Charmed I'm Sure

Hello fellow pumpkin heads. I love Halloween, but not quite as much as my friend J. who loves this holiday more than Christmas, New Year's and his Birthday combined. He's had his house full of decorations for a month now. I've only had the time to spread out a little bit of cheer, and a little haphazardly too. Never got around to the outside. A few pumpkins waiting for carving on the steps, but that will have to happen over the weekend. In the meantime, I've contented myself with a plate of pumpkin muffins with cream cheese frosting.

This week has been so full already -- so much work on the web site, which will be completely re-vamped on Monday to mirror the newsletter which will be going out. The printer is a little bit delayed, but I'm still hoping to have a stuff-a-thon over the weekend and get it out in the mail on Monday. We'll see if they come through for me - it usually hinges on machine breakdowns because they are in the middle of some ginormous job that just keeps getting bigger and my little piddly job comes after that.

Plus I've been doing little photo shoots of all the new stuff. Packaging, packaging, packaging. Lip balm day tomorrow. Each day is a competition to see how much I can stuff into the hours I'm upright. Well, now that I'm rambling . . . I got a crock-pot for my birthday a bit ago and since I've never had one before, I've been trying out new recipes in it to see what's good.

It made a nice chicken chile verde, excellent beef stew and stroganoff. I'll say that the pork roast I did Tuesday was a little dry. It fell apart into a pulled pork mess which didn't have enough sauce for that kind of thing. It didn't taste bad, but wasn't at all what I was going for. I would rather have had an actual pork roast you could slice. I've heard it does excellent roasted nuts, so I'm going to try that too this week. But if anybody out there has a to-die-for recipe for a crock-pot, please send it over. The other drawback to these things, is that they cook all day long (yes, I know that's the point) but while I'm home working, and not away at some office cubicle thing working, the cooking smell for hours on end is making me so hungry.

And I don't understand a lot of the recipes I've seen online. My impression was that it was a convenience for long, slow cooked or braised things that you didn't have time to cook when you got home. What's the point of cooking things like bread pudding and rice pudding in it? Those don't take more than a half hour on the stove or in the oven. Why do that in the crock-pot and waste electricity for a whole 8 hours or so? I guess it's just because people can. Like the tv grill guy who grills every single item on his huge super duper grill - including baking brownies. I'd rather just use the appliance that does the best job.

Also if anyone has a great recommendation for a space heater? Send that along too. I have a tiny little box with a fan that should just warm my cold feet in this chilly basement office. Instead it cooks my ankles to a crisp, even on low, and if you set it halfway across the room it does basically nothing. It seems to only heat a tiny little space right it front of it, but roasty hot -- like my ankles burn while the tips of the toes still freeze. Or the toes are warm and the heels are out of range. Dumb.

Almost as dumb as this whole random stupid blog posting with no news. My excuse? The goblins have gotten me.