Hi everyone!
Can you believe it?
“Believe what?” you ask.
Can you believe that another week has slipped by? Because it has. This past week went quickly for me but I really don’t mind getting to sit and visit with you again so soon.
“I have a question about last weeks letter,” you say.
Really? Don’t you want to see my current desktop photo before we get into all that?
I’ve had several desktop photos up this past week. Several as in three!
First up was this pretty guy. I think he is a cedar waxwing (but I’m not going to check) and I have photos where he sat in a tree, on a branch, a whole lot closer to me than he was in this shot, but I like this shot because of the way he framed himself. If you didn’t know he was there, you wouldn’t see him, would you?
I was walking the dogs yesterday and I heard an owl! I love to hear the owls hoot. It was minutes between his calls and I just couldn’t spot him in all of the trees. Then I saw this! Do owls hide inside trees? I wondered. Is he sitting in there right now? I put my zoom up as high as I could and as I snapped a couple of photos he hooted a third time! It seemed entirely possible to me that the sound was coming from this tree. Then I never heard him again.
Midweek I was looking through photos I’d shot that day and I came to this one of a feather hung up on some brush. I see a heart in the photo and who doesn’t need a reminder of love? I swapped out the waxwing for it.
And then yesterday I took photos of daffies. Yay! The daffies are blooming! I bet the crocus are too, or maybe they’ve come and gone already, I don’t really know because I don’t know where there are any of those.
It was while traipsing about in the weeds to get daffie photos that I picked up my first (and second and third) tick of the season. Not all on the same trip though. The first time was when I was out on Monday and the daffies were barely open. Yesterday they were all blooming and just beautiful! But this isn’t the photo that makes the third desktop photo of the week. No siree!
Third place (and put up just yesterday) goes to this shot of forsythia, which was blooming just up the hill from the daffies and required another foray into the weeds.
Hmm. Maybe I can’t blame all the ticks on the daffies after all!
It might surprise you to know that I had forgotten about having to go into the weeds to get the forsythia photos and that they could be partly responsible for my little hitchhikers. It wasn’t until the very moment I wrote the sentence that I remembered that. Then again, maybe you wouldn’t be surprised at all.
Case in point.
For a year or more now I have been puzzling over Christmas light bulbs. They are everywhere! The first one I saw was a white one and I thought it was a mushroom. I walked a little ways into the woods to check it out and realized it was a Christmas light. How did that get there? I wondered at the time. Then I remembered we had had a really bad rain. I found these shelves along the banks of a creek that had flooded. I don’t know how they got there either but I thought they were pretty and they’re well made so I hauled them home. First one then a few days later I spotted the other one.
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So when I started seeing these light bulbs all over the place I just attributed it to the flood.
That’s what I have been thinking for a year now!
Then yesterday I see this blue one laying in the wash beside the road. And it hit me. Just like that. I hadn’t even been wondering where it came from when all of a sudden…
Dare I say it?
What the heck!
All of a sudden it’s like a light bulb goes off and I know how these bulbs ended up in the woods and all along the roadside on Valley Road and the campground below it.
This used to be the route of the drive-thru Christmas Lights display! We lost it to a town on the other side of the Lake a few years ago but I’m guessing when they replaced bulbs they just tossed away the spent ones.
Sigh. Talk about slow thinking now, would ya!
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Okay, so what was your question about last weeks letter?
“Why do you carry a baggie of cat food in your dog poop bag?”
Good question.
Last fall there was a beautiful orange cat at the top of the Strip. I don’t know if he belonged to someone or was just living under a porch somewhere but he was lonesome. He came right up to Ginger, Itsy and me and begged for some lovin’ -- which I obliged but then, when I tried to leave, he kept meowing and following us down the street. I didn’t want him to get hit at any of the side streets as we crossed them and I definitely didn’t need him following me home! I had to walk really fast and it was all I could do to shake him. This happened three or four times before I thought to carry some cat food with me and use it to distract him while I walked away. He didn’t really look like he was hungry but I had to try something!
How did it work? You wonder.
I never got a chance to try it. I never saw him again.
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Last time I told you I had more stories for you but no more room?
