Though this is really a post about not drinking bleach or taking medicine intended for livestock, both of them point to the pitiful state of American education. This headline is from CNN today.
New mother who was weary of vaccine while pregnant dies of covid before holding newborn.
CNN
Don’t drink bleach, take your dogs heartworm medicine, or your cow’s de-wormer, and for god’s sake, get a dictionary, CNN. Also try looking at it.
Before the Swallowtails Eat All the Parsley
This is a close copy of the Grillade recipe in The Picayune’s Creole Cookbook. As I cannot follow any instructions, I added one ingredient.
Ingredients
One cube Steak, cut into small pieces
Bacon Fat
1/2 Onion, Diced
1 clove Garlic
1 tablespoon Flour
2 medium Tomatoes, milled
Chicken Stock
Salt and Pepper
Chopped Parsley
To start, cook the onions in the bacon fat. Add the garlic, and cook for a few seconds. The addition of the flour makes the roux–brown it properly. Add the steak, and cook for about a minute. Finally add the tomatoes and chicken stock for something of a creole sauce. The parsley is garnish.
We use LA rice to go with this, and we just bought a basket of perfectly fresh pink eye purple hull peas. What we didn’t eat went into the frizzer for the winter. We are the ants in the Ant and Grasshopper fable, as we also buy twenty pounds of rice at a time. We just about need a bigger frizzer.
Karma is being unkind to the unvaccinated, and rightly so, but gave us a truck load of Eastern Red Cedar lumber. Actually, it was my in-laws, who we have practically buried with free eggs. This tree grew on the same property where Melanie Jane grew up.
I’ve never made something this large from slab lumber, so I made sure it would not fall apart–the stretcher is through tenoned and held together with a tusk wedge.
I still have to finish the ends of the slab. The other leg on the bench is full of heavy-osity.
The finish is super blonde shellac, though I think super blonde is Melanie’s nickname at her office. ESPN has a similar looking coffee table made of red cedar in their main studio, but they painted the live edge with gold glitter paint. There really is no accounting for taste.
After this piece of Hop Hornbeam log rolled around on the floor of my shop for a good couple of years, I had had enough. Then we began buying these French made Laguiole utensils, and the answer appeared. Make a knife block out of it.
A few vertical cuts with the miter saw, and some walnut spacers, and the job was done. I had just bought a Swiss-designed Bessey web clamp, and it will hold practically any shaped object tight while the glue dries. The Swiss, they are so clever.
Hop Hornbeam grows on our property, and this is from one specimen that expired during a two month drought. It’s incredibly strong and heavy as a sea anchor, so this is not likely to tip over. Those are steak knives and cheese knives, and one sliced my finger open while making this. That’ll learn me.
Twice a week I am dispatched into a land that is riddled with followers of the VLF–the Virus Liberation Front. Mask-less marauders are legion, but I am an expert at evasion, and they rarely come within ten feet of me. If one tries to, I give them the dreaded contemptuous stare of disapproval.
Let’s have a celebration, a classic German dish, to honor the Fauci ouchie shots. I’ll be ready for the booster in a few months. Schnitzel time!
Ingredients
Two Turkey breast cutlets
1/2 cup of bread crumbs
1 Egg
Pork fat and olive oil, for frying
Schnitzel-izing the Turkey breast is actually the middle thing you want to do. Cook these first.
The tater is peeled and sliced with a mandolin–not the musical kind. I have to have some pork fat to cook mine in. As with all taters, don’t forget the salt. This is the base layer the schnitzel rests on.
The last stage is to fry two eggs for the top layer, and these are from our birds. I always fry eggs in olive oil, though that is looked down upon by some experts. Fine, experts, just don’t come to our house looking for some eggs. Make them as runny as you like as well.
The VLF reminds me of an actual group, the ALF, or Animal Liberation Front. I can only look at their website a couple of times a year, because I am still too young to die from a terminal fit of laughing. ALF is a group of militant Vegans, whose goal is to liberate all the livestock on Earth. Their home page formally featured an attractive young woman wearing a Ninja suit, holding a pink nosed bunny that she had no doubt liberated from some tyrant’s rabbit hutch.
They are also the topic of a magnificent short story, “Carnal Knowledge,” where a group of them attempt to liberate an entire farm full of Turkeys. The narrator, who is something of a dipstick, gets trampled by an whole building of gobblers, and finds himself face down in a pile of Turkey shit. Naturally, all the liberated Turkeys end up being run over by a semi.
Irony rules. Let’s just hope the VLF don’t get their hands on a vial of Smallpox virus.
Sjobergs of Sweden makes literally thousands of benches and go alongs every year. This one is headed for its forth decade soon, and still has many years left in it. Professional woodworkers prefer mortise and tenoned benches the size of a Buick or a beached whale, but this has had at least four different homes, and it was easily moved. Was–it is now bolted to concrete in four places by lag bolts.
This is a realistic picture of the condition my bench stays in, as I am always making something. It would probably cause laughter from the nine year olds in Sweden, which is when they begin studying sloyd (sljöd in Swedish), which is the Swedish word for crafts. This study continues until after the child is fifteen.
Here’s the kind of thing that Swedish public education gives to nine year olds.
That’s a Sloyd knife, in this case a quality Swedish knife made of laminated steel. Instilling quality and character into students is what Sloyd is all about. Sloyd is also a good substitute for physical education, as all I learned in PE was how to become a tolerable free throw shooter.
Alas, the US hierarchy chose to follow “the Russian system,” which is vocational training. The current system here is not to build character and intelligence, but to churn out workers to make some greenback dollars for somebody. As an anecdote, I was the chair of the English department at a “Liberal Arts” University, where the school’s VP told me that English was a department that was a “service” department, there to help departments like the nursing school. So much for building character. My bench has more character than that.
