sparrowgrass

Tomatoes, peppers, green beans, sweet corn, squash, asparagus: 100% homegrown. NO desire for out of season store bought veggies. Peaches and apples: from local orchards, 100%. Beef: from a neighbor, 100%. Chicken and pork: from the grocery store--chicken is probably from SW MO or Arkansas, 150 miles or so. Lord knows where the pork comes from. Eggs: up til very recently, 100% home grown. I am out of the chicken biz for a while--knee surgery scheduled for December. My hens have gone to live in Indiana with my son, so he will keep me in eggs til I get new chicks next spring. I have a new granddaughter, so I will be visiting them regularly, (after my knee gets fixed.) I bake my own bread, but I don't know where the flour comes from. I don't buy fruit or veggies from Mexico or South America. No olive oil from Missouri, but we do have some good wines!!

I don't bother to break the tail end off--it doesn't seem to taste any different from the rest of the bean. I like to sit on the porch with a big basket of beans to break--it is very mindless and relaxing. Picking beans is a whole other story--hot and itchy and bent over so my back hurts--maybe that is why breaking them seems pleasant.

Back when I used to cook for my family, the one sure smile maker was a "cholesterol breakfast", consisting of biscuits, sausage gravy, and scrambled eggs. Even bigger smiles when I made a cholesteral breakfast for supper.

I don't have the recipe, but I was recently at a potluck where someone brought a lemon meringue pie. Which sounds ok, but she used some kind of sugar substitute, topped it with sugarfree/fatfree Coolwhip, and as an added touch, sprinkled the top with crushed black walnuts. Nuts of any sort don't belong on LM pie, and black walnuts in particular belong out under the black walnut tree for squirrels to bury.

I am in. I wonder if I can last a month? A week is no challenge at all--I ordinarily shop once every 10 days or so. I might need to pick up some flour for baking/noodly things, but otherwise I am all set.

Thock, I am with you. I bought Penzeys bay leaves, and can't detect any flavor from them. Or aroma, for that matter. Maybe we are lacking the bay leaf receptor gene?

Oh, no, no label--the fur identifies it pretty well. I live alone, so no worries about someone else being surprised. (But wait--I am having knee surgery in December and my sis will be staying with me a while. I will have to find that squirrel and put it near the top, just for her. )

None of those in my Missouri grandma's kitchen. What I remember from her kitchen was a Surge milking machine in pieces in the sink, and a Dazey churn on top of the fridge.

I have been quite happily single (and mostly dateless) for 8 years. I do miss having someone to cook for--if you are anywhere near Missouri, come on by, and I will fire up the stove.

I know that somewhere in the chest freezer in the shed is a mangled squirrel that I took away from the dogs last summer. I didn't want it in the garbage can in the heat, so I figured I would freeze it and put it in the can on garbage day. Many garbage days have come and gone, and the squirrel appears to have migrated to the bottom of the freezer. It is triple bagged, by the way. If it ever surfaces, I will take a picture. If you want me to.

I don't buy many cookbooks, but I do love books. American Booksellers Exchange has great used books, at great prices. I have never failed to find the book I was looking for at this site.

There are some legume cover crops that do add nitrogen--info from Cornell I have been covering my garden with leaves every fall, and tilling them in in the spring. And (don't hate me for this) I have chickens, and they can turn a couple truckloads of leaves into the most wonderful soil over the winter.

Most of my girls have made the move to Indiana. I couldn't quite fit all of them into the dog crates I used to move them, so there are still 8 hens and a rooster here. We will see if I can deal with them or not--if not, I have several people who would like to have them. Once the knee is repaired, I will get more chicks--my garden needs them.

A second vote for Banrock. And I like Barefoot wines, but they are generally about $6 here.

Back when I was a young'un, learning how to make pie crust from my mom, the thing that always bumfuzzled me was getting the pastry off the board and into the pie pan. When I learned to roll the pastry up on the rolling pin, I never had to patch or curse again. Probably everyone else knows this trick, but it was an epiphany for me.

I once served bear chops to my (now ex) husband, and his only comment was that the pork chops looked funny. Cook it like pork, and don't leave it pink--trichinosis is possible in bear.

Stick the hard to peel bits into a mason jar and cover with sherry. Gingered sherry is the bomb in Asian stirfries. I always have a jarful in the fridge.

Whoo-hoo!! Aren't you just as proud as if you had laid them yourself? Sadly, I think my girls may be finding a new home soon. I have a bad knee, and wrangling those fifty pound bags of feed is getting to be too much for me. I haven't scheduled surgery yet, but when it happens, I will be laid up for a month or more, and I don't think I have anybody who would take over for me.

It will work just fine, but harder than it would in your cooler kitchen. Many people here in Missouri have an extra fridge in the garage or workshop, and our outside temps go to 100--heaven only knows how hot the garages get. My freezer, chest type is in my shed, and has worked well for 8 years. Yes, your electricity bill will go up--a fridge uses a lot of power.

Andie--I bet that kid's plasticine clay or PlayDough would pick up glass shards, too, and would be cheaper.

Katie Meadow, mountain lions are hunted regularly in the West, where they are not endangered. I don't think anybody eats them, however.

You could fatten it for the pot. I am sure someone has a recipe. If you do catch it, you can drop bits of food into the cage--they eat anything, dog or cat food would do fine. A rabbit bottle would do for water. Set the trap on newspaper to make cleanup easier, and drape the cage in a blanket to keep the nasty beast calmer.

When I contribute deviled eggs to a potluck (happens frequently--I have a couple dozen chickens) I split the boiled eggs, put the whites into a container, make the filling the food processor and carry it to the party in a ziplock. At the party, I clip a corner off the bag and pipe the filling into the halves. Much tidier looking than when I try to carry them already filled. I have even, in pinch on a camping trip, mixed up the filling IN the ziplock, mashing and kneading the bag until the consistency was right.

Here in Missouri, trapping and dispatching a predator, like a coon, possum or fox, is legal, but transporting the same animal to relocate is illegal. Got that info straight from the Conservation Officer. (Don't tell him, but the guy who let me use his live trap took the coon away for me, to train his coon dogs. They didn't kill it, just treed it.) Animal control might come get it. But maybe not--some animal control agencies work only with domestic animals, and will refer you to a commercial exterminator.

Just a note on the "humaneness" of live trapping and releasing into a natural area. Most critters that are moved die--they don't know the escape routes in their new territory, and something gets them--a car, a coyote, a dog. . . A gun is the most humane way of dispatching an animal, but that may not be an option for you. If your coop is tight and locked up after dark, you may be ok. Coons rarely visit in the daytime. But don't encourage the little devil--keep your dog and cat food inside, put good tight lids on your trash cans--bungee them if you have to. And if any of your neighbors think that it is cute to feed raccoons, dissuade them--tell them raccoons are rabies vectors, and they have roundworms that can cause humans to go blind or suffer brain damage.