Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota
Husband dines on Mexican food prepared in back of Pakistani-owned tobacco shop on a North Dakota Indian reservation.
He tells owner “We make chapatis and lamb curry”, and shows book of Arabic poetry.
Owner translates, then recites poetry in Urdu, and challenges Husband to read the Koran.
When have you encountered the unexpected?
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota
Advent is a time in the Christian church year of waiting and anticipating. Hymns are somewhat mournful and quiet, and readings deal not only with the wait for the Christ Child but the end time and the crucifixion. We wait for packages and children to arrive, we wait in line, we wait for bread to rise and for cookie dough to chill. I always seem to need time off from work during Advent to recharge and regroup, and that is what I am doing this week.
Yesterday I made some cookies I have never made before-Nurnberger Lebkuchen and Spekulatius. Both are German cookies. The Lebkuchen are honey cakes, and the Spekulatias are like the Dutch Speculaas windmill cookies. I have been contemplating my German roots lately, and I would call these contemplative cookies, as they turned out weird (the Lebkuchen), and ugly but full of flavor (the Spekulatius). They make me contemplate what people were thinking when they came up with the recipes.
The Lebkuchen sound good in principle. They call for honey, flour, spices, citron, almonds, candied orange peel, and butter, as well as a cup of strong black coffee. The sweet honey and the bitter coffee compete for dominance in the taste. I believe the cakes have to sit for a week and mellow. We will see how they progress by New Years Day. The Spekulatius are made by pressing dough into wooden Speculaas molds, intricate woodcuts of old-fashioned figures and scenes. I don’t have any of the wooden molds, so I used a springerle rolling-pin, which has carvings of hearts and other shapes cut into it.
The cookies look like tiles. The only problem is that the pretty shapes disappeared while baking, and I have these terribly ugly yet great tasting cookies. I know that the honey must preserve the cakes so they last a long time; the wooden molds are lovely and the cookies could be too as long as the decorative imprints don’t disappear. There is something about these recipes that is important to the people who grew up with them. It is interesting how tastes differ from culture to culture.
Today I will make Spritz cookies and pepparkaker. Husband wants to make Krumkake on Sunday, as we are now waiting for a blizzard on Sunday and we expect to be snowbound. The NOAA keeps putting out warnings and advice to stock up and prepare for a terrible storm. They have been warning us for days, and now tell us that we will get between 6-8 inches of snow with very strong winds, while others in the central and eastern parts of the state could get up to 15 inches. It is sunny today, with no wind, which is quite unusual here. It is as though the world is holding its breath. We have been to the grocery store, and husband has filled the bird feeders. Now we wait to see if the predictions come true. I am thankful we are all home and safe, and no one has to go anywhere. The air pressure should drop with the storm, so bread should rise well. Husband has mixed up a rye sour dough starter, and I want to make Julekag and Bremen Klaben. We will need to carb up in order to shovel. For now, though, we wait for Christmas and snow and wind in the unnatural stillness and sunny skies outside.
What are you waiting for?
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.
In the Summer of 1978, I accompanied my mother to Los Angeles so that she could receive treatment for Multiple Sclerosis. I was home on break from college, and my parents let me know in no uncertain terms that it was my duty to go with mom for the treatment. I was miserable, since I knew that the treatment was a sham and a fraud, but they wouldn’t listen, so off we went.
Mom had an initial manifestation of MS when she was 30 years old. It was pretty typical, with visual anomalies and numbness in the lower extremities. It was quite difficult to diagnose MS in the days before neuroimaging, and she was never officially diagnosed with the disease at the time. Her symptoms disappeared, and she had no more signs of the disease until 24 years later. The diagnosis was confirmed at the Mayo Clinic in 1977. Mom was devastated. She had to quit teaching, but remained able to walk unassisted and drive. She set out to find a cure for herself, and the treatment in Los Angeles held out great hope for her.
MS is an autoimmune disease in which the body destroys the lining of the motor nerves so that electic impulses can’t travel down the nerves efficiently. People lose the ability to move their limbs. There is no cure.
Mom heard from other local people with MS about a surgeon in Los Angeles who claimed to have great success in increasing blood flow to the brain and reducing or eliminating MS symptoms. It was interesting how the information about the treatment travelled in the days before the internet and social media. Mom talked to people who either had the treatment or knew of someone who had, and all swore by it. Mom contacted the doctor, who was more than happy to take her as a patient.
