155 thoughts on “May 10, 2011: Red Envelope”

  1. NBA Playoff Update:

    Miami nips the Celtics in overtime to take a commanding 3-1 lead. I think Miami closes out in game 5. It looks like Miami/Chicago, LeBron's team against what should have been LeBron's team. Can you imagine Chicago with LeBron instead of Boozer? Oh man.

    OKC outlasts Memphis in 3 OTs to tie up the series at 2-2. The WCF, when we get there, is going to be very good. But first, these two teams have to slug it out.

    Awesome post season.

    1. Ugh, I will be in the unenviable position of rooting for a Chicago team. I'm going to hate myself.

    2. Too bad the results of the "Rochester game" counted against the big clubs record.

    1. That article may have been written by the same guy who wrote Liz Taylor's obituary for the NY Times.

    2. I would enjoy him doing that and flopping. Kill two birds with one stone.

      1. I was thinking after he took his trip back down how much it would suck if he had to try to walk all the way back up there. Then I found out he would not have to.

        I'm amazed there wasn't more yelling the initial problem and the subsequent return to the bottom. Also, I question the intelligence of attempting to halt the rolling snowmobile by hand.

  6. I'm disappointed I missed the gamelog last night - Mrs. Corn was using the computer for mortgage stuff. House going on the market Thursday. I see the diaper converstation continues over there...care to bring it here so things nest? I've got a few million questions.

    1. i've got another DIY question as well: baby food. i'd love to make some, if not all to most of the baby food. other than a good food processor, anyone else have experience with this?

      1. I leave the food making to the Mrs. Sadly the little calf doesn't really like nestling up to his mother too much so we are left pumping, and pumping, and pumping, and pumping.

        Seriously, if you are committed to not using formula, buy an expensive pump for the Mrs. It is worth it.

        1. jane's going to go back to work sooner than later (not hers or my preference, just no real way around it), so we're already looking into those.

          it's still down the road a bit, but i mean making solid food and such at home. again, it would be more supplemental than 100% with the store stuff thrown in.

          1. We went with this one. It is a pretty good product. At times, Ms Buffalo, for lack of a better term, feels like a cow but we both feel pretty strongly about the merits of breast milk. At times I have had to give her, pardon another pun, pump up chats to keep her going. The best thing to say is "remember, you want this." Make sure you take an encouraging tone, not a condescending one.

            I just want to comment on this topic again, to the expecting fathers. Being a Dad is the coolest most awesome and rewarding thing ever.

            1. We're only on week 26 and I (we) already can't wait to meet her...it's going to be a looooong summer.

                1. Hey, go check the CoC from yesterday. I threw up some beers I am intrigued by from out west that are not up nort. (its hard to know what I wanted to try from there without knowing what's not distributed here.)

                    1. In my experience, getting to the point of throwing the beers up means one would only make it worse by trying to clean it up.

                  2. Green Flash amber sounded pretty good. I was also reading about California Amber ales the other day, and thought a sample platter of those would be fun, as I haven't really explored those sorts of beers from out there much. Something like Ballast Point Calico, Alaskan Amber, or Firestone Walker Red Nectar

                    I can certainly make something happen regarding Green Flash, Firestone Walker, Red Nectar (which is Humboldt Brewing), and Ballast Point. Alaskan, of course, is not from California, but I can accommodate that as well.

                    1. I know, I've heard a lot about that beer though, especially from Spooky.

                      I should also note that I have an IPA I just bottled made with citra hops, which I've not used before. (flavored and dry hopped with cascade hops as well.) I think it'll be a winner. I'm planning an English IPA as well. I figure doing lots of simple malt bill pales will be a good way to dial in my new fly sparging set-up. You can be my guinea pig, if you're up for it.

                      (posted with permission from me.)

                    2. Twist my arm, please.

                      Hey, I have those exact cabinets (except for the lazy susan? in the corner).

                      And yes, the Alaskan Amber is excellent.

