Squash Blossoms (Squash, Raffle, Quesadilla, One-Man-Band, Heinous)

It’s that time again…I’m planning my backyard garden. This year I’m going for simplicity: two tomato plants (Better Boys and Early Girls – I try for sexual equality in my gardening!), two squash plants, one cucumber plant, and one pepper bush. It’s a one-man band, though, as my husband has sworn off gardening following last season’s debacle. I wanted to try container gardening and after about $300 and many hours of labor, our garden yielded about five tomatoes. He pointed out that put our tomatoes at $60 each. He says he's satisfied just sticking with store-bought tomatoes, no matter the exorbitantly heinous prices and bland taste. I just can’t give up so easily. I still dream of juicy tomato and mayo sandwiches on fresh white bread. But I am trying hard to keep the dollar investment to a minimum this go-around. So far I’m up to $35.76 for plants, mulch, a new shovel, and a raffle ticket for an electric tiller.

I’ve found some interesting recipes using squash blossoms that I can't wait to try: squash blossom quesadillas, batter fried squash blossoms, and cheese-stuffed blossoms. Squash blossoms are not something that you can usually find in the produce department at your local grocery stores because they are extremely perishable. At best, they will last only two days in your refrigerator’s crisper and that's if you wash and store them perfectly. I’m hoping to pluck these little delicacies right off my plants, rinse them off, and cook them up. Wish me luck!

~Belinda definitely does not have a green thumb, but tries to give gardening a go every now and then. See her blog at Upside Down Bee for links to these yummy squash blossom recipes!

Returning from Paradise...(Squash, Raffle, Quesadilla, One-Man-Band, Heinous)

We've been here a little over four years and loved it. Along the way, we’ve learned a few things:

1. It’s better to win the raffle than the golf tournament. When you win the tournament, everyone is jealous (because you were better than they) but the “rifa” winner is lucky and celebrated. It’s backward, but that’s how it goes.

2. Paradise is overrated and overpriced. Heinous prices are charged for everyday things like peanut butter and dark beer, if you can even get them. Usually, you can’t.

3. Just because the people speak Spanish, it doesn’t mean they have good Mexican food. The quesadilla I had last night was heated cheez-whiz on a tortilla.

4. They have no regard for sports that make sense to gringos. No basketball, no football…they play squash, if you can believe it.

So we are departing this island to take over the family business in the USA…it’s a mom and pop place, a one-man-band, but it’s the next step in a journey that continues to get better.

~dt and family will move from the Caribbean to rural Tennessee in May. He can’t wait to watch ESPN.

Milkshakes (Testing, Fundraiser, Mint, Car Wash, Pizza)

I have an idea for a really cool school fundraiser: a challenge to drink one of every milkshake on our local Cookout Restaurant's menu within one week. And, on top the requisite stomach capacity, here’s an additional twist: you can’t gain ANY weight! The person who drinks his or her way through the menu, (approximately 45 different varieties) without gaining an a single ounce would be the winner and receive some cheesy t-shirt at the final weigh-in ceremony. The proceeds to the school would come from the entry fees. Also, maybe we could talk Cookout into donating a part of the sales on each shake bought for the competition. I think we could pitch it as great publicity.

Each entrant would weigh in at the beginning of the week, keep up with a menu card that Cookout employees punch as they purchase and drink each flavor (verified by an eyewitness, of course), and then weigh in at the end of the week. What do you think? Personally, I believe this would be much more fun (and profitable) than just another carwash or pizza sale!

I’m planning on testing the process out next week. Some quick math says I need to target seven shakes a day Monday through Friday and then taper off to just five on Saturday and Sunday. I think I’m going with classic chocolate, followed by Oreo mint, then blueberry cheesecake, and a banana pineapple chaser. After that, I’ll take a break for a couple of hours or so until I’m ready to pick it back up with caramel fudge, then orange push-up, and finally finish the day with peach.

My strategy is to drink the most disgusting mix of flavors each day in order to induce vomiting, and hence, no weight gain! I’ll let you know how it turns out.

~To see a picture of Cookout’s milkshake menu, see Belinda’s blog at Upside Down Bee!

The Wedding Reception (Testing, Fundraiser, Mint, Car Wash, Pizza)

Do you believe that I once went to a wedding reception held at a Busy Bee Carwash! It’s true….and to make matters worse; it was the wedding of a guy I once dated. I can tell you that my dad breathed a sigh of relief when that ended. His name was Charlie Brown, again, no lie. He was from West Virginia and at the time of his marriage worked at the carwash. He was one of those “great” guys that my brother-in-law hooked me up with.

