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Bats

My earliest experience with bats was when I was about 11 years old.  My family was staying in a cabin in Maine, for a vacation.  My grandparents were there for the evening.  I was playing “war” with cards with one of my brothers when we heard a scream.  Grandma ran to the bed and pulled the covers over her head, soon followed by my mom, who called me under the covers with her.

My brothers were yelling and running around so I looked out from the covers and grandma was yelling, “a bat, a bat, get it!”  I guess we got under the covers because bats fly around and get caught in women’s hair.  I later found out this isn’t really true.  But it sure made for a wild night, until grandpa got the bat.

When I moved into a 150 year old, two-story brick house, that I bought in the late 1990’s, I found out that bats were not what I had previously thought.

I worked afternoon shift, and one night after work, I was going to sleep on the couch on the first floor.  I had a beagle that played games with the coons all night.  He would lay on the door of his box and the coons would come to eat his food and drink his water.  He let them start and would run out barking his head off.  Run up and down the run, and when he was sure they were back far enough, he went and laid in the door again.  Only to run out barking again in three minutes when they came back.  With no neighbors to complain, it was too much noise to sleep through.

So, I had just laid down and pulled a cover up to my chin, when I heard wings go about 10 inches over my face.  Jump up, lights on, saw a bat flying through my rooms.  Since I was there alone, I called a neighbor friend up the road and told him I had a bat in the house.  He told me to leave the lights on until the bat lands somewhere.  Put some heavy gloves on and get a towel.  Then move slowly and, with the towel in your hand, slowly close in on the bat and pinch lightly his wings together on his body.  I thought sure, he’s going to fly in my hair.  So I also put on a ball cap with all my hair tucked inside.

As I was getting close to the bat, he opened his mouth and kind of yelled at me, squeaky like, but didn’t fly.  He let me get ahold of him and pick him up and take him (or her, who knows) outside.  Cool, that worked great!

About a week later, my husband was in the shower and called me in to see what was in the tub.  It was on the tub floor and he said looked like a wet mouse.  I got close and it was a wet bat.  It must have been on the shower head when he turned the water on.  So, gloves back on and bat outside.  (My big brave husband)

This continued enough that we looked into finding out how they were getting in the house.  The chimney to the fireplace just happened to be opened to the sky.  The next weekend, it got sealed off.

The bats stopped getting in the house, but they were in both attics above.  One was a walk-in, and the other you had to use a ladder to get up in.  At first, I was so afraid of going in when they were there.  I thought they would fly at me and chase me out.  The fact is, they never flew at me.  They were hanging on the rafters and would yell at me, showing lots of teeth, but were never aggressive or menacing.  I guess they didn’t like getting woke up in the middle of their night, which was my day.

They were such an organized bunch, I would sit in the driveway at dusk, and watch them come out of the roof.  It was like clockwork.  They came out, one after the other, every few seconds.  I had a pond close to the house and had no mosquitos at all.  Those wonderful bats kept them ate up…

Plus, in October, every year, I would hear one bat squeaking in a cadence.  For several days this would happen.  Then about a week later, they were gone.  I think they migrated to Mexico, but they never told me where they went.  Then, in March, they were home again.

I really came to love those bats.  Mosquito clean up.  Plus, the free bat quano.  I’d go in when they were gone and sweep up all the manure, and put on my garden.  People pay a high price for that stuff.

Since I have moved, I see a bat once in a while.  I bought a bat house to put up next year to try and lure some here.  I miss watching them.

 

The Perfect Cup of Coffee

What draws me to a perfect cup of coffee?  When I see a steaming cup, anywhere; a restaurant, on TV, through a window of a coffee shop, I feel compelled to have one myself.

Something about seeing that steaming cup in my hands screams comfort in ways other things can’t compare to.

During times of extreme cold, like just after shoveling snow, it warms me from the inside out.  In times of decision making or deep thought, a cup spurs me on, sip after each delicious sip, to delve into places I maybe haven’t gone before.

