Cherries, and Berries, and Clouds--Oh My!!

Good morning. Today's posting may be mostly about food, but I am not sure, as I haven't written it yet.  We are never quite sure until we do it.

Last night I made the base and the cloud for Cherry Berries on a Cloud.  I had already sliced a trillion strawberries and lightly sugared them, and stored them in the refrigerator. There they sit, juicing themselves, under a plastic wrap.  Near them are boxes of  other berries, awaiting their introduction at the very last when they are incorporated into the berry bowl.

And the cherries? Well may you ask.

Have you ever heard of  "Eton Mess"  ?
No? Well, it is a dessert famous in England where Eton Mess was cooked up in the school kitchens of Eton to please boys and mamas alike.  It is, in essence, broken up dry meringues, whipped cream,and berries, all melanged in a serving bowl.  Very very delicious.

I suddenly realized that Cherry Berries on a Cloud is essentially Eton Mess, with the addition of cream cheese and marshmallows to make a more sturdy cloud. It also uses prepared cherry pie filling, with cornstarch and red coloring and all. Well, we went to the store and I could not find a proper cherry pie filling , only "Light" filling with is poisonous aspartame which I will not eat.  So I bought two cans of cherries, which I'd only have to sweeten and thicken up with my own cornstarch or tapioca--not a big problem. But when I got home I looked at the Albertson's receipt and saw that we'd paid $4.69 for each of those cans of cherries. No, thanks!  Those cherries are sitting in the pantry with the receipt and will go back to Albertson's tomorrow, thank you. Imagine, paying nearly ten dollars for two cans of cherries. Not me.

I realized that with plenty of sugared fresh berries,  I really would essentially have Eton Mess except that it can be cut into squares.  Well, that's the theory. We'll find out tonight.  Then you spoon the berry mixture over the cloud. Yummo.

I was worried about baking the meringue, which has to be baked at a controlled temperature and left overnight in the oven, but when I opened the oven this morning, there was a perfect huge white drift of dry but not too dry meringue in the pyrex rectangle.  The cloud itself was shortly beaten up and mixed up (too many marshmallows fell in, but what the hey) and spread whitely over the white field of meringue. Then the whole was covered with plastic and inserted into the refrigerator to await the festal event.

I did cut the sugar in both meringue and cloud. I hope I didn't cut it too much; you have to have enough or it won't be good.  But I will take a tiny taste out of a corner (well of course I will) and if it is sweet enough, I shall add the raspberries and blackberries and a soupcon of balsamic vinegar. (That's the genius idea.)  Bland sweet meringue, bland sweet cloud, BALSAMIC  berries.  Bingo.

If you want the basic recipe, google "Cherry Berries on a Cloud," and that will take you to Betty Crocker's recipe which is as basic as you want to get.

Now I am almost ready for the book club.   And the book, you ask, did you ever read the book?  Answer: I read AT it as usual.  It did not grab me enough for a real reading. I thought he wrote copiously, but tentatively.  Needs more work, I'd suggest, if I were at the writers' workshop.  YAZZYBEL

Dusting, here

Good morning!

Yes, I am still dusting. This will be short and sweet, as I'm very late to the post (LOL) and still need to get something done around here.

Today at church the Forum topic was Holy Communication.  It was amazing, the number of tweeters, texters, bloggers, e-mailers, IM'ers,  and so forth that were in the audience.  Today, the main message that came out was--Mindfulness. Pay attention to yourself. Take a deep breath before you thoughtlessly send off that (vituperative, critical, negative, nagging, irritating) communication. Also take a deep breath before you misinterpret what you receive.  All true. All true.  What more can be said? We'll see next week.

I also went through church in a fog, it seems, as I did not kneel when the Dove descends and enters the consecrated elements on the Communion Table.  That is the old fashioned way.  In the Catholic Church a bell would ring to snap you out of it and tell you to kneel down.  Nowadays, what you do in church is up for grabs. You may do as you please.  A former priest taught us not to kneel at that point (to wit:   Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the Highest.)

