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September 3, 2016

‘reward’ dinner notes . . .

This morning (Saturday of Labor Day weekend,) I made good progress in the living area. I hauled out all of the piles of things sitting around the room and grouped ‘like to like’: magazines, writing drafts, books, bills to be paid, etc. I consolidated the trash and moved the bins closer to the table. Cleared off all the extra stuff on our handsome pride-of-place soapstone countertop. Had a little more of a challenge figuring out where to put all the stuff that was being cleared away but that’s the way it always seems to be. And I don’t want to give it away either!

Second, I did two rounds of 30 minutes each and took a five minute break in between. Then, I decided to write checks, pay bills and prepare a package for mailing. Went to the post office, looked at a few things at TJ Maxx but decided to order online at Amazon instead. And finally wound my way back up to the fish market. The first piece a girl behind the counter cut for me was not big enough and still had the thick black skin of the tuna weighing it down. The second piece she cut for me was gorgeous. That’s the only word for it.

On the way home, I thought the piece of yellowfin tuna was so fresh that I debated about whether to ‘dress it up’ and make one of the recipes for “Hawaiian Poke” (pronounced po-kay) with two kinds of onions (sweet and scallions), sesame seeds, nori and wakame seaweed, soy, sesame and a little honey for dressing. . . or serve it up straight and unadorned as a modest tuna sashimi with rice and cucumber salad on the side. I think I’ll let George be the arbiter of this difficult decision!

So, here’s the verdict and a photo of our meal: we both preferred to have the tuna sashimi-style with Ohsawha organic soy sauce and wasabi paste.

I cooked a pot of short-grain and brown rice in some dashi broth with a little soy added. (A teaspoon of instant dashi, a teaspoon of soy stirred into a cup of mixed rice (shortgrain white, sweet rice and shortgrain brown rice) with a cup and a half spring water in a rice cooker.)

This is what we have gotten used to eating and I call it “sticky rice” because of the sweet rice that’s included with the other rice. On the side, I’ll slice some English cucumber thinly and toss with some Japanese seasoned gourmet vinegar, soy, sesame and some wakame seaweed and a dab of sweetener. Yum!

Tomorrow, I’m going to tackle one of the bedroom areas and the plant room where the birds used to reside but are much happier being closer to us in the living room where they warble away every night around 7:10 p.m. right after the evening news. Go figure!

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September 3, 2016

Labor Day Weekend Plans . . .

our living room cleaned up a few years ago . . .

I guess some people have getaway plans for the long Labor Day Weekend that we just started. Looking around me at the various areas in our living space and because George is out on piano moving appointments in the mornings today, tomorrow and Monday, I’ve decided to clean up the house. To truly make a dent on what I’ve been procrastinating about all summer.

Yep, even watched an online video to de-clutter and organize your house in ONE WEEKEND.

Here are helpful suggestions:

1. The most important axiom is to “find a home for each item you want to keep.”

2) DAY ONE & TWO: “Sort “like” with “like things.” This is an important guideline – rather than just willy-nilly going around trying to re-sort things to make the room look better. So, consolidate plants with plants, books with books, magazines with magazines, clothing, bathroom stuff, etc. etc. Just sorting things will make a big difference I think. And it’s easy to do while getting one’s spirit in gear to do a lot of de-cluttering in one-go this weekend.

3) “Decide what to give away.” This is usually the hardest step for me because I like what I have and usually feel like I’m going to use or read something again. . . later. And there’s usually more than I need and not enough space to put it all, never mind finding a ‘home’ for each thingie. Hmmmmmm.

4) DAY THREE: “Organize what you’re keeping.” Instead of buying storage containers before you do these steps, buy them after you see/decide what you’re really going to keep.

5. “Work in half hour increments taking a 5 minute break up to 3 hours at a time.” This is helpful because you can wear yourself out going gangbusters for an hour and then give up completely for the rest of the weekend.

I would add an additional caveat – which is to:

6. “Reward yourself for a day’s work well done.”What I have in mind for today’s efforts is to go to the fish market this afternoon for some sashimi-grade yellow-fin tuna to make a marinated raw tuna salad called “po-kay” or “poke” in Hawaii. I saw a feature about making it on a cooking show late last night and it looked cooling and delicious served with rice for dinner.

proposed dinner “reward” for cleaning out the house this weekend!

So that’s the plan on this early Saturday morning for this Labor Day weekend! More to come, hopefully!

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September 2, 2016

mother nature . . .

East or West, Mother Nature knows best! . . . A yellow goldfinch on a maroon echinacea flower.

photo taken by JEvans. . .

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August 29, 2016

letting go . . . ?

lovely textured landscape in Nova Scotia near our cottage. . .

