How to Get Yourself Uninvited From Potlucks For The Rest of Your Life

1. Volunteer to bring a JELL-O salad to the next community potluck.

2. Dig out your vintage "Joys of JELL-O" pocket cookbook circa 1967. (My Aunt Bert bought one for me on our Lewistown trip yesterday.)

3. Locate the recipe for Molded Chef's Salad on page 69. (Don't get distracted by the glossy Ring-Around-The-Tuna...garnished with curly endive and radish roses on page 65!)

4. Read through the recipe to ensure you have all the ingredients.  It could be tricky.

(You realize this is a lime JELL-O based recipe, right?  With tuna?  And hardboiled egg? 

AND an anchovy-mayonnaise dressing?)

5. Assemble ingredients according to the recipe.  

6. (You may need a bit of wine in order to fulfill this next step.  Or a gas mask.)  Pour the lime JELL-O in the circular mold, then add the tuna mixture and egg as directed.  (Be STRONG!  This is gonna get you out of COUNTLESS potlucks in the future!!!)  

7. Chill the completely disgusting JELL-O mold in the fridge for 2-3 hours until firm. 

8. Prepare the Creamy Anchovy Dressing...if you're still game.  Mayonnaise and anchovies mixed to put atop a lime-tuna-egg-vegetable salad.  It's...remarkable. And greyish.  (Another glass of wine would not be the worst idea, here...)  

9. Unmold the now-firm Molded Chef-Salad on a plate of crisp lettuce leaves.  

(It may not look EXACTLY like the picture in the JELL-O recipe book.

All the better!  Remember our mission?  No potlucks for the rest of your life!)

10. Plate the salad, garnishing with the anchovy dressing, and present it to your family for a "taste test".  

I will spare you the gagging and spewing of green JELL-O into the garbage can, but suffice it to say that you will have a Get-Out-Of-Potlucks-Free if you take this little gem to the next one.

Sara Hags, I challenge you to a wine pairing with this dish...

I didn't read through the cookbook very carefully when I was in Lewistown, just enough to see that the original cook (Margaret Argenbright) had written notes on her favorite recipes about who she'd served, the date, and whether the recipe was good or not.  She did NOT have a note on this recipe, but there was a smudge on the corner of the page indicating that she, too, had probably stopped at this recipe and marveled at the incompatibility of the ingredients and flavors. 

Good luck and keep jelling!

Tour de Friends 2014 Part 2

Are you ready for more?

I really am trying to condense ten days into about four posts, but it's hard.

Here's the only picture we took in Idaho, at the top of the pass.

Idaho was a frustrating, intriguing place of FOR-E-VER miles (even though we went through the narrowest part of the state) and towns that turned into other towns with no warning.

When we left Montana, the sign said something like 95 miles to Spokane on the Interstate.  No problem!  We drive 80 miles to get groceries on a two lane; we'd be there in no time.  An hour and a half later, the highway sign says 50 miles to Spokane.  I'm not kidding. I can't decide whether the Idahoians are messing with Montanan's minds, or if Idaho miles really ARE two times the length of a regular mile. (Incidentally, when I was telling this to Joe Kaufman, he validated the craziness of the mileage in that area.  At least I'm not the only one who felt like time stopped there...)

We got lost in Coeur d'Alene.  

At least we started in Coeur d'Alene.  By the time we found a sandwich shop after driving through 45 minutes of residential area and past the fairgrounds, we had apparently crossed over into another town.  When we told the lady at the Great Harvest Bakery that we were going back to the dog park to eat, she said, "Oh, you mean the one in Coeur d'Alene?"

I didn't have the mental fortitude at that time to ask what town we were in, exactly, at that point.  After all, I had to retrace the path BACK. 

We got lost in Spokane. 

I took the exit to Spokane Community College where I thought my brother in law worked but it turns out he works at Spokane FALLS Community College (which is way across town) (of course), and he didn't happen to be at work that day. 

He was out and about in the city, not far from where we were parked, so we were told to sit tight and he'd come meet us to follow him home.

"What an adventure we're having!" I said to the kids.

Maggie rather wearily informed me from the back seat that NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE AN ADVENTURE. 

Grump.

Finally we made it to my sister's house! Huzzah!  The kids immediately spilled out into the yard with their cussins and played their hearts out.  Jen and Darren have a lawn that feels as though the ten yards should be marked off with goal posts at each end.  It's huge, dense, gorgeously green and just begs to be run on.  So they did.  

My nieces, Kamryn and Livvie...

When my sister got home, we had supper on the deck.

This is pretty much how every day ended while we were there.

(I DID make real food for everyone, but don't have pictures of that.)

Tessie was on a leash for ten long days.  She was an exceptionally good puppy considering all the restrictions she had to live with during that time.  She also loved the lawn.

The next day, Jen took all the kids and I on what can only be described as a marathon tourist day in Spokane.  One of the things I liked about the city was all the art....everywhere.  Downtown it was on underpasses, in the benches, on the walls of buildings.  Dig this bike rack, for instance...

The famous Milk Bottle Diner...

Bus stop bench shaped like a leaf...

Street art and the boy child....

Jamaican monkey outside what turned out to be a rather scuzzy (and proud to be so) second hand clothing shop where the smell of mold mingled with incense (?).  I always hope to find something groovy in places like this, but never do.  

In the parking garage where we lost half the kids for about 6 minutes.  Another adventure! 

This shoe was in the mall and I LOVE IT.  

Steel runner sculpture in the park...

Posturing athletes.

This was one of the drain covers in the plaza by Spokane Falls.  Isn't it wonderful that they're going back to making functional pieces artistically bent?  

The bridge over the river, down from the falls. 

Catching goodness knows what from the hand rail.  Try not to think about it.

