Food Friday: THE Sausage Dip

Credit to my mother, who's recipe this is and whose permission I have to use publish it and whom I love very much and whom I should call more. (LOVE YOU MOM)

Anywho.

Every time I either host a party or get invited to one, the expectation, and sometimes demand, is that I make or bring my sausage dip. Usually, during or after said party, I get bombarded with requests for the recipe. I am always very open to sharing, even jotting it down for people. So I figured it would be easiest to just put it up here, and direct people to my blog.

Although, there is a small chance that now that people can make it themselves that they will not invite me to parties. You guys will still invite me.... right....... guys? .....Bueller?   * crickets  *

Well, I'm going to risk a life of loneliness and share the ever popular, in high demand, amazing SAUSAGE DIP.


Ingredients/Supplies List

- 1 slow cooker
- Frying pan
- Spatula
- 4 bricks of cream cheese
- 2 cans of Rotel tomatos
- One container/roll of Bob Evan's spicy sausage
- One container/roll of Bob Evan's regular sausage

I have visuals to help with the ingredients list:

First, spray your slow cooker with non-stick spray, or use a slow-cooker liner, then throw all 4 bricks of cream cheese in to the slow cooker and turn it to high. This will allow the cream cheese to soften and make it easier to stir everything together when you get to that point.

Next, combine and fry up the sausage. When that is done, be sure to drain the grease.

Throw the sausage in the slow cooker and turn the slow cooker down to low. Open and drain the Rotel tomatoes and add those to the slow cooker too.

Stir together until completely blended. then I usually turn the slow cooker down to "keep warm" after about an hour on low, as everything is already cooked and should be warm/hot by that point.

Serve right out of the slow cooker. Serve with sturdy chips (Tostitos Scoops are my preference). 





Oh, and DogCPK, of course, is always on hand when I am making anything in the kitchen.

Just Your Standard Update-Life Happened

How is it already August? Where did the summer go? Oh wait.... Couldn't possibly be that we spent most of it outside playing an augmented reality game? No.....

Well, maybe. That, plus a bunch of other randomish things that I feel are worthy of including in a blog post, but are not a singular blog-post worthy topic.

So, here we go.

Yes, I am still playing Pokemon Go! * TEAM MYSTIC * Even got myself a Pikachu!

For all of my good catches/hatches, following my Instagram account would be a good place to start. Also too many pictures of DogCPK. You've been warned.

I am still playing, despite some people rage quitting because of reasons too lengthy and exhausting to ruminate here. I find it as a great addition to my walks. Motivates me to walk to work when I normally wouldn't. It is good at convincing Breaky to go on walks with me and DogCPK, when normally he would want to stay indoors. Overall, I may be enjoying it for different reasons than others, but it keeps me/us active, and that's what matters.

Breaky got me an early Christmas present due to an Amazon Prime sale. I got a new tablet with a keyboard and stylus. I actually started drawing again, this time on a tablet, which is a new experience for me. Working on a drawing of the very own DogCPK and will share when I am finished, or am at a point to share progress.


I have been on a huge "home improvement" kick, in which I take projects I have been waiting forever to do for reasons that usually revolve around pure laziness, and actually doing them. This weekend, we were supposed to start building a fence, so our dog can not get tangled in her line, plus, yay home value! But last minute, plans changed and we are not handy enough of a pair to do it ourselves, so I endeavored to finish painting part of our porch, getting an umbrella for our table, and painting a garage door and two window boxes the color I wanted. Doesn't seem like a lot, but to us, it was a huge deal.

A lot of our home improvement ideas come from one of my many Pinterest Boards. If you follow my blog, our wedding a year ago included a lot of ideas I pinned to our wedding board. Also included on the board pretty prominently is my Halloween board. Ever since my sophomore year of college, I have done some kind of Halloween extravaganza. I will not tell you how many years it has been, as that would give away how long is has been since I was in college, and that is painful to think about. Let's just say it has been a long, long tradition.

But the big question is what Breaky and I should be for Halloween. We were thinking something Overwatch related. Thoughts? Suggestions? Last year we were Jack and Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas


Lastly, a HUGE shout out to my little sister, who just got her first full-time teaching position. 6th Grade Math in a public school in Michigan. I am so incredibly proud of my sister, who was my maid of honor at our wedding, and my best friend. She will be amazing, and all of those kids who will have her as a teacher are extremely lucky.

