Parental Advisory. Don’t look if you have arachnophobia
I don’t think she wants to share.
DIY recipes for the pantry: sweetened condensed milk
Continuing in the series of DIY recipes we found in Aunt Regina’s collection. Sweetened condensed milk, for those times you want to keep your pledge to not cook from a can.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #244
Peggy (sneezing): Achoo! Achoo!
Sam: Bless you. Bless you. (pauses) There. I’m covered.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #243
Sam (as he drizzles the last of the orange glaze on orange muffins): Done!
Peggy: Sweet!
Sam: Yeah, I put too much deliciousness in there.
DIY recipes for the pantry: Hot sauce
I spent the day today with Mark’s Aunt Regina and his stepmom, Patti, at Regina’s house outside Kilgore. Patti had been telling me that the cookbook and recipe collection stuffed in the cupboard above Regina’s refrigerator was a treasure, and she was right.
We set aside two accordion files to go through today, hunting specifically for things Regina, or her mother (that would be my children’s great-grandmother), or Patti had written down. I ended up capturing more than 240 images this afternoon. And occasionally taking notes.
Sometimes Regina just had a list of ingredients and the barest of instructions. We talked through it all, to make sure we knew what we were hanging on to and what we were tossing.
I noticed, as I’ve often seen with older recipes, that most of them were quite simple. Regina clipped and saved a lot of recipes, but you could tell by the splatters which ones she used. Patti asked about one that had long instructions. “Did you make this?” she asked. “Oh, no!” Regina said. “When it takes two pages of instructions, no, I didn’t make it.”
I was the most excited to see some of her DIY recipes — salami and ravioli and brisket and hot sauce (below) and sweetened, condensed milk, “for those times when you can’t find it,” Regina said. There’s never been a time that there wasn’t sweetened condensed milk, even the nonfat variety, at the store when I wanted it for a recipe. But Regina is 91, with a life experience that transcends the Great Depression and several wars. That just gave me pause, thinking how much life can change.
We’ll start with the hot sauce. “It’s hot. You have to use gloves,” Regina says.
Hot Sauce
12 red peppers
12 green peppers
12 onions
Grind peppers and onions. Cover with boiling water and let set 5 minutes. Drain.2 cup sugar
2 cup vinegar
3 tablespoons salt
Combine sugar, vinegar and salt. Boil until sugar melts. Add peppers and onions. Cook 5 minutes.
Making your own way: Baked Oatmeal
I’ve racked up a lot of miles traveling to Iowa City and back the past two years. One small thing that’s always made it more pleasant was knowing at the end of the trip was a house on the hill with a comfy bed and fluffy towels and, in the morning, super-smooth coffee and an exceptionally good breakfast.
The house has the tiniest driveway I’ve ever had to maneuver my pickup into. I never would get there before sundown, but that was ok, because Ray and Shirley installed a motion-sensitive light to help out. The squeeze was totally worth it for another reason: the house was only a few blocks, walking distance, from the dorms where Paige lived at the University of Iowa for the past two years.
Mission House – Iowa City
This year, we arrived for the fall semester with a new project: moving Paige into her first apartment. The morning of, I laced up the shoes and went for a morning run along the river, another pleasant part of the routine, and returned to see something I hadn’t noticed the night before. A big “for sale” sign in the front yard.
Bummer. Even innkeepers need to retire.
I’m glad I picked up their recipe book, so if I get a hankering for the way Shirley made eggs (they were never just eggs), I can do it on my own.
What was likely our last stay, though, she made baked oatmeal to accommodate a guest with dietary restrictions. I asked her to send the recipe to me, since it wasn’t in the cookbook, and then promptly adapted it to what I had in the house. It turned out terrific.
Baked Oatmeal
1 cup hazelnuts
1 cup Irish, steel-cut oats
1 large egg
1 cup fresh figs, cut bite-sized (you can substitute apples and raisins)
1/4 cup milk
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup canola oil
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
Toast hazelnuts in a 350 oven for 10-15 minutes until brown, wrap in kitchen towel to cool, rub skins off and set aside.
Bring 4 cups of water to boil, add oats and cook until soft, about 30 minutes. Let cool about 10 minutes. Combine egg, brown sugar, milk, oil, baking power, salt and cinnamon; fold in figs and then stir into oats. Spoon mixture into a greased loaf pan, cover and refrigerate overnight.
Remove from the refrigerator 30 minutes before baking. Preheat oven to 350 and then bake the loaf 50-60 minutes until knife inserted in center comes out clean. Cut into squares, top with a handful of hazelnuts and serve with a small amount of milk poured over the top.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #242
Peggy: “Have you seen this video of Miley Cyrus on the VMAs?”
Michael: “Mom, don’t watch that garbage.”
Vaccines. Just do it.
Until I finished Seth Mnookin’s book, The Panic Virus, it never occurred to me that all of the autism community could face backlash in the future if the anti-vaccine movement continues to take its toll.
I don’t blame vaccines for autism. Scientists have been looking for connections for years and they haven’t found any. Autism rates are continuing to rise even though they removed the mercury preservative from vaccines years ago. And, the study that supposedly linked autism to the MMR vaccine was compromised. (That’s the short version of the science, for the exhaustive, researched version, reach for Mnookin’s book.) It’s distressing that people who should know better, and people in positions of trust, promote parent choice to withhold vaccines as somehow cautious and thoughtful.
It’s not.
This week, we learned of a serious local outbreak of the measles traced to the members of a church that holds an anti-vaccine position.
You wouldn’t take your child to the doctor and then not follow the treatment protocol. That would be heartless and irresponsible. Some people get as mad as a bumped bed of fire ants thinking about changes that could come because of the Affordable Care Act — mercy, you might have to wait for care, or be denied a high-cost treatment option in favor of something less expensive. But somehow you want a choice now, passing on a well-established protocol that prevents some of childhood’s killer diseases? That’s irrational, and irresponsible.
How irresponsible? Derek Bartholomaus keeps a body count.
How to be spontaneous
Sam got an email Friday giving him a day’s notice for a chance to ride on a float Born2Be would have in the North Texas Fair and Rodeo parade Saturday morning. He forwarded the email to me. I replied that I already had promised to run trail with Susan Saturday morning, but this looked like something fun he could do on his own.
When I got home from work that evening, he said he just didn’t think that a day’s notice was enough notice for him. Did he have to go to work Saturday? Did he have other plans? He said no. But, from time to time, through the evening, he would talk about the parade. I knew he was thinking about it.
Finally, I reminded him that in the movie, Mama Mia, the character, Harry, had a hard time being spontaneous, but he saw everyone else being spontaneous, so he wanted to try. Maybe you can try to be spontaneous like Harry, I told him.
Sam decided to call someone at B2B for more information, and went to bed early with a tentative plan of how he would fit the parade into his day. Sam’s right, a person does have to lay some groundwork to be spontaneous.
Saturday morning we all were up early, and he was ready to head out the door to get there in time to meet everyone else. He was home by lunch and said he had a great time.
Photo by my Denton Record-Chronicle co-worker, David Minton.
“I’m spontaneous,” he said.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #241
Peggy (passing the dishcloth): Would you wipe that tomato splatter off the pantry door please?
Sam: Yes. I’ve been doing a lot of that today.
Peggy: What do you mean?
Sam: Upstairs, I had to wipe all the dead mosquitos off the ceiling.