Like a Bug on a Windshield

Before I started this post I Googled tartar sauce recipes just to see how other people do it. I found dozens, each one of them a little different from the one before, all of them wrong. Evidently there are a bunch of cooks out there who have never actually tasted tartar sauce. Tartar sauce, in my expert opinion, is absolutely necessary for any kind of fried fish and it's pretty good with baked fish. Oh, and a fish sandwich without tartar sauce is a sandwich that isn't ready to eat. In the past, long ago and far away, I used to buy tartar sauce. Specifically, Kraft. Unfortunately, tartar sauce is really expensive for how little you get in the standard squeeze bottle. I like lots of tartar sauce on my fish, just like I like lots of ketchup/catsup on my french fries and cocktail sauce on my shrimp. The beauty of my recipe is that I can make just enough for a fish dinner and not have a tiny bit leftover sitting in the fridge for a year. It's also reasonably cheap and it...

Living out in the country isn't for everyone. I love it, but that's just me. We live half a mile from the nearest paved roads, either way you go and there are only two ways, north or west. The east/west roads are named, like Tecumseh Road, Franklin Road and Rock Creek Road. The north/south roads are numbered streets like 156th Street, 168th Street and 180th Street. If you follow 156th about four miles north to Stella Road, it becomes Peebly Road. And if you turn left onto Stella it becomes 149th Street. These are important things to know when giving directions. We live four miles from Dollar General Stores, one down on Highway 9 and one up at Stella. Country Boy market is a little east of the Dollar General on Highway 9. It's a full service grocery store with a deli, locally sourced grass-fed beef, plumbing parts, tools and chainsaw oil if you need it. The closest store is the Absentee Shawnee Tribal store and Valero gas station, two miles south on 156th. It sits in f...

In all of the James Bond films there are always dozens, even hundreds of henchmen. They basically stand around waiting for their chance to die needlessly. They are part of an overwhelming force that gets defeated by one man or woman. They are basically nameless and expendable. I just watched the beginning of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (spoiler alert: the movie ends with a lead-in for another sequel). The heroine is walking through a wasteland and suddenly a gang of henchmen pop out of crates and barrels and from under rubble where they may have been hiding for days and attack. They all die pretty quickly and I got the feeling that their whole purpose was to slow Alice down a little bit. Certainly the super bad guy didn't expect or even want the protagonist killed by a bunch of faux ninjas wearing motorcycle helmits. Otherwise he wouldn't get to gloat and make the little speech that ultimately ends up being his undoing. Henchmen are pretty common in movies and I have t...

Every now and then, I share a recipe on this or my other blog. For the most part, these are not entirely my own original recipes. I don't have a test kitchen and time to experiment with different combinations and approaches to particular dishes. However, except in very rare cases, I have tweaked and adapted the recipes to my own (and my family's) tastes. In most cases I've changed them quite a bit, but I started with someone else's basics. Many of my recipes started out over fifty years ago as Betty Crocker recipes. I also learned a lot from my mother and from a copy of The Joy of Cooking I received as a gift over forty years ago. If I do no more than change a proportion here and there, I try to credit the original source. I don't want to take credit for someone else's work, but I don't want to blame them for my mistakes, either. But here's what's bothering me: all of the recipes I see online at various blogs and web sites include nutritional inf...

It's that time of year when I start wearing my jean jacket. I put it on first thing in the morning and take it off at bedtime. Jacket weather is my favorite season of the year. Denim is comfortable. It's heavy enough to keep me warm in the fifty degrees outdoors and light enough I'm not uncomfortable wearing it in the house. A denim jacket is as much a sign of Fall as the leaves turning color, pumpkin spice everything and chrysanthemums blooming in the flower bed. Soon it will be time to trade my sneakers for my Cat boots.They're pull on, high-top leather boots with thick treads on the soles. And I'll start wearing boot socks--thick warm, comfy boot socks. I wore jeans all summer. Out here in the woods there are scratching hazards everywhere. Even with the long pants, I still get plenty of cuts and scrapes. I'll start wearing my cowboy hat all the time, too. I wear it in the summer when I'm working outdoors, but after only a short while, it gets too ...

Ranch dressing is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind--and most addictive, too! Growing up I had my choice of Thousand Island, French, Russian, Catalina and Italian. And at school we got Miracle Whip. Occasionally I used Blue Cheese, but that was rare. When I was in high school, somebody invented Creamy Italian and I didn't use anything else for years. A creamy dressing that wasn't sweet was a whole new concept. I'm not sure exactly when Ranch Dressing came into being, but I've used it ever since. I do love a good Caesar salad, but I'm not fond of bottled Caesar dressing. Over the years I've enjoyed a few variations on Ranch, such as Peppercorn Ranch, but I always come back to original. Oh, and I'm talking about Hidden Valley Ranch. Other brands just don't get the job done. Then I discovered Ranch dressing recipes online and I've been tweaking the recipes and developing (okay, that sounds like I've worked at it, but not s...

We've been having mixed weather the past week or so: rain, sun, hot, cool, windy. Typical Oklahoma weather. Hurricane Nate made landfall, twice, and is moving north After killing more than twenty people in Central America, things looked bad, but Nate wasn't as bad as the previous four hurricanes when it reached the US. The rain has kept me from doing much work in the garden. I've gotten quite a bit done in the greenhouse, but the wet grass and soil make any work outdoors impractical. I'm still not really over all the complications of my cold and I get winded and worn out easily, plus, I feel my brain is a bit cloudy. Perhaps in a few days I'll be my same old hardworking, creative and witty self--or am I thinking of someone else? Stephen P.

While I try my best not to succumb to gloom and doom, I can't ignore how tragedy has followed upon tragedy without a break. We've lost hundreds of thousands of acres of timber to wildfires in at least six states. The Gulf Coast was hit by hurricane Harvey, leaving Port Aransas and Rockport, Texas destroyed and Houston devastated by flooding. In just days, Hurricane Irma struck Florida, leaving most of the state damaged or destroyed by wind and water and without electricity. That same storm wiped out the island of Barbuda, leaving it uninhabitable. Shortly thereafter hurricane Maria swept through causing untold destruction to Puerto Rico, the island territory that should be our fifty-first state. Last week, a large slab broke free from the rock face of El Capitan in California's Yosemite National Park, killing at least one person and driving hundreds from the park. Then a madman opened fire on a crowd at a concert in a parking lot in Las Vegas, killing at least 59 and ...

The autumn crud came early. Just about the time the weather cooled down and the rain moved in, I got hit with the rhinovirus from hell. There is so much to do around here, but picking the ripe tomatoes wears me out and I have a hard time catching my breath. I've had a collapsed lung before and this is almost that bad. And the initial phase, where I have a throbbing sinus headache, runny nose and constant sneezing lasted five days. It was like the damn thing just wouldn't settle in. I still have to water the greenhouse, but thankfully, most end of season tasks can be put off for a few more days. Details of illness are boring at best, so let's change the subject. The new television season is finally here. I only have broadcast television, so there isn't a lot to watch, but cable was always a whole lotta nuthin' when I had it. I might be missing a few shows, like Better Call Saul and Fargo, but mostly it's a vast wasteland. The Orville continues to be worth w...