Dreaming of my spring garden ......

Every year, I add a new flower bed or two, thus greatly enhancing the beauty of my yard and greatly decreasing the amount of lawn left to be mowed.

This year, however, I am adding a dedicated vegetable bed. I usually just tuck my veggies into the flower beds, producing crops of eggplants and peppers that I share with friends, or drop things like tomatoes into pots, where I'm eager to harvest a measley eight or nine tomatoes each season.

I learned the first problem with my tomato plants: I was buying determinate plants, which are bushy and have only one crop, as opposed to indeterminates, which are viney and produce for many weeks.

That learned, I have gone crazy this year with all the types of tomatoes I want to try! I have found seeds for giant heirlooms, tiny cherries and grapes, mid-sized romas! I have found tomatoes that promise to come in all colors: not the just the same old red we all see, but pinks and yellows and blacks and striped! Oh I can't wait to see what I actually grow ...

And peppers! Who knew there were so many varieties of peppers?!? I usually buy one pitiful plant, or maybe two, and add them to my beds. Plain old bells. Whatever is available.

But not this year! I am going to attempt some bells again, but I am adding anchos and jalepenos and bananas to my collection. Oh I hope I get to harvest a few ... I so love peppers of any and every kind!

What else? What else? Okra and beans and squash, oh my!

Now if the warmer weather would only arrive so I can start my planting ............

Holiday Happenings

Well, it's still Holiday Season here. It's Carnival, which won't last long since Mardi Gras is February 5, 2008, quite early this year. But oh the King Cakes I can try till then ....



The holidays started with a backpacking trip in the Sipsey Wilderness in northern Alabama. A group of friends & I headed up from south Louisiana, enjoying the chilly weather but escaping before the freezing rains set in on Saturday night. Check out the pretty moss & fungus covered log I found at lunch one day.



My birthday was the next weekend, along with the SEC championship game. What a wild weekend! LSU won, and a bunch of other teams lost, leaving us with a spot in the BCS title game! What a great birthday present! :) Of course, we played the title game last Monday and won, making my favorite Tigers the BCS National Champs. They were voted champs in all the polls, too. Quite an exciting football year!


After that, of course, was Christmas and all that goes along with it. Family & feasts, and then more family & more feasts. Culminating with my mom's surprise 70th birthday party on December 30th, 2007. With a New Year's Eve bash to follow. (Who could forget the fireball & subsequent power outage during the party?!?)


All in all, a safe & merry time. Just a few weeks of King Cake temptation left before beginning the Lenten period. Maybe this year I'll try a Zulu ... or a praline & cream cheese ... or ... or ... or ... hmmmmm, I just love King Cake.

Eatin' good on the trail

I love to cook. And I love to hike. So one of my goals was to have really yummy food out on the trail.

I've created a few recipes, and one of them recently was published in Backpacker magazine. Pretty cool.

But even better are the reviews that backpackers themselves have been giving my son's favorite recipe ... here's the latest:

I tested out your recipe that appeared in Backpacker , and after dehydrating it and tasting it at home, I was skeptical. I love hummus, but am not a big spaghetti fan.

The combination of tomatoes and hummus scared me!This past weekend, while in the Red River Gorge, I packed some of your hummus along with my usual chorizo and cheese.

Out on the trail, after a tough day of bushwacking, I tried your recipe......and I couldn't get enough. I ate three tortillas with your hummus and was craving more! The chorizo and cheese went untouched and probably won't be packed in the future, saving me 1/2 lb or more!

I don't know why, but I was craving the flavor of these torillas after my first few bites.Thanks for the recipe!

Jim

What a tremendous compliment! Thanks, Jim!!

All Things Gross

Gross thing #1:

Our family cat, River, was bitten by a venomous snake two weekends ago. He survived the bite, thanks in part to our ability to get onto LSU's campus during the LSU - Auburn game. The game took forever because it was televised, resulting in the roads onto campus being open longer than normal. Since then, he's about about 1/8 of the skin on his body and is currently at the vet for at least a 5-day stay, maybe longer.

We're trying to save his leg, and we're trying to save his life. The wound is huge and open, too big for a successful graft. He's at risk of sepsis and other infections.

Poor kitty.



Gross thing #2:

I forgot to toss my pumpkin today before I head out of town. It should be quite squishy & oozy by the time I get back home Sunday. Ick.



Gross thing #3:

This weekend, my son's 5th grade class is heading to an exhibit in Mobile called Grossology: the Impolite Science of the Human Body. While I'm sure all the 5th grade boys will love it - only one girl is going - well, I've really seen enough gross-ness in the past two weeks to last me a while.

I still haven't figured out how those nurses do all that wound care! Gross!!

Old friends at Pack & Paddle

Tonight I presented a dehydrating seminar at Pack & Paddle in Lafayette, Louisiana. It was a lot of fun to prepare things for the class, but I felt a bit disorganized in the presentation. I should have thought things through a bit more before talking to 35 or so people about how to prepare dehydrated foods for wilderness adventures (or for hurricane preparedness).

Too late now. The class is over, and I hope some folks learned some things they didn't know before tonight.

A new website has been created to help alumni from my high school get back in touch with each other. Through this website, I found an old friend, A.J., who lives near Lafayette with his wife, Lori. Knowing I was doing a class in Lafayette, they decided to wander over for a visit. Even though they don't really do too much in the way of outdoorsy things. We didn't get to visit much since I had this class to do, but it was good to see them anyway. Here's hoping that another 20 years won't go by before we have the chance to visit again.

Tae Kwon Do & Two O'Clock

This weekend was another busy one. Yesterday was a tae kwon do touranment at David Vincent's Martial Arts & Fitness ...

. . . then tailgating at LSU, which is always a good time . . .

. . . then a good night's sleep after a big win.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sunday was a leisurely day. I got up, walked the pooch, and loaded the kayak for an easy paddle at Two O'Clock Bayou. Simply loading the boat was the first adventure as there was a small black widow spider nesting in one of my tie-down straps. Shortly after getting in the boat, my foot peg broke off. But neither of these was fatal to the trip: I left the spider where he was (I wonder if he's still there!) and the foot peg could be fixed at home. And a-paddling I went.

Two O'Clock Bayou meanders through moss-laden cypress trees full of gigantic golden silk spiders, or so people know them as banana spiders around here. There were also lots of egrets, a couple of herons, and a few others birds I couldn't identify, all amongst the stunning metalic blue dragonflies. I only saw one snake, but - unfortunately - no alligators.

All in all, though, a pretty darn good weekend.

First post

Watched a little football over the weekend - NSU Demons won on a last second field goal in what turned to be a much more exciting game than the LSU / VT game. Walked the puppy & let her swim a little. Waiting for cooler weather so that the camping can begin again!