Travels with The Rayman

It’s been a while since I was adopted and what a great time I’ve been having!!

My new folks pay lots of attention to me. Maybe too much attention. Can’t get away with anything. But I am the perfect dog. I’ve learned how to sit. I stay when it suits me. When they say, go bye-bye, I no longer resist jumping into the back seat of the car. I eagerly look forward to the drive and lounge in the back seat. I’m learning to heel and whenever I go to the door, they always take me outside to “do my business”. And that results in a treat, a pet, and the word “yes”. I’m also learning to go to my “place” in the kitchen and I love my crate…I sleep there at night in the laundry room which is warm and confortable.

I’ve been to three puppy classes where I’ve played with 5 other dogs. This is a very pleasant experience because everyone there gives me treats whenever I do the right thing. And then they let us loose and tell us to “play” and so we run and jump and bark and generally have a great doggie time. They weren’t too happy the day I peed all over a great big overstuffed dog that sat in the corner. The lady had to take it home and throw it in the washer. In my defense, I was having such a good time, it just happened.

My new parents are very quick to take me outside every other hour or so and get two long walks a day. Yesterday was the highlight of my life. They took me to the beach and I was reunited with one of my sisters. She looks just like me except she has longer legs and I have longer ears. Seems like a good trade-off to me. We are both black with a bit of white hair on our chests. So, anyway, they took us to a BEACH!! Jaycee, that’s her name, and I frolicked for about 30 to 40 minutes in the sand mostly. However, we did also jump in the puddles of ocean water. Pure delight. We loved every minute of it.

So, all in all, life is working out just great. Good food, lots of walks, car rides, doggie classes and plenty of cuddle time in my parents lap when the TV goes on at night. Cool.

 
I did get to see my doggie mama and doggie dad where I was born. I stayed there the other night and got a bath and while Becky was drying me she found 4 ticks. So, now I’m on medication…sort of a big pharma thing. But if it kills the ticks, I’m all for it.

Well, it time for a nap. I’ll write again.

Bowsie wowsie, Beau Jackson

A discovery was made…by me that I feel compelled to share. Cooking is hard at the front end of the process. That’s where the cook decides what to cook. This can take on many different forms. Use an old standby recipe? Do that one you had a couple of years ago (where in the heck is the recipe, though). Try something completely new so that you can experiment on your family and friends. Make it up as you go along which is good for the creative juices…but it is the holiday and should that risk be taken? All have their pluses and minuses.

This year I decided to use my fabulous crab recipe, spicy baked crab. This necessitated setting the table with newspapers, getting some bibs, buying the crab, warming up the bread as the crab baked, opening the wine and voila. Dinner. Nothing could be easier. It felt like I was cheating. Oh, and I made a pavlova. Thought I’d share the recipes. Everything was wonderful and clean-up was a breeze as clean-ups go.

And as Christmas eve goes, Christmas day follows. What to do? My, oh, my. Should I dig thru recipes, leaf thru magazines, look in my food binder, check out my MacGourmet software? Because I am often a thoroughly modern Millie, I decided to go to the Fine Cooking website where I found a neat little trick. It was called Plan a Perfect Xmas dinner (I’m paraphrasing here). Each course has about 25 choices that you browse through, make your selection, and drag your chosen dishes to the “menu” and hit go and the program automatically spits out a grocery list. So that is exactly what I did. It made the planning much easier. I crossed off from the list what I had in my pantry and then headed out the door for the store. Saved me precious moments.

So, I give you my menu for your reading pleasure. And check out the Fine Cooking website. It is fabulous. Oh, and I’m not sure but I can’t remember a recipe out of that magazine that didn’t work like a charm.

Just saying.

Dear New Family and Friends,
It’s been a week at my new home with my new Grand parents! And for a puppy I’m overjoyed at living in Cayucos. There are so many new smells and things to chew on, both literally and figuratively.

The thing that sticks out in my mind is all the trips made to outdoors. What’s with these people anyway? They hover over me and watch my every move and the minute I look like I’m going to squat, they pick me up and rush me outside. Outside is interesting but so many times a day? I do like the outside because I can see Vino, my next door neighbor. He is a small dog of the terrier variety. The other day I rushed up and pounced on him (I’m already twice his size) and gave him a few friendly bites. Well, he took great exception by yelping and running away from me. Then he wouldn’t have anything to do with me. Now I am more respectful. I still run up to him but now I start with butt sniffing and when that goes well, we meet nose to nose.

