It's Gonna Be A Happy New Year

We're back from our winter trip and getting back into the swing of things, after spending half of November, half of November and the first little chunk of January away from home. This is probably the only year we'll ever have the freedom of schedule to make such long trips, so I figured, why not take advantage of it? M scheduled research mini-trips both times, so it's not like we didn't get anything done. And Robert had such a good time spending big chunks of quality time with all the people who love him. He came down with Strep on New Year's Eve, which was a terrible bummer, and ended up in the emergency room for an antibiotic shot on New Year's Day when he couldn't swallow the oral ammoxicillin. I suspect that is a billing battle we are going to be tussling over in the future, but for now I'm just happy that it worked and he is so much better. He got a haircut today, but I haven't pinned him down for a picture yet.

One thing about the traveling is that I got totally spoiled over our Christmas time away. My mother in law, Melissa, is a wonderful person and keeps a beautiful house. I really enjoyed the time we spent there, for a lot of reasons, but partly because it's just so nice. It's neat and it's organized, tastefully decorated, always smells pretty. Even with Robert around (not to mention M and I!), nothing ever got too crazy messed-up, and she did it all while still seeming pretty relaxed about it. I aspire to that, seriously! Anyway, when we got home, after all that time away, things were pretty much how we left them, and that was a real letdown for me. I am a shabby housekeeper and our apartment is too small for all our stuff. That is the way it has always been.

But I can change! I've decided to start with small steps. The kitchen was already my project, so I did more in there. I finished more of the cleaning I hadn't yet gotten to, including the really icky places like that spot between the stove and the desk-counter where things fall down and are lost forever, and I swept and mopped and scrubbed the counters and the stove until everything looks great. (Melissa and I did our usual pre-homecoming shopping trip, but instead of the usual grocery staples, this time I got new cleaning supplies. They really help!)

Buoyed by my success in the kitchen, I moved on to a persistent filth-trap in the apartment, the master bathroom. Since the master bathroom, in this case, is a closet off the walk-in closet with a cloth curtain strung from a tension rod as a door, it has historically not gotten a lot of use, especially since the walk-in closet itself is overfull and often littered with dirty clothes waiting for laundry day. It was not only dirty and dusty, it was cluttered with stuff that didn't belong in a bathroom, and really the reason I never used it, even at night, was that it was unpleasant. Simply going in and getting all the trash out, all the empty containers and expired things, the books, the laundry, and everything that didn't belong, right there made a huge difference. The bathroom is so small there's hardly room to turn around, but when it's empty it seems considerably larger. I took my Glass Plus and my 409 and gave all the surfaces a scrub, then did the same to the toilet and swept the floor. Finally, I rearranged the plants I keep in there (the one redeeming virtue of that bathroom has been a counter with a sink underneath four powerful light bulbs, making it ideal for plants), and made sure the handwashing essentials were all in place for a homey look. Just a couple of hours of work, really, and it looks amazing, like new. I like going in there now!

As luck would have it, barely had I finished one bathroom than the other one caught my attention. Robert rubbed a surprising amount of jelly in his hair at breakfast, so M gave him a bath while I did my cleaning and other chores. Robert had been in the bath just a minute or two when I went down the hall to the neighbor to thank her for taking in our papers and to chat for a few minutes. I was surprised when M showed up at the door with a wet, pajamaed Robert and a harried expression. Robert, who had been constipated for several days after being sick, had solved that problem in a big way in the bathtub. Yuck!

Once the worst of the mess was dealt with, I realized that as long as I was scrubbing and disinfecting the bathtub, I might as well take care of the whole bathroom. This bathroom is the one we use, so it has all kinds of stuff in it, and though it gets a lot more of my fickle cleaning attention, it's hard to keep clean. The next morning, while supervising Robert in another bath in the newly cleaned tub, I wiped and scrubbed and tossed trash and put things away. Again, a couple hours of work got me a very nice bathroom. Riding the wave, I cleaned half the living room and vacuumed as well, getting up birdseed and remnants of Robert's past meals before breaking my momentum upon the shoal of a mountain of toys. That's okay, there are more days coming. I will get this place looking better!

