One search term that brought a reader to this site.
Answer: Yes.
Guineas eat grass, sweet peas, vines, grasshoppers, lizards, lettuce, chicken scratch, corn, zucchini, etc. Their preference is for fresh green things. They are not all that crazy about fruit, from what I’m seeing, but they did pretty well with a chunk of watermelon last week. The banties, on the other hand, polished the watermelon rinds clean.
time bandit
Swipe in, sign here please.
Tomorrow do it again.
Goodbye says hello.
Cross posted in Cuentos:
Thai style hot sauce
Well, I have asked for more. I’ve asked for a job with health insurance and paid holidays and less driving around. And I’ve gotten that, and delighted to have it, in this unstable economy. (But in retrospect, having work that I enjoy and doing it for as long as my beautiful and incredibly supportive wife has health insurance that covers me too — well, there is just more than one way to do things, isn’t there?)
Oh well. Maybe next month I’ll earn my merit badge.
I’ll be back after the cold medicine kicks in and try again.
Recipe:
Hot and sour soup is a terrific remedy for sore throats. I make it like this:
Chicken or vegetable broth
Lemon juice
Sriracha
Lemon grass
Heat it up. Drink it hot. Kills germs or at least stuns them.
Wow, I love this headline.
I’ll interview all my millionaire friends and let you know. Back soon.
Well, first of all, they tell me billionaire is the new millionaire, so I’m going to raise the bar.
Second — I was thinking it must be all about eco-friendly, sustainable, local food. Rich folk are locavores this week, right? Here’s the food-for-the-rich scenario as I had imagined it (turns out to have been entirely wrong):
“I’ll have my au pair drive to the farmer’s market to buy all the freshest just picked vegetables - the lettuces, the leeks and onions, the rainbow chard, the homemade pies, the early baby creamer potatoes, the hand-salted goat cheese. It can be a lesson in sustainable farming for my seven-year-old. Truffles dug up by my yard man’s farmer friend Joe. Corn and raspberries are hand-picked and delivered to my home weekly.”
As I looked into it, I realized actually that’s how I eat, and I am not a millionaire. Or billionaire. Plus, I don’t have kids, an au pair or a yard man. Wish I did - at least a concierge or something.
How do the very wealthy eat? I did some light reading, and this is what I found. Let’s go look at some of the finest restaurants in the most expensive cities in the world:
According to selected menu items listed in the SPellegrino 50 Best Restaurants in the World, the very wealthy might be eating at this very moment:
Snail Porridge
Bacon and Egg Ice Cream
Warm lettuce hearts soaked in vanilla brine
Sheep’s milk curd seasoned with hay and toasted fern
Beef roasted with the embers of vine cuttings
“Macaroni and Cheese” (butter-poached Maine lobster with mascarpone-enriched Orzo Pasta)
“Oyster and pearls” (”Sabayon” of Pearl Tapioca with Island Creek Oysters and White Sturgeon Caviar)
This convinces me that I am not a billionaire. However, thanks to the beautiful farmer’s market in the small village where I live, I do eat like a millionaire of home-grown tastes. Very sensible of me. Only without the yard guy or the au pair.
With that in mind, here is a recipe for pasta, fresh vegetables and goat cheese with herbs de provence:
Set your pasta water on to boil.
Sautee onions and garlic in olive oil. When these are soft and clear, add each vegetable in turn. Cook at a medium-high temperature. Don’t abuse your vegetables by mashing them about with a spatula or boiling them to death. Add a generous splash of vermouth or white wine. Let sit for a moment.
Drain your pasta and dress lightly with oil or butter.
Plate the pasta, sprinkle an ounce or slightly more of goat cheese on it. Spoon the sauteed vegetables on top of all that. Add salt and pepper.
Serve hot, with a glass of chilled white wine. Have some while you are cooking, too, if it seems advisable.
Light mixed green salad on the side.
Life can be relatively easy, can’t it?
Ingredients:
1 pt. fresh raspberries
4 oz. fresh unsweetened goat yogurt
1 C ice
4 oz. juice (apple or other clear juice, not sweetened or artificial)
Put all of the ingredients in your blender. Put the ice on top, unless your blender is turbo powered. Blend away. Add water or juice (sparingly) as needed to achieve your desired texture.