When sharing with a friend, I hardly remember drinking, but my cup is empty, many times, my heart is full and I’m left with a smile on my face.

During times of intense waiting, like at the hospital or for a much long-expected phone call, that steaming cup settles me down, helps clear my head and warm my belly, helping me to feel hopeful and that all will be well.

During times of grief, that steaming cup warms my hands and a little bit of my soul.  Sip after sip, reminding me that tomorrow comes.  And the day after that and the day after that.  That steaming cup reminds me to move along, keep going, better days ahead.

I have tried to always look at my cup as half full.  Some days that is really hard.  But one more cup of coffee surely can’t hurt anything.

So the perfect cup of coffee is always the one I have in my hands, right then.

Grandma’s in the House – A Reflection

I’ve had a lot of funny stories about my husbands Grandma.  He helped remind me of things to write.  Some things I couldn’t write about, but have told a very few privately.  Oh my…

Today’s post is in honor of her and what she has done in her life.  She is still living and is 96-1/2 years old.  Gma grew up in the 1920’s and 30’s.  She saw the Great Depression.  She was brought up in the mode of children should be seen and not heard.  To speak only when spoken to.  On her family’s farm, she farmed the land with horses.

Her father had a small coal mine that he hand dug and delivered to customers.  When he heard of a struggling family, he would take coal to them for free.  He also had a strawberry farm.

Gma married young and started her family.  Her husband worked at a metal scrap yard.  They leased their first dairy farm and proceeded to raise cattle and sell milk.  Early on, she tended bar and later worked in a nursing home.

Gma found a man, lying in a ditch, that had been beaten up and thrown out of a car.  She took him back to the farm and nursed him to health.  Then offered him a job and he lived and worked on the farm until he was 87 years old and passed away.

She also adopted her brother’s son and he lived on the farm also.  By this time, she had about 100 chickens, milk cattle, pigs and a huge garden.  There were about 10 or more family members living there, in the farmhouse together, at one time.  Lots of hands made the work lighter.  My husband remembers having big meals three times a day.  He said that if you leaned back while eating and your back hit the chair, she asked if you were done eating and if you said, “yes”, she’d say, “if you’re done eating, get out in the field and work.”

If Gma ever heard of anyone in need, she would always take food to them.  She would oversee all of the farm work, pitch in where needed, make sure everyone was fed, sold eggs and milk, canned food from the garden, helped raise grandchildren and always made sure that everyone in the family was taken care of and their needs were met.  She’s one of the toughest women I know, but I sure would have been leery of messing with anyone in her family.

For the Love of Salt

My love of salt started when I was a baby.  I chewed every wood surface I could find and sucked on it.  My mother asked the Doctor about this and he said that I was trying to get salt out of the wood.  He then said that some bodies just need more salt then others.

The first picture is the different kinds of salt that I have on hand at this time. Plus, the third picture is a Persian Blue Salt that I forgot to add to the pix.  I also have a Ghost Pepper salt that I just bought.  The middle picture is my collection of salt dips that I collect.  My favorite find was the little salt spoon that is laying beside the green one.

My love and absolute need for salt continued through my grade school years when I lived beside my grandmother’s house and there was a field that used to have cows in it.  There was a wonderful salt lick that I would take a rock to, and chip off small chunks and put in my pockets to eat on the bus or whenever I needed it.

I also knew where our church kept the rock salt that they used to salt the sidewalks in the winter.  I would fill my pockets with that on Sundays to eat through the week.  It was behind the pastor’s office door, by the way.

If all else failed, I would just go to the stove and pour salt into my hand and lick it out.  In my early 20’s, at a doctor appointment, he asked me if I was thirsty a lot.  I said yes, but I eat a lot of salt.  He still sent me for blood work, but it was all normal. Heh heh.

My current doctor said I may want to cut back a little on salt and I said that it was my favorite food group.  She didn’t even crack a smile.  I thought I was funny.

