Main character: Relatively intelligent woman with cooking skills
Location: A kitchen loaded with pots, pans, utensils and cooking toys
Weapon: Kitchen Pro 2000
Plot: The main character, despite being careful, always manages to cut herself when using her mandoline. The latest attack by the mandoline occurred not when she is actually using it but as she is moving back to the sink to wash a dish.
Mystery: Why does the mandoline have it out for her?
Any kitchen mishaps you’re willing to share?
I’m not going to bore you with my love of lists – this has been catalogued many times on the Trail.
As I was straightening up in the breakfast room after my return from St. Louis, I found a folded piece of paper on the table. Having been burned more than once by tossing out something that is needed, I opened it up to see what it was. I found a list of various foods sorted by whether they were to be picked up at Target or Trader Joe’s.
It took me a minute to realize that this was not a list I had put together (although it could have been) but something that YA had done in my absence. And not just a list jotted down on a post-it note, but clearly a computerized list. With a title! I’ll admit I got a little teary.
Do you have a trait that you’d like to pass on – either to offspring or acquaintance?
You all know I adore my mom. And for the most part, we do quite well when we spend time together but the 9 days I spent in St. Louis did stretch our patience a few times. The place where we have the most friction is the television. I’m happy to leave the tv off most of the time but Nonny has habits that she doesn’t want to relinquish. This starts in the morning as she likes to watch the news. I prefer my news in short, concentrated bursts and would really just like to read my news online. Both the tragedy of the falling condo and the Bill Cosby reversal were in the news while I was there and both stories got re-hashed and re-hashed. I was working in the morning so pretty much tried to tune it out but it was difficult.
The evenings caused more tension. Nonny likes the Hallmark movies, especially the romances and the holiday films. And I’m sure I’m not giving any of you news when I say that I detest the Hallmark Christmas movies (which are playing 24/7 beginning two weeks ago and through July). This is not a secret to Nonny but despite my saying so more than once, she filed this fact away. After a couple of nights we decided to switch back and forth. First I would pick a movie, then she would pick a movie. You’d think we’d both be adult enough for this solution, wouldn’t you?
She didn’t like Ant-Man and the Wasp at all. I thought she might because the Ant-Man movies are much lighter than some of the other Marvel universe movies. I was wrong. She had trouble following the storyline and got impatient pretty quickly. Then she chose one of her Christmas movies, although I know she’d already seen it because she recounted the plot to me in the first 10 minutes. I pretty much ignored the movie, but she kept muting the tv during the commercials to “talk about it”. I was more testy than I should have been.
I chose the old Woman in White with Alexis Smith, Eleanor Parker and Gig Young. How could this go wrong? Well, the thought the Sydney Greenstreet character was too creepy and complained that she just didn’t like movies where the bad guys held so much sway over the good guys. She got quite crabby. But not as crabby as I got when she chose another Christmas movie. I will admit that I pouted and decided it was a good time to do laundry; that took me out of the condo (laundry machines are across the hall) several times. Unfortunately she was convinced that I needed to hear the song at the end of the movie and called me to come back to the living room. Twice.
Luckily I found How to Marry a Millionaire with Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable – this turned out to finally be something we could agree on. It was funny (with great costumes) and since Nonny had seen it before, she already knew the plot line. It was nice to have something we both enjoyed as our last movie of my trip. I’m not sure what would have happened if I had stayed in St. Louis longer. Is there such a thing as bad-movie-induced-matricide?
What’s the worst movie or tv show you’ve been subjected to lately?
Today’s post comes to us from Steve.
I have spoken critically in this forum about my mother’s cooking. She was a typical 1950s Midwestern housewife cook, and I fear that isn’t a flattering standard. Unlike my classmates at college, many of whom grumbled bitterly about the food service, I thought I’d never eaten so well. But my mother took desserts seriously. I can forgive her those Jello desserts she served so often, for her cakes and pies were tasty. Relative to other areas of cooking, she did desserts well.