Makes two 16 oz. servings.
Serve with a little protein on the side to help regulate blood sugar (soy sausage, a hard-boiled egg, a bite of ham, whatever you’ve got that is relatively high in protein but doesn’t add more sugar to this breakfast recipe.
Substitute mango, peach, or any other berry as you wish. Citrus fruits curdle in yogurt, so they don’t really work. Substitute cow yogurt if you must, but goat yogurt is truly excellent in smoothies. Bananas are such a dominant flavor that I do not use them in summer smoothies. In the summer when so many fruits are available fresh and full of their own flavors, choose a fruit that is light and balanced and seasonal.
Fresh foods, prepared simply, simply taste best.
……. and rain, and rain.
On Tuesday, as the wind is whipping up but before the rain begins, Mrs. Bosquechica spends hours climbing around on the roof in the heat (93F/33.88C), setting up the swamp cooler. I am on the ground, handing up wrenches and wire brushes and hoses. The carpenters are work demons - the first dumpster is filled, hauled off and a second dumpster is delivered. The afternoon heat rises, the winds are gusting, but the rain has not yet started. We brilliantly decide this would be a good time to clean out the pump house, which acts as household storage. We pull everything out and put it in the driveway.
Over the course of the next two days, the temperature drops 25 degrees. The wind howls. The driveway is full of half sorted storage, there are vacuum cleaners and fans scattered on the lawn, next to a partially cleaned woodstove that has been sitting in the barn for 20 years or so. The winds are up to 45 mph as the rain begins. The rain turns to hail. The ancient cottonwoods wave their arms and threaten to come down on our heads as we run around in the weather gathering armloads of soggy guilt. The dogs circle us in muddy galumphing joy, helping out by biting each other in the head and running in and out of the house with their big wet dirty feet.
Around that time, the toilet in the main bathroom breaks. The rain continues to come down, the wind is still blowing madly. Lightning strikes. My old laptop takes a hit during the storm, the OS is fried and it is now past time to buy a new one.
The carpenter is making sucking, picklish faces that make me wonder about his sciatic nerve and his prostate, both. His helper is soaked through but having the greatest time rummaging through our giveaway pile, presents for his wife. A lighted misting bowl on a copper pedestal stand! An arm bicycle! A black lacquered TV stand from the 1990s! A terrarium! A doghouse! A pump that almost works!
On Thursday morning, we call a plumber and a house cleaning service, and spend the day rummaging through the wet heaps still lining the driveway. By Thursday evening, the missus and I are so exhausted we can barely move. We sensibly take ourselves out to dinner, where we suddenly break down in a humiliating squabble over a shared hamburger. We sound like the geese attacking a UPS guy – honking honk HONK HONK or maybe even more like the guinea hen who makes a rusty crackling nervous KAH-KAH-KAH sound, very resentful and critical. All because the momentum created by even starting this project must mean we are insane. We collapse in the bed, face down and drooling, the instant we get home from the restaurant, and fall into a deep sleep.
Around 2 a.m., the cat shrieks suddenly at a skunk sneaking by outside the bedroom window. The skunk reacts, the window fan pulls in the fumes, the bedroom reeks. We put pillows on our heads and go back to sleep.
On Friday, the plumber replaces the toilet without drama - thank you, kind plumber! The housecleaner walks through the house, raises her eyebrows and her phone estimate by 25%. She quickly leaves in her enormous shiny expensive new truck with the huge monthly payments and does not look back. The carpenter’s helper tells me his wife loves her new arm bicycle. I get in my 17-year-old Toyota and go to various banks moving money around to pay for the first week of coop building. Kah-kah-KAH!
These are the most beautiful goose coops ever. And no, they are not done yet!
Ah geez. First we cleaned out the barns. Then we brought in a monster dumpster. Then we filled it up and brought in another monster dumpster. Then we cleaned out the pump house. Then the wind started. Everything is in the driveway. The goose coop is halfway along, the carpenters must be insane, the house is full of elm pennies, there’s an ancient woodstove in pieces in the front yard that wants to move into the kitchen and vacation is already half over.
More to come.
