My Award-Winning Chef!

If you can’t beat the snow, enjoy it! At least, that’s what we did yesterday at the town’s Winterfest, where Big Guy participated in the chili cookoff and I walked around taking photos and petting huskies that were competing in a sled dog contest.

In the chili tent, about 30 teams competed for the best chili recipe, including the Big Guy’s Rotary Club. I tasted all kinds of chili but Joe’s was fantastic of course. However, there was that Italian recipe with the sausage…mmm.

Joe’s team won third place, and I have his recipe written down for all of you to enjoy. It’s a meaty, thick stew with none of the things he calls “fillers” (like beans, which I just don’t understand). However, give it a try for yourself at Eat At Joe’s.

I keep bragging about the Big Guy’s great cooking skills, and now he has the award to prove it!

Things my Ministry Director suggested I DON’T blog about

You know you’re an old married couple when all the kids will be gone for hours and you use that time to go grocery shopping and make turkey stock. Oh, and maybe check a blog or two.

We recently acquired a gorgeous red-and-gold antique chair for our bedroom and welcomed it into our family. I got the idea that we should make a checklist of all the love spots in our home and go over them again to make sure we’ve covered everything. Big Guy is worried that if I blog about such things, our friends will no longer want to come over for dinner. I want to reassure everyone that all eating surfaces in our house are virgins and completely CLEAN, not that it matters because none of my friends read this blog, only my Mom. And she would probably cheer, because as soon as I got married she asked me how my love life was, and then said, “I always hoped my daughters would have fantastic sex lives.”

My girls don’t read this blog either, but just for the record their bedrooms are equally off-limits, because that’s just nasty.

Aaaaannnnnyway, Big Guy has also suggested that I don’t use the f-word on my blog. No talking about frogs. Or forks. Or February. But I just want to assure my church friends that, although the f-word was an integral part of my teen vocabulary, I only use it now when someone drops a refrigerator on my foot, or when the laptop eats a key chapter of my novel.

P.S. The Ministry Director DOES suggest that you check out his Chiles en Nogada recipe in the “Eat At Joe’s” section of this blog. And if you’re thirsty, check out the beer recommendation in “Drink Me”.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

We love our new neighbors. Not in a creepy, sneak over and peek in their downstairs windows kind of way. In a completely normal way – and coming from a couple who can be shy in social situations, this is a reason for rejoicing. After spending some time with them, we can’t wait to get to know them better.

Friday night we went to a church staff party (the Big Guy pulled me out of a conversation and into the car after I told my high school story about the bottle of peppermint schnapps and the used tampon that someone put into it), and then over to our new neighbors for drinks and games. We really hit it off. They’ve lived in Spain and New Zealand, they work as high school teachers, and they have fascinating stories.

The Catchphrase game was forgotten as Aaron and I started talking about the effect of a culture on the English language, P. J. Wodehouse, and the differences between Castilian Spanish and New World Spanish.

In the meantime Big Guy was singing along with the “Phantom of the Opera” soundtrack playing on their stereo, and he and Christine were talking Community Theater! Musicals! Lyric Opera!! After a while, we switched gears, and Christine and I were all Architecture! 80s music!! Foreign Films!! While Joe and Aaron were going, Wine! Faith Life!! Linguistics!! Power Tools! Again the conversation shifted and I became passionate about the Irish monks who kept literacy alive during the fall of the Roman Empire, and Aaron held forth on the ethnic origins of the Basque people. With diagrams.

Having interests like these, can you see why it’s difficult for me to find people who share my passions?

I was so into the conversation that I didn’t actually notice how the wine was being poured or that it was actually one in the morning until I suspected I was getting a little slurry. As I walked home my socks started falling down into my shoes and my shoes somehow started sliding off, so I was hoping our new friends weren’t watching us make our way across the street. Then Big Guy kindly gave me his arm and we went straight to bed, rejoicing in our good fortune.

We prayed for a friendship like this.