Long time no see

Posted by Serendipity

Not sure why I keep this alive. I think I’ll treat it like my first attempt at journaling – random thoughts, nothing profound; at the time I was unhappy with my life and decided rather than seek professional therapy I’d speak to a counselor at the state employment office. Turned out he was a professional in his trade; we discussed job options, this and that and he told me to start writing down my thoughts and focusing on little stuff. Huh. Thought it might be wasted time but with no other tools of my own, I started at the beginning. The writing part was drivel, I’m sure but I began to try to pay attention to bits during my day that made me laugh or feel good. We had a newspaper delivered at my work (paving company in New York’s Southern Tier). Part of my job was to look in the classified for posted bids for paving in the small surrounding townships. The boss would submit a bid and most often it was accepted. Along with the classified ads (never any enticing job listings, I had moved from Kentucky and a well-paying bank job in the real estate dep’t of a major bank) but they had a good comics section. I started clipping the ones I enjoyed – Opus, Doonesbury, Calvin and Hobbes, those with an ironic twist or some sarcasm. The workdays and life moved along and then I found out I was 3 months pregnant.

Not to say that was the cure as these mental moments returned many more times as life happened. However the son was born and after a few rough months life became happy again with new adventures, fears and looking forward once again to the future.

Originally I thought I’d be the author of a witty, popular blog; my first post was a bitch-fest about my hatred of packaging. That was at least 20 years ago LOL. I’m not going to blame my age on the troubles I encounter daily attempting to open any fucking thing but between physical ailments (arthritis, carpal tunnel, curmudgeonliness) I rage daily at the manufacturers. I’m sure it’s my imagination but since the pandemic, seems like there’s been a huge bump in the strength of adhesives used to package our goods.

My favorites are food product shrink wrap and blister packs. Wait, how about any health products sold in a box, tight plastic wrap around the bottle neck, glued-on tab on the bottle top, cotton in the bottle.

I do have tools in my arsenal;

an oil filter wrench for jar opening:

stainless needle nose pliers to grab the miniscule tabs on every bottle or jar or the plastic film on dairy products:

and my favorite, the Open-it tool to chomp through blister packs, zip ties and the like:

I’m winning that war but it continues to piss me off.

Two decades later I thought I’d be a recipe blogger, inspired in the early days by A Year of Slow Cooking by Stephanie O’Dea, Smitten Kitchen, Deb Perlman and Homesick Texan, Lisa Fain. I also liked Tasty Kitchen, I think started by Ree Drummond. I have an amazing recipe file that lives in the Google cloud, I discussed it’s humble beginnings in a previous blog. I don’t want any paper in my life so I spent a year digitizing my life after a brush with cancer and a negative complication. At this writing my file has 4k plus recipes culled from all the best (IMHO) websites in my personal word document format. I edit heavily, don’t like the use of the word ‘your’ i.e. ‘your dough’, and remove any anecdotal comments by the author. I thought I could blither away about my day or an event and intersperse the account with the day’s recipes via link. What I didn’t know at the time was I would have to make the whole file public in order for someone to open said link, or give permission which would allow the reader access to my whole cloud account that also stores a lot of personal and financial information. Also, I don’t write in a witty or professional style and don’t take the time to learn all the pretty tricks and tools of penning a blog.

Creating this giant compilation of old recipes from snippets of paper, in cookbooks and online became a hobby. At the time I was once again in a negative mental space (mostly job related, family issues etc.) . One piece of self-help advice often suggests to find something you like – problem was, there wasn’t anything in the world that excited me (also, no meds helped, every one I tried caused a different bizarre side effect). My world was meh. The eureka moment came, however, when I realized every morning while drinking my coffee and reading email I was reading food blogs or recipe sites, copying and pasting them into my file, and dare I say enjoying the process. A decade later I’m still at it and I don’t seem to get bored.

I do have to note that I cook and bake all the time (mindless activity, sort of meditative sometimes) and feed my family every Sunday. Thing about that is the aforementioned cancer and subsequent radiation treatments left me with hammered taste buds. I have to rely on taste memory and smell. According to the fam, I do well. The Sunday meals tend to be vegetarian (for 3 of the kids); we don’t eat a lot of meat ourselves but creating a protein besides beans can be a challenge. I make my own seitan and tvp products since i have a million herbs and spices but it’s hard to emulate the texture of the commercial products. I need some of those chemicals they use.

