Month: December 2018

Have you ever crawled through alders and brush searching for hub caps? When we were children, we would walk for miles on a saturday, scouring the sides of the dirt roads searching for them.  Beer and pop bottles were a bonus find.

I believe this is a 52 chev hubcap

As mentioned above, the roads in our towns and communities were dirt, made from gravel or soil. The nearest paved road was over two hundred miles away. The roads were either dusty, full of pot holes or muddy. It would take quite the knock to loosen a hubcap but it did happen.

Most people knew the type of car or truck that a person owned so it wasn’t that difficult to find the owner. I don’t recall the dollar value of a found hub cap but it must have been only pennies.

My friends and I would would walk both sides of the road in search of those elusive caps. It’s surprising the distance that some of them would travel after breaking loose from the car or truck.  Some would be found deep in the woods or out on the marsh or barrens. I can only imagine the speed that some people drove on those roads. When a hub cap broke loose, at a high speed, it just keep rolling, either down the road or out into the woods.

There were three adult brothers who made some extra cash by selling hub caps. They had a sign put up, outside their house, ” hub caps for sale.” Those brothers were characters and were well known by most people in the area where we lived.

They were, lost and found, hub cap entrepreneurs. They would set up their find on the side off the main highway.  Their wares would be hanging from sticks, from tree branches or lying on the ground. It didn’t matter to them whether it was a chev, a ford, dodge or some other make of vehicle. If the cap fit they would try and sell it to the potential customer.

There have been many stories told about this trio. One was that as one of them was speaking to a potential customer, another of the brothers would sneak to the other side of the vehicle. He would pry off a hub cap and place it with their stockpile.  Then another of them would search through the pile and find the cap that the customer was looking for. It’s a believable story having known those brothers.

We have an older friend who combs the highways, around our suburban area. for recyclables. I don’t know if he makes any money doing this but every now and then he will pick up a wheel cover or for us older generation, a hubcap. We live in an area where the paved roads get filled with pot holes, in the spring, after the frost goes out of the ground. You hit one of those pot holes and you will either damage your front end, get a flat tire or lose a wheel cover.

I notice that one of the wheel covers on my van is broken..I wonder!

Bacon, either you love or you hate it or because of religious reasons, you don’t eat it at all. Other’s may not eat bacon  because of their conviction of animal cruelty or they don’t like the smell of bacon being cooked. For whatever reason, I respect their freedom to choose. Well, I like bacon!

I have tried many flavors and many suppliers. Schneiders is one of my favorites.  There are only two of us in the household now, so we usually cut the package in thirds and make three meals. Those are frozen in freezer bags

Today, I cooked bacon and eggs for both of us, although my wife only wanted bacon.  The following are photos of how I cook the bacon. We have been using The Gotham Steel frying pan and compared to other pans, that we have used over the years, this is one of the best.  We can control the crispiness  of the bacon and the eggs don’t stick to the pan. Also, when you are finished cooking, it’s easy to clean the pan.

This is how we like our bacon cooked. To remove most of the grease,I put the cooked bacon on a paper towel and wrap the towel around the bacon. This gets rid of most of the grease.

I pour the access grease, that’s left in the pan, in a mason jar. In the fall, winter and spring I lay the bottle outside for the grease to solidify. It goes in the refrigerator in the summer. This is how much grease came out of 1/3 lb of bacon. The right photo is the solidified grease. Usually I scrape the hardened grease, from the bottle and place it in the garbage. Some times , I keep it for frying eggs or sausages.

There is just a film left in the pan to fry the egg or eggs. Today, there was only one egg  to fry. I only added pepper as there was enough salt in the bacon fat. Toasted homemade bread and pieces of orange is enough for this breakfast meal. When we have family or friends for breakfast, we will have peaches, yogurt  and pancakes with the bacon and eggs.

Yes, we like Purity crackers or Purity Cream Crisps. Lately, we have been buying the crisps as there are too many crackers, in a box and they become stale. The stale crackers are used as a base for onion pies. It may seem strange but we use homemade partridge berry jam on our toast and bought raspberry jam on the crackers.

Clean up is easy as most of the grease has already been removed from the pan. Just a matter of wiping clean with a paper towel and if you like you can use a few spoonfuls of boiling water and then wipe clean.

Any left over bacon, if there is any, is used to make a tomato, lettuce and bacon sandwich.

What’s for breakfast at your house??

Heh, Gord, do you like bacon and eggs??

Why was the meat packer arrested? For bringing home the bacon.

What do you get when you cross a pig and a chicken? The best bacon-and-eggs of your life.

Why did the pig kill the farmer? To save his own bacon.

 Safe and Secure

Labrador websites and blogs.

Transportation

Labrador Marine Ferry Service