Loaded Baked Potato…Soup Style
Let’s see for a loaded baked potato…I like some bacon bits, cheese, a little sour cream and some salt and pepper. Well, how about a baked potato in soup form? To me that sounds like good comfort food for a chilly winter day.
I tweaked an internet recipe to “lighten” it up, but it is still rich and creamy… and delicious.
Boil 4 large baking potatoes until cooked. In a stockpot over low heat melt 10 tablespoons of butter then stir in 2/3 cup of flour and stir until smooth and bubbly. Now I use 6 cups of skim milk along with 1 cup of whole milk (we all need a little fat!). You have to constantly stir as you gradually add the milk. I added the milk about ½ cup at a time, which took me about ½ hour to add it all. I cube the potatoes and thinly slice 4 green onions and add those to the soup while still stirring constantly (good hand exercise!) After the soup starts to boil turn down the heat to very low and simmer for 10 minutes. I occasionally stirred during this phase. Oh yeah, before you do all this, you need to fry 10 slices of bacon.
Okay once the soup is done simmering; add about ¾ teaspoon of salt, ½ teaspoon of pepper, and all that bacon that you have crumbled. Then stir in 8 ounces of light sour cream and 1 ½ cups of 2% shredded cheddar cheeses. As soon as the cheese melts you are ready to serve.
I can’t help but think that in a restaurant this soup would be made with whole milk and probably cream. But I tell you, the soup finishes rich and creamy. I calculated about 310 calories per cup. Of course one cup is never enough.
Mild winter saves $$$
There are a lot of people who would never want to see snow again. Myself, however, I would not like this. Not only does snow make my job exciting, but mostly I don’t like when things go away from the “normals” of our climate. On average over the last 30 years we get 5.9” of snow each season.
No snow this winter so far, but the warmer air has led to some good news. My December 2011 gas bill for heat was half of what it was last year in December 2010!
Now, I know we still have to get through February, and parts of January have had their cold spells, but I am thinking if our winter keeps staying oh-for-snow, I can save some more money in the next couple of months.
I guess I could take that extra money and head to Alaska where they have had so much snow this winter it might still be on the ground in May! Better yet, I’ll save the money, because at this rate I’ll probably need it to stay cool this summer.
Re-heeling dress shoes
About a month ago, while at work, I started to slip while walking on our studio floor. It happened not once but twice. My first thought, besides feeling lucky that I didn’t wipe on my rear was, I must have some grease on my heel?
I inspected my shoe and didn’t see anything on the heel. I should have looked closer. A few days later I wore those shoes again to work and almost slipped again. So, I checked my heel again and then realized that the rubber heel was missing! I was slipping on the wooden part of the heel.
Humph, so I put those shoes away. That was sad for me, because I really liked the look of those shoes.
About three weeks later I was tossing something into our trash can at work and saw something in the garbage pail that looked like….a heel! Yes, it was my heel. It must have fallen off at work and someone must have just seen it and tossed it. Well, I tossed it back to me.
So, I got some epoxy glue and weighed down my shoe with a barbell and voila, I’m heeled.
I don’t know how long this repair will last, but it was a free fix and I hope it won’t “slip” up.
How to get the Christmas tree out of the house
The holidays are over and last weekend involved de-decorating. It is always sad when Christmas decorations come down. Unlike the last few days, the weather was warm, 70 degrees, when I took down all the outdoor lights. It does go much quicker than setting up all those lights. The only thing that takes longer for me is getting the tree out of the house.
Bringing a tree home is pretty easy. It is bounded up at the lot. After setting up the stand, it’s pretty easy to plop the tree down, secure it and then cut the twine. This lets the tree expand…and that is the problem with removing the tree, it is all spread out and harder to move. So what did I do? The same thing I did last year. I got a hand saw and started sawing.
I took our 11 foot tree and made two 5 ½ foot trees. Even though the tree was spread out, this made it manageable to get through the front door.
After getting the tree(s) to the curb all that was left were…needles. Lots of needles, but at least our vacuum cleaner’s bag will smell pine fresh for a while!
Banana Pudding
Saw a bag of bananas in the grocery store yesterday for 37 cents. Now I like a banana in the morning for part of breakfast, but I only eat one a day or every other day. So would I really need a whole bag of them? The answer is yes if you want to make some banana pudding. I didn’t have a recipe with me so I just started guessing and hunting.
Here is what I bought at the store. Those bananas of course, I would slice 3 large ones up for the pudding. I bought a box of Nilla wafers. Now the pudding part, I knew I needed vanilla, but I wasn’t sure how much and if it needed to be the cooking kind or instant. So I bought one large box of both. Finally I bought a can of Reddi whip whipped cream.
Making it was a piece of cake, after cooking the pudding according to package directions. I layered a 2 ½ quart casserole dish with the Nilla wafers. (One layer with a few trying to go up the side. I then put half of the sliced bananas in a layer over the wafers. We then poured half of the pudding over that. Then I repeated the process. We then refrigerated the dessert for several hours.
