family and friends

Eye Patch Giggles

/ eponine3 / 1 Comment

I’ve been watching my mom sporting her eye patches for over a month now. She was initially (and understandably) distressed about her eye occlusion – you would be too if a main blood vessel in your eye burst. But having the option to look hilarious and stylish at the same time overruled her inhibitions, and she jumped right on the Eye Patch Wagon. Some of you will remember this photo:day one (2).jpg

That first day she was just trying them on – and having loads of fun with her partner in crime I may add. After that she got serious about it, requesting a few adjustments such as thinner elastic on all of them and better sizing so they did not slip off. How nice to have custom-made eye patches and then be able to tweak them besides! It appears there are some benefits to being 83!

Unsurprisingly, she then began to do some serious coordinating with them. I mean, how about this for an outfit?

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Personally I think the mini watermelons were a most perfect choice for this hot July day.

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Friends and family had great fun posing with her. Clearly she was entirely comfortable embracing her disability. Rock on, Mom!

And have fun playing pirate with your great-granddaughters!

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The blue and white combo below works well and maybe doesn’t call quite as much attention to itself as the watermelons, I’ll grant. Some days you want to be striking, and some days you don’t.

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The orange and yellow flowered patch with the solid yellow shirt, lovely again. It’s hard to see but the orangey earrings go with the orange in the patch. Of course.

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I’m so happy Mom is not letting the eye situation get the better of her. She’s always been a take-the-bull-by-the-horns kind of person. It seems that she looks at it this way: If I’m going to have to wear an eye patch, I’m going to have fun with it! 

This teeny yellow plaid patch picks up the yellow flowers in the shirt in this next combination, all bright and cheery for summertime, and playing with delightfully dueling patterns. Unfortunately I was not present for the piece de resistance when she wore the purple star patch to dinner one night with a perfectly matching purple top. Downright elegant she was, so I am told.

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Mom’s patches are coordinated, yes, but most of all they are fun! They reflect the little girl inside the grown woman, the choice to giggle rather than grumble. How she looks is not about her coordinated outfits — it’s about her spirit, her heart, her joy.

All this eye patch business has made me think about how we present ourselves, what we do to hide or not hide our disabilities, our imperfections, our flaws, and where, overall, how we look fits into and reflects the scheme of things. Think about what you do to make yourself look the way you want to both at home and in public. How much do you care about and think about how you look? Do you look in the mirror and say things like:

That shirt makes me look dumpy… this one is better. 

Those pants fit better than they used to … they are not so bad now.

This coat is dated and I look like an old fart….

Just going to pick up a coffee – I’m not changing for that…

Does everyone even look in the mirror? Sometimes I wonder.

The fact is – despite the bombardment of advertising that would have us think otherwise – how we look is only a small part of who we are. My sister Lisa got Hodgkin’s disease in her early 20s. Three weeks before she died, she jokingly said to me, “Finally I’ve grown my nails and lost some weight and now I’m going to croak.” We laughed, but we both knew it’s not about what you look like. It’s about who you are inside that’s so beautiful. It’s about precious time with people you love.

I hate that Lisa died so young, I hate that I missed so many years with her. But I have never forgotten those moments we had together. Over the years the conversation morphed for me into a little voice in my head that says: Make sure you’re paying attention to what’s really important. Don’t take the good things for granted. Let the stupid stuff go. Tell the people you love that you love them – in words when words are all you have and in actions as often as possible. Make the world a better place.

Clueless Yoga

/ eponine3 / 1 Comment

The first time I saw my son Samuel do yoga on the back deck, I was both surprised and highly impressed. That was yoga? It did not look like glorified stretching. It did not look like deep thinking. He was doing moves requiring strength, flexibility and balance. I was nuts about gymnastics back in the day, so I appreciated both the time he had clearly invested to reach this stage of proficiency and the level of difficulty he had achieved.

Subsequently he mostly went to the gym or a class, so I didn’t see him in action much more. And come to find out, I had seen him doing a sub-category of yoga called acro-yoga. Half a year ago, I convinced him to show me how his handstands were coming along. It was winter, so the living room had to do.

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Now I’m not saying he’s ready for Cirque du Soleil, but that’s a darn good handstand (which he held for about 30 seconds, by the way). Straight body, strong wrists, weight balanced over his shoulders – not at all bad. My first gymnastics teacher, when I was 12, would have approved. He was a former Chinese acrobat who made us do handstands for the first ten minutes of a one-hour class, so central, so important were they in the sport.

My second gymnastics teacher was a man named Leo who had a gym in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, on the third floor of an old building with no air conditioning. There, during high school, after a lot of ill-timed flailing and splatting, I finally perfected a side aerial (a cartwheel without hands) – the pinnacle of my gymnastics career. It felt like flying and I will never forget it.

Though I was not destined for greatness in gymnastics, I know a thing or two about pointed toes and body positioning and timing. Some of it is like riding a bike – you don’t forget it. The muscle memory is amazing. Also amazing is the difference between what your mind wants to do and what your body allows you to do, but anyone over 30 knows this.

So I sorta, kinda know something about gymnastics, and I had a spattering of ballet training as well, but yoga (aside from Samuel’s example) was always rather a mystery. Frankly it looked boring. (And you know how I feel about boring.) Don’t those people want to move more? I always want to move. (Therefore everyone does, right?) Over time I watched people doing yoga here and there, and am older and hopefully wiser now, and I see its virtues. And yoga mats are cool.

Rise and Eppie, my darling granddaughters, are here. August is warm, and there is space outdoors. August by 10am is almost too warm and the space beckons. So why not make first thing in the morning Yoga Time?

I know: These girls would do better with a real yoga teacher. I know: I should set up the laptop and play an online yoga session for kids for them. I tried, really I did. I know how to open a YouTube video. I just couldn’t get one to open. I took it as a sign: Get out there and do something with them, amateurish as it is.

