A Few Good Eats

I love to eat, and cook, so food is on my mind quite a bit. Here are a few of the things we've had lately:
PW's Cheeseburger Salad. I made this for the first time when we had company last week. Wasn't sure if it would flop or be a hit. It was a hit! Everyone went back for seconds until it was gone. First, you need to make your croutons. The recipe calls for 4 actual hamburger buns, but I only had two, so I also used bread and it turned out fine. Cut them into cubes, place them on a cookie sheet, pour a cube of melted butter all over, stir around to coat, then put in a 375 oven, turn on your oven light and watch them. Set your timer to stir and check them every 5-10 min until golden brown and crispy. If you've never made your own croutons, I'm sorry to inform you that after eating homemade you'll never again be able to buy those store-bought, hard little brick-ettes they call croutons out of the box. Sorry. While they're cooking, brown 2 lbs. hamburger. I did 3 lbs. for the bigger crowd we had. Then add 1/3 c. ketchup, 1 tsp. yellow mustard, 1 T. dijon mustard, and 2 T. BBQ sauce to meat. Stir and keep warm. Now the hard part, grate up some cheddar cheese, chop some tomato, slice some onions, tear up some lettuce, and most importantly, chop up some dill pickles. When ready to serve, everyone gets a pile of lettuce, puts some of the warm meat on top, then adds the toppings as they choose. Two things they can't miss though are the croutons and the pickles, they totally make the salad. Everyone wanted to pull out the ranch dressing but I convinced them to try it first without, and they all agreed it didn't need it. It ends up tasting more like an actual cheeseburger rather than a salad that way. Try it!
Another favorite is to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on some nice quality bread, then brush olive oil or melted butter on the bread and toast it until lightly golden in a hot pan. Serve with some salty chips and a glass of cold milk, .......utterly delicious!
I may have mentioned this before, but cooking bacon in the oven is the only way to go. If you're still frying on the stove top and making a greasy mess, you'll be glad to learn there's no mess with this method. Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Cover a cookie sheet with foil and spread your bacon slices evenly over the pan. If you have a convection oven you can do more than one pan at a time. Place pan in oven and watch and cook it for about 10-15 minutes. You may have to rearrange slices during cooking if they're not cooking evenly. Remove slices to a paper towel to drain, then pour off grease if you're saving it, otherwise just crumple up the foil and throw it away, your pan is perfectly clean.
Last but not least, I recently made "Hand Pies". They are just little individual pies that you can hold in your hand. Too yummy! They were simple to make - you could use premade crust if you wanted, but I have discovered the easiest and best pie crust recipe ever, so I used that. You need a food processor though. You just put 2 1/2 cups flour, 1 tsp. each of salt and sugar, and 1 c. butter cut into pieces in the processor and turn it on. After 10 seconds and while still running, slowly pour in 1/4 to 1/2 c. ice water until crust forms a ball. That's it! Just place on lightly floured counter and roll it out as thin as you can, and cut into 4-inch circles or squares. Place a spoonful of any flavor canned pie filling on crusts, (I made cherry and apple and they were both delicious), lightly wet edges with your finger dipped in water and fold over. Use fork to lightly make fork impressions on cut edges. Brush with water and sprinkle with plain or decorative sugar, if desired and bake at 375 for about 15 minutes or until lightly golden. Cool and eat!
Give these ideas a try and let me know how you like them!

Grandma Hancock

So my mom let me borrow one of Grandma's journals to read.  It spans from Dec '78 to Dec.'82, although she skipped almost all of '79 for some reason.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading about her day to day life.  Even though I lived near Grandma, I think I took her for granted.  I didn't realize what an amazing person she was.  While writing this journal, whe was in her early seventies but you'd never know it.  She began each day by getting up early and "doing the work", I'm not sure what that could have been because the rest of her day was FILLED with work!   She would go for a walk either in the morning or evening.  Not just a little stroll, but a walk usually a couple of miles.
  Then she would come home and almost always work out in her yard planting flowers, or working in her garden.  She would wash her hair and take a bath and bake four loaves of bread and two batches of cookies so she could always have a stocked cookie jar and then go visit someone or go to Safford to pay bills and get groceries and get gas and stop and see a family member.  Then she'd go to lunch with one of her friends or on a Special Interest outing.  She'd always be working on an aphgan for one of her grandkids.  She was always preparing to go to Mesa for one thing or another and would always tell about those trips in detail.  She wrote down the prices of everything from gas prices, to how much her meal cost.  I especially enjoy her sense of humor that usually involves a cuss word or two.  Maybe she didn't mean to be funny, probably not.  She was cussing because she was so blamed mad about something.  But it's so funny.
 I finished the journal a couple of days ago and was literally having withdrawls.  I wanted to read more Grandma entries.  So I found the binder of copies of all the letters she wrote to Beverly on her mission.  (Thanks Bev for copying them).  I started that last night.  So now she would be about eighty years old.  I was amazed to read this entry:  "This morning I took my 2 mile walk and got home about 6:00am.  I mowed the front yard and hoed a lot of weeds out of some of my flower beds, now I am tired enough to sleep again."  She's 80!!  What a woman.  Didn't we all just have the best Grandma in the whole world?   She loved her family that's for sure, and she missed Grandpa terribly.  I don't think she thought she'd live so long without him.
I'd like to be more like her.

From now on,  I'm going to take more walks and "do the work".

Listen. To. Me.

Run. Walk. Hop. Unicycle. It doesn't matter how you get there, just get there. Quick. To your local grocery store and pick up a new brand of yogurt I tried. It's called Noosa. The honey flavor is to die for. I mean DIE for. If you like yogurt that is. And if you don't, maybe you'll start liking it after you try this one. It's that good. So go get some. Today. You can thank me later.

To all my Australia friends

In our sacrament meeting on Sunday we had a visitor get up and bear his testimony. He is from Australia. From the moment he started talking the whole congregation was instantly quiet. Everyone was listening to his accent. I LOVE Australian accents. I could listen to it all day. So I thoroughly enjoyed his testimony. And he clearly has a strong one. It's a great reminder that we belong to a worldwide church, and that everyone in it believes the same things and feels the same way. But while he was talking I couldn't help remember our Australia trip a few years ago. All the cousins were so fun and we really soaked that accent in! I have to laugh every time I remember LeNell trying to copy the Australians when she made a phone call one time. Down there instead of saying 799-2003 (seven nine nine, two zero zero three), they say 7 double-nine, 2 double-zero three. So LeNell was on the phone with an Australian scheduling an appointment or something and she was telling them the phone number trying to use the "double" number idea. She ended up messing the whole thing up - she got too many "doubles" going and even tried to throw a "triple" in there but ended up giggling and saying it the normal way after all. We all cracked up and had a good laugh. We figured out that they say "cah pahk" instead of parking lot, "rubbeesh bean" instead of trash can, and "bah-bie" instead of barbeque. The word "no" is the one we worked on the most. It's pronounced "nah-oo" but it's tricky to get right. "water" is another one - "woo-dah" is more how they say it. Let's all walk around practicing our Australian accents all day today. It was a fun trip and I'm ready to go back! Australian accents are the BEST.