It's That Nouveau Riche

Welcome to the nouveau riche version of my blog! The 1970s tapestry floral print just had to go, so I enlisted a very lovely lady (Jessica from www.DiamondDollDesign.com) to help me freshen ‘er up. Perhaps it was the previous lack of fanciness and pastel colors that caused me such distaste, but golly, I sure am LOVING the new look. It’s amazing what a splash of color and good design can do. I think it looks like the inside of one of those houses they feature inSouthern Living. You know; those gorgeous, professionally interior decorated houses that those women claim to have created all by themselves. When really, we all know they’ve got a designer on a permanent retainer to do the real work, and all they probably did was fluff a few pillows. Anyway, I digress.

In addition to the new look, I’ve got a few new bells and whistles to tell y’all about.

My first new whistle is my handy little list of links up above this post.

Now, you can click on my “Cookbook” page to see a listing of all the links to all my stolen recipes. If you reference my first ever blog post, you’ll notice that I disclose (rather plainly) that I don’t come up with my own recipes. However, I’m quite the connoisseur of FINDING good recipes and sharing them with y’all. I guess you could call me an acquisitioner of sorts. I acquire recipes from other places, try them out and post the good ones (with my notes, of course).

The next link of interest is the “Y’all Need This” page. This is the most exciting of my new additions and is devoted to the things I am currently IN LOVE with. That gotta-have-it, can’t-live-without-it kind of love that you only get from finding something truly magnificent. I also REALLY like getting a good deal so most of the stuff on here is gonna be cheap, or at the very least, MAJORLY on sale. My keen shopping/deal finding abilities are the way I am able to afford a mostly J.Crew and Banana Republic wardrobe on my measly corporate peon paycheck.

Whether it’s a new color of nail polish, new piece of jewelry or some fancy thing-a-ma-jig that’ll revolutionize your life, I’m going to plan on posting at least one thing that y’all need per month. Maybe more… depending on how often I’ve been able to go shopping.

The next two links are the boring ones: “About Me” and “Contact”. Woopty. It’s that normal, run of the mill stuff that every blog has to have. Other new additions are those cute little gray buttons on the top of the sidebar. Now you can click to follow me on twitter, shoot me an email, or sign up for my RSS feed. And feel free to share my blog with your friends! Sharing is caring, y’all!

Leave your comments and let me know what you think! Hopefully you enjoy the new look and features of the blog. I know I’m dang excited about it!

Oh… and HAPPY FOURTH, Y’ALL!

Recipe: My Family's Taters

First things first, let me say that I am so sorry that I haven't been blogging for like the last month. For those of you who are event planners, I'm sure you can relate. April and May are the atomic bombs of the event planning year.

However, I'm making it up to you all by posting a new recipe. It's one of my favorites that my daddy actually came up with. As a Southerner, he's great at creating his own one-of-a-kind completely unhealthy recipes. Plus, it's super easy! I call this recipe Cornbread Taters.

Cornbread Taters
Ingredients:
5-6 potatoes (you can do sweet potatoes or regular, or both)
1/2 onion (chopped coarsely)
Corn Meal

Peel the potatoes and cut into french fry-like shapes. My dad does this very coarsely so they look more like longer chunks of potatoes instead of fries, but how you cut them is up to you. Put the chunks into a gallon sized Ziploc bag. Then cut up the 1/2 onion coarsely and put into the Ziploc bag with the potatoes. Once you've got everything put into the bag, add about 1/2 to 1 cup of corn meal to the bag. Close the Ziploc bag and shake. It's like Shake-and-Bake for potatoes. Make sure the corn meal lightly coats the potatoes.

Then fry the mixture of potatoes, onions and corn meal. I like to fry my potatoes in an electric skillet because they cook more evenly, but it's also fine to do it over the stove. Just make sure you watch the temperature, because the sweet potatoes tend to burn easily.

Once they're done, pull them out and let them cool. Lightly salt. The corn meal on the potatoes gives them a little bit of a crunchy texture, and the onion gives it all a really great savory flavor. I'm telling y'all, these potatoes are the most requested recipe in our family.

Enjoy, y'all!

When Pumpkins Attack

You know that show called “When Animals Attack”? Sure you do. We’ve all seen those videos where some idiot gets too close to a crocodile and gets his leg bit clean off, or the ones of the idiots taunting the grizzly bear near their campsite before getting mauled to dang-near death. There are some things you just shouldn’t do. I get it; people think that since they’re the “more advanced” species they can out stealth a friggin’ bear. News flash people: regardless of how “advanced” you may be, you still can’t run from a 2 ton grizzly. That sucker’s gonna eat you and not think a thing about it. You quickly learn two lessons from watching about 10 minutes of these types of shows: A) don’t mess with wildlife, and B) acting like an idiot can get you in trouble.

