Editor’s Note – Okay, everyone…this post is from Jani, Whitni’s mother. Recall that we kicked off our Stockyards City Cookbook Cook-Through last week. Here’s their second entry!
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I would like to begin by saying that after reading her first post I think my daughter, Whitni, has shown me up! Unfortunately there will not be a slide show with my post. I’m not even sure I know how to do that. Maybe if I am really nice she will teach me how to set up a slide show when she is home for Thanksgiving.
I looked through the Stockyards City Centennial Cookbook several times before I chose my first recipe. I ended up picking Natalie Browne’s recipe for Chicken and Wild Rice Casserole. I did make one omission to the original recipe, the mushrooms. We are not much on mushrooms at our house. In fact when I asked my husband if he wanted me to put the mushrooms in he said he only wanted mushrooms ‘…if they would give him hallucinations,’ – such a kidder!!
The recipe was very easy to make and the ingredients were easily found. For our family of three (my husband, our 17 yr. old son, and myself) there was plenty of food. In fact, we only ate half of the casserole and that was with everyone having seconds. Which means leftovers will come in handy for dinner another night when we have had a hectic day (translates to: Jani doesn’t want to cook) . Oh wait, my family doesn’t eat leftovers! Well, maybe if you decide to prepare this for your family there will be enough to keep you out of the kitchen an extra day.
We had green beans, salad, and rolls with the Chicken and Wild Rice Casserole. I loved the fact that the recipe calls for rotisserie chicken, this saved a tremendous amount of time. I will definitely make this casserole again.
Chicken and Wild Rice Casserole
from Natalie Browne
1 box Uncle Ben’s Wild Rice Mix (fast recipe)
1 (8oz) sour cream; 1/4 C Italian dressing
1 pkg. sliced mushrooms
1 rotisserie chicken
1 sm pkg sharp cheddar cheese
1 can chicken broth
Shred chicken meat. Cook rice in chicken broth, last 5 minutes add mushrooms. Mix chicken, rice, sour cream and Italian dressing together. Put in a greased 9×13 inch pan. Sprinkle cheese on top. Cook in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes or until bubbly.
The only other change I made to the recipe was I used mild cheddar cheese instead of sharp. For the cheese I bought a 2 cup package of finely shredded cheese and did not use all of it.
If you are looking for an easy dinner this one fits the bill. I think you could even make this ahead of time, freeze or refrigerate, and pop it in the oven when you get home from work.
Happy Cooking, Jani
Chicken and Wild Rice Casserole - easy, lots of food and tasty!
On the day you were born I looked down into your tiny pappoose face, your three inches of thick black hair pointing every direction possible within a 180 degree range, and thought about you on your wedding day. Who would you be? What would you look like? Who might you marry? How would you meet him? What would he see in you that would make him fall in love? What would make you know that he was the one?
I had these thoughts because your dad was holding you, and when I watched him get up to walk you around the hospital room, he and I had only been married for one year and nine months. We were still newlyweds ourselves. But we’ve recently celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and we have changed a great deal over that quarter-century. A friend used to say, “I’ve been married to seven different men during my lifetime, and all of them were the same person.” Well, I think your dad and I are at least on person number three or four in our own marriage.
However, you and he are on your first. So I thought I’d share in the best way I can my memories, thoughts, lessons and wisdom from our marriage for your upcoming life together. This is all I’ve got, sweetheart, except the fact that we’ll be there if you two need us along your own journey together.
Years one and two
At this present point in my life, all I can conjure up in my head from our first year together is that we did a lot of running around, said “We’re married!” quite a bit, wrote lots of thank you notes for the gifts we’re STILL using, and learned quite a bit about each other’s families. By the way, if you get a few things you could stand to go without, I recommend trading them in for one good set of culinary knives. You’ll use them every day.
I think we also had to work out the “self-imposed weirdness” regarding the unspoken assumption that we were having sex. Seriously, the first time we went to the lake with your Roberts’ grandparents and spent the night in one bedroom together, we couldn’t even look people in the face at breakfast the next morning. Not that anything happened; I feel quite certain I wore three extra layers of clothing during that trip and felt mortified that your dad’s family was walking around in their robes drinking coffee and reading the paper. We were shy, awkward, and probably were much more uncomfortable than anyone else at the cabin. So, perhaps the lesson from year one is: Enjoy the newly wed high, and work out the weirdness…as best you can. We’ve already talked about the essential premarital preparation, so I won’t harp on that. You’ve made your appointments, right?!