But I digress. My new mama walked me the other day by a house where some very big dogs live and they started barking at us. Mama had me off-leash so I took the opportunity to flat-out run down the street, around the corner and left on Gilbert. As she tells the story, she called for me and when I didn’t stop, she took off running after me. Well, I was just fine. I ran straight back home and was sitting in the driveway wondering where she was. She then announced to me that she would never let me off the leash again until I came when she called. Guess I blew that one. However, in my own defense, I am just a puppy.

Dad took me to doggy socialization training yesterday and that was really fun and scary. I met lots of dogs in my age range and I think I was the hit of the class. Does well behaved mean anything to you? I sat on queue and learned a few hand signals. Dad had a cold and wasn’t up to snuff but he did his best. My only mishap was pooping and peeing (hereafter I shall refer to this as “potty issues) on the floor but, hey, I was scared and it just came out. Otherwise, people were asking grandpa where I came from,,,they were so impressed. Hopefully next week, I’ll be more relaxed.

Actually, I think I will refer to grandpa as dad and grandma as mama. It is shorter and conveys the same meaning.

And I’m learning how to fetch. Dad and mama are very impressed. They toss the ball, they yell “fetch” and I run to the ball and bring it back to them. Then I get treats. Works for me.

So we’re on to week two and I’m excited to see what else they will attempt to do. Me, I’m just going with the flow. Life is good.

With many bow wows,

Beau

So…now we must start our planning for Turkey in June.  My cousin, Susie, has already purchased her tickets and we have a home exchange to Quebec at the end of the Turkey trip…think of it as a two week intermission before returning home.  http://www.rockvalleytravel.com/Tour-3_Days_Cappadocia_Tour#

Good morning all. Big Sur, south end, what can I say? We caught a beautiful morning the other day when driving north on highway 1 to see the elephant seals. And we were the only ones on the south path of the preserve. That was special all by itself so we decided we’d travel up the coast to Ragged Point for breakfast. And this is what awaited us. Wow.

See all the butterflies. The Monarchs. They made a beautiful picture with their orange color against the backdrop of the purple flowers and green leaves.

 
Here’s a picture of our good friend, Nancy, who had ventured over to visit for a few days. We had a grand time.

 
I really like the special effects caused by the sun. This pic was taken by me holding the iphone. Very cool.

So, Nancy and I love french macarons. We’ve made them together before. We also love France having visited several times. Our plan, then, was to bake some cookies when we returned home after breakfast.

What could go wrong? I had printed out several articles about the proper way of making this delightful meringue cookie and we settled on a caramel macaron. Yummy. But let me back up. One of the articles I had printed out contained very specific instructions on the making of this cookie. Nancy read the article and pointed out that it must have been written to scare the cook. Language like “this is a critical step” infused the tome. See sidebar for the article if so inclined. She got us laughing about how scary the article was. So with that in mind, we donned our aprons and got to work.

One other thing. I wanted to try the italian way of macaron making. It includes adding hot liquid to the egg whites for a superior meringue. Also, I had noticed that the woman that penned the article about macarons used dry egg whites to stabilize her meringue and that intrigued me as well. So. My aim was to try this method.

One of the things the generic instructions included was the idea that you must separate the eggs and let the whites rest at room temp for up to 72 hours. This is so some of it evaporates and causes the meringue in some way to be superior. The media has us completely afraid of food. I personally must wash my hands with soap and water 33 times when preparing and cooking chicken as an example. So the idea of leaving the egg whites out caused some concern…but not enough not to try it. So I had “room temperature aged egg whites” standing by. Nancy sifted the almond meal and the sugar together, I beat the egg whites and everything came together just fine. We piped the batter onto cookie sheets and let them rest for 30 minutes. But wait. Our scary instructions told us to let them rest but the recipe we were following did not. We opted for the rest. Then the recipe said to bake them at 200 for 5 minutes and then raise the temp to 375 and complete the baking for 8 minutes. The original scary recipes did not say anything about two bakings. We opted to follow the recipe. Fete accompli. However, the cookies were a flop. They looked okay but they were soggy.

