Nothing says Mother’s Day like a good old “Beer Butt Chicken”!

Dave kindly offered to cook dinner for the family tonight. He wanted to make something nice, so he asked me what was on hand in the Vollmer kitchen. The only good meat that was defrosted (i.e., not hot dogs or 1/2 a package of bacon) was a whole roaster chicken.

“So, what can I do with it?”

“You have many choices, you can roast it whole, or cut it up into pieces and bake/sautee up 1/2 of the chicken. Or….

I’ve wanted to try a Beer Butt Chicken for years!”

“Hey! Anything with ‘Beer’ in the name of the recipe is all right by me!”

(At least it wasn’t “Anything with ‘Butt’ in the name of the recipe….”)

A colleague/friend from when Dave and I were stationed in Ohio and in Florida, named Ben Kowash, was the first to introduce me to the concept of stuffing a can of beer up a chicken’s backside and grilling it to perfection. I remember him and I discussing cooking on several occasions, and he was quite the chef. He made pad thai sauce from scratch! I don’t even do that!

Since today was a pretty stormy day, we checked online for oven-roasted options, and found several. This is the one we adhered to the most. We sprinkled Old Bay seasoning on the skin, with the little kids, we didn’t want to go for anything too spicy. (Who said Old Bay was just for seafood?) So instead of grilling the chicken, we put it upright in our oven (rack at the lowest setting) for about 1 1/2 hours at 375 degrees F.

Oh my goodness, the chicken was GOOD! I don’t think I’d ever experienced a juicier, more tender chicken breast in my life!

So Ben, if you happen across this posting, thanks for putting the idea in my head, although it was about 6 years ago!

I’m sure that’s what Dave’s going to be calling me for the next few days.

First of all, I want to share this hilarious blog entry that Dave showed me. I’ve felt this mother’s pain, hm, EIGHT times and counting! And we’ll be going through it again in June in Strasburg, PA.

Anyway…

I GOT MY iPHONE! I’m SO excited! Our economic stimulus money is scheduled to deposit on the 16th, but I just received a reserve drill weekend paycheck so I figured I’d do some money magic and get the phone a bit ahead of time. Despite reports that Apple is planning a shortage of iPhones this month in anticipation of some new released, our local AT&T Wireless retailer had plenty of both the 8 GB and 16 GB models in stock.

So, as advertised, it was very simple to bring it home, break it out of the package, and plug it into the computer once you have the latest version of iTunes up and running on your desktop/laptop. It’s pretty straight-forward.

I have only two concerns:

1.) Since I don’t use Outlook to manage my contact information, I wasn’t able to smoothly migrate contacts. I had to manually input phone numbers, e-mail addresses and even several physical addresses into the phone.
2.) I bought a super-fancy iGo car phone charger, which allows you to change out tips only for much less than buying a whole new charger. The iPhone tips are pretty hard to find, so I’ll have to find it online.

As Wendy, Julie, Gloria and Rick will all tell you this afternoon at the park, I was glued to the thing all afternoon while the kids played. Mainly I was showing it off to friends, but I was also feverishly transfering the contacts from my old phone to the new phone.

I got that done tonight. Phew!

So this contact list, once transfered, turned out pretty cool! You can put under one name the cell phone, home phone, work phone, home and work e-mail addresses, physical addresses and even homepages! All in one place. Here’s a demo for you, I’ll pay homage to the guy who provided me the money this week to buy my new toy!

Touch the phone number and you place a call:

Touch the e-mail address and start drafting an e-mail:

Touch the homepage address, and the web browser appears with the web site:

And get this:

Touch the address and Google Maps comes up with the location of the address.

How about a satellite shot?

Then, “Would you like directions here from your current location?”

WOULD I???

(For those who don’t know me, I’m such a map geek!).

I was able to upload almost my entire iTunes music library without putting hardly a dent in the phone storage capacity.

Time to reply to some e-mails…not with the iPhone, though. It’s cool, but I still need to practice typing with that little thing.