Lions, (No) Tigers, & Bears, Oh My!

Summer Day (Hot as blazes, in case you were wondering) at the National Zoo in DC practicing with the camera.  Wonderful time, Ok pictures.

The closest I could get to the Pandas without glass and 40 people between us

Hedwig's long lost cousin

Huge birds and loud little suckers

This just looks very uncomfortable...

Hakuna Matata...

I'm a little Teapot, short and stout

Love the turtles!

The biggest Sting Rays I've ever seen!

Not the best picture, but he grabbed a whole bamboo tree and decided to have lunch.  How cute is he!?

Friday Five

1. Too, too cute!  Also, exactly what my craft room looks like when I scrapbook...

2. Happy Malala Day!  Absolutely wonderful and positively inspiring role model for children to see.  Throughout her ordeal, she's shown such poise and grace.  As one of the commenters said, I hope I'm around when she becomes president of Pakistan one day in the future.

3. Google Chrome: I've been resisting Google Chrome for months now because I like IE contrary to everyone's utter hatred for it.  But when Reader went away, I had no choice but to install Chrome so I could transfer all my subscriptions over to Feedly (which apparently doesn't work on IE...) Anyway, while I'm still not sure about Feedly, I'm starting to like Chrome.  Pinning is way easier, and we all know how I feel about that.  I think I just might be a convert. 

4.  The new Cut & Paste line from My Mind's Eye is gorgeous!  I haven't bought much paper lately as I've been trying to use up the ginormous stash I have, but that will most definitely change once this line hits shelves.  I'm already dreaming of cards and projects to create.

5.  While I haven't quite figured out all the fancy schmancy bits and baubs my camera has yet, the one function I seem to have gotten is the Close-up button.  These seem to be the easiest to take and always turn out right.  Close-up isn't the main reason why I want to take pictures, but for now at least, I've one specialty that's seemingly working out.

A+ for GBR

After you watch a few British programs, you start to pick up on a few often used acronyms and words, "A-levels", "GCSE", "I-Bacc" to name a few.  Words that were just made to be googled.  What began as a quick way to verify that "A-levels" were basically the British version of the SATs, turned into a 2 hour study session of the British Education system.  As ridiculous as this sounds, it was actually quite the page turner.  Thanks to links within links, I  kept going further down the rabbit hole.  During my little expedition, I learned quite a bit, mostly that, as much as Brits complain, their education system seems vastly better than ours, as well as:

* It's like alphabet soup over there.  There's an acronym for every little program, system and test, and apparently, they have no problems keeping them all straight.

* Students between the ages of 7-11 will now read 2 (count it, 2) Shakespeare plays as well as poetry before passing on to the next level.  Not sure about your schools, but I didn't even hear the Bard's name until High School.

* From what I can tell, students basically choose their own curriculum for high school and can decide which specific areas they'd like to study.  If I could have opted out of Math class, high school would have been so much better for me!

* Uniforms for 99% of schools.  As someone who wore a uniform for 13 years, I wholly support this idea!

As well as plenty of other reasons, that are much too difficult to decipher and explain, the number one reason, Britain's schools are better (besides just being in GBR) is:

*  The schools are paid for by the state.  No tuition for primary, upper or college for parents and no student loans to have to pay back.  I don't know how they afford this but how many more students here in the US would shoot for the moon if they didn't have to worry if their families could afford their education?

Maryland Munchies

Every place worth visiting (that is to say every place in the world) has that one (or more) thing that makes them special. A dish or a vegetable or just a little dessert, that brings visitors from miles around to savor that specialty. Scotland has their Haggis, and Kansas City has their BBQ, while Maryland is known worldwide for their crabs. Of course, I’m here to tell you that there’s just so much more than that here in MD.

Before I go into all the deliciousness you’re missing, just visiting us for the crabs, I must issue a quick caveat. While I live, and have lived my entire life, in Maryland, I’ve never been such a fan of the food scene here (though I will most likely be ostracized for saying this, I don’t even like crabs!). I suppose after living somewhere so long, you start to take what you’re lucky to have for granted. Which is one of the reasons I’m writing this post. After reading an article on one of our famous foods (that isn’t crabs) that you’ll hear about later, I began to think about, some of the things that have put the Maryland eating scene on the map and I realized, quite by chance, that there are a ridiculous number of them. While I may not be partial to nearly any of them, they are quite good to a lot of people and make Maryland irresistible to those who love to eat. Now that you know that, let’s get on with the good stuff.

First and foremost, and it really wouldn’t be a post about Maryland without starting with them, there’s crabs. Of course you can get quite Forrest Gump about our Maryland Blue Crabs in the summer. Just about every menu has: Steamed Crabs, Crab Cakes, Crab Dip, Crab Soup, Crabby Fries, Crab Imperial, Soft Crabs, Cream of Crab, well, you get the picture. There’s a lot of crab! The most famous though would be the Steamed Crabs, Maryland Crab Soup and Crab Cakes. Of course you can get these items pretty much anywhere in the world, but ours here are special (or so I hear.) A crab cake here isn’t full of new and interesting flavors. They have breading, lumps of crab, something to hold them together and of course Old Bay, and are then thrown into a fryer or a hot pan for a few minutes. That’s about it. Pretty simple when it comes down to it, but there is that magic ingredient that thankfully is another home spun perfection: Old Bay.

