Waldorf Salad

For supper I made Waldorf Salad. No dressing.

If it has no dressing, is it really Waldorf Salad? Or just a bunch of cut-up stuff in a bowl?

The basics of Waldorf Salad, leaving aside the question of dressings, are: apples, nuts, celery. My nut of choice is pecans, but walnuts are good too.

You can add things to Waldorf Salad and it only makes it better. In England they added green grapes and called it California Salad.  Green grapes  make it sweeter, which is nice.

You can add chopped dates, which makes it richer and sweeter both.

You can add avocadoes, which makes it blander but pretty.

You can add strawberries, which makes it downright exotic and threatens to turn it into Fruit Salad.

You can add cut up orange slices but see above.

You can add pineapple, ditto.

Or just add them all and eat up. It's delicious! 

YAZZYBEL  oh..I forgot to write my haiku. Shall we try it with Waldorf Salad?

Apples, cel'ry, nuts
We call it Waldorf Salad
It's really yummy!

(arf, arf)

Poem a Day?

Imperfect Things


I like things imperfect,
Things bravely started
Then left behind as the maker
Started something else;
I like things that don't quite rhyme,
Or scan: things that are a little off.
Dissonance in music, the right dissonance,
Is the best music to me. It rings
Somewhere where perfection and formality
Lie silent and unheard.
I like the lopsided tree, the branch
Bent in the wrong direction; I like 
The last dog left in the pound whose mates
Have all been taken in preference.
I like the painting gone askew but signed 
By a loving painter anyway.
"Glory be to God for dappled things,"
Said the poet, and when I read it 
I had to read it twice. "He thinks like me,"
Thought teen-aged I. Nothing is perfect;
Nothing is all right; no edges are true; 
Things are not square. Oh, yes!

YAZZYBEL

Early December Rumbles

Hello!

I have been frantically searching on the computer for a poem I wrote.  Searching in real life also, for the concrete version. (Sounds heavy, doesn't it?)

The trouble with looking on the computer is that you are staring at an amorphous gray mass and sticking it with a pin, fruitlessly.

The earth poem should be easier to find, but even thought I KNOW (maybe) that it's in a white ring-binder with big brown and green stripes on the outside, I can't find that either. Ah well. Shall keep looking.

Lots of things to do in December. I have my bills to pay, Christmas presents to worry about (strange and bad that that should be a WORRY), dr's appts to keep, donuts to avoid,...but no singing lessons or singing to do.  I cancelled the lessons till the New Year.  A little voice in my head says, maybe for ever. Whatever kept me singing daily for10 months seems to have taken off, leaving me voiceless and unmusical. Ah well, we'll see as time goes on.

My eating regimen of Whole30  is now on Day Eight.  I looked at the array of goodies and doughnuts at church yesterday with deep indifference. Can you imagine what a step that is? From Craving Insanity on Day 4, to Deep Indifference on Day 7. Incredible. It means that I am getting to the point where I will no longer look at sugary things as Food.  

I was there once before, on the Atkins in the 1970's. I could look at a three-layer cake frosted with a curly ocean of fluffy white peaks with perfect detachment.  I went on the Atkins in October, and by early spring I had the most gorgeous knees ever. All the puffy "dirty-water" had exited my tissues and I was a lean mean good-looking gal. I was about fifty then. Who knows what it'll mean when I am eighty-five as I now am.  Dried up? Shriveled? I'll still welcome those knees. YAZZYBEL

Easy Waldorf Salad

Well, I've started on the "Whole 30", an eating plan devised by the Hartwigs, husband and wife.  Demons that they are.

It isn't as if I'd been deprived of food before. And I do find elimination diets the easiest way for me to alter my food consumption.  But, with all of those, there'd always been a little OUT, a corner of former bliss and ease, with which you could manipulate the diet for youself.  As, in Atkins, which is quite straight-laced, you can have your teaspoon of heavy cream and your packet of sweetener in a cup of coffee...and that's heaven after a day of nothing but meat and veg.

On this regimen, there's no recourse. No dairy at all, even butter. You can make ghee, which in my case comes out imperfect, a little opaque...does that mean I should throw it out and start all over with another two cubes of butter...? Why ghee, and not butter? you well may ask.  Because butter has milk solids in it (that's what tastes so good plus the salt.) When you make ghee, the milk solids burn off leaving you, after a lot of manipulation, with a clear amber colored liquid that solidifies like a stone in the refrigerator. You cook with it.

Read the book...It Starts with Food is the name of it.  The Hartwigs will tell you all you want to know and more.  This diet is for health, not for weight-loss, yet when I weighed at my diet group I'd lost 2 1/2 pounds in 5 days.  I'll have to do something if I keep losing at that rate...don't know what, yet. The Hartwigs are very young, judging by their pictures, and maybe they don't know that 85 year old boneless ladies don't need to lose weight that fast.

I had phantasies of donuts, cookies, bread, cakes, for the first four days. Day five was better. Today they're back (the phantasies, not the cakes, alas.) We just need to try. I had a doctor visit on day five, and he was pleased to learn about the plan. He encouraged me to stick to it and then we'll test me at the end of the month (that's the 30 in the plan) to see what's become of my "numbers," the be-all and end-all of US medicine nowadays.