                    3. Yeah, that's a lazy susan. I like to stand in that corner, spin it and grab whatever spice I end up at when I do my seasoning.

                      I knew I remembered something on that Alaskan Amber. I think that put that first seed of "I think I would like to try that" in my head.

                    5. I drank it, CH. It was mighty fine. Superior to Victory's Baltic Thunder.

                      Although, truth be told, I prefer Okocim's.

                    6. Whoa, whoa, whoa!!!

                      Alaskan arrives in Minnesota in May - Stay tuned for details on launch events throughout the coming month!

                    8. Whoa. Get Deschutes in Minnesota, and I'll never regret my eventual move back.

                      Given Alaskan's ubiquity here, I'm a little surprised it's taken so long. You can't go anywhere in Washington and not find it, so I just shudder at the thought of being without it.

                    11. I can confirm that Alaskan is here. I bought some last week along with a sixer of Red Chair based on spooky recommendations. The Red Chair was excellent. I haven't tapped the Alaskan yet. Also bought a bottle of this after a link posted by bS. Haven't opened it yet, but I'm exptecting great things.

                    12. Red Chair made it out there?! That's awesome.

                      Alaskan is such a smooth, drinkable brew, primarily the amber, but I have good things to say about all their beers. I assume, though, that just the amber is out there.

                    13. Deschutes is the beer of the month at Big Top. 6.99 per sixer. I've got an Inversion IPA right here.

            2. Being a Dad is the coolest most awesome and rewarding thing ever.

              Before he passed, Pops told me how happy he was that he could ask his son for advice as a true peer. I don't know if it was his favorite stage of fatherhood, but it sounds to me like you're in for a lifetime of reward.

            3. Second on the best feeling ever. This weekend, I signed a birthday card "Love, Mom and Dad" for the first time. For some reason, that was more odd and amazing than many of the other events since Gwen's birth. Also, Gwen is 1!! It's really amazing how fast time goes.

              As for the baby food maker, we got this food grinder in a kit with a little mesh bag that the kiddo can suck on (from Target). It works pretty well, though it can be a little difficult to get the hang of (as the reviews say). The mesh bag is awesome, though, and was great when Gwen was just starting to eat. Also, this has the advantage of being fairly cheap, which is always nice.

        2. Seriously, if you are committed to not using formula, buy an expensive pump for the Mrs. It is worth it.

          like this?

        3. My wife breast feed for 16(!) months. At the end it was just once a day, but she kept at it for a very long time. Our daughter was never sick as an infant and I credit breast feeding for part of that (also not going to day care is a biggie). It finally ended when I got her up one morning and fed her breakfast. She didn't really notice and that was it. Lucy was similarly relieved and saddened by the end.

          1. My wife is still nursing Gwen, though she is down to bedtime and sometimes once during the day. We are going through the transition to whole milk from a sippy cup now, and the wife feels a similar mix of relief and sadness.

            1. My wife worked as a nutrition counselor for the WIC program a while back. They strongly support (read: push/force, because the women who work for WIC are batsh*t crazy) breastfeeding, so she has read a lot on the subject. She's definitely going to do it, we both definitely feel its for the best. (also cheaper.)

              1. jeez, you're just doing everything on the cheap. i bet you're even going to get your child cheap toys too, aren't you...

                1. I didn't entirely pick this username by chance. I fully expect plenty of fights with my daughter in her teen years over cost of clothing.

              2. It can be difficult, I've heard, if the baby doesn't get the whole feeding concept. My advice is to be patient at the beginning. Luckily for us, Miss SBG latched on immediately and had no problems. Other people have had problems, though, and this can be very traumatic for mom.

                1. I should add that Miss SBG REFUSED TO TAKE A BOTTLE. Girl would not do it. I suppose that if we had starved her should would have, but we didn't and she never once, not once(!), drank anything from a baby bottle. Not. Once. This made me totally useless during the feeding event until she got old enough to eat something other than milk. The wife basically never pumped after trying some in the beginning because the kid's refusal to take it from anywhere but the source. So, the pump I bought was virtually unused.