That’s when Yoga Time became Clueless Yoga Time!

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Do I have a clue what I am doing? Uh…

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You keep your weight balanced in the center, shoulders back.

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You stretch until your body says that’s far enough. You will notice in the next photo that the girls can touch their toes. They can easily touch their toes. I used to be able to do that.

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You keep straight arms and straight legs except when you mean to bend them.

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You lift up your butt and wiggle for fun!

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You point your toes whenever you remember.

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You tolerate your mat buddy.

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What do you mean? she says. It’s the only soft place out here!

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Once in a while, you lie back and enjoy the view above you.

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You say “Ta-Da!” at the end!

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I realize that all of this is glorified stretching with some giggles thrown in. But when I ask Wanna do some yoga? the girls get excited and put on their leotards. They unroll those mats and head outside. They move and stretch and balance those little bodies right along with me. We do the pencil and the whoosh and the wiggle and the up and the down. I will get some more info and we will do the dog and the cat and the table and the tree next time maybe. In the meantime, we’re having a blast even if we are clueless.

When I Grow Up

/ eponine3 / 2 Comments

As we left Lyn’s house in Vermont last week, she handed me a jar of cookies, homemade maple cookies, homemade by Lyn herself of course. My heart warmed on seeing that jar, wrapped up pretty with beautiful, delicious cookies inside. It was my jar and she was, on the surface of it, giving me my jar back. This past winter, I had used it to give her some of my Virginia applesauce. In Lyn’s book, you don’t return the jar empty, or the container, or the plate, or whatever was used to give you a gift of food. You give it back with something yummy. It’s a thing. It’s a wonderful thing.

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This is Eppie, who might not remember this jar of cookies, but I hope she will always give something back in a similarly beautiful way. I hope when she gets older, she meets a dear lady who becomes for her as Lyn has been for me.

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This is Lyn. I want to tell you what she did to my stove. In my early twenties, our first house had an old electric stove in the kitchen that was, well, gross. It’s one thing to make a mess yourself and clean it imperfectly, but someone else’s mess, someone else’s baked-on spills, someone else’s goo dripping down that narrow space between the side of the stove and the counter – that is just gross.

The man we bought the house from had left a tea kettle sitting on the back burner, which succeeded in hiding the fact that there was no coil under it. Discovering the missing coil and realizing his deception was disappointment enough for me to have talked about it, and in telling the story, I must have mentioned that the stove was not exactly appealing in its present condition. I might have used the word gross. Lyn said to me, “I will come and clean your stove.” Being five months pregnant at the time, I did not argue.

Neither did I have any idea what she meant by “cleaning” my stove. She showed up in work clothes and over the course of two and a half days, she took that stove apart – screw by screw! She scrubbed and polished every piece individually, so that all old grossness of any kind that might have remained lodged between two pieces was able to be removed. Then she put it all back together.

I never saw a person clean anything so thoroughly, to say nothing giving two and a half days of their own time to do it. The stove was an ugly color, that goldish tone that was popular in the 1970s and remained in many kitchens until those stoves one by one kicked the bucket. But despite the (soon replaced) missing coil, it worked, and I was not going to have a new one any time soon. By the time Lyn got through with it, that stove was shining like new and not nearly as ugly. In fact, I could not help but smile when I looked at it. I remember being awestruck at her willingness to ensure that I would have a clean stove.

What a gift she gave me! Who was I that she would do this for me? Why she would go out of her way and work so hard for me like that? And how could saying “thank you” even come close to expressing my gratitude? In my twenty-something, bumbling way I asked her, “What can I ever do to repay you?”

She didn’t miss a beat, but replied gently, “Someday, someone will need their stove cleaned. You clean their stove, and you have repaid me.”

I like to think that anyone would have realized at that moment what an extraordinary human being she is. I did think that. But my thought specifically was – and still is – “When I grow up, I want to be like her.”

It wasn’t just the stove of course. It was cookies coming to me or coming back to me, time and again. It was hours spent listening to me working my way verbally through some perplexing issue or current crisis. It was a lot of kind questions that made me think she genuinely cared about me, though I still didn’t know why she would. Her amazing generosity and warm welcomes were love in action and made me feel loved, to say nothing of her maple cookies, apple squares and buttery turnips! Lyn made the best turnips I ever had! One Christmas after moving to Virginia I was feeling especially homesick for Vermont, which perhaps she knew and perhaps she didn’t. She kindly sent a box of her apple squares, wrapped well for the journey. But to fill the small bit of empty space in the box she did not use Styrofoam peanuts or newspaper. No, she thought to cut some sprigs of a fir tree so that when I opened the box, the pine scent brought me back to Vermont instantly.

I could go on, but perhaps you get the idea that I love and admire her very much. May every woman have such a woman in her life! May every man have a man so worthy and respectable as to inspire the same kind of hope, the kind that says I want to be like that someday! The vision of that someday will stop us short when we are tempted to be lazy or unkind or bad-tempered. The vision inspires. Like the ripples in a pond, the actions of people like Lyn inspire our own actions which hopefully in turn inspire someone else’s actions. In a few years when I show Eppie the photo of herself with the jar of cookies, I’ll tell her what it’s all about. Maybe she’ll get it. Or maybe someone will clean her stove, so to speak.

May we all have people in our lives to admire, to emulate, to learn from – people of such shining, wonderful character that your own life is richer just knowing them. Let us never forget how important we are to one another, how important our actions are and how far the ripples reach.

The Maze of Life

/ eponine3 / 2 Comments

I love it when people find ingenious ways to make money using what they already have. For 20 years a farm family in Vermont has been planting 24 acres of corn, cutting an intricate maze into it, charging admission and making untold numbers of people thrilled that they found their way out! Here is a previous year’s maze to give you an idea of what they do.

