The Morning Show with Mike & Susan

I call them funeral potatoes because we used to have them at every funeral dinner at a church I attended in Oklahoma.  Becky doesn’t call them this…but…well, they’re great!  We had to share the recipe! Thanks Becky! 

Susan

Becky Chandler Kankelfritz

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Baking Time: 45 minutes

Ingredient List:

2 pounds hashbrowns, thawed
1/2 cup of chopped onions
1 cup (8 ounces) of dairy sour cream
8 oz shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1/2 cup melted butter
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 can cream of mushroom or chicken soup

Cornflake Topping:

1/4 cup of melted butter
2 cups crushed cornflakes

Bakeware Needed:

1 9″ x 13″ glass baking dish

Cooking Instructions:

Step 1: Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.

Step 2: Coat your glass baking dish with butter or non-stick vegetable cooking spray.

Step 3: Gather all of your ingredients and finely chop the onion to make 1/2 cup.

Step 4: In a large mixing bowl, combine all of the remaining ingredients and mix until well incorporated.

Step 6: Spoon into your greased baking dish and press the mixture flat into the corners.

Step 7: Bake the potato mixture at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Step 8: In a bowl combine the crushed cornflakes and 1/4 cup melted butter.

Step 9: Sprinkle the cornflake mixture evenly over the top of the potato casserole.

Step 10: Bake at 350 degrees for an additional 15 minutes.

You buy the frozen southern style hashbrowns for this recipe, not the shredded hashbrowns. One bag is all you need, it is 32 oz., I think.
I also added some fresh, chopped garlic to the casserole I made for KSBJ. Probably about 2 cloves, and I didn’t bother with crushing the cornflakes. I don’t think it’s necessary. Have fun!

The eight worst things that you can say in an interview (from CareerBuilder.com). If you walk into the interview prepared, you can make sure you know what right things to say, and you can stop yourself from saying the following wrong things.

1. “I hated my last boss.” Your last boss was a miserable person whose main concern was making your life miserable. Of course you don’t have a lot of nice things to say; however, don’t mistake honesty, which is admirable, for trash-talking, which is despicable.
2. “I don’t know anything about the company.” Chances are the interviewer will ask what you know about the company. If you say you don’t know anything about it, the interviewer will wonder why you’re applying for the job and will probably conclude you’re after money, not a career.
3. “No, I don’t have any questions for you.” Much like telling the interviewer that you don’t know anything about the company, saying you don’t have any questions to ask also signals a lack of interest. Perhaps the interviewer answered every question or concern you had about the position, but if you’re interested in a future with this employer, you can probably think of a few things to ask. “I’m going to need to take these days off.” “We all have lives and commitments and any employer that you would even consider working for understands this. If you progress to an offer stage, this is the time for a discussion regarding personal obligations,” Moran suggests. “Just don’t bring it up prior to the salary negotiation/offer stage.”
4. Why? By mentioning the days you need off too early in the interview, you risk coming off presumptuous as if you know you’ll get the job.
5. “How long until I get a promotion?” While you want to show that you’re goal-oriented, be certain you don’t come off as entitled or ready to leave behind a job you don’t even have yet.
6. “Are you an active member in your church?” As you attempt to make small talk with an interviewer, don’t cross the line into inappropriate chitchat. Avoid topics that are controversial or that veer too much from work.
7. “As Lady Macbeth so eloquently put it…” Scripted answers, although accurate, don’t impress interviewers. Not only do they make you sound rehearsed and stiff, they also prevent you from engaging in a dialogue.
8. “And another thing I hate…” Save your rants for your blog. When you’re angry, you don’t sway anybody’s opinion about a topic, but you do make them like you less. For one thing, they might disagree with you. They also won’t take kindly to your bad attitude.

GOOD EATS ROAST TURKEY RECIPE (got it from Alton Brown)

Ingredients

• 1 (14 to 16 pound) frozen young turkey

For the brine:

• 1 cup kosher salt
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 1 gallon vegetable stock
• 1 tablespoon black peppercorns
• 1 1/2 teaspoons allspice berries
• 1 1/2 teaspoons chopped candied ginger
• 1 gallon heavily iced water

For the aromatics:

• 1 red apple, sliced
• 1/2 onion, sliced
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 cup water
• 4 sprigs rosemary
• 6 leaves sage
• Canola oil

Directions

Click here to see how it’s done.

