Mint Madness

        I love a mojito, which is made with white rum and fresh mint. So when I spotted an abundance of mint plants in my late neighbor's yard last summer, I decided to help myself to one or two.

      I quickly discovered that you can't dig up one or two mint plants from a bed of many. The roots were so long, and so intertwined, that I wound up with five. Wisely, I  put them in large pots. I later read that they will take over a garden. 

     The mint plants flourished. I thought I had lost them in August, though, when I  returned from 12 days in Peru. My tenant had overwatered them, and they looked pitiful. But they soon bounced back. I thought I'd lost them when the temperatures dropped below 32 degrees this month.  But they're hardy little devils, especially when they're among friends. The pot with only one plant froze to death, but the one with three made it just fine. I then brought it inside, and it's still producing.

     So, the question is, what do I do with all this mint? There are only so many mojitos a woman my size can drink. That goes double for mint juleps, which are way too strong for my tastes anyway. 

     A gardening friend freezes fresh herbs in ice cubes, and uses them in soups and stews during the winter. Hmmm. Would that work for mojitos? I froze a couple of ice trays as an experiment. But I can only store so many ice cubes.

     I found a recipe for Green Beans, Snap Peas and Edamame Toss (sic) with Cilantro-Mint Pesto in Publix's Family Style magazine. You steam the veggies, then toss with the pesto. It’s a yummy dish. So I'm making it again for Thanksgiving. I've already made the second batch of pesto. Then I experimented with a batch of mint walnut pesto. I think it will be good on pasta.

     And still I have mint. 

     So I posed my mint dilemma to another friend, who apparently spread the word among her friends, and she sent me three lists of recipes. Most were a bust, because they either used too little mint or were too complicated, but I saved a couple. One was Tomato, Cucumber and Red Onion Salad with Mint. That reminded me of a dish I had in Istanbul last month, which a Turk told me was very Turkish. However, my Persian friend makes it, too, and she’s from Iran. It combined chopped cucumber and mint with slightly thinned plain yogurt. It was quite tasty. Another was Grilled Sweet Potato Fries with Honey Mustard Mint Dipping Sauce, which comes from Bobby Fray on the Food Network. It appears to be a tad time-consuming, because you cook the potatoes in boiling water, let them cool, cut them into wedges, then grill them. But I love sweet potatoes, so I saved that recipe, too.

     My friend suggested adding finely minced mint to my next batch of chocolate frosting and/or a batch of brownies. Hmmm. Mint and chocolate. That's a winning combination.

     So, do any of my readers have other suggestions for using mint? 

     While you're looking through your recipe files, I'm going to enjoy another pineapple mojito.

     Bottoms up!

Saving the Fish

Every summer, my pond becomes a mud hole. I’ve never been able to keep water in it, so I haven’t had much luck with fish, either.

When I moved here 13 years ago, I had 18 catfish and dozens of bream. The fish would feel the vibration of my car on the driveway, and swim to my small pier. I’d throw them fish food, and they’d jump out of the water to get it. It was great fun, and I was looking forward to letting my grandsons feed the fish, too.

The pond is now a work in progress.

But it’s a runoff pond that’s dependent upon rain to keep it filled. When we have lots of rain, the pond is about a third of an acre in area, and several feet deep at one end. However, when we go through a dry spell, the pond shrinks up to a muddy, child-size wadding pool. The poor fish that are left become easy pickings for the blue heron that feasts there every year. A few years ago, when we had a particularly bad drought, I lost all those catfish, including the one with the white face that I called Grandpa.

Besides the receding water, I had a lot of vegetation to deal with, both in and around the pond. Norm Haley, a regional extension agent for the Alabama Cooperative Extension System’s forestry, wildlife and natural resources division, advised me on a herbicide that’s safe for fish and the groundwater downstream. However, it was extremely difficult to spray the sloping banks, much less the reeds and other vegetation in the pond itself. I liked the reeds, but they were slowly taking over.  A tenant got into a copperhead nest while chopping them down. Grass carp wouldn’t help, according to Haley, because the pond gets too low for them. He said I wouldn’t have the vegetation problem if I cut the banks steeper.

I had ducks once.

After 13 years of saying, “I ought to have that pond dug out while it’s shallow,“  I  put my money where my mouth is. Bobby Isbell, a neighbor who has an excavation business, did the job this week. Once the rains fill it in, the pond will be three to four feet deep from one end to the other. When the pond has enough water, Bobby will come back with a truck load of chicken litter, which he’ll spread over the water with a blower. The litter will sink to the bottom and fill in the cracks. Once the leaks are plugged, I’ll be able to keep fish in it, and maybe some ducks on it.

