...seems as how they never stop, clippity-clop, clippity-clop, clippity-clippity...

[hazelchaz]

The chili's cooking, it'll cook for 18 hours (recipe here).

After my last post, I went home, library_lynn and I went out for a sandwich, and we commenced a-shoppin'. Trader Joe's (we now have plenty of Tejava iced tea for the party, and some snacks), Smart & Final (we now have lots of bottled water, Frappucinos, and Stouffers macaroni & cheese), and Stater Bros (for 6 1/4 lbs. of shredded round steak). Oh, we bought some other things -- slightly irregular tortillas, tortilla chips, crackers, six kinds of cheese, and so forth -- but those are the high points. (I'll get to the cakes in just a moment.)

Paying the extra $2/lb. for the shredded beef round, instead of the chuck stew meat, is oh-so-worth-it. We got home about 9:30 pm, and I spent two hours unloading and browning the meat and getting everything into the crockpot. The $12.50 extra I spent to get the meat already cut the way I needed it, meant I wasn't spending my evening cutting the meat myself. I chopped the onion, and the green chiles (opened the wrong can, instead of the diced green chiles), and that's enough chopping for one night!

As you've seen in my previous posts, I've been taking pictures of the various repairs and improvements that Lynn's spearheaded. I used one of those repairs tonight: we have a working electrical outlet outside, so while the chili cooks for 18 hours on the patio it won't quite make the whole house smell of chili as much as it usually does. (And I ran across another repair that I didn't shoot at the time that predates all the other recent stuff: the broken kitchen drawer has been repaired.)

Anyhow, back to the menu. Richard Foss and the Foss-ettes are probably going to bring some kind of salmon dish. [And it just hit me that Richard's only 6 or 7 years older than me.] My mom's bringing a fresh fruit salad, Elaine and Dale are bringing a potato dish and a veg tray. Kim's making "doubletree-style" chocolate chip cookies, and I'm picking up a bunch of classic Ranger cookies from French's Pastry (aka French's Bakery of Costa Mesa, a German bakery from my childhood that now has a branch next to the Trader Joes in Orange). By "classic" in this context, I mean that these brown sugar oatmeal cookies won't have M&M's on top of them. (Why do they usually turn a superior non-chocolate cookie into something like an ordinary chocolate-chip cookie? I don't know, and I'm having the original version I remember from my boyhood. So there.)

Tomorrow: Run down to the office and load my ice chest. When I fill my ice chests, I always put the caffeinated sodas on the left, then the caffeine-free, then the diet sodas on the right. (Or diet, then water, if I'm loading water in that cooler.) This isn't the way I load my fridge at the office, though. I've lately taken to keeping my office sodas arranged in numerical order* by dominant color of the can (Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Grey, White) -- this is a mnemonic device I use, so when I'm completely out of a flavor in the refrigerator, I can figure out what flavor it was without having to refer to a list. One shelf, for example, has cans that are green, green, blue, blue, blue, and purple -- if I see a gap in the greens, I can easily figure out that it's either Sierra Mist or Mountain Vew that needs to be restocked.

So I need to set aside about an hour for that run. I need to get ice on that round trip too.

I need to banzai-clean the living room... the hardest part will be finding a place for Dad's jumbo monitor. The back patio has a few things to be tossed in the wheelie dustbin, that won't take long. Dining room table needs the extensions (leaves) put in, and a tablecloth of some sort on top. (Probably the usual disposable-plastic sheeting.)

Have I mentioned that I like to throw at least one party a year? Usually it's my St. Patrick's Day party. It's five months late this year. 44 guests are expected to attend, based on the RSVPs I've received. (Oh, that's so perfect.) We have nametags (printed in green), because a number of my friends will be meeting each other for only the first or second time.

I promised I'd talk about the cakes! Lynn insisted we must have birthday cake. I asked, you couldn't have brought this up 8 hours earlier when I was putting in my order at the bakery? So we picked out three baked delights from Smart & Final, all pre-cut: a tiramisu, a key lime torte, and a triple-chocolate overload cake. And candles. I wanted to find alphabet candles, so I could spell out my age using just four candles in roman numerals -- we ended up with a pack of candy letters, to do the roman numbers on the cake itself, and we'll have a clump of traditional pencil-thin candles on one section of one of the cakes. One slice. If we have to, we'll tip it over on its side to get enough room. And yes, we have some vanilla ice cream on hand to have with the cakes. Remember animelosangeles's mascot?

Bonus points to the first person who correctly guesses the significance of this message's timestamp...

*Brown=1, Red=2. That's the only clue I'm going to give you.

Comments

[encorecrazay.livejournal.com]

I after reading Lynn's Modified 6-hour Chili recipe, I looked through a few of my favorite chili recipes and found that most included beef broth and/or beer except for my favorite: Frank X. Tolbert's Chili from "A Bowl of Red" (he's one of the founders of the Terlingua Chili Cookoff) Here's a link to the recipe: http://www.abowlofred.com/FXTChili.htm

Beef broth and beer

[hazelchaz]

Well, both broth and beer are basically water + flavor. So you've got a slightly different flavor if you substitute straight water, but it doesn't kill the recipe outright...