Category Archives: Food

2026, Family, Food, home, Uncategorized

Fun!

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Our lives since moving to Minnesota have been pretty noneventful aside from our trip to Kansas City in March. We have spent our time getting to know the community and getting our home to our liking. Not much has been unpleasant, but nothing has been that exciting either. The weather hasn’t been very conducive for outdoor activities.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered three Savoy cabbages through Melissa’s Produce. We grew Savoys in our ND garden. They are lovely cabbage but not available in our local grocery stores.

The ones I ordered were very nice when they arrived, and we refrigerated them right away. This made for an interesting challenge, though, of using up three cabbages in short order.

We cook most everything from scratch as a rule, so cooking a lot of cabbage wasn’t that unusual. I noticed, though, that the recipes we had chosen were really fun to make. Not just pleasant, but fun. I made a huge pot of minestrone. I made a central European pasta dish with cabbage and bratwurst. I made a cabbage, potato, asparagus. and fennel bulb hash. Husband made cabbage and mushrooms, (as well as oatcake biscuits). I love to cook, but I recognized how much fun I was having putting these dishes together, even more fun than usual!

I don’t plan to buy any more Savoy cabbage in the near future. I am kind of cabbaged-out. It reinforced for me, though, the pleasure one can derive from even the most simple activities if you pay attention. Yesterday I made Cuban black beans. Later this week I am making Danish meatloaf (it is made from veal and pork and wrapped in bacon). I expect to have a fun week despite all the rain and staying home. A simple life can be a good life.

What fun activities have you done lately? What are the most fun and least fun things for you to cook? Thoughts about cabbage?

2026, Family, Fantasy, Food, home, Mysteries

A World Gone Mad

28 Comments

Gravity, the 5-second rule, Murphys Law, chocolate is a food group, the toast will always land buttered-side down, oatmeal raisin cookies masquerading as chocolate chip cookies are sent by evil entities to usurp happiness.  These are givens.  In addition YA doesn’t like farm eggs and YA doesn’t like my recipe for deviled eggs.

Farm eggs.  I adore Ben’s farm eggs.  Rich, full flavor and then there are those deep golden yolks.  Bring them on!  Unfortunately YA isn’t always sure about “new” things and the farm eggs fall into this category.  She hasn’t said exactly but I think it’s the color of the yolks.

Deviled eggs.  While in theory YA likes deviled eggs, she doesn’t like my preferred recipe.  I’ve mentioned before that I am a Miracle Whip gal.  YA has grown up into a mayonnaise gal.  It I make the eggs with some Miracle Whip and some mayonnaise and give it a good dose of mustard, she will sometimes have one, but not always.

So after Ben delivered eggs on Sunday, I immediately boiled up a few and made deviled eggs.  When I asked YA if she was interested, she said no, so I made them my favorite way – Miracle Whip, mustard, pickle relish, salt, pepper.  And because they were farm eggs, they were stunning looking – more golden and orangish even than the header photo.  I ate some immediately, had some for breakfast on Monday (they were marvelous on toast with strawberry jam) and was looking forward to the last of the batch of breakfast yesterday.

Lo and behold – when I came downstairs, the container that had held the remaining four halves was empty and sitting in the sink.  SHE ATE MY DEVILED EGGS!  Even though I had made her least favorite version. 

So now what?  I feel like I need to re-write all my life expectations.  What’s next… will the toast fall butter side up?

Any universal truths that have let you down?

2026, Food, home, Technology, Uncategorized

Getting To Know You

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In the last 12 months I have cooked and baked on four different stoves/ovens. Each has been very different from the others, and the cooking experiences have been challenging.

In Dickinson we had a quite old GE electric oven with a glass stovetop. We decided we couldn’t in good conscience saddle new owners with it. The glass top was scratched and uncleanable. The oven baked really slow and we needed to increase the temperature to get things done. We replaced it with a Bosch electric stove/oven which worked very well. It definitely was a positive selling point for the house.

As soon as I had figured out all the niceties of the new stove we moved to our current home. It had a 15 year old Kenmore gas oven with gas top burners. The previous owners had no problem saddling us with it, even though the control panel shorted out everything we started a top burner when the oven was lit. I didn’t like baking in the gas oven since things singed on the sides of the pan closest to the burners. I struggled baking with it, trying to adjust rack levels and temperatures. This was quite a trick in November and December for Christmas baking.