We arrived in LA and spent the first night in a residential hotel that the doctor had arranged for us. Mom had an initial examination at the doctor’s office. He declared her a perfect candidate for the procedure, and she was admitted to a private hospital in the Century City area of LA. The doctor was a vascular surgeon. He claimed that the medical establishment and insurance companies wouldn’t accept his treatment as legitimate for MS, (although he and his patients knew the truth of the matter), so it was billed as vascular treatment for clogged arteries. He reamed out his patients’ carotid arteries, thereby increasing blood flow to the brain. That was it. No repairing of the nerve linings, an impossible task that is the only thing that would have made a difference. He just removed what little accumulation of fat that lined the carotid arteries. His patients stayed in bed in the hospital for a couple of days after the surgery. By the time they were ready for discharge they were quite well rested and of course told the doctor they felt better. They were discharged home and never saw the doctor again.
I spent my time hanging around the hospital talking with other patients and their family members. They came from all over the US, from Florida to Illinois, to Nevada. All were so hopeful, and talked of the doctor as a misunderstood saint. I slept on a cot in my mom’s hospital room. Somehow I found that a nearby theatre, the Century City Shubert Theatre, was putting on a production of The Sly Fox, a modern adaptation of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, with George C. Scott in the title role. He had initially done the play on Broadway. I managed to get a ticket to a matinée. I had never seen a professional production like this before. It was wonderful. It was so ironic to see that play about a con artist when I knew my mom and the other patients were in the hands of such a sympathetic and sincere con artist. I knew he was a fraud, but how can you dash people’s hopes. He had set up a perfect scam, founded on the hopes of desperate and trusting people.
We returned home after a week. We heard several years later that the doctor had lost his medical licence due to insurance fraud. Mom had very little to say about her LA experiences, but eventually agreed with me that the doctor was a con artist. She lived to be 91, still living at home, able to walk using a walker, still a fighter.
What are your experiences with sly foxes?
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota
We have had really bad weather the past two weeks. It started out with 14 inches of snow with tempestuous winds, and now we are dealing with really cold temperatures and wind chills as low as -35. I don’t have such a hard time getting around, although I find I am more fatigued than usual at the end of the day. Husband has a harder time of it, since he has to drive 100 miles north every Tuesday to work on the Fort Berthold Reservation. The road there is curvy and remote, and fills in easily with snow the minute the wind gets above 20 mph. The water pipes have all frozen up in the small trailer the tribe provides for him to stay in when he is there. He has been quite stressed, even when he gets back home, and he is driving me crazy with unnecessary grocery purchases and compulsive baking of rye bread.
I would describe his mood as panicky, and he is even more fussy and particular than usual. He acknowledges how silly he is being. This is also the time of year when our freezers are all full of this year’s garden produce, and our goal must be to eat out of the freezers so that there is room for more produce next fall. You can see from the photos that we have very little room in the freezers for more food. I admit that two people do not need to have three freezers (four if you include the freezer that is part of the fridge in the basement. I admit it, we have two fridges, too). I should add that we gave away pounds and pounds of produce this summer, and we still had too much to put up. The minute we take something out of the freezers, it seems we put more in because we bought bulk ground round, or we baked, or we made too much soup. I refuse to disclose how much butter I bought for Christmas baking. We needn’t discuss that here, but I admit it is substantial. After all, Family Fare had Land O’ Lakes butter on sale for $3.00 a pound!
Husband stored the beets from our garden in coolers packed in sawdust. He decided yesterday that we needed to use the beets, and he wanted to roast them. I love roasted beets, and would be content to eat them, all by themselves, with sour cream and butter. Husband insisted that we had to have them with salmon fillets and russet potatoes. That meant buying salmon. I reminded him we had good sea bass in the freezer, so why buy more fish. He insisted, since that was just how it had to be to fulfill his notion of how to serve the beets. Then he double checked everything I told him we needed to buy at the store.
