A random posting of flepergebet

I love words. I love language in general. I am always listening for colorful phrases, idioms, innuendos, etc. One of my favorite quotes from Dennis Miller:

"I've always loved the flirtatious tango of consonants and vowels, the sturdy dependability of nouns and capricious whimsy of verbs, the strutting pageantry of the adjective and the flitting evanescence of the adverb, all kept safe and orderly by those reliable little policemen, punctuation marks. Wow! Think I got my ass kicked in high school?"

Anyways... back to the point of this post. I subscribe to a feed from Merriam-Webster called Word of the Day. Its actually kinda interesting. Along with the definition of course and example of the word used in the sentence, there's usually a little tidbit or history lesson. Some of the words are really great like, one of my new favorites, "Gadarene". Some are amusing like "flibbertigibbet".

So in a blatant attempt to use my one of my new favorite words, I shall post a bombastic list of flepergebet. These are links that I have collected over the last few weeks that I wanted to share, but each didn't really merit its own posting.

In no particular order:

1001wonders.org - This project is a collection of really great panophotographies of cultural and natural sites all over the world. Explore Ground Zero in NYC or more exotic locations like a crocodile nesting habbitat in Turkana, Kenya or Yongjangsa's Pagoda in Gyeongju, Korea. Great tool for homeschooling.

Banksy - A artist that I find interesting. I don't condone graffiti. Graffiti is bad, mmmkay? I just think some of the things this artist has done are worth a few clicks. Be sure to check out the video on the site.

Bacolicio.us - Because everything is better with bacon. Check out Irreverent, Barefoot Ragamuffins now with bacon!

Bartender Face - Go ahead, let it all out. Anonymous stories/rants posted about people's lives. Hopefully its theraputic for them.

Knitting Biology - This has to be the coolest thing I have seen knitted in a very long time.

Hot Library Smut - Check out this post from the nonist. There's some truly stunning photographs.

The Eyeborg Project - Rob Spence is a film-maker who lost his eye as a child. Now he's trying to build a prosthetic with a built-in camera. Check out the videos on the blog and the site explaining the whole project here.

Bloody Fun Day - I have no idea why, but I am addicted to this game.

Hungry Planet - What 30 different families in 24 countries eat. My kids found this facinating and it may be a spring board for some food studies in the near future.

Make Bunny Fast - I love Julie who has a little pregnant blog. Her style and topics might not be for everyone, but I have laughed to the point of tears on several occassions. This post she talks about how she has seen the Easter holiday has evolved over the years. Something to think about.

This is my new favorite baby gift. Mysterio predicts your baby's future (on a nice t-shirt). These are too cute. I know several people that may be recieving one soon.

Ok, I think that's it. The fluff is out of my system.

Carry on.

Do you know what this is?

This, my friends, is the Polar Bear Award.
Do you know what I had to do to get it?
I had to go camping.
In a tent.
In cold weather.
The requirements for this award are before bed, you place a cup (tin works the best I'm told) outside of your tent with a tiny bit of water in the bottom. If frost forms around the edges during the night/early morning, you qualify.

Oh, we qualified. There was frost on the tents before midnight.

This is the kind of mom I am. I take my kids out camping in the freezing cold. Why? See, this started when one day I wanted a tiny moment for myself. I was browsing a travel magazine, looking at all the pretty places that I'll be able to travel to in 16.5 years from now. That lead to a discussion about my list of 1001 things I want to do before I die. And that evolved into a similar list for our family that we call our Wish To-Do List.

Top of the list was "go camping". It wasn't long after that my oldest son joined Cub Scouts and we were all dragged invited out for a family camp out.

I won't lie. It was fun and the kids had a great time. I'm glad we went. I'm also glad that we joined Cub Scouts. There's definitely a "it takes a village" mentality that makes things like taking 5 kids camping much easier. Otherwise, there is no way I would have been comfortable enough to pull this off on my own.

Back to the wishlist. I'm really delighted by the things that my preschool sons contributed to the list: growing popcorn and making ketchup.

So this summer, we are in fact growing popcorn and tomato plants in the hopes of harvesting the ingredients for a homemade snack and all time favorite condiment.