I do sense flavors, some are intolerable (citrus) and texture is important – need chewy, crunchy stuff. luckily some my favorites (coffee, dark chocolate and beer lol) are still enjoyable but it’s a bummer to bite into a smash burger and taste not much of anything. That begs the question how did I put on 15 pounds since I retired and survived the pandemic?

I think this time around I’m going to try to use this as a personal platform to try to once again drop a few pounds. I’ve done Weight Watchers in the past, still have a gym membership and walk a couple of miles most days of the week but I’m obviously going in the wrong direction. Need to keep a food diary for starters.

I also stopped doing yoga while quarantining. Why? I’ve practiced for 50 years and the last few have enjoyed classes at Gilda’s Club. The instructors offered virtual classes and I know the routines well so what happened? We didn’t have the hardships of many folks, I still was able to keep up my shopping and walking routines, took small trips to Air B&Bs, visited with the family (outside, distanced, masked).

One time suck is Instagram and I’ve returned to reading. Sounds like procrastination to me (the thief of time, said Edward Young, 18th century poet.

This year I began loading the day’s recipe links and possible chores and errands into my Google calendar – kind of a to-do list for the anal. Or the retired and not liking it too much person.

I am so enjoying the changing of the season; I seem to mentally wake up when the weather cools, leaves begin turning, the yard finally begins to leave me alone but the house beckons with items needing to be mended, cleaned, tossed, etc. We sealed the driveway, sidewalk and patio this past week. That required edging the landscape, moving all the furniture from the surface and refreshing all the outdoor doo-dads beaten to death by the sun. I love my Halloween décor! It’s been up since the beginning of September.

Amazon driver has a sense of humor 🎃

Tonight’s fallish menu is spicy vegetarian chili, slaw, zucchini muffins and a tomato pie (tastes like apple!). I need an appetizer even though I made a snack mix with chile crisp. Maybe just hummus and veg. I have 9 crockpots.

Nothing to see here…

Posted by Serendipity

I have to check and see what I’m paying for this blog, if anything. As much as I’ve read I’m still in the dark about owning my own domain, etc. Watching my stupid TV disconnect itself from the wifi I have little tolerance for these things I just start pushing buttons or disconnecting cords until it works. Since I’m old and recently retired I’ve joined the ranks of the cord cutters; should have done it sooner but now I have time to jerk around with all the idiosyncrasies of the platforms; I watch about 2 hours of programming a night max – usually HGTV or or DIY. I don’t like movies (no attention span) and spend a lot of time online reading news, food blogs and looking up words, places and spaces. TV is mostly for the husband.

This was only meant to be a diary of sorts, don’t think anyone would care to read my ramblings and that’s no longer any sort of goal. Maybe a couple of decades ago when the interwebs were catching on and I thought I had something to share.

I do have a kick ass digital file of recipes that I’ve kited from every esteemed blogger, magazine, food personality and all the recipes I’ve culled from 40 years of work potlucks. My older posts have lots of food references. Ironically, I cook and bake more now than ever. And yes, I bake all our bread.

I currently have yet another back crap-out, either a ruptured disc or a collapsed vertebra. End of week 2, some improvement; I can get out of the bed now but turning is still an issue – have to log-roll and I don’t always remember while I’m sleeping. My back is shit – looks like swiss cheese on x-ray, advanced osteoporosis but in the past I’ve been able to heal enough to tear it up in the garden and until now, the 3 stories of my house. All storage is either in the attic or basement. My kitchen is a 5 x 10 galley and I have tons of cooking implements and food items, none of which fit in the kitchen. Much cast iron.

Recently had oral surgery x3 – abscesses and bone infection caused by Prolia and my history so I have a large cavern in my jaw that draws every morsel of food into it. May have had a bit of medical mismanagement as I have a history of salivary gland CA with radiation Tx. I had concerns about the Prolia treatment and voiced them but apparently not strongly enough. Waah waah waah.

My point – so much real suffering happening – bad sickness, loss of job, money, human life so I feel shitty about whining but this stuff hurts and is worrisome. Not to mention trying to stay covid-free.

