Sambuza Runza!!!! A recipe if you call it that...............

This is a recipe that I got from a friend here in Alaska. She got it from her mother in law.  I think we have both made major changes to it to suit our tastes and what our families will actually eat.  My house, full of healthy appetites, have been bugging me all year to make them.  Today seemed to be the day since they are very inexpensive (I am always budgeting), I happen to have 1.2 gallons of fermented kraut, and I literally have 3.5 freezers full of moose and caribou due to the successful hunters that live here.

Traditionally the Runza comes from Germany.  It is a hot meat filled bread pocket with cabbage and onions.  My friend always adds cheddar cheese to hers.  Today, I am flavoring the meat with middle eastern spices and parsley to resemble a sambuza, the deep fried, triangular, meat pocket found at the snack bar in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia, where I grew up.

Ingredients:

1. your favorite bread or dinner roll recipe
2. sauer kraut or lightly sauteed shredded cabbage (see posted link to make your own)
3. ground beef, moose, caribou or anything ground

You might have noticed by now that I do not measure anything much.  I usually make the dough to fit my largest bowl or just make a double recipe for my family of 7.  While the dough is rising I cook the ground meat and season with anything.  Salt and pepper works but today I used Bazhaar liberally and dried parsley flakes, sea salt, pepper, and garlic to taste. Bazhaar is a middle eastern spice that is made from a mixture of 7 other spices, if you have ever had cupsa and eaten on the floor then you are craving it now. 

Add onions to taste into the meat mixture.

Next, punch down your dough and while waiting the 10 minutes for it to rest, drain your sauer kraut in a colander.

My kraut is made from cabbage, broccoli, turnips, zuchini, and carrots from my garden.  I watched youtube videos to learn how.

 Here is a cabbage and a turnip from my garden before they were lacto fermented.

Next, divide dough into pieces until you have pieces a little larger than a golf ball.  In a double recipe I got 18 of these.

Roll out your lump of dough til it is about the size of a dinner plate, shape doesn't matter. My dough is 100% whole wheat and still rolls out perfectly!

Use plenty of flour to prevent from sticking.
Next add a scoop of sauerkraut.  I actually measured since I made so many and wanted them to all be the exact same size. My scoop was half a cup but I packed it overflowing.

I flatten this out a bit and then add two thirds a cup of cooked ground meat on top.

The next part is easy, just folding it closed.  If you want cheese this is the best time to add it, right before you start folding.

Fold opposite sides toward each other.

I make these squarish.  It is not important to seal shut.  You can let them rise a little before you bake but I just put them right in the oven folded side down.

Bake long enough so that they brown on top in a 350 degree oven.  You can butter the tops and eat with bleu cheese dressing or ranch.  When cooled I like to wrap the extras in foil and freeze for lunches.

yum!

Peanut Brittle and Getting Older (Golden Girl Style)

If you read the previous post and were wondering....the peanut brittle turned out so well that it was instantly inhaled by everyone. I ate it until I had visions of trying to explain to Dr. Hostager why I would be visiting his dental office again this year!! I even stocked up on peanuts so that on the next sunny day, we will do it again while doubling the recipe.

WHEN WE ARE OLD

While texting back and forth today with my sister I had a scary mental image of what my two sisters and I may look like when we are old. I guess it was like a flash forward into the future. It got me wondering. Will we be fashionably out of date and continally wear antiquated styles we learned in the 80's, 90's, 00's, and 10's? Will we resemble the "Golden Girls" on t.v.? Will we be looked at as ancient in the same way we see polyester of yesteryear and beehive hairdo's? Which one of us will always try to stay young and edgy adopting all the new fads and fashions possibly ruining the look with wrinkles,saggy skin and gray hair. More important.....who will go all gray first? Who will stop coloring their hair first? I already struggle with the "want to look hot" syndrome of lower 'than you should go' rise jeans that really don't look so hot after birthing 5 kids and sporting that muffin top I am not too proud of. Am I really going down this path? Really?

The sad part is that I am already making the transition in comfort wear styles. Especially in the shoe department. Sexy can have drastic immediate affects that are positive however, it can also cost a person later. Take for instance my last overdue date with my husband. I bought THE SEXIEST PLATFORMS ON THE PLANET for my size (yes, I had to go to the big girl store to get them) just for this date. I was immediately elevated to the heighth of my 6'2" husband and possibly higher. The effect was a success. I felt different, I acted all happy and sweet, and I walked a whole heck of a lot slower!!!