We finally got a brand new, dual fuel LG oven/stove that I really like. The oven is electric. The stovetop is has gas burners. Saturday night I made a apple pie with a crumble topping and found the the oven must burn hot as the crumble topping and crust got too dark, and I probably have to lower the temperature about 10-15 degrees when I bake. Sigh! I suppose most appliances have their individual quirks, but I am pretty tired of trying to figure all this out.

What would you feel you had to in good conscience, replace in your current home before you sold it? What have been the easiest and most difficult appliances/machines to learn to use?

2026, Family, Food, gardening, home, Uncategorized

Garden Plans

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Yesterday we had 120 bags of organic raised bed soil delivered to our driveway. You can see them in the header photo. A retired guy who was the head of the city solid waste department picked them up from Bomgaars and brought them to the house. He has a forklift for just such loads. He knew my dad. The raised beds will ship this week. We have enlisted the help of a young man to move the bags of soil into the back yard. The gate on our fence is too narrow for a tractor, so he will move the bags with a big wheelbarrow. He is a cement worker for his day job and used to date one of the daughters of the former owner of our house. Everyone seems interconnected here!

Best friend is excited to plant chard, heirloom tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers. The raised beds are 32 inches high and will be good for plants that need deeper roots. I am planting a late crop of spinach and lots of basil for pesto. We will have herbs in separate pots on the deck. We saw two large deer roaming our neighborhood a few nights ago and I am glad our yard is fenced.

I want to get some Canadian roses to plant around the house, as well as some hydrangeas. We thought about putting in a raspberry bed but it would be too complicated due to underground wires and such. We also have a Birch tree badly in need of pruning, but we will leave that for the fall, as well as planting spring bulbs.

How are your garden plans coming along? What are your experiences with raised beds?

2026, Business, Family, Food, Travel

Grasso Plaza

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Oft times I feel as if my world is fairly small.  494 to the south, Highway 100 to the west, 35W to the east and Franklin to the north.  Obviously I do travel outside of my “zone” but overwhelmingly, my life and errands are within.  So it isn’t odd to me that my mother also had a fairly constricted range.  It was brought home to me last week when YA and I were in St. Louis that Grasso Plaza is basically a catch-all for just about everything.

Grasso Plaza is about 5 minutes from my mom’s house, up on Gravois Road, which is a major thoroughfare in the southwestern suburbs.  It’s basically just two strip malls across Gravois from each other with five lanes of traffic in between.  (One of these lanes is what St. Louisans call the “suicide lane”, in which you can basically go either direction – insanity.)  The parking lots on both sides were clearly designed by an idiot who had been drinking heavily.  I can’t believe that the insurance companies haven’t banded together to force the Plaza to have them both re-done; I’ve witnessed two accidents myself in my visits to Nonny.

Anyway, here are all the places in Grasso Plaza that we went to in our three full days:

  • Schnucks.  This is one of the grocery store chains in St. Louis; I am not making this up.  We got a few snacks and some beverages to keep in the condo while we were there.
  • St. Louis Bread Company. SLBC was bought by AuBon Pain in 1993 and everywhere else except St. Louis, the name was changed to Panera.  I assume some lawsuit or contractual thing was involved.  On the outside the sign says St. Louis Bread Company, on the inside, everything says Panera, including how your receipt prints out.  We had two meals there.
  • Walgreens.  Of all the things that Nonny didn’t have in her condo was lotion!
  • Southern Bank. Nonny’s bank – we had to deposit a check of hers.
  • Post Office. We had to send the equipment back to MobileHelp (Nonny’s “help I’ve fallen and can’t get up” service).  Very very friendly and chatty clerks – good thing no one was waiting behind me.
  • Cotton’s Ace Hardware. I’ve been here many times over the years but this trip it was to drop off the last of Nonny’s canned goods/cereals.  Cotton’s has a collection barrel for the Affton Christian Food Pantry.
  • Dollar Tree. Just a quick stop for some plastic drinking cups for the condo since there were so many folks working on the cleaning out.
  • H&R Block. Stopped by to ask one tax question concerning Nonny’s taxes.  They weren’t helpful.  I should have just texted Linda.  Ended up getting better info from AARP.

These weren’t the only errands we ran, but it was most of them and I was happy to put Grasso Plaza behind us.  Even though it was handy, I don’t want to mess with those parking lots and that suicide lane ever again!

