Husband had a dental filling on Monday. He came home, mouth and lips still numb from the anesthetic, and ate a slice of bread and laid down to take a nap.
I came home at 5:00 pm, and was shocked to see Husband’s lower lip. I exclaimed “You look like you were in a fight! What happened?” His lip was terribly swollen. He didn’t know what I was talking about at first, as his face was still numb from the dentist. Closer inspection revealed a gash on the inside of his lip, suggesting that he had bit his lip while eating the slice of his homemade sourdough loaf, and didn’t feel it because of the anesthesia. We iced it, and by yesterday it was much reduced although still red and sore looking.
One of my coworkers told the story of her husband the day before their wedding deciding to eliminate a hornets’ nest and getting stung on the eyelid, causing his eye to swell shut and turn all sorts of lurid colors.
Got any fat lip or black eye stories? Ever given anyone a black eye or a fat lip?
Our next door neighbors are a delightful pair of educators whose children we involve in our gardening. One of their extended families has a German tradition of eating cooked Swiss Chard doused with vinegar. That is certainly not our experience with German cuisine, but who am I to judge. We always grow chard so I can make an Italian pie of greens, but our harvests have been so plentiful we always have chard to spare. This year is no exception, and we have so much frozen chard from previous years that I shall not need much this year, except for a bit for a butternut squash and fresh chard phyllo pie recipe husband found. We always grow Argentata, a white chard variety.
The neighbors have happily harvested our chard on two occasions this summer, always looking sheepish and guilty, as though they were robbing us or doing something illegal. We are so happy to share chard with them, and would probably plant chard even if we didn’t need it, just because we believe family traditions are important. The neighbors consider it a real gift.
What family traditions do you think are important to keep? What traditions do you want to eliminate?What simple things do you consider a good gift? How do you prepare chard?
Sunday has never been a day of rest for us, Yesterday was particularly busy, and we ended up in very odd but very affirming encounters with other people.
We started out the morning at 7:30 with a run-through of our choir anthem “Hear me, Redeemer” which is written in a gospel style that has a soprano soloist belting out a solo/descant with the choir echoing her lyrics. The soloist was a terrific singer who is a member of the local LDS church but who sings with us on occasion. People in the congregation loved the song, and said it was “inspirational”, something we consider a real success given this is a pretty traditional Lutheran congregation. They even clapped.
We then spent a couple of hours doing a fall clean up the church garden with other congregation members, and it was during this that a woman drove up in a car with Florida plates, a missing driver side window, a grown daughter, and four chihuahuas. She asked Husband for help, as they were homeless. Husband found a hotel that would take dogs, gave her the number for the homeless coordinator at my agency, and our pastor found some funds for a night at the hotel and gave her a bag of leftover food from the church brunch we had earlier after our service.
We then went home and vacuumed and dusted the house, dropped some kohlrabi off at a friend’s house, and headed to the liquor store for a well deserved bottle of wine. It was there we encountered the clerk who had worked at the store several years ago, quit due to health problems, and started working again. She said she remembered us, and told us she had married, quit drinking, and was really happy in her sobriety. We congratulated her. I don’t know if working in a liquor store is the best work environment for her, but it was inspiring to hear her success. She teased us that if we stopped drinking, she would be our sponsor.
What or who inspires you? How do you spend your Sundays? What are your favorite choir songs?
It was 28° on Wednesday morning. We lost the other creamy colored duck. And the next morning a coyote was howling just 100 feet below the house. At first, the yipping noise they make sounds a little bit surreal and I ran outside to see what was going on. Even the dogs came running back to the house looking at me like “Did you hear that? What the heck is that??“ I yelled and the dogs remembered they’re supposed to deal with stuff like coyotes and they took off after it. Kelly was out the other door slapping her ‘bird away’ boards together. There’s too many leaves on the trees yet, and the corn and beans still out there and too much coverage for things to hide in and it’s tough to see much. And that’s why, a few days later, I was out in my pajamas hunting a coyote.
I was standing at the kitchen window filling the tea pot and I saw something moving out in the pasture. It was too far away to tell clearly what it was, and by the time I got my crocs on, and found the shells for the rifle, (which were behind the toothpaste box), and got out there to a better vantage point, there wasn’t anything to see. But as long as I was out there already, I fed the chickens and let Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of their pen. Rosie and and Guildy are doing good.
