Pantry Cooking and Bird Eviction

This weekend, the major projects were cleaning up the pantry cupboards in our kitchen and evicting a bird family from our house framework.

Our “pantry” is the five cupboards on one side of our kitchen where we keep mostly dry ingredients and a few meal mixes, along with “oh this looks cool.” So we pulled everything out, made a few things, tossed a couple things in the compost, and cleaned it out.

We made: sweet bread with a pecan-royal jelly filling, tapioca (well, we started it) from non-instant tapioca (soak overnight), black cherry gelatin, orzo and yellow lentils with curry and grape tomatoes, and then, for lunches, barley-split pea soup with cream of broccoli soup mix, broccoli stems, and dehydrated vegetables (and some ham).

The bird problem was, ah, less fun.

Behind the gutter in the back of our house is a tube of wood, clearly built to pull the gutter out to the roofline. It’s not closed on either end, and behind it is bare wood, not siding or house sheathing or even paint.

Birds love it.

The plan was to pull out a couple years’ worth of old nests and tack screening over the openings.

I say “plan was…” because it turned out that the nesting was 3-5′ into this narrow tube, packed rock-solid and very very tricky to move. In the end, I managed to budge it with a hook T. screwed into the end of a long plastic stick, but there’s still a bunch in there.

Next plan: several yards of shop vac extension tube!

…at least the pantry clean-out food was tasty 😀

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1094943.html. You can comment here or there.