My mother passed away at 6:15 this morning, after a long battle with ovarian cancer. May she rest in peace. We will miss her presence in body; she will always be present in our hearts. (I will get a better photo posted soon.)
A friend asked me what I generally cook for Thanksgiving dinner, and it was too complicated to do a Facebook reply, so here’ my typical menu.
Roast Turkey - I follow the Joy of Cooking method, which is quite similar to this recipe:
http://www.cookingnook.com/roast-turkey-recipe.html
Stuffing - my mother’s recipe is like this one they call “bread celery” stuffing:
http://recipes.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_to_make_three_different_turkey_stuffings
Gravy - A basic, no-frills variety, similar to this recipe, though I may add a few mushrooms:
http://www.ehow.com/how_6982_make-turkey-gravy.html
Cranberry Sauce - I hate to admit it, but I use the whole cranberry sauce from a can, that turns out kind of like this:
http://www.cooksrecipes.com/sauce/homemade_whole_cranberry_sauce_recipe.html
Classic mashed potatoes - that’s an easy one:
http://www.cookingnook.com/mashed-potatoes-recipe.html
Also, what I discovered are called “American Fried Yams”, but I use brown sugar instead:
http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/319/American-Fried-Yams84680.shtml
Then there’s the question of vegetables. I hear brussels sprouts are traditional, but I detest them, so I do other things.
Dressed-up green beans:
http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/green-beans-almond-lemon-brown-butter-10000001609295/
Green peas were always on the table of my childhood home. I can’t help myself - I don’t really dress them up, and I only have a spoonful but I can’t seem to pass by the aisle of canned veggies without tossing a small can of peas into my shopping cart:
http://recipes.lovetoknow.com/wiki/Canned_Peas_Recipe
Depending on how many people I’m cooking for, I may supplement the green beans with a simple tossed green salad, which I have to explain here. My friend, Sharon, taught me tht the key is how the salad is tossed. To get the right result, use very fresh lettuce (I prefer Boston or curly leaf) and a bit of basic or green onion. Toss the ingredients with a bit of good olive oil for 20 times, then add a bit of salt and an acid (lemon juice or balsamic vinegar) and toss again for 20 times. The 20 tosses are important!
Then, dessert. Pumpkin pie, of course. I cheat and buy one, then top it with real whipped cream, made fresh.
I like to do fruit, as well. This year, I’ve bought a fresh pineapple that promises to be splendid. Other years, it’s berries or a bake pear dessert.
And that’s the whole story. Tomorrow, photos of my holiday table.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what draws me to people or keeps me at arms’ length. and marvel at my good fortune to have been drawn to such good folks. Maybe it’s that I’ve spent the last couple of days with relatively new friends. It’s been a wonderful discovery period, as my previous connection had been a real-life introduction at a conference, and continued contact with one of this lovely couple through Facebook, the result of a shared passion for Scrabble. Now, having met both of them and spending time ensconced in their guest room, I am grateful for the opportunity to have gotten to know them (and their pets), and look forward to reciprocal visits. It’s nice to be around two women so obviously happy, and so delighting in each other’s love and affection, as well. Their warmth radiates out to anyone in their immediate vicinity.
Another couple, local to me, are folks I’ve just gotten to know better. Introduced to them by fluke through an American colleague who since moved back to the us, they started out as business contacts, and are now entrenched as good friends. Recently, I had the opportunity to do a good deed, and house sat / horse sat for them. Seeing them each day as they came by to do horse care, going out for the odd meal together, and interacting with them in small ways - for example, they brought over a modem so I could have internet access - gave me a glimpse into their innate goodness. Again, a couple who show their warmth and emotional depth with each other and those in their circles, whether it be with their horses or their friends.
Another is a long-time friend who renewed her friendship after a many-year hiatus. I’ve always admired her maturity and groundedness, and am extremely grateful to have her in my life. And of course, my best friend, who can finish my paragraph before I’ve completed the first sentence, and has insights into “problematic” relationships, because of her counselling background, and shares insights that it would have taken me years to figure out on my own. These are just a few of the people I’m blessed to have in my life, and the ones that have recently come to the fore to show me support and love.
I could talk about what keeps me at arms’ length from others, but there is no sense is bringing that negativity to this post. Suffice to say that interactions during difficult times have a way of speaking volumes. To those of my friends who have made me feel special during what could have been a far more difficult time, I am eternally grateful.
