Story that I tell

When you get into this email a bit you'll see the song Cottenfields by CCR. The reason for that is that my ex was a cotton farmer back in the day and we lived surrounded by cotton fields. We lived on the family ranch most of our married lives and that's where my kids grew up. I had a wood stove in my kitchen and there were lots of livestock surrounding our home. We had chickens in our yard and rabbits in cages and the loudest bulls ever in the corral next to the house.

My ex went to college at Cal-Poly San Luis Obispo and he drove home almost every week-end during our courtship.

We had cotton pickers and pick-ups and old racing cars and once my brother-in-law even had a boat stored in the shed. Later on some of our friends bought airplanes and years later we were to learn that the planes were used for moving drugs. (I'm simply sharing with you this information as I don't think our little town was very much different from other little towns in surrounding areas.)

I thank God a lot that my second husband got us the hell out of Dos Palos, Ca as I think 100% of the folks that finally ended up in DP were into drugs and by moving we got the hell out of Dodge and my kids weren't affected too much.

The night before I had my oldest kid my husband took me on a ride on the road surrounding the cotton field. As it turned out my daughter was born 6 weeks late on the day MLK was assassinated. I didn't know until 4-5-68 that he was murdered. I was so happy with the new family addition that no one wanted to tell about 'the' King. (My son was to be born 13 years to the day that Robert Kennedy was shot.)

The following video shows 2 football teams and the Broncos in the video are my hometown team. No brag, just fact and my daughter was a pomerette and she was president of the senior class and Homecoming queen and dating the quarterback......... oh yeah her sister was a freshman and president of the Freshman class. (I'm lying, I am bragging as my kids turned out to be pretty great so it musta been a little bit of something I did.)

And, if you think I am bragging, I hafta share with you that Tony Coehlo who worked for Al Gore was valadictorian of his class in DP a few years before I graduated. (........and he turned out to be one of the biggest crooks in the democratic party.) But then again, Dave Henderson, who played baseball for the Oakland A's also is an alumni of my itty bitty town.......... His mother-in-law was married to my Biology teacher Rozwell Smith. ..........all this from a itty bitty town with population of 2,500. hmmmmmmmm
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EXCERPT:

Frogs' legs are one of the better-known delicacies of French and Cantonese cuisine. They are also eaten in other regions, such as the Caribbean, the region of Alentejo, in Portugal, northwest Greece, Piemonte in Italy, Spain and the Midwest southern regions of the United States. A type of frog called the edible frog is most often used for this dish. They are often said to taste like chicken[1] because of their mild flavor, with a texture most similar to chicken wings[2]. Frogs are raised commercially in certain countries, e.g. Vietnam. Frog muscle does not resolve rigor mortis as quickly as warm-blooded muscle (chicken, for example), so heat from cooking can cause fresh frog legs to twitch.


Recipes for Frogs legs
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These 2 photos are of frogs gigs... just wanted to share with you.
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Live frogs hanging from the ceiling of a kitchen in a street restaurant in Saigon, Vietnam. Photograph: Christine Kokot/dpa/Corbis

In the cavernous community hall of the Vosges spa town of Vittel, a large and lugubrious man, his small, surprisingly chirpy wife, and 450 other people are sitting down to their evening meal. It's rather noisy. "Dunno why we do it, really," shouts the man, whose name is Jacky. "Don't taste of anything, do they? White. Insipid. If it wasn't for the sauce it'd be like eating some soft sort of rubber. Just the kind of food an Englishman should like, in fact. Hah."

Outside, the streets are filled with revellers. A funfair is going full swing. The restaurants along the high street are full, and queues have formed before the stands run by the local football, tennis, basketball, rugby and youth clubs.

All offer the same thing: cuisses de grenouilles à la provencale (with garlic and parsley), cuisses de grenouille à la poulette (egg and cream). Seven euros, or thereabouts, for a paper plateful, with fries. Nine with a beer or a glass of not-very-chilled riesling. The more daring are offering cuisses de grenouilles à la vosgienne, à l'andalouse, à l'ailloli. There's pizza grenouille, quiche grenouille, tourte grenouille. Omelette de grenouilles aux fines herbes. Souffle, cassolette and gratin de grenouilles.

Everywhere you look, people are nibbling greasily on a grenouille, licking their fingers, spitting out little bones. "Isn't it just great?" yells Jacky's diminutive wife, Frederique. "Every year we do this. It's our tradition. Our tribute to the noble frog."

This is Vittel's 37th annual Foire aux Grenouilles. According to Roland Boeuf, the 70-year-old president of the Confrererie de Taste-Cuisses de Grenouilles de Vittel, or (roughly) the Vittel Brotherhood of Frog Thigh Tasters, which has organised the event since its inception, the fair regularly draws upwards of 20,000 gourmet frog aficionados to the town for two days of amphibian-inspired jollities. Between them, they consume anything up to seven tonnes of frogs' legs.

