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
There is a vocabulary--perhaps many vocabularies--particular to old age.
Two words that have come into mine are, "maundering," and "irksome."
"WHY are you maundering around all over the place?" said I one night, as my aged husband maundered about the house in the dark.
And I wondered, "Where did that word come from, anyway?" It certainly was not in my vocabulary before. And yet--it was the very word to describe his perigrinations, pointless and non-goal-oriented as they were.
I even looked it up in the dictionary. It is something like wandering, without the intent of the journey. A very apt word for the journeys of the elderly (I thought.)
And there's the word, "irked." And, "irksome." My mother was often irked, but I never in my life was irked at all--until lately. Now I am irked all the time. I find many things irksome: junk mail, the gaggle of scarecrows running for president under the flag of a Party which shall be nameless, the fact that I don't have a dishwasher or a proper oven. Irked I am, and irked I may remain.
We are contracting for a remodeled kitchen. As soon as it gets nice, we'll doubtless sell the house before I have a chance to get the kitchen all grimy. And that will be the most irksome thing of all. YAZZYBEL
What's the best cake?
Chocolate--coconut--daffodil (the name alone conjures up rhapsodies)--angel food--sponge--!
We could and can go on and on.
But here's my idea of the best cake at this time in my life, when my cake genes have been honed, have been forged in the fire--and they KNOW what's good. This cake comes in many versions, sometimes plain, sometimes with nuts, sometimes with fruits.
Here it is, from George Lang's The Cuisine of Hungary. It is the cake his mother made. It is real. It is the best. If you want any other cake, you really want the frosting. If you want cake, eat this one:
My Mother's Cherry Cake
1 lb pitted sweet cherries
1 1/2 sticks sweet butter
3/4 c. granulated sugar
3 eggs, separated
Mix the butter with half the sugar, and gradually add the three egg yolks, beating well. Add one cup of flour.
Beat the egg whites with the rest of the sugar till stiff. Fold into egg yolk batter.
Butter a baking pan 10 x 6 and sprinkle it with 1/4 c. bread crumbs. Put the batter into the pan, and put the cherries over the top.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Bake the cake for 30 minutes. Sprinkle with vanilla sugar.
Just cut it and put it on a plate, and eat. It is more than delicious, it is perfect. It is a cake.
That's all I'll say about that cake today. Mama used to say to me, "You just want to have your cake and eat it too!" I'd say, "You have to HAVE it before you can eat it!" To me it made more sense if one were pointing out nonsense, to say, "You just want to eat your cake and have it too!!" That would be more difficult, Mama, wouldn't it? YAZZYBEL
Good morning. (Written Saturday, Feb. 18)
This has been a two day hiatus with very little news from my kids or my sisters. It's rare that this happens, that so few are writing more than a line or so in a day.
But this quiet period has followed a scene of rarest activity. I have had communication with Home of the past--the life of my mother.
Three days after my mother's birthday I decided to follow up on an old nagging curiosity. It happened like this.
My husband went to school with a guy in Tulsa who happened to have the name of the old high school sweetheart of my mother. I had always wanted Theo to ask him: Was his father so and so, from Waco Texas? But Theo, super conservative in social situations, would never ask.
Last week this man called Theo to reminisce and to tell him of the high school reunion that's going to take place...Theo told me he had no intention of going, but after a few days when no reunion packet had arrived he said sadly that he guessed they had written him off. That did it for me.
I got on the phone and dialed four one one, and found this man. When I got him on the phone, and told him who I was, and asked him about his dad--and, YES! He was the one. This man is the son of my mother's friend from oh so long ago. We had the longest, loveliest talk. My mother had told me so much about her friend's lovely mother and my new friend was pleased to hear about his own grandmother in memories from somebody else.
That's all there is to tell, really. We may not make it to the reunion, but it was a pleasure, a deep pleasure, to take that little trip to Home of the past. YAZZYBEL
Well, move over, Katy Kornettes!
Because this morning I made bacon biscuits, and my, were they good.
I made the tiny recipe of one cup self-rising flour, one-eighth cup butter, and one half cup milk. And one crispy slice of cooked thick bacon, cut into tiny cubes and stirred in at the last before baking.
This made eight normal sized biscuits, normal according to my mother. According to Col. Sanders and his ilk, it would have made about 2 biscuits. I ate two plus some of the scraps, and gave Theo two plus some of the scraps, and froze four for the future.
We may have the frozen four with frijoles, for our supper. Or we may keep them for a surprise treat on some boring night when we just need something good. I didn't make biscuits at all for years, in the interest of health. And had never actually made bacon biscuits at all. I just decided to make them yesterday when I was reading Duchess Fergie's diet book written for Weight Watchers.
Wait a minute, sez I--if Fergie gets bacon biscuits, why don't I? Of course the rule is you just get one per meal, and I ate two plus scraps. (The scraps are the best part once they are baked nice and brown.) But life is too short never to have a bacon biscuit if you should want one, and I thought I'd like to try one today.
