The Best Way to Find Good Food, Guaranteed

Ugh. But the pie makes up for it.

My dad, I have mentioned before, had his 90th birthday in December. In the months since he celebrated the start of his 10th decade he has kept up his winning ways in the Senior Olympics (five more swimming gold medals last month), still gets up at 4:15 a.m. to be the fitness center pool attendant/lifeguard several mornings a week, continues to serve on the tourism board--well, I could go on and on.

He's pretty much unstoppable, is what I'm trying to say. This week, though, we had a conversation I hadn't expected:

Him: "You know, I've decided it may be time for me to stop driving at night."

Me: "Great idea! You have plenty of people who can get you places."

Him: "Oh, I just mean long trips at night. I won't start out from Kansas City after dark any more. I'll still drive to town and around here."

I guess it's a start. I mean, Kansas City is only FOUR HOURS from the farm where he lives, and I gave up night-driving from there when I turned 40, but whatever. And as Husband pointed out, Dad apparently has charmed all the deer between his farm and the small town where he hangs out, so they'll wait at the side of the highway for him to go by. (That was sarcasm, in case you didn't recognize it.)

The upside of this half-hearted nod to mortality was that I had the privilege of driving Dad to a conference a couple hours from his farm last week. And the double upside was that it was day 37 of the Noah's Deluge that has been this spring. My Younger Brother the Farmer declared it too wet to plow and hopped into the back seat for the road trip.

It was lunchtime when we dropped Dad off with his fellow Rotarians so the Farmer and I went foraging and I was able to show off my guaranteed way to find the best food, no matter where you are. Here are the crucial steps of that method:

1. Take out your phone.
2. Google "Best pie in (town where you hope to eat)"

That's it. Unlike the treacherous Google Maps, which once deposited my family at the loading dock of Lowe's instead of at the hotel we were trying to find, Google's "Best Pie in Town" search will tell you that the best pie in Topeka is at Bradley's Corner Cafe, and the best pie in Abilene is at Joe Snuffy's. Google graciously let us know that the best pie in Hays, Kansas, was at Al's Chickenette, and the best pie tends to hang around with fabulous comfort food.

Al's Chickenette not only had the best chicken soup I've had in years (with homemade noodles swimming in a perfectly salty broth) and fried chicken that the Farmer described as the perfect ratio of coating to white meat,

it had what was undoubtedly the best pie in Hays: strawberry-rhubarb with homemade crust and sweet juices dripping into my spoon. Also, a waitress who knew that a spoon is the only way to eat pie because forks are for foods that need stabbing and not scooping.

Al's had restroom doors that were identified for hens and roosters, which may have been a twee bridge too far, but we're going to forgive that in the face of that pie.

Well done, Google, and thanks for giving up long-distance night driving, Dad. I'll make that road trip any day.

Best Non-Holiday

Terrible picture of wonderful pie

Someone on my Facebook feed sounded a little put out when she posted on Saturday:

"Am I the only one in the world not making pie today?"

Given the photographic evidence in the posts surrounding hers, the answer to that question would be "Yes. You are, indeed, the only person in the entire world not making pie today."

It was Pi Day! And it was a very special Pi Day, given that it was March 14, 2015, which would also be 3/14/15, and at one given moment in the morning it was 9:23.56 a.m., which made it exactly the same moment as the first 10 digits of pi--3.141592356.

Oh, frabjous moment!

Now I am not a great fan of mathematics. I leave that to everyone else in my family, including those who balance my checkbook (thank you, Husband!) and those who helped their brothers with algebra homework in high school (thank you, Boy#1 and Boy#2) and those who used math to get them through engineering degrees (that's you, Boys #2 and #4) and the one who scored highest on his math standardized testing (yup, Boy#3, I'm looking at you). Those are the guys for whom pi is an irrational number that always results from dividing a circle's circumference by its diameter.

For the non-mathy person in the house, though, pi is just an excuse to bake on March 14, because PIE!

I had begun to worry just a tad about my pie-making skills. Tenuous at best, my ability to make a good homemade crust seemed to have desserted me (get it? Dessert/desert? Oh, never mind.) and the blueberry pie I made a few weeks ago to celebrate Husband's birthday was so runny I served it in bowls. True story.

For this Pi Day, though, I tried a new recipe. The Cook's Country Chocolate Angel Pie  looked manageable, and since it has a meringue crust I rationalized that it would be a healthier choice than the traditional lard-heavy version.

Well, it's not healthier. I admit that. Any recipe that has almost a pound of chocolate (both milk and bittersweet) and calls for heavy cream is not healthy. But oh, my. Although today's photo cannot be used as proof (I took the picture after a long, long day), it is scrumptious.

Seriously, this may be the best pie I've ever made, and I am rationing it out in tiny little strips in hopes it will last for weeks.

Pi Day may not have the universal appeal of the Best Day of the Year, but this chocolate pie has allowed it to overtake several other non-holidays on my list of favorite dates.

St. Patrick's Day, you have been pie-d.

The Perfect Recipe

My mother was an unbelievable cook. Want to know why Charlie Chaplin enjoyed that boiled shoe so much in The Gold Rush? It was because he used my mother's recipe for Spiced Sole, the one she had pinned to the side of the refrigerator with a magnet, alongside her Famous Rolls recipe and the Funeral Casserole instructions.

She was such a good cook, in fact, that she was constantly asked for recipes, and because she believed delicious food was a gift and not a property, she shared her recipes without thinking twice.

My grandmother also was a good cook, but she had been a Depression mom and had fed her four boys by growing her own food, milking her own cows, raising her own vegetables. When she tried Mom's fabulous recipe for salmon patties, she was disappointed in the outcome.

"I don't know what happened," she told my mother. "I followed your instructions exactly. Except that salmon was pretty expensive, so I substituted tuna, and instead of whole cream I used skim milk, and I didn't want to fry them in butter so I used some bacon grease I had left over."

