No Rare Vegetables, Please

Good morning.

That's the lamp in front of my eyes as I write every day.  It's an ordinary brown paper lampshade with the lovely addition (not skillfully done, I know) of some ferns and so forth that I collected one fall in upper New York State.

I have lots of leaves.  The best way to  keep them is to get a magazine and stuff them in each page, one perfect leaf per page. That way they don't fade and they are kept handy for future perusal.

That lampshade was pretty nice looking until dust permeated the glue of the transparent tape that I used to plaster the ferns on there.  I still love it. When the lamp is turned on you can see all the tiny leaves and stems of the ferns, and the baby maple leaves---and that gives me pleasure, to look at them.  If you are smart, you disregard the dust.

I was reading some blogs from this time last year and marveling at how simple and straightforward our lives were then. We were planning on going to Iowa for Miranda's graduation. There was no real question about it, we were going. Then on Apr. 30, Theo fell and struck his head, a passing and not catastrophic incident, and yet everything changed for us then. Our life is different now.   This is what you get for being old.

Then I was cooking, now we get the Meals on Wheels.  They are strange but edible. It is still a pleasure to have them arrive, but sometimes it is a challenge to love them.  Yesterday we got cannolini (pasta, ricotta, tomato sauce) plus short-cooked string beans and short-cooked carrots with peas.

As my father used to say, "No rare vegetables, please!"  Sometimes I feel that the MOW way overcooks the vegetables but then comes a day like yesterday and I miss the good overcooked green beans that I love.

Did I mention that we are having the kitchen hauled out and put in new? I guess it is a good time for it...now or never.  There 'll be no cooking at all then, for a while.YAZZYBEL