Mid morning musings

 The great thing about about a gray, snowy/rainy/sleety day is that it mostly hides the view of the factory from my front window. The city is quieter, not as many cars on the road. Plus, ever since I was a child, I have always wished for snow on my birthday. A fresh clean coat of white on the world. Usually, I got it, and lots of it. More than enough to scoop up and bring into the house in a cup, pour some grape Hi-C over it, and have a real snow cone. That was one of the joys back then.

I only bring that up because tomorrow is my birthday. It's a big one. But I'll be celebrating small. My daughter offered to make a big deal of it, have a big party, but meh. It's the wrong season for a big party. No one is in the mood, including me. It's just another number, anyway, and it's not one I like looking at. I opted for a sushi dinner out with my daughter and my best friend instead, and that sounds just perfect to me. Next weekend, I'll go to see my friend perform at a comedy club. I like to have a month of birthday rather than just one day, with little celebrations here and there. I always gave my kids a birthday month, with many surprises on various days. I used to have the money to do that. Trips to Disneyland, Disney World, Busch Gardens, Great America. Now they are grown, and I am broke, and they don't want anything much for their birthdays. They are both doing very well and they do so much more for me than I can do for them right now. I guess that's fair, but I still wish we were all doing well. Sometimes I feel like I never will be again. A hard thing to accept. That's where gratitude comes in. Things could always be worse. I am healthy, fit, I have a home, clothing, food, friends, fun times. I've learned a million ways to economize and still have the things I like in my life. 

Today I received an order of fragrance oils, and I'm going to try them out by adding a bit to the melted wax on the top of candles I've made. I got violet (of course), lily and lilac, peaches and cream, and jasmine scents. They smell good in the bottle, but I have to try them out to be sure.

At my former job, we went through tons and tons of pillar candles and tea light candles. They just threw them away, often with a lot of wax left in them. So I kept them, took them home, melted them down, scrubbed out the glass pillars and made new candles. I can't stand wastefulness. You would think a yoga studio would have more green sensibility. Do they ever think about the mountain of garbage in landfills in this world? Well, that was just one of the disappointing things about that studio, among the many non-yogic attitudes and actions that really bothered me. It's a shame. I put up with it as long as I could, tried to be a positive example, and in any case I took many good things with me when I left, metaphorically and tangible things. I'm focusing on those, and letting the rest go. So my remade candles aren't perfect, I am learning as I go. One thing I have definitely learned is the value of wired wicks. I'll use up the plain wicks I bought, but next time I'll definitely go for those. Without wire, the wax melts unevenly and the wick flops over and becomes embedded in the melted wax.

 

The picture in the background was painted for me by my wonderful grandmother, Charlotte Lorraine, when I was a baby. It hung on my bedroom wall when I was a child, then at some point it got stored away for many years. Badly stored by my mother, who is a heavy smoker and doesn't take good care of anything that matters. It's quite damaged and had to have layers of tobacco smoke grime scrubbed off it (thank goodness it's oil paint), but I had it professionally framed after cleaning and it now gets the daily love and appreciation it so deserves. The angel on the corner was also among her possessions that I acquired when she passed away. I treasure them all more than anything.

Over the past month or so, I've gotten back into my winter habit of growing tons of sprouts in jars. And now, as usual, I've grown so much that I'm sick of them. But here's a bunch on top of an open face tuna melt sandwich. They really are nutritional powerhouses, and very tasty. This is a blend of red clover, broccoli and radish sprouts. It's so easy and cheap to do, and you get tons of antioxidants and vitamins without dragging home sacks of heavy fruits and vegetables. When you have to drag them up the stairs to your apartment, that becomes an issue. One of the many times I miss my son.

Sunday and Salsa Ver-Day

My daughter gave me this cool set of beautiful bronze colored nonstick pizza pans for Christmas, and I tried them out today.

I've never successfully kneaded dough by hand, so for several years I used a bread machine. It worked well, but it took so long and made vertically tall and horizontally short loaves. Funhouse sandwiches, anyone? Then I found a handheld Kitchenaid 5 speed mixer that came with regular beaters plus a stick blender attachment and dough hooks (!!!) on clearance for $25.00 a few months ago. It was life changing. I gave the bread machine to my daughter and never looked back.

 

So today I started mixing up my usual pizza dough recipe, la la la, doop de doo...but, ummm, why does this dough feel weird?

