Ambergris

The deed should include any information as to whether there's a home-owner's association.  Also check for zoning ordinances.  The rules for both should be on line. 

Set seeds for Blacktail Mountain watermelon, a black tomato that's supposed to be able to handle chilly summer nights, a cantaloupe of some kind or other, and the baby corn you put in Chinese stir-fry.

My Merlin gets salmon, canned chicken with mayo for his constipation, and more, so I know what you mean.  But when life becomes a burden, you will know what to do.  My heart is heavy for you.  

Forgot to mention the other day: went to a hardware store and noticed that there was a baby store up the street.  Asked if diapers would cost less there than at the department store.  We went to see.  For $41 got two big packs of the 5X natural care (red bag) Huggies plus a 300-count package of wipies plus a small package of wipies plus powder plus a covered bowl with a baby spoon that snaps into the lid for traveling plus a one-week sample of maternal vitamins.  The vitamins might have been free.  Not sure why such a little thing is wearing 5x, but that's what her mom wants. 

Basically, shopping more direct instead of at the more convenient places.  

And, from her mom's angle, getting godmother to pay for things.  

Supper was air-fried plantains, H's version instead of mine, and a thick slice of the local crumbly cheese, with tea.  

H's version is sliced in slices and cooked a lower temp, so they do not caramelize and stay more starchy, while my way is to cut them in wedges and cook them at a higher temp to maximize caramelization, getting all the sweet taste on that outside and getting a softer interior.

Both versions are good, and either way this is my favorite simple meal here.  

We were going to have avocado too, but the avocado was not quite ripe and I was not real hungry, so that's set aside for breakfast.

or bent, or acidic

I think she's teething and needs more to chew on.  She has only one plastic chew toy, and she keeps losing it.  She chews on canes of the plants the cuys eat, but they're pithy and fibrous, clearly not what she wants.  She goes through pig ears and pizzles very fast, so that I can't keep them in stock, and I have not found a steer pizzle at the market.  

She loves to chew up spuds.

Before the seedlings went in.  That squash is blooming on the other side.  RIP spuds.

Speaking of getting your garden ready for a new year: what are you doing for 2024?

Today I plan to put out seedlings of cauliflower, broccoli, beets, lettuce, and red cabbage.  Looking at harvests through February and into March, basically, unless the puppy/puppies wipe them out (RIP potato patch/puppy playground).  Carrots and/or parsnips might be next.  Might not.

The totes last years longer if painted, especially the top couple of inches that don't get shaded inside or outside.

69 cents a pound is great.  Can you get enough to can a few of them?  

You too! 

Can't go wrong with deviled eggs.

Black-eyed peas soaked last night, but without baking soda because I couldn't find it.  Also, we are making corn bread with corn meal sifted out of the freshly ground chicken feed and some pancake mix, because the box of pancake mix is open, the new bag of flour is not, and it's the rainy season.  Don't have an oven, so the cornbread will start in the rice cooker and probably finish as two or three large broken pieces in the air fryer--which makes it wonderfully crunchy.

Not sure what else will end up on the menu. 

I look forward to having a freezer again.  What I have now sits on top of the fridge and has less than two cubic feet before the frost builds up.  It needs defrosting on a monthly basis.  Sigh.  Food would not be good more than a month or so after going in there. 

Separate freezers are not a thing here, but side by side fridge/freezers can be found in a lot of the appliance stores.  That's what PM has and what I'll be looking at when I get my own place.  Shouldn't be hard to get plastic boxes to fit each shelf of a side by side to hold the cold in better.  Tried that with my stand-up porch freezer in Florida, but needed two boxes per shelf, and with both of us loading the freezer (three or four of us sometimes) it stayed chaotic. 

I always wanted a side by side.

Struck the fancy crackers off my shopping list.  What I'm doing is taking a stand against the numerous added refined starches and sugars that have crept into my diet over the last few months.  Instead of the three-cracker packets that taste so good I might go through three packets a day, wiping out a whole package in a couple of weeks (even though I'm also eating some plain saltines) I'm only going to buy the package of plain whole-grain saltines, which normally last a month or so when it's the only cracker I'm eating.  

Also, on the last shopping trip, I bought one-third big cans of cat food, to serve on nights when the white cat comes inside to eat, and 2/3  little cans to serve when I'm feeding them separately.  The big ones are rather cheaper per ounce, but only if completely consumed.  I had been feeding uneaten cat food to the puppy as a nutrient supplement, but now that she's getting meat scraps twice a day that's no longer anywhere near excusable in a financial sense.  So now I have to work harder to get the white cat inside at night more often.  

One of the things I lost in the fire was my stacks of Countryside.  I missed those old issues.  They're online now, but online reading is not the same.

I suspect he's been waiting for her.

I might have mixed up the yellow and red, but there are jersey types (rich in flavor, low in production) and there are holstein types (huge production, less flavor).

Mmmm.....chocolate.   

Wild tree with photo of the flower:  

Fruits from two kinds of chocolate trees.  Yellow is from a holstein-cow type tree, red is from a jersey-cow type tree.   

The fruit is sweet and juicy, around a bitter purplish core.    

People can eat the fruit, which is kind of banana-y, but that's not real sanitary or economically viable if the point is to sell chocolate.  So they just wash and ferment it away to get to the valuable purple part  (which also needs to be fermented, dried, ground, etc).

My recipe for possum is to hang it over a likely fishing spot in the summer and come back a couple of weeks later to fish under that spot, where the fish have become used to maggots falling off the corpse.  Otherwise, it's too greasy and stringy to enjoy.  Knew someone with a pet possum once, nice critter.  DX despised them.

Done right, barbecued coon is as good as barbecue gets.

I haven't had bear in so long I'm not sure I can really remember what it's like.  (Wasn't just bear we were having.) 

Squirrel is really good with gravy over biscuit.  I told my boys I was practicing my recipe for their friend D's father (who characteristically would ask for "fried rat's a** with coffee.") 

I did serve him squirrel with red-eye gravy before he passed.  It was fricasseed, not fried, but close enough.  

I do eat bugs, or rather grubs.  I like them cooked, and preferably in gumbo or stir-fry.

Leftover cheese empanadas today. 

Don't feel good today.  Not anything identifiable as bad, except tender tummy, just not good.  Cancelled shopping trip and exercise class and stayed home to watch the rain.

It's raining.  This is good.