Enjoying a limited menu, rabbit hunting and other foods

       I do a lot of the cooking in the Parker house.
       As hard as I try, I have a limited menu of foods to offer on a daily bases.
       One of my favorites is anything with taco meat. I’ve been known to serve a taco-based meal several times in one week.
       If not meat and cheese in taco shells, I sometimes make a taco Frito pie. It’s taco flavored beef with Fritos and cheddar cheese mixed together.
      Another of my favorites is taco meat, cheddar cheese and sour cream wrapped in a soft wheat tortilla. I roll it over on the plate and eat it with a fork.
     And then there is our old standby, taco casserole. It consists of crushed nacho cheese or taco flavored chips layered across the bottom of a butter-coated Pyrex dish. I then pour a mixture of taco meat with cream of chicken soup and spread it in the pan. I top that off with a layer of cheddar cheese, more crushed nacho cheese chips and another layer of cheddar cheese. I cook it uncovered in the oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
      A few weeks ago, I switched up the menu and made a meatloaf. It turned out much better than my first attempt at cooking a meatloaf when Debbie and I started dating.
      I invited her to my apartment for supper. I pulled the meatloaf out of the oven only to discover I had burnt the darn thing.
       We ate it anyway and all was good with the world.
       Other favorites include sausage casserole and beef goulash, booth cooked in the oven.
       Another meal I like to cook is placing hamburger patties in a Pyrex baking dish, adding salt and pepper to taste and pouring two cans of mushroom soup over the top. I cover it with tinfoil and cook it at 350 degrees for 45 minutes in the oven. To top it off, I add a vegetable or mashed potatoes.
      One of my favorite meals is pork chops. I love them grilled or fried. I coat them in milk and egg mixture and add flour. Back in the day I could eat a half dozen pork chops in one setting with mashed potatoes and black-eyed peas, a southern favorite.
     I enjoyed having friends over and cooking a meal of grilled pork chops, mashed potatoes and all the fixings. It was good food and good company.
      Tenderized pork loin chops cooked in mushroom sauce is another of my favorites. They also taste good coated in a crunchy coating. Toss in a heaping spoonful of mashed potatoes and it makes for a great meal.
I always enjoy grilling out and have cooked on both a gas grill and charcoal grill. Last summer, I purchased a Blackstone Grill.
       Using the Blackstone has taken some getting used to. I saw a demonstration of someone cooking sausage gravy on a Blackstone. I might have to try that sometime.
      Hasty Bake charcoal grills are an Oklahoma-based grill company. They are as rugged as a semitruck. My dad had one that he bought in the late 1950s. It included a rotisserie for cooking a chicken.
     When I was a young lad, we used to enjoy big family cookouts at our Tulsa home. I have lots of good memories of those days. 
       Anyway, I’ve never been a big fan of exotic foods outside of beef, chicken, pork and fish.
       I once tried goat meat chili and that was okay.
      Another time, my mom fried a rabbit. It was ok, but it didn’t make it into my weekly menu. And I’m not a big fan of deer meat.
      My good friend, Rob, in Tulsa and I went rabbit hunting in southeast Oklahoma one Thanksgiving weekend in the late 1980s.
     I had a single shot 410 shotgun and he had a 16 gauge. We shot a couple rabbits and Rob decided we should gut them. We didn’t have a knife, so I knocked on the fellow’s door that let us hunt in his timber. He gave us a knife and Rob proceeded to gut a rabbit while my stomach was turning from the smell. While all this was going on, I looked into the homeowners window and there he was enjoying a good Nebraska and OU football game.
      I said never again would I miss a Nebraska and OU football game so I could go rabbit hunting on a wet, dreary and cold day.
       It didn’t help that the rabbits we shot were filled with buckshot. I froze them and later had my mom boil them and gave them to the dog.
        I think a 22 rifle would have been a better gun to use.
       Another time, I was invited to join some newspaper folks and business leaders in the area to a turkey fry at Lake Ponderosa.
       Those old boys had an oil deep fryer and they were cooking turkey fries by the bucket loads. I bit into one and ended up spitting it out. Yuck!
      I asked the host if he had something different. He dug into the freezer and found me some brats and graciously fixed me a meal.
       One of favorite meals is beef chili cooked with no beans or tomatoes. To me, chili is a meat dish and not soup. A fellow once asked me what makes the juice. “Lard,” I told him.
        Have a great week and always remember that “Good Things are Happening,” every day.