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A few months ago, I unveiled the masterpiece that was the hot-dogtopus. Now it is time for the sequel: Son of Hot-Dogtopus.

My wife found a food tip in Family Fun magazine: people stuck spaghetti into hot dogs sections to make sea creatures. I forget what they called them – the only thing I remember is thinking that I had yet another weapon to add to my culinary arsenal.

I’m up to four now, I think.

The article showed that you are supposed to stick uncooked spaghetti noodles into the end of a section of hot dog. The noodles go right into the soft hot dog with no problem. Then you boil the whole thing and the meat and noodles get cooked at the same time.

Do not, I repeat, do not, try to cook the spaghetti first and then push it into the hot dog.

Also note: the part of the noodle that is in the hot dog does not cook very quickly. So when the visible noodles are done, the hidden noodles are still crunchy. And if you cook the concoction long enough so that the noodle roots are done, the rest of the noodle is mushy. It may take practice to get the right balance.

We tried two methods. The first was not the method prescribed by the magazine – my wife kept the noodles in the plane perpendicular to the axis of the hot dog. (She stuck them in sideways)

The second method was the official one – noodles parallel with the hot dog.

The first method was tricky to cook. That’s a vote for the second method right there. Plus some of the method-one noodles broke during the cooking process. Some shattered due to just being fragile and having to awkwardly support the weight of the hot dog. Others were sheared somehow, leaving hints of noodle at the skin of the hot dog.

For visual presentation, assuming all the noodles stayed intact, I preferred the first method. Spacing the noodles allowed them to remain separate. The method-two noodles just clumped together and reminded me of hair in the shower drain. Appetizing, I know.

As far as the kids were concerned…they didn’t care or even notice the difference between the two methods. They were too busy eating them.

Even Gamma knew that they were yummy. Even though we hadn’t cooked them yet, he somehow knew they were food and kept trying to get them. It wouldn’t have been a problem except I was holding him while I was trying to take pictures. Perhaps the following explains why I settled for blurry/shadowy pictures for this post:

We still haven’t decided what exactly they are. The choices so far are

• scrawny octopi,
• two-tone squid, or
• nervous jellyfish

(I opted for plain “jellyfish” but Alpha settled on “nervous jellyfish”. I don’t know why it’s nervous, other than it knows it’s about to be eaten)

Side note: In case you’re wondering about today’s verse – yes they were venison hot dogs.

On New Year’s Eve, my wife went grocery shopping and came home with steaks for dinner.

Steaks are always welcome, but they were raw at that point, so I asked how she was going to cook them.

“Either boiled or fried” was the response.

Boiled? Ugh. No thanks. I’m sure it would make the meat safe to eat, but that’s just not right. Save the boiling for hot dogs. Although . . . I usually just microwave those.

Fried? Maybe, but a steak deserves better than that.

“Alright,” I said, “I’ll grill them.” You know it’s bad when I volunteer to cook. But steak is a treat, and I was home because of the holiday, so why not?

“In this weather? It’s snowing out there!”

“It’s not so bad. Besides, the grill will keep me warm.”

Here is what grilling on New Year’s Eve in the Midwest looks like:

While I was grilling, my wife was making the potatoes. Rather, she was trying to make the potatoes. She had a bag of potatoes, and the bag claimed that all one needed to do was microwave the bag and the potatoes would be cooked.

However, after being microwaved and put into a bowl to be mashed, the potatoes looked like this:

My wife knew that potatoes are not supposed to be green. Thanks to the internet, she confirmed that green potatoes are very bad.

So she threw them out and considered calling the company to complain about their attempted poisoning bad potatoes.

The best part about the meal was when the kids sat down to dinner and Alpha exclaimed “Steak! I love steak!” Get ’em started young.

The second-best part was that there was a steak or two left over. A breakfast later during the holiday consisted of steak and eggs.

I went out to eat for lunch yesterday. I looked at the menu and picked out what I wanted. The waitress came to take our orders. The guy at the end went first. All standard stuff so far.

Then the guy next to me went. He ordered the same sandwich I had picked for myself. Arrgh…I hate it when that happens.

But that’s okay, because he still has to pick out a side dish. There’s no way he would pick the same side as I.

(And yes, I do try to have good grammar even in my thoughts.)

Then he picked the same side dish that I had chosen.

I was torn, oh so torn, as to whether I should change my order.

I could get the coleslaw instead. That would make it a different order.

