I Didn’t Know You Could Eat That

I see the purple bunches of berries hiding behind the pokey, holly-like leaves every summer. I walk past them without a thought, thinking “most likely poisonous”.

For five years I’ve never given Oregon Grapes so much as a second glance – until my husband picked up a fifteen-dollar book on local edibles. Now when we go out, he’s always on the alert and you’d be amazed at what you’re missing if you live near the woods.

Everywhere we’ve always walked, hiked, gardened, and just been – there are tons of wild plants you can eat, use as a medicine or make tea out of.

Dandelions, Bear Berries, Cat Tails, Rose Hips, Oregon Grapes, Miner’s Lettuce…you could walk outside with a bottle of dressing and have a salad within minutes and within a hundred feet of your front door.

Last week we grabbed some containers and scoured the hillsides of our property for Oregon Grapes. The berries are a deep purple and grow in bunches – like grapes. They’re bitter and will need sugar to make into jam – or jelly.

When we got back to the RV, we spilled our bags out like Trick or Treaters to see who’d picked the most. A trip to the store for a large pot, some pectin, and jars was all we needed to prepare for The Jam Making or The Making Of The Jam – or jelly.

This was a first for both of us but it was my husband’s project. We had several recipes floating around, some slightly contradictory and all of them missing important information such as “when or do you squish the berries before or after boiling them?” and some other “holes” we had to fill in.

My husband did most of the work but I stuck my nose in a couple of times when asked for an opinion. Together we managed to not mess it up and some guessing later, he had the mixture in the containers and ready to can or jar.

The jarring or canning part has to be done carefully but after following the directions from five different publications, we had Oregon Grape Jelly or Jam. The jars have to cool for about twenty-four hours for the contents to set and for the lid to seal.

Then came the first taste: good. No, better than good: excellent!

We’ve spent the past week discovering new ways to enjoy the stuff. Corn bread with melted butter and Oregon Grape Jam or Jelly, peanut butter and Oregon Grape Jam or Jelly sandwiches, cheese and crackers with a dab of Oregon Grape Jam or Jelly.

I’m sold but is it jam or jelly and canning or jarring?

Next – Rose Hips Tea.

The Case Of The Disappearing Vegetables

Linda’s plate was full of food
To her Mom it all looked good
Little did her parent know
All those green beans had to go
What to do, there was no pooch
No furry friend who liked to mooch
Steak and salad with tomatoes
Great big pile of mashed potatoes
But the bane of that great feast
How to slay the veggie beast
Thinking fast she ate the rest
Put her magic to the test
Laid utensils side by side
Under which the beans she’d hide
Lined them up all in a row
Till not one of each did show
Said “I’m done”, picked up her plate
To the sink she made her break
But with Mother on patrol
Into sight one bean did role
Cross-hairs of a pointed finger
Turned around, she didn’t linger
Brought her plate back to the table
Linda ate her vegetables

From a poetry blog I have https://wordchef.press/

Marshmellows And Other Foodstuffs

It’s five a.m. and I’m on my third marshmallow with the coffee brewing. Off to a good start.  Not the best food choice but I seem to be doing well enough for my age – years of exercise, perhaps.

Speaking of marshmellows, we decided to roast them for Easter this year. We prefer to incinerate them. Nothing beats a carbonized shell filled with what survived. The inside also makes a nice dirt magnet and hair sealant.

We whittled sticks for the occasion but I couldn’t get mine thin enough. I might as well have been using a broom stick.

Surprisingly, our son, whom we’d dragged out of his trailer for family time, suggested we roast again the next day.

Dusting off the lawn chair.

My husband is easy to feed and I like to cook so we’re good for each other. He’ll eat anything except seafood (some varieties look like insects, he says) and cottage cheese.

He finds tortillas especially useful and would put a trout in one, only the fish is too close to a seafood (I guess).  Yesterday, I saw him crammed into the pantry from the waist up, looking for a snack. Later I caught him ladling last night’s hamburger gravy into a sourdough bun he’d hollowed out. Not so bad except he was eating it cold. I’m grateful he recently discovered cooking with Chef Ramsey.

