Marc's Musings

Out of all the ones I’ve made so far this year, the March Steak & Guinness pie has been my favorite. So I decided to make it again, but this time with bacon!

Here are the ingredients:

1.5 lbs New York sirloin (sort of diced)
3 onions sliced
Sprig of rosemary
6 cloves of garlic – minced
2 sticks celery – finely sliced
2 carrot sticks – finely sliced
6-8 baby portabella mushrooms – sliced
1 bottle Guinness Extra Stout
1 heaping tbsp flour
1 cup beef stock
1 cup of crushed up bacon
2 cups shredded white cheddar cheese

You brown the meat and sautee the onions in a pot. Then you add the other ingredients to make a nice stew. (But only add enough of the beef stock to just barely cover the meat.)

Than you cook the stew in the oven at 350 degrees F for a couple hours. Then you add half the cheese and mix it. Finally, pour it into the pie crust, top with the rest of the cheese, then bake at 350 for another 40-45 minutes.

Viola! Not only does your house smell great, you get a great tasting pie.

I just finished being off the grid for 52 hours. Yep, no Google+. Or Facebook, or Twitter, either.

And I survived.

In fact, I highly recommend trying it.

Honestly, I freaked a little before hand. Having an internet connection seemed incredibly important. As I drove away from our house, I heard myself thinking thoughts like, “What will happen to Fundraising Coach? What if people want to hire me? What if I don’t answer an email or tweet all Friday?”

That’s when I knew I needed the break.

We all have triggers. One of my “I need to get out of this place” triggers is when I think my job will completely end without my hourly nurture. When I think that the world really does revolve around me, I know something is incredibly warped. So it’s great that I got to get away!

Looking back on the weekend, the lack of internet connection was sort of releasing. But what was really distracting, a complete surprise to myself, was not having brought a book along! *sigh* I got over that too. (And picked up the second Bourne book at a local bookstore on Saturday afternoon!)

I’ve now checked into Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. I am grateful for the connections. But I also love hanging out with my family by a fire and getting to look up at leaves like these.

I encourage you to try unplugging between now and the end of August. If you’re of the camping persuasion, I highly recommend a few nights at Peaks-Kenny State Park here in Maine. But if you do, go for 3 nights. Two wasn’t long enough.

I am LOVING Google+. When I blogged about Google+ for nonprofits, I mentioned how much potential I see in the Hangout feature.

I’ve already used it for staff meetings and meeting new friends. But I hadn’t thought of using it for a bible study!

Until now (click on the image to see it more clearly):

Love it!

Went to the store today. When I came back to my van, I found a note on my windshield.

It said

You will go TO HELL if you park so close to me ever again

Despite the obvious pun on my license plate “I WILL GO” (ironically based on a Christian worship song), the anger in the note was palpable. [More ironically, it was written on note paper from the Humane Society!]

As I walked the note to the trash can, I started seething. How dare anyone write a note like that! Especially when I was right in the center of the painted lines of my spot! I wasn’t sure who’d put the note there, but I started trying to figure out who was to blame.

Then I remembered Zig Ziglar’s story about kicking the cat. You see I grew up listening to Zig. And he had a great story that went something like this:

A man is angry because he got a late start for the office so he drives like a maniac and cuts off Frank. This ticks Frank off so when he gets to his office, he snaps at his assistant about a report at that is late. His assistant is now upset that the person responsible for the report, Joe, is making her look bad to her boss so when she calls Joe, she takes out her anger on him. Joe gets the report but is upset all day. He’s still upset when he gets home. His cat, who’s has nothing to do with Joe’s day, bumps the door and Joe, in his anger, ends up kicking the cat.

Don’t Kick the Cat

The cat had nothing to do with Joe’s bad day, or the assistant’s stress, or Frank’s being upset, or the first guys getting a late start to the day. But the cat takes the brunt of that frustration.

Zig’s point was that at any point in the chain of events each of the people had a choice over their attitude. They could choose to react in kind, or respond more positively.

Each of us have the choice to not kick the cat. To not pass on the negative crap we get by hanging around people like us.

Obviously this lady was having a rough day. I’ve never received a note like that. Think of the effort involved in finding the Human Society note pad, finding my license plate, and hand writing such a venomous note. She must’ve been fit to be tied.

And really…it had nothing to do with me.

Sure, it was wrong. But did my kids really need me to lash out at them as I’d been lashed out at? Obviously not.

So I tried making up a story in order to fight of the anger that kept trying to get me. I decided it was the woman who’d parked into my space and went into the cell phone store. I know how frustrating that can be. And I tried imagining what happened to her on the way to the store and why those people did what they’d done.

Because, her anger really had nothing to do with me. And I didn’t want to kick the cat.

This year I’ve committed to making a meat pie every month. So far I’ve made

• a bacon & egg pie in January,
• Beef & Onion pie in February,
• a Steak, Guinness, & Onion pie in March,
• Cornish pasties in April,
• an appropriately named “Easy Peasy” pie in May, and
• a traditional New Zealand shepherd’s pie in June.

This month, I went to Joseph’s Market, my local butcher and asked how to make a “toutiere” pie. You see, Waterville has a lot of Franco-Americans. Every time I’ve mentioned how my speaking tour in New Zealand inspired my goal to cook one meat pie a month, people would say, “Oh…tourtiere?”

I really thought tourtiere was something else. I’d remembered it being sweetish. So I’d say “No, like steak and cheese.”

So I was suprised when Dan said he’d make tourtiere with ground pork, onions, potatoes, and seasoning.

Maybe I have been making tourtiere all this time!