I really should stop using it as a place to mix my various home made paints. If you look close enough, you can see gold glitter paint, that I spilled while mixing it. That’s too much character.
A good Crayfish, like an honest man, can be hard to find. We had some decent ones from Spain, and then I was wandering through a big box store trying to find some edible seafood, and I saw a big bag of crayfish in the freezer section, festooned with a giant gold fleur-de-lis, so I thought, here are some real Louisiana crayfish. I picked up a bag, and the back had printed on it, “Product of China.” Puke. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been there.
I finally found good pre-cooked crayfish from LA in our southern based supermarket chain. Here’s my favorite recipe.
Ingredients
12+ Crayfish Tails, shelled and de-veined
1 Tablespoon Butter
1 Tablespoon Flour
The last two are for the roux. This needs a blonde, aka un-browned, roux, so don’t cook it too long. Then add the following.
1/2 chopped Onion
1/2 chopped sweet Pepper
Saute these together. If it’s summer, add–
2 fresh Tomatoes (I mill mine)
Chicken Stock
Salt and Pepper
Cook these until they are right tasty. Then add the no longer secret ingredients
Garlic Paste
Hot Sauce (I like Tabasco Cayenne and Garlic here)
Because the tails are already cooked, they only need to be re-heated. This dish takes about as much time as it does to make the rice to go with. Naturally, we use Louisiana rice. About six mudbugs per person is a decent serving. Now if only Santa Clause can bring the Saints a spot in the Super Bowl.
Our seventies vintage Mirro-Matic has a couple of new parts, and pressure canning has gone into overdrive–it will process 16 pints at one time. Our local supermarket, not to mention the entire tomato farming regions of Italy, could go bankrupt.
Speaking of Italy, these pickled peppers are a take on a classic Italian condiment. Their’s is preserved in olive oil, but it’s pickle country here. This will make two half pints.
Ingredients
8 sweet Peppers
1 clove Garlic (I used Elephant Garlic)
A few Capers, chopped
White Wine Vinegar
Sugar
A wine glass of Water
Salt (not much)
Olive Oil
Cook the peppers and garlic in olive oil, just until they are soft. Dissolve the sugar in vinegar and water–the sweetness is up to you. Combine all with the capers, and pressure can, or just use an interminable hot water bath. Or find a Mirro-matic at a flea market.
My mother almost burned down our house, because she let a pressure cooker boil completely dry, and the top blew off of it. No one was harmed, but we thought our parakeet was a goner. A little fresh air, and he was chirping like crazy again. Don’t let that happen to your Budgie.
The takeover continues, despite constitutional promises that the Kitchen cannot over rule the entire House. In this case it is even a kitchen cabinet in the dining room, though it was not confirmed by the Senate–and it’s from Vietnam.
We were sold on this Parawood cabinet when we read that it was made from old farmed rubber trees from defunct rubber plantations. Apparently rubber trees only produce latex for seventy some odd years, at which point they are cut down and made into some quality lumber. in short, this wood supply will last as long as the rubber meets the road somewhere.
We needed the storage space.
This also brought to mind one of my favorite students, who convinced me that the Vietnam war was really about control of the world rubber supply, and all the patriotic balloon about communism was just a bunch of hoya. How did he know? He volunteered for three tours of duty in ‘Nam as a medic for the Green Berets.
He was on paid leave from the Chicago Fire Department, and the union was paying his tuition. He was a conspicuous thirty years older than any of the students at UI, and had a wicked sense of humor. One male student asked him the following:
Student: Why did you volunteer for that many tours in Vietnam?
Beret: Because it was better than Chicago.
That shut the kid up. In a later class another one really stepped in it. He asked the following:
Student: Did you learn anything in Vietnam?
Beret: Yea, I learned not to shoot into Michelin’s rubber plantations.
As a theorist that just about all imperialist wars are fought over control of commodities, I had to get in on this conversation.
Me: Explain that.
Beret: We Green Berets could do almost anything we wanted. Burn villages, shoot civilians, and kill women and children. But, one shot into a Michelin rubber plantation, and your ass sat in the brig forever. And you think the Viet Cong didn’t know that?
That really got me thinking. The Greek empire, especially Athens, controlled the wheat supply. The Romans controlled wine, olive oil, and the famous fish sauce. We are aiming for an empire of canned goods.
Ok, not much of a start on an empire. The only place we’ve invaded has been the farmer’s market.
The junk pile groweth. The latest addition is a dishwasher tub, another ingenious idea from Melanie Jane-I guess she wasn’t a Phi Beta Kappa (farm girl) for no reason. Our twenty year old dishwasher blew a gasket, and the gasket wasn’t worth replacing. She said–put the main plastic part into the chicken’s junk yard. Mission Accomplished, and no chickens were harmed.
The birds like their junkyard as much as the digital sheep in the phenomenal British show Shaun the Sheep. Inventory reveals one mailbox, where the vast majority of our eggs come from, a red wheelbarrow, two tires, and now the dishwasher.
The bottom of the washer is leftover plywood, and the front is leftover 2×4. Some pine shavings and it’s done. Broody Bird, a Barred Rock, was the first in there. The ISA Browns like the dirt under there. I expect eggs in the dishwasher in the next week or so.
Shirley the Sheep, our favorite character from Shaun the Sheep, would be proud.
because facts really should be sacred
Or not, depending on my mood
I am just a girl who loves reading and talking about books
because I've got to tell someone.
a little lunch, a little wine, a LOT of talking!
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Country Living in the Southern Appalachians, USA--A little of this, a lot of that
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