A Tribute to Pop-Pop

Our Pop-Pop passed away on November 19th, after a long, hard struggle with more problems than I care to name.  Even though he was in and out of the hospital since early October, none of us believed that his time was up.  He left a wife, a mother, three children, seven grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren, all of whom loved him dearly.  We miss him, already.

Pop-Pop was a quiet man with a wicked wit that bubbled to the surface at the most unexpected times.  When my husband and I announced that we were expecting our first child (and his first grandchild), his response was to look at my husband and say, "Ain't that just like a woman?  You just want to poke a little fun at them, and they take you seriously."  But when that child was born, before leaving the hospital, he leaned over my bed, kissed my cheek, and said, "Thank you for my grandson."

He was crazy about all of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and delighted in acting as their accomplice in mischief.  When our boys got a go-kart, he put the blade on the tractor and scraped a dirt track all the way around the front field so they'd have a safe place to ride at top speed.  He taught his 3-year-old great-granddaughter how to drive his Rascal scooter, and let her take it up the long driveway to get his newspaper.  He teased them, and argued with them, and good-naturedly endured their jokes about his age and his turtle-paced gait. 

He let the kids tinker in the shop with him, and ride the tractor with him.  He let the girls stick bows on his bald spot at Christmas, and wrote a letter nearly every day to a home-sick granddaughter who went away to Army boot camp. 

His great-grandchildren remember him for the candy he always had stashed in his shirt pocket or in a bowl high on a kitchen shelf.  While the family was gathered at his house after his death, one of them, a six-year-old girl, led me out to the workshop and asked, "Has he got any Tootsie Rolls in here?"  The next day, I caught the 4-year old boy in the shop, climbing onto the workbench and peering into plastic coffee cans, looking for the one that held the stash. 

Pop-Pop and I had a system:  I'd bring the dull hoes to the shop and deposit them in a barrel; he'd sharpen them and put them in another barrel in the gardening shed.  My favorite hoe was almost always ready to be used when I was ready to use it.  He kept my ragged old tillers running, and always took time to fill up a small gas can with a gas/oil mixture that wouldn't make their motors smoke the way they did when I did the mixing. 

After his funeral, the pall-bearers - mostly grandsons - loaded into Pop-Pop's old red-and-white Ford pickup truck and followed the hearse to the cemetery.  They piled out of it, and sang "I'll Fly Away" in the rain at his graveside.  He would've loved it.

Sweet Potato Casserole Recipe

This stuff is lip-smackin' good.

Basic recipe:

3 c. mashed sweet potatoes (takes about 3 big ones) *
1/3 c. milk **
2 eggs
1 c. sugar ***
1 t. vanilla
1 stick of butter
pinch of salt
cinnamon, if you like it, however much you like ****

Mix above ingredients well with mixer or by hand.  Pour into large casserole dish. 

Topping:

1 c. brown sugar
2/3 stick butter
1 c. chopped pecans
1/3 c. flour

Melt butter.  Mix flour, sugar, and nuts.  Pour melted butter over mixture.  Mix well, and spread over potatoes.  Bake 25 minutes at 350 degrees.  Serve hot or cold.

* Do yourself a favor:  boil the sweet potatoes and THEN peel them.  It much easier than doing it the other way around.  ;)

** Half & Half makes it richer.

*** I only had 1/3 c. of sugar in the canister, so I supplemented with light brown sugar and some cane syrup.  Whatever works, eh?

**** The recipe in this church cookbook does not call for cinnamon, but we like it.   Taste the potatoes before you add it, though; they're really good without it.

Chili Kohlrabi Rellenos

Um...yeah.  Chili kohlrabi rellenos.  They're in the oven now. 

You see, I rode my bike down to the garden this evening to see what was happening.  Though I haven't done much writing about the garden for a couple of months, things have been clicking along.  When the summer heat relented, the tomatoes and peppers kicked into high gear.  Every week, I've harvested enough tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants to make sauces for supper and to freeze.  The tomatoes are getting a little "nubby," but the peppers are in their prime.  The limbs of the Big Jim pepper plant were bent and broken with the weight of the peppers.  I wanted to leave them to turn red, but we've had a few very cool nights lately, and I decided to get most of them before the frost does.

And when I turned around, behold, there sat the two kohlrabi plants, planted on the summer solstice, that had managed to escape the varmits and our hoes.  Since I'd paid them any attention, they had each grown themselves a nice green bulb - the size of a tennis ball - atop the ground.  They had big, spiky, collard-type leaves.  I pulled one of them up, root and all, but broke the other off at the ground to see if it will make again.

