Crock Pot Pulled Pork

I found a recipe for pulled pork on www.food.com and modified it a bit. It came out really well. We had this for dinner last night.

Ingredients

• 5 lbs pork butt or shoulder
• 2 large onions
• 1 and 1/4 cup ginger ale
• 1/2 bottle of liquid smoke
• 18 oz of your favorite barbecue sauce

Directions

• Slice one of the onions and place in crock pot.  Put the pork in the crock pot on top of the onion.
• Slice the other onion and place it on top of the pork.  Pour in the ginger ale and liquid smoke. Cover and cook on LOW for about 9 hours.
• Remove the meat, strain and save the onions. Discard all of the liquid. Using two forks, shred the meat, discarding any remaining fat or bones.
• Place the shredded meat back in the crock pot and stir in the barbecue sauce. Cook on HIGH for 30-40 minutes.
• Serve buns or rolls.

We had a lot of leftover meat, so I'm using some of them for dinner tomorrow. We are going to have build-your-own-burritos with it.

A Day at Yezelalem Minch

This post is a little overdue, but I wanted to share a few more pictures of our trip to Ethiopia.  Our last day there, we visited a ministry called Yezelalem Minch. (YM) It is an organization that facilitates child sponsorships, provides job skill training for widows and helps families with nutritional support.  On Saturdays, they have a feeding program where children and adults who are part of their ministry can receive a free, wholesome meal. Before the meal was served, James and I had some gifts to deliver to a couple of kids that are sponsored by friends of ours.

The meal is served by widows, and this is an source of income for them. They are paid by YM to prepare and serve the food.

The kids loved attention and wanted us to play with them.

I had some candy that I had brought to pass out to the kids. They all lined up after their meal for candy. This was about like starting a riot. The adults who were supervising the chaos had little sticks that they used to keep the kids in line.

All the kids wanted to see their photo after we took it. This was fun.  One perk of digital photography!

This is a wonderful organization that is changing the lives of the children and adults in it's care.

A Better Pizza

Several days ago, our local news featured a pizzeria called A Better Pizza. It is close to our house, so we decided to check it out.  The main thing they advertise is their stuffed Chicago style pizza, so that is what we ordered.  The pizza was great, but that is about the only positive thing that I have to say about the experience.

A slice of our stuffed pizza

 The first thing that put me off was the owner's wife sitting at a table trying to peddle her jewelry.  It was one of those things that you host a party at your house and the consultant has displays of jewelry that the guests can order.  After you sat down at your table, she'd walk to you and give you one of her business cards and talk about the jewelry for a minute. These kind of things can be fun, but if my husband owned a restaurant I'd be in there working with him, instead of bothering his customers with a jewelry purchase. There was very little seating inside, and she was taking up one of the largest tables. Her skills could have perhaps been put to better use in trying to decorate the place and help manage the restaurant. The only decorations that were there were posters from the vendor that supplies their cheese.

I was not impressed with the service. I realize that it takes time to make a pizza from scratch, so that is not what I had a problem with. When we got our stuffed pizza, the waitress did not bring anything to our table for us to serve it with.  I asked for a spatula or something, and she said that they don't have serving utensils, and that we would need to scoop the slices up with our forks.  Now realize that this pizza is easily an inch thick, and we were told to scoop it up with our forks. Humph. We only ate half of the pizza while we were there, and we wanted a box for the left overs. They don't seem to carry boxes that are deep enough for their stuffed pizzas. The lid would not shut all the way.

All of the employees at this place need to have a lesson in appropriate work-place attire. The teenage girl who was taking orders was wearing house shoes. The owner came to the front counter to chat with the customers, and he was wearing a ratty old t-shirt that was better suited for yard work or painting.

A Better Pizza is definitely not the kind of place you want to go on a date night.  If you want to try their pizza, I recommend ordering take out or delivery. One pizzeria here that we really enjoy that is date-night worthy is Pi. The atmosphere is nice, but not fancy. They do believe in using serving utensils. There are a lot of drinks on the menu, beers, organic teas, soda, coffee, etc. Their pizza is a little different from what you'd get in Chicago, the main difference being with their crust. Pi uses a corn meal dough to make their crusts, and I really like it.

How we spent our weekend

Well we didn't have a fun weekend, but it was very productive. I've been wanting to replace the carpet on our second floor since we moved into this house three years ago.  We are finally able to do it.  I had to work two days last week, so I spent my three days "off" working at home, pulling up the old base boards and painting the new ones. I was happy to go back to work. Sometimes the work that I find for myself to do at home is more physically exhausting than the work that I get paid to do.

That is the mess that was left. The installers will be removing that today.

We are going through Lowe's to have the new carpet installed, and it is going in as I type.  I was not expecting that it could be put in this quickly.  James and I had two days to get the furniture moved, the carpet and pad removed and all the staples pulled out of the floor. We had to pull carpet out of three bedrooms, our walk-in closet, a hallway, and the the stairway. I was so sore last night, I had a hard time sleeping.

 The new carpet is much darker than the old carpet. The old carpet was almost white.  While we were pulling it out, we found a few pieces of what we suppose was the original carpet. It was pink. Our new carpet is a "green" carpet. It is EverStrand Carpet from Mohawk. It is made out of recycled plastic bottles.

I'm really thankful for all the hard work James put into removing the old carpet. He enjoys having leisure time on the weekends, and this weekend did not offer him much of that!