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There is a boat and a bridge in this one; a boat and two bridges in the next.

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Perhaps it’s hard to understand the scale from the aerial photos. What it looks like from atop one of the bridges is this:

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That’s a boat way out in the distance. The corn is taller than all but the tallest people. And even if you were a giant, it would be hard to see which path to take.

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There are a lot of pointless loops and dead ends. There are “guides” posted on the bridges, wholesome yet also rather smirky young people who may or may not steer you right, and they will tell you they may or may not be steering you right! (I may be reading the smirky into it.) There are two “frustration bells” located in random places just to give you something to do when you feel like you are going in circles. There are numerous paper punches mounted on stands that all make a different shaped hole in the card they give you to punch: star, apple, boat, teddy bear, umbrella, hand moon, leaf, etc. Mine looked like this by the end.

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You are supposed to punch the card every time you come to one, and when you are all done, you “compare your sequence of punched shapes to their locations marked on the aerial photo in the admissions booth to see how you solved the maze.” Let’s just say I used the card as a way to feel like we were making some progress. If you come to the same hole puncher twice, you are really in a loop! We only did that once that I remember, but I was piggy-back-carrying my almost six-year-old granddaughter a good deal of the time, so forgive me if my memory is a bit fuzzy on the details.

We were fortunate during our trek last week to have a scout in our party who often went on ahead and checked to see if we all should keep going that way or try another direction (thank you, Lincoln!). Nonetheless I am sure the nine of us went under one of the bridges at least three times. We discussed what mistakes we might have made. We tried to intelligently choose the next direction. On my own I would not possibly have made it out of there in the two and a half hours it took us.

I should have had a clue it was going to be as challenging as it was. Just getting to the place feels like going to the middle of nowhere.

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You are on a dirt road (not that that’s unusual in Vermont). Finally you see the sign that says M [ear of corn] Z E 627 feet. 627 feet?? That’s your clue right there. This going to be fun!

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Parking is easy. There are goats to visit,

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toys to play with,

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and all kinds of fun things to do before entering the maze itself.

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It’s no wonder people love coming here. Kudos to the owners/designers who give us not only a fun and challenging way to spend time together. They have also made possible an experience that fabulously parallels real life, whether anyone but me thinks about it that way or not. How is a maze like this NOT a parallel of a person’s lifetime?

We come into it, we bumble around (fairly clueless), we think about it, we rest, we have a snack, we try again, we note the milestones, we carry the little ones, we share stories, we slow down for the slower ones we care about (or they slow down for us!), we feel a bit of success, we marvel at the complexity, we get dirty, we keep going, we get help (or not, as we choose), we discuss our options, we go the other person’s way sometimes, we laugh, we leave clues for other people and hope it helps, we get frustrated (not that bridge again!), we make progress, we get tired, we sense we are getting to the end, we celebrate, we finish and we sit down!

Seems about right to me. Some people bumble more than others, some have more successes, some carry little ones more often, some get dirtier. But all in all, life is a maze. We don’t know what’s around the next bend, we don’t know how long it will take us to get through it, we don’t know what our path will be until we start going along. We back up and start again sometimes. We experience surprise, frustration, challenge, relief. We keep going.

I am in the middle of my own maze as you are in yours. Don’t you love it?!

Watching Girls Watching Whales

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We got lucky at Zoo Atlanta on Sunday. We watched the elephant munching his lunch, the tiger slinking as only tigers can and the gorillas lumbering about, vying for status. The bald eagle perched as if posing for us just a few arms’ lengths away, the naked mole rats moved bits of straw about and the baby pandas sat facing us in their black and white perfection. I love to see their sleek bodies, fluffy fur, insane talons, unique markings, hilarious expressions and fascinating form. I want to see their bulk and their grace, the way their heads are shaped and how their eyes connect (or don’t) with mine or how the wind makes them cock their heads to catch a whiff of something. But in the middle of a hot and humid summer day, I was also not surprised to see a lounging lion, snoozing sun bears and tired turtles.

An aquarium is a whole nother thing. Everything is moving at an aquarium. Optimal water temperatures can be maintained. If you go to almost any of the tanks – jellyfish, otters, sea horses – you see bubbles in the water, fantastically shaped and colored marine life and almost continual movement. For these animals, moving sleekly and majestically through the water is part of staying alive. For the people watching them, that movement is mesmerizing.

Case in point, my darling granddaughters, not only mesmerized on Saturday at the Georgia Aquarium,

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but also genuinely thrilled! There it goes, one of the beluga whales making another round, flipping over, spinning, gliding, accelerating, diving, playing, smiling, peeking at us, showing off!

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The belugas are extraordinarily graceful, obviously powerful, delightfully cheerful. These gigantic, all-white creatures from the Arctic Ocean are not small. I’m not sure of the stats on these individuals, but belugas can get to be 18 ft (5.5 m) long and up to 3,530 lb (1,600 kg). They can swim backwards, sideways and upside down. I loved watching them, but I was drawn even more to the five-year-old and four-year-old in my charge for whom nothing else in the world existed at that moment. The girls alternately oohed, aahed, squealed with delight, pointed and exclaimed, “Whoa! Look! Look!”

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Other marvelous creatures inspired our awe as well. The sea urchins that you touch with two fingers together, the sea dragons that look like they could breathe fire if only they weren’t under water, the massive whale sharks that move hauntingly among the groupers, sea turtles, manta rays and hundreds of others, the dolphins that eject like rockets out of the water and touch a ball suspended 30 feet above them – these animals are absolute wonders of our world. I’m grateful to all those many people who worry about them, care for them, advocate for them – very grateful – but I am most grateful that what they do makes it possible for me to bring two sweet, wonderful little girls to see them, marvel at them, delight in them.

