Groundhog Day

Well, here it is again...February 2nd ~ Groundhog Day!

I just saw on the news that Punxsutawney Phil, that devious Pennsylvania rodent, came out and SAW HIS SHADOW....6 more weeks of winter predicted by a true authority (or is it just that those who promote this nonsense want us to believe???).

Here's a tile I have hanging in my kitchen to always remind me what I'm NOT missing:

That is the dumbest thing isn't it..

Well where we live there is no winter so 6weeks will be a picnic.       

Boy, isn't that the truth! And I'm lovin' it!

(sorry everyone who's stuck in freezing locations....)

Where I used to live, there is a church out on a country road that sells pancake dinners and ground hog (sausage) every groundhog day. People come from miles around. Some get enough sausage for their freezers to last months. I always went as soon as school was out and by that time they were nearly sold out.

I like venison sausage but don't know if I could get my mind to accept groundhog sausage (or meat).

Once an image gets in my head I can seldom get past, and a groundhog seems too much like a rodent to me.

Don't even get me started on tilapia.....that bum, Mike Rowe, ruined it for me with the program he "starred" on, "Dirty Jobs". The graphic descriptions he used on the perch farming episode did me in. To this day, I cannot eat tilapia or catfish....and I KNOW it's stupid. But my mind goes nuts if I try. LOL (hey, EVERYONE has their own peculiarities and, quite honestly, I'm proud of mine! Hahahaha)

My mom was like that about Campbell's soup after she went to a chicken egg farm in Minnesota.  The chickens were so crowded in the cages over a moving belt that some of their feet didn't touch the bottom of the cage.  And, sadly, some of them were dead in the cages.  When they noticed some dead ones, the man said, "Oh, those are the ones we sell to Campbell's for chicken soup."

That was it!  No more Campbell's soup was in the house.  

She was really never wild about chicken anyway, as her family had chickens when she was a kid and, of course, she'd name them and then, of course, we all know what happened to them down the line:  On the table and one named chicken was missing...

Oh, Crybaby, same thing happened to me as a child....only it was a steer. We use to name him (Tuffy and Softie ~ not creative but referred to the nose we would stroke). Dad always told us he "traded" a farmer who needed a steer to graze in his meadow for packaged meat. Hey, IF you say it with conviction in your voice, it is true! Dumb kids believe just about anything they are told (chocolate milk comes from brown cows.....).

Well, the year Softy got traded Dad brought home the fresh beef heart and beef tongue to be cooked. Softy had a rather large cut or nick in his tongue (he use to lick our hands) and, low and behold, that un-skinned tongue was all too recognizable to us kids. All 4 of us refused to eat beef that summer ~ we only ate pork or chicken. I think by fall we were so sick of only white meat we conveniently "forgot" who mom was cooking.

But Softie was the last steer Dad ever raised in our barn.

The church didn't have groundhog sausage.  They had ground-up hog meat... ground   hog = pork sausage. They had the pancake feed with pork sausage every groundhog day.

Oh, Thank Goodness! You had me on that one, Norm.

Phew!

Norm, Was that really a 'joke'---  
good one!

There is a family of groundhogs which inhabit the back yard in my apartment building. It is so intriguing to watch them. I did not know what kind of animal it was. I am on the 2nd floor and see the top and back of it. The groundhog is huge!!! The neighbors kids, call it a 'huge rat"--lol! When you mentioned groundhog sausage, I immediately thought of this!!

Barb, I think I watched that same episode about tilapia and catfish! I never watch that program, but I 'had' to see that one! yuk! every time I hear those fishes mentioned, I think of 'bottom feeders'...  

cookingirl wrote:
Barb, I think I watched that same episode about tilapia and catfish! I never watch that program, but I 'had' to see that one! yuk! every time I hear those fishes mentioned, I think of 'bottom feeders'...  

Cookingirl - it was ME who was scarred for life by that stupid program.

