Butter or OIl

Whoever said, "A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing," was right. I have enough mechanical savvy to be dangerous.

While out for a drive, I heard some pinging and dinging under the hood. 'Not a good sign,' I thought. When I pulled into the driveway, I popped the hood, propped it up with that thing-a-ma-jig arm thing, and proceeded to take a look-see. Since, I was out of motor oil, I decided to go in the house and melt butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat to replace the oil. Bad idea.

For a long time it smelled like burnt steel on toast around here.

Join Jenny and the gang for Saturday Centus. This week's prompt is in italics.

Empty Box Equals Shrinking Pants

Empty Cookie Box

The blogging community is made up of an interesting, eclectic group of waggish individuals. Itsme is one such delightful person. She had a "Cookies for Captions" contest on her blog "ItsMeCissy", which turned out to be loads of fun. Her blog post is titled Scary Picture...and it is. Check it out.

 Because ItsMe has a generous heart, she sent cookies to all of us who submitted a caption. There were at least two people who wrote more than one caption to be sure they got a box of cookies, but I'm not telling who.

Three of the delectable cookie creations were (yes, were...they're all gone) cranberry-white chocolate-coconut cookies, chocolate chip-walnut cookies, and oatmeal-cinnamon-raisin cookies. Boy, were they ever good! Thanks, ItsMe. You are a super baker!

There's only one major problem. The cookies made my pants shrink. Now I feel like a blivet. For those of you who are too young to know what a blivet is; it's a WW II term which means trying to stuff 10 pounds of horse pucky into a five pound bag. 

Thanks anyway, ItsMe, the cookies were delicious. When is the next contest?

Store Bought Is Better

dill weed

If asked, I'll bet most of you would probably say that anything home-made is better; better tasting, more appealing to the eye, and better for you. In the case of my home-made dill pickles, you'd be dead wrong.

I'm not exactly Suzy Homemaker, but I am a pretty fair cook... except for my attempt at making home-made pickles. They tasted like digits dipped in gasoline-gone-bad. I don't understand how I made such awful tasting cucumbers. Maybe it was the dill I grew in my garden or maybe I followed the recipe wrong or maybe someone left out something in the recipe on purpose, but the pickles were just awful.

Since the pickle escapade, I tried using the dill in a potato salad recipe and it tasted great, so I know it's not the dill. Good friends who share recipes are trustworthy, so I really don't think they'd leave out a key ingredient. Then I double checked the jars I put the pickles in just to see if anything in the jar was suspect. And there it was!

A spider the size of New York State was nestled in and around the dill weed. It was the worst looking thing you ever saw. It was big enough to emit an awful taste, but I don't think the spider was the culprit. It didn't matter.  I threw out all the jars of pickles and decided that store bought is better.