When is the last time you were awed by a majestic animal showing its stuff? For an even more awesome experience, take a child or two along. Watch them stare in amazement, watch them touch the sea urchins with two fingers carefully pressed together, listen as they recount the day and tell you from their experience that “You can’t touch the belugas!”

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Tea and Thatch

/ eponine3 / 1 Comment

When you have your ten-year-old great niece staying for a week, you think about what activities might be fun. On Wednesday we drove to the Science Museum in Richmond especially to see its “Animals Inside Out” exhibit. Kaileena said the best part of that outing was, you guessed it, the tightrope!

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I asked her what else she liked that day and she did not hesitate in the least: the cartwheels on the back deck that she did when we got home! This reminds me of a family I knew who took their two daughters on a special trip to Disney World, and the thing the girls liked best was – yup – the pool at the hotel!

You do what you can. You hope for the best.

On Thursday we drove west. The destination was Beverley’s summer home where Kaileena got to slide down a natural water slide in a rushing mountain stream (a highlight of the week, to be sure). On the way we stopped for lunch at the Anne Hathaway Cottage Tea Room in Staunton. The interior was elegant in an old-world way – stone floor, dark wood fireplace, fine old china decorating the walls – utterly charming. My beet and strawberry salad, with feta cheese and a creamy balsamic dressing, was divine. Mom’s and Kaileena’s sandwiches were equally impressive and delicious: cream cheese and sliced strawberries on one, and ham salad with pineapple on the other. If you want sugar in your tea, you use the small tongs to pinch a lump and drop it in. You can see the tongs hanging off the sugar bowl on the table.

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Set back from a fairly main road, almost hidden, the cottage itself looks as authentic as it is. That roof is thatch. In addition to being the most common roofing material worldwide, thatch is apparently making a comeback in higher-end circles on account of being lightweight, versatile and waterproof. A great variety of wild and cultivated grains, including wheat and rye, can be used. The wheat that makes the straw that was historically used for making roofs is the same wheat that gave grain for making bread.

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The owner proudly told me that the roof of this cottage in Staunton is likely to last 30+ years.

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When I was a child in grade school, we got a little Scholastic Books catalog every now and then, and Mom allowed me to make some choices. One of the books I picked out, which probably cost 25 cents, had a story that included a thatched roof. I could not help but think of that story when I saw this thatched roof. Lines of dialog were etched in my mind. The story affected me hugely and I remember it well, though its title escaped me.  Its message undoubtedly helped shape the way I think about wisdom and age to this day.

The book itself did not survive my childhood. As I had children of my own, and they got a little bigger, I reflected often on the part that story had played in my life. Finally, sometime in my thirties, I wrote to the Library of Congress to see if they could help me find it. This was back when you wrote longhand letters on real paper and waited weeks for a reply. This was way before search engines.

I wrote to them what I remembered from the story, a summary as well as some lines of dialog. In less than a month, they sent me a photocopy of the story from an anthology of folk tales. How thrilling it was for me to read the story again, twenty or so years later. Some of the lines I had remembered verbatim.

This is how I remember the story. Maybe it will be as powerful for you as it was for me.

Long ago and far away, there was a rural village where the people had always done things a certain way. They followed their traditions strictly and kept close tabs on each other. For the most part their way of life worked very well.

One of the expectations of life in this village was that you must be productive and useful. When you got too old or feeble to be able to contribute your share of the work, you were put on a sled and brought to the woods in the middle of the winter and left there to die.

In one family, the grandfather was no longer able to work. His legs hurt and he was not strong. His son knew the day had come to follow the tradition of the village, even though he didn’t like the idea. He put his father on the sled and strapped him in. The grandfather said nothing because he knew and accepted the custom. But all the while, the grandson was watching.

“Daddy,” said the little boy. “Are you taking Grandfather out to the woods?”

“Yes, son.”

“Don’t forget to bring the sled back.”

“Why?”

“Because someday I need it to take you to the woods.”

This gave the man pause. The idea of his father – or himself – freezing to death in the cold, dark woods made him want to defy the custom. But he knew that if he did not take him, someone else in the village would do it. The only other choice was to hide the old man.

From that day forward the old grandfather lived in the attic. He could not risk being caught, so he did not make a sound and he could no longer take walks in the street or sit in the full sun. But he lived. His grandson brought him food and drink.

This went on for several years. One spring, the boy began to bring less and less food. When his grandfather asked him why, the boy said, “The crops were so bad. We have only a little food left and we have no seed grain for the next crop. It’s terrible. We all will starve.”

“Something like this happened when I was a little boy too,” the old man said. “Tell your father to take the thatch off the roof and thresh it again. There will be seed in it yet, and that seed will produce a crop.”

The father did what the grandfather suggested, and sure enough, there was seed for the next crop! When his neighbors saw what he did and saw his success, they said, “How did you know there would be seed yet in the thatch?”

The man knew he had to confess. “I didn’t know, but my old father did. How fortunate for all of us that he is still alive. His memory and his wisdom have saved us all.”

After that, the people changed their ways. They did not take their old people out to the woods any more. Instead, they cherished them, honored them and took care of them because now they knew that “useful” is not just about how much you can work.

The little boy was especially proud of his grandfather. Sometimes they would sit together and enjoy the full sun.

Pizza Pile

/ eponine3 / 6 Comments

The title does not contain a typo. It is not supposed to say Pizza Pie. I said Pile and I mean Pile. You’ll see.

One day last week – I don’t remember which day except it was the day that included Dog-opoly – Kaileena and I wanted to make pizza. She is ten and so eager about learning to make good food. During the earlier part of the week that she was with me, we had made yeast dough twice, once for cinnamon-swirl bread and once for calzones. Now we would make it for pizza.

