Ham-A-Pa-Looza

THE GOOD NEWS:     The Friday before Easter, ham was on sale and I bought one.

THE BAD NEWS:        Easter was the following Sunday.

THE GOOD NEWS:     We had ham that Sunday.

THE BAD NEWS:         By the end of the week, even I was “hammed out.”

THE GOOD NEWS:      Hams were still on sale for Easter so I bought one and froze it.

Ham out on the grill.  What?? You’ve never had “Ham Incognito?”

This would be the ham from the freezer.

Ahhh, there she be !!! A couple of hours on low heat just to warm it through.

This would be the first time that I had ever tried making gravy from a ham.

Straining out the lumps and what not from the “gravy.”

Get ready Porky, the knife is coming for you !

Some potato galette and steamed green beans to go with the ham.

Oh, and the “gravy.”  Now I know why you don’t make gravy with ham juices.  It was just a little bit salty. Not quite Dead Sea salty, but close.

For day two of the ham, it was fried ham and hash browns.

After day two, this is what was left.

The survivors for day three.

Chopped it up and into the food processor.

All chopped up.

The fixn’s for “ham salad.”

Mix,mix,mix.

Eureka !!! Ham Salad !!!

A nice ham salad sandwich with tater tots.

Day four.  I’m using the ham bone from the first ham that I had saved in the freezer and the current ham.

Another great pot of split pea soup that should last me a week for my lunches.

If You Like Bacon……………………

http://365daysofbacon.wordpress.com/

 

I’m just a bacon amateur  !!!!

More Fun With Food

Nothing really big about this.

Just making bacon and eggs for the little girl had a bit of fun with it.

Mmmmmmmm, BACON !!!

Daughter thought the hair and the mustache was amusing.

Cow Caught By Tail Is Insane

From the Aurora Beacon 09/26/1907:

Michigan Bovine Crazed By Her Imprisonment

Literally reduced to a skeleton, a cow was found near Ewen, Michigan, firmly anchored to a tree, in the crotch of which her tail had become fastened. The animal is believed to have spent upward of a month in the area of a few square feet that proved her prison, subsisting without water and with only one day’s supply of food.

The cow is owned by Joseph Blake of Greenland, Ontonagon County. She had been missing for five weeks when a man passing through the woods accidentally found her in the situation described.

Crazed from starvation, the sight of the man apparently infuriated the animal. She broke loose from the tree, leaving her tail behind, and charged her would be rescuer. He sought safety on a woodpile, and was kept there for three-quarters of an hour, when the cow left to seek food.

Arctic Exploration 1884

From the Aurora Beacon, 05/14/1884, reprinted from the New York Sun:

The North Pole

It is a misapprehension to suppose the chief purpose of Arctic exploration is to reach the north pole.  The north pole has lingered in the schemes of scientific explorers only as a desirable incident in the carrying out of their work.  Geographers talk of the north pole quest pure and simple as an unscientific and puerile idea.  What explorers are really expected to do is to advance as far as practicable into the unknown region, to study its geography and make important scientific observations.  Captain Nares, nine years ago, had to halt 400 miles this side of the pole.  But his expedition was called a brilliant success, because he entered the great frozen sea north of this continent, explored the coast line for a distance of thirty-five degrees of longitude, and brought home a great mass of interesting scientific data.

The leading geographers assert that Arctic exploration is of immense value to the world, both in its scientific and its commercial aspects.  They say that winds, tides, terrestrial magnetism, meteorology and other important phenomena cannot be thoroughly investigated except under many different conditions of temperature and locality.  Among many triumphs of Arctic research they mention the fixing of the position of the true magnetic pole by Ross, the finding of a simple means of keeping the needle pointing to the true North in high latitudes, the discovery of the commercial mineral cryolite, and of the great whaling and sealing grounds in the Spitzhergen and North Greenland seas.  They assert also that, in spite of the frightful disasters that have befallen some exploring parties, the loss of life has been small.  About three per cent of the Arctic explorers have died in the course of their work – not a large proportion when compared with the mortality among African explorers. 

MOOT !!!

Moot

It’s my favorite word.

Sounds like a cow with a speech impediment.

April Showers Bring May Flowers…………………..

I was going to title this post:

“HOW THE #@*&%! CAN IT RAIN SO MUCH?”

The red line is Chicago (close enough to where I live).

This map is from 07:00 am on 04/18/2013.  I wish I had taken a screen shot for yesterday.

It started raining about 3:00 pm on 04/17/2013 and hasn’t stopped yet !!!

Yes, there is again water in the basement.

We don’t have a flooding problem here except when we get these freak storms that last so long and then the backyard floods and then water comes up under the slab in the basement and seeps in through the cracks.  We live in an old house that was built around 1930 and the story goes that the backyards of our neighborhood used to be a creek bed.

We had the infamous “Great Flood of 96″ (in 1996) and besides the chance of water entering through the slab, we also had the problem of the storm/sewer lines backing up that flooded many basements throughout the town.

There are also times when the conditions are just right, we can get a line of storms similar to this one from the remnants of Gulf hurricanes.  I can’t remember which hurricane it was, but about five years ago we had the same kind of flooding and storms that we are currently having.