Do you have any favorite/usual shopping spots?

2026, Family, Food, Gatherings, Uncategorized

Easter Dinner Disaster

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Our Easter menu consisted of scalloped potatoes, roasted butternut squash with apples, raspberry cream pie, and smoked farmer’s ham with a plum glaze.

Since we had to sing in the choir at both services on Sunday, I decided to make the potatoes and the pie on Saturday. I got the pie crust made and the pie assembled, and then started on the scalloped potatoes. I used Julia’s recipe, which she describes as “ambrosia”. It consists of two cups of heavy cream and two cups of half and half, bay leaf, salt and pepper in which you simmer on the stove two pounds of very thinly sliced Yukon Gold potatoes. They simmer for 90 minutes, and then you put them in a gratin dish. They can be made ahead of time to this point, then baked the next day in the oven for 20 minutes after you sprinkle them with grated Gruyere cheese.

I put the simmered potatoes in the 14 × 9 ceramic Le Creuset gratin dish to cool down preparatory to putting them in the fridge for the night. Husband was looking for ingredients for a cucumber salad in the cupboard just above the gratin dish when he accidentally knocked a bottle of avocado oil off the shelf. It landed in on the potatoes, and the gratin dish shattered into about eight pieces.

The pieces seemed pretty intact, and after we had scraped all the potatoes into another gratin dish we reassembled the busted dish in the sink to see if we could salvage the potatoes and serve them on Sunday. We were able to account for all but a quarter inch piece of ceramics.

I was really torn about what to do. Should we serve the potatoes and warn our guest about the possibility of a ceramic fragment? Should I throw it out and make it again on Sunday? I decided to decide in the morning.

The chance of our guest breaking a tooth or swallowing a sharp glass fragment was too great for me to deal with, so I tossed the potatoes and made more after church. They were ambrosial. I remembered a conversation I once had with the wife of one of our ND psychiatrists. She admitted that when her husband was in his residency in Texas she invited several people over for dinner. She really wanted to impress, and wanted to serve liver pate. They were quite poor at the time, so she bought a can of liver cat food and served it with crackers. No one was any the wiser, and her guests liked the “pate”. Well, we certainly could afford more cream and potatoes, and I am glad I threw the first batch of potatoes away.

What kitchen disasters have you had? Ever served a dish that you knew had something wrong with it?

2026, Family, Food, Uncategorized

Tea Time

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I don’t know if it is the increased humidity and cold and storms here, but Husband and I have been drinking much more tea than we did in ND. Husband is a great tea maker and we have nice teapots and infusers.

If all goes well, we will have an order of a variety of teas delivered today. I particularly like fruit teas like Rote Grutze, a North German tea with hibiscus and dried fruit. I also like East Friesien tea you must have with cream and rock sugar. The cream is poured in a specific way to make it look like eruptions. Husband prefers strong black teas like those from Scotland and Ireland.

I never had much tea before I went to England as a college junior, and had tea in a tea shop. I tried to sweeten my tea with what looked like sugar, but turned out to be coarse salt. My, did I get odd looks from the servers! I like lemon in my black tea, but the salt was really awful! They gave me a new pot of tea.

What is your favorite tea? Sweetened or lemon? Tea cakes?

2026, Fantasy, Food, Gatherings, Music, Uncategorized

Lucky Eggs?

36 Comments

Last Saturday I re-created a dish that I had seen on the internet (love Webspoon – if that’s not the definition of food porn, I don’t know what is).  The first step is to whisk 3 eggs with salt and pepper.  When I cracked the second egg into the bowl – double yolks!  I’m not sure but I think the last time I came up with a double yolk was before YA was born.  The internet says the odds are 1 in a 1000.  I don’t understand statistics that well, because we go through eggs at a pretty good rate; I would think I would come across them more often.

Of course, when I’m writing this, I’m not feeling particularly lucky but last Saturday it felt like a good thing.  It was a pretty day.  I made a nice dish using up the last of the tortillas and a jar of my homemade tomato sauce from the freezer – you all know how much I like using up stuff.  And I had a concert on Saturday night (Cantus at Westminster downtown) that was spectacular.

Wish the good luck from those yolks could have lasted longer, but I’ll take any good day I can get!

