Becoming tour guides

Over the past month we have had family and friends come to visit. Very fun!! Makes me even more homesick and I never need to see stonehenge again. But it was a blast and I got to see more of England.


Lacock Village


Warwick Castle


More Warwick


Avebury, smaller version of Stonehenge


Village in the Cotswolds (can't remember name)

My Beloved Jayhawks

Well, Jayhawk football has yet again failed to make it to a bowl game in consecutive years. Of course when you blow two games in which you hold large leads in the fourth quarter you don’t deserve to go to a bowl game.

Since football is over we might as well talk basketball. The relatively minor struggles of the Jayhawks have been much discussed in my family recently, and I have a theory. Granted I haven’t been able to see all the games yet (still waiting on DVD’s from my friend back home that’s recording the games for me), but I did see the Florida game.

In spite of what everyone said about it being a well played game it didn’t look particularly well played to me. The final score was misleading about the offensive output due to overtime. Florida had massive foul trouble throughout the game so were not at their full strength. KU made several mistakes that would have been fatal against a team not plagued by even bigger errors. This wasn’t so much one team grabbing victory as it was which team made less mistakes.

On, then, to my theory. Comparing Bill Self and Roy Williams is inevitable. Roy coached for a lot of very successful years at KU and these early season losses to inferior teams were very rare. However I can’t recall a team that Roy coached that didn’t have an upperclassman who was a vocal leader. KU is certainly lacking that at the moment, but my hope is that Julian Wright finds his voice and yanks the guys out of their stupor.

What does this have to do with my theory? Well, not much actually, that was a bit of digression. Now really to my theory. To me it appeared that from the beginning of the season Roy coaches his transition game. He pounds that into his players from day one of practice each year. This leads to his teams always looking very impressive early because early in the season every team is more focused on what they’re doing than game-planning for their opponents. KU fans got used to this approach which makes early season setbacks tougher to take now.

Bill Self has a different focus. He believes very strongly that ultimate success is rooted in lock down man defense which requires effort and focus night in and night out. His determination to instill this belief in his players at the beginning of the year leads to an offense that can be pretty anemic and a lack of defensive adjustments.

However the more I think about it the more this approach reminds me of how Norman Dale approached the Hickory team. He knew what it was going to take to win in the end and he wasn’t going to be put off of that vision by a few early losses or some criticism from the fans. Bill Self is the same way.

He’s just now got the team understanding that you win games when shots aren’t falling by making sure the other team’s offense is struggling as well (USC and Depaul went a long way toward proving that). Now I think he could make this point much more quickly if he would do a wholesale benching of guys that aren’t giving effort for walk-ons that will. I always thought that was one of Roy’s most effective tactics.

Now that Coach Self has got them going down the road to believing in his philosophy he’ll start putting in the defensive wrinkles and offensive sets that can make this team lethal. Now he has time with Christmas break to truly add all the X’s and O’s that when combined with the effort can make KU a great team. You can tell by his most recent comments that he’s been waiting for this stretch of relatively few games and lots of practice time.

The next few months are going to be a lot of fun!

Rock Chalk!
Frog

Turkey, turkey, turkey…

As promised, here’s a recap of the Thanksgiving meal Wife and I made. Everything turned out pretty well. Juggling burners in our tiny kitchen was a bit of a challenge, but everything ended up coming out together and it was all really good.

We had a pretty aggressive menu planned for the amount of space we had to prepare it in:

Turkey
Dressing
Mashed potatoes
Gravy
Corn
Green beans with butter and almonds
Candied sweet potatoes
Jello salad
Rolls
Pumpkin pie

The turkey was done with the tried and true AB method. Blast it at high heat to brown it and then bake at a lower temp until the breast meat hits 161. Dressing was my grandma’s recipe that I’ve made for the family the last few holidays. It came out really well, possibly some of the best I’ve ever made.

For the mashed potatoes I tried something different. According to a couple websites and a cookbook on our shelf the best mashed potatoes are made by using a two part cooking process. The first cooking is at around 160 degrees for 30 minutes followed by a cool down period. After cooling down the potatoes are cooked again at 180-190 for another 30 minutes. This cooking process is supposed to keep the starches from breaking out of the cells and making the potatoes gummy. It seemed like it worked for that, but I don’t have a potato ricer or food mill so the effect was somewhat lost due to the lumps.

I couldn’t have been happier with the gravy. The only thing that was missing was more of it! Everything else was fine. Wife made it all possible with a ton of help throughout the day and by making the rolls and pie the day before. The rolls were from a recipe that her great-grandmother made, and the pie was extremely tasty, especially with the real whipped cream we made with it.

Mmmm….I might need to pull some leftovers out of the freezer for dinner.

Now that's a nice looking bird.















Gravy doesn't photograph well, but it sure is tasty!



















The table all set and waiting for us to dive in.

Cheers,
Frog