Best Pumpkin Bread

BEST PUMPKIN BREAD, JERRY CLOWER‘S STORY OF THE COON HUNTIN’ MONKEY, TRIVIA + FASCINATING FACTS

Wednesday’s greeting us with a wink and a smile.

I’m winking and smiling back!
And loving the change of seasons.  I’m always ready for a cthange of season, and breaking out my change in wardrobe from the closet.  Hello favorite sweater or hoodie I haven’t seen since last fall/winter.

Hard to believe we’ve already hit the half way mark of October.  But ’tis true!

Presenting Wednesday’s Reader for a little fun in the Autumn sun enjoyment.

BEGINNING WITH:

  • SPELLBINDING WITCHY ARTWORK

  • LESLIE ELMAN’S FASCINATING FACTS

    I got 1 out of 2 of the Pop Quiz answers correct.
    And who knew cockroaches went into space?  And the backstory about Puerto Rico?  And Gadzooks!?
    I’ve never used the word Gadzooks or heard anyone say it — but I fully intend to put Gadzooks into my daily vocabulary just for fun!

  • QUICK QUESTION

    What’s the first thing I notice about someone after first meeting them?
    Smile + eye contact + genuine good vibe  (ya know it when ya feel it)
    You?

  • JERRY CLOWER

    Story about the coon huntin’ monkey is totally a believe it or not read!
    Loved it.

  • BEST EVER PUMPKIN BREAD RECIPE

    Is totally BEST EVER!
    So incredibly good + easy = winner of breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snack attack homemade greatness.

  • TRACY BECKERMAN

    Never disappoints and this column piece about napping is thumbs up!

  • THIS FRIDAY (!)

    Stacy’s World
    This Friday is Flair at the Fair.
    I was there and Stac and I are writing a dual piece from the afternoon Fair experience.
    Don’t wanna miss it.
    A lot of cool people, food, take aways from our day.

  • GRATITUDE DAYMAKER FRIENDS

    For popping in this half-way through October Wednesday + sharing + supporting + engaging!

WISHING YOU A GREAT WEEK!

Catch ya Friday
Same time
Same place

Organ Donor

POP QUIZ

  1. THE FIRST LINE OF A POEM BY EMILY DICKINSON SAYS “HOPE IS THE THING WITH …”
    a) Diamonds
    b) Feathers
    c) Flowers
    d) Golden wings
  2. SQUIRT AND TING ARE SODAS WITH WHAT FRUIT FLAVOR?
    a) Grapefruit
    b) Lemon
    c) Mango
    d) Papaya
  3. WHICH OF THESE WAS DEVELOPED IN FRANCE IN 1869 AS A LOW-COST FOOD ITEM FOR MILITARY PERSONNEL?
    a) Instant cocoa
    b) Margarine
    c) Pretzels
    d) White chocolate
Jerry Clower Story

QUICK QUESTION

WHAT’S THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE
ABOUT SOMEONE AFTER FIRST MEETING THEM?

Fascinating Facts

POP QUIZ ANSWERS

  1. The first line of a poem by Emily Dickinson says, “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul.”
  2. Squirt and Ting are grapefruit-flavored sodas.
  3. Margarine was developed in France in 1869 as a low-cost food item for military personnel.

~ COPYRIGHT 2024 LESLIE ELMAN
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

THE COON HUNTIN’ MONKEY
BY JERRY CLOWER

When I was growing up, word got out that the best coon hunter in the world was a fellow that lived at East McComb, Mississippi.  We done sent him word by the mail rider, “There ain’t no coon dog in the world good as Highball.  Don’t you ever say or tell anybody that there is.  We don’t believe it none.”

Well, we got us up a little contest.  They said, “Yeah, this fellow’ll catch more coons on a night’s hunt than y’all will.”

He come driving up in his pickup truck to East Fork School — that’s where we met.  The fellow let the end gate down on one of them pickups and, there in a cage sitting up in the back of that pickup was a big brown monkey.

Marcel said, “Oh, don’t let that thing out.  He looks too much like folks to be getting out of there.  You leave him up in that pickup truck.”

The fellow said, “Y’all don’t understand.  I use a dog with the monkey.  I just want one good tree dog, and I’ll show you how to catch more raccoons.  Hides are expensive, and I make a good living with that monkey coon huntin’.”

Marcel said, “I ain’t taking my dog with that trashy thing.”

