Happy Father's Day!

Thanks, Dad, for your willingness to taste whatever I prepare.

(though I believe the concoction in this particular bowl was yours)

Happy Father's Day!

LARD. And Some Strawberry Shortcake

Ohhhhh, lordy. It. Has. Arrived. What is it, might you ask? A coveted new cookbook, a new car, my own personal set of wax wings??? No, dear readers. Something far more exciting:

My lard.

A relevant (you'll see) digression: driven to distraction by the horrific photos and stories  that I've absorbed over the years of animals living in squalor and inexcusably mistreated, I've all but given up industrial meat and dairy products. I won't get into the details, because that's not what this blog is about, but trust me, I'm not being hoity-toity here. That said, I've not given up meat and dairy altogether. Every couple of months my mom places a large meat order to a company called U.S. Wellness Meats, a Missouri-based farm. It's awesome. You should support them with your monies. The animals live as they should, with respect to their species. They sell, among other things, pork products. And pork products include lard.

Have you ever had biscuits, a pie crust, anything made with REAL lard? I bet you haven't. I hadn't, either, until about a year ago when my friend Christine made the best pie crust I have ever had so help me god and she made it with lard. I became a convert and will not go back.

So with this last meat order, I had mumsy order me some lard. Which got me thinking, I sure would love some strawberry shortcake. Made with biscuits (lard!), naturally, because we are in the South.

Lard Biscuit Strawberry Shortcake. With Lard.

Southern-Style Wedge Salad

The wedge salad has always confounded me. Here is why: its incredibly easy to make, and the ingredients are laughably inexpensive, yet time and time again high-falootin' restaurants get away with charging patrons a buttload for it. I get the sense that the inventors of the dish put it in front of the first unsuspecting patron saying,"That'll be...ten? dollars...?" And then masterfully disguising their astonishment when said patron did, in fact, fork over (har har har) the requested monies. It's borderline sinister, I tell ya.

So now that I've busted all those rest-o-rawn-tays and am probably blacklisted from most of them, it's also fair to say that the wedge salad is delish. Something impressive to throw together as a meal or first course or what have you. And in this recipe I've dispensed with the traditional bacon and bleu cheese in favor of Southernized andouille sausage and my own pimento cheese dressing, of which I am so proud.

Also, this recipe maaaaay or may not have been printed in the Community Recipes section of June's Southern Living. (squeal!!!)

Wedge Salad with Pimento Cheese Dressing and 

Andouille Sausage

Digger's Diary #7: Troubleshooting Seedlings, Square Foot Gardening, Me VS the BIRDS

Everything's looking relatively good. The tomato plants I got from my neighbor are budding with flowers and two even have little tomatoes, the strawberries look fab (except for where some a-hole bird pecked at a couple of them...more on this later), and I think I've figured out what was wrong with my watermelon, cucumber, muskmelon, and squash seedlings. See, about a week before I FINALLY got them into the ground, they were so yellow. They weren't droopy or diseased looking, but their color sucked. I thought it was just because they were becoming root bound and had sucked up all the available nutrition in their little newspaper pots, but transplanting them didn't help. I tried watering with very weak fish emulsion-nothing. My friend suggested fish meal, but when I went in search my purveyor had none. I got some worm castings instead and side-dressed the transplants with it, working it gently into the soil immediately around them. For those of you who don't know about worm castings-it is the poo. Literally. It's worm poo. But it's odorless and not gross at all and so rich in nutrients you can't actually plant anything directly in them. After the side dressing I watered generously, and in the next few days I noticed improvement in their color. Still not much growth, although the squash appear to have a few promising (albeit premature given the size of the plant) buds. The tomatoes and peppers I grew from seed are progressing nicely, and the basil is beginning to show true leaves.

Square Foot Gardening: this is a concept I've read about in several places. The basic idea, as I understand it, is you take a perfect square or rectangle space and divide it into however many 1'x1' spots as you can. Using this chart, you determine how many of each of your plants will fit into each square. I.e. something like 4 carrots but only 1 squash will fit in a 1'x1' area. It seems hard to believe to me, but since I don't have a lot of space I'm giving it a go. I rearranged my cinder blocks to give me a 9'x4' internal space, and then marked the squares off with twine. Next I put the plants in based on the chart. I don't currently have enough space to fill the garden, so I gave them more space than true square foot gardening apparently needs, but we'll see just the same.

Last week I spent over an hour digging holes, burying posts, and cutting and stapling bird netting around my garden. This is to keep out the birds and the cat. Dang birds keep getting at my strawberries. Dang cat just walks straight through it like there aren't OBVIOUSLY things going on in there that don't need the input of his rotten kitty paws. He'll never know how that bird netting saved his life.

So that's the latest!

Aidan's Monster High Doll Cake

A good friend of mine has a (now) ten-year-old daughter who loves some show called Monster High. Maybe those of you with ten-year-old daughters have heard of it? Or those of you who are ten-year-olds at heart? Because I am a geezer, I had not heard of it until said good friend asked that I make a birthday cake for her kiddo with a Monster High theme. Soooo I got to researching, even going so far as to watch an (1) episode of the show.

I am not a fan.

Buuuuut I can see how a ten-year-old would be. Anyway. I've always seen these barbie doll cakes that people make with a doll shoved down into like 10 layers of cake flared to look like a huge ball gown and I said to myself, "Self, now that's whatcha need to do." Doll + Insane Amounts of Cake and Frosting + Mad Neon Colors of Monster High = Yessssss.

The result? Let's just say that a) I have never, never, never made such a huge mess of my kitchen. Every single utensil was dirty, furniture was moved, there was neon pink frosting on the ceiling...you get the idea. B) that was the heaviest freaking cake EVER. And forget trying to put it in a box. HA. A box. And c) guess what revisits you at your oh-so-private constitutional the morning after you eat black velvet cake with multiple colors of neon frosting? Yeah. Just...yeah.

But it was also really fun to make and a huge hit at the party. So with no further digression:

Black Velvet Cake with Vanilla Buttercream Frosting

Shaped like Monster High Ball Gown