Even though I had feelings of saucy sexiness, my radar was sensing that my husband did not want to be seen with me... in public... with these shoes on. It could just be my own insecurity, I could be way off, or it could be

A. my husband doesn't want anyone else looking at HIS wife because "I'm too sexy" in my shoes. -greedy hoarding type thoughts

or

B. my husband doesn't want anyone to be a witness when I fall from this considerable height and squash a little person because it would embarrass him and we could possibly be sued for hurting people because of my sexy shoes!

Anyway, the next day the balls of my feet were bruised and my calves felt like I had paid a trainer at the gym for a 10 hour calf workout. The only thing that touched my feet were my snuggly soft pink slippers that son #2 got me for Christmas last year......must have known something in advance. I only wore the heels for 45 minutes!!!!! REalLy!!

Words of Wisdom to Women

Every once in a while it is good to change things up, even trying spiky 6 inch platform sexy shoes because it will make all the comfy shoes in the world feel so much more....well, COMFIER!

My Fav Blogs for now.....send me your favs!

waitinthevan.blogspot.com - she makes me laugh, found this by accident.

themofarmersdaughter.blogspot.com - nostalgic stories about my daddy or my momma, love it!

thevintagesistersstudio.blogspot.com -wildly creative how to's and artwork by an amazing lady, I like her recycling strategies.

fail.blog -because we need to laugh at least once a day.

once a month mom - lots of creative recipes for mass producing meals.

peace out my friends!

Movies I like and Grannie's Peanut Brittle

Before I get into talking about my reviews of this weeks funny/ quirky movies, my son brought to my attention that there are two types of pancake makers in the world. No matter what type a person is, if the batter is good, then the pancakes will be great. Son #1 is a liberal pancake maker, only two of them will fit on my huge griddle. Here are at least three reasons why I am a conservative pancake maker:

#1. I mass produce. I want to save time in the future (with so many mouths to feed) therefore I quadruple the recipe. When they are finished and cooled I later freeze/hide the extras. This is equivalent to -3X of making breakfast next week.......brilliant!

#2. In conservative pancaking styles, there are many more pancakes produced at the same time because each whole wheat, flax infested, blueberry buttermilk pancake with pecans is smaller in size. I love to make them hearty too.

#3. More area on the griddle is being used to cook the pancakes so that means overall less cooking, flipping, and standing time in the kitchen. Yay!


MOVIE REVIEW PART

I'd like to watch the whole "Sunny With A Chance Of Meatballs" from the beginning to count how many other fliks it pokes fun of. I woke up late this Saturday morning, groped my way to the coffee pot, and then plopped down on the couch to find everyone, even the two year old, glued to the tube. I was instantly as absorbed as everyone else was to the huge flat screen images of the computer animated life of a geniously geeky teenage inventor, Flint, voted last years movie of America- my 10 year old tells me. Flint is very VERY awkward and wants to make his town happy but destroys it instead with his inventions.

This movie spoofs Armageddon, The Abyss, Titan AE, Resident Evil (so I am told), 2012, the one with huge cyclones and weather patterns that will destroy the earth, Jimmy Neutron, Chicken Little and many more and that was counting just from the last 15 minutes. Because of one of the final scenes of Flint nearly dying from a passing through a death hole with the sharp peanut brittle shards spewing from all sides, my family is going to experience creating peanut brittle today, after I restock my pantry. We even rang up GrandPa for tips and to find out if it has to be sunny or cloudy to make the brittle, Grannie style!!! Grannie always said it had to be sunny or brittle won't turn out.

The other movie that is fun to watch is "Screen Door Jesus" because everyone with any kind of faith at all will find themselves somewhere as somebody in this movie. It pokes fun at many sects of the Christian faith. What is funny is that it is very hard to admit out loud which character you think fits yourself. My husband and I watched and then pointed at each other and asked "Which one are you?" as we lied to each other about who we thought we were. It is really funny and for adults only. Wait, he NEVER told me which character he felt like the most!

To ponder:

Why does a ten year old 5th grade girl think that if you turn on a vacuum for about 60 seconds, then sit down in a chair to play with string, that it deserves the check off mark of finishing the "vacuum living room" on the chore list?

Random important issues:

This may come as a surprise to many people but forks and spoons in MY universe do not fit in the flatware tray UNLESS the bigger ones point down and the smaller ones point up. I only expect my mother to understand this.

