Eat to live…. Or live to eat..

My half-cousin Jeanie (we had the same grandpa) is a very intelligent and perceptive person. We only met a couple of years ago via the Internet. I was not even aware she existed until she and my sister happened to connect on a genealogy Website. She is an anthropologist, did field work in Papua New Guinea (melanesia.org/fieldwork/tamakoshil), and was a college professor until she retired a few years ago. We have exchanged many e-mails, and I have had the pleasure of meeting her twice, the last time in November when she came to meet my father and his sister for the first time.

In one of the fascinating conversations we had during the week we spent together in Los Angeles, she was talking about the differences in the attitude toward food between the US and PNG. She says the isolated villagers in the interior of PNG have a very boring diet, consisting of yams, manioc, various dark green vegetables and fruits, no grains, certain grub-type insects, and little meat. If I remember correctly from my own anthropology classes in college, pigs do play an important role in the social life of the rural people but are eaten only occasionally at ceremonies and such. At any rate, the people eat only to survive, not for the sensual pleasure of it. And, not surprising, although they have pot bellies because of the large amount of fiber they must consume, they don’t overeat. And as a result, there is little obesity, and very few of the food-related illness that plague Westerners, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. The women don’t get osteoporosis, the girls hit puberty very late (sometimes not until they are 18). Course they may have other diet-related health problems because of low protein (anemia, and so forth), but at least they aren’t fat. Along with that, they must work very hard to survive. Very strenuous physical activity is part of everyday life – especially the women..

And then there’s us. We, on the other hand, live to eat. We live for the sensual pleasure of consuming food – far more food than we need. That coupled with our general lack of physical exercise has meant…. well, just LOOK at us. No. On second, thought, let’s don’t.

Why you Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker

I’m almost positive I have heard that, or a similar epithet, in an old western movie, but alas, searches of both Google and the Internet Movie Database came up empty. In any event, I’d have to say if that epithet had been uttered in some movie dialogue, it was very unfair to the Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker. Blue Jays are “showy, noisy” (says Peterson's Field Guide) and the most aggressive birds that come to the feeder. Some of the smaller birds are also aggressive, but they are not very big and the other birds don’t pay them much attention. Blue Jays are like the school bully: large and intimidating, full of bluff and bluster. A Blue Jay arrives and the rest get out of its way – it doesn’t play well with others. Except today I watched a Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker, a bird that gives the impression of being a rather mild, easy-going sort of fellow -- and certainly not aggressive -- stand its ground when a Blue Jay approached the suet cake it was eating. Not only did it not give way to the larger bird, it jabbed at the Blue Jay, sort of lunged at it. The Blue Jay immediately gave up and flew off. There must be a life lesson from this, just not sure what it is.

Hangin’ in thin air

I have observed an interesting phenomena a few times since we moved here when the conditions are just right. Frequently, when its supposed to be winter, the weather will warm and we’ll have a terrific thunderstorm and lots of rain – in fact, last week a tornado cut a small swath of destruction through the countryside just south of here – and the wet-weather spring in the woods behind the house will begin to flow (as it is doing right now). Our driveway turns into a mini-pond at the bend where all the runoff from the field collects and it trickles out across the driveway into a channel that flows eventually into the Eleven-Point river system. And after a few days of 50ish weather, winter will return again in full force and the temperatures plummet into the teens and below (as it has, in fact, done). The wet-weather spring will continue to flow for a week or so after a heavy downpour, but eventually it peters out. If the conditions are right, the surface freezes, but underneath, the water continues to flow until the spring finally quits. This leaves a sheet of ice suspended in mid-air. It’s quite lovely to see, but there is also an immense sense of satisfaction walking down the channel smashing the ice and hearing it tinkle as it hits the ground. As already noted, it has gotten very cold since the torrential rain a few days ago, and I’ve got a stick ready.

Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh oooouuuuuuuuoooooooo

No, it’s not a werewolf in London, it’s just me, howling at the moon, which is about the only action I can think of off hand that makes any sense. (Humm, do I use this as a segue into the interesting vocalizations of the coyotes in the area -- although I never actually heard them howling at the moon? No, another time). I have been trying to post at least once a week (on Sunday) but thought better of it so soon after our son’s 3-day visit ended last Saturday. R and I were just numb—emotionally and every other way—by the time he left. One minute my heart was breaking (Mom, I just wish I could be normal like everybody else and Mom, you still love me, right?) and the next minute I was so angry I wanted to kill him, which was my state of mind as he backed down the driveway. Just before he left, we all went to the clothes dryer so I could help him sort the last of the clothes he had brought with him to wash and had gotten mixed in with ours. R reminded him not to forget his toothbrush. Much to our dismay (we should not really have been surprised by this, of course), we then learned that he had not bothered to bring a toothbrush with him. We have had several conversations with him in the past about the importance of bringing personal hygiene items when he comes to visit, but it seems not to have sunk in. So I asked the obvious question:
Me: You mean, you haven’t brushed your teeth for 3 days?
Him: Oh yeah. I just used one of the extra toothbrushes in the bathroom.
Of course, there are no extra toothbrushes in the bathroom. He used R’s toothbrush. What threw me for a loop was that he said nothing about when he arrived, such as Mom, I forgot my toothbrush, do you have one I could use? and that he had every intention of leaving without having said a word about it. Maybe ignorance is bliss. R seemed to take it in stride, but I was furious. I let him know it too, but it won’t do any good. He simply does not think like everybody else (I hesitate to use the word normal here). In any event, our son now has his own slightly used special toothbrush in the medicine cabinet. This is not a phase he will outgrow. It’s never going to get any better… aaahhhhh ooooooooooo.

Would you like a hockey puck, or perhaps a baseball?

Although I enjoy cooking and have been known, on occasion, to make something that tastes really good, I also have quite a history for culinary disasters. And being that I am extremely thrifty and conscientious about not wasting food, I usually always attempt to recycle the disasters. Earlier in the fall a batch of cinnamon rolls I made came out of the oven over-baked and burnt on the bottom and, indeed, did resemble hockey pucks. I put them all in the freezer to give me time to think about how they could be salvaged. Eventually I hit upon the idea of using them for bread pudding. I scraped off as much of the burnt part as I could, found a bread pudding recipe, and worked my magic on them. Unfortunately, the result was burnt-tasting bread pudding. I made two batches of it before I admitted it didn’t taste very good and threw the rest of the hockey pucks away (but on the compost heap so the freeloaders who cruise through at 3 in the morning could have them). I was curious to see what sort of disaster I’d have today as I put together Christmas dinner. And now that the meal is over, my husband has strict orders to stop me the next time I attempt to make a pie crust. I dropped one cooked, peeled potato down the garbage disposal, so that delayed the mashed potatoes while I ran another one through the microwave. The most interesting failure was yesterday, when I decided to get a head start and made the “quick yeast muffins” as our dinner bread. I misread the recipe and put in less than half the amount of water. So instead of a nice muffin-type batter, I had very dry bread dough that I formed into balls and put in the giant muffin tray to see what would happen. What happened was I had baseballs after 20 minutes of baking, so I redid the recipe. This morning I eyeballed the rock hard lumps while the mental wheels turned and while the sweet potato pie with its horrific crust was baking, I thinly sliced them and made “melba toast.” Turned out pretty good, too.

Bring us some figgy pudding; we won’t go until we get some

Well okay then. Step right up and have yourself a piece, and take a spoon of the hard sauce as well. It has a bit brandy in it (but it’s made by the Christian Brothers, so that makes it ok) and it tastes really great. It was fun making this. I got the recipe off the first Google hit (http://www.whitington.com/unclebubba/wing/figgy/) and divided it in half (there are only 2 of us, afterall). The dried figs have lots of little seeds that are kind of disconcerting to eat (R thinks prunes would taste even better) but I think it worked out well.

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat

“Not that I like Martha Stewart, nobody likes Martha Stewart, I don’t think even Martha Stewart likes Martha Stewart. Which actually makes me like her…” so says the main character in the first chapter of Elizabeth Berg’s novel Open House.

Some years ago I cleaned a dental office, which had eclectic assortment of magazines for the long-suffering patients to read. Martha Stewart’s Living magazine was among them. I always took a minute or two to thumb through the newest issue as I cleaned the waiting room, or even actually read the articles as I waited for the dentist to fix my teeth, as I was also his patient.

Not that I am Suzy Homemaker or care about decorating or crafts, which brings to mind the hilarious segment by Bill Geist on the Sunday Morning program in which he creates a “Martha Stewart Christmas Wreath" with beer cans and Cheese Whiz.