A few posts ago, I wrote about how everyone in the South has a little bit of white trash in them. I also referenced how my husband and I throw our rotten fruit over the back fence “for the birds”. No judgments please. If you had an empty lot behind your house, you’d do it, too. I can’t even begin to describe how enjoyable it can be to have a mini Olympics in your backyard… Your old celery is the javelin event - your rotten oranges the shot-put. Perhaps not the classiest of afternoon activities, but fun nonetheless.

One day a few months ago, my husband finally decided to call my fall pumpkins in. They’d been serving as back patio decoration and managed to stay nice for several months, but now they looked a little over-ripe. I had given him permission to get rid of them since they were starting to smell, but I foolishly thought that since the pumpkins were so large, he would put them in a garbage bag and throw them into the big trash can. If only I had known…

I walked off to put in another load of laundry and heard the door open and close. Soon the hubs was standing in front of me asking if I knew where the hammer was. Here’s how the conversation went:

Hubs – “Hey, do we have a hammer somewhere?”

Me – “Sure, here.”

Hubs – “Be right back. Gotta fix the fence.”

Me – “What happened to the fence?!”

Hubs – “I hit it with a pumpkin.”

Me – “How did you do that?!”

Hubs – “I really underestimated the force I would need to chuck it over the fence.”

I, of course, busted into hysterical laughter. Then I knew I had to see what kind of hammer-needing damage a pumpkin could do to a fence. I walked outside and saw what looked like the gruesome murder of a pumpkin laying across our lawn, and three fence boards that had been jarred from their normal position on the fence line. One board had come darn near clean off. Apparently even a half-rot pumpkin won’t go down without a fight!

Pumpkin Devastation

Pumpkin Guts

Naturally, my husband righted his wrong by reattaching the boards to our fence, and we had a good long laugh. Now, do you think this would deter us from launching fruit over our fence in the future? Take it as a lesson in the negative effects of tomfoolery? Use the “advanced species” part of our brains to realize that was a bad idea? Nope. We just learned that next year, when launching our pumpkins, we’ve got to decrease the distance and increase the force to make sure the pumpkin makes it completely over the fence… with no ill effects or damage to our property…

It’s the South, Y’all!

The Toilet Saga: The Memorial

It is with a heavy heart that I inform you all that my toilet has officially been taken away. I’ve been hoping, unsuccessfully, that it would magically reappear, but I don’t think it’s coming back this time.

It left this world nearly two weeks ago. I should’ve known when I saw all the signs: the city trucks, the mowing crew... I should’ve been prepared to say my goodbyes, but I was in denial. It wasn’t until I drove home one day that I realized my toilet had been removed from its proud post in the median, never to be seen again. I can only assume that the mowing crew disposed of it, deeming it as “in the way”.

My one true hope now is that my beloved toilet is in a better place… Maybe on a ranch in the sky with other old toilets, where it can play Jenga and sip Mojitos all day; a befitting fate for a toilet so wonderful and mysterious. But wherever it is, I hope it’s bringing other people as much incredible happiness as it has brought to me over the past few months.

It's taught me a valuable lesson in never taking ANYTHING too seriously. Whenever life gets me down, I need to remember that some random toilet might just show up, disappear, reappear, get moved into the median of the highway and then sprout flowers. It seems only appropriate that during its last few days on the median, flowers were planted in its tank. Perhaps someone was giving it a proper send off. Or perhaps, it was just another awesome gesture by the toilet artist to put smiles on the faces of the overworked and underpaid.

Goodbye, sweet friend.

My toilet is a metaphor of sorts; a metaphor for the insane brilliance of the small things in life. Even the seemingly normal things we use every day - like our toilets - can bring us smiles. In honor of my toilet, I’m on a personal quest to find something that I can do to bring that much ridiculous joy to someone else’s life. Sort of like a pay-it-forward of ridiculously funny things.

I’d like us all to take this time to observe a moment of silence for my toilet, and the joy it has brought me and countless others.

It's the South, Y'all!

Back of The Bottle Recipe

I come from a long line of women who have learned how to make do with what they’ve got, whether in life or in the kitchen. My grandmother has always been able to whip up pretty much anything from the things she finds in the fridge and cupboard, but not my mom. Don’t get me wrong - my mom is a wonderful cook. She makes a mean meal. The thing is though, she’s always been a busy lady so she’s had to make do by finding awesome, easy recipes that someone else came up with. Now some people might frown on that since this is, of course, the south. However, I’m embracing my momma’s method as a busy-bee of an adult. I ain’t got time for that fancy stuff.

