Peanuts, Salmonella, People and Birds

Bluebirds clean up the last of the morning's offering of Zick dough.

This post started with a note from Nina of Nature Remains, wondering if I'd thought about peanuts, salmonella, and birds. People can get salmonella from contaminated peanut products, and so can birds. Birdchick had posed the question on her blog, and even called up some peanut butter suet manufacturers to see if they could assert the safety of their products. Good question, Birdchick! Eek! Are my Zick Dough eating birds safe?
A dark-eyed junco shares with a field sparrow.

The peanut has moved squarely into my forebrain. At our Superbowl party on Sunday, two toddlers attended, both of whom have severe peanut allergies. What are the chances of that? I looked at those precious little people and it was as if everything in my kitchen was suddenly radioactive; glowing peanuts flying around, infiltrating every foodstuff that went in their rosebud mouths. Yikes. I felt a surge of apprehension, protectiveness, and a huge immediate empathy for their parents, forced to examine every label, think about everything that they offered their children, and pack Tupperwares of safe snacks wherever they went. Peanuts and peanut-based products are absolutely everywhere. If you don't think so, look at the FDA's peanut product recall list. It grows every day.

Now, thanks to the peanut product recall, we all have to think like the mother of a toddler with peanut allergies.

I have been checking online about the peanut-based products I've been consuming of late, namely Luna bars (Peanut Butter Cookie and Nutz Over Chocolate) and my new favorites, Clif Mojo Mountain Mix bars. I love these things for their convenience, especially when I'm traveling in foreign countries. Save yourself some time and money--skip the Luna bars and go directly to Clif Mojo bars. Mojo bars are delicious. By comparison, Luna bars taste like wet straw.

If my choice at breakfast on the road is some kind of sickening sweet roll, a doughnut, bagel or nothing, I'm delighted to pull a reasonably nutritious snack bar out of my pack and take a pass on the carb-laden junk food before me. So I stuff about twenty little bars in my suitcase while I'm packing for each journey, along with raw almonds and macadamias. I'm thereby assured of a nutritious start to my day, or a boost when I'm flagging. Needless to say, I buy the snack bars in bulk, 15-bar boxes. I was going to take a substantial hit if I just threw them out, and the Clif company had made a voluntary recall of its peanut-containing products just to be safe. So I spent part of an afternoon on the phone with the Clif people.

They were terrific, and they believed me when I said I was a travel writer (and unrepentant pack rat) and had, uh, 89 uneaten possibly contaminated Clif Luna bars in my pantry. Cool. The Clif company is now sending me coupons to replace those with new, delicious and safe Clif Mojo bars. Mmmm. Good deal all around.

But back to the birds. In the recent ice storm, I kept my birds going with peanuts. Not only do I feed cocktail peanuts in a cylindrical feeder,A Carolina wren vies with a female yellow-bellied sapsucker for peanuts.

but I make huge batches of Zick dough, which of course is peanut-butter based. Eight bluebirds magically appeared in last week's ice storm and began begging for Zick dough as if their lives depended on it. Which, in the four solid days of ice we experienced, they doubtless did.
Glug, glug, glug. A male eastern bluebird stuffs himself with high-energy homemade dough.

A field sparrow, most delicate and beautiful of sparrows, fills up on Zick dough.

It is clear that, at least on Indigo Hill, the peanut should have its own food group. So far, major brands of jarred retail peanut butter have been declared safe from salmonella contamination, and have not been recalled by the FDA. Big institutional tubs of peanut butter, however, are suspect. And commercial peanut-based suet doughs must necessarily be viewed with suspicion, since they may have peanut paste, peanut bits, bulk peanut butter, and other ingredients sourced from the Peanut Corporation of America, which has a history of unsafe conditions. A blue jay helps himself to dough

Here's the peanut/salmonella rub: If you're feeding peanut based suet concoctions, it's best to play it safe and make them yourself, from human-grade jarred peanut butter, because birds can get salmonella just like people can. So here's the recipe for Zick Dough, once again.

Peanut Butter Suet Dough from Julie Zickefoose

1 cup peanut butter
1 cup lard

Combine and melt these two in the microwave, in the oven, or over very low heat on the stovetop. Remove from heat and stir in:

2 cups plain yellow cornmeal
2 cups quick oats
1 cup flour

Allow to cool and harden, then chop into chunks and store at room temperature in jars. Serve crumbled in a shallow dish. Attracts bluebirds, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, woodpeckers, jays, wrens, thrashers, orioles, cardinals, and towhees. This is an excellent supplement for nesting birds, especially in cold, rainy weather, as they will feed it to their young. However, it is not recommended for warm-weather feeding, as it is too rich and may cause gout. Feed only in the depth of winter or as an emergency supplement in spring.
A northern cardinal likes what she tastes.