The nicest thing about having a clean kitchen is how easy it is to cook. Yesterday I made a giant pot of chili that used three cans of tomatoes, two cans of beans, and a can of tomato sauce. You've seen my pantry in pictures, so you know this is a good thing. Served over potatoes, it was supper last night and tonight, with another full meal's worth in the freezer. Since dinner was taken care of tonight, I looked ahead and defrosted a (rather sad looking, honestly) pot roast from the deep freeze. It was freezer burned, but not so much that it couldn't be saved. I cut off a chunk and chopped it into little pieces, then put it into a marinade of rice wine vinegar and soy sauce. Beef stir fry this week! The rest of it I put into the crock pot for Grandma J's famous pot roast, along with plenty of carrots and potatoes. The resulting deliciousness wasn't done till midnight, but filled two big containers. With the liquid leftover in the pot, I rehydrated two cups of TVP for M's meatloaf sandwiches this week. I shouldn't have to make another serious cooking effort for days, and that's a really nice feeling. I like to give my family good things, whether it's good food or just a nice place to sit on the potty. I just need to keep reminding myself that the pleasure of the results is worth the hard work.

March 16-18, going off the plan

Plans, especially food plans, are a great thing to have. Ours has worked out really well so far. But if there's one thing that's true about them, is that they "gang aft aglae," as the man said. Since we're going to be gone or with my folks for most of the last week of March, my plan was to simply do a one-week food plan instead of the typical two weeks, shop for it on Monday (Monday is when both Kroger and Meijer have their new sales posted), and go from there. I made up the plan and everything. 

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, stuff happened, Bella got sick, we took her to the vet first thing Monday morning, and the vet bill came to a heartstopping three hundred dollars. That's a lot of money at any time, and when you're only pulling down 1100 a month, well, you get the idea. We had just a little emergency money socked away, which is gone now, and we're not looking good for this month's budget. So the shopping trip was scotched, and the plan was necessarily scotched as well. Can't make spaghetti without tomato sauce, etc. 

That's not to say that we're going hungry, though. We have enough food, I just have to be a bit more creative. On Monday  for lunch, we had a boxed mix of cheesy broccoli rice, to which I added the remains of the ham chunk I used the night before in the soup. When fried up and stirred in, it added protein, a lot of flavor, and enough bulk to turn the side dish into a satisfying lunch. Monday afternoon brought another unpleasant shock when M realized he had lost all the work he'd done the day before on his paper. Forget Friday the 13th, we got all our bad luck three days late. He spent the afternoon and evening and much of the night at school to rewrite what was lost, and by the time he was ready to come home, we were both ravenous. I made tangy tomato soup chicken again, once again with roasted potatoes. Our potatoes are getting soft, so it's important to use them while the using's good. I didn't have the onion soup mix, so I used garlic salt, onion powder, pepper, and a little bit of the pork fat I rendered off the ham. That stuff is versatile and flavorful, if not exactly healthy. It turned out just fine, especially once I poured the sauce from the chicken over top my portion. As usual, I made two extra chicken breasts for lunch the next day. We ate and watched four episodes of Star Trek all in a row, M's reward for hard work. Thanks, public library! 

The next day I went back to the yarn shop and knitted again while M fooled around in the house. He's got one more paper to write and an exam to proctor, but other than that he's  done for the term. And I didn't think I could take any more Star Trek for a little while. Lunch was tangy chicken sandwiches, where we cubed up the chicken breasts and put the pieces in a bowl, grated mozzarella cheese on top, and then microwaved it and put the hot mess on toast. It's very good. Supper was a very simple Tuna Helper that I dressed up with a bit of shredded cheese and the last of the sour cream. It was okay, but I've been cooking such nice stuff lately, it was anticlimactic. All food is good, though! 

Today was a busy day for me. We're hoping to leave Saturday for M's parents, which means a week-plus of not having to cook, but also the house needing to be cleaned for the petsitter. I spent much of the day doing laundry, because there was a ton. It's been well over a month since we last went to the laundromat, and even with my handwashing, it's hard to keep up. I finally gave in and went to the laundry room in our building. I've discovered an interesting property of our dryers. To start a dryer and do its default 45 minute cycle is 1.25. Ouch. But if the dryer is going, you can add time to it, and fifteen extra minutes only costs one quarter. I realized I could save a lot of money by A) not drying all the way, and B) gaming the dryer. When I finished loads in the washer, I tossed the wet clothes into a plastic bin next to the dryer, and every twenty minutes, put a new quarter and a new batch of clothes into the dryer. The damp clothes got hung up to dry. Between the spin cycle and the dryer, there was far less water in the clothes than if I'd handwashed, and each load cost 1.50 instead of 2.50 or more. What full load of clothes dries fully in 45 minutes, after all? There are clean clothes hanging everywhere in my house, from the doorway to the bathtub, but it was worth it. 

