Triple Threat: A Birthday Burrito Blog for Becca

This is my gorgeous friend Becca.  And that is the back of my wedding day head.  Today is her birthday, and being a fan of alliteration, I couldn't help but think that an appropriate salute would be to share with everyone a recipe for burritos that immediately made me thing of her.  

Why, you might ask, do burritos make me think of Becca, and is that actually a compliment? Well, being my BFF for nineteen years now, I can pretty much think of a way to associate any good thing with memories of Becca.  For example, burritos--meeting for lunch dates at Taco Time, going to Cafe Ole on New Years and Birthdays, and these particular burritos are healthy and in season, which I think Becca would like.  

Plus, they are just really, really good.  I found them on All Recipes and I think whoever made them up is just a genius.  I'm thinking of adding a sauce to them, but for now you won't go wrong with a little green salsa (Sam says he likes red better).

• Sweet Potato Black Bean Burritos

(I halved this recipe which worked well for us)

• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 6 cups canned kidney beans, drained
• 2 cups water
• 3 tablespoons chili powder
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 4 teaspoons prepared mustard
• 1 pinch cayenne pepper, or to taste
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 4 cups cooked and mashed sweet potatoes
• 12 (10 inch) flour tortillas, warmed
• 8 ounces shredded Cheddar cheese
• 
  
• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees Heat oil in a medium skillet, and saute onion and garlic until soft. Stir in beans, and mash. Gradually stir in water, and heat until warm. Remove from heat, and stir in the chili powder, cumin, mustard, cayenne pepper and soy sauce.
• 
  
• Divide bean mixture and mashed sweet potatoes evenly between the warm flour tortillas. Top with cheese. Fold up tortillas burrito style, and place on a baking sheet.
• 
  
• Bake for 12 minutes in the preheated oven, and serve.

For Becca's Birthday, Sam and I decided to go out and celebrate by driving to Stone Mountain (just a half hour jaunt down the freeway) and arriving 15 minutes to closing time.  We meant to do that!  Anyway, we hung out for a while, posing and doing autographs for some locals who had apparently heard we were a big deal in the blogging world.

I took a gangsta picture of myself while walking (everybody does this, don't lie).

 As Becca can tell you from our burrito eating days in Psych 101, the James-Lange theory suggests that when you act like a gangsta, you suddenly feel like one.  Which is why Sam had to talk me down from stealing this Cinderella pumpkin from a display.

Take only pictures, leave only footprints

Sam said he could eat a horse he was so hungry.  I said that was ridiculous, so he settled for what he could get in the snack department before we headed back home.  Turns out everything was closed and he was forced to make some dangerous choices of his own.

We love you Becca!  And don't forget folks, the virtual world is about to be turned on it's head for my upcoming collaboration with my Dad.  Stay tuned!

Review

What have I been doing with myself, for heaven's sake?  Here I've been out of touch (again!) and apparently even beyond the range of regular email and Facebook interactions.  Basically, I've been working my crazy part time hours and camping and running around with my Sam.  Today we will do a speedy review of the past week and half and then in the next couple of days get on to some topics that I'm really excited to blog about.

So, first and most importantly, a week and half ago Sam stomped his foot down and declared himself in charge of cooking or acquiring (an important proviso from my attorney) all our food for the week.  He did a great job.  Here are a couple of highlights of the new master chef in our house:

Sam's Morrocan Seafood with couscous (this is seriously the first thing he tried, I'm so proud).  And these are his Pecan Sandies:

Sam mades these when I was having a grumpy day.  We ate these and watched Alfred Hitchcock together (Dial M for Murder, please see this if you haven't already--I just love Grace Kelly in it).  I have decided that it is almost impossible to stay grumpy when someone makes you cookies from scratch.  If only we could harness this power to do good on a global scale.

