[Food Day Friday ... where I show you what I've been tinkering with
in the kitchen. Mr. Dude gets a lot of air time on here about some of
the projects he's working on or the things he's reading or thinking
about. But rest assured, my entire life does not revolve around Mr.
Dude's nerdiness - so here's to the foodies!]
Can I please do some lamenting right now?
Food is really important at Casa de Larsen. Or at least to me. We tend to
have a busy schedule, but we somehow usually find time to make and eat great
meals as a family and with friends.
Tomorrow, Ladies and Gentlemen, we
have an event of truly epic proportions
that we can NOT attend and we can NOT do anything about, no matter how hard we
try.
And it makes my little foodie heart so very sad.
Double Pi Day.
Ask any nerd, he'll say 3/14 is Pi Day, and pi day
means pie. Ask any nerd who wants seconds, he'll just say multiply by 2.
6/28 is Double Pie Day. Double the pi, double the pie.
On June
28, come out to our place for some pie. Hors d'oeuvres will be provided,
and don't worry about coming late—we'll have a fire out on the deck for some s'more pies.
Also—don't trust your pie buying or baking, abilities? Come with a
bottle of wine, and we'll hook you up just the same. We'd rather have
two buck chuck than a five dollar pie anyway.
Party starts at 6:30pm, pie judging at 8pm. Blood sugar testing available upon request.
Sigh … doesn’t that just sound heavenly?
I mean, nerdy implications aside, a get-together with
friends that just features PIE?!?!?!
My mouth started salivating just from typing that.
And then my long time friend who majored in math reminded me that Tau is the proper term for 2π.
Last weekend, Mr. Dude's mom called me up and invited me to go strawberry picking.
Mr. Dude was out with his own dad to celebrate Father's Day [something about a brewery tour and a viewing of Godzilla, neither of which I was interested in], and Little Guy and I were about ready to go on a run.
But strawberry picking?
I posed the question on that social network the all-knowing audience [aka, "Facebook"]:
Exercise
Option: Do you think I'll choose my normal run with a stop at a park to
let Little Guy play, or going to pick strawberries with my mother in
law where Little Guy can play in the mud with us?
I'll give you a hint: I'm a foodie who hates running, and a mom who doesn't mind dirt.
Bonus points if you got the right answer before I show you this:
Grandma had a fabulous time with Little Guy, showing him how to find the strawberries and pull them off the plants. I'm pretty sure her plan was to get time in with her grandson whilst her daughter-in-law did most of the picking.
Cute baby in a strawberry basket in the middle of a field. Ridiculously cute? I think so.
Also, there was a lot of dirt. C'est la vie.
Once we got home, though, the real work began. Washing, slicing, sorting and freezing two whole flats of strawberries is no picnic, people! It called for a marathon of something to entertain my brain.
[Fellowship to the Rescue!!!]
It was rather odd to be slicing something so sweet and yummy whilst Ring Wraiths attacked poor Frodo at Weathertop, or whilst nine members of the Fellowship fought off hordes of angry goblins and a cave troll down in the Mines of Moria. But it was nice to have the distraction.
Mr. Dude came home from time with his dad and paused the movie to tell me about his day. I think he may live in the meme-world a little too often, because he stopped it right here:
["So I walk in the door and Steph had
this going. It seems I paused it at EXACTLY the right moment. One does not
simply pause a 3 hr movie at the opportune time."]
[Food Day Friday ... where I show you what I've been tinkering with in the kitchen. Mr. Dude gets a lot of air time on here about some of the projects he's working on or the things he's reading or thinking about. But rest assured, my entire life does not revolve around Mr. Dude's nerdiness - so here's to the foodies!]
Ever since the arrival of Little Guy, Mr. Dude and I have found that date nights at home are easy-peasy: no finding a babysitter, no prepping Little Guy to be with said babysitter, no rushing to get out the door on time to wherever we have reservations or tickets for ... not to say that we don't get out at all - it's just our M.O. to have "date night in". Heck, after our standard college $10 coffee date for so many years, eating a nice meal and sharing a bottle of wine feels extravagant!
On my selfish side, "date night in" gives me the chance to make food that's a little more elaborate or time-consuming. Sometimes it's more expensive than how we'd eat for the rest of the week. Usually it just requires a little more concentration to be sure I'm following the recipe as I should be.
That's difficult to do if you've got a munchkin attached to your jeans as you try to move around the kitchen.
Did we mention that Little Guy likes to be wherever we are? It can make simple house chores take at least 100 x as long as they should. Good thing he's cute!
But I digress ...
Where were we? Oh yeah. Date night.
This recipe isn't really difficult so much as it just feels fancy. Pair it with a good red, plate it well, and you feel like you're at happy hour at a nice neighborhood restaurant.
Coastal Living July 2004
Yield: 2 Dozen [feeds 4-6]
[Ingredients]
1/3 cup olive oil, divided 3/4 pound small fresh shrimp, peeled and deveined 1 1/2 tablespoons minced garlic 2 large plum tomatoes, seeded and finely chopped 1/2 cup sliced green onion 1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese 1/4 cup finely chopped parsley 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice 2 teaspoons minced fresh thyme 1 teaspoon Greek seasoning 1 French baguette, cut diagonally into 1/4 inch-thick slices
[Preparation]
Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Sauté shrimp and garlic 3 to 4 minutes until shrimp are cooked.
Transfer to a small bowl and chill.
