Category Archives: home

2024, Business, Family, Food, home, Technology, Uncategorized

The Yeast Of My Worries

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We typically have pretty good luck with orders and deliveries here, that is, until recently. On July 30 I ordered six, 2 oz packages of fresh yeast on Amazon. Husband has a Nordic baking book that uses fresh yeast in the recipes. Since I had thrown out the remainder of a huge shipment of fresh yeast that I had ordered about a year ago (it got too old in the freezer) it was time to order a more manageable amount.

The order was supposed to arrive on August 5. I tried to track it on Amazon as soon as I got notification that it had shipped, but had no luck. The 5th arrived, and still no yeast. I knew it had to be kept cold or it would start to do its yeasty thing and start growing and expanding. I received a notice that it would arrive on the 9th. It didn’t. By this time, I knew something had gone amiss, and finally Amazon said that it was lost and I could have a refund. It was a bit of an ordeal, but I got the refund and ordered more. This time around I have been able to actually track where it is. It is to arrive today or tomorrow.

The most unreliable delivery service seems to be the US Postal Service. UPS, FEDEX, and Speedee Delivery all do a good job. The latter always makes me think of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Husband is excited that the yeast will arrive soon. I worry that it hasn’t been kept cold. We shall see.

What delivery disasters have you encountered? What are your favorite memories of Mr. Rogers or other children’s programming? What are you worrying about these days?

2024, Fantasy, Food, home, Mysteries

Monster Candy

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Most mornings I try to squeeze in an online crossword puzzle.  My default is the Washington Post puzzles, partly because I already have a WAPO account and partly because there are options, depending on how much time I want to spend.  I’m not too much of a purist… if the puzzle is hard and it’s starting to take too long, the “show me my errors” button gets clicked.  If I make it all the way through without having to “cheat”, I like it, but not enough to struggle and struggle. 

Yesterday morning, early into the puzzle, I read the clue “Godzilla’s rival” for a five-letter word across.  Easy peasy – Rodin.  Then as I was circling back to do the down words, nothing was fitting with Rodin.  And when I got to “Tallinn’s Country” and “Estonia” didn’t fit, I knew something was wrong with my Rodin answer.  I sat for a few minutes thinking of the other monsters that Godzilla doesn’t like.  Gigan?  No.  Manda?  No.  Zilla?  No.  Mothra?  Too long.  Megalon?  Too long.  King Ghidorah?  Way too long.

The only hard/fast rule that I have for crosswords is not to click onto another tab on the internet and look up a word.  So I sat for a bit more, not coming up with any other five-letter Godzilla nemeses.  Then my eyes focused on the clue list and realized that I had mis-read it.  It wasn’t “Godzilla rival”, it was “Godiva rival”.   That was good a for an out-loud laugh – I startled the dog.

Sad but true, I didn’t get the correct answer until I had a couple more letters (Lindt).  What does it say about me that I know so many more of Godzilla’s enemies off the top of my head than I know worldwide famous chocolate companies? 

What is Godzilla’s favorite candy?  What’s YOUR favorite candy?

2024, Family, Food, home, Uncategorized

Menu Planning

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I grew up with a dad who had a small business and a mom who, when she wasn’t teaching, was helping my dad at his coffee shop. That left me at home to fend for myself for meals. If my mom cooked, it was usually on Sunday. During the week and after school I lived on toast, bologna sandwiches, and cereal until I was about 10 when I started to cook real food for myself. Husband grew up in a more traditional family that had three set meals a day, as his mom was a homemaker who had the time to plan and prepare meals. It was easier for me to adjust to his expectations for daily meals than it was for him to scrounge without planning. That made him anxious.

Our meals lately have been planned on the spur of the moment, as we never know what fresh veggies we may find in the garden or the Farmers Market. We can’t bear to let anything go to waste, so we are always planning how to cook up the surplus veggies that weren’t used in any dish we just cooked. So, if I cook too many white beans or chickpeas, we have to find another recipe that will use up the surplus, which usually means yet another trip to the grocery store to get what we don’t have for the new recipe to use the leftovers in.

I blame Bill, the Hutterites at the Farmers market, and the New York Times for the unusual dishes we made recently. I mentioned the other day on the Trail that we had 8 eggplant plants, and Bill commented that was a lot of Baba Ghanoush. Well, that forced me to buy a large jar of tahini, and Husband decided we should make a tahini-yoghurt sauce for some lamb burgers he cooked on the grill, and then I suggested that if we just bought one more pint of cherry tomatoes to go with the leftover pint we had from an earlier white bean caprese salad, and got some curly pasta, we could make this tahini-parmesan pasta salad recipe from the NYT. We did, and it was delicious.

The Hutterites were selling sweet corn on Saturday at the Farmers Market, and wouldn’t you know, the NYT featured a charred corn and chickpea salad with lime crema. We had limes we needed to use up. I cooked a pound of dry chickpeas and we ate that salad Saturday night. I only needed half of the chickpeas I cooked, so we had the other half last night in an Indian curry. You see how this goes.

