Why I Oughta...

I was thumbing through a book that Nat bought for her Dad for Christmas about the early years of Disneyland and came across this caption for one of the photos.  Talks about how Walt Disney and his early Imagineers (which, I'm not so sure were actually called that at the time) had a favorite restaurant:  the Tam O'Shanter.  The caption reads:  "Opened in 1922 and designed by Hollywood art director Harry Oliver, the Scottish-themed Tam O'Shanter in Los Feliz was one of Walt's and his Imagineers' favorite restaurants.  His regular table was number 31, and the eatery still has autographed sketches by studio artists hanging in its lobby.  Oliver's fantasy architecture, which was popular during the 1920's and plentiful in the area, would influence the designs of buildings in Disneyland." The DisneyFoodBlog has a proper review up about the place and includes some photos of Disney art, including a piece that was drawn by the man, himself .  Neat.

This is the first in a series of posts that I'll get to over the coming weeks that place down markers on some terminology for the pizza-curious.  It has, thanks to Steve Dolinksy - a title:  Pizza Parlance .  The first term up in the parlance tag is Frico Edge.  The pizza you see in the photo below is really showing off its Frico Edge.  Or, simply Frico for those pizza nerds.   The guy who gave me "Pizza Parlance" - Steve Dolinsky - describes frico as something that happens.   He writes :  "The cheese darkens as it bakes along the sides, and while it may look like burnt crust, it’s simply a crispy, somewhat charred cheesy edge."   The frico you see below is one that was better in terms of my history of baking these pizzas. I made this Detroit-style pizza on Christmas eve and used a white cheddar (Cabot's Seriously Sharp White Cheddar) laid down and kind of 'packed in' to the blue steel pan to create this Frico edge. ...

 What happens when you do a couple of puzzles and your family notices?  And it is right before Christmas?  Well...that means you get MORE PUZZLES.  MOARPUZZLES.  This one, though, (as the kids say...) slaps .  <insert how do you do fellow kids meme> But...seriously....I am going to REALLY insert it here below. Why? Because, I read somewhere that if you start saying things that your kids have started to say, they'll start to think it is very UNCOOL.  So, I'm getting ahead of things with my kids and the phrase 'this one slaps'.   Well...back to the puzzle.  This scratches me right where I itch:  it is a Disney Parks pins puzzle.  Imagine laying down hundreds of Disney Parks pins and taking a photo of them.  That's EXACTLY what this 750 piece puzzle is.  See below for my photo of the box: You can find it on Amazon (non-affiliate link here, people), but go to your local toy store and ask them.  It is 18" tall....

 Just two days ago, I posted a photo of our waxed-based Amaryllis Christmas flower from Trader Joe's and mentioned how one of the flower buds was set to open .  That photo was from Christmas Even.  Today's post is dated January 3, 2021, but the photo below is from December 28th, 2020.  Just three days late and we have a lovely opened red Amaryllis flower with a bright yellow stamen.  So, this flower did far better than most that we've had and opened just three days post-Christmas.   This is the first time that we did a wax-base Christmas flower bulb.  And, based on the experience, I don't think it will be our last.  Not only did the flower bloom close to Christmas, the stalks weren't too terribly tall - which usually means that you loose them to flopping over.  These were short and sturdy stalks and a nice bloom on top.  The downside to this version is that we have NO IDEA what variety of Amaryllis this really is, but we can guess i...

Back in October of last year, I posted some photos of a pile of Ash (or what I thought was Ash) firewood that I grabbed off of one of my neighbors who was taking down some trees .   After letting it sit around in the back of the yard for a few weeks, by the end of November, I had a couple of 2x4's from our basement project that I hauled back there to use as a sort of rack and stacked the rounds up on them to get them off the ground .  A lot of this stuff was wet and needed time to just dry out up off the ground.  Well...a month later, I found myself needing to get outside for 30 minutes or so and I decided to start to process some of this stuff.   Some of the rounds are cut to length.  But, a lot of them are not.  I don't have a chainsaw, so I decided to take a shot at the ones that were both small enough and cut to the right length.  I split them open and what I found inside looked a lot like I was expecting based on the previous pictures....

 The calendar says 2021, but I'm still talking (and posting) about our 2020 Christmas Amaryllis.  This year (a year unlike any other), we didn't go all-in with Christmas bulbs.  In fact, I'd say that if it wasn't for Nat saving the day, we would have likely just skipped our Christmas flowers/Amaryllis altogether.  We didn't go to Wannemaker's for their Holiday Open House.  And I haven't been in a hardware store in months.  But, thanks to an impulse buy at Trader Joe's, we have this small, unnamed Amaryllis bulb in a wax base that Nat brought home in mid-December .  I'm posting this in January, but this photo is old.  I took the photo below on Christmas Eve and you can see that the flower was just beginning to emerge.  I'd say that this one got pretty.close to being right in terms of timing.

Today is six straight years of posting on my blog here.  Every day.  For six years.  And, it seems that I posted twice on one day in July.  And this is the ninth year since 2010 that I hit a post per day.  Seems the two years that I took off were in 2013 and 2014.  Why not go for seven years in a row, right?  Here's to an even better 2021 in the garden, yard and here on the blog.