Clovis said, “I’ll take old June and we’ll go.”

So, all of us followed and old June hadn’t gone very far and she treed.  Now any coon hunter will know that sometimes a raccoon will get up in a tree, go out on a limb and jump into another tree, and come down way out yonder.  That’s the art of being a good coon dog; you circle around and make sure he ain’t capped the tree.  He’s up there if you say he’s up there!

Well, old June treed.  They turned that monkey loose, and people he had a flashlight in his left hand a a pistol in his right hand, and up that tree he went.  Boogada, booga, right up that tree.  Went all over the tree shining that light with the gun in his hand, looking everywhere, out on each limb, shining, shining.  What he would do, he would find the coon and shoot him and the coon would fall out.

Well, he didn’t find no coon.  Down the tree he come, thumbcocked that pistol, put it up to old June’s head, Clovis’s dog, and said Boom! just killed him graveyard dead right there.

Clovis said, “Man, what in the world do you mean?  That trashy thing has killed my dog.”

And the fellow what owned the monkey said, “Clovis, there ain’t but one thing that monkey hates worse than a raccoon, and that’s a lying coon dog.”

copyright 1992 JERRY CLOWER
STORIES FROM HOME
reprinted with permission UNIVERSITY PRESS MISSISSIPPI

THE WEATHER JUST WENT FROM
99 TO 55 LIKE IT SAW A STATE TROOPER

SATISFACTION
GUARANTEED:

NEVER FORGET WHO YOU ARE
OR WHERE YOU CAME FROM.

RIDDLE ME THIS

WHAT HAS A HEAD AND
A TAIL BUT NO BODY?

Jerry Clower

BEST EVER PUMPKIN BREAD

I cannot begin to count how many times I have made this wonderful, delicious bread — both at home and Hippie Cowboy.  It’s so simple to make and even more simple to eat!  This classic moist pumpkin bread is spiced with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves.  This bread improves with age, so plan to make it a day ahead if possible.

HERE’S HOW TO MAKE IT
INGREDIENTS:

  • 1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 cup vegetable oil
  • 2/3 cup water
  • 3 cups white sugar
  • 3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp ground nutmeg
  • 1/2 tsp ground cloves
  • 1/4 tsp ground ginger

DIRECTIONS:

  1. Preheat oven to 350*
  2. Grease and flour three 7″ x 3″ loaf pans.
  3. In a large bowl mix together pumpkin puree, eggs, oil, water and sugar until well blended.
  4. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger.
  5. Stir the dry ingredients into the pumpkin mixture until just blended.
  6. Pour into prepared pans.
  7. Bake for about 50 minutes in preheated oven.
  8. Loaves are done when a toothpick or knife inserted comes out clean.
  9. Remove from oven and let cool about 20 minutes.
  10. Flip pans over and release loaf from pans.

STORE:

In plastic zipper bags.

~ Hippie Cowboy recipe box

RIDDLE ANSWER

A COIN

Monkey

LOST IN SUBURBIA

WHEN NAPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
BY TRACY BECKERMAN

“When’s dinner?”  my husband asked me when he got home as I stood in the kitchen stirring a sauce.

“Pretty soon,” I replied.

“Do you mind if I close my eyes for a minute?”  he requested , putting down his bag and and taking off his jacket.

I nodded.  When most people say they’re going to close their eyes for a minute, they actually mean more like 20 minutes or half an hour.  But my husband, the King of Naps, he actually means a minute.

Most husbands have some special talent that they bring to their marriage.  Some are handy around the house.  Some are great with the grill.  My husband has a unique skill.  He can choose to fall asleep anywhere, at any time, and wake up feeling completely refreshed.  He loves his naps, even the minute-long ones, and for this reason we call him Sir Napsalot.

He actually has a whole menu of naps to choose from.  When he just needs a quick nap, he does a Five-Minute Facedown.  A slightly longer nap gets him a 10-Minute Snoozer.  In the car on a long drive — when he’s not the one driving, of course — he will often take a Passenger Power Nap.  For this nap he has to get the angle of the seat just right or he will alternate between head bobs and snorts, either of which will interfere with the positivity of the nap experience.  At home, before dinner, he might have a quick Snores D’oeuvre, whereas a snooze on the couch before bed would be his Nappetizer.

He has excelled at finding unusual places to grab a quick nap.  He has napped standing up in an elevator on a ride up to a high floor, and once he stood in full ski gear and napped in a gondola on the way up a mountain.

