A Squirrel's Frustrated Frolic

While at the kitchen sink washing some dishes back in July, I caught sight of a determined little yard rodent desperately attempting to get food out of a relatively new squirrel-proof feeder. I grabbed my telephoto lens and caught quite a few fun shots of his hapless adventures. You can click on any of these photos to see the full/large version.

Just as he began to fall off...
which he did several times.

Meal No. 1360: Simple Beef Chili

The Sunday departure meal a few days ago was the amazing simple beef chili with kidney beans, which I've been making for over a decade now with this as the ideal recipe to get it just right. And Sunday's version was easily ranked among the top that I've ever made: it was so thick and hearty and full of delicious flavor with just the right amount of heat.

This might have been a result of how I tried to intensify the flavors a bit more while the onion, bell pepper, and garlic were sautéing in the bacon grease and spices (and I also added just a bit of beef broth near the end of this part of the process).

Then, with two hours cooking, half covered and half not, and topping off the taste with the right amount of salting, it was the perfect base for a layer of sharp cheddar cheese...and a busy spoon to ladle it all up into my waiting mouth.

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"Simple Beef Chili with Kidney Beans," from Cook's Illustrated, Number Sixty-One [March-April 2003], p. 10-11.

Meal No. 1359: Indian Tacos on Navajo Frybread

Last Saturday night's super tasty alternative take on tacos: completely homemade meat filling and the extra interesting twist of Navajo frybread to put it all on, along with fresh tomato and onion.

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"Indian Frybread and Indian Tacos" and "Crispy Beef Tacos," by Hilah Johnson. From HilahCooking.com.

Meal No. 1358: Diner-Style Breakfast

At mid-day this past Saturday, with a small group coming to the table for lunch, I decided I had a hankering for the kind of breakfast I'm fond of getting at local breakfast spots: sausage patties, fried sunnyside-up eggs, grits, toast, and orange juice. Perfect!

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Source of creamy grits recipe: Luquire Family Stone Ground Grits, milled in Greenwood, SC.

A Weeklong Cass Party

This past week the Roediger House has played host to Amy Williamson's pooch, a papillon named Cass while she was enjoying time down in the Florida Keys for vacation and family visiting. Cass is a great little guy and always seems so happy. He's an easy guest to have here for a multiday stay.

Food Truck Fridays Strikes Again

I was all prepared to make some dinner on last night's delightful summer Friday night, but I also wanted to support the local happenings right outside the back door. So the small crew on hand last night joined me in walking up the steep hill behind the house, up to where the latest round of Downtown Winston-Salem Food Truck Fridays was playing out. I went with a chicken pita from Ghassan's on the Go. Not to be self-serving about it, but it wasn't as good as the dinner I'd've made here at home. Like I said: supporting the local shindig is also important.

After bringing dinner in, though, I still had a hankering to create something in the kitchen, so I turned to the Caramel Popcorn version of Cap'n Crunch Cookies:

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"Cap'n Crunch Cookies," found online at The Capitol Baker, with credit going to The Sugar Plum Blog for inspiration and the source of the adapted recipe.

Meal No. 1357: Not So Cajun Chicken

Standing Room Only in a Life Skills Classroom
Walkertown Middle High School

For the last two days, I've been at a Collaborative Learning Conference with Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools. My presentation (presented in a double block and repeated for a total of four offerings) on planning and instructional design seemed to be reasonably well-received. I was definitely overwhelmed with the number of people who came to my sessions.

And it does this old man's heart good when teachers who are fresh out of their teacher prep programs tell me that their 110 minutes with me made more sense than a whole slew of education courses. Then, too, I'm sad about how frustrated they were with their college or masters experiences.

The sessions were a blast to conduct and the groups in each one were open and receptive and engaged. Still, it was nice to come home yesterday afternoon with only about a 15-minute drive! I was starving from two days of not eating lunch and made an early dinner of one of the most favorite of all the Roediger House regular dishes: not so cajun chicken. It made a fine one-bowl meal last night, and it wasn't long before an early bedtime became too appealing to resist.

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Links To Recipe [in PDF]:

Not So Cajun Chicken, a dish I regularly enjoyed at Crowley's Old Time Favorites restaurant and bar on Medlin Drive in Raleigh, NC.  (Another version of the recipe can be found here.)

Meal No. 1356: Pimento Cheese-Stuffed Burgers

I tried a new take on burgers last night, and while it was interesting and reasonably tasty, I don't think it will rate high on the Roediger House burgers list. I had pimento cheese I'd made over the weekend and wanted to try stuffing burgers with it, and that was what went onto the plates. It was decent and filling but not at all amazing.

