Tuna Casserole

Tuna casserole last night. YUM! It’s a Barnes family recipe, though it could have come off the back of the cereal box, I’m not quite sure.

Bag or half bag of cooked egg noodles

two cans tuna

mayo or miracle whip

½ c. milk or just eyeball it for moisture as this recipe is very forgiving

cream of mushroom soup or celery or hell whatever cream soup you want, though
chicken clashes with the tuna, I have to say

onion

red or green pepper

peas, celery, mushrooms, whatever veggies you want, frozen spinach even works well in this

Salt, pepper, a touch of cayenne and garlic power

Mix all together and make sure is a good consistency

Top with cheese, I use cheddar, but parm works, or motz-cheddar mix, whatever you like. (Maybe this is why I can make the same dish but it never tastes the same twice!)

Put in pan and bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes.


J made fried taters to go with, which were excellent. We’re gonna get fat together I swear. :) Problem with having two good cooks who like to eat in proximity to each other. Valentine’s Day was obscene. Fake-baked eggplant parmesan ziti, anti-pasta and banana-strawberry dessert. We cooked all day. Actually a really fun time. Gotta love culinary adventures with your honey! :)

Snow on the ground, garden in mind

Dad, MJ, and I sat down this weekend to make the seed order. So great when it’s all snowy outside to think of things green and growing. Even got J. excited about plants. (FYI, using initials and nicknames since I haven’t asked these guys if they mind me writing about them.) The garden looks like it’ll be bigger than last year, more potatoes and onions, and we have plans to store them better. Lost a lot of onions and potatoes due to poor storage plan.

We ordered a food dehydrator, which I’ll review when we start using it, and I’m looking forward to using. I’ve got extensive herb garden plans this year since I like mixing my own teas, for headaches and stuff, and they should dry well in this dehydrator. We’ll see.

Dad even agreed to plant horseradish so we can cook our own. Maybe we can grill some hot peppers in the house while we’re at it since both tend to blind you with the fumes. (Yes, that was sarcasm :) We didn’t order any flowers, though they were tempting. But I kill flowers with a dirty look. J and I decided our flower selection would be crazy since we’re both drawn to the unusual and exotic. Absolutely nothing would match. Feng Shui help us if we ever decorate a house together.

Winter dragging a little on the farm, especially after this last snow storm. My car gets stuck if a fat guy sits on it, so the slush wreaks hell on it. Getting tired of getting stuck at the end of the driveway and Dad getting tired of pulling me out. At least last night it was still light out and not three in the morning with me just getting back from the bar and after-party at a friend’s house.

The cows aren’t complaining though, at least mine aren’t. Dairy cattle always complain. My cows, all 29 or 30 of them, we can’t ever get an accurate count for some reason, luxuriate on a hundred acres of corn stalks, and think they’re the luckiest cows on the planet, acting like range cows in Nebraska or something.

I’ve had a few opportunities to take classes this winter. Both Allena Tapia’s Get Pad to Read through LCC and Annie’s Project put on by the Clinton County Extension Office have been great resources. More on both later. For now, I need to keep a forward momentum. Worked until 3 a.m. last night and up before 8. Coffee so wearing off.

Book Review

Sexy/Dangerous by Beverly Jenkins, HarperTorch, Nov 2006, 343 pages, $6.99, ISBN 978-0-06-081899-9

Two Rottweilers and a gun. What more could a girl want? In this romantic thriller, those are all the good things in life, at least until Maxine “Max” Blake, ex-marine and ex-cop with the attitude to prove it, meets scientist Dr. Adam Gary. He’s designed a top-secret world-revolutionizing piece of technology; she’s the government agent sent to protect him from those who seek to kill him and steal his work. A South African terrorist group in particular has their scope locked on Adam’s prototype with the intent to use it in acts of terrorism to restore apartheid South Africa. But Adam doesn’t want her protection and Max is determined he’ll get it; come broken water pipes, a mouthy assistant with marriage mind, a house falling to chaos, or sharpshooter snipers.

Through home cooking and great, long legs, Max slowly wins Adam over, as he wins her own himself. But after two divorces, Max isn’t looking for anything serious, even if the long, sweet lovin’ blows both their minds. Max isn’t sure she wants to give up The Life, swatting mosquitoes in third world jungles, taking out bad guys, that’s what she lives for. And Adam only wants to research and design, not be tied down, even by some fine lookin’ sistah. Especially one as dangerous as Max, a spook, and a killer. But Max’s first priority is to keep Adam alive long enough for either of them to admit what they have goes deeper than just between the sheets.

From high-amped car chases across the state of Michigan to the White House, Sexy/Dangerous is hot from first page to last. Jenkins’ style and sense of pacing makes the story feel like visiting with your best girlfriends and riding along with James Bond all at once. Sexy/Dangerous ties into Jenkins’ previous work, The Taming of Jessi Rose and A Chance At Love, as well as the companion book, Deadly Sexy, featuring Max’s sister, JT, another addition to Jenkins’ string of strong-willed woman loving men who prove worthy of them.

Guess who's back? (Back again?)

I took a, what? several months long hiatus to “reinvent myself” as a friend of mine would put it, but guess who’s back

(back again, shady’s back…anyway…)

with farm tales, short how-to posts, maybe some writing tips, recipe successes and disasters, book shout-outs and reviews, knitting and crochet disasters, and the occasional old-fashioned all-around rant, most days of the week? At least, that’s the idea. :)

So, for those of you who don’t know me (and a sorry to those who do), I’m a Michigan writer and farmer; I milk cows (not mine), read voraciously, and spend way too much time in the barn.

I want to include some book shout-outs. It’s not like Stephen King needs any more publicity, but I finished reading his Dark Tower series the other day. Loved it! Must read for anyone who loves western/sci-fi/horror. At the other end of the spectrum is Beverly Jenkins. Needed a break from the sex and violence I tend to write and read and found it in her books. I’ve read Sexy/Dangerous, Deadly Sexy, and just received Captured in the mail so looking very forward to that. Every book is like visiting with my favorite girlfriend. I got to see Beverly speak at a reading in Jackson last year, along with Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series, and have been as impressed with her books as I was with her. A great all around package. And for the record, I hate romance. That says a lot for her style and characters.

Well it was a long night in the parlor. Cows worked good and it wasn’t too cold. But I’m whupped after a writing most of the day and five-mile jog. Will wrap it up here now by saying it’s good to be back.

TMI - Too Much Information, or, why I was cleaning up tomato sauce in my bra

Why? Because we've put up eight half bushels of tomatoes so far this year, given some away, and I'm dealing with the nearly last bushel and a half today. And some inexplicable inner drive convinces me to share my stupidities.

Picture the scene: noonish, in the kitchen. Full tomato sauce production in action. Two pots on the stove have whole tomatoes boiling down to run through the food mill, the crock pot cools sauce ready to be frozen. Enter Ax with ideas of bagging cooled sauce. She has a t-shirt and baggy jeans on, eyeliner and mascara with messy hair just because it seemed like the thing to add this morning to impress the cows. She has a gallon Ziploc bag ready for sauce and begins to fill it using a cup measure. The bag holds all the sauce from the crock pot, but the last little bit needs poured into the bag. I should also mention that the bag is resting on the counter rather than securely in a bowl or measuring cup.

Is anyone still wondering why I ended up cleaning up tomato sauce in my bra?

Now, normally when I'm cleaning up spilled tomato sauce off the floor, counter and from under the dishwasher, clad in jeans ready to fall off my ass and a black bra, its a prime time for Dad, a neighbor, or Jehovah's Witnesses to come to the door. I'm at a loss for why they didn't. FYI: putting up tomato sauce works better when its in the bag and not down your t-shirt and socks.

Fucking tomatoes.

Calvies, calvies everywhere

It never fails: calving season and trying to go somewhere never mesh. I went to go to work today and looked at the cows before I left, finding feet. New calf feet. Coming out of the cow. It never fails. But the calf is good, the cow has a bum leg from the calf pinching a nerve on the way out, and Dad will probably be sore tomorrow from pulling the big bull calf today. But its all good. Loving the job, loving the live calves, lots of love going on tonight. ;-)

Two live calves, eight pending

I apologize for the hiatus. Lots of farm stuff, lots of drama. But today has been a good day, for all that it began way too early.

I got a job.

(Insert excited squeal here.)

I'll be milking and running equipment at a dairy farm near us and am very, very excited about it. More details to come I'm sure. Expect a tired, stinky blogger.