Pods, Hurt Knee and Easter Dinner

 

Something that has been sitting in my letter pix file for a while now is this photo. Do you know what this is?

 

 

No?

I’ll tell you.

This is a burial pod.

I saw something once, a long time ago, that said, “Always be yourself. Unless you can be a unicorn, then always be a unicorn.” Well, maybe we can’t be unicorns but when our souls have left our earthly bodies and gone on to heaven to bask in the glory of our Lord, wouldn’t it be cool to have your body go back into the earth to nourish other living things?

　

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I had a dumbass attack a couple of weeks ago. I did something I should have known better than try to do.

“What did you do now, Peg?” you ask.

I was working out on the treadmill, doing my interval running and I was paying attention to how my feet were landing. I tend to walk on the outside of my feet and that is clearly evidenced by my shoes-after I get them broke in that is. So I thought that if I made more of an effort to land more evenly of my feet that maybe-just maybe-it would use that inner thigh muscle and maybe-just maybe-help to shape my leg.

Yeah. I’m really way past caring about those things but I thought I would give it a try since I was running anyway. Train my foot to not walk off the side of my shoe and shape my leg in the process. It sounded like a win-win for me. Unfortunately after about a week my knee started hurting. Doggone it!

I iced it down, waited a couple of days and got back on the treadmill. I was trying really hard to not think about how my feet were landing and just run naturally but after twenty minutes my knee started hurting again, so I stopped.

More ice and a knee support for a day or so and I decided to get on the treadmill and just walk. I was about forty minutes in when my knee started hurting again. I shut it down and this time I decided to wait for a couple of weeks until I can unlearn what I had been trying so hard to learn.

So … here I sit … not taking very good care of myself. Not exercising and eating things I shouldn’t be eating. We won’t talk about the dollar twenty-five cent size bag of Crunchy Cheetos that I picked up on my way out of Wal*Mart not once, but twice in the last couple of weeks. Dang that impulse rack by the checkouts anyway!

We won’t talk about the really awesome brownie recipe I found online and decided to make. If I look at a recipe and it has simple basic ingredients and things I already keep on hand, then there is a good chance it will be a good recipe. I ate most of the eight by eight pan myself. Not a good thing. They were fudgy and chewy and once I got a taste, I couldn’t seem to stop. That is my downfall. If I don’t taste I can resist much better.

We won’t talk about the bag or two of jelly beans I ate in honor of Easter either. You have to eat jelly beans at Easter. It’s like mandatory. At least in my world. Maybe in your world it’s a chocolate Easter bunny that you have to have once a year.

And what’s Easter without a ham? Unheard of, right?

Mike and I got a ham and I followed the directions printed on the package.

Place on rack cut side down, it said. Cover loosely, it said. What the heck does that mean? Cover loosely? Does that mean to tuck the foil around two sides of the roasting pan? Three sides and leave one open? What exactly does cover loosely mean? My foil wasn’t wide enough to go over the ham and tuck in all the way around. So in my world, cover loosely gets you tucked on three sides. Right or wrong, that’s what I did.

Bake at 325 for 20 minutes per pound, it said. I smiled. I have a calculator. The package label lists the weight. I dug it out of the trash. Luckily it only had a layer of potato, cucumber and carrot peelings on top, which came off pretty easily when I picked it up. Nine point eight five pounds times twenty equals one hundred ninety-seven minutes. Divide by sixty minutes in an hour and the ham was to stay in the oven for three and a half hours. Three point two eight to be exact but three and a half was close enough.

An hour before the ham was to come out I could smell it. Wait, is it starting to burn? I opened the oven, carefully lifted the foil and checked. It was just the juice in the bottom that was burning. Doggone it! No ham gravy!

Half an hour later, as the burnt smell is getting stronger, my mother is yelling at me in my head. Peggy, put some water in there to keep it from burning!

I jumped up from where I was working on my weekly blog and did as she told me to do.

That night on the phone…

“Momma, if you’re cooking a ham and the juice in the bottom of the pan starts to burn, would you put a little water in it?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she said with no hesitation at all.

“Good. That’s what I did. But it was too late to save my drippings.”

Momma tried a couple of different scenarios whereby using the ham drippings to make a gravy would have been possible, but not where I had burned it for so long.

“Why didn’t you put water in when you first smelled it burning?” Momma asked.

“I guess you weren’t yelling loud enough,” I told her. LOL. Like my burning the ham juice is my mothers fault.

Easter is once a year and what’s Easter without a pie?

How about a Homemade Coconut Pie?

I discovered a recipe online that I wanted to try and I know that my mother-at one time-loved Coconut Cream Pie. Thinking only of her I followed the link to Taste of Home and read the recipe and it sounded just perfect. Easy, basic ingredients. Making a crust would be the hardest part. But heck, you could buy a Pillsbury Crust already made or maybe use a graham cracker shell.

Letting all of this rattle around in my head brought an image to my minds eye.

I see my mother scraping and eating the filling from a cream pie with an awful crust that had been served to us in a restaurant once. Me? I can eat lousy crust.

“You don’t need a crust,” I heard her say in my head.

Yeah!

Thank you Momma! 

Save time, trouble and calories! Just make the filling and put it in a bowl and eat it like pudding!

"Peg, if you really wanted to save calories, you wouldn't make the pudding."

I know, right! But it's Easter.

That night on the phone I told Momma about making the pie with no crust and, "Momma, this pudding is made with flour and not corn starch!”

“Makes it taste better, doesn’t it,” she asked-no-stated.

It is good and you know what else is good?

Warm pudding!

After I scraped the pudding into the bowls, I licked the spatula.

Warm pudding always makes me think of my beautiful daughter Kat. That is the only way she would ever eat any of the homemade puddings I made while she was growing up.

I love this picture of her! It is both beautiful and haunting.