Lauren Reagan

I love a good milk shake and have found a great one at the local Sheetz gas station here in town. They are only $2.29 and they have a good variety of flavors to offer. I usually end up with a plain vanilla one but once in a while I’ll get a strawberry one, but I stay away from the chocolate ones. If I want chocolate I’ll buy a chocolate candy bar to enjoy. Chick Fillet also has good milk shakes but they are a bit more costly, so Sheetz is the place to go for me right now.

How cool – I remember listening to this song at this bar that I used to hang out at once in a while back in the day and I just found it on YouTube.com. The floor was covered with saw dust and discarded peanut shells. This song would come on and all hell would break loose, people would be banging on the tables like all get out to the beat of the song. Good times were had by all!

I usually don’t get to eat a nice big breakfast each morning. It is usually on the weekends that I get to take the time to cook up some bacon or sausage and some eggs. Making pancakes or french toast is a nice treat, so I’ve decided to make pancakes and sausage for dinner tonight. A nice change of pace, it’s all good.

My sister finally sent me the recipe for the corn fritters that we grew up eating and enjoying. I haven’t had them in so long and had a craving but didn’t have the recipe handy. Thanks Sis, you are the best!

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

3 large eggs — separated

1/4 cup milk

2 teaspoons salad oil or butter

1 can corn — drained

 Mix flour, baking powder and salt, set aside. In separate medium sized mixing metal or glass bowl (NOT PLASTIC), whip egg whites until stiff. In large mixing bowl, beat egg yolks and stir in the milk, corn. Add flour mixture. Fold in whipped egg whites gently.

 Melt butter in frying pan, or heat up oil. Drop fritter mixture by tablespoons into hot butter/oil and fry approximately 5 minutes, turning once.

 Serve with butter.

Next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s:

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery………if you had to do this to survive you were ‘Piss Poor’ But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot………. they ‘didn’t have a pot to piss in’ and were the lowest of the low.

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June. However, since they were starting to smell . .. . Brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water!’

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’.

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, ‘Dirt poor’. The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: ‘thresh hold’.

(Getting quite an education, aren’t you?)

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme:

Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, ‘bring home the bacon’. They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and ‘chew the fat’.

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the ‘upper crust’.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a ‘wake’.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people.. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the ‘graveyard shift’) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, ‘saved by the bell’ or was considered a ‘dead ringer’…

And that’s the truth…Now, whoever said History was boring ! ! !