Eleven hours drive time including gas and rest stops and a 30-minute Superior Chinese Buffet lunch stop somewhere in East Texas. Tacos on a Chinese buffet were new to me.
The crappie are in the freezer.
TTYL
WARNING! If you do not want to know what tasty & delicious fish look like before they are on your plate, do NOT read this post.
We caught about 50+ crappie (pronounced ‘croppy’) this morning. We are taking pounds and pounds of crappie fillets back to Mississippi. There is a fish fry in our future.
It was a beautiful morning, atypical for Texas this time of year. Started off almost chilly. Met up with the guide at the local gas station / country store / grill. Got a breakfast sandwich and more coffee. Made our way down to the 4000 acre lake and commenced to fishing and telling fishing stories.
Over the years, I’ve fished many times with Mr. Big Food’s Dad, Mr. Big Food hisself, and a Guide. The men take great care to not catch anything bigger than I. Don’t know how they do it, but they always manage to celebrate my biggest catch of the day.
The Guide even staged this photo.
Mr. Big Food was pretty proud of the two giant cats he caught. Nasty looking things, IMHO. But sometime in the future, a catfish filet from this lake will land on my plate and it will be delicious.
Until then, it’s happy trails avoiding the interstates on our way back home.
Sho’nuff
I am not going to eat liver mush. I don’t care.
Recipe: Appetizer Sandwich Pies
APPETIZER SANDWICH PIES
Makes 4 pies
1 hard cooked egg, chopped fine
1 Tbsp mayonnaise or Miracle Whip, plus more, for spreading on bread slices
Dash dried dill weed
Dash salt
4 ½ oz can deviled ham
1 tsp prepared horseradish
1 tsp prepared mustard
8 oz package cream cheese, softened
2 Tbsp crumbled blue cheese
2 medium unpared cucumbers, scored
6-7 inch round loaf rye bread, unsliced
EGG FILLING
Combine egg, 1 Tbsp mayonnaise or Miracle Whip, dill weed, and salt.
HAM FILLING
Combine deviled ham, horseradish, and mustard.
CHEESE FILLING
Beat cream cheese and blue cheese until fluffy.
TO ASSEMBLE
Slice cucumbers thin and cut slices in half. Cut 4 ½-inch horizontal slices from center of rye loaf and spread each slice with mayonnaise or Miracle Whip. For each pie, spread Egg Filling evenly in center of each slice. Ring with Ham Filling, then with Cheese Filling. Overlap cucumbers atop. Cut into wedges and serve.
Some guys
There are fish involved.
Recipe: Fredericksburg Potatoes
Origninally published March 2015. These are awesome.
Named after the Texas Hill Country town started by German immigrants
FREDERICKSBURG POTATOES
Potatoes, pared and sliced lengthwise into eighths
Cold water (to soak potatoes)
1 tsp butter or bacon drippings for each potato used (or more fat, if needed), melted
Salt, pepper to taste
A few caraway seeds
Soak potato slices in cold water to cover for 1 hour. Preheat oven to 400o. Drain potatoes and pat dry. Drizzle melted fat over potatoes, turning to coat evenly. Arrange in a single layer on baking sheet (lined with aluminum foil for easy clean up, if desired). Bake until potatoes are browned, turning occasionally. When done, sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste, and a few caraway seeds.
Sidetracked
http://ace.mu.nu/
Looks a lot like the Farm.
Y yes it is
Via Powerline’s The Week in Pictures and its a good one. Stay tuned.
Dear Daughter C & The J-Man
We miss you.
This evening, storms rolled through and I remembered how y’all would appear on the apartment porch, and we on the patio, afterward.
In Local News | 911 Calls
May 27. Possible kidnapping attempted; Lawnmower fire
May 28. Two vehicles reckless driving (a.k.a. drag racing); horse loose
May 29. Child custody dispute
May 30. Gas spill
May 31. Fire safety check
June 1. Possible sick dog in house
June 2. Woods fire
June 3. Animal problem
Those are not all. There were a few MVAs (motor vehicle accidents), some medical calls, a fair number of suspicious persons, and a “pregnant lady with sharp pains.”