2 to 3 days before roasting:

Begin thawing the turkey in the refrigerator or in a cooler kept at 38 degrees F.

Combine the vegetable stock, salt, brown sugar, peppercorns, allspice berries, and candied ginger in a large stockpot over medium-high heat. Stir occasionally to dissolve solids and bring to a boil. Then remove the brine from the heat, cool to room temperature, and refrigerate.

Early on the day or the night before you’d like to eat:

Combine the brine, water and ice in the 5-gallon bucket. Place the thawed turkey (with innards removed) breast side down in brine. If necessary, weigh down the bird to ensure it is fully immersed, cover, and refrigerate or set in cool area for 8 to 16 hours, turning the bird once half way through brining.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F. Remove the bird from brine and rinse inside and out with cold water. Discard the brine.

Place the bird on roasting rack inside a half sheet pan and pat dry with paper towels.

Combine the apple, onion, cinnamon stick, and 1 cup of water in a microwave safe dish and microwave on high for 5 minutes. Add steeped aromatics to the turkey’s cavity along with the rosemary and sage. Tuck the wings underneath the bird and coat the skin liberally with canola oil.

Roast the turkey on lowest level of the oven at 500 degrees F for 30 minutes. Insert a probe thermometer into thickest part of the breast and reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees F. Set the thermometer alarm (if available) to 161 degrees F. A 14 to 16 pound bird should require a total of 2 to 2 1/2 hours of roasting. Let the turkey rest, loosely covered with foil or a large mixing bowl for 15 minutes before carving.

Want to work part time hours with companies that give benefits? Here are a few of those companies:

• Starbucks
• Whole Foods
• REI
• Barnes & Noble
• Nordstrom
• Lowe’s
• Lands’ End
• Nike
• Cost Plus World Market
• JCPenney

Listeners said UPS and Kroger as well

We got this list from BonAppetit Magazine

BEST….candy

1. Hershey’s Krackel. These are the elusive sultans of the Hershey’s Miniatures bag.   How does a bit of crisped rice so greatly enhance milk chocolate?  This candy proves that Snap and Pop have long been holding back their gifted brother.

2. Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkin. While the flavor is identical to the classic cup, its gourd shape means there is something rare in your grasp.   Yum!

3. Take 5. In late 2004, candy innovation hit a peak when Hershey’s decided to combine the contents of almost every other candy bar in existence (chocolate, pretzels, caramel, peanuts, and peanut butter) into one crunchy, chewy, salty, sweet wonder-bar.  I’ll take six. *wink*

4. Pop Rocks. Here, candy and chemistry collide giving kids the sensation of swallowing sugary live fire crackers.  You’d be hard up to find much more fun in a 4″ packet.

5. Anything sour or hot (Warheads, Sour Patch Kids, Atomic Fireballs, Hot Tamales). Look, kids love adventure. And these sweets definitely put the “ow!” (and the fun) in Halloween.

6. Blue Razz Blow Pop. Blue raspberries do not exist outside of factories.   this candy has bubble gum inside!  The lollipop also turns your tongue blue, so it doubles as one of the world’s most affordable costumes.  

7. Whoppers. There are very rare instances when you bite into one of these malt balls and instead of their characteristic crunch, they deflate.  While this isolated “Whopper puddin’” is one of life’s greatest disappointments, the crunch is by and large one of its most satisfying sensations.

8. Snickers.  I’ve heard this is the world’s best-selling candy bar.  I endorse compounding this epidemic.

9. Candy Corn. No candy represents Halloween more than the classic tri-colored treat.

10. Anything full size. Halloween candy bars are usually scaled-down and given the hilarious misnomer, “fun size.”   For something to be truly fun size, it must be big enough to climb.

The worst!!

1. Candy Corn. This candy also made my list of The 10 Best Halloween Candies. But hear me out: The holiday’s superlative sweet will quickly turn against you if you dare consume more than five.  And you will. 

Palmetto bugs. 

3. Raisins.  You may think you’re helping to neutralize widespread early-onset diabetes by handing out raisins on Halloween. But raisins are mostly sugar.  That, combined with their sticky, enamel-clinging consistency, and you’ve created a veritable fairground for bacteria.   Kids’ teeth will decay alongside your popularity. 

