johnny November 27th, 2008
This will probably be our last week in Tennessee before we head out for warmer climes sometime next week. Jenn’s aunt and uncle have invited us to Thanksgiving dinner, and there’s no way we can refuse, considering the spread they put out. In the spirit of traditional Thanksgivings, we figured we’d share a few more homemade recipes: my grandmother’s chocolate pie recipe and Jenn’s uncle’s recipe for limoncello.
Grandma’s Chocolate Pie
2 cups of sugar
6 teaspoons of cocoa
1/2 cup of corn starch
4 eggs
4 cups of milk
1 stick of butter (or margarine if you insist)
dash of salt
1 8 ounce container of Cool Whip (thawed)
2 baked pie crusts
Grab a medium sized pot and toss in everything but the pie crusts (duh!), Cool Whip and butter. Set your stove to medium or medium high heat and begin mixing it together. Once the mixture seems to be warming up a bit, toss the stick of butter in and keep stirring. You’re going to do a lot of stirring. Basically, you want to keep stirring until it achieves the consistency of a thick pudding. I recommend a whisk for this… or even a small hand mixer if you can keep it from splashing all over.
Once the mixture thickens up, remove it from heat and pour into a couple of pie shells. Personally, I like Oreo or graham cracker pie crusts, but it’s pretty hard to ruin this pie by picking the wrong crust. Next, I like to leave the pies sitting out under a paper towel so that the steam doesn’t form condensation and make the crust soggy. About an hour should do it. Once they’ve cooled a bit, toss them in the fridge or freezer to cool further. Before serving, cover them with Cool Whip and grab your own fork and plate so as to be sure of getting a slice.
Continue Reading »
Tags:
booze,
family,
recipe,
thanksgiving
Related posts
jenn August 18th, 2008
Fun with the Folks. Part 1:Food, food, and more food
Before we headed to Karst-O-Rama, yet after our time in Gatlinburg, we spent a good deal of time hanging out at my parents place in Tennessee. We had only planned on spending a few days there, but those few days turned into a month. I was having such a great time that the days were passing as quickly as hours. If it had not been for Wormfest, Johnny would probably still be trying to think of a gentle way to coax me out of my parent’s yard.
Its been a long time since I have been able to spend more than a couple days with my parents. We have lived pretty far apart for the last 10 years. The first part of that was because I was getting my career together in a far away city, then they semi-retired and started traveling around. They did end up settling down and getting a home base, but they can’t seem to stay there for more than 2 months at a time. So, the majority of the time we saw each other was a quick 3 day weekend once or twice a year and Christmas every other year. That’s just not enough!
Continue Reading »
Tags:
cooking,
family
Related posts
johnny July 23rd, 2008
We made it back from Karst-O-Rama alive! We met some really amazing folks that were happy to bring along complete novices, loan equipment to complete strangers and give lots of advice. Jenn’s parents and her nephew came along in her parents’ Class A. The road getting in and out of the Great Saltpetre Preserve was… interesting… for the 35′ motor home, but we made it without any mishaps.
The general format of Karst-O-Rama is caving all day and partying all night. The electric sites are smack in the middle of the party camp, where there are no quiet hours as there are in the family camping area. It was awfully hot, hitting the 90’s every day and we were glad to be underground during the heat of the day.
Continue Reading »
Tags:
caving,
family,
festival,
hobby
Related posts
johnny July 13th, 2008
I’m on day three of being temporarily crippled. Seems I managed to give the knee with the least amount of cartilage left a viscous twist a couple of days back. Over the course of twelve hours, it went from mildly annoying to three times the size of it’s twin. Needless to say, I’ve spent the last two and a half days laying on the bed chewing through books at the rate of about five hundred pages a day.
Day one was pretty rough as I had not yet figured out the delicacies of reaching the bathroom on one leg. Thankfully, the bed is only about ten feet from the bathroom with plenty of things to lean on along the way. The catch is that there are a couple of steps at both the bed and the bathroom to negotiate. After handling these obstacles poorly for a day, I finally got the hang of it and can now handle the gymnastics like an old pro.
Continue Reading »
Tags:
caving,
family,
health,
hobby
Related posts
johnny July 7th, 2008
We just finished up a week long stay at a commercial campground with Jenn’s family. The entire week was a blast. There was good food, good company and plenty of kids to keep things interesting. However, after spending the prior month in the middle of the national forests, we had a bit of culture shock coming back into ‘the city’.
It started as we came into Pigeon Forge, which is about as big a tourist trap as Myrtle Beach. Six lanes of traffic, giant signs on both sides of the street and lots of useless shops and attractions. Thankfully, we got out of the Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg areas and back into the National Park lands for the last few miles.
However, as soon as we arrived at the campground, we ran into the owner who quizzed us about pets and whether or not we were planning to ride our moped in the campground. She then pointed us at the site we were to occupy; it was, in fact, next to the creek, but the creek was very low. It was also thirty feet from the entrance to the campground and as close as you can get to the road. At least, we had three sites together, so that we only backed the truck camper in halfway, turned around the pop-up camper on one side with the class A on the other and had the creek to form the fourth ‘wall’ of the compound.
Continue Reading »
Tags:
campground,
family,
gatlinburg tn,
holiday,
pigeon forge tn
Related posts