Steve’s Popper Blog

The DIY bug bit me again this week. After making a Climashield top quilt for winter hangin’ I began thinking about making another top quilt for summer. I liked the fleece top quilt I made last year but it was a little warmer than I wanted and ended up being a bit too short. Didn’t work for me but my oldest daughter Ashley was thrilled to get it. Last fall I made Sew-Up Poncho Liner Under Quilts for my daughters and for Ashley’s boyfriend Jared for Christmas. I’d ordered some poncho liners off fleabay and when I received them I noticed they seemed quite thin. I thought that one might make a good summer top quilt so I kept that little tidbit of info stuck in the back of my brain.

A few weeks back Jared’s dad asked me if I’d make poncho liner under quilts for him and his other son Jonah. Naturally, I told him I’d be glad to and asked him if he’d order an extra for me. The poncho liners came in last week and by the time they arrived, I’d had a pretty good opportunity turn the idea of a poncho liner top quilt around in my brain several times and had pretty much figured out how I was going to make it.

Now I know there are easier ways to make a top quilt out of a poncho liner. In fact, it can be done with no cutting or sewing at all…but what fun is that?

Fortunately I’d saved the poster board top quilt template I put together when I made my winter top quilt so that saved me a big step. All I had to do to get started was spread out the poncho liner, tape the template to it and draw the outline with a Sharpie marker. Next I ran a line if stitching all the way around the the outline of the top quilts to ’stabilize’ the new edges of the ripstop and the insulation. I used white thread to make the edge easier to see when I cut it out.

Some of the quilting on the poncho liner was coming loose so I change over to the black thread I’d be using for the rest of the build and made some repairs.

Once the repairs were finished I cut the whole thing out.

I added grossgrain ribbon along the top edge and along the sides to cover the raw edges. I added channels of ripstop to the bottom 24 inches of the sides and along the bottom.

The ripstop channels served 3 purposes. 1) They covered the raw edges; 2) the channel along the bottom would receive a drawstring to allow me to cinch up the bottom, creating a foot box and 3) the channels along the sides would be sewn together to complete the foot box.

I was pretty pleased with the result.

As with any new piece of new DIY gear, I had to take it out this afternoon for a test drive…

I’m not sure why but that test drive lasted nearly two hours and I was accused of snoring. Hey, quality control is important right?

BTW, for those that are wondering - total cost was just over $20 for the poncho liner (including shipping), 4 yards of grossgrain and a new spool of polyester thread. I haven’t had a chance to weigh it yet…

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What a difference a week makes.  Make that ‘What a difference a week of 80-degree weather makes’…

Last weekend I couldn’t buy a fish on a topwater bug.  This week they were tearin’ it up.  No real story to tell this week…just catchin’ fish…

Eight or ten of these (this one was the smallest of the bunch)…

And 20 or so of these (this lake is stacked full of cookie-cutter bass that weigh between a pound and a half and two and a half pounds)…

Gotta do this again sometime soon…

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Do you even need to ask?

Seems like its been ages since I last slid my yak into the pond.  Thinking back its been at least five or six months.  Its been three months since I caught a fish for that matter.  Fortunately both are like riding a bicycle…you may not do it for a while…but you never forget how.

Yesterday was a beautiful March day and I was in serious need of some hydrotherapy.  Having not fished or paddled in a while it took a bit longer than I would have liked to get my gear rounded up and loaded into the truck and I still have no idea where my Tupperware container that I use for a ‘tackle box’ is.  Oh well, it’ll turn up sooner or later.

The pond was off color and quite full thanks to our recent rains and the water seemed a bit warmer than I expected.  Water conditions were great and it was a warm sunny day…so what more could one ask for?  How about no wind?  Or at least wind that blows constantly in one direction instead of two or three different directions seemingly at once.  Guess I shouldn’t grumble too much…it could be snowing.

Back in January I picked up a couple of Frog Hair fluorocarbon leaders and some Frog Hair tippet at the Great Southern Fishing Show in Atlanta.  Since I haven’t fished since last year, today was my first chance to give one a try a try.  All in all, I was pretty impressed.  The 9 ft 3x leader turned my bugs over quite nicely and I didn’t notice any significant abrasion after 3 or 4 fish and some pretty good rubs on subsurface limbs and stumps.

