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So. Trivia Night 2012 is over.

The Little Smokies were sub-par. We weren’t exactly sure how long they needed to cook, so we started them too late and ran out of time before they were fully done. (Note – it is going to take longer to cook them than 45 minutes.) You win this time, Matt Haden, but Lloyd believes we should test this recipe again and again until we get it right.

The trivia questions were mostly as expected – there were several categories that made me feel like an idiot, a few questions where I felt confident of the answer and got it wrong, but one category where I knew 9 out of 10! Thanks, “Textiles”!

Then we were nominated as a Spirit Award finalist, and each table nominated had 30 seconds to showcase their spirity selves. The Fortune Cookies table sang songs from “The Christmas Story”; Gilligan’s Island table sang the iconic song; the Concordia table played the fight song and cheered; the Magic 8 ball table shook their magic selves; the Star Wars table just stood around to the theme music (which was lame, but still made me jealous because their costumes were amazing); the Cheeses of Nazareth did something, but I don’t know what because they were after our table (4th of July), and we had An Event.

Once we realized we had to have 30 seconds of awesomeness, I was excited because I wanted us to SING, for cryin’ out loud! We decided on the tail end of the Star Spangled Banner, followed by chanting “U*S*A! U*S*A!”

Our moment came, we stood up and started to sing. I was finding some harmony and looking for something on the table I could wave around, then looked up and saw Charles standing on a chair – peeling down to his USA t-shirt and biking shorts. There was a small, small wardrobe malfunction (some tidy-whitey waistband showed – at least from my angle before my eyes shut down), but I was too stunned to do anything but sit down and laugh. I don’t even know if we finished the song. He had told Deborah his plan ahead of time, but the rest of us were just as surprised as the rest of the room. Our guts hurt from laughing.

Sooooooo. There’s that.

Oh, and we didn’t win, but we placed solidly in the slighty-above-dead-center range.

Friday night is the annual Trivia Night hosted by our school’s PTL. Tables of eight compete with 10 rounds of 10 questions (or as I like to call it, “One Hundred Things I Don’t Know”) while eating snacks and drinking drinks. That means Lloyd and I have to make food for other people, and you all know how skilled we are at that.

At Lloyd’s faculty party Matt Haden and his wife, Lindsey, brought Little Smokies Wrapped In Bacon And Baked With Brown Sugar, which were promptly inhaled by everyone. Lloyd was intrigued and immediately subscribed to their newsletter.

Lloyd asked Matt for the recipe, and at the risk of blabbing like the Bush’s Baked Beans dog, here it is:

Ingredients:
1 package of Little Smokies
1 package of bacon (we usually get center cut)
Brown Sugar…
Toothpicks
9×13 pan
Tin Foil

Instructions:
Line the 9×13 pan with tin foil. (This will accelerate the cleaning process. Part of the tin foil might get stuck to the pan but it’s a lot easier to clean up than the mess without the tin foil.)

Take one smoky and one piece of bacon, wrap the circumference of the smoky once, stab with a toothpick all the way through, cut off excess for the next smoky [here, Lloyd wondered aloud if it was the excess bacon or the excess toothpick], repeat until all smokies are fully wrapped. (I had about two inches of bacon left so I just stabbed it with a toothpick and put it in the pan with the rest.)

Shower the smokies with brown sugar. Your preference on how much you want to put on them. (We did add a little more brown sugar halfway through the cooking process.)

Bake until the bacon is fully cooked as I believe most smokies are pre-cooked…

Enjoy!

P.S. Let me know what they think.

There is an alternate version of this recipe where you wrap the smokies in canned croissant strips and then put crushed walnuts in with the brown sugar. Our Kansas City friends called them Crack Weenies.

Lloyd and I made a little assembly line and got the little drops of heaven ready to pop in the oven tomorrow. As Lloyd wrapped them up he sang, “Anything Matt can do, I can do better…..”

Are you going to stand for that, Matt Haden? Are you?

Let me make it clear from the start that though I am going to mock him thoroughly in this post, I really love Lloyd.

I rarely walk home from work anymore since I mostly drive the truck. On the rare occasions that I do and I know Lloyd won’t be coming home anytime soon, I walk down Seward Street to 7th Street. There are store windows to peek in, and Dollar General is open late and I can stop in to browse and warm up. It’s enjoyable.

Here’s the route. Notice the straight lines of this journey?