Tortilla Omelette
3 eggs, whisked together with salt & pepper
Add 4 tortillas, rolled up and cut into strips
Add 2 vegetarian brats, chopped up (Webspoon used ham, rolled up and cut into strips)
Add a cup or so of shredded cheese (I used some mozzarella & some Mexican shred)
Pat is all down in a springform pan
Add a cup or so of tomato sauce and spread evenly over top
Add a bit more cheese if you so desire
25 minutes in a 350° oven.
Let it sit for at least 15 minutes to firm up before cutting.
Yum-O

What makes a lucky day for you?  Any double yolks recently?

2026, Business, Fantasy, Food, Gatherings, Movies

Conversations in the Dark

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I couldn’t resist.  Got up early on Sunday morning and headed to SunStreet Breads for their last day.  Got there a little after 6; there was one fellow already standing outside the door but since I didn’t have a coat on, I stayed in the car listening to my book on CD.  When the next two guys joined the little line at 6:10, I got out and joined them.

We had a great time, first talking about bakeries and donuts and rustic breads. Everybody had other bakeries that they sometimes frequent but it was clear that Sunstreet had a place in all our hearts.  I can’t remember why somebody in the line behind me highly commended the movie The Hail Mary Project.  I mentioned that I wasn’t sure I wanted to see that – another favorite book of mine that I don’t want “sullied” by some movie producer’s vision.  This led to a lively bit of talk about science fiction movies.  The first guy in line and I convinced to the two younger men between us that they needed to see Forbidden Planet with Leslie Nielsen and Walter Pidgeon.  I mentioned John Scalzi, but apparently any science fiction written after 1985 was a non-starter for my new friend in the front of the line.  The topic then returned to the bakery with all of us listing what we were planning on purchasing. 

At 6:30, opening time, the line was all the way back to the Caribou Coffee – probably 40 folks.  There were signs up about no espresso (I’m guessing that’s a time suck you can’t afford when you have lines out the door) and only six pastries per person.  All three of my guys did the six pastries bit but since I was just there for the experience, I just got three – a raspberry cream scone, a laugen croissant (kind of a pretzel crust) and a blueberry turnover for YA.  Oh and one last tray of outrageously expensive (but yummy) animal cookies.  

The line was even longer when I left.  I headed on home with my treasures, realizing that I’d had a great time – not so much because I’d gotten pastries on the last day of my favorite bakery but because it had been a blast to talk about donuts, bakeries and science friction in the wee hours of the morning.

Any really good conversations recently?

2026, Art, Food, Music, Mysteries, Songs

Went To a Bar

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A few weeks ago, here in Winona, there was an event at the Two Fathoms Brewing, a bar-and-grill downtown, on the river. Here’s the press release:

Silent Auction & Benefit Show for Winona Sheltering Network
Sunday 2:00 – 5:00 Free Event, All Ages
[Music by:] Ironstill; Mike Munson; Sheep for Wheat

When I got there around 3:00, the place was packed – standing room only. I got a lucky seat when a person sitting beside my friend Cherie left for the other room, where the Silent Auction was taking place. I eventually stood in a long line for a Cold Milk Stout (really a delicious thing – look it up).  It had been a year or more since I’d been to Two Fathoms – it hosts weekly Beer Bingo, weekly Trivia Night, live music on weekends, and a monthly Karaoke, et al. Best, though, are the monthly Jazz Jams on a Sunday afternoon – with the local H3O Jazz Trio and an open mic;  each month a portion of the proceeds go to a different local cause. Here’s a photo to give you the “flavor” of the place…

I enjoyed some of the changes that had been made in my absence – they’d relocated the bar, which left more central space for the stage. But since the noise level made conversation close to impossible, we just listened to the music and WATCHED people – best people-watching I’ve done in ages:

– people seeing each other and hugging, or just being delighted to reunite
– lots of little kids, some in tutus and other fancy dresses
– a guy in the corner talking to his friend, holding his mug and a baby
– so many different ages of people, and everyone seemed in a good mood
– a singer pauses to announce that there’s a pizza looking for a home – can anyone please claim this pizza???
– and the pizza smelled SO good..
–  felt good to be among these people; everyone there was in support of the Sheltering Network
– there were great silent auction items – “knocked it out of the park”, someone said – and they raised around $12,000 for the WSN

 When was the last time you were in a bar? Or attended a fundraiser?  Was it enjoyable?

Where is your favorite place to “people watch”?