Real Milk from a Real Man

Coming from the dairy industry, I think I know what milk is all about and what it should consist of. The industry of course, has made countless changes like any other industry in the world today, but basically, the cow still produces the same milk. The same butterfat, the same protein, and the same lactose. Granted there are a few growth hormones thrown in for good measure, but then there are a few extras in everything we consume today.

But really, where has the industry gone wrong? We went from glass to cardboard and then to plastic. What would you rather drink out of? And what will be next?

When I was a kid back on the prairies, the milk man stopped and actually delivered personally, milk in glass bottles. There was the full fat milk which really was milk and not this blue looking skim slop they serve today. And the chocolate milk was incredible. It was rich and dark and it tasted so good. Today it is runny, plastic looking and tasting and has so many extras in it that if I told you them all - you would head right for the commode !!

Down here in the south, the milk does not last. It does not matter what you do, it goes bad before the date that they stamp on it. And really, what does it matter because even if it borders on the good - chances are it will taste like cheap liquid plastic.

Such progress we have made !!!!

Fast Food in a Slow World

Everywhere you go today, there are fast food joints everywhere. You can have just about any kind of cholesterol coating, artery clogging junk you could ever wish for. When I was a kid it was not quite so obvious. I never experienced McDonald's until I was 19 and that was in Edmonton.

In the small town I lived in, there was a little gas station cafe that never made that much but they did create really awesome homemade chocolate shakes, that came in the metal stirring jugs that they were whipped in. Thick and cold and full of full fat ice cream, they were absolutely incredible. They did not come with straws but came with long spoons for the great experience of savoring the thick liquid going down a kid's dry parched throat.

Once in a while and I do mean once in awhile ,we would go to Lloydminster which was a city of about 10,000 that straddled the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan. There you could find two favorites, A&W and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Not KFC but Kentucky Fried Chicken. The A&W actually had it so the car hops came out to your vehicle, took your order and then delivered it. Oh it was good. So good that I still love A&W today. Unfortunately or maybe fortunately there are no A&W's down here in the far South. The closet would be Sonic Drive In's which are pretty good. Dad used to buy us something to eat and then would order a gallon of authentic root beer to go. It was a brown glass 1 gallon jug filled with the real root beer that made A&W famous. When you came back, you brought the gallon jug for the deposit and we would get another one. Of course it never lasted !!

That was pretty much the extent of fast food. Everything else was homemade. Real food not fast food.

The Day The Outhouse Died

When we moved from the farm to Waseca, we still had no services or conveniences for a few years. There was no running water and no indoor plumbing, so of course we still had to make the journey out to the little building in the back yard. Every back yard had these little creations, basically a small shack over a deep hole. I never liked the little shacks. They were not very hospitable to us, and they were an awful place to go to in the cold of the winter and the heat of the summer.

I am not saying I was a daredevil kid, but I did have my times of stupidity I am sure. Although not exactly impulsive, I wondered about a lot of things. One of the things I wondered about was what would happen if I were to throw a lit match down the open hole of the outhouse. Now under most circumstances, it should just fizzle out and that would be it. And that is exactly what happened to the first 100 lit matches that I threw down that hole !! I had one of those large eddy box of matches that holds at least a couple of hundred wooden matches. One after another I threw them down there, watching them burn out.

I was not prepared for match 101 but I dropped that lit match, it caught on some toilet tissue, sucked in some quality methane gas, and the entire hole exploded into flames. I believe I was in shock, excited that the experiment worked but wondering where it would end. The fire was so intense that it eventually engulfed the whole outhouse, letting everyone know that I was dissatisfied with it.

I ran to the house, and somehow we got some pails of water poured on it to prevent the fire from burring the whole house, garage and yard. I was the least popular person around the house. I don't remember being drawn and quartered but I had in effect shut down the family bathroom. A great start to Waseca living. Maybe why I am such a bathroom connoisseur today !!

Grandma's Great Goodies

Now that the holiday season is over, and people start to resort back to a relatively normal way of eating, I was thinking about all the incredible food that my Grandma was famous for. My Grandma came over on the boat from England in 1905. She was 5 years of age. As she grew up, she obviously set out to become one of the best cooks around. She could and did, cook and create and bake anything you could think of.