When we got to the grocery store, he said that since we had too much cheddar cheese in the fridge, he was going to get some apples so he could have cheese and apples. He insisted they had to be Haralson apples. There were no Haralson apples to be had, and he wouldn’t consider any other apple. He noticed that the pears looked good, so he decided to get pears, which meant we had to buy Brie, because that is what you are supposed to eat with pears. Now we have too much cheddar as well as Brie. We arrived home with Brie and salmon, and announced he was too tired to cook. He had microwave popcorn for supper. Then he mixed up a rye sponge, and went to bed. We’re glad we have a strong marriage.
The high temperatures this week are predicted to range from 4 to -9. I don’t want to think about what the wind chills will be. We certainly have enough food to eat. We won’t starve. I just hope the freezers don’t break down.
What’s in your freezer?
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota
We have five grocery stores in our town. We gained one large Cashwise during the oil boom, along with a brand new, bigger Family Fare that joined the two smaller Family Fares we already had. Walmart was already here. It really is too many stores for a town our size, but none have closed since the oil bust.
Daughter chose recipes for Thanksgiving this year that called for lots of fresh sage, rosemary , and thyme, as well as parsley. I waited until the Tuesday before Thanksgiving buy the last of the ingredients, certainly not the last minute I thought, especially with so many grocery stores in town. Well, daughter and I searched all the stores for the herbs, and came up empty except for some limp parsley. We were told at each store “we might have a truck in tomorrow night, but we’re not sure if they ordered more herbs. People just snapped them up last week as soon as we put them out”.
This called for some creative thinking. I knew we had a large Lemon Thyme plant on the south side of the house that was a little ragged but still greenish, and a smallish rosemary plant in the front that might not have quite froze, but what about the sage?
We were in the Walmart produce section after one of the produce workers made an unproductive search of the back cooler for errant herbs, when I saw them–four medium sized pots filled with fresh sage and thyme plants, each at a price identical to one of those plastic boxes fresh herbs come in. This was true serendipity if not Divine intervention. We bought two, and only used the sage in one of the pots. The extra pot is now in my office, along with the much pruned rosemary plant from the front yard.
What did it take to find your missing ingredient?
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota
Early in November, Husband and I spent a Friday in our church basement making lefse. We were there for about 7 hours rolling and frying. In addition to sore and tired backs and arms, we took away a strange new sense of perfectionism that I hope ends soon.
It is exhausting us.
I am not a perfectionist, not really, especially when it comes to housekeeping and baking. As long as it tastes good and there is nothing for the cats to eat off of the floor, I think I have success. I have learned since the new DSM-5 has come out that people like me, who chew their nails, have an official diagnosis of Other Specified Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I have to think about that more carefully regarding my own psychological makeup. I don’t know if I accept it yet. I fear that it is true.
Now, the lefse ladies in my church basement are perfectionists! We were set at different stations around the kitchen, and the lefse manager had the nerve to tell me that my first lefse sheet wasn’t thin enough. My standard for lefse thinness is that you can read the words “Bethany Pastry Cloth” through the lefse before you take it off the cloth and fry it. Her standard is that you roll the 1/2 cup of lefse dough into a round that is at least 12 inches in diameter. All the other lefse rollers were doing it, so I swallowed my pride and rolled thinner. I also was put on notice that I was far too splashy with the flour, and that I had better sweep up the flour I got on the floor before someone slipped on it. My lefse didn’t stick as I rolled it out, but no one had as much flour on the counter, the floor, and themselves as I did. My critic also complained that the flour on the edges of the lefse was going to make edges lefse hard. Well, we can’t have that now, can we, so she made a point to brush the flour off the fried lefses as they came off the griddle. We rolled almost 700 sheets of lefse that day.
Ever since we had our lefse day, Husband and I have been cleaning the house in strange and finicky ways. We spent the whole day after lefse Friday cleaning out all our kitchen cupboards and cabinets, meticulously wiping down the cabinet fronts and interiors and every spice jar and objects contained therein. It wasn’t planned. We just started to do it at 6:00 am and didn’t stop until nightfall. The next week I cleaned the basement carpets with vinegar water, and we washed windows for the first time in two years. All our stray papers and mail got sorted and put away. I have been dusting like a fiend.
I think we caught the Creeping Perfection Virus in the church basement. I am hopeful that it will start waning now that we are doing our Christmas baking, but I still wince every time I touch a cabinet front with floury hands, and everything that comes out of the cabinets gets wiped off before they go back in. I never realized how addicting perfection is. After all, how can you argue that something is too clean?
