High Water

The Mississippi and Missouri rivers have been into flood stage for a couple of weeks from spring rains and snow melting upstream. I went by Joseph's eagle project this morning to see if the benches were flooded or not. Last year’s flooding went higher than the benches. They were not under water but the water was close. The peak water level on the Missouri River a few miles upstream, according to official records, was yesterday morning. When this photo was taken this morning, the records show that the water was down about 0.5 feet from yesterday. So it looks like one foot higher than yesterday's peak would touch the bottoms of the benches. With warm dry weather forecasted for the next week, the river is expected to go down quickly.

I have been thinking about placing a geocache at or near the benches ever since we built them, but when it flooded last year I backed off of that idea. I might still do a cache where the container is in a tree and attached by a string to prevent it from floating down steam in a flood. I’m still thinking about it.

Scout campout at Pere Marquette - JB Weld to the Rescue

A week and a half ago, we had a scout campout at Pere Marquette state park. It rained on Friday evening but stopped about the time we went to bed. It was pretty muddy and the low temperature was about 38 to 40 degrees. A warm breakfast tasted good. We had scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and of course the traditional pancakes.

I had my 100 foot rope (5/8” diameter nylon) that I let the scouts entertain themselves with. The decided that they wanted to use the rope to get a scout into a tree. They found that it was harder than they thought to lift someone up, especially when the guys pulling are falling down.

After trying several approaches to the problem, they found that if they started on top of the trash can, they did not have to lift as far. Now that he us “UP”, what do we do? They pause and take photos with their cell phones.

While on the campout, one of our best camping utensils broke. It the inexpensive combination wire whisk and tongs.

There have been small rust color cracks in the plastic for quite a while, but a piece of the plastic broke loose while I was making pancakes

Since it is inexpensive, the plan is to get a new one. But until we actually get another one, I wanted to fix this one in case I need it. This is where JB Weld comes in. I held the whisk wire in place with a twist tie from the grocery store.

Then I mixed up some JB Weld and filled in the holes and even reinforced some of the other cracks.

Now it is “as good as new”, at least until another crack fails. In the meantime, we need to find a replacement before I need to any serious campout cooking again.

Pi Day

Yesterday was Pi Day. To celebrate, I made two pumpkin pies and one cherry cream pie. I did not take any photos as the pies looked exactly like you would expect them to look. Mom and I were invited to a potluck with several other families at the Gomes home in Jamestown Farms, close to the Deffords. We took the large, double batch of cheesy potatoes and a pumpkin pie. We needed to make sure there was a pie to celebrate the pie day dinner. Most of the other dinner guests did not know about Pi Day, but a few did understand the mathematical importance of the day. The dinner, the company and the pie were all quite good.

Now the observant reader will note that I told of making three pies, but I have only accounted for one of the pumpkin pies. Last night was Stake priesthood meeting. At stake priesthood meetings in our stake, Aaronic priesthood quorum presidents from all of the wards report their quorum attendance in the meeting. In order to encourage attendance, we had pie and ice cream at the Sowards home for the young men and their fathers. The second pumpkin pie and the cherry cream pie were taken to the Sowards for the boys and their dads and YM leaders. We did not have many show up, so I ended up taking half of the pumpkin pie and half of the cherry cream home. Mom had already made a cherry cream pie on Friday and there was still half of that one left over. Now we have 1.5 pies left to eat. 1.5Pi = 4.71238898 = a lot of calories.

I’m having a tasty piece of pumpkin pie for a snack right now. I hope you all had an enjoyable Pi Day.

More food in Monterrey

The sun came out today and it finally warmed up to the upper 60s. I did not even need my jacket this evening. At lunch today we went to Los Fresnos, which is the favorite restaurant for lunch for almost all Emerson visitors. Their salsa and “limonade” are amazing. This is a photo of my “mug” of “limonade”, chips, salsa and “limon”.

Limon is Spanish for key limes. The limonade is made from fresh squeezed key lime juice, sugar and water. Los Fresnos has perfected the optimum ratio of juice, sugar and water. They put this salsa on the chips and then squeeze lime juice on it. Today, they brought us guacamole also and we had guacamole, salsa and lime juice on our chips as shown in this photo.
For my lunch, I had Shrimp Veracruzana. The shrimp were cooked into a mildly spicy red sauce with peppers, green olives, carrots, chyote (a delicious green vegetable) and onions. It was very good.
For dinner tonight we went to Pacifica which is a local Mexican seafood place. I had “Trini” shrimp. The shrimp are cooked in a sauce that was explained as a traditional Mexican style sauce. When they brought it to the table, I was concerned. As you can see in this photo, the sauce looked almost like mud, but it was actually quite good. This photo was taken after I had already eaten two of the shrimp.
I fly back to St. Louis tomorrow afternoon. I go back to “regular” food then.