Along with cooking up a storm, we had another stay-cation weekend where we visited Atlanta's Hindu temple--it was beautiful:

This is my leaning-tower-of-Pisa take on it

We checked out the Dali exhibit at the High Museum and found it a lot more cool than we anticipated, which goes to show you once again the glory of low expectations, no offense to the High or Dali intended, I just wasn't sure I cared for surrealism.  For those of my 2 3/4 readers in Atlanta, get the audio tour, it is great!

After that we worked, so blah, blah, blah we skip ahead to camping.  Sam and I made another quick trip to Unicoi State Park (right next to the Bavarian village).  

This is when we first got up.  It was our first two night camping trip!  I got a little cold and kept Sam awake with my whining on night one, but night two I wore every piece of clothing I brought and did just fine.

We are so excited to have a new camp stove!  As you can see, we made a feast of carbs and protein to test it out.  Do you notice me trying to be balanced with that sad little bag of carrots over there?

Perhaps the best thing to happen to us in this glorious week was that we were able (at last!) to begin our ironic coaster collection.  We had been wanting to do this since our honeymoon, but quirky coasters are harder to find than you think.  I give you the beginning of what will someday be an incredible assemblage...

Try not to be jealous.  

My dad has been helping me to prepare an upcoming blog that I'm really looking forward to, so stay tuned for that.  And also, Sam's inner Bostonian is calling out for some chowda.  Anyone have a good recipe?

The Wild, Wild West

Sam and I, ever slaves to your needs for new scenery and entertainment, went on location to my home state of Idaho recently.  Okay, so I realize that at least half of my readers might not find this location a novelty because they live there already and may even be in these pictures, but work with me here.  See it anew.

It is always good to be in Boise.  Sam stayed in Georgia for a few days doing top secret paperwork for his job before catching up with me in B-town, and I got to spend time with my family and these gorgeous girls:

Here we are at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, one of my favorite places in the world to be.  We went to a play that was the absolute perfect level of scariness--The Woman in Black.  I love that level of fear, when things are just deliciously scary.  You remember that feeling when you were a little kid and adults would fake chase you around?  You knew they were coming to get you and it was so exhilarating and fun.  That's how this play felt. 

As we have established, I'm a woman who loves her coffee, so we also had to have a girls morning at Big City Coffee, a Boise tradition.  While Atlanta has ridiculously cool stuff to do, I have not yet found the place that serves scones and muffins the size of your head.  Maybe I'm going to have to take matters into my own hands and introduce Atlanta to the giangantic, home made muffin, farm store theme scene.

Seriously, how cool is this?  If they made up a bed for me I could live there quite happily.

Once my Sam rolled into town there was only one place he wanted to be:

Goldy's has a special spot in both our hearts because it is one of the first places we went after we met.  On that fateful morning a couple got engaged while we were halfway through our marmalade french toast (which I retroactively took as a sign of good things to come).  That, and it has amazing food.  It also has an amazingly long line on Saturday mornings.  It takes so long to get in that they take your cell number and let you roam around the farmers market, which we did.  

We wandered around for about an hour, listening to street musicians, sampling blue cheese dressing and strawberries and dutch cookies.   I started to think to myself that, all sampling aside,  I really was getting hungry and maybe something had gone wrong with our reservation.  I asked Sam whose number he gave.  And he said mine.  And I said, (why did I say this?) are you sure you told them the right number?  So I called them.  And then I gave them my number again.  But wait!  After I hung up the phone I had the sneaking suspicion--no I KNEW-- I had just given them my number wrong.  Have you ever had a neurotic moment of self doubt like this?  When you suddenly forget your own phone number because you are so excited about a chorizo breakfast burrito?  

This is my lovely mom, who is new to the mother in law business, but who wants it to be known that while she can keep her opinions (like what has happened to you that you can't remember your phone number?) to herself, she won't be wearing beige anytime soon.  And there is my sweet Sam.  Calling Goldy's again to clarify that we were the perfectly sane people who really wanted to eat there and who really, really wanted to be contacted.  It was touch and go, but I am happy to say that I didn't let a little thing like my pride get between me and that breakfast burrito.  I know that as I took you on this emotional roller coaster of a story you are probably asking yourself, was all that pain and drama worth it in the end?   Mmmmm hmmmm.

