PNewL PNewS
Volume 29 Issue 2 “All the pnews that phits.” June 2021
Adventures in Cooking
One of the many reasons I like traveling is about the food. Sometimes it is exotic and something I have never had before. Sometimes it’s Cold Soba Noodle Salad with Veggies at my sister’s house (and then again at the lake—a recipe so nice, we had it twice). It’s all about getting out of the rut, or into a new one.
So in addition to putting my eyes on my recovering sister, which I didn’t realize I needed to do so badly and reassuring myself she was the strong funny person I know and love, we got to spend some time in the kitchen together cooking and eating when I visited last month. (It takes some calories to recover from cancer treatment, so says her handsome funny doctor—I was there for a tele-health appointment. As a witness to Martha’s healthy appetite, I would agree.) She has some enviable knife skills I have never had the patience to master. You wanna fine mince? She’s your gal.
From that visit, I came home with a few new recipes and a new cookbook to purchase, and I have jump started my cooking which had gotten a bit tired after all of the months of home alone eating my food. I have picked up some other new recipes during the pandemic—from David on Facebook (Vietnamese creamy noodles), and from Splendid Table, and from Creative Mornings Field Trips (Gyoza! Gnocchi! weirdass Japanese soufflé street food! there were others I can’t think of at this time!), but I am always happy to find something fairly simple and tasty and which does not make so much that I have to eat it for days in a row.
When I went around the world, now 26 years ago (!), the whole idea came to me as an excuse to take a cooking class at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok that I had read about in Gourmet Magazine. It seemed easier to take a year off and bang out the Grand Tour of Europe I hadn’t done in my youth and make my way to Thailand than leave for shorter bursts and do separate trips. Ah the workings of my mind. Well, it worked out well, and by the time I got to Bangkok, I realized I could learn easily and more cheaply from chefs at food stalls in narrow streets or in gas station parking lots. (I did visit the Cooking School at the Oriental Hotel but was escorted through the lobby as apparently I didn’t look like their usual class of guest. And I did take a cooking class at the Cordon Bleu and got in trouble for talking in class, but that’s another story.)
I am glad I like to cook, am willing to experiment…and fail sometimes. I have always been curious when people say they don’t cook, especially when it is someone who raised children. How did that work? What happened at mealtime in those homes?
Now, several weeks later, the nurse practitioner suggested I needed to do a better job of managing what I eat. What could she do to help? I know what I am supposed to do, I say…don’t we all? Make better choices. Specifically, make choices and don’t eat mindlessly which is so much easier and…well…fun. So I pulled out the right cookbooks and made grocery lists and reminded myself that I can like to cook like this. It’ll be fine. I can do this. And then I drove to the store listening to an audiobook that seemed to mention in every other sentence some sort of food that is no longer on my list. It’s a new Adventure in Cooking and I think I may need a bit of an attitude adjustment.
In the Time of the ’Rona & Other Observations Part VI &
Miscellaneous Observations
I would love to think this would be a wrap up of the pandemic editions of the PNewS but I can’t go there quite yet. I am very confused by what is “right” now—masks, no masks, how many people in a group is too many. I walk inside places tentatively and ask what the protocol is, or find myself gasping when I forget to ask. Susan thinks it is a good thing that we are off balance, that it provides us an opportunity to experience the world as others often do.
My social skills which weren’t great are worse now. My heart literally aches when I leave Roger the dog—we have spent so much time together. Perhaps it will get easier, perhaps some day I will forget. We continue to live in interesting times.
• In my next life, I hope they have figured out batteries better. I think it’s a wasteful underdeveloped technology.