The wedding had been held at a nearby park with the Wedding March played over a portable tape player that squelched during the whole song as they were trying to amp it through a karaoke system. They had put up this little platform right by the pond and the ducks kept coming up thinking they were going to get fed. The Bride’s father kept trying to shoo them away. I don’t know which made the more noise, the ducks or the horrible sound system. There were about 25 of us at the wedding, standing there as they had not provided any chairs. Fortunately it was a very short ceremony. Then we all proceeded over to the carwash for the big reception.

They had the buffet table down the middle of the carwash. They had those buttery wedding mints, pizza rolls, little crust less tuna & chicken salad sandwiches and a two tier wedding cake with a big Busy Bee on the top of it. They had no plates, just these cocktail napkins with ducks on them left over from the annual Ducks Unlimited fundraiser. The best man kept joking that he was going to hit the button to start the carwash during the dancing. The bride’s father invited us over to his house after the reception for a taste testing of the different Boones Farm wines! As the couple was departing and we were throwing the rice my brother-in-law leaned over and said, “And this could have all been yours.” Thank you, Lord, for my singleness.

~Cheryl keeps writing monologues but forgetting to put in tag lines. So here is one that GM wrote for her. She has a knack for humor!

My Head (Baseball, Caramel, Curry, Horns, Rain)

I’ve had the strangest headache for the past three days. It’s really more of a skull-ache or a scalp-ache, I suppose, than a traditional headache. Nothing I take seems to give any relief; I’ve tried Motrin, Excedrin, and Aleve. The pain is centered on the top of the right side of my head in an area about the size of a baseball. It’s been keeping me up at night.

This morning around 2am, awake and uncomfortable, I turned on the TV and flipped around until I settled on the Food Channel. I watched a show on Indian food and now I have a great coconut chicken curry recipe to try. A blessing in disguise, I suppose. Then I tried to go back to sleep by lying still and listening to the rain pinging on the gutters. It didn’t work, but it was rather peaceful to be awake in the middle of the night, listening to all the sounds a sleeping house makes.

Finally, around 5am, I gave up and decided to just get up for the day. I made myself a caramel-flavored coffee with our new fancy one-cup brewer and settled down on the couch to do a little reading. The pain was too distracting, so I gave that up, too. I went to the bathroom to see if I could find anything on my scalp that would be making it hurt so bad. I parted my hair and gave myself a good examination. What I saw was very disconcerting.

I think I’m sprouting horns.

~Belinda, writing at Upside Down Bee, really has had a weird headache for the last three days. Her husband was the one who suggested it was horns.

The Horse Sale (Baseball, Caramel, Curry, Horns, Rain)

I had so much to do and the rain would just not let up! The water was pouring in sheets off the roof of the barn and even running in rivulets down the aisle between the stalls. The horses were stamping and snorting at the noise that the rain made pounding on the tin roof above them. I had six horses left to curry and also the back breaking task of trying to sand and blacken their hooves and then clip the hair in their ears. All of this to do with yearling foals who like to jump around with every noise, pretending to be scared. To make matters worse, my younger sister and some of her friends were out in the paddock chasing “Elmer,” our young steer around trying to tie one of the girl’s tennis shoes to his horns. Needless to say Elmer was not a happy camper and kicking up quite a ruckus. I’m sure they could hear him bellowing and blowing at the farm down the road. The girls were soaked through to the skin and covered with mud.

My dad was in the house trying to get the horses’ pedigree papers ready while an Atlanta Braves baseball game blared from the radio in the background. Grannie was in the kitchen making my very favorite caramel cake. My two sisters and I had once devoured a whole caramel cake at the wake of one of my great aunts! We were sitting by the dessert table and just kept slicing on that cake, “making it even” until we had evened it down to crumbs. My mom was sitting, as usual, at the big desk trying to figure out how we are going to pay this month’s training fees for the horses we had at the track.

Tomorrow will tell us much of how the rest of our year is going to go financially! We have a group of 11 foals going into the yearling sale at the “OBS,” the Ocala Breeders Sale. The sales are great fun to go to as a spectator, but a lot of hard work and nail biting if you are counting on the sale of these foals to fund your breeding farm for the next year! Sure, you have grooms and walkers working for you, but when there is so much money at stake, there is lots of hands on supervision from the family! We are really a very small thoroughbred farm, surrounded by huge, palatial farms, but we have had good results so far with several different multiple stakes winners to come from our mares. My father is great with the animals and does the training work with them from the time they are foaled till they go for their last training before the track.

Some people would say it is as much of a gamble to make a living off a breeding farm as it is to make that same money betting on horses at the track. And most people you see trying to do that are usually in the food stamp line! My father, who has been known to win a nice sum every now and then, says that he would give back ALL his winnings for 10% of what he has bet over the years! There is a lot of hard won wisdom in that statement! All in all, I’ll take the bumps and the bruises, the highs and the lows, the wins and the losses of horse breeding any day over the endless grind of trying to make a living sitting in an office forty hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 30 years of my life!

~Cheryl didn't write a tag line for this, but she has quite an imagination.