Advice to Myself
Saturday, August 26, 2023
After finishing a one-year program at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill to get a master’s degree in accounting in May 2015 I spent a great deal of time in 2016 and 2017 studying for CPA exams.
There are four parts to the test. I passed the first two (which I had studied for properly), in May and June 2016, and failed the next two (which I had not studied for properly), in July and August 2016. Upon receiving the results I felt like if I studied for the last two the way I had studied for the first two I would be able to pass, so I started studying in fall 2016 and studied very diligently for a number of months then took a little break then got back to it over the summer and re-took the tests in August 2017. I passed both of the remaining tests the second time around. Hooray for me.
After getting through those and feeling officially done with school — and also no longer being self-employed, and also dealing with many complications in both my personal life and my professional for the next several years — I closed the door to my office and didn’t go back for … a while. Like maybe three years. (The office is in the upper level of a detached garage in the back of my property so it is pretty easy to ignore.)
When I finally managed to get around to getting back out there to try to clean things up and reorganize, I found the note shown in the picture above amongst the piles of paper on my desk. This was a note I had written to myself when wrapping up studying and doing my final preparations for re-taking the tests in August 2017.
One of the problems I had the first time around, when I was seriously underprepared for the second two exams, was that I would skim the question then start freaking out when I didn’t know anything about that question. Like, anything. On multiple occasions I felt like I didn’t even know what they were talking about. But even if you don’t know what they are talking about, you still have to give an answer. So this was my step-by-step plan for managing the situation that had sunk me the first time around.
Step One: Don’t Panic. Do not let your brain jump the fence and run away. You cannot do anything when you are panicking, your mind goes completely blank. And while it may seem like not enough to simply tell yourself to not panic, I have actually found telling yourself not to panic to be an effective strategy. DON’T PANIC.
The next step is to go back and actually read the question. Don’t just skim it and freak out. Actually read it. Carefully. What are they asking? What is the topic? Break it down as much as you can to get to the actual subject of the question, and to understand what they are specifically asking for. READ THE QUESTION.
The next step, now that you have read the question calmly, with the part of your brain that is inclined to panic firmly tethered, and have a better understanding of what the question actually says, is to think about what you know about that topic. Even if it feels like you don’t know anything, you probably know something, however small and insignificant. Whatever thing you can remember on that topic, just start with that. Write it down.Then keep going. THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW.
This was good advice for the exams, it helped me pass. And upon seeing it again, lo those many years later, it struck me as good advice in general.
Because even when you think you don’t know what to do, you think you don’t know anything, you probably know something.
So take a deep breath, calm your mind, look closely at what is being asked of you: What, exactly, do you need to do here?
Start with what you know, the smallest thing you can think of, and move forward from there.
Candied Grapefruit Peel
Thursday, June 30, 2022
Candied Grapefruit Peel
This is for my Coven Friend Nancy, who loves these. I told her they were simple to make, she could definitely do it herself, and I walked her through it, but we were just talking, she wasn’t writing it down or anything. And then the next time I went to make them I didn’t have my recipe handy and of course I couldn’t remember exactly what I was supposed to do and had to really think it through. And I was like okay there’s no way she is going to remember this from me telling her while we were drinking cocktails, since I can barely remember and I actually have done it a bunch of times. And none of those times involved cocktails.
So here are some instructions, written down. For her and for me.
The basic proportions are: For every one cup of peel, you use one-half cup sugar and one-quarter cup water (a 2:1 sugar syrup). One grapefruit results in about one cup of peel. But I really love these and they keep for a long time so usually I do more than one grapefruit at a time. So I’m going to give a recipe using two cups of grapefruit peel, which is what I made most recently, and which inspired me to finally put this post together.
Peel the grapefruit and cut the resulting pieces of peel into strips. The size of the strips doesn’t much matter, I like them a little wider than some recipes I’ve seen, which called for thin strips to make candied “threads.” Mine are more like fat matchsticks, probably between an eighth and a quarter of an inch wide, and however long the piece of peel ended up when I took it off the fruit, maybe a half-inch to an inch.
If you want to get rid of the bitterness, you can soak the peel overnight in salt water (and then rinse in fresh water) or boil it in fresh water multiple times (boil, dump, rinse; fill with fresh water, boil, dump, rinse). The more times you boil it, the more bitterness you get out and the sweeter your end result will be. However, for me, the bitterness is actually what I like about these, so I do not soak them or rinse them at all, I just cut them into pieces and go straight to the candying part. (I do wash the grapefruit before I start … and if I cared more about pesticides I might start with organic grapefruit, but I am generally fatalistic at this point, so it is hit or miss whether I use organic or conventional fruit.)
So here is the actual recipe:
Candied Grapefruit Peel
2 cups grapefruit peel, cut into strips
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup waterPut the water and sugar in a small saucepan and stir to combine. Place over high heat and bring to a boil, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved. Add the grapefruit peel pieces and stir to coat the pieces. Reduce the heat, if necessary, to keep from boiling over, but continue to boil, stirring occasionally, until all of the syrup is absorbed and the grapefruit pieces are translucent.
Remove the peel pieces from the pan and spread on a cooling rack to dry. If desired, roll the pieces in granulated sugar to coat the outside with sugar.
The first few times I made these I struggled to get it right — either the syrup wasn’t right, or the ratio of syrup to peel wasn’t right, I was never quite sure. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes when I had too much syrup, I ended up with leftover grapefruit-flavored syrup, which was actually delicious mixed in drinks. So if you want that, you could use less grapefruit and more syrup (e.g., use the same amount of syrup as above with 1 cup of grapefruit) and you should end up with leftover syrup that you can use in other recipes. (You would stop cooking the grapefruit when it was translucent, even if there was still syrup left in the pan.)
I also made them several times when they didn’t “candy” properly, they were just chewy sweet grapefruit peels, almost like gummies. It was okay, but not as good as when they are candied for real. I think this was either because (a) I didn’t cook them long enough (i.e., I got impatient and took them off before all of the syrup was absorbed), or (b) because the sugar-to-water ratio was wrong. It’s really hard to not flip the amounts of water and sugar, it feels unnatural to use more sugar than water, but that’s what a 2:1 sugar syrup is, twice as much sugar as water, so just follow the recipe, don’t do what it feels like you should be doing. The sugar melts into liquid and the water boils off and that is the whole point of candy, to pack as much sugar as possible into the smallest amount of space.
I eat it just like any other kind of candy. You can also use it as a garnish on baked goods, or you can combine with dark chocolate, which is also tasty. Or you can add it to cocktails. And note that you can do the same thing with any other kind of citrus peel, lemons or limes or oranges. But I like grapefruit the best.