Years three through five
For us, these were our hardest years. Your father began working nights six months after we got married – stressor #1. I began a sales and marketing job with a good deal of travel-related requirements – stressor #2. We had you – blessing, but in reality the addition of children to a family are also stressors, #3. We internalized our feelings, didn’t communicate, began distancing from each other and really considered splitting up, results of stressors #s 1-3, plus we didn’t know how to handle conflict or much of what it took to manage distance and conflicting schedules – stressors #s…well, a whole bunch of them.But, our friends, our family, our leaders at work, and a therapist didn’t give up on us when we were giving up on ourselves.
So what’s the lesson from us to you for years 3-5? Use your support system, ask for help or get it if you need it, and when you find yourself turning inward – then that’s the key time to begin reaching out to each other.
Years six through fifteen
These were our regrouping years, our managing years, our family life years, and our time together where we really began to learn how to be a family. We got involved in your school, we had your sister, we downsized to a smaller house so I could spend more time with you and your sister (among other reasons)…in a sense, we started our second marriage. We began learning how to parent, how to co-parent, how to trust each other better and how to manage all the responsibilities that came with a young family. In other words, we were getting to the place that I wish we had been in years 3-5, but it just didn’t happen that way.
What’s the lesson here? Well, mostly it’s that if you begin a family, you will always be considering your actions, your goals and your decisions based upon not just you, or even the “us” in your marriage, but the “we” as an entire family. You may give a little more than you expected at this point in your life, but the entire family gains. We were worn out, broke, and sometimes at our wits’ end with parenting demands, but those were really, really good years.
Years fifteen through twenty
At some point in your family life, there will be a juncture where you don’t have to drag around baby paraphernalia, you’ll be able to sit down and eat entire dinners together as a family and enjoy the conversation with everyone there…you’ll be able to sit back and take a breath as a parent. This was during years 15-20 for us.
Wow, it took a great deal of energy to get there, but – wow again, it was such a good feeling to be able to allow you and your sister to: Go to your friends’ houses and spend the night, take a short vacation with just Mick and I, and allow you to drive to places we had always shuttled you to before this time. You became more autonomous, and we began enjoying that change.
The lesson? I hate to write this phrase because it has sort of been captured by the bullying community now, but it holds true in marriages as well… “it gets better.” When you pour your love, your energy and all you have together into child rearing, family development and professional development – eventually, it DOES get better. To have enough money to eat dinner out occasionally, to sit back and watch you and your sis go to prom and then to college – – what a rewarding and blessed time those years were for us!
Years twenty through twenty-five
I think of these years as the time where your dad and I got to shift a few resources from you and sis and begin redeveloping ourselves. Your father began to really enjoy golf again, he began to get tickets to sporting events and take a few trips with men from church. I went back to school and began really working at my career in a more in-depth way than before. I’ve worked on developing a few ideas I’ve always wanted to do. In other words, we got to help you begin your own journey, then begin enhancing our own.
The lesson of this time in our life? I think for one thing, you WILL be able to change your role as parenting/overseer to parent/mentor and encourager. You’ll be able to sit back and offer guidance to your children when they ask, but enjoy watching them manage their own lives as they can. You’ll be able to rediscover the desires of your own heart and take more than two or three-day vacations with your husband. And, you’ll be able to go to dinner with your children – oh, say – at a restaurant in south Oklahoma City, where they tell you, “Mams, Paps…we’re getting married.” And, you’ll be able to celebrate with them, because you’ll know they are as ready as they can be at this special time in their life.
Dear sweetheart – when you and your fiancée are in the middle of a stressful time somewhere in your future life, just let us or his parents know…and we’ll do our best to help you get through the wrinkle. The main point of this letter, though, is that you CAN. There will be struggles, you can get through them, and to have a husband you can grow with over the next twenty-five years and beyond…well, it’s a blessing that I could never had comprehended.
Your dad and I love you very much, sweetheart, and we love your chosen man too. May your first twenty-five years together be all you could hope, and may our Lord richly bless you and he over the next few months as you get ready to begin your life together.
All my very best….Mams
My daugheter at six months old. Fall, 1987.My daughter and her boyfriend goofing around at the movie theatre, in Spring 2007. They had been dating about 3 years or so at this point.
As I sit here basking in the glow of my 13 inch computer in an otherwise dark room this morning, I’m reminded about one of what I consider to be one of the great tenets of manhood; that is, waking up early.
As a child and then a teenager, I was always amazed each morning at how early my dad woke up. No matter how early I got up each day, without fail, he would already be awake and laying on the couch wearing his Nike hoodie, reading the paper.
The funny thing is… the man is not an early to bed kind of guy. This is a man who regularly stayed up late to watch Letterman in its entirety. The even more amazing thing to me, that I’ve only learned in the past few years, is that he never uses an alarm clock.
I never understood that facet of my dad’s life until recently. You see, for most of my life I’ve told myself a story that wasn’t true. And while I’ve definitely told myself many stories that aren’t true, the story I’m talking about right now is the that I was not a morning person.