I know there is nothing wrong with tilapia. There is nothing wrong with catfish.

But I cannot eat either without gagging.

And it's all because of that dumb television program.

lol

We have super catfish down here, lots of it farm raised. And it's not the bullnose type of catfish you see in those "dive and get one" shows. It's delicious fried and a lot of places serve fried "catfish fingers" as appetizers -- that's small pieces of catfish that they usually serve with tartar sauce and/or cocktail sauce.

You can get fried catfish down here and also "thin sliced catfish" which a lot of people prefer. I eat all of it, as it's quite good.

Cookingirl wrote:There is a family of groundhogs which inhabit the back yard in my apartment building. It is so intriguing to watch them. I did not know what kind of animal it was. I am on the 2nd floor and see the top and back of it. The groundhog is huge!!! The neighbors kids, call it a 'huge rat"--lol! When you mentioned groundhog sausage, I immediately thought of this!!

I've never seen a groundhog except on TV but we have opposums here that get huge. Every once in a while, we'll see one in our backyard or, get this, walking down the top of the 7-foot wooden fence along one side of our yard. They're huge, too -- maybe 18 inches long (without the tail) and fat, too. And they don't scare either. Our cats (well, now, cat since Fred's gone) are inside/outside cats and much smaller than those huge opossums so when we see one coming into the yard, we go outside and holler and clap our hands to scare it away. Guess what? This does absolutely nothing and they keep coming toward you. They remind me of huge rats with lots of long hair -- ugh!

Cookingirl & Crybaby....take it from me ~ just stay away. They ARE wild animals and will, if cornered, become pretty bold and nasty, especially if there are babies around. None of them is worth taking the chance of being scratched or a nasty bite, which would require a trip to the ER. Raccoons are another nasty creature to find in your backyard. If it were me in an urban setting, away from any woods where they would live, I would call animal control and ask them to come and "live trap" them all and move them away from people and pets.

bethk wrote:Cookingirl & Crybaby....take it from me ~ just stay away.  They ARE wild animals and will, if cornered, become pretty bold and nasty, especially if there are babies around.  None of them is worth taking the chance of being scratched or a nasty bite, which would require a trip to the ER.  Raccoons are another nasty creature to find in your backyard.  If it were me in an urban setting, away from any woods where they would live, I would call animal control and ask them to come and "live trap" them all and move them away from people and pets.

I had to snicker, Beth, as they would laugh at you here in New Orleans. We're right near the river and though there's no big thick stand of trees behind the levee anymore, there are still all kinds of critters around. But we have a goodly number of hawks around (most of them are Cooper's hawks) which I think are responsible for keeping any rodent problem decently in check. In fact, we've seen Cooper's hawks several times in our small backyard literally "busting" through the trees for the feeder birds. It's funny, as we feed the birds so there are lots of them in our backyard. They make a lot of bird "noise," which we don't consider noise at all. But if you're out in the yard and all of a sudden the birds are eerily silent, all you have to do is be quiet and look around or just wait -- as the hawk is either nearby or about to make an appearance.

We have lived on these 15 acres for 38 years. Never had a critter problem until our last dog died. Now there's coons and possums that I have to trap, for they were getting into our workshop and terrorizing our cats. They seem to like cat food!

Niagara Visitor wrote:We have lived on these 15 acres for 38 years.  Never had a critter problem until our last dog died.  Now there's coons and possums that I have to trap, for they were getting into our workshop and terrorizing our cats.  They seem to like cat food!

They sure do! We stopped feeding our cats outside as we attracted too many possums. They get HUGE down here, too, and often do not feel threatened by humans. If my cat Lola saw one, she'd probably pass out at the size of it!

Possums have only been here in this part of Canada in the last 30 years. I caught one this winter, big, ugly sucker. We have a catch and release program. LOL Neighbour said it was the biggest that he'd ever seen. My cats are barn cats, they have a little "doggie" door for getting in and out. I really can't stop feeding them in the workshop.