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Kitchen Aide Pretzel Maker

One of my favorite bloggers — HouseholdDiva6 — has this soft pretzel recipe on her blog that looks really yummy. I’ve always wanted to try it, but even more so since our trip to Europe. That’s where we discovered that, just like Ann Marie said, most little German bakeries sell them. At least that was the case in Austria and Italy. We found some pretzels at a bakery in Luxembourg City, too. The Swiss love their soft pretzels so much, that we saw quite a few Brezelkönig (Pretzel King) stands in the train stations. They sell them in grocery stores, too.

So, I’ve been wanting to try this recipe, but I’m not a baker. I mean, I could make the darn things if I wanted, but I just hadn’t been sufficiently motivated. But then the Kitchen Aide arrived.

AND, while at the grocery store on Sunday, I noticed they had blue crab meat on sale. (The meat is not blue, that’s what the crabs are called. CLICK HERE for a picture of some live blue crabs.) My first thought was to make crab cakes, and then I remembered Ann Marie’s pretzels . I knew that would be the perfect thing to use the Kitchen Aide for.

My Kitchen Aide pretzel maker.

Shannon loves cooking AND baking. Heck, the girl has made her own bagels before. Can you imagine doing that? (She takes after her Dad who also likes to bake.) She also likes crab pretzels. So I knew she’d probably be thrilled to make soft pretzels for me. Of course I had to photograph the process.

Rollin', rollin', rollin'. Keep those pretzels rollin'. Rollin', rollin', rollin', RAWHIDE... (Earworm alert!)

“Rawhide” has nothing to do with these pretzels by the way, except for the “rolling” thing. That tune just popped into my head.

Her pretzels even look like pretzels.
Sprinkling on some salt.
The finished product. Don't they look delicious? They smelled divine.

I didn’t photograph the entire process, just the highlights. I was working after all. The pretzels REALLY smelled yummy as they were baking.

Fresh from the oven.
One of the crab pretzels.

Since it is summer and Papa John’s corn-on-the-cob — the best in the WORLD — is in season, it was only fitting that we serve that with our crab pretzel dinner, too.

Our crab pretzel and corn-on-the-cob dinner.

Now, doesn’t THAT look delicious? It was. Shannon’s homemade pretzels absolutely made the crab pretzel. The crab mixture on top was good, but the homemade pretzels are what really added the special touch.

I’m glad it all turned out in the end. I was a bit worried. Why? Because as I started to pick through the “fresh” crab meat to remove the shells, I realized it wasn’t so fresh after all. It smelled a bit off. Not horrible, but not great either. So I had to stop what I was doing and take it back to the store where I bought it then go to Costco for some of that pasteurized crab meat. Blue crab meat would’ve been better, but that’s not easy to find at reasonable ($12.99/pound) prices. It’s usually closer to $20 or even $25/pound.

It was still good though. I didn’t follow a recipe. I just mixed the crab with about 4 ounces of softened cream cheese, a few tablespoons of mayonnaise, a splash or two of Worcestershire sauce and a teaspoon or so of Old Bay seasoning. It could’ve used a teeny bit more of that, but I didn’t want the crab to be overly salty (like the shrimp salad I’d made a couple days prior). We cut little troughs in the tops of the pretzels, filled them with the crab mixture, sprinkled on a little four-cheese mixture plus an extra dusting of Old Bay and baked them at 400 degrees for about 5 minutes. Then I switched the oven to broil for a minute or two so the tops would get that nice, brown color.

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8 – 9 – 10

So, I didn’t realize until this afternoon, while reading someone else’s blog, that today is 8 – 9 – 10. That’s August 9, 2010 for those of you who are a bit slower on the uptake.

Anyway… just so you know, when I started yesterday’s post, my intention was to tell you about something that made me quite happy. That’s why I started off with a big ole smiley face. And then Hubby told me about this mean trick he was going to play on his Mom. Which, by the way, is related to the thing that made me happy.

Shannon with fireman statue in San Francisco.

Shannon, who has been traveling the world since October 2009 and wasn’t supposed to come back to the United States until October 2010 took this picture especially for me. If you follow THIS LINK you’ll see the whole picture and will understand why she is laughing. (In addition to the fact that she’s standing beside a weird statue, which she knows is just the sort of thing I enjoy being photographed with.)

It was taken in San Francisco about a week ago. As in California. You know, IN the United States.

Turns out, she decided to come home early and surprise us. Which is good and bad.  Good because it was the best surprise we’d had in a long time. Bad because we made a last-minute decision to spend last week at the WV place. She got home on Tuesday. We didn’t get home until Saturday night.

So, although we were supposed to be the first people to be surprised at her early return, we ended up being the last. She got to spend a few days with Amy and the kids. And she got to surprise my mother-in-law, too.

Hubby thought it would be funny to make his Mom believe we didn’t know Shannon was home. So when she called our house on Sunday and asked him, “How’s your heart?” He acted all dumb and said, “What?” Then she said something like, “Didn’t you get a bit of a start yesterday?” He still acted like he didn’t know what she was talking about. And he made it worse later when he went to her house to get some peaches she’d picked for him and told her he wasn’t going back home, he was going back to the WV place where I had supper waiting. (I was in Maryland, NOT West Virginia.)

