K had a unique Birthday request,. She wanted to make Swedish Potato Sausage from scratch. We were headed down to Austin anyway to eat out at an Ethiopian place, so we decided to pick up some sausage casing from the Whole Foods Market downtown. I love the grocery store in Austin, and we found a lot of items that we don't usually come across at HEB.

Anywho, I think I'll let the pictures speak for themselves:

The result: 11 lbs of delicious homemade sausage. We will be eating it for weeks!

Next year, we are definitely buying some type of device to put the sausage into the casing, but it was still fun putting it all together!

Out! DJC

Texas Winter

This blog is about more visitors in Waco! Thank you for coming!

First off, we are always super excited when folks come to visit. It's a tough thing to live so distantly from family and friends, so we always appreciate it when people come to see us. Mike and Chelsie included us in their between-jobs-Texas-road-trip. Mike made me miss living in a democratic environment, and Chelsie reminded me that all meals do not need to include meat. This second point is more of a problem than you might think here in Texas. There is a lot, lot, lot, of Beef here. And, it finds it's way into most meals. In fact, sometimes it just is the meal if you're at a Steakhouse or a Roadhouse or a Smokehouse Bar-B-Q establishment.

However, the best part about M&C dropping in was that we got to put our board game library to use. We of course played Settlers of Catan. And yes, we played the Cities & Knights expansion. Now, K and I had played that add-on before, but we never got a chance to really figure it out until this most recent December. We also played a lot of hand and foot. Probably too much hand and foot, all things considered. Mike and I got Clobbered in a way that would be most difficult to replicate in this game. Normally when the other team does well, they end up having a higher meld and Your team can catch it up a bit. This was certainly not the case when Mike and I teamed up. So, to make up for it, Mike and I decided to clobber Eighteen Pounds of Oranges that we bought for $6.00. That's right, 18 lbs. is a lot of oranges and anytime one of ate one, the other had to keep up. Luckily we decided that making 40 of them into OJ was PC.

Last game: Dominion. Its a card game where you 'buy' cards to add to your deck. So every turn you are adding better and better cards to your future hands as the deck gets shuffled and reshuffled. The former Magic: The Gathering player in me loves this game for its draft style play, but the best part was getting an opportunity to see it in action with four players.

And yes, I did spend way too much time talking about the games, but they also dominated a good deal of our time as well. So that leads me to "other interesting points"!

--We took a Vegetarian to Rudy's!

--We ate 18 lbs of oranges in like 3 days of eating.

--Dozens of hours of board/card games...

More stuff later!!!

DJC