Until very recently, I have been making pizza the same way for my entire adult life.

  • Make dough. Let rest.
  • Roll out dough and put on prepared pan.
  • Spread tomato sauce on dough.
  • Sprinkle basil, oregano and garlic powder (one at a time) on sauce. Back in the day all of these came in little jars, dried and broken into very small pieces. Thus the sprinkling. Fresh is much better if you can manage it.
  • Top with grated mozzarella, parmesan and possibly asiago (one at a time).
  • Top with whatever else: spinach, salami, peppers, pepperoni (one at a time).
  • Bake in a hot oven.

In all these years it never once occurred to me to combine ingredients. Here is the way Kaileena and I made a pizza pile together.

First you gather all the ingredients for your pizza other than the crust, which is separate for obvious reasons. We decided to make our pizza with just two cheeses, mozz and parm, and also to use salami, spinach and a half of a yellow pepper that we found in the fridge. Of course you can put whatever you want on your pizza.

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You see two cheeses (mozz wrapped in plastic and parm in a jar), spinach between them, a few slices of salami next to fresh basil and garlic cloves (we used just one clove), fresh oregano next to the garlic, and a piece of yellow pepper next to the can of all-important Don Pepino pizza sauce.

Kaileena grated the mozzarella while I cut up the rest.

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We are getting closer to the pile. All of this stuff, except the sauce, goes in a bowl. Don’t forget a little salt and pepper. I would say not quite a teaspoon of salt for a pizza this size. But the amount is up to you.

pizza ingredients in bowl

Then you mix it up and either use it right away or put a plate on it and put it in the fridge until later when you want to make the pizza.

pizza ingredients mixed in bowl

Easy peasy.

Normally I would make the dough first, then grate the cheese, cut up the rest and mix it in a bowl while the dough is resting. But we knew we had to go get my mom and had only a little time, so we reversed the normal order. When we came back home with Mom, we made the dough.

First put one cup lukewarm water in a bowl along with a tablespoon of yeast. Stir. Add a cup of flour and a teaspoon of sugar. Stir. It will look like this.

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Add another cup of flour and a teaspoon of salt. Add flour about a cup at a time until the dough pulls away from the side of the bowl (about 4-5 cups total I think). Transfer to your countertop and knead about 10 minutes, until smooth and elastic. Kaileena got pretty good at this. In the kneading, you push with the heels of your hands, then pull the dough back toward you. Put some umpf into it. You’ll get a better dough and strengthen your arms at the same time. Who needs a gym when you can knead yeast dough like this?

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After your dough is smooth, let it rest about 20 minutes before you roll it out. Just put a little flour on the counter and let the dough sit there.

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I swear we did not try to make a smiley face in the dough!

After 20 minutes or so, roll out the dough. Kaileena did this without help of any kind.

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We let that sit while we prepared the pan. Can you tell I’ve used a pizza cutter on that pan a gazillion times? I poured a bit of olive oil on it.

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Kaileena spread it around with her hands, not worrying about getting them oily because she was going right back to the dough, and that won’t hurt a thing.

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I then sprinkled a few tablespoons of cornmeal on the pan. It’s not necessary. I just like the added texture.

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By the way, my oven takes 15 minutes to heat to 425 degrees, so I would turn it on about now.

Kaileena folded the dough in half and lifted it carefully to place it on the pan.

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She unfolded it to cover the pan and curled up the edges that hung over the sides.

dough on pan opening up

Then we put half of that can of Don Pepino pizza sauce on the dough. I used to use the little 8-oz cans of tomato sauce, but one time last year we went to make pizza and had none of that in the house. Mom was here at that time, in transition from one house to another, and had stored a few bags of groceries in my basement. “I think there’s a can of pizza sauce in one of those bags,” she said. She had Don Pepino. Samuel deemed it the ingredient that moved homemade pizza to another level. I agree it was an enormous difference. We ordered a case from amazon.

pizza pan sauce

Kaileena spread the sauce. If you have the least bit of an artistic bent in you, this part is quite fun. A little like fingerpainting, only you do it with the back of a spoon.

pizza pan sauce spread2

Out from the fridge came the bowl of mixed-up cheeses, herbs and toppings. When you unload the bowl onto the pizza dough and sauce, you are looking at a PILE. You knew I would show you: Pizza Pile, get it? 🙂

pizza pile

None of this “first the basil, then the oregano, then the …..” Just empty the bowl on top and spread it out. Done! Oven ready in no time!

pizza pie oven ready

To get a good bottom crust, I slide the pizza right onto the bottom oven rack when it is set but not yet brown. This crisps it up and in five minutes or so I can slide it right back onto the pan. A spatula helps.

Voila!

pizza pie done

Mushrooms from Outer Space

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The sunflowers caught my eye. Coming down the driveway late yesterday afternoon, I had to stop the car in front of the garden and go look at them. Coco had come along for the ride and hopped out to go have a sniff around too. Look, one of the flowers is even (sadly) fallen over, yet it still turns its face toward the sun! What a lesson in that alone!

sunflowers.jpg

Naturally I can’t just take a picture of the sunflowers and then get back in the car. I remembered the tomatoes, and decided I also had to quickly check them. When I got there, I noticed something strange. All the rain we have had brought visitors of an otherworldly kind. This little colony of mushrooms was restricted to the area near the water pump, on the way to the tomatoes, where for some reason I am content to leave the hose a mess.

Check it out! These little volunteers are so delicate.

funky mushrooms 2

Forgive me, I just watched The Princess Bride (a thing to do with a ten-year-old visitor), so in my head I hear:

Inigo: The mushroom heads look just like *lace*

Fezzik: I think they come from outer *space*

I could easily crush them, easily overlook them, easily dismiss them. Instead I have forgotten about my car left in the middle of the driveway (and the ten-year-old in the car), and find myself fascinated, entranced, intrigued.