I feel fortunate to have a love for cooking, a partner who also loves to cook, and a budget that allows us to eat the way we do. I will probably need to get another jar of tahini sometime next week, though. The eggplants have set fruit and are getting bigger.

What is your strategy for meal planning? What was your family’s pattern for meals? Favorite pasta salads?

2024, History, home, Kids, Uncategorized

Good Friends

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When we moved to our neighborhood in 1988, it felt as though we had moved to and outpost of the Czech Republic. The Karskys, the Knopiks, the Kovash family, and the Dvoraks all lived next door or across the street. They were all somehow related to one another. Mrs. Karsky described us as “a nice young couple with a young son” to the other neighbors, information she had got from our real estate agent. Everyone was excited when we moved in, as most of the people on the block were older and/or retired. There were no children on the block.

36 years later, we are the older people on the block happy to see new and younger faces in the neighborhood. Only the Knopiks remain as the Czech contingent. There are lots of young children, especially on our side of the street. A couple of houses south of us lives a hard working family from Zimbabwe. They have a teenager who walks back and forth past our house most days during the school year to get to the Catholic High School, as well as several younger daughters and a young son who are friends with the Hispanic family on the corner. The other day I was driving past those houses when I saw the three Hispanic little girls, their brother, and all the Zimbabwe children sitting in a row on the curb. They had exhausted themselves in the enormous jumper house that the Hispanic dad had inflated for them all to bounce around in.

We share surplus garden vegetables with the neighbors, and everyone gets along. It is so nice to see the neighborhood continue to be a haven for young families and for the more mature, longer term residents.

What was your neighborhood like to grow up in? Any “bad apples” or nice grandparent-types as neighbors? Who were your best childhood friends?

2024, Food, home, Uncategorized

Perfecting Pastries

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When we visited our daughter in Washington last April, we went to a cookware shop in Gig Harbor. I found a new pastry cookbook there, and last weekend was my first attempt at the recipes. I tried the dough for laminated pastries, and made croissants and Franzbrotchen.

The book New European Baking is by an American baker, Lauren Kratochvila, who was trained in France and runs a bakery in Berlin. The recipes look wonderful, although are pretty complicated. There were illustrations that were helpful, and the finished dough tasted wonderful. I don’t know how many baboons have made their own croissant dough, but the basic premise is that you envelope a 10 inch square of butter (about 9 oz) in a 10 inch round of dough, and then proceed to roll the dough into a 30 inch length, fold the dough in a specific way, chill it, roll it again to 30 inches, fold it again, chill it, and then roll it out into a 20 X 12 rectangle and cut the dough into rolls. The end product has hundreds of butter/dough layers because of the folds. This all has to be done really quickly so the butter doesn’t get soft in between the dough layers and ooze out. I was so irritable and stressed during all this that Husband was afraid to come into the kitchen.

I have made Julia Child’s croissant recipe in the past. This recipe was more complicated, but I am determined to try it again. My rolls turned out pretty good for a first try, although they didn’t have the perfect shape that the book author showed in the book photos. They were light and airy and buttery. The Franzbrotchen have a cinnamon filling and are supposed to look like squashed bicycle tires. You can see the rolls I made in the header photo. I considered this first try a learning experience, and I am going to try them until I get them as perfect as I can.

What have you tried to perfect and with what success? What pastry would you like to learn to make?

2024, Family, home, Travel, Uncategorized

Moving to France

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One of my high school friends is a rather successful composer and music teacher who studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. I wasn’t too surprised to hear that my friend has decided to move permanently to France.

I can’t imagine what is involved in such a move. It is complicated enough planning a 500 mile move to Luverne in the next year or so. I don’t imagine it is at all financially possible to move one’s entire household to another continent. I marvel at how my ancestors left Europe, leaving what they had and starting over in a new place thousands of miles from home. There were a few precious items that were packed and transported, but everything else was left behind.

The last time we made a long distance move was when we moved to ND from Indiana in 1987. We didn’t have much then, and the move wasn’t too hard. We have a lot more stuff now. Husband has agreed that he has way too many books and is bravely starting to cull them. They will go to the local library’s used book store. He has agreed that his old college philosophy books will go to the landfill. He insists that we are moving the piano to Minnesota.

Every time I go in the basement or garage, I cast a critical eye on our possessions there. Do we move dozens of empty canning jars? What about the book cases if we are getting rid of the books? Do we move the bean poles, soaker hoses, and tomato cages, or buy new after we move? How about the snow shovels and rakes? In some respects, getting rid of it all and just starting over from scratch seems more simple, but I know it isn’t possible.

What is the longest distance you have moved households? What did your ancestors bring with them to the US when they immigrated? What country would you move to if you decided to immigrate?

2024, Food, home, Uncategorized

Wild about Cherries

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The plan was just to go into my local Aldis, get the shredded cheddar and a half gallon of milk.  I swear.

