At Home - This and That

 ...back home again, just hanging around, watching the wooded areas in the neighborhood disappear and playing with a couple of food items we hadn't tried before.

This was the wooded lot diagonally across the street from our home.  Other than the lot next to our home, this was the last wooded lot in our 2 block area.  A new house, directly across the street from us was being built on the lot to the left of the woods shown above.  We believe that the lot next to us is tied up for now with legal issues but that can't go on forever...

...and this is a view of that same 'wooded lot' just a couple of weeks ago.  We used to see trees as we rounded that curve toward our home... Now all we see is construction and the backs of other homes.

Unfortunately, unless specified by the home builder or the person who is having a home built, the common practice is to just strip the lots bare.  It simplifies the new construction and holds down some cost.  Even worse in this instance is that the subcontractor who was hired to clear the lot didn't even stick to the property at hand.  The homeowner in the first house past the cleared lot was very unhappy when the equipment operator took down trees on the common ground between homes as well as a couple of trees that were actually on the edge of their property.

But we especially felt sorry for the new homeowner in that white home at the left.  When Jane and Roger got title to the home, that treed lot was lovely and verdant.  When they actually moved in the trees were gone and so were 2 or 3 trees that were part of their property.  

Now for some food topics...

In my never ending effort to create a salad that my medications allow and that satisfies my urge to munch on produce, I've been playing with my options.  Iceberg lettuce isn't an issue but just how many wedge salads can one person eat...much less enjoy?  In this instance tomatoes and iceberg lettuce served as the base and then I covered it with radishes and slices of yellow squash.  I decided that this iteration was OK but now when I make similar salads, I don't use that blue cheese dressing, but instead I opt for a red wine vinaigrette.  The vinaigrette provides a fresher taste than the blue cheese dressing and its a bit healthier too.

Recently we were inspired by Big Dude at https://bigdudesramblings.blogspot.com/2024/07/creamed-chipped-beef-on-toast-and.html#more, to make our own creamed chipped beef on toast (SOS for those who served in the military).  We wanted to make extra so we could freeze a batch for a second meal sometime in the future, so we doubled the recipe from Big Dude's blog site.  To be honest, I'd never noted the dried sliced beef in a jar in the grocery store...but there it was.  So we chopped up the beef!

Next we created the slurry that serves as the base for the creamed chipped beef...butter, flour, garlic powder, onion powder and dried rosemary.  We upped the seasoning, adding a bit of pepper and red pepper flakes as we like our SOS a bit spicier.  

These photos show the result of our culinary copying efforts.  First that big pot of creamed chipped beef and then two containers from that pot...one for dinner and one for the freezer.  The whole effort was simple enough...but how did we fare with the actual resulting taste test?

This was my serving of creamed chipped beef on a slice of toast...in this case it was from that batch we didn't freeze but which was left over from our dinner 2 nights earlier.  

Yes, that is Tabasco on the SOS!  I put Tabasco on almost any creamy entree, even on Alfredo entrees in restaurants.  Now for the moment of truth... We did deviate from the recipe published by Big Dude.  We don't keep whole milk in the house as we don't use that much of it and it goes bad too quickly and I hate wasting food.  So we only buy half and half milk, the advantage being that it has a shelf life of 4 or 5 weeks.  The problem with making creamed chipped beef with half and half is that the resulting cream sauce is too rich, overwhelming the spices and producing a product that looks like the original intended product...but which just isn't as tasty.  Live and learn!  The next time we'll buy enough regular milk to make SOS the way it was intended.

As we recently wandered through a plethora of local markets, farmer's markets and boutique malls, Laurie spotted this package containing the makings of Dakota Cheese Soup.  We both like cheese soup so it was a natural impulse.

After Laurie followed the directions on the package and made the soup for dinner one recent evening, this was the result.  Laurie liked it but I thought that it was too 'thin'...and not cheesy enough.  Sometimes these 'special food items' are complete winners and sometimes they just aren't.  

A recent 'winner' was a jar of Amish "B-E-A-R" Jam.  It's made with blackberries, elderberry juice, apples and red raspberries.  It is excellent jam.  Sorry no photo.  Check out the available sources and varieties on-line by just searching for "Bear Jam".   

The perfect ending for this 'hanging at home post' is this photo of the sunset as taken from a traffic jam on the I-75 bridge over the Tennessee River/Watts Bar Lake as we returned home from a local gathering.  Laurie just snapped the photo out of the car window...

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them...

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave