My entry is early this month because we had a "Costco Experience" combined with a bonus trip to Barnes and Noble today that needs to be reported. You probably know what I mean about the Costco visit. I have to gather an odd sort of energy to make that trip; don't you? The first thing that makes me anxiously competitive is finding a place to park. Shallow breathing begins as soon as we turn into the lot and start the line up for the "best" parking spot. Then there's the weird rush to get a cart and be the first one to show our card. This is followed by the sudden and very weird need that arises to get to the sample tables first. Then I try not to lose patience with the people who are rude about making their way around the book tables. After all, I was there first and I'm traveling in the correct clockwise direction. I finger several books including the one I want to find at Barnes and Noble although I'm sure the price here is much cheaper. Of course it is, but I can read it on my Nook for even less if it weren't for the fact that I still need to hold a book in my hands once in awhile for that true organic reading experience. Then it was off to find the shortest check-out line, if there ever is such a thing.
I did find the exact book at B and N but it was too expensive compared to the Nook price so I sighed and turned my attention to the cook books in the Bargain Books section. I LOVE cookbooks and have owned hundreds of them in my lifetime. I try to limit my current collection to just one long shelf in my pantry but that is getting pretty full. I'll soon need to recycle or give some away. (Let me know if you'd like one or ten.)
My very first cookbook was The I Hate to Cook Book. My old friend Lee used it and she truly hated to cook although I really enjoyed fussing around in the kitchen even at the newly married age of 21. Still, Peg Bracken's lasagna recipe was hard to beat. I have added so many books since that first one. I even have my Aunt Gracie's original The Joy of Cooking and have read Julia Child from cover to cover. I don't do fancy cooking but I like to read those haute cuisine books because they teach me so much about food. I'd just rather serve something traditionally American rather than a wedge of exotic fish plated over a squiggle of orange sauce and adorned with a sprig of arugula. I'm fascinated by crock pot cookery and acquired probably half of dozen cookbooks featuring that kind of food preparation until I realized that those recipes just imitate each other from book to book so I stopped buying them. I like easy to fix recipes but don't like those four ingredient cookbooks. They include too many recipes based on cream of mushroom soup.
The book I bought today is from the Taste of Home publishers called Country Cooking. I will read it at least two times from cover to cover if not three times. I will promise myself to make at least one recipe from each section. If I don't, oh well, I got the reading's worth out of it. And just let me say that you can purchase cookbooks in the bargain section at B and N for less than the purchase price of magazines at the grocery store.
These all seem like strange musings from someone whose dinner menus are usually built around Dream Dinners.
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Friday the Fourth!
It's July! Summer's here! It's almost time for fireworks but it's actually started already here in my neighborhood. People have already made the trip to Vancouver for illegal stuff and are "testing" them to make sure they're loud enough or dangerous enough and figuring out if they themselves might be able to manage them after downing a number of growlers on Friday.
When I was a kid, the Fourth of July meant sparklers. While waiting for the California sun to fade into the West, we would start begging my dad to light up "just one," sort of like asking to open one Christmas present on Christmas Eve. We always managed to wear him down for that and we knew we'd soon have him looking for the candle and isolating himself way out on the driveway to light it. Then the big moment arrived. He'd light it; we'd jiggle and dance and then swoop in with screams of delight when he signaled the "okay" then he'd carefully light ours and hand them over. More screams and swooping as we made sparkling circles and other fabulous designs in the air until all the sparklers were gone and lay dead on the cement and in the lawn with the stench of their smoke lingering for what seemed like forever.
One Fourth when I was about nine, we were invited to watch the fireworks over Lake Merritt in Oakland from the top of my mom's cousin's apartment building. Several people we knew lived in apartments around the Bay Area but we actually rode the ELEVATOR up to the cousin's place (her name was Beans which made the excursion just that much more exciting - how could you not have fun at the apartment home of someone called Beans?!) and then went up even higher to the roof. The display scared me a little at first because the booms were so loud and the popping and bursting and wild colors seemed to be at eye level from our lofty viewpoint. And they reflected in the water! It was all so exciting.
When we had our own family and lived out in the country, six of the neighborhood families would gather together every Fourth of July for a gigantic barbecue and fireworks display of our own illegal purchasing. We moms would have a special meeting to plan the menu and the tables would be absolutely loaded with all the most delicious picnic food ever. All of our kids would be excited for days ahead and ran around like wild beasts on the day of. We all ate ourselves sick and then gathered our folding chairs for our glorious display where no one got hurt and everyone was able to make it back to the fire pit for s'mores.
This Fourth, as we have in the last several years, we'll go over to the Burton's who live on the bluff. The party will be for adults with only one, maybe two or three little kids present. They will shriek and run amok as all the 35 and probably more grownups will drink more than usual, eat a fabulous gourmet barbecue dinner and then retire to the backyard where we'll be able to see the fireworks displays from all over the surrounding area. Pat and I will make the five minute drive home and wonder how we'll get to sleep as the bombs literally bursting in the air outside our open windows rattle all the pictures on the walls.
Our house is decorated inside and out with flags and red,white and blue objects and will stay that way for a few more days as the neighborhood lets off a few more rounds of fire crackers and bottle rockets just for the heck of it.
When I was a kid, the Fourth of July meant sparklers. While waiting for the California sun to fade into the West, we would start begging my dad to light up "just one," sort of like asking to open one Christmas present on Christmas Eve. We always managed to wear him down for that and we knew we'd soon have him looking for the candle and isolating himself way out on the driveway to light it. Then the big moment arrived. He'd light it; we'd jiggle and dance and then swoop in with screams of delight when he signaled the "okay" then he'd carefully light ours and hand them over. More screams and swooping as we made sparkling circles and other fabulous designs in the air until all the sparklers were gone and lay dead on the cement and in the lawn with the stench of their smoke lingering for what seemed like forever.
One Fourth when I was about nine, we were invited to watch the fireworks over Lake Merritt in Oakland from the top of my mom's cousin's apartment building. Several people we knew lived in apartments around the Bay Area but we actually rode the ELEVATOR up to the cousin's place (her name was Beans which made the excursion just that much more exciting - how could you not have fun at the apartment home of someone called Beans?!) and then went up even higher to the roof. The display scared me a little at first because the booms were so loud and the popping and bursting and wild colors seemed to be at eye level from our lofty viewpoint. And they reflected in the water! It was all so exciting.
When we had our own family and lived out in the country, six of the neighborhood families would gather together every Fourth of July for a gigantic barbecue and fireworks display of our own illegal purchasing. We moms would have a special meeting to plan the menu and the tables would be absolutely loaded with all the most delicious picnic food ever. All of our kids would be excited for days ahead and ran around like wild beasts on the day of. We all ate ourselves sick and then gathered our folding chairs for our glorious display where no one got hurt and everyone was able to make it back to the fire pit for s'mores.
This Fourth, as we have in the last several years, we'll go over to the Burton's who live on the bluff. The party will be for adults with only one, maybe two or three little kids present. They will shriek and run amok as all the 35 and probably more grownups will drink more than usual, eat a fabulous gourmet barbecue dinner and then retire to the backyard where we'll be able to see the fireworks displays from all over the surrounding area. Pat and I will make the five minute drive home and wonder how we'll get to sleep as the bombs literally bursting in the air outside our open windows rattle all the pictures on the walls.
Our house is decorated inside and out with flags and red,white and blue objects and will stay that way for a few more days as the neighborhood lets off a few more rounds of fire crackers and bottle rockets just for the heck of it.
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