So here is a list of the kinds of salt that I have right now:  I have 2 Himalayan salt blocks, 1 Himalayan salt light, 2 Himalayan salt candle holders, Himalayan salt chunks, also in white, a Himalayan salt heart, white pretzel salt, tobacco spiced sea salt, roasted garlic sea salt, spicy garlic salt, sriracha salt, chipotle salt, green herbs salt, rosemary lavender salt, curry salt, plain sea salt, hickory smoke salt, cherry wood smoked sea salt, seasoned salt, garlic salt, Himalayan pink salt, smoked salt, Hawaiian red salt, Eurasian black salt, pure ocean salt, sel de guerande, Persian blue salt, jalepeno pepper sea salt, sriracha pepper sea salt, Cyprus citron flake salt, Carolina hickory smoked salt, Trapani salt road sea salt, Cyprus chili flake sea salt, and ghost pepper salt.

P.S.  I haven’t found anything that salt is not good on.

My Bird Friend

When I moved to this property, seven years ago, I had room to put a nice big garden in.  There were lots of deer and critters around here that like to eat gardens, so I put a fence up to deter them.

While I was planting my first garden here, I heard birds singing.  I have always mimicked and whistled back what I hear to keep the birds “talking” to me.  One bird would even come and light on a far post of the garden and “talk” to me.  It made all kinds of different sounds and when it flew, it had a white circle under each wing and its tail.  I had never noticed a bird like it before.

My mom is a bird watcher and has always named birds when we saw them together.  So I asked her what this bird was and she didn’t know.  I had looked in a bird book she had and the only bird that looked similar was a mockingbird, but the book didn’t say anything about white spots underneath.  So I was still unsure of what it was until a friend was over and identified it for sure, as a mockingbird.  That explained why it made so many different sounding songs and tweets.

That summer was fun because whenever I was outside in the garden, that bird always seemed to come around to “talk”.  After the third year of this going on, as soon as I would step out from under the porch to work outside, that bird found me quickly.  I even knew which couple of trees it was usually in and started looking for it, but it would start chattering excitedly as soon as it saw me.

The last two years, that bird would even find me when I would be in the big garage with the door open, working out there.  It would come out and sit on the wood pile by that door and “talk”.  Which was very brave because of the cats we have had.  The very last time I saw it, was on that wood pile and I was in that big garage painting something with my husband.

The next day, it wasn’t anywhere and I never saw it again.  I have seen several mockingbirds since, but none are “my” bird.  It was a six year relationship with a creature that weighs only a few ounces, but when it disappeared, it left a tiny hole in my happiness.  I never knew what happened, whether it had lived its full life, or a predator got it, but that little piece of nature left a warm and fuzzy place on my heart.

 

 

Homemade Pizza

If you’ve read my previous blog on baking bread, you might be surprised that I make really good pizza.  My parents owned a couple of pizza shops and I worked at them both and became good at making pizza, my very favorite food of all.

I made pizza for my 50th birthday party with all of my family and my cousins wife, Amy, sent me a message on Facebook afterwards and said that I had inspired her to try and make her own.  Her words were that she had tried a recipe she found online and “NOTHING compared to the fluffy cloud of goodness of the delectable yumminess” of my pizzas.  Bless her heart…

I don’t have a recipe for the dough, but I can describe how I do it.  I use a kitchenaid mixer with a dough hook.  I put cool tap water in the bottom about an inch and a half deep.  Then I add about a half an inch of milk.  I put in a tablespoon of sugar and sprinkle yeast all of the top of the liquid.  I turn the mixer on for a few seconds to mix and turn off and let it sit until the yeast bubbles, usually a few minutes.  Then I put in a teaspoon of salt and some whole wheat flour, maybe a cup or little more.  Then I start adding unbleached flour, while the hook is stirring.  I let it go awhile and if it is too runny, I add some more flour.  When it just pulls all together, I mix it on the 2nd lowest number for about 3 minutes until there is no dough left on the sides of the bowl and it is all together.