The camping equipment is getting unpacked - I’m going camping for the first time in ages. What it took to get me out of my complacency was some enthusiastic lobbying by my grandkids. Photos will be on Facebook. It should be fun; there’s nothing like bonding with these two lovely souls over nights under the stars. Follow-up: We went pseudo-camping, as in: slept inside, but had the basics of camping (well, I had my computer, too). Swimming at the lake, picking wild blackberries (with which I made blackberry sauce for pancakes), dogs, cats, horses, and a llama, and lots of fresh air in the country. The smile shows, as my grandkids say goodbye, they’ve had a good time.
Going blueberry picking with my honourary grandchildren (and their mom, of course). Love this time of year - fresh berries and spending quality time with the kids. I like that they learn about growing food (it doesn’t come from the grocery store shelf) in a fun and tasty way.
Here’s a terrible and amateurish site to find u-pick places. (It’s worth looking at, just for the nostalgia factor.)
From hereon in, sticking to safe topics. Love my Fluevogs:
http://www.fluevog.com/code/?pp=4&view=detail&p=92&colourID=2263
http://www.fluevog.com/code/?pp=2&view=detail&p=39&colourID=2033
And here’s John Fluevog himself:
An distasteful incident reminded me of this song.
My great grandmother used to sit in front of the television watching the news with a look of intense concentration, though I never knew if it was because of the subject matter or because she had difficulty understanding the language. Anna was the matriarch of my mother’s side of the family. With her children, she had come to Canada from the Old Country, long after her husband had died and left her to fend for herself. She took turns living with her son — my grandfather, and her daughter in Saskatchewan, but spent most of her years living with my grandparents. She never worked outside the home but made as much of a contribution as everyone else to the running of the household.
I never ascertained what kind of formal education Anna had, though I suspect it was very basic. She could write Slovak, and she would let me trace over her handwriting, copying those mysterious looking shapes that I have come to recognize as penmanship typical of eastern Europeans. Even Anna’s attempts at writing English transliterated into Slovak bore her special hieroglyphics. She would try to teach me to enunciate the Slavic sounds, in words that sounded like dziwka, tcheck-i, znash.
Anna learned English by reading the Bible. Wherever an important passage appeared, she would mark the beginning and the end with a large, pencilled circle. Her entire Bible was circled in this way. Anna wore out more than one copy of the Bible, the already thin pages getting thinner and greyer until the fibres would give way and the words on one side of the page became inextricably linked with those on the back. My great grandmother never read novels or magazines or even the newspaper, for that matter. Reading was an activity reserved for religious publications, which she read from cover to cover every week. To keep up with world events, my great grandmother watched the news.
Anna watched the news every day, but only the six o’clock news. She loved Walter Cronkite. I knew there was something unseemly, something almost indecent, with the way my great grandmother carried on about Walter Cronkite, and not just in the way she talked to him. She talked to just about everyone on television. Sometimes she railed and shook her fists, daring the performers or announcers to answer back. The fact that they never responded didn’t seem to phase my great grandmother. To her, television was like having a personal stage production. The audience is allowed to heckle but the actors’ jobs are to keep the show going, not to respond to the audience.
But my great grandmother knew, as well as she knew the sky was blue, that the people on the television screen could see into her living room. Randomly, she would tell me, “Pull your dress down over your knees. They can see up your skirt.” I would dutifully untangle my frame from whatever sprawled-out position I had adopted, and modestly pull my skirt down as far as it would go, even as I would mutter, “No, they can’t.”
Walter Cronkite’s refusal to talk to my great grandmother bothered her, though. Anna offered him her advice, asked him angry, rhetorical questions, and chided him any time he reported an item from a particularly stupid viewpoint. And when Walter Cronkite signed off with, “Goodnight,” my great grandmother would always answer in kind before she turned off the television.
Watching the news with my great grandmother was boring for me since the stern looks of the announcers could not bring even the most light-hearted news story to life. Watching wrestling with my great grandmother wasn’t much better. My mother and my grandmother could never figure out what made my great grandmother tune in to watch men fling one other onto mats and pretend to stomp all over each other. Anna would point her finger and shout excitedly in Slovak words to the effect of, “that’s it,” and “let him have it.” My grandmother especially, being the gentle soul she was, would try to convince my great grandmother to turn off the television. My grandmother’s excuse was that I should not be exposed to such violent degeneracy, but Anna was stubborn. My mother and grandmother would eventually retreat to the kitchen, clucking and shaking their heads in embarrassed bewilderment while I remained in the living room, feeling privileged for my right to this entertainment, but actually finding more diversion in watching my great grandmother watch wrestling.
