Eggnog?

Yes, it’s that time of year again, when the debate rages around the yule log, merry and bright – is it spelled “eggnog” or “egg nog?” One word or two?

While you argue amongst yourselves, I thought I’d share my foolproof recipe for this traditional holiday beverage.

Ingredients:

6 large egg yolks

3/4 cup sugar

2 cups milk

2 whole cloves

Pinch cinnamon

1 cup heavy cream

1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg (lightly packed)

1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

4 egg whites

Your favorite bourbon whiskey

 

Instructions:

Gather together all the ingredients except the bourbon, and find a large saucepan. Throw all of the gathered ingredients into the trash and use the saucepan to defend yourself against anyone attempting to give you eggnog. Pour the bourbon over ice and enjoy with or without regular Coca-Cola. Your choice!

Eggnog, as the name explicitly states, contains eggs as a primary ingredient. You are not Rocky Balboa. Eggs are not a beverage. They are meant to be eaten with bacon and used to make cookies and cakes. They are basically snot until cooked, and therefore it should be obvious to anyone not to drink them.

Eggnog was invented long ago during a horrific drought and ensuing bourbon shortage, by some very poor, very uneducated peasants. It remains unclear if the dairy cows were underproducing due to the drought, or the peasants just got bored with the straight cows’ milk. What is perfectly clear is that these foolish people did something unspeakable – they added raw eggs to their milk.

When the drought was over and other people heard about what they had done, the egg-sucking peasants tried to save face by pretending it was a good idea and adding bourbon to make it a “festive” holiday drink. In reality, they were just trying to get drunk and forget they were drinking eggs.

We’re better than that. Let’s not perpetuate this horrible mistake onto another unsuspecting generation. Stop the madness. Keep your children safe.

Tell them to just say no to nogs of any kind.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Dirty Chicken Kissers

Want to reduce your chances of becoming just another statistic in the latest salmonella outbreak? There’s an easy solution, says the Centers for Disease Control. Stop kissing your chickens.

The headline “CDC Warning – Stop Kissing Chickens” landed in my news feed a few days ago, so naturally I dropped absolutely everything else I was doing and read the story. A Fox 10 News station somewhere in Arizona gave me the grim numbers.

Over the past 25 years, 13% of chicken-related salmonella cases were caused by people kissing their chickens. Over half admitted to snuggling with the baby chicks, and almost half admitted to keeping the chickens in the house.

Fantastic!

Arizona residents, in my head: “Oh, great! Not only do we have to stop kissing our chickens, but we have to stop snuggling them too? And give me a break. You mean to tell me that I’m supposed to keep my barnyard animals outside, instead of next to my bed? What kind of monster are you?”

Come on, people! While ‘Dirty Chicken Kissers’ would obviously be a great name for a rock band, it’s no way to live your life. Was it just Arizona? Are there other states where salmonella is decimating the chicken kissers? I must know! Off I go to the CDC website, where I learn... holy puckering poultry, Batman. There’s a nationwide epidemic of dirty chicken kissers! Arizona is the least of our worries. The biggest offenders are highly concentrated in the Great Lakes states and the upper north east.

Just a Smidge PSA:

Hey up there. It’s wicked bad to kiss your chickens, eh. And don’t let ‘em inside to sit on the davenport with ya, OK? Salmonella is wicked bad. Keep ‘em outside in the yaahd, eh.

That should take care of the problem, but just in case, the CDC did come up with a wicked good poster. It’s a yellow silhouette picture of a baby chick with the title “Don’t play chicken with your health. Wash your hands.” – I’m not making that up.

Inside the outline of the baby chick there’s a handy salmonella outbreak chart by year, showing the number of outbreaks caused by handling live poultry, with the outbreak indicators as cute fuzzy little baby chicks. Again, not making this up.

Our most dangerous chicken kissing year as a nation was 2012, with eight baby chicks stacked up on top of each other. Ranked second-worst was 2009, with six baby chicks stacked, and four chicks stacked on 2015 puts it in a five-way tie for third worst with four other years since 2000.

The poster shows us that 1992 through 1994 were the happy times. Zero stacked chicks for those years suggests that chicken kissing was apparently still frowned upon back then.

This unnerving spike in chicken kissing got me thinking. Why in the hell would anyone kiss a chicken? Also, I thought, this must be due to the seemingly recent increase in the amount of people who have converted the back 0.000344 acres of their suburban backyards into chicken farms.

I can only assume that this practice has something to do with ‘sustainability,’ or ‘homesteading,’ or getting ‘off the grid.’ I doubt too many people wake up and think, “You know what we should do? We should become commercial poultry producers! Wait, we live in town and own no land. Oh, well. Let’s throw a tiny coop and four chickens in the backyard for now, and we’ll expand into a multi-million-dollar operation when we can.”

The ‘sustainability’ aspect got me thinking some more. In this case I guess sustainable means someone will keep selling you chicken feed. But does having backyard chickens that you can kiss and snuggle and bring indoors make financial sense? What’s the national average price for a dozen eggs? How much does it cost to keep a kissable chicken alive and making eggs? Why in the hell would you let a chicken live inside your house? And where? In the kitchen? Living room? Chickens don’t even have lips as far as I know.

There was a lot going on in my head.

