All posts by verily sherrilee

Directionally challenged, crafty, reading mother of young adult
Baboon Achievers, Food, Stories

Memorial Day Leftover Pasta

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I’m a weekend cook. On weekdays, all good intentions about cooking and cleaning go out the window by the time I get home.  Heated-up leftovers are about all I’m willing to expend energy on for dinner.  On the weekends I have plenty of morning energy and time for cooking.

One my Memorial Day weekend gatherings was grilling at our house – veggie burgers with all the fixins’, potato salad, pasta salad, grilled corn, watermelon. There were leftovers, but not really anything you could reheat on a Thursday night so I still felt the need to cook something.

I decided to use the leftovers to make a dish. I started with what was left of a large yellow onion and sautéed it in olive oil. Then I cut the kernels off the 3 grilled corns and added them.  I found a can of black beans in the cabinet, rinsed and threw them in. Then I added the leftover pasta (I made WAY too much the night before.  I seasoned it and it tasted ok but didn’t look quite right so I chopped up the leftover 2½ tomatoes and stirred them in.  Then it was perfect.

Memorial Day Leftover Pasta
Olive oil
1 yellow onion (or almost one), chopped
3 ears of corn (grilled OK), kernels cut off the cob
1 can black beans, rinsed thoroughly
4 cups cooked pasta
2½ tomatoes, chopped
Salt, pepper, cumin, chili pepper to taste

Heat up the olive oil and sauté the chopped onions. Add corn and after a few minutes, add beans and pasta.  Mix thoroughly and season to taste.  Add tomatoes at the end and toss gently.  Eat warm or cold!

What leftovers will you have after this weekend?

 

 

 

History, Movies, News

RIP Roger Moore

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Roger Moore, most famously-known for playing James Bond, passed away this week. He was always happy about being known as 007.

James Bond, as written by Ian Fleming, is a smarmy, violent, misogynist. In addition the 007 movies have taken the violence to new heights.  If you can think of it, Hollywood has blown it up in the name of British spydom.

So why am I a Bond fan? Why have I seen them all? More than once? Can probably tell you the names of the books and the movies in order? Why did I make a special trip to visit Schilthorn (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service locale) when I was in Switzerland? Have had more than one heated discussion about who was the best Bond?  It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

Just one of my many quirks, I guess.

What’s your most outrageous “quirk”?

Baboon Achievers, Business, Fifty Words, Food, Stories

The Mall

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We have a variety of shops: cheese, socks, pie, underwear, candy, Cracker jacks, Three Musketeers, peanuts, toast, jam, fish balls, ice cream, chocolate, books, Gold mine stock, swamp real estate, Brooklyn Bridge, air, pet rocks, nails and screws.

What should we name our little mall? Should we open on holidays?

Food, Travel

Sardines and Only Sardines

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Our last day of the cruise was really just a quick ride from the Port of Lisbon to the airport. No statues, no scenic tour, no talkative guide with plenty to say on the current political climate in Europe (or America).  The Lisbon airport is quite large and getting through the duty-free shop before getting to the gates is like a trip through a perfume-drenched Ikea.

Just after escaping the duty free, as we walked down the hallway, hoping to find our gate, we saw the brightest, most colorful shop ever – it looked like a carnival inside – with rows and rows of colorful tins. After a bit we realized it was shop full of sardines – just sardines.

Apparently Portugal is known for its sardines and from what we could tell from the shop, aged sardines are a real treat. The tins are marked with years on them, although I find it hard to believe that there were 50-year-old sardines in the tins marked 1967.  The shop was busy so we couldn’t get anyone to confirm if they were really that old or if it was just a marketing gimmick.  Both of us are vegetarians so even though it initially seemed like a fun thing to buy at an airport, we both passed.  But even a week later, I’m still amazed at how one product can keep a store open, especially such a big store!

If your store had just one product, what would it be?

Family, gardening, Stories

Gardening Traditions

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Today’s post comes to us from Jacque.

Last weekend, the weekend of Mother’s Day, I gardened under blue skies and warm sunshine. I planted most of the flowers in the front garden—snapdragons, petunias, vinca, marigolds, and indigo salvia.   Last year I did the same thing.  Then the local rabbits then feasted on the tender seedlings.  Fat and happy, the entire Cottontail family flaunted their white tails at me and my dogs.  HMPH. And my front garden was much too bare when those flowers should have bloomed.

