I’ve been getting ready for our annual Valentines day dinner. This is one holiday that is dedicated to The Hunka. I usually get taken pretty good care of the rest of the year so I’ve always made it a point to do something big for Valentine’s just for my babe.

The meal for this annual event is a French one I found in this tiny little ‘French’ cookbook I bought back in 1992 for a dollar. In 1994 (both girls were living with us at the time) I had planned this awesome dinner for my honey and had asked the girls to get home late that night. They didn’t.

Worse yet The Hunka got home very late from work too. I was lucky to have been able to keep the food going as long as I did but in doing so I changed the recipe. Drastically. And it was good. Oh so good. Good enough we’ve had it every Valentine;s day since, and I have to try and remember all the chain of events of that night so I get it right.

The recipe starts off with chicken fried in a bit of oil, and then cooked in a port wine sauce. However, since The Hunka was so late, I had used all the port, and had to wind up using some sherry I had on hand. Anything to keep the sauce a sauce and not a crispy goo on the bottom of the pan. By the end of the night I had a bottle of port and a bottle of sherry in that pot.

Did I mention I drank some of that port? I drank some of the sherry too.

By the time my Hunka came home, I don’t remember the full details of the recipe. But I remember that the food was divine. I also made asparagus filled crepes with a sauteed onions and mushroom sauce to put on it. Divine. It’s the only word you need to describe it all.

The kids got home that night in time for dinner and my middle one - my darling child - she put ketchup on it. If I ever wanted to kill a kid that would be the time. For that, and the because her sister made sure they got home ‘early’. I could have killed them both.

Tomorrow, me and the Hunka will be eating Chicken in Port Wine Sauce with Asparagus filled Crepes. So will Devon. The kid won’t like it. He’ll make comments. He’ll make faces. He’ll probably drag out the ketchup.

Isn’t it romantic?

31 years, 1 month and 5 days ago there was a revolution going on in Iran. The people clamored to the streets to protest, chanted to Allah, and wanted their freedom from their dictator and tyranny in their government. My family had been living there for 2 years. In one blink of an eye we lost everything, were whisked to the airport and evacuated out of Iran - without my Dad.

My mother, carrying my 2 year old sister, me, my brother and a friend of ours boarded a plane with only what we could carry. For us, we each carried two ski-boot bags full of brass, copper, silver and gold. My mom, all 90 pounds of her, carried my sister and one bag, tried to keep her eye out on three teenagers while worrying herself sick that we’d get mugged.

We landed at Turkey to get jet fuel but because they too were undergoing a coup we weren’t allowed to get off the plane. We were lucky to get the fuel without getting shot out of the air. We didn’t know that at the time.

Next we landed at London Heathrow to change planes to go to New York. We had to take our hefty bags, too heavy for a 12 year old girl to haul far, and walk through the airport, down some escalators, through the terminal to another plane. Some stuff we had in trunks that was in checked baggage went through customs without us having to deal with it. We boarded in barely the nick of time, flying out in the middle of a snowy night.

As we collapsed in our seats and settled in for the long flight to America my mom slept for the first time. I’m sure she cried herself to sleep, but being twelve, I was on an adventure and didn’t realize the bad things going on around me. I was happy to be headed home to Texas to be with my grandmother, Ma. I just assumed my Dad, who was left behind, would be fine. None of us knew at the time that he would barely escape with his life just a week or so before the hostages were taken at the American embassy.

When we landed in New York the weather was bad and they required us to stay overnight at a hotel. Us kids were thrilled, my mom was not. We had to once again haul all those bags through the New York airport, filled with expensive goods, and not get mugged. We were backwoods Texas hicks. Everyone looked like a mugger.

Customs stopped us in our tracks. They never once looked in the bags in our hands but our trunk was supposed to weigh no more than 100 pounds. One was WELL over 200, the other had a room sized hand tied Persian carpet meticulously folded to fit into the small trunk that contained it. It took every mathematical theory my physics degreed Dad had to make it fit. But it did. And it was very, very heavy.

The bellhop guy looked at my mother and said “Lady, this bag ain’t no hunnerd pounds!”. She just stood there and started crying. I piped up and told him we were being evacuated from Iran and pointed to the rest of the kids. He gave my mom a hug, and hollered out at the guy behind him “Trunk moving on, move ahead lady, move it on!”. We were passed through customs without another look back.

