Crochet Bread Basket

This is another easy project to do in an evening .

I find making crochet baskets to be quite handy since they can be all sizes for bread, fruit,peanuts, chips etc....

They look good on a table , are washable and fold so you can put them away till you need them as part of your table accessories.

I made this one big but if you want smaller ones then you can make more than one in one evening. This one still needs a few ribbons to weave around it for decoration.

It's a nice way to watch TV at night while being creative.

They make nice gifts too.

Have a great day!

The Autumn Falcon

THE AUTUMN FALCON

Nothing pleases me more than to see the world a blaze in color and autumn in Quebec, was something to behold.
Not only were the skies ablaze but the streets were also covered like a woodland pathway.
The cool morning dew and the rising sun just added to a land, only God could create.

My Dad used to wake me up very early because there was a time limit before the morning mushrooms would decompose or be eaten by worms.
It was a true case of the early bird catching the worm and we were to be the early birds.

We’d cross the bridge off the island of Montreal and head towards farms which left large parcels of land unkempt and natural.
The farmers didn’t mind people entering their woods at that time.
The woods were thick and wild.
The soil was rich and black and you could feel and smell the life in it.

Amongst the rotting tree trunks and beneath birch trees, we would begin to collect our beloved mushrooms.
As I find out today, they are called Pidpenky but in English, the closest I came to calling them were Honey Mushrooms.
http://myweb.wvnet.edu/~roman/souvenir_sheets/hribi.html

I could be wrong. Does any one know?

My Dad always warned about collecting mushrooms you don’t know because eating them would be devastating. We only took what we knew and always made sure never to take the roots.

These particular mushrooms were excellent fried. You could never have enough and after collecting two 50 lb potato sacks full, my Mom, Dad and I would sort them right away,
clean them, wash them and put them into salt water, just in case they had any worms.
Worms were a good thing cause if they ate them, then people could.

My Mom would prepare the jars and the spices and she would then parboil the mushrooms and prepare them for pickling. All this had to be done rather quickly.
The result was the best pickled mushrooms all year round. We always had enough for us and to share.

At the same time, on week ends ,we’d go to the apple farms. They would allow us to pick our own apples.
McIntosh Apples are still the best in my book to this day.
They are red, hard, crunchy, sweet and juicy. There is no apple like it in the world.

No wonder Apple stole the name, because they know tons of people will be looking for this apple,
and they would land on their web site instead.lol
http://www.producepete.com/shows/mcintoshapples.html

Being a veracious book reader, I would always have a bushel beside my lounge chair and instead of eating food, these apples always made a great snack.

My Mom would make lots of jars of apple sauce and I would help her churn the cooked apples
so as to sort out the skins.
We’d eat it in the winter with ice cream or pork or turkey.
She’d also make the best rhubarb preserves I ever tasted and since she stopped, I never had any.

One of these trips to the apple orchards landed us a Wild Falcon.
He was beautiful, lean ,smooth, with brown feathers ,clear sharp eyes and a beak that could do real damage.
Since it was hunting season, some one shot it and its’ claw on one foot was closed so he could not use it.
It affected his hunting skills.
He was weak and didn’t put up much of a fight so we brought him home to nurse.

My Mom was a nurse by profession and she loved cleanliness. She kept her house so spotless, you could eat off of the floors.
( I am not like my Mom. Loll)
It was surprising she allowed us to place newspaper all around her beautiful wood floors so this Falcon could have a room to himself, in the house, to recuperate, instead of outside on the closed balcony.

Come to think of it, she let this Falcon get away with more than she ever allowed us loll.
Since it was around Thanks Giving, we had this huge turkey we bought to bake.
It was already defrosted so we decided to
give the Falcon a few pieces to see if he would eat.

