Spring Break, Part 3

After Battleship Park closed, we headed back across downtown Mobile, towards the Botanical Gardens. There were so many cool buildings and trees to look at, we could've just wandered downtown and filled up the rest of the day.

 Pulling into the Botanical Gardens. I LOVE the azaleas!

Erik and I waiting for Ethan to catch up. He thought these bright red snapdragons looked like the yummiest things he'd seen all day. I was sooo mean and wouldn't let him eat them.

We wandered around in the gardens for an hour or so, but by that time Erik had had just about enough and really needed a nap. So we jumped back in the car, went back through Mobile, and headed out on possibly the longest bridge I've ever been on to cross the Mobile Bay and get to our next and last stop for the day. I've been telling Ethan of the magic fairytale land of Bass Pro shop ever since he tried to impress me by taking me to a Cabella's. I'm not even into hunting and fishing and all that stuff, but I love the Bass Pro Shop, it's sooo cool. Needless to say, Ethan was suitably impressed.

Notice those little deer up there near the ceiling? Those are real deer (stuffed of course). That gives you and idea of the size of this place.

 As soon as Ethan saw this he was hooked. He loves corral reef aquariums, and this one was huge! I think it was somewhere around 15 feet tall, and formed one of the walls in the in-store restaurant. We stood there and drooled over it until the people in the restaurant around us started to give us funny looks. 

Our next stop nearly sucked Ethan into its vortex permanently. It was all I could do to drag him away. Actually, to be fair, he reached a point where he knew if he stayed another minute in here he'd lose all self control and blow every last penny we own and leave us homeless and stranded on the sidewalk outside. So he forced himself to leave and tried really hard not to look back, except to take this picture.

 Seriously, what could be better than a huge room filled with fancy shmancy fly fishing gear. I think this is what heaven's going to look like for Ethan. Erik thought pretty highly of it too...

This is standing at the top of the water fall (yes, there's a huge waterfall in the back of the store that you can climb to the top of) looking back towards the entrance. So much fun stuff here!

 After Bass Pro, we went and found a hotel and crawled into bed for the night. Erik was asleep before he even hit the bed, and didn't twitch 'til morning. As long as he's got his afghan he can sleep anywhere.

Spring Break 2012, Part 2

The light at the end of the tunnel...

So, in case you haven't already figured it out, we survived the tunnel and found our way to the most awesome place of our trip (we really can't decide if this or the beach was better, it was that close!)

This park was one of our splurges, but it was so worth it! The website says to plan two hours to see everything, but I think you need at least twice that long. We got there about three hours before they closed and we moved as fast as we could and we still didn't get to see everything. As soon as we got in the park we made a beeline for the USS Alabama.

The Alabama sailed into active duty in 1942 and worked hard to pull her weight in World War II in the Pacific. She was decommissioned in 1947 and "mothballed". Eventually it was decided that the expense of maintaining ships like the Alabama was too great and she was slated to be scrapped. The people of Alabama couldn't stand for that so fund raisers began and they managed to earn enough to buy her for the state of Alabama. Now she sits in Mobile Bay and is open for tours.

We took tons of pictures, but I won't force you to sit and look at them all. Just remember that when you're thinking I put a ton of pictures on here, this is just the tip of the iceberg!
This is standing at the top of the gangplank, looking at the main deck.

This narrow hallway is actually the bakery. Those shiny things? Walls and walls of ovens stacked on top of each other. It would've been SO hot in there!

Here's some of the sleeping quarters. The men had to keep all their equipment on their bed. Anything out of place would've been confiscated and as punishment they would draw extra duty. Also, you didn't just get your stuff back. If you wanted it, you had to bid against everyone else for it in an auction at the end of the month.

Standing at the bow of the main deck looking towards the stern. Notice the chains running down the deck? Those are the tiny little anchor chains.

To give you a size reference:

Here's the view from the top of the tower looking back towards downtown Mobile.

Once we'd seen enough of the USS Alabama that we could manage to peel ourselves away, we headed over to the USS Drum. First launched in 1941, the Drum is one of the top 10 subs from the WWII Pacific theater. She's eighth highest of all U.S. submarines in total Japanese tonnage sunk, and earned 12 battle stars. Here's Ethan and Erik getting ready to head down the stairs into the forward torpedo room.

We thought things on the battleship were crowded, but the sub was crazy! We weren't able to get good pictures of the inside because it was all so darn cramped. This is the galley (aka kitchen). Don't you wish you had a kitchen this huge! (By the way, in order to get the whole thing into the shot, I am standing in the captain's cabin across the hallway with my camera zoomed out as far as it would go. That's how tiny this is!) 

Ethan and Erik manning the Conn. Again, I'm standing way back in the corner behind some big piece of equipment I had to practically climb under in order to get far enough away to get this much into the shot. I don't have enough room to turn around, and getting back out of there was tricky!

