Black bean and sweet potato burritos

Eckth.

It is a sad that blogging is kinda over and done but the thing is

The thing IS

I need somewhere to keep my recipes so I don't keep being like "I'mma give you that recipe, ok, hold on, it's this one but you need to make like 5 different changes to it."

I will change them and store them here.

Sweet potato and black bean burritos are my huz's favourite vegetarian dish. (He is huz, I am wifesband.)

They are a combo of these two recipes with a couple alterations:
http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/refried_black_beans/
http://ohmyveggies.com/recipe-roasted-sweet-potato-black-bean-tacos/

Sweet potatoes:

Follow the above linked recipe! To quote (removing black bean instructions):

Ingredients

• 1 extra-large sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
• 1 small onion, cut into 8 wedges, then broken apart
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon lime juice
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon chili powder
• 1/8-1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper (or omit altogether for milder potatoes)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400ºF.
2. Toss the sweet potato cubes, onion wedges, olive oil, lime juice, cumin, chili powder, cayenne pepper, and salt in a bowl. Transfer to a rimmed baking sheet and bake for about 25 minutes, or until potatoes are tender, stirring halfway through cooking time.

Black beeeeeannsss:

I love making my own black beans from dried, they taste great, but it literally takes HOURS and canned beans ain't that espensive.

So I say skip the dried bean instructions on the linked page (if you're going to make your own, use a slow cooker.)

1. If you want onions in these, chop your small onion up and start frying it in oil. You want that nice Maillard reaction that gets them smelling so good.
 1. Drain and rinse black beans. Get rid of as much salt as possible, you'll get plenty more when you put salsa and cheese on your tacos!
2. Put beans in pot or pan that doesn't have a nonstick coating. You'll scratch it.
3. Dump in like 1/3 cup of water (doesn't have to be exact) and get them heating. You can throw in spices now: 2 tsp chili powder, 1/2 tsp cumin, 2 chopped cloves garlic (you could just do 1/2 tsp of garlic powder instead).
4. Once the beans are heated, take a potato masher to em. Mash em up real good.

Your refried beans are ready. Put them in whole grain wraps with all the usual taco ingredients! Salsa, sour cream, ranch, lettuce, tomato, bell peppers...whatever you like!

Fwee-ooo.

It's been awhile, for sure and for certain. I don't keep up this blog anymore, though it's very pretty. Maybe I will again in the future- I just lurve my URL. Perhaps when I have something of note to post here. I cannot tell.

In the meantime, enjoy what's here.

~Jill

The Heavens Declare The Glory of God!

This, my dear friends, is the whirlpool galaxy, or M51, for you astronomy buffs out there. It isn't colliding with the galaxy beside it- that's way out beyond by however many thousand light years. The whirlpool galaxy itself is somewhere between 20-37 million light years away from us. The red areas are nebulae- considered to be stellar nurseries. In itself, the idea of stars being formed in the shroud of secrecy called a nebula is enough to make me exhale a little in sheer awe.
The Hubble telescope took this picture. However...what you can't see is the core of the galaxy. Hubble took a photo of that too. The x- structure that is found there took my breath away last night when I saw it at a worship conference, and all I could do was cry. Have a look, slowly, and savour it:

Can it be clearer? There is a God who loves us so much, He has written it upon the stars. In the core of a galaxy we can see face on. He LOVES you!!! The God of the universe is crazy in love with YOU!
This, right here, is the reason we live.
And we? Here we are, in what I believe is the last photo Voyager 1 ever took of earth.

A dust mote suspended in a sunbeam.
The blue jewel, no larger than a pixel, "coincidentally" imaged inside a reflection from the sun.
My heart echoes the psalmist today- "What is man, that You are mindful of him? The son of man, that You visit him?"
More on the conference when I return for real. But I knew y'all would love this.

Look! The Sits of Insanity! He'll never catch us there!

