It Takes a Village

You've heard the expression, "It takes a village to raise a child." Well, apparently, it takes a village for me to have people over. August was my month to host my book club and as I was preparing for the meeting, I realized that I was using a village to pull it off.

First I made some chocolate chip cookies because I just happened to have the ingredients for them. See the mixer? That was my mother's. I got it recently when we cleaned out her house. Before that, I had been using a hand mixer that I got when I went to college. It's much easier to use the stand mixer, let me tell you. Also, the canisters in the background were a gift from a high school friend.

After the cookies came out of the oven, I cooled them on this heavy duty cooling rack that was also my mother's. The metal is about twice as thick as the one beside it.

I served the cookies on this pottery dish from my sister in Maine made by a local potter there.

Next I prepared a vegetable plate with dip. The divided vegetable tray came from my mother's house and the dip bowl was my grandmother's. The cucumbers for the dip and tray came from Uncle Billy.

Then I fixed a fruit tray with yellow watermelon from Uncle Billy and the tray was new to me from my mother's things.

To add some salty to the mix of food, I had crackers and hummus served in a plate made in Kentucky given to me by a friend.

The drinks were served in glasses that were a gift from Ward's grandmother.

The napkins were from a friend at work who was giving them away.

And tablecloth (not pictured) was a gift from Ward's aunt in Guatemala. I didn't get a picture of the tablecloth so I'm using the cookies again. They turned out delicious.

So with my village of things, we had a successful meeting with good refreshments. 

But Wait, There's More for Inquiring minds:

Why did you spend over 30 years using a hand mixer when you wanted a stand mixer?
I ask myself the same thing. Have I ever mentioned that I have a hard time spending money?

What did you use for these plates and trays before you got them from your mother? 
I made do with whatever I could cobble together. I'm into practical solutions which sometimes comes at the expense of pretty.

Do you entertain very much?
No, and it's usually outside where we supply the meat and others bring the sides. Then we use our picnic plates which are melamine ones we got from MacDonald's years ago that feature the movie Aladdin.

What recipe did you use for the cookies?
The standard one on the bag of chips. I added a little less butter because I like chewy better than crunchy cookies. 

Thankful Sunday, September 8, 2019

I am thankful for my sisters.

My mother and father
with my oldest sister.

At the end of August was the first anniversary of my mother's death. It was also my sister's birthday. My mother died on the same date that she gave birth to her first child many years earlier. That may or may not mean something depending on how you feel about the cosmic connection of things. I feel like it was a coincidence. Maybe.

What I do know is I didn't want my sister's birthday to forever be overshadowed with the sorrowful day of our mother's passing. So I told her to start thinking ahead on how she wanted to celebrate. We couldn't ignore our mother's passing but that day needed to have more to it than the sorrow we were feeling.

My sister thought about it for a while and came up with the following. We should each say a prayer of thanksgiving for our mother's life and how well she lived it. And then have a hot dog with everything on it to celebrate my sister's birthday. So amid the tears, we each said a prayer of thanksgiving for our mother and then had a really good hot dog. Because of the distance between us, we weren't actually able to be together for this experience but we shared pictures of our special meal, some of them complete with birthday candles. We had a fun time seeing what each of us chose to make our perfect hot dog and wishing my sister happy birthday.

Here are all four of us,
ten years after the above picture.

So for shared experiences with my sisters, I am thankful.

The rest of the story:

I am not sharing the picture of the hot dog I had because I put candles on it with my sister's age. She may not want me to share that for 50+ various reasons.

Also, sharing common things from a distance is something my sisters and I have started to do. On my father's birthday, we have ice cream to remember him because that was something he loved. We all share what we did whether it was a trip to the Dairy Queen or a big bowl of ice cream with chocolate sauce at home. 

Dark Clouds, but No Rain

You may ask, where have I been and what have I been up to. You may ask, but most likely not. In your busy lives, I probably don't make it to the top of your list of things to think about. But that's okay. Because in my busy life, I don't always think about blogs either. However, I do try to keep up with all of you out there best I can even if I don't comment.

But just in case you have asked, where have I been and what have I been up to in the last couple of weeks, I'll try to give you some highlights.

After several tests, I decided to go with a one time treatment for my trigeminal neuralgia. It may take several months before I will know if it helps, but in the meantime, I think it's in the stage of it might get worse before it gets better. But having made the decision to go ahead with this treatment is definitely better than the indecision I had before.

We had some dark clouds while camping,
but luckily it didn't rain.

Also, last weekend I went with Ward's family to a big festival that is really hard to describe succinctly, so I'll just say that we were camping with 2000 people who were all having a good time--especially Ward's father who has been going for over 60 years without missing one. He spent a lot of time talking to friends old and new. His family, also, played a lot of music--both as a family and with pickup bands. Bluegrass is their favorite, but they are open to other things, also.

And to make sure that this blog continues to be about not anything significant, here are a few pictures of a recent outing we went on. I have mentioned before, that we keep a folder with info of local places we want to visit. Then when we have a day that we're tired of the grind and want to get out of the house, we look in our folder. This time we visited a nature center that we had passed by before. We had a good hike and saw some interesting exhibits.

