Saturday Night Special: Noodles and Beef

Life hack for the week: Make your bed as soon as you get out of it in the morning.  

Made this tonight based on what I had on hand.  Buon appetito!

Saturday Night Special
Noodles and Beef

Ingredients:

1. 1 pound beef, diced
2. Dry Italian salad dressing mix
3. Olive oil
4. ½ cup finely diced onions
5. 2 large cloves of garlic, crushed, peeled, and chopped fine
6. ½ pound wide egg noodles (papardelle are fine, too)
7. Italian cheese: Parmesan, Romano, Pecorino, or a mixture of these
8. Fresh parsley, chopped

Steps:

1. Bring to a boil a pot of well salted water for the noodles
2. Coat the diced beef with olive oil and add a good coating of the dry Italian salad dressing mix; set aside to marinate
3. Add olive oil to a deep skillet; set the heat to just above medium
4. Add the chopped garlic and onion; stir occasionally till the onions just start to brown and you can smell the garlic
5. Add the marinated beef to the skillet, stir occasionally
6. When the water comes to a boil, add the noodles, sitrring occasionally
7. When the beef is cooked through, turn down to low until the noodles are ready
8. Add the noodles, stirring to coat with the beef and onions; turn the heat back up to medium
9. Grate about 1/4 c. cheese
10. Garnish with the parsley

Serve with a glass of red wine, crusty bread, and a green salad

tajb, 7/28/2019

Quotes

I've saved a lot of clippings over the years. Some are recipes (OK, LOTS are recipes!), some are obituaries. Many are quotes that stopped me in my tracks because they gave me a new perspective on some quandary that I had recognized. Here are two from this week.

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.---Marc Chagall

Don't mistake the wound of the world for the world.

Musings on Jobs

Over the last year, my work scheduled has gone through some changes --- one job has shrunk and another has expanded. I now often work two or three evenings a week instead of just one (and, fortunately, I rarely work Sunday afternoons anymore!).

This has meant that I'm often looking for somewhere to eat supper after 9:00 p.m. There are not a lot of choices (other than fast food!) at that hour of the day. There is a local chain of Italian restaurants that are open to 11:00. One local restaurant is open 24/7 which has comfort food, but I can only take that about once a week. (A similar one closed when the interstate was widened, and although it has re-opened in another location, it is, sadly, no longer 24/7.) My favorite restaurant closes about 9 p.m. If I can get there before 9 a.m., the owner will serve me since he's there till 9:30 or 10:00 getting ready for the next day.

Which brings me to a local chicken 'n' biscuit place. They close the dining room at 10:00, and if you arrive after 9:30 and place an order to eat in, you are pointedly informed that the dining room will be closing in 29 minutes. This seems silly (and unwelcoming) to me because the drive-through stays open for another hour or two. They have usually done most of the cleaning in the dining room --- they could simply block off most of the dining room for the last hour or so just as my breakfast hangout does for the last hour before closing.

I know it's not always easy to maintain grace under pressure. I've never worked that kind of job, so I'm not familiar with the kind of pressures that that line of work carries. I've never had a job with a time clock, and I've never had to wear a badge or nametag. One of my brothers worked in food service for many years, so I'm going to ask him about what it was like.

A friend of mine just wrote a blog about his struggles with jobs contributing too much to his identity. I know just what he means. About 14 years ago, I left a job of many years. Sometimes it was too much a part of my identity. The interesting thing was that after I left, I didn't miss the job per se, but I did miss the work I had been doing and realized that the work had affected me positively even though the job (the trappings of employment) had sometimes been toxic.

Christmas Day 2009

Christmas Day was rainy --- all day long!

I didn't have to play anywhere, so I slept in till about 6 (that IS sleeping in for me!), but didn't get out of bed till almost 8.

Went out and got some breakfast (the food was good but the restaurant was having HVAC trouble and it was COLD) and read the paper.

Then I opened presents and cards.

Lunch was with friends. I took a bottle of Carménère. We had turkey breast, carrots, broccoli salad (not!), potatoes, apple and onion stuffing, turnip soufflé (not!), with figgy pudding (YES! YES! YES!) and mincemeat pie for dessert. After lunch, most of the folks played Liverpool Rummy, while I had a nap, then worked on a crocheted afghan.

