Voyage Autour de ma Chambre

A voyage around my room....hmmm.

I remember when I thought that book/story was written by Proust and a very serious French-Canadian finally convinced me that I was wrong. I don't remember who is was...I could look it up on the web...(Xavier de Maistre)..but it was a good essay with a good idea.

If we all sat and made a voyage around our room more often we might pick up on our treasures, our trash, our cobwebs...more mindfully. Okay, I'll do it.

I 'll do my (our) bedroom, because that is really "my room" if anything is...
Starting with me in the bed, awake and restless to be up as I always am if awake.  I am surrounded by radios,books, hearing devices, phones, and the TV zapper, but I have been sleeping quite comfortably.  When I wasnt sleeping in the middle of the night I was listening to Coast to Coast talking about nuclear disasters to come.

Next to the bed on my side is a little Bodart dresser, full of stuff that I am gradually weeding out. I cannot part with my old Weight Watchers booklets; they're often an inspiration and insight. Old medications, hairbobs, and dustballs recently got relegated to the trash.

There are books in there. I'd better keep them there for I'll never find them if I move them.  My mother's cookbook.
How to grow your own opium. A few others.

Above the dresser hang religious icons, Mexican silver on black...beautiful. A Black Madonna on tin which I bought at an antique show, thinking it was Mexican.  But the more I've looked at it over the years I can see that it's Eastern in its art....she's still beautiful and now I think she's from the Filipines, perhaps, where there was a Catholic culture.  Think how the East, the Filipines, Viet Nam, all the rest...have been culled for art over the last twenty to fifty years....anyway, she's mine and I love her.

Well, I've only moved four feet around the room so far.  And am writ out.  Perhaps the voyage will be resumed at some other time..... Perhaps not.....

YAZZYBEL

I Remember Landrums!

I was thinking about painting some little Mexican figures, folk-type, on a wall the other day. Don't worry, I'll never do it, I'll just think about it.

But it made me remember Landrum's Restaurant of Brownsville, Texas, my home town.

Landrum's was a restaurant of some elegance, there on Levee Street downtown.  It was in an old historical building, which all the downtown buildings seemed to be. Outside its style would probably be described as New Orleans style...white-painted brick colonial building. The inside walls were of brick, also, painted white also.

Landrum's had a great menu and we all thought the food the only place comparable to my mama's good cooking.  They had some things that my mama never served at table, like ham steak with grilled pineapple and melted cheese.  Well, yummo. I thought it was delicious.

Landrum's had "Mexican food," of the style now known as Tex-Mex--fried corn tacos, enchiladas, beans and rice.  All the dishes were delicious. The style of cookery has been refined into "Nuevo Leon" style Mexican food, and I still love it best of any Mexican style food. Meat, beans, rice, chiles, barbecue, goat if you will. There at Landrum's it was simplified to ground beef or steak. None of this Sinaloa-Michiocan style.  Just the real stuff. The flavors were right!!!

There was also good seafood to be had at Landrum's, most of that in the American manner. Mexican shrimp cocktail hadn't been served in the good old USA yet.  I love Mexican style shrimp cocktail but I love American style too.

Well as usual I got sidetracked onto the food. But my point in remembering Landrum's is that the walls were adorned with hand-painted humorous folk paintings done in oil by "Mrs. McGonigle," the mother of a friend in school.  Mrs. McGonigle was an accomplished architect and artist and her contribution to the decor of Landrum's was incomparable. 

Does anybody else remember those paintings? I wish we had some photographs of them to remind us of how darling they were.  YAZZYBEL

Too Many Lobsters

Have you ever watched a commercial from The Lobster House and thought, "No, wait a minute--there can't be that many healthy, fresh and natural lobsters out there being fished up and wolfed down all over the United States!"  Where do all those lobsters come from?  What happened to them before there were chains of lobster restaurants devoted to serving up millions of lobsters daily to millions of happy diners?  They must have proliferated there in their cold briny healthy waters until they carpeted the Atlantic several feet deep. Not.
Same thing with chicken breasts.  Look at your supermarket chicken department.  Lots and lots and LOTS of chicken breasts, pruned, trimmed, denuded of skin, lying there in huge packages ready for you to take home and cook for Coxey's Army.  You wont find your pristine, modest-sized backyard fowl there--but you'll find those chicken breasts by the million.  Something is awry in the state of Denmark, folks, and by that I mean Denmark USA.