Falcons are no fools. He saw good raw meat and he didn’t care who gave it to him.
He took piece after piece for supper. He took piece after piece for breakfast. He took piece after piece for lunch.
He took piece after piece for supper. By the end of the next day our 20 lb Thanks giving Turkey was gone but our Falcon was in tip top shape.lol

He became so friendly and strutted around the floor still unable to open his claw. We tried to do it for him but were not lucky either.
It was closed, frozen and that was that. He would no longer be able to use it.

We took advantage of being so close to nature and held him and patted him and checked his wings to make sure nothing else was broken or damaged and he was cooperative just as if he understood we were his friends.

No matter how much we covered the wood floors, this guy with his sharp eye, would find one inch some where, where the floor showed and he would shoot his excrement right there, bulls eye, missing all the newspaper lined out for him to do his business on. The whole floor was covered and he'd see a little opening and that was what he targeted.
Some how we all found it funny cause he’d never miss. lol

He’d lift his tail and shoot backwards with a dead aim that would bring the best hunter to shame.
For this entertainment we decided he was strong enough to fly and try to live his life again.
He still had lots of woods around full of nice rodents to feed on, so if he was smart, he would be able to survive or come back home to where he got free food.

We wished him well and in as much as he was a perfect guest, we saw in his eyes how grateful he was to see the world he grew up in, waiting for him.
As we watched him fly away, we knew we’d never see him again.

He had an agenda. He had a purpose. He had a place he wanted to be and
with this in mind, he flew away.

He left us with a good memory, a few laughs, no Thanks giving dinner, and an understanding that you can tame the wild but you can’t control their heart. They will always be free spirits.
In this way, this Falcon was like a human.

TURDUCKEN

Now this recipe is like a Volkswagon.
You will either love it or hate it.
Personally I think it’s like killing three birds with one stone loll
Pardon the pun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken

Sausage-stuffed Turducken cut into quarters to show the internal layers

The result is a fairly solid layered poultry dish, suitable for cooking by braising, roasting, grilling, or

LENT CAN BE FUN

LENT CAN BE FUN.

Lent is something not many people practice today but if it is in religion,
we must ask ourselves why?

I believe it is a very good practice to follow because it purges your system of meat, dairy, alcohol and fat for 40 days.
Your body has a chance to rest and not fight toxins which continue to weaken the immune system.
I may be wrong but it sure does make a lot of sense and it costs you nothing to lose a little weight,
while strengthening your character, will power and thus…. your mind.

After 40 days, your taste buds sure do appreciate life and living and of course………FOOD!!!!

My Dad was a man of many talents. He loved to tinker.
One day he decided to design his own tent camper so we could go fishing.
He got the base frame from a car (junk yards were treasures in those days, you never knew what you’d find),
took out his welder, got a few pipes to weld. Then he sewed his own tent from canvas he got from somewhere and we girls
did the interior work putting in the mattresses and pillows to make it homey.
It was quite a project and maybe this is why I love doing projects today, which does my house a disfavor.
But….. I believe a house well lived in, is better than a show case home which looks more like a place you visit
rather than a home you love and enjoy being in, surrounded by…… stuff.(Maybe I should get out more loll.)
Anyway,
My Dad had a propane tank fitted for the outside of the trailer so we could cook inside when it rained and heat when it was wet and damp.
Once all was ready, off we went.

We had great days in that camper fishing in the Richelieu River, in Quebec, in a little town called Noyan, just by the US border.
I have many good memories from that river. Sometimes I feel like Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, where that river is concerned.
It’s very historic in that it has two forts: Fort Lennox and Fort Montgomery.
Samuel de Champlain went up it and many battles took place with the Iroquois and sitting there,
one could almost feel those days as if they were yesterday.
Fort Lennox is on the Canadian side and they turned it into a tourist place where people are taken out by ferry boat.
Nice little island but when I was a kid, it was a place I’d love to drive to with my boat and run around on with my dog.
The river in those days was very clean. People used it for drinking water and the fish………….
well ……if you didn’t catch one or three on one line at the same time in a few minutes, you had to move on.

