Smoked Oysters - March 11, 2025

I was grown and married and had two kids before anybody ever offered me a smoked oyster from a can. I'd grown up watching my father eat sardines from a can, thinking I'd sooner eat a live minnow.  These oysters looked even worse, mashed onto a round cracker and doused with Tabasco.  It smelled awful.  If I hadn't been drinking, I probably wouldn't have taken it. 

But I did take it (and kept it down), and the next time I saw some in a grocery store, I bought them, and crackers and Tabasco.  For a little while, they became a regular thing around our house.  Even our 4-year-old loved them, Tabasco and all.

Until last week, when I was shopping for road trip snacks, it had been years since I'd bought any. On a whim, I got a can, and Sunday evening, just before I started dinner, I peeled it open (cutting my left thumb on the lid in the process) and got out the crackers and Tabasco - possibly the same bottle from years ago. ;)

I'd just eaten the first one and was fixing the second one when The Husband came through the kitchen.  I offered him the one I was building.  "O M G," he said, "I'd forgotten how good those were!"  We polished off the can, standing at the counter.

As good as the oysters were, I'm not sure they were worth the cut on my thumb. Tin can cuts are the WORST.  Now BOTH my hands are gimped up.

I'm powering through it.  This morning, I raked about 25% of the front yard, cleaning up winter debris of sticks and sweetgum balls so we can mow pretty soon.  I'll feel that in the morning.

But I have to get limbered up.  I've been hibernating since Christmas. And it's time to get the garden ready to plant.  A local greenhouse has put out their cool weather vegetables, and we don't have a spot ready for them.  The tire is about to fall off the big black tiller or I'd be down there tilling up a row right now.  Maybe I can talk The Husband into working on the tiller with me, since we'll still have daylight, courtesy of Daylight Savings Time.

I've been whittling for the past couple of days, in little spurts, until my hands get tired.  Yesterday I worked on a goofy bug-eyed chicken.  Its proportions are all wrong; it is way too fat.  Last night, the knife slipped and it lost part of its top knot.   I could cut off its floppy red parts and turn it into a recognizable toad frog.