Bobby had to pump out some water before he could start the excavation, and I wanted to save the few fish that were left. So Phillip, his employee, scooped them out with a butterfly net and by hand as the pump sucked out the water. Some of them scooted into the mud, where they flopped around until Philip could grab them.

We put several dozen small bream in one water tank, and two catfish, a bass and a carp in another. Phillip suggested that the raccoons probably would make a feast of the smaller fish, and I was okay with that. At least they would die as part of the food chain, instead of from asphyxiation. But they were either too crowded, or the cold night temperature got them, because next morning, they were all dead. 

Well, at least I tried.

Alabama dancer gets paid to sail the seas

Jesse Calvert at Thessaloniki, Greece

If you’ve ever taken a cruise, you’ve no doubt noticed that most of the crew members are from all over the world. It’s rare to meet a ship’s crew or staff member from the USA. Imagine my surprise, then, during my Greece and Turkey voyage last month, to hear the ship’s captain introduce a staff member from Brushy Pond, Alabama. I just had to meet this gal and find out how she got where she is today.

As it turns out, 25-year-old Jesse Calvert, cruise sales manager, danced her way onto the ship. After graduating from Birmingham-Southern College with a degree in dance, she left Brushy Pond, a small community near Cullman, for the bright lights of Atlanta. “I danced with a small company there,” she says. “I’ve been dancing since I was five.”

In 2012, she auditioned for the cast of Royal Caribbean Productions, which provides entertainment for the entire cruise line. The audition lasted three hours, but a week later, she had a job on Royal Caribbean’s Brilliance of the Seas. The cast of 12  rehearsed together seven to eight hours per day, seven days per week, for six weeks, in Hollywood, Florida. She spent six months on the ship, sailing in the Baltic region, to Iceland and to Eastern Canada. “It  was my first time on a ship, and it took two weeks to get my body to adjust to the ship and stage always moving,” she says. “It was very different from anything I had done before, and I loved it.”

  A summer spent studying art and literature in Paris proved useful when she started helping the ship’s art auctioneer keep up with the bids. “It became a side job, and I earned a little in commissions,” she says. When her contract was up in January 2013, she did a couple of shows with her old dance company in Atlanta. She was scheduled for another ship that June, but got a call in March about an opening for a dancer on the Azamara Quest. After eight weeks of rehearsals, she signed on to the Azamara in late May as part of the crew, staff and entertainment. That first tour was from May-December of 2013, and she got home to Alabama two days before Christmas. 

“Contracts usually are for six to eight months, but a lot of entertainers do repeat contracts because they get addicted,” she says. With the Azamara, she works four months on, two months off, sometimes spending those off months  in Atlanta. Her experience with the auctioneer on the Brilliance of the Seas helped her land her current job as cruise sales manager. “It was a big jump going from dancing to speaking in public, and it took a lot of preparation,” she says. “This this job is detail oriented.”

        When she's not on duty, she likes to explore foreign ports-of-call. Her favorites are Iceland, because of the geo-thermal hot springs at its Blue Lagoon, and Sorrento, Italy,

because it feeds her cameo collection. "In Sorrento, they carve cameos out of the conch shells they collect," she explains. "You can watch them carve one, then buy it."

      One of the first things I noticed about Jesse was her lack of a Southern accent. “I worked at that,” she explains. “When doing boat drills, for example, people from other countries don't understand a Southern twang. But when I go home, in two days, my twang is back.”

Eventually she’ll want to settle in one place, but not for a while. “You’re always  visible on a ship this size,” she says of the Azamara, which houses up to  694 passengers and a crew of 407. “You do crew duties, too. You meet people, and you make friends. I like what I’m doing.”

It has to be more exciting than life in Brushy Pond!

All Hitched Up and No Place To Go

Some friends enjoyed another trail ride.

        I was supposed to go trail riding in the Bankhead National Forest one recent Saturday. I hooked up my trailer the day before, and had planned to load my tack while my horses were eating breakfast. 

However, it was pouring down rain when I got up at 5 o’clock that morning. Some weather reports indicated a 40% chance of rain throughout the day, and the one for Bankhead said 80%. I just don’t like riding in the rain. Even worse, I don’t like loading up in the rain.

So I took my cup of coffee to the front porch to watch the sunrise and contemplate my choices for the day. The festival at Homestead Hollow? Nope, not in the rain. Besides, I wanted to take my grandson there Sunday afternoon. Clean the house, or at least a portion of it? Nah, maybe I could hire someone for that.