I reused a plastic container that once held really yummy white chocolate macadamia nut cookies for a tiny greenhouse to sprout our popcorn kernels. In theory, regular off the shelf popcorn should sprout some seeds. If not, I am holding these people personally responsible and we'll probably order some seeds online. I'll update later on our progress with this.

Then last weekend I bought some tomato plants. We've been having some chilly/warm/chilly/warm weather lately. So I've kept the seedlings inside until we're reading to put them in our garden spot. Yesterday the looked a little droopy so I put them on the porch to get some sunshine. Then promptly forgot about them where they sat all night. They're starting to perk up. Hopefully they'll recover a bit more before the kids get home from school. Who knew tomato plants were so finicky?

Apparently is a time consuming process, making this homemade ketchup. Maybe I can make batches of spaghetti sauce in tandem.

Also on our Wish To-Do List:
go to Tex Ren Fest
visit Alabama
have a big party
fly in a plane
ride on a train

What's on your list?

Happy Pi Day

Today just happens to be Pi Day. One day a year, nerd and bakers come together to celebrate such a day. (Or perhaps its just nerdy bakers.) In any case, I thought I would post a pie post in honor of this day even though I am neither a baker nor a nerd really.

I ran across this recipe for a Bean Burlee Tart a little while back and thought I would give it a try.

The filling is made from:
1 cup dry navy beans (eww I know, but stay with me)
2 eggs
4 tbs. butter, softened.
1 cup sugar
6 ounces evaporated milk
2 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. vanilla
2 tbs. turbinado sugar (I have no idea what this is. I just used cane sugar instead.)

So after soaking beans for 4 hours, cooking them down for 90 minutes and puree'ing the crap out of them for another 30, you have your bases for the pie filling. The whole thing is fairly easy to make, its just time consuming. And before I tell you how it tasted, let me hedge that with I really hate beans. Pinto, navy, lima, black, white, green, purple, refried, reheated, regurgitated, it doesn't matter. I really hate beans. The pie was okay. It was sweet and had a pretty good texture. It was like a earthy cheese cake. My kids ended up eating it pretty well. I don't think I'll be making it again though. It just wasn't for me. Kudos to whom ever came up with the recipe.


Karate Kid had a bake sale this morning to raise money to buy their kindergarten graduation caps and gowns. My grand contribution to this project was a:
1 homemade sweet potato pie
2 Rainbow cakes (one with cream cheese icing, other chocolate)
9 Rainbow cupcakes (Bet you can guess what happened to the other 3)
6 pie in a jars (2 cherry, 2 sweet potato, 2 apple)
and 6 plum muffins

I used Alton Brown's recipe for the sweet potato pie. It calls for yogurt instead of milk and eggs. I had some homemade yogurt sitting around that needed to be used up.

We'll come back to the rainbow cakes/cupcakes in a second.
Pies in jars. I thought this was a really cute idea. Being a single person, even though I hardly never cook for one, I thought it would be nice to have some single servings of the good stuff available. I like how they turned out. You can read more about how to make these here. These are super easy to make. The cherry pies I just made the crust, molded to the jar and tossed in pie filling. Sweet potato was leftover filling from the 9in pie I made earlier. And the apple pie filling was made from scratch from apples from a neighbor's tree.

Plum muffins are super easy to make, but turn out really great. Fill muffin cup (smaller cupcake cups will not work) with favorite muffin recipe or pound cake mix. Cut plums in half, de-seed, and place into cup. I sprinkle the top with cinnamon and brown sugar and bake. The cake mixture bakes up around the plum. The plum in the meantime bakes down to a really soft, sweet center. They're great for a bunch.

And now rainbow cakes. I wish I can claim credit for these bad boys, but alas I cannot. I can tell you, that they cupcakes were kind of a pain to make compared to the cakes. They were the hit of the bake sale. I was some kind of kindergarten mom rock star for all of 20 minutes.

I love this photo for two reasons. One is obviously because the cupcakes turned out so well. The second is because I haven't touched up the photo at all. I'm dabbling in photography and still just learning my way around how light affects things. My kitchen is really poorly lit where I took this photo and it was too dark to take it outside for natural light. So I, the ingenious person that I am, bounced my flash off of a handful of coffee filters to get this picture. This is the 3rd pic I had taken so I am tickled with myself.