Take a Break, Think about Home

From Sippican Cottage:

I was reading Essays In Idleness by Kenko. He was dead in 1350. . . .


. . . the personal essay is tie that binds us.


I hate the term: blog. It's ugly, and it's come to mean something even uglier than the sound of it. It's become the minor leagues of hate. I write personal essays here. Zuihitsu. It might not be noble, but a person has little to offer to others but knowledge of which they are sure. "I am an expert in the affairs of all men" is the banner of the professional politician and their toads. Not hardly.


Why am I wandering in the few moments between exhaustion and sleep in the dusty stacks of an alien culture dead and buried for seven hundred years? To find a kindred spirit. . .


I have never been in a hotel room as comfortable and pleasant as my own bedroom, and I have been in Presidential Suites before. Money can't fix the problem, and the availability of money without the governor of a framework of rules to expend it almost always makes things worse.


Our post-modern zeitgeist evangelizes that rules of any sort that govern personal behaviors or the appearance of our surroundings or entertainment are stultifying and worthy only of mindless opposition. The unthinking rejection of all tradition leads to a counterintuitive outcome: a set of rules, much more stringent than what they replaced, will replace the old ones, and they will consist of the worst possible alternative to what was there before.


. . . How else can I explain a Japanese man writing about my house, and the house you should be living in, in the fourteenth century?

From our own unfashionable but comfortable home and garden:

Interesting Tomatoes, both old and new varieties
Assorted garden gifts and a dog
BIG tomatoes
Ripe Green Tomatoes

And recipes for garden vegetables:
Skillet Lasagna with Zucchini
Grandma's Chili Sauce

Some thoughts on happy children and expectations

The Sometimes Bumpy Road to Progress

Before we left on our last whirlwind trip to Utah, we heard a story in church about a one-eyed, non-flying pet crow. After attaching a dog kennel to the crow's cage to allow her more freedom during the day, the crow's "daddy" would hear her screeching at sundown, clinging to the side of the wire kennel, unable to find her way back home to her comfy cage. He would have to unhook her claws from the wire and put her back in her home. In her anxiety, she resisted leaving the side of the kennel. Sometimes we are the same way. God wants us to move on to a better place, but we "cling to the wire". Sometimes when we "let go of the wire", progress comes in fits and starts.

While David was talking to people at a foothill facility in Utah, I got out of the car and was met by the most fearless Magpie I have ever seen. Glossier and fatter than the one here. It took food from my hand, even though I was a complete stranger. It flew around, showing off and flirting. And following its interests. Magpies are related to crows, and this one sort of looked like a medium-sized crow with prettier plumage. Quite a contrast to the story about the pet crow stuck to the wire in fear. Kind of uplifting.

David had a wonderful interview, but he did not meet all of the qualifications for the job. I was great to see Mom again. We went home in light spirits. Since that time, David has had another nice interview. When it's time, he'll find the right job.

He's back to work in the house. The sheetrock part is done and the kitchen arch rounded out. Now he's re-doing the surfacing and texturing in the living room and hall. What a mess. Things are piled up everywhere, covered in drywall dust, and the contents of some book cases and a hutch are in boxes. But the job that was done when the house was built has always bothered him, so I'm glad he's fixing it. I haven't been able to get into the office, the back bedrooms or the back bath for a few days. I'm taped into the media room right now. Things should look a lot better soon.

We've also been juggling dogs and cats in the recent wet weather (for which we are grateful). Princess Cat Darla accidentally came into the house while Troy the Giant Dog was inside, causing a big commotion and leading him to think for several days that she was still in the house. I winterized the Kitty Condo and made sure their heater was working. I put a kitty heater in the big dog house in back (Maggie, Troy and Little Buddy came in with me part of the time - it was a little crowded with the 4 of us). I set up a cold retreat in the garage for Sparky, who normally wants to be outside. Maybe it's his Husky/Labrador background. Huskies sleep in the snow, and Labradors were bred to retrieve fishing nets from the ocean. Brrr. He's getting unsteady on his feet and can't get his footing when he's lying on slick surfaces, so now he has a bumpy rubber mat and ridged fabric carpet. He's only wanted to come in on two nights, and I've still had to guide him into the garage against mild protest.