But so far I have a house I can still pay for, food, family I can still be with – a GREAT election outcome so I won’t allow any self-pity. I busy myself with my food and nit-picking. Since I have 8 more hours in each day at home I find myself even less tolerant of little items on the floor and on my counters. I don’t even care anymore if I’m obsessively vacuuming and wiping. My house is 90+ years old and I have a ton of wonderfully curated tchotchkes in every room/wall/floor/corner. As the sun moves around during the day the floor and surfaces show me things I missed in the morning that need attention i.e. removing. Certain areas demand absolute order, others can be totally derelict. IDK but it no longer matters as there’s no-one watching LOL!

Thing about it is we worked on this house for a year – every day I came home from work at the hospital and worked till 1AM or later. When we moved in everything was clean, painted, repaired, somewhat new. All the things we brought from the old house were washed, overhauled etc. before they came in. I’ve wanted to keep that feeling since then. I know it’s not reasonable but I try anyway.

On the flip side I can exist in total stupid chaos with or without all my ‘stuff’. One holiday family vacation our clothes were left upstairs at the house; I borrowed some from my SIL and bought Walmart undies. Another vacation all of our toiletries were left behind (notice how I kindly don’t lay blame); I wish that had been a lesson learned in how to travel lighter i.e. both trips were wonderful without the baggage. I saw a Michael Kosta clip from one of his comedy acts – packing the car for a road trip since folks aren’t flying as much; from the Detroit Free Press: “Bring it! We’re driving!,” shouts Kosta as he assumes the roles of a married couple packing an SUV. “‘Honey, should I bring the blender?’ Yes! We’re driving. I may want to make fresh tomato soup this weekend. ‘What about the treadmill?’ It’s already packed. We’re driving. We’re driving! ‘Two thousand and five tax returns?’ Of course! What if the accountant calls?” That be me. We either vacation in Airb&b, VRBO or my brother’s time share properties; I don’t like eating out other than a lunch or two so I bring crockpots, herbs & spices and all my favorite kitchen tools. Not to mention provisions, since my frugal nature doesn’t appreciate buying basics at higher cost.

Apropos of nothing, my little fruitcake is 30 years old this year. Dare I say Happy New Year?

Meh

Posted by Serendipity

I live in a small, 1930’s bungalow a block from a beautifully landscaped bird sanctuary of a neighborhood. My daily walks take me past all types of architecture and foliage. I consider it a form of forest bathing as I stop to admire and photograph a grand old tree or new cluster of seasonal flowers and ground cover. Folks wave as I pass by – I’m definitely taking advantage of my good fortune to live nearby, my self-care ritual.

This was a comment I posted to an article in an Apartment Therapy by Emma Balter titled I’ve Never Lived in My Dream Home, But I Did Live Next to Whole Blocks of Them. I appreciated our common thoughts as I’ve been blessed to live in the absolute best, sought-after neighborhoods in my city, whether I fit in according to financial or social standards or not. I made the most of these experiences and now continue to enjoy my life on the outskirts.

So….our current state of affairs. Most of my fear is for the health of my young family; minimal co-morbidities on my daughter’s side; my wonderful son is asthmatic and is alternately uber compliant or stupidly not and my husband who has the weirdest, worrisome pain in the ass reactions to any ailments. I’ve worked in an infectious disease environment for the last 20 years and that fact plus my OCD tendencies and rituals afford me a good amount of infection avoidance that I hope might get me through this because I’m effing old.

I hope I live long enough for my retirement financials to recover.

Not depressed or anxious, I only sweat the small stuff. I live in a safe little house; I have enough food to feed us and probably the neighborhood forever. The weather has improved (not so allergies but otc stuff helps); I can work in the garden, we have great neighbors and plenty of beautiful places to walk. I also just get in the car and drive, lots of things to look at in Louisville.

I’m lying about the anxiety but that’s present pandemic, tornado, financial ruin or not so besides my nightly few beers (quit smoking when I had the cancer surgery) I cook. And cook. And bake. Mostly carb-based yummies.

Today the boy-chick went off the rails and drive to Indiana because Mendard’s screwed up his deck stock order delivery so I baked chocolate chunk coconut oatmeal cookies.