Oktober-Feast

Okay, yes, I am aware that is an incredibly cheesy title.  But I chose it on purpose!  Because this will be by far the post with the most cheese I could possibly munster (seriously, somebody stop me, I know that is a terrible joke and I can't stop myself--turn your heads).   And speaking of embarrassing--side note--yesterday I was looking for sweet potatoes at the grocery store.  I found yams, which I will admit did look a lot like sweet potatoes.  But I couldn't find sweet potatoes.  So there I am, standing in front of the yams and I ask the produce man where I could find sweet potatoes.  He just looks at me with that look that says, please, please lady, don't make me point out your foolishness to your face.  So yeah, for that one other person out there who doesn't know, yams and sweet potatoes are the same thing.

Anyway, last night in Atlanta Sam and I had friends coming over and it felt like fall.  For Sam, this is a tragedy because he is very much a warm weather person, but for this Idaho girl it feels like heaven.  It was time for pumpkins and candles and apple cider and every fall thing.

While Sam planned a trip to Aruba online, 

I lit candles and waved my cinnamon broom in the air and generally cooked myself into a frenzy.

Which brings me to cheese.  Years ago my dad (here pictured at a haunted hotel in Silver City--spoiler alert, future blog on the way!)

went to the library, flipped through a cookbook and copied out a French recipe for cheese bread.  Now, my dad is not usually one to copy recipes, but he has very good instincts about food and must have known he was holding a classic.  Years later it is still a family favorite.  Some people think that Southerners like Paula Dean have taken the prize for putting the most fattening foods together.  I tend to think that the French had cornered the market on fat centuries ago.  Whoever the winner is, no one can dispute that this is a ridiculously fattening recipe.  Seriously, I have no defense for this amount of cheese.   If you like cheese, you will love this and that's all that needs to be said.  There is just enough butter and eggs in here to hold the cheese together.  

Cheese Bread 

1 stick of butter

1 1/4 c. flour

4 eggs

3 cups shredded cheddar cheese

1 cup shredded swiss cheese (the kinds of cheese don't necessarily make or break it, just the amount)

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. ground black pepper

1 garlic clove, minced

2 jalapenos, finely chopped (I never put these in, but you can if you want to)

1/4 cup yellow onion, finely chopped

1/8 tsp. cayenne (I put in red pepper flakes when I don't have cayenne)

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.  In a medium sized sauce pan, melt the butter over a medium heat.  Add all the flour at once, stirring over the heat until it incorporates into the butter to become one big ball. Take the pan off the heat.  Add the eggs, one at a time, fully stirring in one before adding the next. Add the cheese.  (The mixture will be hard to stir so I hope you've been working out. And if you have, all your good work is about to be undone, so sorry about that.) Stir in the spices, garlic and onion. Bake in a greased cast iron skillet or 9 x 9 pan for 40-45 minutes. I would make the slices on the smaller side since there is enough cheese in there for your daily allotment of calories.

This is my cheese bread just ready to come out of the oven:

Now, much as we all love cheese, it wouldn't look good to serve it by itself.  So we needed some soup. This recipe for turkey chili is really easy and I love the flavor.  Hopefully you will, too.  You can mess with this recipe and it will turn out fine.  I sometimes add some kidney beans when I'm moody and rebellious.

Indian Summer Turkey Chili

(page 31 for those of you who have my cookbook)

2 TBSP extra virgin olive oil

1 1/4 lbs ground turkey

1 TBSP grill seasoning

1 TBSP ground cumin

2 TBSP Worcestershire sauce

2 TBSP hot sauce (I can only do 1/2 TBSP, I'm a wimp)

1 large yellow onion, chopped (reserve 1/4 of the onion for topping the chili)

2 bell peppers, any color, cored seeded, and chopped

3/4 cup (1/2 bottle) beer

28 oz. can tomato sauce

1/2 cup smokey barbecue sauce

1 cup frozen corn 

Heat a pot over medium to high heat.  Add the olive oil and ground turkey.  Season the meat with the chili powder, grill seasoning, cumin, Worcestershire, and hot sauce.  Break up the meat with the back of a wooden spoon into small crumbles.  

