My in-laws are farmers.  Or rather, my father in law is a farmer, and my mother in law runs their house and does all the bookkeeping for his business.  His job is muddier, but both are pretty important in their day to day life.   Thanksgiving here is a really special kind of thing, since their lives are very dependent on factors outside their control (sometimes as variable as whether the guy at the produce shed feels like being a jerk today.  Or whether it will rain here in the Rio Grande Valley).

One of the coolest things I’ve gotten to do this trip, aside from pouring over my mother in laws embroidery sewing machine and assorted fun project magazines, has been a trip out to the farm itself (their home is some distance away, since the land that he farms is her family’s historically).  I got to see fenugreek, italian parsley, curly parsley, cilantro, dill, and tomatoes.  South Texas’ climate allows for there to be produce in the ground all year long - and winter is one of the best times for greens.  Some of the tomatoes have just turned as well.

So I’m returning back home on Saturday with an armful of fresh cut dill, another armful of fresh Italian parsley, and approximately 10 lbs of tomatoes that were ripe enough to nearly fall off the vines when we picked them today.  The dill I will most likely dry (at least what we don’t eat by early next week), the parsley I’ll hopefully use up.  I’m not sure yet what to do with the tomatoes, other than slice them open and eat them with a little salt, because they really are that good.  Maybe I’ll bust out some old quart mason jars and can them for tasty noms this winter.

All in all though, a very good sort of day, busy for the right reasons, and not at all busy this evening.  I hope all of you had a similarly good turkey day (er… so long as you’re not turkeys - there are no turkeys on the internet right?) and a good weekend as well.

Tomorrow is the beginning of … well … crazy.  Fall is my favorite time of year, and this coming month is the ending of that and the beginning of winter, at least in places that are not full of palm trees.  There are some aspects of the coming season that I do truly love - and some that make me want to do my own dental surgery with rusty pliers.

But that’s a post for another day, so for now, enjoy lots of turkey leftovers, and don’t bug Uncle Ernie too badly for snoring at the football game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ-jv8g1YVI

(Ok, so I met some of them once - but it was at our wedding, and I take absolutely no guilt for not remembering them.  Hell, I didn’t remember what the freaking CAKE looked like, and that I picked out myself.)

Also - I’m exercising my right to shut the f*ck up and stay out of it a lot.  I think I’m doing a pretty good job at that, at least.

I apologize.

Today a lot of people are talking about things like Hope and Change, drinking their victory (or drowning their sorrows).  Rather than talk about that - since it’s a long discussion and I have too much else on my plate right now, I’d like to mention a little bit of hope that I saw today, on a very very local level.

Many of you know that Hurricane Ike did serious damage to my town.  Our Dairy Queen was, at one point, completely submerged.  When the hurricane rolled out, leaving the water still to recede, there were three fishing boats floating in the drive thru, and people kayaking to Target.  My apartment didn’t get power back until over 3 weeks after the storm.

It’s now been just shy of two months.  There are still people living in tents.  Blu-Roofs abound.  Busted boats are still everywhere.  But today I saw a sign that I think shows the tenacity of a lot of the people here that have run their little businesses and fishing boats and will continue to do so.

On a local family-run restaurant, they have a new sign.  It’s said “Open Sometime” for a week or two.  Today it says “Opening Soon: 90% finished with renovations”.

And that makes me smile.

For dessert, I’ll be making these apple dumplings.  They do not masquerade as health food.  They look a little strange.  But oh dear lord are they amazing.

Breakfasts:

• Cereal, Yogurt with fruit and granola
• Banana Bread
• Leftover apple dumplings

Lunches:

• Muffuletta (made with 1lb Italian bread loaf - serves at least 5)
• Spinach salad
• Sides: Corn and Black Bean salsa w/ Tortilla Chips; Cauliflower salad

Dinners:

• Flank Steak (woot!  sale!) and roasted potatoes
• Mustard Dill Salmon and wild rice
• Sides:  Roasted Asparagus with Balsalmic Vinegar; Fresh steamed green beans.

Normally things like fish and steak would be… uhh… budget busters.  But I live right near the incoming fish/shrimp boats offload point, so I can get seafood for amazingly cheap!

If anyone wants recipes for any of these, let me know!  Many of them are Anna’s Mama or Anna’s Nana’s recipes

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six. According to another blogger, they encourage us to:

*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (abriged)

I figure 38/100 isn’t bad!

You will need:

1 large can of chicken breast meat, drained well
1 can of sliced mushrooms (optional)
1 medium onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, diced
1 large can Hunt’s Traditional Spaghetti Sauce (the big one)
12 oz cottage cheese - I used low-fat
1 egg
6-8 Lasagna noodles - use the “cooks in the pan” kind, not the “boil first” kind
1 cup shredded mozarella cheese, divided in half

Italian Seasonings (Parsley, Basil, Oregano)
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil

1 2-quart ceramic casserole dish (I love my Pyrex)
Large skillet of some kind

Heat the skillet over medium high heat with 1 TBSP olive oil.  Saute onions for a minute or two until they start to turn clear.  Add chicken and cook for another minute, until starting to brown.  Add garlic and mushrooms, cook for another minute (DO NOT LET THE GARLIC BURN).  Add 2/3-3/4 of the can of tomato sauce, put the rest in a container and freeze for individual spaghetti serving some other day.  Heat until just boiling, and then add in herbs.  I used about 1 TBSP each fresh parsley and basil, and about 1 tsp fresh oregano.

In a bowl, mix cottage cheese, egg, and half cup of mozarella thoroughly.

Now for the fun part!  In your casserole dish, place a good ladleful of the sauce to coat the bottom of hte dish (this keeps your noodles from becoming cement on the bottom of your casserole dish).  Then a layer of noodles (two for each layer was all I needed).  Then 1/3 of the cottage cheese mixture, spread out.  Then 1/3 of the sauce.

Repeat twice, until you have on top a final layer of sauce.  Sprinkle with the other 1/2 cup of mozarella cheese.

Bake covered at 375 degrees for 30-45 minutes (until bubbly on the edges) and then uncovered for another 10 minutes to brown the cheese.

• there is enough money to pay the bills/rent (even if I don’t like writing the checks)
• there are stamps to mail them
• the Kingdom chronicler emailed me with a reminder that I need to mail him last month’s issue ( very politely, AND on the same day I was planning to mail this months… and had forgotten about last month’s) - meaning that I will be all up to date for Red Tape
• it smells like fresh cut grass outside.
• there is a snoozing kitty, upside down on my desk.  And he has toe-hawks.
• I have yarn to knit and fiber to spin

I do feel rather better now, actually.  (:  I think I’ll go have breakfast.

Granted, I did not manage to spin every day of the Tour, but I came pretty close (I did go on vacation for part of it, and airports don’t look kindly on long pointy sticks with hooks in the end).

So today I went to go look at the spindlers and rookies threads on Ravelry to get some inspiration for taking pictures of what I’d spun.

And discovered entire threads of pictures from people who have been spinning for 1-2 months that is perfectly balanced, even, and in huge quantities.  I’m not sure if the difference is the spinning wheels (most of the rookies have wheels), or that I have crappy spindles, or if I just absolutely suck and should not spin anymore, but I’ve been doing this for a year and can’t create yarn like that.

Needless to say, I’m not bothering to post my meagre, lousy skeins.  They’re only going to get felted anyway.