Princesses
and Pumpkins.
Never
seen anything like it. While everyone else went out trick or treating,
Judy and I sat at a table in the driveway and handed out candy to the hundreds
of kids that swarmed the streets. 😊
And
the occasional captive being held by space aliens.
Happy
Halloween!
We
rented an attached casita.
It’s
that little section on the right, looking at the house.
A
shaded patio.
Front
room, kitchen, bedroom, and not far from Matt and Lindsay. It’s a good
setup. It’s like an attached apartment with a connecting door to the main
house that is kept locked. We have the run of our casita, but not the
main house.
We’re in Gilbert
Arizona. Collecting hugs.
And getting a preview of
Halloween from Arie.
And Ayla.
It’s
fun to be here.
Not
as industrious either. He doesn’t move peanuts.
But
he has his own charm.
The
Groove-billed Ani.
Clean
and full, hanging in the sun.
We
had three different feeders up for the migration, refilling them daily.
Now we’re back to one feeder and it only gets the occasional visitor. The
migration is over for us.
We
do have turkey vultures though.
At
one point this evening we had 50 of them all within our field of view.
They’re never not here, but there are way more in the winter than in the
summer. They are migrating in.
Who knew a person could
screw up hamburger by handling it too much?
I grilled some
great-tasting patties, but they were tough. Tough hamburger? Who
knew that was a thing? I googled it. It turns out that the more you
handle hamburger meat the tougher it gets when you cook it. All my effort
to shape it into nice round evenly sized balls, then massaging it out into
perfect patties with smooth edges, was actually screwing it up. Keep it
simple. Ground chuck. Separate it into the right size chunks and
smush each one into a patty once. Don’t stress about smooth edges.
One more factor.
There is a grain to hamburger meat, and it matters. It doesn’t matter as
much as the grain in a tough piece of meat like skirt or flank, but it matters
a little. When hamburger comes in a round tube, the grain, the way it
comes out of the grinder, runs horizontally the length of the tube. If
you slice crosswise across the tube you’re cutting across the grain; you cut
the pound of hamburger into three or four pucks. Take each puck and lay
it on the flat side. That orients the grain vertically. That’s the
way that will result in the most tender bite. Squash it out into a patty.
Okay, one more
thing. You can fashion the patty with your hands and put a dimple in the
middle so it won’t ball up when it’s cooked, or you can squash out the patties
with the dinner plate method. Place a plate upside down on the
counter. Lay a square of waxed paper over the round part on the bottom of
the plate. Put the puck of hamburger meat in the middle of the
upside-down plate, put a square of waxed paper on top of it, and with a second
plate, right side up, squash the hamburger down into a patty. They come
out like this:
Salt and pepper.
Grill to 165 degrees.
Melt in your mouth tender
and juicy. Best burger ever.
And there we have today’s
installment of “Answers to questions you never asked!”
After.
The
climber.
One
little trimming knife.
You
can trim palms a little at a time and keep them looking full and natural.
That’s what we did with the palm trees on our site at Gulf Waters as long as we
could reach them. When you have to pay someone to climb the trees and
trim them, it makes more sense to pineapple them, so the trimming doesn’t have
to get done so often. We don’t have to pay for the trees to be trimmed
here, but the park does.
The
little plane is working the large agricultural field next door.
It
flies really low over us then drops right down to the ground over the
field. It’s a reverse process coming back. It flies really low
across the field, then pulls up just enough to get over us.
Time
for winter crops.
