Texas Institute of the Peanut Leadership Class

We are in Lubbock, TX tonight for the Texas Institute of the current Syngenta Crop Protection / American Peanut Shellers Association Peanut Leadership Class. This institute is always a great learning experience for the guys from the Southeast and is a true lesson in Southern Hospitality at its best. Nobody goes away hungry either.

Tonight was a fun night with more get acquainted time and a little bit of work. Tomorrow morning we go to the classroom and then on tours of local agriculture.

The crowd took over Abuelo's patio for a while and had a nice time getting reacquainted. I just hope by the time we get through a couple more of these I know the guys by name.

Tomorrow we will be doing some media training and sure could have used it tonight as a guy who claimed to be with the CBS affiliate showed up to do interviews. I sure hope our guys did OK with no media training. I guess we will know in the morning.

Here are some pictures of tonight's events.

Elvis Bread

Last night I was in the kitchen and noticed two very ripe bananas which were going to not be eaten unless I rescued them. They were the kind that have the really dark brown spots on them. The kind you make pudding or bread out of.

My brain went in to gear and I developed a new recipe...well the measurements still will have to be discovered by my Administrative Assistant or anyone bold enough to go with my abouts and try this. You see I don't measure, I just pour and mix and hope for the best.

I poured about a cup of store brand buttermilk pancake mix, about a cup of self rising flour, about a third cup of Jif Extra Chunky peanut butter in a mixing bowl and folded the peanut butter in the floury mix until it was kind of all the way through.

Then I took about a quarter cup of chopped dry roasted peanuts, about an eighth of a cup of sugar, an egg, about a third cup of skim milk and about a third cup of water and with a wire whisk blended all of that together to a thick but pourable batter.

Then I took the two bananas and sliced them lengthwise and then crosswise and mixed that in but left them coarse enough that you have bites of banana throughout the bread.

I have some small loaf pans so I sprayed them with the butter cooking spray and filled them just slightly over half full, maybe about three fifths full and baked in our oven at 400 for 30 minutes (but I warn you our oven cooks slow so it might take a bit less than that.)

I cooled in the pan for about two minutes and then dumped them from the pan and cooled them on a wire rack.

I sampled them when still warm but firm. Mmmm I loved them. Made a nice breakfast this morning, too and tomorrow I will know how well they store in Tupperware.

Be bold try it before we have a final recipe.

Crop Conditions

Seems that the further south and west I go the better the crop conditions look. Baldwin County Alabama looks about like the Garden of Eden. The panhandle of Florida looks pretty fair though it is late like everywhere else. Southwest Georgia is doing a lot of catching up with recent rains and I actually saw water standing in the fields in some spots yesterday. The crop is late everywhere and there are still some weedy fields and some fields with really skippy stands. You can also find fields almost anywhere in Georgia where the middles are yet to lap. We are a long way away from being done with this crop and I am still very worried about our ability to trick Mother Nature and make October wet in the first two weeks and warm for the next two.

The weather forecast is also calling for a heatwave for the coming weekend. We need mid 90's and not high 90's. Also, a ridge of high pressure seems to be poising itself to locate over us so the rain will go away in a hurry if that situation is prolonged.

I am pretty well convinced that Mother Nature is doing her part to eliminate any surplus of peanuts we may have at this point.