This is all leading up to a lady I saw at the beauty parlor yesterday.  As I was being blowed and combed out, I saw her arise newly coiffed from her chair.  She was a lady of my age. Her hair looked terrific.  She was a person of some excess poundage, say about like me. But not too bad.  She was cutely attired in faded jeans and pullover tee shirt of a nice green.  About like me.  She then put on a three-quarter length coat of black, adding a nice concealer to all.  And took out her pretty scarf, which she artfully draped about the collar area to draw the eye's attention to the top part of her person.  About like me.

Too many lobsters, I thought.  My cute look is going the way of all flesh.  I have to think of a new look and a new hairdo.  Skirts, perhaps--but that involves pantyhose or tights because my legs don't look too good. Panic is setting in.  My clones are all about me.  Maybe my granny's retreat to simple dresses, simple stockings, and lace up granny shoes wasn't too bad an idea after all. YAZZYBEL

Raining Blessings

Good morning!

It's raining again this morning. The rain itself is a blessing!  In Southern California after a dry fall and winter, it's especially good to have a lot of water falling from the sky.

The grass in the Lower Forty is growing wild. Julio was supposed to come cut it last Monday, but he didn't.  Now, if he comes this Monday it will be wetter than ever, and it will bow down under his mower and spring back tall and ready to dry out just waiting for a wildfire spark.  Not that we've had one, but I'm just sayin'.

We have had a time of it with the doctors and so forth. Five times in ten days to the ER was just too much, so we jumped up and down and made a fuss and the result is that my husband's Foley catheter was removed and he's on his own again in the dept. of waterworks.  I hope it works out as he already seems happier in general.

Add to that five visits to the ER, the equal number of visits to doctors to try to find a solution to Theo's plight.  That is a lot of gas, a lot of going, and very little time spent at home except to mess up the place and crash from exhaustion. I don't know what the solution to health care problems is; all I know is that it isn't what's being done.  Ninety percent of our problems could be taken care of if we had a good live-in nurse.  Hah.

Anyway, the Primary Physician yesterday seemed to think that Theo isn't doing too badly, and advised him to be positive.  There isn't much more that we can do anyway, is there--be happy and deal with the crises as they arise.

Anyway, as the earth benefits from our welcome showers of rain, so our spirits benefit from the welcome respite from crises.  YAZZYBEL

Panorama of Clouds

This morning as I was driving to church, I was treated to a wonderful vista of the most exquisite clouds.

Our weather's been so changeable lately, has it not?
"Yes," everyone over the United States can probably answer in chorus.  Wherever we are, the weather phenomena seem so different this year--or lately,--or this week.  We don't quite remember when it started being changeable, so perhaps we forget that it was probably always that way.  Since we left the Garden of Eden.

"San Diego--another ho-hum day in Paradise," our tourist tee shirts of the 1970's used to proclaim.  But even then, one day was truly not like any other, no matter how beautiful they all may have been.  Nowadays, it's still ho-hum weather but not quite so much so.  Frankly, we never know from one morning to one evening what the weather may be like.

Yesterday and the day before were truly Paradisical, though a little too hot.  Especially in my living room, which tends to warm up if given the slightest chance. But outdoors it was just about perfect...calm, sunny, blue-skied, just the way it ought to be.

Cooler and more turbulent weathers are predicted for this evening, and one could see, as one drove along the Freeway 5 to the north, one of the most unusual and striking panoramas of diverse clouds that have ever been around.  First, there were on my left, low smooth blue clouds in large oblongs...
higher up, and more toward downtown broken fluffy white clouds gleaming in sunshine...huge stormy white-with-gray clouds hanging up there with nothing to do....streaks and streamers...a few dark dark blue clouds with shapes like flukes: wavy and motile...