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"South Carolina-Style Pimento Cheese." Recipe worked out by me, based on Sharon's Palmetto Pimento Cheese.

Meal No. 1355: Country Ham and Rice

Last night, after I drove in from Clarke County, Virginia, I made a simple and delicious breakfast for supper, just like my mother used to make.

A Squirrel's Bucket List

I keep my birdseed in a small roller cart plastic trashcan, close to the majority of my bird feeders located in the small grove beside the house. It's been relatively safe there for several years now, but I'm afraid a particularly aggressive squirrel has decided he's not content with the droppings and fallings from the feeders and thinks it's time he scored the big time. Do you see the big hole he's eaten into the lid, above?

I've been using the same bucket kept inside of this trashcan, which used to be the form for the birdseed I'd buy at Sam's Club. That was years ago, and now you can only buy the seed in bags there. (You understand, don't you, that I have to buy seed in bulk?) It's an old plastic bucket and the bottom is cracked but I love it. Well, that squirrel made a bit of a mess of it:

I figured he's risen to the level of inescapable nuisance by this point, so it was time to set out the Havahart® trap, and I got him relatively quickly:

He was wild, wild, wild, and it was nearly impossible to get a good mug shot of him. I loaded him into the back of the truck, put a highly-agitated Cyprus into the truck cab with me, and drove this rascal up to a large cemetery near R.J. Reynolds's tech center. When I opened up the trap, I think he must've launched himself into a 15-foot leap off the railing of the truck bed. He was gone like a shot!

Meal No. 1354: Grilled Filet Mignon and French Fries

I did not follow through today on my plan to make beef and mushroom stir fry. Instead, I took the easy route of grilling filet mignon and tossing a mess of french fries straight from the deep fat fryer onto the plate. This was the lone meal of the day for me, made around 3:30 pm, before I jetted back up the highway for a two-day training in Virginia.

Meal No. 1353: Pipetizer Casserole

Last night's filling and comfortable dinner:

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"Pipetizer Casserole" is an adaptation of "Tailgate Casserole," from The Big Book of Casseroles, by Maryana Vollstedt. San Francisco: Chronicle Books (2000), p. 120.

August Friday Slumber Party

Whoa: I just taught five days straight, which was split between a road gig in Virginia for the first two days and then three days of teacher training in the next county over from home. By Friday evening, I'll confess to feeling a bit tuckered. But it was also a great night for another Roediger House slumber party with eight or ten friends due. Although I had bought groceries with plans to make a big dinner, it turns out that it worked better for most of the crew to get here later, thanks either to work or traveling in from out of town.

Thank goodness, then, for Food Truck Fridays, right outside the back door of the house:

My two slices of feta and spinach pizza from Home Slice Pizza & Subs last night were fantastic:

As for my kitchen responsibilities for my own shindig here last evening, I guess I learned from the previous overnight gathering back in April that we don't necessarily have to have a ton of food. So this time around there was a fresh batch of pimento cheese, which got completely wiped out by hungry munchers:

As noted in yesterday's blog post, I also had Sprinkled Donut Cap'n Crunch cookies already made, and they were quite delicious!

Around 1 am, I brought up to the crew a warm batch of swiss bacon dip, inspired by an appetizer version of this that I enjoyed with great friends and colleagues at the Woodstock Cafe in Virginia:

Then, this morning, even though we'd all been up until after 3 am, folks somehow got up too early for me to have prepared anything more than a bowl of creamy grits for them:

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"Swiss and Bacon Dip," from Rachael Ray. Available online at the Food Network website.

"South Carolina-Style Pimento Cheese." Recipe worked out by me, based on Sharon's Palmetto Pimento Cheese.

Source of creamy grits recipe: Luquire Family Stone Ground Grits, milled in Greenwood, SC.

Sprinkled Donut Cap'n Crunch Cookies

After dinner last night, I made some Sprinkled Donut Crunch cookies, one of the versions of Cap'n Crunch cookies that are passionately much-loved around here:

I wanted to take some with me when I returned to Rankin Elementary School in Greensboro today, to share with their fantastic principal Kathy. I also wanted these to already be made since the Roediger House is going to host another big slumber party tonight. Folks will be glad to see these, I think.

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"Cap'n Crunch Cookies," found online at The Capitol Baker, with credit going to The Sugar Plum Blog for inspiration and the source of the adapted recipe.

Meal No. 1352: Roasted Wild-Caught Alaskan Salmon

Slow-roasted herbed wild-caught salmon, some quinoa, and a mess of sugar snap peas for dinner, along with a Boulevard Tank 7 brew? Yes, please.

