Trust Me, They Are Pulling Our Leg

My friend Cecelia, whom I absolutely love (and who blogs here and is one of the bravest bloggers I know) put the bag on my desk a little over two weeks ago. It was a gallon size plastic bag with some pale glop in it. Alongside the bag of glop was a sheet of instructions to make "Amish Friendship Bread."

You know what I am talking about. These recipes have been circulating for decades. My beloved late mother-in-law, Ellen, had one tucked away in her cookbook with a note that it came from Betty Meyers next door. Somewhere in my long ago past, I was even on the receiving end of one of these recipes. I was unsuccessful back then: my glop turned rancid and moldy.

The whole friendship glop thing is not unlike a chain letter. You feed the batter, you nurture the batter, then you beef it up and pour off cup portions of it to give to friends.

It never stops.

All the same, I was intrigued. What Cecelia gave me was about a cup of potential sourdough starter. I have always been interested in baking with starters, but never went beyond envying people who baked with them. Given my extremely limited and highly unsuccessful experience with glop in the past, I never tried my hand at a starter.

So here I was, with glop from someone I truly, truly like, which meant I couldn't just toss it away. And it was starter. So I squeezed it and fed it and nurtured it just like the instructions called for. By the miracle of fermentation, the glop actually did what it was supposed to do. It developed bubbles and froth and had a nice tangy odor when I opened the bag.

Today was "make more glop to give to people and bake the bread with the remaining glop" day. I just popped the "bread" into the oven. I have a large bowl of starter, which I may just be selfish and keep for myself.  We'll see.

But here's my take on the "Amish Friendship Bread" recipe. Somewhere there are a group of Amish women laughing their heads off.

I don't know why the recipe calls for starter, except to make middle class white women (who I imagine are the only ones who ever, ever make this stuff) feel they are baking something authentic and earthy. They may be communing with their Little House on the Prairie alter egos (and who among us doesn't do that?) but trust me, this is not a recipe that needs starter. There are more than enough ingredients (eggs, baking powder, baking soda) to make it rise on its own without the starter.  

But I digress. The real reason this recipe is still making the rounds is that "Amish Friendship Bread" is a sugar fest from the word go. Even cutting back on the sugar, there is more than enough in the dough (especially after you add one LARGE box on instant pudding) to stun a horse. And that was before I sprinkled the cinnamon sugar combo on the top. As it bakes, I can smell the sugar rising through the house. While traditional Amish baked goods do call for a lot of sugar (because this is a community that does everything manually and they need the calories), I doubt there is an Amish woman anywhere in this country who ran to the general store in her little community and popped a large box of instant pudding into her basket so she could make this little treat.

I won't be making "Amish Friendship Bread" again. But I DO have a lot of starter now and see no reason it cannot be used for real bread. And I'm willing to be the butt of the joke in the meantime. Because I know darn well that somewhere out there is a whole bunch of Amish women laughing their heads off at us all. "Oh, ja, that's what we bake all the time," they assure us, waiting until we turn the corner before clutching one another in gales of laughter.

The 400th Post

I knew I was approaching this milestone in blogging and had been turning over topics in my head. I wanted my 400th post to be something truly worthy of the status. So here it is:

I walked home today from work.

I know, I know. You are reading this thinking "that's it? That's April's 400th post? She walked home today from work?"

Let me explain.

It's been a long time since I have walked home from work. More than a month. Almost two months. First I had a blood vessel behind the knee cap break, which caused great pain and made walking impossible. Just as I was recovering from that, the whole Aunt Ginger crisis started. Five days walking and sitting at the hospital set my knee recovery back almost to the beginning, making walking painful and walking almost any distance impossible again.

But finally we are on more solid ground. Ginger has been home for a week and is making good progress. My schedule (daily/work/home/community) is starting to fit again. And my knee has finally (I think, I hope) healed.

So I walked home late morning, under a brilliantly blue autumn sky. All the way home I thought about how wonderful it felt to walk again, how much I had missed walking, how grateful I am that I am able to walk.

I have two posts in the wings: one on weddings, one on "The Wizard of Oz." They will appear (all in due time, of course).

After all, I walked home today from work. And that has made all the difference.

