Category Archives: cooking

The Present

14 Wednesday Dec 2016

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“Each new day is a gift. That’s why they call it The Present.”  So states a bit of 12-Step folk wisdom that is annoyingly accurate.

It’s been kind of painful around here, physical pain. I have some back pain that will not seem to abate. A trip to the orthopedic surgeon revealed no changes at the surgical site. Ergo, what I am experiencing is muscle pain.  That’s nice.  I guess.  So I’m back to swimming and walking and doing all the stuff I normally do, with no expectation that the pain is going to go away. Fair enough. As long as I know nothing is getting worse, I can live with the pain.

We don’t do any decorating for Christmas.  Being married to a person who has no commitment to organizing or cleaning means that the clutter  is the Decor.  Throwing a marriage away for slovenliness of the dwelling seems like a crappy reason to walk though.

Cooking is the general activity  for me around here. I fix dinner every night and groove on being a House Husband.  I did turnips Monday, for the first time in eons. I just peeled them, cut them up, boiled and mashed them with some dill weed and poppy seed.  Yummy.  I made salmon cakes with canned red salmon,  the kind they call “Sockeye”. I just added cracker meal, celery, dill weed and an egg and formed them in patties.  I fried them in my Scanpan nonstick skillet until golden brown.  The pan requires no added fat and they browned beautifully  Again Yummy.

I had a cooked sweet potato in the fridge and resolved to make a sweet potato pie with a Graham cracker crust.  Pulling out the trusty Betty Crocker Cookbook, going to page 331 were the directions. Simple and delicious.  I mean that.

I shared all this bounty with my stepmother.  That was the most satisfying aspect of the whole experience.

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Penance and $2.04

19 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by in Catholic Life, cooking, food, Pie Crust, Uncategorized

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Yesterday was Friday. As a Penance, we refrain from eating meat. Penance involves an act which seeks to turn our thoughts and lives toward God.  It is a challenge,  but not so much for finding meatless alternatives.  The challenge lies in choosing to not eat meat as a Penance in the first place.  Vatican II said you could eat meat, right?  Yes, it did, but one is obligated to choose another Penance as a substitute.  Penance, to most people, Catholic or not, is a foreign concept. If one cynically reduces religious observance and the devout life into some sort of cosmic and existential board game , replete with rewards and penalties, it is merely an absurd gesture among many absurd gestures. I see it as something more; leave it at that for now.

Having set the context, the admonition from Mrs CorC? yesterday morning was “Don’t go out and spend money for food I might not want to eat when I get home from work.” Good point.  What to fix then?  I do a quick check of items on hand,and decide on a mushroom and cheddar quiche with fried apples on the side. All that’s missing are mushrooms.

After a noon AA meeting and a meandering drive, debating whether to go to the library or not, I head to the store, then home. I see a package of fresh mushrooms for $1.99.  Mustering all the power of self-control a recovering alcoholic can possess, I pay for them, ignoring all else, especially the Thrift Bakery items. Total for trip is $2.04, with tax.

Upon arriving home, I get out the butter, lard and flour and prepare a pate’ brissee,  from The Joy of Cooking. Making the dough went quite well and I was recollecting a wonderful exchange with another blogger I had about this recipe a few months ago.  It needs to rest in the fridge for at least two hours, so I take this time to go for a four mile power walk around the neighborhood.

The walk went well. The shower felt great. I await Mrs CorC?’s return and finishing the meal prep.  I read from Sometimes She Lets Me, (Cleis Press, Tristan Taormino, Editor)  a collection of lesbian erotica.   Lesbian erotic writing is plain old good writing and not an insult to the intelligence, unlike much other erotic writing.  Upon arrival, she is tired and not completely unplugged from the work day. I leave her to chill and wait for her word to start supper.

Assembling the quiche was easy and fun. I made another major dent in the half gallon of milk I bought the other day, used up the shredded cheddar opened a couple of weeks ago, and got to use the white pepper I deemed an extravagance when I bought it.  The fried apples kind of morphed from rings to apple sauce. I think the Cortland apples  I used don’t cook well for that purpose, but they tasted great. Who cares, right?

My old friend back pain was there through most of yesterday.  But Life is good.

Adventures In Gender Nonconformity

01 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in cooking, Gender Roles, Sexual Identity, Suburbia

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That term “Gender Nonconformity” is pretty daunting. Why would I, a committed macho-type heterosexual male, dare to venture into this semantic minefield?