- Since I last sewed clothes many years ago, things have changed a bit. People are publishing patterns online now and get this: I get to pay for the pattern, download it and then have to print them at home or take them to a “copy shop” that may or may not understand how to print them. So if I print them at home, imagine covering your body with 8.5x11 paper, front and back, and then tape the edges together…this is my new nightmare. When I stopped making clothes, it was because places like Marshall and Ross were selling clothes for a fraction of what I was spending on patterns and fabric and thread and interfacing and I could find out instantly that I looked like a whale in the color or shape rather than after spending the money and several hours of labor. (I was not as concerned about sweatshops as I should have been.) I am not sure why I am going back to the old ways. I will let you know if it is anywhere near a sane decision. So far I have bought two pieces of fabric online which are really lovely though not at all what I expected. And I have bought two patterns, one which I finally sucked it up and printed, and it is 30 pages long. Wish me luck.
- I am making a knitted temperature wrap/shawl/throw thing with one row corresponding to the high temperature of each day. I bought the yarn online. The colors have all melted into each other as the colors online are not quite as they appear in real life—it’s not all bad, it’s soft and will be nice on a cold day at the end of the year plus I’m going to wind up doing my first “steek” where I cut into live stitches and the whole thing will hopefully not unravel. Today, I received a skein of yellow that is HIDEOUS, worse than the one I was running out of. It makes “mustard” look cheerful. Granted yellow is a tough color for me, but this is dull and sad and makes the 70s, my favorite temperature that it corresponds to in the knitted thing, sad and dull. I took a picture of the yarn to send to the company I bought it from to say, how do you get away with selling these lies, and, lo and behold, on my phone camera, the color looks just like it does online. Lesson learned.
- Last month, I "went" to the NYC Creative Mornings meeting on the theme “Procrastinate” and it was the most fun thing—the most perfect thing to do on a Friday morning. The speaker, Sam Furness presented his “Playing House” (https://samfurness.onfabrik.com/portfolio/playing-house-2) adventure. He had us doing little scavenger hunts in our houses—finding or making hats (this is a creative group of people so the hats were pretty entertaining), putting on the brightest colored clothing we own, finding a product with a label (think Tomato Soup can) and then we showed everyone what we'd found, all 262 of us from all over the world. Then we teleported to Studio 54 and Andy Warhol's studio and the Brooklyn Bridge among other places in NYC. We were all in. This is how he has entertained himself—and others—during the pandemic. I had a big grin on my face for the rest of the day.
- I took Roger camping in the Smokies…just overnight. I felt like I was running away from home. It was so refreshing.
- There was a lot of bear activity the other night—broken fence, destroyed bird feeders, clipped bird feeder wire, broken branch, and I missed several hours of sleep. The bears have moved on to the neighbor’s house. I’m okay with that.
- I went to fill up my mower's gas can and couldn't get the bleeping can open so had to ask the nice young man at the next pump to help and he agreed the design was just plain bad, but took pity on the old lady anyway. Really, I don't feel that old but sometimes I do, like today with the gas can. I think I will cut the safety flap off. I may be old, but I still have opposable thumbs and tools!
- At Take out Fridays, I asked the assembled folks, do you like my pants? and they said um okay huh or something, wondering where this was going. I said, I’m just asking because I don’t remember ever seeing these pants before—they were in my drawer but I don’t remember buying them. I’m officially starting to lose my mind.
- A while back, I volunteered at a vaccination clinic at UNCA. When I got home, I could barely walk. I was the “Runner,” cleaning chairs, picking up clipboards and pens at check-out, cleaning them and delivering them to check-in. For 4.5 hours, I was constantly on the move, 8000 steps on linoleum. I have to say it felt good to be in the world, providing a service people appreciated, but it kinda hurt.
- I have come to realize my problem (one of them) is that I am almost incapable of putting things away. There are times when I find my jacket on the floor since I couldn’t seem to hang it on the back of a chair. Living alone, this is not such a bad thing; living through a pandemic, it reallllly doesn’t matter. But the world is starting to open again and there have been the occasions when someone came into my house (to water plants, or for an emergency bathroom stop), and I thought OMG this looks very bad.
“The sun loved the earth too much to burn it up.” The Removed by Brandon Hobson
Haiku for Summer
Temps are heating up
Fruit is ripe, market’s bursting
Thank god for the dog