Getting Away

Back in August, I started the following post:

Canning is a messy business. Over the weekend I canned a batch of salsa, only seven pints, and by the time I finished, there were dirty dishtowels everywhere. Everywhere. In the sink, on the table, on the stove. By the time I had washed and dried bowls and cutting board and knives, there were even more towels.

How did Ma Ingalls do it?

We know Ma canned, because Laura refers to her doing so in The Long Winter. So if Ma was canning at the homestead shanty at De Smet, we are not talking a big room. We are not talking about a family that had a lot of towels either.

My good friend Margo and I often dissect the Little House saga with painstaking precision. Where did Ma go the bathroom? And now this all consuming question: how did Ma can?

I am not planning on a lot of canning this year. My heart is not in it and, other than the salsa, I am not sure I want to lay up treasures in my earthly pantry.

That's as far as I got.

My writing got set aside for lots of reasons. A concert cancellation lead to Warren being able to leave town for a week and we made tentative plans for a long overdue break. Aunt Ginger unexpectedly went into the hospital for the better part of the last week of August, an adventure that started at 8 p.m.on Monday and segued into rehab at a nursing facility at 4:00 p.m. the following Friday. Our vacation plans tottered and threatened to all with the medical crisis, but once Ginger was safely ensconced in the nursing home, I felt I could leave town with impunity.

So we fled. Fled to Cape Hatteras and the gift of a cottage at the ocean. Fled to a week of no office, no Symphony, no hospital, no much of anything. Oh, we did a little bit of going out and looking: Monticello on the way to the cape, the Wright Brothers National Monument when we got there, but for the most part we kept quiet and stayed home. The ocean was a short walk over a dune and we both spent time walking or just sitting and listening.

The cape is two weeks behind us and I am still playing catchup. (But I'm closer, really I am.) The great news is that Aunt Ginger was released today from the nursing home and is now back home in her own comfort zone. She lives a block away from me, so now she is a short stroll away instead of driving across town.

It's good to be writing again. I did write some while I was gone, but not blogging posts. It's good to be back, but because I am still catching up, I am finishing this post with my September Myeloma Beacon column:

I once read an article in which the author described her habit of working herself into an illness requiring hospitalization about every two years. She did this routinely until a doctor finally pointed out to her that scheduling a vacation every so often would be a more cost-effective, healthier practice. The author, who had been eschewing vacations as a waste of time, became a convert.

I read that article decades ago. I read it back in the pre-computer, pre-cell phone, pre-tablet, pre-plugged in 24/7/365 era. Today, a similar article would have to start with the precept, “disconnect.” While I agreed with the author’s conclusion, I too have been guilty of not taking time for myself but instead pushing myself to the point of dropping.

Not this year. The first week of September, I took an unplugged, “health first” vacation. It was made possible by the generous loan of an ocean cottage by a very good friend and an unexpected opening in my hus­band’s too tight schedule. A last-minute medical crisis of a family member managed to resolve to the point I felt I could leave town without worrying too much. So the first day of September, we were on the road to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

Living with myeloma, I never forget the reality of having a chronic, terminal cancer. Every time something new and different emerges (the latest being veins that spontaneously break), I flinch. I try to spend my days not dwelling on it, but the truth is that myeloma is never far from my mind.

But for the vacation, it was, at least much of the time. There is a timeless quality to the ocean, an eternal pattern in the waves. Sitting on the beach and watching them roll in, I could shove myeloma to the far corner of my mind.

To my surprise, my awareness of the cancer was strongest the first time we walked up over the dune and dropped down onto the shore. I stood for the longest time just watching the waves, closing my eyes to listen to the surf. Then I turned to my husband.

“I didn’t realize until just now how much I was afraid I would never see the ocean again,” I told him, my voice hoarse with emotion. I sensed a weight lifting from me as I took in the sounds, the smells, the sights. I stored them up greedily, hoarding them for when the surf is too faint and distant to sense.

Prior to our leaving on the trip, my husband asked me what I wanted to do while we were on vacation. My answer came quickly.

“Sit on the beach, listen to the waves, and do nothing.”