We will always remember that blessed man. I hope God has taken good care of him.

As much as I remember of that trip, getting through customs and standing in the middle of the airport to a mountain of reporters is probably the most memorable. 15 reporters came running up to us with microphones in their hands wanting to know all about how terrible it was in Iran, how much we hated the country and the people, and to tell our harrowing tale of the evacuation.

But we didn’t tell them that. We told them about the people we knew and how they were lovely, good, hard working individuals. The country was simple and beautiful and backwards, but in a good way. The evacuation went very smoothly. In reality we were never in any real danger. Boeing, Bell Helicopter and the American military had a very smooth evacuation plan that went off without a hitch.

The reporters couldn’t get away from us fast enough. They didn’t want to hear that! They wanted to hear my friends mom who was crying it up like some chick on Jerry Springer, with her overly dramatic and not quite true tales of woe. That image has been burned into my mind forever, and I remind myself of it when I see nothing but bad news of wars and terror overseas on the TV.

We evacuated out of Iran on January 6, 1979 and landed on Texas soil on January 8, 1979. Our country was about to go into a severe recession. We would have gas lines, and rationing of gas. My dad would finally return home in late March. I would kiss my first boyfriend. We would move to Utah.

But the people of Iran were entering a time of growth. They wanted freedom. Freedom from a dictator that they didn’t believe in. Freedom from other countries making decisions for them. Freedom from ‘the man’. What they got was a religious zealot that was worse than any dictator in 4 centuries. A man who pushed their country back in time five hundred years. A zealot that took freedom and rights away from the women worse than they had ever seen in their lifetimes.

Those same students who stood up and protested and said they wanted freedom were then in a religious prison worse than what they had under the regime of the Shah. Those same individuals are now 31 years older and have had enough. They’re living under the tyranny of an idiot and they hate him. They want their freedom. They want their government to make sense.

I pray for them. I really do.

They are standing up to a crooked government and are trying to take back their country. They want growth, and freedom, and the technology we all take for granted. They want something to believe in that is true. They want only what is good for their country and for their children. They are tired of the poverty that comes when government mandates every facet of its natives lives.

Watch them. Watch their heartache and frustration. They are standing up, risking their lives, getting beaten in the streets. All to show their government that they are tired of being mandated, tired of being squashed and being used as pawns in some madman’s game. They’re tired of passively sitting by and thinking ‘if God wills it’. Insha’Allah.

I wonder.

When will we wake up to our own plight?

Mondays are vocabulary day and begin new thing day here in the Shelly school of hard knocks and today is no different. We started a writing assignment last week following a pattern of three point concepts. Devon has already written two such papers and next to him is the recipe on how to get it done.

He has a total disdain for writing though so for the first 30 minutes he sat there pouting. He thinks at some point I’ll probably get mad and send him to his room (thereby escaping the terrible task) but i’ve sat patiently guiding him and encouraging him and escaping myself only to go get coffee and do deep breathing excersizes.

He will eventually get around to actually writing it and when he does he actually does a pretty good job.

But it will take two days and lots of deep breathing to make it happen.

The butthead.

Like Salad? Me too.

Like those premade bags with the mixed lettuce that’s precut into bite sized pieces? Me too.

Do they turn into a jellied mess before you finally eat them all?

Yeah. Mine too.

I hate that. Truly.

(cue super hero music with cheesy man voice)

Announcing the Foodsaver that Saved Shelly’s Lettuce!!!

Too much? Okay, fine…

I love my Foodsaver. It does a lot more than just suck the air out of packages. It reseals chips, packages of brown sugar or marshmallows, and if you have the canisters you can keep your coffee fresh, marinate meat and keep leftovers fresh.

But when it comes to salad…it’s a life saver.

Salad Mixing

In these packages is the cheapest precut salad ever. Well, honestly I bought a head of iceberg. And a bunch of romaine. And, I actually cut it up myself.

And mixed it. It’s cheaper that way. And that’s how I do things.

To be fancy, I threw in some spinach.

Bagged Spinach

Mixed up, then sealed. Tight. Big fluffy handfuls of salad shrunk down into tiny little packages.

Shrunken Lettuce

I bagged some spinach by itself. It went from fluffy.

Fluffy Spinach

To lean and mean.

Shrunken Spinach

And best of all it will last long enough in the refrigerator drawer that we can eat it all before it turns into lettuce or spinach soup. I don’t like lettuce soup.