You know those big cardboard boxes that usually are full of watermelon at this time of year?  Or all those bags of freezee-pops?  Well, right inside the door was a big cardboard box of cherries.  Bag after bag of gorgeous cherries and at a very good price I might add.  I was powerless.

Yesterday I pitted all the cherries from one of the bags – chopped up the amount was exactly what I needed for a batch of cherry freezer jam – 6 and a half jars.  Fairly quick but the messiest of all the jams I make.  I ended up using my Vidalia chopper – it made just the right-sized bits for the jam and it also didn’t spew cherry juice all over the place. 

But here’s the kicker; you all know that I didn’t just buy one bag of cherries.  I’ve never actually made cherry jam before so wasn’t sure exactly how many cherries I needed.  Well now I know.  With YA out of town for work, it’s just me and that whole bag of cherries. I suppose I could make more jam but I’m already pushing the limit of how much jam I can eat in a year.

What should I do with all these cherries?

2024, Family, Food, home, Kids, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized, Weather

Melting

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I received a text from Daughter on Tuesday in a panic because it was 93° in Tacoma, her apartment was hot except for her bedroom, where she has a portable air conditioner, and her refrigerator had stopped working and everything in her freezer/fridge was melted. She had to throw out eight grocery bags of food. Only the cheese was salvageable.

I immediately went into problem solving mode, inquiring about rental insurance, repairs, etc. This was not what she needed or wanted. She just wanted me to commiserate and console. It turned out to be a problem with the fridge shorting out the fuse panel in her apartment. She just needs to keep an eye on it.

Very few people in the Pacific North West have air conditioning because it rarely gets that hot there. There have been unusual but increasingly frequent heat waves there. I am a person who is always cold, so no matter how hot it is, it rarely bothers me. I could probably do ok there. I remember how excited my parents were when we got an air conditioner installed in the dining area of our house when I was in about Grade 1. It only kept the livingroom cool, but it sure made them feel good.

I have never had to deal with a freezer or fridge that went on the fritz. I often wonder what we would do if we had an extended period of electricity loss given all the freezers we have in the basement. I think I would gets lots of ice to keep everything cold and get a gas powered generator to fill in for the loss of power.

When did you first have air-conditioning? Ever had to deal with a freezer or fridge that malfunctioned? What kind of help do you want when you are upset?

2024, Family, Food, home, Poems, Uncategorized

Hiawatha’s Pork Roast Smoking

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I really can’t explain how the idea for this post came together. All I can tell you is that I was sitting at my desk at work on Wednesday when The Song of Hiawatha, Lewis Carroll’s parody Hiawatha’s Photographing, and Husband’s plan to smoke a pork shoulder on the 4th all converged in my brain.

Husband has planned to get his smoker going for weeks, and he has been fussing about the fuels he needs, the type of rub and mop he would use, and the pork shoulder he intended to smoke. I guess that might have reminded me of Carroll’s parody of the photographer fussing to set up the camera and get the photo subjects to cooperate. My Uncle Harvey’s farm in Pipestone. MN bordered the National Monument where The Song of Hiawatha pageant was performed (my tall, blonde, cousins were often extras in the production), and my parents took me to see it several times.

I have never been a fan of Longfellow’s poetry. I also have a hard time reading epic poems like The Kalevela that have been translated into a sing-song cadence. It dawned on me that if I could write a parody of Longfellow, anyone could. Here goes:

Husband Chris got out the smoker,

Like an iron lung, the smoker

Filled it up with logs and wood chips

Double checked that it was perfect

Set the contents all on fire

Waited for the embers glowing

Then he made the pork roast spice rub

Covered all the roast with spice rub

Closed the lid and smoked the shoulder

Sat for hours by the smoker

Feeding logs and chips as needed

Doused the roast with special mop sauce

Drank some beer to pass the hours

I had to stop there. The eight syllable pattern was getting tedious. It could go on and on, just like Longfellow.

What are your favorite/least favorite epic poems? What activities turn you into a fuss pot?

2024, holidays, home, Kids, pets, Uncategorized

Fireworks!

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Guinevere is afraid of everything.

She is afraid of little dogs, big dogs, medium dogs, the vacuum cleaner, the Roomba, the lawnmower, the hairdryer, paper bags, squirt bottles, the dog gate, noises close to her, when you wave your arms around, outsiders, things touching her without warning (pillow falling on her, towel slipping off a hook, toy tossed at her when she’s not looking). 

But there are two things that Guinevere is NOT afraid of.  Thunderstorms and fireworks.  Unbelievable.  YA and I used to do a few fireworks out on the front sidewalk but we quit because my last Irish Setter, Rhiannon was afraid.  I suppose we could get a few things now that Rhiannon is no longer with us, but considering how many other dogs get scared, it doesn’t seem worth it.

So we’ll watch fireworks on tv and we’ll hear fireworks from the surrounding communities, with Guinevere snoozing at the end of my bed!

Doing anything fun today?  Any fireworks on the schedule?