I’ve been thinking long and hard about continuing the blog or letting it die and I’ve decided to let it die. My decision to do this is mainly in reaction to news stories recently of people being forcibly institutionalized and general deterioration of free speech.  I will continue to post recipes and projects occasionally, but my online presence will be greatly reduced. For my family and friends that use the blog to keep up with me, email or phone is probably the best way.

If you’re interested in an email list (and I get enough interest) please leave your email or send to me privately and I might do a newsletter with recipes and projects

The Best Blueberry Muffins
Yield: 12 standard or 6 large muffins

Ingredients:
Jam:
1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries
1 tsp sugar

Muffins:

You’ll need:

1/4 cup yellow mustard seeds (you can use 1/8 cup ground mustard as well)

2 Tablespoons black peppercorns

8 bay leaves

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup kosher salt

2 onions, wedged

1lb bacon, thick cut

Six 12 ounce bottles Guinness Stout

One 12-14 lb turkey

1 cup turkey or chicken stock

1 Tablespoon butter

1 Tablespoon flour

1. In a very large pot, combine mustard seeds, peppercorns and bay leaves. Toast over moderate heat until fragrant (about 2 minutes).

Add the brown sugar and salt and remove from heat. Add 4 cups of water and stir until sugar dissolves. Add the Guinness and 16 cups cold water. Once mixture is cool enough, add onions and bacon. Stir to combine and add the turkey, breast side down and cover. Refrigerate 24 hours.

2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lift turkey out of brine and pick off any peppercorns or bay leaves. Pat dry and put in a roasting pan. I like to use one with a small horizontal rack in it, but the V shaped racks work nicely also. Breast side goes up this time. Scatter the onion wedges around the pan and add 1 cup of water. (Note: This will seem like a good place to use some beer or the leftover brine, don’t do it. It’ll caramelize and burn to the bottom of your pan and screw up your gravy, water is good) Use toothpicks to secure pieces of bacon all over the turkey.

You’re ready to roast the turkey for 2 hours. Remove the bacon (save the bacon) and return the turkey to the oven to roast another hour.

3. Once your turkey is ready, transfer it to a carving board. Pour the pan juices into a saucepan and boil until reduced to 3 cups (about 5 minutes). Add the turkey stock and boil. In a small bowl, mash the butter and flour to a paste. Whisk the paste into the gravy and boil until thickened slightly, about 5 minutes.

3a. If you don’t have 3 cups of pan juices or like a thicker gravy, do this instead: Pour juices into a saucepan and whisk in 3 Tablespoons of flour. Add the stock and deglaze the pan (if necessary). Whisk until the gravy comes to a boil and begins to thicken. Add 1/2 cup milk and whisk until the gravy coats the back of a spoon, 5-10 minutes. Season to taste.

4. Serve with gravy and the bacon sliced up.

One hundred million years ago, New Mexico lay nameless and borderless and partially submerged beneath sprawling, shallow seas.

Dinosaurs of every size and appetite wandered to the edge of such seas, in search of plants, water or smaller creatures further down the food chain. The air above them hung hot and dense, sagging with humidity, and pterosaurs flapped and glided against it.

Pterosaurs – or pterodactyls, as they’re often called – once filled our Western skies, flying on leathery, membranous wings that sometimes stretched more than 40 feet from tip to tip. Using multifingered hands and pointed mouths full of teeth, pterosaurs snapped up fish along the muddy banks of prehistoric lakes and oceans. One pterosaur left its footprints along one sea’s western shore, time turned its tracks into stone, and Clayton Lake State Park – in the northeast corner of modern-day New Mexico – turned those prints into a tourist attraction.

Clayton Lake State Park

Bones of another pterosaur in the San Juan Basin in the northwestern part of the state, joined other skeletons from throughout the West to suggest that pterosaurs lived all across what is now New Mexico throughout the age of dinosaurs.

In Lordsburg, old-timers used to gather at the now-defunct Triple J – a coffee shop and tavern – to play pool and trade stories. Many had known even older residents, and some of the stories they passed on dated back to the 19th century. One man, Leroy Jones, used to recall area ranchers in the late 1800s who swore they had seen pterosaurs – reptilian, enormous and amazingly alive – swooping over the desert hills and scrub brush of New Mexico’s southwestern Bootheel.

In Maxwell during 1972, not far from the petrified tracks of Clayton Lake State Park, a Los Alamos man named Ronald Monteleone reported glimpsing a living pteranodon, one of the largest known pterosaur varieties. While driving, “Suddenly he saw a 25 to 35-foot pteranodon-like creature fly out a ravine,” wrote Phillip O’Donnell in Dinosaurs: Dead or Alive?.

The credibility of this account suffers harshly from a few things. For instance, O’Donnell was a 14-year-old home schooler who used the online moniker “Living Dinosaur Man for Christ” and seemed hellbent on promoting the ideas that mankind and dinosaurs were created together only 6,000 years ago. The credibility of the late-1800s sightings suffer, as well – mainly from a seemingly total lack of documentation – and although many other accounts of living pterosaurs have been reported throughout the country and throughout the world, the possibility of pterosaurs having survived into modern times, in New Mexico or anywhere, is highly unlikely.

Odds are, most witnesses to such anachronistic creatures actually saw large birds such as condors or herons – or that the severity of the often-desert landscapes they were staring across suggested to them a world millions of years younger than the one we live in today, a world perfectly suited for flying reptiles.