I told him he was being mean. It was sort of funny, but it’s never nice to play practical jokes on your Mom for gosh sakes. Especially when your Mom is as sweet as his mother.

That’s why I couldn’t tell you that my “Oh, happy day” referred to Shannon’s return, NOT the end of my brief hiatus.

Speaking of that little break… it was nice getting so many comments and e-mails telling me I’d be missed. I didn’t know I had so many regular readers that actually look forward to my posts.

I may not post as frequently, or with such detail, but I’ll try to be somewhat regular.

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Censorship in America

Most of you know that Shannon, our oldest daughter, has been off seeing the world since last October. October 1 to be exact.

At the time of this writing, she’s been gone for 294 days. That’s 9 months, 21 days excluding the end date. If you prefer to think of it in terms of weeks, think 42. Forty-two weeks!

Dang.

Wanna read about her journey? Check out her blog. Or, if you’re a more visual person like yours truly and would rather just SEE where she’s been, check out my snazzy Google tracker map.

Hubby and I have been 100% supportive of her journey since the minute she came to us with her “what do you think of this” speech. She thought for sure at least one of us would’ve given her a reality check. She was wrong.

Anyway…

One of the reasons she was able to just up and go is that she doesn’t own a house. Her timing was quite fortuitous, too. She left right after the lease on her apartment expired. She just changed her mailing address to our place so we could keep an eye on her mail and help take care of things that might need taken care of while she was away.

She’s gotten all sorts of mail over the past 42 weeks. Hubby and I look it over when it arrives to decide if it’s something she needs to know about now, something we should save for later or something we should trash immediately.

Yesterday a piece of mail arrived that Hubby decided she definitely does NOT need to see.

When he showed it to me, I quickly agreed.

What do you think?

To share or not to share, that is the question...
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A Bit Strange

Things have been a bit weird lately. Actually, they’ve been a lot weird. Here are just a few examples…

A Weird Way of Saying Things

Four days ago, we had a blizzard. We had one in December, too. Now we’re having another. They haven’t officially called it a blizzard yet. But we’re supposed to get 10 to 20 inches of snow and it’s going to get really windy. You might as well call it Blizzard #3.

Saying it straight.

We only got about 27 inches of snow at our house in Maryland. In Romney, where we have our WV place, they got 33 inches of snow. That’s a mere six inches more than we got here. But it sure sounds like a lot more. Especially when you consider how many hilly, windy roads there are in Hampshire County.

There are fewer people, true. And not nearly as many suburban sidestreets. But three feet of snow is a lot to deal with. So I was not surprised to learn that roads there are still slick. They, too, are getting more snow today. What did surprise me was the way they reported on road conditions.

Seriously. Check out the small headline…

If you don’t have to go out, don’t. DOH.

That’s pretty funny. I posted this image from their Web site to prove that’s what they said. Maybe folks around here should heed that warning. If not, and they get stuck, just tell them, “Well, why’d you go out. DOH. There’s three feet of snow on the ground!”

They take directness one step farther by saying, essentially, now that outside contractors have been hired, the main roads are in pretty good shape. Way to show your highway workers love, dudes. DOH!

Pricing That Makes No Sense

A few months ago, I looked into the cost of a plane ticket to fly from our local airport (Baltimore Washington International) to Zurich, Switzerland then, 10 days later, on to Brussels, Belgium and a few days after that back to BWI. I checked fares for the same itinerary from Dulles Airport in Virginia. From Dulles, it was about $400 per ticket cheaper.

I wasn’t ready to buy the tickets back then, I was just checking.

Yesterday, I checked again. Now, for whatever reason, it’s cheaper to leave from BWI. Which is cool because we live like five minutes away from there.

Almost all of the flights from BWI have connecting flights in Philadelphia. It just so happens that Philadelphia isn’t that far away from here, so I thought maybe we could save a little more money by driving up to Philly and leaving from there.

I was wrong.

It would cost about $320 MORE, per ticket to fly out of Philadelphia. That makes absolutely no sense. We’d be eliminating an entire plane flight for two people and it would cost us $640 more dollars.

Just How Far Away is She?

If you have been following Shannon’s blog, you know she made it to Laos today. I’ve been keeping a map of Shannon’s travels. Today, after adding Laos, I zoomed out to see just how far away she has gotten. I do that periodically. When I zoomed out and moved the map toward the right so I could see Maryland, USA, this is what I saw…

How far away is Shannon?

After seeing that image, I got to thinking, “I wonder if she’s farther away heading east or west?” That’s what was weird.

Look what happened when I moved the map in the other direction…

How far away is Shannon?

I guess she really is halfway around the world. This isn’t as much weird and/or strange as it is just an odd coincidence.

There sure is a lot of water between us now.

Weird Weather

Yes, we’re back to that again. During lunchtime today, I took a quick stroll around the neighborhood for some between storm images. I want my followers to see what the world looks like three days after a 27-inch snowstorm. And then, what it looks like with another 10-20 inches of snow on top of that.