Part of Spokane Falls...I think this would be considered the upper end. 

I was taken with how tiny they were in relation to the cement structure!  Then I thought about it and hustled down the steps, because my kids aren't exactly shrinking violets when it comes to climbing to get a better look.

There were steel statues honoring the native people of the Spokane area, placed in little corners of the park.  It was a bit startling right at first, but then we started looking for them to see what would be next.

I believe this is where God makes rainbows to spread around the world. 

The carousel!  We adore carousels, and this was a great one.

Little post-fun cotton candy to rejuvenate ourselves... 

Clock tower is Spokane-iconic.

OH! Do you remember The Great Zoltar from the movie "Big" with Tom Hanks?  I had to get my fortune done! 

He seemed to indicate that I would do well to curb my conversational ability. 

*sigh*

Maggie thought it was interesting that I got an owl fortune, since one of my friends calls me Athena (the goddess represented by owls). 

I thought perhaps it would be fun to get a fortune that didn't hit QUITE so close to home...

The garbage eating goat!  It really does eat whatever you put in its mouth.  Regrettably, we had thrown all our garbage away before we got to it. I wasn't handing the kids my fortune, so they finally scrabbled around a little piece of paper for the goat to munch. 

Humongous Radio Flyer slide.  (I told you that we hit all the touristy places in town, right?) (In ONE DAY.)

I love to take pictures of people's sticker collections.  This one wasn't as impressive as the one I found in Providence, RI, but pretty good for WA.  

The rest of the day went like this:

Shopping in Auntie's bookstore.

Eating Panda Express in the mall.

Stopping at a corner lemonade stand and heavily tipping the vendors.

Going to a swimming pool which was evacuated about 20 minutes after we got there due to "contamination" in the water. (None of us contaminated the water. I promise.)

Finding a coffee shop-by-day-bar-by-night that was built in an old garage. 

Driving back to my sister's house to hurriedly drive BACK into Spokane to Old Spaghetti Factory where we met one of my long-time blog friends, Kerry, for dinner and a visit.  (I will get a picture off my phone of that.  It was delightful to finally be able to give her a hug and chat in real life!)

Back to the house to collapse in a heap on the floor.  

To be continued...

Sundries

The last week or so we've been preconditioning calves for shipping this fall.  Essentially this means that we bring in each bunch of pairs, sort the calves off the cows, run the calves through the chute giving them 4 shots so they won't get sick from the stress of shipping in a month or in the feedlot where they're going.  The cows get Ivermectin and their fly tags cut out, then we throw the pairs back together and put them in pastures with good grass until we pull them at shipping time.  It's been great weather, 80 degrees and sunshine, so working cows hasn't been an awful trial.  

We also preg tested our heifers by ultrasound to see who gets their big girl tags and will be having their first calves next spring.  I have to tell you...out of the first 20 heifers that were tested, we had 7 "open" or unbred cows.  It was tense, to say the least, and I was nearly in tears as I wrote their numbers on the sheet on the clipboard.  But then it picked up and eventually we ended up with 13 open heifers out of 113, the rate of 10% being average on any given year.  My little heifer, Violet, was bred!  78 days with a bull calf.  I know I sound like a little kid when I tell Dr. Beck "That's MY cow.", grinning as big as you please, but it's truly thrilling to hear that call "Pregnant" from him.  You might not believe it, but it's almost as exciting as seeing double lines on the little stick for your OWN pregnancy.  (There are about 50 of my 64 readers that will not understand that, but at least 10 of them that do.)  

All this means that we've had our hands on every cow and calf on the place...with the exception of the 150 pairs to do this Saturday, but they're not our cows; we run a cousin's cows in exchange for pasture lease, basically.  But still...every one of our cows, we've handled, examined, shot, sorted and moved this week.  And they're looking good.  Today I cried a little....mostly because I was tired and frazzled and thought I'd really messed up a gate, but more because I see a lot of hard work coming to fruition in these girls (and babies).  For as hard as it is calving in March, loading half frozen calves in the pick up to haul to the heating box, it's more than doubly gratifying to be moving them through the fall grass, seeing the big, soggy calves trotting along beside their moms.  

In other news, my friends Myron and Ada Pentz from Perth, Australia have sent me some really good literature about the land down under!  I finished "Melbourne" by Sophie Cunningham  and feel a real need to take a tour of that city with book in hand in order to fully appreciate it.  I read it every evening last week, underlining words I was unfamiliar with and marking references that I want to read up on.  Some of the more fascinating things are that right now, as we're doing our fall work on the ranch, the folks in Australia are doing their spring planting.  New Year's celebrations are in the middle of summer, sort of like our Independence Day celebrations.  The book walks through the seasons and areas of the city, exploring history and culture on the streets of Melbourne.  It also gets into "footy" which is Australian football, which is JUST as big to them as NFL is to us...I mean, me.  Sophie grew up in Melbourne, so the book is very personal in some places...she writes in a professional, journalistic style, but occasionally reminiscences sneak in to make the book read more like her own diary.  Good stuff.

I read about 89 pages of "From Strength to Strength" tonight while sitting on the deck with a cocktail, watching the clouds go to pink, listening to the prairie ease into evening.  It's an autobiography of an amazing woman who ends up ranching in Northern Australia, after marrying an American who had big dreams but nothing to substantiate them.  In the book right now, she's just survived a typhoon on a sailboat in Red China waters with her husband of 4 months and his man servant Ernesto...she's dying of what I recognize to be morning sickness and they're unsure what to do about the leaking bow, besides stuffing her wedding dress in the hole.  It's a dandy!  

I'll try to get some pictures this week for you. Really, you should see how green and lovely it is here since the rains,,,  Which makes me think of Ian Tyson's song "Since the Rain"...click on the title of the song and enjoy!