Willing fish were a bit scarce but I did manage a few, including my first fish of the year…

…and a couple of others that came out of the same mold as this one…

May not have been the best fishin’ day ever…but it sure beat doing yard work.  How many days till next weekend?

Filed under: flyfishing, largemouth bass | No Comments »

Thought I’d post a little update to my red beans and rice adventure from this past weekend…

Connie was out this evening taking Jenna to Marietta for an eye doctor appointment and then on up to Kennesaw to meet up with a good friend from YHC and her daughter.  With the girls out and about I was left to fend for myself for supper.  Fortunately for me, this is no big deal.

Since I have four gallon-size zip lock bags full of dehydrated red beans and rice and chili mac sitting on the counter, I figured it might be a good time to give one of the other a try.  Since my last blog post was about making the red beans, I thought it would be most appropriate to give it a taste test and post an update.

The weather outside wasn’t exactly optimal for boiling water on a little alcohol stove.  It wasn’t raining or cold but the wind was rippin’.  The idea that my little aluminum foil wind screen would do anything to even slow the wind down was laughable at best.  Sure, I could have boiled water on the stove inside…but where’s the fun in that?  However, I had an ace in the hole.  I could simply put the stove and cook pot inside my Big Green Egg, close the dome and the wind would be a non issue…

I grabbed my cook pot, stove, windscreen and fuel from my day pack and headed out onto the deck.  I filled the cook pot with water, put half an ounce of fuel in the stove, set the pot on top of the stove and fired that puppy up.

In the mean time I grabbed a bag of red beans and rice and a cozy…

The stove burned just under seven minutes and brought the water to a boil.  Then the boiling water was added to the red beans and rice and the bag was placed in the cozy to rehydrate for about half an hour.

Once rehydrated the the red beans and rice looked like this…

I added a little hot sauce (OK, Frank’s says ‘hot’ on the bottle but its warm at best.  Too bad my bottle of Crystal is at my office) and all in all, it was good eats.  Mighty good eats…

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“You wanna do what?!”

I’ve been hearing that and similar phrases since I was little.  I’ve heard it from my parents, friends and coworkers.  I’ve heard it from Connie Lou and even from my kids.  It seems that every now and then I get the itch to do something that just isn’t along the same line that most other folks think and do.  Now I’m not talking about doing anything really off the wall like naked bungee jumping or eating chicken fried fire ants, just something a little different. For instance, I was flyfishing long before ‘the movie’ came out and everyone wanted to be just like Brad Pitt.  But sure enough, I recall one day when one of my hardware chunkin’ classmates in school asked “Why do you wanna do that?”  I also remember telling another friend that I was planning to go to Young Harris College after high school.  Of course, that drew a ‘You wanna go where?!”  So I suppose it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise when I asked for a food dehydrator for my birthday last week to be able to dehydrate my own meals to take hiking or backpacking and Connie Lou said “You wanna do what?!”

Here’s the deal, I love the outdoors and I like to spend my spare time out fishing and hunting and hiking and camping and such and I like to eat well when I’m outside.  I wouldn’t call myself a ‘foodie’ but Connie Lou will tell you I’m not exactly bragging when I say I’m a pretty good camp cook.  Give me a propane stove, a couple of pots and frying pans and a Dutch oven or three I can make just about anything that can be made in the kitchen at home and more often than not I can do a better job of it.

You may remember in a few previous posts that I’ve been getting back into hiking and backpacking.  Eating out on the trail, whether its a day hike and we’re only carrying lunch or on a multi-day trip and carrying three meals a day, is vastly different than eating while car camping.  The weight of one’s food and cooking gear comes into play in a very big way.

Now coming up with a lightweight cook kit isn’t all that difficult and doesn’t have to be too expensive.  My basic cook kit weighs less than a pound with fuel and cost about twenty bucks to put together.

