He Forgot the Poop Sac

Sinai hospital. 4 am. Thanks for the Lasix (sp?) doc. I'm peeing every 1/2 hour. And starving--having eaten practically nothing but liquids for two weeks. Surgery soon. Looking forward to it. Blog surfing. Find one about a year's worth of crock pot cooking. Reminds me of my own crockpot story. I'm about to incriminate myself. Promise you'll still love me.

About 1980. Larry brings home a cottontail and drops it, skinned and all, into the kitchen sink. The kids are little. Clayton hasn't been born yet. We gardened. We canned. We hunted. He shot it, I cooked it, and we ate it. Grass fed beef. Goat milk. Home grown corn, potatoes and tomatoes. A different life. But I digress. So I rinse the little bunny's body, drop it in the crock pot, cover it with potatoes, carrots and onions, add water, salt and pepper. Put on the lid. Turn on the heat.

The next night:
What's for dinner? (Now how did you know that was asked by a man?).
Rabbit and potatoes.
You mean...the rabbit I brought home last night?
Yeah.
But I didn't finish cleaning it.
What do you mean you didn't finish cleaning it? You always clean in the carport and bring me the finished--parts.
Well, I forgot the poop sac.

The poop sac. Little brown pebbly rabbit poop. Hmm. The crock pot is full! There's so much food in there! Good, healthy organic-before-we-knew-what-organic-meant food that we planted and nurtured and harvested. And luckily, the poop sac is on the very bottom. Once I turned on the heat, I never touched the food until the next night.

Fast forward 25 years. I'm telling my younger sister, Rachel, the story. She's laughing. She and Mike did the mountain-man-and-his-little-woman stint too, in Oregon. So she gets the self-sufficiency at all costs mentally. In fact, we used to talk about collaborating on a cookbook: How to Make Two Hot Dogs Feed a Family of Five. But I digress again. Back to the story:

Rachel: So did you throw it out?
No.
Did you eat it? Now she's laughing harder.
No.
Well if you didn't throw it out and you didn't eat it, what did you do with it?
I'm laughing now too, and barely able to squeak out the truth:
We fed it to the kids!
We laugh so hard that tears run down our faces.

Oh the things we confess as we age!! But in my defense--I scooped off the top just that one time--and the rest wasn't totally wasted. It went to the dogs.