Brown the meat for 5 minutes, then add the onion and bell peppers and cook for 10 minutes more.  Add the beer and deglaze the pan, scraping up the drippings and cooking off the alcohol.  Add the tomato sauce, barbecue sauce, and corn and bring the chili to a bubble.  Let the chili simmer for 10 minutes.  Adjust the seasonings and heat level to your taste.  Remove from the heat and serve.

Chili is such a temperamental model at night...

Of course, what would our party be without apple cider?  It is so easy to make, and it makes the house smell so good.  Just get a gallon of apple juice, throw in a couple of cinnamon sticks and some whole cloves, and heat on the stove.  Yum.

And finally, what would fall be without a cookie?  Since we already had molasses cookies and Sam and I still have some of those in the freezer, I thought blondies were in order.  

Blondies

• 2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2/3 cup butter
• 2 cups packed brown sugar
• 2 egg
• 2 tablespoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 to 1 cup of chopped pecans (or any other nut you've got lying around).
• 
  
• Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a bowl and set aside.

In a mixing bowl, combine butter and brown sugar.  Add the eggs and vanilla and mix in thoroughly.  Then through in the flour mixture and finally add the chopped nuts.  Bake for 20-25 minutes in a greased 9 x 13 pan.

So cute in their Polish pottery!

Here they are by candlelight

Happy October everyone!  From us, the hard living, cranky people in bad lighting...

This photo was taken pre-cheese bread

Just when I thought I was out...

When Sam and I were dating we used to talk on the phone for hours about everything in the world.  It was so fun to discover all the things we had in common; I knew it was destiny for us to be together. I remember how shocked I was when I learned that Sam and I had both spent time in high school cleaning out dirty trailer homes that renters had left behind.  For those of you uninitiated into the elite circle of cleaning executives in the rental industry it isn't all just dirty diapers and rings on the tub.  Sometimes the previous occupants had pets! For me, thinking that Sam and I had both scrapped hideously gross ovens and emptied the rotting food out of stranger's refrigerators was a bonding moment.  I liked him even more!  Oh, the romance of those early days...

Not so romantic however, is when past meets present and you look at your husband, now a landlord, and realize that his renter's mess is your renter's mess.  My expertise in this field has honed my instincts so acutely that I knew without even going into the house that this was going to require a more invasive
cleaning intervention.

I love that my father and my husband are both entrepreneurs.  I love when rent checks come.  But, and I say this with a great deal of shame, sometimes when people are having phone conversations and falling in love, they can misrepresent themselves.  It may be that when our heroine spoke of her cleaning days in the blush of first love, she spoke of them with the fond remembrance of someone who thought she would never have to do that again.

When we got through the door, the air was ripe with eau de chien (if I've spelled essence of dog correctly, that is) and some people (namely me) were not quite as jolly about the cleaning prospect in front of them as they were about remembering their war stories.   And really, back then it was my tough as nails sister that scraped the dead mouse off the stove top, not me.  I don't want to get into all the gory details, but needless to say, a heroine was flea bitten in the line of duty when she got reintroduced to the cleaning scene.  And she didn't necessarily react gracefully to that fact.

From the Sam and Sarah "Emotions" Collection, a Macbook Photo Booth Production

So anyway, here we are working along.  We sort through a fair amount of junk.  Our noses become numb.  We start enjoying the camaraderie of working together.  I start thinking that really, this isn't that bad at all.  And then we find it.  It!  The jewel that makes every moment of the day worthwhile.  Sometimes, just like on Antiques Roadshow, dreams do come true.  

You can see on Sam's face that he is shocked by our find.  No, your eyes do not deceive you.  That really is Jesus on high thread count velvet with an El Greco revival K-Mart parking lot frame.  Needless to say, there will be some new art in the Chalkboard House.