In 1961, the 4-H Club came to Skipwith Elementary School. We were still considered a rural area at that time, before the few farmers remaining sold out to the developers.  There were two teachers, facilitators, I guess they would be called now. There were two programs offered, Insect Collecting presented by the male teacher and Home Economics, facilitated by the female.  The unspoken cultural norm was that the boys would sign up for the Bugs, the girls for the Cooking and Sewing.

I signed up for  Home Economics.  I had no real interest, at that time, in collecting insects. The wonders of entomology had yet to seduce me.  I did, however, have some interest in cooking and the other “Domestic Arts”.  I was the only boy in Home Ec.  I do not know if any girls signed up to catch bugs, kill them with ether in a jar and present them pinned to a board.  The point is that it was no big deal.  Nobody said anything.  My mother was not concerned that I might become a “homo”, to use a contemporary term. She always welcomed any help around the house.

I did learn a thing or two. It kindled an interest in cooking, cleaning, and interior design that I still have.  Regrettably, there wasn’t much focus on sewing. I could have benefited from learning sewing. I wish I had pursued it.

“Gender Nonconforming”.  A boy takes Home Economics. A girl collects bugs. It seems the term inflates the significance and obfuscates the reality of what’s actually happening.  I don’t mean to disparage anyone dealing with these issues  and encountering difficulty.  I know that this is a very tough issue, from what I’ve read from my blogging colleagues. Simply put, my experience in doing a “girl-type” thing was, all in all, rather benign.

To all you Gender Nonconformists out there. Rock on!

Cousins, Part One.

09 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by in cooking, Health Issues, Sexual Identity

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They were born on 21 August ten years apart, he in 1949, she in 1959. We’ll call him Leroy, her Annette. Daddy’s brother, Uncle Jim, married their mother Ruby all of sudden.  One week, he was single, living with my grandparents, the next week he was married. He was in his early thirties, a WW II veteran, a CPA.  Ruby, they said, was a widow with a child, Leroy.  That is what we were told. Being children, not investigative reporters, that was a perfectly good explanation.  I remember playing at their house in Highland Park, a North Richmond neighborhood.  Then they moved to Lakeside, in a house near my grandparents with a gate allowing passage between the two houses.

Uncle Jim was hard of hearing. He was in the Navy during The War.  My mother told me he was based in Australia. He was a sonar man.  That was all I knew of his war service until my brother told me he was awarded the Purple Heart when he burned himself with his soldering iron while his submarine was being depth-charged.  It is fairly easy to conclude his hearing loss was attributable, in part,  to the depth-charging.   Imagine, for a while, being in a long steel cylinder, under 60+ feet of water, and people on the surface are dropping explosives on or near that cylinder with the intention of killing you..  Do you think you might be a little crazy after that experience?

So, all of a sudden Bachelor Uncle marries Aunt Ruby and adopts Leroy.  They live near Pop, Grandma and my Aunt Lois, who still lives with her parents.  We visit my grandparents nearly every week.  So we see them a lot. Sometime after 1957, they get a dog, which they name Sputnik, after the Russian satellite.  Leroy likes Elvis and The Mickey Mouse Club. Life rolls along, and they next thing we know Aunt Ruby has a baby. Everybody is surprised. I mean she had a weight problem, but hiding, not talking about a pregnancy with a family that’s pretty damn close is weird. We children were hip to the whole Women Having Babies And Being Mothers Thing. Why they would hide it from us because of some sexual inhibition wasn’t an issue.  I remember seeing my new cousin at the hospital and learning they named her Annette at the urging of Leroy.  To you youngsters out there, Annette Funicello was one of the Mouseketeers on  The Mickey Mouse Club. In the prepubescent world of 1950’s sexuality, she was the hot one to the boys.

We keep seeing our grandparents, aunts, uncle, cousins. We now notice that Annette has a weight problem just like Aunt Ruby and Uncle Jim.  We start to call them The Tank Family.  Cooking  was Aunt Ruby’s passion.  She was good at it and she expected that you eat! Having plenty of food was an obsession of Depression survivors of my parents generation. Annette’s problem morphed into obesity.

Our nuclear family moves in our own specific areas of interest. We see the Tank Family less and less frequently. They move to a subdivision called West End Manor into a typical tri-level. Uncle Jim gets active in the American Legion; Aunt Ruby participates in the Auxiliary. Leroy graduates from high school, gets a job at the Safeway. Daddy gets him in the Marine Reserve and away from service in Vietnam.  Leroy marries someone named Alice whom I never met. The constant is Annette’s weight.  Annette is home, going to high school. She isn’t much interested in boys.

The other constant is Leroy’s inability to form a stable relationship with a woman. He divorces Alice, finds some woman named Myrtle, marries her. I never meet her either. Leroy liked women. Women liked him. He also liked to drink.

