Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for February, 2024

From Soup to Sanity

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 27, 2024| Leave a Comment »

This has been the winter for strengthening one of my super powers – SOUP! During the pandemic, while Bob honed in on his sourdough bread, I discovered a delicious Asparagus Vegetable Soup recipe courtesy of Jamie Oliver https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetables-recipes/creamy-asparagus-soup-with-a-poached-egg-on-toast/. I don’t do the egg on top nonsense btw. Now, due to unforeseen circumstances, I’ve been experimenting with more healthy and hearty soups. My take on these liquid elixirs is usually thick, like a stew.

But I’d rather not label these gastronomic efforts; or maybe I should just call everything I make in one big pot “chowder”? Thinking chowder was meant only for fish stews, I went in search of its meaning and yes, it’s mostly fish, but not always – https://www.foodandwine.com/soup/chowder/chowder

The problem with Bob is he’s not happy when I whip out the immersion blender. He likes a chunky soup, he wants to identify the vegetables. Maybe it’s just that we still have all our teeth? I did manage to win him over with a beautiful, cauliflower soup from the New York Times: Creamy Cauliflower Soup with Rosemary Olive Oil! https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1020764-creamy-cauliflower-soup-with-rosemary-olive-oil that surprisingly has no cream whatsoever!

I’m probably best known for the soup I deliver to new moms and friends recovering from an illness. We have a cousin who was in need of some Jewish penicillin, so last week I taught his wife, Peg, how to make it, Reform Jewish Style. When I was in the middle of converting to Judaism, the rabbi arranged a cooking class for me. You guessed it – Real Chicken Soup! No matzah balls, no noodles or rice, just the basics. I’ve never felt so professional as I passed on my secret recipe to Peg in her new kitchen! She was a delightful sous chef, while also archiving the lesson for all eternity.

I brought my Starbucks apron and we traded tidbits of of gossip, chopping away, slowly perfuming the air with chicken fat. Maybe the world needs the next Southern Jewish French Irish Julia Child? My cousin is also a writer, a prolific expository health journalist, for major digital and print news outlets. In fact, she already has a cookbook… and I might have major writer-envy… but in a good way. I’m so happy Peg and her husband moved right across the river.

The Bride’s famous Sweet Potato Soup was recently discussed in detail here https://mountainmornings.net/2024/01/24/gray-swan-events/ and it continues to be a favorite in my winter soup rotation. Don’t despair if you don’t have any V8 on hand, you can substitute a can of fire-roasted tomatoes. I love the dollop of peanut butter you add at the end. This might be my favorite soup of 2023, and next on the list?

I’d like to try my hand at Pasta e Fagioli, a classic Italian pasta and bean soup. The Flapper used to make this all the time. I asked my brother and sister if they remembered a favorite soup from their childhood, and they both said Pea Soup. They like to remind me that their early years were much harder than mine. After our Year of Living Dangerously, Kay told me she had to do all of the housework, including cooking, while our mother was “… lying on the couch in the kitchen.” Jim told me if they had a ham to eat during the week, they could count on pea soup made with the bone that weekend.

They had no TV in 1949, and the radio was stuck in a big box in the front parlor, so the Flapper read aloud poems from a little red book, “A Thousand and One Poems.” Kay has all these poems stored away in her brain that she can recite at will. Just ask her! Occasionally a nurse would visit the kitchen in Scranton, trying to stretch out the Flapper’s legs, while I imagine my Mother screaming obscenities at the top of her lungs. Poetry and cursing in motion.

Making soup has become my antidote to cursing the media for leading every story with you know who. What about calling anorexia “terminal” so that patients can enter hospice? “In Colorado, a state where medical aid in dying is legal, [patients] would also be eligible for MAID (medical aid in dying) drugs…” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/26/terminal-anorexia-mental-illness-diagnosis/

What about Alabama calling embryos “babies”? “In a recent court case over embryos accidentally destroyed at a fertility clinic, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled under state law that all embryos are “children”. However, the global medical and scientific consensus on when reproductive cells become human life says otherwise.”

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240226-what-is-an-embryo-global-medical-definition-of-personhood-ivf-ruling

Ooof. I’ll continue making soup to calm my Novemberphobia.

Read Full Post »

Us vs Them

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2024| Leave a Comment »

There were Nazis marching in Nashville this past weekend. They were downtown, near the Capitol building, waving their swastika flags and dressed in black and red, their faces completely covered in ski masks. Not as many as the Charlottesville event that killed Heather Heyer the weekend we moved out of our Virginia mountain home in August of 2017. “Blood Tribe” was the name of this group of men with mommie issues. It’s assumed they didn’t have a permit, since there were no police lines, barricades or counter-protestors.

