Scatterday Night's Alright

When the going gets tough, the tough get procrastinating...er, I mean, cooking. Today's theme was stress control, and there are few things better for that than cooking, for this girl. Let's start with bacon drippings, butter, onions, jalapenos and garlic on simmer.




Now, let's throw in cumin, chili powder, and salt.
After that, let's pour in the cooking water from the black beans made earlier, and bring it to a boil and reduce it to a nice thick sauce. Then let's add it back in to the pot of beans.
















Later on, it's time to make banana bread before the bananas become too overripe to use. My great grandmother's recipe is the one I use, with my updates. I'll add it later. For now, I will let you know it involves dark chocolate chips, walnuts, mace, vanilla, whole wheat and white flour, eggs, butter, salt, baking soda, bananas, and ground flax.

Self: learn to manipulate the photo layout!

This is Wisconsin, after all. We like a little banana bread with our butter.

Found a place to use the decoupage box I made a few years ago...cookbook holder. I took the doors off the cabinets over the stove, in an effort to open up and brighten up the space. This is a work in progress. I also added several of the cookbooks to the St. Vincent's donation bag o' the day. I organized a few kitchen cabinets and pared down the contents to the essentials. How the heck do I always end up with ten thousand plastic container lids, and only three containers?

I also finally found a place to use the lazy susan I bought at IKEA last spring. It's too big to fit into any of the cupboards, but this works. Behind the coffee and tea and honey are all my vitamins, easily at hand but out of sight. Win. This is my grandma's breadbox, by the way.

Last but not least, I started some seeds soaking to have sprouts. On the right are mung beans, and on the left a combination of radish, broccoli and clover. So yummy! It's the first time I've grown them since moving into this place...I used to grow them all the time, "back home". Yes, I do miss my old town and my old apartment there at times. But that's a topic for another day. Sweet dreams, everyone, and thanks for hanging out with me on my Saturday tiny kitchen adventure. Peace.

Of Nice and Men

I'd like to start my post with a huge shout out to my son for this, today. 

I hope you'll do like almost 2,000 others have already done (maybe many more by the time you read this), and "like" this wonderful thought he posted on facebook. He is a phenomenal person in every way, inside and out, and I am so, so proud to be his mom.

Today I dragged the Christmas tree out to the curb. Not such an easy task when the tree is 7' tall and 4.5' wide, and the curb is under about 3' of dense snow. I snapped a few pics of the snow as I ran errands tonight. It's not going to warm up enough to melt any of it anytime soon. I don't mind it a bit. This is a sidewalk near my place at about 6 pm tonight.

To the right is what I saw out

my passenger side window as

I sat at the stop sign. Most lots have snow piled up to 8 - 10' or more. Just another day

in a Wisconsin winter. NBD.

This is the only star that would show
  up when I snapped the sky with my
 phone camera (admittedly not the best). City lights don't make for the greatest star viewing either. This star was pretty bright, though, and the three stars of Orion's Belt were pointing at it. Is it the North Star? I'll have to Google that later. :-) I wish I knew someone who could tell me exactly what I'm seeing when I look at the sky at night.











As I've mentioned before, my apartment is old, and pretty janky in many ways. Tonight the closet door handle came off, and when I tried to fix it, it wouldn't work because the cheap plastic threads were broken. I went to the hardware store across the street and got this very, very pretty antiqued gold metal one to replace it for $1.29. I had to go back again and get the right length of screw, adding a whopping 15 cents to the total, but it's done now. My home improvement projects may be small, but they make me happy. One less janky thing to look at each day!



One of my favorite things about long, dark, cold winter nights is burning candles. I have a motley assortment, and I like to light a whole bunch at once for the warmth and the glow and the fragrance. I found a new favorite Yankee Candle scent this past weekend at Mayfair Mall in Milwaukee -- Pink Sands. Light, soft, warm, a little bit floral. So here are my harbingers of heat and light, all in a row.

That about wraps up today's post. I hope everyone stays warm, and well, and has much love in the new year, more than enough to share. Peace.

Jan 2, 2013 (ok, an hour late)

Today I undecorated my Christmas tree. I had plenty of time, so I got very organized. I put things I was tired of in a bag that will be either Freecycled or donated to Goodwill. This is the box of unbreakable ornaments that can be hung on the lowest branches, so that my cat won't break them when she bats them around. She is going to miss her friend the tree, which has been so much fun to hide under when my daughter's dog Leo is visiting. She taunts him, then sprints away, and he can't follow her under the branches. If cats could laugh, she would.

                                               

Unwrapping the lights from the tree; I've had these for at least 20 years. They have a little control box with 10 different flashing and glowing settings. My favorite is random soft glow, so they look like

stars in the sky. Such a peaceful effect. I hope they never wear out,

because they are very special and I don't know if anyone else makes

them. I bought them at K-Mart, which used to exist in my childhood

neighborhood, but that's been gone for years now.