I thought of that story this weekend when I made "Grandma Ople's Apple Pie" from the AllRecipes.com. For the first time in the 26 years we've lived in the House on the Corner, weather conditions were not too hot and not too cold but juuuuuust right and the apple tree in the back yard produced a bumper crop. Husband and I harvested at least half a bushel of fruit, and I got all housewife-y about making it into a pie.

People, this recipe is really, really good. It looked like the picture (more or less) and it tasted like fall weather on a plate. It was so good that I decided to add my comment to the 5,000+ who already have raved about the recipe's excellence online. That's when I discovered that almost all of those commenters are my grandmother.

"I added a teaspoon of cinnamon, a good dash of nutmeg and a tablespoon of vanilla to the syrup prior to simmering (compensate for adding the vanilla by omitting a tablespoon of that 1/4 cup of water). Next, definitely mix the syrup with the apples rather than trying to pour into the pie (save enough to glaze top crust)...."

"WONDERFUL PIE!!! I heeded other warnings and suggestions on this one. 1. I baked the pie at 350 degrees for the entire time to minimize scorching. 2. I added 2 tablespoons flour and 1 tablespoon cornstarch to the syrup mixture. I also eliminated the water from the syrup mixture which made the pie very thick and gel-like. I also added cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and nutmeg to the syrup...."

I won't continue because they go on and on (and on) in this vein. "The perfect recipe, so I made these changes..."

Pfffft. It's the perfect recipe. Just make it, or you may end up with Salmon Patties.

Food, Glorious Vacation Food

Here is what to eat when you are on the perfect vacation in Michigan:

Everything.

That was the motto Husband and I followed, and it worked well for us, at least until we stepped on the scales after we got home but that was not when we were eating everything.

We started off acting like the restrained senior citizens we are, splitting a sandwich at Schlotzky's as we drove between Chicago and Paradise.

But by the time we reached the first evening stop it was all caloric caution to the winds. We were going to experience every kind of food that isn't available in Small Town, which is to say everything except Mexican food and fast food. So we ate this:

Indian food that came thiiiiis close to setting off the fire alarm! And this:

Really, really good fish! I counted it as restraint that I only got the basket and not the all-you-can-eat, because all the other patrons at Buddy's Bar and Bowling Alley (not kidding) were having the all-you-can-eat. I felt quite virtuous. So I ate this:

Spinach and feta spanikopita in the airport, because at our own airport I normally limit myself to coffee and the apple I brought from home and this was yummmmmy. And perhaps best of all, we ate...

Pie! Oh, my gosh. This was not just any pie. This was Sweetie-licious pie baked by the national champion pie-baker for multiple years running. Don't believe me? Here's proof:

Husband was able to close his eyes and ignore the sadly out-of-order championship certificates, because we had driven 30 miles to get there with my horrible navigational skills getting us lost not once but twice, and because PIE. We actually forced ourselves to buy two of the pint-sized desserts and they were not only delicious when we dug in that night, they were delicious the second and third nights as well.

But just to reassure you that we did not eat everything, I bring to you evidence of the night we ate at Jen's Five-Star Pizza.

It was two-for-one night but we did not realize this until after we had ordered this pizza (black olives on my side) so we took the leftovers from this one and an entire second pizza back up to the Loft refrigerator, where the second pizza stayed until we the morning we checked out, at which time Husband took it away and let me know it was happy at its new home on the farm, making friends with all the other pizzas.

So to sum up: The vacation food was glorious. We ate pie and enjoyed life, we showed no restraint at all, and now we are re-committing to salads.

How soon is Thanksgiving?

Kitchen Essentials Part Two: Gadgets and Gizmos

Before I continue with my list of kitchen essentials (which today are not so essential, because they're gadgets and gizmos that make me smile but really aren't essential in the sense that you can definitely cook without them) I must take a second to talk about this post's illustration.

When I saw the image of this book cover my Pavlovian instinct kicked in and I began to drool. The MomQueenBee ancestral home had a copy of this book and Much Older Sister and I learned to cook from it. We LOOOOVED this cookbook! But do you know what this illustration was illustrating? A blog post titled "15 Ridiculous Highlights from Betty Crocker's '50s Cookbook for Kids." (No, I am not linking it. I'm mad at it.)

Hrmph. Obviously that post was written by some California hipster who had no idea how delicious Betty Crocker's molasses crinkles are. I still use the blonde brownies recipe. But I will admit that the gender roles do seem a little skewed--why did I never notice that the girls were doing all the work while the boys did the tasting and eating? Hmmm....

Anyway, frivolous additions to your kitchen supplies:

1. A rolling garlic chopper. Oh, my gosh, I can't tell you how much I love my rolling garlic chopper. And yes, I could use a knife to chop garlic, but when was the last time you made vrooom-vrooom noises while you chopped garlic with a knife? That's what I thought.

2. An onion chopper. Again, could I use a knife to chop onions? I could. I often do. But I use onions in everything except dessert, and if I could find an onion pie I'd make it. This baby perfectly chops a quarter of an onion with one hearty smack and you save both time and tears. It's also helpful in carrying out my mother's advice that if I ever found myself having spent the supper-prep time reading a book instead of cooking, to throw a handful of chopped onions into a hot skillet. Within seconds the house smells like you've been cooking all day. In my early years of marriage I did that often. Now, I have grown old and lazy and prefer to support the local restaurant economy.

3. A wide-rimmed pie pan. Best of luck with this, because apparently they aren't sold anywhere except eBay any more. (Does that link even work?) But oh, my, do I love my wide-rimmed pie pans. They're like regular pie pans except, well, with wide rims. The extra 1 1/2 inches on the edge do a topnotch job of keeping the bubbling pie filling from bubbling right onto the oven floor and causing me to feel guilty for the next six months until it's time to clean the oven again. (What? Ovens should be cleaned more often? Huh.)

4. A honkin' big pizza cutter. You don't make pizza, you say? Not a problem. Use it to mince herbs, and to cut bar cookies, and to cut dough for your famous bierocks, Use it to rough-chop canned tomatoes when you accidentally get the whole kind instead of diced. Slice apples with it. It's the Swiss Army knife of the kitchen.