My mother and grandmother taught me to garden. They both fashioned cloches from milk cartons which dotted their gardens.  Neither one of them would have ever considered spending hard-earned money on a real cloche!

The first cloche I saw was Grandma’s made out of a milk carton. At that time milk cartons were made of card stock covered in wax.  Grandma cut off the top and the bottom, then used the middle to protect her plants.  Mom did the same thing.  When plastic milk jugs hit the grocery store, those were even better.  They cut off the bottom.  Those were ideal—just the right size and with a pre-existing vent in the top.

So guess who follows this tradition?   Each year I hoard my plastic jugs, cut off the bottoms, and protect my plants under the milk jug cloches.  In the past I have only used this for vegetables.  But I am weary of losing my flowers to these rabbits.  So this year my front garden is sprouting milk jug cloches.

Our neighbors stop by and ask us, “What’s with the milk jugs? Why do you do that?”  Then I explain the concept of a cloche and not spending the money on the real thing and thinking about Grandma when I garden.  And I feel connected to all those gardeners from generations past.

In a few weeks I will string all those milk jugs together, store them under the deck, and re-use them in the next season. I will enjoy spoiling those rabbits’ snacks.  Then when the flowers bloom, I will think about Grandma again, and how we used to tease her about saving money with the milk carton cloches. I also teased her about being a living yard butt. She used to  position herself bottom-side up in her flower garden, pulling weeds, loosening soil, and babying her flowers.  I smile as I think of that scene.  Then I bend over and pull a weed, my rear end high in the air, carrying on another great family gardening tradition.

What do you re-use around the house?

Stories, Travel

The Rock

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Our last full day on the ship started in Gibraltar, a slip of land at the very south of Spain, just across the straits from Morocco, which actually belongs to Britain. It feels very British on the peninsula with the traditional red telephone boxes, London-style litter bins and even little bobble-heads of the queen in the souvenir shops.

We happened on a mental health rally, complete with drum corps in kilts and a spin class set up right in the middle of the town square.

With only an hour or so left before the ship sailed, we negotiated an abbreviated tour with one of the local taxi tour drivers. Of my own free will I went into the St. Michael’s caves (client has a photo as proof) and we rode over the top of The Rock to see the view and, of course, the monkeys. There are 202 monkeys currently; the government of Gibraltar keeps track of them via tattoos, feeds them and protects them. The monkeys certainly understand their special status, calmly posing for photos, catching rides atop taxis and attempting to hijack purses and photo bags.

Our tour driver had to wing his way down the rock and through traffic, but we made it back to the ship in one pieces – and just 5 minutes late. They pulled up the gangplank behind us!

Have you ever had a whirlwind tour?

Baboon Blog Redux, History, Stories, The Baboon Congress, The Future

5,000 Challenge

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Trail Baboon?

I was thinking I wanted this blog to have a familiar title – something easy to recognize, but sly.  A turn of phrase that describes information that’s sent out solely for the purpose of observing the reaction of the audience. Something catchy but common.  However, somebody else has that title locked up, and so one must make do with the opportunity that one has.

Maybe “Braille Typhoon” would be better. “Teal Ballroom”? I’m open to suggestions.

This was how we started out 7 years ago – a rag tag bunch still mourning the end of TLGMS and following our favorite DJ into a new venture. Earlier this year we completely hijacked the trail and made it our own.

And as of yesterday, we have 5,000 followers to our little blog. Some days it feels quiet on the Trail, but even then we have many likes and probably a few lurkers.

I have a challenge today. If you are reading this blog, but have never commented, please put one quick comment out there.  One word or two or even a sentence is fine.  If you been here before you know we are a kind community and we’d love to hear from you.

For everybody else – do you remember your first comment on the Trail (or the Trial Balloon)?

Travel, Weather

Rain, rain, go away

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It was pouring down rain the morning we steamed into Malaga. I had meetings in the morning and had resigned myself to an afternoon stuck on the ship.  Then as we sat in the restaurant having lunch, the sun suddenly broke through and the clouds started drifting away.

