franksolich still looking for a primitive for Thanksgiving. This morning, Saturday morning, three days before election day, is the first day of pheasant hunting in Nebraska, and despite the Great Barack Drought of ‘12, there’s plenty of pheasants running around.
I’d stayed up most of the night, so as to get ready for the influx of visitors here. Pheasant hunting isn’t as “big†as deer hunting, which comes in mid-month, but long before sun-up, there were seven motor vehicles parked in the front yard, the hunters coming in them obviously gone far afield.
The house reeked of steaming beef stew, in two crockpots, because it’s very popular.
franksolich’s recipe for beef stew: beef of the tenderest and most expensive cut so there’s no fat, cut into cubes. Tomato juice. Tomato paste. Tomato sauce. Ketchup and mustard. Salt and pepper. Onion salt. Paprika. Real beef bouillon. A little bit of water, a couple tablespoons of coffee. Potatoes cut up into cubes and first boiled on the stove for a while. And then half an hour before serving, frozen corn and frozen peas tossed in.
No slimy and unpleasant surprises in franksolich’s beef stew.
It can be expensive, what with using beef that costs $8 a pound, but whatever. It’s good.
About 5:00 a.m., before they went out hunting--the usual thing is hunters stop in after they’re done, not before--a couple of them came inside the house, and we engaged in a little idle chitchattery before they headed out again.
The talk around here, on the eastern slope of the Sandhills of Nebraska, is of course about the election, and there’s great concern expressed that the corrupt big-city bosses might pull this out for Barack Milhous, what with their talent for creating “votes†out of thin air.
It bothers people around here, because all it takes is one Democrat boss in a big city in Ohio to fiddle with the numbers, and he can cancel out all the honestly-cast votes of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming, and Montana combined.
I was asked if I’d seen any primitives lately, or damn it, if there’d been any skinny-dipping in the river since early autumn. I’m irritated the story holds credence, given that the only eyewitnesses were the village idiot and the town fool, who usually aren’t believed on anything, and so I changed the subject.
I mentioned that I’m looking for a primitive for Thanksgiving; perhaps someone in town might have a shirt-tail relative for the holiday who’s a primitive. Once I find a suitable primitive, even if I don’t know the family very well, I’m sure I can inveigle an invitation for dinner out of them.
<<<has relentless charm and gentle subtle ways of getting what I want.
Thus far, I’ve found three half-baked primitives who’ll be spending the holiday with their families, but they’re not quite exactly the sort of primitive I really want to observe; something like the neighbor’s wife’s now-late “Auntie†who, if she’d been sentient, would have been a popular poster on Skins’s island.
I gave my criteria for the “perfect†primitive, and these two hunters offered to inquire around, to see if one was showing up here later in the month, after which they headed through the wilds of the property just south of this one, owned by some guy in New Jersey who hasn’t been around since 1948.
The sun isn’t up yet; I’m sure I’ll have more to report as the day waxes on.