I realized all the chickens spend a lot of time hiding, so it’s not just them. (See the first paragraph.) Course hiding under a bush seems more helpful for attacks from above than from coyotes.
Bringing pears in the house was the solution to eating them. They soften up and taste really good.
I have seen a couple guys combining soybeans around here. The freeze kills the stem and they harvest better that way. A few more days now and everyone will be going full force.
I still get some dairy magazines in the mail and I spent a bit of time wondering what I would have changed if I still had cows. My whole calf raising situation would have been the first thing to improve. I’d have needed to get them out of the dairy barn pen and into individual stalls somewhere.
Adding more cows and getting out of the stanchion barn would be important, but where and how I’m still not sure. We’re on low ground and it’s wet and I don’t know where I could have built, or how, or if I even would have wanted too.
Kelly asks me sometimes if I ever wanted to be one of those big farmers with thousands of acres? Well, the machinery and toys are fun, but it also turns into more management and less actual work at some point. So I don’t know.
As I’ve always said, just add more zero’s to the bills and income.
I don’t consider myself a trendy person although I do like to think that I at least pay attention to what’s going on in the world.
A few years ago when charcuterie, although not a new concept, became a big deal, I noted it. I’ve never served a charcuterie board; I don’t have a good reason, just never got around to it. (Aside: I DO have a stamp set of a board with all the normal charcuterie inclusions – meats, cheese, olives, tomatoes, etc.)
Now I see that “butter boards” are all the rage. At first I thought butter boards were an assortment of butters, which seemed a little weird but now that I’ve read a few articles, I understand the concept. You start with a board, spread soft butter lavishly all over it and then add various seasonings. Salt, lemon zest, garlic, red onion, various spices, greens, even honey – you name it, there is probably already a recipe out there for it. You serve these butter boards with bread and there are lots of opinions about that as well.
They look fun but I don’t know if I’ll get around to serving it. In my circles I envision spending more time explaining it to people than I would eating it!
What would you like on your butter board? Will you miss charcuterie?
I received several condolences from local people these last couple of weeks on the death of my mother. This was rather surprising, as my mother died in 2014.
There was a death notice in the local paper a couple of weeks ago for a Marilyn Boomgaarden. Well, the last name is correct, but the first name is not my mother’s, and I understand the confusion. Local folks thought she must be my mother because we have the same last name and there aren’t any other Boomgaardens in southwest ND. Marilyn was the wife of my dad’s cousin Irwin, and was briefly here in Dickinson to be close to her daughter, my third cousin. She moved here from Dell Rapids, SD.
My grandfather had eleven brothers and sisters, and if you encounter a Boomgaarden in Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, or North Dakota, chances are really good they are my kin, especially if their last name has two a’s in it. It is a pretty odd name, although in Ostfriesen/Dutch it means orchard. The family was fairly close knit, and cousins kept track of each other, so I heard all about all Dad’s cousins growing up. I have yet to write to the person who sent a sympathy card to me and donated three bibles to the Salvation Army in my mother’s memory. Oh, to live in a small community!
Have you everbeen mistaken for someone else? Do you have any close or distant relatives who live nearby you? What does your last name mean?
Despite already having way too many kitchen toys, last month I couldn’t resist a set of hand pie molds on sale in a catalog of cooking fripperies. I had never heard the phrase “hand pies” until I moved to Minnesota and even then, I don’t hear it often.
Now that YA and I are overloaded with apples from our trip to the orchard on Sunday, I decided to try out one of my new molds – the apple one. I didn’t use any particular recipe, just some thinly chopped apples with sugar and a bit of cinnamon. At the last minute I tossed in a half cup of raspberries from my canes. I also used refrigerated pie dough (Trader Joe’s) since I wasn’t sure how it would all come together. I hate wasting dough made from scratch!
They turned out pretty well considering that I was just winging it. I figured out pretty quickly that flour was needed in the mold and that although I was using an egg wash on the outside, I should have used water as the binder between the two layers of pastry. The last issue is one I’ve encountered before; when working with store-bought pie dough, you have to really work the edges together when you roll out the scrap pieces or they don’t hold. I know this but didn’t follow through well because I was rushing a bit (I had already made an apple crisp at YA’s request). They turned out OK but not as pretty as any of the online pictures. That’s OK, I didn’t expect masterpieces the first time around.
