Free TV 101 - Part I

By Ward

Who would have thought in 1960 that we would be paying for TV? What have we come to? I won’t even talk about satellite radio. In 1960 your local TV station sold antennas for about $15. You mounted them on the same pole and pointed them in two different directions to receive three or four different channels. Everyone was happy and life was a lot simpler. Today, you can subscribe to cable or satellite and receive several hundred channels for hundreds of dollars each month. What happened to free TV? Nothing --- it’s still there alive a well. When was the last time you looked?

Part 2 to come Tuesday . . .

Brasa Brazilian Steakhouse

Our anniversary dinner. First you do the hot/cold buffet. Stuff like salad, jumbo shrimp, rice and beans, chocolate drizzled strawberries . . .














Then they come around with something like 12 different kinds of meats on spears and cut off a piece for you. Pictured is not meat, but pineapple cores coated with sugar and cinnamon then blasted with a blow torch. Yummy.


Our waiter really wasn't a pupiless zombie, it's just a poor cell phone pic.

Sunday's storm

A "bowed" cell came through, with strong winds that bought down trees and power lines. I could never quite get a shot of our tree in a really good windblown position.

Beet greens for supper

I've never cooked beet greens before, and probably never would now except that I got a bunch of them in my CSA (community supported agriculture) box yesterday. Below are beet greens on the left, baby bok choy in the middle, and a humongous head of lettuce on the right. On the plate below, I've started to separate the leaves from the stems because the stems take longer to cook.

By the way, when I picked up the box yesterday, I had to ask why we were only getting beet greens. What happened to the beets? Well, these greens get pulled to thin out the beet patch. The beets are there, but they're tiny.

(Beet posing with spice bottle for perspective. Sorry about the blurry cell phone pic.)

The recipe included sauteed scallions and garlic (which also came from the CSA), then water and chopped beet greens. And it was MARVELOUS! Tasted somewhat like cabbage, but milder, and it picked up the flavors it was cooked with (onion, garlic and OIL). But a bunch (actually, 1/2 bunch) of beet green cooks down to about 1/4 of a bowlful.

(Beets posing with tea kettle for perspective.)

Yup, oily and good.


Oh yeah, last week Ward got a tick from the CSA box. This week he held it at arm's length and put it in the trunk.