And now the next time I go to make this and can’t remember what I’m supposed to do, I can just look here. Problem solved.
We Treat You Like Family
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
I was talking to my friend Ann today. She’s coming into town in a few days. At first she was going to stay with me then she was going to stay at another friend’s but now she’s back to staying with me. My house is in the midst of a slow-motion reorganization (super-slow-motion, actually … These Things Take Time) but I can get things more-or-less back together if I put my mind to it.
I told her that was fine, I would work on it. I said I would pretend my family was visiting. Which reminded me of a joke, but I couldn’t remember the details. The punch line is something like “Oh I would hope for better than that!”
I was walking home from the library later, and walking is when my mind wanders. While I was walking my mind wandered over to trying to remember what the actual joke was, but instead of landing on the joke, it remembered a story from a long time ago about an actual visit to my actual family.
I’m too lazy to google the joke, but here’s the story about my family.
My first few years out of college I lived in Princeton, New Jersey where I didn’t know anyone when I got there and where there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment activities for a 22-year-old person without much of a local network. However it is centrally located, and I had friends from college and high school up and down the Eastern seaboard so I would often drive to visit friends on weekends. At the time, my brother was living in Arlington, Virginia, working in the DC area. My brother always knows a million people and I knew my brother’s friends from college, and we had mutual friends from high school, and I also had other friends in the DC area, so I would visit him fairly regularly. Whenever I got too tired of being by myself in New Jersey that was an easy place to escape to.
The drive from New Jersey to DC took a few hours (3 or 4, as I recall, depending on traffic and which route I took to get to I-95, etc. … the details are fuzzy lo these many years later). I lived outside of town in the opposite direction from a trip to DC, so usually I would leave directly from work, and I had a fairly normal entry-level office person schedule, with some limited amount of control over when I got to work and when I left. So I would leave New Jersey around five or six o’clock and get to DC around eight-thirty or nine. After happy hour, but before late-night.
And of course this was in the pre- cell phone days, so you didn’t call from the road with an ETA, you talked on the phone during the week and told the person you were visiting what time you expected to be there, and only if something unusual happened would you stop and find a pay phone to call and give an update.
So I’ve made plans for a visit, my brother is expecting me, we’ve confirmed everything on the phone and I’m more-or-less on schedule, maybe a little bit late since I’m usually a little bit late. It’s dark when I get to his place. He lives in a big apartment building, ten or fifteen floors. The building has a buzzer system for guests to be let in — you call the number from the keypad outside the door and the person in the apartment buzzes you in. There’s no lobby or doorman or anything. (And, as noted, NO CELL PHONES.)
So I park in the parking lot and gather my things from the car and walk to the door and pick up the phone receiver and use the keypad to call his apartment and … nothing. There’s no answer. I’m like Hmm, okay. Maybe he went out to the store or something, I’m sure he’ll be here soon.
So I put down my bags and I hang out and wait.
And wait.
I feel like the pre-cellphone stages of waiting were:
(1) Relief [Oh good, I’m not late!];
(2) Patience [No problem, this is fine, I’m sure they’ll be here in a minute];
(3a) Concern [Wait, do I have the right day/time/meeting place? Hmm…];
(3b) Annoyance [Geez, what the heck? They knew I was coming, where are they?]
(4) Worry [Gosh, I hope something terrible hasn’t happened!]
My initial response was definitely Stage (1) — as a chronically borderline late person I’m always relieved to be spared having caused someone else to have to wait for me — which quickly slid into Stage (2), This is Not a Big Deal. (We chronically borderline late people try to be very forgiving of lateness in others; what goes around comes around.) After continued waiting, I was wavering between Stages (3a) and (3b), which tend to happen simultaneously for me, I’m never sure which one to focus on so I kind of just bounce back and forth, and just about to shift into Stage (4) — okay this is bad, I think something is really wrong — when my brother shows up.
He’s like, Heyyy! You’re here!
He tells me he’d been at happy hour at his regular happy hour bar, he’d been wrapping up, getting ready to leave, being good. His bartender friend asked if he wanted another round and he said No. He said, “My sister’s coming to town, I have to get home, she’s meeting me at my apartment. I have to be there to let her in.”
His bartender friend said, “Ahhh, she’s family. She’ll wait.”
And my brother was like, “Hey, you know what? You’re right. On second thought, I will have another beer.”
We treat you like family. We leave you standing outside in the parking lot waiting for us while we have another beer.
Wait, I think that might be the joke.
Well, That Was Delicious
Thursday, March 4, 2021
I’m in an Eating Down the Fridge moment, and also have been taking semi-regular deliveries from my friend’s expired/about-to-expire food distribution, which has resulted in a flurry of new-to-me food combinations.
Most of the food distribution goes straight to the freezer without my thinking much about it (the about-to-go-bad nature of it means you can’t dilly-dally with that stuff or you will lose it) which eventually results in freezer randomness overload — my freezer ends up chock full of things that I may or may not have ever chosen to buy but that I have nonetheless ended up with and that now needs to be dealt with. So I’m trying to work through all of that, aiming for a fresh start for spring.
Here are a few of the winners:
Waffle & Ham Sandwich
Ham slice from the freezer (friend’s distribution, VERY SALTY) heated on stovetop and sandwiched between pieces of hot-off-the-press sweet-potato waffles (Everyday Waffle recipe with half of a leftover baked sweet potato mixed in.) [The sweet potato ended up in the freezer after I didn’t finish it at dinner one night then didn’t do anything with it after a few days in the fridge; my plan was to use it a batch of muffins or something. Waffles seemed like as good of an “or something” as I was likely to get.]
I dialed back the salt in the waffles, because the ham was so salty it was hard for me to eat, and putting too-salty ham between otherwise not-salty-enough waffles turned out to be just the ticket.
I used my hack version of pancake syrup (a 2:1 sugar syrup plus a little bit of molasses and a little bit of honey) as a dipping sauce.
SO GOOD. Omg. Sweet, salty, bready, porky.
That one had it all.
Ham and Spinach Casserole
Cubed ham from freezer (friend’s distribution, different ham, not as salty), frozen spinach, elbow macaroni. Held together with white sauce made with chicken fat (skimmed from broth after stewing a hen), sprinkled with grated cheese and topped with buttered bread crumbs (from freezer, rescued from a bag of Martin’s potato rolls that were on the verge of being lost to mold).
This was a combination Tightwad Gazette universal casserole plus techniques gleaned from James Villa’s My Mother’s Southern Kitchen, which has some classic old-school Southern church potluck dishes.