My original plan was to roast the Big Jim peppers and either pickle them or freeze them.  Before I made it back to the house with them, I decided I'd stuff them, instead. 

But what was I going to do with kohlrabi?  I'd never eaten the stuff.  I'd seen a few recipes on the internet.  None of them exactly turned my crank.  I peeled one and tasted it.  It was turnip-y, but surprisingly sweet, good enough to eat raw.  I chopped it into little cubes and decided that it could just go in the stuffed peppers, along with some tomatoes, onions, and cheese.  A few of the chopped leaves got tossed in, too, for color.  I wrapped two of the peppers in bacon, pinned on with toothpicks.

I'll let you know how they turn out.
 

Sears Repair Service, Part III

Today is the day that the Sears appliance repairman was originally (rather, most recently) scheduled to work on our refrigerator.  Earlier this week, someone from Sears called and said that it will be NEXT Friday, October 7, before the repairman comes.

I haven't heard the noise in a while.  Maybe the freezer fan isn't making the noise, anymore, or maybe I've grown so accustomed to it that I just don't hear it, anymore. 

In any case, it will soon be a month since I made the first call requesting repair service. 

Sears, Part II

The saga continues.

The Sears repairman came on September 6, about 1 p.m.  Naturally, the refrigerator was not making the offending noise when he arrived.  I explained to him that my diagnosis was that there was frost building up on the freezer fan, and that the blades eventually knocked off the ice for a time, then it would build up again.  He said he suspected that I was absolutely right, since it is a common problem.  He said that the culprit was the half-tube that feeds water into the ice-maker.  Since it's only a half tube (like a mini-water slide), water splashes when it squirts into the ice-maker.  He slipped a whole piece of tube over the existing half-tube, and said that oughta do it.

The fridge started making the noise again this weekend; this time, it's a serious snarl instead of a low purr. 

Today, I took a deep breath, and dialed the Sears repair service again.  The deep breath was to keep me from going all ape-shit on them right off the bat.  After giving the customer service rep. all of the necessary info, we began to talk about appointment times.  I took another deep breath and said, "Can we talk, girl to girl?"  She said we could.  I told her about the crap we've been through, so far, with this refrigerator.  My main complaint was that the repair service historically hasn't done what it said it would do, when it said it would do it.  I asked her to please flag the call, somehow, to let these people know that I'm already irked.  She said she would.

I can't get a repair appointment until September 30, 10 days from now.  The time will be between 8 and 5.  They're supposed to call 30 minutes in advance of coming. 

We'll see.

Meanwhile, I have video-taped the freezer with my cell phone, to capture the noise.  I've also taken snapshots of the freezer contents, because if this problem is as big as it's beginning to sound, Sears may have to buy me some groceries.

New York, New York - 9/9/11 thru 9/11/11

My niece, Libby, and her finance, Jordan, invited us to their wedding in New York City on 9/10/11.  When we received their "Save the Date" card and saw the date and the location of the wedding, we thought, "Have they gone mad?"  Granted, "nine-ten-eleven" is a catchy date, one the groom should not have trouble remembering in years to come, but why New York City?  Won't it be especially crowded, and maybe even a little dangerous? 
The "why" had one main point:  Libby loves NYC, specifically Brooklyn, having lived there for three years while she was in law school.  And, in the good old American spirit, the thought was, "Hang the trouble-makers, they'll not keep us down." 

Friday, 9/9/11

So, on 9/9/11, Joel and I, along with six other members of our family, boarded an early morning flight to New York City.  My Aunt Barbara and Uncle Larry were part of our entourage.  They'd never been to New York.  Uncle Larry was especially excited about the trip, and he wanted to see everything - EVERYTHING - that he could see in the three days we'd be in town. 

When we arrived at noon on Friday, my brother, the father of the bride, picked us up at the airport and took us to our hotel on Smith St. in Brooklyn.  As we checked in, the clerk handed us cute little gift bags with tags that said, "Thanks for coming!"  We peeked into the bags when we got to our rooms and found little bottles of champagne, a little bag of macarons (no, not "macaroons" - "macarons"), a map of the area, and menus from nearby restaurants.  How sweet!

After stashing our bags in our rooms, the group re-assembled in the hotel lobby, then hit Smith St. in search of lunch.  Not far from the hotel was a restaurant called Coco Roco.  The menu on the storefront listed Peruvian dishes.  "I've never had Peruvian food," I said.  That settled it.  "Then let's eat here," my brother said.  We went inside. The food was good.

