Nobody Goes Hungry Here

If there’s one thing about this place you can count on, it’s that nobody goes hungry around here. You couldn’t, even if you tried. We all know that Miss Terry is an amazing cook and baker. In the 28+ years that we’ve been married, she’s never served me a bad meal. Not even a mediocre one. I’d like to blame her for being fat, but that wouldn’t be entirely fair. I had a 45-year head start on her cooking before we ever got together.

Having traveled all over the country as fulltime RVers for 18 plus years, and living several places in my life, I’ve enjoyed good food from coast to coast and border to border. But some things really stick out in my memory, and one of them is Cuban sandwiches. We first discovered this delight on one of our many RVing trips to Florida when our friends Tim and Ann Moran introduced us to them. There are variations, but a true Cuban sandwich includes roasted pork, sweet ham, Swiss cheese, dill pickles, and yellow mustard on crusty Cuban bread. The sandwich is lightly buttered and press until crispy. We’ve eaten Cuban sandwiches in other places besides Florida, but nothing ever measured up. So, Terry decided that she would make some for our dinner yesterday.

The first step was baking two loaves of Cuban bread. Terry said they came out larger than she expected, but nevertheless, the bread sure tasted good.

Then she put the sandwiches together and cooked them in a panini maker. They were as good as anything I ever found in Florida, and now we can have them any time, right here at home.

Terry isn’t the only good cook in the family, though. On Sunday, Tiffany and Kenny invited us over for ribs that he slow cooked in their Traeger smoker. Knowing that I’m allergic to onions, he even made a special dry rub he made up just for mine. They were delicious. Sometimes I think that man is wasting his talents as a mechanic. Maybe he and Terry should open a restaurant. But if they did that, they might get so busy that she wouldn’t be around to keep me out of trouble during the day, and Kenny wouldn’t have time to fix the things I break on a regular basis. Never mind, that’s not such a good idea after all. 😊

In other news, it’s warming up here in Arizona. The weather forecast says it’s going to be in the upper nineties this week down in the Phoenix area, with the possibility of triple digits next week. I’ll be glad to see it warm up here in mountains, though we won’t see that extreme heat. We are still having some nights down in the 20s. We have some bare patches in our lawns in the front and back, and when it rains they turn muddy. When we were in Lakeside a few days ago, we stopped at Christopher’s Garden Nursery, which has been around here forever, asking for suggestions on what kind of ground cover to plant. They recommended white Dutch clover, which spreads out very well and is fairly low maintenance once it gets established. They said not to plant it until about mid-April or early May, when the overnight temperatures are warmer. But that’s a project we are definitely going to address as soon as we can.

Did you know that you can find all of my books and sign up for my free author’s newsletter on my website at www.nickrussellbooks.com?

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day – No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it. – Theodore Roosevelt