Holiday Party & Kleptomaniac Mo

Homebrewers do the best pot lucks. Besides the pots of beer, I mean.

It makes sense: gourmets are gourmets. Someone who is fussy about their beer isn't likely (with some huge exceptions) to think of Beanie Weenie as the food to marry that fine beer with.



And because we're geeks, we even make a friendly competition out of it, with votes for best beer, side, main dish, and dessert.



Corn relish with avocados, mushroom anti-pasta, smoked salmon, etc., etc. My plate had about three bites of each offering, and it was really too much food. And great food, too.



I was originally going to do a stuffed pumpkin for my entry, but I neglected to notice in the recipe the cook time. At 3:00, when I was ready to head to the store to buy the ingredients, I re-read the recipe to make sure I wouldn't forget anything and noticed it said to bake with the lid on 80 to 90 minutes, then another 30 minutes with the lid off.



That's two hours of baking after cleaning and scooping the strings & seeds out of the pumpkin. I needed to leave for my Dad's house (he and his wife were watching the girls for me) by 5:00 to make the party, so stuffed pumpkin will have to wait.

So I made queso dip. But I didn't want to just do the obvious Velveeta/Ro-Tel thing. It's good, but I wanted it to be something different. It's for a party of homebrewers, after all.

So I drained the Ro-Tel, counter to the recipe, so I could add about 1/3 cup Mrs. Renfro's Hot Habanero Salsa (the best salsa in the universe, bar none), without it getting to runny. To make it a bit stringier, I shredded about 8 oz. of Colby-Jack into it (versus 24 oz. Velveeta).

As the final kicker, I added a bit of Chipotle powder to the mix, not so much for heat as for the mesquite smokiness it imparts.



I never get to go to Bier Meisters meetings because they meet on Friday nights when I almost always have the honyocks. I guess if the meetings were a huge deal to me, I could get some babysitting help and get to a meeting here and there. But I never do, so it's good to get to at least one of the holiday parties (Maifest & Oktoberfest being the other two). I miss these characters.

And every one of them, I assure you, is a character.



So anyway, when I get back by my Dad's to pick up the girls, Em is in the process of working a puzzle with her Grandma and Mo is stuffing her pockets with little guys.

By guys, I mean toys. The little wind-up nick-knacks from Happy Meals and other small, miscellaneous toys. There's a box of them, and Mo always tries to take them with her when we leave.

It's not that they're worth anything, it's that they're for all the grandkids to play with there, and it's the life lesson thing: we don't take things that aren't ours.

Plus, Mo would have little guys overflowing the walls of her room if she didn't compulsively throw them in the trash. It's not that she hasn't had her share: used to have her dresser top covered with neat rows of them, in fact, before the trash-can tick came to the forefront of her OCD tendencies and blotted out the lining-shit-up tick.

So I made her empty her pockets and she came downstairs and got her hat and gloves and went back upstairs. When she came down, I patted her pockets, and she was clean. Except then we noticed her stocking cap looked lumpy. Pull off the stocking camp, and sure enough, eight or nine guys come raining down to the floor.



It's a smuggler's life, I guess.