Here's Garth the red-bellied woodpecker, Ruby's mate, homing in on some Zick dough. Yes, he's still around and going strong.
My thanks to Nina for sparking this post, and to Birdchick for raising the question about peanut safety and birds in the first place. Until your peanuts get contaminated, you don't realize how ubiquitous and valuable they are. Be safe, everyone--and make sure your beautiful birds are safe, too.

I Love The Boss

I've never been a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. Like many who came of age in the late 70's, I was overexposed to Born to Run and Clarence Clemons' nattering saxophone solos. But I always liked the line, "Wrap your legs 'round these velvet ribs/And strap your hands 'cross my engines." There was something good in those words, something more than Jersey strut. I found myself alone a lot in the mid 80's, and wound up buying Nebraska, an album whose spare, bleak imagery suited me just then. That was the only Springsteen I ever sought out. The rest just oozed in over the airwaves.

Superbowl Sunday found me in and out of the kitchen, with a bunch of friends on our couch. I was in it for the chili, the laughter; for the hoot and holler of men watching the game. The screen got my attention only at the halftime show. And there he was in all his Bruceness, stomping up and down the catwalk, all in black, like a late-period Johnny Cash or Elvis. Black is slimming, but he looked bigger than I remembered, as if, to quote a line from Gross Point Blank, he had swelled. Maybe a little stiff, too, as if his back were acting up. Well, heck, he's been at it for thirty years. I'm wearing more black these days, too, and if I drop something on the floor, I have to work out a little plan for how I'm going to get down to pick it up, figure out what I'm going to grab to get back up.

And then he did it, made a little run, dropped to his knees and started a power slide down the slick catwalk. And, this being the Superbowl, there was a camera positioned at the foot of the runway, trained on Bruce's rapidly approaching pelvis. The slide ended with a clunk as The Boss' goods connected with the lens; he'd attained quite a bit more momentum in nearly four decades of power sliding than perhaps anyone had counted on. After a brief moment of clobbered confusion, the camera pulled back to see Bruce, his arms windmilling as he worked to get up from his Z-bent position. His face split in a goofy, I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this grin as he struggled back to his feet. And at that moment, now and forever, he won me over. I gotta say, I love The Boss.

The Amish Wii

Living in the country has its drawbacks. When the power goes out in an ice storm, you're in for three days, minimum, which is what we dealt with this past week. I'm watching it all melt off now, enjoying reading by incandescent light and the resumption of my electronic addictions.

When it's snowy and cold and the power's off and all your favorite toys need to be plugged in, it's time for the Amish Wii, Bill of the Birds' new term for amusing oneself in a power outage. (Is it any wonder I leave the pet naming to him? He's a genius.)

We chose Sledding on our Amish Wii and off we went.

While walking with the kids this month in a dusting of snow, we took a route across the hayfield/cow pasture near our mailbox. And it hit us that for 16 years we have been living on top of the best darn sledding hill on the planet, and didn't even realize it. We'd always taken the slope in our yard, which ends abruptly and painfully in a tangle of multiflora rose and sumac. Yow! Nothing like a face full of Ninja stars at the end of a thrilling run. The kids and I looked at this smoothly mown hayfield and resolved to make it ours in the next decent snowstorm.

I made them pull me out to the end of the driveway. It's good for them.
Then we hoofed it across the flat until we reached the Bowl. You can see the dropoff at the left side of the picture. We followed their track from that morning, when I was busy doing something else.
It's a heck of a hill. The huge oak tree is on the very southeast corner of our land, which is doubtless why nobody has cut it down. It's a line tree, and it's our line tree. It will stand until it decides to fall down. I smile every time I see that tree. Although we have only a pie-slice of land that it stands on, I also put a bluebird box up near the oak, further marking our territory in a gentle way.
Bye, kids. Be careful. Just remember Mommy loved you.We loved you, too, Mommy. Farewell.

Talk about a long run...you go and go and go.

There's a wonderful steep berm that gets you really moving. Here, Liam's trudging back up.
It's the long trudge up that limits the number of runs you do. I'm usually good for about six before I start thinking about popcorn and hot cocoa.
And roses and freckles.
We always draw a cowd.In this particular episode, we hit a frozen cowpie that stood up about six inches--a deadly mogul, taken at speed. I took it right on the tailbone and wasn't right for two weeks. It's finally better today and we're going for one last run before the snow melts off. I am going to stuff an Ugly Doll down my pants just in case.