Okay, we did a little more than that. We toured Monticello en route to the ocean, and we ventured away from the cottage a few other times as well. And we did watch some old movies (old, old movies: “Giant” (1956) was the newest of the lot) on television. But a lot of the vacation was spent reading and resting and watching the waves.

The great naturalist Henry David Thoreau wrote, “[a] man may stand [at the shore] and put all America behind him.” He was writing of Cape Cod, which he walked the length of more than once in his lifetime. I was considerably farther south, but my sentiments were one with Thoreau’s.

On Cape Hatteras, I could stand facing the ocean and put all America, as well as all of my myeloma, behind me.

And I did.

The View (A Guest Post)

The following post was written by a coworker and close friend, Debby Merritt. She had shared it with me recently, having come across it in her papers, and I asked if I could use it as a guest post in my blog. I am honored that Debby said yes.

We differed on whether the third word from the end of the second paragraph should be "furried" (her choice) or "furred" (my choice). In a nod to Humpty Dumpty admonishing Alice in Through the Looking Glass ("When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.") and a salute to Lewis Carroll, who made up words when no others fit ('Twas brillig and the slithy toves...), I'm using her preferred choice.

I love this piece because it evokes strong memories in me of my childhood, especially on the farm my grandparents had when I was a child.

Debby wrote this piece some years ago, and there continue to be many changes in the immediate vicinity of her house. While Debby and I differ on many (oh heck, most) issues politically, I agree with her observations about the price of "progress."

Enjoy. And thank you, Debby.  

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The View

Since the late 1880s, there have been only three houses on our road. Every day from inside his old henhouse, my rooster signals morning. It is reminiscent of a time when sleep was determined by daylight and dark, and not by "Good Morning America" and the late night news.

In the afternoon, anticipating their late day milking, neighboring cows begin to wind their way from the woods toward the barn. Watching them is like looking at a centuries old painting. At night, they are our sentinels, mooing at interlopers both furried and not.

In the heat of the summer, my attic bedrooms smell like the hams and bacon that years ago hung from the rafters. That aroma reminds me of waking in my grandma's farmhouse to the sounds of corn cobs and sticks poured into a clanking wood stove, fresh eggs popping and bacon curling in a big iron skillet.

Each spring, groaning beneath layers of sweet black fruit, mulberry trees play host to opossums, raccoons, and other critters gorging themselves. Sometimes at night, caught in my headlights, baby raccoons scramble for safe branches to continue their feast. Their little bandit faces make it impossible for me to interrupt their banquet.

Later than most farmers, crops across the road are planted in fields fertilized by friendly cows. The farmer's old, lumbering tractor often hesitates and then stops dead. After a few adjustments, the engine backfires and percolates as it struggles down the row. These are sounds long forgotten in many parts of Delaware County.

Other modern, sprayed, and debugged fields seem more affected by drought and heat. Our farmer's corn is as high as an elephant's eye and as dense as a forest. Franklin Park Conservatory spent a fortune creating its corn maze. Our road has one every year.

I feel at home here. It is how things used to be. It is the solitude that Merton described in his essays. Thoughts are incoming and outgoing, not forced or contrived. There is no need to feel time is short and become harried consumers rushing to give our children happiness underneath the golden arches.

This road could outlast the politicians and the projected growth patterns, but every day places like it with their lands and heritage die. They pass into a fast paced abyss, a place where a road is measured only by how many cars it can carry and how much shopping can line its sides.

With malls and a commute faster than the speed of sound becoming eminent domain issues, I doubt that roads like ours will endure. So for as long as I have it, I will enjoy it, and when they come with their bulldozers and blacktop, I will mourn it, for we all will have lost something worth everything: our past, our present, and our future. 

Music To My Ears

It is raining.

After a pretty wet June and early July, the skies turned dry. Oh, the temperatures stayed pleasantly cool for the most part, but it was dry, dry, dry. As I sit here writing this, we are on the backside of a good, solid, drenching rain.

If you had come upon me in my kitchen five minutes ago, you would have seen me standing at the open casement windows, facing the rain, my hands cupped behind my ears.

There's a reason for that.