Those three stories were about food so all week long, whenever I thought about this letter, I thought it could be a food issue. Then I accumulated a story or two plus 16 or 17 or 18 or 20 photos I want to share with you!
The best laid plans, right?
So! At the bottom of page four. Let’s get on with it, shall we? And we shall see where we end up.
I made Kandyce’s (my beautiful daughter-in-law) recipe for meatloaf a couple of weeks ago. It was only the second time I’ve made it and quite a while since I made the first one. So there I was, mixing the ingredients according to the directions and realized the can of tomatoes that I had were twice the size I needed for a single loaf. This didn’t happen last time, I thought to myself. What did I do with the rest of the tomatoes? The only thing I could think of was that maybe I made two meatloafs the first time. What am I going to do with half a can of tomatoes? I could eat them warm, like stewed tomatoes or I could just put them in the fridge and figure it out later. Yeah. Right. More like until they go bad then throw them away. What the heck! I like tomatoes. I dumped the rest of the can in the meatloaf. It’ll just be extra tomato-y.
I baked it and Mike and I sat down to supper. I took my spatula and freed the meatloaf from the sides of the pan. Then I turned the spatula the other way and cut a nice think slice. It was as I tried to scoop it out that I knew I screwed up. It fell apart. This didn’t happen last time. Even though I hadn’t thought the extra tomatoes would hurt anything, they definitely hurt the stick-togetherness of the meat loaf. But it’s the flavor that counts, right? “I might have screwed up,” I forewarned Mike. Then I had to tell him what I did and why.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Mike said.
Well, it wasn’t all that fine. I mean, we ate it. It nourished our bodies and filled our tummies and Mike didn’t complain, but it was nothing I wanted a repeat performance of and I had a little more than half of it left!
All that evening this disastrous meatloaf rattled around in my head. What am I going to do with it? Rattle-rattle. It tasted more like a goulash without the macaronis than meatloaf. Rattle-rattle. I could make it into goulash. Rattle-rattle. I don’t want to do that. Rattle-rattle. I really try to avoid pasta as it is a refined grain so I didn’t really want to do that. Rattle-rattle. I have a head of cabbage... maybe I could do something like an unstuffed cabbage roll. Rattle-rattle.
Ultimately I did what I always do when I have a problem. I called Momma and we talked about it. After going over my mistake and listing what was already in the meatloaf and what I needed to add to it, it was decided I would give it a go. I’d try to turn this flunked out meatloaf into an unstuffed cabbage dish.
“How did it turn out?” Momma asked me on the phone the next night.
And I’ll tell you what I told her. “It was alright.” But again, it was nothing I wanted a repeat performance of.
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My next cooking disaster was deviled eggs. Can you believe that! I’ve been making deviled eggs for years! Sometimes I just toss whatever into it and it’s fine. But once in a while I’ll pull Betty Crocker off the shelf and use her recipe and that’s exactly what happened this time. I pulled her down, found the page and laid it open on the kitchen table. I had everything in the bowl except the last ingredient. Mayo, or in this case, Miracle Whip. I checked the recipe for the amount and I don’t know what I was doing all those other times I made this recipe but this time I read the line the whole way through.
3 tablespoons, mayonnaise, salad dressing or vinegar, it said.
Vinegar? You can use just plain vinegar? I didn’t know that. That will really cut down on the calories. I thought I’d give it a try. I mixed it in, scooped some onto the egg white and popped it in my mouth.
Yuck!
Maybe if you have never had them any other way it might be good, but I didn’t like it. I mixed a spoonful of Miracle Whip in and served them anyway. They were eaten but one more time, it was nothing I wanted a repeat performance of!
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My third food story is about homemade bread. My beautiful daughter Kat gave me the best and easiest homemade bread recipe EVER! And I think of her every time I make it. I try not to eat a lot of it, not like I did when I first started making it, but I like to keep a loaf sliced up in the freezer. Once a week Mike and I have scrambled eggs, usually Sunday morning, and what’s scrambled eggs without toast!
I know! Right!
This particular time I was making bread and ran about a cup short of flour. I didn’t want to run to the store and I had a bag of whole wheat flour in the cupboard. As a matter of fact, it is the exact same bag of flour that’s in my photo from a year ago. Yeah. I knew I’d been pushing it around in the cupboard for a while but I didn’t know how long until I started writing this letter.