Just a small bunch of fools that mistakenly made their way towards the honky tonks… where one guy confronted them.

“Video showed a counterdemonstrator following the men along downtown streets, not far from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, challenging participants to show their faces. His video captured the march and his reaction.

“Cowards,” the man chanted, adding some expletives.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/neo-nazis-march-nashville-leave-challenged-rcna139415

He was actually yelling “F_ING COWARDS” to drown out their hateful speech. The Nazis retreated to a U-Haul and left the county. Sometimes it only takes one brave person, like the black and white photograph of a man in a German shipyard in 1936, surrounded by his co-workers who are all givng the Nazi salute. August Landmesser stands alone, with his arms folded across his chest. “Landmesser was opposed to the Nazis and their racial worldview. His partner, Irma Eckler, was Jewish.”

It seems fitting that the day before the Nazi rally, our family went to see the movie “Origin.” Director Ava DuVernay brought a highly researched, academic book, “Caste: the Origins of Our Discontent,” to the big screen in a compelling narrative.

“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.”

DuVernay filmed in Germany, beginning with the love story of August and Irma. Then she moved to the United States with its brutal history of slavery, where we learn that Nazi lawyers actually followed the Jim Crow template in devising anti-semitic rules and regulations. And finally we are shocked to discover the despicable caste system in India; how the lowest caste of untouchables, the Dalits, must live on the margins of society. We are shown, in exquisite detail, the way these three caste systems are similar; not so much rooted in race, but in keeping one segment of society down. Dehumanization is not limited to war, or one particular country.

I thought about how Confederate secessionist symbols are still on seven of our state flags. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/09/10/confederate-state-flags/ How it took a massacre in Charleston, SC to get Nikki Haley to remove the confederate part of her state’s flag. Germany does not allow any Nazi statuary or symbols to be displayed under penalty of prison. Those Blood Tribe miscreants would have been carted away to jail if they were in Munich.

I thought about how when I was a child, I was told by my foster parents that I couldn’t play with a school mate, because she was Puerto Rican. I heard that one girl couldn’t play with me because I was a Catholic. Bob’s best friend in middle school wasn’t allowed to come to his Bar Mitzvah because, you know, something might happen if he went in there. I didn’t understand it then, and I still don’t. But this weekend has been illuminating.

A portrait in brown, white and red.

Read Full Post »

Will You Be Mine?

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on February 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I can hear mourning doves outside my snug window. Their cooing soothes me into Spring. Are they looking for a lost love, or just announcing their presence? The sprinkling of snow we had last night must have given them plenty to coo about…

The Love Bug ordered heart shaped candies with romantic sayings on my phone with a swipe. She’s making Valentine confections for school. Over the weekend, Leslie left us heart shaped shortbread cookies wrapped in red ribbon, her latest in a series of delightful porch surprise packages. Bob’s ordered a special dinner from our local restaurant for tomorrow, complete with champagne. Cupid seems to be alive and well in Nashville, sharpening his little arrow this week.

And to top off this romantic week, the Rocker and Aunt Kiki celebrated 7 years of marital bliss in their newly renovated MidCenturyModern LA nest, while I thought about their delightful desert wedding in Palm Springs. https://mountainmornings.net/2017/02/14/happy-valentines-day/

The boys in the band flew west from NJ along with friends and family. The Bug was their flower girl while the toddler Pumpkin sported a fish taco bow tie to match his Dad’s. We stayed in a house with casitas, and I’ve longed for a casita (ie DADU in builder’s lingo) ever since. We rode a gondola up a mountain into the snow with cousins, and we fed giraffes at the zoo. California is a fairy tale come true – I felt like I belonged there. Wasn’t I the only girl skate boarding in the parking lot across from my step-father’s office in 1965? How many lemons did I squeeze into my freshly washed hair to dry in the sun? Didn’t I play the Beach Boys on repeat?

I was born to be a California Girl!

I just met a Cali grandmother on our street strolling her recently arrived grandbaby. She and her husband live in San Diego, but they are building a house one street over so they can live on the same block as their daughter. And it is not a small house, compared to our Blue Ridge home. Construction noise competes with a dove’s plaintive call. They plan on becoming migrating snow birds, like the cranes I saw in the clouds. Like us, they have adult creative/children in California. Their trusses are up and the Tyvec is on! And I know I shouldn’t envy them, it’s not a helpful emotion. But maybe it’s bringing up feelings of House Regret?

Bob’s had that feeling for decades. Great Grandma Ada’s family owned a small piece of land in Chester, NJ where her father Pinky had built a bungalow colony. A summer escape from the heat of Brooklyn, it was passed down to relatives over time. When Bob was a teenager, the aunts and uncles sold the Chester property, called Four Bridges. He’s sad about it to this day.

