Phred's Experimental Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients

one cup cooked wild rice
one pound ground turkey
six chopped garlic cloves
four peppers
salt and pepper
one 14 oz can diced tomatoes
four ounces feta cheese
one teaspoon cumin
one teaspoon grated ginger root
one cup chopped onion
one tablespoon olive oil

Directions

1. Cook the rice.

2. Cut the top off the peppers and clean out the insides

3. Fry the onions in olive oil until translucent and stir in the turkey and spices. When the pink in the turkey is just gone stop cooking and stir in the feta cheese, rice and diced tomato.

4. Fill the peppers with the cooked mixture and bake at 350 F. in a shallow pan until the internal temperature reaches 165 F. ( about 30 minutes). Serve immediately. Freeze any excess filling for more peppers later...or have it for a snack...

Send in the Clowns

Yes...That's Mrs. Phred in the float with the stuffed giraffes and tennis balls around her neck. It was the annual free lunch and homecoming parade for all the snowbirds here at Sun and Fun....

Sarasota is known for its circus history. Ringling established a vast estate here on the water when the place was a muddy, mosquito-plagued backwater.....

The lady above is part of a collection of fibreglass clowns at the "Sailor Circus" on Bahia Vista. I got to know her during a great Greg Allman concert last week...you remember? The Allman Brothers? "Eat a Peach?"....

 We also went on Sunday to see the play "Spamalot" It was based loosely on Monty Python skits....It was good and we hit a piano bar afterwards....

Then on Tuesday night we went to the Clam Factory for the weekly jam  session...this morning I let the doctor carve on my head some more...sometimes I feel like such a turkey... Fortunately, it is only a flesh wound....

Lots of people hate clowns....when Sarasota put out fibreglass clowns in 2006, they were covered with graffiti, overturned, had limbs broken off and two were even abducted and subjected to who knows what depravation....that never happened to the Chicago fibreglass cows or the fibreglass porpoises here in Venice....

Speaking of clowns, a retired policeman here got upset about another man who was texting his 3-year old in a movie theatre....he shot and killed him with his .380....The guy who got shot also threw popcorn on the guy with the gun during s subsequent argument....he's dead now....

Isn't it rich?
Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground,
You in mid-air..
Where are the clowns?

Isn't it bliss?
Don't you approve?
One who keeps tearing around,
One who can't move...
Where are the clowns?
Send in the clowns.

Nobody Loves Me But My Mother..

And She Could Be Jiving Too...

I listened to BB King on LP vinyl before Pink Floyd cut their first Album. He's 88 years old now. Personally, my favorite blues guy is Jimmy Reed. I used to listen to Jimmy in the 1950s instead of the Beach Boys and drink grapefruit wine and think I was cooler than the other kids...but BB King is the most famous and influential of them all...and when you get to be that age and still remember some of the lyrics you should feel very lucky...I feel lucky to have been able to see him in concert at the Van Wezel in Sarasota last night...

BB King puts on a somewhat uneven concert. He has a tendency to lose track and spend 20 or 30 minutes rapping and trying to get the audience to sing "You are my sunshine"..it's sometimes hard to understand his raps because he seems to forget to talk into the mike all the time.... his musicians walk off stage when this happens and the audience eventually started to boo and walk out...they don't seem to understand that they are in the presence of legend and greatness.... Then he cuts into one of his classics...and sounds great...and they come back....
.

Nobody loves me but my mother,
And she could be jivin' too

Now you see why I act funny baby,
When you do the things you do

I read online that BB King has 15 children, all from different women. ...Maybe that's true? He named his guitar Lucille....I was doing my usual ten mile walk into downtown this morning when the two BB King super RV buses blew past on the way out of town...I waved but the windows were dark....BB spent about 45 minutes signing autographs after the concert....

Squirrels 2, Phred 2

Rats and squirrels are similar rodents but somehow you don't mind a squirrel on your knee quite so much.

The ones that live near us have gnawed though two of my propane barbeque hoses. They also have the habit of starting fires by eating electrical cables and creating havoc with the hoses and wires in our vehicles.

I caught two squirrels today with peanut butter. This is a good time because Eastern gray squirrels breed twice a year, December to February and May to June. The first litter is born in February to March, the second in June to July. Normally, two to six young are born in each litter, but this number can be as high as eight. The gestation period is about 44 days. The young are weaned at seven weeks and leave the nest after 10 weeks. So if I catch them now and release them a mile or two away, I won't lose any sleep over starving baby squirrels.

Gray squirrels make several thousand food caches each season. If they feel themselves being watched they will pretend to hide food by digging a hole and filling it up while actually concealing the food in their cheeks. I suppose that the squirrels know why they like to destroy propane hoses, but they're not talking....

Anyway, the squirrels have been relocated about a mile East....I need to start coloring them to see if they are finding their way back or if I need to release them further away.....