Chicken Monday: 11/30/09

Even though we're well into fall, there's still a lot of activity in the chicken pen here at the Happy Kitten Cottage.

Everyone's still eating well and looking beautiful. (From background: Henrietta, Leroy, and Big Chicken #2.)


Isn't Leroy a pretty bird? He certainly thinks so. He's also King of the Coop, much to the chagrin of Big Chickens #1 and #2.


But B.C. #1 is still gorgeous, even if he's not Chief Chicken in Charge.


Leroy had just started another "cock-a-doodle-DOOOO" when I snapped this picture. The sunlight makes his feathers all the more beautiful—he's so glossy.


Look at those tail feathers!


I've seen some gorgeous fabric, but nothing comes close to the iridescent greenish-black of Leroy's tail. His body is mostly a dark reddish-brown, with the feathers on his neck and head a different, more fiery red.


And the girls (Henrietta, Ernestine, and Pearl) are still laying eggs, against all odds. By late November, most chickens stop laying for the winter season and prepare to molt (lose feathers and grow new ones)—except these chickens. My Aunt Becky, who lives in southern central Michigan, says her chickens stopped laying almost two months ago. Other than the fact that Small Town is 900 miles south of Becky's farm, and that my hens have a little more daylight to keep them egging it up, I can't figure out why my girls are still laying this late in the year.

But it doesn't bother me! Especially not during holiday food prep!


This egg contained not one, but TWO deep-orange yolks, and went into the Corn Souffle. (The dark orange is from the high amount of living greens that my chickens get; more beta carotene equals healthier hens and eggs.) My hens are bantam-sized, and the egg itself was about two-and-a-half inches long and rather pointy on one end. Looking at it made my lady parts hurt.


I hard-boiled another egg to chop up and put in the cornbread dressing (I'll post a recipe if you want it—every Southerner has her/his own way of making it). The yolk, while not orange after cooking, was still a startling bright yellow, which you don't often see in eggs from commercial farms.

Why, thanks! I think I will!

Thanksgiving finds Mom, Steve, and me at Waffle House. Pixie and Guy arrive this evening, and our Turkey Day feast will be tomorrow, so we're not at all disappointed with waffles and hash browns today.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING 2009!

Hold on, kitteh! Mom's workin' on that pie!

Hope you're all having a wonderful Thanksgiving. Pixie and Guy fly in this afternoon, and our family's official Thanksgiving dinner is tomorrow.

Ask Mom™ : Turkey Day Edition!

It's been a looooong time since Ask Mom™ was last featured here on E&P, so what better time to bring it back but Thanksgiving?

Face it: it's MOM's advice you want when you're faced with an undercooked turkey, a pie that just spilled its soggy contents into the bottom of your oven, relatives who've been drinking since 9:00am (and it's now lunch time), and a house full of screaming kids who don't ALL belong to you so you can't exactly get away with slapping the hell out of them. Well, okay, so that's MY example. I was channeling Mom there for a second. [ahem]

Today's food-related question comes to us from Angry Professor, who's a longtime Ask Mom™ reader and question-sender-inner.

Dear Mom:
I know I already got my few moments of your time, but I hear you're an awesome cook, and I would like to know how to make a fruit pie crust so that the bottom gets cooked. "Crispy-cooked" probably isn't possible, but "not raw-like-dough" would be good. I don't make fruit pies any more because of that damned bottom crust.
Sincerely yours,
A.P.



Dear A.P.,
Oh, ye of little faith! You CAN make good homemade pie crust—it's not that hard, provided you have a decent recipe. This recipe is for smaller pie pans; for bigger ones, like deep quiche pans, you'll need to follow the recipe on the back of the Crisco can. But for now we'll just do a 9" pie crust. So here's what I do, works every time.

1-1/2 cups PLAIN flour
1/2 cup vegetable shortening (like Crisco)
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup ice water

• In a big bowl, cut the shortening into the flour mixture with two knives or a pastry cutter. (I always use the knives—it's cheaper and I know how. One knife in each hand, draw through the Crisco scraping against each other. Don't be shy. After a few swipes you get the rhythm and it's easy.)
• Then add salt and ice water (be sure it's REALLY COLD and not just cool-from-the-tap water).
  
• After the flour and shortening are all cut together, I start mixing with a fork and then finish up with my hand when the dough gets thicker. However, DO NOT PLAY WITH THE DOUGH! The longer you mess with it, the tougher it'll be. And the warmth of your hand can start melting the mixed-in shortening.
• Roll it out thinly, 1/4" or less.
  
