Whats Cooking Mother

Recipe:    Sausage, Potatoes, Carrots and cabbage
From:      Mother
Makes:   Plenty if you leave Mom in the attic

Ingredients:
   1 Lb Smoked Turkey Sausage sliced into 1 inch pieces
   5-6 Medium Red Potatoes, Quartered
   4 Carrots cut in large chunks
   Small head of Green Cabbage cut into 12 wedges
   1/4 Lb Salted Butter
   Salt and Pepper to taste

Directions: 

Add cabbage, carrots, and potatoes to cold water. Bring to boil and then turn heat to medium. Cook until vegetables are firm but not to firm by the fork. Add turkey sausage and cook for an additional 10 minutes. Drain then add butter. Salt and pepper to your liking. Enjoy immediately.

Prep time 10 min. Cooking time approx. 35-40 min

 Every so often I get home earlier than my wife and cooking dinner is my reward. One of our favorite meals, especially on a chilly, rainy, most foul night is sausage, carrots, potatoes and cabbage. It is likidy split fast and will have its consumers screaming, more! The whole cooking process is filled with nostril pleasing enjoyment. A single trip to the ice box will have your arms full of yummy-a-plenty ingredients, except for the spuds which can be found in the pantry. To prepare the vegetables you will need a strong butcher knife, like Norman Bates uses. This part can be scary (see video and be warned: extremely graphic).

 

There’s no sense thinking here, just hack away, throw the chopped stuff in the water that’s in a pan that’s on top of the island. Carefully transport the hodgepodge to cook stove top and twist ignition knob to high. I suppose if you are a stickler for detail you could cut your veggies to the sizes listed above, but come on, live a little and improvise. Munching fresh garden fruit is your reward for cheffing and will arouse your taste buds to the looming bliss. But please be careful, too much stimulation and dinner will surely be unsatisfactory. At this point you have about 1800 seconds of downtime (I use this time to think about nuclear proliferation).  How do we know when the meatless part of our meal is ready for meat? You will need to test the doneness of the spuds. Imagine sticking a fork in your eye and sticking a fork in a peeled orange, you want orange softness. When before mentioned spuds reach almost al dente it’s time to add the crushed turkey, pork, cow, and other stuff stuffed in an intestine tube to the stew and wait  most patiently for 10 more minutes. Drain, toss in the butter, season for your buds, voila. This meal fills the house with aromas fit for Kings and roughage enough for their horses. Hey honey, what to drink, it’s time for din-din, rub-a-dub-dub thanks for the grub, its chow time!

Note: It is best to leave Mother in the attic during dinner!

Final Blog Entry

I'm not real sure how to go about this reflective piece on my blogging. I will just go about it pretty much the same way as I blogged,  say what comes to my mind. The way I picked subjects for my blogs was like this. I would sit and think for a few minutes and if something was on my mind then I would just start writing, with no particular direction in mind. If my mind was blank with ideas then I would look around my desk and pick some object or a word within my sight and create a blog from scratch. The process seemed very easy to me and subject matter was no issue. I enjoyed creating mini stories from my warped mind. One night, while at home alone, I wrote about demons that were harnessed by music playing on my radio. This may seem really twisted but it was where my mind was that night. I enjoy writing these thoughts down and then reading them back to myself. I realized that most of my writing was going to be Greek to my readers but I didn't care. It was Sam's Space I was writing in and it was going to be Sam's ideas in the blogs, period. I will write civilly on Christmas cards. When I would start to think of people reading the blogs my writing would become watered down and homogenized, not really me. I don't like thinking about critics reading my stuff because then my style changes and it becomes their stuff. People don't want to read what I think they want to read do they? I think they want bold and fresh. I'm not good at ESP anyway. When picking a name for my blog site I decided on Safe From the Storm. I wanted my space to be safe from preconceived notions and expected ideas (the storm of conformity). There are other reasons too, but they are personal. This blog project was unexpectedly fun and enabled me to go beyond the normal "copy/paste" discussion boards @ OTC.

The Storm Came Close

Well I had a very restful night last night. I love to snuggle down under the covers when a storm blows through. The thunder and lighting were terrific. My bedroom is on the second floor and the roof is just above us and this makes for some very nice sounds. Sleep like a baby! I woke and went about my daily routine, jet dressed, make a couple mugs of coffee for me and Dan, feed the cats, pack up my computer, and wait for Dan to pick me up. I strolled out to the truck thinking what a beautiful day we were in store for. I was really surprised when the first thing Dan said to me was, do you think our walls are still standing. I had no idea what he was talking about. Did you not know there was some tornadoes that went through the area last night, he said. Nope! Yea, he said, one hit Buffalo and one went from Kimberling City to Branson, right over our job. Wow! our morning was starting off a little bit different then I expected. As we were traveling toward our job we received a call from the builder and he told us trees were down and the road to the job was probably closed. Me and Dan went into a steady conversation of all the things that might have happened to our job. Are the walls still standing, is there debris everywhere, has a big tree fallen on the floor, has the whole neighborhood been demolished, a million questions, but no answers. Well, our trip to Gobblers Mountain went in a giffy and at first we thought, oh my goodness there is no way the walls are standing. Trees were down everywhere and there was a lot of home damage. We eased our way through the rubble and made it safely to the job site. Low and behold we escaped unscathed. How can a storm destroy property just a few hundred feet away and not even a small branch on the sub-floor. Safe From the Storm!