Troy and Maggie have stayed in the house with Lucky a couple of nights during the rain, leaving Little Buddy in the big dog house by himself. He gets separate snuggle time, as he still chews furniture and sometimes gets too playful when the other dogs want to rest. Old Dottie gets a kitty heater in her doghouse next.

We finally have new neighbors across the street, but the house next door is still vacant. Our princess kitty Darla is starting to think the house and yard next door belong to her.

Things are rather unsettled in the world at the moment, but President Obama gave a graceful speech in Oslo. He's on a learning curve, too, I think. On the lighter side of American media and politics, William Shatner and Sarah Palin read from each other's works on the Tonight Show. Maybe you remember Shatner's dramatic reading from Palin's Twitter posts, or his self-parody with "Rocketman".

But back to everyday life: At our fun Branch Christmas Party, the Cox family brought an entire "Polar Express" train painted by an artist friend on refrigerator boxes. The kids got to hear the story read to them in front of the train, while getting little treats. They also heard the Christmas Story via whispers from "Maurice", the shy camel hand puppet who belonged to one of the Wise Men. We sang carols and ate.

I made Spanish Green Beans and a big bowl of coleslaw very similar to this Christmas Coleslaw. I will post more lated on how I used the excess cabbage (bought too much for the party).

The Ongoing Thanksgiving Season

I've decided to expand that "Thanksgiving Feeling" to a longer season. No reason some of the thoughts and sentiments which Thanksgiving calls forward cannot be extended into the Christmas season. There is so much for which to be thankful.

And you really can't eat all the Thanksgiving Recipes on Thanksgiving. Already, our Thanksgiving has been stretched out. We were supposed to serve dinner to guests, then go over to David's parents' house for supper. But one of our guests locked herself out of her apartment, away from the Sweet Potato Pie, Cake, and Ham she had prepared. Another prospective guest took off to try to find a way to open the apartment. So we had company into the evening. But David still got some of his Mom's coconut pie on Friday. We missed Debbie, but saw Donny, Carmine, Mom, Dad and Aunt Helen.

This year, Ken brought a "complete dinner" again, so I just had to fill in with a few extra dishes. I made "boiled" ham, (a small butt portion ham) in an oval 6-quart slow cooker, pumpkin bread pudding, cauliflower and broccoli, and I tried to make this cornbread dressing, but got distracted and burned the cornbread and pecans. Later. I haven't made Dixie Salad yet, either.

Earlier, I posted on the Pilgrim's struggle against famine here. No matter how hard our economic circumstances are this year, things could be worse.

No time to write more now. Hope everyone continues to have a nice Thanksgiving-to-Christmas season.

Filling in a Picture of Life

On Sunday, we had two interesting messages at church. The first was about learning to take "Joy in the Journey". Something I need to think about more deeply and plan for more carefully.

The second speaker used a story about his neighbor who likes to work on jigsaw puzzles as part of her quiet, meditative times. He noted that when working on a puzzle, she first put together the framework. I think of "frameworks" in life as principles and related rules for behavior. Without a framework, we are likely to get chaos. It is almost impossible to reach for the higher aspirations in life while mired in chaos. We really do need a place of at least minimal order in our lives if we want to make much progress.

On a more secular level, I thought of the famous "no guardrails" essay from the WSJ.

Back to our Picture of Life: As the speaker's neighbor worked on the puzzle, she placed odd-looking, sometimes ugly, pieces together to form something beautiful. In our own lives, working within a proper framework, we can fit difficult events, circumstances and often even difficult people into a beautiful picture if we work mindfully.

More bureaucracy this week. David seems to have caught whatever I had a couple of weeks ago (or something similar). He has been quite sick for a couple of days, but is starting to feel a little better, with an antibiotic, etc.

As a diversion, I've posted cookie recipes - traditional chocolate chip cookie bars with notes on getting the best texture, chewier big chocolate chip cookies or coconut bars and Oatmeal/Coconut cookies - for making ahead of your event. I wrote about Jujubes, too.

