sparrowgrass

Those are pillbugs or sowbugs. American pillbugs live on damp, decaying vegetation, like the stuff under the pot of a potted plant, and they won't hurt living plants. I don't know what Japanese pillbugs eat. They are crustaceans, but it sure would take a lot of work to peel a mess of them for dinner.

I have a picture book--no recipes--like this, called Critter Cuisine, by Al and Mary Ann Clayton. Full of lovely photographs of things like tadpole soup, bat sandwiches, roast armadillo and mouse kebabs. Buy it!!

Are they importing it from England/Europe? Not that it makes any difference to me--I would probably have to drive to St. Louis or Chicago to find anything so exotic. I am lucky if I can find avocados or mangos in my grocery store. (But I don't care--I have real asparagus growing right outside. Neener-neener.)

I will send you the chicken tractor if you want it. It is about building portable chicken pens that you move around to where you want chickens to scratch up the soil and deposit the things that chickens deposit. I just let the girls roam free, and they mostly deposit on the back porch. Where the cat food is. Or useta be, til they ate it.

Well, now, Maggie, if it has recipes in it, it's a cookbook, no? Put me down for 3 Euell Gibbons "Stalking the Wild. . . " books, 4 other wild edibles books, a wild berry field guide and a wild mushroom field guide, each with many recipes. That's 9. The three other mushroom ID books have a couple recipes in each, but let's not count them. The Chicken Tractor and the Complete Guide to Raising Chickens have a couple of pages of recipes, too, come to think of it.

If you want this kind of "wild asparagus" you can go to West Virginia, apparently. www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/cgi/b98_map?genus=Ornithogalum&species=pyrenaicum Star of Bethlehem Botanical: Ornithogalum umbellatum (LINN.) Family: N.O. Liliaceae Other Species ---Synonyms---Bath Asparagus. Dove's Dung. Star of Hungary. White Filde Onyon. ---Part Used---Bulb. The Star of Bethlehem is a bulbous plant nearly allied to the Onion and Garlic. The leaves are long and narrow and darkgreen; the flowers, in bloom during April and May, are a brilliant white internally, but with the petals striped with green outside. They expand only in the sunshine. Though there are numerous species in this genus, only one is truly native to Great Britain, the spiked Ornithogalum, O. pyrenaicum (Linn.), and is not common, being a local plant, found only in a few counties. It is abundant, however, in woods near Bath, and the unexpanded inflorescence used to be collected and sold in that town under the name of 'Bath Asparagus,' and was cooked and served as a vegetable.

Now I am embarrassed--I should look at the link before I shoot my mouth off. The vegetable in the link is not closely related to the wild asparagus of the US--common names will get you in trouble every time. From the latin name, it seems the vegetable they are talking about grows from a bulb, and is related to the star of bethlehem flowers that are a weed species in the Midwestern US. Sorry, my bad.

I have picked wild asparagus in Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Utah and Minnesota. Asparagus does need several months of dormancy in cold weather. It grows in the deep south, but not well.

Wild asparagus is exactly the same as tame asparagus--Asparagus officinalis. Tame asparagus has been bred for more yield, or for disease resistance, or purple color--see avatar.

Invite me to the next one, Varmint--I will uphold the honor of my gender.

I've never had polenta--I have eaten spoon bread--yum. Maggie, put me down for 7 cookbooks, if Rodales "Putting Food By" and the Ball Blue Book count, that is. (If I need a recipe, I just do a google.) BTW, the bro is coming down next weekend--should I send some eggs up?

Just licking the last few tiny baby peas out of my bowl. Got home from work at 5, picked and shelled those delicious little green jewels, cooked and buttered and salted them, and ate them with a spoon. Dug a few new potatoes, too.

I have never made crackers, but I was wondering if I could roll them out with my pasta machine?