I’d do a lot of waterskiing and snorkeling in those days and was fascinated by the world under that strip of water.
We had everything. Perch, sunfish, rock fish, bass, pike, cat fish .
Once I met up with an eel face to face and we both got scared of each
other and high tailed it into different directions.
There was an old wooden bridge, we’d like to hang around to jump into the water from.
(They tore it down now and replaced it with a cement over pass, a little tooooooo high to jump off of today.)
Under it lived this huge old fish. It must have been one of the white fish people talked about.
It was about 5 feet long and if you teased it with a juicy worm on a hook, it was too smart to bite. It just lay there,
so we’d settle to come by every day and hang off the bridge looking at it.
This fish was killed in droves by people who wanted the pearl inside its’ head.
Unfortunately they would just throw the carcass away and the local people were not very happy about that.
We also had our own Loch Ness monster story.
We camped just at the mouth of Lake Champlain and this is where two fishermen disappeared.
After a thorough search, they found their boat broken in half under water but no people. Hmmm.
Since the Richelieu and Lake Champlain connected with the St Lawrence and the ocean, anything was possible.

Well, one day we went out to our camp site and found this jolly old French couple as our neghbors that weekend.
The man wore this hat full of different kind of fishing lures. He’d leave every morning around 4 am and by 8 am would return with 16 nice sized pike.
They were a really friendly couple but did not speak a word of English and my parents didn’t speak a word of French but they managed to communicate anyway.
My Dad was fascinated in how he managed to catch so many pike when at most we could only catch 4, with three fishing.
So the old man told him he’d take him with him the next day.
My Dad set the alarm to ring at 4 am but he didn’t need to cause being the fun guy that he was, the old man placed his boom box under our trailer on full blast and then turned it on.
It basically blasted us out of the trailer.
After having a good laugh at this heart failing joke, and waking up the whole campsite,
he and my Dad left and came back with some very nice pike.

So what does this story have to do with Lent??
Well, the reason we liked Pike was because my Dad would skin it and my Mom would put the meat through the grinder and do her culinary magic and stuff the meat back into the fish.
She’d sew on what needed to be sewn back on so it again looked like the majestic fish that it was when we caught it and then she’d bake it.
It would come out of the oven as proud in death as it was in life, with a wide open mouth, full of jagged teeth waiting for its prey.

When she would present it on the table, people would dishearten thinking: “ Oh darn, a bony fish to choke on.”
Then you would see their faces change in amazement as my mom gently cut the fish as she would a piece of cake.
All our visitors would suddenly become interested in knowing where she bought this fish with no bones and then we'd sit and talk fish for the rest of the meal.Loll

My parents were brats sometimes and they liked to tease people this way and it especially worked well with the priests in our church who we would invite a few times a year for dinner around the Lent period.
It made them feel so good not to have to fight with the food on their plate and made our family look good cause they thought we fasted for 40 days. lol

MOTHER TERESA AND GOD

Mother Teresa died and went to heaven. God greeted her at the Pearly Gates. "Be thou hungry, Mother Teresa?" asked God.
"I could eat," Mother Teresa replied.
So God opened a can of tuna and reached for a chunk of rye bread and they began to share it. While eating this humble meal, Mother Teresa looked down into Hell and saw the inhabitants devouring huge steaks, lobsters, pheasants, and pastries. Curious, but deeply trusting, she remained quiet.
The next day God again invited her to join him for a meal. Again, it was tuna and rye bread. Once again, Mother Teresa could see the denizens of Hell enjoying lamb, turkey, venison, and delicious desserts. Still she said nothing.
The following day, mealtime arrived and another can of tuna was opened. She couldn't contain herself any longer. Meekly, she asked, "God, I am grateful to be in heaven with you as a reward for the pious, obedient life I led. But here in heaven all I get to eat is tuna and a piece of rye bread and in the Other Place they eat like emperors and kings! I just don't understand it..."
God sighed. "Let's be honest Teresa," He said, ". . . for just two people, it doesn't pay to cook."
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