Guess I could have worked on that quilt I started a year and a half ago. It’s the one I’m making from a blanket I bought in Guatemala. It’s not one of those beautiful handmade blankets often seen in the Indian markets. This one is polyester, with an ugly gold fringe. I bought it because it has a purple horse on it, and I had painted my room lavender. However, the blanket was much too thin to act as a quilt, so I decided to turn it into a coverlet. I removed the fringe and spent $200 on fabric for the border, backing and coordinating bedskirt and pillowcases. 

I got so far as to applying the iron-on backing to stabilize the wiggly, misshapen  blanket, then put it away. For a year.  About two weeks ago I took all the materials over to a quilt-making friend’s house, and she helped me trim and square the blanket and cut the strips for the border and backing. 

My goal is to get it ready for Pat at the Ashville House of Quilts to quilt it for me on her long-arm machine while I’m in Greece. A rainy day seems like the perfect time to sew. But guess what? The sun came out about 9:30 or 10! 

Somewhere in Bankhead Forest the Outback Riders were looking at fall foliage from the backs of their horses that Saturday. I looked at it through the sunny window above my sewing machine.

I hope those riders got soaked.

Llama Drama

A Baptist church in Pelham, AL, had its annual Blessing of the Animals earlier this month. I believe mine are already blessed, or they wouldn’t have survived  their recent escapade.

Monday was a day of drama for the llamas, Rio and Beeper. As my weekend house guests were preparing to leave, I got a call from a neighbor who lives about a mile up the road. “Elaine, your llamas are out,” she told me. “Are they outside the gate?” I asked, because some folks see them grazing by my pond and think they have escaped their pen. “Yes, my daughter saw them down by the church.”

Beeper and Rio

That’s about two blocks from my gate. Fearing the worst, one guest and I jumped in my UTV, then I drove like a wild woman to my barn and grabbed llama collars, leashes and a couple of strong lead ropes. We high-tailed it down the hill as fast as we dared in a vehicle with brakes that are almost metal-to-metal. My other guest jumped into her car and followed us. We prayed all the way to the church that the llamas were safe. We also wondered which one of the workmen putting up fencing in my pasture had let them out. I had warned them that when entering or leaving my property, they should stop until the gate closed behind them, to make sure the llamas didn’t dash out.  Obviously, someone didn’t heed my admonition.

As we passed the little church graveyard, we spied the llamas, prissing down the road as if they owned it. My friend Calvin, who lives near the church, had spotted them, too, and stopped his truck to help us herd them home. We had a feed bucket with us, so Beeper came right up and started eating. I quickly threw a lead rope around her long neck, then slipped on her halter. But her mama, Rio, wouldn’t get close enough to eat, much less be caught. We had her surrounded, but animals can slip through such a paltry posse as we presented.

Figuring she would follow where Beeper went, I ve-rrr-y slooow-ly drove toward home, while my friend held onto Beeper’s lead rope. Beeper wasn’t  happy about this arrangement. She stubbornly pulled back on her lead rope, and it seemed to take us 10 minuets to get 10 feet. Even the feed bucket wasn’t enough to entice her, so I jumped out and let my friend drive while I walked with Beeper. Her mamma followed us, stopping frequently to graze or stare at passing traffic.

My friend's roommate followed behind in her car, while the motorist who had been patiently waiting for us to get the llamas out of the road slowly followed her. Calvin drove across the street and parked just outside my fence, then punched in my gate code. As the gates slowly opened, Rio loped across the main road and through the opening gates. Whew! One down, one to go. 

I thanked the Lord profusely as Beeper and I passed through the gates, too. Then we ponied Beeper from my UTV up my hill and back to the barn, a distance of about 1,800 feet. I put the llamas in my arena so they couldn’t escape again, gave them  hay and water, then chastised the contractor for letting them out. I knew it was he, because his was the last vehicle to come in before the llamas got out. Turns out he hadn’t seen them and didn’t realize they were nearby.

This story could have had a very different ending. If the llamas had been hit by a car, they could have been maimed or killed. They would have suffered either way, and I would have mourned their loss and been angry with the contractor who left the gate open.  As it turned out, the llamas had been blessed, even without the church service.

Fresh Eggs

  You know your eggs are fresh when you watch the seller take them out from under her hens!

I've been buying my eggs from Sue and Al Maddox at the Old Farts Farm in Springville for a couple of years. I'm not making up that name, either. It's on her signs. She raises and sells rabbits, pygmy and dwarf goats, exotic ducks, peacocks and several breeds of chickens, including Silkies and Rhode Island reds. She sells the animals, as well as baby chicks and fresh eggs. Her small farm is crowded with cages, pens and pools, old tires studded with tomato plants and various other vegetables and flowers. She gets so many folks wanting to just browse the place that she had to start charging for tours.