I used to argue about it with my son Gregory. "But he says that you'd just be kneeling to some people on an altar," said Gregory. Oh, I see--and the rest of the whole service? Off to the golf course we may as well go, to me, in that line of reasoning.
But, as it is, some kneel, some continue standing, and some are in the "Anglican Crouch," as John Mortimer describes a much used posture in the Anglican church.  That's when you are neither kneeling nor sitting, with a large part of your anatomy flung over the pew in front of  you, and  your behind comfortably remaining in its perch. Never say we aren't democratic. Every person  for k'self. 

K'self originated in my family and comes in handy when a gender bias is not to be established.

Anyway, I forgot to do it today-- consciously to kneel down at that point. I think we should kneel down as much as possible in the Episcopal Church, for two reasons: 1) to honor The Incarnation, and 2) not to be such pew-potatoes as we are getting to be.  We might as well be Methodists, or Congregationalists!  Let us ACTIVELY participate in the Mass as far as we are bodily able.

So today I was not mindful...that much unmindfulness is rare. I wonder what clouds were going across my mind as I was saying those words today!!!  What was I thinking about, or was I thinking at all??? Scary.  YAZZYBEL

Pick-up Day

Today's Saturday, and the book club comes Monday night.  Today is pick-up day around the living room, here, the day when I'll be going around with a big cardboard box, trying to get this room into a Martha Stewart state of blandness. It is such a small room; it really should never be dominated by the welter of papers, books, music, souvenir rocks,  pine cones, family photographs and candlesticks that are usually lying around in it.

So, I'll get everything out of it and it will look so neat!! I 'll take a photograph of it and think: wow, how nice. Wouldn't it be great if it could look like this all the time, in the Temple Tradition? My family would be proud of me. Then on Tuesday morning, I'll go back to living in it.

I can pick up a few things on the blog too. Yesterday's cold brought another flurry of dire reports from my sisters.  Things are really dead over there in South Texas. And when a lot of plants die there, that's a lot of botany that is going to wilt and rot over the next few weeks. It is going to smell terrible, because shortly the weather will be hot again.   It's sad.  When I was a kid, there were a lot of citrus growers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. If it was going to get cold, they would put out smudge pots to save the orange and grapefruit and lemon trees.  My mother or grandfather might go out with an old blanket or carton to protect a special plant or tree.  But cold like this was not something that happened then. This is huge, a massive blight that will leave its effects behind it for years.

Another thing. I found a book in my bookshelf yesterday entitled, A Wholly Different  Way of Living.  It is a transcription of some dialogs between Professor Alan W. Anderson and J. Krishnamurti. Professor Alan W. Anderson is the man I told you about some days ago when I was writing about the I Ching.  I had his first initials wrong, as I knew at the time (but you have to just go along on a blog).   Anyway, the important point, besides getting the name right, is my remembrance of seeing those very dialogs on KPBS TV in San Diego.  I heard them shortly after my transformative experience with Jungian therapy here in San Diego, and it was a shock to me then  that I heard them and understood them.  Oh, I didn't and still don't get the depths that those men could plumb in their discourse, but I could follow along quite easily. I knew what they were talking about. It was like picking up a book in a foreign language that you suddenly realized you could read and comprehend. So, we can grow.  I have put A Wholly Different Way of Living out where I can put my hands on it when the book club has gone and I can read at it from time to time.

Another thing. I went to the Mission Hills Library Book Club on Thursday morning. They had read Swann's Way by Marcel Proust.  It has been many a long year since I read at Swann's Way. It is indeed a remarkable book.  Most of the readers seemed to be impressed by the quality and quantity of his observation. Call it presence.  Call it Mindfulness.  Call it a wholly different way of living. Only it isn't wholly different. He just happened to have the time, with that asthma and all, and not having to go out and teach school every day, come what may, to lie back and recall, and let it all happen through him and his writing hand.

But now I have to pick up the living room and sort out the silver forks and spoons and worry about the timing for the Cherry Berries on a Cloud. The book club will be disappointed not to have whipped cream on the side, but there is whipped cream in the dessert.  I have to do a little actual cleaning, for a change, creeping along in my husband's wake as he's already done the most, as usual. It has to be neat, and it has to be a Good Thing.  Ah, Martha, Martha!! Which Martha can I mean, you ask ?   Just think, if Martha Stewart's mama had named her Mary Stewart, she mght have been the one having the  dialog with Krishnamurti!
YAZZYBEL

Everybody's freesin' !!!

