I have been boring me lately. Do you ever bore you?

Are you ever mixing a gin and tonic at three a.m. (since insomnia might as well come with a cocktail hour) and you’re standing there in the kitchen at eye level with the ice trays in the open door of your freezer and you think to yourself, “There’s something not quite right about this? What is it?” and then you realize that you’re not wearing any shoes so everything is maybe an inch higher than you’re used to seeing it. Ah perception, so relative.

I hate the thought that I am probably up for the day. Ah well, I can nap later.

Soon spring will be here and the BBQ season will begin again. My father trimmed the apple trees in our orchard, I guess you have to trim the tops of the trees every few years so that they grow out instead of up. Did I mention we have a small apple orchard on the farm and that when mom brings homemade apple pie from Wisconsin that it’s home grown as well? Have you ever eaten apple pie with sharp cheddar cheese slices for dinner? You haven’t lived.

Some of my earliest memories are actually helping my grandmother jar preserves. The orchard looks odd in the winter because we keep these cut up gallon milk jugs in the trees. You fill them with sugar water and they trap the bugs that would otherwise eat the apples – but in the winter they look like medieval warnings to roaming bands of milk jugs, “we string our milk jugs up around here so you best beware, you lactose toting bastards.”

The orchard is right next to the asparagus patch on the southeastern corner of the golf course – when Dad first retired he turned the cornfield into a nine-hole golf course. It is now a full eighteen. MMMMMMMMM golf and apples and asparagus MMMMMMM. Anyway, the folks are coming to visit in April and I need to make sure they bring me some apple wood for a summer smoke fest. I should have loaded up the van when we were just up there. Apple wood, smoked BBQ pork chops, or a side of ribs from Jack’s Cash Saver.

Do you know these local shopping tricks? Buy your seafood in bulk up Olive in the Asian fish markets and your ribs down Olive in the hood. Jack’s keeps pigs feet and breakfast steaks in the impulse buyer’s isle at the front of the store. I started shopping there during the Schnuck’s workers strike (because I’ll be shot dead before I ever cross a picket) and I’ll be damned if they don’t have some of the best, and best priced, cuts of meat in town.

Now that we have a Trader Joes with affordable flash frozen fish in smaller sizes (at the Asian market you buy the whole fish) I can glut myself on tuna steaks and swordfish all summer long. Missouri grillers revel in modern global trade particularly when we can buy from environmentally friendly food sellers “at lower prices than the chain stores”.

It’ll be time to start the herb garden again soon. I should bleach the pots tomorrow. This is a rite of spring. Ceramic pots get nasty molds in them that can affect the quality of your herbs, so at about this time of year you should soak all your empty ceramics in a mild bleach solution to kill and clean for your April planting. I think I am going large with basil this year. My basil crop was insufficient last year for my pesto demands...