Batter-Splattered

ptsd

No recipes today. Just stopping by to share that we had a rather traumatic weekend, me and the dog.

Here she is doped up on painkillers and recovering like a champ:

First, I dropped her off at the vet's on Friday morning to get spayed.

When I returned in the afternoon to pick her up, I queried the vet: "Did she say anything about me?"

Vet: "What?"

Me: "Did she say anything bad about me for leaving her here to be cut open and sewed back up ... like did she say she hates me?"

Vet: "Oh! ahaha!"

He thinks I'm kidding.

After paying up, Sadie and I cried the whole way home. Really. There was weeping. Lots and lots of weeping. And whimpering. She started it.

And then the next day, there was an incident too ugly to describe in great detail. It involved a vintage fishing creel, a cartoonishly large vintage fishing lure, and one curious and sneaky puppy. Or more specifically, the gum and lip of a curious and sneaky puppy. I'd just unpacked the creel from one of the last fewed boxes leftover from the move and she sidled over and jumped right up to it, shoved her head inside and chomped down. Before I knew what happened, we were both huddled together on the kitchen floor rocking to and fro, waiting for my husband to race home to help extract the lure. It was a long fifteen minute wait. Luckily, she was already hopped up on painkillers from her operation.

It was very, very ugly. Afterwards, we both had to lay down for about two hours to recover from the shock of it all.

She was remarkably unphased by the experience though (I wish I could say the same) and she went immediately back to gnawing on sticks with the very same lip and gum.

Sticks are her idea of haute cuisine, if haute cuisine were something one chews into tiny bits and spits out, an eating habit she's forced to do al fresco, for obvious reasons.

It was plenty enough excitement to last us for quite some time and when my husband's friend came over and greeted me by saying, "Hey! Heard you want fishing for dog," I had to tell him I wasn't ready for joking yet.

He nodded solemnly.

this and that

miscellaneous things from here and there and there and here.

Those are allspice berries. I used them to make this recipe for spiced venison steaks with red cabbage confit and red wine sauce. You crush the berries up with peppercorns and then press the mixture into the steaks and let them sit overnight. It was quite tasty. My mom and brother stopped by and insisted on taking me and Sadie out to find a dog park. We were unsuccessful (anyone know where the dog parks are in Wasilla? Val?) and when I asked if everyone wanted to go home and have some moose steaks, we left skid marks on the pavement in our haste to return to the house.

Those are those flowers I like because they're cheap and they last forever but I can never pronounce or remember their name.

Yesterday I joined a CSA in Washington to have a box of organic vegetables delivered every two weeks to me at my favorite shoe store. Fresh this week, they have purple top turnips, bunched carrots, butternut squash, green leaf lettuce, ruby grapefruit, jonagold apples, cara cara oranges, limes, and yukon gold potatoes. First, I hemmed and hawed over the cost but then I thought about how the organic choices here can sometimes be slim-pickins (especially in the winter-time) and the non-organic stuff in the produce section is often a bit shriveled by the time it makes it here. I decided that $10 a week per person for fresh vegetables will be a much-appreciated luxury...

...at least until I can get my own garden and greenhouse up and running this summer. With the run of spring-like weather we've been having here, my thoughts have turned to growing stuff and I've been hungrily reading up on what the University of Alaska Fairbanks cooperative extension's site had to say about home gardening in Alaska. Can't wait to build some of these window boxes to hang on the new house and grow some of these.

Just updated my recipe index and, by my count, I have now have 103 recipes posted here.

Check out this very funny post about Germany's cheeseburgers-in-a-can.

My research at work turned up this very interesting recipe for squirrel mulligan stew at the Oklahoma wildlife conservation website. Anyone want to try it out for me and let me know what it's like?

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn't point  you in the direction of this video of Anchorage's first Running of the Reindeer event, part of this year's Fur Rondy celebration. The shake-shake-shaking reindeer at the beginning cracked me up -- I watched that part over and over.