Good morning!

My father spoke really good English even though it was his second language.  He hardly had any accent at all when he was younger and fresh out of the University of Texas, it seems, but as he grew older his Spanish accent, like other parts of his personality, inclined more back to the Mexican.  One thing he never quite seemed to master was the treacherous English "z".  He spoke it  like an "s" no matter how hard he may have been trying.  As far as I know, he never had to live through weather such as his beloved town of Brownsville, Texas, is sustaining now.

Perhaps the most southerly US point of all this cold that's sweeping the middle part of our country now, Brownsville is suffering hard.  I spoke to my sister on the phone this morning, about six my time, and she told me that every single plant and tree in her yard is gone.  Brownsville is semi-tropical in climate, and lots of beautiful big-leafed tropical plants and trees thrive there.  It is generally warm, and it rains a lot, and things grow wildly. Gardens are beautiful. But now, every single plant gone! That's heart-breaking.

Their power is still on so they are warm.  Their passion is birdwatching, watching the little and big birds that frequent their backyard feeders.  The birds are out there this morning, jumping around to keep warm.  Their water is frozen, of course. She is going to put some fresh water out there now. It probably won't freeze today,though she says they haven't seen the sun for days.  Oh--and dead sea turtles are washing up down at the Gulf....

My sister in San Antonio has sent us beautiful photos of Encanta St. in northeastern San Antonio, where it has been even colder. Everything is frozen there too and there is a beautiful light covering of snow all over.  Underneath that snow there's deadly ice, and the people of San Antonio are advised not to go to work until the ice has had a chance to melt off.

My sister in Tucson is the coldest of all. She and her husband went to bed with all their coats on last night because it was TEN DEGREES by their garden thermometer, and they have no heat. Right.  No heat. I asked why and she said that the city of Tucson ran out of gas. Instead of sharing the problem around, they just cut out a whole area, and Ventana Canyon got the ax.  Imagine!  Did they leave Glens Falls for this???  The city underestimated the amount of gas their inhabitants would be needing, and they didn't order enough...James Howard Kunstler would be pointing his finger and saying, AHA!  He knows it is going to be difficult when the petroleum products all go away.

My sister in North Carolina is still freesin', as she has been for some weeks now. She's more used to it, and has wood to burn, so she's more prepared than some. She wraps up and hunkers down by the fire and reads.  Hope the lights don't go out, my  sister.

Here in Chula Vista, it is as cold as heck, but we have a nice blowy gas furnace with plenty in supply still, it seems. The sky is clear and the sun will be out, but, Daddy, we're still freesin'!!!   YAZZYBEL

Oysters Then and Now, Part Deux

Good morning! This will be short and sweet as I am going to run up to Mission Hills Library to catch a discussion of Proust's Swann's Way. Theodore will obligingly drop me off for an hour. How he will amuse himself I do not know; perhaps he will come into the library and read the Wall Street Journal, or go to Trader Joe's.

This post is less about oysters than about the title up there. I chose that title yesterday (an arresting one, isn't it?) as a tribute to a theme written by my son Alexander many years ago, entitled, "Artillery Then and Now."  This effort is bound up into a red folder and bradded in strongly. It has a title page, and in every way conforms,  I am sure, to the instructions for its presentation. I look at it every now and then when I want  to enjoy a gentle laugh.

Is it wrong to laugh at our children? Of course not, if we don't mock them to their faces.  It is good to have a little laugh once in a while at the absurdities they practice as they work their way up to committing adult absurdities, is it not? I am lucky enough to have preserved some of the writing efforts of my kids, all seriously marked and commented upon by the teachers lucky enough to have them in their classes.

I would also like to report that they turn the tables on us when they are grown up and do not hesitate to indulge in rollicksome merriment when advised on topics such as finances, ailments, personal health, intestinal parasites amongst their restless children, the coming collapse of the USA as we know it, and vitamins. Among other topics.  And they do not trouble themselves to be discreet either.