What symptoms indicate the onset of YOUR Creeping Perfection Virus?
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.
North Dakota doesn’t have a native son who became president. I think the only president who ever lived in North Dakota was Teddy Roosevelt. We have clasped him to our collective bosom, however, and his only presidential library is due to be built about 4 blocks from my house, on the former rodeo grounds at our local college. The Theodore Roosevelt Center At Dickinson State University website tells us:
“Theodore Roosevelt established two ranches in the badlands of western North Dakota: one called the Maltese Cross seven miles south of the Northern Pacific Railroad (1883) and the other called the Elkhorn, 35 miles north of the village of Medora, North Dakota (1884). Roosevelt never owned a single acre in North Dakota. Like most other ranchers in the badlands, he was a squatter on lands that still belonged to the public domain or the NP Railroad. The Maltese Cross (Chimney Butte) Ranch had already been named by the time he invested in it. He named his second ranch the Elkhorn after he found the horns of two male elk interlocked at the site. The elk had been butting heads in a struggle for primacy when their horns became locked. Unable to extricate themselves, the elk died of starvation. This appealed to Roosevelt, who regarded life as a Darwinian struggle.”
“At the Elkhorn Roosevelt ranched and played cowboy, went on long solo horseback rides, often for many days at a time, and hunted for elk, mule deer, white tail deer, and other quadrupeds. He also grieved for his mother and his first wife Alice, who died together in New York City on Valentine’s Day 1884. In fact, at the Elkhorn TR wrote the only tribute he would ever pen for Alice, who died two days after giving birth to Roosevelt’s first child Alice. He also wrote parts of two of his 35-plus books at the Elkhorn.”
The plan is to rebuild the Elkhorn Ranch house next to the library. For that purpose, large cottonwood logs have been collected from the area, and local ranchers are encouraged to donate logs to rebuild the 60 x 30 foot cabin. A builder from South Dakota has been hired to build the cabin by hand using only tools that were available to Roosevelt’s builders. You can see some of the logs that have already been hauled to the grounds.
It will be quite a job, and I look forward to seeing progress on the cabin when I drive to work each day. The Legislature set aside many millions of dollars to build the library, as long as the TR Center could raise 3 million more. They have a ways to go, but are optimistic that the library and the cabin will both get finished.
If you could design a presidential library for any president, what would you do?
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.
Husband and I just returned from several days in Seattle, where we attended 18 hours of continuing education courses sponsored by the National Academy of Neuropsychology. I like to call it Brains ‘r Us. Neuropsychologists are extremely well-trained psychologists who specialize in research, evaluation, and treatment of brain disorders such as stroke, learning disabilities, dementia, traumatic brain injury, etc. They typically don’t treat mental illness. Husband and I are Clinical Psychologists. We treat, test, and evaluate people with mental illness, as well as some with learning disabilities, TBI, and other brain disorders, but not to the extent that a neuropsychologist would. Our nearest neuropsychologist is 100 miles away, and many people in our catchment areas are too poor, or frail, or have too complicated of lives to drive to Bismarck or Fargo for many hours of neuropsychological testing. I received some really good neuropsychology training when I was at my clinical internship at a VA hospital, and I feel comfortable testing and evaluating fairly straightforward cases of brain dysfunction. I always refer to the big dogs if I get out of my range of expertise.
I learned this week of a pretty nifty construct called Cognitive Reserve. What this means is that people with more education (High School or higher), who have lots of social engagement (friends, social connections, blog participation), who exercise (even if it is only stretching), and who have intellectual stimulation, are less likely to get Alzheimer’s Disease than those who don’t have or do the above. There is something about education, exercise, and social engagement that results in a thicker cerebral cortex, and also seems to inoculate a person from dementia. Even if such a person develops Alzheimer’s Disease, those with more Cognitive Reserve function longer independently than a person with less Cognitive Reserve, even when having more amyloid plaques and tangles in the brain.
Well, isn’t that good news?!
I think blog participation is a great way of maintaining and increasing our Cognitive Reserve. Writing blog posts gets you extra credit, I think.
Think of some creative ways you could increase or maintain your Cognitive Reserve .
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.
North Dakota is noted for honest elections and ease of voting. You don’t need to register, and all you need in order to vote on Election day are one of the following:
If you don’t have ID, you’ll need to sign a sworn statement at the polling place swearing to your identity in order to vote.