But there's a problem. When the fair began, its founder René Clément, resistance hero, restaurateur and last of the great Lorraine frog ranchers, could supply all the necessary amphibians from his lakes 20 miles or so away. Nowadays, none of the frogs are even French.

According to Boeuf, Clément, whose real name was Hofstetter, moved to the area in the early 1950s looking to raise langoustines in the Saone river; the water proved too brackish and he turned to frogs instead. A true Frenchman, his catchphrase, oft-quoted around these parts, was that frogs "are like women. The legs are the best bits".

Hofstetter/Clément would, says Gisèle Robinet, "provide 150kg, 200kg for every fair, all from his lakes and all caught by him". With her husband Patrick, Robinet runs the Au Pêché Mignon patisserie (tourte aux grenouilles for six, €18; chocolate frogs €13 the dozen) on the Place de Gaulle, across the square from the restaurant Clément used to run, Le Grand Cerf. Now known as Le Galoubet, there's a plaque commemorating the great frogman outside. "As a child I remember clearly him dismembering and preparing and cleaning his frogs in front of the restaurant," says Robinet, who sells frog tartlets to gourmet Vitellois throughout the year, but makes a special effort with quiches and croustillants at fair-time. "It's a big job, you know. Very fiddly. But we were all frog-catchers when I was a kid. Now, of course, that's not possible any more."

Boeuf recalls many a profitable frog-hunting expedition in the streams and ponds around Vittel. "One sort, la savatte, you could catch with your bare hands," he says. "Best time was in spring, when they lay their eggs. They'd gather in their thousands, great wriggling green balls of them. I've seen whole streams completely blocked by a mountain of frogs."

Others, rainettes, would be everywhere at harvest time. Or you could get a square of red fabric and lay it carefully on the water next to a lily pad that happened to have a frog on it, "and she'd just hop straight off and on to the cloth", Boeuf says. "They love red."

Pierette Gillet, the longest-standing member of the Brotherhood and, at 81, still a sprightly and committed frog-fancier, remembers heading out at night with a torch in search of so-called mute frogs, harder to catch because they have no larynx and hence emit no croak. "They'd be blinded by the light, and you could whack them over the head," she says.

But those days are long gone. As elsewhere in the world, the amphibians' habitat in France – where frogs' legs have been a recognised and much remarked-upon part of the national diet for the best part of 1,000 years – is increasingly at risk, from pollution, pesticides and other man-made ills. Ponds have been drained and replaced with crops and cattle-troughs. Diseases have taken their toll, and the insects that frogs feed on are disappearing too. Alarmed by a rapid and dramatic fall in frog numbers, the French ministry of agriculture and fisheries began taking measures to protect the country's species in 1976; by 1980, commercial frog harvesting was banned.

These days, a few regional authorities in France still allow the capture of limited numbers of frogs, strictly for personal consumption and provided they are broiled, fried or barbecued and consumed on the spot (a heresy not even Boeuf is prepared to contemplate). There are poachers who defy the ban; two years ago a court in Vesoul in the Haute-Saone convicted four men of harvesting vast numbers of frogs from the Mille-Etangs or Thousand Lakes area of the Vosges. The ringleader admitted to personally catching at least 10,000, which he sold to restaurants for 32 cents apiece.

By and large, though, France's tough protection laws, enforceable by fines of up to €10,000 (£8,500) and instant confiscation of vehicles and equipment, seem to be working. As a result, all seven tonnes (officially, at least) of frogs' legs consumed at this year's Vittel fair have been imported, pre-prepared, deep-frozen and packed in cardboard boxes, from Indonesia.

Needless to say, this does not much please patriotic Gallic frog-fanciers. "We'd far prefer our frogs to be French, of course we would," laments Gillet. "Especially here in the Vosges. This really is the heart of frog country."

A Vittel restaurateur, who for obvious reasons demands anonymity, suggests there are still "ways and means" of securing at least a semi-reliable supply of French frogs for those who demand a true produit du terroir, "but it's really not very easy, and no one here will tell you anything about it. We'd like to source locally, but the law is the law."

But the fact that the Foire aux Grenouilles – not to mention the rest of France, and other big frog-consuming nations such as Belgium and the United States – now imports almost all its frogs' legs has consequences that run deeper than a mere denting of national gastronomic pride. For scientists now believe that, just as with many fish species, we could be well on the way to eating the world's frogs to extinction. Based on an analysis of UN trade data, researchers think we may now be consuming as many as 1bn wild frogs every year. For already weakened frog populations, that is very bad news indeed.