Well, it’s Monday morning and I woke up after a bad night dreaming about the world coming to an end. Yes, there’s a level of stress in our lives this week. And no, there’s nothing we haven’t already done to try to alleviate it and have things go our way. In fact, this oscillating situation has been with us for a long time. . . way too long, but there’s nothing we can do about it except to manage it as best we can.

In any case, an article from the NYTimes popped up after breakfast and an old familiar Zen tale appeared. Here it is:

Two traveling monks reached a town where there was a young woman waiting to step out of her sedan chair. The rains had made deep puddles and she couldn’t step across without spoiling her silken robes. She stood there, looking very cross and impatient. She was scolding her attendants. They had nowhere to place the packages they held for her, so they couldn’t help her across the puddle.

The younger monk noticed the woman, said nothing, and walked by. The older monk quickly picked her up and put her on his back, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other side. She didn’t thank the older monk; she just shoved him out of the way and departed.

As they continued on their way, the young monk was brooding and preoccupied. After several hours, unable to hold his silence, he spoke out. “That woman back there was very selfish and rude, but you picked her up on your back and carried her! Then, she didn’t even thank you!”

“I set the woman down hours ago,” the older monk replied. “Why are you still carrying her?”

So, that’s today’s lesson so early in the morning! Let something go, if only the way you’re not handling things so well. Mitigate one’s frustration at something you can’t change.

Wow, wouldn’t that be great?

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August 28, 2016

spirit animals . . .

If you believe in the Spirit World and that there are affinities between humans and animals, then Zuni fetish carvings are a wonderful way to reinforce and celebrate these connections.

One year, members of my family found animals in the toe of their Christmas stockings. Some were handmade pottery and a couple were carved fetishes: a den of wolves, a pair of loons with spots on their backs, a wonderful bear fetish, a raven and a tortoise carved from jet with turquoise eyes.

Anyhow, I had almost forgotten about them until I came upon a Zuni buffalo carving this morning. The buffalo is revered in Native American culture because of its contributions to the sustainability of life, sheltering humans with their hides and skins plus providing nourishment with their flesh.

The description on this buffalo carving said:

“This beautiful Picasso marble and turquoise buffalo fetish was handmade by Stewart Alonzo. The buffalo’s body is carved from Picasso marble, the eyes. the tip of the tail & spirit line are turquoise inlay and the offering is a dark shell arrowhead with turquoise & red coral beads.

The buffalo represents endurance to over come, great emotional courage, provider to all.

American Indians have used fetishes throughout history, especially the Southwestern Indians. A fetish is considered to have magical powers.”

A second carving caught my eye, due to the coloration of the stone. It was a bear, one of Mother Nature’s strong animal totems. Here’s an excerpt from the description:

“This wild horse stone & turquoise bear fetish was handmade by renowned Zuni Indian artist Emery Eriacho. The beautiful wild horse stone bear is composed of a lapis arrowhead with turquoise & shell beads. The bear represents strength, healing, introspection and the spiritual journey. “WEST”

It’s a peaceful Sunday morning here in New England as I compose this post. There’s a slight breeze, the air is dry and the sun is out. Seeing these Zuni carvings has enriched my spirit and calmed my soul. I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing them too.

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August 27, 2016

Icelandic yogurt! . . .

looking forward to my lunch!

My daughter, C. stayed in Iceland for a few days this summer after a sojourn in France. She commented on how delicious the butter was in Iceland. So today in the grocery store, this yogurt made with milk from Iceland caught my eye. It’s also coconut flavor so I thought I’d try it out with a white nectarine sliced up for my lunch.

Yum!

Note: The yogurt looked creamy and delicious when I opened it. The first spoon tip of yogurt was to die for – smooth to the tongue and not as thick as Greek yogurt, slightly honey-sweet with tiny bits of coconut. I dipped thin slices of white nectarine into the yogurt and stopped halfway through. I was sated as I packed the remaining slices of nectarine into the yogurt to have for dessert, later tonight. Now, I’m tempted to drive back to Shaw’s this afternoon and buy up the remaining coconut flavor and a couple of strawberry of this delectable Icelandic yogurt. And a couple more white nectarines too. What a great summertime treat!

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August 26, 2016

flour + water. . . not so fast!

homemade pappardalle noodles with mushrooms and scallions for dinner tonight

Okay, so maybe I was a little impulsive to order a Philips electric pasta machine before I read the cookbooks about making homemade pasta. There I was after my day-surgery to remove hardware from my ankle going through those beautiful books about how important it is to knead the dough and then let it rest for a half an hour before rolling it out, either by hand or with a manual pasta roller.

The Philips machine doesn’t do that. It mixes the flours and water/egg for three minutes and then starts extruding it through the pasta wheel that you select. I did this the first time and cut up lasagna width noodles. I thought that maybe rolling out the extruded noodles after resting a half hour might make them tender to the bite. Not so: they were thick and tough. Not a good beginning and I set the pasta machine in the other room until I had another chance to use it.

