I’m up wide awake, breakfast has been consumed and I’m going to make some cards.
Recipe blog has been updated, and I had to include your pie recipe Beebs. 
Hope your feeling better!
Drive by… much too busy.
In short – Rigs, congrats on FINISHING all your coursework. Woo and hoo!
**Haze **-- having that ticket in hand really drives it home that you’re leaving, doesn’t it?
Yay, boo, hugs everybody… vroooom!!!
Blurf.
Is it Firday yet?
The boss is gone to sun himself on a beach in Mexico for the next three days, leaving me (nominally) in charge… which means that I will probably spend the next three days alternating between panic and pretending I actually know what I’m doing.
Gulp.
Spaz, I vote for apple crumble. Maybe with some dried cranberries tossed in if you’re feeling particularly fancified.
Is crumble the same as a crisp? Apples baked pie-style with brown sugar and butter on the top to make a crispy crust?
Morning, all. I was a goooood girl and worked my little fingers to the bone yesterday. Hence my absence.
Those shoes are Teh Sex, Haze!! Oh, to be able to wear shoes like that again! Of course, I never was even close to as adorable as you even on my best day, so I’m not sure how much sexy shoes would have helped.
But I still hate to see you leave for a year; you’ll have to promise to post faithfully!
All these dessert recipes remind me of my favorite baking-a-cake story:
When my parents got married, my father insisted his mother ALWAYS baked cakes from scratch – no box cakes for her! – so no cake from a mix was allowed. My poor mother, being a mediocre cook at best, struggled and struggled with one disaster after another. When the birthday cake she baked for her brother actually slid off the plate onto the floor, she was ready to give up.
So next time she saw her in-laws, she told her MIL her sad tale and asked for help. In response? Grandmother walked in the kitchen, pulled a cake mix out of the cupboard, and said, “We’ll fix him!”
So they baked the cake from the mix and served it for dinner. My father, never one to forget to rub salt in a wound, proceeded to go on and on to my mother about how, see, HIS mother could bake cakes from scratch and they always turned out, so why couldn’t she?
At which point Grandmother walked into the kitchen, picked up the cake mix box, brought it back and plunked it down on the table in front of him.
My mother never baked a cake from scratch again.
And last but not least, I finally have a contribution to the recipes – I was reminded when Papa Tigs cooked these last night for a work luncheon for today. It took great willpower not to go scarf down the whole bowl!
Gujarati Green Beans
1 pound whole fresh green beans
4 tbsp oil
1 tbsp whole black mustard seed (also called brown mustard seed)
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp brown sugar
Salt to taste
Black pepper to taste
Optional: 1/2 to 1 coarsely crushed red chili if you want to heat it up
Trim the beans. Blanch them by dropping in boiling water for 3-4 minutes or until they are just tender.
Drain and rinse under cold running water. Set aside.
Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium flame.
When hot, put in the mustard seed.
As soon as the mustard seed starts to pop, add the garlic.
Stir the garlic until it turns light brown.
(If you want to use red chili, add it at this point and stir briefly.)
Put in the green beans, salt, and sugar. Stir well to mix.
Turn the heat down to medium-low.
Stir and cook for 7-8 minutes or until the beans have absorbed the flavor of the spices.
Add the black pepper, mix, and serve.
This is a great dish to make ahead, then reheat the following day; the beans taste even better after soaking in the spices overnight!
Off to do more work. Lucky me.
Summat? You’re going back to Korea, not Yorkshire!
I know vat ve vill do. I vill vork on mein Deutsch unde I will build a soundproof, 650 square foot living space in my basement. We will drug Haze and drag her down there where she will never see daylight again, but will have a TV… bwahahahahahahahahaha. (we won’t molest you or anything, and certainly won’t require you to have any kids!)
Ok, all those who found the above completely tasteless, raise their hands.
I’ve been doing domestic paperwork for 2 hours! Camp registrations, arrangements for #2 son’s Bday party etc. This mom stuff is a lot of work. <wipes brow>
MamaT--that’s the kind of MIL I want to be.
Please include bb’s recipe for mud pie in the blog.
I was willing to go along with this until the sentence in parentheses came along…
Can I have a library card as well? Please? :: bats eyelashes ::
MamaTigs, I pray my future MiL is that cool. (Too bad rigs doesn’t have any older sons.)
Spaz, apple crumble and apple crisp are more or less the same thing, at least as far as I’m concerned.
I usually top mine with a mixture of rolled oats, brown sugar, cinnamon, ground ginger, and then enough melted butter to make it stick together, and toss the apples with a sprinkle of lemon juice, brown sugar, corn starch, cinnamon, ginger and a dash of cardamom before they go into the dish. If I’m feeling fancy, a few handfuls of cranberries or blackberries go in with the apples. It’s one of my favouritest last-minute OMG-company’s-coming-over desserts (that and clafouti, which can be made with just about any fruit you’ve got lying around despite the fact that most people think it’s just for cherries).
