Our son Mark returned home from college
to surprise us over the weekend.
What DIDN'T surprise me was...
he came home with this:
Sonny has been an explorer since he was a little boy.
He dug through and dissected every drawer and cabinet in our house by the time he was two.
At age three I found him in bed one morning with
ink all over his face and hands and sheets and carpet...
actually, ink footprints across the floor leading to his closet.
That's where I found the guts of a ball point pen.
He evidently, because there WAS evidence,
snapped off the tip of the pen to explore how it worked.
Ink splurted all over EVERYTHING.
After his curiosity was sated,
he hot-footed it back to bed.
When he was four, in that same closet,
under a stash of stinky socks,
I found the five rolls of film I had been searching for.
Seems Sonny was curious and pulled the undeveloped film out of ALL five canisters.
I could go on and on...but it all leads to
THIS:
My son messing up my kitchen with his latest experiment.
No wonder he's majoring in chemistry in college.
This time he brought an accomplice, his friend Tyler.
Sonny saw some guy on TV showing how to make beef jerky
and he HAD to try it.
The truth is, I ADORE this about my son and
he caught his curiosity from me.
Over the years, I helped him explore stuff like
the time we made our own crayons, our own soap, rock candy,
fruit leather, on and on....and last summer
Tyler and Mark made their own ginger ale.
"Can't you just buy this stuff already made?" Hubby asked.
You name it...we tried to make it!
It's just so darn fun.
So, of course, I had to photo document this
latest experiment.
The boys cut up the meat,
then mixed up a savory marinade.
Following the instructions that came with the food dehydrator,
they boiled the meat strips in the marinade.
They blotted the strips on a ton of my paper towels...
Then arranged the mini slabs on the dehydrator racks.
They turned on the machine
and hated the thought of waiting 4 to 8 hours
to dig their teeth into their OWN beef jerky.
Sonny announced he and Tyler were going out to meet friends.
"Uhh, it says here in the directions that you have to blot
the meat every hour," I read from the pamphlet.
"Mom, can you blot for us?" he said as he walked out the door.
Forget blotting...every fifteen minutes I was back
in the kitchen eating!
It was the best darn beef jerky I've ever tasted in my life.
I gave some to Hubby and he joined me
on the quarterly checks.
After just two hours...we had THIS:
PERFECTION!!
Sonny called to check on his babies.
"Honey, Dad and I have eaten most of your young," I admitted.
Sonny rushed home and was delighted his project was a success.
Heck, it was so successful,
we continued dehydrating.
The next day, we bought grapes.
I sat down to prepare an economic and strategic plan
for a dried foods business,
but nixed the idea when it took TEN hours to turn the
grapes into raisins.
They were the plumpest, juiciest most gorgeous
raisins I've ever seen!
"I think we could have bought several tons of raisins for what we paid in
electricity to dry those," Hubby said.
Hubby's birthday is tomorrow
and he wants me to make him a carrot cake.
How many wives would dry their own
raisins with such love and devotion for their
husband's birthday cake?
(Probably only sicko wives!)
Anyway, we can't stop dehydrating.
Sonny wants to try dried pineapple,
I want to dry the last tomatoes from our garden.
Let's hope our curiosity