But I decided to stick with my original order. And you know what? It tasted just fine and was not affected by the fact that the guy next to me was eating the same thing.

My wife doesn’t understand why it’s a big deal what other people order at the restaurant. I know I’m not the only one like that. It doesn’t matter if the other person knows what I’m ordering (“steals my order” after hearing me order it) or just randomly gets the same thing (as in this case). Either way, I am troubled by it.

But why? I haven’t figured that out yet. Maybe it’s a desire to be unique, to be myself. But why can’t myself be similar to someone else?

Random Life Tip : When you put dishes away from the dishwasher, unload the bottom rack first before even pulling out the top rack. If, just hypothetically speaking here, there were a bowl in the top rack that was upside-up and so it got filled with water because it couldn’t drain, you wouldn’t want that bowl to spill water all over the formerly-dry dishes in the bottom rack. Not that it would ever happen to me.

We had some birthday parties at our house this past weekend. It was for our extended family (wife’s side), so in-laws and cousins also had some birthdays. Anyone who has a birthday in the fall was a guest of honor. And since some people involved were young boys, the theme was pirates (“And I’ve never walked the gang plank and I’ve never owned a parrot and I’ve never had a birthday in the fall“).

My wife prepared for the parties by buying some Lego molds – one for cakes and one for water (AKA an ice-cube tray).

The cake mold was used to make some cakes – one for each of the children whose birthdays we were celebrating. That would be two boys and one girl.

No, there was not a female version of the standard Lego minifigure. My wife just added some extra pieces of cake to the sides. Frosting covers a multitude of sins.

The ice-cube mold (mould for you Brits) was not used for ice at all. We made chocolates – white chocolate with food coloring (that’s colouring for … oh, never mind) added. It resembles the smaller, plastic bricks quite well. Some people just glanced at them and thought they were plastic pieces added for decoration. They were, of course, pleasantly surprised when we told them they were chocolate. The pieces were about an inch and a half long, in case you need a sense of scale.

There was also ice cream and a trifle. No shortage of desserts here. Oh, and we had dinner before that.

A warning in case you get the same or a similar Lego mold (yes, it was official Lego-brand merchandise): the resulting cake is fragile. One guy’s hand fell off (frosting hid that) and the heads broke off all three cakes (frosting again).

I haven’t frosted very many cakes in my life, and these were difficult to frost. The frosting (that’s icing for… okay, okay, no more) was just the standard frosting, but the cakes were too intricate. The hands were the worst – most of the details got lost and there were so many curves and crevices. And the face… the cake had eyes and a mouth, but those stood no chance of showing through the frosting.

But food coloring and gel decorating tubes made up for any deficiencies in the frosting department. Oh, and my wife did the detail work.

Lunch for Beta today consisted of macaroni and cheese, accompanied by a hot dog. It was an extra-nutritious lunch because I was in charge. Normally when my wife makes lunch she includes things like fruit and/or vegetables.

When I make hot dogs, I check with each child to see how he wants the hot dog served: normal, cut into little circles, or made into an octopus shape. I think they have each taken me up on the octopus offer only once. After they see that the octopus isn’t really much to behold, and it tastes the same anyway, they stick with just a plain hot dog.

But today, for some reason, Beta took the octopus option. So I got to serve my infamous hot-dogtopus.

It might be better if the octopus had 8 legs instead of 4, but my knife skillz aren’t that great. They are approximately halfway between dejected and upset – nowhere near mad. And if you do try this at home, you get bonus points if you taper the legs so that they look more like tentacles and less like stumps.

Come to think of it, the mouth isn’t representative either – but who wants to eat a hot dog with a beak in it? That’s a rhetorical question.

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On a somewhat-related note, Alpha is at school all day so he takes a lunch. I packed him a salami sandwich, some chips, string cheese, and 2 chocolate-chip cookies. He came home today with the following items in his lunch box: half a bag of chips, string cheese, and 2 chocolate-chip cookies. So all he ate was a sandwich and about 4 chips.

That is uncharacteristic of him – he is a very god eater. Lunch for him yesterday was 2 pieces of pizza. Besides, what elementary-school-aged child ignores chocolate-chip cookies?

Oh well, packing his next lunch should be easy. I’ll just make another sandwich and put it in the box with today’s leftovers. He didn’t say the food was bad – just that he wasn’t hungry.