I'll post pictures of the peanut brittle if it turns out.

ciao

Garden Harvest Dinner

What a great idea! Get together with friends and everyone bring a dish from your harvested garden. There was Italian spiced tomato soup, pumpkin pie, zuchini bread, strawberries, grilled salmon and more. I brought a half gallon jar of my garden Kraut 5 weeks into fermenting process. Because it is made at home and has never been heated and canned there are all kinds of healthy creatures as a double bonus for a healthy gut! It is tangy, a bit different from ordinary cabbage kraut and very good for you. I think I like it most because I have eaten so much bad food lately......I mean good food, but bad for you- like Grechens Confections turtles and soft chewy caramels, fudge and chocolate dipped pretzel sticks!!!

Why! Oh why did I eat the whole bag that should have lasted an entire year!!! Let me back track just a bit. I lead this group of 10 and 11 year old girls in all sort of crazy activities, like Red Cross First Aid training, camping in September when it is 30 degrees at night and the dew freezes on your tent, after school meetings where nearly all of them giggle til they fart and then roll on the floor laughing more, and actual badge earning types of things such as finding your way with a compass to a pile of snicker bars in the middle of the woods in which will never be found because the pesky squirrels pillaged them off to their treetop hideouts before our compass and trail signs led us to them. So because of all this crazy service to scouts I was given a bag of treats from a mother who...OWNS A CONFECTIONARY!! ...BLESS HER SOUL!

Previously I had sworn off sugar until I achieve a desirable weight and fit into my pre-pregnancy #3 clothes. That means that I don't care to be the waif that I was before the birth of the first 2 kids which is over 19 or so years ago. I am settling for the third child, strike that, pre-prego #4 will be good enough! Grechen you are amazing!!

Garden clubs are nice because you always learn something new, like how to store fresh herbs so they last longer, or storing tuberous and non-tuberous begonia bulbs and dahlia bulbs? Well that was the topic at the harvest party. I have amazing friends with delicious food and many with handy info.....thanx friends!

Interesting, but more interesting to me is the fact that the last four chapters in the book that I read immediately after the harvest party, "Earthly Treasures" another historical fictions read by Phillippa Gregory, was about purchasing bulbuous flowers all over Europe for the gardens of the Lords in King James' England of the 1600's. It seems that unfamiliar topics of interest seem to sprout themselves to the intellect in clusters near about the same time. I want to see England's gardens now.

Got Bulbs?

What I Wish I Could Have Done Different

This is a difficult prompt for my blog for many reasons. Research papers are hard to begin with, time consuming, and it is extremely difficult to jump in and work on something huge in an hour here or there like in other classes.

Besides all the reasons that research papers are hard, who really knows how to do them? What order? If I had a list of everything to do and in what order it would be easy. That is what this English class did for me. By the end of the course I realized that each lesson was a chunk in the final major project. It shortened the process by grouping it into chunks. Taking on each chunk was was feasible. I couldn't have made it any easier. In the end the paper really came together quickly, very surprising to me actually; even though I write most the time like Yoda speaks, there is some grammar rule that is always backwards. I really don't know what I could have done different to be honest.

What I will do is go back through all the lessons and make a list. The list will be called EMERGENCY INFO FOR FUTURE RESEARCH PAPERS and will have numbers from one-to like fourteen with instructions of exactly what to do before continuing. I work well with lists so this will be a good thing to always have on file. Which makes me wonder how many research papers I will actually have to do for my 2 year degree, my 4 year degree and then my masters. The thought is making me want to eat.......popcorn, ice cream and blueberries and pie...any kind of pie. It isn't helping that I am drinking a stress relief magnesium drink right now.

To end this blog, I wouldn't have done anything different because if I didn't have this class to guide me through the process then my paper would be a disaster...like the last one was in Psychology 101. However, once my blood pressure was down again from writing the paper on the teenage brain, I thought that I had done a super duper job. Looking back, and that is figuratively, I AM NOT ACTUALLY GOING to reread that paper, I think that I would scrap the whole project and cry, on my first paper that is, not the one I JUST did for English 111.

Peace out, I must leave, people are knocking at my door.

My Consultation

It all began with going to my first Chemistry class on Tuesday- after getting four people up and dressed, lunches packed, off to school, the bus stop, plucking my eyebrows, and driving 30 minutes in the wrong direction to take the cutest terrorist to daycare. Then another 45 minute drive to school in which I parked at the lower lot to catch the gold shuttle bus to the Nat Sci building.

While riding the shuttle up the hill I called The Writing Center and made an appointment with the writing center up at Gruehning, that wasn't hard at all, really it wasn't. I really need to finish this English class before all the other Chemistry and Biology homework starts to waterfall into my life so when I heard that there was no lab for Tuesday, I dropped in unannounced to The Writing Center disregarding my appointment the next day. I really really really want English to be over at this point and am willing to buy more coffee to keep myself at it.

