Super Delicious Mustard Relish

It was a couple of minutes past midnight and I hadn’t started on Thursday’s blog. My only excuse is that I had been editing videos all day and just didn’t get around to it.

Wife Lila said, “Why don’t you just skip a day? You’ll get a bunch of comments on that.”

“No, because I’d get a call from Mother wanting to know if I was sick. As soon as she finds out I’m not, she’ll chew me out for not doing my homework. Now that she’s had an iPad for a year, she’s not buying that old excuse that the cat licked the story off the computer screen.”

So, in desperation, I started looking for something to put up that wouldn’t take much work. Clicking through directory after directory, I poked around in the MISCL folder.

It turns out I had taken 481 photos of Lila making mustard relish on July 7, 2010.

Jayne Payne’s Super Delicious Mustard Relish

Actually, Lila makes it, but she uses the Jayne Payne Super Delicious Mustard Relish Recipe. Jayne was the wife of Lou, my legally blind darkroom technician.

Despite that, Lou had a certain amount of job security

  • He was a nice guy, too nice to fire
  • He had been there forever
  • He was always prompt to answer the company two-way radio (even though he tended to forget he wasn’t on the CB in his truck: “Ten-Fer, Good Buddy, cum bak.”
  • He was willing to come in at 4 a.m. to process the film that bureau reporters had shot for the afternoon paper. The pictures were so bad to begin with that it didn’t matter that he couldn’t see to focus.
  • He was reliable. I never had to drag myself out of bed at 4 a.m. because he was a no-show.

Still, when he announced that he was taking early retirement to spend time fishing out on Lake Okeechobee, we threw him the second-biggest party ever held at the Steinhoff home. (I’m the distinguished-looking guy on the floor. Lila is in the center of the photo.)

How do you get from there to here?

If enough folks care and if I can persuade Lila to help me narrow down 481 photos to a reasonable number of steps, we’ll show you how to get from the picture at the top to the picture at the bottom. Or, you can share your own favorite mustard relish recipe.

(She pointed out that green tomatoes are a major ingredient in the Jayne Payne Super Delicious Mustard Relish Recipe, but my top picture doesn’t show any. I promised her that the OTHER 480 photos have tomatoes in them.)

By the way, if you haven’t checked out her gardening blog yet, you should head over there. She’s battling bugs right now.