4. Smarties. These are on the worst list, not because kids don’t enjoy tiny discs of pure sugar, but because for every five pounds of candy a kid collects, two pounds will be Smarties.  Also, these days there are hundreds of YouTube videos of kids demonstrating how to “smoke Smarties” by crushing them up and inhaling the powder.  We cannot endorse this insanity.

5. Necco Wafers. Necco Wafers are like the Smarties of 1847, when the nation’s scientists were still figuring out fun and flavor.  They look like slivers of sidewalk chalk, but don’t taste quite as good.

6. Werther’s Original. The original butterscotch sucker is not to be confused with those legions of sad sack counterfeit Werther’s imitators.  Just kidding, there are none.  This is because candy manufacturers are interested in profit, and not some fallacious nostalgia to which adults feel little connection, let alone their kids.

7. Plain Hershey’s.  Kids might not care much for cacao percentage or bean origin, but they do care about boringness.

8. Dum Dum Pops.  Have you noticed that Dum Dum rhymes with humdrum?  Though these lollipops are the exact size and shape of Bob Barker’s microphone from when he hosted The Price Is Right, kids generally lost interest after his retirement.

9. Milk Duds. Consider it a red flag when a food item puts “dud” right in its name.

10. Tootsie Rolls.  Are these supposed to taste like chocolate!?  It’s trick or treat, not both.  Give me a candy I can use!

Volkswagen (the company) wanted to make people take the stairs at a location where everyone ignored the stairs and hopped onto the escalator instead…SO, they wired the stairs and made them look like a piano - when someone stepped on a key it played the right note! FUN WORKED! people started taking the stairs and ignoring the escalator….SO, we want to find out if it would work with Christianity.  If we Christians made it look like more fun would more people be interested? What can we do to make living for Jesus look attractive, look like fun!? 

A young man writing to his father about an upsetting personal problem said, “Dad, yesterday I put this whole matter into the Lord’s hands and asked Him to help me. At times like this I often think of when I was a little boy and you and I would go fishing. Remember how I would get my fishing line all tangled up? Finally I would hand the whole tangled mess over to you, and you would smooth it out. I’m trying to learn to do that with the Lord now-turn my problems over to Him and not pull at the line too much before I give it to Him.”

Impossibilities!

Difficulties!

How tangled some of our problems become!

And it seems as if the knots of difficulty become tighter as we try to struggle through them in our own strength. Maybe you are wrestling with a problem that looks too complicated for it to ever work out. Do what this young man did. Turn the whole thing over to your loving heavenly Father. Psalm 115:9 TLB says, Trust the Lord! He is your helper. If you trust the problem to Him, He can untangle the knotty impossibility that is troubling you so.

Now commit the situation to God with this prayer.

Father, this problem is too much for me. I hand it over to You right now, knowing that with You all things are possible

Task.fm  acts like a personal secretary, or nagging mother. You can use it to manage to-do lists, remember to pay bills and arrange a wake-up call, and most features are free. You don’t have to go in and manually set dates and times, because it understands natural language. For example - type “lunchPaige Tuesday at noon” that would be enough information to get it to remind me at just the right time. It’s pretty amazing. You can create reminders on the site, or you can e-mail it or Twitter it to set up reminders, and you choose whether it reminds you via text, e-mail or phone call.  There’s a free version too!!

In Houston - and surrounding areas this comes in really handy!!Find coffee shops and other cozy places to meet almost exactly halfway between far-away friends that are a drive apart with A Place Between Us. It’s free. Type in the addresses each person will be coming from, then describe the sort of place at which you’d like to meet. The default is coffee shop, but you can also pick a certain kind of restaurant, like “donut shop” or “tacos.” It will find you a place like that as close to the middle as possible. It will map directions to the meeting place for each of you.  How cool is that!?

Elephants don’t forget
One thing no one ever tells you about adulthood is that it involves an inordinate amount of time spent remembering to buy people presents, and then to write thank-you notes when you’re on the receiving end. Gift Elephant is an online system that keeps track of all the presents you’ve ever given and received, for free. It manages your thank-you notes and reminds you of upcoming holidays and birthdays and special occasions. For a small fee, they’ll even print and mail thank-you notes on your behalf, personalized with your own photos if you wish.

Got this information from the Today show website!