Nobody had to ask us twice; we were off the ship in a flash. All up and down the streets of the older part of Malaga is the Andalusian state tree, the beautiful “Jacaranda” with the most amazing purple flowers in abundance.  I had ask a local is it was Ha-caranda (as you would expect in Spain) or Ja-caranda (maybe the word coming into the language from elsewhere).  Ha-caranda it is!

We poked our heads into a pretty little cathedral and on the way out encountered a sweet but spoiled dog as well as some very good street performers playing guitar.

The Picasso Museum was too tempting to miss; he was born in Malaga, so they feel very territorial about him. It was a nice exhibit with some of his very earliest work up through pieces he did near the end of his life.  They also had bookmarks with just the cat from Reclining Nude with a Cat but wouldn’t take a credit card for a purchase under €10 and I didn’t have any more Euros.  So we settled for some Picasso refrigerator magnets from the souvenir shop across from the museum.

We also had to take many photos of the Malaga Ferris Wheel (the Noria de Malaga) as my client collects Ferris wheel photos (no, I don’t know why). It is the largest itinerant Ferris wheel in Europe, as it is technically moveable.

By the time we got back to the ship, the sky was bright blue with just a few wispy white clouds in the distance – a perfect way for a rainy day to end up!

What do you like to do on a rainy day?

 

Stories, Travel

Wandering, wandering

30 Comments

We had meetings all morning and by the time we were finished, it was too late to catch one of the shore excursions. But I’ve never been in Cartagena before and my co-worker, Shannon, had never been on a cruise and didn’t want to sit on the ship all afternoon.  So we headed out, grabbing a map of the city center on our way.

We wandered through the narrow streets, took lots of pictures and stopped at one point to listen to a guy playing the accordion. We ended up on the top of the hill overlooking Cartagena among some Roman ruins, including an ancient flour mill where they were installing large metal black widow spiders. I couldn’t remember the word for spider (“aranda” – I remembered it as soon as it wasn’t useful anymore!) but we asked the young men doing the installation “porque” (why).  We got nothing from them – just a laugh and a nod of the head.

Then we wandered down off the hill to look at a big church that we had seen from the top of the hill. It was locked but when we peered inside there was a man sitting in a folding chair at the back of the pews and he came over and let us in. My Spanish is just good enough for me to ask him the name of the church and he gave us the name “Basilica de la Caridad” and a little of its history.

After that we walked a bit until we found a current excavation of some more Roman ruins. It was fascinating to see how everything is put back together during this kind of work and it was very interesting to see the artist renderings of what the building and rooms looked like in Roman times.

By then we had just enough time to buy a t-shirt for Shannon’s son and then get back to the ship. I’m sure we had a better time than if we had done a canned bus tour.

When have you wandered?

Family, Food

Begging for S’More

28 Comments

I started becoming a vegetarian when I was four. My Aunt Effie served lamb for Easter and when I discovered what was on the plate I promptly threw up.  At the age of five I had to be taken out of a seafood restaurant when I realized the lobsters in the tank at the entrance were becoming the meals at the tables around us.  When I was six I found out that venison was Bambi.  And so it continued.

I gave up the very last bit of meat left in my diet (ground beef) when I was 16. Even after all these years there still a few things I miss.  Tuna salad on a tomato on a hot summer day, sizzling bacon on a cold winter morning.

And marshmallows. No yams with marshmallows at Thanksgiving.  No Rocky Road ice cream.  No s’mores. That’s the one that really hurts. In the past few years there have been a couple of companies that have tried vegetarian marshmallows but they weren’t very good to start with and not good at all for s’mores: too small, too sticky, too melty. Over the years I’ve even tried s’mores with marshmallow cream.  If you think regular s’mores are messy, marshmallow cream is messier.

So when I saw the Trader Joe’s has come out with vegetarian marshmallows I was skeptical. But I figured if they were terrible it was only a couple of bucks. Over the weekend, Young Adult and I made a little fire in our pit and gave them a try.  Imagine my surprise when they turned out to be great.  Not quite as soft as your basic Stay Puff, but great for s’mores.  They stayed on the skewer until they were done and tasted just fine.  They did go pretty fast from light brown to bubbly but that might have had something to do with the impatience of the s’more makers.  Guess I’ll have to try marshmallows on yams next!

What have you given up that you miss?