                  1. Starving doesn't work too well. At least by a loose definition of starving. With our first, my wife was still working. As a nurse. 12-hour shifts. My daughter didn't eat all day and then she ate non-stop when my wife got home.

                    We also failed to get bottle success on the second child, but my wife was at least working less frequently and 8-hour shifts then.

                    With the third, we've done a bottle every day and she has stuck with it. With the others we tried a bottle early, confirmed it worked, and then stopped until they needed it. So two weeks later the kids would say "no way in hell."

                  2. The type of nipple used with the bottle can have a lot to do with it. The more natural it feels, the more likely they will take it. My wife breast fed, but we had no problems using a bottle when she went back to teaching. My boys also were very healthy as babies (also did not go to daycare). I would say don't be afraid to supplement with formula in the beginning. We had to do that with Junior in the first week because my wife was just not able to produce enough initially. She wasn't getting any sleep while trying to recover from the emergency C-Section (Junior's head was too big. She blames me), so we finally gave him some formula and he slept for three hours. We only used it once or twice more but it saved my wife's sanity that first week at home.

                2. A nipple shield can be really useful to get a good latch. We ended up using one right from the get go because Gwen was a little sluggish from the birth and the ensuing activity (our labor definitely didn't go as planned), and it helped quite a bit. The downside was that she kept using it for quite a while (~7 months) and wouldn't latch without it until then. But she did take a bottle really well, possibly because the the material is so similar.

              3. My wife worked ... for the WIC program ....the women who work for WIC are batsh*t crazy

                So, you don't let her use teh Interwebs, right? 🙂

                1. I thought twice about posting it that way, what with that implication. In the end, those women are so off their rockers that it still made sense to say it.

                    1. I'll admit I probably shouldn't paint them all with that brush. My wife worked for two separate counties and both had a director that acted so bizzare as to confound me on how they were still employed. Maybe it didn't show through to the people utilizing the program, but behind the scenes was amazingly bad people managing skills.

                    2. so, you are saying that your wife worked for two different agencies/companies, both of whom had lousy managers?

                      Inconceivable! What are the odds of running into a bad manager? 😉

                    3. Heh, a fair and true point.

                      It wasn't that they were bad managers, though, it was that they were so weirdly bad as to blow my mind. I've had bad managers before, but even their level of suck was nothing compared to the stories I heard of these WIC directors.

          2. EAR found breastfeeding our first to be the most painful thing she had ever experienced (C-section so no labor pains to compare to) but still she stuck with it for 8-12 weeks. She didn't even try for #2 and #3. We both wanted the more natural thing, but EAR would cry at feedings it hurt so much. Thank goodness for modern medicine/dietary science.

            We were also looking for a more natural childbirth, but then the whole breech thing... It's a cliché, but life is what happens when you've got other plans.

            1. Both of my daughters would have been stillborn under natural conditions.

              The Milkmaid was in labor for 37 hours with Skim, and after all that, we had to do a C-section because she'd gotten stuck. With Sour Cream, the placenta was breaking down so she would have died in the womb if they hadn't taken her out - six? eight? - weeks early. She ended up having to spend the first month of her life in the hospital, after nearly dying on the table immediately after her birth because her underdeveloped lungs were flooded.

              1. Those are definitely good reasons for getting the ball rolling. So far, everything is going generally smoothly, although we're finding some doctors to be a serious pain. My wife got labeled as a high-risk pregnancy due to her blood pressure, and she met with the high-risk councilors who was all doom-and-gloom about it even though there wasn't actually anything wrong with her yet. (bp was a bit high because she was in a freeking hospital, its come down on subsequent readings in a more relaxed environment.) And they did it as three doctors giving one pregnant woman only the bad possibilities. So, instead of telling her they would simply monitor everything for the next four months and act accordingly if something like preeclampsia presented itself, they scared the living crap out of her for no reason and were going to try to force her to switch doctors from the woman she decided to see and really liked.

