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Two different people said we should go out and buy another air mattress:  The very next day, after spending a miserable night on the ground, we rode to Rogersville.  While we were there, we did spend $30 on a new air mattress.  I took the money out of our Dave Ramsey clothing envelope.  Hey, you could wear a mattress if you had to!  Even counting that expense, we still saved lots of money by camping and not eating out.  


Lindi had this to say:  "Sandwiches and cold cereal!  My favorite part of camping was my Coleman stove or cooking over a campfire.  That's the only time I liked hot dogs and s'mores.  Long time ago."
Cliff and I had a great laugh at this one.  Long time ago indeed!  Lindie, we took the Coleman stove, and we used it to make coffee.  I also took a skillet and a pan in case I wanted to cook.  However, I want you to imagine riding a motorcycle for five or six hours at age 67.  A lot of the allure of riding a motorcycle is feeling the wind in your face, but fighting that wind in your face wears you out after several hours.  Now imagine your tired self getting off the motorcycle, putting up a tent, and pumping a little plastic bellows for fifteen minutes to blow up an air mattress.  Honey, if you feel like cooking supper after that, you are a better woman than I.  Then after all this, imagine living in a 67-year-old body, sleeping on rocks all night, and getting very little sleep.  Would you seriously want to cook something that would dirty up a pan that you are going to have to wash?  Seriously?  I was doing well to make coffee, and the only reason I got that done was my addiction to caffeine.  The second morning there we found out Randall makes coffee in the office every morning before 6 A.M., and I didn't bother making my own.  We left an extra $5 when we settled up, in gratitude for the coffee, clean rest room, and shower.     


We intend to lighten our load next time.  I'm taking fewer groceries that need to be cooked, since I wound up cooking nothing, not even the can of Campbell's tomato soup.  We'd also like a one-burner Coleman stove.  The two-burner one we have is pretty heavy and takes up precious room.  Even with a trailer, by the time you pack sleeping bags and luggage and a tent, and leather coats and chaps, it gets pretty crowded.  We love to stay at Hub resort because, for one thing, bikers look out for one another.  Also, if torrential rains came and we wanted to abandon the tent, we could quickly rent a motel room for $55 plus tax.   


There was one thing that helped me make it through part of my miserable, sleepless night:  A group of BMW bikers from Wisconsin sat around a campfire just a few yards from our tent and talked.  I couldn't make out much of their conversation, just bits and pieces.... just enough to keep me tuned to what they were saying and get my mind off my troubles.  I was fairly sure they were from Wisconsin, judging by their accent.  Then I'd hear phrases like "when I worked up in Minnesota" or "when we were fishing in Canada", and I was positive Wisconsin was home to them.  I verified this the next morning by looking at their license plates.  
The group was made up of about ten guys.  They were drinking beer and passing around a bottle of moonshine.  Every once in a while I'd hear somebody say, "Here, take a pull."  And they'd start talking about their 'shine again.  
There was, of course, some colorful language.  What really cracked me up was when a couple of them came fairly close to our tent to take a leak (I could hear the splashing).  I made out their conversation quite well, but what cracked me up was the loudest guy back at the campfire (isn't there always one loudmouth in every group?) called out, "What are you guys doin', comparing?"  
And then, "Hey, are you guys hookin' up, or what?"  
By the way, we were in a dry county.  But then, who's going to bother people on private property?  
Personally, I think the whole idea of a dry county is ridiculous.  Just think how much money they could be making from liquor tax.  Surely they don't think they are stopping anybody from drinking?  

Merry Christmas

I had the laziest day imaginable yesterday.  I broke down and made brown sugar fudge because it just isn't Christmas without it.  One bite of brown sugar fudge and I'm a kid again.  I also made cheese ball to take to my daughter's today, and made corn bread and beans for dinner.  That's the extent of my labors!  
I settled into my easy chair in the afternoon and watched an excellent tear-jerker of a movie, Life as a House.  I won't be soon forgetting that one.  
I haven't been able to watch "It's a Wonderful Life" and "The Christmas Story" on our DVD player because in our haste to send Dish Network their equipment, we evidently pulled the cord out of our DVD player and sent that to them, too.  I looked at our nearest Walmart, and I didn't find the cord I need.  However, "It's a Wonderful Life" was broadcast on TV, so I DVR'd it and Cliff and I watched it that way, zapping about two hours of commercials in the process.  
Cliff and I talked about how we wished we could go back, just for a few minutes, to an age where we believed in Santa.  
Granddaughter Amber spent the night and got up this morning wanting home-made cinnamon rolls; at first I brushed her off, telling her it would take four hours to make them.  
Then I got to thinking what a scrooge I was and started the dough.  After all, if I have a granddaughter in her twenties who comes to spend the night every once in awhile, she ought to be worth a little effort on my part.  I'm trying to hurry things along; I put the bowl with the dough inside a larger bowl containing warm water.  In the old days when gas ranges had pilot lights, the warmth of  the gas oven was just right for rushing the rising process.   

