My Pancake Recipe

I was checking out one of my favorite sites yesterday (www.allrecipes.com) to look up what on earth I was going to do with a 4 pound pork butt that was in my fridge. I needed some inspiration. Was I going to make a traditional roast with root veggies? (Too redundant at the moment.) Maybe some tamales? (Too time consuming.) A ha! Pulled pork for BBQ sandwiches. Perfect! Easy, yummy, and just what the Dr. ordered. So, what does pork have to do with pancakes? Well, nothing...Other than the darling children's book "If you give a Pig a Pancake."

But as I was on the site, I happened to catch something out of the corner of my eye that looked familiar.

MY PANCAKES!!

My very own pancake recipe was the featured recipe of the day. How cool is that? (Well, probably only cool to me...but still...)

So, I thought I'd share that recipe here. I've made these pancakes for more years than I can count. Okay, well maybe not THAT long. But still, a couple of decades anyway. My mother always used soured milk in her pancakes, waffles, cakes...whatever called for buttermilk. We just never had buttermilk in the house, but we always had milk and vinegar. So, don't let that trip you up. Soured milk is a perfectly perfect substitute for buttermilk. Don't let anyone tell you different!

This link will take you right to the recipe page:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Fluffy-Pancakes-2/Detail.aspx

If you want to see some of my food photos, click on my name (kris) in blue next to the recipe's picture. That will take you to my profile page and you can get to my photo gallery from there. And don't tell me how nutty I am that I take pictures of food! I love food! Why not take pictures of it? The hard part is taking the picture before I eat the stuff. I love eating even more than I love photography!

Enjoy!

Death of a few thousand sunflowers

It's time! The sunflowers have been looking quite sad for a long time now.The seed heads get so heavy that the stems can't support the weight, and they snap over.
The heads aren't as heavy now, because they've dried down. (Here you can see a couple of bare spots where the blackbirds have been working on pulling out the seeds.)

Hard to believe that this was once a glorious bright yellow sunflower field.

Oh well! Just one thing left to do...

Get them harvested before these feathered friends eat them all!

Today is the day!

The Combine: 101

I really wanted to get some pictures of the combine unloading, but as I got to the field, this is what I saw. One of our "straight" trucks driving away. Dang! Missed my opportunity...for now. Anyway, why is it called a "straight" truck? Because, unlike a semi, it has a bed connected to the truck and therefore doesn't bend. Didn't think the explanation would make sense, did ya? These are terms that I lived with for years and never bothered to ponder. I still call them grain trucks, but the hubby seems to call them straight trucks. I don't know why. Now that truly makes me ponder things.

I arrived just as Ted was finishing up cutting the beans (that's soybeans) in this field. Beans get cut with a "flex" head. It's called a flex head because it is...well...flexible. More on the flex head later, but this is what it looks like. (And that is Ted inside the combine cleaning the windshield...again.) Combining beans is dusty work!Is that duct tape on the end of the unloading auger? Duct tape fixes EVERYTHING! (For those that don't know, the unloading auger is that arm sticking out of the back of the combine at the top.) And for those that don't know, duct tape is a farmer's best friend. Driving through the field, the reel (flex head) rotates much like a paddle boat. It grabs the beans, and those "fingers" on the reel feed them back into the cutters. If you look about smack dab in the middle of this photo, just under the reel , you can see the cutters. The cutters are actually called sickle knives. Let me tell you, they are sharp, sharp, sharp! And they slide back and forth faster than you can see them move. My camera has frozen them in time for us, but to watch in real time, you just see a blur of silver metal.

Under the sickle knives is an auger. The auger has retractable fingers that help grab the crop being cut and feed it all to the center of the combine where it will go through a magic transformation. I call it magic because the "separator" truly does separate all of the "chaff" (a.k.a. "junk") from the beans, or corn, or sunflower seeds, or wheat, or whatever...

Clean seeds then get pushed up into the hopper on top of the combine. Amazing! Now, how can you tell if this combine has gas? It doesn't. It runs on diesel.

(Sorry, I just couldn't help myself!)