Like many aging Boomers, I am showing some hearing loss. Mine was accelerated a few years ago by a head cold that left me temporarily deaf in one ear and partially deaf in the other. My hearing slowly came back in both ears, but it was forever changed. I hear endless white noise, just enough to wash out the softer sounds in the world. It is impossible for me to follow a conversation in a noisy restaurant. Add the normal loss that comes with age, and you get the picture.

I recently read Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise by David Rothenberg. Close on the heels of that, I read several chunks of The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause. (Bernie Krause and Warren are discussing a possible Symphony project, so the book is presently on the coffee table. I needed something to read.) Krause wrote about making faux leopard ears out of paper, clipping them to his glasses, and then listening. "The difference between what I heard with my ears alone and with the faux cat's ears was impressive," Krause said.

Rothenberg wrote about cicadas, katydids, crickets, and the other rhythm makers of the insect world. Around here, the cicadas (just the annual ones, not the periodic ones) started up in early June and the katydids arrived in mid-July. The former dominates the afternoons, especially the lazy, sultry ones; the latter rules the night. For me, they are an irreplaceable sound of summer.

A few nights ago, when the katydids were good and loud in the trees, I thought about Krause's cat ears. I cupped my hands behind my own ears to increase the gathering range of the pinna (the part of the ear outside the head).

I was staggered by the roar of the night.

Not only did the sound of the katydids increase several times over, but the first time in forever (Since my childhood? My young adult years?), I heard the whole noisy chorus of insects underneath the katydids. I tried to describe it to Warren, finally hitting upon "it sounds like a coursing river of bugs out there."

And it did.

Just now, listening to the rain with my improved range, I had a similar revelation. I heard the rain, yes, but this was rain amplified, rain magnified. This was rain with the volume dial cranked up. This was rain with a hundred nuances of splash.

It was RAIN, not just rain. Just as the other night it was BUGS and not just bugs.

I'm already pretty far up in the geek stratosphere in some circles. Walking around town with my hands cupped behind my ears should propel me even higher.

And I can just see myself questioning that future audiologist. "Will this hearing aid  give me the full bug chorus on a hot summer night? Will they enable me to hear a million raindrops hit the deck? Because if it can't, I have (dramatic pause) these!" And putting my hands behind my ears, I will walk back into the world.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen....

I have worn out the beaters to my mixer. Oh, it's just a little sturdy hand mixer, but one that has carried me through 11 years of baking. I can't begin to count the number of eggs, syrups, custards, meringues, icings, and cakes I have whipped up with that mixer.

And now due to some colossal metal fatigue issue, one beater is on its last two tines.

I had noticed the first tine had failed some months ago. The second failure was brand new; I noticed it yesterday when I went to beat the eggs for the next round of zucchini bread.

Usually one wears out a mixer by burning up the motor. I wasn't that lucky.

The mixer model (a Black & Decker) is "obsolete," and replacement beaters are not to be found easily. or at all, I concluded after a thorough internet search. It is possible that other (newer) B & D beaters may fit this model, but unless I take my beater to a store and surreptitiously try the fit on a new mixer, I am rolling the dice in ordering beaters.

I may break down and treat myself to a brand new mixer. Heck, I may even splurge and go for the Kitchenaid hand mixer (the low end one, not the high end one) if only because I can get it in red (fire engine) or flamingo pink (loud).

How cool is the thought of making a lemon tart using a fire engine red or loud flamingo pink mixer?

I thought I was being clever when I posted the photos on my Facebook page yesterday and said there had to be a moral to this story. Apparently I was tempting the gods of Baking by my lighthearted approach. About the time I slid the second batch (four loaves to a batch) into the oven, I called Warren from the shop and asked him, "Do you smell something electrical?"

Yes, he did. And so did I. But there was no smoke, no lights going out, and nothing seemingly amiss, so he went back to work and I went on with cleanup while the bread baked.

The first two loaves (smaller) finished on time. Five minutes later the third loaf finished. But the fourth loaf (the largest of the batch) was taking forever. Truly forever. I would set the timer for 5 more minutes, check the loaf when the timer went off, and set it for 5 more. After some 15 minutes of this, I scrabbled around for an oven thermometer and stuck it in alongside the loaf. When the timer went off again, I checked the thermometer.