Okra

One plant that never seems to have a problem in my garden is okra.  If it's too wet, the okra thrives; if it's dry as the Sahara, the okra flourishes.  It seems to have no natural enemies:  bugs leave it alone, and it doesn't have any form of blight or pestilence that kills it, like so many of my favorite garden vegetables do.  
It's easy to freeze, no mess, no fuss:  Just slice it and put it in a freezer bag, and it's ready to be used in winter soups and stews.  
The trouble is that there's only so much you can do with okra, so far as I know:  fry it or use it in soups and stews.  Oh yes, and okra and tomatoes.  Which to me is just chicken gumbo without the chicken.  
Cliff and I absolutely love southern-fried okra, and we've had far more than we should have had this year.  The granddaughters spent this past weekend with us and I fixed fried okra for them twice in two days' time.    They would have eaten more, had I offered.   
As I type this, the low-fat, healthy version of chicken gumbo is simmering on the stove, so dinner will be ready whenever we're ready to eat, which will probably be shortly after 10 o'clock when Cliff gets out of bed.   
I enjoy cooking, baking, and trying new foods.  All I require of a recipe is that the ingredients can be found in a normal grocery store and that it doesn't require my purchasing a special bowl, pot, or pan in order to make it.  


I've made baking powder biscuits ever since I took Home Economics that one year, and I've never had any complaints.  I've tasted better biscuits, though.  The better ones were always made by ladies raised in the south; and in the back of my mind I couldn't help wondering what a person could do to improve a recipe that's so simple and basic.  What could you change to get that subtle difference?  
Now don't tell me to go buy those frozen biscuits; yes, they are as good as home-made.  But where's the fun in that?  
The book I'm reading aloud in the car as we travel, The Bridge, takes place in the south and has as one of its main characters an elderly woman who makes biscuits often.  For some reason, this stirred up in me, once more, the desire to improve my already-pretty-darned-good biscuits.  
I don't watch cooking shows; I haven't since the Frugal Gourmet turned out to be a molester of little boys.  My son has one TV cook he likes, though, and mentions often... the guy on "Good Eats".   
Well, I thought, if he's good enough for my son, he's good enough for me.  So I googled up his recipe for biscuits, only to find it's pretty much like the recipe I've used all my life.  Beneath that recipe, though, was this comment from his grandmother: 

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  Advice courtesy Mae Skelton
  I don't have much use for recipes but the one you get on a bag of White Lily self-rising flour is hard to beat. And it's a lot easier than the one my crazy grandson dreamed up.  

So I finally found the two secret ingredients:  self-rising flour and buttermilk.  Cliff and I don't have biscuits often, but from now on when we do, they will be the biscuits I've always wanted to be able to make.   

How's this for a rambling post?

Planning meals

As we're eating one meal, I'm usually planning my next one.  Cliff thinks that's weird, but that's because he never had to prepare all the meals.  I've explained to him that some things take longer to cook, some things have to be thawed, and you can't just go into the kitchen half-an-hour before dinner and wonder, "What are we going to have for dinner?"
By the way, I notice over on Meesha's blog, both in his entry about the visit to California and in the comment section, that there are people who actually consider restaurants a big factor in where they live.  I guess it's because I've lived in the boonies most of my married life and cooked most of our food from scratch.  Somehow I just can't imagine that being a factor in where I reside.  Culture wouldn't enter into the picture, either.  We're not big on culture around here.  But I digress.
At least once a week we'll have salmon at dinner (our noonday meal) because it's supposed to be especially good for us; we buy it frozen in individual four-ounce servings.  I microwave a potato and fix broccoli or spinach, and viola, we have a quick, easy, and nutritious meal.  I can do that meal really fast, with a minimum of fuss.  
We have our low-fat chicken jambalaya and chicken gumbo often.  Either of those is a meal all by itself.  Both of the recipes require tomatoes, and so does the chili I make often in cold weather.  This is why I'm going to run out of my home-canned tomatoes within four to six weeks, and then I'll be buying canned tomatoes again until July when, hopefully, I'll have producing tomato plants.  
This rambling entry was all brought about by my trying to decide what to cook today.  I have some low-fat bran muffins in the oven for breakfast, but I'm not sure yet about dinner.  I'm leaning toward Tuna-noodle casserole with some sort of vegetable on the side.  For Cliff's work-lunch and my supper, there's just enough hamburger stew left for the two of us.

