Tag Archives: Sports

Food, Sports

Wabbit season

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Duck season! Football season! Yay!

About damn time. College kicked off last night and continues through the weekend, the NFL begins next week, and soon we will be awash in games. I watched – or, rather, listened while helping paint one of the bedrooms – to South Carolina stomp all over Southern Miss, and then USC make it past Hawaii. As for Towson and Indiana? Yeah, right.

Anyway, the painting. Someone who shall not be named decided one of the bedrooms needed to be painted a different color: radiant sun, to be exact, although to me it looks like an off-white sort of color, but who am I to say? It will take a couple of coats, since it’s lighter than the current color, but it’s good exercise for me, even though by the end of the taping around the baseboards and the subsequent painting in that area, I was getting a bit sore. Still, with that part done, the rest is fairly easy, just rolling away, and we should finish today. Just in time for some Georgia person to arrive and stay for a few days.

And it’s time to go back to cooking a bit, too: this afternoon, stir fry, with chicken and lots of veggies, and scallion noodles. Since we will have people in the house this weekend even though we are not doing a big gathering as in years past, I’ll be brining a butt today so it can go on the smoker in the wee hours and be ready for Saturday afternoon’s more traditional kickoff of a slate of college games. We also need more bbq sauce. And I think, just for fun, we’ll do a bit of chicken as well, as it’s been forever since I’ve done any smoked poultry. Chicken breasts alone are tricky, as they’ll go from tender, moist, and delicious to rubbery dried out nastiness in no time, so perhaps a whole chicken is in order (but I’ll have to rig something so the chicken doesn’t drip on the porkalicious goodness that will be in the smoker before it). Applewood smoked chicken quesadillas for leftovers, anyone?

Odds and ends, Sports

Adsensical

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Probably should have picked the Giants to win last night. Once again, just as they did in Green Bay, they came to play with much more intensity than their opponent. One of the better games over the years I’ve been watching football.

The ads, however, left quite a lot to be desired. No Budweiser frogs, no office linebackers. Instead, a mostly uninspired and, at time, downright offensive collection of ads.

The worst of the bunch: the salesgenie ads, with their strange insistence on stereotypical, annoying caricatures. The Audi ad, which was just plain awful. The E*Trade baby ads….creeeeepy. IceBreakers, completely forgettable. Shaq and the tiny horse in the vitamin water ad. Doritos’ “Message from Your Heart”, which could be a good song, if sung by someone else. PepsiMax and the bobbleheads. GoDaddy with yet another attempt at T&A, just as stupid and sleazy as everything else they do. UnderArmour. Ray Lewis leading what resembles nothing so much as a fascist mob.

The WTF ads: Gatorade’s water drinking dog (although this did make Mickey perk his head up, since that is exactly how he sounds when he’s slurping up water). Naomi Campbell dancing around with a bunch of fire-farting lizards for SoBe Life. Planters Nuts with Frau Unibrow. The talking stain for Tide to Go. Dell Red: if you buy this laptop, people will cheer you for no other reason when you’re walking down the street – and as a bonus, will slap your butt?

The movies: Iron Man. Yes.

The snoozers: Claritin. Sunsilk. Drug dealer: thanks for alerting the kids that they can go raid the medicine cabinets in their parents’ bathrooms. Bud’s Rocky-inspired Clydesdale.

The “Eh, you could have done better, but these were mildly amusing” group: All the Bud Light ads. The CareerBuilder ads (the “Follow your heart” ad was better than the firefly ad). Cars.com (the deathmatch in the circle of fire was better than the witch doctor). PepsiStuff, which only made it into this group because Justin Timberlake got racked in the crotch. Coke. Toyota Corolla, because the world needs more face-eating badgers. Gatorade and the path of green.

The best:

Bridgestone’s screaming squirrel (if only for the almost-too-tiny-to-hear screaming cricket). Not so much their unexpected obstacles ad.

Doritos’ “Mouse Attack”.

Garmin (gar-meen), with Napoleon zipping around in a tiny car, background soundtrack a perfect French cruising tune.

FedEx, once again checking in with a good one: giant, mutant pigeons creating havoc in the city when used to deliver packages.

The NFL ad with Chester Pitts playing the oboe: awesome.

Likewise, the T-Mobile “Fave 5” ad with Charles Barkley and Dwayne Webb: “I don’t want to look too fat in high-definition. That’s what HD stands for. Did you know that?”…”And that’s why I don’t eat shrimp.”

Cats, dogs, chickens, and other critters, Gardening, Homestead, Sports

Super Sunday

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Superbowl day (and what the hell with this stupid pregame crap on Fox, anyway, reading the Declaration of Independence? This household polls 100% WTF.), but also a very fine Sunday to do various things around the homestead: a test mix of soil to go in one frame, to see how we liked it. The answer: we liked it very much indeed, and will be mixing up a huge batch in the coming week or so to fill a lot more frames to hold the seedlings we’ve started – and a whole lot more that will be directly sowed.

I finalized the area for the chickens and their coop,  spread some hay, put out another flat of seedlings, supervised my sister’s preparation of the guacamole, and let others put the kebobs on the grill. If I could drink alcohol at all, I’d be kicking back with a nice cold beer, noshing on chips and guac, waiting for the food. Alas, none for me. Guess I’ll round up some chips, though, and give those a go while I get some more work stuff done.

