Just Eat It

"You should see the way my brother eats crab," I tell anyone who is listening. "He's so patient, he'll spend hours picking every bit of shell clean of crab meat."

The truth is, we are strange that way. Both Bowser and I have always hated to see food thrown out, and I mean every bit of it has to get eaten. Bowser is quite the angler, but he will clean his fish meticulously so that all he has to throw out are a few fins, tails and some parts of the entrails. He will use the rest. Including bones and some of the organs.

I'm afraid he may be the only one who will understand my current "challenge."

The wet winter has created a population explosion of snails and slugs here but while Big Dog hurls his snail catch at rocks, I gently take them into my Snail Zoo. It's a plastic container with cornmeal mush. If you've ever tried to raise snails for food, you know what this means. My snails are headed for Escargotville.

"You have no idea how gross that is," grimaces Big Dog.
"Of course I do!"
Who does he think I am? Snails are slimy, crawly, disgusting looking things. (Okay, on real close inspection, they are actually quite beautiful. But a tub of them IS pretty gross.) And I have yet to work up the courage to plunge them into boiling water, pull them out of their shell, cut away the gall, cook them up with tons of garlic butter and stuff them back into their shell, but...that is the plan.

Meanwhile, I find out that those smelly plants that keep growing all over the place (and for some reason, near the wild fennel) are hemlock. Yup. The stuff that killed Socrates.

"I had no idea! I actually tried one of the leaves at one time! How come it didn't kill me?" I asked Big Dog who was on a wild fennel/hemlock eradication program.
"Because you're no Socrates?"
Well, duh.