Put some poaceae in it.

Alison, they are soft and made of cotton. I should have spread them out for all to see. I got lucky when I posted the pictures because I had a new computer and it has a different operating system than my old one. This one has windows Vista. Anyway they downloaded totally different from my old system. Now I'm trying to download and post a picture of the towels and I'm having all kinds of problems.

Last 3 baby showers I went to played: Let each person pull a length of toilet paper off a roll, the one that's piece fits around mom-to-be the closest wins.2nd game, fill a bowl with uncooked plain white rice. Mix in several packages of loose safety pins. Hold the bowl over each persons head, they reach up and grab a handfull of rice and pins. The person who grabs the most safety pins wins. You need a 2nd person to be standing there with a bowl or styrofoam plate that the player can dump their handfull of rice and pins in and it can be counted before dumping back in the rice & pin bowl. It is a lot of fun when you can get male guests to play too. 3rd. game have a list of items used for baby, scramble words and see who is first to unscramble correctly all words. You can see I have been to baby showers with the past 6 months. Oh, nice suggestion, ask everybody to give a book instead of a card with gift. I found a baby cloth book at one of the craft shows I did for last baby. Mom-to-be really liked it.

The classic paella is rabbit, snails, and green beans. Peasant food. The hoity toity seafood paellas came later. But, like sangria, paella is at heart at improvisational dish, I think. The poor Spanish peasants wouldn't have turned their noses up at chicken or mutton if they could have gotten it, and there were probably times when the bunnies were scarce. Here is what I usually do. Make a hot wood fire - or a heap of really hot coals. Heat the paella (the word actually refers to the pan itself) to really, really hot. When you squirt a bit of oil on it, the oil should instantly smoke and even flame up. Throw on your rabbit or chicken. The pieces should be cut into serving-size (rabbit quarters, or chicken thighs), tossed in salt and lots of oil. The oil on the meat will help it not-stick and the cold meat will cool the pan enough that you can squirt more oil on it without igniting a fire. Using long tongs and gloves (the fire and pan are still really hot), flip the pieces to get all sides browned. Don't try to cook them through, you're just browning. Remove the meat and set aside. Dump a bunch of chopped garlic, onion, celery, a bit of tomato, a couple of seeded not-too-hot peppers, and whatever else you like in a soffrito, in the paella. Move it around to cook it without burning, add oil if there isn't enough left from the meat. As soon as the aromatics are soft, remove them. Add more oil and your green beans - you can use another vegetable, but beans stand up to the whole cooking process without getting mushy, which is more than you can say for the lesser veggies. The fire or coals are cooling and the pan, while still very hot, is not the smelter that it initially was, and you won't have to work so frenetically or wince at the heat. Remove beans when softened. Then cook the snails, of course canned snails don't really have to be cooked but they want to be kissed with the paella anyway. If you're going to wuss out and substitute prawns, then they get a kiss too. Now add oil and chorizo. No, that's not in the purist's paella, but if those Spanish peasants had had chorizo I'm sure they would have used it. Cook the chorizo for awhile, it is a wet sloppy Joe sort of stuff so it takes some time. Remove the chorizo, leaving its oils and residue in the paella. Pour the arborio rice into the paella, fry it just a little, and then pour in some hot chicken stock, just enough to barely cover the rice. I'm assuming you don't have any rabbit stock handy. Add the saffron and the soffrito, and stir. Smooth out the the rice in a flat layer, as the stock bubbles and starts to get absorbed into the grains. Take all the stuff you set aside - the rabbit, snails, beans - and nestle the pieces into the rice in a pretty design. As the stock gets absorbed by the rice, add some more. Taste the rice occasionally to make sure you don't get it too soggy. The fire is mellowed out now, it is content to simmer the stock and gently cook the rice and all the yummy stuff in it. When the rice is cooked, stop adding stock but keep the paella on the fire. Have a drink. After 10 minutes, use a chopstick or fork to feel the bottom of the rice, where it touches the paella (pan). Is it crusted and part-burned? No? Then keep cooking until it is. Sometimes you can tell that the desired crust has formed, by smelling a wafting toastiness. But feeling is more reliable. Don't skimp on this step. The crust is important, some think it is the best part of the paella. When you get crust, as confirmed by sone excavation, move paella to table and dive in. The whole process takes around two hours. More or less. Maybe more. I'm usually a bit drunk by the end. A cheap thin steel paella - carbon steel with red plastic wrapped loop handles - costs maybe $25 and you need it, but you don't need or want an expensive, pretty paella. Because you're going to get that pan freaky hot, maybe over a wood fire, it will turn black, the plastic will burn off, your hands will burn off if you don't have gloves, and if you bought a $250 polished copper paella, you'd just cry. The cheap steel pan just needs to be oiled and hung up for next time. This post was edited by johnliu on Tue, Apr 9, 13 at 22:52