                It's all leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth for hospitals and how they deal with pregnancies. I hope the rest goes smoothly, and if there is a legitimate medical concern that would require an induction or a c-section, we'll listen. But right now it really does seem like they're only concerned with their convenience and making us run as many tests as possible to make us pay more money.

                Whew, sorry for the rant and I hope I didn't cross any lines, but it did feel good to get out.

                2. I don't know if I have told the story about Ms. Buffalo's labor yet but it is a good one. The last month of a pregnancy the doctors want to see you once a week. With 3.5 weeks to go Ms. Buffalo went in for her usual check up. She calls me at work and said "My blood pressure is a little high so they want to keep me under observation". This was at about 3pm. I left work and made it to the hospital as quickly as I could. She told me how it was unnecessary, yada, yada, etc. Yeah, sure, like I was just going to leave her there.

                  Anyway, after sitting in a waiting room pleading with the physicians for 3 hours, explaining how we lived 5 minutes away they let us leave around 7pm with strict instructions to come back 4 days later to check in. We left the hospital, grabbed some take out from the local pizza place, and went home. We turned on the tv about 745pm and began to eat. At 8pm her water broke.

                  Less than 11 hours later we had the Calf.

                  1. The Mrs. was on bed rest for ~6 weeks prior to delivering The Boy. Two weeks prior to due date, I was scheduled to go to Jetertown for a conference. She said "no, you are not."

                    Naturally, The Boy arrived almost to the minute of when my flight was scheduled to depart.

                    Our story: she was allowed to get out of bed for two things and two things only -- to go to the bathroom, and to visit the OB. So, that day, she was to visit the OB.

                    The doc's office was on the south side of the street, the hospital on the north, with a covered walkway connecting the two at the second story level. Anyway, she'd been uncomfortable over night, but we were in no hurry because of said appointment with OB. We get there. He says that the Mrs. is like, 6 cm dilated. Walk over to the hospital and I will be over soon. We walk over, with several pauses along the way.

                    We get to labor & delivery and meet the Sargeant Major delivery nurse. She is now ~8 cm dilated. Sargeant Major gets on the horn and orders the doc to haul his skinny @ss over RIGHT NOW, 'cuz the kid is practically hanging out the front door.

                    Plop plop, fizz, fizz. A few snarls, a few pushes, an episiotomy later (for those of you not in the know, you prolly don't want to know), and we are parents. No time for drugs or nothin'. Holy cr@p. What do we do now???

                    Epilogue: We took the Boy home for, what, two days, before having to return because he was jaundiced. We spent a very sleepless night and then some at the hospital, watching him toast in the EZ-Bake oven before the orange went away.

                    1. loving all these anecdotes 😉

                      for our part, peckish jane just came back from the gyno, and everything is going swimmingly. in fact, it's a going a little too well: homeboy's 3 weeks ahead of schedule as far as size and weight goes. the average is 4.28lbs for this week, and he's pushing 5.8lbs they say. in fact, if he continues at this pace, the doc says they might have to move forward ahead of time. before, one way i would try to dissuade the missus when she was on her baby kicks was to remind her that i was about 10lbs 6oz and birth, and she was a bit over 9lbs. obviously, that line of argument only stalled for so long, but it's coming to fruition regardless.

                      besides that though, strong heartbeat, and everything seems to be going very well (*knocks on wood*), though his aversion to ultrasound cooperation has become somewhat notorious.

                    2. The medical staff is going to have to make one hell of a convincing argument in favor of an episiotomy before I let them get anywhere near my wife with that blade.

                    4. The doc sees any tearing, he/she is in there with the blunt-point scissors and done before there is any sort of arguing to be made.

                    5. The staff at our hospital would much prefer to stitch you up than cut you open.

                    6. I'm not a fan of anything to do with surgery, but the episiotomy was unfortunately the one part of the delivery that I recall with clarity. And bS, even with the episiotomy, the baby can still rip her a new one.

