The Serpent in the Garden

Jack had a very scary encounter with a snake last night. Scary because this snake was not small; it was not a harmless garter snake; and it was not hiding quietly in the green beans.

Last night after dinner, A. and Jack went outside to continue work on a stone wall A. is building adjoining the patio. Jack ran out first onto the patio and stepped right over a rattlesnake. On the patio. Eight feet from the door. Directly in the path we always take to go into the back pasture.

Holy shit.

The snake was probably there because the sky had clouded over and it was seeking the warmth of the stones that had absorbed the sun's heat. It didn't rattle or, thank God, strike as Jack ran over it, though it did coil up.

A. was right behind Jack, saw the snake just as Jack ran over it, and yelled out that there was a rattlesnake and GET AWAY. Jack veered right off into the driveway and ran a safe distance away. The snake had still not moved.

It was a pretty big rattlesnake--about two feet long--so A., rather than use a hoe or a shovel or anything that required him to get within a handle's length of the snake, got his gun and shot it in the head.

All of the other children of course joined in at this point in the proceedings to observe the snake and hear all the details of the encounter. Charlie, being Charlie, requested the rattle. A. got out the hatchet to cut off the rattle, but took the precaution first of cleanly cutting off the head and throwing it over the fence.

And still, five minutes after its head was blown off, when A. went to cut off the rattle, the snake's body tried to strike A. WITHOUT ITS HEAD.

Freakiest thing ever.

Anyway.

Charlie got his rattle, no one got a snake bite, and Jack's guardian angel should get a promotion and a pay raise.

The end, and three cheers for a happy ending.

Friday Food: Early Morning Cookery

Friday

Short version: Beefy rice taco skillet, corn on the cob

Long version: We tagged along with A. when he went to a city to pick up a big copy job for work. This was the most exciting part of the trip for the children:

Italian sodas in the historic plaza, under the melancholy gaze of Nuestra Senora de los Dolores (Our Lady of Sorrows.) No sorrow from the kids about the Italian sodas. I hadn't had one in years, but they're just as good as I remembered.

We didn't get home until just after 6 p.m. with many groceries to be unloaded from the van and put away. I knew we were going to be gone until dinnertime, so in the morning I cut some chunks off a big sirloin roast I had taken out of the freezer for A. to make jerky, simmered the chunks with onion, garlic, tomato juice, cumin, and chili powder until they were tender, then put that in the refrigerator.

When I got home, I reheated the meat, added the rice left over from the night before, stirred in some grated cheddar cheese, and served it up.

This is the time of year that the roadside stand goes up in this city with produce from Colorado. I got peaches, corn on the cob, and a watermelon (with seeds, of course). The corn I shucked and wrapped in a wet towel to microwave it. This is a good trick to know when you don't have time to boil a big pot of water. Or don't want to heat your kitchen by boiling a big pot of water. The children were thrilled to have corn on the cob.

Saturday

Short version: Pulled pork sandwiches, cucumbers with vinegar and salt, watermelon

Long version: As is my habit these days, I cooked the pork in the morning, pulled it apart, and stuck it in the refrigerator to re-heat at dinnertime, with some barbecue sauce. Cubby was very happy. He tells me that pulled pork sandwiches are his favorite kind of sandwich. They are awfully good.

This was the watermelon we got at the roadside stand in the city, and it was the best watermelon we've had so far this summer.

Sunday

Short version: Leftover pulled pork sandwiches, carrot sticks, scrambled eggs with feta and chives, sauteed bell peppers and onions, peaches and cream

Long version: The children ate the sandwiches and carrot sticks, A. and I ate eggs and peppers and onions, and everyone except Jack ate the peaches and cream. He lost his dessert because of an unfortunate incident with a can of spray paint he was using as a weapon against his brothers. Luckily, he didn't actually manage to hit anyone, but he still had to punished.

The peaches, like the watermelon, were exceptionally good. Of course, pretty much all fruit is improved by peeling it and adding sugar and cream. But even completely unadorned, as I ate mine, the peaches were sweet and delicious. Way to go, Colorado.

Monday

Short version: Meatballs in marinara sauce, pasta, sauteed green beans

Long version: I made the meatballs and sauce in the morning (of course), but I only used a partial can of opened tomatoes in the refrigerator to make the sauce, so there was only enough for the meatballs.

The kids are the only ones eating the pasta, anyway and they're just as happy to have it with just butter, garlic powder, pepper, and Parmesan cheese, so it all worked out.

When I went out to pick the green beans, I was startled by the re-appearance of the resident green bean snake, who I hadn't seen in a few days and was hoping had re-located. I mean, I'm pretty sure it's a harmless snake, but even non-venomous snakes can bite. I keep a very wary eye on it and don't pick anything in its vicinity.

If this is some kind of viper rather than a garter snake, someone please tell me.

Tuesday

Short version: Flank steak, mashed potatoes, sauteed mushrooms and onions, alliterative vegetables

Long version: Hey look, a whole meal that I did not make in the morning! Which is why my kitchen was 85 degrees when we sat down to eat.

Anyway.