Food itself is a bit of a challenge just because food tends to weigh a lot for its size.  Freeze dried or dehydrated food helps solve this problem in a big way…when you take out the water you take out most of the weight.  There are quite a few brands of freeze dried and/or dehydrated foods available but nearly all have one thing in common…they lack flavor.  They just don’t taste as good as what you make at home at base camp.

Not too long ago, while reading various posts on HammockForums.net, I ran across a link to a website called ‘The  Hungry Hammock Hanger‘ by a guy who goes by Babelfish5 on the HammockForums.  B5, for short, has put together a series of videos containing recipes for trail foods with instructions for how to cook each recipe and how to dehydrate it yourself in a home food dehydrator and I just had to give it a try.  I’ve dehydrated fruits and made jerky in the past but I’ve never done recipes for meals.

Well, last week when my birthday came around I asked for a dehydrator and sure enough, when I woke up that morning and went downstairs there was a shiny new Nesco dehydrator waiting for me under the birthday tree.  What?  You don’t have a birthday tree?  You’ve never heard of a birthday tree?  Me neither, I just threw that in to make sure you’re still with me here.  Lets move on.

I watched most of B5’s videos over the past week and finally settled on red beans and rice to try first.  I’ve made red beans and rice a few times before so I knew I shouldn’t have any problems.  I chopped the veggies and sausage last night and got up early this morning to get it cooked and in the dehydrator before we headed off to church.

Cooking went off without a hitch…

By mid-morning the red beans were finished, the dehydrator trays were loaded and our house was smellin’ really good.

According to B5 the red beans and rice need to dehydrate for about 12 hours and since a fruit roll try was used, they should be flipped at the half way point to allow both sides to dry evenly.

After 12 hours were up the beans were dry and brittle and it was time to package the red beans up with some instant rice (yes, instant rice, get over it) and store it in the freezer to be eaten down the road.

So…by now I suspect you may be asking just what the heck do you do with the dehydrated stuff to be able to eat it?  Simple, you rehydrate it.  You just add water…boiling water.  Just put the dried food into a cook pot, add water, bring it to a boil.  Then put the pot into an insulated cozy for 25 to 30 minutes.  Once your food is rehydrated…dig in!!  The process is the same using freezer bag cooking methods (which I’m set up for).

Give it a try.  It sure beats Beanie Weenies, Vienna Sausages or sardines and crackers on the trail!

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Lachau Talofau, in the Creek language, means “Acorn Bluff” in English.  Its also the name of the plantation owned by Chief William McIntosh, Jr., which today is part of McIntosh Reserve.

McIntosh, who was the son of a Scottish captain in the British army and a native Creek woman, was a leader of the Creek Wind Clan who often acted as an intermediary between the Creek Nation and the United States government in the early 1800s.  In 1825 McIntosh signed the Treaty of Indian Springs which essentially sold all Creek lands to the United States.  To say that this royally ticked the Creeks off was a bit of an understatement.  In retaliation, a group of Creeks murdered McIntosh and burned his house.  Today he rests within McIntosh Reserve, which was created on his land in his honor.

Ashley is back at school and Connie was off for a girls’ day with her BFF Linda so Jenna and I had the day to entertain ourselves.  Scattered showers were in the forecast but a quick look at the regional weather radar hinted that the rain might hold off until much later so we decided to get out of the house for the day.  We’d never been to McIntosh Reserve before and I knew there were several caches and lots of hiking trails in the park so we decided to head over and see what there is to see.

McIntosh Reserve is a 527-acre park situated on the banks of the Chattahoochee, just upstream and across the river from Chattahoochee Bend State Park.  We paid our $3.00 entrance fee when we arrived and and in return received a brochure about the park and a trail map.  Let me interject a gripe here.  I’m not sure what third-grader drew the trail map but for all practical purposes it was useless.  The trails themselves are very easy to see but are not well marked, there are no blazes to speak of and very little signage except near the river, which made it quite difficult to know what trail one is actually on.  Had it not been for a good map on the brochure and the tracking feature on my GPS receiver we would have spent a good portion of the day wondering just where the heck we were.

OK, enough griping.