We always have sweets around but we also keep plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables on hand. It’s tick season so we have a cutting board filled with fresh cut garlic and tomatoes to snack on throughout the day. Garlic can make you nauseous if eaten by itself, thus the tomatoes. We smell but that’s the point – theoretically, the ticks also think we stink.

We could do away with the sweets and be perfect but what is life about if you can’t enjoy a charcoal encrusted lump of sugergoo that’s guaranteed to dissolve your tooth enamel on contact?

 

Christmas At Walmart

My husband and I spend a lot of time at our local Walmart. It’s almost a joke between us. Nothing against the brand but frankly we associate it with tackiness. Still, here we are again; the goal of the day: Christmas shopping.

My husband always parks in the outskirts of the parking lot because our truck is big. This somehow makes sense to him. He points out the other trucks and large vehicles as he edges slowly into a moorage slip.

During the mile-long walk across the parking lot and having lost me, he’ll call back “Hurry up Babe” while he strides ahead on his six foot plus frame with me taking four steps to his one (imagine a centipede), trying to keep up.

Which door to go into is usually our next big decision after how far away to park. The Lawn and Garden (Holiday supplies in the winter), the Home and Pharmacy, or the Groceries. God forbid we forget to pick a landmark so we can navigate our way back to where we docked  parked. If we lose our bearings, we may end up wandering the parking lot in humiation with a fully loaded cart looking for our vehicle.  Yesterday our landmark was the giant inflatable Christmas tree. Last week, it was the kayaks on display out front.

Once in the store, the shopping cart vetting process begins with a ten foot test drive. Results are categorized on the following brokenness scale: The Drifter (self explanatory), The Harmonic Resonator (the one that alternates every twenty or so wheel revolutions between a powerful bolt-loosening vibration and a Cadillac-like glide), and The Quitter, AKA Old Ironsides (the one that lost the jousting match with a vehicle). There is a rare exception: The Miracle (this is your lucky day. This one’s straight off the truck from the factory).

Any leftover debris in the cart from a previous user is grounds for immediate disqualification and referral to the CDC. 🙂

I usually have my list ready to go and we set off, me leading the way. First through the Home section, then onto the Toys/Sporting Goods, past Auto and Hardware, looping back to Crafts and Bedding, gliding past clothing and shoes before reaching Electronics and pausing at the conveniently located bathrooms at the back of the store. Rushing through stationary and pets and into the Groceries with my husband, pushing whatever the cart of the day is. Now it’s HIS turn to keep up.

Zigzagging back and forth through the dairy and deli, breakfast and baking goods are but a blur. Gaining our second wind, we skillfully maneuver our increasingly difficult-to-steer barge now loaded with five hundred pounds of Walmart through the morass.

Lamps, rugs, electronics, cat food, and groceries are causing our cart to teeter dangerously on corners so we pull over to adjust the load for more ballast. It occurs to us that maybe we should have gone with shopping cart option number five; the military grade Hammerhead. With it’s semi tank-like build and roomy interior, we’d be set but that would have required a side trip to the Holiday section too far off course.

By now it takes a good push to get the carriage up to speed but soon we’re out-pacing octogenarians and the not-so-intense shoppers as we skirt the meats, frozen foods, and produce, then radio ahead for the tug boats. Eyes scanning for the checkout with the fastest line, we see them; the only other people in the entire store who get that this is a competition. Our mental calculations put us at the check stand at EXACTLY the same moment as them. This may be a dead heat. Increasing our speed by three knots we manage to pull ahead by a nose and the line is ours.

Checkout is an art form. I usually predict the total as me and my husband team up to move the inventory from the cart to the conveyor belt. Heavy items first by category (household before food stuffs), then boxed goods and finally, bakery – the delicate stuff. If you want to eat something on the way home, it gets its own bag that goes on top of everything else. I process and bag while my hubby handles the transaction. We make an excellent shopping team and quite often, my prediction of the total is only dollars off. 🙂

Finally, past the pay portal, shopping cart neatly packed according to weight and type of product, we nose out and merge into outgoing traffic, slowly accelerating to cruising speed.