MamaTigs, those beans sound absolutely wonderful. We loves us some spicy food at Chez Mahna, so this is right up our alley. Plus I’m growing some beans in the backyard this year, so chances are I’ll be trying to find new and interesting ways to serve green beans come mid-summer.
I’m trying to debate whether I should go for a walk during my lunch break, or whether I should just stick close to the office. The sunshine outside is deceptive… when I ducked out to join a friend for his smoke break, it was cold and windy. Yuck.
Actually, Grandmother was kind of a horror as a MIL; she just never, ever wanted her son, my father, to think he had the upper hand. I recall once when my sister was visiting as a teenager, she needed a small purse for something, and Grandmother opened a drawer full of brand-new, unused purses and small bags and said, “Help yourself. These are ones your mother has sent to me over the years.” :eek: Fortunately, by the time she got to 90 or so, she started mellowing. But she was a very, very scary woman when she was younger. She took lessons on it from HER MIL, who apparently was a tyrant of the first order, and what’s worse, lived with them until my father was a teenager.
Anyway, enough family history. I’m trying to persuade myself to go run a couple of errands. They really, really need to be run, but I have a severe case of the Don’t Wannas. Can someone please tell me to get my behind in gear and get my errands over with so I can come home and get backto work?
Ok mumpers, I’ve got a poll. I know typically IMHO is the forum for that, but I’m just enlisting mumpers opinions at the moment.
The thread about baby names got me to thinking. Not just about the upcoming addition, but in general.
If the newest is going to be a girl, we’re naming her Anyanka Josephine. Jim picked out the middle name, I would have preferred Charlotte or Olivia myself. We’ll call her Anya for short.
If it’s a boy, he’ll be Erich James. Jim got to pick the first boy’s name because he is a third. And I’ve been set on this name for a boy since I was a wee lass, dreaming up baby names. Ya’see, My great grandfather was Erich Karl, my grandfather is James Karl, my father is Mark James.
Now I’ll start with my existing children, because on the note of James…
I married a James, my son is James Lyle III. (So, yes, there will be a lot of James running around.) I’ve always thought it was a good solid name.
My middle child is Jeanette Nicole. While pregnant with her, the boy name was already a given, and we were stumped about a girls name. One day we stumbled upon Nicole, and we liked the idea of Nikki, so we had that part. Trying to come up with the then middle name was something else. We came up with Jeanette because I had an aunt who was my godmother, and she passed away at age 34 from cancer. I had helped take care of her while she was ill, and she and I were very close. We really wanted Jeanette to be the middle name, but Nicole Jeanette doesn’t flow as well as Jeanette Nicole. There was a lot of controversy in the family about my name choice, even after we insisted that we were going to call her Nikki. My aunt’s daughter wasn’t too happy, but was thankful that I would do such a thing, and she hasn’t been able to have children yet. Forward to seven years later, and while we still call her Nikki, all her school papers come back with her writing Jeanette on them. She knew she had another first name and wanted to be able to spell both of them.
My oldest child, I was seventeen and bright, but a bit overly romantic. Her name is Brandalynne Alexandria. We call her Brandy. I had a girlfriend who had named her daughter Brandalynne, and I always thought it was lovely. Alexandria came from my mother, if she had another girl her name was going to be Alexandra. I still don’t think the name is horrible, but I do know it shows my age.
Now I’ll tell you what I was going to name her. Pantera Nirvana-Paine. :rolleyes: , I’m so glad I came to my senses on that one!
So are my names horrible? And you CAN tell me the truth and your opinions! I asked for it, right?
I refuse to offer opinions on other people’s name choices because it’s really a no-win situation. 
But last night, my daughter and I were discussing names for her future kids, and I was pretty well relieved to learn she was tending towards more traditional names rather than trendy or extremely alternative spellings. I’m hoping she’s no longer considering Ariana for a daughter, only because of Ms. Huffington. How’s that for sound reasoning? I may suggest Juliana - that was my grandmother’s name, and I always thought it was lovely.
Like she’ll listen to my opinion…
NoName, my standard choice for a girl’s name is Denise; a boy, Denephew.
Other than that, I’ll second what Mooooom said.
Same dealio with Dish. Even their brand-new high-def box doesn’t include an HDMI cable. They do provide a trio of component cables, an S-Video cable and even an “old school” composite video cable for people bravely hallucinating they can watch HD on a 1980’s TV. (What? No rabbit ears?)