[If you’re interested in the how-to, here it is: I sauteed onion in chicken fat, then added flour (equal parts flour and fat — two tablespoons of each) to make a roux, then added one cup of liquid which was mostly chicken broth (from the freezer — every few months I poach a chicken that I freeze in three-ounce packets, and I also freeze the stock …. this is something that is basically always in my freezer) plus a tablespoon of heavy cream (which I had bought for … something … around this time I made I made a birthday cake for some friends, which involved ganache, and it might have been left from that) topped off with whole milk. Plus some spices, to taste — maybe salt (though not too much … needed to adjust for the ham), pepper, half-sharp paprika, dry mustard. Maybe some Penzey’s jerk seasoning, which I started adding to pretty much everything last year after I put it in a grits bowl and fell in love with it.
Add the liquid to the roux and stir and cook until it is thick and bubbly, then pour into a casserole dish with cooked pasta, cubed ham, frozen spinach. Stir everything together to mix it all up then add shredded cheese — whatever kind you like, as much or as little as you like. I used sharp cheddar, and I was making a small version with about two servings (six ounces) of cubed ham and two ounces of pasta, so I added about an ounce of shredded cheese. Then topped with buttered bread crumbs. Cooked in a 350 degree oven until the bread crumbs were brown and toasty.]
This was really super delicious. Possibly because of the cream. I don’t usually have that around so I think this recipe had some extra deliciousness from that.
Frothy Chocolate Drink
Silk brand unsweetened coconut almond milk (friend’s distribution, three days until expiration date) + evaporated milk (friend’s distribution, dented can but indefinite lifespan) + cocoa powder sugar mixture (recovered from the back of the pantry when I cleaned the top shelf off a few weeks ago). Frothed using hand immersion blender which I got from my mom after she cleaned out her kitchen and decided she was never going to use it, and then it sat in a pile in my living room for … a while … before I cleaned things up a few months ago and now I use it all the time, it is my new favorite kitchen appliance.
I made this because I thought it would be good mixed with coffee, but it was so good I drank a glass of it by itself, and then made a second batch to mix with the coffee. Both were delicious. Maybe even BETTER THAN STARBUCKS, as my nieces might say.
Coconut Almond Smoothie
Silk brand unsweetened coconut almond milk (friend’s distribution), frozen banana (friend’s distribution), honey, dark cocoa powder, whirled in blender. Like a chocolate coconut milkshake. Good!
Chewy Ginger Snap Cookies
I made Marion Cunningham’s basic gingersnap cookies substituting fat skimmed off a batch of slow-cooker pork barbecue that I made in December, and they are very tasty but not at all snappy, so I dubbed them Chewy Ginger Snaps, since that seemed like the best way to describe them even though that name technically makes no sense. (Which is it now missy chewy or snappy? Huh???)
I made these the day after the Capitol Insurrection, possibly in a bout subconscious stress baking. Many were eaten the night they were baked, because they were extremely good hot and fresh, and the rest went into the freezer. I’m now working on finishing them off, because it’s time for some new cookies.
Pork Barbecue Pilaf
In addition to the leftover fat from the slow-cooker pork, I also ended up with cooked onions saturated with spicy porky fat. In the past I have pulled these out and saved them, because they seemed too good to waste, but I had never figured out what to do with them.
This time, armed with my new immersion blender, I bzzzzz blendered them up and combined them with a small amount of leftover barbecue [a.k.a. pork … in North Carolina “barbecue” means pulled pork, something I learned the first week I arrived in the state and was told that the lunch menu for the day was barbecue and I asked “barbecued what?” — that was the first and last time I ever asked that question] and sauce that remained after I had eaten most of a batch I had frozen. (I freeze this in approximately one-cup/six ounce batches, then thaw and eat as a sandwich or in a grits bowl or whatever.)
I then used this as the base of a pilaf.
I dumped everything (onions plus pork bits plus sauce) in a large skillet and heated it up, then added a cup of uncooked rice, stirred to coat the rice in the fat, then added two cups of chicken stock, brought to a boil then added half a cup or so of frozen peas, returned to a boil then simmered, covered, until all of the liquid was absorbed. (This is the basic Tightwad Gazette universal pilaf recipe but with less protein and using barbecue pork sauce and blendered porky barbecue onions as the fat and aromatic base.)
This was really tasty, and was a great way to get three or four meals from some rice and peas plus a bunch of stuff that otherwise would have gone to waste. I will definitely be using the onions in a pilaf again the next time I make slow-cooker pork.
Use it up, use it up! That is my mission at the moment.
On a semi-related note, I went into a bit of a rabbithole recently on the Hilaria Baldwin “different kind of Bostonian” thing, which led me to a Today Show interview with Amy Schumer, who I love [my favorite line from the Hilaria Baldwin weirdness is this quote from Amy Schumer: “Look, she’s a mom. She has a million and a half kids, and that’s really hard,” Schumer added. “So I just, I don’t want them to be going through a bad time. But also, you can’t just pretend you’re from Spain.”] and they showed a short clip of her Super Bowl ad for Hellman’s mayonnaise, which I then had to look up and watch, and I just need to say that I love that Hellman’s and Amy Schumer are teaming up to give people tips on how to reduce food waste! Go Hellman’s! Go Amy Schumer! Mayonnaise is the answer.
Anyway that’s it from here.
Waste not, want not.
The Doubtful Guest
Thursday, December 17, 2020
The artist and illustrator Edward Gorey, creator of the original Addams family, who was known to walk around Manhattan in a floor-length fur coat (a bit of information I got from reading a New Yorker article and found just so perfect that I felt compelled to include it here), produced a work called The Doubtful Guest about a family who, out of nowhere, receive an odd visitor — a penguin-looking creature, wearing sneakers — that comes into their house and proceeds to behave in an extremely disruptive manner.
In the spring of 2019, I placed a special order to buy this book from my favorite local bookstore, The Regulator, because I decided I needed a physical copy of it in my life. It felt disturbingly relevant to the situation in which I had found myself.
At my place of business, we had made several questionable hiring decisions some time prior and were still living with the results of those bad decisions. These hires seemed to be the workplace equivalent of a plate-eating penguin. And in fact, as a work friend I shared the book with pointed out, some of the entries were almost freakishly apt. Like this one:
And protect them by dropping them into the pond.
The last stanza of the book reads: “It came seventeen years ago — and to this day / It has shown no intention of going away.”
When I purchased the book, more than a year into the Doubtful Guest travails, I truly had begun to worry that in 17 years we would still be dealing with these people.
Fortunately my problems with Doubtful Guests had all been solved by October 2019, and finally I could begin to try to restore some order to my life.
However I have been thinking of this book again recently, due to a Doubtful Guest in Washington who “has shown no intention of going away” and has triggered some PTSD for me.
Some people just don’t know when it’s time to leave.
