Cemetery Picnic

What do you pack for a picnic at a cemetery?

Okay.  I should probably back up. For Mother’s Day, I took my mother to a cemetery for a picnic. This is not a hint to my mother that she has one foot in the grave and not a me being dramatic and exaggerating the truth.  The truth is, I did take my mother to a cemetery.  The cemetery in question is about an hour away and is the cemetery that hold the remains of the first generation of our family in America.  Pretty exciting stuff if you are interested in family history/ genealogy.  Since the cemetery is about an hour a way, it makes sense to bring a picnic and refreshment, which bring me back to my original question. 

What do you pack for a picnic at a cemetery?

Do you go full funeral meal and bring cold salads and finger food? Do you liven it up and play off a Halloween theme? Do keep it to traditional picnic food? These questions rolled around in my head, until I did a mash up of all three.

Cemetery Picnic Menu

Chicken Salad on Onion Rolls with Cheese and Tomato

Deviled Eggs

Marinated Mushrooms

Mozzarella and Tomato

Strawberries

Dirt Cups. (Chocolate Pudding with crushed Oreo’s and Gummy Worms)

What would you pack for your picnic?

Experiment 452

  I think that if you are going to experiment on people, you shouldn't always let them know that you are doing it. It ruins the experiment, because it isn't a controlled test. How do you know that the results are really the results if the test subject knows that they are being experimented on?  You don't know.

Which brings me to one of my coworkers, I will call her Experiment 452, mostly because I would not want to embarrass her by the multiple tests that have been ran through her programing without her knowing.  This is the one case, where I have let the test subject pick the experiment that she was going to partake of.  There are mixed results.

In my quest to use at least one recipe in every cookbook that I own, it becomes rather obvious that I have an issue with Betty Crocker.  I own six Betty Crocker cookbooks, and I am not ashamed yet of it.  When I was growing up, my mother used to use a Betty Crocker cookbook for lots of stuff, and it is what I learned to cook and bake out of. It is as much of my childhood as my kid brother was.  As an adult I strive to try and find the same exact Betty Crocker Cookbook version that my mother uses. It was not to be found. Instead I found a bunch of other versions.

The version that I used was a picture less paper back, that is just recipes. It is a very compact version and really handy if you needed to take it traveling with you to the grocery store, or to work. I let Experiment 452 pick out several recipes that they would be inclined to try.  I was amazed and shocked, Experiment 452 put some thought into the recipes she chose (about  half a dozen) and the theme was readily apparent. I was going to be making a soup and sandwich combo.

Curried Chicken Salad (page 485) and Mulligatawny Soup (page 559) was the final decision.  I have no idea what Mulligatawny Soup was, and it sounded a little bit like a golf term. Thankfully after a quick scan of the recipe and a cross reference of the Internet, Mulligatawny Soup is a curry flavored soup. Curry was going to be a theme, and considering I am a fan of curry, this was a very smart selection of Experiment 452.

Gathering my ingredients for the soup and the chicken salad I felt like I murdered a flock of chicken to make broth and to divide it between the soup and the salad.  Both the soup and the salad were really easy to put together. There is something to be said about simple clear concise instructions.  You have not guess work as to what you are to be doing and or house to do it. I have done some recipes where it is 2 parts guess work and 1 part crossing your fingers that you made the right choice in how you combined the ingredients.  Both the Mulligatawny Soup and the Curried Chicken Salad  required a very low skill in culinary mastery and provided you trusted a child with a knife, they could make this easily.

But how does it taste?  That is what Experiment 452 was for.  I needed an un bias taste tester. Packing a lunch for her and I trotted off to work.  Experiment 452 loved it and thought it was awesome.  I on the other hand was a bit of skeptic. It wasn't horrible, but love was a really strong word for it. Mulligatawny Soup smells really good when heated up but was not a super strong curry flavor. The Curried Chicken Salad was alright. It wasn't something I would write home about. It has rice in it, which makes it really unique for chicken salad.

