Backcountry Notes

More coffee!!!While resting up from a difficult week and guzzling coffee to keep my brain at least halfway in gear, I've been occupying some time by looking around the Backcountry Blogs list -- it's over there in the left-hand column, in case you hadn't noticed -- and finding interesting articles that others have posted.  These are a few good ones.

Stack cake: In Appalachian History -- "The dried apple stack cake is one of the most popular southern Appalachian cakes--- no surprise considering apples are found aplenty in the mountains. . . . It looks like a stack of thick pancakes, with apple preserves, dried apples or apple butter spread between each layer. At holidays and weddings, early mountain settlers traditionally served stack cake in lieu of more fancy, and costly, cakes. Neighbors would each bring a layer of the cake to the bride's family, which they spread with apple filling as they arrived. It was said that the number of cake layers the bride got determined how popular she was." Link: Stack cake.

Go Devil & A Mystery: A "go devil" is a tool.  If you don't know which tool, you can find out on Blind Pig and the Acorn.  Link: Go Devil.

Protecting Yourself In The Supermarket: In Southern Highland Reader, rules to shop by, such as, "Don’t buy anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food." Link: Ten ways.

Brain-Dead Headlines: A nice collection of boneheadlines on Joyful Reflections, including such gems as these: "Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over" and "Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures." Link: What did you mean?

Abner, The Wild Monkey Of The Smokies: In Holler Notes -- "On cold mornings like this one when the last leaves of autumn are riding a chill wind through Rhodes Cove, I sometimes think of Abner, the wild monkey of the Smokies. It was mornings like this when I used to hear stories from folks in Deep Creek or Big Cove who claimed that they sometimes heard a knock and opened their doors to find a little shivering monkey on their porch." Link: Abner.