One of my interests is cooking. I'm not good at it, but I do get lucky with a recipe once in a while, and Patty and I both love spicy food.

This morning I found some wild garlic growing along the fence row. It's hard to tell it from onions gone to seed, so I pulled a bulb and took a taste. My, that stuff was strong! Hotter than any Jalapeno pepper I ever tasted. Wow, it was hot.

So I pulled a few bulbs and hung them in the garage to dry, but I kept one (all I would need for a week) and started preparing barbecue.

Now when I prepare meat for barbecue I take a cheap cut of beef and beat it with a tenderizing hammer until it cries "Uncle!" then marinate it for about 24 hours. I figured to use that garlic in the marinade.

Also when I prepare meat for barbecue I have a lot of help. Generally there are small meat scraps flying, and Traveller, Willoughby, Sasha, and Maccabee are climbing all over one another to snare these airborne morsels. The competition gets pretty fierce, and I have yet to have to sweep or mop the floor after I get through. When I get out of the way they lick the floor clean. Spotless.

That meat was getting beaten within an inch of its life; the juice and scraps were flying and being caught and cats and dog and feet were getting royally trampled. Immediately I finished beating the meat I grabbed a clove of garlic, laid it on the board, and whacked it with that tenderizing hammer. OOPS. The hammer hit it a glancing blow and sent it sailing into the crowd. The fight was on.

Maccabee caught it first and gobbled it furiously, trying to get it down before the cats took it away from him.

Dogs can't spit; their lips don't work that way, but he was trying harder than any dog I'd ever seen to expectorate that fresh, hot, garlic clove. It finally dribbled out both sides of his mouth. Immediately, when the cats saw I had stopped pounding, everybody swarmed Mac trying to take his food away from him. They did.

Traveller turned and licked Willoughby's butt; Willoughby let out a screech you could hear plumb to Jericho and attacked Sasha. Sasha was busy gagging (cats can't spit any better than dogs), and Mac was running in place and howling like a fox hound on a hot trail. At least, I think that was him howling. Between the screeching and the yowling and the hisspitting and critters bouncing off the cabinets and running up the walls and down the walls and across the kitchen counter knocking everything off on the floor and all of them trying to get to the water dish at the same time, it got pretty lively there for a while.

Copyright © David Yehudah
May 22, 1999