sparrowgrass

Spearmint Cloves Turnips Green olives Pickled anything, especially pickled pigs feet--sour AND gluey I love brussel sprouts. And lima beans.

Forget all this semantics stuff--I just want to know who in the heck would put sweet corn on pizza?

The June Martha Stewart Living mag (so sue me, I read Martha ) has a beautiful looking Hummingbird Cake recipe. The cake has banana, coconut, walnuts and pineapple in it, and it is decorated with thin slices of dried pineapple. The pineapple slices look like coreopsis flowers.

I think I am not charging enough for my eggs. You can have all you want for $1 a dozen, but I don't deliver. Mine are free range, but I don't guess they could be certified organic. I buy my feed from the feed store, and I feed all my table scraps to the little cannibals and I am sure that somewhere in there, there must be some pesticides They are fertile too, but I don't think that makes any difference unless you want to raise some chicks. Or balut.

I don't care whether y'all like me or not, grits is gross. I feel the same way about oatmeal. Let me see what else we could have for dinner--wilted lettuce salad, cabbage fried with bacon, country ham, Mississippi mud cake. . . . I do think it's time for you to get on I-55, maggie. I'll leave the light on for you, it's a 10 hour drive from Warrenville.

Round-up will work (glyphosphate). If you prefer a more organic method, solarize your space. Get enough CLEAR plastic to cover the area. Water well, stake down the plastic. The heat of the sun will kill the grass, probably rather quickly in Houston. I would think a week would do it. The only problem I see is that it is awfully late to be starting a garden this year in Houston, but I am not a way-South gardener, so I would talk to locals/extension office about what to plant. You may want to wait and do a fall garden, which will give you lots of time to get rid of the grass.

I had peas for dinner tonight, picked them out of the garden, shelled them and ate them all in about 15 minutes and I know that minutes count with peas. Not quite as critical with sweet corn and asparagus--I will give ya an hour between picking and eating for those. (The act of canning peas should be a felony punishable by death.)

maggie, stay away from grits--grits is nasty. The only food that doubles as mortar. And I don't care if you put cheese or garlic or old overshoes in grits, grits has no redeeming social value. However, you are certainly welcome to come down here for fried okra and catfish, green beans with bacon, and gooey butter cake (a St Louis specialty).

I don't believe your serrano seeds would have a chance, Hopleaf. Look around, though, you could still plant some plants if you could find them. I ate my first new potatoes last night. Yum.

Hopleaf, pan fry some pork chops/steaks. When they are done, take them out of the pan, and dump the hominy into the pan drippings and warm it up. Yum. Posole is good too. I sometimes put hominy in my beef veggie soup. I love hominy.

And, mags, for me it was Peeps, not Orange Crush. I distinctly remember some great aunt giving me a little yellow Peep. I remember the sugar crunch and the soft sweetness, and thought that I had never tasted anything so wonderful. I was probably all of 2 years old.

I picked my first lettuce yesterday, and new potatoes will be on the menu as soon as the garden dries out a bit. I planted big pots of nasturiums. I stuck 4 quarter inch dowels, about 18 inches long, in each pot, to keep the cat from sleeping on the little plants. I have been picking lots of asparagus in the neighbor's field, but the poison ivy is getting alarmingly high around the plants, so I am about to give up on that. I love asparagus, but poison ivy is too big a risk. And I have the feeling that chiggers will be coming out soon too. Beans are coming up, but no sign of the sweet corn yet. Peppers and tomatoes are thriving, even with the hailstorm the other evening. Irises, salvia, roses, yarrow, daisies, and coreopsis are blooming, and the peonies are all face down in the grass. I picked all of the least smashed blooms, and have vases full of peonies in every room, and on my desk at work. Why does it always have to rain so hard when the peonies are blooming?

Coffee. A sip of beer was ok, but coffee would stunt your growth. Actually, come to think of it, we probably weren't allowed coffee because, with 4 kids under the age of 8, more energy was the last thing my mom wanted us to have.

Maggie, you're weird. I like that in a person.

Nope, I don't think so. The only resemblance they had to asparagus was the color.

I tried fiddleheads once, and was disappointed, probably because the wild food book I was using billed them as a "substitute for asparagus." We all know there is no substitute for asparagus. Day lily buds, on the other hand, are yummy. And no fussy prep work either. Just go out along a country road, find a big stand of those orange day lilies (my mom calls them outhouse lilies, cause that is where they grew on the farm) and break the buds off. Steam, then a little butter and salt and pepper.

I had a non-cooking sweetie who decided to surprise me by "jazzing up" a frozen pizza. He took a whole head of garlic, separated the cloves, chopped them and put them all on the pizza. No peeling involved.

I found a real scary bag of potatoes under the sink, and rather than toss them, I tilled a row in the garden and planted them. That makes about 30 pounds of potatoes I have planted so far--red, white, yellow and blue. While I had the tiller out, I cultivated around the stuff I planted a month ago. Lettuce will be ready in a week, the other taters are up, and the peas look nice. Another sign of spring--one of the 4-H projects I do at work is an embryology program. I take eggs and incubators to the schools (and the nursing home, this time), and I have been picking up chicks and incubators all week. 52 chicks so far--so sweet. And multicultural--black, brown, red, yellow, white.

Long, long ago, when the Evil One was working as lowly GS-5, we lived up on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Poor as church mice we were, and all we could afford to eat were razor clams we dug ourselves, fresh wild salmon that the guys at the hatchery brought up to the house, smoked salmon that the our Indian neighbors made in smokehouses in their back yards, and Dungeness crabs, purchased at the local grocery store, already steamed, for $1.00 each. Oh, to be poor again.

Me, too, sugar, but he didn't share his food. (Or much of anything else, come to thing of it.)

Girlfriend, that is the least of the reasons that he is an ex.

The Evil One (the ex-husband) used to insist that I order the same meal that he did whenever we went out. Can you say "control freak", boys and girls?

Dear Lamb, I lost my dad in December, and I would love to have dinner with him again. It has to be an all-you-can-eat place, and we HAVE to be there by 5. The man was serious about eating. And always skinny as a rail til he got sick and couldn't run around any more. (I didn't inherit that gene. ) He would pick up the check for both of us--all $12 or so--nuttin fancy for him. Before I read your message, Lamb, my choice was going to be Sacajawea. How 'bout that kid? All of 17, gives birth on the trail, hikes halfway across the continent and back with a whole flock of men.

Are there any forums on gardening that are as interesting to read as this food forum is?