The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of South Enders, isolated from the mainland and remote from major grocery outlets, have reverted to primitive customs.  Now, don’t you northern neighbors worry — we aren’t talking cannibalism here.  Not yet.  No, we’ve gone back to ancestral roots.  We’ve become hunter-gatherers.  Most of us have small gardens, some of us have large ones, but we grow what we can to supplement what we can’t afford down at the Plaza IGA and Hardware Sales.    

  Sure, the tomatoes we planted in May don’t ripen until October and the corn won’t grow high enough to hide our medical marijuana plants and there’s really only so much a person can do with the zucchini that always threatens to escape the deer fence and become the kudzu of kamano with thousands of gourds dropping down from power lines like aerial IED’s on car windshields and the Walking Women of Mabana’s phalanx of human obstacles to unwanted commuter traffic.  

    So we’ve been forced to resort to yet another strategy for culinary survival: CANNING.  A lot of my neighbors come to me and say, Skeeter, I just don’t think I can eat another jar of your savory ZUCCHINI DADDLE DILLS, no offense.  And I say, None Taken, and gently move them to a recipe from Skeeter’s Skillet Skills (available at Addled Daddle Press for 9.95 plus shipping and handling), the chapter on food preservation.  I like to give them a Tried and True first, something like the wildly popular Nettle Kraut, a fermented in the crock nettle with maximum garlic that, once canned, can be eaten on Christmas snowgoose or Easter crab bratwurst (another Skillet Skill fave) or just a snappy side dish any occasion.  

    I’m not suggesting these pioneer skills will end poverty down here or take the place of  our food banks, but for those of us who chose unemployment over work, it has been a lifesaver.  You start canning a cellar full of nettle kraut, you might consider telling that jerk boss of yours to take a hike too.  You got the safety net now, that’s for sure.  And with a healthy diet, you can drop that health insurance.  This stuff cures what ails ya.      Next week we’ll talk Animal Husbandry.  And no, I don’t mean Tough Love Matrimony.

Hits: 26