Meeting our Sponsored Child

 Last Friday, we had the opportunity to meet our sponsored child. We began sponsoring Tariku last summer through Compassion International.  He's between 8 and 10 years old. Birthdates are not generally kept up with in Ethiopia, so we don't know for sure. He was wearing a sharp looking suit.  We complemented him on it, and he told us that he got it with the money we sent him for his birthday. (Which was only $30.)  When we began sponsoring him, he was unable to attended school because of the financial strain that his family was under at the time.  In his first letter to us, he asked up to pray for him to be able to go to school. So we did. And he attends school now. He told us that English is his favorite subject, and he likes math too.  He looked so much different from the boy we saw in the first pictures from Compassion last year:

Here he is being instructed on how to operate a hand-crank flashlight that we gave him.

We gave him a backpack full of school supplies and other items.  His favorite gifts were a soccer ball and a calculator.

Tariku was escorted by two Compassion personnel. They brought him to the guest house we were staying at.  After we gave him his gifts, we had to wait for a little while for a car to pick us up and take up to an amusement park. While we waited, I showed Tariku how to play Angry Birds on my phone. He caught on very quickly.

Tariku had a lot of fun at Bora Amusement park. He wanted to play air hockey with both of us.

He won tickets at some of the games.  Here he is counting the tickets with a park employee.

He chose to get a package of colored pencils and a bouncy ball with his tickets.

Next, we rode the swing ride. I was pretty nervous about getting on this dang ride. James has gotten sick on these kinds of rides before. I mean we were in a country that probably doesn't have any sort of safety regulations, and I doubt that this ride had been serviced in the last decade.  But, we rode it & we lived to tell about it.

We had lunch at the amusement park, and this was the only meal I had all week that I did not like. We all ordered hamburgers.  There was a lot of seasonings in the meat that I did not care for at all. I'm not ever sure that they were made out of beef. It could have been goat meat for all I know.  Tariku wanted to pray in English before we ate, and he did a good job!  He fed both James and I a bite of his food. This is an Ethiopian tradition called "gursha." We both returned the gesture.

During lunch Tariku told us a little more about himself. We learned that he plays the drums for the younger children at his church. He told us that this was his first trip to the city and he rode a bus from his village to the city.  It was his first time to ride a bus.

This was by far the best day we had on the trip. I'm really thankful to Compassion for setting this visit up!

Back from Ethiopia

We got home Sunday from what should have been our court trip. On Tuesday last week, just before we went to the orphanage to meet Baby M, we were informed that our agency had just learned that Baby M has a half-sister who was adopted to the US two years ago. The half sister was adopted through an different agency. The other family family was informed about our situation, with the two failed referrals and they were informed that we were willing to do what we could to keep the girls in touch. Both agencies were both in favor of us proceeding. We asked if the other family would be given the option to adopt Baby M, but our agency dodged that question. We were told that we should go ahead and meet Baby M. So we did. We held her, played with her, and fed her. She even fell asleep in my arms. We took a bunch of photos and James shot a lot of video.

We were supposed to go to court on Thurs. Three people from our agency came to the guest house to talk to us & we knew that they probably had bad news. They informed us that the other family had chosen to adopt Baby M, and there is nothing we can do. Our agency’s country director is the one who told us, and he wept as he spoke to us. He has worked in social services for many years, and he said that this was the hardest day of his career.

Our agency gave us three different children to consider. Two boys and one girl, all under one year of age. We spoke with a pediatrician on Thurs. and went through all the medical records for all three children. The girl is the healthiest one, although the two boys are in fairly good health too. We got to meet all three children while we were there. Over the weekend, our agency sent a team to the hometowns of two of the children. They conducted investigations over the weekend to see if there are any issues that could cause problems with the adoption. On Monday, they will send another team to do another investigation. Within two weeks we should know if they are any problems. We are not certain that we even want to give this other try, it depends on what the investigations turn up. Our agency's stateside office should have the results of the 1st investigations sometime today. The staff is confident that they can get our case submitted to court before the court closure in August, however it is unlikely that we will get another court date before the end of Sept.

These past two weeks have been extremely difficult. We are not pleased with the way this disaster transpired or with the way James and I were treated by a particular social worker while we were in Ethiopia. Baby M never should have been referred to us.  The staff in Ethiopia found out about the sister early enough in July that we could have canceled our trip if they had told us right away. They decided to sit on the information for a little while and allow us to go ahead and make the trip. Our agency's stateside staff is not pleased about that. There is a lot more to this story that I'd like to share, but I feel that it is not appropriate to share all of the details publicly at this time. I will say that if you are pursuing and Ethiopian adoption through our agency, to proceed with extreme caution. (Unless you know me in some capacity outside of the blog, you don't know what agency we are working with. I have removed their name from all of my posts.) I will be more than happy to give you an earful if you talk to me.

We now have been through three failed referrals, and are wondering what else can go wrong. I'm at a place where I'm tried of investing my time, energy, and heart into adoption. I'm tried of praying about adopting a child & I'm tried of asking others to do the same. I'm tired of printing out photos of little girls that get referred to us and putting them up all over our house, just to throw them in the trash a few months later. I'm tired of mailing photos of another little child off to our parents, just to have to make another difficult phone call to them telling that we won't be bringing that child home either. I'm tired of getting every one's hopes up.

I wish I could rewind the past two years.

Donations and Toys for the Orphanage

 We are taking some toys with us that will we use while we are visiting Baby M at the orphanage.  I got a dozen of those little beach balls from Oriental Trading $6.  They are only 7 inches wide, so they will be good for little hands.  I also the little toy dinosaurs and the little plastic Slinky's at Oriental Trading. The other items in the photo are a package of bubbles and a package of plastic links.

These are donations.  A few outfits, diapers, (cloth and disposable) and a Jenny Jumperoo.  The orphanages seem to be in need of weight bearing toys for the little ones, so I hope they can use this.  We are also taking a bunch of children's underpants that my parents donated. We've had several people give us monetary donations for the orphanages.  We will use that to buy formula while we are in Ethiopia.  Thank you to everyone who has donated!