Korean Family Finally Home

If you’ve been reading long, you may recall we have a son in the Army who has been in South Korea the past three years, along with his family – except Alex who’s been living with us. They got back to Fort Knox, Kentucky safe and sound on Wednesday, after a few days stopover in Hawaii. After getting checked in and securing housing, they headed for Almost Heaven South for a couple of days in route to a 10-day vacation at Disney World. Bev and I passed off the parenting baton and are now back to being just grandparents - whew. It's been a real experience for all of us and Alex is a very different person than the one who showed up here 14 months ago.

I had previously asked Rhett what he wanted for meals while here, and as a loyal reader, he said “all that stuff you’ve been posting on your blog.” We probably can’t do it all, but we have a pretty good handle on their favorites, so we’ll try to cover some of them. Like most of the Caton clan, fried okra and corn on the cob are high on the summertime list and we decided to have that as a first meal along with some beer can chickens – food we all like, fairly easy to cook for a crowd, and we had chickens in the freezer. We were going to do it at the lake, but some long awaited showers were passing through so we used the house grill, which has a roll out awning above it.

For the chickens, I did my normal of rosemary, thyme, and fruit (had oranges and lemons in the fridge), in a half can of beer (Dos XX for these). On the outside, I rubbed one with homemade Wolfe Citrus and the other with Home BBQ’s Sweet Orange Habanero spiked with some additional cayenne. I set them in the middle of the grill over two off burners, a lid temp of 300*, and cooked to an internal temp of 165* in the breast. They came out moist and tasty, but not as spicy as Bev wanted – I may have to marinate hers in Sriracha sauce next time :-).

Since I’m not really gardening this year, I didn’t have any super fresh corn, so I bought some from a couple selling it out of their pick up sitting along the road and Bev got some locally grown okra from the veggie market. We cooked the okra in the discada and the corn on the grill side burner so no heat was added to the house. The corn turned out to be just ok – I’m spoiled by the sweet, tasty, fresh picked stuff – but the kids liked it. No food pics as it was just ordinary stuff that I've posted before.

It sure is nice to have them back in the states and they are really glad to be home. They will be at Fort Knox, Kentucky, which is about a 5 hour drive. Rhett left here at 7am this morning to go get his boat from storage – guess we know what he missed. Middle child Reese is ready for some serious hanging out.


When the girls got up, Bev took them blueberry picking then turned them into pancakes for their breakfast - had a table full of happy campers.

We finally got a little rain Friday evening, and while better than nothing, the ¼” won’t go very far toward reducing the 8+ inches we’re behind for the year. The silver lining – it should be a good weekend for boating.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by.

Larry