After my grandparents die, Aunt Lois inherits the house.  She has a successful career as a civil servant, with a high-powered job with the Defense Supply Agency.  In the early 1980’s she puts in a nice in-ground pool..  The family reconnects at my Aunt’s, like in the days when we were young children.  My sons get to know my cousins’ sons and daughters. (It’s a rarity these days when second cousins are close.)  The next tragedy is the death from a heart attack of Uncle Jim, in 1985, at age 60.  We get even closer as an extended family.

We see Annette more and more frequently. Her obesity spins off into diabetes.   Around this time, Annette comes out to my then wife and me. I had known gay and lesbian people before this, but never had I known one to come out.  All of a sudden, a distant issue becomes very immediate.

 

Hiding

02 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by in cooking, Exercise/ Fitness, loneliness, Love and stuff, Sexual Identity

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I do all kinds of things to hide out.  Mostly they are “activities”.  I’m being busy, waiting for the chance for something exciting, exotic, or just plain memorable to happen.  This is not unique to me and it’s certainly not a waste of time. Because there’s a lot of time between the exciting, exotic or memorable events of life. There are gaps to be filled.

So I swim. In the water I get lost. In my thoughts. In time. In my workout. I love feeling the water on my body as I swim. I love how my muscles feel.  I don’t care much about my pace or whether I am moving quickly or slowly.  I fantasize that a woman desires me because I swim, that she finds me attractive, that I’m wanted.

And I cook. I love the smells, the sounds of a whirring blender, vegetables frying, the colors of the vegetables and fruits.  I love to see heavy cream turn into whipped cream.  I love sharing what I cook with others.

And I try not to think about the void in Passion. The Love is there. Good old Love. Old Love, soon-to-be geriatric Love.  Selfless Christian Sunday School Love. But I need Passion, too. Passion that can flower because that Love is there.  Put all the chips on Passion.  Tattoo your name inside a heart on my bicep Passion.  Staying awake after one fuck, just so we can have another go Passion.   No “good” manners, dirty-talkin’ Passion that would make your friends blush on the outside, while they die of envy.

“Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.”– John Mellencamp

Rest Day

20 Wednesday Jul 2016

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Back in high school, fifty years ago this fall, I went out for cross country, then track.   I got used to working out five days a week.  Five workouts a week mean I’m serious about the program. I like the self-discipline it fosters. Yesterday I finished my five workouts (lap swim 2050 meters 82 lengths of a 25 meter pool) I started Friday. By then my body was feeling the fatigue and the work I had put my body through.

Workout #5 was not without drama, all internally generated.  The mental fatigue wanted me to just skip it, wait till the next day or the next. I left the house, did some errands first, and  got to  the Y around four P M.  Looking at the sky, I saw dark and ominous storm clouds in the northwest sky.  Usually the storms come out of the west so I thought we might miss this batch of nasty. No such luck. The pool closed just as I was ready to go in. So I got dressed, went home, resolute to return. I had time to go online, and take a nap before I ventured to return . When I got back the lifeguard was outside and he told me the pool would reopen in about 25 minutes. OK.

I get in the pool and start. Every little tweak and funny feeling I magnify into a re-injury of my shoulder or my back.  I find that groove that distance athletes can find, where I feel I can go on forever. I finish my distance.  It was faster than yesterday.  The feeling of accomplishment and being on “purpose” is great.

Home again. Mrs C or C? had already texted that she was tired and hungry. Fortunately I had brought some steaks down from the freezer to thaw that I would fix on the George Foreman grill. Paired with the fresh local tomatoes, we enjoyed a delightful supper, with minimal effort.

Today, on the rest day, I had a nap that was more a continuation of the night’s sleep. I’m enjoying the luxury of doing what I wish to do, write. Then I will read,starting a novella by James Baldwin Giovanni’s Room. It is a gay-themed story, from a major American writer of the Twentieth Century. I read some essays by him in high school,  Notes of a Native Son.  After I finish reading Baldwin, I’m moving on to Nelson Algren.

Retirement. It’s about creating your own world. Cool

Cooking In Modern Times

15 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in cooking, food

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A few weeks ago, I went to my new favorite cooking store, Sur La Table, after Sunday brunch at a restaurant in the same mall. They had this rather fancy device called a Lux Multifunction Cooker by Fagor. It is a slow cooker, rice cooker, yogurt maker, and pressure cooker all combined with a control system that allows all these functions at different times and temperatures, under pressure or not.  I’ve always been intrigued and somewhat intimidated by  pressure cooking, the fear of a malfunction present in my mind dampening my enthusiasm.