You may have heard of the Cliffs of Insanity.
Well, today I encountered- and here I coin a new phrase- the "Sits of Insanity."
Any lifeguards out there will know what I mean by a "sit". In Lifeguardese, this means "situation"- a simulation of guarding a swim in which something goes wrong. There is usually a team of 2-3 guards on the deck, and the rest are in and around the water, acting as patrons, with assigned problems from the instructor. For example, one person, charged with going first, might be acting out a spinal injury. When they are taken care of, someone else will "go"- maybe a heart attack, or a non-swimmer "climbing the ladder" in the deep end.
At any rate, that's how it's usually done.
My examiner (for my recertification) today is fond of stressing her trainees out to the max, because in a real situation we will be that stressed. Or maybe she's just sadistic. Sooooooooooooo...with ten candidates, she makes up 2 teams of 3 guards and 1 team of four. The first set of sits is basically as described above.
Then, with appropriate warning from her and one of her previous students, we break up into similar teams for the second set. The first team had to deal with a double clutch (two non-swimmers basically trying to climb on top of each other to get air), a power outage, a patron very afraid of the dark, another with a broken tooth and bleeding lip, and, oh...what was it- a "10 year old" with a cut on her toe? But it starts with the double clutch, and then the lights go out, and then all crap breaks loose as we all "go" within about a minute of the other. The three guards are suddenly triaging 7 troubled people. Hehehe. I was the one with the "broken tooth"...apparently have really good acting skillz as the guard rescuing me thought I might really be hurt. Oops.
So, less hehehe-ing this time...it was my group's turn. We had a head injury, a penetrating chest wound, a non-swimmer who kept going in and drowning again, inappropriate behaviour (we'll leave that at that), and- oh, yeah- an "11-year-old" experiencing abdominal cramps for the first time that yours truly definitely failed to recognize properly. *blush*
The third sit, as four guards were on, was pretty much A Lifeguard's Worst Nightmare-Come-Almost-True. EEEEheeeheehee. (That was an evil laugh, btw.) One girl was pretty much constantly hitting on the male guard (the only male in the group- poor guy, he really got picked on), there was a "pregnant" choking victim, a pair of people went to the gallery and got in a fight involving a glass bottle (and then of course lots of bleeding, head injuries, etc.) and one more thing that I forget but the girl wound up lying on the deck being treated for shock...
And what was yours truly up to? Well. I will tell you. I got assigned one of the ones everyone wants- tonic-clonic seizure, in the deep end, lots of convulsing. I asked the examiner at first if she wanted convulsions- some seizures (at least the ones that happened at the pool where I used to work, and no, I was never on at the time) involve the person just freezing in place, unable to move. Yes, said the examiner. I want you to convulse not only in the water but on the side and on the deck. Fun fun fun! *breaks for other evil laugh* >8-)
I swear, if directors of plays involving injured people coulda seen me out there today, I'd have been cast in a heartbeat. If they didn't think I was on my way to the hospital.
PS- yeah, we all passed. 8-D

It's Almost Recess!

Well, kiddos...
This do be my last blog entry, at least for a couple of weeks as I'm back at home. They may resume on a semi regular basis after that, though at the moment I don't know.
In the meantime I just wanted to thank each and every one of you for listening to my random ramblings and for posting insightfully and cheerily for me to read too.
Hmm...shall we write one more humourous (or humerus, for you biologists) essay for the folksies before we goes, Precious?
Oh, yes, we shall.
On what, Precious?
We doesn't know. Mustn't ask us. Filthy hobbitses.
We aren't hobbitses.
Ohhhhhhhh...
Oops. Multiple personalities kickin' in again. I shall return with something hopefully halfway amusing later. I suspect the packing will all too easily go to my brain.

'Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tamed so.

In the randomness department:

Whenever I'm stuck in traffic, I can't help but wonder, 'Where did the creator of The Jetsons go, and why hasn't he done something about this?'
~ Jimmy Fallon

Hehehe. So true.