The possibility of pterosaurs having survived into modern times may be unlikely, but it isn’t unprecedented. In 1839, paleontologists discovered the fossil remains of a prehistoric fish – the coelancanth – and later theorized that this fish, with its stumpy, leg-like fins, was the missing link between animals living in the sea and animals stepping onto land. They studied coelacanths as bygone creatures from another time, as things reduced by millennia to bits of petrified bone, as relics, as remnants of things gone away from this world forever.

They studied them as fossils, right up until 1938 – when a fisherman caught a live one.

the coelancanth

These are great winter muffins. The cranberries pop in your mouth and become addictive. I found these were better the next day when they were completely cooled.

½ cup buttermilk
1 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs
pinch salt
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tbsp  fresh orange zest
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
½ cup oil
2 cups fresh cranberries

1.  Preheat oven to 350 F.  Mix the  buttermilk, sugar, salt and eggs together in a large bowl.  Add the orange zest and vanilla extract.

2.  In a separate bowl, mix together the flour and baking powder.  Add dry ingredients to wet, and stir together until moistened.

3.  Add oil and mix, mix, mix until batter is smooth and homogeneous.  Fold in cranberries.

4.  Bake for 20-25 minutes until a toothpick inserted into muffins comes out clean.

Orange Simple Syrup

1/4 cup fresh orange juice
1/4 cup granulated sugar

In a small saucepan, heat the orange juice and sugar together gently until all the sugar dissolves.  Brush over muffins. I also sprinkled mine with sugar for a bit more sweetness.

First, get your letter(s) ready. I free handed mine with a sharpie, but you can use several sheets of printer paper to trace your pattern. Then, you’ll want to cut it out. I got The Dude to cut mine for me with a jigsaw.

Once you have it cut out (don’t worry too much about jagged edges, they’ll be covered by the ribbon) you want to lay out your corks to make sure they will fit with minimal cutting.

I chose to lay mine out in an ombre pattern (light to dark) that didn’t require any cutting of corks. Glue them in a row at a time. You might have to shave off a few edges on the corks from wine openers, but it should be pretty easy going. Glue the ribbon around the edges and you’re done!

This year, the turkey was amazing (I will put up the recipe in a few days) and we had dinners with both families. I got a WiiFit board (that we’re returning because it’s not what we thought it’d be), an office chair, new shoes, a hunting back, a new purse, a toaster, lots of chocolates and a little spending money. I got myself/Hootie/Lucy a new cat box that is supposed to be easier to sift. I also got myself a flat whisk, cupcake set, 30 below rated socks, some touch screen gloves and a new water bottle. I will probably still buy myself a set of thermals and a few other things. I am also considering upgrading my phone to a Galaxy Note II, but we’ll see about that.

I tried to build it with Christmas activities, but I didn’t get to participate in much that I wanted. The weather sucked, The Dude wasn’t into it or some other thing kept us from it. It really put a damper on my fledgling spirit. I like to put something on the front door, on the truck grill, put up a tree, go to see carolers and lights and festivals, going to buy presents and make a lot of cool stuff. A lot of my problem was expectations this year, although they were (as I felt) pathetically low. All I expected was a few decorations, I didn’t expect any presents since money’s been tight and to go out and do a few things together. I suppose I’m mostly missing the going and doing things, but those were the things I was counting on instead of presents.

We went to my mom’s for an early Christmas, which was great, except for the fight we had on the way there. He’d been complaining about having to get up to drive us there and I felt it was unfair to complain about this singular thing I wanted to go and do. Anyhow, I slept all day yesterday because I was depressed and have been putting on a brave face this morning. Christmas music while opening our few presents helped and a turkey in the oven is warming me up. My dad was overly-generous with me and it’s totally brightened my Holiday, my mom’s gifts were great too. The Dude got us a Wii-Fit board that I’ll have to check out.

According to University of New Mexico Division of Government Research, in 2007:

• 42% of all fatal crashes involved alcohol.
• 5% of all crashes involved alcohol.
• A person died in an alcohol-involved crash every 50 hours.
• A person was injured in an alcohol-involved crash every 5 hours.
• An alcohol-involved crash occurred every 3 1/2 hours.

It’s not worth this. Get a DD, drink at home or get a ride

We see on the news all the time people who have 5, 6, 7 arrests for drinking and driving. It makes no sense and I don’t understand these repeat offenders, but drinking and driving kills. Please don’t be stupid/selfish and try to drive, there are more important things than you getting home when you’re drunk.

Here’s a bunch of resources to get free rides home. There is no excuse!

PORTALES
Enmu Safe Ride
Phone: 575-607-9995 or 575-607-5999
Hours: 24/7
Details: Free to Eastern New Mexico University students only;
http://www.enmu.edu/current-students/orgs/safe-ride.shtml

CADDy (Chauffeur and Designated Driver) Program (Santa Fe) The CADDy program provides a safe ride home via Capital City Cab to adults from a liquor establishment or residence/party where alcohol is served. Santa Fe County subsidizes cab fare up to $25. Cab riders pay $1 and the difference of the fare over the $25 limit. The service is offered on Friday and Saturday nights from 5:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. Call 438-0000 for a $1 cab ride home.

These guys will even drive your car home for you for a tip (ABQ, Bernallio, Bosque Farms, Corrales, Rio Rancho, Isleta and Los Lunas) http://designateddriversondemand.com/about-us.html

ABQ- http://abq.designateddriversinc.com/

There are also tons of resources out there for Designated drivers and a lot of states offer rewards to designated drivers. A lot of bars will also give you free sodas and non-alcoholic drinks if you are a DD.

https://www.facebook.com/myturn2drive

http://www.santaanastarcenter.com/DWI_Prevention_Program_2.aspx

http://www.unm.edu/~cj475fall12/story_pages/mcelroy_story1s.htm