We don’t have TV back in the den
I want to go back to the days when the internet didn’t work and you fixed it by pulling the plug and waited for 60 seconds.
What they heard back home
June 6, 1944– Tonight’s communiqué just in from D-Day invasion headquarters summarizes the news. “Allied forces,” it says, “have succeeded in their initial landings in France; and fighting continues.”
Lowell Thomas was the Walter Cronkite of radio. Beginning in 1930, he broadcast twice each evening on CBS radio. It was said that his voice had been heard by more people than any other man’s in history.
So this evening, 75 years ago, this is what Americans– whose husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers were among the “tens of thousands of men”– heard.
And Speaking of Joseph Warren… | I Laughed So Hard I Almost Cried
Originally published June 12, 2013; formatting updated
A bit of background about why I found this article so so so funny… .
Yesterday I had occasion to learn a bit about Joseph Warren, who among other things, helped craft the Suffolk Resolves of 1774 which denounced Parliament after the Boston Tea Party. Paul Revere carried the Suffolk Resolves to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
And, as long time readers of the blog and I guess now just about every civil servant knows, I like data. So this cracked me up.
The larger the score, the more connected a node is in the network– in this case a “Social Networke” of suspected terrorists. Note that Warren is third most connected. Here’s how the author of this really really really funny serious article describes it:
Once again, I remind you that I know nothing of Mr Revere, or his conversations, or his habits or beliefs, his writings (if he has any) or his personal life. All I know is this bit of metadata, based on membership in some organizations. And yet my analytical engine, on the basis of absolutely the most elementary of operations in Social Networke Analysis, seems to have picked him out of our 254 names as being of unusual interest. We do not have to stop here, with just a picture. Now that we have used our simple “Person by Event” table to generate a “Person by Person” matrix, we can do things like calculate centrality scores, or figure out whether there are cliques, or investigate other patterns. For example, we could calculate a betweenness centrality measure for everyone in our matrix, which is roughly the number of “shortest paths” between any two people in our network that pass through the person of interest. It is a way of asking “If I have to get from person a to person z, how likely is it that the quickest way is through person x?”
That’s pulled from near the end of the article. Don’t be put off by talk of tables and matrices. The author, Kieran Healy, does an awesome job of walking even the data-adverse through an analysis of a sample of metadata–nothing more than the names of 254 men, and their membership in one or more of seven organizations, that’s all— to uncover a treasure trove of information that culminates in a most interesting person of unusual interest.
To give you a taste, here’s how the article– really a blog post— begins:
More below
Give me a call sometime!
That we have Facebook to “keep up with friends” is this century’s version of “I read Playboy for the articles.” That’s what telephones are for. If you don’t care enough about the person to give them a call now and then, you don’t really care about “keeping up” with them—you’re interested in their keeping up with you. You want them to see the perfectly manicured version of your life that exists exclusively on the internet. Your ex will seethe when she sees the selfie you snapped with that blonde you met in Tijuana; no one needs to know her boyfriend showed up a few minutes later and sent you scampering out of the bar like a kicked chihuahua. That constant stream of yoga selfies and Gandhi quotes will let all the other moms know how profoundly spiritual you are.
The Imaginative Conservative, June 4, 2019
FYI: My life is not perfectly manicured. The zinnias have aphids. The squash leaves have stink bug eggs. The lawn is infested with chiggers. Stupid deer ate the stems that were this close to flowering profusely. And I don’t yet have the blackeyes planted. No where close to perfectly manicured.
Recipe: Hoppin’ John VII
I kid you not, I had never had Hoppin’ John before. Liked it.
Seriously easy, too. Just go get you some blackeyes and tomatoes from your deep freezer, bacon from the fridge…
Recipe calls for canned peas. We used 1lb. frozen.