For most of my life, I’ve been a snoozer. When I was a kid, my parents had to institute a 10 a.m. reverse bedtime during the summers and weekends to prevent me from sleeping all day. And boy did I ever balk at that one. In college, if I didn’t have early morning classes, I could (and often did) sleep until 10:40 or so no matter how late I stayed up.
That was my sleeping in pattern for most of my life.
A few months ago, that all changed. A guy who’s blog I read, posted about the idea that each of us has several internal stories (plural) which may or may not be true that we tell ourselves which make up our STORY (singular).
I’ve always been a firm believer that our lives are stories, and his post got me thinking about my life and the stories I’ve told myself that maybe weren’t true.
The timing of that post couldn’t have been better. Just a few days earlier, I’d heard a man speak at a luncheon who’s own story really resonated with me. A very successful business man and person of faith, the speaker spoke on the importance of being a man of discipline. A man of discipline himself, he spoke about how men of discipline wake up early: A) because it’s difficult; and, B) because life is short and sleeping through too much of it really is a waste.
The combination of the post about the stories we tell ourselves that aren’t always true and the idea that men of discipline wake up early couldn’t have intersected more perfectly in my life. I left the luncheon thinking to myself, “Self… I want to be a man of discipline even if that means waking up early.”
And so that night, I set my alarm to go off the next day at 5:00 a.m. When it went off, I got up. I read a few chapters of a book I was reading at the time, I prayed, I sat in silence, and I ran a mile. Despite the fact that I was exhausted by 2 p.m. that afternoon, it was a great experience.
It wasn’t until a few days later when I read the aforementioned blog post that I was really able to articulate what I’d already been feeling about my own story as a morning person. Since that time (it was last November) I’ve been re-telling myself that story almost every day when my alarm goes off and I stumble out of bed at 5, 5:30, or (on bad days) 6:00 a.m.
As Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Waking up early has been a great help in my attempts to stop and look around every once in a while.
Some mornings I go for a run. Some mornings I take a walk. Some mornings I read. Some mornings I write. Some mornings I reflect on who I am or what I’m accomplishing. Some mornings I think about my marriage. Some mornings I talk to God. Some mornings I just listen for his voice. And some mornings, (rarely but still occasionally) I waste almost 2 hours perusing the Facebooks, or the Twitterz, or my Google Reader RSS subscriptions.
I’m hesitant to say that waking up early has changed my life, but honestly, I can say I’ve seen a marked improvement in my quality of life since last November when I started waking up early.
As a man, I think there’s something deep in my core that calls me toward self-improvement and challenge. Waking up early, though really a small thing, has been a challenge that I’ve taken on successfully. Not only have I had more time to myself each morning for personal and spiritual reflection and development, but each day I get out of my bed before the sun comes up, I reinforce the idea that I have control over and can change the stories I tell myself.
The little victory I’ve had over my sleep story has started to make me question other questionably “true” stories that I’ve been telling myself for too long. It’s amazing how one little victory combined with a few more early morning hours of introspection each day can make all the difference in helping us become the men we want to be.
For me, realizing I could wake up early was not only a victory over a very real physiological and mental myth in my life, but it was also one of many early steps in my realization that I still had a long journey toward becoming a real man… a journey I’m still learning from and enjoying almost every day before most people are even awake.
Sometimes a real man does things that are difficult simply because of the discipline it takes to do so. I want to be a real man. I want to be a man of discipline. For me, a big part of that means I wake up early.
For the uninformed November is National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. Every November across the nation and around the world there are thousands of people who sit down and write an entire novel. It’s a competition against yourself. If you write 50K words in 30 days you win. If you don’t… well, you tried to win. When you think about it, there’s never a loser. I’ve been participating since 2005 and look forward to it every year.
Click photo to visit Sara Gonzales' webstie from where the graphic was derived.
Before you start thinking the things I know you already are, stop and breathe. It’s not as hard as it sounds. It’s almost as crazy as it sounds, but we’ll leave that part aside for now. Deep breath, open mind, positive thoughts…..and GO.
If you’re like most people I know, you want to write a book. I hear this from people often when they find out I write. They say “I’ve always wanted to write a novel but I never have the time.” Well, I’m here to tell you, it’s time. I know some of you are thinking: “Is 50K words really a novel?” Yes. 40K words is a novella, and 50K is a novel. While there are many novels that are much longer, many novels have about fifty thousand words. One of my favorite books of all time, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is about fifty thousand words long. (Also included: Brave New World and The Great Gatsby.)
National novel writing month started in 1999 with a group of 21; last year there were just under 170, 000 participants. In the Oklahoma City area alone we have almost 1000 participants according to the NaNoWriMo website. When you choose to write a novel in November you’re not alone. Writing a novel with the support of others makes it much easier than writing a novel alone. The accountability alone is empowering, but the social aspect really helps to move things along.
