My parents are good about bringing up shrimp when they visit, so we frequently have shrimp in our freezer. For a long time we seemed to find the most complicated ways to prepare shrimp, and cooking shrimp could end up being a time-consuming project because they are so small.

I recently decided to keep it simple and did a shrimp boil. My recipe (created on the fly as I was cooking):

• 1 lb jumbo shrimp, unpeeled
• 8-12 small new potatoes (I used white), whole
• 1-2 medium yellow onions (the sweeter the better), quartered
• 1 head whole garlic cloves, peeled
• Tabasco sauce
• 1-3 large lemons
• Old Bay seasoning
• Salt and pepper

In a large pot, combine water, juice of 1-2 lemons, Tabasco sauce to taste, about 2-4 tablespoons of Old Bay seasoning (depending on how much water you use), and salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil. Add potatoes, onion, and garlic. Boil until all are just about cooked, and add shrimp for up to 3 minutes. (Shimp cook very fast and will quickly turn rubbery, so it’s important to check them frequently.)

Serve with lemon slices, tartar sauce, cocktail sauce… whatever you want. Recommended with a nice lager.

technorati tags: cooking, food, shrimp, recipe

After about four weeks of downtime, I’m starting a new job on Monday. This summer was the first time I’ve had this much time off since college, and it’s been great but I’m ready to go back to work and I’m really excited about my new job.

Here’s what I did on my summer vacation:

• Read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• Threw a baby shower
• Watched the first two seasons of 24
• Re-read Lord of the Flies
• Made going to the gym more of a habit
• Added a third column to my blog
• Saw Soulive
• Started going for more walks with my dog
• Learned how to play Galactic Civilizations 2: Dread Lords
• Made a dent in my magazine backlog
• Started reading The Third Policeman

And here’s what I did not get done that I wanted to do:

• Go to the Dr. Pepper Museum
• Clean out my garage
• Visit my family in Orange, Texas
• Thin out CDs

technorati tags: leisure, unemployment, life

On Wednesday we went with our two-year old nephew to build a custom stuffed animal at the Build-A-Bear Workship. This is a great little store where you can build a stuffed animal of your choice from scratch, complete with clothes and a birth certificate.

The whole process starts with you selecting an unstuffed animal. You can then select a sound you want your animal to have. Next you take it to the stuffing station, where an associate helps you stuff your animal to your liking. You select a heart and then your animal is sewn up.

The next step is to give your new animal a bath, which is a stream of air that helps to fluff your animal’s fur. Next comes clothes, which come as complete outfits or mix-and-match. Here you can choose from everything from t-shirts to baseball uniforms to firefighter outfits.

But no animal would be complete without a birth certificate. Here you name your new friend and are presented with a birth certificate that gives the specifications for your animal and its name. They pack your new friend in a box that looks like a cage, and off you go.

The whole process will run you about $30-35 for the largest animals, and takes about 30 minutes for kids. It’s a lot of fun and makes a great gift for both children and adults.

I built my own bear last fall. We came across the store while shopping and decided to check it out. This is Howard:

technorati tags: family, toys, bears, shopping

When I was in college my now husband and I took several road trips: Washington, DC to see the Grateful Dead, Colorado, and a couple to the Southwest. We enjoyed the Southwest trips the most, and have talked about doing another one since our last road trip in 1996 (we fly everywhere now).

An important piece of road trips is having the right music. Before road trips we would spend hours making mix tapes for just about every mood or landscape imaginable. The Southwest mix tapes always had a calming, almost mystical feel to them. The music was meant to have a feel of being in wide open spaces, alone.

When we first heard this week’s ACL Festival pick, we immediately thought back to those road trips.

This week’s pick: Calexico

Hailing from Tuscon, Arizona, Calexico has captured the sound of the Southwest. The music can be described as spaghetti Western meets surf meets mariachi meets western swing.

We originally saw Calexico at the 2004 ACL Festival. It was in the middle of a 100+ degree day facing the sun, and the music felt perfect for the weather. That night we stopped at Waterloo Records and bought The Black Light, which is still my favorite Calexico album.

We saw Calexico again last November with Iron and Wine, where we bought Scrapping and The Book and the Canal, two albums that are only available from the band. Both are great live albums, and worth every penny.

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To see the complete ACL Festival line-up, click here.

technorati tags: music, austin, acl, festival

You’ll notice I added a left column to my blog.

My new look is a modified version of TicTac by Dan Cederholm. I really like the look of this template, but wanted to add a third column to separate things about the blog from other links. It keeps the outer columns shorter so there is a lot less scrolling.

I’m going to explore options for categorizing in the near future to make it easier to navigate the site.

How does it look in your browser-monitor combination?

technorati tags: blogging, blogs

We had some unexpected visitors on Friday. My husband walked across the street to check the mail and two Chocolate Labs followed him home.

Of course, they had no tags.

Being people who can’t stand to see a lost pet, we decided to catch them and found that by opening the gate to the backyard, no catching was necessary. They immediately took over guard duty patrolling for unauthorized squirrels while we papered the neighborhood with signs, assuming that their humans were at work.

After about three hours we received a phone call from a grateful neighbor who had seen one of our signs. Apparently they are indoor dogs who had escaped through the garage that morning.

I’m very happy that we were able to reunite these dogs with their family quickly, but am also aggravated at the lack of identification.

These dogs could have been microchipped, but that would have required us taking them to the pound or a vet to find that out. If the concern is about choking, Premier Pet Products makes a great collar that will unhook when pressure is applied.

