No, I’m not a foodie.  No, this isn’t a recipe/cooking/moral-support-in-the-kitchen blog.  Most likely you’ll think this is WAY off my beaten path and you are right.  For those of you who don’t normally visit here: welcome!  The normal fare is advice around your SOHO, coaching, speaking and training with an occasionally soap box thrown in for good measure.  Today is something special. Recipes!

First the history!  (Those of you who are SMCKCers can skip this part and go straight to the reason why I know you’re here-  located in the next paragraph.)

I’m a member of the Social Media Club of Kansas City.  We have a monthly breakfast meeting at the Kansas City Cafe (@KansasCityCafe if you’re on twitter).  (Montica, the owner, gets it so you should give them a try!  They open just special for us and cook some fantastic food up because they aren’t normally open in the mornings.  SMCKCers love bacon.  We talk about bacon – a lot!  A month ago I wondered out-loud on twitter if anyone had tried chocolate chip cookies with bacon in them.  Tweets were on fire with the debate about the sanity around such a combination.  Since I have a killer chocolate chip cookie recipe I decided to give it a whirl and share the results at the following SMCKC meeting.  I’m sharing the recipe here!

Chips N’ Bits

2 sticks unsalted butter
2 1/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups brown sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons milk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3/4 cup chocolate chips
3/4 cup bacon, fried crisp and crumbled (about 10 slices – that would be the bits people!)

Heat oven to 375° F.  Melt butter. Sift together flour, salt, and baking soda. Set aside.

Add sugars to butter and cream together.  Add egg, yolk, milk and vanilla.  Stir until well combined.  Slowly add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients.  Using a #2 scoop portion out the cookie dough and chill – I usually chill overnight.  Bake for 14 minutes or until golden.  (Do I really need to say ovens vary?)

For future versions I think I might try using the bacon drippings as part of the butter and up the bits to 1 cup.  The original cookie recipe is from Alton Brown.

The next recipe is something my mom and I created when I was somewhere around high school age.  I’ve used the same recipe ever since.  Several of my Virtual Assistant friends DM me for it frequently.  So I decided since ’tis the season for cornbread I should share with everyone!

Sundi’s Cornbread

1 egg
1 cup milk
1 1/2 flour
1/2 cup corn meal
2/3 c sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup oil

Whip all those ingredients up.  Throw them in an 8×8 pan for 20 to 25 minutes on 400°F.  Serve it hot, cold or even a day old with ham ‘n beans.  It feeds my 6 but for a smaller group you can cut the recipe in half and put it in a pie plate instead.  Warning – for some reason the recipe does not double well.  Please don’t ask me why.  I just know it to be true because I found out the hard way.

NOW you may really be…

Nibbling away -

Sundi

UPDATE:

December 14, 2009:  So I tried the Chips N’ Bits recipe with one stick of butter and 1/2 a cup of bacon grease and drippings.  It tasted better.  It also changed the consistency of the dough and how it cooked.  Since I was very happy with the cookie recipe the way it was I don’t think the more bacony taste was a good trade off for the change in texture.  I’ll keep fiddling with it as time goes on.

If you haven’t read about my Goolge revolt on Patriot Day you can see it here.

My cold-turkey Goolge stoppage has gone pretty well.

Thanks to Rachael (@caffeinatedelf) I found Inbox.  Not only has Inbox replaced my GoogleMail service but also my Toodledo and GoogleCalendar.  Inbox has addressed another problem I had and that was file storage.  So, now I have 30 GB of online storage for files and photos (Inbox provides a photo album too) plus my webmail and it costs me about $30 a year.  A small price to pay in order to leave Google.

For my search engine I’m currently using Bing.  I don’t have any complaints, nor am I overly impressed with it.  I’d be open to suggestions if anyone wants to throw some my way.

I’m back at Bloglines as a replacement for GReader.  Well, actually I’m not really back because no matter where I load my opml export from GReader it truncates about a quarter of the way through.  I’ve tried it on three different readers with the same result.  Nice! 