It’s nasty.

And wasteful.

And thrifty people don’t like being wasteful.

Seriously.

If you don’t have a Foodsaver, get one. You’ll fall in love too.

I like sales. I like sales on food. I really like sales on big hunks of meat. In particular I get giddy when I find beef of any kind on sale and I scored big time this week, twice.

Score one, rib eyes at Brookshires for $3.99 a pound. Not crappy, fatty, gristle laden steaks, but 3/4 inch thick juicy marbled goodness.

Aged Rib Eyes

Yo baby come to momma. I aged these two ways, one I left them open in the fridge for a few days. Second, I coated them in kosher salt and garlic before I stuck them in the fridge. I’ll write about that part later, but do it. You’ll be glad you did.

Second score of the week was this bad boy.

10 Pound Roast

Ten full pounds of all American beef. For $1.99 a pound!

Really! Aren’t you giddy now too?

Beef. Beef. Beef! Let’s cheer beef!

Okay.

I’ll stop.

But beef on sale makes me giddy.

I planned to get four roasts out of that hunk. I reached into the knife drawer and pulled out my most expensive non-appliance kitchen purchase ever. My first Wusthof knife. I spent $120 on this knife in a time when we really didn’t have the money. Good knives should always be sharp so I bought the most expensive knife sharpener to go along with it. If I’m going in the hole for a knife, I might as well go all the way, right?

The Worlds Most Expensive Knife (in my drawer)

Sheer beauty. And by beauty, I don’t mean the dent in the tip of it.

Dents?

In the tip of the world’s most expensive knife?

Yes, dents. Let me explain.

Once upon a time in a world far away, my darling hunka chunka wanted to show the nephew the difference between bagged coconut and fresh.

See where I’m going here?

He used a, a…(sniff, small cry) hammer, and my (sobbing gasp) World’s Most Expensive Knife to crack that sucker open.

And then…

THIS HAPPENED!

Dented Wusthof

Doesn’t this break your heart? It sure did mine, and he hid it for as long as possible. I could have killed him, but since I love him, I just slapped him around a little bit.

And I might have spit in his food.

Kidding!

Or am I?

So with the world’s most expensive dented tip knife, I cut the right side off into two big chunks.

Roasts

Then packaged them up into Foodsaver bags so they won’t get burned in the freezer. I love my Foodsaver.

Foodsaver Roasts

I was going to freeze the whole thing, but since I’ve started doing the homesteading thing I thought I should can the other half. I’m learning to not put all my eggs in one basket, or in this case, all my meat in one freezer. If the freezer goes out I’d be hosed. Canning and freezing the same items ensures that we’ll have something to eat should something go wrong. Plus, canning meat is better than buying pre-made stuff at the store that has ingredients you can’t pronounce. Why buy Hormel Roast Beef when you can have your very own in a jar right in your cabinet!

Go beef!

To make sure this raw blob of bloody meat actually tastes like roast I needed to prepare it first. I plopped the two massive chunks in my favorite skillet.

Searing Beef

I sprinkled both sides with salt, cracked pepper and garlic powder. With the heat on pretty high, the spices turn a golden brown and get crispy, sealing in flavor.

Looking through all the pictures I’ve taken, I failed to take a picture of the the crispy crust. Silly me. Sear both sides about 5 minutes or so each side. Trust me, you’ll thank me later, even if I didn’t show you a picture of it.

Set the meat aside and let it rest. Let’s use that beautiful crunchy goodness in the bottom of the pan to make some juice. Pour in some water, and break up those browned bits of spice and meat on the bottom of the pan.

Gravy

Earlier when I pulled the meat out of the package there was a bit of fat on the bottom. Normally I leave that on and sear it like crazy when I make a pot roast, but I knew I was canning meat later so I cut it off and browned it.

Put it in the pan of watered bits.

Boiling fat

Let it boil up with the gravy for awhile to get a lot of flavor infused in the juice.

Oh my. Half the floor is being swept by dog tails, while the other half is getting soaked by drool.

Dog slobber. It’s my favorite wrinkle cream.

Gauge and Cassie are lucky dogs.

Fat baby. Fat.

Yes, they ate it all. I got roasty dog kisses for this little snack and undying devotion. At least until the hunka got home.

While the gravy and fat melded into gravy goodness I prepped the pressure cooker. No little water bath for these babies. Nope, gotta let them cook for awhile.