Went to Aldi this am, early access for seniors; had my gloves and Microban to clean my cart. A few other folks lined up for the opening, we shared the cart cleaning. Ended up with a large haul and bleach-washed it all after I got home. Whew – load it in the cart, unload it at the check out; reload it into my car then unload it at home; clean it and put it away.

Headed to Total Wine to pick up my quarantine stash, wish they had curb pickup. Order was ready, locked and loaded but to exit I had to stand in a checkout lane behind a chatty customer who was leaning too close to the cashier, and dealing with paper money. Disturbing but I had on my gloves, had sprayed the cart with Microban and headed to the car; I had the husband glove up to load then sprayed the cases again with Microban. Removed my gloves, used hand sanitizer and enjoyed a leisurely drive home through our beautiful, eerily void of humans park.

Overkill? No, the major transmitter of this beastly virus is our hands touching our faces, which is an almost subconscious habit.

Glad no-one reads this, apparently I’ve lost the real focus of my reasons to begin this in the first place, I’d so love to share my thousands of recipes culled from the best periodicals, websites and blogs but it’s just turned into a therapy session. PM me if you would like a recipe. I need to not pay for hosting next year lol.

Beauty all around, forest bathing today!

a good day(s)

Posted by Serendipity

wonderful, supportive club in Louisville

this good day began with Gilda’s yoga; wonderful, skilled instructors, many new peeps in today’s class ( thanks, cancer) and a strenuous chair or floor workout.

picked up the husband, he’s always excited to join me on my field trips because they might include a meal out. Haircut first at his salon; the gals were talking about their beginnings – doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, you end up reminiscing about the great or shitty managers, characters you worked with and situations that made or broke you and maybe caused you to chart a different course. I rarely go to the salon, get my trims in the backyard but it’s a cold, dreary January day and I was looking pretty shaggy. I see why folks faithfully return to their stylists – it’s not just the do, it’s the atmosphere of care and camaraderie that’s comforting. Off to the Spectrum store to dump our remaining components and finally cancel the service. We now are amongst the somewhat limited income group and cable tv is another thing that gets the ax to help balance the budget. Long line there but a helpful perky rep greeted us and sent us to the UPS store where we dumped the stuff and went on our way to Trader Joe’s for kale gnocchi, cruciferous crunch, a lovely sweet potato and my favorite crackers. A short stop at Kroger for a lemon and a bag of pintos for Super Bowl chile which I just realized I left in the car. Hope the lemon isn’t frozen. Onward to Whole Foods for bulk dark rye, good flour (all for my breads) and brown rice krispy cereal for Tahini Brown Rice Treats. And lunch.

we like small bites of different things. the best for me was the lentil balls, I got a pic of the ingredients to try to copy. i did, however, really like the cranberry chicken breast and man’s mac n’ cheese. Dangerous crappy wonderful noodly cheesy stuff.

the good day proceeded to go a bit south, we’ve switched to ROKU + Philo streaming. 3 units already working great but man’s system downstairs is McGuyver’d with shit tons of wires and speakers and remotes. new unit didn’t allow the booming sound he so loves.

i set up the web pages for him to research and, bless his heart, he found a solution (i hope!!!) a specific unit that allows one to pair it with their sound crap. yay. ebay came through with a viable option but the remote won’t pair so waiting to hear from the seller. A moment of panic, rumors that ROKU was dropping FOX Sports or vice versa – tomorrow is the Super Bowl. at this writing, it’s still available; wouldn’t want to deal with having to set up streaming on all the various devices so we could see the commercials. actually, we’re all rooting for the Chiefs. actually we’re just in it for the food. i’m still using up parts of my hoard, promised myself i’d try to use what i have for the menu. so far so good, only had to buy fresh veggies. menu will be veggie pizza and carrot-in-a-blanket sounds gross but yummy marinade and sauce(using up refrigerated crescent rolls why did i buy these?), the obligatory black eye pea dip nothing but butter, cheese, green chiles, onion and a few peas, harissa wings, fresh veggies + hummus, spicy veg chile, cornbread and tiramisu brownie trifle (how could I have leftover brownies in the freezer?). beer.

bread

Posted by Serendipity

I like a soft boiled egg on Friday; this is my feeling free day since I mostly retired a year ago. I actually have to schedule time to do nothing – a tip from Headspace https://www.headspace.com/, a very good site featuring guided relaxation and meditation on a myriad of subjects and situations. Also recommended by the Dutch, who seem to have perfected the art. The productivity addiction for me was unfortunate function of working for the man all these years. Have to get it done at work, then come home and do it some more.

My weekday routine has been to start the day with a protein shake; it’s an expeditious way to get the digestive system rolling and ensures that I will consume a certain amount of fruit each day. I wish I liked fruit more but since my taste buds are jenky due to them being radiated, eating fruit is a challenge. The sensation I get is like sucking on a lemon, no matter what fruit I try (except maybe a perfectly ripe peach or fig).

I usually have a cooked breakfast on Sunday consisting of leftover meal scraps, lots of veggies and greens formed into a frittata. Also, a serving of the ever popular avocado toast.

I love carbs so much. I made a gorgeous no-knead harvest bread for tonight’s Sunday dinner offerings. Also on the menu, a Southwest-style chopped salad with extra kale & spinach and vegetarian stuffed peppers.

I have been trying to use what’s in my pantries and both refrigerator/freezers; I don’t know if I lived through the Depression in a past life but I acknowledge the fact that I’m a food hoarder. Included in that issue are spices, herbs and kitchen tool. In my defense I use them all (except the food, I keep buying more).

My family joins us on Sunday so that clears out a certain amount of product but I also hoard recipes so I usually have to augment my stock. First world problems, eh?

This is my anxiety medication – lucky since none of the real stuff worked. Nothing tragic, just dark clouds all the time. I managed to go through the motions of life (work, keeping up the household & finances) but stopped socializing or wanting to do anything happy. There were a number of burdensome people and issues in my life at the time.

When I started this blog in 2017 I was trying to show myself that my life was good by writing about it. I think I described what precipitated my digitizing my life but it caused a spark. Also, I enjoy technology.

I had a cancer, which is in remission; I didn’t play into it but had a scare during the removal of it and lived to tell the tale. I unfortunately didn’t come away with a new zest for living, but decided I better act like it and start appreciating all my luck and some of the goodness in my life regardless of the bad bits.

I love my photographs and due to the aforementioned OCD tendencies, they were already organized and living in albums. Every day I see or hear about tragic catastrophes where people are still alive but have lost all their possessions. They always mention their pictures and photos. Most of my stuff I could live without but not my photo memories. I set about digitizing them all; I used a flatbed scanner for the albums, page by page titling and dating them. I scanned all the framed photos as well. This project took about three months as I chipped away at it a bit at a time. It actually was less tedious than I would have thought (since I didn’t have a personal deadline) and mostly fun looking at them all.

Next came the recipes, that was a labor of love. I had a ton in an old data binder (from family, friends, neighbors, potlucks etc.), a bunch of the little Pillsbury and Gooseberry Patch books, newspaper clippings and, of course numerous cookbooks with a zillion post-it notes stuck in them – cooked and liked, wanted to cook, bleah; time to thin the herd; I have no room for cookbooks nor could I find anything in them if I wanted to. I spent a fair amount of time editing and eliminating, then proceeded to copy the survivors into word documents. I was often able to find them online as so many came from Better Homes, Bon Appétit and the many ‘Living’ mags i.e. Midwest, Southern and Sunset.

Unfortunately, each time I found one, another rabbit hole opened up lol! I did cross reference a lot of them e.g. chicken stew was filed under chicken and stew. They number almost 12,000, in 80 folders and sub-folders. They take up almost 4gb and are stored in Google Drive and redundantly on a thumb drive.

I love Google’s speedy and efficient search; put in the word ‘celery’ and it quickly will first list recipes with the name ‘celery’ in them and then begin diving deeper to any recipe with the ingredient. Great for using up little bits of things I refuse to throw away. I’ll find something that will use it.

Case in point – tonight’s dinner, as mentioned, uses an assortment of fresh and frozen (for too long) veggies and miscellaneous grains, plant-based meatish items and frozen grated cheese. Dessert is a Kentucky jam cake but more like an Oregonian as I had to use up some lovely Loganberry jam my daughter brought me from her trip west. Also some pretty old buttermilk but, like yogurt, who would know if it was bad? I think it will all complement.