Freaky Friday Favorites

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Breakfast Ham Braid and The Principal’s Office

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Odd photos are always a good blog opener!

Working with kids (even in my unexpected housewife part-time manner) can be a real challenge.  It does keep you young and there is a lot of joy in being around kids, but you also have to be just slightly insane.  If you didn’t have the insanity cloak of protection, you’d end up in a corner, in the fetal position, chewing your toenails (I just tried to research the % of adults who bite their toenails.  That information is surprisingly difficult to find.  So difficult, in fact, I didn’t find it).  At any rate, sometimes you just have some really bad kid issues to deal with and today was that day for me.  I had to meet with the principal of the school to discuss a kid issue. 

Going to the principal’s office reminded me of my childhood terror of that location.  It wasn’t like I didn’t get sent there a few times, usually for something sarcastic or stupid.  That happened later though.  The time around K-3 grade…I had nightmares about my life ending, if I got sent to the principal’s office.  I knew, at best, I’d get a spanking- the kind of spanking where you have to go to the woods and pick your own switch.  At worst, I figured it was death.  I had no idea what might happen in that office.  I did imagine it involved alchemy and fire, but I could only venture to guess of the other horrors that awaited me in that room.  This fear plus my absolutely awkward shyness, keep me from ever entering the office until at least 5^th grade.  Then once the seal was broken, I found myself in the presence of the principal a few too many times.

Hey…check out this recipe!  It is not only really pretty and braided it also includes Crescent Rolls!!!

Breakfast Ham Braid

Ingredients

½ cup milk

4 ounces garden vegetable cream cheese, softened

8 large eggs, lightly beaten

1 package Hormel Black Label breakfast ham, cut into strips

1 cup shredded co-Jack cheese

2 (8-ounce) packages refrigerated crescent roll dough

Directions

Heat oven to 375°F. Lightly grease baking sheet.

In bowl, beat together milk and cream cheese until smooth. Beat in eggs.

In lightly oiled skillet, cook egg mixture over medium heat until set but still moist. Stir in ham and cheese.

Unroll 1 package dough, without separating, onto baking sheet; seal perforations. Place rolls from remaining package along edges of two long sides of rectangle (4 per side), overlapping first layer of rolls, with pointed ends facing outward. Spoon egg mixture down center of dough. Bring corners of rolls together to form "braid."

Bake filled dough 25 to 30 minutes or until filling is warm and rolls are golden brown.

Recipe Source

Blackout the Web

Click Here to Read More and Do Something

I’ll off my blog today in protest of SOPA/PIPA legislation. To learn more about what I’m protesting or the internet blackout, keep reading:

“What is SOPA?

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, H.R. 3261) is on the surface a bill that attempts to curb online piracy. Sadly, the proposed way it goes about doing this would devastate the online economy and the overall freedom of the web. It would particularly affect sites with heavy user generated content. Sites like Youtube, Reddit, Twitter, and others may cease to exist in their current form if this bill is passed.

What is PIPA?

The Protect IP Act (PIPA, S. 968) is SOPA’s twin in the Senate. Under current DMCA law, if a user uploads a copyrighted movie to sites like Youtube, the site isn’t held accountable so long as they provide a way to report user infringement. The user who uploaded the movie is held accountable for their actions, not the site. PIPA would change that - it would place the blame on the site itself, and would also provide a way for copyright holders to seize the site’s domain in extreme circumstances.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation laid out four excellent points as to why the bills are not only dangerous, but are also not effective for what they are trying to accomplish:

• The blacklist bills are expensive. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that PIPA alone would cost the taxpayers at least $47 million over 5 years, and could cost the private sector many times more. Those costs would be carried mostly by the tech industry, hampering growth and innovation.
• The blacklist bills silence legitimate speech. Rightsholders, ISPs, or the government could shut down sites with accusations of infringement, and without real due process.
• The blacklist bills are bad for the architecture of the Internet. But don’t take our word for it: see the open letters that dozens of the Internet’s concerned creators have submitted to Congress about the impact the bills would have on the security of the web.
• The blacklist bills won’t stop online piracy. The tools these bills would grant rightsholders are like chainsaws in an operating room: they do a lot of damage, and they aren’t very effective in the first place. The filtering methods might dissuade casual users, but they would be trivial for dedicated and technically savvy users to circumvent.”

 from sopablackout.org/ and afternoonsnoozebutton

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The Real Hunger Games – “True” History Tuesday

Many, many years before Suzanne Collins wrote her page-turning trilogy, The Hunger Games, the actual real hunger game battle took place and went virtually unnoticed by history.  The real hunger games, however, was nothing like the post-apocolyptic novel series.  This battle for survival and food took place in the middle-ages in an overly crowded McDonalds drive-thru.  Although the actual date is lost to history, we do know that the event occurred somewhere around the late 1300s, just after the invention of the two-lane drive-thru system.  The new system was very confusing to drivers.  People felt like other drivers were cutting in front of them.  The Bubonic Plague made people jumpy and more easily annoyed.  Additionly, the mechanical overly happy voice asking if you wanted a mocha latte made people's blood boil. Combine the plague and the voice with the confusion of the new drive-thru system and you had a brawl waiting to happen.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was literally a soft drink straw that was thrown in violence at a rider on a camel waiting for his Big Mac.  The straw thrower felt certain the camel driver had cut in front of him, when in reality it was really just his turn to move forward to the payment window.  The camel driver unsheathed his curved long sword and cut off the other driver’s head.  This unleashed pandemonium. All the driver’s began to rumble.  Arrows, knifes, throwing stars, war hammers, blood and body parts flew outside the McDonalds.  The mayhem only concluded when one driver was left standing.  This driver claimed all the orders and took them back to her village.  For the rest of her days, she was considered a hero.