I don’t think Jane Austen liked children
Sunday, November 1, 2020
Hello everyone, I hope you are all making it through. (And I hope everyone enjoyed the best day of the year today, when we all got an extra hour to sleep!)
I have retreated into my own little world for the past few months, and in recent weeks have gone into a more or less complete media blackout. No TV, limited internet, and almost no social media. (I am old-school, I get actual paper newspapers delivered to my front yard, the New York Times and the News & Observer, and I do look though them on some semi-regular basis, so I can try to keep up with things a little bit.) Really just working to shut things down as much as I can. My life feels manageable when all I have to think about is my own life, what I am eating and which part of whatever longstanding project that has been languishing for the past 5+ years I am going to try to tackle today. If I can feed myself and do my laundry, and maybe go for a walk, I feel like I am doing okay … but if I have to try to figure out all the problems in the world all at the same time it is too much.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Esther Perel, because she makes me feel like every problem can be solved, if you are thoughtful and empathetic, and if you are willing to work at it; and that the world is an endlessly fascinating drama. (It would be hard for me to overstate how much I love Esther Perel right now. I feel like she is my pandemic buddy.) Also I recently learned that she speaks nine (9!) languages, which I am hoping will inspire me to work on doubling the number of languages in which I can converse, from one to two.
The other thing I have been listening to on my media blackout is LibriVox audiobooks.
This is an open source project with public domain books read by volunteers, so you get mostly the classics, which I like, and they are free, which I also like. In addition, they have no advertising, which I especially like right now. Some of the volunteer readers are better than others — I downloaded one very long book a while back that was read in a deathly monotone and was extremely difficult to listen to. (Though I was having significant sleep problems at the time and it was pretty good for listening to when I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep … so that was something at least.)
I’m now listening to Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, which is a collaborative reading so that is nice, different people reading different chapters — if you don’t like someone’s voice you’re probably only going to have to make it through a few chapters before you get someone else. I’ve been listening to it mostly while cooking or doing the dishes, so sometimes there will be something I miss with the running of water or clattering of dishes or whatnot, and usually I just keep going but if I start to lose track of what’s happening in the story I’ll back up and listen again.
In a recent listening session there were a few lines that confused me, and I listened to them again and they still confused me. I thought it might be the way it was read so I went to see if I had a copy of the book on my bookshelf, which I did, and I was surprised to see how many passages were underlined. I clearly read it for a class, though I don’t remember which one. Possibly Victorian Literature. Man we read a lot of words in that class.
I did find the passage that was confusing, and I didn’t understand the written version either. So there. Sometimes things in old books are confusing.
But anyway, all of that is to say that I am very much enjoying listening to the book, and being able to escape into a past century, where certainly there were many problems, but none of them are my problems, and most of them only make it into Jane Austen in a very oblique way.
I don’t remember the book much at all from reading it, so it is familiar in a general Jane Austen-type way, but not in any way that detracts from my listening pleasure.
One of the things I’m sure I didn’t notice when I read it in college is how funny and biting Austen is when writing about mothers and children. (Based on my underlining of passages, we focused mainly on the courtship and marriage angle in class.) The primary object of her satire on this subject in Sense and Sensibility is Lady Middleton:
There was nothing in any of the party which could recommend them as companions to the Dashwoods: but the cold insipidity of Lady Middleton was so particularly repulsive, that in comparison of it the gravity of Colonel Brandon, and even the boisterous mirth of Sir John and his mother-in-law was interesting. Lady Middleton seemed to be roused to enjoyment only by the entrance of her four noisy children after dinner, who pulled her about, tore her clothes, and put an end to every kind of discourse except what related to themselves.
When, in chapter 21, the Miss Steeles are invited to visit Barton Park, Lady Middleton is initially opposed to their coming, despite being told that they are relatives of her mother, but her opinion is changed once they come on the scene:
The young ladies arrived, their appearance was by no means ungenteel or unfashionable. Their dress was very smart, their manners were very civil, they were delighted with the house, and in raptures with the furniture, and they happened to be so doatingly [sic] fond of children that Lady Middleton’s good opinion was engaged in their favour before they had been an hour at the Park. She declared them to be very agreeable girls indeed, which for her ladyship was enthusiastic admiration.
The Miss Dashwoods (who are the main characters of the story), are less taken with the Miss Steeles upon meeting them, but Elinor warms to them when she realizes that they can keep Lady Middleton occupied in such a way that will spare her and her sister Marianne from having to do much of anything with any of them:
“Fortunately for those who pay their court through such foibles, a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, the most rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow any thing; and the excessive affection and endurance of the Miss Steeles towards her offspring, were viewed therefore by Lady Middleton without the smallest surprise or distrust. She saw with maternal complacency all the impertinent incroachments and mischievous tricks to which her cousins submitted. She saw their sashes untied, their hair pulled about their ears, their work-bags searched, and their knives and scissors stolen away, and felt no doubt of its being a reciprocal enjoyment. It suggested no other surprise than that Elinor and Marianne should sit so composedly by, without claiming a share in what was passing.
‘John is in such spirits today!’ said she, on his taking Miss Steele’s pocket handkerchief, and throwing it out the window – ‘He is full of monkey tricks.’
And soon afterwards, on the second boy’s violently pinching one of the same lady’s fingers, she fondly observed, ‘How playful William is !’
‘And here is my sweet little Annamaria,’ she added, tenderly caressing a little girl of three years old, who had not made a noise for the last two minutes: ‘And she is always so gentle and quiet — Never was there such a quiet little thing !’
But unfortunately in bestowing these embraces, a pin in her ladyship’s head dress slightly scratching the child’s neck, produced from this pattern of gentleness, such violent screams, as could hardly be outdone by any creature professedly noisy. The mother’s consternation was excessive; but it could not surpass the alarm of the Miss Steeles, and every thing was done by all three, in so critical an emergency, which affection could suggest as likely to assuage the agonies of the little sufferer. She was seated in her mother’s lap, covered with kisses, her wound bathed with lavender-water, by one of the Miss Steeles, who was on her knees to attend her, and her mouth stuffed with sugar plums by the other. With such a reward for her tears, the child was too wise to cease crying. She still screamed and sobbed lustily, kicked her two brothers for offering to touch her, and all their united soothings were ineffectual till Lady Middleton luckily remembering that in a scene of similar distress last week, some apricot marmalade had been successfully applied for a bruised temple, the same remedy was eagerly proposed for this unfortunate scratch, and a slight intermission of screams in the young lady on hearing it, gave them reason to hope that it would not be rejected. — She was carried out of the room therefore in her mother’s arms, in quest of this medicine, and as the two boys chose to follow, though earnestly entreated by their mother to stay behind, the four young ladies were left in a quietness which the room had not known for many hours.
Now there’s a description of a social visit involving small children if ever I read one!