The Alliance Tee-Shirt Saga

As many of you know, Breaky and I have been together for over 4 years. Before I knew Breaky, I did play games, just not with the enthusiasm and frequency as I do now. I tried World of Warcraft during a promotional free month period. I chose to only do the one month for free, because I worked at a call center, had student loans, and lived in an apartment by myself and had no money. In addition to taking advantage of free-month games that usually cost way too much, I also took advantage of ThinkGeek's promotional $5 tee shirts, back when ThinkGeek's customer service was decent and was not owned by GameStop. The promotion was you send them $5 and they send you a random tee-shirt. Usually one that was the wrong color, discontinued, or couldn't be regularly sold. 

Why this information? It all ties in, I promise.

The tee-shirt I received from ThinkGeek was a navy blue shirt with the Alliance logo from World of Warcraft. This was around the time I was thinking about trying the game out anyway, so I did. Was Alliance. Got really confused and frustrated (I didn't have anyone else that played, and was shy about playing online games with others for fear of making a fool of myself), so I cancelled the free month before I got charged. I didn't dislike the game, but definitely couldn't justify the purchase of a game I couldn't see myself playing all the time.

But I kept the tee-shirt. Went about my merry way. Met Breaky (our "how we met" will be a different blog post), and when I would wear that shirt, he would get all pissy, in a joking manner. Told me he was Horde all the way, and that dating someone with an Alliance shirt was blasphemy for him, as he was ride-or-die Horde. Told me when I wasn't looking he was going to burn it, or take scissors to it. When I cut around the neck of it to make it a workout shirt, he was disappointed I wasn't destroying it just for him.

YEARS later (just kidding, probably just less than a year), the shirt, like most articles of clothing, had seen better days, so it was reduced to rags, with Breaky doing the honors.

So imagine my surprise when years later, he started playing WoW again. And with what faction? Oh, Alliance.

* Activate Bitch Face *

All of the grief I got for wearing an Alliance tee-shirt? And you end up Alliance?

"Well," Breaky explained, "it is less about Alliance vs Horde now babe! It is all about 'For Azeroth' and the people I am playing with are Alliance."

Ok, I thought, not that bad. I'll tease him about it, sure, but I won't be super mean about it.

Sure enough, at Blizzcon that year it was evident that Blizzard and the game were really pushing for a "united Azeroth" kind of thing.  Despite being Alliance, Breaky got us Horde shirts at the gift store, as well as got me a Hearthstone journal and a Hearthstone necklace.

Less than a year later, went to see the movie. Even wore our Horde tee-shirts.

Couple months later, the Legion expansion came out. Breaky, ever the socialite, organized a few chat groups to decide what faction, what server, when to play etc.... I had a few weekends here that I have been busy with family and our cabin up-north, so I decided not to join in this time.

Needless to say, emotions were high, and arguments happened. First they were going to be Alliance. Then they were Horde. Finally Breaky came back and said they were officially Alliance. I laughed to myself, and then decided to have my revenge for my poor, fallen tee-shirt. Went online when he left the room and ordered him an Alliance tee-shirt similar to the one I had. It was going to arrive in two days.

Perfect, I thought. It will be a cute surprise, we'll get a laugh out of it, blah blah blah.

That next night, driving home from our Trivia Tuesday at the bar, Breaky announced that they decided, officially, to be Horde.

My head hit the dashboard in a frustrated thunk. I think Breaky thought I was broken. He described all the drama and in-fighting and how someone made this rallying speech and someone followed someone else and that was the end of it. Horde it was.

So I explained with an exasperated sigh about the gift that was coming and how he was going to wear it anyway, because I was his wife and he owed me a little for all the grief about my old tee-shirt. He chuckled and agreed.

We received it the next day. Even wore it, right away. Of course, did so to be troll at work and in his WoW chat. But that's the man I married.