Something I didn’t think about when I decided to Google exit was dropping the verb “google” from my vocabulary.  Honestly the transition has been seamless which surprises me.

The ONLY thing I miss about GMail is being able to chat in the same screen.  That has brought serious withdrawal.  I was a Meebo fan before because of the purely web-based ability to use multiple services in one location.  I haven’t dropped GChat all together for the simple fact some people I chat with only use GChat.  So, I’ve now added that to my Meebo service.  I guess they’ve got me there!

All in all, I feel like I’m fighting the good fight.  Never forget!

Nibbling away -

Sundi

Today is Patriot Day.

Yesterday was my birthday.

As a gift to myself I’m going to use my blog as a personal soapbox just this once.  Or, maybe this will become an annual tradition…my official complaint about Google, posted every year on September 11th.

Does anyone think it was important that UFO trended on Google last week?  Google certainly did.  They thought it was cool enough to change their home page anyway.

If you were given a list of the top ten events in the history of your generation do you think any of these would be on it:

Birthday of Beatrix Potter
World Cup of 2006
Persian New Year
Death of Michael Jackson
Nobel Prize Centennial Award Ceremony

Alright, I’ll give you MJ but I’m certainly not moved by it so it wouldn’t be on my personal list.  I was more moved by the death of Chris Ledoux in 2005.  Now that would be on my list!

It would seem that Google likes to celebrate our native holidays consistantly through the years:

Mother’s Day
Father’s Day
Halloween
Thanksgiving
Earth Day
St. Patrick’s Day
Valentine’s Day
New Year’s
Independence Day
Martin Luther King Day

This yearly list seems fairly extensive and specific to the US but then sometimes you’ll see:

Chinese New Year
Persian New Year
Summer Games in Athens
World Water Day
International Women’s Day
Lunar New Year
Large Hadron Collider
Bastille Day
La Fete de la Musique
Dragon Boat Festival
Children’s Day – Japan
St. George’s Day
Korean Liberation Day
Swiss National Day
Canada Day
Shichi-go-san – Japan

So maybe they like global stuff and maybe they don’t want to do something for a specific locale in the US.  But then comes Bloomsday.

How about a quick rundown of the random birthdays or individual accomplishments they’ve celebrated since 1999?

Rene Magritte
Marc Chagall
Diego Velazquez
Walter Gropius
Alexander Graham Bell
Luciano Pavarotti
Yuri Gagarin
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Louis Braille
Frank Lloyd Wright
Leonardo de Vinci
Vincent van Gogh
Ray Charles
Gaston Julia
Alfred Hitchcock
MC Escher
Albert Einstein
Michelangelo
Picasso
Andy Warhol
Piet Mondrian
Monet

I think this list is short-sided because good ol’ Beatrix isn’t on it; however, I distinctly recall the Google logo with Farmer Brown and Peter in it.  Oh, and let’s not forget that Google celebrates their own birthday every year.

Please tell me, after seeing the variety of only the ones I’ve listed here which of these dates is in our hearts as a nation more than September 11, which has come to be known as Patriot Day.  I can’t think of a single one.  Notice I said of the ones listed.  I can think of only one holiday that means more to me than Patriot Day and that is known to Google as “Season’s Greetings.”  In their ten year history Easter hit Google’s logo only twice.  For me, Easter ranks right up there with Christmas and Patriot Day.

If Google doesn’t want to go a religious route that is fine with me.  Leave out Christmas and Easter.  If Google doesn’t want to go heavily into holidays celebrated by the US that is fine with me too.  Neither of those is the point of me standing here on this soapbox.

September 11, 2001 directly impacted two-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-three lives from ninety countries.  (Yes, I figure that is a violation of AP style.  I did it for emphasis while on my soapbox.)  Please notice I said d.i.r.e.c.t.l.y.  Indirectly the event impacted a nation of people and brought many nations around the world to tears.