That evening, the groom's family hosted an outdoor cocktail party at Anable Basin Sailing Bar & Grill.  We had been expecting drinks and light hors d'ouvres, and we'd made plans to nibble at the party, then go to Chinatown or Little Italy for a late dinner.  If food had been our only consideration, we could've skipped the trip over to Manhattan; the "light hors d'ouvres" would've sufficed.  I still don't know the specific names of the dishes served to us, but there were delicious little sandwiches of pork belly wrapped in pancake-like bread, sausages, corn on the cob, broccoli, pulled pork with barbeque sauce, and several other treats that I did not get around to trying. 

As the sun set, the view of Manhattan across the water was amazing. 

We left the party around 8 p.m., went back to our hotel to swap our dress shoes for walking shoes.  With maps in hand, we headed for the subway.  I shall (mostly) refrain from teasing my brother about his map-reading skills.  I shall simply say that we walked quite a long way before finding a subway entrance, and that men, in general, seem unnecessarily reluctant to ask passers-by for directions.  ;)

Chinatown almost made me puke.  For real.  Oh, it was an amazing sight, for sure.  But the smell of old, rotting fish was almost more than my constitution could bear.  I put my hand over my nose and mouth, but it did not block out the smell or the sound of my gagging.  We hurried toward the next corner, anxious for the sight of green, red, and white decorations that would signal Little Italy. 

Maitre d's attacked us as we entered Little Italy.  We escaped several of them before one snagged us and dragged us into his restaurant.  The waiters quickly pieced together a table for 12, and we sat down to a very good Italian dinner. 

Back at the hotel, I showered and fell into bed.  It was only 11 p.m., but I'd been up since 5 a.m., and my feet were aching from all the walking.  Sleep did not come as rapidly or deeply as I expected.  Country bumpkins normally sleep in quiet places, where the only sounds that can be heard (aside from house noises) come from insects and frogs.  The city dwellers among us may not have even noticed the symphony of noise coming from the street, but I heard every horn blast and siren.

Saturday, 9/10/11 - Wedding Day

After breakfast, we headed back to the subway to get to Times Square, where we bought tickets for a double-decker bus tour of the city.  Times Square was writhing with people.  The sights on the billboards are almost more than one brain can process.  As I stood there, numb with visual overload, I doubted that the founders of the city could ever have imagined what it would become in 400 years.

But, oh, the weather was perfect, and when we climbed aboard the bus and snaked our way to the top deck, life was good.  We did the "downtown" tour this day, going past Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building, Macy's - all the tourist destinations.  Uncle Larry most wanted to see the Statue of Liberty, so when we reached Battery Park, we left the bus and took a round-trip ride on the Staten Island Ferry to see her from afar.  After that, we got back on the bus and went back downtown in search of gen-u-ine New York pizza.  When lunch was over, the group split up, with some going shopping and others going back to the hotel to rest and dress for the wedding.

The ceremony happened in the Dumbo area (which I later learned stands for "Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overlook"), in a tiny park between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge.  We assembled on the slate steps at the water's edge, where the bride and groom sneaked in a quick vow-saying between the rumbles of passing trains.  The bride's brother had passed out a basket of wooden train whistles, and we merrily honked our whistles as the newlyweds enjoyed their first kiss(es) as husband and wife.  With the legal formalities done, we scurried across the street to the Smack Mellon Gallery for the reception. 

The sign outside said "Eat, Drink, and Be Married!"  What a fun party it was!  Food, booze, music and dancing.  There was "Connect Four," and "Operation," and a Ms. Pac-Man video game.  There was a photo booth where we grabbed masks, plastic moustaches, and eyeglasses on sticks and acted goofy while a photographer snapped our pictures.  We had a great time.

Sunday - 9/11/11

Since we didn't have to be at the airport for the flight home until 3 p.m., and since our bus tour tickets were good for 48 hours, and since we hadn't had time on Saturday to do the "uptown" tour, back to Manhattan we went.  A tour bus was loading as we emerged from the subway.  Seeing that it was almost full, already, we asked the tour guide, a cute little octogenarian, if there was room for 8 of us on her bus.  "Yes, of course!" she said.  "But no talking on the tour!"  I looked at her as if she'd sprouted a second head.  "I mean it!" she insisted.  "No talking, and no cell phones!"  I could see right away that she might need to be thrown from the bus before this tour was over.

Off we went - past Central Park, over to Harlem, past rows of burned-out tenement houses, around to 5th Avenue, past rows of mansions and museums - and all the while our cute little tour-nazi was informing us, not so much with facts and dates, but with stories about the buildings and the people who lived in them. "Don't look for it," she would say, as she began the next story, "we're not there, yet!"  "Slow down, Miguel!" she would call to the driver from the top deck.  "Now, Miguel, go slowwww-ly forward...a little more...a little more...there!  Ladies and gentlemen, there's your picture!" 

