Further adventures in cooking

We shut the house up when we left for church yesterday, and so when we arrived back home at noon, the house was really cool compared with the 90+ degrees outside. This was a good thing, because I ended up having to fire up the oven twice to make bread for Richard.

Nothing quite as good as a slice of bread, fresh out of the oven with butter (in my case, a tiny bit of butter.) Except the first batch wasn’t so good. He was in the kitchen talking to me while I was combining the ingredients and I left out the salt.

“Honey,” I said, “The bread doesn’t taste that bad—if you make a PB & J sandwich out of it you can’t hardly tell.”

He was not persuaded. I had cooked some great northern beans earlier in the day, so I guess I will be having beans on toast and PB & J myself

So, at about 3 p.m., I started over and made another batch of bread, and remembered the salt, and fired up the oven again.  

Backtracking to Saturday, I got an e-mail from friend who was very happy because her husband had finally shot a groundhog that was tearing up their yard – and for those who feel sorry for the groundhog (and I admit I feel a bit sorry for it myself), one must remember that they dig huge holes and they can wreck havoc in the garden.

So I sent her an e-mail with a recipe on how to cook a groundhog and told her we would be over for dinner at about 5 pm (just joking of course).

I received an e-mail from her this morning:

Just for the record, I ain't cooking no groundhog! I'm not against sampling one if someone else cooks it, but don't give me one to cook. That’s right up there with cooking kidneys -- yes, I’ve tried that! I know what you are thinking, “are some people just born stupid?!" While they were simmering, I stepped out of the house for a minute and when I came back in it smelled like someone had peed all over the house. I grabbed the kidneys, pan and all, marched directly out the back door, and threw it in the yard. Let the neighbors cat sink his teeth into that!!!

I think this woman needs to write a blog.

I too cooked kidneys once upon a time. We had bought a couple of sheep from a friend and had them butchered, and I asked for the kidneys, along with the heart and the liver. I had been reading too many British novels where steak and kidney pie was being eaten by the characters, so I decided I had to try it. I got a bit farther than she did. Richard refused outright to sample it, but I actually ate a couple of bites before I threw the whole mess away.