As promised, here’s a peek at the well-traveled rubber chicken.
Sunday we went to the Christmas preview downtown and took the 9-year-old. Its not often that little kids get to go downtown at night. Last time Tommy and I took him to a play at Chico State and we treated him to ice cream afterwards. It was a Thursday night about 9:30 p.m. and a lot of college-aged students were out and about. After we got our ice cream we were strolling about and gave Leify all the usual warnings about staying close to us and staying out of peoples way.
It wasnt long until he was asking to go home.
Christmas preview is different because there are so many families wandering about.
The 9-year-old disappointed me by professing that he was too old to sit on Santas lap this year. We had brought the rubber chicken with us to sit on Santas lap as well. We were going to force him, but the line was long.
We didnt spend any time looking at gifts, but raced from place to place looking to see who had the best treats.
Then we wandered into the newly-opened City Plaza. Weve stopped by the plaza several times since it opened.
I must admit, its very pretty at night, with the warm glow from the lights on the stage overhang and the lights shimmering up into the streams of water. I was a naysayer, like a lot of Chicoans, when we watched for more than a year as more and more concrete was trucked in.
Im still skeptical how comfortable it will be in when its 106 degrees, but at night the place is quite romantic.
We stopped and asked a family if they would take our photograph in front of the fountain. I whipped out the rubber chicken to pose, and to my delight, one of the women said are you the one who writes that column in the paper??
What fun to be recognized because of a rubber chicken.
Ill post a picture of the chicken on my blog.
In addition to the photo gallery on the Enterprise-Record Web site, my friend Jim has some cool before, during and after photographs he put on his Web page at www.Jiminchico.com.
Green gold
As much as Ive been enjoying fall, its hard to let go of the summer garden.
The 9-year-old next door saw us the other morning trimming off the limbs of the tomato plants and harvesting the green tomatoes. He had planted a tomato in a pot at his school in spring and had us care for it. When he saw us taking out the tomatoes, he got really fussy.
Youre not going to chop up my tomato!? he said, standing up like a tough guy.
Yes we are.?
No, just dig it up and Ill put it in a pot.?
We explained that it didnt work that way and that tomato plants just die when it gets cold and then you plant new ones next year.
For some reason, I wanted to save all the green tomatoes. We have already made corn and green tomato fritters twice and the remains of the last batch just went bad in the fridge.
When we took out the tomato plants, Tommy lopped off each long stem and I picked through them to harvest.
We ended up with two full colanders of green orbs, far too much to manage.
I imagine recipes for green tomatoes come from poor people in colder climates. They saw all that good fruit out in the yard and didnt want to have it go to waste. Why throw away perfectly good food when it must be good for something?
Thanks to the Internet, I tracked down a few more recipes that require a lot of green tomatoes.
