Wild rabbit, please

Mom was always a slim lady until she quit smoking. Then she added a good it of weight. Once she moved to Tifton, her weight bounced up and down a good bit.

When Robbie & Danielle started bringing her food, she was on a real downhill slide. With their attention, she put some weight back on.

Her favorite meat was wild rabbit. She loved them. Never had them until she moved to S. Georgia and Dad brought home some. She fried them and that was it. She also never had catfish until she came to S. Georgia. Her favorite there was fingerling catfish, no more than 6 inches long. She'd eat the tail until the vertebrae got too hard to crunch.

She refused to eat squirrel. Called 'em tree rats.

She was a really great cook when she wanted to be. She enjoyed it too. One of my favorite things she made was quite simple. Noodles, cream of mushroom soup and canned tuna. I'm sure there's a name for it. I just called it "That stuff you make with tuna and noodles and mushroom soup."

To her disappointment, she never learned to fry chicken like Granny Nancy. But no one ever has, not even Aunt Ginger. Granny explained it one day, "Your hands ain't black."

She did learn how to make fried cornbread, some people call it lace bread, from Granny Nancy. In that, you could not tell which one made the cornbread.

Her cathead biscuits invariably came out with dots of unmixed flour on the top. We called 'em measles. We also ate pans full of them.

We had at meal at her house in Tifton one day that featured wild hog. She took and bite and swore she never wanted domesticated hog ever again. "It doesn't have any taste," she said. One day I took her the backstrap of a middlin' sow, cut into medallions. I put 4 pieces to the pack. "Don't put a lot in there. I don't eat that much."

She cooked the first batch and told me to keep the deer from then on. She only wanted wild hogs.

She also cooked several packs at once and ate all of it.

She had her own version of chicken soup. It had star-shaped bits. She drizzled raw eggs into the boiling soup so I guess she had star chicken egg drop soup.

She wrote down her favorite recipes and gave a copy to people who wanted it.

Once Shag & I reached the age we could scrounge a meal for ourselves, she announced she was done cooking supper on Sunday nights. Every other meal, she'd cook.

She cooked about everything we brought into the house, including rattlesnake. She didn't eat any of it though.

When we killed a cow, she followed the carcass to the butcher. Come time to cut it up, she was there to help and make sure the steaks were thick enough. She liked her steak extra rare, I'm saying if you hooker her steak up to a nutrient bath, it would probably start growing again. She never understood why I wanted mine well done when I was youngun. I don't get it either since these days I like mine the same way she ate hers. Still mooin'.

She really didn't have a signature dish to my thinking.