While I was doing all this laundry, I was also cooking, through the magic of crock-pot! It took two days to thaw my turkey breast in the fridge, and it still had an ice cube in the middle today. But a turkey breast has enough meat on it to see us all the way through the weekend, so it's perfect for our needs. I put it in with a stick of butter in the cavity, poured two cups of white wine over the top, and sprinkled the whole thing with minced onion. I was supposed to use a real onion, but I didn't have any. The lid also wouldn't go down all the way with the turkey breast in there, so I piked a couple towels on top. It did the trick. Because it needed seven hours to cook, we had a late lunch/lupper of chicken-bacon-artichoke pizza, a family favorite. A packaged pizza crust, ranch dressing sauce, dressed with one cooked and cubed chicken breast, chopped artichoke quarters, bacon bits, and mozzarella cheese. It was very satisfying and I was totally going to take a picture but I forgot. 

The turkey ended up being  finished around 8pm, after making the house smell extraordinary all afternoon. I'm sure the neighbors were envious. It was so tender that the breastbone slid right out when I tried to use it to remove the turkey from the pot. We had simple sandwiches of turkey and buttered bread, and it was great. Tomorrow I'm going to have to bake some bread, because we are all out. But I have big plans for this turkey. The overall plan may have failed, but that doesn't mean I'm going to give up. Now, more than ever, I need to get creative! 

March 14-15, the belated weekend

So, looks like I've owed this blog a post for many days now, and I mean a real one, not just me railing about how I can't afford either McDonalds or organic free range arugula nuggets. So I'm going to do one better. Realizing that trying to talk about the whole week would make a post much longer than I'm comfortable with, I'm going to break it down. Here's the promised post about the food I made this weekend. 

Saturday, M had to go in and write a paper for his final project in one of his classes. Before he left, I wanted to give him a good lunch, so while he took Pookah to Petsmart for the adoption event (still no takers! Can you believe it?), I made tortillas. I've been wanting to do that for awhile. I like tacos and quesadillas, but the wraps are not cheap.  Homemade tortillas take more time, and they are not quite the same, but they are very enjoyable, and literally cost pennies. Flour, baking powder, salt, and vegetable oil, that's it! My first batch turned out pretty thick, but I think I can temper that with a little more rolling next time. We went simple with the toppings, folding each one in half and filling them with shredded cheese and fire sauce from Taco Bell. I dipped mine in salsa as well. They were delicious! 

Actually, the biggest cost associated with the tortillas was the rolling pin. After the fiasco with the pasties, where I was left trying to roll out dough with my fingers and the tube from a turkey baster, I decided it was time to finally add this basic utensil to my large collection of kitchen implements. My first thought, being thrifty and all, was that I could go for a French-style rolling pin and simply buy a piece of thick dowel rod at the hardware store. I bopped over to Lowe's to check it out. I spent much more time dreaming over container garden stuff than looking at dowels, but that's okay, I didn't buy anything. As it turns out, they only sell dowel in four-foot lengths, so I would've had either the world's largest rolling pin or three rolling pins, a bit more than I need. And they were 7.50. I thought maybe I could do better, so I headed to Target. I was tempted, oh so very tempted, by the KitchenAid and the Oxo GoodGrips ergonomic, acrylic, cool-colored rolling pins at twenty bucks a pop, but settled on the store-brand, wood, round-handled model for six dollars. I paid the price for being cheap by having to return the first one to the store after discovering a big chip in the handle, but the second one worked just fine. It's nice to have a rolling pin, and you can see it in the picture above. 

For supper on Saturday, I used the big pack of drumsticks I got at 89 cents a pound and made spicy chicken legs. Holy cow, were they good! Really easy, too. Defrosted the legs and put them in the crockpot, cubed butter and sprinkled it overtop, poured an entire bottle (got it on sale, too!) of Frank's Red Hot Sauce overtop, then shook on garlic salt, onion powder and pepper. I deviated from the recipe a bit, I crockpotted it for two hours, then put them all on a pan and oven-cooked them for 40 minutes at 350. While they were in the oven, I took the liquid from the crockpot and reduced it in a pan on the stove, then spooned it over top of the legs while they cooked. When they were done, we ate them with ranch dressing. Absolutely delicious, and enough for lunch the next day, too. I was very happy that they are even better when reheated. Drumsticks are always going on sale, but I've never had anything this wonderful to do with them before. 

