Mona Karel Author

Bet that last word caught your eye. It would certainly catch mine since there never seems to be enough money left at the end of the month. For a number of reasons, I mostly cook for myself, and I refuse to succumb to Easy, Cheap, and Processed.

One store bought chicken carcass, frozen; one home baked carcass, frozen

I will buy those rotisserie chickens. Love them hot, love them added to other meals, but after awhile I have chicken left when I don’t much want to see it for a while. At this point I stuff it in the freezer. I do the same with any chicken I roast myself. Once I have three or four, I dig out my trusty large crock pot and stuff all those chickens in together. crock for a while on high. When you’ve sucked as much goodness out of those bones as you can, let it cool until you can take all the meat off the bones. Toss the bones, at this point there’s not much good left to get out of them. If you have dogs you might want to bundle them up in a bag and stuff them back into the refrigerator until trash day. Just in case.

At this point I start adding vegetables in huge quantities. Bok Choy, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Celery, Onions…if it’s in the refrigerator I add it in. Garlic too, of course as well as Parsley and any other herb that’s looking for a nice warm bath.

Cook a while longer. You might make the Low Carb Biscuits  I mentioned last month. Or you might have your own decadent biscuit or cornbread recipe. I like to make enough soup to freeze some for later and also share some with friends who don’t cook much. It’s all good.

And Cheap.

And Yummy.

Winter Sunset New Mexico

Kristen Lamb shared an article advising women over thirty what they should not wear. Naturally she received a satisfying overload of responses and she has now set up a Pinterest page for awesome after fifty. Hold on let me see if I can find it. HERE is the blog.  Kristen’s Pinterest won’t let me find what I’m looking for…AKA it’s too full of awesome stuff!

Then an online dog magazine ran a nifty article about Agility and why some people think they can’t do it Agility Excuses Most of which is just piffle but excuses are easy, doing is hard. I should

Fire Dragon and Me. He’s being good here!

know I started Agility with my non-standard breed, when I was 63 and over my optimum weight. We even entered the Saluki National six months later. Didn’t do too well but we were there. And why the heck not? No one has the right to tell us we can’t do something. I would hope self preservation would kick in if we decided to start hiking by scaling Mt Hood. But that would be our decision.

Same for writing, doggonit. So what if you’re older than dirt and not published. SO WHAT if

You don’t enter, you don’t win

you’ve been writing for forty years and never published? Have you submitted in the last couple of decades? If you don’t enter, you don’t win. This time I moaned and grumbled my way down to a show five hours away. I was at a mental low with my dogs and thinking it was a waste of time, money, and happiness. In a happy joining of luck, the judge, and a good dog, we had our first big win in, well, decades.

Then there’s the gentleman who started writing at 90. Yep, Ninety Years Old. And he’s published. And he’s still writing.

What about you?

Me, I’m rushing out the door in about two minutes to run Bouddicca around the Agility Drill. I’m a year older than when I started, not quite as fat but there’s padding to help if I trip and face plant.  I’ll let you know what happens.