                3. My wife's first appt with #1, she had high blood pressure. She said, "yeah, we were late and parking was awful." So they said they'd take it at the end of the appt, and avoided the stigma of being "high-risk."

      3. I made baby food once. But I did it with a 200 gallon tank fitted with a two-level chopping blade and then ran it through a heat exchanger to pasteurize it. Now that I don't work there anymore, I no longer have access to that equipment, sadly, so I don't think I can be much help on this one.

      4. Ice cube trays, hj. Process large patch, throw some in trays to freeze and repeat. That way you have fresh and frozen single-serving meals to warm up. All three of mine grew up on homemade baby food mostly.

        1. My first meat was ice-cube-trayed food-milled steamed squirrel. Dad loved to hunt. Mom didn't eat squirrel. Dad found a way to make hunting something he needed to do for the baby. (As I read it, he was a rather disinterested parent for the first two years or so.)

          Which reminds me. It's happened with all three babies, but about 9-12 months after the birth, my wife and I typically hate each other and everything done innocently is seen as a jab. Might be time to find a grandparent, aunt, or uncle who can sit for the evening (better yet a weekend), find a way to do something fun together that requires interaction (movies are just tv shows on big screens, they don't count).

          1. Great point. You need to take care of each other even though all time and energy are devoted to the little bundle of joy.

    2. Just wanted to mention re: diapers and "green" -- cloth diapers aren't necessarily all that much more environmental than disposable, when you factor in cleaning detergents, etc. In other words, don't let environmental friendliness be the deciding factor; expense and convenience are the bigger items.

        1. That would be ours too (if we do go cloth). I get the feeling that they are not as convenient as disposable and my wife is not really a patient person...I mean that in the nicest way. She has about 15 things going on at any one time, so I find half-finished projects laying around at least daily. Finishes the essential part of one thing and moves on to the next. Whatever she had been working on just hangs out until she gets around to cleaning-up or finishing.

          Long way of saying that if cloth require more than just putting on a clean diaper, we probably won't go that route - whatever is most convenient for her is the rule, not the exception in my home.

          1. That is a very good question and one I will have to get from my wife. She's done all of the learning and purchasing stuff with these. I suppose it probably is about time I get up to speed on it.

            I do know that we have a bunch from a handful of different sources, so there's a mix of types and brands.

            1. I threw a couple of links up in yesterday's game log, but it'd be really interesting to get people's experiences with these things, since there are a few new dad's around here. Maybe we should have a biweekely "daddy post"?

                1. That's what happens in a Twins game log these days....

                  So my wife is sending me a ton of info that she's collected, so if anyone is interested shoot me an email at peterson.jessea at gmail dot com and I'll forward it on to you.

                  1. if you could hit me up at jonelliot[no space here]2323 at the same domain, or just chuck it over on the facedbook, i'd be much obliged.

                    1. Judging by how well the dad threads do, might need a new WGOM page for all of this info.

                    2. not a terrible idea. in fact, with all the dad's, maybe a rotating column would be best. i'd be willing to organize everything if others were interested.

          2. I should throw my experience in here a bit. We went cloth diapers with kid #1 and disposable for kid #2, I think basically due to laziness/convenience factor.

            I do have to admit that I once pinned a diaper to my daughter. She was crying and fussing while changing her and I (accidentally) stuck the pin through her skin and clasped it before or I realized that her crying had changed from a "I'm being fussy and difficult" cry to a "damn it that bertin' hurts" cry. I still haven't lived that down. It didn't get me out of changing diapers either.

            1. Fortunately, the diapers we'll use have buttons, so no worries about pins.

              1. You know what still scares the crap out of me? Changing a baby's clothes. Their fingers are so little and when you are putting their small little arms through the arm holes in a shirt, man, I am just terrified that I am going to break their tiny little fingers.