And now, I'm hungry again. I think I'll go slice an apple with my pizza cutter.

Next up: Stirrers! Scrapers! Small appliances!

The Dessert Lady's Conundrum

Source

I am the dessert lady for one of my women's groups tonight. This is a responsibility of almost overwhelming proportions. It isn't because these ladies are judgmental or unappreciative--on the contrary, they are unfailingly enthusiastic no matter what is put on the tiny plates they must balance in their laps.

"Oh, wow!" they will say. "I do love crushed potato chips with sausage gravy. You always know exactly the right thing to top off a meeting."

No, no, no, I'm kidding. With crushed potato chips you serve cheese sauce, not sausage gravy. But what I'm saying is that these women are lovely and gracious.

At the House on the Corner, though, we rarely have dessert. There's a box of juice bars in the freezer for when I'm peckish in the evening, and Husband has ice cream sandwiches because he can't stand the teeth-in-ice sensation that the juice bars require. But cakes and pies? Those just don't happen unless we have company. Being the dessert lady, then, is my rare opportunity to make the very best of these fat-packed delights and not have it hang around in the refrigerator to taunt me while I'm trying to be rational about my food choices.

My Pinterest dessert board is the non-parallel universe for rational food choices, and that's where I turned for inspiration. The cumulative calorie count of these entries would feed a small country for several weeks if they could be translated into actual food. There's Chocolate Lasagne, Blueberry Pie, and Apple Galette. Hot Cocoa Souffle With Coffee Ice Cream, and Brownie Cookie Pie.

I could make that one! No, that one! Chocolate! Lemon! Rhubarb! They all look so delicious--choose meeeeee! To make matters worse, I was trying to decide at 5:15 p.m. so that I could dash to the store for supplies after work, right at the moment my blood sugar is lowest and my dessert resistance weakest.

And that's why tonight instead of a light and tangy lemon yogurt cake we're having Vanilla Pecan Pie. It is a pie crust, topped by a layer of cheesecake, followed by a layer of pecan pie. Oh, and real whipped cream. With caramel sauce.

I'm betting right now the ladies will like this even more than crushed potato chips with cheese sauce OR sausage gravy. Or at least they will say they do.

Another Food Post

Brother Fred was in the House on the Corner over the weekend, and as everyone knows, this kind of visit can only mean one thing: Tall tales and laughter and food from Pinterest!

Oh, yes, another opportunity to take on the challenge of recreating the best of the internet, and this recipe for Apple Pie in an Apple looked delicious. Instead of a fat-laden double crust, it uses the scooped-out apple shell as the bottom crust, with a darling little hat of pastry on top. And because I've been trying to watch my nutrients and increase my apple intake but it's easy to be distracted by ....Hey! There's some pie over there!...it was a good compromise with my neophyte good eating habits. I pulled out the apples and began to work

If I were truly a food blogger I would have photographic documentation of each step of this process, but since I remembered I should be doing this at about Step 47, you'll have to take my word that I followed the recipe carefully. Slice off the top of the apple. Use a sharp knife to cut around the edges, cut an X through the middle, scoop out the sections, swing your partner and do-si-do.

The crust was a little different from normal pie crusts, but I'm sure that can be attributed to the recipe's Portuguese roots--I think I forgot to mention that this recipe is from a site called Testado, Provado e Aprovado!, which I believes can be translated as "We end every word with Ado and scatter random vowels around." Also, some of the measurements were in grams. (100 grams of butter? Say what?)

Anyway, after 40 minutes at 370 degrees the baking Apple Pies in the Apples made the house smell scrumptious. I opened the oven door expecting to see this:

Well, maybe not the placemats.

Instead, I saw something else. Something that looked less pretty and neat, something that looked, well, pre-chewed. Even possibly pre-digested.

Another angle.

Either I translated a step wrong or those Portuguese are amazing food stylists. Either way, I was not going to sacrifice what had taken me an hour in the kitchen to make, so I went ahead and served it to Husband and Fred. They were most appreciative--Fred even said it was (and I quote) "very good."

I'm sure he was talking about the Pie in an Apple, and not the three scoops of butter pecan ice cream I used to almost completely hide the unattractive mess scooped into the bottom of the bowl. After all, everyone loves a healthy dessert.

Now I'm A Real Blogger

People, I'm beginning to feel like a real blogger. I know, I know. I haven't blogged since...well, it appears since my debut/final performance as a professional tambourine player, which was literally weeks ago.

In spite of that absence, I'm earning my blogger stripes and carrying on the greatest and most revered of blogging traditions--Husband and I went on a short trip and I took a picture of every single thing we ate.

Well, not every single thing. I mean, even the Pioneer Woman doesn't photograph the Quik Trip cookie, does she? There was a good reason for this photographic documentation of our nutritional failings: When we started our three-day-away, Husband and I decided we would not eat at any chain restaurants.

This is more difficult than it sounds, especially since we are old and empty-nested and our mealtimes are no longer dictated by the whinings of teen-aged stomachs. It turned out that on this trip I spent a fair amount of time studying Yelp from Earl's passenger seat and saying "This one sounds good! Oh, wait, they close at 9:30 so never mind."

But we managed to eat. And eat. And eat some more. We only had one meal that I would describe as average. All of the others would rate from good to excellent, with two breakfasts I would push into the region of "sublime."

We started at the Doo-Dah Diner in Wichita. If you live anywhere near southern Kansas you already know about this mecca of deliciousness. Oh, my, gosh. Because we are old and empty-nested and there was no one to ridicule us, we split a breakfast. The Triple D consists of half-portions of banana bread French toast, crispy corned beef hash, and Timi's Benny (a glorified eggs Benedict). By the time I was down to the final bite of over-medium egg and avocado, I was pretty sure I would burst but was too far gone to be concerned about how that would read in my obituary. (Husband's smiling in the picture, but I was imagining him trying to explain to the nice folks at the next table that he was so sorry his wife couldn't resist that last bite and exploded all over them.) Rating: Sublime.