These collars come in a variety of sizes and colors, and can also be used when walking dogs. The trick is that the collar has two hooks that you use with the leash to prevent the collar from breaking away. The KeepSafe Break-Away Collar and can easily be purchased through the company’s Web site for a reasonable price.

technorati tags: pets, dogs, neighborhood

One of my close friends is having a baby in September, so a group of us girls are hosting a baby shower tomorrow. I’m in charge of sandwiches and cake.

Of course I’ll be serving variations on some traditional tea sandwiches, thanks to the fine folks at Whole Foods and About.com.

But the cake is what is really exciting to me here. I got this recipe from my grandmother, and it’s got to be one of the simplest yet satisfying cakes I’ve tasted. Every time I bring this anywhere it gets rave reviews. And now, I am sharing it with you.

• Make a regular white or yellow cake (box or from scratch) in a 9 x 13 dish so that it’s a sheet cake
• Once baked, immediately poke several holes in the cake with a fork
• Pour one can of sweetened condensed milk over the cake
• Let cool completely
• Spread 1-2 boxes of sliced frozen strawberries (thawed) across the cake
• Slice 2-3 bananas and place on top of the strawberries
• Cover bananas with either Cool Whip or freshly whipped cream (I prefer whipped cream)
• Store in refrigerator until ready to serve

This cake is aptly named “The Attitude Adjustment.” Enjoy!

technorati tags: cooking, food, cakes, recipe

I like numbers. It’s the precision of numbers — and the importance of that precision — that makes me respect numbers so much. Also, it’s easy to detect patterns in numbers and predict future patterns.

As a child The Count was my favorite Sesame Street character. For years I also played soccer for as a kid growing up in Orange, Texas. Like many great pro athletes, I insisted on having the same number each year even when I changed teams. The number? 3

I’ve always been partial to odd numbers as well. With the exception of the number 2, all prime numbers are odd. I was born in an odd month, on an odd day, and both are prime numbers. So today I thought I’d ask myself what number I am.

Funny, both 3 and 5 represent numbers in my birthday.

technorati tags: numbers, childhood, counting

Syd Barrett, original frontman for Pink Floyd, has died.

“Astronomy Domine” and “Interstellar Overdrive,” both from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, are two of my personal Pink Floyd favorites.

technorati tags: music, death, loss

I have to admit that I’m a bit of a gamer. It all started back on my eighth birthday, when my parents surprised me with an Atari 2600. I didn’t even know I wanted one.

After that, I spent my summers with the following daily routine: mornings at the pool, lunchtime rest over some MTV (which had just started broadcasting), and then the afternoon indoors playing Atari with friends. My favorite games included Combat, Homerun, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Pitfall, and Pac-Man. I even had Pac-Man Fever on cassette.

By 1987 the Atari had gotten too simplistic to enjoy, and I upgraded to the Nintendo Entertainment System. I had very few games for this, but nevertheless I spent hours playing Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Excitebike, and of course, an upgraded version of Donkey Kong.

I then coasted through my teenage years without a game console, and then in college a roommate happened to have a Super Nintendo. The game then? TopGear 3000.

As a wedding present we received a turkey rotisserie, only the catch was at the time we were vegetarians. So we promptly traded that appliance in for a Sony PlayStation. The games we played? We enjoyed N20, MLB 2000, The Phantom Menace, and some snowboarding game whose name escapes me.

I recently upgraded to a Sony PlayStation 2 now that the console and games are pretty cheap, given that the PlayStation 3 is due out soon. I’m so late to the game here that almost every game I own is from the Greatest Hits collection. For me this has mostly become the Sims 2 machine, since my PC is too slow to support that game.

Which brings me to PC games. We bought our Gateway back when the company was trying to get the Gateway stores off the ground, and of course we bought the gaming pack. It was here I found that I really liked strategy and simulation games. We suddenly had Small Soldiers Squad Commander and The Neverhood, both of which I promptly completed. I then moved onto The Sims, eventually buying all the expansion packs.

But of all these, the game that has taken up most of my free time is Galactic Civilizations. I came across it a couple of years ago when the Austin American-Statesman recommended it as a versatile strategy game. The review reminded me of a Mac game I played in college called Galactic Frontiers, so I decided to give it a try.

Now I know the space strategy purists out there claim that Masters of Orion is the better game and that GalCiv is a rip-off of that, but I don’t care. For me this game has all the elements I like: it’s simple to learn, can be customized for level of ability and duration of game, and it requires that I actually think about what I’m doing.

I have recently upgraded to Galactic Civilizations 2: Dread Lords, but have only played it a couple of times and don’t quite have the hang of it yet. I think it’s a better game than the original, as it has more customization opportunities and some additional complexities that make it more unpredictable.

So what does all of this have to do with this year’s ACL Fest? Nothing really, other than the name of this week’s pick.

This week’s pick: Galactic

We first saw Galactic at the 2003 ACL Fest. We were standing very far back from the stage, but what I immediately noticed was the power and intensity of the music. A lot of this has to do with the talent of the rhythm section, which consists of bassist Robert Mercurio, keys master Richard Vogel, and drummer Stanton Moore.

Like Soulive, Galactic is one of the frontrunners in the move to bring jazz-funk back into the mainstream, and you can count on this to be a powerful show.

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To see the complete ACL Festival line-up, click here.

technorati tags: music, austin, acl, festival, games, gaming