Mid Century Madness

Had a pretty good weekend.

Lori and I went out to the Old Rock on Friday night with Mr. Thom. It was a little weird in there that night. We sat down, and we waited at least 20 minutes before anybody even spoke to us. Granted, it was busy...but not that busy. The good news is that once we WERE finally waited on, I quickly forgot about the lack of attention earlier. One thing, though -- they need better beers out there. Only the Hopalicious appealed to me, but I don't like to drink that all the time. I tire of it rather quickly. After listening to countless country songs on the juke, we needed to get out of there. Too rural. ;-) Home by 10PM.

I headed over to Mr. Thom's place on Saturday morning to help him with his home network. He had some serious bandwidth issues over his WiFi connection. Not only was his signal being trounced by that of his neighbors, his equipment was almost a decade old. Using Speakeasy's website, we determined he was only getting about one-third of the possible bandwidth. We installed a WRT1900AC by Linksys. It was up and running within about 20 minutes, and the results were incredible. Excellent signal strength and fantastic throughput over WiFi. And now he's rockin' a Roku. How could life be any better?

Saturday night we met up with Niki, Miss Mommaerts and Jen. We hadn't gone out together for a while and it was nice to be able to catch up with them again. We ended up having a couple of brews at HSB, and then quickly migrated to the Black Kettle. I'm always surprised by the steaks out there. I'm not ready to render judgement on their food yet. I need more data.

Sunday was time to relax with smatterings of cleaning. Did laundry, cleaned the floors, took down a Christmas tree (don't fucking judge me), and cooked some spaghetti. Dudes -- lemme tell ya. I have the spaghetti sauce dialed in. Totally easy and it has HUGE flavor. Here's the dealio:

Clark's Spaghetti Sauce

2 green peppers (diced)
1 large white onion (diced)
3 28 oz cans of diced tomatoes
1 12 oz can of tomato paste
5 cloves of garlic
1.5 lbs of ground chuck
1.5 lbs of italian sausage
2 teaspoons oregano
2 teaspoons basil
2 teaspoons thyme
3 teaspoons sugar
1 tablespoon fennel seed
dash of chili pepper
sea salt and ground pepper to taste

Empty cans of diced tomatoes into large pot. Add tomato paste. Fill the empty can of tomato paste with water and add it to the pot. Mix in peppers, onions, garlic, oregano, basil, thyme, fennel seed, sugar and chili pepper. You only need to add about 2 teaspoons of chili pepper. If you add too much, you'll overpower it, so chill. Let simmer on medium-low heat. Stir occasionally.

The place should start smelling fucking fantastic.

Now you need to start on the meat. I brown it in an electric skillet just out of convenience. I mix the ground chuck and the italian sausage by hand in the skillet and then brown it over medium heat. I usually hover over the skillet and break up the large chunks of meat until I get it to the consistency that I want within the sauce. Drain and add to the sauce.

Add your salt and pepper. Taste as you go. It'll take a few minutes for the sea salt to properly dissolve, so make sure taste...add....wait....taste...etc.

Let that all simmer on low for about 30 minutes.

I add salt to my water when I boil spaghetti noodles, as it helps to keep them from sticking together. Cook the noodles in the boiling water for 9 minutes. Rinse. Toss with olive oil.

Serve, bitches.

Still working on the financing for the house. We should have some news today or tomorrow but it is driving us insane. I want to make an offer and get the negotiation started. Lori and I need to be in that place. Anybody else in there would be a disservice to coolness.