Next stop, many hours later, was The Feedbunk in Yates Center. We felt lucky to find this spot, as there is not much original dining at 2:30 on a Friday afternoon in this area of Kansas. Not only did this restaurant exemplify the only permitted use of the Western Font EVER, EVER, EVER (ahem), it had a dandy pork tenderloin sandwich. And put your finger in this spot, because we're coming back to the Feedbunk later. (Rating: Very good.)

And here is where I began to notice how few restaurants stay open past 9 at night. By the time we meandered our way to Topeka (stopping at many, many spots along the way) and checked into our hotel and cursed the construction cones that seemed to be mocking us everywhere we went, we slid into the Monsoon Grill with just minutes to spare before closing time. Indian cuisine that was really good, and delightful staff who didn't roll their eyes at people who arrive just before closing and order some kind of lentil curry that they can't pronounce. Rating: Very good.

Okay, you know that finger you used to mark your place at the Feedbunk? Go back to that place, because breakfast the next morning came from there, too. When we had finished our sandwiches and sweet potato fries we were still stuffed so we decided to save the homemade pie until later. "Stuffed" turned out to be the day's descriptor, so the pie was still waiting the next morning and became breakfast.

Friends, if you really want to have a vacation that's a vacation, eat gooseberry pie for breakfast. It's really not that different from a doughnut, right? And you're getting some fruit, right? And if it's gooseberry pie from the Feedbunk, you will smile all day long. Just writing about it makes my salivary glands tingle. Tart, sweet, flaky, tart. Double tart. Rating: Sublime.

So, I won't bore you with every single thing we tasted in the next two days, but we ended the tour at Tortilla Jack's in Topeka. It was once more really late when we were ready for supper and most non-chains were closed, and in spite of a Yelp review that said "This will probably appeal most to Washburn alumni with strong senses of nostalgia," we tried it. The restaurant was clean and apparently we were hungry because I forgot to photograph the untouched meal so you're going to have to take my word that this nasty-looking paper tray held a chili burrito at one time. Rating: Okay, or a little better than okay. Probably terrific on late nights if you went to college across the street.

As I conclude this run-down of our non-chain eating experience, I'm pleased to report that my technique for finding the best local restaurants held us in good stead.

And in non-related news, yesterday I signed up for Weight Watchers.

We Do What's Expected

The only thing that makes a Thanksgiving dinner for 33 people run smoothly, or really, run at all, is that after this many years all of us know our roles.

My dad, for example, is in charge of ironing the tablecloths. He and M.A. always show up early enough that I can pull out the ironing board and the wrinkly used-once-a-year plaid cloths, then he irons while I take my shower and change out of my cooking-spattered chenille robe and into a more respectable splatter-palette outfit.

Of course, I'm splattered most of the day because I have been busy completing my role:

My role is to keep the dairy farmers in business and I take this job quite seriously. You would not even believe how many pounds of butter and cream cheese I use to prepare one meal. What you see was all used to whip up the Pioneer Woman's mashed potatoes. No, I am not kidding, and if I were being totally honest I'd also include the whipping cream and half-and-half in this photo. On the other hand, they were delicious even though my hand got tired of mashing early so they were incredibly lumpy. Lumpotatoes, but yumpotatoes. 

But the role all of us most enjoy filling was taken this year by Miss S, who had her first birthday a few months ago. Remember her from last year? When she wasn't at all sure she should be sitting with the crazy lady? 

Last year.

This year she was the official pie sampler. 

She's sitting on her grandma's lap (is my Much Younger Sister the most beautiful grandmother you've ever seen?) and clearly Miss S finds the pumpkin pie satisfactory. 

Take a note, Miss S. It wasn't too many years ago that all those galoots behind you had the pie-tasting job, and now look at them. They're too old and sophisticated to dig in with this kind of gusto, and they probably filled up on turkey which you were wise enough not to do, plus we might look askance if they started eating their pie with their hands.  

Enjoy that role while it's still cute or you might end up helping Grandpa B with the tablecloths. 

Our Kind of People

Two and One with childhood friends

After the gigantic "whoosh" that was the sound of a collective release of held breath in the House on the Corner, Husband and I couldn't wait to jump in the car and travel to North Carolina so all of the Research Triangle could hear us yelling "Wahooooooo!" together. We stopped in Missouri to pick up Boy#1 to be co-pilot and for the next two days I Miss Daisy-ed in the backseat, reading and knitting while Husband and One picked out scenic side trips to break up the 1,300-mile trip. 

We were quite aware that this was probably our final trip to the Durham area, since Two already had his plane ticket toward the next (employed! Yay!) stage of his life, so we had to be selective in our activities there. What was the very most important thing we needed to do, in case we never make it back to North Carolina?

Why, Mount Airy, of course. 

What? You've never heard of Mount Airy, North Carolina?

Then obviously you are not a superfan of Andy Griffith, and you did not spend your childhood watching old black-and-white re-runs of a show that began with a whistle and ended with a laugh. Unlike you, one of our brilliant sons (*cough* Boy#1 *cough*) not only watched every episode TVLand had to offer, he can to this day quote verbatim passages and tell you which of the Darlings was the creepiest Darling. (That's a trick question. All the Darlings were creepy.)

Mount Airy is the home of Andy Griffith, also known as super-sheriff Andy Taylor, and even though "The Andy Griffith Show" filmed in California and there is precious little evidence Barney and Aunt Bee ever set foot in Mount Airy, a childhood buddy of the real Andy Griffith became the unofficial documentarian of all things Griffith. The result was (to our surprise) absolutely charming.

We expected a tiny, run-down town with a sad and dusty room holding old Griffith memorabilia, maybe a few shops filled with identical selections of t-shirts and mugs. Instead, Mount Airy has a perfectly-sized modern museum with items from Griffith's growing-up years, as well as mementos from the show (including Otis's vomit-stained coat--ick) and from Griffith's other projects (a Matlock suit, for example). I forced our Boys to pose with the Andy and Opie statue, of course, and Husband let me take his picture in Barney's sidecar outside the museum. (This shot available upon request.) 