Our house.

That picture really doesn’t make it look too bad.

One of many snowpiles as tall as or taller than me.

But check this out. All along our street and the main street through our community, there are piles of snow as tall as or taller than me. And I am not a short girl.

I can’t wait to see how tall these piles are in a couple of days. The snow is supposed to stop tomorrow, but it will likely be a couple of days, AGAIN, before we can really go anywhere.

I still love the snow, though. Call me crazy if you must. I just do.

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Does It Get Any Better?

I really have not been in a very Christmasy mood this year. I don’t know why exactly.

Maybe it’s because this is our first Christmas with no children left in the nest. Perhaps it is that Shannon is halfway around the world. Or, maybe I’ve just become an old Scrooge.

As a parent in a blended family (parents and step-children), Christmas has always been a struggle. Trying to arrange where the kids will be and when for the holidays was never easy. It always added an extra bit of stress.

Now that Amy is married with a blended family of her own, that pressure hasn’t gone away completely. But she and TJ always manage to work things out nicely. She and the kids will be coming here on Christmas Eve. We’re hoping Eric won’t have to work so that he can join us. Or maybe he’ll want to be here on Christmas morning. Maybe both.

But that still leaves Shannon. In India of all places for the Christmas holiday. I might be revealing some ignorance here, but that’s okay. I am not afraid to admit that I don’t know everything.

I always thought India was a Hindu and/or Muslim country. While the majority of the population is Hindu or Muslim, about 25% of Indians are Christians. Christmas is actually celebrated with quite a lot of fanfare in India. It is even a national holiday, so everyone, irrespective of their religion, gets to enjoy it along with the Christians.

Of course, that begs the question of whether it will it be harder for Shannon to be alone on Christmas in a nation that actually celebrates Christmas. Or would it be better in a place that doesn’t celebrate the holiday? So she doesn’t miss her family too terribly much?

We’ll never know. Because, although Shannon won’t be with us, she will not be alone for Christmas.

The way things have worked out, she is only in India now because of her visa delay (she had a hard time getting a visa). She is currently making her way across the northern parts of the country. By the time Christmas rolls around, she’ll be in the south, in a city called Bangalore.

The company I work for has a sizable operation in Bangalore. I don’t know many of my Indian coworkers well since we don’t speak often, mainly because of the time difference. But there’s a woman named Joyce who works in the Bangalore office doing the same job as me. We do interact by e-mail occasionally, so I sent her an e-mail asking if she had any recommendations to share with Shannon for her pending visit.

Shannon will be arriving in Bangalore on December 23rd or 24th.

While Joyce was more than willing to give Shannon some recommendations, she did even better. She invited Shannon to stay at her house and spend Christmas with her family.

Hubby and I were both quite touched by that very kind, generous and completely unexpected offer. I mean, Joyce has a husband and two daughters (ages 10 and 16 months). Who would ever think she would invite a stranger to her house for Christmas?

Well, Joyce did invite that stranger (Shannon) to stay. And Shannon accepted. So Shannon will get to spend Christmas with a family after all.

Not just any family, either. A very special family with children. A Christian family that celebrates Christmas like we do.

While I know Shannon will miss everyone over the holidays, I think it is her niece and nephews that she’ll miss the most. Because children are what makes Christmas so magical.

As I have told Joyce, we will never be able to thank her enough for opening her home and heart to our daughter. Of course, knowing what a special person Shannon is, I know Joyce won’t be sorry. And apparently Joyce’s oldest daughter is already making plans for Shannon’s visit.

I don’t think it does get any better. I’ve got some Christmas spirit now!

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It’s the Big Three One!

Today is Shannon’s birthday. Of course, for her it is technically over since she’s in India, which is 10.5 hours ahead of us. But I’m going to celebrate anyway. Because she deserves it.

I won’t go and make her cry (scroll down to see his comment if you do follow the link), like Hubby did. I could get all mushy and stuff, but I won’t. I mean, it is her birthday. She’s supposed to be smiling and happy, right?

So, I just decided to post a bunch of pictures that will make her smile. Of course, if they don’t make Shannon smile, they’ll at least make everyone else smile. And who can’t use a good smile now and then?

Anyway… back to Shannon’s birthday. The image quality of some of these pics isn’t fabulous, but some of them are as much as THIRTY ONE YEARS OLD!

The next one is only 30 years old.
Can you guess at what big event it was taken?

I find the next one particularly cute.

Who would’ve thunk she’d grow up to be a world traveler?
Especially since she looks all Green Acres–ish in the next shot…

She is with Hubby in the next shot.

I really, really like the next one, too.

And just look how darn cute she is here…

I had to post one of Shannon with Amy.
Because I know Amy has been looking at these shots,
thinking, “What about me?”


Let’s Jump ahead to 1996 and Shannon’s Senior Prom.


And I am pretty sure the next one
was on high school graduation day.

Okay, I have lots more pics to share, but if I don’t hurry up and post this, she’ll never see it.

So, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Shannon!

I hope you enjoyed the trip down memory lane.

You know I love you, so I’ll just stop here.