Strikes (and all sorts of random stuff)!

For some reason, I just couldn’t get a blog post completed last week, so here’s another mammoth posting with tons of completely unrelated pictures and links.

For starters, here is what our fancy-schmancy new strike sheet looks like. We talked about this on “The Catholics Next Door” last week, but basically, we’ve allotted the four boys, as a group, 30 strikes a week. Anyone can contribute a strike. They can get a strike for whining, talking back, not finishing a chore, or basically doing anything Jennifer and I don’t approve of. If they get 30 strikes in one week, then Family Fun Night is cancelled.

They’ve been getting Family Fun Night for no reason whatsoever for years now, so the threat of losing it has been a tremendous motivator. This has been working far beyond how we ever imagined it would.

Next up is a little experiment, courtesy of Dina Cheney, tasting expert and author of the Tasting Club.

When she was on our program this week, she told us about roasted grapes, which I thought was too weird not to try.

Basically, I put red and green grapes in a bowl, added salt and pepper, tossed them in olive oil, and then roasted them in a pan at 400-degrees for about 10 minutes.

It was very odd to be roasting grapes, but it made for a very mild and interesting warm salad of sorts. It got even better when I sprinkled walnuts into the mix.

I made far more than I should have, though. Just 10 grapes each for me and Jennifer would have been plenty.

Below is another picture of the grapes. In the big colander are grapes prior to roasting. In the bowl are what they look like after.

Dina was a ton of fun, though, as always, and lead us through another chocolate tasting on the air.

Apparently, when you do a chocolate tasting, the first steps are to break off the chocolate into small pieces, then cup your hands around the chocolate and smell it.

From my side of the studio desk, it looked like Jennifer was snorting her chocolate like some sort of drug addict.

After she snorted it, then we tasted the chocolate and let it roll around in our mouths like wine.

Eating it slowly like that was definitely a change in pace for someone like me who typically follows the chocolate eating process of:

1) Open Chocolate
2) Dip Chocolate in Peanut Butter
3) Eat and Rapidly Repeat.

Okay, so there will be another photo of the chocolate tasting at the bottom of the post. As a warning, this is one of the most unflattering photos of Jennifer that you’ll ever see. As she said on the air the other day, she looks like a big doofus.

But you’ll have to wait for that one.

It’s at the bottom

Don’t skip ahead.

As promised (multiple times), here are links to all the links we talked about during last week’s shows: