Small Gestures

How many times in your life have you glanced out your window to observe a log floating by? It's one of the reasons we love living on the water. Something is always happening; something is always changing. Calling Harbor Patrol to alert them they thanked me and said they’d “go wrangle it”. Log wrangling is a concept you won't hear in too many circles.

A neighbor invited us out to follow the Christmas Ship in Seattle last night. http://www.argosycruises.com/themecruises/xmasSchedule.cfm

It’s a tradition around the waters here. Onboard his well-lit powerboat, amidst a highly decorated gaggle of other boats, like the geese that travel our waters, we trailed a large Argosy Cruise vessel with onboard Dickens Carolers singing at several stops. The night was clear and warm; literally shirtsleeve weather. We passed Seattle’s floating home community and turned the corner passing through the cut where University crew’s race and into Lake Washington. Many homes around the lakes here deck out in Christmas lights. It’s a unique and festive sight for those lucky enough to view it from the water.

My folks loved decorating our home inside and out every Christmas. Dad would spend several months building motorized displays. Imagine Rudolph hoisting Santa Clause up the side of the house by pulley and having him slide back down upon reaching the top, Sort of a holiday “myth of Sisyphus”. They won prizes in numerous years. Imagine having the whole town alerted to drive by your house alive with lights and moving Rudolphs. At age 16 it was a bit embarrassing. Now I salute them. They loved doing it, thus indulged themselves. And, they created fun for those who make a holiday tradition of a night viewing Christmas lights.

Their Christmas decorating

extravaganzas all started one year when Mom ordered a life sized, plastic, stuffable Santa Clause from Hancock House. (I think that was the company name, it was little catalogue that had every odd thing imaginable). She stuffed it with newspapers and sat him on a bench in our yard. Dad got the idea of putting Santa’s feet in a bucket with some dry ice and shining a light on him. Someone entered them in the town’s Christmas display contest and after winning third prize, they were off and running.

What a treat it is to think back on the fun they had. Mom would help come up with the concept and design. Dad would build it downstairs in his shop cutting and painting plywood, rigging motors and lights. I don’t remember being asked to help, it really was their project and must have been fun for them. It was never about the competition with others, they loved outdoing themselves year after year.

I now have a friend who finds pleasure in creating over 100 custom-made Christmas cards involving cut outs and pop-ups and tales of her yearly adventures. It takes her hours of work, but it’s work she loves. I, and I’m sure all on her list, look forward to receiving them. I’m glad to know there are still folks whose indulgence involves creating holiday surprises for the purpose of bringing smiles to others. She and my folks remind us of how much fun can be had constructing simple things and sharing them. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for my appreciation, last night, of the folks who took the time to light their homes and boats. And, today, when most holiday cards arrive with just a signature or printed name and gift cards are often the extent of creative giving, I thank my friend whose hand made cards are reminders that there still are good people who enjoy sharing their sense of fun with others. I want more people like that in my life.

Yam Curry an Amazing option for the traditional Thanksgiving candied yam dish

My hobby is cooking Indian cuisine. It's a country that does amazing things with vegetables. I feel like an alchemist creating Indian dishes. The aromas are so compelling, often, my neighbors saunter over to see what I'm cooking. I've made this Yam Curry twice. This year, it's going to be my alternative to the traditional Thansgiving sweet potatoes and I know it will be a hit. The spices blend together and when you take a bite it's subtly sweet, savory and addictive.

You can purchase Indian spices in bulk (small amounts) at many natural food stores. In Seattle, Puget Sound Consumer Coop stores have most of them. I keep a little of a lot of them in a separate Rubbermaid container on hand for my experiments. Many Indian dishes freeze very well.

Yam Curry
Yields: 6

Ingredients
1 pound sweet potatoes, or yams (I use 3 large yams)
1 teaspoon salt (to sweat the yams)
1 large onion, chopped coarsly (I use a sweet onion)
1 teaspoon salt
Vegetable oil to shallow fry potato chunks (can deep fry in 3" hot oil)
2 inches fresh ginger root, grated (or bottled chopped ginger or ginger paste)
3 garlic clove, chopped (or ready chopped garlic)
2-3 tablespoons vegetable oil (for frying onion, garlic, ginger, tomato mixture)
1 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
2 green cardamom seeds (seeds removed)
1 bay leaf (I omit)
4 whole peppercorns
2 inch cinnamon stick broken in half
1 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon chili powder or use cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon ground coriander
Salt to taste
4 ounces tomatoes fresh (I used 1 large tomato or you can use 8 oz canned)
4 tablespoons plain yogurt or sour cream
1 1/2 cups water
1 tablespoon cilantro leaves chopped,  (for garnish)

Directions
(1) Place all the spices except cumin seeds in a smal dish ready to add.

(2) Peel the yams, cut them into 1 inch cubes, place in a colander and sprinkle liberally with 1 teaspoon salt. Let stand 10-15 minutes, then rinse and drain.

(3) While potato chunks are sweating, finely chop the onion, ginger, and garlic, and roughly chop the tomatoes.

(4) Heat the 2 to 3 Tablespoons vegetable oil over a moderate flame, add the cumin seed, and cook until they begin to sputter. Add the chopped onion, ginger, and garlic. Cook until the onion is a rich golden color.

(5) Add all the spices and season with salt to taste. Cook a few seconds more, and then add the tomatoes.
Let this cook while you continue as below.

(6) Heat oil for shallow frying the yams. Cook the yam cubes, a few at a time, until golden brown. Drain on absorbent kitchen paper. Pour out oil and set potatoes aside.(I removed the ginger onion garlic mixture and used the same frying pan to shallow fry the yamchunks in about 1/4 in oil.)

(7) Return the onion, garlic, ginger, tomato mixture to the frying pan, add the yogurt to the mixture, and continue to cook until the oil begins to separate out.

(8) Add the water and bring to a boil. Let boil a few minutes, then add the yam cubes, reduce heat, and simmer, covered, for about 25 minutes.

(9) Serve hot, garnished with the chopped coriander.

Traditionally served with chapatis and rice. I took it to my sister-in-laws as replacement for the traditional sweet potato/yams at Thanksgiving and it got raves. (If somebody "must" have marshmallows, dish up a serving and nuke it with a couple marshmallows on top.)

Beginners Indian Cooking Basket

My latest Beginners Indian Cooking Basket created for an auction.

Sports Cars & The Moose Lodge

Ferrari CEO says 2008 will be a record-breaking year for sales. Is there something wrong with this? I certainly don’t begrudge folks what they earn and the pleasures they derive from such, but the gap between the rich and not so rich has grown larger and appears more blatant than I ever remember it to be. What seems worse, opportunities enabling the not so rich to achieve more seem to shrink daily. This on top of the current bail out; my Grandfather, would have been sad and probably more than a bit angry. He fought for the common man and helped form a union. He voted for Eugene V. Debs and I still treasure his gift of a well-used copy of Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle. He was inspiration for my professional ambitions to play a role in helping create a better world in my own unique way. He might have been a bit extreme but it was out of true concern for common folk.

He came out of the backwoods of Idaho, a common laborer. Responding to the needs of a handicapped child he and his young wife moved to a city to be near medical care. He went to work as a heat plant worker supporting a wife and three children. They owned a home but were never rich in a monetary sense. He cut hair of family and friends and shared vegetables from a huge garden. They befriended refugees from Germany and were loyal Moose Lodge members contributing to their community. It’s sad that many today may think those simple human gestures small. My grandparent’s passions were for people, not things. They exhibited graciousness, never greed. I was lucky to have their impact on my life.

Mental Health

Alas, life expands to overfill our day, at times. Umpteen responsibilities take over and our indulgences go by the wayside. Not so good. Indulging in what gives us pleasure does healthier things to our minds and bodies than pressure filled responsibilities. Though I haven’t turned to my blog in the last month to relax, I have paid attention to my bodies needs and during pressure filled days, I have taken “time outs” periodically amidst my activities. A hop onto the love seat on the back deck, feet up in the sunshine and a fifteen-minute period of concentration with mental training exercises I teach and use daily. Not only does my body relax but my brain is more creative and focused when I return to my tasks.

Too often we get ideas of things we want to do, or are forced to meet demands of our world and expect our minds and bodies can be dragged into responding effectively on cue. We've learned that in order to keep our bodies in shape physically, we must exercise and sleep enough. Hopefully we are learning that we must keep our minds in shape, as well. Effective timeouts for our minds is essential if we want them to respond effectively by “thinking well”, ‘being creative”, “remembering effectively”, and “handling emotion well”. Timeout’s for the mind also deactivate our nervous systems.

As you go through the day, think of your central nervous system (brain, spine and nerves) lighting up like a Christmas tree – that is stress. Effectively quieting the brain begins turning off those lights and relaxing your body.It’s easy to teach a simple mental training exercise, the difficulty is helping people make it a habit in their daily lives. At first for most it seems awfully simple, and they may wonder, “Here I am counting backwards again, what’s that got to do with my problems?” Even if it makes sense, it takes a while to make it a habit and therefore is easily forgotten. Another problem is that unfortunately our bodies are not used to feeling calm and relaxed. Most people are more used to feeling stressed and frazzled. When a calm, relaxed feeling overtakes the body it can actually feel “uncomfortable” until one gets used to it. It’s worth getting used to, in fact, essential for health.

Here is a simple way to start, take ten minutes a couple times a day and give it a try.

Get comfortable and close your eyes, count backwards slowly and silently from 25 to 1,

Next: heighten your breathing and slowly focus your breath into the various parts of your body(feet, legs, hips and stomach, chest, back and spine, shoulders, neck and head)

Next: Visualize a beautiful scene from nature and hold it for a couple minutes (just experience it, the colors, details, sounds, etc. – no “thinking about it”)

Finally: Count from 1 to 5 (cueing the mind to speed up again and get going)

If you do this series of mental exercises very slowly and hold the scene for a couple minutes it should take around ten minutes and give your mind and body a needed rest. It’s been shown that ½ hour of mental training can be the equivalent of 4 hours of sleep. Give it a try. If you make "quieting your brain" a habit, the effects over time can be life changing.

Slumgullion

It’s a landmark day; I looked up the meaning of Slumgullion for the first time. My folks made this simple hamburger, onion, tomato, macaroni dish for years and I never once thought about the name. My assumption was always that it was made the same in every household. The poor might be able to afford it, its economy was probably part of what helped keep the middle class in the middle and if the rich never had it, well, sorry for them. It is the ultimate comfort food hot or cold (I’m munching it cold for breakfast this morning). Far predating Hamburger Helper, it’s simplicity makes you wonder why folks fall for those prepackaged ingredients full of chemicals you’re body doesn’t need and cardboard that requires recycling. (It just occurred to me that, mid century, our "recycling bin" was a burning barrel-and we lived in the city.)

Ah, but back to Slumgullion and its commercially generated spawn, Hamburger Helper. Does the fact that Slumgullion and its like are so easy to make from scratch say something about the Hamburger Helper fans being challenged by larder stocking skills? Do many people think one meal at a time? Actually, my culinarily creative husband is an inveterate one-meal-at-a-time thinker. “How do I know what I’ll be hungry for a week from now?” he laments when chided. It works, though, because I’ve become a larder stocker. It's something he takes advantage of and I don’t say anything about because he isn’t going to change and he’s such a good cook. Slumgullion doesn’t take a fancy larder, though. No capers needed.

One evening enjoying a gourmet dinner out with friends the subject of Slumgullion came up. “My Mom made that!” a friend exclaimed when told of the ingredients but we called it (I can’t remember the name he used but it was as odd sounding as Slumgullion, starting with a T, I think.) Since then, I've asked alot of people about Slumgullion and everyone with whom I’ve used the term instantly knew the meaning. It might have been made with slight differences in their households but there was a universal understanding. I don’t hang with the super rich, so I don’t know if they were Slumgullion deprived.

Here is our family’s recipe for Slumgullion. You could fancy it up with chopped olives, Parmesan cheese and other stuff, I guess, but plain is still amazing. I do cheat a bit and use Marinara sauce instead of plain tomato sauce. I’d love to hear of other approaches to it and of other names given to the concoction. And, by the way, the first offering of the definition I found bothered me a bit (the word cesspool was in there somewhere) but the last definition fit it to a T – meat stew.

Slumgullion

Ingredients:
1 lb. hamburger
1 large onion, chopped
Tomato sauce (I would guess 2 14oz cans. I used a jar of marinara sauce and about 4 Tbsps. tomato paste because I have good larder stocking skills.)
2 cups elbow macaroni (that’s 2 cups when uncooked)
1 Tbsp. sugar
Salt to taste

Instructions:

Brown the hamburger and chopped onion. Drain excess grease. Dump in tomato sauce, cooked macaroni, sugar and salt. Stir together and heat.

A Lifestyle Choice

Good morning. It’s 7:30am and brilliantly sunny. The lake on which I dwell matches the blue sky, its surface textured with ripples. A corner of the flag on my neighbor’s boat moves slightly once in a while - barely a flutter. A sailboat in the distance has managed to pick up a bit of air to fill its sails. Scullers, whose powerful arms will make it seem immobile, chase it. Sculling is about speed; sailing is not. Glory Of The Seas, is passing by my window. A huge old gaff rigged wooden schooner with proud lines that project pride and power.

The Dictionary of Sailing defines a Schooner as a fore-and-aft rigged vessel with two or more masts, often called by how it is rigged, for example topsail schooner, gaff schooner, staysail schooner, etc. Sails on a gaff rigged boat have an unusual, "chopped off" look.

According to The Oxford Companion To Ships and Seas, the term schooner is possibly derived from the Scottish verb "to scon or scoon," to skip over water like a flat stone. An alternative source for the name is said to have come from a chance remark "there she scoons" from a spectator at the launch of the first vessel of the type at Gloucester, Mass. in 1713.

Spending so much time on the water, continually provides me with chances to learn about things outside my sphere of immediate intellectual interest. Weather, boats, mechanical things (I have a recalcitrant outboard) and wood finishes (it's about time to focus, once again, on the 6" wide toe rail that runs the edge the boat). In an odd and oxymoronish way, living on a boat keeps me grounded. As I've often said and written, it's a lifestyle choice not merely a place to live.

A Virtual Chat With Friends

Facing a blank page awaiting your thoughts - it's amazing how stressful that can be for some folks. I've pondered what makes me return again and again to that blank page with determination to create meaningful prose. For me, it’s the pleasure of sharing. There are many things I care about and want to celebrate. My mother had many friends with whom she often got together and she loved to talk on the telephone. She shared. I’m in a different setting and a different time. My way of sharing is maybe less immediate and less intimate, but I’m doing it in a way that will last over time and, hopefully, touch lives beyond my immediate circle.

For ten years I've taught writing. It started out at my Dad's senior center as a Write Your Life Class to encourage folks to get something down for posterity about their unique experiences wending their ways through time. (That there's no such thing as time is a subject for a more esoteric blog.) Those who joined the class were not published writers but because my philosophy is: Writers should be read! They began to pick up on my enthusiasm and encouragement about their pieces finding a home in a publication somewhere. Since that time, I've had one win a national memoir contest sponsored by the Greyhound Bus Company, two in the class were picked to appear in the New York Times best-selling book by Willard Scott titled, The Older The Fiddle, The Better The Tune, one sold a column to a regional magazine, one had her humor piece, the first piece she'd ever sent out, purchased and published by the Christian Science Monitor, all in the class currently (now about fifteen) have now been published somewhere, some many times. I'm bragging for them, I'm excited for them. What a high to see your name in print.

I salute anyone who has the courage to face that blank page. It’s been said that the largest reason writers are not published is that they do not send out what they have written – I believe that. I had a writing instructor once admonish, "You know how to write. Don't spend time in grammar classes or obsess so much you never send something out. You can have people and even your computer help you clean up your piece for spelling or grammar."

If you have faced that blank page but don't know how to put a piece in the right format to send to a magazine, pick up a copy of The Writer's Market (it comes out yearly so there are a lot a second hand stores.) It shows the desired format, lists magazines and what they want and has simple articles on how to send pieces out. There are markets for everyone. If you haven’t published before look around at regional publications, even newspapers, as a way to start.

You’ll write if you are destined to, if that becomes your way of sharing. My mother, though, didn’t fret over not putting her words more formally on a page. She imparted much insight and knowledge and touched many lives in her way. I hope the insights I offer here make you think or give you a laugh or just comfort you in some way as evidence others have lived your experiences. I’m approaching this blog as a virtual chat with friends.

Raised Green

There is an area in India where, because of religious beliefs, many folks do not eat onions or garlic. Now, you’ll find me a most tolerant person of even the most odd-seeming religious convictions but – onions and garlic!? Since my husband and I are of the ‘live to eat’ rather than the ‘eat to live' crowd, I tried to imagine cuisine without onions and garlic.

Unbelievably, I survived the first twenty years of my life without garlic (I do believe I’ve made up for it since). With all the amazing fresh produce that emerged from my Dad’s huge and thriving yearly gardens and with the universal love of anything green and fresh, I don’t now how garlic slipped by them. I think they pretty much stuck to the vegetable array that had filled their plates in childhood. Thinking about that endless stream of green things to our table, though, they really did stick to the basics, onions, green and yellow, literally tons of potatoes, ears of corn, cauliflower, radishes, carrots, lettuce, cabbage (for vats of homemade sauerkraut) tomatoes, big, yellow Hubbard squashes (to be baked with butter and sugar), cucumbers and a few pumpkins for Halloween carving. There was that odd and wonderful asparagus patch my Dad tended lovingly and bunches of rhubarb on the side of the garage. Oh, and his huge and enviable raspberry patch with plants in it that were, he’d proudly explain, ‘75 years old’. How spoiled was I by all those readily munchable raspberries. And by the beautiful quart jars filled of peaches, apricots, and pears that lined our basement shelves each year. One day each year the whole family, grandparents, aunts and kids would trek to Wawawi, a sunnier place some twenty miles or so near a river to spend the day picking fruit for canning.

And, they’d bring home extra cucumbers from those picking trips because every year they would “put up” 60 quarts of dill pickles. Only after my cousin married a German fellow who introduced the “amazing” idea of hot peppers amidst the pickles was there a change from the established pattern. After that a certain number of quarts would get the peppers, for my Dad who quickly developed a taste for the peppery hotness. Hot peppers had certainly not been a part of those gardens or of the food they ate (wrong soil I now know - hot peppers had grown well in the soil of my husbands folks in Nevada and, thus had been a part of what he had learned to love.)

I guess there wasn’t a lot of vegetable experimentation. No garlic appeared in our dishes. I never met a bell pepper until I was grown. An avocado was a foreign animal to them (an adventuresome Uncle would return once in a while and enjoy avocado with salt, I heard said. I vividly remember my mom commenting, “They taste like soap.” Though a vegetable lover and willing experimenter, it took me way into my twenties to develop a taste for avocado (in guacamole) and into my thirties to enjoy it straight on sandwiches. Yeah, I know it’s really a fruit but it seems awfully vegetably to me.

The tomatoes were eaten fresh, not “put up”. Dad ate the thick sweet slices with salt and pepper. Mom and I loved sugar on ours. In the summer, salads (something unfamiliar in their youths because of no refrigeration for mayonnaise) would appear. Iceberg lettuce (my favorite to this day) and chunks of fresh tomato mixed with mayonnaise. On special occasions, a can of shrimp would be added. The concept of a salad appearing as part of what they ate stuck in my Dad’s memory. He told the tale of remembering his mother chatting with friends on the party line all agog over the new idea of a “vegetable salad”. He called them vegetable salads all his life.

Ah the vegetables of my youth, all freshly picked and full of taste. And back to onions, my Dad loved those little green onions, we now call scallions, on a little plate at dinner along side those slices of white bread. He'd eat each one with a little salt. Funny, as so many other dishes were filled with onions, no one ate them straight except dad. I guess there were some chopped into those green salads sometimes.

Since learning to make Indian food, I’m amazed at how they’ve come to combine vegetables. I make a Dahl (a dish with lentils or dried peas). It’s a heavenly mixture of zucchini, onions, tomatoes and green peppers all swirled together with aromatic spices and at the end combined with yellow peas. My folks would not ever have imagined combining vegetables this way. The only combining they did was to dump carrots, potatoes and onions together into a beef stew. The only vegetable combining I truly remember was when the “new potatoes” were on, new potatoes and fresh peas swimming in a cream sauce with a pinch or two of sugar. It was yummy but certainly not the serious vegetable combining of the Indian dahls. And, even though where I was raised is now known as the “Pea and Lentil Capital of the World” no dried pea I ever knew existed outside split pea soup and I never munched on one lentil during my entire childhood.

Ah, see where onions and garlic can lead one? I certainly thank my folks for my love of vegetables. I wish I could share with them some things I’ve learned and amaze them with my vegetable repertoire. I think they’d have loved, or at least tried, anything done with vegetables as long as avocados weren’t in the mix. And, if dad had his garden today, I’ll bet I could convince him to plant some garlic.

My Black And White World

The large bicycle with newly painted white fenders required real pedal pushing. It was too big for my short legs but in working class 1959 hand-me-down bikes were it. I flew past the two chestnut trees and screeched to a halt up a dirt road a block or so past my house. Laying the bike on it’s side in the grass at the roadside, I ran across patches of little white wild flowers like tiny daisies with yellow centers, and over a little stream. I clambered up onto some railroad tracks at the entrance to an old, narrow, black metal railroad bridge.

The smell of gummy black creosote and caked oil on the metal in the warm sun was comfortingly familiar. I ran the length of the bridge along the wood planks beside the tracks. At the far end I jumped down onto a metal platform and ducked under the bridge. The supports formed an odd maze of chambers. The first was clearly a kitchen with a metal beam “shelf” for imaginary spices. The hall was a narrow passage under the bridge with two identical square chambers on the left--the bedrooms of course. When you scrunched under the metal plate into a bedroom and sat on the cross bar “seat”, you looked directly into a perfect round hole the size of a dinner plate. Those “mirrors” saw me primp for many an imaginary boyfriend. Down the hall past the bedrooms was the patio, a black metal plate about a yard square that overlooked the creek.

I remember lounging on my patio, sometimes for hours. My only childhood memories of considering the larger questions and possibilities of my life were of sitting on my secret patio, watching the creek trickle through the field of white flowers.

Many years later I took my Dad to that bridge. We squeezed our way through my black; oil caked hideaway and sat for a while on that patio. The creek and flowers were still there but somehow the creosote just smelled dirty. My black and white world was gone.

Our Past & Our Future commences...

Welcome to my new blog. New is fun and full of possibilities. As a quintessential Baby Boomer and middle class gal, you may find me celebrating, poking fun at, and waxing nostalgic about my upbringing. As a therapist you may find me sharing insights about ways of building toward a future of possibilities. As a writer you will find me practicing my prose.

I've found, though, that a blog can take on a life and a direction of it's own. I hereby give permission to Our Past & Our Future to commence and to lead me down whatever path of prose it so chooses. I may resist at times, but I'll listen.