The Southern Idaho Trailer Stoop (live, good, season)

[banjomike]

Originally Posted by elousv

I brought my own:


Do y'all eat like grits and crawdads wayyyy down there in the south?

I like grits! We have some crawdads in the creek, but I've never eaten one.

[nice2bfree]

Originally Posted by banjomike

I like grits! We have some crawdads in the creek, but I've never eaten one.

Do you mean you've never eaten one? You don't know what you're missing! (neither do I...)

[banjomike]

I'll bet you haven't eaten spring fries. They beat crawdads by a mile.

[Clark Fork Fantast]

I've eaten prairie oysters. Anyone? Other than Banjo who has eaten everything on the range!

[mistyriver]

I'll stick with regular oysters. Raw, on the shell with a little cocktail sauce. Yum!!

[banjomike]

Originally Posted by Clark Fork Fantast

I've eaten prairie oysters. Anyone? Other than Banjo who has eaten everything on the range!

Not everything.
Some friends of mine, while we were out on a moving bender a half century ago, stopped and picked up a road kill badger. We pulled off the road and built a campfire.
Someone dared each of us to eat it. I passed. The other three didn't, and spent the rest of the trip hanging their heads out the windows while I drove.

The car should have been burned afterwards. By far the nastiest trip in my life.

I'm glad kids today don't do stupid stuff.


My paternal Grandma cooked and canned everything but the hoof and horns back then. The Depression hit my grandparents hard and they had 4 kids to feed, so nothing was wasted.
She was a great cook, and I always just ate what was put in front of me. I grew up eating head cheese and tongue sandwiches and other odd stuff, but I never knew until much later what I was eating. It all tasted good! But it wasn't all weird; we ate lots of chops, roasts and steaks, too. And a lot of game birds and trout.

The odd stuff was saved for up in the hills. She would send up big cartons of home-canned stuff with a half-dozen loaves of homemade bread. All the men except for one uncle couldn't cook a damn thing, so I ate lots of sandwiches up there, and whatever else came in a Ball jar.

Back then, there were still a lot of sheep, and most of the sheepherders were pretty good cooks. I ate a lot of lamb, always with some mint jelly, fried spuds with onions, and coffee that would peel paint at the sheep camps.

[nice2bfree]

Lamb, to me, needs mint jelly. I'm sure it helps with the coating it seems to leave in my mouth, if I don't have it. Has mint jelly fallen out of style today? I don't see a great deal of it in the stores.

[banjomike]

Originally Posted by nice2bfree

Lamb, to me, needs mint jelly. I'm sure it helps with the coating it seems to leave in my mouth, if I don't have it. Has mint jelly fallen out of style today? I don't see a great deal of it in the stores.

Lamb needs to be cooked well done always. Otherwise, it does leave a fatty taste in the mouth. Most cooks don't know how to cook lamb these days, and cook it like beef, but lamb stays very tender, even when it's cooked until it's almost charcoal.
The jelly adds the proper tang, much like steak sauce does with steak, but fresh mint leaves will do just fine.

The sheepherders used stinging nettle in a pinch if there was no mint around. Stinging nettle, when either cooked or dried, is edible, and the sheepherders would pick some, then dried it in the heating frying pan before the lamb chops went in the same pan. The formic acid, the stuff that makes the nettle sting, was cleaned out of the pan with a little rock salt before the meat went into the pan. The nasty gloves they wore when doing everything were another matter- it was best not to ask how the nettle was picked.

[Cnynrat]

Originally Posted by banjomike

Lamb needs to be cooked well done always. Otherwise, it does leave a fatty taste in the mouth. Most cooks don't know how to cook lamb these days, and cook it like beef, but lamb stays very tender, even when it's cooked until it's almost charcoal.

A matter of opinion!

I like my lamb medium rare, and hold the mint jelly please! Tastes just fine to me that way, tender and juicy with no greasy taste that I can detect.

[mistyriver]

Originally Posted by Cnynrat

A matter of opinion!

I like my lamb medium rare, and hold the mint jelly please! Tastes just fine to me that way, tender and juicy with no greasy taste that I can detect.

Agreed!