I love to drive, but that is the sad thing about driving, you can't crane around and see all you might wish to observe out the window.  Now that my husband has been forbidden the privilege of driving (well, almost forbidden; advised against it), I'll have less and less time to gaze about.  If I could have seen more, I could have written more and more descriptions of remarkable clouds of this morning than I already have, and they would all be, alas, just as inadequate.  YAZZYBEL

It's Saturday

It's Saturday! It once was
Working woman's day to be a woman,
Doing the shopping for groceries,
Hauling the kids,
Getting things done
So she can get home and do some more.

Even an old lady retired
Remembers Saturday.
Sometimes she remembers
That it took two years before she realized
That stores are open on other days.

Old ladies are busy
Even when getting their hair washed.
Their old husbands sit
And wait for them....

"Esta leyendo" I ask the hairdresser.
"No," says he who can see out over the room.
(He seats me that way.)
"Que hace?" I ask.  "Esta pensando,"
Says the hairdresser.

Pensando en que? I wonder.
Pensando los pensamientos
De viejitos, es lo que piensa,
The hairdresser and I think together.

We smile, and I pay,
And go out and take my old thinker
By the arm, and we come home.

Serendipity

Good morning...long time no see!!!

Today I'll write about cooking without fat.  It's a difficult problem in our culture, the whole idea of non-fat cookery.  I myself have always been a believer of the criminality of starch, not fat...but I know in my little heart that the flaw is in the combination of the two.

And since I like to eat, I am trying to eat without fat as much as possible.  What to eat out? Shrimp cocktail, my dears!  Whether Mexican or American style, you get a number of plump cold boiled shrimp and a tomato-based sauce without any fat.  A couple of soda crackers on the side are not without the scope of the plan.  And, yum yum.

Looking at Drivein's, Diners and Dives, I positively get kind of nauseated looking at the tons, the absolute piles and mountains of fat meats smothered in fat cheeses that the   folks are wolfing down.  It isnt belated virtue, either.  You know I've always told you not to mix meat and cheese!!

Nowadays I hardly eat any cheese at all.  I never was a maniac for it, except for the once in a while that I enjoyed a nice little cheese sandwich.  Handy for tucking into the purse or bag for a plane flight, or a bunch of them for a car ride.  But though one can buy a 'mayonnaise' without fat,  fat-free cheese is a joke.  It just isnt good, melted or otherwise. And low fat is iffy.  Good as one individual item, it can turn on you if you end up with too many "low fat" items and don't add them up.

At the Goodwill, I found the most wonderful cookbook.  Most "low fat" cookbooks are compilations of the same old ideas, heavy on the sugar, low on the fat and mostly low on the flavors.  The wonderful cookbook I found is called
The Low Fat Cookbook, by Sue Kreitzman.  It's one of those beautiful over-illustrated books from the English publishers...trillions of mouthwatering photographs that make even a few grains of salt in a dish look good.

And this book has much more than just photos.  Sue Kreitzman has wonderful ideas for flavorful, low fat dishes of all sorts.  And here is a great idea that I'm going to try immediately.

"Oil-Water Spray"

Get a small sprayer or mister and make a mixture of 1/8 oil (olive, walnut, sunflower, sesame) to 7/8 water.  Shake and spray.

That's it.  A simple tip that enables us NOT to be buying those cans of spray oil that have evil canola and evil soy in them.  Let's try it.

I'll be referring back to this beautiful cookbook as I try out its very creative approach to cookery.  How could I have bought this book at a store or at Amazon?  I didnt even know that it existed.  But now you know too and can look for one online.  It is worth it even if you just look at the pictures. I, however, could only have stumbled upon it at the Goodwill, which I did. Serendipity, baby, serendipity.  It's all around us.....YAZZYBEL