My favourite time to watch television with my great grandmother was during the afternoon. This was a treat possible only when I slept over at my grandparents’ house. We would watch soap operas over top of my great grandmother’s running commentary. Here the heckling would become serious as Anna would spit out her most scathing remarks at the television screen. “Look at her. Hussy. Look at all that stuff on her face. If I was her husband, I would make her wash it all off. How can she show her face on television?” What bothered my great grandmother most of all was to watch people kissing on television. She would contort her face into a grimace and look away from the screen, commanding me to do likewise. “Ah yoi,” she would utter in disgust, “look what they do. Germs, germs you get from doing such a thing.” Then she would wipe her mouth on the tissue she kept inside the cuff of her sleeve for just such occasions. Over time, I learned that the best strategy was to keep quiet. Any attempt to explain why the characters were kissing or, heaven forbid, to absolve them would result in a lecture about God, morals, and upbringing, invariably ending with, “I never kissed my husband on the mouth. Never.” But if I kept quiet, Anna’s curiosity would get the better of her and she had to peek at the screen to see what happened next, if someone needed chiding or if anyone tried to sneak in another mouth-to-mouth kiss as soon as she’d turned her back.
Every so often, my mother and her brother would try to explain the mechanics of television to my great grandmother. The entire family would be concentrated around the kitchen table. Diagrams would be drawn showing boxes representing television sets and wavy lines as transmission frequencies. Anna would be sitting in the middle, the thin white hair nodding up and down with her head as she indicated she understood.I would lose interest in the exercise soon enough, and would wander off to watch whatever television program was on, taking advantage of the fact that the level of concentration in the adjoining room distracted the adults from realizing I was tuned in to programs my mother normally would not allow me to watch.
Eventually the time would come when everyone would rise and mill around the kitchen, refilling their cups of tea. My uncle would stand, face reddened from his mission of enlightenment, and shake his head as if he’d finally taught a stubborn child the dangers of crossing the highway. From the next room, I would hear my great grandmother pull back her chair and call out to me in a clear voice, “Ah yoi, cover your knees. He can see up your skirt.”
Walter Cronkite was an important link to my greatgrandmother. I miss my greatgrandmother, and now I miss Walter Cronkite.
If you’re one of the few friends who hasn’t heard the news by now (after E announced it on Facebook!), I’ve separated from E, en route to divorce. I also sold my house, and am going to house sit for friends for a while, to get my bearings. I’ll be out of here by end of month. It’s the end of an era, for sure. Time for new adventures, and some self-care.
So, after what seems like months of not writing, I come to my blog and discover that despite captchas, spammers have infested my blog with junk comments. My choice was either to delete them a post at a time - an all-night proposition - or to simply delete all comments. So I did. My apologies to friends who have posted comments. It’s not you, it’s them. Scum of the earth. And now comments are moderated, though I still don’t know how to get the comments to come to a current email address. I wish I knew enough programming to be able to bombard any spammer with enough email to crash their servers. On the other hand, maybe it’s better that I don’t know these things.
Three teenage girls on the Skytrain, loud and full of themselves sitting across from me, suddenly get quiet and I hear, “...like her, just shoot me.” I realize they’re talking about me; they’re judging me. Before, I might have taken it personally; now, I think “sure, honey, come see me when you’re 50, and I’ll pull the trigger for you.” I never got that shallow, loud, fluff that passes as self-aggrandizement: ooh, look at my toenails. Ooh, look how tight my butt is. Ooh, there’s a boy nearby, let’s talk louder. Okay, back to work for me. But I just had to say it.
Friday morning started out as a stellar morning. I’d dropped 2 lbs the previous day. All Friday, I was so good. Ate carefully and consciously, drank lots of water, worked out (45 minutes of cardio plus 1 hour of weights). By the evening, I’d gained - yes, gained - 4.5 lbs. It was a devastating blow, and my immediate reaction is to be demoralized. I was hungry when I got home, and cooked a low-carb stir-fry. I also roasted an organic chicken, and had a chicken leg. Woke up this morning having gone down 1 of those 4.5 lbs and felt intense frustration. It’s a completely irrational reaction, to be sure. But that’s part of my unhealthy relationship to food. When I get frustrated, I’m less likely to restrain myself. (Is that called acting out? Re-acting out?)