On Sunday, we were scheduled for scrambled eggs but we skipped that because we were both more interested in eating spicy chicken brunch. I dropped M off at school to do more with his paper, and then went to a yarn store in the next town over, to check it out and see what it was like. I've been doing just tons of knitting lately, I have a gallon-sized Ziploc full of baby hats and mittens and booties by now. And this knitting store is the type that has classes and knitting circles, and is the sort that promises human interaction. I miss human interaction so much! I went over there, and it was great. I met some really nice people, got some tips on my knitting, and invested a small amount of money in needles that are actually the appropriate size for all the small things I've been doing. I've been back once already and plan to go again. I love M, and the cats and the birds, but if I don't get out a little more, I'll go crazy. 

After coming back and picking up M, I made up a Tuscan White Bean Soup from a mix we got in a care package from M's mom. I wasn't expecting much from it, it looked kind of watery and boring, a bean soup of meh. To kick it up a bit, I added a splash of basil-infused olive oil and half a chunk of ham from the freezer. Wow! It turned out to taste much better than I thought, and was actually very satisfying. And in case you're wondering, I haven't been taking many pictures because my computer has been gone, and it throws everything off. It's back now though, so I'll try and do better in the future. 

March 5-8, the messy weekend

My computer is in the shop for repairs, which is why the last entry there is so backdated, and why I haven't posted any food minutae for so many days. I thought that I'd lost that entire post, but thank God for Blogger's autosave feature. I came back today, and there it was where I'd left it. Hurrah! I wish I could hope the same for the contents of my hard drive, but oh well, c'est la vie. At least it was still in warranty and doesn't cost anything to fix but time. Right now I'm using M's old workhorse of a laptop, which is a bit slow, but has a huge screen that is something of a novelty. It's the one we normally use for watching movies. 

There wasn't really much to report on the food front this weekend, except large deviations from the plan. Thursday M had chili for lunch and I had pork, and there was so very much pulled pork left over that we decided to have it again in the evening instead of tuna melts. Five pounds of pork is a lot, seriously. Thursday night, I made shortbread cookies. I loooove shortbread cookies, but they are five dollars for eight cookies, and that's just crazy. Butter was on sale at Aldi's, so this seemed a good week to give it a whirl. With a food processor, making shortbread cookies turns out to be a breeze. Pop in a quarter-cup of sugar and let it spin to fine down a bit, add three-quarters of a cup of flour (My sifter is messed up, so I spun that a bit too), and then chop in a whole stick of butter, pulsing it till it turns into a doughball. Refrigerate for an hour, then divide the ball in eight circles, smash them with a cup, poke them with a fork, and bake at 350 for 20 minutes. They turned out wonderfully. I made two batches, which made sixteen good-sized cookies for basically a dollar's worth of butter and maybe fifty cents worth of flour and sugar. Not bad! Not good for me, but oh well. 

Thursday I also started a new experiment, washing clothes by hand. We've been doing a laundromat trip a month, which is a rather expensive proposition that takes hours out of one single day. What I've been doing is washing 5-10 pieces of clothes at once in the bathtub, rinsing them, then hanging them to dry on a tension rod with a plastic bin underneath it. It's really good exercise, so I don't feel quite as bad about the buttery cookies. If I keep this up, I'll have arms like Michelle Obama in no time! Well, as long as I don't go nuts with the butter, of course. 

Friday I went in to school with M, so a shortbread cookie on the way out the door was all I ate at home all day. Speaking of going crazy with cookies, sheesh! I hung out in the grad student lounge all day and finished another hat, my fourth in two weeks, and got a little much-needed human contact. I also got coffee and even more cookies, as well as a pulled pork sandwich from home for lunch. After M finished his classes, we went to a Friday evening program the UC Wellness Center was putting on. They showed a bunch of 80s cartoons, fed us healthy snacks, and had trivia raffles for fabulous prizes! I fell in love with the amazing taco dip they had there. Full of fresh veggies, guacamole and black beans, it filled a lot of cravings I haven't satisfied lately with the drive for thriftiness. Even better, there was a fresh fruit plate with pineapple, strawberries,  blueberries and muskmelon, all things that are out of our price range when out of season. I'm not ashamed to admit I made a bit of a pig of myself, but since it was lightly attended, there was plenty for all. M and I, being trivia buffs, also did quite well in the trivia raffle. I came home with a giant bouncy ball and a Fraggle Rock DVD, and he scored a set of Matchbox cars and a Barrel of Monkeys. (If you recognize the slap bracelets in the picture, then you know you are from the 80s.) It was a very fun evening, and all free! 

