Party on the Bayou! (and a sneaky contest)
My body is rebelling this morning. The reason? Well, let me tell you really quick before Termite and I go remove the shaft on the mud boat and install a new one and new propeller (and sweat).
Last night, we had a birthday party for The Captain.
I have been slowly trying to change my eating lifestyle to more of a Paleo diet.
The Paleo Police informed me this morning that fried fish, french fries, birthday cake, and trying to eat like a “hunter-gatherer” do not mix.
But . . . . we had a blast.
We laughed until we cried. We giggled until our cheeks hurt. We guffawed until our ribs ached. And I am probably the only one who laughed so hard I peed my pants. Literally.
We fried and seared some of that delicious trout I caught last weekend. And here’s what else we had . . .
This was my plate! Let’s see, besides the obvious, there are hush puppies, tartar sauce made with a secret recipe developed by Handy Friend, which should be at your grocers soon. And what I call “chow-chow” that Deloutre Switch (a reader and dear friend) made from her garden tomatoes. My kids say that “chow-chow” has a nasty meaning, so they laughed when I said it and called it “relish” instead. I’m still oblivious.
And the gang was all here, except for our oldest son, who was unfortunately still on his boat until the 17th.
You can tell by the jerseys that a certain football team was playing on TV in the background. Guess who dat was?
Dotter baked this delectable cake . . .
a strawberry Jell-O-infused strawberry cake with homemade whipped topping, made from heavy cream, confectioner’s sugar, and a touch of vanilla.
Some of us like the icing as much as, or should I say MORE THAN the cake . . .
and one of us really pigged out on the leftover whipped topping. I won’t mention any names!
Now, I can’t put off the hot job any longer. Termite is hanging over my shoulder urging me to go before it gets any hotter outside.
For the person who can remember what the nickname is of the kid eating the topping in the above picture, I will ship a premier jar of Handy Friend’s tartar sauce mix called Melange, and you will NEVER buy tartar sauce again. (More details on the product will appear in a post when Handy Friend gives me the go-ahead.)
So, what are YOU doing this weekend?
BW
(CONTEST OVER! Cammy was our winner!)
Miah? Just a bad guess from the inner recesses….
Handy Friend better get me a bottle soon too.
I’ll be crappie sacaulaits y’all fishing up a storm soon.
That is one son’s name but not his! Nice try from your RAM though. I got a bottle for you. Send postage, lol!
Ps I had a coworker Farnsworth who practiced the ‘not too far from the tree’ diet. It is where my flaxseed oatbran smoothie mudslings come from. Fiber and Antioxidants.
Hope ‘The Captain’ had a great day.
Bayou type pop up storms going on here now. Woo hoo rain.
I’m glad to see there are others who have a problem getting all their family together. I was beginning to think we were the only family with this problem.
Dabo is my guess.
That food looks so good. I love having all my family over to eat. Wish it happened more than 2 or 3 times a year though.
I am awful with names. I remember faces though.
Is it Danno?
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! Congratulations, Cammy. I don’t know how you did it, but you guessed it right. That is his nickname. I’m sure I have your address somewhere in an old email but finding it and not having deleted it might be impossible. So if you would, send it to me again, please! If you eat fried seafood, and you use tartar sauce, you will not be disappointed. The Melange is mixed with 1 part mix to 5 parts mayonnaise. I like it 1 to 4, because I like tasting more of the Melange. It’s all up to you because you mix it yourself. A little, or a lot! It’s a great idea because you make enough for that meal and you don’t have a jar of tartar sauce sitting in the fridge for a long time. The Melange will stay in the frig. for a long time and still be fine to use.
As soon as I hit “Post Comment”, I knew I’d written the wrong name. Oh well, next time.
I got a jar with your name on it. When ya coming down?
Wish I knew. I’m tied up remodeling Daddy’s house and He’s spending every other weekend here. Not to mention driving to Mississippi at least every 2 weeks to cut grass. Daddy has really gone down in the last few months. Half the time he doesn’t know who I am.
We’ll be bringing him out to eat next Fri. for his 90th birthday. If he’s not taken to an Ethnic rest., we need not even ask what he wants. It’s Fried Catfish every time!
Fried catfish — makes things easy!
I was just as lost as you were with the whole “chow-chow” thing, but for someone who is very, very selective about when she likes tomatoes and when she doesn’t, I LOVE that stuff!! There’s one more piece of cake here. I bought Mike some fudge Oreos yesterday in the hopes that I can carpe the cake!
There is one piece left here, too! I ate my share, though, against my better judgment!
