With a Family As Weird As Mine Is . . .

. . . you never know exactly what will happen.

Yesterday, I unexpectedly had to go pick up my 9th grader from volleyball practice.  As our rural school is about 20 miles away, this would take some time.

My husband, knowing I would be gone during the time I would normally have been preparing dinner, and knowing I had not planned ahead for this event to happen during my limited time at home before raid, told me as I walked out the door, "I'll take care of food."

When I came home, I found in the kitchen my large stainless steel bowl with cleaned rattlesnake meat.

That wasn't exactly what I had in mind.  (My husband, of course, grinned and said, "I told you I'd take care of dinner!")

How it really happened:

My husband had gone back out to the garden and seen our 10-yr-old doing very fast jumping jacks like a wild woman, staring at the fence and repeating, "I'm big!  I'm big!"

As this is unusual behavior, even for our hyper 10-yr-old, he was very curious.

It turned out that alongside the fence was a rattlesnake.  The sharp-eyed 10-yr-old had seen it and, having heard somewhere that jumping around can make your heat signature appear much larger to a snake and thus discourage it from striking at you, was attempting to try out this theory.  (Instead of, say, backing away and finding her father.)  The snake was just sort of looking at her as if it was saying, "What kind of a nutcase is this?"

If it had chosen to slither away into the desert, it might have made it out of this situation alive, but as it was, it chose to head along the fence toward the yard.  That's when my husband, who is an excellent shot, popped it in the head with an air gun from 20 feet away, much to the delight of the girls.

Neither my husband nor the kids believe that something should be killed and thrown away when it can reasonably be eaten, so he cut off the head and rattle, skinned it out, and cleaned out the interior.  By the time I came home, the piece of meat had stopped trying to climb out of the bowl, but the idea of snake for dinner just didn't sit well with my appetite that night.

The conclusion to this saga is I didn't eat any for dinner, because my stomach just didn't feel right about it, although I'd had rattlesnake before this.  (I ate instead some of my homemade bread and hummus.)  I did, however, at my husband's request, prepare a batter for coating the rattlesnake for deep-frying.  My husband deep-fried the rattlesnake, which he and the kids had for dinner, along with slices of homemade bread, carrot sticks, fruit, and a sliced garden tomato.

Apparently, they enjoyed their deep-fried rattlesnake very much.