Back in Waseca, when the Village was getting the water and sewer lines put in, there were several hungry construction workers who came to my Grandmas for a daily hot meal. And a meal it was. A sheet of plywood over two saw horses was put up in the living room of the house that they lived in , and she cooked all kinds of great creations. I was also lucky enough to partakes of these great meals every day. While other kids were stuck eating stale tuna sandwiches at school, I was feasting on every delicacy known to man.

One of my favorites for the main course was the Shepherds Pie. This was no ordinary Shepherds pie. This was pie that was loaded with all kinds of things that I have tried to duplicate several times but have never ever come close. There was no recipe for this, it just came out of her head. My mouth is watering right now as I am typing this description.

Desserts were really her specialty however. And they were numerous, incredible baked apple dumplings, lemon cheese tarts, cakes, bread puddings, raisin puddings, custard pies and cinnamon buns. There was a real favorite though that I liked. It was called "an old maid". Here was what it entailed. Pie crust that lined a muffin tin, raspberry jam as filling, which was topped by a moist white cake mix of some sort. She made dozens of those tarts and put them in the freezer out in the porch.

It did not take too long for me to realize that with a little planning, I could snab a couple of those frozen old maids once in awhile and help satisfy my incredibly pathetic sweet tooth that has been my nemesis since my early years. Who was able to stop at a couple? Not me. I ate those suckers like they were candies. I even became addicted to them in the frozen state.

I have not had one of those for over 40 years. They made such an impression on me that I can still visualize tasting one. They were insanely good, a fat man's poison, a skinny man's dream.

My sister gave me the recipe to the Lemon cheese. I have made some and it was great. All the great ingredients such as sugar and butter makes it a cholesterol nightmare but what a high you get from it.

They say that memories can make you as a person. The food sure has. The longing for all of the above has started again. Now, where were those carrot sticks again?

Better Then a Toboggan Hill

I had mentioned in earlier posts about the lack of hills that we could toboggan on. My Dad had the perfect solution to it all. He would pull us around with the car !! We had a 1969 Ford Country Sedan Station wagon. It was long car, 121 inch wheelbase to be exact. I was always good with numbers ! The winters in Saskatchewan of course were nothing less then brutal so we always drove in the winter with studded tires. Underneath there was a luggage compartment, and he would stack that full of wood so that there was a lot of weight on the back tires. Man, could that car go through snow. He would tie a long rope on to the toboggan and he would pull us through all kinds of snow at a fairly high rate of speed !! He drove down snow covered roads and even onto the frozen lake surface and boy did he put the hammer down. The snow would be coming up from the backs of those tires in a flurry, pelting our faces with wet icy snow. The faster he went the worse it got. Eventually he would be going so fast that you could not see a thing but just hung on for dear life. We would go through drifts, over drifts and under drifts. It was a wild ride. I suspect that he disciplined us through the type of ride we got. There were a lot of wet tired children after those excursions.

As I got a little older, I was looking for more challenges. My grandfather had an old pair of skis, and your foot slipped into some leather loops. These skis were not state of the art. In fact, they probably came over on the ark but I thought they would work good behind the car. I convinced my Dad to take me down a snow covered back road in the country. Now that was a ride. He wound that car up and he pulled me down the road. I tried to stay straight and keep those skis from crossing over each other. For a time I did, but there was no way to tell him to slow it down. He wound it up faster and eventually I blew a ski and rolled and crashed into the ditch. I was bruised, broken, and scraped but I felt like I just got the gold medal at the Winter Olympics.

How many kids can say their Dad did that for them? There is no question that it was different culture then but it was a culture that made me realize that fun was what we thought and made up. Anyone care for a ride?

Hockey Night in Canada

There is not too much hockey down here in the south. There is one team, the Mississippi Riverkings from the Central Hockey League. Other then that, the only other professional team around here is the Nashville Predators of the NHL After that, the only other ice around here generally comes in a bag. This brought my thoughts back to the prairies where hockey was not only a sport, but really a religion. As football is fanatical in the States, hockey is a rite of passage in Canada.