Enjoy the game, everyone. For the record, I picked the Patriots.

Food, Gardening, Sports

One winter day

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Today has been all about food. Well, that and getting the dogs shaved and bathed. That, and getting the Princess wiped down and brushed. And watching football. But it has been a day full of cooking for me, although I was a bit behind schedule due to the dog-bathing part.

We begin our tour with a hunka hunka nice looking buffalo.

Buffalo roast

Salt, pepper, garlic, and in it went to a pan to sear. After nicely browning on all sides, it went into the oven in a bath of beef broth with some onion and garlic as companions.

After that, it was time to start the soup. I had roasted a couple of butternut squash, and started some onion, garlic, and carrot in a pot. Some chicken broth, a couple of diced potatoes, the innards of the squash, and some spices, and it turned into something like this.

Starting the soup

All of that was stirred together and then allowed to simmer while I began the next item on my culinary agenda: guacamole. Here, our model Aubrey demonstrates the functionality of that fabulous green appetizer.

Guacagoodness

Meanwhile, those of us still suffering from a root canal went on to the creation of another yummy item.

Dough

The soup was coming along nicely, and was almost ready for the immersion blender.

Simmered soup

Two other parties chimed in with their own orders.

Boots

Often, they don’t know exactly what they want, but they know you might have it.

Newton

The soup was ready, so I blended it and Mom kindly jarred it for me.

Jars of soup

I asked that she do that because I was moving along on the bread front.

Rising

I also threw together some tarragon-pickled mushrooms and onions for Aubrey, who was starving because she insists on doing this “total carb” thing instead of net carbs since she wants to drop some weight, but hey, who am I to say anything about peoples’ strange ideas? I moved along to the roast, pulling it out of the bath it had been in for about three hours.

Roasted buffalo

The braising liquid, to which carrots, onions, and potatoes had been added, was thickened a bit to give us a hearty backdrop for the roast.

Stewed

We also had some roasted zucchini with parm-reg.

Zukes

And we added the final touch of our lovely focaccia.

Focaccia

Besides the Packers losing a game the Giants seemed better prepared to play, a very enjoyable day. Just to prove I am certifiably insane, I also ordered more seed today, because the very best thing to do when you think maybe you’re getting too close to that gardening mania line is to just boldly step right over it.

Food, Sports

Playoff dinner

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This afternoon, we watched the Packers beat the Seahawks in a near blizzard. This evening, we watched the Jaguars put up a valiant fight against the Patriots. They played much better than I thought they would, and really, after watching the Patriots in a couple of close games this season, I think the Jags put up a bigger fight than the Colts and the Ravens did – the game was much closer than the 11 point difference in the score.

And what do you need in order to watch a couple of playoff games? Food!

Guacamole: this batch was perfect. Astonishingly perfect. I’ll have to remember the ratios next time. I even ate some myself. We had corn tortillas made from organic corn with this. I had a few chips, too, but I think I could just eat this with a fork and be as happy.

Green stuff

Shrimp! Boiled with Old Bay, and lots of that.

Old bay is the best

Beef! A big pile of it. Grilled, and seasoned only with salt, peper, and garlic.
Beef

That was because half of it was ordered from a place in Missouri offering grassfed beef. And I think this is even better than the last batch of beef we found from a local place – sweeter, more fragrant, if you can apply that sort of terminology to beef.

More beef

Shrimp! This batch in honey, lime, soy, pepper, cumin, red pepper, and ginger.

More shrimp

Broccoli! Because you have to have something green.

Broccoli

I also made another batch of rolls (there are a grand total of three left), we had corn on the cob, and we had a cheese sauce for the broccoli. I just realized as I was uploading these images that we completely neglected to make any baked potatoes. Not that anyone missed them, since we stuffed ourselves with everything else.

So we watched the Jags hang with the Patriots for awhile, enjoyed our food and good company, and overall had a grand evening. Now to start work on the menu for the conference championship games…

Life in general, Sports

Football paradise

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For football fans, this time of year is the best: both college and pros come to the end of the season, which means multiple games throughout the week, and the very end of the year brings the bowl games, with multiple games on the same day, starting early and ending late.

One of the other things all this activity brings is even more strange and bad things from the mouths of the announcers.

Tonight I heard Sterling Sharpe say “I don’t got none o’ that.” while referring to an Oklahoma State fan decked out in his Cowboy duds, complete with large belt buckle. This is as bad as anything Emmit Smith managed to stumble through in what I hope will be his one and only season on ESPN.

During the Minnesota game yesterday, I caught this gem: “How many defensive touchdowns has Minnesota scored on defense this year?” Well, that would be all of those defensive touchdowns, just by definition, since the offense can’t very well score a defensive touchdown. I’m sure he meant “How many defensive touchdowns has Minnesota scored this year?” (six interceptions returned for tds for 2007, in case you’re curious), but that struck me as quite funny while I was checking through all the games.
I know it must be hard, speaking extemporaneously during a live broadcast, but at least in the first case, I would hope they would be able to speak in a grammatically correct way.