So today, (since I can’t really return the machine now that I used it to make the first batch,) I thought I’d try again. This time I used King Arthur flour and Italian “OO” flour; plus water and egg yolk. The proportions are KEY. Even when I followed the markings on the plastic measuring cups they provide you with, the dough was too moist. The pasta sticks together when it’s being extruded. Not good.

‘angel hair’ noodles sticking together as it comes out of the machine. . .

I stopped the machine and added a couple of sprinkles of flour and re-set it on “mix” again, starting the cycle from the beginning. This time, it was a little better as the pappardalle noodles came out, but not by much. I hand-separated them and laid them out on a plate so that they would unstick and also dry a little before this evening when I’ll boil them up and make an alfredo mix with mushrooms and green onions for tonight’s supper.

To sum up the lessons learned so far in trying to develop a hybrid method for making tender, homemade pasta in an electric pasta machine, they are:

Add less water/egg yolk mixture to the flours than called for. A smidge less liquid or else the pasta comes out goopy.
If it is, try stopping the machine (including unplugging it) and sprinkle a little more flour into the dough mixture, reset it and start from the beginning of the cycle. At least this way, you don’t have to throw out the whole batch just because it’s too sticky.
Be patient. I still have a small ball of dough that I took out of the machine, kneaded and rested for half an hour in the fridge. It wouldn’t extrude when I tried it back in the machine, but I plan to roll it our on a board, and hand cut it for noodles and see how they turn out.
ball of dough, kneaded after scraping out the too-sticky angel hair
As in any kind of cooking, paying attention to the core chemistry factors at play is key. In this case, it’s the development of gluten in the mixed flour and how it is handled from then on either in the electric extruder or rolled and cut by hand. I’m still thinking about how to manage this part with the electric machine.

But the concept is still good, isn’t it? A bare cup of flours, a scant half cup of egg yolk beaten into some spring water; mix it together and voila, a scrumptious plate of tender homemade pasta with fresh ingredients on hand for supper! Simplicity isn’t always simple, is it?

At least, that’s still the plan.

Update: decided not to cook the pasta for supper. Will have to revisit how to use the machine so it produces noodles that aren’t too sticky, not too thick and which might approach that ideal in my head of tender, tasty pasta. In the meantime, the machine parts are loaded into the top layer of the dishwasher. And we’re having salmon for dinner tonight. Not too bad of a compromise!

Footnote: Actually, I’m thinking of changing direction and exploring making onigiri, Japanese rice cakes with seasoning, wrapped in sheets of toasted nori. May come back to the Philips pasta machine when the weather turns cooler and less humid.

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August 24, 2016

criticism . . .

a well stone in Gloucester, MA. – in the book, a wellstone is a talisman about relationships, past and present

Criticism is sometimes hard to take but it can be invaluable. Depends though on how we react to it. I asked some acquaintances to read the beta-version of my book, “Uncommon Hours” this summer. Maybe it was who I asked to read it in the first place that was the problem. I didn’t know what their reaction would be and I purposely picked people with backgrounds different from my own. I received reactions from two of them last week and was surprised in a way that I had not expected.

Each of the heroines in the book represents a female dilemma in our culture; self-doubt and blame, insecurity, being unhappy even when one has what she’s always wanted; feeling “unlucky” in life, etc. “Uncommon Hours” is about enabling women to reach out for happiness from within rather than succumbing to hopelessness or waiting for someone else to do it for them.Fortunately, there were other reader reactions that were zmore positive: “I felt like I was in the room with Jessie.” and “you have to keep going because I know other women who would love it too!” So there’s been a gamut of reactions to something that I made up and put down on paper . . . which is what writing is to me.

There’s so much noise around what w-r-i-t-i-n-g means these days (b.s. about ‘craft,’ rituals to get one to write, workshops, agents, buzz,) that it’s hard to just settle down and recognize that it’s solely up to me as the writer to convey to the reader what I’d like them to understand. Plus, it’s really easy to give up on making that happen when you’re tired of going through the manuscript any longer and feeling impatient if/when the reader doesn’t “get it” the way I had hoped they would.

Yesterday, one of my most loyal readers came over and went through her comments with me: there were fewer grammatical/typo corrections than I had feared. And she only had one place where the paragraphs might have been reorganized. Most importantly, she liked the book. In fact, she liked it a lot. I thought about what we might have in common for that to happen: we both have leanings towards New Age stuff: the Tarot, horoscopes and destiny (which neither of the criticizers above mentioned, much to my surprise.) She also really understood the metamorphosis that the heroine, Jessie, went through in the plot to enable herself to be happy, released from her self-imposed bugaboos at long last.

botanical engraving by Maria Sibylla Merian (1711) . .

