What are you up to this Easter?

Anything that's named scrapple or kishka would need an acquired taste, Chai....and a really good stomach lining too!

How come all the fun & dancing & stuff happens when I've gone to bed?

Nothing like a polka to put a spring in your step, I always say!

Turkey doesnt make scrapple, it would make carp bait .
SCrapple must have a substantial fatty meat like pork or beef. (Pork is preferred) .Some of the lard is used along with all the ground meat , added meal (add corn meal and buckwheat and oat meal) lard, and all the secret spices (much pepper is needed as well as the coriander, sage, etc etc.

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We had a great time pigging out on the
KIshka (I had a small bit) kie;basi (I had a lot) Cabanyozcis (Like eukie "slim jims" , KRAKOSKA sammiches, and a nice veal chop sit down dinner with asparagus and a salad of wilted greens and dandelion with a sweet bacon and vinegar dressing (thick)
For dessert was a batch of blinnyes(SP?) with sour creme fresh and sugar. . SOme left over Jewish traditions included the apple sauce for dipping kruscykis and a very , very hard vodka and ale punch. It really was a killer but I only tasted it.

There were some pickled pigs feet in a sour creme , vinegar, and hot pepper sauce.
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It will probably be several hours before I can safely lie suppine

course there was (always is) a huge bone in butt ham cooked with a sweet glaze and tons of cloves corms. The ham was divvied up and we got a huge pile of slices and some really great sweet yeasty bread. (The ham on the bread with some fresh ground horseradish will be sammiches for the week)

Its good to dig up your roots occasionally. Too bad the kids couldnt be there(so I ate my boys share)

You just don't see hams these days--most of the time, it's "cooked ham" with water added. Real, honest to god we cut this off the hog like this ham seems to be largely a thing of the past.

Sounds delicious, farmer! Yum.
Especially the pickled pigs feet (I'm serious) & kruscykis (my mother used to make them) & the various sausages & ....
But I felt like I'd put on a kilo, just reading .....
Such lot of food!
Was it good catching up with long-lost relatives & friends, too?

yeh it was pretty cool. I have two cousins who are priests and four who are lawyers. I actually saw a business card being passed. Everyone from the remaining earlier generation is in their 80s and doesnt get all this "Spacebook ****".

My one cousin, a research geneticist at a major NY teaching hospital is doing some really neat work and he and I were off in a corner for a whie.

We couldnt hang out long because we have 4 baby ;ambs to feed every four hours and our trip time ws over 2 hours each way so we were only there for like 6 hours total.
We did promise to keep in touch but outside of my one cousin (who I already am fairly tight with), the others have different lives and interests.
Families can be a blessing and a real pain in the ass. Next wee we are gonna visit Mrs F's ist order clade. SHe has 2 sisters and a real asshole brother, who I think I will probably punch out in the forst hour of our get-together.
Everyone else, husbands(of which I am one BIL short due to his death last year), kids , are mostly cool and lotsa fun. My wife even has two uncles and an aunt still playing golf at ages like 82 to 88

Theres still lots of locally produced farm hams in the east coast, especially PA, Del and NJ and Va.
Va hams are not my favorite because its such a bitch getting the salt our of em

Yeah, tell me something!
Still, by the sounds of it, farmer, it there were more of the good than the bad & the ugly in attendance!
It seems amazing to me that there are so many of you! (I have only one aunt & some cousins here. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing ...)
And relatives in their 80s! I can't imagine that.
Still, 6 hours of it was probably about right, yes?

may have been 5+ between food and yelling and hugging, not much rel communication.
Yeh, relatives on the 80's are to be handled like glass champagne tulips, fragile and brittle.

I know Im going to be listening to golf stories and its a game I particularly have no use for. Its a grand waste of space and time.
Now I got myself all pissed off. THANKS for bringing up my relatives!!

I think that the popularity of real hams has lessened since i was a kid because you don't want to roast a ham unless you're gonna have six, eight people for dinner. You don't see whole hams in the supermarket the way you did 40 or 50 years ago. People don't necessarily cook big dinners every day the way they once did.

Ha.
My pleasure!

Go pat one of those beautiful new lambs & you'll feel much better!

maybe not in Toronto but hams (Big mufos) are avalibale like turkeys. REally GOOD hams are all available at ocal butcher shops (which still exist in healthy numbers on cities and rural areas where stuff like fresh ,eats are a tradition) Remember, we have raw milk plants and country abbatoirs all over SE Pa. People demand em especially at holidays demand it and even the VA hams have a substantial following. Them I really hate

Mrs F takes 10:30 and 2:30 , Ive got 6:30 and she takes the rest of the day shift cause I go fishing tomorrow. catch big fish, feed many braves.

You have to acknowledge, though, that most folks don't live in such an area, and to see whole hams in the supermarket is very uncommon in urban areas. In the Columbus, Ohio, area, i only ever saw hams in the supermarket at Easter. That wasn't to say you couldn't get 'em, just that they weren't common.

Sounds good to me!
Spring time!
Enjoy your fishing & do report back on what you caught.
Enjoy the new lambs too.

Up early, since we'll drive to the Archaeological Park (archaeological open air museum) in Colonia Ulpia Traiana (aka Xanten) with our vistors shortly. (Hopeful, it isn't too crowded and there'll be no traffic jam when driving back and all the cars return from Holland at the same time.)
Waiting now for the bakery to open to get some rolls ...

I wonder whether if there is some pent up demand for realy good hams out there in fly over country?

We could get em and air drop them on Topeka

I'd suspect those folks have no lack of hams--their situation would be like yours. It's urban areas where hams have disappeared from the supermarkets.

In Toronto, you don't see many hams because they're not kosher and they're not halal. In addition to the Jews and Muslims, you've got a lot of south Asians who ain't eatin' no meat at all. In the China towns, you probably don't want to know what constitutes the pork dish yer eatin' . . .

I think that's probably still true. Easter and Christmas they appear, but they're not always there the rest of the time.

Our Easter was pretty low-key. No big meal (we had pasta for dinner). Sozlet had a big Easter basket decorated with fresh lilacs (I don't believe lilacs have ever been in bloom on Easter day before), and more "mature" stuff than usual (less candy and stuffed animals, more jewelry and art supplies, the watercolor pencils were a big hit) (though a bunny-shaped box of Ferrero Rocher candies were included).

She and a friend connected and went biking hither and yon, came back for an Easter egg hunt I'd offered earlier. I had to get it together within about 20 minutes, I had the eggs but wasn't sure what to put in them. (The only candy in the house was sozlet's stash and I knew she wouldn't be happy if I in effect handed over half of it.)

Ended up putting dollar bills (5), quarters, pennies, and beads in two dozen eggs hidden inside and out. The girls had fun.

And that was about it!