I put in an oiled bowl in a warm spot.  Sometimes I sit on the oven and turn it on low.  You can also put it in the refrigerator and it raises overnight.  You can use it the next afternoon for dinner.  You can freeze it before you let it raise and just get out as needed.

When it looks like it has doubled in size, I poke a finger in to the first knuckle and if it doesn’t bounce back up, it is ready to use.  I spray oil onto a cookie sheet.  Sometimes I put a little cornmeal on it.  Then spread the dough to all the corners.  You can either let it raise some more, like another 20 minutes or you can just sauce it and lay on your toppings and bake.

I use Dei Fratelli Pizza Sauce.  I have made homemade, but don’t really notice much of a difference.  Then just the toppings I like and top with a mix of mozzarella and provolone.

Bake at 400 degrees until cheese is browned.  About 20 to 25 minutes.

It’s fun to try different toppings and even dessert ones.  You can put butter on the crust and add Nutella and marshmallows; cinnamon and sugar; apples and caramel etc.  The kids love to get creative and come up with new ones.

 

 

Here Kitty Kitty Kitty

After Gma Kate had lived with us with all those cats she brought, I just kind of was tired of cats for awhile.  They fought with each other, were persnickety, divas, you name it.  Then a little black kitten with a white tuft under its chin started sneaking in for food.  Long story short, we named him “Charlie”.  He’s been a wonderful cat that we say is half dog, because whenever we are outside, he finds us and follows us around the whole time.  Lots of petting goes on to.

Cats were eating my cats food as soon as I went inside after putting food in the bowl, so I started putting a heavier metal bowl on top to take off periodically, so the food would last a little longer.  By 9 am every day for a couple of weeks, the bowl was knocked off the top and all the food eaten.  And I thought, “who is eating that much?”

One day, I heard the metal bowl hit the ground.  I went out and saw a large cat down by the chicken coop.  I thought that must be the hungry one so I call out, “here kitty, kitty, kitty.”  The cat stops and turns around and looks at me and then continues on.

The next time I hear it the cat is only half way down to the coop, and I see one of our cats, flattened along the ground a couple of feet from the larger cat, just looking at it, giving it plenty of respect.  I couldn’t believe the size of that cat and when I called, “here kitty, kitty, kitty”, it turned and looked at me and I saw that it was a bobcat.  Yes, I was calling a    bobcat in.  It kind of reminded me of the glasses commercial when the lady calls for her kitty out the door and a raccoon runs in and she says, “come snuggle with mommy”.  That would have been a mistake.  Getting ahold of the bobcat…

Brownies and School Lunches

Along with the learning to cook story, from that first cookbook, “The New Betty Crocker Cookbook”, I tried some baking also.  I was a stay at home mom for the first years of my children’s lives, so the one income had to cover everything.  So, I wanted to try the brownie recipe and real chocolate was pricey.  I had seen on my cocoa can that you could substitute with some oil for melted chocolate.  I tried it and really liked it and I have done it that way ever since.  I also doubled the recipe to fit a regular sized cake pan because when my children were in school, I would make a big pan, cut into 15 pieces and freeze in sandwich bags, so I could just pop them into the lunch bags in the morning and they were defrosted by lunch.

I tried to make some of the snacks they carried for their lunches.  That way, I could use unbleached flour, a little whole wheat flour, cut the sugar a little or substitute honey, and make them without preservatives, colors and additives.

I am now baking for my grandchildren’s lunches.  I make cookies, cupcakes, breads and muffins also, along with Ree Drummonds Strawberry Granola Bars.  The children LOVE these!  I substitute any fruit that I have in the freezer.  Sometimes, I use up a lot of close-to-empty jam jars and just polka dot the flavors all over.  Then cut them as usual and the bars have different flavors in each bar.  I call them mystery bars.

Here is my adjusted version of the brownies I mentioned above:

c=cup, t=teaspoon

1 c. cocoa powder

1/4 c. oil (I use olive)

2/3 c. shortening

2 c. sugar

4 eggs

1 t. vanilla

1-1/2 c. flour

1 t. baking powder

1 t. salt

(You can add 1 c. of chocolate or white chocolate chips and/or 1 c. of toasted walnuts at the very end of mixing, to change it up a bit.)