We didn't have to throw her off the bus, after all.  :)


Lunch at a corner deli fortified us for the trip home.  We grabbed our bags, called a car, and headed for the airport.  Our driver was from Bangladesh.  He was smiling and friendly and didn't seem to mind one bit when I fired off a dozen questions to him about his home and his life, but I must admit that I did not understand all that he said.

The flight home was uneventful and arrived on time. 

It was such a fun trip, but, as always, it was good to be home.

SkeeterVac Review #4

The SkeeterVac ran out of gas over 2 months ago.  We were about to leave the next morning for a short vacation, and didn't want to fool with the machine.  Over the next few weeks, daytime temperatures hovered around the 100-degree mark, and we didn't hang out in the yard much, so we weren't encountering any mosquitoes, anyway.  Replacing the gas tank on the SkeeterVac hasn't even been in our thoughts.  Now that the heat is beginning to relent, we're starting to venture out again, and since we have not had the SkeeterVac running, the mosquito population growth has been unhampered.

Last Sunday at dusk, when The Husband and I were puttering around outside, he said, "I'm going in. The 'skeeters are eating me up!"


"We need to crank the SkeeterVac back up," I commented, as I followed him inside.

Yesterday, I picked up a new gas tank.  After installing it, I changed out the TacTrap and put in a fresh bait cartridge.  Happily, the machine started on the first try. 

You should have seen the old TacTrap.  While I didn't see many mosquitoes stuck to it, I did see loads of horseflies (which I loathe more than mosquitoes), houseflies, and crickets.  There was even a dried-up skink stuck to it.  Sadly, there were also a couple of rows of feathers from a bird's wing.  (Poor bird probably thought he'd found some easy pickin's.)  All that was in the trap drawer was dust and fuzz, stuff that was in there before the gas bottle ran out.

Theoretically, I guess we're starting over in trying to decimate the mosquito population around here.  Before the heat drove us indoors, we were not seeing many mosquitoes in our yard, but neither was I encountering many in the garden, which is far outside the SkeeterVac's reach.  Had the SkeeterVac been doing its job, or has this simply been a slow year for 'skeeters?  Hard to say.  We have never seen mass quantities of mosquitoes stuck to the TacTrap or in the trap drawer - nothing that even distantly approached the drawer-full of mosquito carcasses shown in promotional videos.  But we have also (until recently) not been eaten alive by mosquitoes in our yard.  Perhaps the real test will come in the next few weeks, now that the mosquitoes seem to be out in force.

* * * * * *

On the gardening front, I mailed a garden soil sample to the University of Tennessee yesterday.  I am hoping that the results will come back about the time the garden poops out so that I can amend the soil for next year's garden.

Monday afternoon I tilled up the green bean rows and would've done the same to the purple-hull peas except that they had a "mess" of peas still on the vines.  Nanny picked them while I weeded the tomatoes.  The black-eyed peas need to go, too, but their vines are massive and should be mowed, first.  The butterbeans and butterpeas are still producing, so I'll leave them alone a while longer.

The squash is kaput, except for the zuccinis.  The okra is still making like crazy. 

The raccoons have gotten every single ear of corn, so far.  I'd be mad, except that I knew when I planted the corn that the 'coons would get it.  This year's corn crop, such as it was, is a dwarf variety, seeds that I bought half price at the end of the season last year.  The whole plant is barely waist high, and the little ears aren't two feet off the ground; the 'coons don't even have to break a sweat to reach them.  If I plant corn again next year, you can bet it's going to be giant stuff that the 'coons will have to work to get.

As for the tomatoes....    I sprayed fungicide to combat late blight over the weekend.  This may sound weird, but Monday when I went to work in the garden, there already seemed to be less of that throbbing, yellow-ish glow that a full-swing blight infestation seems to emit.  The top two-thirds of the tomato plants still look healthy, and the plants are still blooming, so maybe we'll get more ripe tomatoes this season.

The tomato vines have been outrageously large and lush this year, spilling over their cages and trailing onto the ground, but they haven't produced all that much fruit.  I blamed it on over-fertilizing until I heard other gardeners complaining of the same issue.  Uncle Jack says that he has lopped off some of his tomatoes to see what will happen, and they are doing well, so far.  I'd thought about doing that, myself, and may yet try it with a couple of the plants.  I'll let you know what happens.