Around the nature center building, they had natural, pollinator gardens. Among the plants were these Queen Anne's Lace. Notice the black spot in the middle. 

On the other side of the walk, there was a group of Queen Anne's lace
without the black spot in the middle.

A few years ago was the first time I noticed a Queen Anne's lace with a black spot in the middle. My friend said that was the only kind she had ever seen. That started me on path to learn more about the difference that I shared here on my blog.

This was our second stop that day. However, we got there too late to spend much time
so it went back into our folder for another outing.

Until next time, have fun.

Basil

Making Pesto or How I Almost Burned Down the House

Some grape tomatoes hidden among the basil.

I have mentioned before that I have two self-seeded basil patches that are quite large--meaning my cup runneth over with basil. I have given away plants and cuttings to everyone I know, enough so that they are starting to run the other way when they see me coming. Also, I have left some to flower to make the bees happy and I've made pesto. And more pesto.

The traditional recipe for pesto calls for pine nuts. I'm not even certain what pine nuts are, but they sure are expensive. So Theo and I studied substitutes and decided on cashews. We had used almonds before, but didn't like the texture they produced, and while cashews are expensive, they cost about 1/2 the price of pine nuts.

The other day, I was making a another batch of pesto to use up some basil that I hadn't been able to give away. I picked and washed the basil leaves, shredded the cheese, and chopped the nuts and garlic so they would blend better. Then I decided I would cook the garlic just a bit to mellow its bite. I wasn't going to take the time to roast it, so I popped it into the microwave. And flash! There were large flames. This wasn't a little arc but flames filling the oven. Luckily they were gone as soon as I turned it off.  Crisis averted. I quickly examined what was in the oven, but nothing was there except a little glass bowl and some charred garlic.

Beginning to make pesto. Notice this was
before I burned the garlic.

Then I did what I always do in these situations. I consulted Google. Surprisingly (or not surprisingly) I got a hit when I entered, "garlic burning in the microwave."  It seems that garlic has minerals in it that are not evenly distributed and it can arc between these different charges in the microwave.  And it is especially prone to happen if there are sharp edges on the food. Just like the ones I had made by cutting up the garlic cloves. It turns out that garlic is not unique with this characteristic. It happens with other vegetables. So, I don't know how I've been using the microwave for over 30 years and not have this happen before.

So what did I learn from this? For a fun time, try cooking some cut up garlic in the microwave. In fact, I feel an experiment coming on. Trying different vegetables to see which ones are most likely to arc in the microwave. Mmmmm...... What ones should I start with?

But Wait, There's More!

As I suspected, pine nuts are just what the name says, seeds/nuts from a pine tree. They are expensive because it can take 36 months to produce them and harvesting is usually done by hand.


But Wait, There's Even More!

I found this book at the library, Pesto by Leslie Lennox. The perfect book for a bumper crop of basil. All kinds pesto recipes as well as ways to use the pesto. Lot's of ideas to explore.

Here we go again.

Well, gosh, darn it. My attempt to post more frequently is not going as well as I had hoped. In fact, I'd say no change so far. But after posting regularly on this blog for 8 years, I'd say it's pretty remarkable that I am even still doing it. Especially since there is no theme to guide the posts. Well, it's either remarkable or I don't know when to quit. But I'm going to give it a go again. : )

Here's another time Annie was not happy
after a trip to the vet.

Last week was filled with appointments and meetings plus the ever-present work. We are moving ahead on the porch that we want to replace our rotting deck with and had another meeting with the architect. Now we are starting to contact contractors. The cats had to go to the vet where she found both of Annie's ears infected. Let's just say Annie is NOT fond of the drops she needs twice a day. I hosted my book club where we discussed a very interesting book (more on that another day).  And we're still figuring out what to do with our good crop of pears. And yadda, yadda, yadda or if you prefer, blah, blah, blah. You know, just a lot more of the same.


Now onto the subject of the day:

Bumble bees vs. Carpenter bees

It wasn't that many years ago when I didn't know that carpenter bees and bumble bees weren't the same thing. I just called every big bee that was gold and black a bumblebee. Well, doing my Second Looks taught me differently. I learned that bumblebees are fuzzy on the end and carpenter bees are smooth and shiny on the end. (I know entomologists are out there screaming with my over simplification, but you gotta start somewhere.) See below. These pictures were taken a couple of years ago at my old house.

Bumblebee on the left and carpenter bee on the right. Notice fuzzy vs. shiny.

Carpenter bees may not always desirable to have around. Notice the round holes on the fence board above the woodpecker. Those were made by carpenter bees and our fence is full of them. They can do the same thing to your house. However, they are good pollinators just like other bees.

Here's your quiz. Look carefully. Is this a bumblebee or a carpenter bee on this Mexican sunflower.
(Hint: Is it shiny?)

Until next time, Happy Trails to you ....