Back to oysters.  My mother allowed us to put catsup on seafood when we wanted to.  I thought that was wise, for some kids just have too active imaginations. If catsup makes something more palatable, let 'em use it. I did that for my kids, and they cheerfully ate any amount of liver, strange seafood, or anything else as long as I allowed them catsup.

The only things they ever refused to eat, period, were : eggplant, which turned out to be because I put green pepper in the mix, and an asparagus quiche I once made (it was simply delicious, at the beginning of the quiche era when we used all the eggs we wanted and made the whole thing with lots of rich whipping cream). NOBODY would go near that quiche, which proves that the boy is father of the man.

Now, in those days, my readers,  kids ate at the table in our house or they did not eat at all. After the big refusal, I offered to make anyone who cared enough to purchase it,  an alternative--a cheese sandwich for twenty five cents.  Alex and Greg were broke and had to go hungry, but the youngest, Ben, went upstairs to his room and searched around for ages and finally came down with twenty five cents. Gregory told me many years later that he would never forget the sound of Ben rooting around in the toy box for those coins. I didn't think of offering catsup for the quiche, but I would have if I'd thought of it.

Right now, all the oysters in Port Isabel are freezing in record low temperatures in their oil-sludged beds at the mouth of the Rio Grande, at the conjuction of river, bay and Gulf.  I pray they survive in good health for the delectation of all of us. I seem to have gotten away, largely, from the subject of oysters and onto the subject of kids. Aren't they wonderful? Oysters, and kids? YAZZYBEL

Oysters, Then and Now

oyster: Middle English, oistre, from Middle French, from Latin ostrea, from Greek ostreon, akin to Greek ostrakon shell, osteon, bone.

That's its etymology (edited) according to Webster's New Collegiate. I won't bother with the definition because everyone knows what oysters are. Don't they?

"The bravest man is the one who first ate an oyster."  No doubt about that. My grandfather said that he followed the precepts of his own father, who "would not eat anything that still had its bowels."  Lucky for him that he lived on a farm in Tennessee, and then in Central Texas,  where there are very few oyster beds.

When my father, traveling on the cotton business right after WWII, went to New York, he went to the hotel restaurant, where fried oysters were presented at some certain price by the half dozen.  "I'll have two or three dozen," he said to the waitress.  "Are you sure you want that many?" she asked, boggled. "Well, start with two dozen, then, " said he.  "I'm going to start you with six," said the lady, "and then we'll see."  When the oysters arrived, they were each the size of a small steak, of course, and had to be cut into with knife and fork. What a surprise.

My mother loved to tell that story of how surprised my father was to receive those six  fried oysters on a large platter.  We could all imagine his surprise, because the oysters we ate were very small Gulf of Mexico oysters, as fresh and sweet as you could imagine in the ages before petroleum laced their natal waters. My mother fried them up in cornmeal and salt and pepper, and even the kids could eat a dozen each without ever having to cut into one once.

The best place to eat oysters out was down in Port Isabel, about twenty miles away on the Laguna Madre and the Gulf both.  When I was very very young it was Point Isabel, but at some point it became Port Isabel as I remember the younger generation (my mother and uncle RB) correcting my grandmother to set her straight.  The best place in Port Isabel to eat oysters was at Carlos's Cafe.  Carlos just knew how to make those oysters so perfectly delicious.  His crowning success was Oysters En Brochette. I can still see the grease-marked piece of paper with the menu items typewritten across it...good, I can't see the price. It would make me cry for our monetary system.

Carlos strung those little oysters on sticks of wood, dredged them with flour, salt, pepper, melted butter, and grilled them over a flame.  I can't tell you how good they were. Even my mother, dauntless cook, refrained from ever competing with Carlos on Oysters en Brochette.  In my memory, it is always November when we are driving down there in the frigid twilight, driving about to look for Carlos who tended to move his operation around from time to time. Yes, it did sometimes get cold in our tropical kingdom of South Texas, when a norther hit and it became very cold (in the forties), damp and dark, with a neat 50 mph breeze constantly buffeting us as we drove.  The oysters  were worth it.