Molly

She sits on top of my file cabinet totally thinking she is in complete control of me. I try my hardest to go about my business without showing any fear of her. That is really hard to do when she looks at me that way. She has a friend sitting in her lap who seems nice, at least in my mind. I am not real sure how she managed to climb onto that high file cabinet. For that matter how long has she been there. I got to be honest here she is making me very nervous. I should tell her my feelings and ask her to please stare at somewhere else in this big room. I want to do that, but being a rocket scientist, I realize this would tick her off. If she would take a break and gaze at the ceiling for a short while maybe her friend would take the message from me and tell her later (in a minute or so) when I start back to work. Come on, brother, cut me some slack here, look over there please! If I go about my important things to do surely she will get bored and start clipping her toenails won't she. She must know they need clipped, I do. How can she do that? Sitting there just scaring me for no reason, with no regards for my teetering emotional state of mind. How did she get on top of the file cabinet? Why is her friend in her lap? What is the bond between the two of them? Oh! I wonder if she (not her friend) is having a big time messing with my head. How in the world did they get on top of that high file cabinet? They may have crawled up when my head was turned.

Of bits and pieces my world is made

Life is a very complex thing. Like a well crafted quilt, with bits and pieces of fabric stitched together into one large tapestry. Each piece of the fabric was very important in its day. Nothing seemed more important than that particular kind of material on that particular day. Funny thing is the very next day you ask yourself, What was so special about that cloth from yesterday? No bother its a new day and corduroy feels good now. Tomorrow may be denim and the next day flannel but corduroy today.  Many years go by and the pile of different fabrics fill a whole closet. There is so many different pieces that you begin to wonder if they could possible be all yours. There is red, blue, green, plaid, stripes, patterned, soft, itchy, thick, thin, pretty, gross, just every texture and color combination possible. As you look at each different small insignificant pieces of fabric a story comes to mind. These stories are some sad, some funny, some happy and a couple have no story at all. With all of this hodgepodge of fabric you decide to build a quilt, no rhyme,  no reason to it, just a blanket of fabric pieces. With a spool of thread and a thimble you splice together the memories and tales of days bygone until you fashion a complete quilt, complex and complicated yet simple and simple. Such is life!

A Storms a Brewing

There is a certain smell in the air, you know the smell. The Earth has been sitting around dormant waiting for the wind to take its dust into the atmosphere. The smell of that dust is a tell tale of a bad storm closing in. I have noticed that other types of storms have precursors to the main event too! There is a perfect storm on the horizon, one that will blow us all away. You can't smell this storm but your gut churns and your head gets fuzzy/dizzy knowing there is no escape. You can't outrun it, you can't hide in a basement, you can't stick you head in the sand, can't even pretend its not coming because it is. No way your gut can be wrong on this one, it hurts to bad. Our desires and wants have created a high pressure aloft and the winds of low pressure encircle us. These winds are held back by a facade of government intervention designed to fake the wind out. You can't fake out wind, it does not respond to wishes of hopeful thinking. The best thing to do is brace yourself and say your prayers, lots of prayers. Don't even try to act smarter then your pants on this one, just plain hunker down. It amuses me, all the people looking right at this thing and acting like its going to blow off to the north. Kind of reminds me of folks watching a tsunami coming in. Man isn't that something, honey get me the camera, hey kids you might want to build a dike for that sandcastle. 

Fast Tracker

Tony is a very busy man. He goes from to to fro in just a couple of seconds. In our business we call a man like that a fast tracker. The rest of us sit around contemplating things and Tony just gets it done, or does he? I overheard him tell his boss that he could get it done no problem. Get what done? I did not hear that part but I did hear his boss say GREAT! When you put "no problem" and "GREAT" together my guess is that if not both than a least one of these men must be a fast tracker. I have heard Tony say "no problem" many times before and he says it really fast, at a minimum he is a fast tracker. But what is it he is getting done? He never ever works; he just bangs around on his phone thingamajig. I am perplexed. The next day Tony was toying with his thingamajig and also talking to a subordinate at the same time. WOW! What talent. They were a little distance from me so their voices were hard to hear. I was unable to see this subordinates face but somehow I could read his lips clearly, "no problem". Then Tony said, I was reading lips here too, "GREAT!" What is it that will give Mr. Subordinate no problem? Is it the same thing that would give Tony no problem? Both Tony and Mr. Subordinate spend the next 10 minutes playing with their thingamajigs. Mr. Subordinate then gets up and heads for the exit door. When he gets a little closer I recognize the face. Tom, I yelled in his direction, what’s up? He was a busy man but came over anyway. "What are you doing here" was the first words out of his mouth. "Get back to work". Oh yea, that's right I was suppose to have all my work done by this morning and I did tell Tom "NO PROBLEM".  Does this mean we all have a problem?