Well...I promised an entry about our dear Shakespearean nonsense. Apparently it was very good nonsense since we got reviewed in a local arts reviewing paper, and they called it "Shakespeare's funniest play ever in the hands of this extroverted bunch" or something like that.
Had us grinning.
Our wonderful director created such great blocking- physical comedy got a huge proportion of the laughs; picture Lucentio as Cambio giving Baptista a bear hug when the two first meet (that was closing night, the other times he just shook his hand like a madman, but still). Grumio was magnificent and consistently stole the show with his utter craziness.
His conversation with Curtis in Act 4 Scene 1 was brilliant- he begins "crying" quite hard as he describes his journey home, losing it entirely as he declares that he "lost his crupper" and falling upon Curtis' neck and wailing.
After about 10 seconds, he turns to the audience, stage whispers "I'm fine" and then goes back to his loud sobbing on Curtis' shoulders.
Closing night we had Hortensio declare his identity by stating "I am Hortensio Travolta" and causing the chorus to quietly lose our composure. Basically, it was utter mayhem, but very controlled mayhem. We had a lot of fun, I must say; I am dreadfully sorry it's over.
The laughs just built up and up and up with every performance; our final night we had about 105 people in attendance! (That was our biggest crowd.) And they laughed far more than any other crowd, even getting the Shakespearean wit that all the other audiences just didn't pick up on. It was wonderful, it was hilarious, it was...over.
And now I am left here behind, trying to catch up on everything I've procrastinated on. Including writing. Well, there you have it. If you don't know the play I apologise; this entry probably didn't make a lick of sense.
At the end of this week my job ends and then I have a few weeks at home before school starts again. This may mean the end of my blogging for awhile; I can't honestly say. But I do promise that if it is to be the end I will return and post at least once more to let y'all know.
Cheers!

The Cosmic Conclusion

Having just finished That Hideous Strength, I am overwhelmed.

Truly, Lewis' gift is astounding- one reads phrases which, when read, delight the senses just due to the flow of words, and force one to re-read if one actually wants to understand the meaning of the sentence instead of feeling it, allowing it to flow into one, to lull one into hearing it in one's head as a vague thing which will never be remembered.

There were phrases of such deep significance that could be chewed upon for weeks and still preserve freshness.

There were descriptions of Language and other things in a way that makes the seem more real than could be imagined.

There are phrases like "what looked like a somnambulist chimpanzee dressed up as a Doctor of Philosophy" that make one laugh out loud.

I am the sort of reader who loves a good plot- I have a very hard time reading slowly to analyze the poetry of the words themselves; I cannot pause for a long time to ponder the depths of some of the concepts. They seem far too heavy for the first read, though I try to ensure I have at least the tiniest grasp of them before moving on. On my first read, I must flow with the story, I can't put the book down. Maybe this is just impatience. I don't know.

What I fully intend to do is to re-read this story at some point in time to soak up all the teensy details, all the marrow of the story that I have missed or not spent enough time on the first time through- when my hunger to find out what happens next can be replaced by that peace that the whole story will, indeed, work itself out by the end and so I may simply enjoy it. I intend to also have an english, english-german, and english-latin dictionary on hand as well. There are quite a few opportunities here to expand one's repertoire. I have eaten the meal in that sort of a delightful rush one uses when one is ravenously hungry and gets that almost savage pleasure from devouring the food- now it is time to eat, daintily, the best bits, the bits left behind on the plate that serve to complete the satisfaction of a meal without overfilling you; the bits you have to savour, slowly, getting all the taste.

I wanted to quote an astounding passage on Language that makes me utterly salivate, but I felt it would not be quite fair to Cymru who has not yet read the book. She will thrill to the core of her being to read it, I have no doubt, and I could not stand to spoil it for her.

To all whom it may concern- I highly recommend this book.

I also think that this whole bit of spraff was rather heady and above my league; it may very well be the product of it being 1:30 in the morning. My analogies which seem quite clever now will no doubt seem hackneyed or superficial in the morning light. Oh well. It never does to take oneself too seriously. :-P