Even the downtown was fun, with lots of individual shops that referenced the show but didn't go overboard. No one was running around yelling "Citizen's ar-RAY-ust!," which, to be absolutely honest, was kind of disappointing. 

Not disappointing was the moonshine pie shop. We had missed lunch hour at The Loaded Goat Bar and Grill so we had a mid-afternoon lunch at the pie shop, splitting pulled pork and rhubarb pies. We passed on the moonshine pie, but the Boys report the peanut butter pie was excellent. 

And then we went home and watched the full episode of The Loaded Goat,  

It was a good day, as Husband and I walked around with two of our grown sons remembering when they were little boys and we watched this show together. I think Andy would have approved.

via GIPHY

We Gather Together, Apart

 

One Thanksgiving pie

In any other year, the very thought that I would sit down at 9 o'clock on Thanksgiving morning to write a blog post would send me into peals of hysteria-edged laughter. 

Thanksgiving is my favorite day of the year, as I've noted in this space every single year. I love the season, I love the food, I love the lack of commercialization as vendors leap over this holiday to get to Christmas. And most of all, I love that for as long as I can remember, my extended family has gathered to celebrate the day. 

For the better part of three decades that gathering took place at the House on the Corner as my parents, all my siblings and their families, and any other un-familied friends I could gather in would pack the house for hugs and laughs and turkey and all the pie we could eat. When the expanding family outgrew the house we moved the celebration to a college meeting room, then to a church fellowship hall. We began alternating hosting duties with Much Older Sister in a different part of the state, and last year there were dozens and dozens of best-beloveds hugging and squealing and passing around new babies.

The event was not without its glitches--one year my mixer gave up the ghost before the potatoes were mashed, and another year the turkeys weren't cooked through at the appointed eating time--but it didn't ruin the day for even a second. 

We were together, and that's all that mattered. 

This year is, well, this year. 

Husband and I will sit down to turkey in our dining room table with only two Boys, both of whom quarantined and tested before they started home. The other two Boys are with their own nuclear families in their own homes. My siblings are likewise siloed with their immediate family members, and my youngest brother is cooking a full dinner for Dad and his wife. 

There is one turkey, not six. One pie rather than 13. Quantities scaled down from 60 servings to four, plus leftovers.

It could not be more different from the Thanksgiving I hold in my heart. I should have been up at 5:30 to sauté the onions and celery for the dressing, mentally checking off when the sweet potatoes needed to come out of the oven and when the green bean casserole needed to go in.

I'm sad, of course, that I won't see my Dad, or be with Baby Wonderful for his first major holiday. I'll miss the almost tactile swell of love that gusts in with the arrival of each family.

But, oh, you cannot imagine the gratitude with which I am counting my blessings. Maybe it takes a year like this, when we're all so close to the precipice, to be able to articulate the causes of our joy.

The family, today all safely tucked in their own homes. We cannot take tomorrow for granted, but today...

The friends from every age of my life, who this year have been so precious in the reconnections and checking-ins. 

The technology, without which we would not have seen or heard our dear ones. 

The new tone of hope in our national discussions, a time in which our elected leaders are urging us to be kind and think of each other. 

The selfless, beyond-exhausted service of our health workers, our teachers, and especially our minimum-wage store clerks and farm workers. 

Every single person I see wearing a mask and acknowledging wordlessly that we are in this struggle together. 

I could fill the internet with the my list of blessings, even in 2020. All of those who last year I assumed I would see today are counting their own blessings around their own small tables. 

And next year, God willing, rather than gathering apart we will once again gather together. 

Also, I've Been Reading

The picture that opens this post has nothing to do with what I'm actually going to write about, but since the other images today are "borrowed" from Amazon (and I'm pretty sure that if you click through to buy a book they wouldn't mind, even though I have no financial stake in that decision) I thought I'd participate in the Pi Day frenzy.

When I visited a couple of weeks ago this was the daily specials board at the cafe in the small town near where I grew up. Pie! Pie! Pie! Also, carbs over carbs with a side of carbs. It was delicious, she said defiantly.

But back to what I'm really aiming toward talking about today, which is, what I've been reading. Yes, in addition to ACTING in the opera (maybe the most fun I've had since, oh, I can't remember when), my jam-packed schedule has included more reading than any time in the last decade or so. I'm always looking for recommendations of good books (and I assume you are as well) so here's a sampling of what I've read. I recommend them all.

A Man Called Ove. I know! I was the final person in the world to read this book, largely because I am perhaps the cheapest person in the world and my spot on the waiting list at the Kansas state library's e-book collection did not come up for months. The timing was perfect, though, because the day before January's Iceamageddon was to occur I was notified that it was in my queue. Since Iceamageddon did not actually happen at all but everything was cancelled I spent the entire day cuddled into an afghan getting to know Ove. He seems to be a type I am predisposed to love, since I also love Doc Martin, and I highly recommend this to anyone who believes there is redemption for the cranky.

The Underground Railroad. Another one for which I waited until all the buzz had died down and no one wanted to talk about any more. It has been out long enough that I don't think I'm spoiling anything by revealing that this underground railroad is actually a  railroad that is underground which, hmmmm. It's an intriguing premise, and I was rooting hard for Cora, but I was not as bowled over as the critics and Oprah were.

Rules of Civility. This one I had never heard of, but someone recommended it to me and I pass along that recommendation with no reservations. I loved the narrator and her aspirations to be more than a typist, I loved the descriptions of the Depression-era music, I loved the matter-of-fact way Kate lived her life in spite of her unpredictable friends. But even this book wasn't as much of a delight to me as...

I Capture the Castle. I paid 50 whole cents for this when I saw it on the Friends of the Library sale shelf. Oh, people, if I'd have known I'd have paid up to a thousand times that. Two thousand, because what a lovely book! Wikipedia informs me it was written in 1948, when Dodie Smith was living in California. It's set in England sometime between the two Great Wars, and the narrator is a 17-year-old girl who wants to be a writer. Her family is living in a crumbling castle, and...well, you just MUST read it. It's Downton Abbey without any money, pretensions, or missing Gutenberg Bibles.

