Screen doors and fried food

Greg's been irritated with me for fourteen years now. Every spring, when the weather warms up, I open the doors. I love having the doors open. He doesn't like screen doors. I open the doors anyway and the bugs come in. I tell him he has to put up with the bugs if he doesn't want screen doors. For the last few years, he has said he'd put in a screen door if I would get one. Well, I've looked and looked. The doors that go onto the back porch are strange sized, I got them at the Pella sale years ago and we built the house to fit the doors. But, there are no off the shelf screen doors that fit. The front door is a standard size, but I haven't been able to find something that's not ugly at Home Depot or Lowe's, and buying off the web is expensive and uncertain. So, still no screen doors, still getting bugs.



At this particular moment, I have a problem. I have a hummingbird in the house, upstairs where there's a tall cathedral ceiling. Yesterday I heard a chirp/squeak that I decided was the ceiling fan, but now I'm wondering if it wasn't this hummingbird. I've had a chickadee in the house before, but never a hummingbird. I don't know how to lure it outside, and I hate the thought of losing a hummingbird. The only thing I can think to do is to open the windows upstairs, and take out the screens.

I just this minute learned something that I did not know five minutes ago! Those little sea snails, you know the tiny ones that cover everything at the beach? They're called periwinkles, and they're edible. Well, most everything is edible, but The Joy of Cooking has a recipe. Boil them for three minutes, pick them out with a skewer, and dip in garlic butter. By golly, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do with a sea snail. But periwinkles? I thought periwinkles were flowers, blue ones, like in Joni Mitchell's song...."peridots and periwinkles, blue medallions, gilded galleons spilled across the ocean floor..." It turns out it's the name for both the marine snail, and for the common groundcover with blue flowers called vinca, or myrtle, or...periwinkle.

Greg says he's making fried seafood dinner tonight. That's one of those things that seems more suited to a "fry house" than to my kitchen. When I make it, it's a huge affair, and makes a terrible mess. I've been teaching him to cook, and in typical Greg way, he now thinks he can go straight to the head of the class. I think I convinced him to fry two kinds of fish, oysters and shrimp, instead of four, and maybe only three kinds of battered vegetables. We'll see.

When I make fried seafood platter I've found that oysters are better with a crushed cracker coating, other shellfish with a double dip of egg/milk, then cornmeal and flour, and vegetables in egg and flour batter. That's probably why it's such an ordeal. I think we will try to make a pretty dry batter and use it for the veggies and shrimp, and then dip the oysters in egg and then in cracker crumbs. I have told him that he needs to start really early so that the batter can set on the food, but it's two o'clock and he's still at work - on a Saturday. This is going to be a learning experience. Maybe between the two of us we can actually come up with a workable system. Stay tuned.

Later that same night ........ when Greg got home I told him to see about opening windows upstairs to see if the hummingbird would find its way out. He found the bird, sitting forlorn on the windowsill in the loft at the peak of the cathedral ceiling. Greg, the hero and rescuer of all things, went and got a ladder to open the window where the bird was looking out. I think this hummer may have been there since yesterday because I was hearing a chirping then, so she was pretty tired and thirsty. When Greg opened the window she just sat, dazed and confused, but he was able to pick her up and when he held her aloft, she flew away. Whew! I hope she made it to the feeder ok and will recover. The air traffic on the back deck is so busy now with the hummers preparing to leave, it'd be impossible to keep track of one.

And the fried dinner was a success! He made shrimp and scallops, mushrooms, eggplant and zucchini. And even though I already said no more zucchini or eggplant this season, I ate it again, and it was good.