• Gently ease it into the pan, and trim edges if you want to. This crust is so good, if you have some left over you can sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar, bake, and then eat it as a snack. Kids will nearly shit themselves trying to get to it.
• If the pie directions call for you to have a pre-baked crust, go ahead and bake.
• As to too-juicy and soggy: reduce the juice in the pie filling. Easiest way to do this is add cornstarch. (You can use flour, but it makes the filling opaque, which you DON'T want.) Start with a couple tablespoons of cornstarch added to COLD liquid. If you mix cornstarch with hot liquid, it WILL lump.)
• The trick is to get the bottom COOKED/DONE before the juice has a chance to soak in. If your recipe calls for 350 degrees, make it 425 for the first 15 minutes, and then reduce back to 350 for the rest of the cooking.
• Don't let the filling sit in the crust any longer than you have to. Have everything ready to go when you put the filling in the crust: oven nice & hot, timer set, etc.
  
• Cover and don't screw around with the edges or the top. We aren't creating a work of art here—we're making a pie.
  
• Now that you've made your first homemade pie crust, you can forever dispense with the ready-made crusts you get at the store. I mean, my dogs WILL eat a store-bought frozen crust....IF they've been without food for 24 hours, and they aren't paying attention to what they're eating. Then they give me this look: "Are you trying to poison me?" and then sit down and lick their butts to get the store-bought-crust taste out of their mouths. YEEEECH! That, or they go eat "cat crunchies." Both work really well to get rid of a bad taste. For dogs, anyway.
• HAVE FUN! And remember, you Southern cooks: PLAIN FLOUR.
  

Do you have a question for Mom? Just ask it in the Comments section of this post, or e-mail it to me at misskitty_ep[AT]bellsouth.net. And remember, no question is too outlandish to Ask Mom™. She'll answer them all.

It's not easy being Squirrel

Two days 'til Thanksgiving, and Squirrel is incredibly disappointed in the entire holiday season scramble; another EPIC DISAPPOINTMENT. It's tough being Squirrel when everyone and everything let you down. [deep sigh]

View from the bridge of the Starship Crete

A recent series of mishaps—the last of which included a fellow truck driver dragging his trailer across the front of El Seebeno's parked truck, completely tearing off the front end—have culminated in Seeben's being assigned another truck. A brand-new truck, at that!


"Captain's log: Hard as a rock." (Thank you, Seeben.)

El Seebeno had to watch three training videos before management would even give him the keys. He says the "bells and whistles" on this state-of-the-art vehicle are giving him fits, but he's slowly getting used to what every little "ping!" and "rrrrnk!" is supposed to mean.


The compartment above the C.B. radio is meant for maps, fuel cards, log books, and such trucking-related stuff. Seeben's got all that stashed in there—and, of course, the plush stuffed Siamese kitty you see here. Seeben says it reminds him of the late, evil Skooter, and of big, tubby, sweet Yoda—and keeps him company until he gets home.

Fall color—but not from tree leaves!

Today is November 21, but for this Kurume azalea in my front yard, it's April 21. Weird weather here in Small Town: low 60s and rainy. Where's the cold weather?!?

Friday Kittehs, featuring Beignet

The party's over! Beignet is at the vet's office today...getting fixed when she wasn't even broken. Poor kitteh!

Step right up! Sign your own FAIL warrant!

We're nearing the end of a fairly good semester, and lately I've been thinking that it's simply too good to be true. And it is! To wit: the e-mail I just received.

Prof. Kitty,
I am having a difficult time choosing a topic. I have no clue about what I want to write about. Any suggestions will be great.

My reply:

Okay...remember that I'm asking you to write on something that's related to what we've been talking about in class the last few weeks. This can include ideas on social class and how it's portrayed in mainstream media (TV in particular); poverty and wealth (and assumptions about it in American society); commercialism in American society (targeted toward kids, adults, women, and so on); how advertising tells us we should be; and tomorrow we'll be discussing more things related to these topics. Surely you can boil down something from what we've been watching/discussing the last few weeks.

And let me ask you this: what kind of notes have you been taking?

Because, had this student been taking notes and been intellectually engaged during the documentaries we've watched, as I have exhorted her and her classmates to do—instead of automatically flipping into "Movie ON! Brain OFF!" mode...... [deep sigh]

So much for the daily journal entries on our class discussions and readings. So much for copious explanations and examples of good essays and end-of-semester writing portfolios.