Last night, I decided to use the device for the first time.  I started by making yogurt. The tricky part, for me, was getting the milk to the right temperature to kill any microbes that might be in the milk, 185-190 F (85-87.7 C). I did not have a candy thermometer and the meat thermometers I had didn’t give an accurate reading, so I wasted a lot of time. The cool down to 100-110 F (37.7-43.3 C) was easy. I added some fresh yogurt, set it to “yogurt” and went to bed. The function prepares the yogurt over 8 hours, (longer if you wish).  When I woke up, I had a rather tasty yogurt all ready to eat. So I am generally happy with the yogurt making function.

This morning, after soaking the garbonzo beans overnight, I used the pressure cooking function to prepare the beans for the homemade hummus  I’ve been contemplating. I put in the beans, the water, to the right amount maybe, 1:1 beans to water, and 2 tablespoons oil (their suggestion). I pressed the pressure setting  to high (9psi), set the timer to 25 minutes and pressed “start”. It does cook automatically once the pressure is reached. And it does shut off automatically.  It has two cool down function  “Fast” and “Slow” also called “natural”. All “Slow” means is that you leave it alone once the device is turned off and the pressure escapes through the safety valves. I allowed 60-90 minutes to cool down, but I suspect you could use a shorter interval.  I just checked on the garbonzos. They were ready and delicious! These garbonzos are unadorned, no spices, not even salt.  This multifunction cooker is  a keeper!

On to making the hummus.  I will get out my copy of Moosewood Cookbook and use that recipe. I may make felafel also. I feel like a hippie again.  Gonna go light the patchouli incense and put on my Ravi Shankar CD.

Later.

The Injury

09 Saturday Jul 2016

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Yesterday  Dorothy and I went to the Y a little early because there was a demonstration class for a program called M.E.L.T. that I was curious about. M.E.L.T. is an exercise program designed to stimulate the production of the fluids that keep our joints lubricated. It sounds very valid, but won’t work for me, because the fusion makes my getting on the floor and getting up again really difficult. So after saying  “No thanks. This won’t work for me” to the leader, I left to sit out in the area where the Senior Citizens hang out.

The Wimbledon Quarterfinals were on. A lady was showing another lady (probably a centenarian) how a numerical puzzle similar to a Sudoku worked. It was a typical “hanging with the Seniors” morning.

A staff member approaches me.

“Are you David?”

“Yes”.

“Dorothy fell off a treadmill. She is OK. She is getting first aid right now”. I go back and see the lifeguard from the pool who is a Fire Fighter/ EMT in his real job attending to her.  She is on the floor, at the back of the treadmill with blood coming from a nasty laceration at her kneecap.

“We called an ambulance”. Moments later, the EMT’s and  Fire Fighters from the station down the street are there. They continue what the lifeguard started, put her on a stretcher and take her off to the hospital about two miles away.

Once at the ER, after assessing the severity of the injury, the waiting begins.  First she goes to X-ray, then she’s back. Dorothy is lucid, cheerful, and talkative. We chat for a while. I tell her I will take care of dinner that night. We wait and  wait. There is a little  excitement when an elderly gentleman who is shouting about pain or something is transported on a stretcher to another facility. His son, about my age, balding, with a Larry Fine hairstyle, wearing pale pink tennis shorts and a pale pink polo shirt, comforts and reassures his father that all is well as they leave. The son’s pink Hello Kitty backpack is the last thing I notice of the two. (“That’s odd”, meaning the backpack, is my mental note.)

We wait some more. Another elderly lady, age 83, is waiting at the nurses station on her stretcher until a room opens up. She too is lucid and a little embarrassed  to be causing “all this fuss”.

Dorothy needs to go to the Ladies Room and  Nora, the RN working with her, takes her. When  Dorothy returns, we talk about The Thin Man, prompted by the name Nora,  Nora Charles being the name of Myrna Loy’s character. We both agree about what a good movie it was and both of us concur that Asta was a really cute dog.

Finally, Simon, the PA, comes in. He is handsome, about six feet tall, Latino, with a neatly trimmed black beard and black horn-rimmed glasses. (They were the style made famous by Barry Goldwater, half a century ago.) On Simon’s left ring finger is a black wedding band. Interesting.

He lets us know the knee cap is not broken and goes to get the cart containing all the wound-stitching paraphernalia,  sutures, needles,  Betadine, saline solution, draping cloths, bandages, other dressings.  He returns and gets to work, first numbing the wound area with Xylocaine.  The suturing is somewhat painful and I hold Dorothy’s hand. It takes about an hour to close a gaping wound with fifteen stitches. Simon tells us that she needs an immobilizer for her knee and that Nora will bring it in when she returns with the discharge instructions and a prescription for Lortab.  Dorothy is calm, relieved it’s over,  and we wait some more for Nora to return with a wheelchair for transport and the aforementioned stuff.