                1. No worries there. Their bones are so flexible, they like a nice green tree branch, It's gonna take a lot to snap those bones. I think babies evolved that way as a hedge against clumsy dads.

                2. I put my fingers through the sleeve, grab the hand, and pull it through that way.
                  I pulled some fingers on #1 very far back, and dealt with the screaming, tears, and condemning looks.

            2. Is your daughter into piercings now, free? 'cuz then you'd have that to be blamed for.

              1. She's not, although mom would never allow it. Let's see what happens after she turns 18 this summer and goes to Art School. Yikes!

                1. Does she have a boyfriend with a conversion van yet? I'm pretty sure that's de rigueur for art school.

    1. Are you implying that E-6 isn't a lover of great performances? Or do you mean "...and other lovers of..."? The fate of worlds rests on your answer.

        1. You're tearing me apart, Lisa doc!
          httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plz-bhcHryc&NR=1
          Now that's acting.

          BTW, if you're looking for a fun rom-com (is there really such a thing?), Blue Valentine should be avoided at all costs. If, however, you want to see two of the finest young actors of their generation at the top of their games, put it in the queue.

  8. Past Life Martyred Saints by EMA comes out today, and it's the best album I've heard this year. It's streaming here if you want some haunting, droney girl rock to listen to today.

      1. Pitchfork's been pushing it (interviews, previews of three tracks, etc.). But that doesn't mean it's bad.

  9. Heh, thought this was pretty good:
    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeJPJDpq3-Y

    2. That Other Brand's target market consists of people who are too stupid to employ this method.

      1. I'm a little surprised nobody did that sooner. I've heard it from real people (including on this blog) since those insipid commercials started playing.

    1. IMHO, stadiums outside of a city center are a terrible, terrible idea.

          1. I think the biggest problem with the Fire's stadium in particular is that Chicago has a good public transit system and they weren't able to find a location that was accessible by rail

            I've heard that NYRB's new stadium is also pretty tough to get to (more for inability to park, though), which is a shame.

        2. I think it could work for an NFL team as compared to an MLS team. Although, on second thought, the NFL is putting more and more games at odd times. But if the NFL stuck mainly to Sunday afternoon/evening games, more plentiful stadium parking could be a good thing, thanks to the tailgating culture in football, and with essentially only 8 home games per year, travel hassle is probably not that much of an issue.

          To make another MLS comparison, Gillette totally works for the Patriots, but the Revs would probably benefit hugely from a stadium much closer to Boston.

          And at any rate, eventually NFL games will all be played in LA in front of a green screen.

        3. The worst part of Toyota Park is there is no public transportation to it. Oh and Bridgeview smells.

    2. A day-long NFL experience for family and friends

      I may be mistaken, but that's what watching it on television already seems to be. Why go to the game?

      1. When NFL games are held in suburbs it just makes it a greater distance drunk people have to drive. It seems there is least one fatality a year leaving a Bills game due to some irresponsible drunk idiot.

        1. When NFL games are held in suburbs it just makes it a greater distance drunk people have choose to drive.

  11. CJ Wilson on the A's' (?) offense:

    It’s like obviously no one sets out there to go walk guys, and I haven’t been doing that lately. It’s just only against their team that I do that. They take everything close. If it’s not called a strike, then they walk. It’s lawyer ball. That’s how they roll. That’s how they’re going to beat me. That’s how they have to beat me. I have to make a bunch of mistakes and walk a bunch of guys because they’re not that good of a hitting team. The whole game was frustrating.

    Sound like a bit of sour grapes to me. Some how the A's not being a good hitting team forces Wilson to walk them?

    1. He's not set up to face an entire team full of patient hitters, and he couldn't make the adjustment. I get his frustration, but it's a little like yelling "This game cheats!" when you can't beat a boss.

      1. Hey game bosses do often cheat. Especially in arcade games made to make you pump tons of quarters into them.

          1. I'm very fond of arcade-styled games, so this is one of my hugest pet peeves of all time. If you're going to make the game hard, make it difficult but fair. It makes for rewarding gameplay, and it makes the game replayable because there's the possibility of a one credit clear.