So that's what I've been doing as I'm pretend I'm super-super-busy.

What have you been reading?

Friday Orts and a Blurb

Time for our weekly wrap-up, while observing that obviously the person in charge of the mailing list for the unsolicited catalog I received this week must have been spying on me as I cooked.

*****
A follow-up to the dessert conundrum: People, that was pretty good pie. The Vanilla Pecan Pie did not disappoint, although the crust was the approximate consistency of a shingle after baking once for the cheesecake part and once for the pie part. Next time I'll make my own dough, but the recipe is going into the keep file.

*****
Sadness in my life last week: Our get-away weekend to see Boy#4 before he graduates meant that I missed the Small Town spelling bee. It was last Friday night, and apparently the major news outlets did not cover the event because I have not yet heard who won. But there's a confession to go along with the sadness: The first emotion I felt when I knew I would not be defending my title as Top Speller On One Night In The Crapshoot That Is A Spelling Bee? Relief. Because have I mentioned that spelling bees are crapshoots, and that had I gotten some of the other words in last year's bee I might very well not have won? Yes. This way I got to retire undefeated due to circumstances beyond my control.

*****
Did any of you grow up being doctored with Merthiolate? When I was a kid that orange liquid was the cure-all for the skinned knees and roughed-up elbows that came with kid-dom. It burned with a blue-hot flame when it hit raw skin and the orange tint was a badge of bravery that didn't wash off. The other day I was telling one of the young'uns in the office about Merthiolate, which they had NEVER HEARD OF, and I Googled it so these whippersnappers could see how their pansy germ-killers that don't hurt also don't kill germs. Do you know what I found? The most prominent ingredient in Merthiolate is MERCURY. Seriously, mercury of the kind that is found in the warnings on old thermometers. After all these years I realized that my mother had been trying to kill me. Between that and the lack of car restraints (throwing an arm out as she braked doesn't count) it's a wonder I survived to adulthood.

*****

This week's blurb is in praise of cheap coffee. I am a coffee drinker. I love everything about coffee--I love its smell, I love its taste, I love the way the mug feels in my hands on a cold day, I love the moment of reprieve when I've been asked a difficult question in a meeting and take a sip of coffee before I answer. But weak coffee is disgusting--do not be weak,coffee. Just do not be.

A few years ago I discovered Cafe Bustelo. It is sold in WalMart and is the cheapest coffee on the shelves, but also is the opposite of weak and immediately took me back to my days in the Peace Corps when I was in coffee paradise. It tasted just like 3 p.m. in Costa Rica, when the whole world stopped and drank coffee together.

It turned out that I was way behind the curve in discovering the yellow can.  A New York Times article in 2009 (five YEARS ago!) featured Cafe Bustelo: "Potent, cheap and with an aura of both urban exotica and blue-collar utility, it’s long been an item on the bohemian shopping list, even making it into the lyrics to Rent ('Bustelo, Marlboro, banana by the bunch')." I must be bohemiam, because if you leave out the Marlboros, that could be my shopping list. 

Put your thumb way up for Cafe Bustelo. Then wrap that thumb around a cup of it, and enjoy.

Belated Mother's Day Observations

Boy#4 delivering flowers, and Boy#2 skeptical about whatever his brother is saying. 

The beauty shot that goes with today's observations will seem confusing at first glance. Stick with me, though, because it is emblematic of what I want to say about Sunday's celebration of motherhood. (I know, I know. I'm three days late, which also is emblematic of my motherhood style which began when I was a geriatric 32 and has always been behind the curve.)

Anyway, I almost skipped writing about Mother's Day even though this blog is just pretty much a series of blatherings on that subject. But I will plant my stake on one truth about being a mother:

No one knows how to do it.

Really.

I was sure I had motherhood all figured out when I was in my teens/20s and not yet a mother. I would be firm but fair. I would be my children's mother, not their friend. I would never be too tired to listen. I would teach them how to make pie crusts and read to them at every opportunity.

I had confidence in confidence alone, but it only took a few hours of actual motherhood to realize that I was unfit for the position. Boy#1 had been born precipitously (preeclampsia is a real thing) and I had sunk into exhaustion after midnight when the door of my hospital room swung open and in rolled a nurse with a sub-five-pound baby in an incubator.

"Time for his late-night supper!" the nurse said cheerily. I just gaped at her.

Honestly, it never occurred to me that after having done a full and strenuous day of work I would not be allowed to sleep through the night.

And that, my friends, should be the motto of motherhood, embroidered on sofa pillows in every home: Honestly, It Never Occurred to Me.

It never occurred to me that being firm but fair was a standard too high, until the day I heard myself callously telling a kid "Fair is where you take your pigs." (I didn't originate that phrase, but oh boy, did I appropriate it.)  It didn't occur to me that there are a lot of times when being a friend looks like a lot more fun than being a mother. It didn't occur to me how bone-tired I'd be during year after year of not-sleeping-through-the-night-yet babies, too tired for late-night discussions. It didn't occur to me that I make a lousy pie crust, so why would anyone want to learn that?

The only mothering vow I made that I kept was that I read to the Boys at every opportunity.

Still? I love being a mother. I loved the babies, and their pat-pat hands on my cheek. I loved the toddlers, who are the only age group who can properly wear overalls. And the school-agers, and even the teens (oh, the teens! Those tantalizing glimpses of solidity!). Honestly? Motherhood is equal parts roller-coaster emotions, cliff-hanging decisions, and boring slog, and no one knows how to do it.

We're friends with a family who had four children just older than ours, and that mom? She had it all put together. Her kids were kind, smart, and well-mannered at just about the time ours were going through their untamed hellion stages. A friend asked Sharon how she had been such a good mom, and she just laughed.

"You do the best you can every day, forgive yourself, then get up the next day and do it again."

That became my motherhood mantra, and I thought back on it Sunday. We'd spend Saturday car shopping with Boy#4, and he arrived with a gorgeous arrangement of spring flowers from all of his siblings. Then Sunday night we had what has become our Mother's Day/Father's Day/birthday tradition--a raucous Google Chat with the Boys trash-talking over each other and showing off the dog's latest trick and generally behaving as if they were at home around the table instead of in four different states.