It feels weird because it is weird. Because you grabbed the wrong flour, genius girl. (My daughter is gluten intolerant, so I have brown rice flour on hand for baking when she's here.) So, I just kept going with it; not going to waste food. Not now, not evah. Warning: inappropriate/hilarious video.

 

The label I misread...my own abbreviations did me in. A quick glance with my not-so-good glasses had told me I had BRF = bread flour, when I actually had BRF=brown rice flour. Now it's been put in a jar, unmistakably labeled.

The dough actually did rise, after an hour near a sunny window. It had a little bit of whole wheat flour and a little added gluten, so I guess that helped. The dough felt like gritty playdough. I baked them up, and they came out quite hard, but still edible. They taste fine, actually, not that I would ever make them with this messed up recipe again, but edible is good.                 

 

Then it was time to make the salsa verde. I spent many summer days cleaning, scoring and roasting countless tomatillos to fill the freezer. Note to self: never again plant five tomatillo plants. I just love chili verde, though, so all of them will be put to good use. 

Tomatillos, red onions, cilantro, good olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, coriander, and fresh squeezed lemon and orange juices, since I ran out of limes. Soooo good, you don't even know. I really wish you could taste these pictures. 

 You may have noticed I like to save and reuse glass jars. I try to have as little plastic in my food and life as possible.

This. Tastes. Like. So. Good.

 

End result: mostly gluten free "toothsome" pizza crust, refried black beans, mozzarella cheese, salsa verde, and sour cream. I ate one and a half of these guys, and then immediately took a Sunday nap.

Peace.

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.

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.

Gratitude and Catitude

Sometimes I just feel almost overcome with gratitude. Right now, the feeling is inspired by an article I just read about twin boys, one of whom identified as female from the very beginning of his life. I can't even imagine the pain, anguish and confusion that father felt, saying goodbye to his son and eventually accepting and welcoming his daughter. I hope one day all such children can be blessed to be in a society that accepts them for who they are, and that their families respond with so much love. As for me, my gratitude comes from never having to face such a tremendous ordeal with my own two children. We went through enough drama and upheaval just with the usual middle school issues, I am thankful every day that they are both happy and healthy and have no major life challenges on this kind of scale.

Grateful also today and every day for my new job, the people I love working and being with who make me feel valued, and positive work that I love doing, in a beautiful environment. Work and life feel more in balance than they have in a very long time. Grateful for the sweet, warm, fuzzy, purring little kitty draped over my shoulder watching as I type this, even if she is a naughty Christmas ornament snatcher. Grateful for a refrigerator full of healthy delicious food. Grateful for a beautiful Christmas tree and the special decorations that each carry their own indelible memories. Grateful for Christmases past and people I have loved and who loved me, gone now but still ever close in heart. Grateful for breathing, for moving my body without impediment, for enough money to meet my needs if not all of my wants. Grateful for new opportunities, new friends, old friends, good coffee, warm winter days that make travel easy. Grateful for the shoulder massage of tiny little white paws.

A Pearl of a girl.

Home again home again jiggity jig!

My daughter, that is. She moved to South Dakota to make a difference in the lives of school children on the Rosebud Indian Reservation right after college. After three years she continued that journey and calling in New Orleans, at a higher level in her organization. Now three years after that, she is finally home, or close to it, in Milwaukee, having moved up again. I am beyond overjoyed to be able to see her more that 2-4 times a year for the first time in wayyyyy too long. I can hop on the bus and be there in an hour, or she can drive here in the same amount of time. I visited her new home there for the first time this past weekend, and I love it. We had a great Memorial Day weekend, visiting places we frequented years ago when she was a baby and small child and I was a young single mom who just needed to get out of town and see new faces and places every other month or so. A favorite destination was the Grand Avenue Mall, which was quite the cutting edge place to be among malls back then. Glass elevators in the central courtyard, glass ceiling, and a huge food court were among its novel innovations of that time. Food courts weren't yet a "thing" found in every mall. I looked forward to the exotic (to me, at the time) Greek food at a place called Grecian Garden. I would get the lemon chicken and garlicky orzo soup...heavenly.

Unfortunately, the mall has fallen onto hard times now. There are barely any businesses left, and the glass ceiling, once so grand, leaks badly, crumbling the pillars and flying buttresses supporting it. Still beautiful, though, and I hope it comes back to its former glory in time. It's a real downtown treasure.

 

Do try this at home.

