The Year 2020 continues…Just Hanging around the House

This year has been a doozy don’t you think!  Covid-19 with over 225,000 deaths in the USA, the politics/election, civil rights issues, rioting, storms, wildfires…the list goes on and on.  It’s been one nasty year for sure.  By the time I publish this post, we should know who our next President will be.  Will that settle things down…or will they get worse in the near term?

Like most of you, we’ve really limited ourselves to ‘hanging around the house’.  We used to view this relative lack of activity as an occasional relaxing break in the action.  Now it’s the norm...and it’s getting to us!  Can you spell boredom?  

So once again…this post will be about food, views around our home and Halloween, such as it was.

Let’s start with food, not ‘just food’, but rather top notch comfort food!  In addition to the fresh rolls that friends Larry and Bev brought us recently, they also dropped off some amazing cream of potato soup.

Laurie served hers as designed…add shredded cheese and green onions and serve with a roll.  My serving of potato soup was sprinkled liberally with my favorite condiment…Tabasco.  In either case, the soup was excellent!

Oh yes, I had a roll left for my dinner as well.  I slathered it with some Amish butter and applied a generous amount of multi-berry jam… It served as my dessert and it was immediately consumed after I finished my soup.

On a recent sunny fall day, Laurie took this photo along one side of our house.  There already was some fall color showing and you can see the Smoky Mountains in the distance.

Then one day, we decided to finish off the remaining deep dish pizza that I’d received with a Chicago themed food gift pack.  It was either to celebrate Father’s Day or my birthday.  Two of these pizzas were part of the gift pack but we already had the deep dish sausage version.  Lou Malnati’s is famous for their deep dish pizza and they also make a great thin crust version.

We’d lived in Chicago for 27 years and we’ve been outspoken about the one thing that we really miss after moving to East Tennessee.  One word – FOOD!  Chicago hot dogs, ethnic cuisine, local bakeries and butcher shops, steaks, pizza and more.  We are thin crust pizza aficionados though and never really got into deep dish pizzas.  That said, we did prefer this deep dish pepperoni pizza over the sausage version we’d eaten before.

Back to faux cooking…prepared food in lieu of bothering to do it ourselves!  We’d picked up this package of Main St. Baked Scalloped Potatoes during a recent visit to Costco.  How could we go wrong with cheesy scalloped potatoes!  So what should we use for a main dish with this comforting side dish?

The answer to the above question also came from Costco.  This is our package of A La Cart Sesame Soy Beef Short Ribs.  Like the potatoes, this entrée could be ready in minutes!

…and the combination of the previous 2 pre-cooked ready-in-minutes food offerings is shown above on Laurie’s dinner plate.  Note: For something healthy we did have a small side salad before attacking the main course. 

The short ribs were very tender and very tasty but the sauce was a bit too sweet for my taste.  Laurie didn’t think so though… We both agreed that the potatoes were about as good as one could make at home with all fresh ingredients.  Excellent!  Yes, that roll on Laurie’s plate was furnished courtesy of our friend Bev and Larry.  

Now for a non-food photo or two!  Halloween here is very tame.  No sidewalks, dark roads and few children…it all equals no trick or treaters.  Nor does that stop us from consuming a bag of ‘just in case any kids show up’ candy, but that’s another story.

This was about as close as we got to seeing kids at Halloween.  Laurie is their great aunt and they live in the St. Louis Missouri area.  From the left, Delany, Charley, Avery and Elliot.  Arya is standing guard over the group.  They aren’t a spooky bunch but they are cute!  There was some fancy pumpkin carving going on, that’s for sure…

I’ll end this post with a photo that Laurie took of the full moon (a blue moon) on Halloween eve.  I like that misty image shining through the semi-bare branches of our oak tree. 

A blue moon isn’t necessarily blue.  It actually is the second full moon in the same month.  This relatively rare occurrence happens once every 2.5 years on average, hence the saying, "It'll happen once in a blue moon!"  However, this particular ‘blue moon’ was even more special.  It was the first full moon seen in all U.S. time zones since 1944!  It won’t happen again until 2039…

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Stay Safe and Take Care, Big Daddy Dave