No picture, but I tried an idea I've had for a long time this year. I got some Martha Stewart glass paint and painted each bulb of a set of 150 white Christmas tree lights. It sounds very tedious, but it was very relaxing for me. Now I have lights to put on my windows in the perfect shade of soft pink, not the garish magenta pink that's mass produced. My lights are one of a kind! They turned out soooo pretty.

 I tend to save things. Today I had time to go through the whole stack of Christmas cards I've received over the past 25 years or so. Some were from people I've lost touch with, some are from people it took me a long time to even remember. I decided to save only the ones which were "picture cards", because I had to draw the line somewhere.  One mystery, though, was two cards I received from my friend in MN for two years in a row, both referring to some great thing I had done. This would have been over ten years ago now, and I just could not remember what I had done that made her so grateful. I finally took a picture of this card tonight and texted it to her and asked, "what was it I did?!?" Once she told me, it all came back. When she was a young single mother and her toddler son's father was in jail, she was having a very hard time. For Christmas, I sent her a care package of toys and books for him, because I know what that is like. She is doing great now, has a beautiful house and a wonderful husband and good job, but she's never forgotten what I did for her that year. It touched her so much that she sent me heartfelt thanks for two years in a row. Things like this make me feel like I made a difference to someone, and that's a really good feeling.

Little Things Mean a Lot

Let's just tell it like it is. My bathroom is ugly. It's old, decrepit, and poorly maintained. However, I did convince the landlord to paint it, covering up the years of disgusting tar and nicotine left by the previous tenant. He had it painted, all right. And the walls look much better, but I don't believe a scrap of painter's tape or a single drop cloth was used, although I saw the guy had both with him. There is dried paint on the tub enclosure, counter top, toilet, floor, towel bars, everywhere. He even painted over the latch that makes the door stay closed. SIGH. I just can't deal with making another call to the landlord right now with the holidays upon us, so I will live with it, temporarily. I just finished scrubbing the bathroom from top to bottom, and it looks and smells nice. All ready for the kids to come home for the holidays. This is going to be my first apartment therapy-style post. Yay! I'm hoping if I make note of each little or big improvement I make, I will begin to see my progress over time, and inspire myself to do more, the way that Apartment Therapy inspires me now. Maybe you'll get inspired too. Anyway, the little bathroom improvement I did today was to hang a decorative shelf. Here it is:

Grandma Becker's beautiful corner shelf

Speaking of the holidays, when I was growing up, every Christmas eve we would head over to my great grandmother Becker's cozy little house, in a neighborhood of cozy little houses on a hill in Middleton, WI. It would always be bitterly cold and of course pitch dark even at 6 pm, but the snow and the twinkling lights made the drive so pretty. Her house was always very warm and full of relatives coming to see grandma, and she put on an amazing spread of Norwegian, German and standard American holiday foods. Some of them were scary to me, like mincemeat pie (I never did try that). Others were wonderful, like homemade lefse spread with butter, sprinkled with brown sugar and rolled. I always loved the inside of grandma's house, it was like a tiny museum, with a lifetime of gathered treasures all carefully kept and charmingly displayed. She had an array of beautiful teacups and saucers, no two alike, and many ornate crenelated dark wood shelves that held little figurines. When she passed on at the venerable age of 97 (I think) in 1993, I was blessed to be allowed to choose from some of her belongings. Other older relatives had picked everything over pretty well before I got to make my selections, but they left things that epitomized my grandma for me. Maybe she had a hand in that from above, who knows, but the dishes, shelves, doilies, embroidered-edge pillowcases and antique cookbooks and such I brought home with me mean the world to me, and seeing them every day keeps her close. She was a very special lady, so kind and very humorous. She had so many descendants, but always made me feel like I was her primary concern the few times of the year I saw her. Some people are just golden like that, and she was one of them. Anyway, the shelves were something that, although loved, never quite fit anywhere in my prior apartments, and they remained in storage for years. Now that I am in my first empty-nester apartment with my kids  grown up and on their own, I am learning to just "do me". My tastes, my time, etc. My tastes in decorating are usually in the realm of shabby chic. These pretty, curliqued shelves finally fit my life, and I am so happy to see one on the wall again after all these years (grandma passed away in 1993). After brushing off the cobwebs and wiping it clean and then dosing it with Pledge to add some shine, it looks great. There are little areas that need some wood glue and touch-up staining, but nothing too major. Something about them even makes me think of India, another decorating theme I love. They are going to work perfectly here. Thank you, grandma...love and miss you. Merry Christmas.

Great Grandma Becker and her first great-great-grandchild, my daughter Brianne. Christmas, 1982.