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sparrowgrass

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Everything posted by sparrowgrass

  1. That is how I do it--I brown a whole pound of breakfast sausage, sprinkle it with a quarter cup or so of flour, brown it a little bit more, pour in enough milk to make a nice thick gravy with lots of sausage. Plenty of pepper and salt, and homemade cat's head biscuits. (So called because they are big--the size of a cat's head.) Most of the grocery stores here do their own bulk sausage, and there is a wide variety of packaged sausage in the meat case. Maggie, maggie, maggie--you are missing one of the good things of life. Biscuits, gravy, and a big dollop scrambled eggs--heaven.
  2. Nothing, but I am thinking seriously of raiding the office cache. Corn chips, or, let's see, corn chips. Ok, that is settled then. I am eating corn chips.
  3. What kenk said. When my kids were 1 and 4, I had about a half acre in garden. July of that year, I got a full time job and ended up with bushels of tomatoes and no time. I just tossed them into the freezer in plastic bags. It was so easy to grab the number of tomatoes I needed, thaw them a little, slip the skins off, chop and cook. The texture, of course, is different than raw tomatoes, but for cooked dishes, they are great.
  4. sparrowgrass

    Freezing Beef

    Word. Six or seven dollars a dozen for those suckers!!
  5. I bought a hog last fall from a friend, who butchered it himself. There were 2 packages in there marked "head". I slow cooked them and pulled the meat off--I think I put some bbq sauce on it. (Tasty, too.) No eyeballs--what freaked me out was the palate and teeth--looked just like I had been boiling a dog.
  6. Note to self: Next time, to use the timer on the microwave, punch 20 minutes into the timer function, not the cook function. Cause if you leave the empty microwave on high for 20 minutes, while you watch the last few minutes of Queer Eye, your microwave will smell funny and you will have to go to Walmart to buy a new one the next morning.
  7. Beans, turn the oven up as high as it will go, open all the windows, crank the fan up to Mach 2, and go sit on the front porch with a book for an hour or so. (Disconnect the smoke alarm, too, unless you like loud noises.) After it cools, get the vacuum out and suck up all the ash--you may need a spatula to loosen some of it. Then you are good to go, at least until you bake another pie. Martha Stewart ain't got nothin on me.
  8. The most embarassing thing in my kitchen is the dirty floor--dog hair, not cat hair--and the compost bucket beside the sink. I try to carry it out to the chickens every day, but . . . OH, and that pile of incinerated peach pie runover in the oven. In the not-self-cleaning oven. At least it doesn't smoke any more when I turn the oven on. And the cloud of fruit flies that appear out of nowhere any time any vegetable comes in from the garden. I have some packs of ramen noodles and maybe some mac and cheese stuff, but I wouldn't rush to hide them if anyone came over.
  9. I am ready to put the garden to bed for the winter. I have lots of okra and peppers, the brussel sprouts are coming on, but everything else is kaput. I am still getting enough tomatoes for salad, but canning season is over. Soon it will be time to till a row and plant the garlic for next year. I planned to put some turnips for my office mate (YUCK--I hate turnips) but I may have procrastinated too long. As an experiment, I think I am going to toss some spinach seeds out after frost--I understand they will come up very early in the spring for salad.
  10. Fry Sauce (half mayo, half ketchup) is standard for fries in Utah. (Which is not just another state, it is another planet.) I once visited a salad bar with a friend who took a bit of everything on the bar--lettuce, garbanzo beans, macaroni salad, chocolate pudding (!)--and covered it with ranch dressing. . She said, "Well, it all goes to the same place." I am still suffering from Post-Traumatic Lunch Syndrome, flashbacks and all.
  11. I have a friend who belongs to the "Can't get it at Home Club"--people whose spouses hate liver eat out once a month. Deer liver is always opening day dinner, if the guys are lucky--with bacon and onions. I also like pork liver, but it is hard to find.
  12. Salsa. I always drip salsa on my ample bosom. I also remember that all of my maternity shirts were stained--that belly works even better than an ample bosom for keeping napkins pristine.
  13. I had a BF whose freezer was full of frozen pizza, and when I would visit him I would add some grated parmesan, fresh veggies, anything to to make them taste like real pizza. One night, he decided to "cook" and asked me how much fresh garlic he should put on the pizza. I told him a clove or two. I sat down at the table to find that he had taken the whole head, chopped it without peeling, and sprinkled it on the pizza. Fiber-rich.
  14. my ex-M-I-L made jello "salads" too--usually orange jello with shredded carrots. I think at some point in history, jello salad was considered to be slimming. Another delightful salad at her house was a wedge of iceberg lettuce with about a cupful of Miracle Whip globbed on top. Holidays called for turkey, of course. They would get up at 4 am to put the turkey in the oven, it would be done by 9 am, and then it would sit on the counter til 2, when dinner was served. After dinner, it sat out til bedtime, so people could make their own turkey sandwiches. It is a good thing my kids had strong immune systems. Dessert was always something with cool whip, some flavor of instant pudding and graham crackers. I do miss her Waldorf salad. And her sugar cookies.
  15. I am going for the flame treatment. Yeah, buddy!!
  16. Just guessing about Mexican corn, but I thing you need to find some field corn--the corn grown for animal feed. We used to call them roasting ears, when I was a young-un visiting grandma. The uncles would go across the road, pick a basketful of young ears, and grandma would boil them up. I don't know if city folks can buy corn like that.
  17. When the Evil One divorced me 3 years ago, the hardest part was dividing the books. I got all the cookbooks, however. (And most of whatever else I wanted, by the simple expedient of taking a box into the library whenever he wasn't home and packing it full. Too bad I couldn't do that to his retirement account.)
  18. Sausage McMuffin with egg for breakfast occasionally--McD's is the only fast food drive thru in town. Fast food lunches, if I am traveling alone--drive thru and keep moving, try not to drop mayo on the shirtfront. Almost never for dinner--rather go home and eat whatever is there.
  19. What is your address again, Maggie? I have a duck I will mail to you.
  20. Mark, I believe you have hit the nail on the head. Strong flavor that permeates every bite of a dish is hard to ignore. I think I will grow to like cilantro long before I will enjoy black walnuts, however. Another problem with black walnut trees is that they are the last to get their leaves in the spring, and the first to lose them in the fall, so you spend 7 or 8 months of the year with a tree that looks dead.
  21. I used to live in Utah (at Flaming Gorge NRA, Manila, to be precise.) It is not a foreign country. It is a whole other planet.
  22. Pick the nuts up after they fall, put them in a burlap bag in the driveway and run over them until the hulls are gone. WEAR GLOVES when you take them out of the bag--black walnut hulls make a particularly good (read permanent) dark brown dye. Let them sit in a warm dry place for a couple of weeks, shell (a big hammer and a chunk of railroad iron is traditional here) and use for black walnut pie or in chocolate chip cookies. I don't like them, but people here pay premium prices for them. I am not sure you want to use walnut wood for smoking--I think it would leave a bitter taste. If you want to sample some walnut smoked pork butt or whatever, just cut up some small branches with your pruning shears and toss them in the grill--that is what I do with the hickory in the back yard.
  23. -I went to the orchard and bought a box of eat-over-the-sink peaches. Not those little tennis ball jobs, these are softball size. Slurp.
  24. Short ribs of what? Snow leopard?
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