Because the internet is awesome, I was able to look up all the information I needed in my normal exhaustive two-minute Google research time allotment. Chickens definitely do not have lips. Also, I was able to find a website apparently dedicated to tracking the price of a dozen eggs on a nationwide scale. That beat my prediction of “there’s no way anyone has a website that tracks nationwide egg prices” by one hundred percent.

For simplicity’s sake, we’ll say that a dozen eggs will run you about two dollars right now, if you live in Anywheresville, USA. My public school math tells me that equates to seventeen cents per egg.

Purina Premium Poultry Feed costs fourteen dollars for fifty pounds. That would be twenty-eight cents a pound not counting tax. Yet another website reveals that an average laying hen eats about a quarter pound of feed a day. So your four chickens are downing twenty-eight cents worth of premium chicken feed every day.

Homesteading websites tell us that we can expect an average of one egg per day from each of our healthy, happy hens. If chicken feed were all we needed, we’d be money ahead with our flock, getting eggs for a mere seven cents each. A full ten cents cheaper than the store brand. I think we all know, after perusing the chicken feed store websites that mere chicken feed will not do it. Our hens need to be happy.

The thirty-ounce bag of Happy Hen Treats Mealworm Frenzy – I swear I’m not making that name up – costs twenty-five bucks. I don’t know how many mealworm treats it takes to keep my hens in a laying mood, but thirty ounces doesn’t seem like it would last that long. Especially if these mealworms are so good they cause a frenzy, as advertised.

So you have unspecified mealworm expenses, and let’s not forget the initial set up costs. Not the least of which is your Williams-Sonoma Cedar Chicken Coop with Planter that set you back fifteen hundred dollars – you heard me – or the designer chicken toys to keep them engaged and mentally stimulated.

Add in your inevitable ER visit for salmonella poisoning, and I think this chicken raising business is costing you about nine hundred dollars per egg, give or take.

I think I’ll stick with the eggs from the commercial poultry producer. He keeps the egg shelves at the store full for me, which I find very convenient, and when I don’t want eggs, I just don’t buy them. Try that with your flock.

He’s smart, too. You know what that commercial poultry producer never does? Kiss his damn chickens, that’s what.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Head Lice Nit Wit

Son Number One came home from third grade yesterday with the school district’s boilerplate Head Lice Notification in his backpack. Normally, we just scoff at the head lice notices and throw them away. We have never worried about lice because our kids don’t have enough hair to support them. We shear our children like sheep. Their hair is usually never longer than an eighth of an inch. As far as lice are concerned, our kids have the human head equivalent of the Sahara desert.

We have become lazy, however, and have not cut the boys’ hair in quite some time. Their hair is well over three eighths of an inch long at this point. Not exactly 80’s rock band length, but certainly enough coverage to support a louse. So this time, I actually read the letter. The first few sentences were entertaining.

There has been a case of head lice in your child’s class recently. Don’t panic! Head lice are common among school children and are a common source of frustration and DO NOT reflect health or house cleaning habits.   

Hmm… In this participant trophy society of ours, a notice about a parasitic infestation starts with, “Head lice aren’t a gross parasite that come from filth. They are just an everyday nuisance that come from nice clean homes like yours.”

Yeah, I don’t think so. While I will grant you that a kid from the cleanest home in the world can come home from school with head lice, I would challenge the idea that ground zero for a particular festival of lice was anything less than squalor. There’s a reason that de-lousing is one of the first things they do to the new inmates at the prison.

Reading on, I discovered that louse eggs are called “nits.” Is this where the term “nitwit” came from? No telling. (If only there were some sort of internet-based search site that could be used to research that question. Alas, no such luck.) Nits, the handy notice tells us, are not at all like dandruff.

Unlike dandruff, the nits or eggs will not easily flake off hair…

That’s a good point. Another important distinction between dandruff and nits that I can think of off the top of my head (get it?) is that the nits are BLOOD-SUCKING PARASITE EGGS!

The notice then goes on to give us tips on what to do if lice/nits are found.

Step number one: Clean everything. Hmm... After applying the special lice shampoo that probably smells like a mix of gasoline and Wild Turkey, and carefully removing the nits with the special metal comb, you are instructed to:

Wash clothes

Wash bedding

Vacuum carpet, furniture, and car seats

Wait a second... You started this friendly notification letter by telling me there is no connection between lice and home/personal cleanliness, and now you’re telling me to clean everything? We may not be controlling our parasite infestations very well, but at least we all have high self-esteem. Here’s your trophy for showing up to the game, kid.

Then the notice stopped being subtly humorous and just came right out with the laughs.

If you find lice or nits please notify everyone who your child has been in contact with.

Hmm… Everyone? Luckily, we are lice-free, but had I actually found any, that notification process would have been a little tricky. Just in the last week we’ve been to the school, the store, the ball fields, the church, the park, the other store, the restaurant, the gas station, the other restaurant, the other store, and the city-wide fun run. If you were at one of those places then you were in contact with Son Number Three, the kindergartner, at some point. He’s like the Tasmanian Devil, whirling from place to place in a shouting cloud of dust. Consider yourselves notified, North America.

After reading the helpful notice, along with having higher self-esteem, I also experienced a renewed sense of work ethic. While I am sure that laziness is not a common trait among lice-breeding households, and therefore I DO NOT need to feel guilty in any way, I have decided to get off my duff and cut the boys’ hair anyway.

Luckily we don’t have any lice to deal with, but I liked it better when I didn’t even have to read the notices.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!