The town that I lived in was small, so small that there wasn't even a restaurant or a bar, but it did have a skating rink. No - not a covered ice surface. An outdoor rink. Why would it be easy in the 60's? The ice was flooded at the beginning of the winter when the temperatures dictated that it would not melt away. My Dad was usually the one who set up the community ice rink with long hoses that pumped water from the town's dugout. A dugout was a large hole in the ground that accumulated water. Water that was used to flood the rink. Old boards surrounded the rink to keep the pucks in. More important is the fact that it snowed a lot and snow covered the ice in large amounts, so kids could not play until the ice was scraped. We had our hockey sticks and our skates but we always dragged a snow shoved behind us when we went because you never knew if the ice was going to be clean or not. It was easy to learn how to skate because you had a snow shovel to keep your balance. You learned how to skate and angle your shovel so that you could clear the ice like a snowplow.

There was a building beside it that was used to put on skates. It was simply called "the shack". A very old building that we shared with mice and an old oil stove. The chances that the shack had heat going when you went there was about as good as winning the weekly lottery. Typically it needed to be lit, or cleaned or something but most times we put our cold feet into cold skates and headed to the ice. No one liked it I suppose, but we really did not know anything different. Even Gretzky had it better then we did, his Dad had a backyard rink for him when he started.

We scraped and skated for hours as we shot pucks. balls and whatever else we had at the time. Many a time we over shot the boards and had to go looking in huge piles of snow from the ice to find the elusive puck. Sometimes we were lucky and sometimes not. When Spring came we were the first there to find all the wayward pucks from the winter so that we had a fresh stash for the next year.

Without trying to sound old, we made our own fun. We had lots of exercise and used what we had to create a world of culture that we believed in, even at that early age.

Winter Fun

Living in a area now that practically never has snow, I started to reminisce about what we did with snow in the early days. In those days we got snow and lots of it and it stayed around for a long time, and when you had long and cold winters, you had to learn to play in them.

You either played outside or you stayed inside and became one of the most bored kids in the town. Therefore, hockey and sledding or toboganning became one of the main highlights. Being on the prairie, it was hard to find hills big enough that would constitute what one would call a toboggan hill. You had to go to the river to find them. So some Saturdays we were taken to the river. Those really were some big hills !! High above the river bottom were these majestic hills, free of trees and dangerous obstacles, beckoning for us to climb them and set the toboggan on a straight downward course. The toboggans were about 6 feet long, long enough for 2 kids to get on, but we really preferred to go alone. The thing about being a kid is there is usually no fear, just anticipation of speed through the snow.

I climbed the mountain, lots of deep snow made it hard going and I suppose I could of just went half way and had a pretty good run, but I wanted the top. It was Mount Everest to me and I wanted the whole experience. I finally made it to the top and looked down and realized that it was quite a hill and the people and cars at the bottom really did not look that big. I got on, holding the rope and stretching my feet out so I was balanced properly. I put both feet on and pushed forward, but nothing happened. I jerked my body to get it going but I was stuck in the snow on the very top of this hill. Using newly acquired swear woods that I was learning in bits and pieces, I picked up the toboggan and moved it over several feet to find a better course. I got on and knew then that this sucker was ready to fly. As soon as both feet were on the wood, it took off. I came down that hill in a rush. I was going so fast that I really could not see and all I could do was hang on for dear life. Wow - this was a speed paradise. All of a sudden I went airborne. I could feel nothing underneath. I was flying!! Toboggans are not meant to fly, they are meant to go down hard surfaces !! The balance was gone, and I could feel myself falling over in the air. CRASH.....

That hurt bad. My tailbone felt like someone smashed it with a hammer and my face was filled with cold icy snow. I lost my mitts somewhere and wet snow was melting and running down my back. I was cold and I was hurting. Did I go home? No - not a chance. I knew now what it would take to really ride the wooden slab. I was going to master it, and I started the long cold walk back up the hill. Good exercise and good fun - a culture that will never be forgot.