I can guess what some of you are saying, “Oh, Sundi. It isn’t that big of a deal. They get to choose their celebrations and what they do to their logo.”  True, and I get to choose my search engine.  From now on, it is no longer Google.  “Hello new search engine. My name is Sundi and I’m a Virtual Assistant.”

If people in our country can walk around like this for a day, then I think Google can change their logo for a day.

Nibbling away -

Sundi

I came across Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?  last spring.  Since then I’ve been paying close attention to the reading behavior of my 11-year-old.

I’m an avid reader.  It started when I was in elementary school.  Into adulthood I’ve continued to read several authors over the decades and can go through books at an almost alarming rate - which actually makes me prefer a series to a single book.

Although I know there are several places you can read books online I tend to not like sitting in one spot, especially a desk chair or even up-right period, and scrolling while I read.  Although I typically get books from the library a UPS delivery of an Amazon box at our house is just this side of Christmas morning.  The only thing better than the crack of a new spine and the smell of a new book is the sweetness of a newborn baby.

My oldest son seems to have picked up this love.  He has read some of my old favorites and shared some of his favorites with me.  Even the second of my 7-year-old twins seems to be following in our path.  The first-born twin, not so much.

The concerns which Carr outlines have not come to pass in my family yet; however, it won’t surprise me if they do.  The best I can do is pass my love of reading on to my children.  Honestly, shouldn’t every parent be doing that anyway?  And if they aren’t maybe we digressed way before the internet became the norm.  Shall we face it…some people just don’t have a love for reading.

With that I say, Thank you Mr. Internet.  I think we should rejoice for every vehicle we use to get any generation to consume information.  Fortunately, I realize my children will do it differently.  “It” being almost everything I’ve ever done in my past!

Actually, I wonder if history is only repeating itself.  When remote controls for televisions came out did someone say we would never view television the same again?  Did they say the networks were doomed because viewers would never stay on a station through the commercials?  Just to make it clear – I am old enough to remember NOT having remote controls but NOT old enough to remember what the “experts” thought about them.

Even if the book industry is doomed I have some books on hold for me at the library so I need go.

Nibbling away -

Sundi

Being a farmers wife, she put substantial meals on the table three times a day, the first one being before sane people rollover in the morning, let alone actually get out of bed.  She kept a garden, did the laundry – which was line-dried, performed typical farm chores like milking the cows, raised two kids, had a strawberry patch bigger than her house and was one of the craftiest people I knew (as in made cool things by hand).

I’m sure some of that seems standard to a house wife today – except in my memories it was 35 years ago!

Without a lawn service she tended multiple flower beds around the house and mowed the yard…most likely because her husband was tending the fields and didn’t care how tall the grass was.

The garden was in a pasture far from the house and she didn’t have a sprinkler system.  In fact, I recall filling buckets and barrels full of water and trucking them to the garden.

By the way, the line dried clothes were by choice.  She actually did own a dryer.

Not one stitch of food on her table came from the freezer, save the meat, which was most likely a product of the farm and kept in a deep freeze in a building detached from the farm house.

The can goods were kept in the cellar along with bushels of potatoes.  I can’t think of a single canned fruit or vegetable she didn’t have down there.  When I say canned I don’t mean off the shelf of the grocery store.  I’m actually talking about jars which is called canned when you do it yourself.

The meals she created weren’t just for her family of four – especially during planting and harvesting.  I remember spending almost as long packing up the food as we did cooking it.  We’d truck it out to the fields too.  I remember the fresh baked Monster Cookies – chunky peanut butter, oatmeal, M&Ms, raisins AND chocolate chips.  I still have that recipe somewhere…

Over the years she accumulated eight grandchildren.  One of them was me.

All that just to tell you my mother was born and raised on a farm.  She named me Sundi (pronounced sun, like our star, plus de as in details) because Sunday was her favorite day of the week.  It was her favorite because she got to spend it with her dad.  Go figure.

Sometimes I wonder if I could have pulled off a Carol or Maxine – after my grandmother.

Nibbling away -

Sundi