Manure Tea Report

Our hero sits down with Little Kim. Another historic medal of comparable value. Cavalier hubcaps! The Chevy Cavalier of Presidential medals! Fitting for the Chevy Cavalier of Presidents. Two domain names I own are apocalypsetrump.com and prisonforthedonald.com. I plan to have them up and running before the fall 2018 election. Trump must go. Can you believe the White House issued a commemorative medal before having a summit with Kim Jong Un? 

I got busy and took a break from the blog for nine years. This is, more or less, true. I was waiting for the right time to jump back in. Like many folks, I found myself involved with an app called Facebook. It seemed like a much easier way to "blog" and rant and share. But Facebooger, as we know, has experienced long overdue growing pains and I'm not as comfortable sharing my genius with data mining bots and Russian trolls. The Facebook experience is now more and more like making snow angels in the dog park. Since we last met, Ping and I moved to northern California and live in the heart of wine country. Lucky left us two years ago for that great dog park in the sky. We haven't found another dog yet but we became a cat hair household last year. We adopted Mochi and Wu last spring and they've adapted well to our strange ways. Moch is a standoffish male gray tabby addicted to scalp massages. Wu is valium cat, a cool and easy-going mouse-hunting ball of marshmallow

I found the perfect project for a cold Sunday afternoon. Today I made hot pink horseradish. This weekend it was time to put the garden to bed. I spent most of the afternoon dumping flower pots, chopping down sunflowers, rolling up chicken wire and filling the compost bin. The last task of the day was digging horseradish. I missed the opportunity last year and I was determined to put some horseradish away for the winter. My Dad used to make horseradish. I remember him grinding it on the back porch. "Mom, why is Daddy crying?" It didn't look like fun. Our horseradish was here when I moved in. We have a well established patch at the north end of the garden. I waited too late last season and I couldn't dig through the hard, frozen ground. The soil in that area is hard and thick but this year I had a secret weapon- the tiller. I mowed the patch down and zipped through it with the tiller in just a few minutes. From there it was just a matter of picking up the pieces. I bro

10/08/09 After several days away Lucky and I finally made it back home last night. We've been away most of the last two weeks so it was nice sleeping in our own beds again. I woke up a little before 6 am and thought I heard Lucky eating his Iams in the kitchen. It wasn't Lucky. As I walked into the kitchen I found an opossum having breakfast out of Lucky's dish. He trotted off towards the porch through the dog door. Lucky watched it all go down and didn't bother to react. It was like they were acquaintances, or at least familiar strangers. I expected a couple of "get out of here damn cat" barks. I made my coffee and started some long overdue housekeeping. The temperature is supposed to drop to the low twenties tonight. I had the day off so I decided to pick and put away the last vegetables of the season. From the edge of the garden ther e didn't appear to be much left. I found a few peppers but most of the tomatoes were mushy. A light frost must have

老干妈 !!! Put this on your shopping list for your next trip to the Chinese grocery store. Lao Gan Ma Oil Chilli is a brilliant and tasty mix of "crunch" red chili pieces and peanuts in vegetable oil. Cost: under 2 bucks. Oil Chilli makes a great dipping sauce for dumplings and a wonderful addition to almost any meal. This is more than a condiment. You can use Oil Chilli in a variety of ways. I tried oil chilli with Ping's baozu (steamed pork dumplings a/k/a Chinese hamburgers) in Shenzhen last winter and I was hooked. The flavor is subtle and seductive. It's hot, but not painfully hot. The oil helps bring out the deep rich flavor of the red chili pieces and the chili oil soaked peanuts are a special treat. The Lao Gan Ma Company in Guiyang, China specializes in "chilli foods" and there's an interesting variety of products on store shelves. Their website has product descriptions and company information in English/corporate Chinglish. They have been cer

L ate Augus t is a peculiar time to start writing about gardening. The summer is coming to an end. The days are getting cooler and the nights are getting longer. The garden is dwindling down but now I finally have a little free time to write. Today I transplanted Chinese onions and "Red of Florence" onions . I started them in pots and today they graduated to rows in the garden. I planted some white onion sets last week. I should have onions well into November. Every summer I try to save a quart jar or two of chopped, dehydrated green onions. They are so handy for cooking and they keep very well. Today's bounty included a five gallon bucket of cucumber, a bucket of tomatoes, purple yard long beans , a dozen lemon cucumbers, Chinese cabbage, patty pan and scalloped squash. My lovely and talented Chinese wife, Liu Li Ping is back in Shenzhen, China so Lucky is my garden helper. Sometimes he helps me dig. He's also the official garden greeter when kids and neighbor