo-blue-heeler moments, for the most part he’s content to laze around, as demonstrated above.  I love that animal.

I sometimes serve as tech support for my boss’s mother, which I don’t mind because she pays me in delicious baked goods.  She just got a new laptop with Vista on it and asked me to set it up for her.   Since HP no longer ships install discs with their machines, I thought I’d make a set of recovery discs for her as well.  Little did I know what was in store.

After about two and a half hours, only one of the two discs was completed, but it was at a point where I could leave since all she’d have to do would be label a disc and shut down the machine.  It was 7:00 p.m., and I was very hungry and in need of a refreshing beverage.  A burger and a beer.  Yes.  That was just the ticket.

There aren’t a lot of restaurants near our house, and those that are usually have at least a half-hour wait on busy nights.  I was in no mood to wait, so instead of heading to some place like Lazlo’s, we headed for Risky’s.  It’s not much to look at (and neither is their website), but the food is decent and very reasonably priced.

Amos had a Philly steak sandwich and I finally got my burger.  The food was great — Amos didn’t particularly care for their home-made fries, but I thought they were good.  Unfortunately, I’d forgotten a lesson learned earlier this year: when at a sports bar like Risky’s, don’t order any fancy tap beer.  They don’t go through it fast enough, and there’s nothing worse than paying four bucks for a pint of beer that tastes like it was filtered through a dirty sock.

I couldn’t finish my pint of Sam Adams Oktoberfest.  It had that unmistakable tanginess of beer that’s either bad, or has run through a dirty line.  I ordered up something that couldn’t possibly get screwed up: the humble can of Busch Light.

Say what you will about the beer and the corporations that produce it, but Busch Light is one darned consistent beer.  So, note to self: when at a sports bar (and especially one decorated largely with NASCAR memorabilia) stick to the macrobrew domestics.

I’m now out of my broken ankle boot most of the day, and can also stand for a good while without my left foot/ankle swelling to giant proportions, so I’m cooking more.  We’ve got a year-end garden/CSA bounty in our kitchen, so that makes cooking extra cheap and extra fun. Despite evidence to the contrary (frozen pizza boxes in our recycling each week), I actually do enjoy cooking when I have the time.  I especially enjoy mastering a new set of recipes, and tonight’s is one of my new specialties.

The menu included flat iron steak from Leon’s (my favorite neighborhood grocery store, where they actually employ real live butchers), garlic mashed potatoes, and vegetables.  I intended to photoblog the whole thing with my new toy but, as usual, got so caught up in the process that I forgot until the very end.  Here’s the final product:

Meat

The steak is prepared per the butcher’s instructions (pan fried a few minutes on each side with olive oil, salt and pepper), with slightly longer cook time. One of the reasons I love Leon’s is that I can ask the butcher (a) what’s easy to do, and (b) how do I cook it? and he’ll give me usable advice.  It isn’t the cheapest place in town, but I’ll pay a little extra for quality, and a little more on top of that for good service.

The potatoes are a variant of Alton Brown’s Mashers recipe (scaled down for two, and using butter, skim milk, and sour cream).

The vegetables are a combination of store-bought and garden, roasted in the oven with olive oil and salt.  I knew it was time to take these out of the oven when the olive oil started burning and smoke began wafting upwards.  Miraculously, the vegetables themselves were not burnt.  If I had it to do over again, I would’ve done the asparagus and red peppers first, and added the tomatoes in the last five or so minutes. And maybe not have used so much olive oil under a broiler.

All in all, pretty good.  And it took about an hour and a half from the time I walked in the door until the dishwasher started a’whirring.  That’s my kind of dinner.

This post was inspired by The Pioneer Woman, and delicious, tasty beef.

I’ve been having so much fun on my work blog lately, I’ve decided to start a personal one.  It will contain: pictures of my pets, food-related content, craft-related content, and other things that don’t quite belong on the work page.

The site is named dainto.org after my childhood imaginary friend, Dainto.  My mental image of him came from the Fisher Price Little Person shown in the masthead.  What was the appeal of this grumpy-looking Little Person?  He looked mischievous, like someone upon whom I could blame a broken vase or mud tracked into the house.

This will be a photo-heavy blog (especially once my new Canon Powershot G10 arrives), and in that spirit, here’s a picture.  I  have a dwarf umbrella plant in my office (not toxic to cats — I checked), and Boy George  loves to crawl around it to stare out the window.  I think it makes him feel wild.