She has several kinds of chickens, so she has eggs all year round. She was charging $2 per dozen, which is cheaper than the grocery stores. I stuck with her when she went up to $2.50, because I know they're fresh. When she went up to $3, I started looking around for a new source. I found one just down the road from my place, which is a wee bit closer than the Old Farts Farm.  But that lady charges $3 too. Well, at least she's closer, I reasoned. Meanwhile, Sue has gone back down to $2 per dozen, so I'm back with the Old Farts, where many folks think I belong.

Her eggs aren’t graded by size. You get several sizes in a dozen. You also get several colors, from the traditional white to solid brown to speckled. I guess that’s because she has so many different types of chickens.

Last week when I went by to get a dozen, Sue was out. She had sold the last two dozen earlier in the day, and her hens were molting so they weren't producing as many as they usually do. "Let's check the nests and see if they've laid any since this morning," she offered. So I dutifully followed her around her hen house, plastic egg crate in hand because I recycle them, while she unceremoniously lifted first one hen and then another from its nest. "Nope, none here," she'd say. The hens clucked at the indignation, but she merely chortled and clucked, too. "Come on, girls, we need some eggs," she added.

One of her pea hens had strayed into the chicken house, and was running around trying to find its way out. She finally darted between us when we weren't looking. "Silly hen," Sue said. "She keeps getting lost in here."

Sue managed to scrounge up seven eggs, so I offered to buy half a dozen for $1. I used those up over the weekend making brownies and banana bread. When I went back Sunday for more, she was still out. When I went to my second source, she was out, too. I was forced to buy a dozen from the (gasp!) grocery store.

I wish Sue’s hens would stop molting and start producing. I like my eggs fresh out of the nest.

The Cat Peed On The Mattress

        Oh, how quickly a furry love affair can turn sour...as quickly as it takes a cat to pee on your bed.

In an earlier post, I wrote about bringing Barney-the-barn-cat indoors. He was my first barn cat, he’s probably eight or nine years old, and I didn’t want him to disappear the way most of the others have done. So I tried to make him a house cat.

Of course, I chose a most inappropriate time to do this. It was early August, one week before my trip to Peru. So for the 12 days I was gone, I boarded him with the vet. I also got him caught up on his shots while there. That cost me $140.

Since then, I’ve left him locked in my bedroom suite up to nine days at a time while out of town. He did fine, although you can imagine the smell coming from the litter box when I returned. My intention all along was to train him to go in and out of the house via an old cat door, so he could do his business outside. To that end, I shoved him through the cat door one day, and he ran off.

I was very upset, and prayed unceasingly for his safe return. He had often disappeared from the barn/pasture area for four or five days, so I kept telling myself he’d come back. Sure enough, five days later, he showed up for breakfast. I grabbed him, hugged him and penned him up in my bedroom suite again.

An affectionate cat who seemed content indoors, he never could adjust to being so near the dogs. When I would bring him into the Great Room to watch television with me, he’d spy the dogs and run back to my bedroom. One day after such an episode, he peed on my bed. Fortunately, I had just installed a soft, thick mattress cover so that my grandson’s occasional diaper leaks wouldn’t soak through to the mattress. But I spent two days washing the new cover, the sheets and the blanket I use as a coverlet. I forgave Barney, though, chalking the experience up to his being scared.

No sooner had I put everything back in its proper place than he did it again. This time, the blanket wasn’t on top to provide an extra layer, and the mattress got wet. Phew! I did my best to soak up the spot with a dry cloth, then scrubbed it with Fabuloso, let it dry, then sprayed it and the room with an odor eliminator. Once more, I forgave him, because the dogs had scared him again.

The third time he peed the bed, however, the dogs weren’t involved. The mattress was. Fuming over having to wash the linens again, I bought a waterproof, zippered mattress cover. I put it on top of my covers, beneath an old blanket that I use when I let the dogs sleep with me. The next two or three times he peed (I lost count), the plastic caught the brunt. It was becoming odoriferously obvious that this was developing into a habit. Oh, and he pooped on the bed once, covering it with the doggy blanket.  But I’m here to tell you, it was much less smelly and much easier to clean up than the wee-wee.

I contemplated taking him to the vet to determine whether he had a bladder problem. I contemplated calming pills. Do they make Valium for cats? Either way, I saw dollar signs. And day after day of bed-linen washing. I decided I had already spent enough time and money on this ungrateful creature. So I tossed his butt out.

Yep, I picked him up, opened the back door, and put him down. He hit the ground running. He’ll probably show up at the barn in four or five days. But I won’t be bringing him inside again. Nope, I’ve emptied his food dish, cleaned out his litter box and put it away in the shed. Already, my bedroom smells better. 

Some animals just weren’t meant to stay indoors.