Pretzel Day

"I wake up every morning in a bed that's too small, drive my daughter to a school that's too expensive, and then I go to work to a job for which I get paid too little, but on Pretzel Day?...Well, I like Pretzel Day." -Stanley Hudson-

I was in the mood for soft pretzels, like the ones I used to get at Costco for .99 before they switched to Churros. I searched through some recipes and remembered an episode of Good Eats I saw on food network dedicated to the soft pretzel. I tried Alton Brown's recipe and they were good. They didn't end up being the most beautiful pretzels of my life, but the best I've been able to produce myself, getting that chewy outer crustishness with the soft center. I made half cinnamon/sugar, but next time I'm going to try just baking them plain, and after their done, brush some melted butter on, then the cinnamon/sugar because it kindof burned being baked with the pretzel itself.

Soft Pretzels

-1 1/2 cups warm (110 to 115 degrees F) water

-1 tablespoon sugar

-2 teaspoons kosher salt

-1 package active dry yeast (2 1/4 tsp)

-22 ounces all-purpose flour, approximately 4 1/2 cups

-4 T. unsalted butter, melted

Vegetable oil, for pan

-10 cups water

-2/3 cup baking soda

-1 large egg yolk beaten with 1 tablespoon water

-Pretzel salt

Combine the water, sugar and kosher salt in the bowl of a stand mixer and sprinkle the yeast on top. Allow to sit for 5 minutes or until the mixture begins to foam. Add the flour and butter and, using the dough hook attachment, mix on low speed until well combined. Change to medium speed and knead until the dough is smooth and pulls away from the side of the bowl, approximately 4 to 5 minutes. Remove the dough from the bowl, clean the bowl and then oil it well with vegetable oil. Return the dough to the bowl, cover with plastic wrap and sit in a warm place for approximately 50 to 55 minutes or until the dough has doubled in size.
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line 2 half-sheet pans with parchment paper (I just used one cookie sheet)and lightly brush with the vegetable oil. Set aside.
Bring the 10 cups of water and the baking soda to a rolling boil in an 8-quart saucepan or roasting pan. In the meantime, turn the dough out onto a slightly oiled work surface and divide into 8 equal pieces. Roll out each piece of dough into a 24-inch rope. Make a U-shape with the rope, holding the ends of the rope, cross them over each other and press onto the bottom of the U in order to form the shape of a pretzel. Place onto the parchment-lined half sheet pan.
Place the pretzels into the boiling water, 1 by 1, for 30 seconds. Remove them from the water using a large flat spatula. Return to the half sheet pan, brush the top of each pretzel with the beaten egg yolk and water mixture and sprinkle with the pretzel salt. Bake until dark golden brown in color, approximately 12 to 14 minutes. Transfer to a cooling rack for at least 5 minutes before serving.

Os Coxa gig #2

There was a luau party for the SAA, organization for spouses of med students. Rhett's band backed up a portion of the chorale group from their school. The songs were from the chorale group so not as much their style, but they had fun. Rhett didn't need his whole drum set, so that is always nice. If you check out the photo, I had to turn the flash off, so you can see his right hand IN MOTION. We won a sweet gift certificate, had fun chat with friends and saw some pretty limber guys limbo it up. Here we are together--only 10 weeks until our son's due date!

Spouse Tag

1. Where did you meet your husband?

At a church activity which was volley ball and a BBQ, we were on opposite teams, Rhett hates volleyball.

2. What was the first thing you said to your husband?

"You're in a band? We'll totally go to your shows and be your groupies." Click here for explanation

3. Where was your first date?

It was a date loop-hole. We had been really good friends and he invited me to go see Lord of the Rings: Return of the King with a "group of friends" which turned out to be his best friend, Travis and his wife...I think we may still owe them for the movie tickets. I kept putting out "please hold my hand vibes" throughout the movie, but nothing came of it. Rhett still holds I sat there and didn't put out any vibes, but later that night we held hands and I gushed about my crush on him.