Scientists have long been aware that while human activity is causing a steady loss of the world's biodeversity, amphibians seem to be suffering far more severely than any other animal group. It is thought their two-stage lifecycle, aquatic and terrestrial, makes them twice as vulnerable to environmental and climate change, and their permeable skins may be more susceptible to toxins than other animals. In recent years, a devastating fungal condition, chytridiomycosis, has caused catastrophic population declines in Australia and the Americas.

"Amphibians are the most threatened animal group; about one third of all amphibian species are now listed as threatened, against 23% of mammals and 12% of birds," says Corey Bradshaw, an associate professor at the Environment Institute of the University of Adelaide and a member of the team that carried out the research into human frog consumption that was published earlier this year in the journal Conservation Biology. "The principle drivers of extinction, we always assumed, were habitat loss and disease. Human harvesting, we thought, was minor. Then we started digging, and we realised there's this massive global trade that no one really knows much about. It's staggering. So as well as destroying where they live, we're now eating them to death."

France is the main culprit: according to government figures, while the French still consume 70 tonnes a year of domestically gathered legs each year, they have been shipping in as many as 4,000 tonnes annually since 1995. Besides popular, essentially local events such as the Foire aux Grenouilles, frogs' legs are mostly a delicacy reserved for restaurants with gastronomic pretensions; one three-star chef, Georges Blanc, has at one time or another developed 19 different recipes for them at his celebrated restaurant in the Ain village of Vonnas, baking and skewering and skilleting them in everything from cream to apples.


Obama eating a frog's leg........ hmmmm


Credence Clearwater Revival - Cottonfields
here

Upland Pheasant Hunting With a Weimaraner
here

Dog & Dog Training Tips - Hunting Birds with Bill Schaller
here

Frog
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I hafta tell yaw'll that I never really learned how to cook Pheasant as my ex used to shoot the bird and give it to his aunt to pick and then his Nona got the pheasant and cooked it. After the hard work was all done, his Aunt would bring the bird over to us for dinner. hmmmmm, I was fortunate as his Nona and Aunt (the kids called her Sugar) were wonderful Italian cooks.

I learned about 9 course meals from his family and to this day do not think I have eaten as well. OMG, and we had a cellar under our house and they had a cellar under their house that housed 200 gallons (each house) of wine a year.......... have you ever drank wine in an Italian cellar? OMG, if you ever do, don't try to manuever the steps as it doesn't work.

My brother-in-law is Portuguese and you don't ever wanna be around when an Italian and a Portuguese gets in a 'wine' discussion............ and you ain't gonna believe this but one of my husband's partners was French. (That's a whole other soap opera so we'll leave that 'wine' story for another day.)

Now, do ya wanna hear about our frog legs adventure....... We had friends who had a hot tub and we used to have regular 'Friday' nites frog legs get together. OMG, Frog legs in beer batter can hardly be beat. They are scrumptious........ and the beer and wine weren't bad either.

We had other friends that we'd party with that had an indoor pool and the wife had her own MG. When we were a lot younger, we'd get in the MG and head backwards on the freeway. It's a wonder any of us are still alive to talk about these things as we were a bit wild. (Thank goodness some of our best friends were cops, eh?)

Anyways, if you think being a country girl was ever boring, I guarantee you need to rethink THAT again. It was a hoot growing up in California.

When I was really young in our itty bitty town, we used to borrow a sled from a local 'BIG' farmer and go grass sledding. It was a wonderful way to grow up. When I was 13 and 14 years old I used to have friends that were much older and it was always great.

Some of my male friends were really into fast cars and we would pile into a bunch of cars and head out to Palm Rd. There were always a bunch of boys out there racing and it was a really neat way to grow up. There were '57 chevys and there were El Caminos and there were always LOUD cars revving up their engines.......... those cars always reminded me of the level of testosterone the boys had. Have you ever seen a Rooster (cock) puff out his chest? That's what those boys reminded Us girls of and we all loved it back in the day.

The testosterone levels are probably what got a lot of the boys my age into the service at that time as that was when Vietnam was happening.


Pheasant Recipes
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EXCERPT:
Cream of Sherry Pheasant or Partridge
Posted by highplainsdrifter

I developed this recipe using various ingredients that I happened to have on hand at the time. It has gone through several revisions. It yields the most tender pheasant (or partridge) I have ever tasted. MORE»

Recipe #409272

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Pheasant Casserole
Posted by Catnip46

This recipe calls for Beau Monde seasoning. Beau Monde is a mellow beefy flavor with broad tones of celery, onion and garlic. Widely sought for use in party dips and Bloody Marys. Marvelous on salads, green vegetables, or pot roast. It can be... MORE»

Recipe #407718

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Pheasant European Style
Posted by Catnip46

I got this recipe from a 1989 NAHC Wild Game Cookbook. Cooked in a crock pot and so good. MORE»