On Saturday, we slept shamelessly late, the last day before springing ahead made us wake up early, and took Pookah in once more to the adoption event at Petsmart. Once again, there were no takers, but she's showing better, without turning her back on anyone who might be the least bit interested. Adoptions have been slow these past few weeks, which worries me. We're going to hit kitten season soon, and fat, loveable five-year-old Pookah is not going to look good against a cage full of adorable, playful kittens. Fingers still crossed! While she was strutting her stuff, we took M to get a haircut. One of his Christmas presents was a card for a dozen haircuts, so he has no excuse to get a real grad-student scruffiness going on. I went over to Kroger and picked up the turkey breast I'd gotten a rain check for. A big six pound breast, originally twelve dollars, now six. That'll be several meals! 

Saturday night, there was a party at one of M's friends' apartment. It's graduate recruitment weekend, so there were new potential grad students who needed to be shown that the department is cool and fun and has parties. (This is in fact true, if you count very nerdy fun, which I do.) For the party, I bought a box of generic Ritz crackers (they actually taste very good) and made a cheese ball from one of the mixes M's mom sent us. A pack of cream cheese, half a stick of butter, once again with the food processer, and voila! White chocolate cherry almond cheese ball. We didn't eat supper that night because we went to the party, where we had nachos and veggie tray, cheeseball and potato chips. We did outlay some money, though. Last year when we were graduate candidates, some of the grad students took us to Graeters, a local institution and home of the Best Ice Cream Ever. They paid for our ice cream and told us that if M came to the school, he should pay it forward next year. So, as promised, we took one of the candidates and took him to Graeters, where we introduced him to the wonders of black raspberry chip ice cream. It was ten dollars for the three of us, but it was worth every penny, and fulfilling a verbal contract. 

Today I would've taken a stab at getting back on the plan, but I had leftovers that needed using up first. For lunch, I warmed up the last of last week's split pea soup, which was getting crowded out of the freezer, and paired it up with corn muffins. Corn muffins make soup a real meal, I think. For dinner, I used the last of the pulled pork and my carefully reserved pork liquid to make fried rice. The cold pork water was gross, with an inch of fat on the top of the lid, but when I removed that and microwaved the jellied juice, it was the perfect medium for cooking rice. I didn't have peas to add this week, but I tossed in two eggs, all the rest of the pork and a packet of seasoning mix, and we got a very good meal of pork fried rice. No picture this time, but you've seen it all before. 

Now, though, I have to totally rewrite the plan for the coming week. Not following the plan for three days means that there are perishables that need eating, and meals that need filling. I was supposed to make penne hot dog casserole tonight and send the leftovers to school tomorrow, so that meal needs filled, etc. It's not a big deal, and I'm still glad to have a plan. My mom tells me that she's been inspired enough to start making a plan, and I'm glad. They waste more food than we eat, I think! Besides, between working out with the Wii and washing clothes today, I'm ready to sit down and let my aching muscles and blistered foot relax. 

March 4, the food

It has come to my attention that I have been ignoring my English muffins. English muffins must go on the menu for breakfast! This weekend is scrambled eggs for breakfast, perhaps I'll break out the English muffins and these leftover hot dogs and do hotdog mcmuffins. That was pretty good last time. It does remind me, though, that I need more A-1 sauce. I got addicted to A-1 on eggs during my misspent college days, and now the two are not the same apart. It's my biggest gripe against Waffle House, honestly. 

Anyway, for lunch yesterday M had about half of the rest of the chili. He reports that overnight refrigeration thickened it up and made it even better, so that's good to know. The other half is lunch for today, so that made things easier. I had turkey sandwiches for lunch, trying to eat up the open packet of turkey before it goes off, especially since they're getting bumped off the menu in favor of leftovers fairly often.

