What's the last thing you ate or are currently eating?

[Big Frank]

I just had a bunch of dried red tart cherries. They were Montmorency variety, the kind in cherry pies, and a product of the USA. I can't say where in the USA they were grown, but Michigan grows over 90,000 tons of them a year, more than any other state. I tried to convert that into pounds with my calculator and the number was so big it wouldn't work.

They're grown not in Montmorency Township or Montmorency county, but near Grand Traverse Bay where the microclimate is good for growing fruit trees. When it's not buried under tons of lake effect snow, that is.     Over 500,000 people a year go to the National Cherry Festival in Traverse City, Michigan in July.

[Timothy]

180,000,000 lbs

1.8e+8

[Big Frank]

180,000,000 lbs

1.8e+8

That's a whole lot of cherries. I think I ate 5 ounces of them yesterday, but that was dry weight with no pits. I keep forgetting about the calculator Windows has on the Accessories menu. It can go a few digits beyond that on the Standard calculator, and way more in the Scientific and Programmer modes. I don't even know how to use the Statistics calculator.

I looked up some food facts and statistics about Michigan and some of it surprised me. Michigan grows over 125 different crops and leads the nation in the production of several crops, including asparagus; black, cranberry, and small red dried beans; cucumbers; tart cherries; Niagara grapes; squash; red skin potatoes and potatoes for making potato chips. Michigan agriculture contributes more than $101 billion annually to the state’s economy, and is second in diversity only to California.

[Timothy]

We used to pick cherries in the farms around GR when we were kids!  Didn’t pay well but we ate our fill of cherries to the point of getting sick!

[emoji4]

[Big Frank]

When I was a kid a neighbor across the street would let us pick cherries off the tree in his front yard. And a guy my dad worked with had pear trees, so we got those too and my mom canned a bunch. We had a peach tree, strawberries, raspberries, and rhubarb in the garden, and grapes growing past the top of six foot high fences. There were crab apples at the elementary school, and something that looked like tiny orange colored cherries on a tree I walked past on the way there. A house on the corner had apple trees, and anything hanging over the fence was fair game. There was something to eat growing everywhere I went. We got as many black walnuts as we wanted from my mom's friend. They're great in chocolate fudge and so-so in cookies. We picked chokecherries in the woods and my mom made delicious jelly out of them. We picked blueberries in between four foot tall anthills in the woods too. It's not much fun when you have ants in your pants. Inch long carpenter ants.

Free snacks aren't as plentiful for me now, but a neighbor told me about these big trees at the back of the church parking lot. He said they were mulberries but I thought mulberries grew on a bush. Possibly a bush that a monkey chased a weasel all around. Long story short, I can walk across the street and eat as many mulberries as I want when they're in season. And I suppose I could eat the hickory nuts that the squirrels bring me from 3 houses down.

Long story longer, last summer a friend and I were riding our ATVs in an area many of us rode around before. Some of them snowmobile there too. There are 2 hills we climbed, back and forth, down one and up the other a few times. We stopped for a break at the top of one hill on the edge of a wide open field in the woods. I went back to the top of other hill and wondered what was just a stone's throw away among the trees. Wild blueberries! In all the years he rode past them he never knew they were there. The bushes were full of black blueberries and light blue ones too. When I showed my friend he got excited and said that I found the mother lode. That was the day I found my thrill, on blueberry hill. I ate everything I picked but he took some back to the cabin for pancakes. Wild blueberries almost always ripen a couple of weeks after we all go home from our Fourth of July vacation. These got a lot of sun on one side since it was an open area, and ripened early.

[Sponsor]

[Big Frank]

I have pork carnitas meat in the microwave. I have to let it cool a minute or so before I take it out and shred it. I'm going to make some sandwiches with that and some good white bread. I'll put a slice of Colby Pepper-Jack cheese on the bread before I put the meat on so it doesn't get soaking wet, then microwave it. Time's up.

[Big Frank]

The store bought carnitas didn't have much seasoning. It was basically sugar, salt, and lime juice. It probably shouldn't have sugar in it. What it should have is chili pepper and cumin, which are in the chili powder I'll sprinkle on the rest of the meat. The chili powder also has oregano and garlic which are in most carnitas recipes. It also has more salt but it should be okay.

[Big Frank]

I'm eating more of the same right now but with chili powder and Mexican-style hot sauce added. I prefer mildly spicy to not spicy at all, and mild to medium is even better. It has a slight burn, not enough for me to drink a lot of water. It's much better now.

I have real Mexican hot sauce in the cupboard but it's not open yet. I have 2 bottles of hot sauce open and 6 more in reserve. 2 bottles are the original red Tabasco, and there are 7 different kinds in total. I like to try different hot sauces but don't like to have more than 2 or 3 open at a time. I don't actually use it very often and don't want it to sit there and go bad.

[PegLeg45]

Tater-tots.......... with ketchup.

Yep.

 


Last night I did have a piece of battered/fried wild turkey from the gobbler one of my sons shot last week.

[Big Frank]

I had half of a DiGiorno Supreme Crispy Pan Pizza today. It says 6 servings on the box for the Supreme and Three Meat pizzas. The Pepperoni, Four Cheese, and Cheesy Garlic pizzas are 5 servings each, but they don't tell you how to cut a rectangle into 5 equal pieces. If you cut it into 5 parallel strips, 2 will have way more crust than the other 3, and that hardly seems fair. I searched and searched, and finally found this square cut into 5 pieces. Quartering it is much easier and what I did. And I had a double chocolate muffin for dessert.

This solution may also work on rectangles like my pizza. If it does, the area of a rectangle is always length x width. 1/5 of that would be the area of each piece. I finally remembered that, the most basic geometry that I learned 40+ years ago and haven't needed since, after I spent an incredibly long time figuring it out in a more complicated way. I think I'll have some more pizza later. When I finish it, that will be the end of the 5 California Pizza Kitchen and 5 DiGiorno pizzas I bought really cheap. None of them were as good as what I get from local pizzerias.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/nov/21/did-you-solve-it-can-you-cut-cake-correctly