4. Where was your first kiss?

An incomplete snow igloo in Rhett's front yard. That winter, 2003-2004 it snowed over 3 feet in Ogden and Rhett and his roommates were buidling an igloo. You pack down snow in a huge mound, it was at least 5 feet high, then chisel out a room inside. It was still Christmas break and we had recently crossed the difficult void of friendship into a romantic relationship and we'd spent the morning hacking away in this igloo. Rhett's full body was in the igloo and I was in the entrance tunnel. He would chisel away and shove the remnant ice/snow back to me and I would shove it out the door like moles or gophers. We were wet and cold, and before ending I went in to check out our progress. Igloos are quite cozy actually, and it was just big enough for us to basically lay right by eachother. Rhett was on his back and I was next to him on my stomach. We were chatting and there was a pause and he smiled at me and went for it. I saw his head and shoulders approaching, and put my head down, nestling into his shoulder. All the sudden his shoulders went rigid and he quietly asked: "No?" In my head sirens were going off. THAT WAS A KISS ATTEMPT YOU IDIOT!! WHO WOULD GO FOR A HUG WHEN YOUR FACES WERE RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER SQUISHED IN ONE OF THE NICER IGLOOS!! I gasped and pulled back and apologized, rambling on and on about how sorry I was I ruined the romantic set up and how dumb I felt. He just lauged and was glad I was just stupid rather than rejecting him. Later he did kiss me, but kindof grabbed my head so I knew it wasn't meant to be a hug. Thanks for more warning bud.

So pretty much one of the most romantic first kisses you've heard? I'm just waiting to see it reinacted in a survivor film set in the Arctic that surprises the audience by ending up a romantic comedy.

5. Did you have a long/short engagement/courtship? Compared to society as a whole, super short, compared to our LDS religious culture, I would say on the long side of average. We met and became best friends in August 2003, began dating January 3, 2004, were engaged March 20, 2004, and married June 16, 2004. I was 19 and Rhett was 23.

)

6.Where did you get engaged? There are three different accounts. On the record we say in a gazebo that made for a really romantic night...if you want the previous two you'll have to ask in person

7. Where did you get married? Mt. Timpanogos Temple--it was sweet. No reception, just get the check from Dad and run away on our honeymoon!

Hmmm, I'll tag Natalie, Katherine, Rachel, Ashley, Jayne

Another Crapo Story

Before we moved to rural Missouri, and we lived in civilization that had both Target and job opportunity, I worked in Radiology. A patient came in for a chest x-ray and he was a teenager. I went out to call him back, and looked at the name: John or something common Butte. Taken back, I just called John and the kid came back. Before explaining the exam, I asked him: "Do you pronounce your name [Bute]?" (I'm not familiar with all the pronunciation symbols, but blogger doesn't have it anyway, I thought it would be bute, like cute) Without any emotion he said: "Nope it's Butt." I was for some reason really excited by this. "My name is Crapo but it looks like Crap-o. It's too bad we don't have siblings or relatives that could get married because I'm sure they could get on Jay Leno with the "Butt / Crap-o" wedding!" He kind of laughed and mentioned his little sister's friend was a Crapo and maybe he could make it work out.

So you just may see this kid's wedding announcement from his local newspaper on Jay Leno in the next 5 years or so, and I think I may just take credit for hooking them up.

Its Pronouced Cray-po! Like crayon or cray fish.

We are well aware the spelling of our name can put people in a situation where they aren't sure how to pronounce it. It is French and was originally spelled Crapeaux, but upon immigration to the New World, became Crapo.

One of my favorite friends growing up was a Crapo, so I didn't really think much about it when I met Rhett and found out his last name. Later when we were engaged, his oldest brother kind of apologized about it, saying it might be kind of a step down from my Irish common maiden name, Kelly. But I never really thought about it one way or the other, and actually when we first got married, I didn't really feel like it was MY name necessarily. I was of cource a Crapo now, but I didn't feel loyalty to it and would occasionally look for opportunities to make a joke. For example when asked my last name, I would say: "Crapo...spelled like Crap-0." Rhett ever thought the jokes were funny, obviously they were 23 years old to him by that time, but I got some humor out of it.