We parked in the one of the picnic/camping areas along the river, broke out our packs and got ready to walk.  The camping area appeared to be a hammock hanger’s paradise with lots of good trees…

The trail took us around a huge grassy field that borders the camping area…

Past a beaver pond…

And then on up into the woods…

Recently I’ve been putting together compact, lightweight cook kits to take with us when we go hiking so we can have a hot lunch on the trail rather than sandwiches and I was planning to teach Jenna a little bit about backcountry cooking using simple alcohol stoves…but…someone, who will remain anonymous, forgot to put a lighter or some matches into his pack.  (Note to self…get lighters and matches to keep *in* our cook kits, in *each* of our packs).  Fortunately I had the foresight to grab a Snickers bar for each of us while out running errands before we left.  We stopped at a convenient pavilion to enjoy our snack and rest a bit.  Even LB was happy for a short break…

Once rested we headed on toward our last two caches.  We passed by McIntosh’s grave site and a log house which had been moved to the park from Mississippi which was similar to the house which had been burned…

We wrapped up the day checking out the view of the river from Council Bluff…

And spending a little time wandering along the river bank…

After hiking about 5 1/2 miles and finding 6 of the 7 geocaches we set out to find, we headed back to Newnan for calzones and some ibuprofen.

Not too bad for a Daddy-Daughter afternoon…

Filed under: Geocaching, Hiking | 2 Comments »

My butt is out of shape.  OK, lets face it, it ain’t just my butt that’s out of shape, about 99% of the rest of me is out of shape too.  Lately, maybe, just maybe, I’ve found the inspiration to begin to do something about it and have fun while I’m at it.  Back in the day, say in the middle 1980s when I was a student at Young Harris College, I was in fairly decent shape and spent many hours hiking the various trails in the area.  But after I left Young Harris to go to Furman my time spent hiking and roaming the woods decreased significantly and then as I moved on to real life it pretty much came to a screeching halt.  A job and responsibilities took the place of boots and a backpack.

Fast forward twenty-something years.  Now Ashley is at Young Harris.  Last semester she took an Honors seminar at YH called ‘Writing the Appalachian Trail’ which, in addition to reading and classroom lectures, a few short hikes on the AT were required.  Somewhere along the way she got bit by the hiking bug herself.  This past year, as I began fiddling with hammocks and got into hammock camping, it finally occurred to me that hiking and backpacking and spending time in the woods was something that I’ve been missing…and I knew I had to do something about it.

When I asked ConnieLou for a new day pack for an anniversary present back in October she knew something was up.  I fessed up and told her I wanted to get back in the woods…but she didn’t realize I wanted to take the whole family with me.     Things were coming together…

Christmas was quite good this year on the hiking front, I got new boots and a pair of trekking poles and Ashley got boots and a new day pack (and has been making noise about wanting a backpack that can be used for overnight trips someday as well).  More pieces fell into place.

As I’ve said before, Jenna is my partner in crime.  Usually if I ask her if she wants to go caching she’s in the truck before I can get there myself.  We’ve been doing some short hikes while geocaching…hiking without saying we were hiking.  Last weekend I asked her if she wanted to go hiking and caching with me and, in her usual form, she was eager to go.  We spent a couple hours hiking and caching around Cochran Mill Park up in Palmetto.  By the time all was said and done we’d hiked a little over 2 1/2 miles, added a couple of caches to our totals and came home feeling quite pleased with ourselves.

Since Ashley heads back to Young Harris tomorrow to start spring semester, we wanted to have a ‘family day’ before she left.  We’ve also been wanting to go check out Chattahoochee Bend, Georgia’s newest State Park.  There just happens to be several miles of new hiking trails and a handful of caches in the park.  Care to guess what I had in mind?

This afternoon we loaded up the dogs, made a quick stop to grab some Chick-fil-a (Ashley needed a Chick-fil-a fix before heading back to YH since there isn’t one anywhere close) to take with us and headed out to ‘The Bend’.  We had a picnic lunch on the riverbank then headed up the trail.

The trail took us northward, first to an observation platform…

and then onward to three geocaches between a mile and a half and two miles from the trailhead.   New boots and trekking poles were no match for a slick mud bank at the last creek crossing on the approach to the third cache of the day.  Sneakers and jeans didn’t fare too well either…

We turned around after finding the third cache and headed back toward the truck.  We stopped for a for a water break and to take one more look around at the observation tower then headed to the trailhead, arriving at the truck just as daylight was starting to fade…

Not bad for a family day, huh?!

Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention…Jenna earned her trail name today…Caterpillar.  I’ll let her ’splain it…

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Every year we head up the highway a couple of miles to Connie’s niece’s place to celebrate Thanksgiving.  This year I was trying to find something to take that I could cook on the Egg.  I’m always tasked with making pecan pies but I wasn’t sure how it would do in the Egg.  It would probably be fine but I didn’t really have time for a test run and wasn’t too sure I wanted to take something that I hadn’t tried on the Egg first or at least had a pretty good idea about how it would turn out beforehand.  Late last week I remembered a post on Griffin’s Grub, a BGE blog that I follow about Swamp Balls.  Basically, a Swamp Ball is a variant of the standard Bisquick/sausage/shredded cheese ball that are common appetizers and/or party fare.  Swamp Balls are different in that they have a few extras mixed in…some Cajun or Creole seasoning, cayenne pepper, chili powder, minced garlic and some diced onion.  I haven’t made ‘em before but I know that Griffin (aka Jason) made them for an EggFest in Tejas a few weeks back and they went over quite well.  Sounded like they’d be something worth taking a chance on.

Thanksgiving morning found me up bright and early firing up the Egg.

Once the charcoal in the Egg was sparked up I had time to mix up the Swamp Ball fixin’s.

Some would try to use a dough hook on a stand mixer but the best way to mix sausage balls by far is to reach in, start squishin’ and kneadin’  and just get yer fingers and hands dirty.  Heck, they’ll wash…

This time around I made made the balls about an inch in diameter.

The Egg was set up for indirect cooking - plate setter legs up, grill grate on top of the legs, and a baking stone on top of the grate.  The Swamp Balls were simply cooked in a pan set on top of the baking stone.  Being it was kinda chilly this morning, it took a little while for the egg to warm up and stabilize at 375 but once it was there it held rock solid for the entire time I was cooking.  Because the balls were a bit bigger I ended up cooking them for about16 minutes rather than the 12 or so minutes Jason mentioned on his blog.

The finished Swamp Balls looked like this…

and were mighty tasty.

And now…I’m stuft…

Filed under: Big Green Egg | 1 Comment »

OK, Ashley is in her freshman year in college and Jenna is in 8th grade so I guess they’re not really rugrats anymore.  Oh, forget that, they’re always gonna be rugrats to me.

I’ve been hammock camping in the back yard once every other week or so lately to try to figure out the lower temperature limits of a top quilt an an underquilt that I made this year.  I knew Ashley was coming home for a visit this weekend so I texted her last week and told her to bring her bring her hammock gear and we’d hang out one night this weekend.  She liked the idea and I already knew that I wouldn’t have to ask Jenna twice.

I’ve had two hammocks up in the backyard before but had to clear a new space to hang three.  Fortunately we have four almost perfectly spaced threes almost in a line that we can hang three hammocks and tarps end to end to end.

We got our gear set up early Saturday afternoon so we wouldn’t have to set up in the dark later.  I put the girls on the ends and I took the newer space in between since it still has a few little stick-ups that need to be cut back to the ground.

LB supervised the process…

Alex seemed to like the arrangement.

The girls are sleeping on foam camping pads for bottom insulation for the time being until I can get underquilts made for them.  I put Ashley in my old mummy bag that somehow shrunk over the past 10 or 15 years (yes, it shrunk, that’s my story and I’m stickin to it) and I put Jenna, who is a walking space-heater like me, in a heavy Coleman rectangle bag that I’ve been down into the low 40s in several times before…I knew they’d stay warm even if I didn’t.

We slid into our hammocks about midnight and the temperatures were already in the mid 40s with the low predicted in the mid to low 30s.  Our gear was definitely going to get a good test!

I woke to nature’s call around 6:00 this morning.  Mother Nature can be rather insistent when there’s a cat sitting on your bladder.  I finally got Alex to move to another spot and managed to avoid getting up for another hour.  During that time I noticed my feet had gotten pretty chilly and there was a bit of cold creepin’ in around my shoulders…got to do something about that.