Over on the "Perplextities" blog, there's a post about blogging and a balanced life, featuring a link concerning Kristi Yamaguchi and one on how good men and good women can minimize the hurt they cause each other. My first attempt at "liveblogging". I am not particularly fond of "liveblogging", as a rule.

June already

Well, we're mostly over our respiratory infections. I just have a slight cough now. We've been doing a lot of paperwork. David helped his Dad on the day he had knee surgery. He's doing better with his recovery from open-heart surgery.

Our weather started cooling down last week, and we had a freak storm with high winds and lightning which scared the dogs, especially big old Sparky. He had to hang out in the laundry room for a while. We weren't hit by the full force of the storm. Some locations were warned to expect hail the size of a quarter. We heard about a security system fried by a power outage and surge. Our region seems to be prone to these fast-moving, intense storms from the East in the summer.

We had a relaxed, casual Branch party last week, and I took lemon cookies from cake mix. Very quick and easy. Popular. Remind me to
post the recipe. It was an adult party. I was interested in who chose to go swimming. A mother and daughter who are kind of sporadic in their church attendance, and an older woman who walks with a walker. Nice to see her in the water.

Last night was the Pinewood Derby for the Cub Scouts. A lot of adults in the community put a lot of work into this little event. The kids were excited. A brother and sister team just a little older than the Cubbies judged who crossed the finish line first. A friend suggested that next year, I need to prepare a car of my own for this race. it would probably be fun.

On my kitchen and garden blog, I've posted a report on apricots and our first tomato from the garden, and also a recipe for yummy, down-home Okie Squash and Tomatoes.

On the Culture and Political front, I've put up posts on American Values (Prager University), Andrew Breitbart and Hollywood, Newsweek, Playboy, the General Motors bankruptcy and the 20th anniversary today of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Take a look around if you like.

My Food Blog

I decided that it was going to become cumbersome to put recipes and such in this blog, so I started a new one just for food and gardening. Here's the recipe for yesterday's Blackeyed Pea Salad.

Happy New Year!

I didn't post anything for Christmas, so I'm going to work backward here.

NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS?

Normally, I don't pay much attention to New Years Day, but this morning while David was working on our friends' fence, I heard part of the second hour of Dennis Prager's New Years program. He talked about the power of New Years Resolutions. I usually don't put much stock in typical New Years resolutions, and it was interesting to hear his ideas and those of listeners. He got a surprise call from his Mom, who slyly reinforced the typical stereotype of a Jewish Mother by suggesting that maybe he could resolve to call her more.

Dennis favors setting three resolutions - one each for:

Happiness
Health
Character

Speaking of character development, I sent Our Sacred Honor by William Bennett to Mom for Christmas. She was impressed by how often individuals in the founding generation of our country thought about improving their personal character. Our Country's Founders is an adaptation for young adults.

Back to the subject of New Years Resolutions: Dennis maintains that resolutions are useful even if you may not be able fully keep them. He suggested that all-or-nothing thinking is usually an excuse for doing "NOTHING". Maybe I need to re-assess the usefulness of New Years Resolutions. He and callers also discussed the advantages of keeping a diary or journal, even if all you record is events. I hope I can work the blogging thing in to the "journal-keeping" ideal somehow. Otherwise, I'm still stuck at the stage of notes jotted on calendars.

The audio of today's program isn't up at his website yet, but here's an interesting hour on gratitude in trying circumstances and on how to deal with problems or sadness during the holidays. I heard part of the hour while David was with his Dad at the hospital for an angiogram and found it touching.

Update: Hour One, Hour Two and Hour Three of the New Years broadcast have been posted. Sometimes the holiday broadcasts get repetitious (as they are for radio). I would probably choose Hour Two if I were just going to listen to one of them.