So the last cup of flour in this batch of homemade bread was whole wheat.
“One sixth wheat,” you say, “it probably didn’t even make any difference.”
That’s what I was thinking too! Great minds, I’m tellin’ ya’!
But it did change the flavor. It wasn’t bad, it was just a little wheat-y. Fine if you like wheat bread but I’m not all that partial to it. Instead of eating my normal two slices piping-hot out of the oven, I ate only one. And I have two loaves to eat! I thought. Mike has given up bread. I know! I’ll call Kevin! I looked at the clock and saw it was within minutes of our youngest son getting off work at the dock company. I called him. “Stop and get a hot loaf of bread,” I told him.
“Alright,” he said.
I was glad I didn’t have to run to the store for a cup of flour and now I was doubly glad I wouldn’t have to eat two loaves of it!
Although I wasn’t crazy about it, I would eat it. After my loaf cooled I finished slicing it, put it a Ziplock freezer bag and put it in the freezer.
Now, I’ll tell you what. The first time I made toast with this bread I loved it! It had a little bit of a nutty flavor to it that really appealed to me.
And now that is one mistake that turned out to be not such a bad mistake after all! And one that I have not only repeated but will continue to repeat.
Kevin? You ask how Kevin and his family liked it? I asked him.
“We loved it. Andrew had a piece and I had piece and later on we both had another piece and Kandyce had a piece and I have a piece left for work,” he said.
Yah!
I spend a lot of time thinking of and planning meals. I noticed one of the local groceries had eggplant advertised in the sales circular of the newspaper and thought something different might just hit the spot. Some time ago one of my Curves gals gave me a recipe for eggplant that she said was easy and delicious but I never tried it. In fact, at this point, I am not even confident that I can find the recipe. But I would worry about that later and I went ahead and bought an eggplant. Just like that. No research on the subject, no recipe, nothing. Kind of reckless of me, don’t you think?
I’m in the grocery store and I’m standing in front of the bin of eggplants and wondering how the heck you are supposed to know which one is a good one. I looked around for the produce manager but not seeing anyone I tossed caution to the wind and reached down and touched one. Soft. I touched another. Soft. And another. Soft, soft, soft. They were all soft. Maybe they are supposed to be soft. I’d never bought eggplant before so what did I know. I picked one up and put it in the cart. I spent the rest of the day doing what I should have done before I went shopping for an eggplant. I researched it.
Did you know there are both male and female eggplant? Who knew! Females have more seeds. That makes sense. Pick a male if you can or in the very least, look for a smaller female, the web site advised. And you want it to be firm. Too late for that. The website showed pictures on how to judge a male from a female. I was curious as to which I had picked so I got up and looked. Near as I can tell, I picked a male. Dumb luck there, but I’ll take it.
I went over to Facebook and asked if anyone had a recipe for eggplant that was both good and easy. Then I waited. And I waited. And I waited. I kept checking back in on Facebook but I wasn’t getting any replies to my request. Then a couple hours later, with the supper hour drawing near, I decided I’d better get my butt in gear and find a recipe on my own. There are a lot of eggplant recipes on the web, let me tell you! But I was limited by the contents of my cupboard. So I read recipe after recipe after recipe. I ended up printing two recipes that I either had the stuff for or felt like I had something I could substitute or just plain skip altogether. I wasn’t going to go to the store and since my eggplant was soft to begin with, the website recommended that you use it ASAP. I liked some of the things about each recipe, but not everything about either one. So I cobbled them together and made my own recipe.
“How was it?” you ask.
Again, I had to preface supper with, “This might not be any good...” but it wasn’t all that bad. I’m still not sure what eggplant tastes like though. With the spices in the eggplant parmesan I couldn’t really taste the eggplant.
“Peg, that was four food stories,” you say.
Yeah, well, we acquired a new food story last week besides the three from the week before. Deal with it.
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We are at the bottom of page eight. Not only have I not shown you all the photos I wanted to show you I didn’t even get to some of my stories!
Sigh.
Next time then.
Lots and lots of love,
Peg and Mike
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