As time has passed and I've been a Crapo for 4 years, I have begun to own the name, and now my reactions are unpredictable. I try to throw people a bone, because hey--we know it looks like Crap-o, but occasionally if someone brings up one of the many jokes, I find them not funny as I once did and my fangs and claws are unleased. Such an experience happened with the General Surgeon, Dr. McIntire at work...

It as about 2am and work was going as usual. The vascular/thoracic surgeon was finishing late rounds on one of his patients in the ICU and one of the General Surgeons was also finishing up. Part of my job is taking off all the doctor's orders from the charts and after I've done everything I need to, I have to sign my name: J. Crapo. I was busy drooling as I stared at all the heart monitors wiggling their way acrosss my screens when I heard Dr. McIntire laugh (this is the first time in over a year of interactions I ever heard this man laugh) and show the patient's chart to the other surgeon. "Look at this. J. Crap-o." I think it caught me off guard or it was really late, or I'm a pregnant time bomb, but I flipped around and in the most condescending and disgusted voice I can achieve smirked: "It's pronounced Crapo." For some reason, this caught him off guard, (it is obvious that the person who signed it would be the girl sitting at the desk and at 2 am not much is usually going on, so I would obviously have heard his comment) but he said: "Really?" I gave a really teenagerish scoff and blurted: "Yah. I think I know how to pronounce my own name," dramatically spinning around in my seat and clicking my mouse vigorously at nothing.
Really, I doubt I showed him, probably make myself look immature and lame, but later I was rethinking the interaction and kind of laughing because that was probably my biggest blow up about our name being mispronounced and one of the less offensive remarks. Needless to say Dr. McIntire and I have nothing to chat about when he makes his rounds.

One bonus to having an a name everyone mis-pronounces is any call we get asking for Mr or Mrs Crap-0, we hang up and tell them they have the wrong number, because they obviously don't know us or haven't lived in Idaho (the senator is a Crapo). This hanging up on all the Crap-o callers only back fired one time I can think of when it was an important call from our car insurance trying to respond to Rhett and I hung up on them...but they usually call back if they really need us. Also sometimes it's satisfying to correct tele-marketers, surveyers, highway patrol wanting money and act totally offended and make them apologize profusely only to hang up after they do so...am I a mean person? I guess I am...but, hey, they called me.

So Long Dump of Farm House!

We have moved into a new duplex which is much nicer and more convenient than the dumpy farm house. We are still getting everything settled and in the end it's been nice to move closer to everything and to avoid a lot of the issues of living in an old home. Also, no more dead animals to deal with. We are really excited to live in luxury for a few months before we move for rotations.

So we are excited to say goodbye to the shack we were living in and as a eulogy, a story from this past Spring showcasing how we won't miss living there at all...except for the fact Rhett can't play his drums at home anymore.



