other dog

Oh, and I have many more pictures from the car show on the camera. I'll post a link when I get home. I took about 350.

I bought this one in 2019. And it was an honest young turkey, it never lied to me. We're not even cooking a turkey this year. I smoked one last year, but I've got ribs in the smoker now. We're at Vicki from Florida's house.

They had some really good looking food too. A turkey leg at one food stand was $15, a little too expensive for me. I once bought a whole turkey for $4, so I went with an $8 cheeseburger.

Santa and some elves. Wow...

I guess y'all know where I'm at.

Yeah, but it's a clip-on

Time to put it back in the shed. Can't wait to make a stew and try it out! I have to drag it on the wagon, it's too heavy to carry very far.

This is my platform that I made to put the stew pot lid on when I add ingredients, and the lid lifter that I made a few years ago out of a long bolt. Works great.

Looks "not too bad". By the time I use it a few times it'll be looking good. I'm gonna invite everybody over for stew, so y'all come on.

Welp, we're getting there. Looks better already. The pot that is, can't say the same for the piece of fat meat. I think I'll make a bigger stand so it will fit in it a little bit deeper though.

Check out that Lodge Cast Iron website too, there was some pretty good information on it.

Yes, I put the wire brush wheel in my drill and worked on some of those skillets with it, used fine sand paper on some too.

Here's something Zina got to clean cast iron. I used it to scrub those skillets, it came from Lodge too. I think she found it at the Walmart store. It works good too, pretty stiff bristles.

I hope Mack (the digger dog- the other 2 don't dig holes) doesn't see that trackerhoe on marketplace, he'll want it so he can dig bigger better holes.

I suppose you could rent a big truck just like you can rent a car, remember the old "Ryder rents trucks!" commercials? Vicki from Florida rented a car in Richmond when they flew in last week and turned it in in Roanoke when they left, a one way rental. Just a thought.

Sounds like a good idea anyway, but I know nothing about a blasting cabinet. I'd certainly go with the test piece first. My sister in law gave me some cast iron skillets that were her father's to clean and reseason for her a while back. I cleaned them with a brillo pad first, then used Dawn and a sponge, and seasoned them on the grill. Then I scraped them with a metal spatula, Dawn and sponge again, seasoned them again. I repeated that process about 4 times, until I considered them good enough to cook with. These were not terribly rusted though, just dirty with built up crud from years of use. I looked at the Lodge Cast Iron website and they said even though some people say to never wash cast iron it's fine. They said just never let them soak and when you wash it to dry it immediately, preferably by putting it on the stove burner until it's completely dry, then put a light coat of oil on it.

That's the reason I use the Crisco, no salt. I bought a big chunk of cured hog jowl to rub it with before I do the Crisco. I'm sure it's loaded with salt, but salt works good to clean cast iron too. I just don't want to use salted fat to season it and then let it sit for months before I use it again. This is what I'm going to wipe it out with first, easy to grip and hold too.

Wow, the UPS man just left- delivered the new bigger stew pot. I don't know if it's better, if it's just as good I'll be well satisfied. Can't wait to give it a trial run. It's supposed to be "pre seasoned, ready to use" but I'm not falling for that. I'm going to heat it up, scrub it out with this piece of hog jowl I bought just for this project yesterday, then reseason it with Crisco before I use it. I've had the old one probably about 30 years, maybe a little more, and it still looks better than new. Ever since I've had it I've cleaned it and reoiled it with Crisco every time I used it. I was looking on marketplace for a used one before I bought this new one, and every one I looked at looked like they had just pulled it up off the bottom of the ocean, completely rusted, and they all wanted almost as much for them as this new one cost! It would have taken a LOT of work to get any of them back to usable condition. Usable to cook in anyway, you could put it in the yard and plant flowers in it, which I see people do quite a bit. Using these pots take a bit of work, but I think it's worth it.

Hmmm, the stew pot picture made me realize it just might belong here- If your stew pot stand is sitting on an old dish antenna, and your fire wood is propped up on a piece of a step off of a truck, and your "burn barrel" is 3 truck wheels stacked up, and a dog is digging a hole in your back yard...

I'm not too far away, just a few inches on the map.

I don't see how they could make that stick in court either, being that it's still a free country. They can't prove you were trying to avoid the scales, maybe you just enjoy taking the scenic route. They probably figure most people will just pay the fine and not even go to court. We all know it's all about the money anyway.

That's something I always dreamed of doing when I was young. Driving the entire Trans Canada Highway and on up the Alaska Highway to Alaska. In the summer of course. Now that I'm in "the 4th. quarter" it doesn't interest me as much, but it would be a great trip to make.

I saw a nice looking green car in Appomattox the other day. I saw this stew pot in the back yard Saturday. We made stew and had some friends over because Zina's sister Vicki from Florida and a friend of her's were visiting, they arrived late Thursday night and left Monday evening. Our stew pot holds 7 1/2 gallons, and for just the 2nd. time ever the pot was emptied. I didn't even get a bowl of stew myself, but I took it as a compliment because everyone liked it, and more than one said it was the best stew they'd ever had. Zina already said we needed a bigger stew pot. I could have- and should have- added that 1/2 gallon of tomato juice that I bought in case It needed more liquid, but I didn't think of it. It was pretty thick. But I did order the next size bigger pot anyway. It holds 9 gallons. Zina wanted to go with the 15 gallon, but it weighs over 100 lbs. The 9 gallon unit only weighed 10 pounds more than the one we have now, and it's an inch wider and an inch deeper, so it might fit the same stand. And if we're expecting like 100 people and all you folks came over I can always use both pots. I made more hot sauce too. We're going to Florida to see Vicki from Florida and go to the Turkey Rod Run next week so we'll take a bunch of hot sauce. People down there love the stuff. Vicki and her friend Debbie wanted to see Natural Bridge so we went by there before they went to the airport in Roanoke Monday. We saw this fire when we stopped on the mountain on rt. 130. It's still burning now, and as of yesterday they said it was 0% contained. It's on a steep mountainside and very hard to get to. They were using 2 helicopters Monday, we saw them with the big buckets dipping water out of the James River to dump on it. Natural Bridge-

Wow, hope you're doing all right. I'm glad you got to the hospital and found out before it was too late.

We raised and killed hogs too when I was a yungin'...that was many years ago. We had the scalding tank , but I don't remember what is was made from. Made a wood fire under it to heat the water, and my grandfather would run his fingers through it periodically and say when it was right- it had to be hot enough, but it couldn't be too hot. My uncle always had the job of shooting the hog, used a .22 short. Hit it in the right spot and it just dropped. Done. Right then. Then the butcher knife came out, then in the scalding tank. Me and my brothers helped with the scraping but not cutting the meat up. We made lard out of the fat too, and had real cracklings out of that process, and real pork skins. My mother made some fantastic cracklin bistits too! We had a smoke house, salt box, cured our own hams, the whole deal.