We had a discussion on this topic last night, in the graduate TESOL class I'm taking. Teachers and professors tend to have a lot of subject knowledge and teacher training, which is great. But what happens when our students don't have much learner training? It's hard for them to integrate a second-language experience into their world view, and hard for them to view the new language—or any learning, for that matter—meta-cognitively, rather than the high-school method of memorize-and-regurgitate-on-a-test that lets them forget even those bare little facts they learned. Sometimes it helps to teach students learning strategies. One of my classmates demonstrated the Learning Strategies method of language teaching, and it hit me that this approach could be helpful in nearly any discipline.

But here we are at Week 14 of the semester. We've discussed a huge range of issues the last few weeks, yet my student is clueless. I bet she hasn't taken even the first note. Oh, and this young lady is a Pre-Nursing major, too. How reassuring.

Tomorrow's Comp I lecture will be titled:

"The Price of A College Education Does NOT Include PowerPoint Handouts;

or,

Had You Fucking Taken Notes, Then Maybe You'd Have Some Ideas for Your Final Essay."

Okay. This one missed the whole "Fall memo" thing, too.

I didn't think camellias were supposed to bloom until late December, but here's a gorgeous pink one in all its glory on November 18.

Didn't you get the memo about Fall?

Today is November 15, yet Mom's gardenia refuses to acknowledge Fall. The dozen or so remaining blossoms still make the front porch a wonderful place to spend an afternoon.

Pupdate: That's my boy!

Lucky may have grown up surrounded by cats and chickens, but he's 100% dog. Witness this photo, and every dog's motto: "If it smells like it's dead, roll in it."

Friday Kittehs, featuring Melody

"Friday's FINALLY here? You'd better not be bullshittin' me."

A meditation on the laundromat

When both my washer and dryer died last month, I thought at first that it was the end of the world. However, there's a lot to be said for going to a laundromat to wash clothes.

• Watching clothes go around and around in the dryer (or the front-loading washer) is meditative. I'm learning how to let my mind relax as I watch my clothes get clean.
  
• It's impossible to multi-task at the laundromat—there's no Wi-Fi access, so no wasting time on the internet. There's no running off to other parts of town to run errands, because my clothes will be done in 23 minutes. The digital timer on the machine tells me so. So I'm forced to plan ahead for a laundromat trip: bring a book, bring something to snack on, and use the time to quiet my mind.
• Having to use a laundromat also forces me to, as the Colonel says, "get all my shit in one sock." (Laundry pun intended.) I have to plan when I'm going to wash, block out 90 minutes or so to get my clothes done and folded. I have to stop by the ATM to get cash to put in the change machine, and I have to remember to bring my detergent with me. (Purex's 3-in-1 works really well for my ADHD brain: put one sheet in the washer, then transfer it to the dryer along with the clothes. No need for a separate dryer product.)
  
• And, most importantly of all, I have to gather all my dirty clothes at once. As a few of you pointed out on my last laundry post, at the laundromat your clothes ALL get done at once. This forces me to get organized and bring all the dirty clothes with me.

Mom and El Seebeno have kindly offered their old laundry pair to me, and I'll eventually bring it to the HKC. Until then, going to the laundromat really isn't a bad thing.

Chicken Monday: 11/9/09

so much depends
upon

a


glazed with

beside the


Original poem explained here—and my sincerest apologies to the late William Carlos Williams.

Iz mah birfday!

YAYZ! I iz 36 kthxbai!

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...

I will fear no evil. Nor standardized test.

Today finds me at Middle-of-Nowhere State University, taking the GRE Literature Subject Test. Can you tell how thrilled I am? Yee-haw. [yawn]

Friday Kittehs

I was trying to take a picture of Moo for Friday Kittehs, but instead got an o hai! moment thanks to Erngeakura!

Student Essay Insanity #64!

Will you still love S.E.I.
When it's 64?

All bad Beatles references aside, it's time for more Student Essay Insanity! This week's picks of the nose litter are from 2008's Comp I & II research papers. I chose these not necessarily for their mistakes, but because of their sometimes-clunky wording (in a final draft, no less—Lord help us) and how poorly they make their points on otherwise interesting and timely topics.

Each blooper is from a different author and paper, unless otherwise noted. YES, they are ALL final drafts. I couldn't make this up. And, as always, it's all for real: real students, real essays, real(ly) bad.

I shit you not.