This past week I finished a crocheted striped (claret, burgundy) prayer shawl for a person at church who has been diagnozed with a tumor (pancreas?). I know this person, so it was special to be able to do it for her. I'm going to make another one, along with a simpler variation, so I can take pictures and write a proper pattern for them.

Merry Christmas!

In the Midst of Music

'Tis the season, so they say.

Have played two funerals this month. The first was very ordinary. The second, today, was unsual (for me, anyways). I was filling in for a colleague who is away for the Thanksgiving weekend. On the music list was UNC's song, "Hark the Sound." Seemed odd, especially since the deceased was NOT an alumna as far as I could tell. During one of the "witnesses" (read "eulogy"), a woman told this joke: Q: Why don't Southern Ladies go to orgies? A: Too many thank you notes to write. Seemed out of place to me. Especially in a church funeral service.

Yesterday I played a wedding for a (different) colleague. All went well except that I forgot to play "something" on the chimes to signal the minister, groom, and best man to enter. They figured it out and came in at the right moment just the same.

Used a lot of the same prelude music for both the wedding and the funeral (Walter/Vivialdi Concerto in B minor; Bach Nun freut' euch; Bach Von Gott will ich nicht lassen; Pachelbell Canon in D; Bach Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring).

This week begins Christmas music with a vengeance. This week there is a concert on Tuesday evening, a rehearsal on Thursday evening, and concert on Friday evening. The following week includes playing (organ) for two dinner parties, another rehearsal, and another concert. And it goes one like that for most of December.

Hope to deliver tomorrow the baby blanket that has been sitting, finished, since before the baby was born. I've got a card, gift bag, and tissue paper all ready. Just have to figure out which knitting bag it's in.

Am working on several prayer shawls. I had a request for one for someone specific, so have settled on a design (stripes in shades of red) and have started crocheting it. It shouldn't take me too long.

Mother broke her hip and fell (that's the sequence that the doctors confirmed). She got a new hip. We are hoping the severe pain in her leg was from deterioration or cracking of the hip over the last two years. On a scale of 1 to 10, she said that her pain had been a 40!

Best quote of the week: "Food and love both begin with looking."

Compline

Tonight was the first Compline of the fall semester at the Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill, NC, where I am a member. I'd forgotten that they resumed tonight until someone mentioned it on Facebook. I still had enought time to get there, so I went.

20 singers + 1 thurifer. Nave full. Candlelight (except for music stand lights for the singers). LOTS of incense!

The picture was taken just before the service began. I tried to take some indoor pictures, but they didn't turn out well --- I think I had the camera on the wrong setting.

An exciting event took place at the end --- a man proposed to his girlfriend (yes, got down on one knee!) and she accepted.

Way Behind

Since my last post, I've been to the Men's Spring Knitting Retreat and a worship and music conference. I finished a white baby blanket for one of the prayer shawl groups and am in the middle of several shawls.

At the MSKR '09, everyone brought a 15"x15" square to contribute to a blanket as a gift to Easton Mountain. Joe bravely volunteered to do all the assembly. As you can imagine, it was not possible to assemble a queen-sized blanket over a long weekend, so he took it home to finish. Soon he shipped it to me. I had volunteered to put the border on it. I am finally on the last round! The first two rows were 1100 stitches each and the last two rows are 2750 rows each. And since I get almost no tv channels since the big switcheroo, there isn't much to watch while I'm working on it. The color of the border is olive, so I am grateful for my lighted crochet hook.

While I was working on the above-mentioned white baby blanket, the wooden handle on my aluminum crochet hook became detached. Just as a test, I worked the rest with a full-length hook inserted into the wooden handle. It worked very well, so I'm going to glue the long hook into the handle instead of the chopped-off one it came with. I also used, for some of the time, a Brittany hook. It is a longer style and more comfortable. Longer hooks are definitely the way to go!

After the worship and music conference at Montreat, I made a pilgrimage to Yarn Paradise in Asheville, NC. A fabulous place with a huge yarn, book, and magazine inventory. That's where I found the long Brittany hook, along with a new style of needle gauge and a brochure on yarn requirements for crochet projects.

Since I'm almost done with the border on the MSKR blanket, I need to get ready to take lots of pictures of it. I went to Wolf Camera at University Mall and did a little browsing for a decent digital camera. I am not satisfied yet that I know what I want, so I didn't get anything. I'm going to do a little more research this weekend.

I'm planning to write an entire blog about the MSRK, so stay tuned for that.