The children ate the two ears of corn I still had left--and every single child except Poppy complained that they were only getting half an ear--A. ate some cucumber, and I ate some fried cabbage. The vegetable letter of the day was apparently "c."

Wednesday

Short version: T-bone steaks, garlic bread, roasted bell pepper/onion/green beans, roasted garlic

Long version: A storm conveniently blew in just as I was cranking up the oven to cook the bread and vegetables, blessedly lowering the temperature in the house by several degrees. Hooray.

Thursday

Short version: Beef goulash with potatoes and carrots

Long version: Can you guess when I made this long-cooking meal? Lemme give you a hint: starts with an "a," ends with an "m," and has two periods.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

Poppy and the Chickens

Like most toddlers, Poppy is a big fan of routines. Particularly if it's a routine that she knows well enough to dictate the steps. In her case lately, that means taking care of the chickens in the morning.

She wakes up before the sun, and before the chickens. But as soon as the sun starts to come up--around 6 a.m. these days--I tell her it's time to go let the chickens out and she heads straight to the door to put on her pink boots.* Then she goes to the refrigerator to get the container of chicken scraps and waits at the door until I open it for her.

After getting down the steps and into the enclosed porch, she leads the way to the shop, wherein lives the commercial chicken food. Once there, I fill the container of food for her, and we switch containers; she carries the commercial food and I carry the scraps.

I would rather it was the other way around, because the container of scraps has a lid on it and is therefore much less likely to spill all over if she falls over a rock or into a hole or whatever.

But she wants that open container of food, and she will have it, by God.

No one's telling THIS girl what she can and can't carry.

To be fair, in the two weeks or so that we've been doing this, she's only tripped and spilled the food once, which is pretty good for a kid who's not even two yet.

Anyway.

Once we get across the back pasture to the chicken coop, I open the outer door to the pen, and we both dump our food into the chickens' pan.

At which point she always announces, "Dump!" with great satisfaction as she suits the the action to the word.

Then she exits the pen and I open the door to the actual coop for the chicken rush.

Best to stay out of the way of those birds when they're headed for food**.

As soon as the chickens are released and eating, she heads back to the shop, puts the container back in the bucket of commercial food, takes the empty scrap container from me, carries it inside to the kitchen, and puts it back on the counter, thus completing another successful morning of chicken care.

Pretty soon I bet I can just send her out on her own to do it. 

* Which, incidentally, she can do all by herself. As the parent of any small child can tell you, this is pretty much the Holy Grail of children's shoes.

** Unfortunately, the gray chicken formerly known as Lucy appears to be more of a Lucius and will probably not be with us for long, because I have no interest in having two roosters.

Friday Food: The Beat Goes On

Friday

Short version: Meatballs with marinara and cheese, fried garlic bread, raw green beans with ranch dip

Long version: The continuing theme of this late summer weather is trying to do as much cooking as possible in the morning while it's cool. My kitchen gets pretty hot in the afternoons, and firing up the stove or oven for any extended period when it's already 84 degrees in that room isn't appealing.

So. I made the meatballs in the morning, forming them and browning them under the broiler. Then I made the marinara and put the meatballs in it, shoving the whole skillet into the refrigerator to await reheating at dinnertime. When I reheated it, I also added some asadero cheese on top. Asadero is the cheese we use in place of mozzarella. I can't tell a difference. And given that this particular cheese is made in Wisconsin, there might not be a difference other than the packaging.

Instead of heating the oven again to make the garlic bread, I instead just fried it in butter in a skillet I already had on the stovetop from making lunch. That was a popular move.

Saturday

Short version: Potatoes with bacon and cheese, raw broccoli with ranch dip

Long version: We were at the Cowboy Camp Meeting in the afternoon and didn't get home until almost 6 p.m. They were serving dinner there, but not until 7 p.m. this year, so we left after the foot races and came home for dinner.

I had already cooked some potato chunks before we left. When we got home I cooked a bunch of diced bacon, then added some diced onion, the potatoes, and grated cheddar. Cubby was thrilled. He came in the kitchen while I was cooking and said, "I really need some real food."

The multiple bags of chips, bottles of Gatorade, and sno cones the children consumed at the camp meeting definitely do not fit that definition.

The onions I used in the potatoes were from the bag I had diced and frozen before we left for Blackrock. I had like four onions that I needed to do something with--can you imagine the stench if I had just left them in the cabinet for a whole month? ewwww--and I read online that you can dice them and freeze them. So I did. They come right apart right out of the bag, so it's easy to grab just a little bit at a time, and they are convenient to have, but I can smell them even through the heavy freezer bag I put them in. I had to wrap another plastic bag around them so I can store them in the freezer without contaminating the frozen fruit or butter or whatever else that's in there.

Sunday

Short version: A puppy-excursion picnic

Long version: At 3:30 p.m., A. said he was going to look at some puppies and he wanted everyone to come. The puppies were at least an hour's drive away, I did an instant dinnertime calculation and decided I'd better throw some stuff into a cooler for a dinner picnic. So in five minutes I put together all the food we had suitable for travel. That is, cheese, two random hardboiled eggs, beef jerky, bread and butter, cherries, and apples.