Guest Blog Post: BreakyCPK

Below is a guest blog post by my husband, BreakyCPK, who frequently appears in my blog. He is often asked how he got in to the industry of esports and video games, so he decided it would be neat to share with everyone! Below is the blog post: 

My name is Nikolas Caras, but most people that know of me know me by the name that I go by online which is BreakyCPK.  My closest friends and even my wife refer to me as Breaky instead of Nick, and it doesn’t faze me.  I started my Video Game casting career back in 2009 and over the years I have had the privilege of traveling all over the world, as well as my current place of residence in Kalamazoo Michigan where I met “The Good Geek Wife” or as I know her as, Kelsey.

But this post isn’t going to be a full story of my journey over the years of casting (that I am saving for either future posts, or hey even a book).  Instead, I wanted to go over the story of how I even got into casting Video Games in the first place some 7 years ago, which is probably one of the most popular questions I get to this day.

The very short version is simply I was looking for more ways to get experience with sports casting, so I decided to give it a shot with video games, specifically Heroes of Newerth since I was playing it at the time.

The more detailed version is as followed.

Back in 2005 I graduated from high school, where I was overall a fairly good student.  When it came to my first year of college up at a school in northern California however, I let World of Warcraft get the better of me.  As a result of flunked out after my first year and decided it was best to come back home to San Diego, and live with my parents.  So here I was, in the “what the hell am I going to do with my life” phase that I am sure most others have gone through or are possibly going through as well.

I worked several different retail jobs over the next ~3-4 years including Blockbuster Video and Home Depot, while at the same time attempting to go to some local community colleges just to simply keep up with education and earn some type of degree that I could use to further pursue a career.  It felt like I was just going to school just to go, not really knowing what I wanted to pursue and really just getting general education classes done, but mainly because my parents told me I had to.

During this time as well, I continued to play plenty of computer games and also become more and more of a follower in a very new competitive gaming scene.  Ranging from CS 1.6 to WoW arena, to DOTA, I even did a little bit of writing for some gaming websites just to be involved in that scene.

In 2008 however I happened to be looking at upcoming classes for the new semester of a Community College, and came across sportscasting / radio broadcasting.  I have been a lifelong sports fan, specifically a San Diego Chargers and Los Angeles Lakers fan and I also have been told many times that I have a great voice, and I should do radio.  So it just seemed fitting that I should give it a shot and see where it took me.

I ended up taking the class for the two semesters of that year, and both enjoyed going to school for the first time in a very long time, but also started to gain experience in a career I would potentially be pursuing.  I started to cast some local high school football and basketball games for the college AM radio station.  However those seasons only lasted so long and the opportunities for them were constantly shifted from person to person.

A game that I happened to get into recently was called Heroes of Newerth, a recreation of the popular game DOTA which I had previous experience playing with friends.  Streaming video was also starting to become a more popular thing, however the tools were nowhere what they are today.  But I wanted to get more experience in this career that I have come to realize is something I could really make something out of in broadcasting, so I decided why not.

Now to be clear, streaming has evolved a LOT in very little time.  Back in 2009 when I did some research and a lot of testing, I was lucky to get a stream going with 360p quality.  But hey, that was great for its time and the idea that people could just see what you had on your screen was cool enough.  For a better idea of what it was like to stream, you can check out this video that I made in the earlier days, before Twitch was a thing. 

The first couple of times I did it, I don’t think I had any viewers, especially without there being a platform like today with Twitch where people would just go to watch streams.  But that never deterred me, I honestly wasn’t doing it for recognition or in hope that I would one day be a video game caster.  However after a couple of weeks of casting random games, between “in house” matches to some scrims between “top teams”, I started to gain some recognition within the scene.  It wasn’t until I was contacted by someone concerning a project they were planning to start about streaming HoN matches that eventually became the Honcast we know today that I realized maybe I could get something out of this more.

Over the next year things drastically changed, going from me just doing this on the side for experience while still working my retail job living with my parents, to getting a monthly pay check and eventually moving out on my own.  My parents, especially my mother were never really behind the idea of me focusing so much on a video game, especially with my history and of course I can’t blame them.  But in summer of 2011 the offer came to move out to Michigan and work officially as the head caster of Heroes of Newerth for S2 Games, and the realization finally hit that I had started what would be an awesome journey towards being an esports caster.