Two days later I brought Experiment 452 more soup, but added rice to it. The rice was needed to add more body to the Mulligatawny Soup. You don't even realize that it needed rice until you tried it with the rice.  Overall I would keep the recipe, but add rice and noodles to it. The broth hits a happy spot, and as noted by Experiment 452 this would be a really good fall soup. The mace in it is reminiscent of nutmeg and makes you want to finish up with a piece of pumpkin pie.

The only remaining to talk about is the Curried Chicken Salad. It didn't knock any socks off. I have been eating it for a week, and all I can think of is this is what people who don't really like curry would want curry to taste like.  There was such a small amount of curry in there compared to all the other ingredients that it was almost ashamed to have curry as an ingredient.  I wanted to love this recipe, and so did Experiment 452, but the sad truth is that there is not a lot of flavor in the chicken salad and that you would be better off with a regular chicken salad then trying the Curried Chicken Salad.

It is a sad realization the Betty Crocker just isn't' that interested in the full potential of curry. The recipes are all middle of the road and don't get all that wild or exotic with the ingredients. The most exotic ingredient that was actually hard for me to find was the Mace, which I later discovered is just a different version of nutmeg and comes from the same plant. I can only hope that I have better luck with flavor and spice in other Betty Crocker recipes and I want to thank Experiment 452 for being a good sport about this.

FYI- 7 of 58 achieved.

Spinach: A Leafy Story

I like spinach. It is green and leafy and despite it being part of the dirt dozen, it is supposed still be good for you. I thought that I would try and beat the system and grow my own spinach. A bag of baby spinach is $3.99 a bag and a nine pack of garden spinach is $4.99.  It seemed like pretty easy math on my part.

It took three days and two nights to turn a grassy pox ridden spot in my back yard to become a mini flower and vegetable oasis. The ground was clay. Up rooting sod on top of clay jostled every nerve ending of my body. With much thanks, my mother came down with a case of the shits (that is her get out of work excuse) and took a day to help me remove sod and prep the garden.  Every bone, every muscle, and every mental fiber went into the garden and its creation. Perennials were planted.   Two Tomato plants, three pepper plants and six spinach plants went into the garden. It was the dream of a fresh spinach salad.

The only hitch in that plan was the fact that spinach grows at a much faster rate then the tomatoes. I had six very healthy spinach plants that were growing leaves the size of my head and a real blank what to do with spinach other then the obvious spinach salad.  In the beginning I tossed it into soup. Then I tossed it into curry, because I love spinach curry when I go out to eat.  But I couldn't keep up.  It just kept getting bigger and bigger. The abnormal weather we were having of lots of rain following by sunshine, worked as a natural growth hormone. My spinach got huge over night.

After harvesting spinach and giving it away, I still had a whole bunch of spinach left. It kept growing and the more I harvested, the more it came back.  So it was time to get creative. It was time to do something with the spinach. In the last week I have made several spinach dishes and I am oddly okay with this.

Sunday: Harvest all the feasible spinach from the garden and clean it.  Take a portion of spinach and make vegetable soup out of it. Eat a little bit of sauteed spinach with garlic and butter

Monday: Avoid looking spinach in the eye as you make smoothies.

Tuesday: Start spinach and ricotta gnocchi dough and eat chicken salad wrapped in spinach. Make Meat loaf and incorporate spinach into meat dough and bake.  Ignore the flecks of green and just keep
eating.

Wednesday: Finish spinach gnocchi and eat left over spinach and other vegetable soup from Sunday.

Thursday: Avoid looking spinach in the eye.

In four days, I have done four different spinach recipes. All taste good and for the most part healthy, but clearly not enough, because I still have more spinach.  I am on the hunt for more spinach recipes that I can incorporate my mutant large spinach in peacefully.  The moral of this story is that if you are going to plant something, be prepared for it to grow and have a plan for produce!