This was a good call, because it was after 5 p.m. when we left the puppy house. Luckily, there was a designated picnic spot just about five miles from there, which is almost miraculous, given the scarcity of such places in rural areas like the one we were in.

Picnicking children. And Adventure Van, waiting patiently to bring us home.

Monday

Short version: Pork chops with marinara sauce and asadero cheese, pasta with pesto, cucumbers, apricot cobbler with vanilla ice cream

Long version: This was the meal I was planning to make Sunday before I was sidetracked by puppies. Monday was a celebratory day anyway, as it was the first day of school for Cubby and Charlie. Pasta with pesto is one of their favorites; any meat cooked with cheese is A.'s favorite, and everyone likes ice cream.

With only the two smaller children home, I was able to let them help me make the pesto without too much chaos.

Pulling leaves off stems is the perfect task for tiny hands.

I had a vague memory of a similar photo I took of Cubby and Charlie doing the same thing for me at about the same ages, and here it is:

Find what works and stick with it, I say.

I made the cobbler because we got a box of about thirty pounds of apricots from Miss Amelia's daughter. Most of it I made into jam.

Yum.

But I thought I should use some of them for a special dessert. I made the topping with coconut flour, so everyone could eat it. It was okay. I don't really like coconut flour that much, but A. and Cubby loved it. And the apricots with the ice cream was delicious.

Tuesday

Short version: Tuna patties, fresh bread and butter, roasted sweet potatoes/bell peppers/onion, sauteed green beans

Long version: The green beans are finally producing enough that I can pick beans every morning. Not without trepidation, however. That damp, luxuriant foliage is a magnet for all kinds of insects and the things that feed on them. There are numerous spiders that spin their webs right across the foliage, along with a small snake that hangs out right at the south end of the row (thankfully a harmless garter snake), and a lot of bees that love the squash flowers beneath the bean plants. 

I spend a lot of time poking cautiously in the foliage before reaching my hand in to pick beans. This is why I don't have the children doing the harvesting for me.

Wednesday

Short version: Beef and potatoes, cucumbers with vinegar and salt

Long version: There was a big rump roast in the freezer that kept getting in my way when I was trying to dig other things out, so I finally just took it out and cooked it. I put it in the oven early in the morning, took it out around noon, chunked it up, and saved the fat.

I also boiled some potato chunks. We had to be at church at 5 p.m., so when we got home at 5:50 p.m., all I had to do was re-heat the meat and potatoes in the tallow, along with garlic powder, paprika, and thyme.

Thursday

Short version: Ribeye and T-bone steaks, rice, sauteed green beans

Long version: Nah.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

Coming Soon To a Family Near Nobody

Many of you guessed, but here's the photographic answer.

In two weeks, we will have two puppies. Boom.

Why two? Why not? I have four kids, which is more than the average. Might as well have more dogs than the average, too.

These are a mix of border collie, blue lacy cur, and Australian shepherd, all working dogs. Their parents are cattle dogs, and they were born on a ranch about an hour from us. 

We were only going to get one, but when we went to look at the puppies, the people had one with a non-functioning eye that they couldn't really sell as a working dog, but wanted to give to a family as a pet. The puppy was so quiet and sweet that I told A. we might as well have two, so we don't have a lone dog getting bored and lonely when we're gone for one of our day-long shopping trips or whatever.

They're still only six weeks old, and puppies aren't typically weaned until eight weeks, so in a couple of weeks they'll get de-wormed and get all their shots, and then they'll be ready to come home with us.

We're all excited. Except maybe the chickens, but they don't know what's coming.

Teaser

Something exciting is going to happen very soon here. Two somethings, actually.

Here's a hint: We're hoping they'll be a boy's (and girl's) best friends, too.

Any guesses?

(I'll post a photo tomorrow that will make it all very clear.)

Grossing Out the Grossest

As the mother of three boys, I spend more time than I would like saying, "Stop that. That's gross." They like to talk about disgusting things, do disgusting things, and show me disgusting things. (No, I do not want to see the dead shrew in the garden, thank you so much, son.)

I got a little bit of revenge with Cubby yesterday, though.

When I was gathering trash in the morning in preparation for A.'s dump run, I moved the bag of trash and the trash can in the enclosed porch to find a few dozen maggots squirming around underneath them.

Yuck.

As I really didn't want those maggots becoming yet more flies that inevitably end up in my house, I swept them up and put them in a bucket so I could drown them in water. But then I remembered the chickens. Chickens LOVE maggots. So instead of drowning the loathsome things, I called Cubby over and asked him to take the bucket of maggots to the chickens.

He looked in the bucket, made a face, and stuck a stick through the handle of the bucket, as if the thought of touching the bucket the maggots were in was just too much for him.

So of course, I had to elaborate on how delicious those maggots were for the chickens; how the chickens have never had such a delectable treat; how chickens love nothing better than live maggots.

"MOM, STOP," said Cubby. "That's gross!"

HAHA. I WIN.