So, once the Dish guy left, I had to pop over to Fry’s for proper cables. The quality difference between even component and HDMI is startling and worth the price. ($15 each - don’t waste your bucks on those “monstrously” expensive cables.)
The whole thing is goofy - they send out a guy to install the high-def boxes, so why don’t they just stock the truck with an assortment of loose cables, so they can use only what’s needed? Sounds like a win-win. They ultimately spend less on cables since they’re not giving everyone a fistful of needless stuff, and the customers get hooked up with the best possible signals. The way they do it now, I’ve got a pile of extra cables. Guess they’ll be going in the yard sale…
Can I put up my usual cast of idiots in the yard sale as well? Right now, my prime target is the people that we’ve been telling since last August that we don’t support their database, yet they persist in thinking otherwise even though I remind them every three weeks or so when they ask us to set people up. Even puppies will eventually figure it out.
Is it retire-o’clock yet?
NoLa, having an unusual name myself, I’m a bit torn. Anya’s beautiful, but she’s going to go through life with teachers and bosses and people at doctor’s offices trying to get their mouths around Anyanka. And that can be a bit of a drag. Not so much as an adult, but as a kid and then even more so as a pre-teen and teen, it sucks. The flip side of that, though, is that you never have to specify which one someone’s talking about. There are a TON of Sara(h)s my age so it’s always Sara(h) B or L or whatever. And now at work we always have to specify whether we’re talking about Mike C or K or F. But no one has to specify when talking about me, which is kind of nice.
So… I guess I’m not going to vote either way, I’ll just leave you with an unusual-named person’s perspective.
(Oh and in that rare instance when someone with your name does something stupid and is on the news 24/7 for an entire month… yeah, everyone directs their oh-so-original and hilarious (yeah, right) jokes at you. Yippee.)
NEIN, Dumbkopf! Du will keine Biblioteke Karte haben. (I think Bibliotek is actually a bookstore and I’m not at all sure about the verb or the gender case, for that matter. Guess I no longer know any German. Scheiss. 
).
#1 son is 16… come on, you can wait a few years, no? I appreciate the compliment. Dankesch¨on!
Why is my umlaut like that?
RE MIL–good god–what a bitch! I won’t be like that. I’ll be more stealth-like and conniving. Bwahahahahahahaha.
Baby names is a mug’s game, but I hit my head when I keeled over from the shock of your horrid names. How dare you curse your kids with those monikers? Death is too good for YOU.
Me, I like traditional names that are good for adults. I hated, hated, hated my name as a kid, but I love it now. I’m UNIQUE (at least around here), but not trendy or nouvea–it doesn’t get better than that. Names are odd things; some people can carry a strange ones and others are burdened by the most innocuous of names. There’s no figuring it out.
What does one for shampoo residue in the hair? I rinsed and rinsed, dammit!
Rigs, baking soda for the hair thing. And I humbly apologize about hitting you head.
Off today. gonna go car shopping in a bit. I took Nelly for a walk.
Well, since you’re gonna be so nice and all, I’ll give you a choice:
Cake or death?[/eddie izzard]
Ta on the baking soda; will try it when I next practice hair hygiene. How does one do this? Make a paste of bkg soda and water; sprinkle dry soda over your head, what? I’m a concrete operationalist, I need direction!
Also, German sentence reads you will have no library card, not you are not permitted to have a library card, so let me rephrase: Du will eine Bibliotek Karte nicht haben! Literally, you will a library card not have. Except it’s bookstore. Dammit.
The word Geschichte just floated to the top of my brain. I cannot get google to cooperate re finding German words. But for some reason, I think the word for library is geschichte… Off to read some Klosterman for fun.
I’m gonna stay out of the baby name thing aside from saying that if you already have a first-name James you should avoid giving another kid a middle-name James and let him have his own unique name. That, and I find the fact that you named one child Brandy Alexander gigglicious! Also, that apple cake thing sounds wicked yum but thankfully also sounds a bit complicated which will discourage me from making it and subsequently snarfing the whole damned thing!
I’m playing hooky a bit today since I’ve gone as far as possible in assembly of a buncha generators as possible until we get some more materials in–so instead I’ll probably be touring the local auto parts stores trying to scare up a few flexible bag style windshield washer reservoirs. Joy.
Oh, and Pratchett the Evil Genius cat has figured out how to open the screen door–from either side. I can understand learning the latch part because that’s just a simple paw swat, but how in the hell he manages the push button on the other side (where you have to push the button but pull the door open) I just don’t know. He’s too damned smart and now we have to remember to lock the danged screen door!
Tigs, them green beans sound absolutely delish and I forwarded the recipe off to my vegetarian daughter who will probably go nuts over it–thanks!