I haven’t had a slice of a good strawberry cake in ages. Too hot to bake though. Do plan to make a couple of sugar-free lemon pies this week to deliver to the workers at the food bank for their pot luck lunch. Grand daughter & I made one last week and took it up there and not everyone got a slice. Those who did said it was yummy and wanted more than the couple of bites they got.
Cammy, your package is on its way from Houma, LA. Be watching the mail for it, okay?
Thank you! I have been fixing really quick to cook meals or crockpot meals due to the heat. I lit a burner last night to boil some potatoes and I bet the temp went up 10º in here. At least it felt like it! But, won’t be long and I’ll be able to cook the good stuff like fish again.:)
You are most welcome! I hope when you fry fish you really enjoy the mix. We love it! Lil Sis and I were shopping around town yesterday, and the outside temp down here reached 103, and that’s not the index, so I know y’all are burning up. Shreveport is in just as bad shape.
Got it today! Thank you. I am not going to open it until I fry up some fish though. Looks simple to use and hubby said he was ready to try it.
Again, you are most welcome. It will keep a long time. And then in the frig. after opening.
Look at it this way – even when you’re missing family members, your crew still is four times the size of mine. Or more!
One of these days I’m going to learn not to take strange terms over to the urban dictionary. I’ve learned things I don’t even want to know. Do not look up chow-chow. I’m going back to my previously ignorant state where it’s what you do with too many garden tomatoes!
Sure wish I could trade some peaches for some ‘maters. I haven’t had a decent tomato in a long, long time. Guess I’m going to have to wait for fall gardens now – providing we get some rain. We had a half inch two weeks ago, but we’re way beyond limiting lawn watering. There’s no more of that, no more water in restaurants, no more car washing, etc. The city supplies are being affected now, and they just took 200 dead oaks out of the prettiest city park. It’s bad.
It’s just so strange to watch that rain evaporate at the TX/LA border!
Ok since I’m running on Indian time and missed the contest at least tell me how I can get the mix myself. Or did I just miss that in the post? This if fair week so all the heat and late nights has my brain even more scrambled than usual.
Email me, Mrs. Coach!!!
I wish we had some good tomatoes down here too. We are on a very tight restriction for water and it isn’t getting any better. I have an iris bed around a pecan tree that is probably 75+ years old and they are dying! All the work we put into our yard is gone too. Just makes me so sad to see it that I don’t even open the shades any more.
Get a dishpan. After you’ve washed dishes or run the water for any reason, it will catch in the pan and then you can take what would usually go down the drain and water the iris bed.
Wow, Steffi, what a thrifty idea! Y’all have rain, though, right?
Nope, no rain. Lightning and thunder all around us, but we haven’t had any rain.
I remember my grandmother watering her Daylillies with the old dishwater. She’d also put the used coffee grounds in her bed. She didn’t make compost, it went straight from the coffee basket to the flower bed.
gray water is the wave of the future.
I sometimes leave the outside drain open since it is so hot and let the water from the washer drain out around the house to keep the ground from drying completely. I do use a dishpan as much as possible and the plants do get the water. I even have a 5 gal. bucket under the window AC to catch the drips to water with. But, the iris bed is HUGE and has the old fashioned Soap Wart plants too and they drink water!! I can’t tote it out now though, I am back on a walker and wheel chair and hubby is too tired to carry water at night.
Steffi, coffee grounds are fabulous for plants. I also dump expired vitamins on them.
When I was a kid and grandma still was using washtubs outdoors (oh, YIKES! I’m OLD!) one of our chores always was to tote the wash water to the flower beds and the rinse water to the garden.
The fact is, a lot of 20 and 30 year olds who think they just invented recycling and such don’t have a clue about how it used to be. Another example: glass milk bottles that got returned, washed and reused. We’d put them out in the box on the front porch for the milkman to pick up when he made his next delivery!
I love when you share stories like this! I do remember the Milk Man coming to pick up our glass bottles and leaving fresh milk in the frig. LilSis and I used to ride around on our bikes with empty six-pack cardboard Coke cartons on our handle bars and scour the ditches for castaway glass soda bottles. At one point, we sold them back to Pak-a-Sak for 5 cents each! Talk about exercising and recycling at the same time! You’re right, 20-30-year-olds have no clue (big grin)!
Pak-A-Sac….that’s a name I haven’t heard in years! Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t they become 7-11 and now Circle K?
I know I’m a dieing breed, but I still hang my sheets out to dry. Everything else goes in the dryer. I personally don’t care for scratchy towels. (I have delicate skin LOL!) Hubby and I love that “sunshine” smell on the sheets. My daughter thinks they stink. Here’s another one for y’all. I’ve got “pants stretchers” that I sometimes put our jeans on to dry. Nice creases and no ironing! Before someone asks…I’ve had mine about 30 yrs., but I do still see them sold in catalogs.