All this feedback has caused me to reflect about the old adage, “if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, does it still make a sound?” meaning that if you create something but don’t put it out there for other human beings to take it and react to it from their own experience and perspective, (even if they don’t “get” what you were trying to do or don’t even care if they don’t get it,) does it ultimately matter? And my answer is “yes.” The tree conundrum presumes that it’s man’s hearing that counts, not the tree in the forest in the context of Mother Nature. Whether a human is within earshot is irrelevant, it seems to me. BUT, I also feel that it’s important to put our work out there even if some or a lot of people might not react to it in the way that we intended.

Having gotten through my initial defensiveness in reading the negative feedback and wanting to put the book away in a drawer, I’ve instead begun thinking that it’s my job to make the book shine so that the reader has to get it and not the other way around (arrogantly waiting for readers to get it because I wrote it and if they don’t, then “tough.”)

Huge, right?

So, now I’m going to go back and see what alterations I might make to the book so that more readers will understand what I’m up to than the way that it stands now. Taking responsibility for these improvements has directly been a result of reading this article in the New York Times today about how another writer responds to reviews.

Here’s a link to an interview of how that writer reacts to reviews. Edifying in the part about whether she’s done the very best she could do to impact the reader in the way the writer intended.

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August 23, 2016

Rocky and Bach . . .

If someone were to ask me which composer’s music I would listen to on a desert island, I’d have to demur and say that my two favorite composers are Bach and Rachmaninoff. In a way, they’re the two most romantic composers I can think of . . . but that would depend upon whether you feel like I do that Bach’s music is deeply romantic or not. In any case, imagine my excitement when I discovered earlier this summer that Rachmaninoff had composed a piece for the piano transcribed from Bach’s Partita in B-flat for violin! Immediately, I wanted to learn how to play it myself and vowed to learn it after finding the piano score.

But, truth be told, I’ve been pretty lazy this summer. I meant to start practicing it when the summer began but outside of reading the first page, haven’t done much more than that. Today, with the weather cooling off finally and the air conditioning getting a much-deserved rest, I’m going to sit myself down at the piano and try to figure out how to play this piece.

A long time ago, I was taught to learn a new piece by playing a few measures of new music one hand at a time and repeating each hand separately a few times. Then slowly play both hands together. Then repeat a few times until the notes are in your head tonally and in the muscles of your hands kinesthetically. At least that’s what I think is going on.

This piece is so much fun because of its repeating leitmotif (B to E) that sounds like a horn calling us to the Hunt. It’s also very playful with that leitmotif crisscrossing through the whole piece, sometimes with the left hand and then with the right hand while the toccata-like melody skips relentlessly all the way to the end. Toccata means once the piece starts, it retains the same rhythm all the way to the end without breaking it up.

Here are some fun examples of this piece played by two women pianists from Eastern Europe.

Hope you will enjoy this glorious music on this bright, beautiful summer’s day!

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August 22, 2016

“sparking joy” in our own living room . . .

one of my favorite indoor plants – a maroon leafed oxalis plant that has pale pink flowers when in bloom. . .

Hey, you know how it’s all the rage these days to pare down, simplify and only keep what “sparks joy” when you pick it up and look at it? Even Deborah Needelman, the Editor in Chief of the New York Times Fashion magazines wrote about it yesterday in her editorial.

Well, I looked around today and decided to do a major pick-up-the-piles-of-stuff-and-sort-it-out this morning. But what sparked it as an enjoyable task rather than feeling like a drudge was to recover and recoup wonderful plants that I’ve had scattered outside for the summer and place them in our living spaces indoors. The maroon oxalis plant, one of my favorites, is now a central figure in a little living room still-life graced also by a tapestry “heron” pillow from France that C. gave me a few years ago.

cyclamen corms . . . still surviving

I’ve also kept a pot of multi-colored miniature cyclamen that bloom and then go bust since a few Christmases ago. They’re sort of in a “bust” mode right now but I love the shape of the pot so much that I put it in a place of honor near the kitchen window where I can water it from below and keep an eye on it. Usually the plants out of sight suffer more than they ought to.

And since we returned from our mini-trip to Halifax, we’ve placed our two canaries closer to us in front of the mirror where they can see themselves and go crazy thinking they’re more of them than there really are. We’ve noticed that they tend to sing their heads off after the 7 o’clock evening news has finished and G. and I look at each other in wonder at the incredible volume their song produces at that time of night. Go figure!

It feels so satisfying to “spark joy” with things I’ve had for such a long time and also refresh our living space without feeling the need to go out and buy anything more than what we already have. Plants especially are satisfying to do this with because they’re alive, just like us. And revive with tender care, just like us too.

(Come to think of it, though, I’m really wanting to replace our electric stove that we’ve had for about twenty years! Maybe in the Fall.)

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