I hiked up 5 flights of stairs, figuring I can lose some calories too, to the meet three lonely expert English persons suffering from lack of activity. School JUST started, I am sure they were not expecting someone with a nearly completed research paper to walk in the first day of school. They were nearly fighting over me, well kinda. Ian C. won. This is cool, someone you can hand your assignment over to, to read over, and hand it back and say "nice"...NOT!!

Ian asked me what my assignment was, what type of writing project, what did I think I needed the most help with. Then he began reading while I found the water fountain. I really hiked 5 flights of stairs. He read half and then we began to discuss the correct way to make web citations. We had a discussion with a few other English expert fellows that were consulted because Ian wanted pro backup. I hated to disturb their intellectual dialogue on the 80's transformers, storm and sunbot known to have special UV powers but they were ecstatic to join the consultation. We all learned how to properly make unpaginated web references in a research paper. Cool.

The next part was even better because that previous part, I knew for sure that stuff was wrong. After reading half the paper and complementing my research and two pages of citations, Ian was a little unclear on some of my points, even though I pointed them out to him. He gave me some really good ideas on how to make my points stronger, how to leave one part and go onto the next part stronger. Like making a big entrance everytime someone comes in the door. That was my analogy not his.

We worked on transitions and where I needed more of them. I told him that this was my suckiest part and he disagreed and said that this was the time to work on this part. He said writing is a process and I am still in the process of creating the research paper. (Really without the consultation I was ready to just send it in!) I have put in lots of time on this project, sometimes with tears, sometimes with bursts of tantrums-my husband will celebrate for sure when English 111 is over- and mostly with a lack of sleep.

The last part. Ian suggested that I change up the introduction and gave me reasons why which I will not say here in my blog. It sounded reasonable to me. I will try it.....tomorrow! Rewriting, fine tuning, and editing will make tomorrow a busy day and a great day to end chapter 14.

For any writing assignment due, before it is due, go see Ian or some other unbusy English person expert at UAF on the 8th floor of the Gruening Building for some advice. They are really helpful and nice even when you put yourself down.

Now go eat some ice cream! I know that ice cream has nothing to do with the blog and neither does the fact that all those stairs that I hiked didn't help get me to 10,000 steps on Tuesday.

Summarizing Reading

I feel like a pretty lame summarizer. I am a plain to the point type of person that probably writes in that manner, I don't like to write if there is not a direct compensation in some way personally, and I think I sometimes miss the point totally and can interpret things really wrong at times.

If I were to get paid to do this I would need to really figure out how to increase my skills greatly. I read quite a bit therefore I know what good writing is and therefore I don't think that I am a creative enough writer to make it really interesting, even while summarizing. I can give a basic overview if that is interesting enough, just giving the main points. Sounds easy enough yet I know that I am not a writer, I don't have things floating in my head that are clever and that need to be written down. I must wonder though, how did Virginia Wolf get so clever at writing?

I do understand that effective communication is necessary in life, business and even in Girl Scout meetings with eight preteens in attendance. To put it bluntly, the business of writing is critically important especially in many professional fields. Therefore, if it helps my sales in a business, or my career as a nurse, or a researcher, then I will painstakingly do my best. One thing that comes a bit easier to me is creating simple ads and flyers. Sometimes I can write out things to help out my friends, editing, or even help overcome a software issue. Helping a friend is compensation, doing something nice for someone else. It doesn't mean that I am good at it, just because someone wanted my advice or needed my help. I am sure most people in the world better at writing than me; many of them still in grade school!

It is sometimes like a bad joke that my Cuban/German American friend tells me. It takes me a week to get the punch line if I ever get it at all, not sure if it is his accent or the meaning of the joke. Or like the time I tried to help my daughter in interpret a poem in high school. I told her exactly what I thought about the poem after studying it for half an hour. I thought it was totally obscene, morbid and immodest. Turned out she googled the poem got some others advice, and interpreted it herself quite well. She rejected everything I had to say and got a good grade. It turned out that I was totally off base and nowhere near the enigmatic meaning of the dark poem. My impression was very far wrong and I went further by making it political. I realize I do this, like when I sing the wrong words to songs on the radio. It's the way I hear it though. I misunderstand things all the time, that is why summarizing can be difficult for me.

So anyway, when I have to summarize something, especially something that will hopefully get me and "A" in a class, it really helps me to understand what I read better even though I hate doing it. I don't write creatively, especially if there is not much in it for me, I am blunt, and hopefully I don't get the content all wrong when I am summarizing. However, if I summarize by writing, I usually get the content less wrong, I helps me read better. Let me summarize, I hate to write but I do what I have to; it makes me better.