Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I are in the process of heading out to see family for the holiday, but I wanted to take a minute and put together a post.

We haven’t done all that much in the past week… oh yeah so I saw a recipe for Pumpkin Biscuits and found it really interesting. It was seasonally appropriate, and Heather tends to like anything with pumpkin in it.

The only problem is the quantities seemed overly large, and I didn’t want to experiment with such a huge batch.

My solution was to take the normal recipe I use for biscuits and add pumpkin to that. In the process, I thought it would be a good time to finally try making biscuits in the food processor. That may end up being the best discovery I made in this endeavor! Cutting in the shortening is always kind of a slow process, but with the food processor it’s done in about 30 seconds. I ended up being so fascinated by the success I was having I forgot to add the pumpkin until I already had the dough finished.

I don’t know when the ideal time to add the pumpkin would have been, but I guess adding it as the last ingredient worked ok. Well, I say ok, but this is when things started to go off the rails for the biscuits. I added 3/4ths of a cup of pumpkin to a recipe that only had two cups of flour. That was more pumpkin than I probably should have added. The results were a sticky mess. I could tell there was no way I was going to get them rolled out, the dough wasn’t thick enough to roll, even if it hadn’t been so sticky.

Initially I thought I could try adding some more flour, but then I worried that the biscuit-ness of the resulting paste might not be there anymore. Looking at what I had in the bowl a little more, I decided it was thick enough I could probably just scoop it onto the baking stone and see what happened.

The didn’t end up being the most attractive baked good ever, but Heather gave them high marks for taste! 🙂

-Jordan

Name This Photograpy Style

Posted on by Jordan

I have said a number of times that Heather and I don’t necessarily like the same kind of photography.

For Heather, it’s easy to explain, she likes to take pictures of people.

I have struggled to define what it is that I enjoy with photography though. Over the weekend hunting in Nebraska however, I took a picture I am really happy with.

Not to say that I only want to take pictures of old or rustic things, but hopefully you get the idea? I just feel like I could look at that picture for a long time. It might be that it is a picture of ‘my home’ so I feel more affinity to it than most people would… all the same, I hope to learn to pick more of these kinds of thing out.

And to tie in the title of this post, anybody know the proper term for this? ‘landscape’ doesn’t sound right to me, but maybe it is…

at any rate, I am rather happy with the picture, and uploaded a full-quality version if you click through to gallery 🙂

(full-quality from our little pocked sized camera, the SLR didn’t get to come on my hunting trip)

-Jordan

The Big Hunt

Posted on by Jordan

As I mentioned, the weekend spent hunting was a lot of fun. The majority of the time I was sitting right here:

I kind of jammed the camera into some grass to try and give you prospective into the area I was hunting. It didn’t work all that well, and the pictures when I was actually looking at the camera came out blurry for some reason. Anyway, what you can kind of see is that I am setting above a canyon. What isn’t real clear is that I am sitting in a little niche under a tree and that just a few feet from where I am sitting the wall drops 40 feet straight down, and all the trees in the background are a lot bigger than maybe they appear.

Having set the scene, I will just skip to the part I got to retell over and over again…

I found the spot Saturday afternoon, after having decided my initial hide wasn’t giving me the visibility I needed, nor was the deer traffic as good as we had hoped. I was trying to be quiet, but alerted a deer to something being in the area when I slipped into the spot. I never got a good look at it, but I don’t think the deer really knew I was there ether… just casually moved away from that sound that didn’t seem quite right.

Then things were quiet for probably close to an hour. I thought I had a great idea of exactly where deer would enter and exit the canyon, and at what points I would be able to see them. Somehow a patch of deer colored fur was moving across the other rim of the canyon… and I was going to have a hard time getting turned to really look at it without making some noise. After I lost track of it, I got probably a little too free with craning my head around to try and find an angle to see down through the brush into this unexpected approach.

I must have shifted my entire body, although I don’t remember when, but I was squared up with the last known position of the soon to be discovered buck. He stepped into a spot where I had a clear line of sight, and I started bringing the rifle up without even thinking about it. All I remember is getting the scope view lined up and feeling like the horns took up the entire view! My reaction wasn’t what I expected, on the one hand I flipped the safety off and stabilized myself without having to think about it, but on the other hand my heart-rate went up by about 200 percent and I couldn’t control my breathing in that moment.

It didn’t end up mattering, because he didn’t stop walking and the window through the trees only gave a few seconds to soak all that in. Nothing indicated to me that he was spooked, but at the same time he didn’t come out on the trail farther up the canyon like it appeared he should have.

I was disappointed and relieved at that point. Obviously, I wanted to get a better look at the buck and a shot, but relieved that I wouldn’t have to try and take a shot with my heart pounding like that. I sat very still for the next 20 minutes doing little except trying to prepare myself to be relaxed if this happened again.

Three doe started working their way down the path towards the spot my elusive buck vanished. I took the opportunity to observe where the trail intersected good shooting lines. I felt pretty prepared, and just hoped maybe another buck would wander through.

The doe worked their way past the big blind spot the buck had vanished into and came out on the trail I had initially expected traffic to use. I decided it would be a good idea to practice holding the scope over a deer and doing the “deep breath, release slowly” thing to make sure I was being stable. The only problem was that doing that required me to drastically shift my body position.

The process of getting shifted around, made a little bit too much noise. Not enough to scare the doe off, but enough that they looked all around and started sniffing the air. I froze. They were cautious, but apparently figured things were ok, and stared to move again.

