Harvest is finished. No lentils to dry this year, thank God. I'm finally back in Orofino.
Truthfully, the harvest was finished weeks ago, but between the Clearwater County Fair and the Nezperce County Fair (which my nieces had livestock in) we didn't get moved back to town until this week. I am comfortably back in my dark, air-conditioned mancave in the back porch room of our house. As I am typing this 'my' dog has finished clawing aside my comforter from my bed, clawing on the blanket underneath until it has loose folds, and then placing a mouthful of dry dog food in the middle of my bed, which he will 'bury' within the folds of my blankets. When he is finished he will sit on my pillows and lick his balls. He's lucky he stays with me, I'm the only person in this house who would tolerate this shit. My mom thinks it's hugely funny.
Lately my life has been all about zucchini bread. In the last few weeks I've made close to fifty loaves, and I have about four dozen wrapped and in the freezer. The house garden had a bumper crop of dreadnought-sized zucchini. We have dozens of these monsters, more than two feet long and weighing up to 12 lbs, they're so big that if you get dirty thoughts while holding one you really do need to get professional help. And they don't keep forever, so I've been making zucchini bread.
http://www.bagofmice.com/stuff/zuccbread.png
Btw ... Yes, that is a genuine 1982 Magic Chef 4-burner self-cleaning, automatic shutoff stove. In almond. 'Cause thats the way I roll.
My bitchy aunt has been critical of my baking methods (even though I used to work in a bakery and also baked breads and cookies for a deli). I commit these huge baking crimes, such as using a whisk in a metal bowl to sift my dry ingredients. I pat my shredded zucchini with paper towels. I refuse to use canola oil. I don't bake the loaves until the tooth pick comes out clean, I usually pull them just a little early. All of these practices go against ancient Lutheran baking principles. Crimes. So I entered four of my zucchini breads (orange marmalade, pumpkin spice, applesauce, and a vegan/no gluten) in the Nezperce County Fair. My aunt entered three of her zucchini breads (boring, boring and more boring were the flavors, I think.) Anyway, I took two blue ribbons, a red, and a motherfucking gold 'Best In Category', and she got two reds and a no-show, SUCK IT, BITCH! (Yes, you DO sift out the walnut dust from your chopped walnuts and you DO use four eggs, BEYOTCH! I don't give a fuck how grandma used to do it, I AM WINNING!) It was such a blatant victory for the forces good that I didn't bother to go to the awards presentation, so that I wouldn't have to walk back to my seat next to my aunt holding my FOUR motherfucking ribbons includinggoldbestincategorybitch ....
I make these sacrifices so that the entire family can pretend it didn't happen, and thus tranquility is maintained.
Summer has finished. Fall is coming. The only kind of sports/water bottle that the local grocery store has in stock has a picture of Hannah Montana on the side of it. The same store doesn't stock any male aerosol deodorants, just greezeon style speedsticks, which I hate. Life in a small town.
-- Peotr
P.S. Later I will walk my dog through an empty lot about a block from our house. There used to be a nice house on this lot, but the little old lady who lived there was bottling homemade seasoned cooking oil, which she would make by heating a few gallons of light olive oil in a crockpot with some garlic and other herbs. Anyway, one day she was doing some huge holiday cooking and she ran out of outlets, so she took the ceramic crockpot out of the heating unit and put it on the stove top ... with the burner going, of course, so that the oil would keep hot, and that way she could use the outlet the crockpot was plugged into, and anyway to make a short story long that ceramic crockpot that was sitting on that stove top, on that burner, with several gallons of hot olive oil in it ... cracked. In half. On that GAS burner.
And that house burned down.
The community, to show our disdain for her foolishness, are slowly filliing her empty lot with dog poop. Someone planted a bunch of tomato plants in a garden plot, but the deer ate all those, so now it's just dog poop, deer poop and weeds.