Where did they come from? Why are they here? Why are they only here and not growing up from the rest of the mulchy areas in the garden? Why do they cup their heads like that? Do they serve any purpose? Will they be gone tomorrow?

funky mushrooms

Sometimes I ask myself how much I miss, how much beauty exists all around me that I never see because I am too busy with this or that. Today I did not have to ask. Today did not lack for breathtaking beauty. I got my fill. We visited a friend in Williamsville, in the western mountains of Virginia more than an hour beyond Staunton. Behind her house is this incredible mountain stream. I don’t know the words rich enough to describe it.

mountain stream (2)

Kaileena was not the least concerned with descriptions — she found it to be a perfect natural water slide!

mountain stream K

My adventurous 83-year-old mom walked a hundred yards or so along a not-so-easy mountain path to get to the not-so-easy stone steps leading to a rock to sit on in this little pocket of paradise. Bravo, Mom! She doesn’t want to miss anything either.

When you think a thing is very cool, it’s even cooler when someone else thinks so too. We all were awestruck at the swimming hole and waterfall. We listened to that water rushing over the rocks the way it’s been doing for countless generations. How many kids have slid down that rock the way Kaileena did today? How many beamed like she did every time she landed in the froth?

mountain stream K3 (2)

Rivers like this don’t get old or tired. The water keeps coming, keeps flowing, keeps rushing. Kids keep having fun. Sunflowers keep turning toward the sun. And mushrooms have landed from outer space!

You think the day has given you enough and you are grateful. But it is not finished. On the drive back we watched a mother wild turkey and her two little ones prance across the road in front of us. Many adorable black calves walked closely to their mothers in the green fields of the farms we passed. A raccoon did not see the danger of dawdling along the shoulder of the road. And just as I turned into the driveway, two deer leaped gloriously within our field of vision. Kaileena let out a breathless Ohhhh! as she watched them bound into the forest. I hope she remembers today.

Pies, Galettes, Bread and …Cartwheels?

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I have been cooking and baking for a long time. When I was a kid, we always helped my mom make the salad or stir the pot. When I was 16 I got a job at a French restaurant called Picot’s Place in Hamden, Massachusetts, and learned to make Beef Wellington, French onion soup, chocolate mousse and the best omelets ever. I wanted to learn to be a master chef and was accepted to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. Before I turned 18 I had worked in the kitchen at a German restaurant, at a country club and, for part of a summer, at a little country inn in Bavaria. Starting in my 20s I made food for my family all the time.

What on earth this has to do with cartwheels is a good question. Getting there…

Today was a baking day with Kaileena, my ten-year-old great niece. She said she wanted to make something like a tart and had mentioned swirl bread as well. A wet front has been coming through our area, so on this rainy July day, we picked up Mom, got what we could from the garden before the skies opened up, and headed for the kitchen. We decided on plum galette and cinnamon swirl bread.

Kaileena has helped make pies at home at Thanksgiving every year but had never made any kind of yeast bread before, not that she remembers anyway. She helps a lot in the kitchen at home, loves watching cooking shows and is very comfortable in the kitchen. Nonetheless, kneading bread dough until it is smooth and elastic, incorporating enough flour but not too much and keeping yourself and the kitchen from becoming a gigantic mess is no minor effort.

Kaileena kneading bread dough

“Wow!” she said upon seeing that her dough had risen the way it is supposed to.

And oh how yummy the bread was, lightly toasted, a few hours later with its delicate swirls and hint of cinnamon…

cinnamon swirl bread.jpg

Rolling out pie dough so that it doesn’t stick to the counter, is the right shape and the right thickness and then transfers nicely to the pie dish takes some doing as well. Kaileena had the distinct advantage (and pleasure!) of working alongside her great-grandma.

Mom and Kaileena rolling out dough

She learned what a galette is – a free form pie, in this case filled with pieces of plum and a few dried cranberries, mixed (as with any fruit pie) with a little sugar for sweetness and flour to bind,

filling galette

and baked to golden brown!

plum galette.jpg

She even learned how to put a lattice top on this little pie (which did not last long)!

plum pie.jpg

Have you ever tried to put a lattice top on a pie? You start with rolling out a piece of the dough as thin as your bottom crust. A tool called a pastry wheel (which we affectionately in my family call a Raedle) is used to cut the dough into thin strips that have a zigzag edge. You start with two strips laid across the middle of the pie at right angles to each other, then add one strip at a time and weave them together working outward – over, under, over, under – and then another strip in the other direction until you have covered the pie. Crimp the edges and into the oven it goes. As they say, easy as pie!

If you have never made a pie, or put a lattice top on a pie, it’s a little like doing a left-handed cartwheel if you have been doing them right-handed or doing a right-handed cartwheel when you have been doing them left-handed – harder than it looks! Or like signing your name with your nondominant hand. Or like walking up stairs backwards or trying to have an intelligent conversation in a foreign language you learned in high school and never quite polished. In my case it’s like using a biscuit joiner – a woodworking tool that has nothing whatsoever to do with making yummy biscuits! I think about how cool it would be to make useful and beautiful things from wood, and I’ve watched other people do it many, many times, but doing it myself is oh so different!

If you do a thing often and are very practiced at it, you develop an ease, a finesse, an effortlessness. I think of Mark doing a drop shot, Brad or Lincoln or Ernie building anything with wood, Marie taking photos, Samuel doing a handstand, Kim holding a preemie, Claudia making jam. It’s easy to forget how many steps are involved when a given skill is broken down, how awkward and slow you (you too!) used to be back when you had not devoted so much time to developing and practicing it.