If you’re not from the East Coast, you may never have heard of this gem but it’s basically seasoned salt, just about 100x better. You can put it on everything but my personal favorite is french fries. This spicy and salty condiment is on pretty much every table in every seafood restaurant here and is made by McCormick Spice Company located right in Maryland’s Inner Harbor. Can’t get much more local than that!

Also on the seafood front, we have Oysters fresh from the Chesapeake Bay. We get a little Bubba Gump with these slippery little shuckers as well. If you’ve never had one, it’s a bit hard to explain the texture. They most definitely need to be sampled at least once for their brininess and sweetness (also, so I’ve been told). They also pair quite well with Old Bay which should be no surprise, what doesn’t go with this stuff?!

Now suppose seafood isn’t your thing. Then you’ll need to be sampling the Baltimore Pit Beef Sandwich. This one is a little hard to explain, it’s sort of like a Roast Beef Sandwich mixed with BBQ without the sauce or fancy cuts. It’s most often served between 2 slices of white bread with Horseradish (not really my cup of tea!) thrown on top for good measure. The smell of this meat cooking is almost as good as Old Bay smothered crabs just out of the steamer.

Now that you’ve had your meal, you’ll be needing dessert. That of course, brings us to Berger cookies. If you have a sweet tooth, this will most definitely suffice. These plain vanilla cookies are slathered and I do mean slathered (you can barely see the cookie anymore) in rich chocolate fudge; about an inch of the stuff and have been made for over 100 years. We Maryland-ites tend to do quite a bit of baking with them, adding them into cakes, cheesecakes and pies whenever the mood strikes us.

If super sweet isn’t your thing, your dessert should most definitely be Smith Island Cake. This seven layer wonder seems to be the new cupcake in our neck of the woods. Every restaurant is making them in every flavor imaginable but the original is still the best. This behemoth is 7 layers of vanilla cake and rich chocolate icing and is as delectable as it sounds. You all can have my crabs, and oysters and pit beef. I’ll take the cake any day!

And if you for some reason, would very much like to stay on the diet you're on, then you'll most definitely need to hit the Eastern Shore.  The fresh produce such as peaches, corn, tomatoes, cantaloupe, watermelon, plums, zucchini and about a dozen other fruits and veggies, are what I dream about in the summer.  There's nothing better than a giant, juicy, and especially fuzzy (which in any other food description is a terrible adjective but in this case, it's so not!) Eastern Shore peach.  Dreaming up recipes to make with these beautiful veggies and fruits is half the fun of summer.

I’m sure there are many other local favorites that I’ve forgotten to mention like Natty Boh, whose winking face lights up our skyline, but hopefully I’ve whet your appetite. Maryland tends to get a bad wrap based on what I see on the Food Network or Travel Channel. If they’re to be believed, Maryland is nothing but The Wire and Crabs. We’re so much more and I’d love for everyone to realize that. So if Maryland is on your summer itinerary, I have one suggestion for you: Come Hungry!

Nothing and Everything

There are some days when there just isn't anything to say.  And some days when there's too much to say.  Then there are days when both happen at the same time.  If you hadn't guessed today is one of those days.  In the "real" world; the day to day life that I live that includes work, and food and family and friends, nothing happened.  It was just another day at work.  I solved the daily puzzle.  I went on a field trip to Vera Bradley at lunch.  I came home.  All fascinating tasks, don't you think?

But then in the bigger picture of the world; the one we all live in, the media is exploding with headlines and special reports.  Edward Snowden and his many asylum requests, the San Francisco plane crash, a train explosion in Canada, Egypt in uprising, football players being charged with murder, wives of baseball players being charged with attempted murder. Every day there's a new story of someone hurt or some terrible event.  So while I could write about those things too, it would almost be too much.  The press is inundating us with thoughts and opinions of these events hourly, why should I do the same?

Yes the everyday "real" world lives we live can often be boring or mundane, but when you look at the bigger picture of what's going on out there, a little bit of the everyday grind isn't so bad - just a little uninteresting to write about.

Down the Ocean, Hon!

 

Girl Time with the Momma.  Cracker Barrel.  Outlet Shopping.  Super bargains.  Beach time.  Calm Seas.  Sun and sand.  Boog's BBQ.  Thrasher's French Fries.  Dumsers Ice Cream. 

Yep, a pretty perfect summer day! 

Crafty Cooking

I made this Recipe Book about a year ago with good intentions of using it to hold all my favorite recipes.  But that fell through real quick.  Mostly, because I couldn't figure out a way to format it.  The outside was fun to create but when it came to the inside, I couldn't even decide what paper was best to print the recipes on or even what font was best to read.  Can you say over thinking it?  Anyway, it sat patiently waiting for me on my bookshelf until this week when I discovered this brilliant blog post and I decided to finally make it work.  All in all, I'm pretty pleased.  So far these are the most used recipes I have so it wasn't too taxing to include them.  We'll see how the organization goes when I discover new and exciting recipes and actually type up the old standbys.  Even if it's not useful, at least it looks cute : )

PS: Please excuse the carpet background, I'm not that photo savvy yet : )