how to make Bush Depression pancakes…

today’s survival lesson involves an inexpensive breakfast that gives liberal independents the weekly nutritional boost needed to combat far right wing extremist republicans intent on derailing change in america….

keep in mind that bears are not detail oriented so quantities of each ingredient are somewhat fuzzy….

1. couple of cups or so of krusteaz whole wheat instant pancake mix
2. cup or so of quaker oat meal (not instant)
3. lots of cinnamon
4. capful or so of Jack Daniels
5. lots of raisins

mix it all up and add water until it is the consistency of pancake you desire- thick like milk shake for big fluffy cakes…less thick like tomato soup for thinner crepe style pancakes…

fry as you like them in bacon grease…

when you flip the pancakes over be sure and coat the top with small pat of butter as the bottom cooks to allow the butter to soak in…

cover with favorite jams, syrups fruit etc and then enjoy them…

serves 6 or so…but if you are like us you can freeze the excess to pop in toaster through the week for quick get up and go after them energy…

happy times and do come back for more tips from time to time…PB

why use a helicopter???

let’s give George W and Dick a ride home they won’t forget…..

ralph the logger…

ralph the logger and i met while fishing the blackfoot river one sunny march day many years ago. had to haul him out of Harold’s Club many nights after he had imbibed because he was bothering the regulars and trying to pick up women who were attached to men who did not approve.

when he wasn’t logging, he stayed in a trailer out back and drew cartoons. he was constantly borrowing my Larson books. loved the caveman named thag and began to call himself thag in the third person; thag like this. thag not like that…ralph was good company but not much on rent paying responsibility so we had to part ways…

last i heard his car drove into a tree one late night near the Bull River Bar and he lost the use of his legs with a spinal cord injury over 15 years ago. i sometimes wonder if he still draws cartoons or calls himself thag. if anyone knows where he is i still have the jacket his veteran sister sent to him from korea in my attic…

pure hell adventure #2

it would take about 9 minutes and 27 seconds for a soviet built nuclear missile to launch from tehran and hit tel aviv, thus triggering the beginning of armageddon….i wouldn’t put off doing anything you have always wanted to do if i were you.

all the animals want something to eat…i just want to eat more than most of them…

and tonight this animal just wants cinnamon rolls…

maybe the diet i am on is making me delerious, but visions of cinnamon rolls and true danish pastries from my favorite bakeries are on my mind these days- and i have a question pertaining to the place where i live. don’t get me wrong, missoula has some fine hippy and yuppie bakeries among the best are le Petite Outre and Bernice’s, but they are not the traditional danish bakeries i grew up around. other than the sad substitute of a supermarket bakery- Missoula does not seem to have a traditional danish bakery. this seems strange for a town of this size to be bereft of the flaky epicurean delights of scandinavian culture.

one of this bear’s first memories at age 5 was the smell of cinnamon wafting from the back of a bakery delivery truck in Medford Oregon as a man dressed in white (yes- i am quite middle-aged) pulled still warm cinnamon rolls from a huge rack of shelves stuffed with seemingly endless arrays of pastry. it looked like heaven to a small black bear cub as the man dressed all in white swung the double doors open and exposed the epicenter of the caloric black hole- it instantly sucked me in. i swiveled toward his every movement with my nose positioned like the magnetic north of a compass to suck in the most concentrated mass of cinnamon molecules i had ever inhaled. the deliveryman ignored me as he swept past to our neighbor’s house. some money was exchanged and the screen door slapped a loud rebuff to my begging whine. it may have been the first time  i ever seriously considered breaking and entering. i was too young to know the name of that bakery but that truck will forever be the conveyance of my soul to heaven whenever i finally offer this bedraggled and outsized bear body to the local rendering plant.

later, our family moved to Beaverton Oregon where a true danish bakery has been operating non stop since 1925. The Beaverton Bakery fulfilled all my pastry cravings from 5 to the age of 20 when i moved to Eugene to sample the delights of college life which never included pastries of any kind although i did enjoy mama’s home fried truck stop for eggs and hashbrowns- of course during the college years my cravings did not allow me to eat much. seemed to subsist mostly on mother earth corn chips and baskin-robbins chocolate almond fudge….accompanied by lots of beer from maxwell’s and the mill race tavern and the black forest ….

i have sampled many fine danish style bakeries accross the pacific northwest among the notable was cannon beach bakery home of the haystack bread.  but none would ever come close to the memory of the nameless truck delivering pastry door to door in Medford Oregon…..

now that my legs are straining like a 5000 lb toyota forklift to hoist  my mass out of chairs it is time to lighten the load so my pastry days are over for now…must get solace from a wad of green lettuce and a 6 ounce steak…and the noncaloric memories of my pastry devouring youth, which have accumulated prodigious girth in the past ten years….

during a recent visit to a clinic the doctor was diplomatic but obviously concerned about the speciman she was inspecting…i offered that there was a team of experts working on the problem day and night as to how i could have allowed my waist size to approximate the entire circumference of a pair of pants once nailed to the wall (for the amusement of the clientele )above the door of the wigwam sporting goods store i frequented as a kid or perhaps they were displayed simply as a curiosity to people who could not comprehend a corpse so large as to require that much cloth to envelop them… but now i believe the riddle has been solved – i am not particularly big boned nor am i absorbing calories from the montana air… turns out i ate too much.

and as to why Missoula doesn’t have a true traditional danish bakery it may be a moot point and a fortuitous fact that there is no danish bakery nearby…i can’t have any for a long time now…

Obama in Montana

my great grandfather Johnnie O’Sullivan had a peg leg

and piloted the St Lawrence for Alcoa Aluminum in 1903

when the ice trapped his barge

and the Iroquois moose hunters saved him

and brought him to their village to recuperate

 

after two months, everyone in Colosse gave him up for dead

but Johnnie showed up on Easter Sunday at the back porch

to surprise my great grandmother Rosalie as she was leaving for church.

 

the nation electing Obama President feels like that.

funniest pics, blogs, quotes etc of ’08

happy new year!  enjoy the picks here!