I also like the very first introduction to Lady Middleton, when she appears at Barton Cottage with her husband and young son:
Conversation however was not wanted, for Sir John was very chatty, and Lady Middleton had taken the wise precaution of bringing with her their eldest child, a fine little boy about six years old, by which means there was one subject always to be recurred to by the ladies in case of extremity, for they had to inquire his name and age, admire his beauty, and ask him questions which his mother answered for him, while he hung about her and held down his head, to the great surprise of her ladyship, who wondered at his being so shy before company as he could make noise enough at home. On every formal visit a child ought to be of the party, by way of provision for discourse. In the present case it took up ten minutes to determine whether the boy were most like his father or his mother, and in what particular he resembled either, for of course every body differed, and every body was astonished at the opinion of the others.
So there you have it. Jane Austen on children.
And if anyone is looking for an escape from the current moment, I recommend LibriVox.
Bananas
Saturday, May 23, 2020
I have a couple of friends who frequently end up with large quantities of slightly past-its-prime food — food that is still usable for certain purposes but can’t be distributed because it fell outside the window of acceptable food safety (e.g., it was held at the wrong temperature for too long) or for some other reason. Sometimes the problem is just too much of one thing all at the same time that they don’t have the capacity to distribute while it will still be edible.
Knowing that I both (a) hate food waste and (b) love a food bargain, these friends will contact me when they have some excess food item they need to get off their hands. Which is how I recently ended up with a case of ripe bananas in my kitchen. (I actually took two cases, but was able to give half of them away to friends and neighbors.)
I said I would take them because I know that you can peel bananas and freeze them and they will keep indefinitely. You can use them straight out of the freezer for smoothies or you can take them out and thaw them to use in pancakes or muffins, or to make banana bread.
I have a friend who would freeze bananas in the peel and then take them out and thaw them in a bowl and take the peel off when they were thawed and mash them and make banana bread. This is fine if the only thing you are going to do with the bananas is make banana bread, and if you are willing to wait for the bananas to thaw before you use them. It won’t work if you want to use them frozen in a smoothie. This I learned when I tried to peel a frozen banana and I thought my fingers were going to fall off, they were so cold. You cannot imagine how cold your fingers can get until you try to peel a frozen banana. OMG so cold.
So now my strategy is to peel the bananas and wrap each banana individually in little piece of plastic wrap. I put the wrapped bananas in a plastic bag, and then I put the plastic bag in a zip-top freezer bag. (I usually insist on putting a label with anything I put in the freezer so that later I can figure out what it is, but I’ve found bananas to be sufficiently visually identifiable that I can skip that step.)
I know that seems like a lot of plastic but you can reuse it for the next round of bananas, so it’s not as bad as it sounds.
Then you can just pull out of the freezer however many bananas as you need.
If you have just a few bananas, not a case of them, you can skip the freezing step and just wait until they get ripe enough to made banana bread. For banana bread, you want your bananas to be really ripe — almost uniformly brown.
I had a good whole-wheat banana bread recipe that I liked a lot that I hadn’t made in a while so I was going to make that but then when I looked at it I was reminded that it calls for maple syrup, which I don’t have at the moment. So I went in search of a new recipe, and because I had so many bananas to use up, I was looking for the one that called for the most banana. Some of them said one or two bananas, some said two or three, some of them said a half cup or one cup of mashed banana.
Then I found one that I thought said one and three-quarters cups, so I made that one, but then later when I looked at it more carefully, I realized it actually said one and a quarter cups. Oops. But it worked with one and three quarters, so I just stuck with three medium-to-large bananas as the baseline banana amount. (The original recipe says two large bananas or three small. Some of the bananas I had were GIANT, they were like mutant bananas. I think I used three pretty big bananas and it worked okay.)
I made the recipe three times: the first time for me, and to test the recipe; the second to give to the friend who gave me the bananas; and the third to give to a friend who told me that he loved banana bread so much that sometimes he would drive to the Bob Evans restaurant just to buy their banana bread. I gave him the recipe along with the bread, maybe it will inspire him to learn how to make it. It’s never too late to learn how to make your own banana bread.
As I made it, I made some adjustments to the recipe. Here is the final version I came up with.
[NOTE: I was not able to put nuts in this because I didn’t have any, and was not motivated to go get any, but if you like nuts in your banana bread, feel free to add 1/2 cup nuts — walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts — to the final mix-in.]
HELP I NEED TO GET RID OF A CASE OF BANANAS BANANA BREAD
1/3 cup softened butter
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 egg
1-1/2 cup flour [NOTE: The original recipe calls for 1 cup wheat flour and 1/2 cup white flour, but I used white flour only because that’s what I had in my pantry and there was no flour to be had in my local grocery store the last three times I shopped. Once I can get my hands on some wheat flour, I’ll try it with that.]
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon [optional]
1/4 tsp nutmeg [optional]
1-1/4 to 1-3/4 cup mashed banana (from 3 ripe bananas)
1/4 cup buttermilk or yogurt
1 tsp vanilla extract [optional]Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and beat until combined.
In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, salt, and spices, if using.
In another bowl, combine the banana, buttermilk or yogurt, and vanilla.
Alternate adding the wet and dry ingredients to the butter/sugar/egg mixture and stir until combined.
Pour into a greased loaf pan and bake at 350F degrees until the top is brown and the loaf is springy to the touch. (You can use a toothpick to test, but with so much banana in this, the toothpick may still come out looking wet even when the batter is cooked all the way.)
Do your best to not to eat all of it as soon as you take it out of the oven.
Who Know?
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
I have many friends who are very funny. One of the things that tends to happen with my very funny friends is that there will be a funny story that can be boiled down into a single phrase that can be thrown out to make people laugh, just hearing that one phrase. That’s all you need.
Like one night when I was living in the Washington, D. C. area and one of our very funny friends wanted to go to a place for dinner that she was trying to talk everyone into going to, so she kept saying the name of the place. She was from Kentucky and she was boisterous (okay, she was loud) and this was when I was in my mid-20s so the odds are good that alcohol was involved. Especially with these friends. The name of the place happened to be Chicken City, so that’s what she kept repeating, loudly, in a drunken Kentucky accent.
CHICK’N ci-daaaay!!!!!!
(I wish I could do justice to her phrasing with my writing, but alas my Kentucky accent transcription skills are not what they need to be to make this happen.)
So for weeks/months/years after that all you had to do was say “Chick’n ci-daaaay” in your own pale imitation of our Kentucky friend and everyone would start laughing. (I find this especially funny given that we did not even go to Chicken City that night; our re-creation of our friend’s Chicken City call to action became its own thing, independent of any actual activity involving a restaurant with the name of Chicken City.)
