Miscellanea

We're still officially in the middle of Dry Season. (We are also in the middle of The Season, and High Season, both involving tourists from up north and the money they bring with. We have lots of overlapping "Seasons.") So, of course, tthe first big thunderstorm of the year arrived at noon, exactly as predicted, and my brother announced that his truck was dead. Fortunately, just the battery, so we spent a few minutes in the pouring rain using my new battery to jump his.

The sidewalk construction is over (directly in front of us, anyway). Tuesday morning a gang of six or seven came by with the front loader. It was carrying a stacked cube of lawn turves, each like a large flooring tile about two feet on a side. When the scraper went through at the start of construction, the path it made was more a suggestion of where the sidewalk could go rather than the exact line it would take and so the scraped area was a couple times wider than the ultimate installation. This bunch was filling in the divots, as it were, walking along beside the front loader as it crawled down the street, pulling turves from the stack and plopping them in place on both sides of the sidewalk. It was absolutely the largest crew I've seen working on any aspect of this project. When they were gone, the guy with the leaf blower came down the street again al by himself, pushing their dirt and droppings off the road, cleaning up after the parade. Today the cones came down and we are officially out of the construction zone.

The mango tree is covered, engulfed, smothered in blossoms. If even one per cent of them survive to become fruit we are going to be buried this summer. We gave away half our crop last year, ate mangoes every day for six months (mango ice cream, bowls of mango and mixed fruit, pancakes and French toast topped with mangoes, chilled mango salad, sweet potatoes with mango glaze, mango salsa, mango lassi, mango chutney, . . .), and we still have stocks in the freezer.

Real Convenience Food

One of the major advantages to living in South Florida is that, when you discover Thanksgiving morning there is no orange juice in the refrigerator for your orange juice and brown sugar glazed sweet potato recipe, you can just go outside to the orange tree, pick a big ripe one and juice it on the spot (using a 3+ lb. solid steel 1940s era tabletop hand juicer).

Turned out perfect.

Too Late For This Year

I was just listening to my local NPR station. They're doing a program on local Thanksgiving recipes.

Apparently, it's necessary to capture your Thanksgiving 'possum at least a month in advance so you can cage it and feed it nothing but sweet potatoes as a way of improving the flavor. "Like feeding acorns to a wood duck," according to one of the show's hosts.

Seriously, who knew?