24 quart pressure cooker

Put a couple inches of water in the pressure cooker. When I first got this cooker, I was under the impression that like a water bath, the water had to be over the top of the jars. The stuff I canned is good, but let me tell you, it took FOREVER. Have you ever tried to boil 24 quarts of water? That’s full of jars? And food?

Let my inexperience be your guide. Don’t. Don’t fill it. Don’t cover the jars. Just put some water in the cooker so you can create the boil, that creates the pressure, that cooks the food, to seal the jars.

Got it?

Good. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t pass along that little nugget of info.

Do you have hard water?

Do this too.

White Vinegar

Pour about a quarter cup of vinegar in the water. It’ll keep the white film off your jars. We have seriously hard water. Pour the vinegar. You’ll thank me later.

Put your empty jars in the cooker, put a little of the water in them so they don’t float away and turn the heat up on high. While you’re waiting for the water to heat up, cut your meat into jar sized chunks.

Take the fat out of the gravy, let it cool, and give it to the dogs. If the puddle under my feet got any deeper I’d have to take swimming lessons. Or mop. And I don’t like doing either.

Take your jars out of the cooker, pouring the water back in the pot. Throw in the jar lids so they get hot while you’re filling the jars. Don’t boil those lids.

Pack the jars with your seared but yet still raw meat, and pour that gravy goodness into your jars. Fill the jars to within an inch of the top.

Jars with meat and gravy

The jar on the left has too much liquid. The jar in the middle doesn’t have enough. The jar on the right is just…right.

If you don’t have enough gravy, use water. As the meat cooks, it’ll condense the juice into the best pot roast gravy you’ve ever had. Don’t worry about it. Use water if you need to. Just make sure you fill it to within an inch. Not too much. Not too little.

Put your lids on, put the bands on, and put your jars in the cooker. Seal the lid. In about 5 minutes, with the heat on high, your cooker will start building pressure. Put the regulator on when you get a constant steam hiss from the hole. Let the pressure build to 10 to 15 pounds. The 10 pound range is best.

Mine stayed at a steady 15 because my pot was on the back burner and every time I turned it down, and moved the pot back, the pot moved the knob back to high.

My pot is always on the back burner. In fact, most everything I really like to do, is on the back burner. But that’s how I roll.

In about an hour, you’ll have cooked pot roast.

Canned Pot Roast

These jars are straight out of the cooker. They’re bubbling and boiling and will for another 30 minutes. As they cool, they’ll seal so tight you’ll need a bottle opener to pry the lids off.

As they cool, let them sit. Don’t touch them. Don’t turn them, don’t shake them. Let them cool right where they are without being fooled with. They’re temperamental like that.

Once cooled completely, take the bands off and wash good. These jars will last in your pantry fo-evah. But why wait that long. Next week, when you’re running into the house from picking up the kids, milking the cow, training the dogs, building a web site, chopping wood, sewing a quilt and cleaning the baseboards you’ll be so happy that half your dinner is already done. Pop some bisquits in the oven, throw together a salad, and eat pot roast.

You’ll be glad you canned some meat.

Three nights in a row I’ve sat up waiting for Devon to sieze and three nights he has. This evening I was so tired and almost fell asleep when I heard the familiar repetitive pattern of noise coming from his room and actually got there before it fully kicked in. It was a bad one.

God knows I hate those things. We get new meds tomorrow. Hopefully he won’t have one during the day. Hopefully he won’t have another one tonight.

I slept nearly 11 hours and am still sleepy. Is it wrong to want a nap just 2 hours after you wake up? Worse, Devon is still asleep. He won’t want to go to bed tonight. Both dogs are snoring. Hunka is out of town. It’s going to be a lazy day!

We’re headed to Tyler today to celebrate my brothers 2 year pin at narcotics anonymous. It’s taken a very long time for him to get here and while he’s been sober before and for a longer period of time this is the first time he’s actually doing it on his own and he’s learned to be independent.

He suffered through the sadness and pain of my mothers death without falling off the wagon. He’s in a position to be a mentor to other guys in similar lifestyles. He’s had a girlfriend for longer than a year and they aren’t married, living together or pregnant.

He has come a very long way and is finally doing things in his life that are ‘normal’. I’m very proud of his accomplishments.

And he’s older than me and actually acting like it for the first time in our lives. Happy birthday Warren. I love you.