I fell off the wagon a bit in the morning, having a croissant at breakfast. At the day-long meeting, they brought in muffins in the morning and sandwiches for lunch. (I took off the top piece of bread, and ate as much of the filling as I could without eating the bottom slice.) I made a point of having meat and salad late afternoon, and other than suffering terrible indigestion - I suspect from the vestiges of the bread mixing with the protein and salad, it kept me going. I also walked across downtown twice, from the university to the West End, and then back to the Skytrain station. Oh yes, I fell off the wagon at night, too, accepting an offered piece of an Australian chocolate-covered licorice stick, which I’d bought for E, as I knew it was a childhood favourite of hers.
Tomorrow will have to be a big work-out day, as Ineed to get myself back on track as soon as possible.
Had a drink with a friend who is moving back east today. Well, he had a drink and dessert; I had club soda, a calamari appie and a side salad. We commented that though the waiter treated us as a stereotypical couple, bringing a dessert and two spoons, there was nothing stereotypical about either of us - a straight 30-something guy and a gay 50-something woman hanging out. We also commented on a difference between men and women: he said that men think about sex every 3 seconds. I said that women think about food or looks every 3 seconds. Food because though women’s beauty products come in every “flavour” under the sun, we can put these substances on our bodies, but heaven forbid we actually put anything will flavour into our bodies. Being attractive, ergo, being thin, is put out there as an impossible ideal to be achieved, and it takes vigilance: is the hair good, the make-up good, nothing showing that shouldn’t be showing, skirt straight, legs arranged in a provocative but not too provocative way? And the food obsessions! How many calories is that? That looks really yummy, but if I have one of those, I’ll have to find something to give up, to keep the calorie count low. It’s insane.
Dear Food Diary,
Guess that the week got away from me. This going to an office 8:30 to 5:30 plus the commute plus the gym every day - well, I’m just not used to it, I guess. The flip side to going to an office all day, every day is the constant mental stimulation and lack of access to food. Actually, the lack of food part turned out not to be such a good thing, as a couple of days my blood sugar dropped (I can always tell because my hands get very cold, and I start to get a bad headache) and by the time dinner time rolled around, I was nauseous, I was so hungry. But the flip side is that I have dropped an average of a pound a day. So it’s tea, modest breakfast, a litre of water by lunch, a salad with protein, another litre of water, a modest dinner (on the early side), and more tea. And a workout. Trying to do 45 minutes of cardio a day: 15 minutes on the elliptical trainer, 15 minutes on the bike, and 15 minutes on the treadmill. Two weight training work-outs this week, too. The change makes it bearable and gives my arthritic hip a break for the middle part. Realizing that my trip to Atlanta was a mere 2 weeks away, and wanting to look great in my Anne Klein suit, gave me the extra push of discipline that I needed.
Net effect: down 5 lbs since Monday. (One more pound and I’m back where I was a week before that. Whew.)
OK, Food Diary, I tried very, very hard over the weekend to get back on track. I went for a workout on Saturday morning and then came home to get some client work done. Instead, got into an argument which left me feeling headachey and out of sorts. So napped, and then worked. I can’t even remember what I ate on Saturday. I just remember that I was feeling nauseous and chilled, before I napped, and worked till all hours to make up for my nap. Net effect: down 1 lb.
On Sunday, I had a low-carb wrap with protein, and went off to volunteer with the Feed the Hungry project, where Jews and Muslims get together at a Downtown East Side church to cook for, and serve, a couple of hundred homeless people. (Yeah, the irony of volunteering to handle food and not touch it isn’t lost on me. Had lovely conversations with a publisher and an architect, and ran food to tables. Oddly enough, I have no urge to eat when I’m around food all the time. Cooking is a sure-fire way to kill my appetite. But I did drink my litre of water before lunch.
Then, went to my first book club meeting, where we were scheduled to discuss Fall on Your Knees - only I turned up a week early, it seems. So I stayed for lunch - a take-off on huevor rancheros but with way more taco strips in it than I’d expected - and refamiliarized myself with the book. After that, a trip to the office to do some work with a colleague, and another litre of water. After dropping her off, stopped at the grocer near her to buy a package of matzahs - not for me, but to send to my penpal in Japan as a special request. I think that having the carbs at lunch made me headachey and hungry, so I grabbed a half-dozen non-coated chicken wings before heading home so I wouldn’t be ravenous later. Dinner was a bit of salad and low-carb meatloaf, and some tea, before finishing up a bunch of work. I didn’t think I did that badly during the day, but eating after 6 PM is always tricky. The net effect was: no weight loss (no gain, either). Disappointing, but I’m not going to let it get me down. Onward and upward.