When it time to serve, we sprayed a spritz of the whip cream on top of the pudding and voila, a true southern dessert with minimal effort. I still have some bananas from the bag; I have a few more days left before they would become overripe. Mmmm, if overripe bananas occur, can you say banana bread anyone?
Hurricane Irene leaves its mark
First and earthquake then a hurricane, these past seven days have been busy. It is amazing to me that with the highly technological lives that we lead, we are still at the mercy of Mother Nature.
Hurricane Irene could have been a lot worse. Thank goodness it weakened before hitting North Carolina. Still it cut highway 12 in half around Rodanthe. This left Cape Hatteras and the towns on Hatteras Island cut off. I am sure a person with a boat will make a lot of money out there.
Watching the reports from the northeast though, I see that Irene will be remembered by the flooding rain it produced from New Jersey through Vermont. They already had a lot of rain this summer and Irene just brought disaster, landlocked Vermont seems to have been hit the worst.
Through September we are in the peak part of hurricane season, and there is already another storm out there, Katia. Katia is a name I never heard of before. It replaces the “k” name on the list from six years ago…Katrina. Let’s hope Katia is a nice girl and stays out at sea.
My First Earthquake
I thought it was my cat. One of our two cats likes to hang out under our bed. I looked under the bed and no cat! It still felt to me like something was shaking my bed. You see I was just laying down to get a quick afternoon nap on Tuesday. I was really tired, so when I saw that nothing was under my bed shaking it, I just thought I must be dizzy or something. So I slept.
Little did I realize that I felt my first earthquake of my life. I found out, when I woke up, 3 hours later. (Told you I was tired!) Our east coast earthquake is a yawn in other parts of the world where earthquakes are devastating.
The crust of the earth is cracked all over the world, but in the eastern U.S. we don’t have actual tectonic plates colliding with each other like they do in California, Japan, and other parts of the world. But if you think about it; proportionally, the hard crust of the earth is as thin as the skin of an apple. The big difference is that below our crust, or apple skin, is molten rock and not a solid piece of fruit. So it’s a wonder we don’t have more earthquakes around the world.
I wonder what my cats were doing at the time of the quake, they say animals can sense things better than we can. The one thing I do know is that they were not under my bed!
2011 Population of the World
Seven billion is a huge number. I know it must be because 1 million to me is a huge number, and it is only 0.0143% of 7 billion. I remember a project in school where they wanted to show how big a million was. They had a giant bin and it was going to be filled with a million bottle caps. I don’t think they got there; but I do remember that they had collected a ton of bottle caps and it wasn’t even close to a million. So it is hard to think of the world’s population in terms of 7 billion.
Seven billion is the current population, and over 1 in 3 people in our world live in either China or India. (Is that why everything is made in China!) I saw an article that lists the populations of the world’s biggest countries. Where does the U.S.A. rank? We are number three with 311 million people. I was most surprised that Indonesia and Pakistan were both in the top six along with Brazil.
The way I figure it is if everybody in our country would collect 22 ½ bottle caps we could put them in a pile and have the seven billion that live in our world.
RDU Climate Heating Up
What’s normal? Well when it comes to weather, normal is the average from the last 30 years. The 30 years, change after each decade. So a new set of normal weather has come out. The range is 1981-2010.
I did some comparing to the averages from 1971-2000 and we have warmed up. Our average temperature has gone up a little over one degree. This seems pretty significant. The average global temperature has only gone up 1.5 degrees since the mid 1800s. I don’t know if we should worry about our change; but suffice to say that the climate in central North Carolina that I moved to in 1983 is warmer in 2011. As a matter of fact our overnight lows have gone up. The old normal had average lows in the dead of winter near 29 degrees. Now the coldest average low is 31. Come to think about it, I can’t remember the last time we set a record low. I can tell you that we hit some record highs already this year.
More stuff I found: average snowfall has gone from almost 7” a season down to 5.9”. Yearly precipitation has gone up a bit from 43.05” to 43.34”.
The rainfall should help my yard, however, the normal grass that most folks try to grow in our area, fescue, is designed for a cooler climate. It always has struggled during our summers. Now, I think landscapers should think about switching to a warm season grass like Bermuda grass for our new warmer normal.
Tax Free Weekend Mistake
Tax free weekend got me out to the store. I bought a few things, but nothing was as taxing as buying a yoga mat on Sunday. Kind of funny to think about, but yoga is supposed to calm you down and the purchase of the mat fired me up.
I knew that the NC tax free weekend included sporting and recreational goods under $50. So I thought, ‘why not get a yoga mat tax free?’ So I headed to my local Target and found one on sale for $17.99. When the cashier said my total is $19 and change, I said, ‘no it isn’t.”
I was told that yoga mats were not on their list. I said it must be included, as you use it for exercising!
Cut to the Target manager. He was very blatant that the mats aren’t included on his list. I asked to see the list. He pulled it out. Long story short, the list showed some of the recreational items eligible to be tax free. At the end of the list, a statement said this is a “non-inclusive list.” Meaning not everything was listed. The manager who vehemently said he was right before, then realized he was wrong. I used the extra $1.21 to buy a frozen lemonade….it was hot yesterday outside and at the cash register.
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