Her social world was centered on bridge clubs. The hostess of a bridge club meeting was expected to serve a dessert so special that club members would be talking about it for days. At one bridge club meeting, Mom’s chocolate devil’s food cake was a huge hit. Someone called out, “Charmion, this cake is wonderful! You have to share your recipe!” Mom didn’t have the nerve to admit that the cake began life as a Duncan Hines box mix. Her embarrassment doomed her to spend many hours one week researching library books for made-from-scratch chocolate cake recipes. She had to find a recipe that was both tasty and credible as the source of the cake she had served.
Each member of my family had a strong dessert preference. Dad thought nothing on earth could be better than apple pie. My mother loved her Graham Cracker Pie, a simple dish made from Eagle Brand Condensed Cream mixed with eggs and lemon, served in a crust that was smooshed graham crackers. My sister came to favor French silk chocolate pie. On my birthdays I always requested a white angle food cake that was heavily frosted with chocolate-flavored whipped cream.
When I tried to teach myself to cook I thought the logical thing would be to collect recipes. When a recipe appealed to me, I’d type it out and add it to my personal recipe book, kept on my computer’s hard drive. I see now that I collected about a hundred dessert recipes, of which I only ever used two. I’m actually not much of a dessert person. The really big sections of my cookbook are salads, chicken and soup dishes. My erstwife was a fine cook, but she too cared more about main dishes than desserts, so I failed to learn how to make good desserts from her.
While I’ve mostly ignored desserts most of my adult life, now and then something catches my fancy. When my erstwife and I traveled in the UK, we discovered a tiny London cafe that served crème brûlée, and I was totally smitten. Still am. I once won a writing contest whose reward was a free trip to the Florida Keys to flyfish for tarpon. While I never caught a tarpon, I sure made a pig of myself with Key Lime Pie, something I’d never encountered before. The dessert I’d now request on my birthday would be pecan pie served with a generous scoop of cinnamon ice cream.
What’s your favorite dessert? Which desserts do you remember most fondly? Do you have a recipe to share?
Last month Bill asked “How do you judge a cookbook at first glance?” For me the first thing a cookbook has to have is a great photo on the front to initially catch my interest. Then it needs to be a niche that I’m interested in (vegetarian, ethnic, baking). That’s enough to get me to request it from the library. Once I get the book, the quality of the production is key, how easy it is to follow the directions, how many recipes appeal to me, will the ingredients be do-able? Probably 50% of the cookbooks that I peruse from the library go back and I never think about them again. Then about 49% might have a recipe or two that I’ll copy for myself (I have a big white binder for these). Then there is the rare 1% that I feel I would to have my own copy of and then I try to find it as inexpensively as possible. And then I have to get rid of an existing cookbook. Cookbook shelving unit is cram-packed!
All of this quantifying led me to another thought. How do you judge ANY book at first glance? How do you decide to read a specific book? And if you choose badly, what do you do about it?
For me, great titles are key; it needs to be interesting, maybe some word play. “Dragons” in the title is a gimme. The phrase “mercenary librarians” on the cover of a book was too tempting to pass up last month. It’s a toss-up whether author or subject matter is the next ingredient for me. I’ll pretty much read anything by my favorite authors. I even read Michael Pollan’s LSD book last year. Only a very few authors have failed to keep my interest. Poor Barbara Hambly lost me between the vampire books and the nasty ice queen series. If a book has an author with whom I am unfamiliar, then subject matter can draw me in. Of course, I’m curious about so much stuff that pretty much anything can work in this respect. I’m not a romance fan and I get irritated pretty quickly with historical fiction but even having said that, I will still occasionally read something in these genres. I prefer fantasy to science fiction. I’ve read my fill of WWII titles the last few years but if something comes well-recommended, I might put it on the list.
There is another category of “what do read” for me because I’m one of those folks who reads multiple books concurrently. At any given time I have a book on CD in the car, an audiobook on my pc and a variety of books piled up in my bedroom. When I decide I want to read, I have to decide WHICH of those books to pick up. Most of the time, it’s my mood that decides, but if a book is coming due soon and I can’t renew it, that factor often takes precedence. Now that the library has re-instituted due dates, I have to think about this more.