You, my dear, are what we call a “throw back”—not like an undesirable fish, please understand; but more like a flashback to times gone by. I remember when we played in the backyard around Mother’s freshly washed sheets blowing in the wind, hanging on the clothes line and noticing the neighbor lady had her son’s blue jeans hanging out on those stretchers. My, how we thought those were so fancy! I loved sleeping in my Grandmother’s bed, because her sheets were always line dried, and they smelled so fresh. And get this–I did cloth diapers with my first baby AND used a clothesline. Now, that was some work, cher!!! I’m sure you can top that story, too! 🙂 I had a clothes line up until our move in 1990. There was no place in that “city” yard where the birds didn’t poop from the trees, so I gave it to my down-the-bayou friend whose husband welded it for me in the first place. It was one of those on a center pole, with three rows that whirligig around. I loved it. I sometimes say I was born in the wrong era . . . . Scarlet O’Hare and all. Maybe you were, too!
Cloth diapers for all my children. I’ve still got a few of them too, as well as diaper pins. Hubby took most of them to use as wax cloths for the cars. I did use disposables if we went out of town.
You need to run you a clothes line on the first set of pilings under the house. I’ll bet you could capture that sunshine smell!
BTW, In my other life, I was friends with Huck and Tom (you may have read about them) we used to fish a lot and sometimes painted fences to earn a bit of money.
In your other life, was your name Becky?
We used an old wringer washer with 2 #3 washtubs until 1964. Mom rigged up a long hose to drain the water from the washer and we dumped the rinse water into it to make it easier to drain into the garden too. If the 2nd rinse tub was half decent, it got set into the sun between hanging sheets for our bath that night. How many of you have got your arm hung in that stupid wringer??? I was darned good at slamming that release on top!
We moved to our present town in ’64 and had an automatic washer for a year. Still had to hang them on the line as soon as I got home from school. Bad weather meant a trip to the laundrymat to dry them. We moved from that mobile home to a 2 room house 10 1/2 miles from town. No running water, no well, an outhouse, no privacy for a 15/16 yr old girl at all! I hated all of us sleeping in the living/dining/kitchen/pantry room! I solved that problem by eloping when I was 16. Dumb kid thought she knew it all.:) I finished school & went to college after the kids were born though. I still recycle all sorts of things. My son calls me a pack rat because I save jars for canning, sturdy plastic containers for the freezer and to send things home with them and old rags for cleaning/dusting. He rips a seam and tosses the item and spends a small fortune for plastic zipper bags. Wasteful to me.
As far as my lovely, half dead iris bed, someone siphoned 20 gallons of gas out of my husbands truck in the early hours Sat. morning and a lot of it went into my iris bed and into the roots of our big pecan tree. Guess they thought he went and refilled it because, they came again in the early hours this morning to try again. This time, they left the gas door open and the cap on the ground. I think it was at 2:30 am because I heard something fall and turned on a light to check. Probably scared them off. Hubby better put a lock cap back on again asap!
Ooooh, I love hush puppies. I may be the insane, non-seafood eating one in my family but I’ll never pass up hush puppies.
Paleo diet? Hunter-gatherer? Heck, I’ve been on that all my life. I hunt and gather from the icebox, the pantry, the cookie jar….. It’s probably why my doctor is pitching fits for me to lose 15 lbs. I’ve hunted and gathered myself to a BMI more suitable to a Mack truck than my body frame! LOL
What kin I say? I LOVE food!
I have got to ask this finally since I have been reading your blog for some time now. When I click on this page (home) and go to the heading of the column, in this case, “Party on the Bayou (and sneaky contest)” and look to the right of it at the heading of the ad “Wetland Treasures”, there is a gray area and it that area is a smiley face. It has been there for months and I am so curious as to whether you put it there or it was an accident in the web page design.
It is cute and always makes me smile.
That little Smiley Face is a little spy put there by the blog people. It means that SOMEONE is reading the blog at that moment! And it could be YOU! LOL! Thanks for asking! It’s a great question! Anybody else notice what she’s talking about?
Well I’ll be jiggered…I’ve seen those for ages on blogs and never known the purpose for them ’till now (though suspected something o’ the sort).
Thanks for clearin’ that up m’dear!
AHHH! Now we know.:)
Love reading your post! His nickname is termite
Hi Roxanne! Thanks for the great guess, and I guess I should have posted that we had a winner! His nickname is Danno, found in an earlier family story! Thank you so much for visiting and reading and commenting! Please come back soon! BW