We had a guy staying at one of the cabins and I said he could come over here for supper every night so I had to think of something to cook for 8 nights straight. By that I mean we didn't have those nights when supper was celery sticks filled with peanut butter with an apple on the side.

But this doesn't mean that every meal was a full-course masterpiece, not by any means.

I have a bag of frozen pre-cooked Italian style meatballs that are good not only swimming in a jar of pasta sauce, but also roasted with potato and onion wedges. I've also made them smothered with mushroom soup and seasoned with finely diced sauteed onions a la Swedish meatballs.

One night I made a putanesca corkscrew pasta - the sauce has black olives, mushrooms, a couple anchovies, and some capers. I made too much and the fox helped me out getting rid of the leftovers, although he is not a big fan of olives and capers.

As 'payment' for my trouble the guest said he wanted to take us out to a restaurant, but I'm not a big fan of the restaurants around here - being a tourist town they tend to be overpriced, and none of them has very good food. So I told him to buy some steaks and we'd grill them. That's when I made that garlic-chili powder rub that I posted a few days ago. (Flavorful Grilled Steaks)

One night we had bratwursts that I didn't bother grilling, I just cooked them in water and when they were heated through poured it off and browned them. I could have cooked them in beer, but didn't want to waste a beer on that guy. I think it's important to toast the buns for the brats because you get a nice little crunch with each bite. We also have "Beer and Brats" mustard with horseradish in it.

I didn't serve dessert while he was here, although I did have some lemon bars left-over from a lunch I served to some other guests and Mr. Kitchentales chose to share those with our boarder.

When he was getting ready to leave for good, he said he'd like to come back in September, and I said 'We'll see.' but I was thinking 'No way in hell, not doing this again, go stay somewhere else.'

I know you are wondering how I got into that situation in the first place. I like this guy's wife, and we email back and forth a lot. She's always saying how much she loves it here, and how she wishes she was here, and how someday she will come and sit on the porch and watch the hummingbirds. So she asked me if he could come early and she was coming later because she couldn't get away from her work, so I said okay, but then she changed her plans and went to stay with her old college roommate so I was stuck with him, and she wasn't here to absorb his stupid comments.

Also, she thinks he's going to volunteer to help with some of the projects around here to justify us charging them half of our usual rate, but when she's not around he acts like a selfish teenager and never offers to help with anything, just goes off fishing every day. I don't care so much about the fishing, because he's on vacation, but meanwhile she's emailing me asking if we are working him hard and so forth and he should be paying full rate.

I don't like him because he thinks he has to be cleverly entertaining all the time and says really stupid things just to have something to say, such as: "I'll eat anything but rocks." (as if there was danger of me serving him rocks) And then he'd make some comment like "Well, I've lost my appetite" because he just wolfed down a big meal that he had enjoyed - but makes it sound like it was my fault. Oh, I know you're thinking what's so bad about that, but you had to be here to get the full irritation factor.

As God is my witness, never again.