Getting outside, I discover that at 3 PM, it is sweltering. I pull the car  up to the exit.  A burly male nurse gets her from wheelchair to car  and we head to her house.  The big challenge is getting her out of the car, a full-size 1998 Mercury Grand Marquis LS (Dad’s old car), without banging her leg around too much.  We get her out and into the house.

At this point, she calls her son Harvey, recounting the story, assuring him that she’s OK, and asks him to arrange for a home aide to be with her while she is temporarily incapacitated.  At this point I leave to go home, eat some lunch, fetch my phone charger, and  get the salmon, tomatoes and cantaloupe I had been planning to fix for J’s and my dinner.  The fresh basil, balsamic dressing and Gorgonzola crumbles are also packed.

I return. The house, being the house of a 90 year old, could double as a sauna. I turn on the air conditioning. The home care coordinator comes, as does Harvey. They map out a plan for care for the next few days, while I rest a bit. The home care person is very reassuring and Harvey, Dorothy and I are pleased with what she suggests.

Harvey and Home Care Lady leave. I start dinner, hunting for what I need in a strange kitchen. There is some dried tarragon to season the salmon. I find a grill pan in the oven. I  figure out how a strange oven works. Solid state electronic controls mean that turning a simple, mechanical knob to the right setting in a simple, familiar manner is out of the question. It is a Bosch oven, very nice, all in all, with a convection feature. In about a half hour, the fish is ready. The tomato is sliced, garnished with fresh basil, drizzled with balsamic vinaigrette dressing with the Gorgonzola crumbles completing the presentation.

Dorothy loves her dinner. The tomato is a local tomato, from Hanover County, northeast of town.  These are the prized tomatoes of the Richmond area, unquestionably delicious. The tomato is as tasty as its reputation promised it would be.

Dorothy has found a walker (my late Aunt Midge’s). It expedites getting out of her chair, where she sits with leg elevated per the discharge instructions. She uses the bathroom  while I prep the cantaloupe. It too is delicious.  A rainy May has meant some fine produce this year.

Comfortable, confident she can get along on her own for the night, Dorothy sends me home.  Around 8:45, I arrive home, recount the day’s events to J and prepare her a plate of grilled salmon and fresh tomatoes from the leftovers I brought.  I sit for a while, then strip out of my sweaty clothes, and take the nicest shower I have had in a long time.The patchouli-scented soap is a real pleasure. I decide to sleep nude, luxuriating in the clean feeling and before I know it, I am asleep.

A day well spent. A job happily done.

Random Observations

06 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by in cooking, food, Fruit, personal grooming, Uncategorized

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Observation #1

Men are gross. The ladies are right about that. Why do I say that? Yesterday, at the Y , I’m getting dressed after my swim. One of my fellow members is also attending to his grooming. He takes the blow dryer there for use in drying hair, presumably that particular hair on top of the head, and, after a quick once over to his pubes, uses the communal blow dryer to dry the space between his toes! All of a sudden, I really didn’t need to style my hair with the blow dryer.

Observation #2

Somebody tell me the difference between cultured buttermilk and kefir. The most basic one is that kefir costs about twice as much. The two products taste remarkably similar. I know there are active probiotic cultures in kefir, but does their presence mean I have to pony up twice as much dough?  I guess so. 

Observation #3

Kitchen parchment is really cool stuff. Last night I lined the pan with it when I grilled the swordfish steaks in the oven and wrapped the corn on the cob in it as I cooked them in the oven along with the fish. The clean-up with parchment was easier, I think, than with aluminum foil. By the way, cooking corn in the oven or on the grill is so much easier than throwing them in boiling water on top of the stove.

Observation #4

Fruit 1: Why do strawberries seem to last an incredibly long time before turning into gross red pulpy blobs these days? I notice this in the ones I buy at the market in the big PETE #1  containers that come from some farm near Watsonville, California. Maybe they pick up a weird vibe from the spirit of John Steinbeck, who lived near there. The locally grown, “pick your own” kind seem to have the shorter life I remember from the Dark Ages of the Eisenhower Administration.

Fruit 2: Peaches grown locally, within a few hundred miles, more or less, are delicious. The ones trucked in from California or Washington (I live in Virginia) are pretty nasty. Let’s not even talk about the ones from Chile that show up in the stores in the winter.  I must say that the Chilean cherries are pretty good.   Chilean  apples aren’t bad. The oranges are so-so.