Wild Turkey (but not bottled kind)

We do have a Wild Turkey Bourbon Distillery here in Kentucky, but that is not the wild turkey I'm speaking of today. I'm referring to the real thing.  A two legged wild turkey. Pop and I nave never cared to kill and eat the wild turkey that raise here in Kentucky. We do eat poultry, but just never thought we cared enough for the wild turkey, to hunt and kill one. We do enjoy watching them raise their young and roam the clover fields and hill sides of our little farm, but that is the extent of our interactions with the turkey.

However.........A good friend dropped by yesterday with a turkey he had just killed. He was determined to share it with us. I agreed to accept a half breast, so he proceeded to clean the turkey on the tail gate of his truck. I thought surely we could use the half breast. That alone was quite a chunk of meat,but before the evening had ended, he had persuaded me to take both leg quarters and the entire breast. What's a person to say when some one gives you a fully cleaned turkey, but Thank You.

I cleaned and soaked the fresh turkey meat for a few hours in salt water while we attended a Halloween function at the auction, then I proceeded to freeze the breast and cook the rest in the crock pot. Now comes the problem of deciding what to do with the cooked turkey meat. I have no problem finding ways that I will eat it. I have Cajun blood, you know, but now Pop is a different story. I'll have to be very creative to get him to eat it,so I'll be thinking of various ways to slip it into his meals in the near future.Wish me luck.

The Last Hurrah!

The weather is slowly but surely getting colder. The sweet pepper plants are still holding on, but I fear, they will not survive the cold temps for too many more nights.I may try to cover them, but even that will not protect them for long.

I planted two sweet pepper plants in one of my new raised beds this gardening season, and I have had an abundance of sweet peppers. I have shared my peppers with a few family members and neighbors since they were so plentiful. I also received many colorful sweet peppers from a good friend, since I only had the green. They were so nice, I have decided that next year, I will be planting a few other types of sweet peppers, other than my usual green sweet peppers. With my own peppers and those obtained from my friend,I was able to freeze approximately 2 gallon of sliced and diced green peppers.

This summer, along with my older step daughter, Rhonda, my sister,Rita, my niece, Cindy, and my niece's son, Braydon,I had an opportunity to visit one of the new Chipotle restaurants in Louisville, Kentucky. The meal was so nice, I have decided to freeze as many peppers as possible, in the future, just to use when I attempt to assemble a similar dish at my home. After the visit to Chipotle's, I had my sister and her daughter over for an experimental meal, Chipotle style. It turned out wonderful, thus I will be using up a lot of sweet peppers in the future. Pop doesn't eat sweet peppers, so I have never grown an abundance of them, before now. I am sure he will not be interested in trying our new dish,so I will plan to serve the new dish only when I have family dropping by. 

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

How many times have I heard those words from my Mother's lips. Very few excuses were acceptable in her eyes, regardless of the situation.

white paper bag

Today, as I was taking my medicine from the bag it came in, I noticed the nice white paper it was made of, and it brought this thought to my mind.

Mom was born in 1926, and times were bad for even the most affluent families. Not only was she poor,but she came from a broken home, abandoned by her father at the age of six or so. Her Mother ended up placing the children in a orphanage of sorts. She was separated from her siblings for quite some time, before being reunited with them again. She endured horrific treatment and conditions before reaching the age where she could finally get a job and take care for herself.

Nevertheless, this bag brings to my mind, the story Mom always told us of her school days,which were very few. She told me near the end of her life, that she had such a hard time with her schooling, they held her over several times. It seems she had grown as tall as the teacher, and was still in the third grade. That's when she dropped out of school, so as not be be made fun of. Since times were so hard, Mom had to do her lessons, many times on brown paper sacks. The teacher would hold her work up for the class to see, and tell them how not having paper was no excuse for not getting their homework. She'd say,"Look at Butch.(that's what everyone called her as a child).She had no paper so she used brown paper bags." Wouldn't it have been wonderful if Mom would have had access to this type of paper bag back then.