If I know Lloyd is home, I might call him for a ride to pick me up, then convince him that as long as we’re in the car, we should swing by Subway for a sandwich. (It’s an easy sell.) I tell him where I’ll be: On Seward Street or on 1st Street.

See, when I walk home in the summertime, occasionally I’ll call him at home and ask him to meet me. He grumbles, but he’ll do it. He walks 7th street to Lincoln Street, and I walk 1st street to Lincoln Street. See how we’re just following straight lines?

(Now the mocking begins.) On Tuesday morning my truck wouldn’t start, so I caught a ride to school with Lloyd. We had a staff meeting until 8 p.m., and afterwards I walked out to my truck…. that wasn’t there.

No problem!

I started walking and called Lloyd for a ride. “I’ll be on First Street,” I said.

Now I ask you, dear readers who are not even married to me, by what I’ve just said, if you were at Point B and needed to drive to get me, wouldn’t you drive down Lincoln and turn on 1st?   So would I, because we are reasonable people. That’s why I like you.

Back to my long, stupid story: A few blocks into my walk I was creeped out by a male fellow pedestrian. I called Lloyd again so I’d be on the phone in case MFP tried to talk to me or ninja-chop me. I could sense by the echo-y sound of Lloyd’s voice that he had not yet left the house. “I’m putting on my shoes,” he said.

Really?

I kept walking and kept walking, and as I rounded to Lincoln I wondered where he was. I kept walking a couple more blocks and called again.

Lauren: “Where are you??”
Lloyd: “On First Street. You don’t seem to be here.”
Lauren: “I’m on Lincoln now.”
Lloyd: “You said you’d be on First.”
Lauren: “Not forever.”
Lloyd: “I drove around. You weren’t here.”
Lauren: “Grrrrr. I’m almost home.”
Lloyd: “Oh.   Do you still want a ride?”
Lauren: Facepalm

This post was originally just going to be me babbling about how the past couple of weekends, I’ve been back into making no-knead bread. Half of the batch is usually turned into a pizza for lunch. Today as we were throwing toppings on, I was a little self-absorbed and when Lloyd cleared his throat expectantly, I snipped, “What? This is how much onion I’m using!”

Turns out he was fine with the onion, he just wanted me to notice what he was doing with the ham.

Ha! – that’s cute!

The second part of the dough has just been made into a little loaf of bread, but this Sunday I wanted to see if smooshing out the dough and then criss-cross cutting it would yield dinner rolls.

Cut cut cut.

Bake bake bake.

I put it in the oven on the pizza stone that long ago cracked into two pieces. I still use it – I just shove the pieces together and it’s all good. I also poured some water in the discolored cookie sheet that lives in the bottom of the oven (right under the pizza stone). The steam is supposed to bring out some magical quality in the bread.

I plopped myself down on the couch by Lloyd to read until the bread was done.

After a couple of minutes, I heard a quiet ‘boom’. Not as loud as a neighbor slamming a trash can lid, but something…. ominous.

Lauren: “What was that? I bet that’s the pizza stone cracking again. Dang it!! Soon I’m going to be baking on a jigsaw puzzle!”
Lloyd: “Well, there’s your post.”

Stupid stone.

Though I don’t think I’ve ever made a specific post about them, when we got new windows I went the cheap-n-easy route of using tension rods, curtain clips and tea towels as curtains. (You can see them behind Lloyd here.) They turned out to be the perfect size, and saved me a heap of bad sewing and fist-shaking.

Well, back in December Lloyd received a present in the mail from his Aunt Margie – a box full of tea towels that she had embroidered with different barns! It was accompanied by a lovely hand-written letter, a rarity these days. Lloyd admired them and then said, “They’re too pretty to use.”

I disagree. As tea towels, yes. As new curtains, no!

Have you seen this story yet? Please, please click on the link. It shows an art installation in Australia where they painted everything white, then gave children stickers to cover every surface. It fills a hole in my heart and makes me cry out for color, much like this commercial from long ago.

I’m sure at some point I’m going to try a small prototype of the white area/colored dots – probably at school – but tonight I wanted to do something now.

What’s white?

My kitchen is white.

Hello, favorite striped contact paper!

Meh. It’s great up close, but from far away it reads a little ‘fast food restaurant’. I’ll take it down right after I get the rest of the Christmas stuff put away.

It did save me from drawing on the counter with permanent markers, though, which was a close second.