Now, down to the nitty gritty. If you’re really considering this, here are 10 things you should know:
It doesn’t have to be good. The point of NaNoWriMo is to come out of November with a first draft, or if you’re a perfectionist like myself, a “pre-first draft” because first draft connotes some level of completeness that I feel I can’t be expected to do in a month.
It’s okay to fail. Nobody really can say anything to you if you don’t finish. They can try but your retort should be “Oh yeah?! Well, how many books did YOU write this month?!”
It’s only 1667 words a day. That sounds like a lot, but it’s really not much. Right now, at the end of this sentence I have over 600 words….that’s about 35% of your daily word count.
When you come to meet-ups it’s not a competition, unless you want it to be. We have all won and lost before, and the ones who haven’t are in their first year too… it’s all about succeeding together. Every once in a while a “word war” will break out which is a short burst of writing frenzy where the timer starts and you write as much as you can before it goes off. Whoever gets the most wins, and who ever doesn’t win got a LOT of new words typed.
You don’t need a plot, characters, outline or plan. Write whatever you want, you can fix it later.
You can’t/shouldn’t edit in November. You’ll never win if you edit while you write. Leave the mistakes in (it’s hard!) and go back later (after November!) and fix them. Be sure to let us know about the really funny ones, we call them NaNoisms. NaNoism: a typo the detonates and takes out the entire sentence around it. See: “the dragon escaped by flapping its enormous wigs,” or “he bowed to thundering applesauce.”
Write now. Since the “rules” say from November 1st to the 30th and it’s already November, start now. Don’t worry about missing a day or two. Head over to the NaNoWriMo website, sign up and start writing. Open up a word processing document, type “Chapter 1” , save it, close it. Go to the NaNoWriMo website and update your wordcount, 2 words. You have officially done better than many people who sign up. Now close your browser and go write your novel.
Come to meet-ups. Jasmine Brothers (our municipal liasion) says: The meet ups happen during November primarily so people can socialize, get away from writing for a bit…or brag, or complain, or run over plot details to try to make them make sense. Some folks chose to write in good company, and word wars have broken out. Someone behind the scenes with NaNo actually ran the numbers once, and it turns out that more than half of all the people who sign up each year never enter a word count. Among the half who do, those who participate in the forums are more likely to make it to 50,000 words than those who don’t…and those who go to meet ups are even more likely than those who only hang out on the forums. I personally think that has to do with the support and companionship you receive…hitting that 50,000 isn’t a solo effort anymore.
Write anywhere. Whether you have a laptop, a spiral notebook, or an old Smith Corona you can write anywhere you are. I take a notebook with me to sort out my plot bunnies and write down ideas when away from home. Plot bunny: a random idea that comes hopping up and demands your attention. These are known to go on to spawn lots of cute little sub-plots, and so can be said to ‘breed like bunnies.’
Whatever you do, have fun. Life is too short to have regrets. If you get stuck come to a meetup and we’ll help you.
Final word count for this entry? Nearly 1000 words. See? I told you it was easy.
My very first car was a red, 1967 Ford Mustang. Red dust (old paint) clung to every individual who attempted to lean against it.
The vinyl top was mostly gone, and the condition of the seats….well, they were bad. I was taught how to use a screwdriver on the starter to start it. Piece by piece the car was revived to it’s almost original state and accessorized with a collection of B. Kliban Cat pillows. It lasted the rest of high school and most of college then I wrecked it. Bummer. It had the coolness factor. As punishment for wrecking the cool car, my parents bought me a beige Chevy Citation and told me I would be paying them for it. Definitely not cool.
I declined the offer and purchased a little silver Fiat Spider convertible before the month was over. The convertible top had to be duct-taped in the winter.
The next phase of my car purchases was not as exciting. My current Saturn Vue has cloth seats, and yes, there are days when I miss those heated leather seats. It’s not the coolest car I’ve ever driven, but it’s pretty reliable and gets me back and forth to work. It’s just not exactly what I need on the weekends. If you’re looking for affordable used trucks, then you may check out some used trucks in dallas here.
Enter the farm truck. Ours is a 1993 Chevrolet 3500 known by us as “The Dually.” It belongs to my father-in-law, and he is proud to drive it to do “farm-type” errands that involve more filth than usual.
The farm truck is essential to life in the country. Need some lumber? The farm truck can haul it. No trash pick up? No problem. There is plenty of room on the farm truck. Wearing muddy boots? Hop in the farm truck. The inside is trashed anyway. No one will care. When it comes to cool, there is nothing cooler than driving a farm truck…unless it had some cute pillows in the back.
I’m going to work on that.
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Showcasing Red Dirt culture ~ authored and managed by contributors with connections to the great state of Oklahoma.