Good grief, how is it that we're getting any reception on our television?  There's about a quarter-inch of ice on everything.

Good eats

Cliff and I have been eating like royalty lately. Yesterday, for instance:

we had cooked Savoy cabbage...

corn-on-the-cob....

and potatoes boiled, and then browned in Bonnie-butter.

Today we'll have Kentucky Wonder beans cooked with a healthier version of Kielbasa

with small potatoes thrown in. I may have to quarter a larger potato, because the potato crop is mostly made up of huge potatoes, now.

If some of you were my neighbors, I'd share a few.

Of course, there are tomatoes in abundance; I canned seven quarts yesterday, and there's a bowl of grape tomatoes on the table at all times. The bugs killed the zucchini, but the butternut squash is still doing well (knock wood). None of them are ready to eat, though.

I've discovered something this year: Almost any vegetable is good stir-fried with a little soy sauce. I've done this with grated cabbage, snow peas, and zucchini. I'm sure it would work great with green beans, too. I always put some sliced onions in, and some chunks of sweet pepper. My grocery list is considerably shorter, these days.

I'm waiting for some eggplants to get just a wee bit larger, and then I'm going to try another Russian recipe from Meesha. He says it's almost impossible to screw it up. I like that in a recipe; that, and the fact that it doesn't have a lot of exotic ingredients. And I wasn't disappointed in the borscht.

M.V., if you and your daughter come out this weekend, you are welcome to take home some garden goodies.


I really want some more fried green tomatoes, but two people can only eat so much.

How I prepare morel mushrooms

Morels can't be used like you'd use regular mushrooms from the grocery store. You mustn't eat them raw in salads, because they can make you sick if they aren't cooked.

The first thing I do with them is halve them lengthwise, rinse them off, and soak them in salt water. Salt water gets the ants and snails out. When I'm ready to use them, I remove them from the salt water and rinse off any remaining dirt.

Some people saute them. If I only find a few, so that it isn't enough to make a "mess", I dice them, saute them, and scramble some eggs with them.

My mother simply rolled morels in flour and fried them. I really prefer them dipped in an egg-and-milk mixture, then rolled in a combination of half flour and half finely-crushed round crackers like Hi Ho or Ritz.

I love a bargain, and I hate to waste money.

Every time Cliff and I are in Richmond at Walmart, I check out the meat that has been marked down 40% because the "sell by" date is almost up. Today I spotted a package of nice center-cut pork chops. We don't eat a lot of meat of any kind, especially pork; but I can't pass up a bargain.

Rather than freeze it like I usually do my bargain meats, I put four of them in the bottom of a Corning Ware dish, spread Stove-top stuffing over the meat, and spread a can of cream-of-chicken soup over that. I covered it and baked it for almost an hour.

Someone I once worked with told me about this simple pork-chop fix, and until we changed to healthier eating habits I fixed it often. It really is better than it looks. Normally I used Cream of Mushroom soup, but I didn't have any today.

I can always find marked-down bread at that Walmart, too; and today was no exception. I bought a square loaf of sour-dough for a buck.

This time it wasn't such a bargain; it was pretty dried out.

"Oh well," I told Cliff. "You win some, you lose some."

After he went out to the shop, I remembered another dish I used to make a lot: bread pudding. I figured we may as well have two unhealthy items for supper, because I really hate to throw out that bread; I paid good money for it. With whiskey sauce poured over it, it is hands down the best bread pudding I've ever made. Of course, the fact we haven't had it in years might be a factor.

Granddaughter Natalie was here to help us eat this bargain-based meal, and when Cliff's sister gets home after twelve hours of working, she'll be glad to have supper ready and waiting. Tomorrow Cliff and I will have nice, healthy Chicken Gumbo. With maybe a small piece of bread pudding for dessert.