On my fiction blog, Cuentos, I am in the habit of tossing in freewrites without judging or editing, and this has worked well for me, I think. Here at Trees, though, where I am theoretically exploring creative non-fiction, I’ve got actually dozens of drafts rotting in my manage files, and I am afraid they are stuck there. Why is that? I am somewhat reminded of my journalism internship back in dark wet moldy Seattle. I believed I was an unreliable source of factual information, and found myself wretchedly unsure of my ability to report the facts of the council meetings and “about town” features that I was assigned. To report “facts” at all, actually. I’m given to hyperbole, equivocation and dithering (the robin was 7 feet tall, well almost, well metaphorically, and maybe it wasn’t a robin, maybe it was a shadow or something someone told me or I just heard it somewhere). And sometimes I say things because of how they sound instead of how they mean. I’m pretty sure my internship advisor would still shudder and turn away if she ran into me in a back alley somewhere.
So for no other reason than here I am, awake and ungrounded, here are a few fact-lets (or they may be fict-lets) about my life of late:
Goodnight or good morning, wherever and whoever you may be.
On Friday, I was shopping at Smith’s on my way home from work. I bought tortillas, sour cream, guacamole, wine and ice. Company expected. On my way out, I paused at the freezer to pick up my 10 lbs. There, I was stopped by a tiny old man with a snowy white beard. He was riding a red electric scooter chair, and his eyes were a sparkling, electric blue (not unlike my husky’s eyes). 
“Whoa,” he said. “I gotta follow you for a little while.” I looked at him and smiled absent-mindedly, thinking more about my house and how to get ready for guests with less than an hour to spare. I crossed the parking lot, stopped at my car and opened the trunk. Then I realized that the little man really had followed me. I looked at him again and he looked back with those sparkling eyes, big smile.
“Excuse me, but I just had to tell you that there is a golden glow shining all round you, and following you, too. You are beautiful!”
“Thank you,” I said. “You know, you remind me of my friend Eunice F.”
“Why?” he asked. “What’s wrong with that person?”
“Not a thing,” I said back. He did a nice little preen, put his hand up against the back of his head as if puffing up his hair, and said “Well, thank you kindly” and looked delighted.
“You have a nice weekend, now,” I said. He scooted on to his own car, right next to mine, and put his things in the back seat. His license plate had DAV plates (disabled veteran) and a bumper sticker that said “Honor the dead, heal the wounded, end the war”.
I went home feeling decidedly perked up by this exchange, and thought about his strange similarity to my good friend Eunice F. Eunice F. is the seventh Eunice in a long line of Eunices. She is 63 years old, with electric blue eyes. She attracts lightning, and has been struck several times. She is an apple-faced hippie lady who lives in a stone cabin in the mountains east of Albuquerque. She is a doll-maker and an artist. She has a beard (not snowy white) that she does not remove, and she is a calm and moving storyteller. She is very poor, hauls water and raises chickens. At 63, she is suffering from the effects of a life of hard labor, and she has a lot of physical pain. She made me a doll with wings who flies around the house and appears here and there on window sills and mantlepieces, apparently at will. 
I went home and told Mrs. Bosquechica about my strange meeting and she was amazed on many different levels. First of all, who gets stopped by total strangers with that kind of comment? Second of all, another Eunice F.? Astonishing! Funny thing is, though, that like Eunice F. and her repeated encounters with lightning, I have been stopped periodically with the “you are glowing/beautiful/ or something equally surprising” by total strangers, both men and women, since I was very young. Not, you know, weekly or anything, but about every two or three years someone does this. It’s been awhile, though, longer than usual, and I started thinking about that and about Eunice and the little man and his bumper stickers, and healing the wounded and electric scooters and lightning. It occurred to me that, like the storyteller doll that Eunice made for me, maybe I have started flying again, maybe there has been time for healing and resuming whatever that glowing thing is that attracts lightning to some and odd compliments to others.
And here is the amazing Eunice F., for those of you who have made it this far.
 | lollyloo on Can guinea hens eat water… |
 | bosquechica on New Job Haiku |
 | ybonesy on New Job Haiku |
| lollyloo on New Job Haiku |
| bosquechica on Marshmallow Creme Sandwich on … |
|