My friend Sue, who I also was friends with during that period of my life and who I have written about previously, made me laugh more than anyone.
I wish podcasts had been around then, I think Sue and I could have hosted a great show. We used to talk on the phone almost every night, usually late, because my roommate would be on the phone every night, talking first to her boyfriend and then to her parents. (This was back in the day when phones went with dwelling units, not people.) So I would be in my room and Lisa would knock and say, “Sue called, she said you should call her back. Do you want the phone?” And I’d say “Yes,” so Lisa would walk in with the cordless phone and hand it to me. Half the time I was already in bed (I used to be a normal person who had to get up and go to a job in the morning so I went to bed at a normal-person time) so I would call Sue back from the comfort of my bed and we’d chat about whatever was going on. Sue had worked on the (Bill) Clinton campaign starting in New Hampshire when no one gave him much of a chance of winning then when it turned out that he actually did win, she took a job with the Administration, so there was always some crazy government thing to discuss in addition to whatever was going on in our personal lives. So we would talk about the day’s news, personal and political, and invariably she would start talking about something that would end up being just so funny, I remember so often just laughing and laughing. It seemed a waste for the two of us to be the only people hearing these hilarious conversations.
One of the stories that Sue told around this time, that turned into its own catchphrase, was about her going to get a haircut.
I don’t remember all of the details — she went to a place that was a new place, or maybe the place had been recommended by someone but she hadn’t been there, or maybe it was a place she’d been before but her regular stylist wasn’t there. I don’t remember. But whatever it was Sue found herself at a salon sitting in a chair in front of a stylist she didn’t know. The stylist was a very nice, very young Vietnamese woman with passable but not great English language skills.
The stylist asks Sue what she wants done with her hair today. Sue does not have a strong opinion on what she wants done with her hair today, she’s willing to entertain options. This is why she goes to a stylist, so the stylist can tell her what she should do with her hair.
So the stylist asks this question and Sue says, “Oh, you know. It needs to be cut, I don’t have strong feelings. I don’t really know.”
The stylist stops and looks quizzically at Sue in the mirror. Don’t know?
She points to Sue and says, “You no know,” she points to herself and says, “Me no know,” then she shrugs and raises her hands towards her shoulders, palms up, and puts forth a deep, heartfelt query: “Who know?”
Like it is the world’s greatest mystery, what should be done with Sue’s hair today.
And Sue is like Uhhh is it too late for me to get out of this chair and go find a different stylist?
But she stuck it out and got her hair cut. And I don’t remember what it looked like, so that means it couldn’t have been too bad. And we got a good story out of it.
After that, whenever Sue and I were in a situation where we were talking about something that seemed exceedingly complicated, that we weren’t sure of, that we didn’t know the answer to, one or the other of us would shrug and raise our palms and say, “Who know?” Which would make both of us laugh.
I sometimes find myself telling that story to other people, lo these many years later, because I sometimes find myself putting my hands up and saying, “Who know?” and I feel like the catchphrase works better with the full story behind it.
Especially lately I seem to have been telling that story a lot because I seem to find myself using the phrase when talking about things that are unknown, or unknowable. Of which there seem to be many at this point in time.
You no know. Me no know. Who know?
Who know, indeed.
Food Update, Week of March 30
Thursday, April 2, 2020
My main project so far has been trying to not waste food.
On Wednesday 3/11, I stopped at the Lakewood Food Lion (which I LOVE, by the way, I know there are a lot of FL haters out there but that store is good — really good prices, super clean, nice fresh produce). This was before the coronavirus dam burst, but after everyone was worrying that it might. I had been on an eating-down-the-fridge project, trying to get rid of all of the detritus that had built up in my pantry and freezer over the past few weeks/months/years of erratic eating, and I’d gotten through a lot. This was good, that was the whole point, to give me a fresh start. But it also meant that my backstock was limited. Not so good when the apocalypse comes.
When I left work that night I decided that since I had my car and I wasn’t in a hurry or starving to death, I should do a big shop while I was right there. So I bought some food for dinner plus a restock — I bought eggs, pasta, canned salmon, canned tuna, frozen chicken patties, canned fruit, cans of seltzer. It came out to over $50 in groceries, which is a lot for me. (Usually these days I spend around $20 per shopping trip, with one shopping trip every week to 10 days. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But in that range.)
The next day, Thursday 3/12, was when the wheels started to come off the bus. But things were still generally rolling. The weekend was pretty normal. It was the next week that things really started to fall apart.
On Tuesday morning 3/17, before I headed in to the meeting at work where I would find out that I was being furloughed, I made a trip to King’s, where I usually shop, and bought things I normally buy, but somewhat more than usual, just in case. I bought a stewing hen, ground beef, ham hock, russet potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, cucumber, apples, eggs. Another $50. Then I went to the Food Lion on Roxboro Rd, which is more of a standard Food Lion, it is definitely not the Food Lion at Lakewood, and stocked up with more long-lasting items: flour, oats, pasta, canned tomatoes, peanut butter, dried beans, canned tuna. And of course BROWNIE MIX. Because you never know.
Another $50.
So I had now spent $150 on groceries in less than a week. That is a lot of groceries for me to have at one time.
But you know. Pandemic.
I had previously planned on going down to the coast the weekend of 3/20 with my friend Ann, who has a house in Carteret County. We debated whether or not to go but in the end decided that we would. Neither one of us had a job, there aren’t any people to speak of where her house is, and I figured if we didn’t stop on the way down or on the way back, it didn’t seem significantly more or less dangerous than staying home.
So on Friday 3/20, we went away for the weekend.
We took a cooler with food with us so we wouldn’t have to stop for groceries and could just work with what we had. We were there for three days and we didn’t even scratch the surface of the food we had brought. So on Monday we packed up everything we hadn’t eaten and brought it back with us, including leftovers of the things we’d made.
We got back Monday evening 3/23, and I’ve spent the past week trying to work my way through the leftovers and everything I had bought in the pandemic rush before we left.
I ate the rest of the pasta dish I had made on Sunday that we didn’t finish (penne, tomato sauce, mushrooms, green pepper, onion). I also ate some of the rice pudding I had made in an effort to rescue a brown rice fail — I had put some rice on the stove to cook then completely forgot about it. It was over very low heat, so it didn’t burn, but it did cook down to mush. So I added sugar, milk, half and half, raisins. And that actually worked out pretty well. I ate some of it while we were down there, the night I made it, and the rest came back with me. I had some of the leftovers the first night I was back then I stuck the rest in the fridge. I thought I might have let it go too long, but I looked at it yesterday and it was still good. So I had that for desert Tuesday and Wednesday and can now cross that off the list of things I thought I might lose.