Rhett and I were chatting right before we fell asleep and heard some banging. Rhett leaped out of bed, pulled the shotgun from underneath the bed and cocked it, thinking there was an intruder. “I think some animal got under the house.” I said, pointing out a scratching noise that had joined the banging. We located the noise under our feet and stomped around until we couldn’t here it anymore. Rhett ran outside with the gun hoping to kill the culprit, but didn’t find anything. We assumed it was the groundhog that has been living under the back porch since we moved in and we were ticked. The next day Rhett found the break in route, the animal had busted through a vent under the house. Rhett repaired it and we thought nothing of it.
Two weeks later, I came home from work at 6am and our bedroom REEKED. I turned on the fan and asked Rhett what it was, no idea. He went to school and I thought possibly a wet towel or something was stinking. I did all the laundry and it progressively got worse throughout the day and the stench was more identifiable as decay. When Rhett got home from school I told him I thought something had died under the house and after taking a large whiff of the vent in our room and almost retching right there, he agreed. We called Animal Control and they were setting up an appointment and when given our address told Rhett—you live outside city limits, we can’t come. Rhett was so frustrated. “We pay all our bills to the city of Kirksville and you won’t come an extra mile?” So no help from the government and the county doesn’t have any services so we were on our own…or Rhett was on his own.
He had just studied in microbiology zooontic diseases (he explained these are diseases contracted from animals) and was too worried about contracting something to venture down in the crawlspace that night. I went to work and brought home an isolation outfit for him from the hospital. The next morning he geared up and prepared for the disgusting job.
I laced the mask with peppermint oil to help with the stench because that is what we always did in surgery when the patient was extra stinky but I underestimated the power of the oil and Rhett’s eyes were watering from breathing in the peppermint. He took it off and said: “Jess, I appreciate the thought but I think I’d rather deal with the stink.” Oops! He was more worried about disease and just ended up doing the job with peppermint tears.
Luckily we had put a bug bomb under the house weeks earlier, so the spiders were at a minimum, even though he came out covered in webs none the less. At first he popped up and said he thought it was the septic tank because there was stagnant water everywhere, but as he crawled around he concluded it was merely rain water that hadn’t absorbed yet. I had been up all night and fell asleep on the back porch and woke up to Rhett crawling out of the house with the what looked like 2 pink dirty diapers in a trash sack: “Jess, the next time we move to Missouri, lets not live in an old, crappy farm house OK?” he said removing the face mask. “I don’t think we’ll ever be moving back to Missouri Rhett.”
He explained he found that the groundhog had broken its way into the ventilation of our house…and given birth right below our bedroom!! The groundhog had a litter of 2 pups, after which Rhett had blocked the mother rodent’s entrance earlier; the babies had obviously died and began rotting. Rhett had to use a mirror to see into the vents and saw the first hairless lump and couldn’t see any more, but just reached in, feeling for more…SO GROSS! Anyway, he got the dead rodent carcasses out of the ventilation system and spent a few hours having to go to Home Depot to buy supplies to clean/ repair the vents under the house. I felt bad because it was the Saturday before finals week and he had been counting on being able to study but ended up having to spend all morning on the rodent control, but I was grateful he was willing to do it and the stench cleared up within an hour.

Sun Damage

I received this image in an email. The email focused on the gross, tan, damaged skin. But what caught my eye was the side view of the position of the bikini top. Follow the back string to the woman's anterior. I think it should be a rule if your chest is lost in your waist when you bend forward, time to hang up the string bikini...but that's just me.

Egg the Landlord

Thursday we just found out our flaky landlord allowed the house we are currently renting to go into foreclosure. Just as we were sitting down to dinner, a rep from the mortgage company came to our door to claim the house. He was shocked to find us--living here. He was kind of flabbergasted by the situation, "In all the foreclosure's I've dealt with, there's never been tenants, so I don't know what to tell you." With this he left, and I had to go to work.

Today, late Friday afternoon, we found out we have to move out by January 24th. We have to move in 13 days. We are frantically looking for housing that is 1. available to be moved into next week, and 2. will allow us to sign a lease only through July because we will be moving back to Utah July 20th.

Stressful, but what can you do and I'm just hoping this will be a blessing in diguise...although I know God has a sense of humor and I've complained a lot about our current house and this would make a great joke of my ungrateful attitude I guess sometimes the hardest lessons to learn hit you right in the middle of a hard semester of med-school , when your 6 months pregnant, and when it's freezing outside. :) Well I know Heavenly Father will help us relocate and I should stop blogging and go begin packing...only 12 more days to go now that it is Saturday.

Os Coxa

Tonight Rhett's band composed of other med-students performed at a Breast Cancer Research Fundraiser. They've jammed almost every Saturday since August in our upstairs bedroom. They played mainly just for fun, so this was their first performance and they did a great job. The name of the band is Os Coxa, the anatomical term for the hip bone. The audience was really excited, I don't know if they really loved the music or if the fact most had been drinking for 3 hours before they started playing made them a great crowd.