Doing a cartwheel, for instance, involves lunging with your dominant leg in front, then in one smooth motion putting your hands on the ground shoulder-width apart and turned 90 degrees, kicking your back leg up and over followed by your other leg and landing in a lunge facing the opposite way you started. That’s a lot of steps. Not to mention keeping your weight over your shoulders when you are upside down or keeping your legs straight.

Sure, that’s doable, right? This is Kaileena, who is not a gymnast, in mid-cartwheel on her dominant side.

Kaileena cartwheel

And this is her non-dominant side.

Kaileena cartwheel 2

Wait, what? How do I do this? It felt totally awkward to her, but no amount of awkwardness prevented her from wanting to try it again. And in one short session, that cartwheel improved considerably! Luckily, gymnastics is not a required activity for most of us.

As we get older we see the cycle of learning more clearly. People of any age can be eager and energetic but also fairly clueless about the how-to or the why, and certainly lacking in high levels of skill. Others come along to guide, instruct and encourage.  As learners we get the joy of doing something new, which is not only exciting but also feeds on itself and makes us eager to learn something else new. We also get what it feels like to be the novice so that we don’t get too impatient with the novices when we ourselves are on the guiding side. As guides we get the joy of passing along some of our sometimes-hard-earned knowledge and skill, and seeing someone else enjoy a thing maybe as much as we do, as well as carry forward a method, a style or a tradition.

I love this cycle. I love being in some things on the learning side and in some things on the guiding side. I got to make a beautiful red bench with my uncle’s patient help, and with my help and Mom’s, Kaileena got to make a scrumptious pie. For this happy face, I’ll guide her any day!

Kaileena and pie

The Cookbook Comes Out

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I grew up in the era of television commercials. One of my favorites was for Almond Joy and Mounds: Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t! I don’t eat nuts at all, and even if you took the almond off the top of the Almond Joy I would not eat it, though I am fairly sure it is exactly the same dark chocolate covered coconut underneath as Mounds is. I would eat Mounds endlessly if only there were not a price to pay for such a delicious indulgence.

I find it’s the same with living in the country. Sometimes you feel like going outside and getting yourself busy with something that is likely to involve wheelbarrows, garden gloves and sweating. Some days I wake up and can hardly wait to get out there. Yesterday I was so anxious to get going (on weeding of all things! It had rained, okay? and I knew the ground was soft, and I had guests coming, and it would get hot later…) that I got dressed in my grubbies before even taking the dog out, then just stayed out there weeding after she did her thing. She stood next to me for that hour with a look on her face that clearly said: This is not the way this works. We get up, we go out, I do my thing, we go back in, you feed me breakfast, then you do whatever else you want. What’s up with messing with the routine? Hungry here! Starving! Wasting away!

Needless to say, she survived the wait. When we went out after breakfast, she came again, this time standing there with the look that said: Yes, great, my belly is full, but do you really expect me to lay down on these stones? I went and got the old pink towel that doubles as a soft outside blanket for her (which of us is well trained!?), put it in the middle of the driveway where she would be near but not underfoot, and watched her lay down and look up at me with her That’s more like it face.

Coco on towel

But sometimes you don’t feel like going outside. Today I had no such drive. It was a pleasant morning just the same as yesterday, cool enough, calm, lovely. I wasn’t put off by the coyotes howling somewhere in the distance. I didn’t feel overly tired or sore. There is plenty to do out there (and there will be for the rest of my days!). But my inner voice said No, today is a good day to bake!

My 10-year-old great niece Kaileena is coming for a visit with her 4-year-old sister Brea, her mom (my niece Erika) and her grandma (my sister Lynn). I was thinking yesterday about what Kaileena and I will do together next week when the others have gone to North Carolina. I was thinking about baking. We will make pizza together for sure, and maybe crackers (some of you might remember my cracker post from a few years ago – I have a hankering for those again!).

But before they come, some baking would be good. Think about how you feel when you go visit a family member or a friend and they have baked for you or prepared yummy food of any kind for you. That’s how I want my friends and family to feel. Besides, good neighbors of mine brought me some scrumptious lemon bars this past Saturday and I want to give the container back, but with something in it. Many years ago, my friend Kim told me that she and her mom had a plate that went back and forth between them a number of times because neither one wanted to give an empty plate back to the other. I always liked this idea, so I will put something yummy in Jen’s container.

Like anyone who is comfortable in the kitchen, I have some old stand-by, tried-and-true recipes for sweet things that time and again I find myself falling back on. Why? Because they are good! Chocolate chip bars, for instance. Strawberry tea cake. Oatmeal cookies. Sour cream coffee cake – oh, with blueberries in it at this time of year! That won’t fit in Jen’s container very well though. And two children are coming…

I settled on chocolate chip bars, which I made countless times over the years, so many times that the recipe was clearly in my head. I said was because I was a little disappointed in myself this morning in that I was slightly unsure of the amount of butter (Rule Number One: Always use real butter). Being unsure meant that I had to take the cookbook out.

THE cookbook.

Back in the day everyone had a cookbook, everyone I knew anyway. Well, some people had a little file box with 5×7 recipe cards in it, but that system never worked for me. You write recipes on a scrap of paper sometimes, or the back of an envelope, and scraps don’t fit well in a file box. Here is one example from my book. Believe it or not, this is a recipe:

scalloped potatoes

Mario Da Silva was the Villa lunch chef at Keswick Hall for years. He verbalized this recipe to me and I scrawled it out (clearly in a hurry!). It says

Scalloped Potatoes (Mario Da Silva)

3 onions

chop fine

4-5 cloves garlic

fine chop

olive oil    saute    S&P

(What is the difference between “chop fine” and “fine chop”? You tell me!)

heavy cream

mozz cheese

when sticky    stop

parsley

set aside

slice potatoes

boil

 

in pan

spoon of sauce

layer

mozz on top

parsley on top

bake

That makes sense, right? I’ve made these potatoes several times. They are my mother’s favorite.  Mario now works as the Executive Chef at the Holiday Inn in Sarasota, Florida. If you are in Sarasota, go eat there. Trust me. I never saw a chef get more accolades! And he’s cute besides! (Hello, Mario and Mary!)