For dinner last night we had pulled pork, a project I started on early in the afternoon. I found a great recipe here: Southern Pulled Pork , and simply adjusted it for a five pound roast. I trimmed the fat off, chunked up the meat, browned it, put it in the cooker, and put the broth of onions, garlic and pork-flavored water over top, garnished with liquid smoke, and let it all cook till 8:30. (I would've started earlier, but after being up all night trying to fix my computer, I was running late on everything yesterday.) To eat this kind of pulled pork, you pull up a spoonful, drain it off, slap it on a bun, and squirt it with your favorite barbecue sauce. I use Sweet Baby Rays, which is my favorite and was 99 cents a bottle this week. Perfect! 

Thursday, February 26, the food

Last night I went to put the split pea soup in the freezer for next week and realized that I am running severely short on room in there. To free up some space, I pulled out a container of peaches I'd put up months ago, when my mother in law bought us a bushel of peaches. That was fun, even though a lot of them turned out to have spoiled in the bushel basket. Teach me to look before I buy, I guess! Anyway, I'd chunked and frozen these old peaches months ago and they were still pretty good, though they looked kind of sad. I made midnight peach smoothies using frozen peaches, skim milk, a little Splenda, and some vanilla extract. They turned out great! I'm going to do the same thing, probably tomorrow night, with the rest of the peaches, plus the frozen blueberries and the last of our bananas. It will be a fruit bonanza, just in time for grocery day. 

This morning was oatmeal and sandwiches again, ho hum. I need to find some better options for weekday breakfasts and lunches. Leftovers help break the lunch monotony, but breakfasts are pretty blah. I often skip them or move them to the end of the day when I'm up late and hungry. For dinner tonight, though, I made ham fried rice, and that was pretty good. I used another chunk of the giant ham, diced it up, and put it into fried rice with egg, peas, rice, and a packet of fried rice seasoning, then added a liberal quantity of soy sauce. Gotta get my salt and MSG in while I'm young enough that my cholesterol is still good, doncha know. 

On a side note, taking pictures of all my food really shows me how often I use my big pasta bowls instead of regular plates. Got those as a wedding present and totally forgot them for a couple of years, but now they're my favorite dishes. I've got a huge matching one to serve pasta from, but it doesn't see much rotation at all. When you don't have a dishwasher, you serve from the pan! 

After supper I had all this fat that I trimmed off the ham, so I decided to see if I could render it down a little. Pork fat is no good for you at all, but it's a lot of pound weight to just let go to waste, and Emeril says it's like liquid gold for flavoring stuff. I took all the fat, including the stuff I'd cut off the big ham and tossed in the freezer, and put it all in the baking pan for awhile at 350. I got about 3/4 cup of clear liquid fat, and quite a bit of burnt pork rind. The smell was unpleasant. I think there must be a better way to do that, maybe next time I'll do something different. I like to think that when I experiment with leavings and leftovers, it teaches me things without me having to ruin a meal for the lesson.  After that, I made a dozen corn muffins, so we'll have some of those for breakfast tomorrow. 

Tuesday, February 24, making soup!

Today is split pea soup day, and I am very excited. Ever since I got this honest-to-god ham bone, I've known what its destiny would be. Turns out, I left about twice as much ham on the bone as I needed, though, so I thought I'd make more soup than the recipe was slated to. Unfortunately, none of my big stockpots ended up making the move from our last house with us. They were cheap things, and towards the end, when the moving truck was stuffed to bursting, they got triaged out. I later learned that we had boxes full of things like old mail and canned goods that should've been donated to the homeless shelter, but c'est la vie. I was buried in finals and M was left with a totally disproportionate share of the packing, so I lost my right to bitch (very much) about how it all ended up. I rarely used the pots while I was in school anyway, so it didn't seem like a huge loss. 

Unfortunately, that means I've had to try and split my recipe into two pans. Stymied as to how one goes about splitting a hambone, I've resorted to soaking it for ten minutes in a pot, then switching it to the other. Just so both pots get some ham lovin, I found a gristly bit of ham I'd saved in the freezer and put it in the non-hambone pot, and switch it around too. I have no idea if this is going to turn out, but the house is starting to smell like split pea soup. I take it as an encouraging sign. Assuming this turns out, I'm going to have enough split pea soup to float a small, viscous battleship.