I am also a book-abandoner. I decided about 15 years ago, after struggling for weeks to finish Blood on the Snow by Tunstall, that life is too short. There are so many books published each year that no one could read them all so if I don’t finish a book, it won’t doom the publishing industry. I once quit reading a book on page four; I already had the feeling that I wouldn’t enjoy the characters or the plot. Authors beware – you gotta hook me fast!
So the answer to Bill’s question is complex.
How do YOU decide what to read? Can you abandon a bad choice?
I lived in St. Louis for many years, including my formative “learn-to-drive” years. In high school I drove all over the west and south county burbs. No GPS, no “directions” printed out from a computer. And no problems.
But now that I’m back in the city to assist my mother, I am completely lost. Nothing looks familiar even when I’m absolutely in a place I know I’ve been before. In the last few days I’ve mastered the way from Nonny’s condo to the grocery store and back but everything else, I’m using my phone to guide me. There just isn’t anything that pings my memory as I’ve driven around doing various errands. As I was driving yesterday to pick up a shower seat from a friend of my mom’s I realized that if my phone went out, I would have NO idea how to get home. I’d have to stop at a gas station and ask!
Is it just me or can you really not go home again?
Husband and I are traveling to Tacoma, WA on Monday to see our Daughter. We will be gone for a week. This week we are prepping our gardens for our absence, watering like crazy and taking care of any garden pest and disease issues.
Due to the lack of humidity and the isolation on the Northern Great Plains, we have a comforting lack of pests and diseases in our gardens. We rarely need to combat anything, but there are a few persistent garden problems that require action.
We somehow have blight problems in our tomatoes and roses that require an application of fungicide. I sprayed with Daconil last night. Last year, we had flea beetles in our kohlrabies that required insecticide. I applied some Sevin to some chewed up kohlrabi plants last night. The potted tomatoes and peppers in the church garden need something called Rot Stop to combat Blossom End Rot. (Calcium uptake in a pot is difficult at times.) We also have cabbages that need help with cabbage worms with Thuricide, or Bacillus Thuringiensis, which is an organic worm deterrent. No worms in our Savoy cabbages!
How do you deal with life’s pests, garden or otherwise?
We have two, 50 ft. tall spruce trees in our front yard that are full of birds and their nests. The Collared Doves begin the nesting season, followed by robins, then sparrows, finches, and Warbling Vireos. Chickadees and wrens make their presence known. We feed the birds sunflower seeds in the back yard, but not in summer. Still, our trees are full of birds all year. I wonder how they choose our trees and yard? There are tall trees all around, yet we have lots of birds. I suppose the grapes, hazelnuts, raspberries, strawberries, and currants in the yard are a draw.
I was in a rather fanciful mood the other day and imagined a bird real estate agent trying to sell bird condos in our trees. What would they say?
High rise living with ample food supply in the cold weather. Luxury summer garden worms. Indoor cat brushed outside, leaving fur for nesting. All the comforts of home. Good opportunities for subletting. No squirrels allowed.
The blog title, by the way, is from a Broadway play from the 1970’s. I have no idea why it came to mind.
How would a bird real estate agent list your yard? What are your experiences buying property?
We like to grow dahlias in our garden, even though our winters are too cold for them to winter over. We don’t have a cold room in our house to store dug up dahlia tubers over the winter to replant in the spring, so we order new tubers every year from wonderful place in Washington State-Swan Island Dahlias. Their instructions for successful dahlia growing are sort of confusing.
We are to plant the dahlia tubers in rich, moist, soil, but are instructed to not water the tubers until the shoots emerge from the soil. They will rot if we do. It may be ok to water if it is dry or if they are in pots, but that is dicey. It is hard to know what we are to do. What is too dry, and what is too wet? I am happy to report that five out of seven dahlia tubers are emerging from the soil with some watering here and there, given our dry spring, but I still have anxiety about the watering issues. I still don’t know what I am to do!