My cookbook is in a three-ring binder using plastic sleeves. That way, whatever slip of paper or card a recipe is on, I can find a way for it to fit. For the most part, the recipes written in the standard way, with a list of ingredients followed by instructions. The style of Mario’s potato recipe is the exception (you knew that).

I love so many things about my cookbook. Back in the day I had two smaller notebooks instead of one bigger one. I had one for BREADS CAKES / PIES COOKIES and one for EVERYTHING ELSE. Guess you know where my priorities were! I covered the notebooks the way we used to cover our schoolbooks with brown paper bags cut to fit, except I had book cover paper that had been a giveaway at a Ben & Jerry’s stand at the fair one summer in the mid 90s.

The paper was so colorful and fun. We lived in Vermont then and Ben & Jerry’s was still a local business. I loved my cookbooks covered in this paper:

ben and jerry 2

When I made cookbooks for each of my children about ten years ago, I didn’t have any more Ben & Jerry’s paper, so I scanned the last image in The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, retold and illustrated by Lorinda Bryan Cauley. It is one of my favorite images from when my children were small and I used to read to them (a lot).  I think it made a great cover for a cookbook.

towncountrymouse

The text just prior to this image says: “Then off he went to his snug little home in the fields, whistling a tune and looking forward to a good book by the fire and a mug of hot barley-corn soup.” The cozy chair, the tea kettle on the stove, the cinnamon swirl bread in the oven (just like I made many times!), the soft lighting … I can almost smell that bread!

Inside my cookbook is a collection from many years of trading and finding good recipes. Many are handwritten, which is precious in its own way. One look at the recipe and I know who gave it to me, even if their name is not on it. I see Lyn Boyce’s handwriting, my daughter Marie’s from when she was a teenager, my son Samuel’s, my mom’s, my grandmother’s, my sister Lynn’s, Kim’s, Claudia’s, Anett’s, Crissie’s, Marisa’s, Judy’s, Margaret’s, Eileen’s, and Mario’s (not quite as challenging to follow as my scrawl, but close!).

This is really good soup, by the way. Don’t you love it: “…PLUS 1 GALLON WATER… SALT PEPPER AS YOU WISH. AFTER EVERYTHING IS COOKED, JUST BLEND IT.” You know what that means, right? That means a blender, a few scoopfuls at a time. Did I mention that this is really good soup? And see, not everything in my cookbook has sugar in it!

Mario's yam soup

Handwriting is a reflection of personality and individuality, as unique to every person as their voice or their laugh. How blessed am I to have such a collection! I also see recipes cut from the side of packages or from magazines, printed from emails, hand-copied from other cookbooks, typed on an old typewriter. I see smudges, stains on the paper (from pre-plastic-sleeve days), translations (from some of the German recipes), even notes to me, like these:

Claudia's fettuccini (2)

Marisa's handwriting (2)

There is nothing in the world like the combination of good food together with friends and family. You can make all the amazing dishes you want, but if you don’t share with people you care about, something is missing. Sharing good recipes is not as fun as being with people you love and eating the food that good recipes make, but it’s right up there.

Back to the chocolate chip bars. The recipe (below) says Chocolate Chip Cookies. I haven’t made it as cookies in years. Bars are easier. You put all the dough (no need to grease the pan) in a 9×13 pan. I don’t know why it says 15×10 at the bottom of the recipe – ignore that! Spread it out and bake until golden brown on top, maybe 25-30 minutes, I’m not sure. You tell it’s done by the color, not too dark, not too light. When it has cooled, you cut them up however big you want them.

With bars, you also achieve a more reliable goo-factor — you know, when they are still fresh and the chocolate (which melts together more in bars) is so soft it’s gooey, even kind of a mess. Almost heaven. Almost because, like Mounds, there is a price to pay. Then again, life is short. Every now and then, by all means, pay up.

This recipe is so old, it’s from my pre-must-use-butter days. You see it calls for shortening, which I don’t even have in my cabinet any more. That’s part of the charm of it for me though. I look at the recipe and remember when I kept a cardboard can of white fatty stuff, and I used it! The flavor with butter is so superior, to say nothing of shortening being a mystery food for me, and I like to know what I’m eating: What is that white fatty stuff and what do they have to do to make it? We need to see our own progress sometimes to be reminded of how far we’ve come. It’s like finding some hideous shirt in my closet and thinking I used to wear that?! Then again, sometimes the shirt is hidden for a long time and years later I find it and say, Hey, look at that nice shirt! Maybe I’ll come around to shortening again too.

I always wondered about the half teaspoon of water – could it really make a difference?  What if the eggs are bigger than usual? Might that not be at least half a teaspoon of water difference in the overall amount of liquid going in? But I always put the water in anyway. Some things you just do.

This is the only recipe in my entire book with sections circled and numbered, which I clearly did after the fact. I think I did this in an attempt to tell someone (one of my children maybe?) what order to do it in. Sorry for any confusion. 1. Combine butter, sugars, vanilla and water and beat till smooth. 2. Beat in eggs. 3. Add dry ingredients (I never combine them first any more) and stir them in. 4. Stir in package of chips.

You can add a handful of old fashioned oats if you want. This adds texture and makes them a little easier to justify. A couple shakes of cinnamon is wonderful too. Or add some chopped nuts, let’s say half a cup, if you like nuts. Walnuts might be good, I’m not entirely sure. Nut-eaters could tell you better.

I could type out this recipe, but it wouldn’t be the same.

choc chip bars