So after church, I came home and made bacon biscuits. Theo doctored up with his extra insulin, and he got his fair share. Self-rising flour is something I've never used before but I bought a pkg of it lately, so got the recipe off the web and made them.
Church was good today. I love the old rituals. I love seeing the old faces and the new. Sermon was good, as always when Dean Richardson preaches. In fact, it is almost always good anyway. Secret is, to listen. Then you hear something you had not thought about before.
So, old church and new biscuits. Makes for a beautiful, though with a foreboding dark sky and cold wind, Sunday. YAZZYBEL
The cry rises from my hordes of readers.
"Whatever happened to Kitty Blanko?" they cry. (In my dreams.)
For Kitty Blanko, that large and gawky young cat who figured largely in these posts in the latter part of 2011, has disappeared from Fairway Court, as far as I can tell. I believe he was gone by the time of Miranda's visit, for I think Miranda never saw him.
Of course, I have been awfully busy--otherwise I might well have been down to the corner whence I believe he came, to inquire. But it's a corner of rentals, with strange young people from the Navy and otherwhere. Kitty Blanko seemed to call that his home. Lots of them moved out recently. In the best scenario, I like to believe that someone loved Kitty B. well enough to take him along with them and that he's getting along fine somewhere with a family. I hope.
I think about domestic animals a lot. Watching "Animal Cops: (city)" has made us all aware of how many animals there are out there who need care and feeding. And they aren't all little balls of fur. You grow up fast if you're on your own. You get mean. You get selfish to the core. You get hard. It's rather amazing that these semi-feral animals, once they've been introduced to captivity, settle down at all into the docile and affectionate animals that we know. Some of them never do, like Lily, KB's predecessor. Lily started out a house pet, but got captured by the wife of a neighbor and put into a cage, and cared for, and then released when those people moved away. Lily never returned to her domesticized ways. She got wilder and wilder. She came around to eat (who wouldn't?) but she was her own man. She lived in a hole in the lower forty under some long grass. And it wasn't easy. She lost an eye too. Then, she too, disappeared...was simply never seen again. Was she run over on the other street? Captured by a civic group running down feral cats? We will never know. She like Kitty Blanko lived her own mysterious and private life. Our paths crossed for a time, and then it was all over...guess life's like that. YAZZYBEL
The best thing about eating at a restaurant is that you get courses, should you so choose.
Someone comes and takes your plate away after you finish your salad. And they come back in a moment and give you something else.
I like that. If I won the lotto, aside from getting a larger house to accomodate all my stuff, I'd spend all my money on a good house-servant or two. Someone who knew how to put it down and take it away. Even if I did the cooking myself.
However, the restaurant poses another crucial choice. We can choose three courses (or more of course) and have Appetizer, Main Course, and Dessert. But our old tummies can't accomodate that much food any more and we have to choose two. That leaves one with a main course with either an appetizer to precede, or a dessert to follow.
I guess it'd be the mood one's in, mainly, that decides the procedure. Usually nowadays I skip the dessert (as they are usually manufactured in a warehouse far away and kept in the refrigerator till needed, sometimes much later indeed.)
But there are niceties to be observed with choosing my usual, the Appetizer and the Main Course. They should be as far different as possible in manner of preparation. I had the clam and mussels in wine broth, and then the veal scallopini with vegetables. Who knew that both dishes would include tomatoes diced finely, in a mixture of tomato-onion-garlic-herbs? I should have asked. I should have thought. But I didn't.
A better choice would have been the salmon and spinach presentation, perhaps. Probably no tomatoes there. But my sensibilities have been warned off sickly US cultivated salmon, and there was no adventence to the contrary. The chicken was another herb/chicken dish. The steak? It had a tomato sauce...
It's a distinction like that one I was talking about before: No Garlic in the Enchiladas. Our cuisine should be fairly rigid, so that one would know pretty exactly what one was getting upon ordering a dish. There should not be a more than 70% inclusion of tomatoes in the main courses for sure, as all the rest of the things on the menu (pizzas, pasti, and all those appetizers) seemed to have tomatoes too...Come to think of it, that is the major flaw I found in the restaurant, Trattoria Italianissimo (other than the name), in downtown Chula Vista. Otherwise it is a pleasant place with real waiters (with ties on) and white tablecloths and nice cutlery and real people cooking in the kitchen. I got a glass of yummy Pinot Grigio for eight dollars to go with my clams and mussels. Their menu was more ambitious when they opened up...but times are hard, restaurant-goers expectant of chain-store practices, tastes ignorant in the long run...so they have become more accessible. I guess that means tomatoes and lots of them. Maybe I should suggest risi-e-bisi (spelling looks wrong) or some of the other simple but beguiling dishes in the Italian cucina. YAZZYBEL