Then I saw movement back at the other end of the canyon, and it was moving out of the blind spot!

I managed to revert to my initial position real quickly, and without making much noise. Then the buck held up sniffing the ground perfectly centered in my last realistic shooting lane on the trail!

I heard the safety click off, and thought something like “GAAAAAAAH!!! this is too perfect, calm down….”

brought the cross-hairs into the center of his shoulder and back a little, let out a big breath in what was meant to be a slow fashion, but wound up being like trying to blow out candles 10 feet away and….

**boom**

I switched back to binoculars and scoured the area, finding…. nothing. It was kind of a long walk around to get to the spot he was standing… no blood, nothing.

In hindsight I am sure my trigger-pull was every bit as gentile as my breathing had been, but it was a really frustrating thing to have happen!

So, in conclusion, I learned that ‘Buck Fever’ is a very real thing.

/sigh

-Jordan

ps. The story of the buck in the picture I posted before isn’t interesting at all, but at least I was able to relax and put a round into the vitals of a buck.

Another Side Of Cooking

Posted on by Jordan

For the most part, when I post something I made on the blog, it is because it is ether a mildly out of the ordinary recipe, or perhaps I was just really happy with the appearance of whatever it was.

Over the past month or two, Heather and I have had the chance to help out with a homework center. Our connection is through our church, although the Des Moines Vineyard isn’t the sole sponsor of the program. Specifically, our connection has been to arrange food for the kids each Wednesday night.

Often we have been able to recruit volunteers to prepare a meal to bring, and all we have to do is coordinate who, when, and where. Other times we have needed to prepare the food ourselves. This brings us to the topic of this post, because cooking for 30+ people is a little different than cooking for just Heather and I.

The first thing I made was chili. I don’t have any pictures of that, but well most chili looks about the same. The noteworthy thing is just that the ‘big’ pot we have isn’t quite as large as I had thought when your trying for massive quantities. I didn’t have room for all the beans and veggies in the pot, but at least we had enough food for everyone to eat.

The second time we cooked, we tried meatloaf and scalloped potatoes. I should be clear, I do mean ‘we’. Often Heather and I find that we get in each others way when we are both trying to work in our little kitchen, so generally I just ask Heather to go find something else to do when I am wanting to try something new. In this case however I wanted every bit of help I could get, and Heather really came through! She peeled ten pounds of potatoes, and then sliced them all! The assembled product, ready to be cooked:

They look pretty good don’t they? What we probably should have known, is that they were going to turn a nasty grey color in the fridge overnight. To make matters worse, we didn’t even know what had happened until we were at the church the next night with just enough time to throw them into the oven and have them done in time for dinner. To make matters worse, we didn’t notice the yellowed note near the ancient ovens warning us that they ran cold until 30 minutes into the 50 minute cook time! In the end, they looked sad, tasted fine, and were only 20 minutes behind schedule. It was a little demoralizing, Heather felt almost guilty serving “those gross potatoes” to the youth. I thought they were good, but I wont pretend they didn’t look a little off.

Our third try was a little more straight forward, spaghetti. I would have to leave work a little early to have enough lead time to make it work, but at least I figured there wouldn’t be any surprises.  Then we got a call from one of the people who work with the youth, saying that they were expecting a lot of extra kids, so plan on around 50!

The church kitchen is well-stocked with huge pots and pans, so at least we weren’t going to run into the problem we had with the chili.

It might be hard to tell from that picture, but that pot making pasta has to hold at least seven gallons of water…  It was kind of surreal cooking on that scale. Oddly enough I can’t think of much to say about that process, except that I was kind of thrilled the entire time to be cooking on that scale. I didn’t ever get a headcount on the attendance, but the group managed to go through 6 pounds of pasta, 4 loves of bread, and roughly 4 gallons of sauce. I don’t think anybody went hungry, but we didn’t have any meaningful leftovers ether.

In conclusion, I have enjoyed some of the challenges feeding the homework center kids have presented, but if you have ever fed a big group like that before and have some great menu ideas we could probably use them!

-Jordan

Web Work

Posted on by Jordan

Wow, you blink and another week goes by.

So, what happened this week?

Heather’s parents came to visit. The occasion was the Huskers playing against Iowa State University. We only managed to obtain two tickets, as it turns out Husker fans suck up all the tickets far quicker than our planning could account for. That may have been ok though, as much as it pains me to say it, Heather is not a football fan. She would not have her moneys worth out of a ticket.

The game was… intense to put it gently, but in the end, the Huskers won it, if only by the smallest of margins.

Sunday afternoon Heather had the opportunity to take family pictures for a coworker. She was on cloud nine for hours, both during the actual picture taking, and the culling and cleanup stages on the pictures.

I would love to show off some of her work, but I don’t know that it is really proper to be throwing up pictures of other peoples kids here.

In less dramatic news, I played around with PHP and javascript to produce these. They are really rough, but I have grand plans for doing a super stripped down version of a gallery, after the program “Gallery” messed up my picture links. We shall see how long that motivation holds out 🙂

Up next week:

Nebraska Deer Season, and  The “Cake Boss” visits Des Moines. I will let you guess as to who is attending what event.

-Jordan

Gallery

Posted on by Jordan

Ok, so hopefully nobody even ran into a problem with this, but I let my hosting run an upgrade script on gallery last night.

Gallery is the program I use to manage the pictures linked from the blog etc.

It looks like all the linked pictures are now broken /sigh

I fixed the newest linked picture, and well… we shall see if I get the others fixed in a timely manner 🙂

-Jordan