You get primitive on this plan. Waldorf Salad has been reduced to a half-apple, some celery sticks and a few pecans eaten out of hand. I could put it in a bowl with some of my homemade mayo, which you can have since you're allowed olive oil and eggs...and salt. But why elaborate it? Simple is good. You get so hungry that it's easy to kid yourself that an apple, a stick of celery, and a few nuts is a Waldorf Salad. And it's GOOD FOR YOU.....YAZZYBEL

Thanks Be for Thanksgiving!

Tomorrow's big day is almost everybody's favorite holiday.

Feasting without guilt...
Historical reminiscences...
Family memories...
Coming together...
Crispy cool weather...
Love all over the place.

This year, I am alone, so am going to eat with a friend and her other friend...Three of us. The hostess is making Cornish Game Hens, the other lady is bringing sushi, and I am bringing a sweet potato/pecan dish which I hope isn't too sweet! I think it'll be okay.

When I was a child, we ate our sweet potatoes in the form of pie.  That was the Southerners' way of making them palatable.  Asked whether I preferred pumpkin pie or sweet potato pie, I always chose sweet potato pie.  Don't know why...maybe it was the way mama spiced it (or didn't) that made it preferable. Anyway, it's worth making...it has a separate kind of texture and flavor that's real good. We never used marshmallows in any sweet potato dish at that time, so we were spared that inundation of sweetness.  Then I went to college and I had marshmallow/sweet potato casseroles, and, Lo! I found them good.

Good they were not, but they sure were tasty. Made the idea of pie kind of redundant.

When I was about forty I found the deliciousness of baked potato, split, with a spoonful of finely-diced fresh salsa(tomato, jalapeno,onion) on top, equally yummy and probably much more healthy. I ate them that way for several years.  Now, this year, I parboiled the pieces that I got in a bag from Trader Joe's, put them into a ghee-smeared glass dish, and topped them with a mixture of ghee, honey and water boiled down a bit, and the pecans on top . I hope they are not sweet, as I tried to put in just enough honey to pique the flavor. Tomorrow we'll see, when I go to eat my Thanksgiving dinner with two other old ladies. YAZZYBEL

Restored to Life

I begin this posting with a--not with an explanation ("Never complain; never explain."), but with an apology for letting it go at all.

I meant to start a new blog page: "Haiku a Day," which I may add to the present address. Or may not; it's all that I can hardly drive this vehicle (my computer) at all and so had to stay on Bkfst W Yazzybel. SO BE IT.

I went to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to visit my eldest son and his wonderful wife, and had a lovely visit. I got to see my oldest grandchild, Miranda, on a quick visit to Iowa City where she's a senior at IU.  I got to spend time, precious little of it, but TIME, with my grandson Daniel. What a fabulous guy he is. I did not get to see Isabel, off to her freshman year at Ames, IA, at ISU, but she was never far from my mind and heart which is true of them all.

Weather was incredible..cold, cold, the coldest weather I've ever been in.  Snow all over. Ice--rivers, lakes, creeks, puddles...frozen. With kind help, I maneuvered over it all without calamity. I got to see Daniel's Show Choir presentation, which was simply astounding. If I can find it on the web, I'll send it to those interested.  He's the tall guy on the right.

I 'm ba-a-a-a-ck!  Back from Cedar Rapids, with a detour on the way home to see my friends the Longnecker girls in Denver (thanks to a serendipitous missing of connections on Tuesday and catching the plane out on Wednesday.) What wonderful people they are, they and theirs!

So I'm here at home astounded and pleased. Love to ALL...I won't quit again any time soon. YAZZYBEL

A Vacation at the End of the Known World

The I Ching makes us aware that our lives are really made up of constant changes. Tension builds up and things tip over and re-start constantly. Sometimes this happens almost unnoticeably, and sometimes it is sudden and precipitate.

When my husband died, my life turned over in a normal way. It's to be expected. Often, what is not expected is the completeness of the turn. Like a roto-filer, a device that used to be in all offices and held the names of clients, let's say, and could be turned by hand so that the cards came up and flipped over, our days after such a huge event can seem to be flipping over without much impact. But the impact was there, and made itself known again and again.  

I went on a vacation to my old old world, the world of my childhood and girlhood. Cards that seemed in the past to be flipping over in a fairly orderly way gave a big THUMP, and suddenly came to a stop. Things that come to a stop unexpectedly have the effect of making one pay attention.  

When the wheel stops, a movement of the hand will make it start up again, or the very momentum of time will restart it.  But things are not the same. A new life has begun; a new life begins every day actually but we often do not pay attention to that fact.  A jolt makes us see with new eyes; we restructure; we reprioritize.  This is good for us. But it hurts.

So, this is the end of Breakfast With Yazzybel. She will or will not breakfast again, but she will not be back under this chatty format.  Time to see with new eyes. Yes, it is. I was ending this blog post with the last paragraph but I realized that that was not all I had to say. Thanks for reading with me so far.    YAZZYBEL