The good news is that even though they weren’t picture-perfect, they taste great. The addition of the raspberries gave them a bit of a twang and being able to pick up your pie and eat it without a fork or spoon is a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll try blueberries next time around.
What kind of food have you discovered as an adult?
Our puppy needs a haircut, and is a very fuzzy boy. I noticed that he had two rather large dried on pieces of poop on his rear end, stuck to his fussy hair. I told husband that he had to help me with the “clinkers”, as we have called such things since we got our first dogs many years ago. I started thinking about the word and the euphemisms that we use. I am not talking about hurtful or derogatory ones, just interesting ones.
I suppose many euphemisms stem from talking about body parts or functions. Many of my child/adolescent clients are embarrassed to death to have to refer to body parts by their proper names. A good friend had a daughter who referred to boys’ parts as “hoses”, which I thought was a pretty good descriptor. I don’t know what she calls them now that she is a grown woman.
What are some euphemisms that you use? What words are hard for you to say in public?
Yesterday the Fargo Forum reported that bar patrons in Maddock, ND, who were in the Maddock Bar the night of September 6 needed to be aware that they may have been exposed to rabies. It seems a rather intoxicated woman came into the bar holding a racoon she had rescued days earlier from the side of the road. She was asked to leave the bar, but not before she walked all around the bar showing people her racoon. The racoon was reportedly injured when she found it, and she had nursed it back to health and was keeping it as a pet. It is illegal to keep racoons or skunks as pets here due to the threat of rabies. They are still looking for the woman and her racoon. The bar employees say they are going to dress up as racoons for Halloween,
When I was about 6 years old, I tried lifting a friend’s rather fat beagle into my father’s fishing boat that was stored along side the garage. The beagle was not amused, and bit me on my face. It was just a nip, but my mother was panicked about it. The beagle’s owners refused to lock the dog up the required number of days to see if it was rabid, so I had to have a series of rabies shots. I got the shots under my shoulder blades. It was painful. I wouldn’t want to go through that again. The beagle wasn’t rabid, by the way, and he and I remained friends.
Know any good bar jokes? What animals would you like to see in bars? What are your experiences with rabies or rabies shots?
My dad was a big baby about getting sick. Luckily he didn’t get sick often – mostly when my mom would just be recovering from something. Right about the time she was feeling a bit better, he would come down with whatever bug had afflicted her. My sister and I had always joked about it but then it got really funny the summer before my junior year when he caught my mom’s “persistent stomach flu” and it turned out she was actually pregnant.
That old trope about women marrying men like their fathers hit a little too close to home with my second was-band. He was pathetic and unbelievably whiny when he was ill – to the point that I was usually out of patience within the first 24 hours. Me!
With these shining examples, I’ve pretty much always kept my sicknesses to myself. Since my doctors figured out my adult-onset allergies, I’ve actually been quite healthy for the last 20 years, including managing to get through pandemic so far without contracting any of the variants. Then last week I came down with a cold (yep, just a cold; I’ve tested twice). It’s the first time I’ve had a cold in at least 10 years.
Being retired, I didn’t need to call in sick so except for an occasional “stuck with a summer cold” text, I was pretty much just laying low. As the weekend approached, I realized I might have a couple of conflicts that didn’t jive well with having a bad cold. First was my other book club that was scheduled at my house on Saturday morning. One of the members is a little fragile; didn’t want to her to catch the cold and honestly I wasn’t up to cooking and getting the place picked up. On Friday morning I contacted everybody and re-scheduled. Was still hoping to attend Steve’s celebration in person – tripled masked and standing in the back of the room. Saturday morning I was still too symptomatic so switched to the virtual celebration.
It made me feel a little silly, bowing out of commitments I had made, just because of a cold, and I worried a bit that I was blowing my cold out of proportion, acting like my dad or my was-band. But if pandemic has done anything good, it’s made me realize that I really shouldn’t drag my contagious germs around and expose innocent folks, even if it’s “just a cold”. And I did put on a dressy shirt and earrings for the virtual!
Guess I have a couple more days of laying low and looking up silly sick memes.
How do you take care of yourself when you’re sick?