I had made cookies to take down with us — half went to a friend who was supposed to go with us but didn’t, because she has an elderly mother in the area and didn’t want to be 3 hours away, and the other half we ate some of while we were there and then I brought the rest back. They were oatmeal raisin cookies, made with a Marion Cunningham recipe that I tried for the first time, which had honey in it. The honey gave them a nice, complex flavor, they were very tasty, but it also made the texture a bit complicated. They got very soft after baking, so I put them in the freezer to see if that would help them keep, but then they kind of all fused together. But they were also quite crumbly, so it was hard to separate them. It was just kind of a big blob of cookie.
They made the trip in a freezer bag, then I stuck the remainder of the cookie blob in a cookie tin when I got back, and have been eating handfuls of crumbs, with the occasional whole cookie, since then. I ate the last cookie yesterday, so no waste there either.
And yay! All the deserts are gone! So now I get to make something else.
I made my standard cole slaw recipe before I went down, which is from the plaid Better Homes & Gardens cookbook — the dressing is mayonnaise, vinegar, sugar, salt, celery seed — and I was worried I was going to lose some of that, because I had made quite a large batch, but I finished that up today and it was fine.
I still had half a cabbage in the fridge, so on Monday I made Marion Cunningham’s L. A. Slaw, which is good and keeps for a long time, and kept out about a cup and a half of chopped cabbage which I’ll need to do something with soon. I’m thinking maybe stir fry, or yakisoba.
I have to keep working on the iceberg lettuce, which I used to think of as being very ephemeral but is actually quite robust. It keeps surprisingly well.
I made a vinaigrette with olive oil and raspberry vinegar, and can probably have as many tossed salads as I want, with carrots, and cucumber, and red pepper while it lasts. I’m not sure what else to do with iceberg lettuce, other than put it on a hamburger (which is actually why I bought it, because I wanted to make a hamburger with a quarter pound of the ground beef I bought, and then freeze the rest of the ground beef). I was thinking about green smoothies, but I’m not sure if I have anything that would work for that. I’ve just been doing basic orange-banana smoothies, I don’t really have any other fruit or juices around, and I’m not sure how lettuce would go in that. I think I need to do some more research on that.
If anyone has iceberg lettuce suggestions, let me know.
I had cooked the hen before I left, I poached it with onion, celery, bay leaf, peppercorns, dried pepper, then took the meat off the bone and froze it in three ounce packets, so I can pull one out of the freezer and reheat while I cook the rest of my meal.
Last night I had some of the chicken with penne pasta and pesto that I have in the freezer, that my mom made for me, with basil from her garden, when I was at her house in the fall.
One of the things I had been eating a lot of before I flooded myself with food then went out of town was grits bowls. They serve them at Grub, and I had one, and it was good, but mostly it made me think, Hm. I could make this myself. So I did.
Here’s how I’ve been making them.
GRITS BOWL
For the grits
1/3 cup grits (not instant!)
1-1/3 cup water or chicken stock
1/4 to 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 to 1 Tbsp butter (optional)approx 1/2 to 1 oz grated cheese of your choice (cheddar, pepper jack, swiss)
Worcestershire sauce
ground pepper
tabasco sauce (optional)Mix-Ins (as many or as few as you’d like … just regular cheese grits are good on their own)
cooked chicken (or cooked bacon or cooked sausage, or some combination thereof)
frozen spinach
chopped tomato
fried egg1. Make cheese grits.
Put the grits, salt, and water or stock in a saucepan. Stir with a whisk to combine and get rid of any lumps, and bring to a boil. Turn the heat to low, and cook covered, stirring occasionally, until all of the water has been absorbed and the grits are thick and creamy.When the grits are cooked, turn off the heat and add the grated cheese, a few turns of ground pepper, one or two dashes of worcestershire sauce, and hot sauce, if desired. Cover the pot and let the cheese melt. Once melted, stir everything together so the cheese and sauces are evenly distributed throughout the grits.
2, Prepare the mix-ins.
In a separate pan, heat together the chicken, spinach and/or tomato, and whatever else you’d like to include. Season to taste. (I have been using Penzey’s jerk chicken & fish seasoning, along with ancho chili pepper, to great effect. Except that I just ran out of the ancho chili pepper so I’ll have to make some adjustments there.)I use 2 or 3 ounces of cooked chicken, about a third of a cup of frozen spinach, and maybe a quarter cup or of chopped tomato, if I have it. Chicken is what I use the most, because I almost always have that in the freezer, but I’ve also made it with sausage or with bacon, which I cook up while I’m making the grits.
You can fry an egg separately, with a soft runny yolk or a hard center, as you prefer, and add that along with the other mix-ins. It depends on how hungry I am (and how many eggs I have available) if I include the egg or not.
You can mix it up in the pot you cooked the grits in, or you can put the grits in a bowl then add the mix-ins and mix it up in the bowl.
Good stuff — easy, cheap, and made with things you can keep on hand.
In pandemic updates, I read tonight that the songwriter Adam Schlesinger died from complications of COVID-19, which is tragic. (And not just because he was the same age as I am, though I do always find that disconcerting.) I love Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers is one of my favorite albums, there are just so many great songs on that, and he did the songwriting for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which is a brilliant comedic satire that I have had extremely limited success convincing anyone I know to watch. But it is just so funny. Not designed for binging, though, the story moves slowly and it repeats itself. Which works fine for weekly appointment television but gets tiresome when you try to watch a bunch in a row. It works better if you stretch it out. And actually the songs are the best part, and I think you can watch most or all of those on YouTube, so you could skip the show and just do that. Though be warned that they are ear worms — I had the line “I have friends. I definitely / have friends” stuck in my head for days and days once. (And probably will again, now that I am writing about it.)
So sad.
RIP, Adam Schlesinger.
Stay safe, people.
Waffle House
Sunday, March 29, 2020
When my brother’s girls were little he would make waffles for them on weekend mornings. Every time I’d visit and we’d be having breakfast, he’d tell me how great it was to make waffles, how much the girls loved them, how great they were. He would go on and on about it. Every time. He’d tell me I needed to get waffle maker. Homemade waffles are great. You should get a waffle maker.
I’d nod my head and agree. Yes, waffles are great.
(My mother’s mother, our Grandma Evelyn, used to make waffles for us for dinner when we’d stay over at her apartment when we were young. She died when we were still in elementary school, I was 9 and my brother was 10, so our memories of her are limited. But that is a strong memory for both of us, having waffles for dinner with our Grandma Evelyn. Maybe that’s why he liked making waffles for his daughters so much.)
While I was nodding my head and agreeing about waffles being great, I was thinking about how the chances of me going out and getting a waffle maker were zero. I live by myself. Making waffles for myself was just not on the list of things I needed to do. And anyway, I live in North Carolina. If I want waffles, I can go to Waffle House.