Around 7:00 I came on inside.  Turns out Ashley had come in around 3:30 because she couldn’t get comfortable on her pad.  Jenna remained zonked out until she got a personal wake-up call around 9:30.

While some would claim our camp out to be a bit of a disaster, I look at it a much different light because I learned few things.  First, the girls, Ashley especially, need underquilts.  Pads work well for insulation but just aren’t comfortable.  They can wiggle in and out of sleeping bags easily enough so top quilts can wait for now if need be.  Second, my top and underquilts did their job but my top quilt needs a modification.  I’ll add a little patch of fleece in the bottom in the near future as a draft stopper…or maybe not since the idea of set of warmer and lighter quilts made from 6 oz Climashield has been rollin’ around in my head for a couple of weeks now.  I also think I can reduce some of the temperature issues by wearing a pair of insulated booties and a fleece pull over…for now anyway…sounds to me like its time to make some more DIY camping gear!

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In case you haven’t noticed by now, my entries on this here blog aren’t just limited to my flyfishing adventures.  They can be about just about anything that has captured my interest on any given day.  Today the large green ceramic cooker called a Big Green Egg that’s now sitting on the corner of our deck is the object of my interest.  We brought it home from the Eggtoberfest Saturday but it was well after dark when we finally got it settled into its new home on the deck and, honestly, we were all still stuffed from all of the sampling and tasting we’d done at the Eggfest.  Sunday rolled around and because of other plans during the day and evening I was still unable to fire it up and cook something.  Anybody remember that super cool toy you got for Christmas one year when your were a kid and couldn’t play with it until somebody could go to the store and get the batteries that Santa forgot to leave?  Yeah, that was how I felt on Sunday.

I’ve been perusing recipes for weeks, trying to decide what I would cook first on my new Egg.  Steaks immediately came to mind but after dropping a bunch of coin on the Egg, I was looking for something a bit less spendy.  Pizza was a possibility but when I got right down to it, I was in the mood for some wings…but what kind of wings?  There are more wing variations than variations of shrimp according to Forrest Gump.  Connie had given me a Big Green Egg cookbook as part of my anniversary present a couple of weeks back and it had a recipe for Georgia Red Wings, a variation on the hot wings theme that folks raved about and it couldn’t have been simpler…Make up the marinade, marinate the wings, dust ‘em with your favorite BBQ rub and cook ‘em indirect at 350 for an hour, turning once half way through…it don’t get much simpler than that.

I made the marinade last night just to have that step out of the way.  No cooking involved, just mix the ingredients together…

Then dropped the wings in this morning for an all-day soak…

Getting the Egg going this evening was my next task.  Having never fired one up before, I approached it in my usual manner…read everything I can find, ask friends what they do, watch a few videos and then dive in head first.

First came the charcoal…

Lump charcoal is a different critter.  About the only similarity between lump and briquettes is the color and the name ‘charcoal’.  Lump charcoal is pieces of real wood that have been charred.  Briquettes are pieces and parts of charred wood and filler that have been pressed together.  Remember the phrase ‘parts is parts’ from the old Wendy’s chicken nuggets commercial which referred to McD’s nuggets…you get the picture.

One of Connie’s coworkers suggested that we get the electric starter rather than using charcoal starter squares or similar…

Good call on that one Margaret!  The electric starter had the charcoal going good within 7 or 8 minutes and it was up to temperature and ready to cook in less than 15…sure beat the 30 minutes Kingsford used to take in a charcoal chimney…

I choked the dampers down a bit when it hit 350 and once the wings were on it didn’t waver from 350 for the next hour except for when I lifted the lid to turn the wings.  Since I had some time to kill I found myself a tasty treat to toast my first cook on my new Egg…

After 30 minutes the wings were ready to turn…

and after another 30 they were ready for the table.

How did they turn out you ask…well, if they weren’t the best I’ve ever had, they were among the top three…and they were by far the best I’ve cooked myself.  Now my big problem is deciding what to cook next.  A nice problem to have, don’t ya think?

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