I look at the latter option with some amusement, as many of the DAPL protesters have been in the state long enough to vote, and indicate that they intend to vote. The ND Secretary of State indicates he is prepared for an increase in voters who will need to sign statements as to their identity when they vote in the very rural counties when the protesters are encamped. I wonder how they will influence the votes for local offices? Our Secretary of State is an old guy who has been in office since 1993 and who embodies the best of the best in civil servants. He follows the election rules and makes sure that everyone who wants to vote, and who can vote, is able to vote.
I voted for the first time in 1976 in with an absentee ballot from home. I did the same in 1980 and 1984 when I was living in Winnipeg. For some reason, I had to go to the US Embassy and fill out my ballots in front of Embassy staff. My Canadian friends were very insistent that I make the effort to vote, as though my vote would somehow remove Ronald Reagan from office. I did what I could, but I didn’t have as much influence as they imagined I did.
Daughter asked me to find out how she could get an absentee ballot for the November election. She seemed to think I could just go and pick one up for her. I found the Stark County web site she needed to order one, and she assures me she will vote. Son and DIL are registered in SD, and will vote, too.
My paternal grandfather told me that he voted for Warren Harding the first time he could vote. He also told me he never forgave himself for that, and voted for Democrats from then on.
Husband will vote before he travels to the reservation on Election Tuesday. I will sneak away from work sometime during the day to vote. I don’t plan to listen to election results, but will turn on NPR in the morning to hear the results. I won’t be able to stand the suspense.
What are your Election Day plans?
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.
We drove to Minot last Wednesday to attend the Norsk Hostfest and hear Emmylou Harris perform. We have lived here for 28 years and never once attended the Hostfest. It was quite an experience.
The Hostfest is a celebration of all things Scandinavian, and is a major trade show, community reunion, cultural celebration, and entertainment venue. I counted more than 200 vendors of food and crafts. About 55,000 people attend annually. Tourists come from the Scandinavian countries to attend. It has all the kitsch you would expect (hence the Rosemaled toilet seat and the Cream of Lutefisk Soup), really wonderful Scandinavian textiles and arts, comforting food, and music all over the place.
The bigger concerts like that by Emmylou are held in “the Great Hall of the Vikings” which is a hockey arena that also serves to show livestock during the ND State Fair. In the various halls named after Scandinavian capitols are smaller stages where various groups play traditional and modern music. There is adequate space for those who want to polka. Hardanger fiddlers, Danish folk musicians, Norwegian Country-Western stars, and Meti musicians play in the hallways and staircases. We missed hearing Ragnarokkr, who bill themselves as Vikings with Guitars. Outdoors are demonstrations of Viking games, crafts, and arts. Many people are in costume. People in troll costumes wander the hallways.
The food is interesting. You can sign up for a six course dinner prepared by fancy chefs imported from Norway, or else visit the food booths. Most of those are sponsored by local Lutheran churches. You can get potet klub, lutefisk and meatball dinners, lefse, Finnish beef stew, sandbakkels, and aebelskiver. There is a lefse making competition that lasts 4 days. Nordic Ware puts on cooking classes. My favorite was the class that taught how to make traditional Viking fare like kale porridge with smoked herring. For some reason, the Germans from Russia were selling Kneophla soup and brats, and there were a couple of places to get baklava and gyros.
Artisans teach classes in making Arctic flutes, making Sami bracelets and rings with spun pewter, felting, knitting, making your own wool using a drop spindle, weaving, and carving a Dala horse.
I suppose this pales in comparison to venues like Ren Fest, but Hostfest has its own charm. It is local and international, sophisticated and silly, all at the same time. I like that one of the Minot banks had a booth where you could write a cheque for cash even if you were from out of town and had your account at a different bank. I like that people were encouraged to go up to strangers and say “Hi, and where are you from” in the hopes that the stranger was a Mystery Viking who would give you $100 I like that many people have been at every Hostfest since it started 39 years ago, and many people stay for the entire 4 days. Emmylou was in good voice. We saw an honest to goodness whooping crane in one of the prairie potholes south of Minot on the trip there. The weather was sunny and warm. It was a good day.
Describe (or invent) a festival that you would go out of your way to attend.
Trail Baboon 