Outside the dugout: What's cooking?

I am making carnitas to be shredded and served as tacos.

I have some left over tomatillo and avocado salsa and made a batch of roasted pineapple with habaneros, cilantro, red onion salsa. It might be a bit too picante for my family, but I like it.

 

We need more folks talking about what they cook. We are now behind the Old Guys thread.

Oh, crap. This is an old guys thread.

We need some young blood talking about what they cook.

Bazza, you ain't that young.

 

My wife is giving me the day off from cooking. Either she is bringing home some veggies to make with rice or take-out. All I asked in response is what kind of wine to prepare.

 

Since I have a lot of green beans that need to be eaten and also have some skirt steak and home made pesto I am making a veggie bedding of green beans, roasted corn, and pesto topped with pan seared skirt steak. And a bit of rice on the side.

Tomorrow I am smoking a turkey breast to be made into turkey salad to be served in a Bibb lettuce cup.

When I was a grad student up at Illinois I lived in a trailer. It was cheap, but the biggest thing was that I had a plot of land to do some gardening. And Champaign county had legendary soil for farming. I grew the best tasting Bibb lettuce I have ever tasted. My mom said that I could go courting with just that.

I never did tell them why it tasted so good. I incorporated all of my brother's German shepherd's chit into the soil a couple of weeks before planting. Over six month's worth from a big dog in a small plot is a lot.

The tomatoes were also special. I used no pesticides. I managed to catch a praying mantis that did everything I needed.

 

The downside of where I lived was that it was really seedy. It was the Lincoln Park Trailer Park and locally it was known as the Lincoln Park Zoo (a Chicago reference). I once mentioned where I lived to a wife of a faculty member in my department and she was aghast. She worked for the local health department and said that most of her clients for STDs lived there.

It was never "my place" as a choice.

 

Sorry for the TMI.

 

Dinner was a HUGE hit.

It sounded weird, but was awesome.

My wife wants to try it again using chimichurri instead of pesto.

 

Turkey breast is smoking.

I also had to replace the sprayer in my kitchen sink because it was leaking and I had to build up a new mower. Plumbing stuff is always "fun" if you think "fun" involves a lot of cuss words.

My old Craftsman self-propelled mover with a Honda engine died. The engine is fine, but the transmission no longer works. It is so old that not only does nobody make a replacement transmission, nobody has a new old stock one anywhere. At least not one I could find using Google and I tried for hours.

While I can mow with the old mower, it is now quite the workout and I have three half acre yards to mow.

I bought a Craftsman push mower (not self propelled) with a Honda engine today. Since I have a lot of intricate mowing around things involving a lot of backing up having a much lighter mower without self-propelled is actually a bonus. And one less thing to break. And cheaper.

My favorite mower ever was a LawnBoy two-stroke with an alloy deck and a light, but powerful, Toro engine. It was push and not self-propelled. The problem with it was that it was prone to snapping the connecting rod. Light and powerful is a problem. I had rebuilt it twice already and now it is one of my many projects to do when I have the time to do it again. But you could dance around the yard with it when it was running. It was a great mower to use, but flawed in engine design.

I also have a really old LawnBoy with an F-series engine. It is clunky and I hated using it. I should probably sell it on Ebay because there actually are old LawnBoy mower collectors out there.

 

And when I bought the mower they wanted to sell me an upgraded warranty. That was hysterical. I will use this mower mostly for mowing rental properties and doing that automatically puts me into a commercial 3 month warranty instead of the two year home owner warranty. I really doubt that if I bought an upgraded warranty it would be honored.

 

I have always loved my dogs, but don't really like the Dawg.

 

The three yards that I mow are all big lots (about half an acre each), but have lots of trees and shrubs to go around. Two of the yards have lots of camellias because I used to show and judge them. Because of that there is a lot of back and forth mowing and not much straight line mowing where having self-propelled really does shine. Self-propelled as a big negative when going backwards. Often the drive wheels jam up and it is a royal PITA.

Tried out the new mower today in my backyard. It will work just fine for me and better than what I was using. I even mowed my main camellia area which I rarely mowed before because it was really hard to do with my old mower.

Since I am mowing two rental property yards I only have three months of warranty unless I lie and I don't do that. I wonder if my old Honda engine could bolt right onto the new deck? It runs like a top with YEARS of mowing three big yards.

I set up a spreadsheet to monitor my mower usage for two reasons. On is for tax purposes so that I can claim a fraction of the price as a business deduction. I can't claim it all because I also use it at my own house. I will need a record just in case I am audited. Secondly it is for maintenance. I know that I need to do an early oil change much like we had to do with new cars way back in the day. Do kids even know about "breaking in" an engine? And if they do, do they know why it was required? Hint: Machining tolerances have gotten much better since then so new car engines are good to go right off the lot, but fancy machining is not used on lawn mower engines. They use the early period of their life to "lap in" the rings and cylinders.

Tonight will be the turkey salad along with tuna salad. The smoked turkey was so good that we didn't have enough for another meal for three: me, my wife, and my MIL. My son will want something else. He was fine eating sliced smoked turkey breast last night, though.

Tomatoes will be involved in some way along with Bibb lettuce.

 

I just remembered another seedy element about where I lived as a grad student. The trailer just east of mine seemed to be unoccupied except that about every four weeks or so a Cadillac would drive up and the driver would enter the trailer.

The Caddy had a remote ignition and would start about a minute before he left the trailer and then he drove off.

Probably enough to get a search warrant.

But, hey. I grew up on the Southside of Chicago.