The Conclusion of the Battle of Tunnel Hill

Look!  I really did follow through!  I'm giving myself 12.5 gold stars.  So, when we last left our heroine she and her husband were on the battle field.  One thing I haven't yet told you about the battle was that it was the most humid and hot time I have ever spent in Georgia.  Sam and I were trying to stay cool under an umbrella, but our courage waned as the heat and the battle wore on and our confusion mounted.

I knew when I began covering this war that though the battle itself was important, I wanted to capture the gritty truth of the human drama of what was unfolding before us.  The face of an old man watching his son go off to a reenactment,

the worried wife who wonders if her husband will be one of the first to go,

and most importantly the nurses who get out on the battle field in HOOP SKIRTS to tend to the wounded in 90 degree weather!

There is no way I am woman enough for that job.  In fact, perhaps one of the most shocking things about my coverage of this battle is that Sam and I

were so overheated and parched that we went to get lemonade and missed the end of the battle!  Christiane Amanpour never does anything like that.  Oh, the shame!  However, can I just say in my defense that this was the best lemonade of my life and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

I really like how they made such an effort to have their products take you back in time.  One of my favorite parts of this event was wandering through the camps (both teams camp out the night before the battle with gear from the time period) and seeing all the fun people were having with historical accuracy.

By the time Sam and I got back to the front, we learned that despite heavy casualties early on the South had won the battle (which means that the North gets to win the next day because in reenactment land you very sensibly take turns).  The conquered blue team lined up to shoot their guns at the end of the battle.

I thought to myself, "Oh good, a chance to redeem my lack of footage of the end of the battle."  I would get a picture of all the guns firing at once.  Instead, I caught this,

which I think powerfully captures how scary and loud it is when a lot of guns are fired at once.

The Battle of Tunnel Hill

Little did I expect when I moved to the south that I would become a war correspondent.  But when I heard that Sam's home town of Tunnel Hill, GA had a Civil War Reenactment coming up, I knew that you would need up to the minute (or at least within the week) coverage.  I woke up so excited--this was my first war!  Taking pictures in the car, I you can see I had all the intensity of Liza Minnelli gearing up for a show:

My sweet Sam was also looking forward to our adventures, but he to had make a stop on the way.  As sometimes happens in married life, one person is really excited and chomping at the bit to get to the scene of battle, and the other person has to go to the bank and do important business and leaves the war correspondent in the car for 45 minutes.  I had to ask myself, what would Christiane Amanpour do in a situation like this?

Perhaps just cover the story that was unfolding before her...

I think the bun is the most compelling aspect of this photo narrative

At last, important business done, we were able to go off to war.  The first thing to note is that the Battle of Tunnel Hill, historically speaking, is just the tiniest bit imaginary.  There were a few skirmishes in the area, but according to Sam no one died and there was never a real battle.  That being said, the fighting was still intense.

What you will notice is that throughout most of this coverage, I have pretty much no idea what is going on.  The blue and grey teams started out shooting at each other from a distance of about 50 ft for the first part of the battle, but no one died.  Sam and I theorized that this could be because none of the soldiers wanted to be taken out that soon.

After awhile people started riding around on horses, and the cannon fire began.

Unfortunately, that's when we started getting some wounded and dead people.  This poor (and ambitious!) guy was blown right off his horse.

The grey team seemed to be losing more people and soon the dead were scattered everywhere.

The great part about being a reenactment correspondent is that there is hope even for the dead, who sometimes miraculously are able to sit up and keep an eye on the battle even in their state of demise.

Still confusion reigned.  Who was winning?  What was happening?  I expressed this to my Sam.

While that may be true, I bet all of you want to know who actually won.  Well, stay tuned because tomorrow I really will tell you.  Now, I recognize that I'm kind of a false promiser.  More than once I've told you I would finish something and (fickle woman!) didn't do it.  Just try to have faith in me.