This was the first recipe I didn’t look up to find specific measurements. I used:

1 1/2 lbs ground pork
a couple onions
some boiled potatoes
some poultry seasoning

I set the potatoes to boiling (I like adding onion salt as they boil). Then I chopped the onions and started browning them in a big skillet with some olive oil. After a while, I added the pork and started adding seasoning. Dan said to keep adding the seasoning until you liked the taste, so I did. I added a lot of seasoning! I also added healthy doses of onion salt and garlic powder.

Once the potatoes were tender, I drained them and added about 3 potatoes to the skillet. Dan was adamant that the potatoes not be mashed. Tender so they are falling apart, but not mashed.

I put that whole mixture in a shell of the trusty store-brand pie crust I love and baked at 400 for about 35 minutes. (I always tinfoil the edges so that the edges don’t get burned or hard. The tin foil can be taken off in the last 5-10 minutes.)

This was super easy. And it tastes great with my home brewed red ale!

This was the first pie with ground pork that I really liked. The other pies with ground pork reminded me how much I love beef. But this one stood on its own.

For seasoning, I used McCormick’s “Perfect Pinch Original Chicken Seasoning.” Had I looked in the cupboard, I would’ve seen that my wife had purchased Bell’s Seasoning. McCormick’s would probably taste great on a roast chicken, but I think Bell’s would’ve made a better pie.

I’ve got 5 more meat pies to make. Do you have any favorite meat pie recipes?

A couple years ago, I bottled a coffee stout I called Mo Joe Porter. (The name came from a fun beer naming competition.)

I am now finishing up the last bottles. And it’s much better with a couple years of aging. Right after it was bottled, it tasted a bit odd, the coffee was so pronounced it was confusing. Was it a porter that tasted like coffee? Or an iced coffee with an alcoholic content.

Now it’s all mellowed. Rather than two competing tastes, it’s just s nice coffee porter. And the molasses notes linger pleasantly.

So often in life, good things come to those who wait.

Let me tell you about a dream I had last night.

I wanted to get a burger at 5 Guys. I’ve never had one from there and a new 5 Guys had opened up in our city.

When I went there, it was packed. The line wasn’t out the door, but it might as well have been. I don’t like lines like that. They get stressful and people often get mean. So I started strategizing.

I decided to step outside, call in my order from my cellphone, and relax while it was being prepared.

The problem was…I didn’t have my cellphone. I wracked my brain to figure out where I left it. I also tried figuring out who I knew that would let me use their office phone to make the call.

As I was looking up to get the 5 Guys number off the sign, I realized I already had a burger. And I’d eaten half of it!

I’d been so focused on the seeking, that I hadn’t even realized I’d been munching on my burger. Somewhere along the way, I’d accomplished my goal. But I had such tunnel-vision, I missed it.

Sometimes success isn’t about the journey

I blogged about the fundraising implications of this dream over at FundraisingCoach.com. But I really think this dream is about life.

It got me wondering: am I so focused on building my business and helping others that I am not realizing I already have achieved some of my goals.

Self-employment is amazing. The most exhilarating thing I’ve done, and the scariest. There’s no HR office to work with, no regular paychecks, no planned vacation days. Nothing happens financially unless I start it.

It’s easy to get so focused on building the business that I forget how much has been accomplished. I get so focused on getting the hamburger, I fail to see the one in my hand. And if I do recognize it, I’m too busy worried about where the next hamburger will come from to enjoy the one I have.

They say that success is a journey, not a destination. But sometimes it is a destination…at least a rest stop on the journey.

An invitation

I think this dream was an invitation for me. An invitation to enjoy what I have, savor it, cherish it. Family, friends, things, all of it.

I don’t have any formula for this recognizing and enjoying these rest stops. But I think that knowing they exist will help. It’s like GI Joe used to say, “Knowing is half the battle!”

How about you? How do you recognize and enjoy your accomplishments?

Last night we made s’mores with some friends.

Until someone took out a Sharpie…

 

 

I don’t advise eating these. We decided to just burn them. And we had a “name this image” contest with the final one. Some suggestions were:

• Still edible
• I’m meeellltting
• flaming inferno
• I’m not dead yet!

This month’s meat pie was from a traditional New Zealand recipe shared with me by Rob Price. I figure NZ, being the sheep capital of the world, would know how to make a shepherd’s pie!

The recipe in the Edmonds cookbook was:

1 T oil
1 onion
1 lb ground beef
2 T flour
1 T ketchup
1 T chutney or relish
3/4 C beef stock
3 potatoes
1 T butter
1 T finely chopped onion
1/2 C grated cheese
salt & black pepper

The onion and oil are heated in a pan. Then the meat browned in it. After you pour off the excess fat, you put it back on the heat and stir in the flour, ketchup, relish, and beef stock. Let simmer for 5 minutes and set aside. I didn’t have onion, so I used generous quantities of onion salt. And I added garlic powder.

I boiled the potatoes (I used 5 or 6) in water with more onion salt. When they were tender, the recipe said to drain the water and then reheat the potatoes to get rid of even more moisture. Then you add the butter (I added a couple tablespoons), onion (for me more onion salt and some garlic powder), and the cheese. (I used 1/2 cup of cheese–twice the amount called for in the recipe.)

Then you add the meat mixture to a pie plate and top with the potato mixture. Knowing I’d used alot of salt, I didn’t put anymore in at this point.

I sprinkled it all with another 1/2 cup of cheese and baked at 375 F for 20 minutes.

I really liked this recipe. It’s VERY tasty and pretty easy. Much better than the hot lunches i remembered from school.

My son showed me this video.

The hazard of seeing this video, and hearing my son’s amazingly accurate reenactment, is that now whenever I hear the Plain White T’s “1, 2, 3, 4″…I hear:

There’s only 1 thing 2 say, 3 words 4 you…Wai, wuv whoooooooo!

June 12: Update

My son just let me video him imitating Mishka the Dog. This kid cracks me up!