After we finished on the Drum, we went to the Air Craft Pavilion, where I sat and fed Erik while Ethan wandered the HUGE warehouse full of aircraft. He was pretty impressed by it all.

This whole park was SO cool, I highly recommend it to anyone who's in the area and looking for something to do!

So it seems like a five hour car trip and a three hour tour of Battleship Memorial Park should be enough to fill up a person's day right? Nope! This was just the first of three stops that day, but the rest will have to wait for another blog post.

Spring Break 2012, Part 1

Ethan's Spring Break was last week, and we thoroughly enjoyed it! Ethan had to do some of his field work on Monday and Tuesday, and then we both had church responsibilities on Saturday, so that left us with only three days to really do whatever we wanted to do. We started looking around for things to do, and while there were several cools things within an hour or two of our house, we decided that since we had several days that we needed to make the most of them. We spent Tuesday night choosing our destination cities, and researching things to do when we got there. We tried to find cheap, family friendly things to do, but there were a few things we really wanted to see that we decided to splurge on. After figuring out how to cram as much as possible into our short time frame, we went to bed.

Wednesday morning dawned cool and rainy here in Starkville, but that didn't slow us down. We threw everything we needed in a couple of duffel bags, jumped in the car, and we were outta here! Erik wasn't so sure about all the excitement. He kept looking up at me from the back seat as if he needed to know I was still there.

He finally gave up though, and this is how he spent the rest of the trip.

We are loving Spring here in MS. There are flowers EVERYWHERE!! This picture is not great (what can you expect when you're taking pictures out the dirty window of a moving car), but it gives you an idea of the flowers all over the place. There were azaleas in every imaginable color, along with some kind of small tree covered in white blossoms. These were in people's yards, but also just growing wild out in the forests. It was so pretty! 

When we left our house, we got on a small highway headed south, and just maintained that heading for several hours. We passed through lots of forest, and some cute little towns, but no major cities until we reached Mobile, Alabama, which was our first destination. We knew it was a large city, and were expecting to have to fight our way through lots of city traffic, but we were pleasantly surprised. We came out of the forest into a somewhat dirty ghettoish part of town, and thought to ourselves, "Oh great, we're really out on the edge of town, it's going to take us forever to get to where we want to be". The streets were all lined with these really cool trees. It was pretty neat looking.

Then, I looked up and saw this:

There were the skyscrapers in the downtown area (which is where we wanted to be), not too far away. We'd only been in the city for a few minutes, and we were almost right where we wanted to be. There were lots of neat old buildings on every side, and we were really enjoying just taking it all in.

I looked up a minute or two later, and boom, the skyscrapers were even closer, we were going to be there in a matter of minutes.

There were so many cool things to look at. We were really enjoying all the cool old buildings and everything else there was to see.

Next thing we know, we're right in the heart of the city, looking up at the towers around us. We were excited, because looking at our atlas we thought we should be able to see the Mobile Bay any second(we're such desert rats, we've both seen the ocean before but it's still just as exciting), and we were on the lookout for it. I knew we needed to cross a small section of the bay, so I figured that as soon as we got around this big building we'd see a bridge and have the whole bay panorama open in front of us.

We came around the building, and the road went into a really tight curve with high walls on either side so we couldn't see anything but the road directly ahead of us. Just as we were coming out of the curve and I was sure we'd see the bridge over the bay, the road plunged down into...a tunnel! I've never been in a tunnel under a body of water before. It was a little weird to think about what was overhead and to not even be able to see out the other side. It looked like it just kept going down forever!

Did we make it out without being crushed by hundreds of tons of water? What was on the other side? Well, you'll just have to wait for Spring Break 2012, Part 2. I'll tell you this though, what's on the other side of that tunnel became our favorite part of the whole trip.

Spring at Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge

Saturday was such an incredibly beautiful day that we had to get outside for the afternoon. We decided to head down to Noxubee to see what it looks like in the spring time. So far there isn't much growing, but it was still really pretty. The trees here have just barely started leafing out, but any fruit trees around here have been blooming for a week or two now and are so pretty. There are Asian Pear trees (I believe that's what Ethan said they're called) all over town that are just covered in blossoms and they make me think of a certain primary song every time I see them.

I looked out the window and what did I see...

When we got to Noxubee we were amazed at the difference in the water levels from the first time we were here. There's a small stream that you cross over right after you get on the refuge that was just a trickle the first time we were there. This weekend it was bigger than most of the rivers I grew up around. We stopped by the boardwalk that we took our first time there, and here are some pictures from both this visit and our very first visit.

The swamp this weekend.

The swamp in August.

Submerged log this weekend.

Unsubmerged log in August. Notice that the water level is high enough for this to have moved several feet. The tree in the bottom left corner in this picture is the one near the middle of the log in the picture from this weekend.