I'm the luckiest mother in the word. We didn't know how to do it, but somehow Husband and I have children who are kind, smart, well-mannered, and obviously like us and each other. That this could be the outcome of such a terrifyingly uncharted journey?

Honestly, it never occurred to me.

Role Model

 

Today is my father's 84th birthday, so last weekend when I was on the farm I baked a banana cream pie. Until this year, Mom had made his favorite dessert every Dec. 10 for the 57 years they were married.

I am no expert in making banana cream pies--the number I've made can be counted on the fingers of one, well, finger. But I wanted Dad to know that I loved him, and knew how deeply he missed his wife, so I forged ahead. I scalded milk and tempered egg yolks and whipped the whites for meringue and sliced overripe bananas.

The results were truly horrendous. The scalding milk stuck to the bottom of the saucepan so the finished custard was simultaneously lumpy and runny. The crust shrank and the meringue was slopped clear out onto the edge of the pan.

Still, when we cut the pie and Dad dug into his first bite, you would have thought it was the best thing he'd ever tasted. 

"Ahh, delicious!" he sighed.

I've long thought that most of us base our first impressions of the character of God on the character of our own parents. My heart goes out to those whose fathers were absent or abusive or immoral. I have experienced God as loving, just, sacrificial, and One who thinks I'm special beyond words.

I am blessed.

Happy birthday, Dad.

Blow Out the Candles

Yesterday I posted this pictures on my Facebook page. It was snapped 27 years, almost to the second, from the moment the handsome young man on the right blinked for the first time and yelled his disapproval of the bright lights and activity surrounding him. Boy#4 had joined our family.

He'd already had an eventful morning: We arrived at the hospital early to find that sometime between my final prenatal check on Friday and the Monday scheduled induction, this child had decided to flip and was now sitting Buddha-ish with his head right between my ribs. The fact that I did not know that almost 10 pounds of human being had done a complete flip INSIDE MY BODY is a tribute to  his five-year-old, almost-four-year-old, and two-year-old brothers, who had been competing for my attention during that weekend. Also, we had an unexpected house guest, so there was that.

Anyway, my obstetrician happened to be the only person in Big City Hospital who had been trained to perform an external cephalic version which is a fancy way of saying "turning the baby." And because this  pushy-pully maneuver was something the doctors at BCH normally did not attempt, enough extraneous hospital personnel (interns, nurses, aides, other doctors, janitors, etc.) gathered to observe   that Husband remarked we could get a pretty good start on Four's college fund if we charged admission--but this was not at all the blog I planned to write today.

I was going  to write about birthday cakes, and how they've morphed in our family since the frog-themed Dairy Queen cake that marked Boy#1's first birthday. I've made dozens of cakes over the year, maybe as many as a hundred when you count Husband's birthdays.

I would begin planning the cakes weeks in advance--what were the Boy's interests? How could I symbolize those in buttercream? The results weren't Pinterest-worthy but that wasn't a problem because for most of those years Pinterest didn't exist. And they usually turned out whimsical and fun, like this Winnie the Pooh that I freehanded on top of a cake into which love had been added with every ingredient:

Yesterday's celebratory dessert was different. Husband and I took Four out to church and lunch in the Big City to the South where he  lives, then we went back to his apartment where I pulled out a book of matches  and some candles....

...and stuck them into a pie.

Which was purchased. 

By the birthday boy.

As Husband and I sang "Happy Birthday" Four was urging us to double-time the song because "the smoke alarm in here is really sensitive and it's horrible to turn off. Open the windows, quick!"

It occurred to me that all those years ago I would not have believed I would arrive at this point, where the candles and "cake" would be less satisfying than seeing Husband and Four working on his tax return together.

Like birth experiences, birthday traditions don't always turn out the way you think they will. It turns out maybe/probably I was the only one obsessing over those cakes--when I polled the Boys last night, no one could remember which had been the recipient of the Winnie the Pooh cake. (I had to look for photographic evidence. It was Boy#2.)

All those years ago I thought the cake was the centerpiece of the birthday celebration, but it turns out all we needed was a birthday and some family to celebrate with.

Happy birthday, Boy#4. You still take the cake, even when the cake is a pie.

Tra-la-la! So Alert!

Oh, it's the second best (regularly-scheduled) day of the year! And I'm wearing new earrings to celebrate!

The day after our clocks fall back is my first-runner-up favorite day of the year. It's second only to Thanksgiving, and that's because you simply cannot have a favorite day of the year in which pie is not involved.

Anyway, on the Monday after we end the cursed Daylight Savings Time, I wake up refreshed and ready to meet the day, no matter now later I've been up the night before. My post-exercise walk around the block is done in daylight so I see (and avoid) the sunken spot in the neighbor's sidewalk that fills with dirt and becomes the outdoor litter box for all the feral cats in town. (Really, feral cats? You have the ENTIRE TOWN to poop in. You have to do it right there, where I invariably stumble into it?)

On this day I walk around singing tra-la-la, happy all the day, and taking pictures of my new earrings which I love, even though taking pictures of one's own neck without having the neck accordion into itself in discouragingly aging ways is difficult. I LAUGH about the difficulties rather than cursing the darkness of (obviously premature) neck wrinkles.

I love the click-clack-tinkle-clack-tinkle of the new earrings as I walk down the hall, rather than shrieking at the noise that is constant and un-shutting-up and relentless, and I'm not going to move again because those danged earrings....

I may need pie.

Don't Cry for Me, All You Young'Uns

If you had asked me a decade ago what I thought would be the saddest part of being empty nesters, I would probably have included the word "holiday meals" somewhere in my answer.

I love cooking for holidays. My menus are as unchanging as the Rock of Gibralter, and as predictable as right-wing outrage.  Thanksgiving is turkey, yams, and pecan pie; Christmas is ham and peppermint ice cream pie; Fourth of July is fried chicken and homemade ice cream.

