Happy Birthday Savannah!

January 17, 2009

Well, technically it was yesterday, but today being Saturday, we are doing most of the celebration activities today. More on that later…

Yesterday the kids had a half day of school and their 1st Semester awards program. Both kids received honor roll once again with Sean earning a 4.96 grade point and Savannah earning a 3.79 average. Pretty good!

Savannah has been watching a lot of cooking shows lately on the Food Channel and decided she wants to be a chef. She has been at my side for years now helping me cook. One of her favorite Food Channel shows is the Challenge Show where folks make really, really outlandish and beautiful cakes. So yesterday, she decided she wanted to make her own birthday show cake – and she wanted minimal help from me or Suzanne.

She actually went as far as making molding chocolate and fondant, as well as cakes/brownies. Keep in mind, she just turned 11, but you can see the result of her hard work below. As you can probably see, she went with a breakfast in a skillet theme. Pretty darn good job! She is already itching to make more.

To help celebrate her Birthday today, we will head in to town. She received a bit of money from some relatives for her Birthday and wants to stop by the mall and shop (oh boy). Then she wants to see a movie. The movie she wants to see is Mall Cop. I fear we have seen all the funny parts in the ads on TV, but its here choice.

After the movie, we will grab some dinner. She has in mind this shish-ka-bob place for dinner. I have never eaten there, but she is itching for some Oriental shish-ka-bob. After dinner, we will likely return home and have some cake (yes, its edible) and finish opening her presents. Depending on the time, we may even partake in a family boardgame.

Smoking and Super Heroes

December 27, 2008

Yesterday I put my new Christmas present, a smoker to the test. We also decided to have a Super Hero movie marathon to watch three relatively new movies that we hadn’t yet seen.

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday getting the meats ready to smoke. I had decided to smoke a top loin pork roast, some boneless, skinless chicken breasts and some pork baby back ribs. I prepared a cure or a marinade for all of them and let them sit over night.

I decided to smoke the meats with apple wood. After warming up the smoker, in went the pork. I had planned to smoke the pork roast for 6 or 7 hours. A couple of hours later, the ribs went in, followed by the chicken a couple of hours later. All three were smoked at a temperature between 200 and 220 degrees F.

A fair amount of smoke was thrown up throughout the day and it sure smelled good. We had a mixture of rain and snow throughout the afternoon and the smoker did fine holding the temperature of the inside. And the taste of the food???

The food tasted wonderful. The pork was just absolutely perfect. It came cooked to a very nice white with a nice smoke ring around it. The taste was my favorite of the three. The ribs and chicken were also very good. We now have enough food to eat for a week. Everyone, except for Sean, really liked the flavor of the meats. He was a bit less enthusiastic. I now look forward to using my new smoker to try a bunch of other things.

During the evening and night, we enjoyed three recent super hero movies. The movies were Batman – Dark Knight, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. Of course, all three were Blu Ray versions of the movie. The hands down winner for our family was Iron Man.

All three movies make you suspend belief and reality. While the Academy Awards are likely to disagree with us, Batman was the least enjoyable of the three. Also, the movie just seemed too long and could have ended at several points along the way. Heath Ledger was very good as the Joker, but the movie was not quite as good and seem fixated on him. Iron Man was just more enjoyable and kept you fixated on the storyline the whole way through the movie.

It was kind of funny to see The Hulk feature a few moments of Iron Man in it. I think the two movies may have set themselves up to do a combined follow on movie that features the two super heroes from it.

We had a forth “super hero” move, Hancock, but ran out of energy before we could get to it. So, we will view it later this weekend.

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