One of my favorite things I've seen around here this spring is the Red Bud tree. It grows wild out in the woods around here, and is so pretty! It just pops out at you from among the bare brown branches when you least expect to see anything pretty. While there are some of these growing in people's yards, most of them are just out in the woods. I love them!

Once we'd finished sitting on the boardwalk looking at the swamp and the lake, we headed over to the picnic area to have some dinner. We threw a blanket out on the ground, fired up our Volcano Grill, and just enjoyed the afternoon. Erik was loving getting to be outside. He was fascinated by everything going on around us, especially the cars driving by.

Somehow we made it down there with only one plastic fork between the two of us, and it was too wimpy to cut our pork steaks anyways, so we ended up just eating caveman style. We both got a kick out of it though. The very first cook-out we did after we moved to Idaho the same thing happened, so we thought this ended up being perfect. Apparently it's now a tradition to have no flatware for our inaugural cook-out when we move somewhere new.

Did you notice what Erik chose to eat for his dinner?

 

After we finished eating, we just hung out there on our blanket and watched the sunset over Bluff lake. It was a perfect afternoon.

Revolutionary Mac & Cheese, Testing a new Recipe

I recently became a follower of the blog Pinstrosity, which I'm loving so far. If you don't know what it's all about I suggest going and checking it out. There's some really fun stuff on there! A few days ago they posted a recipe for Revolutionary Macaroni and Cheese, and after reading through the recipe I was intrigued. I decided to give it a try for lunch today and see what I could find out about it.

Since it was just me at home I decided to only make a half a batch, so that I wouldn't have mountains of questionable mac & cheese on hand. Then I split that half batch between two pans, one to make following the original directions exactly (the control batch) and one that I could play around with (the test batch).

For the control batch I followed the directions from the recipe as exactly as possible. The only deviation was that I think I ended up using almost twice as much milk as it said to. If I had let that pasta go for 20 minutes without adding some milk, it wouldn't have had enough liquid to cook the pasta and it would have burned to the bottom of the pan. I'm not sure exactly how much I added, I just put in a few drops every time it got too dry. The recipe says to add the mustard to taste so I put a little in at a time, but for my taste preferences it needed all the mustard. I also followed the recipe's suggestion to add more milk at the end to make it more creamy, otherwise it would have been inedibly dry. I was skeptical about the need to cover it and let it rest for 5 minutes after cooking, but the pasta seemed to absorb even more liquid as it sat and that may have enhanced the richness of the pasta, though I can't prove that.

For the test batch I made several changes. The original recipe says to cook your pasta for 20 minutes, which seemed like a huge amount of time to me, so I only cooked my test batch for about 15 minutes. I also made a few other changes like adding the salt to the pasta while it cooked instead of afterwords, adding more cheese, and using ground dry mustard instead of the prepared Dijon mustard. I skipped the step where you let your pasta rest for 5 minutes.  

So what were the results you ask? Well, here we go. I'll start with the test batch. I think the pasta itself had more flavor from being cooked in the salt instead of the salt being added at the end. I thought the more subtle flavor of the ground mustard would be better for this dish but I didn't end up liking it. Granted, I do think I got too much in there, but I still think it wouldn't have been that great. The texture was rich and creamy, but tasted incredibly bland (except for the overpowering mustard) even though I added extra cheese. This recipe could be called Creamy Macaroni, but I wouldn't add cheese to the name. That's more than a little misleading. What surprised me most was that the noodles were definitely under cooked, despite the unusually long cooking time. I realized though that instead of boiling your pasta like usual, you're just simmering it so it makes sense that you'd have to cook it longer. Duh! 

Now for the control batch. It was rich and creamy, the hint of Dijon mustard was a nice addition. Again, the flavor was incredibly bland. If it weren't for the mustard there would have been no flavor at all. There is such a small amount of cheese that I really couldn't taste it at all. The pasta was cooked to just about the perfect doneness and yet still had a really odd texture.

After thinking about it and doing a little research, here's my hypothesis as to the weird texture. Pasta contains starch which normally cooks out into the water and is drained off. What little starch remains stays in the pasta to help give it texture. Since there was no liquid to drain off along with the starch it all stayed right there in the sauce. Also, if the starches in pasta are similar to the starches in rice, than the more you stir it the more starch is released. That is how risotto gets its creamy richness. This means that not only are you not getting rid of the starch that comes out during cooking, but because milk requires frequent stirring while cooking, you're actually encouraging the release of MORE starch into your sauce, hence the bizarre texture.

So my final conclusion? The original recipe is just not that great, but it makes an edible product if you're not too picky. The sauce is too starchy, there's not enough cheese, it just isn't great. If you want good Mac 'n' Cheese, then either stick to the beloved blue box, or make your own with a tried and true recipe (once I've finished scraping pasta starch off the roof of my mouth I'll have to make my mom's recipe and post it here for anyone who's interested). Honestly by the time you stand there and simmer the dumb stuff for 20 minutes, you've put in enough time to have done a quality job, so why not do it right to begin with?