We had been meaning to make ice cream with the boys all summer, but summer was too busy (or too lazy, take your pick) so we never did that. They did manage to make ice cream with their grandmother, but that was during the day while I was at work, so I didn’t get any of it.

Now that it is the day after Labor Day and school has started, we finally made ice cream at our house. The recipe that we used calls for zip-type plastic baggies, a cheap substitute for the near-indestructible wood and metal ice cream maker that my parents used when I was a kid.

For those not familiar with the plastic-bag method: pour the ingredients into a small plastic bag and seal it, put ice and salt and the small plastic bag into a large plastic bag and seal it, then shake/roll/toss the large plastic bag for several minutes. Here is a picture of the first step.

Apparently, it went fine the first time the kids tried it, at their grandmother’s house. Today, I got to try it with them here, after dinner (“you kids want dessert? Okay, but you have to make it yourselves.”)

Our recipe didn’t say anything about double-bagging the ice cream mixture. I highly recommend using two bags for the ice cream and two bags for the brine solution.

“Why?” you ask.

One reason is that we inadvertently got the extra-pointy ice from our freezer. A couple minutes into the last step, I noticed that the salt/ice mixture was turning brown. I was making chocolate ice cream, and I expected the chocolate to stay in the ice cream. The zip fastener was sealed (I checked), so I just kept going and hoped that the salt wasn’t leaking into the ice cream.

Another reason is that the table was getting wet while I was trying to get the ice cream to freeze. At first it was no big deal – I figured it was just condensation. But the other bag didn’t have that problem. My wife held up the bag and we watched it drip, drip, drip. We double-bagged the whole thing and didn’t have any more problems.

Just double-bag everything beforehand. Or pay extra for the high-quality dull ice. Or just use an old-school, industrial-strength ice cream machine.

One more thing – rinse off the ice cream baggies after you take them out of the brine. The middle child made it about halfway through his ice cream and then was done eating. I hated to see ice cream go to waste, so I started eating it. I took 3 bites, and 2 of them had a granule of salt. Biting into a chunk of salt is not good when you’re expecting strawberry ice cream flavor. I don’t know that biting into a chunk of salt is a good idea any other time either.

Double bagging may help with keeping the salt off the inner bag, but I’d still recommend rinsing off the ice cream bag. Hint: use cold water, otherwise you’ll undo all the work that it took to make the ice cream.

As you learned from yesterday’s post, I took the kids raspberry picking (this year went much better than last year).

And a week before that, we went blueberry picking.

After having experienced both, I will say, contrary to my longstanding view that raspberries are the best fresh fruit, that if you have your choice you should take kids blueberry picking instead of raspberry picking. Here are some reasons why:

• Blueberry plants are friendly. Blueberry bushes don’t hurt you. Raspberry plants have thorns, which causes children to avoid picking the fruit, leaving you to do all the work.
• Blueberries are sturdier. Kids can easily pick blueberries without squishing them. Grab the berry and pull. Raspberries are too delicate for those with not-so-fine motor skills.
• Blueberries are sturdier. I know I already used that point, but it has another aspect: you can pile the bucket full of blueberries and the berries at the bottom will be just fine. Kids can carry a bucket a lot easier than a shallow tray (“No, don’t tip it!”).
• Blueberries are sturdier. Last one with this heading, I promise. Raspberries almost, almost, collapse under their own weight. Drop a ripe blueberry from the table onto the floor, and it bounces nicely. Drop a ripe raspberry on the floor, and it splats. Now when you get home from your picking and your children want to help you wash and sort the fruit into containers for the fridge, which berry would you rather they handle?
• One vote for blueberries is that they don’t spoil so easily. The raspberries that seemed perfect a picking time were too ripe about an hour later, when I was washing and sorting them. Next time we pick raspberries, I am going to pick the ones that are not quite ripe. That way, they’ll be good when we get home. The blueberries stay good for a week or two at home after picking, but raspberries fade quickly after a couple of days.
• The other vote for blueberries: all the kids like them. Our middle child doesn’t really like raspberries, but he’ll eat a bowl full of blueberries quite readily. Note: If you are in charge of watching him, then don’t actually let him eat a whole bowl of blueberries. It’s not good on the digestive system.
• Oh, and blueberries are cheaper too. Blueberries were $1.60 per pound and raspberries were $3.75 per pound.

And now, some gratuitous close-up shots of fruit, compliments of the macro setting on my camera…