He did not nap skiing on the way down.

He naps on his work commute, both ways, whether it be by train or ferry.  He seems to know on a subconscious level when it is time to wake up so he doesn’t end up missing his stop, and only once did he end up at the end of the line in an empty train car.

Unlike my husband, I only nap in one of two places:  on the couch or on the bed.  And I don’t feel rested unless I nap for an hour.  He believes you have to keep your nap under an hour or else you wake up more tired than before you went to sleep, and it will interrupt your sleep at night.  Science is actually on his side, but I’m not sure what scientists would say about the total of a series of short naps and Nappetizers in a given day.  Since my husband seems to sleep just fine at night, it would seem he may be on to something.

Meanwhile, back at nap central, my husband chose to have a post-dinner Five-Minute Facedown rather than a Snores D’oeuvre before we ate.

“So, is there any of that cake left from last night for dessert?”  he asked when he emerged from the bedroom to help me clean up.

“No,” I said.  “I ate the last piece.”

“You didn’t save me any?”  he asked sadly.

“Sorry,” I replied.  “You snooze, you lose.”

~ Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, “Barking at the Moon:  A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble.”
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

Fascinating Stuff

  • The first terrestrial creature to mate and conceive offspring in space was a cockroach named Nadezhda (Russian for “Hope”) who traveled into space on the Russian satellite Foton-M in September 2007.  After 12 days in orbit, she returned to Earth and gave birth to 33 baby cockroaches.  Less than a year later, those babies had healthy offspring of their own.
  • The United States wanted Puerto Rico so much that it took the island by force.  In July 1898, during the Spanish-American War, 18,000 troops invaded Puerto Rico — then a Spanish territory — and occupied it until Spain agreed to give it up.  On October 18, 1898, Puerto Rico officially became part of the United States.  Nearly 20 years later, in March 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act, granting the people of Puerto Rico U.S. citizenship.
  • Gadzooks!  Language is chock-full of minced oaths.  Those are the words and phrases we use in polite company to substitute for “curse words” or profanity.  While the definition of a minced oath can include all sorts of swear substitutes, it has traditionally applied to euphemisms for words and names with religious connotations.  Shakespeare and his contemporaries used words such as “zounds” and “gadzooks” to avoid taking the name of the Lord in vain.
  • The unusual marine creatures called sea squirts nourish themselves by filter feeding:  sucking in water through a body opening called a siphon, straining the plankton and other edibles from the water and then expelling the water through a second siphon.  When they’re young, they swim around looking for a rock to call home.  When they find one, they latch on and begin to absorb their own internal organs, turning themselves into beautiful, passive, literally brainless creatures.
  • When it was introduced in 1911, Crisco brand vegetable shortening was made from crystallized cottonseed oil  (The name Crisco comes from the first syllables of crystallized cottonseed.)  Promising flakier pie crusts and an economical alternative to lard and butter, Crisco’s early marketing plan included a free cookbook containing 615 recipes, including something called a “Lettuce Cocktail” with a Crisco-based salad dressing.  Customers ate it up.  In 1914, American households consumed about 60 million pounds of Crisco.

~ COPYRIGHT 2024 LESLIE ELMAN
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

Bread
4 replies
  2. Carol says:

    Love the Halloween artwork! The pumpkin bread recipe arrived in tandem with cooler temps – baking weather! I can almost smell the bread now. . . . . .

    Clower, Beckerman, Elman – all the regulars – spot on, as usual!

    Can’t wait until Friday!!!

  3. Marty says:

    Re: Crisco. We all grew up with our mother’s cooking with Crisco. Remember the flavor of those great foods cooked with Crisco? Pie crust, fried chicken, cookies, cakes and yeast rolls.

    Interesting, health critics like to hang high cholesterol numbers onto shortening.

    However, our family of 8 to this day has never had a cholesterol problem! I remember my Dad having a physical about the time he retired and they couldn’t believe his cholesterol was around 100!. Mom didn’t need packaged food with additives or preservatives.

    So how about the opposite: My dear friend, Marie, had cholesterol readings of 400 plus. The doctor assistants would call Marie with, “Oh, Mrs. Franz, your cholesterol is over 400, you must come in to see the doctor, and always adding hints of it will kill you. Marie would ignore it with a little giggle knowing that was the way her body operated. Well, stop to think of it, it did kill her. She died in her late 90’s.

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