India is home to the oldest civilized culture on earth, dating back some 3,000 years. In all that time, an amazing wealth of knowledge was amassed, from spirituality to health and everything in between. I've become increasingly interested in the time-tested healing power of Indian foods, which usually incorporate potent, colorful, fragrant and delicious herbs and spices. Turmeric, a relative of ginger, is included in most dishes, as are onions, garlic, cloves, cardamom, cayenne, ginger, tamarind, fenugreek and many others, dependent on regional cooking styles. It's become a fascinating journey for me, and I have only scratched the surface so far.

My good friend has recently shared his family's recipe for spicy fish curry with me, and although he is in the UK and I am in Wisconsin, we cooked it "together" through the magic of Skype video chat (love my new Mac laptop!). It was my first time cooking with tamarind, and shopping for the correct form of it was a new and fun experience for me. Luckily we have an amazing Asian food store in Madison which carries all types of foods and products from Mexico, the Philippines, Iraq, India, Morocco, Israel, China, just about every middle eastern or Asian country. Surprisingly, I even found a can of my favorite Cafe du Monde coffee and chicory there, which hails from my beloved New Orleans...may all her precious sea life now rest in peace... But I digress. Tamarind has a rich, savory and slightly sour taste; it's one of the main flavors in Worcestershire sauce, so for those of you who have never tasted tamarind, that might give you some frame of reference for how delicious this dish is. Here are the photos of the finished result, which was, I must say, amazing. (My dear friend is home in India for two weeks visiting his family, and I am missing him and our daily Skype chats just a wee bit. I can't wait til he comes back and brings new recipes from home to share with me via our Skype "cooking classes".) ॐ

Click pictures to see larger in more detail...and yes, those are Mardi Gras beads still sitting on my table from my birthday trip there in February. They make me smile every time I see them. 

Here is the recipe, paraphrased. The fish that is normally used for this dish in Hyderabad is not one I recognized or could locate a translation for, so I used my favorite fish, catfish. One large catfish should feed at least three hungry people, or one very lucky empty nester mom such as I for three days...plus the leftover sauce, which made a nice vegetarian rice dish on the fourth day. For a side dish, I made some simple saffron rice (basmati rice cooked with a couple of pinches of good saffron, a few dashes of cumin powder, and a handful of red lentils just for added texture). This is sooooo good! I hope you'll try it and tell me your impressions.

Spicy Fish Curry

Cut one good sized catfish into 1 - 2 inch thick slices (I don't like the deboned fillets; the bones seem to help keep the fish moist and impart more rich flavor). Wash the cut fish pieces and rub with salt and turmeric two or three times.

Put the tamarind pieces* into hot water and let soak, we will use the juice.

Cut one medium onion into small pieces. Chop green chilies (I used serrano, I think; they were just labeled green chilies at the Indian market) one or maybe two, if you want it spicy. I used one. You may want to remove some or all of the seeds if you don't want it too spicy. (I love spicy!).

Place the cut fish pieces into a medium size frying pan with the onions, green chilies, a tablespoon of turmeric powder, salt depending on how much fish you have, 1/2 to 1 teaspoon red chilie powder if you want it even more spicy, a tablespoon of dhaniya powder (coriander powder), and 2 tablespoons of garam masala powder (available at Indian and sometimes other stores). Add three tablespoons of olive oil. Mix all of the above with your hands (I used disposable plastic kitchen gloves because of the hot peppers) so that the spices infuse the fish well. Pour in the tamarind water*.

The tamarind water should be enough so that all the fish pieces are slightly floating; the fish will steam in that liquid. Place the pan on the stove on high heat until it reaches a fast simmer, then reduce heat to medium-low and continue to simmer about 15-20 minutes. Remove the lid and cook until fish is cooked through and the tamarind water is much reduced into a gravy-like sauce. Do not overcook fish. Serve with rice (traditional) or your favorite side dish.

*This is the correct form of tamarind to buy for this recipe:

It comes wrapped in a block like this; you just break off a few hunks and soak them for awhile in hot water. Maybe half an hour, until they are very well saturated and soft, and can be broken apart easily. For this recipe, we used nearly half a block, and probably 3-4 cups of hot water. Once it's well soaked, you stick your hands in there and squeeze it all up a bunch of times, separating the tamarind fruit flesh from the fibrous parts. Then you press it all through a sieve, and compost the stuff left behind. It doesn't take long. The end result is tamarind water.