This brings me to the best advice I’ll ever give you: check the back of your bottles. Condiments, soups, sauces - anything with a label, you better be checking for recipes. Let me tell you, this is a fail proof method of finding some seriously delicious recipes that don’t take that long to make. How do I know they’re all easy recipes? Simple. Think of the size of the label on the back of an A1 bottle or a Campbell’s soup can. You can’t fit some long fancy recipe on there. It’s got to be good and straight to the point.

I’ve used the check the bottle method for years now, and I can’t say I’ve ever found a recipe that wasn’t easy and wonderful. I’m sure there’s one out there, but for now, I’m blissfully ignorant to it.

Most recently, my husband and I were eating dinner and I was eating A1 with everything on my plate. Yes, I will eat A1 with any and everything. That stuff is dang good, and I buy it in bulk. That evening, I was enjoying some A1 with my steamed carrots (don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it, it’s the culinary pairing of the century), and I decided to turn the bottle of A1 around to see what was listed on the side of it. See, I’m so used to employing the check the bottle method that I just do it naturally without even thinking about it. Lo-and-behold, glued to the side of that beautiful brown bottle there was a recipe for a slow cooker pot roast seasoned with A1. As an avid A1 enthusiast, I wanted to try this new recipe. And try it we did. My husband made this recipe because he was off on spring break, and I’m a 40-hour-a-week cog in the corporate machine. Plus, every so often I like when he’s my househusband. If I’m gonna work all day every day to put him through med-school, I like to be pampered housewife-style sometimes, too. Anyway, back on track. My husband, who hates to cook, actually said the recipe was easy peezy. In our household, “easy peezy” translates to “it wasn’t hard and I’d do it again”.

The best part though was the meal itself. The A1 pot roast was a huge success. The meat tasted great and the vegetables had this really great sweet and savory flavor to them. My husband and I both went back for seconds and scraped every ounce of it out of the crock pot for leftovers. Even better, the leftovers were great tasting, too! Reheating leftovers is like the culinary version of playing chicken: it’s you facing off against the leftovers in a battle of who’s going to get scared and give up first. Sometimes when you make something, it just doesn’t keep well. Some things get all congealed and the mere thought of eating it again is sickening, or sometimes you get the stuff that was great fresh but tastes like garbage once it’s been nuked for a few minutes. The icing on the cake for our A1 pot roast was that it kept great and fed the two of us for a week straight.

Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients:

½ cup A1 Original Steak Sauce

½ cup water

1 pkg onion soup mix (I used Lipton)

1 boneless beef chuck eye roast (2-2.5lbs)

1 lb. baby red potatoes (we just took 5-6 regular sized red potatoes, peeled and cut them up)

1 pkg baby carrots

1 onion, diced

Mix first 3 ingredients, place meat in slow cooker. Top with vegetables and sauce; cover. Cook on LOW 8-9 hours or on HIGH for 6-7 hours. After cooking, scoop out and enjoy!

The thing is, ladies, these recipes hide in plain sight. It’s just about training yourself to find them. And if you’re really desperate for a new meal idea, go to Walmart and scout out the back of the boxes, bottles and cans. If anyone asks what you’re doing, LIE. Tell them you’re on a diet and are checking the nutrition facts. When you find a recipe that peaks your interest, take a picture of it with your phone. Yes, I freely admit that I do this. It’s called southern resourcefulness.

What are y’alls favorite check the bottle recipes?

The Toilet Saga: Eclipse

I woke up this morning thinking it was going to be an ordinary boring day. I got in my car and was on my way to work when … DUH DUH DUH (that’s supposed to be the suspenseful movie music before something really crazy happens or the killer gets revealed) my toilet was gone. AGAIN. For those of you who haven’t been reading my blog for very long, you can read the first part of the toilet saga here.

See, normally when I drive up over this little hill in the road, I can see the side of the toilet sticking up just slightly. I always check to see if it’s still peeking up at me every morning and every evening on my way to and from work. This morning though, it was gone again. I started to get really panicky, because I knew that I would never see it’s beautiful porcelain sheen ever again. This had to mean that the city FINALLY came to take my toilet away. I started to worry about it. I hoped they had just decided to take it to a place where it could live happily with other roadside toilets and appliances, but I knew that my toilet was probably being crushed into a thousand pieces or thrown into some dump somewhere. My only hope was that it was being taken to a dump with a view. I mean, I am not lucky enough for someone to take and return my toilet twice. It’s like an eclipse or Halley’s comet; one of those things that only happens every so many years. That doesn’t happen twice in one lifetime. It’s like too much awesomeness for one soul to bare. So this time, I knew it had to be gone for good.