**********

• When talking about rock 'n roll or any other of the aforementioned genres, the first ideal that has been crammed into humans' mind is the sudden impulse to question the references that each song makes. Forget enjoying music for the sheer pleasure; rather, dissect it, skewing the lyrics in a way that makes them seem bad in a far-off context. Albeit there are songs with noticeable sexual and mature references, they will be explored later.
  
• The phrase "child abuse," is something that one may find hard to define because the definitions have expanded over the years. Since 1964, when the first child abuse reporting law was written, most of us have not taken child abuse seriously. ... [Author and book title] have touched the heart of many people and brought awareness of child abuse to our attention. This is an aspiring book that shows determination through a little boy's eyes. ...As a young child only his dreams barely kept him alive and motivated to go on and fight stronger.
  
• The Spanish Civil War began as a fight for change, as civil wars tend to do.
• There are many relationships that tend to exist in today's society.
  

And our last one from a paper covering, among several other works, Jamaica Kincaid's short-short story "Girl." This student both 1) started at the very last minute and 2) misread the text's purpose and meaning. And to think I spent all that time in my office, so students could come talk to me.

• The narrator had strong view points and talked to the girl straight forward. In the text, the narrator gave the girl a list of chores for the entire week and also gave her lessons on how to act in different situations. The narrator also continued to warn the girl that if she did not follow her directions and advice, the girl will grow up to be a slut. At this time, women were still under men's controls.
  
  
  

It's TMI—and I don't care.

Yesterday, in a discussion about their upcoming research papers, my Intro to Lit class had some questions. "What do you mean about 'voice,' Professor?"

"Voice? Oh, like authorial voice, the writer's voice." Oops. They were still confused. "Hmmm. Do you know anyone who has a distinctive voice? Like, you could hear that person anywhere and know exactly who was talking?" Heads nodded. "Have any of you ever called your ex and tried to disguise your voice?"

A ripple of laughter spread through the classroom, and I laughed, too. "Right! It never works, does it? It's the same thing with writing. You get to a point where you can establish that tone, that phrasing, that word choice that will make your writing distinctive to your readers, no matter where they might read it. For example: you can probably spot the King James Bible style anywhere, even in a parody. Same for Ernest Hemingway." I saw the light go on in a number of eyes. "Now, I've posted in BlackBoard an example of my own acad—"

And I had an idea. Risky, but with a potentially large payoff. That is, if I weren't going astray with an act of ADD-induced random impulsiveness.

"Okay, hang on while I bring up something on the projector for you." The students fidgeted while I worked on the computer to put up another example of my writing to contrast with the scholarly article I published a few years ago. What would appeal to them that I've written lately? I wondered. Hmm, not actively working on any articles right now...needs to be really different, but with a real target, a real voice and point it wants to make. YES!

So I blanked the screen (so the class couldn't see what I was doing) and came over here to E&P. I copy-and-pasted part of last week's rant on "feminine deodorant sprays." By God, it was different enough, and it was the same author. Maybe it would work. And it was something a real person wrote, too. Highlight...CTRL + C...CTRL + V into a Word doc.

I edited out a few things, but probably not enough. While I know that nobody really wants to think that their college professors are real people with real bodies that do the real things that other people's bodies do, it still helps to think about it—to remind us that everyone we meet is human JUST LIKE US.

I read the excerpt aloud, and was a little embarrassed. I asked the students a few questions about the audience for whom the E&P text was intended (didn't give them the URL), the point I was trying to make in the text, and what changes I could make to present a similar argument to a more formal audience. Then I read a few paragraphs from different parts of my journal article.

"I apologize for any TMI, folks," I said as I was about to dismiss them, "but the difference in style and tone was something I felt you really needed to see." A few stayed after class to ask research paper-related questions, and then the classroom was suddenly empty and silent.

Yes, I'd left in Too Much Information. I could feel the flussshh-BURN in my face as I realized that I might have weirded out my class, or maybe diminished my own standing with them. I stood there, alone in the weirdly-quiet room, and changed a few more things so I could present this example to another class.

"Fuck it," I said suddenly. "It's just like Flannery O'Connor said. They were uncomfortable, and I don't give a damn."

Because in my experience, true learning never takes place when we're inside our comfort zones.

A kitteh for your Tuesday

It's Tuesday, the day when the reality of the work week finally hits us: "Aaaack! Four more DAYS of this shit?!?" So here's Emmylou to cheer us up.

Chicken Monday: 11/2/09

Will someone tell me why kittehs always seem to want to be in the chicken pen? Because I can't figure it out.






Henrietta and Ernestine don't know, either. [chicken sigh]

On a bumper in Denver, Colorado

So true.