PS. One correction on yesterday´s dinner: The appetizer was Artichoke Formagio. It was the best artichoke and spinich dip ever.

Monterrey Mexico

I am posting this on my second night in Monterrey while here on business. After all of the really cold weather and lots of snow, I was looking forward to warm weather in Mexico. When I arrived yesterday, at noon, it was 76 degrees and when we were done with work at 5pm it was 80 degrees. After I got to the hotel, I went for a walk in fabulous evening temperatures. All around Monterrey are mountains. I took some photos with my cell phone as it was getting dark. The low light level made the photos a bit grainy but I think you can still see that they are some very interesting mountains.

I heard some noises in the trees and as I looked closer, I could see that there were green parrots making the noise in the trees. I tried to take a photo, but the low light level and the lack of a telephoto lens made it impossible to see the birds.

As part of my walk, I went to a fountain in the center of the city that is about 0.3 miles from the hotel. There was a couple of virtual geocaches at the fountain. There was not an actual cache container, but I was supposed to answer some questions about the fountain and email them, which I did. It was getting too dark to get a good photo, but this is a silhouette of Neptune and his horses with fishlike tails (like mermaids). I was able to log two geocache finds in Monterrey on the walk.

This morning it was cold and rainy. At lunch time it was 45 degrees, which is more than 30 degrees colder than yesterday. By dinner time, it was 38 degrees with a lot of wind. Yesterday I wondered why I even brought my coat, but I really needed it tonight.

I am traveling with Jason Jurkowski and he suggested we go to an Italian restaurant that is his fiancés favorite. We had an appetizer of artichoke formage. It had lots of cream,formage cheese, spinach, and sun dried tomato in it and was amazing. I ordered grilled chicken fettuccini. In addition to slices of grilled chicken and fettuccini, it had carrots, broccoli, diced tomatoes, gorgonzola cheese, and lots of cream in the creamy sauce. It was really amazing. I took a photo of it with my cell phone.

Valentine’s Day

On Saturday, the day before Valentine’s Day, we went to Texas Roadhouse for dinner. Apparently, a thousand other people also wanted to go there too. We had to wait an hour and 40 minutes to get seated. The food was really good. Especially the fresh baked rolls with the honey butter with cinnamon. The sirloin steaks and loaded baked potatoes were also excellent.

After dinner, we went to our ward activity. It was a “Wacky Prom”. It was a dance for the whole family, including small children, with very creative attire. I wore jeans, running shoes, my tuxedo short with bow tie. Mom wore a long black skirt, snow boots, a pink blouse and a Mickey Mouse tie. It was a fun time. We got photos taken at the dance.

For our Sunday Valentine’s Day dinner, we had Lobster tails. After studying several cookbooks, I decided to split the tails and then add olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. I roasted it in the oven at 500 degrees. This is what it looked like when they came out.
I also made roasted potatoes. The potato chunks are coated with olive oil, salt and pepper and roasted. When they were almost done, I sprinkled parmesan cheese on top and finished roasting for 5 more minutes. We added beets and peas for a very tasty dinner as shown here with hot melted butter and lemon juice for dipping the lobster pieces in.
Desert was vanilla ice cream with home made magic shell.

We really enjoyed the wonderful food and had a great weekend.

Almond and Parmesan Crusted Tilapia

Several years ago, we tried tilapia and found that it was a pretty tasty fish. Most of the time, I would coat it with olive oil on both sides, add salt and pepper and bake in the oven and serve it with lemon wedges. We occasionally tried it with fish breading and baked until browned, which was also quite tasty. Lately I have been experimenting with toppings on the fish before baking. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to take a few almonds and finely chop them in our food chopper and cover the top of the fish with it after the salt and pepper. The next time I added parmesan cheese on top of the almonds. This time I added another ingredient. I sprinkled basil on the fish after the salt and pepper, but before the almonds. This is what it looked like before it went into the oven.
We had the fish with brown rice and broccoli as shown here.
The following is how the above fish was prepared:
-Thaw fish if frozen.
-Rinse and dry the fish (I use a paper towel.
-Pour olive oil into the baking dish and coat both sides of the fish with the oil.
-Add salt and pepper.
-Sprinkle basil on the fish.
-Spread finely chopped almonds over the fish. I chopped 6 large almonds per piece of fish.
-Sprinkle parmesan cheese over the entire fish to partially cover the almond crumbs.
-Bake in oven at 475 for 15 minutes until browned. I did this in the convection oven. A conventional oven might take a little longer. I believe the fish was actually done after about 10 minutes, but I wanted to get the almonds and parmesan cheese browned and slightly crusty.
-Serve with a lemon wedge squeezed over the fish.

I liked it a lot with the basil added, but I also liked it just as much without the basil. It’s good either way. The almonds and parmesan cheese make this quite a bit tastier than the way I used to make it. I highly recommend it.