It has almost been 2 years since Rhett's performed, and he had a lot of fun. He'd been with his former band, Stitch Riley, since 8th grade so it's been great to have the opportunity again to play his drums and perform.

I've been going to gigs since we were friends, and at one time I knew how to set up his entire drum set except for the double bass pedal and the high-hat cymbals. But since it's been a while, my roadie skills were definitely lacking this show...but my groupie skills are just as great as they ever have been.

To read more about our rock band romance past, catch the post of when we first met.

Ghost Writer!

I was at work and found an awesome pen in a random pencil cup. It was really "inky" kind of like a gel pen. I was writing along, and thought: "This pen is sweet! Just like the pens the kids had on Ghostwriter."

I have not thought of the PBS TV Series Ghostwriter for at least 10 years. From 1992 to 1995 I loved this lame show. It's about a ghost that helps kids in New York solve mysteries. They can only communicate with letters provided by the kids, I remember he was fond of the alphabet magnets on the fridge. In later seasons Ghostwriter even learned to communicate on DOS based Internet...there was obviously a reason I forgot all about this show until last night.

Anyway, as a kid, I was a little obsessed with office supplies--especially pens. One year my Grandma gave us $20 cash for Christmas and I spent the entirety of my small fortune on coveted office supplies. Office Max was one of my favorite stores...with this crazy love for pens I had a deep appreciation for the pens used by "the team" on Ghostwriter:

They used pens that were basically black fine tip markers, but attached to the lid was a lanyard type necklace. That way they could just pull down mid mystery to get more clues from Ghostwriter.

So I lusted after these amazing pens for some time, when to my joy, they had a promotion to get your own Ghostwriter pen. I can't remember the exact details of the promo but I remember having to wait until the end of many episodes to write down different things--maybe it was as simple as getting an address to mail in $2, but I remember it taking weeks to be able to send it off, followed by an eternity before getting the bulky envelope in the mail.

After my dedicated weeks waiting for each episode to end, and all the days checking the mailbox daily, it finally came time to use my amazing Ghostwriter pen. I opened it up and found: a crappy ballpoint that didn't even produce ink, but just scratched along the paper. The neck strap was worse than a shoelace and the first time I tried to pop off my pen mid-run, the whole pen came off.

GHOSTWRITER JIPPED ME!!!

It was probably the biggest disappointment of the entire 9th year of my life.

I could definitely sympathize with Ralphie from Christmas Story. We were both swindled by big, non-existent celebrities just trying to sell a buck. At least Orphan Annie gave Ralphie something he could use more than once.

10 Items or less is back!

Last Spring TBS aired an original comedy called 10 Items or Less. The first season was only 6 episodes, but it is picking back up Jan. 15 at 11/10 c on TBS. This show cracks us up and thought you might be interested in it also..

The show is about Leslie Pool, who struggles managing a grocery store, the Greens & Grains, after his father's death. Todd is the butcher and a lady killer, and Richard is the full time cashier who dreams of a spot in the Ice Capades. Check out tbs.com if you want to learn more.

Christmas Break

We were in Missouri for the holidays, and it was better than we expected. I was kind of sad because it would be my first Christmas without family, and has been a very nice holiday break. Rhett and I made a big meal for Christmas Eve, and he was in charge of preparing the turkey.

Christmas morning we ate Creme Brule French Toast and opened our gifts. Our friend, Molly got Rhett a gingerbread kit...here is his handy work. Unfortunately, I had to work Christmas Day. Since then we've mainly nested in our house fearing the freezing weather except for one day when we drove south to Jefferson City, the capitol of Missouri. Some highlights were museums on Missouri, the capitol, Target, and the fact we left Kirksville for a day.

The State Capitol

The Missouri State Penitentiary being torn down