I did not eat raw oysters until I grew up, and those mostly were in San Francisco or San Diego restaurants. I have forsworn for a number of years the presentation of raw oysters in my own home.  One Christmas holiday I bought some wonderful raw Eastern oysters flown out that day, from Ron Kiefer's market in Mission Hills.  I am sure they were perfect.  But instead of putting them bravely out on chilled plates with lemon and hot sauce (yes, yes, we have to have it at every meal), I chickened out and served my guests from South America a pallid bisque, instead.  Since then, if I want a raw oyster, I leave the responsibility of buying, keeping and serving it to professionals (like Carlos). The best raw oysters I ever had were at lunch, at the counter, at Dobson's in San Diego. WOWie. Who needs pearls?   YAZZYBEL

The Bliss of Retirement

Good morning! Younger readers can retire off this essay right now, as I am writing for the elderly. HOWEVER, if you are young you will someday be where we are right now. So you may want to stay on and learn something. (Crabbiness.)

I retired in 1996 or so, and my husband retired about a year later. I don't know what I did with that year I had alone, but I should have photographed it or something.  It was probably just too good to believe--being on the loose and having nobody to answer to for a number of hours each day.

Read that last sentence over again, especially, "having nobody to answer to for a number of hours each day."

I would not want to be completely alone now, but I do resent having company twenty-four-seven.  I know, it's ungrateful of me.  It's great that my husband and I are both in pretty good health so far, but I wonder if I am alone in wishing he'd go somewhere for about four hours every day, at a consistent time so I could count on it.  It's a mistake for me to mention it because it hurts my husband's feelings, and, besides, he does not want to go.  He has nowhere he'd rather be, so far as I can figure out, but here in the house or in the yard.  Like so many American husbands, he has no pals with whom to share the joys of retirement.  He is bigger than I am, and stronger.  I need him in many ways around the house, but I don't like to call on him too much because it just reinforces his strong conviction that this little world can't function without his input, minute to minute.  I have known some wives who shortly have said, "Listen, I ran this house and got your meals on the table for blank number of years without your interference. Scat!" However, for me and for many who will come after me in the future years, this won't be true as we too were out working.

When I was young with little kids, I had the luxury of not having to work for about ten years.  What a blessing. What a bounty.  There is no better sound than that of the front door slamming after the last of your housemates has gone off to work or school.  You can actually go to the bathroom without someone turning over a cabinet full of dishes, or desperately needing some lost thing.  You bathe at leisure, you get dressed, the sun is shining--and you still have hours ahead of you. Dishes to be done? You'll do them when you do them.  Beds to be made? Only one if you have bought comforters for your kids and taught them how to pull them up to cover a multitude of books and toys.  Groceries to be bought?  Happily you can put the keys into your car and go off into the great world, there to see friends and strangers upon your own pleasure.  You can sit at home alone at noon and savor the quiet and light and peace of solitary mid-day. Even if you still have toddlers about, they are not being critical nor showing you how they can mop the kitchen floor better and more frequently than you do. You can TAKE COURSES!! And learn things.

The Spanish word for "retire" is "jubilarse."  I dont like the word because I always have a picture of people jumping up and down for joy and that isn't always the way it is.  It is good for people not to have to go to work after they have put in a lifetime or even a partial lifetime at the daily grind. But you can't sit around and do nothing, you can't take over another person's role or life.  And a woman has always had a life at her house even when she went out to work. It all depended on her, and she handled it and got used to its being HER house.

My house is not my own.  I get so bound up in a deep resentment that I become immobilized.  I know that that is a grave sin, a true flaw. I don't know how to get myself out of it and still stay in my house --where I , also retired, also want to be. Alone.  Some of the time.

I was going to write about oysters today, but got sidetracked.  Tomorrow I will write about my oyster sandwich that I had at PLSF last week with a friend.  And I will write about the Gulf of Mexico, and about Oysters I Have Known.  Hasta mañana from crabby old YAZZYBEL.