I do like to cook, however, and the magazine is so beautiful with its gorgeous photography and clean, crisp layouts. It’s a feast for the eyes. Her suggestion that one cook a goose for Christmas caught my interest. She gave very detailed instructions about the stuffing and how important it was to save the goose fat. So I decided to stuff a goose for Christmas dinner.

The goose was expensive -- very expensive -- and not much bigger than one of the Muscovy ducks we used to raise. The stuffing required expensive things like dried apricots and a bundle of fresh sage. By the time I got the thing assembled and in the oven, the kitchen looked like a bomb had gone off. I cleaned up that mess.

At the appointed time, I removed the goose from the oven and siphoned off more than 2 cups of fat. Almost immediately, I spilled it all over the floor. Dog (that was his name), always lurked in the kitchen when I was cooking because good things to eat would magically appear on the floor. So, naturally, he was right there and began lapping up this grease as I frantically tried to get it up without smearing it everywhere.

Finally, we sat down to eat the goose and it was terrible. Tough and stringy. The dressing was nasty. It was the worst dinner I had ever made. Things got even better.

Dog got very sick from eating the fat and threw up, and then had an attack of pancreatitis, and I had to take him to the vet the next day. That was not cheap either. So it was a disaster all the way around. Thanks Martha, but I’ll stick to turkey.

Woudja like a cuppa coffee?

Having poked fun at R for compulsive shopping, I guess I need to examine my own compulsive behavior about being thrifty and not throwing anything away. A couple of weeks ago we bought a new chest freezer. When we transferred the food from the old freezer into the new one, we didn’t cull the mystery packages (mostly jars and old peanut butter containers), we just loaded everything in and shut the lid. But I decided that anytime I put anything new in the freezer, I needed to take a few of the mystery containers out and find out what they contained. So today, I put in 2 dozen doughnuts (our Sunday morning treat) and took out three jars. When they thawed, I found a half cup of cooked hamburger meat, a peanut butter jar of pumpkin or squash puree, and about 2 cups of a brown liquid in a quart jar. I thought it might be beef broth or perhaps a marinade. It was none of these things. When it finally thawed, I took a taste of it. Coffee. COFFEE! For some weird and totally bizarre reason, I froze 2 cups of coffee, and it was in the freezer for a very long time. I can't imagine why I did that. R has been sniggering under his breath all day. I don't blame him. I'm sniggering too.

Gotcha! The triumph of technology

The little furry creature that had set up housekeeping behind the headboard of our bed is now outside where he/she belongs. And I figured out how to catch it. Unlike the mousie in the earlier post, this chipmunk could leap in and out of the 5-gallon pail of sunflower seeds with ease. But I figured if it had to leap up through a small hole then maybe we could hold it long enough so it could be turned outside. So, l got a newspaper, cut a small hole out of the middle, and spread it over top of the bucket and weighed down the edges with a few pieces of wood. Sure enough, it scurried across the paper at about 12:30 a.m. and jumped in, but then could not get back out. We won, we won, we won. Unless it comes back.

Chipmunks roasting on an open fire. . .

This is a mondegreen for “chestnuts roasting on the open fire” (see http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/humor/mondegreens.asp) and rather humorous I think, especially when one considers how tiny chipmunks are. We now have a chipmunk in the house. R saw it in the kitchen yesterday and the night before the cat was chasing it all over the bedroom in the wee hours of the morning. This morning there was a small pile of sunflower hulls on the propane heater (it's sitting on the propane heater eating sunflower seeds???) I am not sure what we are going to do about it, either. Glue traps, poison, and spring traps are out of the question. We think it is probably way too small to trip the live-animal trap we use for squirrels and rats. We haven’t figure out a plan B except to hope that maybe it will end up in the bottom of the bucket of sunflower seeds and we can let it go. This is not the first time we have had chipmunks in the house. When we still had the homemade doggy door (a wood insert into the bottom section of the storm door with a hole cut out and a piece of cloth stapled over the opening), the cat would bring them in on occasion and let them go, and toward the end of summer, a chipmunk had figured out that it could come in anytime it wanted, help itself to the sunflower seeds that were sitting by the back door, and leave. Things got interesting when the cat and the chipmunk both decided to use the doggy door at the same time. The last straw with the doggy door occurred when the cat brought in a rat and let it go, and it got up inside our propane heater. We had to dismantle the heater and take it outside so the rat would leave. But in the meantime, what are we going to do with the chipmunk?