Then it hits: we forgot the Christmas stuff. We bought everything BUT Christmas. Five hundred pounds of NOT Christmas and there is no slowing the shopping cart now. Might as well be the Titanic. If we’d only made that trip to the seasonal section for the Hammerhead…… But it’s too late to change course as we are swept towards the exit in the current.

As we glide past the smiling greeters on the way out the door in the Christmas regatta, (the only vessel not decked out), we maintain our heading and decide to hit the local shops on the way home. It evens out in the end. 🙂

Cats, Dogs, And Politician Control

My heart breaks when I look at the picture above of the feral cat we caught on our property night before last. Our goal was to take it in to animal control to have it fixed and/or relocated to a better place such as a barn cat type of situation. Here, it is just hungry, cold and gets into fights with our fixed house cats.

We should have done our homework before we trapped it as we discovered there are no animal control services in Stevens County – for cats, at least. They have limited services for dogs but cats – forget it. Thank God there are some non-profits in the area that are filling the vacuum.

What is wrong with the local officials that they are ignoring this problem? Could it be money? The culture? Whatever it is, it’s bullshit and it pisses me off badly. There is a problem because there are no services. Ignore it and it will get worse!

I looked up animal control in the Revised Code Washington and in black and white there it was; there is no requirement for a jurisdiction to have services set up for animal control. Wow.

Once we had kitty, we made some calls and got the runaround. Animal control referred us to the sanctuary but they are closed for a few days (bad timing for us), and the Stevens County Sheriff who told us they don’t offer any services referred us to Spokane County’s SCRAPS program. We drove eighty miles only to find they didn’t accept out-of-county cats.

That’s when I posted on Facebook.

There I learned a little about the local attitude: dump ’em in another town or take care of things the – you know – old fashioned way.  I’m not going to give that disgusting option any words on this page.  One person mentioned that they’d heard cats taste like chicken. What kind of human being could say something like that? Answer: it wasn’t a human – it was a pig.

After the SCRAPS program turned us away, we drove home with kitty and let it go for the time being. Luckily, there are people here who have evolved past the Crow-Magnon stage of evolution and with their help, there is a plan in place to re-capture kitty and find a good home for it.

I’d like to re-home a few politicians while we’re at it – oh – and take care of couple of assholes on Facebook – you know – the old fashioned way.

I’m joking, of course.

The Man, the Bear and the Truck

We camped in the national forest near Snoqualmie Pass during the summer of 2017 while we looked for property to buy. It was a popular area and most of the spots were full at that time of year.

Every now and then, a bear will discover that food is readily available in these places and will take advantage of the smorgasbord. One had been seen going up and down the road so the Forest Service had posted warning signs.

My husband and I were driving back to camp one afternoon when we spotted a truck parked just off the road with the tailgate down. There, a bear was happily rummaging through the truck owner’s goods – his dinner, perhaps.
We pulled over. The bear took off and I very carefully crept up to the truck hoping I wasn’t about to see a blood bath. I got close enough to peak into the back and into the shell.

There was a man asleep but very much alive in the back! His feet had been mere inches away from where the bear had been ransacking through his supplies.

I woke him up and told him what had happened. Can you imagine if he had woken up while the bear was at work? He would have had no where to go.

Our family has had our own bear encounters.

One year one kept coming into our campsite so we moved our food to the car with the exception of some canned goods. We learned that cans don’t stop bears when we woke up to find it with a can crushed in its mouth, enjoying the contents through the holes it had bitten.

It continued to cruise the campsites so we called Fish and Game. I don’t know what they did about it.

We now carry bear spray wherever we go.

Recently, two men who were mountain biking near North Bend, not far from where we used to camp, were attacked by a cougar. One of them ran, and was subsequently killed. . This was just months ago.

Cougar Attack

We now live in much closer proximity to predators.

A couple of years ago, a bear attacked a neighbor’s dog in her carport and she beat it away. There are wolf packs in the area that are being tracked for conservation efforts. They have been killing livestock which has lead to ongoing friction between the conservationists and the ranchers.

Be prepared if predators may be around: make noise so you don’t surprise an animal, be aware of your surroundings, store all food away from yourself, and carry a firearm or bear spray.

If you’re not careful, you may not be as lucky as the guy in the back of the truck.