Melt shortening in microwave for 20 seconds, stir and do another 20 if needed.  Add cocoa powder, oil, and sugar.  Stir well.  Add eggs and vanilla, stirring well.  Then mix in flour, baking powder and salt till just incorporated and you don’t see any more flour.  Spray grease your 13 x 9 cake pan.  Bake at 350 degrees for 20 – 25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.  Let set till cool before cutting.

I do not put icing on these when they are for the freezer, because icing doesn’t do well with the plastic bags after they thaw.  But I frequently do for home.  I just use a simple recipe of 1# confectionary sugar mixed with 1/2 c. shortening or butter and 1 t. of vanilla and just enough milk to bring it all together.  You can add some food coloring if you like.

Learning to Cook

When I was about 13 years old, my mother thought it was time for me to learn how to cook.  She would ask me if I wanted to help her cook dinner.  I remember thinking, “why do I have to help cook?” and I would hurry outside as fast as I could.  Whenever she would ask, I’d say “nope, I’m going outside”.  I had two brothers with lots of stuff to do, any type of ball to play, bikes to ride, ropes to jump, or mud puddles to try and throw each other in.  And a really great train went by our house every day and the caboose guy would wave at us.

She got clever and said, “I’ll teach you how to make pie crusts and I’ll make the filling”.  Pie, yes I’ll make the crusts anytime to get a pie out of it.

Along came my first husband.  We got married a week before my 19th birthday.  His mother was a gourmet cook and even packed him a thermos of mashed potatoes to take in his lunch for work.  After cooking for a week, I was given a Betty Crocker Cookbook for my 19th birthday gift.  It looked like greek to me.

I got all “gung ho” and was going to make all the bread for my family.  My first and final loaf (for many years) came out of the oven looking exactly like a brown brick.  The upside of that was if I would make enough bread, I could build us a house.  Plus, I got really good at blowing out oven fires.

I tried a soup recipe and saw where it said to brown the meat.  I thought it was brown and I would save some time by skipping that step.  It came out tasting like what I think stone soup would have      tasted like.  How could so many things be in that pot and it tastes a     little like lightly flavored water?

I was going to cook us some pork chops.  Since you put a roast in some water to cook it, I put the chops under water to cook them.  They came out tasting like cardboard.  The cookbook wasn’t helping much.  And in the first month of being married, he lost 10 pounds.

I ended up asking my mom to come show me some tips and I started learning to cook after I got married.  She said she knew I’d eventually want to know how.

And that is how my love of cookbooks started.  I have too many to count at this point in my life, and I have become quite a good cook.  My grandchildren always challenge me for their birthday dinners with stuff I’ve never tried before.

My advice on cooking would be, take it slow and simple at first.  If you’ve never made a recipe before, do exactly what it says.  You can adjust it the next time, if you want to.  And have fun, it’s so satisfying knowing you’re feeding your family good home-cooked food.  Plus, the joy of sitting around the table and listening to the stories of the day from each other.  This grows a family good!

A Berry Picking We Will Go la la la

I was going out back to pick blackberries a few days ago.  I ride my four-wheeler out a trail through the woods, to the open fields where the berries grow along the tree line.

I don’t know how fast I was going, but about one foot in front of my face, a spider web came into view about one second before I ran through it. It couldn’t have hit me more directly in the face if I had been aiming at it.   It covered my face and neck and was in my hair.  I was going too fast to see if there was a spider in it, or not, so I started swatting all over my head and shoulders, while still going down the hill.  Yuck!

A pair of turkeys with two young ran off the trail as I came through.  I think they were laughing at me.

From now on I’m going to ride with a pole stuck out in front of me to catch any webs first.  This kind of thing is exactly the     reason that I let Tom ride in front of me.  Heh heh.