Picture Source

Quicksand and Aluminum Boats Experiment

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When I grew up, quicksand was a real concern.  When you only had a handful of television stations to choose, you ran across a lot of older shows and movies.  If any of these programs were in a jungle of any kind…quicksand always played a role.   The seemingly innocent pile of deadly sand was always featured slowly (and I mean slowly) sucking in the unsuspecting adventurer.  Being very young and viewing this scarred me.  I even avoided sandboxes for a few years.  I would look at the other kids playing in the sandbox and think they were either stupid or had a death wish.  It seems to me that kids today aren’t aware of the menacing threat of quicksand.  This is another reason I’m glad I grew up in the seventies, quicksand knowledge.

Aluminum Boats

What You Need:

Small bucket or large bowl

Water

Scissors

20 pennies

Aluminum foil

Ruler

What To Do:

Fill the bucket with water.  Using the ruler make measurements, cut 15 cm (6 inch) squares from the aluminum foil.  Wrap one of the squares around 10 pennies and squeeze the foil into a tight ball.  Fold the four edges of the second square and make a small boat.  Place 10 pennies in the boat.  Make sure you seal each corner tightly so water cannot leak into the sides from below the boat.  Set the boat on the surface of the water.  Place the ball on the surface of the water.

What’s Going On:

When you dropped the ball of aluminum foil in the water, it had a completely different result than the boat.  Although both pieces of aluminum foil have the same weight, the ball takes up smaller space than the boat.  The amount of water pushed aside by an object equals the force of water pushing upward on the object.  The larger boat pushes more water out of the way than the ball and creates enough upward force to cause it to float.

Experiment Source

Absolutely Fabulous Fish and Chips

I included this clip from Absolutely Fabulous because:

1.  The show is brilliant

2.  New episodes in February!!!

3.  A segue to today’s blog topic. 

Yesterday we saw Iron Lady and I made fish and chips.  It was English Saturday.  Quite right.  I was disappointed with the Iron Lady.  Meryl Streep was totally convincing as Margaret Thatcher, but telling a story through Alzheimer flashbacks is a little odd, sad and slightly disrespectful.  No matter what you feel about Thatcher, nobody deserves to have their Alzheimer’s be the focus of their life story.  Absolute tosh.

I gotta say…the fish and chips I made were surprisingly good.  Totally pub quality.  My kitchen, however, was a complete disaster.  Blimey! It was probably due to the fact that I was imbibing beer in my pub kitchen and was rat arsed when I fried up dinner.   The flavor of the food was worth the mess though.  Here’s how I made my fish and chips.  O’righty then!

Absolutely Fabulous Fish and Chips

I sliced the potatoes before taking this picture to give you
an idea about strip sizes.

Ingredients

1 pound white cod fillets

2 cups of flour

1 egg

5 oz of milk

5 oz of beer (I used Sam Adams Boston Lager)

Salt and pepper

4 to 5 medium Idaho potatoes

Oil

Malt vinegar

Tartar sauce

A roll of paper towels!

Preparation

Open up two bottles of Sam Adams Boston Lager.  Sit one aside to use in batter and start drinking the other one.  Rinse and peel your potatoes.  Cut them lengthwise into ½” strips.  Put strips in a large microwave-safe bowl, add about ¼ cup of oil and salt to taste.  Toss the potatoes with your hands.   Put a paper towel over the bowl and put in the microwave for about 5 to 6 minutes until potatoes are pliable.  Rinse potato strips again and place on paper towels to dry.  Open yourself another beer.

Heat up your oil to 375 degrees.  I used a Cool Daddy. Cut your fish fillets into 2-3” strips.  Rinse and place on paper towel.  Combine salt, pepper and flour in a bowl.  Mix the egg and milk in a separate bowl.  Pour the egg and milk mixture into the bowl with the flour, salt and pepper and mix.  Add beer and a fair amount of malt vinegar to mixture.  Open another beer to drink.

Heat oven to 300 degrees. Once oil has reached appropriate temperature, add your potato strips.  Fry for 2 minutes and remove from grease and place on paper towel.  Salt the potatoes again.  Using tongs dredge your fish strips in the batter.  Place in the fryer for about 6 to 7 minutes or until golden brown.  Remove from grease and place on a paper towel.  Put fish in the oven to keep warm.  Put your potato strips back in the grease and fry for an additional 3 minutes.  Remove from grease, place on paper towel and salt again.  Plate chips with fish, serve with tartar sauce or malt vinegar and presto you have fish and chips!  Open yourself another beer and eat.

Friday the 13th Kitten

I trust everyone made it through Friday the 13^th.  I ran out of coffee, but I didn’t get axed in the head with a machete by anyone wearing some sort of mask.  I consider myself pretty lucky.  In the spirit of surviving I thought it appropriate to post this scary kitten video.  I’m sorry if you pee yourself from fear.  Just quietly change your “draws” and we won’t speak of it again.  Before you watch the video, be advised, I am attempting to make fish and chips tonight.  There will be hot oil.  There will be ale.  I got a Cool Daddy for Christmas.  If I live, I will report back to you on how the frying went and if the fish and chips tasted authentic like I am hoping it will.