So far, David and I have not done well at establishing any New Years Day traditions, let alone making resolutions. I can't get into the California Okie tradition of blackeyed peas with ham on New Years day. So I'm making blackeyed pea salad with a pound of frozen blackeyed peas, cooked until tender but firm. If you'd like to try it, use a classic 3-bean salad recipe, replacing the sugar in the dressing recipe with honey (measuring a little less than sugar in the recipe, preferably in the cup you used to measure the oil). Replace the green bell peppers in the recipe with deep green, slightly spicy Pasilla (Ancho, Poblano, etc) chiles, and maybe some red bell pepper. It all works together and looks festive. I can't eat much of it, as blackeyed peas tend to give me migraines. I bet the Pasilla chiles, red bell peppers, onions, honey and cider vinegar would also work well with garbanzo beans or even with little canned white or pink beans.

Recipe here.

NEW YEARS EVE - Preoccupied with dogs

New Years Eve, for me, now involves a goal of smug satisfaction that I am not out with unpredictable revelers. But we also must think about the dogs on noisy holidays. We stayed in again for New Years Eve last night, taking care of dogs frightened by the (illegal) fireworks and smatterings of gunfire nearby. Surprisingly, Sparky stayed in the doghouse, even though he usually wants to get in the house and even in the bathtub during fireworks. Maybe that insulation David put in the doghouse makes him feel safe. Dottie was in the garage. Reverse of the last night of fireworks in town (the big championship football game). Sparky started in the garage and ended up in the house. Dottie seemed content when she was in the dog house.

Sparky's hearing isn't what it used to be now, which may make it easier for him to tolerate fireworks than in years past. He once bent the gate in a chain-link fence in order to get into the house during a thunderstorm. He's really showing his age in a lot of ways now. He went to visit Troy and Maggie yesterday, and it was sweet to watch clumsy Troy's delicacy around Sparky, who is not so steady on his feet. In close quarters, excited dogs sometimes knock him over accidentally.

I think that Sparky and Troy are probably about the same weight, but Troy looks bigger because he is a little taller and hold his head high. Sparky, who is part Husky, has a heavy, big-chested sled-pulling build with a furry hump on his back like a grizzly bear. Our neighbor Emma still calls him "bear". Troy's more elegant coat with flowing tail feathers and other fancy touches make him look bigger than Sparky, too. Troy is almost as scared of fireworks as Sparky used to be. Odd to have two big dogs with the same excessive fear. Both Sparky and Troy have very soft undercoats, but Sparky's guard hairs are more wolf-like. There's such a variation in breeds of dogs. Maggie's soft, wavy coat resembles a Cocker Spaniel's even though she looks like a small, black German Shepherd.

CHRISTMAS TO NEW YEARS

Our Christmas day wasn't typical. We took the neighbor's formerly neglected little Chihuahua over to David's parents as a playmate for their Boston Terrier. He immediately knew he was home. We took the little heated house we made for him, where he normally ate, so he would get the idea that he was not being abandoned again. He had his first meal there inside the familiar little house. Soon, David's Mom was talking baby talk to him and he was seeking love from David's Dad. Previously, it had taken him quite a while to warm up to men, probably due to abuse earlier in his life. He was promptly named "Radar" for his huge ears (relative to the tiny rest of him). We also saw Debbie, Judy, Dan and Aunt Helen and passed out pillows.

Radar makes their rambunctious little Boston Terrier, Prissy, look huge. Prissy showed him how to navigate the ramp into the garden. He and Prissy got along well until a couple of days ago when he scolded her for something, causing her to temporarily avoid him. It's probably a good thing that he has the spunk to hold his own with her. Reports are that they now get along pretty well, though Prissy wants to eat Radar's dinner and hers, too. He's gaining weight and doesn't look so much like a death-camp survivor. Our inexperienced neighbors were well-intentioned when they took him in but were only feeding him once a day and expressed their frustration at trying to take care of him. They were thinking about taking him to the ASPCA. He's reportedly up to three hefty meals a day now and looking much better.

The Elders spent much of the day with us on Christmas, getting calls from home at our house. We had Ken, Suzy and Berta over for lunch and Marcela and Pauline for dinner. Thank goodness for frozen roll dough. I even got in a short nap while the Elders were watching their yearly G-rated video with the others before dinner.