            Sorry for the rant.

    2. I think that would be a legitimate complaint in a slow-pitch softball league. But he's a professional baseball player, and if the hitters aren't going to swing, he's gotta throw strikes. I wouldn't be terribly averse to a somewhat larger strike zone, though, since at times it seems the league has trouble finding enough pitchers who consistently throw strikes and keep the game moving.

  12. daddy dearests:

    bowing to popular demand, and in an effort to shield our happily childless swingers from harsh realities in the gamelogs, we definitely should start some sort of column for the patres familias of the nation (great idea, sean). my suggestion would be some form of column of rotating authorship, and definitely of a free form nature. each father/author is free to expound upon any topic they wish for as long as they care to rant.

    if you’re interested, just give a shout below, i’ll set up a schedule, and we’ll get this thing off the ground. depending on the response, i’d suggest bi-monthly, or perhaps even weekly.

    1. I may even be willing to write about some things. I've got some rants I could probably rant on.

      1. i suppose it goes without saying that tips from wiser, more knowledgeable [read: prematurely grey] would be much appreciated from some of us of the less experienced of us.

          1. i should think we can get enough people where the frequency for any one author would be once every three months, maybe even a little longer.

    2. I think that sounds like a good idea but I gotta tell you as someone on the back end of the whole parent thing (I've got a soph and Sr) it's gonna be weird, its gonna be fun, it's gonna be disappointing, scary, exasperating, tiring. Girls are harder than boys; girls are harder on their moms than dads. You're gonna make mistakes. It's gonna be alright; we all seem to muddle through and somehow raise pretty damn good kids. Oh and look for a whole lot of hurt if you tell your wife, some friends on this baseball blog I read said we should do xxxxx for little Mason/Ava. Doesn't mean there won't be good ideas given by other WGOM citizens, just don't tell your wife where you got the ideas.

      2. [gigantic pic of Ms. de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong]

        *bumps fists with free*

        1. I'd be willing to contribute. I don't have author privileges.

          I can't decide if I'm a veteran dad or one in his prime. I'm going to go with one in his prime. (Although I did utter the phrase "stop running around and go play some video games" so maybe I'm not in my prime.)

    6. Don't know if I'll write, but I'll definitely comment lots.
      Three babies in, I feel veterany on the ages 0-14 months.

    1. fwiw, Mags, I think all they did was to fan the peeled slices in a baking dish, pour over the juice to half-cover the slices, and bake at about 350 or so.

      Braising is about half way between roasting and boiling. The braising liquid should only reach about half-way up the food -- don't cover with liquid.

      In this case, I suppose you could consider dotting the sweet potato slices with butter and loosely covering the pan with foil for the first half of the baking time so that the juice doesn't evaporate too quickly. You don't want the sugars to burn in the pan. If need be, add a cup of hot water for the second half of the cooking time.

      Or take a look at this similar recipe for stove-top preparation.

    2. Ever cooked a roast in a crock pot after searing the outside? If so, then you've braised something before.

      As bS indicated, your main concern is to make sure the cooking liquid does not evaporate. Sweet potatoes burn really quickly, so make sure you get a good seal on the foil cover. And when you open it, open from the end facing away from you and peel back.

    1. Good Luck. Gardy thought the lineup last night did so well at not scoring runs that he figured he would throw the same one out there again. Rivera catches 11 innings (well, 10 1/3) and gets to play the next day after flailing at pitches that had Delmon Young, Torii Hunter and Jacque Jones scoffing at him.

      1. Rivera...gets to play the next day after flailing at pitches

        How's he supposed to run into a pitch if he doesn't get to play?

  16. Balls its hot here today. I was not prepared for 85º weather (91º at home!) at this time of year, and it seems neither was the office's HVAC system.

    1. Heh, it's been above 100º in tejas 5 times since April 1st. I feel no sympathy.

Comments are closed.