Combine tomatoes, 1 tablespoon olive oil and next 6 ingredients in a large bowl; stir in shrimp. Refrigerate until ready to serve.
Place bread slices on a baking sheet; brush bread with remaining olive oil. Bake at 375º for 8 minutes. Spoon 1 heaping tablespoon shrimp mixture onto each bread slice.
[Steph's Notes]
I used the shrimp from Trader Joe's - no peeling or deveining! And I didn't have time to chill them in the fridge since I started dinner prep so late, so they sat in a bowl in the freezer whilst I prepped the veggies and bread.
Small sugar plum tomatoes took a little more work to de-seed, but were easier to dice into smaller pieces. And they had more flavor than large plum tomatoes, in my opinion.
Trader Joe's crumbled feta with herbs mixed in meant that I didn't worry about not having "Greek seasoning" on hand. Most companies use some combination of garlic, onion, oregano, mint, thyme and/or lemon. I'm cheap, so I buy all of those separately and then combine them as I need to.
We were both full after 3 of these [I put a very large heaping spoonful on our baguette slices], and the leftovers lasted for a couple of days. Bonus: we used a slice of toasted Dave's Killer bread when we ran out of baguette slices, and it was super tasty!
In the computer world, "bug" is a bad, bad word. [This is where all the coders start shuddering.]
Within the confines of my house, "bug" means "pest that's only alive because the cat isn't doing her job or Mr. Dude hasn't killed it yet even though I asked a whole 2 seconds ago".
For my garden, "bug" means "that thing that's trying to eat all the plants!"
As far as my to do list is concerned, "bug" refers to the verb, as in - "I haven't done Item A [or Item B, or Item C, or Item D, or Item E ...] yet, and it's starting to bug me".
For the purposes of this blog, "bug" explains the content of this post, and I'm going to refer to all of the above.
Let's go in reverse order, shall we?
To Do List: Let's just say that mine has been rather long, without much progress and without enough coffee. [For the record, there's never enough coffee. You'll be my best friend if you bring me some good coffee. Promise.] We've had lots going on with Mr. Dude's work schedule, Little Guy's sleep schedule, and my manage-our-home-behind-the-scenes schedule. Thus, the blog fell off the "highest priority, must get something posted today" radar. Hard to blog about life when you're too busy living it, right? Don't worry - it gnawed at me. So we're back.
Garden: The bugs in the garden have been watching us pull up undergrowth, kill off the moss that was eating our lawns [oh, the joys of living in the PNW] and set up all kinds of accessories. Our backyard is now sporting some awesome garage sale finds and hand-me-downs: patio table and chairs, solar LED umbrella [oooh! blinky lights!], fire pit, and gas bbq grill. [Can you say "neighborhood cookout"?!]
If you thought Mr. Dude's only hobbies were building and modifying computers or finding random videos on YouTube featuring reviews of the Goat Simulator game given by a gal who just ate a habanero pepper stuffed with ghost chili pepper sauce, then you were mistaken.
He ALSO loves sprucing up a much-loved grill to make it shine like new and filling up the gargantuan yard waste can with vines and dandelions and blackberry bush clippings. Not the stereotypical nerd who never sees daylight, I tell you. [Although, did I tell you about how he worked in the basement at our university's IT Help Desk, and they had pictures of windows overlooking sunny landscapes on their computer desktops in lieu of actual windows? Apparently the nerds thought their virtual UV rays were sufficient ...]
But seriously, when he's not doing yardwork, he really is looking up Goat Simulator game reviews.
House: I've been doing my own geeking out over things like design, function and decorating. I may or may not have spent most of a sunny day outside, lounging in our new-to-us patio furniture and reading this:
Mr. Dude likes the "DIY" concept for building computers; I like it applied to cooking and decorating. Also, I appreciate bloggers with a sense of humor, so I follow them on Bloglovin'. [Note: You could follow The Almost Nerdy Wife on Bloglovin', too. Just sayin'. #shamelessselfpromotion #justkiddingIhateselfpromoting]
The only downside is that I can't actually do most of the project ideas in here: we're waiting on even basic things like paint and hanging pictures until our walls are demolished and rebuilt. No, we're not knocking our entire house down. Yes, we have to redo most of our electrical work.
[1916 House + Nerd with Excess of Electronic Devices = Supply and Demand Imbalance]
Actually, we needed to do the update anyways [hellooooooo, knob and tube!], and I'm too lazy to paint walls that are just going to be torn up in a few months. But it's so much more fun to point out Mr. Dude's wattage consumption. He won't mind, though. He willingly measures how many watts his machines pull out anyways.
This is actually pretty low, especially after we had legit outlets installed downstairs, in addition to the lightbulb-to-outlet conversions he had done. Otherwise, he had a ridiculous number of devices daisy-chained to a single extension cord running off one outlet in the mudroom/pantry just up the stairs from his man cave and it was consistently up in the 400s. We really need to get the electricity finished, folks!
Where were we?
Oh yeah. Decorating. Or not. At least not until Mr. Dude's machines can't cause a shortage throughout our entire house and blow every fuse in the box with one fell swoop of overclocking.
Excuse me. I'm off to go stock up on batteries for the flashlight in case of Wattage-gate.
Maybe I'll buy a can of paint while I'm at it.
[*Bonus Points for those of you who ever watched the Cartoon Network "June Bugs" specials where they ran a marathon of Warner Brothers' Bugs Bunny cartoons. Ah, such wonderful childhood memories.]
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