Then, all of sudden, I started to see something white off in the distance. Only, it was in the median in the middle of the road. HOT SHIITAKE MUSHROOMS!!! Could it be?! Could that be my beloved toilet’s striking white glare?!

As I got closer, I realized that I was staring at my toilet proudly positioned at the end of a median in the road. “MY TOILET!” I screamed. I was driving up on the backside of it, so the first chance I got, I whipped a U-ey in the road (screeching tires, cutting other cars off, the whole thing) and drove back up as fast as I could to get a better look. It sat there, like a monument to all things weird and white trash. It was beautiful and pristine.

Glorious.

As I sat staring in awe and trying to get a good picture, I got to thinking: who is this mystery toilet mover? What possessed them to move the toilet to that median? I mean, besides the obvious delight it will bring to the hundreds of overworked people who drive down this road every day. Do they read my blog? Were they the ones who moved it before? If they were, where did it disappear to for all that time? And how can I ever thank them for the joy they have brought to my life?

Have you ever seen anything like it? Bet not.

If I ever figure out who you are, toilet artist, I will buy you a meal. But please don’t be offended if I refuse to shake your hand. Can y’all imagine the germs on that thing?! Whoever they are, I sure hope they wore gloves.

It’s the South, Y’all!

Down Here, We're All A Little White Trash

It’s a well-known fact that the South is filled with a rare breed of humans that we like to lovingly call “white trash”. White trash has been around forever and has, in many ways, plagued and enriched all of our lives. We laugh at the white trash on TV shows such as Raising Hope and My Name is Earl, but what I don’t think you all realize is that you laugh because deep down inside of you, there’s a little bit of white trash, too.

Every Southerner, born, bred or otherwise transplanted here, has something they do that is in some way considered WT. In my neighborhood, we have an entire family of people who I would consider to be WT. And it’s not just because their 3 year old son runs naked through the neighborhood at least once a day, or the fact that we see him stand on the top of their minivan and watch traffic go by, or that he uprooted the dead mini tree out of their front yard and proceeded to hit the other kids and their minivan with it. They do other WT things, too. My husband and I lovingly call their child “naked baby”. We’re sure his name is something spectacularly WT like Cletus or Jimmy Bob, but "naked baby" just stuck. They have a thousand cars parked around their house, and sometimes we drive by and their front door is standing wide open for hours while they let their pack of WT kids roam around unsupervised like little yard apes. But here’s the thing... we really know nothing about them. For all we know, the dad could be some genius nuclear engineer or the mom could be the heir to a huge old Southern fortune. Not likely, but the point is that we all have our white trash tendencies.

My husband and I are offenders, too. If you sat on the other side of my subdivision on a Sunday afternoon, you’d see rotten fruit flying over the back of our fence and landing in the empty lot behind our house. At first glance, you’d think “Wow, what white trash people. They’re throwing rotten fruit into the empty lot instead of just throwing it in the trash.” But in reality, my husband is “feeding the birds”. A lot of it has to do with wanting to chuck fruit as far as we can throw it, but we’re also helping to preserve the local bird population. The thing is, after watching us shot-put oranges, apples and pumpkins over our fence, you’d never know my husband is studying to become a surgeon and that I work in finance. Around Christmas time, when you look into our neighborhood and see the house with the MILLIONS of cheap-looking Christmas yard ornaments all strung up and shining so bright that it knocks out half the town's power, you might think “WOW! So white trash.” But again, it’s just us. Whether naturally ingrained in us or bestowed through our raising, we all exhibit some signs and symptoms.

My dad is a math whiz. He can literally compute things in his head like a human calculator, which is to be expected since he’s an accountant. But you’d never know he has a deep dark secret: he burns trash. My mother works at a school and used to teach autistic children and English as a second language. The woman’s a saint, but she also likes to shoot Starlings (they're demon black birds, don't feel bad for them) off of the back porch … in town.

  

A plague on the classiness of the Old South, or a natural instinct passed down through generations of Southerners? I say, look inside yourself and decide.  Perhaps you’re a garbage burner, an I-like-to-use-my-yard-as-a-parking-lot person, or even one of those people who walk into Walmart wearing pajamas and fuzzy bunny slippers.

Or you have a car that looks like this.  

Whichever white trash poison you choose, accepting and embracing it may be the first step towards the full growth of your true Southern roots. What are your white trash tendencies?

Now if you’re sitting there thinking “I don’t do anything that’s even remotely white trash,” you are a dirty rotten liar … and probably not much fun.

It's the South, Y'all!