250º.  75 degrees cooler than the 325º that loaf should have been baking at. And that was when the terrible truth hit me. That little electrical smell from an hour ago? That was the smell of the baking element breathing its last.

A word about the oven. Warren's parents bought that oven around 1970 (by his best recollection). It is a 40" GE model with a small bake oven next to the regular oven. The stovetop has the conventional four burner arrangement, with extra workspace on top thanks to the width. In the almost five years I have lived in this house, I have baked hundreds of breads, cake, pies, quiches, tarts, and cookies, to name a few, in that oven. I have roasted chickens and turkeys galore. I have baked thousands of pieces of biscotti.

I love this oven. I would be bereft without this oven. And I was terrified that due to its age, parts would be impossible to procure.

The little oven is to the left in this photo. 

When I posted the newest disaster news on Facebook, friends quickly responded with links for parts. Three hours later, we had a new baking element ordered. In fact, we had two new baking elements ordered, the second being for the little side oven, which has not been available for baking all this time because of a faulty element.

The parts ship out tomorrow from Tennessee, so we should be up and operational by the end of the week. I am giddy at the thought of having two (Two!—Count 'em!—TWO!) ovens.

Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, "I cannot live without my books." My variation would be, "I cannot live without my books or my oven."

Fortunately, I don't have to live without either.

This Other Time, This Other Self 2*

We have had a run of cool weather here, balmy days and crisp mornings. Today's temperature at 7:00 a.m. was 50°.

I went outside early to string the clothesline and breathe deeply of the chill morning air. If I didn't think of the calendar proclaiming itself to be July, I would have easily have said it was September or even October.

The brisk morning air triggered memories of other times, other Aprils.

First Glimpse

Back in my childhood, for a span of several summers, I went away for a week to a summer camp in a nearby county. The camp was run under the auspices of the Lutheran church (LCA, I believe, back in the days when the designation mattered). It had a two strings of log cabins, one for the boys, one for the  girls. I think there were eight of us to a cabin, in bunks of two. The cabins had the names of biblical women—Deborah, Sarah, Rachel. Our counselors were all college students from Capital University, a Lutheran institution in nearby Columbus.

There was a large dining hall and a small arts building. There was an outdoor "theatre" (a stage and rows of log seats), and a snack shack/post office opened only at certain hours. A trail past the dining hall would take you to an outdoor chapel and, on down the hill, the campfire circle. There was a small swimming pool and a vast open field that dropped down to a creek before rising up again.

I am sure there were hot, muggy days at camp. After all, this was Ohio in July we are talking about. But I remember the crisp

Th outdoor chapel, 1969

mornings, much like this morning, where eight girls would squeal "it's cold!" and burrow in our suitcases for sweatshirts before heading to the dining hall for breakfast. We would walk quickly against the chill, all the more delicious for it being the height of summer.

Fireflies, spirited games of "Capture the Flag," which the college boys dominated fiercely, dining hall songs while we all snaked around the walls waiting to reach the head of the line. "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder" around the campfire, watching the sparks soar heavenward, and seeing the Milky Way spilled across the sky over our heads.

And those delicious, crisp mornings, just like this morning.

Second Glimpse

Paint me a summer weekend in the mid 1970s, somewhere in a small Wisconsin town close to the Illinois border.  It was a village really, a cluster of summer cottages strung around a small lake.

There was a get-together there that weekend, hosted by the parents of a college acquaintance. A dozen or so of us drove north from Chicago, converging on the cottage with our sleeping bags and frisbees and swimsuits. There was a large, quasi-potluck meal, there was singing around the bonfire late into the night. Someone had a guitar and played and sang a passably good "Rocky Raccoon."

The next morning was crisp and chill, much like the mornings here right now, much like those long ago camp mornings. Three or four of us rose early while the sun was just lighting the sky, donned our suits, and headed to the lake, a short, unpaved block away. We willed ourselves into the water, flinching at its cool kiss before submitting to the water once and for all. We swam our way to morning and to breakfast.

It seems strange now to be sitting here at the kitchen table, peering back almost 40 years (the lake) and on beyond some 45 years ago (the camp). It is today's chill air that pulls me back, rushing me headlong into those other times, those other selves.

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*My first This Other Time, This Other Self post can be found here.