Blather
Cooking for Guys
Live to Camp
Camp to Live
Poetry
and Other Lies
Rusty Nail – Praise & Treats
It has been an unseasonably dry winter. Up until Friday, when it started to snow. It has been snowing all weekend. Sunday morning it cleared, revealing a sparkling winter wonderland. With no pressing need to go anywhere, most people elected to stay home, off the...
BBQ Sauce
I made this sauce for the rabbits at the last Bunny BBQ. I cut up and brined the rabbits for 9 hours, then rinsed and boiled them for 10 minutes. They were painted with BBQ sauce and frozen until the day before the party. I thawed them Friday, and put the meat in...
Moussaka
The Food Stamp Gourmet by Wm. Brown has been out of print for years, but you can still find it on-line at a reasonable price. I have had my copy since the seventies; it contains some of my favorite recipes. Every so often, I pull it out and choose one of them....
Moussaka Hand Pie
I made moussaka for dinner last night and had some left-over filling. Today I got out the pie-irons and made moussaka hand pies for lunch. Forcing the Greek pita bread into the buttered pie irons, I spooned some tomato paste over the pita, I filled it with the...
Grandma Wade’s Mince Meat
Grandma Wade used to make mince meat pies for the holidays. She shared the recipe with Mom,and this delightfully sweet pie has been a treasured memory of mine for decades. The recipe is pretty labor intensive and contains your entire annual dietary allowance of fat in...
Good Afternoon
5/27/25 3:30 80f (26.6c) Clear sky, warm breeze. Mike and I went up the mountain to have a look around. Found coral mushrooms, shaggy manes, and a handful of morels at between 3000 and 4000' under mixed conifers. ...
Mardingtop 25L Backpack M6347A
For years my EDC was a Wolfman tankbag. When I was still working, I kept it filled with maps and tools and fuses for my moto, emergency kit, knife, a roll of T.P. and my lunch. I could leave straight from work for the woods when the notion took me. When that bag wore...
Voyagers
Having discovered Disappearing Lake was full and the road free of snow, four of us loaded up our boats and headed into the woods for an adventure. Five of us, if you count Walter Dawg, and really, you must. He has been an integral member of the team from day...
In Search of Disappearing Lake
Every winter South Prairie floods, forming a chain of connected lakes or impoundments covering many acres. For a brief, miraculous moment there exists the Pacific Northwest equivalent of a bayou. You can kayak between towering cottonwoods and...
Good Afternoon
5/22/25 3:30 54f (12.2c) Breezy and fair. Mike and I spent the afternoon ranging across the ridge between Mosier and my house, looking for morels. We didn't find any, even where we have found them before. The soil was damp and the terrain looked promising, but no joy....
Good Morning
7/23/26 6:00 65F (18.3C) Calm and clear with some haze around the edges. It is pleasantly cool. I can smell the faint perfume of woodsmoke. Yesterday, it smelled like BBQ and the haze was so thick I couldn't see the mountains. It was hot and muggy. A rain...
Good Morning
7/22/26 6:00 67F (19.4C) Cloudy, still, quiet. Puffy white clouds hover motionless above me. Autocorrect and predictive text turn what I write into gibberish as soon as I look away AI is pervasive, unreliable, and an unrepentant pollutant of information, art,...
Good Morning
7/21/26 5:30 60F (15.5C) Calm, mostly clear, no smoke. Yesterday's gray skies have been replaced by blue, decorated by brilliant white tufts, illuminated by the sun, still struggling to rise above the ridge. Good morning. ...
Good Morning
7/20/26 6:00 62F (16.6C) Overcast, no wind. This morning is as soft and gray as the underdown of a dove's belly. A crow's rasping call tears the stillness. A hummingbird perches on the top branch of a birch. It is quiet once more. Good morning. ...
Good Morning
7/19/26 5:30 55F (12.7C) Birch leaves shudder under the caress of an unseen breeze in the clear blue shadow of morning, before the sun has risen. Amy, just returned from California, is still asleep in the house. Walter slumbers on the deck, with one eye open....