Easter is ham, asparagus, strawberries, homemade rolls, and cheesecake. Always.

Except that yesterday, for the first time in 30 years, Husband and I had no extra chicks in the nest. The Boys haven't been home for this holiday for several years, what with three of them in school many states away and the fourth a musician for whom special church services are a prime opportunity for picking up paying gigs. Since the Boys have been gone we've had Husband's mother with us, so I continued with my rock-bound big meal tradition.

This year, though, it was only the two of us. Two of us who don't need a week's worth of leftover homemade rolls and cheesecake, much as that prospect makes me drool on my keyboard. At this time of the year Husband  is more focused on deductions than on asparagus so he was fine with my tentative suggestion that maybe we should try the buffet.

The only problem was that I'd always assumed holiday buffets were for a certain segment of the society, a segment mostly defined by the words "old" and "lonely," and also tagged with the label "loser." I pictured the sad  white-haired couples tottering into the restaurant where they would gum their food and carefully count the tip out of their coin purses. Since obviously that does not describe the young(ish), life-of-the-party winners that Husband and I are, would we have moved into that pitiful category feared by full-nest folks?

Well, the answer to this question is, of course, "MomQueenBee, you are an idiot." 

Did you know that you can pay the restaurant some money, and they will COOK YOUR FOOD FOR YOU? You don't have to spent Saturday proofing rolls and carefully incorporating cream cheese into eggs and sugar, or set the alarm for 4 a.m. so the ham can be in the Crockpot before church. Also, the nice restaurant folks CLEAN UP! AND DO THE DISHES! so the Sunday afternoon nap is uninterrupted by hand-washing of the good china and wrapping up of leftovers.

Also, when you have lived in Small Town as long as we have, you know most of the people in the restaurant anyway, so it's like eating with family. That's especially true if you drag the preacher's wife and her husband with you because they're empty-nesters, too. You'll be waving at the family two tables down and asking the nice lady next to you how her daffodils are doing. You will eat fried chicken even though it's not the Fourth of July. You and your friend the preacher's wife will feel as if you've discovered buried treasure because this was so easy and fun.

But we'll let it be our secret. We don't want the young'uns to discover this, the easiest holiday menu ever.

As a Cook I'm Self-Delusional

A Family Feast is a better cook than MomQueenBee.

A week ago today I was scheduled to be the co-hostess for one of the women's groups I belong to. This means that I don't have to clean house or stress over whether the coffee is strong enough, all I have to do is bring a dessert to keep the natives from getting restless during the business meeting.

I don't make many desserts, now that it's just Husband and me splitting up all of those extra calories, but I am incapable of passing up food porn so I pin the recipes instead. Pumpkin Cheesecake, Peanut Butter Torte, Chocolate Lasagne, an embarrassment of richness all waiting for me on Pinterest when my turn to co-hostess comes around. It's just a matter of choosing which delectable treat to put out on the little plates.

Last Tuesday I decided on the German Chocolate Pie. A tantalizing picture of this had been posted by several of my friends, and who doesn't like Germans and chocolate and pie?

Except.

Except that the crust was terrible, and the chocolate layer was hard and the coconut layer was sticky and I was hugely relieved when the speaker cancelled and the meeting was postponed a week and I could dump both pies into the trash.

So for tonight's meeting I chose a different recipe, this one a Toffee Pecan Bundt Cake that its inventor (a food blogger) described as foolproof and delicious. Surely even I couldn't mess up this droolworthy confection.

Judge for yourself:

 Are you drooling?

Sigh.

Blueberries on the Scale

So, chapter 2 of the blueberry saga. Since I have convinced myself you come here because I have Opinions, today's post will be entirely made up of Opinions. What did I like about the day at the blueberry farm? What was less than my favorite? Get yourself a cup of coffee, because this is going to be long.

This time was on Pearl's clock when we left the House on the Corner. Saturday morning, people. It was Saturday morning and I was already in the car at 7:26. And I didn't even have the satisfaction of knowing we'd left on time, because we planned to leave at 7. On a blueberry scale of 1-10:

This is me trying to find the blueberry patch. Yikes! This place is so remote that it does not have an address. Do you understand what I'm saying? I couldn't even input the address on my phone and claim technological failure when I couldn't find the place. Navigation R Not Us. Blueberry rating of ease of finding the farm:

Nothing says you're in the country like sharing the road with a cow. I loved this cow. It made me feel like a complete pioneer, a hunter-gatherer with air conditioning and non-functioning GPS. Fortunately for the cow we were hunting and gathering blueberries and not hamburgers or she might have been speeding up a bit. Blueberry rating of the cow:

The blueberry farm itself was astonishing. There were no mosquitoes, folks. No bugs of any kind, in fact, unless you count the bee that was buzzing around and well, you know how I feel about bees. Lance and Elizabeth, the owners, personally gave us instructions on how to pick the berries, since we were complete novices. You don't really pick them; if the blueberries are ripe they practically fall off the stem into your hands. It's a caress, maybe a fondle, but not a pick that yields the ripest blueberries. Also, did I mention no bugs? Blueberry rating on the facilities:
 

Okay, in the interest of truth and justice and the American way, I must admit that blueberries ain't cheap even when you provide your own stoop labor. Persons such as myself who are accustomed to fruit costing 19 cents per pounds (bananas, on Tuesdays, in 1987) will gulp just a little bit at the price. When the sun was at its peak and we were beginning to get a little swoony Husband pointed out that if he had stayed in the office and billed out standard rate he could have earned, let's see, carry the two and multiply by...well, significantly more than we saved by picking our own, and that doesn't even count the cost of gas and lunch. At that point I batted my (sweat-dripping) eyelashes at him and asked "Yes, but what is fair market value on a full morning with a beautiful woman these days?" and he realized he'd gotten a bargain. Blueberry rating on the price:

And later that evening, when Husband stuck a fork into the juiciest, tartest, sweetest blueberry pie ever, he forgot all about the morning he could have spent at the office. Pie trumps economics every time. Blueberry rating on the day:
 


We'll do this again.