HOPPIN’ JOHN VII
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Ingredients
- 4 C tomatoes fresh chopped or stewed (the latter preferably homemade—see recipes in Basics and Canning … sections—or use 2 16-oz cans)
- 1 bell pepper seeded, copped
- 1 small onion chopped
- Salt pepper, to taste
- 1 Tbsp butter
- 2 C cooked rice
- 2 to 3 15- oz cans black-eyed peas heated
Instructions
- Cook together tomatoes, bell pepper, onion, and salt and pepper in butter until tender. To serve, place a mound of rice on each plate, top with peas, then with tomato mixture.
Notes
“Note: A quick and low-cost dish.”—Jane Self, Union County (New Albany), Country Cooking from the Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation (1987)
Recipe: Creative Cooking Spinach with Bacon
If you ever come across Creative Cooking, pick it up and take it home. There is literally nothing in it that’s not absolutely delicious.
The Creative Cooking Course: A Complete Course in the Art of Cooking with 1200 Recipes and 2500 Color Photos. Charlotte Turgeon. Weathervane Books, New York. 1973/75.
CREATIVE COOKING SPINACH WITH BACON
Makes about 4 servings
Ingredients
- 1 ½ to 2 lbs leaf spinach washed, stems removed, cooked covered in a large pan with ¼ C water over medium heat for 10 to 15 minutes or until spinach is tender, turning occasionally with a fork, drained well
- 5 slices bacon cooked until crisp, drained on paper toweling, ½ Tbsp bacon drippings reserved
- 1 Tbsp lemon juice
- ½ tsp salt
- 1 hard-boiled eggs chopped
Instructions
- Place cooked drained spinach in a serving dish and crumble bacon over top. Add bacon drippings, lemon juice, and salt, and toss with 2 forks until mixed. Sprinkle top with chopped egg
Marica Cooks a Mishmash
Most weeks, I’m responsible for cooking one night. I failed to take this responsibility seriously last weekend when Mr. Big Food was working out the menu for this week. I knew I wanted a veggie plate, and I did have a hankering for spinach so picked some up when we did the shopping. Beyond that, baked sweet potatoes? Maybe? But of course yesterday, Marica cooks Monday, I did not feel like going to get sweet potatoes. Didn’t feel much like cooking, either.
But we had potatoes– and who doesn’t love potatoes fried up with fresh rosemary?– and spinach, so that’s a start. And then the lights came on! There were still two packages of homegrown black eyed peas in the freezer. Lots of stewed tomatoes, too. Do a couple of quick searches of The Big Food Manual and Survivalist Flourishing Guide and there you have it.
Mr. Big Food volunteered to make the Hoppin’ John VII while I finished the other two dishes.
It was delicious.
I thought I’d seen it all.
But I was wrong.
Aphids on zinnias in a glass on a table in the house.
And not only that!
Lady bug nymphs eating aphids on zinnias in a glass on a table in the house.
You get what you deserve
I like technology just as much as the next country mouse but if you turn your life over to something over which you– you— do not have ultimate control, you deserve working up a sweat walking up the steps in your non-air conditioned apartment to physically check on your spawn.
“It’s like living in a cave.”
That sums up how impressed Mr. Big Food is with my superior abilities to block the sun from shining into the house in the morning when it’s 85°F at 10am, and in the late afternoon when the heat index is 100°. A cool 76° inside and the A/C has hardly been running.
(It’s been a while since I’ve stepped into a cave but if this joint is a cave, it’s a darned nice one despite all of the crappy old stuff.)
I poked fun the other day of an article at Popular Science titled, “Cool your Home without Air Conditioning,” which wasn’t so much about cooling your home as it was about preventing it from heating up too much in the dead of summer. The ideas were mostly fine but dude got a lot of the science wrong.
Blah blah blah. Yes I am just sitting here cooling off having just come in from doing garden chores.
Up next, laundry. Which reminds me! Miss M and I had an interesting text conversation about ironing the other day.
It is drudge work Monday, if you’ve forgotten.