For me it was a villa called Papillon in the 80s. It was an older, pink patio home with a pool on the windward side of an island in the South West Indies. Not too big, not too small. It would have made a lovely vacation home. Bob wasn’t ready to commit to returning to the same place every year. Of course we did, return to that island time and time again. And each time we moaned about our lost opportunity since Papillon’s price, when it went back up for sale, had risen far beyond our reach.

Surprisingly, I don’t regret selling our mountain home, the one we built on 14 acres with a gorgeous view of the Blue Ridge. I had plans for a pond, and bunk beds for grandchildren in the basement. But moving to Nashville was an easy choice, I was tired of driving 9 hours for a visit. Plus, you know when your adult children aren’t coming home any more, their work and their children’s education begin to take precedence, and that’s how it should be. Unless you live in Italy.

Then you cannot live too far away from your Mama, it’s the rule.

But our generation of Americans, if we’re lucky enough to have a loving relationship with our kids, we get to pull up stakes and downsize. I knew what I was getting into marrying Bob – a pilot and ER doc who never sits still. His knee was shaking my desk in high school when he first stole my heart. Maybe moving back and forth between two families as a child was preparation for our nomadic life. I certainly don’t regret marrying him. I would do it all over again because my home is with him.

A psychologist said that only 5 year olds have no regrets, and sociopaths. I hope your Valentine’s Day is filled with love, of family, friends and fur babies – and very few romantic regrets.

Read Full Post »

It’s Delightful

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 5, 2024| 2 Comments »

On my way to the Bride’s house, I heard a strange sound. It was a typical early spring morning, a bit overcast and chilly and I thought to myself, I should have worn a heavier jacket. But it’s a short walk, just two houses down our street to the next block. Their house would be empty, everyone at work or school, and I’d promised the little French Emperor he could visit us and chase rabbits in our backyard. The sound was getting louder, and it was coming from the sky.

But first let me start with the beginning. Most mornings, I’ll sit in my snug for breakfast and scan the news on my desk/laptop – the BBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Bob and I will attempt to do the Connections puzzle if we have the time, and I might browse through the vegetarian recipes on Times’ Cooking. I may or may not pick up my phone, depending on a few factors; like did it ding and did I remember where I left it.

But that morning, the one with the otherworldly noise, I was looking at Instagram on my cell and saw that Brother Jones, aka TN52 Democrat Justin Jones, was visiting the Wheeler Wildlife Refuge in Alabama which attracts thousands of wintering waterfowl. It seems that the flight path between Wisconsin and Florida takes these magnificent birds right over Nashville. Jones was going to introduce a bill to protect the whooping crane, an endangered species that first migrated here in 2004. Whooping cranes numbered only around 20 in North America in the 1940s. Today we have about 600.

As I swiped left, I could hear a cacophony of noise, like a gaggle of geese had boarded a slow-moving train playing metal clackers with their webbed feet. I’ve seen great blue herons and egrets on the Jersey Shore, but I’ve never seen a crane of any kind.

And voila, not an hour later, I was gobsmacked, craning my head upwards, listening to the exact same discordant/natural/music/sounds I’d heard on my phone… only louder and more urgent. I shielded my eyes. For a long minute the clouds sauntered and the music amplified.

Then they appeared out of the mist in gray formation, scattered Zs so high up, heading north by northwest.

I stood very still. I remembered to breathe. I felt present, as if I belong. Thousands of sand cranes escorting whooping cranes through their ancient flyway. Escaping. Migrating.

When I returned home with the little emperor, I tried to tell Bob about the whooping cranes. I showed him the Jones video, but something was lost in translation. It was otherworldly, it was out-of-body, it was magic! And maybe, it was because of my T’ai Chi classes that I stopped and soaked in that moment. In the past, would I have stopped, or looked up for so long? “Mindfulness is deliberately paying full attention to what is happening around you and within you – in your body, heart, and mind. Mindfulness is awareness without criticism or judgement.” Jan Chozen Bays

Every day I am confronted by delightful experiences; a petulant dachshund named Lucy, rainbow sprinkled biscotti left on my porch by Leslie, a grandchild walking through the door. Or a video of an owl in the wild walking like Charlie Chaplin! I follow a New York City photographer named David Lei on the Gram, and was delighted to learn his pictures of Flaco, the aforementioned Eurasian eagle owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo, were recently featured in the NYTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/nyregion/flaco-owl-central-park-zoo.html

These small, unexpected delights add up and sustain me through health challenges and news cycles. And I can smell spring. We divided a monster (monstera) plant this week that had been devouring the dining room table. Its roots were like tentacles. Bob is planning to build a raised bed for vegetables. I can only hope the rabbits, chipmunks and birds approve of our choices this year.

 

Read Full Post »