Honey pots--the kind that look like beehives and have bees on them. Like this : I have some beehive cookie jars, too. My first name is Debra--Hebrew for honeybee.

well, colorado potato beetles don't like rotenone. Or diazinon, but I wouldn't put diazinon on anything I was going to eat. There is also a Bt (bacillus thuringiensis) for potato beetles--I believe it is Bt San Diego. Regular Bt won't work. Are you sure they are potato beetles, not squash bugs?

10' by 16'. It used to be a summer kitchen, separated by a walkway from the main house. The walkway was closed in at some point, and my computer desk sits in it now.

Kids and gardening! When my youngest (the suspect in the potato caper, now 20) was about 2, he and I were in the yard. I was putting in the garden, and he was finishing off the contents of his Easter basket. After a few minutes, I asked if I could have one of his jelly beans. "Nope, Mom", he said, "can't have one." "Why not, don't you want to share?" "Nope, can't eat em, I planted em." They didn't come up--I think the frost got em.

I have a monster oregano plant too, and I use it a lot early in the spring, but by this time of year, the leaf miners have gotten into it and it is just not very appetizing. The miners are inside the leaves, so you can't wash them off. And I don't care if oregano leaf miners taste just like oregano, I don't want to eat them.

The key to finding asparagus is to look for it now, when the fronds are up and waving in the breeze. They look like feathery Christmas trees, about 3 or 4 feet high, and soon will have little bright red berries on them. Make yourself a little map marking all the places you have seen them. Then, come next spring (early April here) go hunting. Learn to recognize the dried stalks and investigate at the bases of the plants. It grows almost everywhere, along the roadsides and in the fence rows. I must have eaten 50 pounds of wild asparagus from my little hill this spring. I only gave up looking for it when the poison ivy got too tall.

I just read the thing about Mrs. Varmint's pasties being dry. You need to cut them open and pour some cream in just before they are done--oh, wait, this is a dieting thread--never mind. You go, big guy.

This is very terrible, and I am only telling you this because none of you are likely to drop by my humble abode and personally witness my lousy housekeeping. I hurt my back this week, and the physical therapist gave me some exercises (well, I call them exercises, but there is no sweat involved, more like positions, but that is neither here nor there) to do to straighten myself out. I have to put a mat down on the floor, and while in this position, I noticed a bit of greenery behind the china cabinet. I pried around with a ruler behind the back leg of the cabinet, and what came out but a tiny, wizened potato, with about a foot of sprout (which is what I saw creeping out from behind the back leg) complete with TINY POTATOES. I WAS GROWING POTATOES IN THE DOG HAIR BEHIND THE CHINA CABINET! Martha would not approve. And how the tater got behind the cabinet I do not know, but I have my money on the kid or the dog. Or both.

I am not eating anything, I am drinking homebrew, which may explain why my splelling is blad.

Sorry, I missed part of the question. AA's should be better than A's, but in practical terms, I don't think there is much difference. You may have found some on sale.

I did not work as a grader long enough to be able to tell AA from A. An AA or A egg is fresh (white is thick--you can see this as you candle the egg and see how quickly the yolk moves in the white), yolk is not broken, shell is pretty (no wrinkles or cracks) and the egg is the proper size. Something that struck me as odd was that the GRADE A designation is not protected--anybody can put "Grade A" on an egg carton. USDA Grade A eggs or meat have a shield about the size of your thumbnail somewhere on the carton, and that means a government employee worked at the plant, and sampled product to see if it met standards. Otherwise, plant employees inspect and sample products to see if they meet PLANT standards, which may or may not be the same as USDA standards. Which is not necessarily a bad thing--the plants have a vested interest in making sure that product is of good quality. The Tyson chicken plants that I worked in down in SW MO and AR were clean, and I have no hesitation at all about eating commercial chicken (except that real chicken tastes better). The egg places were smelly and not quite so clean.

I do dilly beans and dilly okra, both with nice red peppers and garlic cloves. I don't like pickles, but I hear that they are quite tasty. I have also pickled crab apples, but I moved away from the tree, so don't make them anymore.