Never once, in all those years he was telling me I should make waffles, did I find myself thinking, Gee I wish I had a waffle iron so I could make waffles right now.
Then at some point in the past year or two (the last two years of my life is just one giant glob of time that can’t be separated into individual units … I have no idea when any of this happened or how much time elapsed between all of these steps), my friend Sara brought some stuff in to donate to The Scrap Exchange. Included in the donation pile was a waffle iron that she had intercepted from a mutual friend’s donation pile but then decided she didn’t want to keep. (I don’t remember the specifics but I think she had one, but she thought this one would be better, but it turned out it wasn’t better, so she brought it in to donate. Or something like that.)
She asked if I wanted it.
Now, a waffle iron wasn’t something I was about to go out and buy, but if someone was standing right in front of me with a nice vintage waffle iron, right there in my office, it seemed like I should take it. If it turned out I didn’t use it or it cluttered up my kitchen or whatever, I could always complete the donation cycle and finally get it to land at The Scrap Exchange. So I said I would take it.
The nice vintage waffle iron sat in my office for a bit then I moved it to my car and it stayed in my car for a bit then I finally got it into the house, where it probably sat in the living room for a few weeks/months, until eventually I found a permanent home for it in the kitchen cupboard.
And then, finally, one day, I made waffles for myself. (I don’t remember what inspired this but I think the first time I made them it was for dinner. Maybe I was channeling my Grandma Evelyn.)
They were good. But the recipe I used — the Everyday Waffle recipe from the plaid Better Homes & Gardens cookbook — made a lot, and also I put way too much batter in the waffle iron, it oozed all out the sides and made a big mess.
[SIDE NOTE: For anyone reading this who hasn’t made waffles before and is about to, you ladle a small amount of batter into the middle of the waffle iron and it flows out to the edges; when you put the top down it squeezes it all through the little channels. You don’t put a bunch of batter all over the waffle iron. After I did it, that seemed perfectly obvious, but it didn’t occur to me when I was putting the batter in for the first batch. Live and learn. And clean up the mess as you go!]
I made them again a few weeks/months later. The second round was better. I figured out how much to put on to the waffle iron without making a mess, I ate the ones I made fresh out of the waffle iron instead of making them all and then eating some (they are better hot because they are crisp; if you let them sit, they wilt from the steam), and I put the leftovers in the fridge and ate them later. They were pretty good left over. Not as good as they were hot off the iron, but good enough, with some strawberry jam on them.
So … they were definitely good, but because I haven’t made them much, they take a fair amount of mental energy; I have to think about the steps involved and make sure I’m doing them right, and also it takes a bit of time to mix up the batter then cook them all, and the recipe used kind of a lot of milk and it made way more waffles than I actually needed, so it felt wasteful. And you are supposed to separate the eggs and beat the whites separately but that just felt like SO MUCH WORK that I just mixed the egg in together. Lazy person’s waffles. So I wasn’t even doing it right and it still felt like too much work.
So, after actually getting a waffle iron and making waffles, it turned out that making waffles is something that I thought about fairly often but rarely did. Just about every Sunday when I wake up and think about what my day looks like, I think about making waffles. But then I don’t make them. It seems like a good idea when I’m lying in bed pondering my day, but once I’m up and doing things, it just seems like too much trouble. I end up making something else, something easier.
Until … pandemic!
Because what else do I have to do with myself but beat egg whites stiff and cook up the country ham slices that had been in the fridge for a month or two (exp. date July 2020 … still good!) and make some fresh hot crisp tasty waffles. And eat waffles and maple syrup and country ham. Sweet & salty & delicious.
Yum!
So if any of you out there are trying to figure out what to eat, and you have a waffle iron that you never use because it just feels like too much trouble, now is the time. Now is the time to make yourself some waffles.
Here is the recipe I used, which is half of the original Better Homes & Gardens cookbook recipe. (For today’s batch, I used self-rising flour, which already has the baking powder and salt mixed in with it, which I bought it by mistake and used it like it was regular flour in any number of recipes until I finally noticed the label and started using it properly.)
PANDEMIC EVERY DAY BUTTERMILK WAFFLES
- 3/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp white flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 cup sour milk or buttermilk [I used 1 Tbsp vinegar + sweet milk to make 1 cup]
- 1 beaten egg yolk
- 1/4 cup melted butter (or melted shortening or neutral tasting oil)
- 1 stiffly beaten egg white
Sift together dry ingredients. Combine milk, egg yolk, and oil; stir to combine; then stir into dry ingredients. Fold in whites (“leaving a few fluffs,” as the cookbook tells us.)
The full recipe says it makes three 10-inch waffles. I made smaller ones, and think I made four waffles, three of which were immediately devoured and the last put in the fridge to be eaten later in the week, with strawberry jam.
I do hope that everyone is well and healthy during this time, and staying safe, and being creative in thinking about ways to spend your time and energy.
If anyone is wondering what’s going on in my life, I will tell you that a new Executive Director came on at The Scrap Exchange in May 2019 and my job switched from finance to operations while we tried to work through some major bottlenecks (most of which we were able to get through by the end of the year). In January, I asked to cut my hours down to 10-20 hours a week for three months to try to recover from the last two years of dramafest, and then we could revisit at the end of that time period to see where things were at. I was nearing the end of the three months when our two stores shut down and all of the staff, including me, were furloughed.
So now I’m in a weird in-between state, with no responsibilities, and not even really able to think about what I might do eventually, or when I might want to do it, because the whole world feels like it’s in a state of suspended animation. And I know people are suffering, and I don’t want to minimize that or be flippant about it, but I’ve really been enjoying myself. My normal state is one of social isolation, so this hardly feels any different — except of course that I don’t have a job. Which in some ways is worrisome, no job means no money, but in other ways is such a huge relief. Because I don’t have to think at all about this place that I spent the last ten years of my life spending so much time and energy worrying about and trying to make work. It is someone else’s problem now.
I’m sure I will start to go crazy at some point but I’m not even close to that yet, it just has been feeling really good to not have to think about anything and for once in my life to not have to think about what I should be doing. Because there’s nothing I can do, whatever I’m doing is what I should be doing.
I’ve stopped listening to the news and I don’t have a TV so that eliminates some major sources of anxiety. I’m still reading the paper but I can be selective about that. I’m strictly limiting my use of the internet. I’ve mostly been reading books (published a minimum of 10 years ago), and listening to previously downloaded podcasts, and watching DVDs on my computer. And trying to get through all the things in my house that I spent the last 2+ years ignoring. Just getting through that should keep me busy for months.
And then after that, who knows. There’s always waffles.
Less Is Enough 