Before we knew they were soggy, we made the caramel. Caramel is tricky. It’s very easy to undercook and a disaster if over cooked (with a putrid burnt taste). It has to be just right. So, I got right to it, screwing it up from the start. I flipped the directions and put in 1/4 sugar to 3/4 water. When it turned a fine shade of color, Nancy stirred in the cream and then the butter. Well, the recipe said it was supposed to look like paste. Ours had the consistency of water. OMG. We had to do it again. That’s when I discovered my mistake. It should have been 3/4 cup of sugar to 1/4 of water. AND the recipe stated 200 g of cream. So, I double checked what that really was. We had that wrong too. First of all, who ever writes a recipe using 200 g of liquid of any kind? That doesn’t make sense. I equate grams with dry ingredients. Well, google reported back to us that 200 g of liquid was about 1/2 the amount we had used before (using some arcane methodology). So….we were pretty much cursed from the beginning!! And I did our share of the cursing. Words like “dogged gone it and fiddlesticks” came floating out of the kitchen.

Well, the second batch of caramel was much better BUT it wasn’t a paste. Would work well over, say, ice cream.

There we were, two firecrackers of food in the kitchen with soggy meringues and not-thick-enough caramel. We howled with laughter. We were armed with the very detailed instructions, a half-baked recipe and fine ingredients and we ended up with a total flop. As I threw the instructions away, I glanced at the recipe one more time and noticed that it was not even authored by the author of the detailed instructions. OMG. Just about everything was wrong. The measurements, the baking technique…everything. And the recipe did not, I repeat, NOT use the italian method and it did not call on the addition of powdered egg whites. OMG. What were we thinking? More howls of laughter ensued.

So…for those of you that think experienced cooks don’t have flops…well, you’d be wrong. It happens.

Epilogue. We cleaned up the kitchen, left the house, went out to dinner and took in a movie. Ray will eat the meringue “nipples” as he dubbed them and we’ll use the caramel sauce for an ice cream dessert at thanksgiving. Or maybe I’ll throw it away. Either way, we had a great time and learned a lot…what not to do. And it starts with the recipe. If you don’t have a good recipe when you bake (it’s chemistry), you are going to have a flop. Also, it helps if you read the recipe correctly…but I prefer not to think about that.

Next time I will do the italian method and use one of the good recipes that add egg white powder. Main thing is…there will definitely be a next time and it will probably occur when we drive over to Ridgecrest to Nancy’s house because we are both obsessed!

So, today I was adopted by these people…Ray and Dianna. I was wondering when someone was going to choose me….all my brothers and sisters were picked before me. I was beginning to feel like chopped liver…but then the Jacksons showed up.

It seems that Dianna was talking about her blog and since it rhymes with dog…I figured it was something that I should get involved with along with sniffing the kitchen floor and learning how to walk up and down stairs. I’d had not seen stairs before and they really threw me for a loop.

But I digress. My new parents came and met me, wrote a check, signed some papers, asked all kinds of questions about me and my personal habits and then off we drove to the beach (from Atascadero). Actually, my new mom and I have a lot in common…we were both born in Atascadero but she is ancient. We stopped at a pet store and we all went in and they bought me all kinds of toys and a leash that serves as a dog collar too and some treats. They seem like they are generous enough.

They drove me home while I sat in Dad’s lap and it was a really winding road but I managed to not get sick, apparently to the relief of all concerned.

I’m very nervous about this arrangement. Where’s my real mom? my real dad? I’m lonesome. And the stress has tuckered me out.

My new parents spent the afternoon baking an apple galette which made the kitchen smell really good. Dad moved a crate and some toys and food and water to the garage, they turned on the light and that was the last I saw of them until after 10 p.m. Boy was I glad when they returned but I was also scared and I hid on the other side of the car that they had left in the garage. They found me, took me outside, I relieved myself which seemed to make them exceedingly happy and we all went inside to watch TV. Well, they are. I’m busy authoring my blog. As a puppy, I want to get off on the right foot and blogging seems like a good way to do that.

My mom really got tickled tonight. And I found one my sisters. Yes, mom found out thru Becky, the breeder, that someone who had a house in Morro Bay had adopted one my sisters. And it ended up that mom knew the woman…so doggy beach romps are planned and they are convinced I will love it. I’m not so sure. What’s a beach? I’ve haven’t seen one yet. One thing I know for sure…it sure will be nice to see my sister again. Here is a recent picture my mom just received. Her name is Jaycee.
So, I’m still a bit nervous but I think it will all work out. So, I’m just going to stretch, relax and enjoy the evening. Tomorrow is another day. Of course, I will have to do a little payback as they left me alone for 4 hours and I DID NOT appreciate it. That garage was cold. So, we’ll see what comes. But for old folks, they aren’t bad.