Paula got baptized Sunday. I hemmed up her dress, hanging a coople of David's fishing weights inside the hem at the side seams in little cloth packets (didn't have any drapery weights) so that the skirt wouldn't float up. David thoroughly cleaned the font Saturday, discovering years of dirt on top of the mirror hanging above the water. It was a nice baptism.

Corn-free rice pilaf for a crowd

Again this year, Ken, bless his heart, bought a complete, prepared Thanksgiving dinner for us to serve. And, as usual, none of the dishes, even the pre-cooked turkey, were free of corn products. I did fine on the extra mashed potatoes, green beans and cranberry sauce we fixed, since we had a second turkey later in the day. But this demonstrated once again how few prepared foods are corn-free.

I made rice pilaf last night for the Branch Social. I didn't have the energy to make pozole (which I can't eat anyway) and wanted to prepared something easy. It's nice to have a box or two in the pantry for times like this. Directions here.

Thanksgiving recipes

One thing I always do at Thanksgiving now is to make a batch of cranberry sauce from scratch, from the Ocean Spray Cranberry package. Sort through the berries while washing (they float) and follow the recipe exactly, breaking berries which don't burst. It's so easy, and much better than canned whole-berry sauce. Wonderful if you're transporting food to someone else's house, as it doesn't need to be refrigerated and is best made ahead. For a different flavor, less assertive, add 1/4 teaspoon salt. You can also use part orange juice in place of water and a little orange zest. But I've been going the purist route in recent years, leaving the oranges for raw cranberry relish. For kids, have some mild, jellied Cranberry/Raspberry sauce on hand.

One year here in our garden, we had fresh shelly beans in the garden at Thanksgiving, several varieties, and I combined them with corn, a little caramelized onion and a touch of heavy cream for a "more traditional" succotash. I got the idea from the Joy of Cooking. No cup of butter in the succotash for me. Though tomatoes in succotash are another way to go. Keira's mom used to cook dried corn and add a little cream for fall sometimes to remind everyone how things used to be.

I cooked some of the shellies (fresh seeds from over-grown, but not dried, green beans) separately for myself, since I can't eat corn. Black Valentine and Coco Rose de Prague are good varieties for variable fall weather, and make good shellies as well as green beans. Supplement with frozen lima or green beans if you are short of "shellies".

The Amazon cooking blog has a recipe for roasting a small turkey in 45 minutes. Might need to try it this year for our second shift dinner. Though if I'm going to the trouble of removing the backbone, I'm also going to separate the breast from the dark meat, so I can cook the dark meat a little longer, like they do in restaurants. The Sweet Potato Pie and the dressings for the Romaine salad sound good, too. There are general tips for whole turkey (brine the bird, chill the breast) and for making gravy.

Keira's mom used to partially roast the turkey in a big roasting pan, then remove it, pour off the pan juices for gravy and pile a lot of bread and rice dressing into the pan before placing the bird on top to finish roasting. A good way to prepare enough dressing for everybody and for leftovers, plus gravy. I still follow Grandma Smith's practice of putting the simmered giblets in the dressing. Fresh sage makes a difference, though the bread and rice dressing was good with extra celery, thyme, etc. to make up for a sage allergy.

Don't think I'll be doing deep-fried turkey or crockpot turkey breast. My rolls will be from frozen dough, not "scratch".

Butternut squash and apple cider soup and diabetic apple and pineapple pie sound good. We still have Red Fuji and Pink Lady apples on the trees. We tried several varieties of winter squash this year, but the Butternut family of squash is still best for our hot valley, unless you're exporting Kabocha squash to Japan in June. Francisco grew a Mexican variety that's shaped sort of like a pumpkin, but with some green netting in the skin. He gave a bunch of them away to friends. We grew Argonaut, a giant hybrid butternut. Ours didn't get anywhere near 100 pounds. Next year, maybe we'll go back to Tahitian. Maybe with Rainbow Butternut or Greek Red Butternut.

Hoping that everyone has a wonderful day tomorrow.