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Chilled Rosemary Dijon Cream Sauce, from "Poached Salmon," in The Ultimate Southern Living Cookbook, compiled and edited by Julie Fisher Gunter. Birmingham, AL: Oxmoor House (1999), p. 216.

Caramel Popcorn Crunch Cookies

Ever since I stumbled across a recipe for Cap'n Crunch cookies, they've quickly become a favorite around here (and on the road, when I take 'em on trips). Good ole basic Cap'n Crunch was a favorite cereal from childhood through college, but I never was drawn to their other long-available flavors (peanut butter or crunch berry). I remember there was a vanilla version that was briefly available when I was a kid, called Vanilly Crunch, which I loved almost as much as life itself, but it did not catch on in the marketplace. My search for an image to include in this post led me to discover that there has been a whole line of failed "sequels" to Cap'n Crunch over the years:

Recently, I've enjoyed coming across some sporadically-available new flavors from the Cap'n and trying them out in these cookies, with great results. As I've noted before, it's not easy getting ahold of some of these: Cinnamon Roll Crunch has most consistently been located at Kroger in Virginia Beach, and Chocolate Crunch is carried at Target, but I've got to go to WalMart to find Sprinkled Donut Crunch. My own usual grocery stores have been sticking only with the "mainstream" versions.

This past week, though, an exceedingly rare find, brought to Winston-Salem all the way from a WalMart in Oklahoma, and available only in a few select stores: Caramel Popcorn Crunch:

Select stores, indeed: it's not available at WalMart.com or Amazon.com and even a basic Google search turns up very little on this new product. I did see where the Cap'n Crunch twitter feed has advertised it a bit, always with the note that it can only be found in select stores:

I have no idea how the cereal itself tastes in a bowl of milk, because that's not the reason I have it on hand. Instead, on a recent quiet evening at home, I made Cap'n Crunch cookies with this intriguing new version of that favorite childhood cereal, and the finished product was yet again worth writing home (or, at least, on the blog) about:

It didn't take long for me to repeat these, as mentioned in the Meal No. 1343 blog post.

Update: I don't often make it to the big WalMart SuperCenter, but I popped into the one on Kester Mill Road and, lo and behold, found a healthy collection of this special edition cereal. I stocked up:

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"Cap'n Crunch Cookies," found online at The Capitol Baker, with credit going to The Sugar Plum Blog for inspiration and the source of the adapted recipe.

Meal No. 1351: Hamburger Supreme

The past two days were really solid and productive, up in Clarke County, Virginia, working with the team of administrators there. It's a long drive back to Winston, though, and dinner was late and had to be easy to put together, so I went with hamburger supreme and had zero regrets.

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"Hamburger Supreme," from the late Mrs. John T. (Glynn) Johnson of Buies Creek, North Carolina, via Janice Jones Bodenhamer.

Key Lime Cake

For a Friday night dinner gathering not so long ago, I was encouraged to try out key lime cake, something one of the dinner guests had encountered at a soul food café. So I did.

We were overwhelmed with how bursting with flavor this cake was, and we also found it a real challenge to conquer a typical size slice of it. I'm glad I went with a deliciously standard cream cheese frosting without any key lime enhancement to it: this cake needed a counterbalance in the frosting!

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"Key Lime Cake," credited to Katie, mother-in-law of Layla Palmer, who blogs at The Lettered Cottage.

Meal No. 1350: Monroe County Pork Steaks

It's the Sunday afternoon before I get to depart for the northern reaches of Virginia to spend the next two days with a new set of administrators, to commence my instructional leadership institute with them. I had a choice to eat something on the road, or to use the afternoon before leaving in order to make a fine early supper. I chose the latter.

This is Monroe County Pork Steaks, according to the article headline in the latest issue of Cook's Country, and I'm mighty glad I gave them a trial run.

The side dishes were steamed baby Brussels sprouts and macaroni and cheese casserole, also a good find from a previous issue of that same magazine. My belly was way too full to be getting behind the wheel for a nearly five-hour drive into the beautiful Virginia countryside, but there you have it.

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"Monroe County-Style Pork Chops," by Ashley Moore. In Cook's Country, August/September 2015, p. 4-5.

"Macaroni and Cheese Casserole," by Sarah Gabriel. In Cook's Country, June/July 2012, p. 17.

Meal No. 1349: Deviled Chicken Thighs

It was a warm and cozy meal at the Roediger House on this fine summer Saturday night: deviled chicken thighs along with sugar snap peas and stuffing. The chicken was super moist and incredibly delicious...it's so nice when it comes out exactly right.

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"Deviled Chicken Drumsticks," by Ian Knauer. In Gourmet, August 2008.