It’s about time to write again.  The goosies are calling me through space and time…they’ve been squeaking and squawking at me in their usual relentless way.  Oh, and the grass keeps on growing!  So I must keep on writing my exciting posts about geese and grass! Lately, we have had massive rains punctuated by one or two days of sun; we are still running around the farm  doing whatever is possible in this wet weather when the opportunity presents itself.

We have been very fortunate with farm harvests during this rainy season and we are very thankful for them.  Plenty of akee:

We really enjoy the texture and taste of akee; it has a unique fatty, buttery taste.  I would even venture to say that I prefer them to avocadoes.   We also had the fortune of wild paddy straw mushrooms coming up on one of our vegetable beds.

Here is a dish of paddy straw mushrooms cooked in olive oil, Gnome pasta stuff (yay! he is still cooking) and akee.  Yes, we are still eating really well off the farm:

Oh and look at this…in between this huge abundance of food, Gnome still dug up beetle larvae, brought it into the house and asked me rather politely if I would like to share some food with him,

“…eh, Munchkin….would you be willing to eat some grubs…”

He wasn’t joking.  This comes from his old bush tucker days in the Northern Territory, Australia when he used to forage around and eat witchity grubs and berries (as Gnomes do).  I was a bit scared about eating these wiggly things live so I said that I could coat them in egg and breadcrumbs and fry them in oil.  At this point, I started looking very closely at the writhing grubs and felt (would you believe it!) sorry for them.  I exclaimed,

“…it’s a bit cruel to chuck these poor things in boiling hot oil, though!”

Next thing I know, Gnome is having a conversation with me about how to practically approach this apparent mental stumbling block:

“…well, I suppose you could parboil them first…or, you could chop their heads off first…”

I bailed out at this point and said,

“…look Gnome, I would eat these in a survival situation but the truth of the matter is that we have plenty of food on the farm right now.  Why don’t I give them to Duckie? “

He didn’t really have a choice because I was out of the house before he could say anything.  Sure enough, Duckie had a real gourmet treat of beetle larvae…she gobbled them up like there was no tomorrow.

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