What are some confusing directions you recall? When were you at a loss about what to do?
Today’s post comes from Steve.
Timothy Gruncheon Grooms, born in a barn in Iowa, was adopted into my family in 1946. He was officially my sister’s cat and always seemed to understand that. Although she did things to him that were beneath the dignity of any cat, he slept each night in the crook of her arm.
Timmy was a fighter. My parents had never heard of a cat being confined, and they would have been appalled at the suggestion pets should be neutered. So Timmy was a free-range tomcat who roamed the neighborhood fighting with other cats and filling the world with orange and white tabby kittens. All the fighting he did caused Timmy to have a fat face because so much scar tissue built up on his cheeks. His ears were riddled with cuts and holes. I did witness one epic encounter in our backyard, Timmy relentlessly chasing another cat, and I was shocked by the violence of it all.
Timmy obviously lost some fights. Once he came home with a chunk of tissue the diameter of a nickel missing from his left cheek. Our vet gave us a spray to keep the wound clean, but our dog had a better idea. Danny, a sweet golden retriever, began following Timmy, licking that wound. Danny and Timmy never had physical contact before or after that incident, but Danny licked Timmy’s wounded cheek until fresh skin formed over the hole.
My sister bonded with Timmy as if he were her child. As I recently wrote, she dressed him in doll clothes, including a bonnet. She plopped him on his back in a baby stroller and went about the neighborhood with him that way. The set of Timmy’s ears were a clue to how he felt about this, but he accepted it all. When Nancy’s fascination with medical issues led her to subject Timmy to some treatments, including an enema administered by eyedropper, he put up with that, too.
Timmy was the most remarkable athlete I’ve ever known. Two stories established his legendary status.
Once our family was in the dining room watching television (eating Swanson’s TV dinners on our TV trays). A bat entered our home and began flying from room to room. Timmy was sitting on a braided rug in the middle of the dining room. As the bat wobbled through the dining room a second time, Timmy shot off the floor like a jack-in-the-box, snatching the bat midair. To my eye, Timmy’s leap took him five feet into the air, and it could have been higher. With the bat in his mouth, Timmy went to the back door and asked to be let out.
In our last home in Ames my mother kept her precious chinaware in a cabinet by the front door. Timmy’s way of letting us know he wanted to be let out was jumping to the top of that cabinet. One afternoon he did that, just as he had countless times before. Timmy, from the floor, could not see that my mother had filled the cabinet’s top with stacks of china. My mother screamed in terror when Timmy walked to the cabinet and launched his leap. Once he was in the air, Timmy saw the china and performed a desperate midair gymnastic maneuver. He managed to land with his four paws in the tiny openings between the stacks of teacups and plates. Standing there, Timmy was unable to move, and he let out a dismayed yowl so we could rush to his rescue.
By 1964 our family, Timmy included, was living in Wayzata, Minnesota. He acquired one annoying habit late in life, crawling around inside the family Christmas tree in the middle of the night, eating tinsel and knocking glass ornaments to the floor. Timmy still lived much of his life out of our sight, and he still got in fights. His health declined. My sister, who was then a student at the University of Minnesota, fell in love with a young man, and they soon got married.
In 1965 Timmy disappeared for four days. We feared we would never see our 19-year-old cat again, but at long last he dragged himself home in terrible shape. He clearly had lost a big fight. Stroking his scarred old head, my mother had a heart-to-heart talk with him. “Timmy, old guy, you have been Nancy’s baby all these years. She is now married and will soon have a baby of her own. You look like you’re at the end of the line, but I’m asking one last thing of you. Can you keep it together a few more months? Can you keep alive until Nancy’s new baby arrives?”
Nancy’s baby arrived in August. A few days later, Timmy died.
Timmy was a vivid character in our family life for nearly two decades. Have you ever had a pet with a distinctive personality?
Trail Baboon 