I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND SOME PEOPLE. No, that’s not accurate. Closer to the nugget of Truth would be, “I just don’t understand most people. Of course, of the few people that I do think I understand I’m usually wrong.
It’s not that I think I am superior or more intelligent than the bulk of humankind it’s just that my most frequently muttered phrase is, “Why they do that?”
A prime example of my mystification with people happened yesterday.
THERE MUST BE SOME BAD JUJU FLOATING IN THE AIR TODAY. Everybody seems to be complaining about something wherever I go. I’m getting my coffee and the person in front of me in line is moaning about the weather.
“It’s going to be hot all week. I don’t like hot weather. I just don’t like it.”
Well, Lady, it is summertime in the Midwest and it is supposed to be only 88° today and 93° tomorrow. I would call that warm, maybe bordering on hot, but it ain’t Death Valley.
See? Now she’s got me doing it. I’m complaining about her complaining.
Bad juju.
IT’S TUESDAY AND I SMELL.
Due to some technical difficulties I am having with WordPress it is necessary that I post a few more things from the past. This post is from 2015.
Enjoy and bear with me.
Last Saturday I volunteered to help out at a Kiwanis Club Fish Fry fundraiser. I was there from 3:30 PM until about 7:30 PM. I helped out selling tickets at the door and greeting the several hundred people who showed up to dine until they dropped. The thing is – I don’t belong to the Kiwanis Club.
Sometimes there are just too many choices. Every day I am faced with the tasks of making choices as soon as my eyes pop open.
Get up or not get up?
Matching socks or just grab any old two?
It goes on like that until I have made the choices that will make m,e presentable to the world.
Once I get downstairs I am faced with an unending Q&A. It goes on all day. It seems like I can’t go anywhere or do anything without having to make choices. My only respite has been a those few precious minutes in the early evening when I’m able to relax, pour a cup of coffee, and nibble on a cookie or two….or three. But, now even that oasis has been overrun by a stampede of “Choose me! No! Choose me!” When I go down the Cookie Aisle a the Supermarket I am ambushed by a wall holding Twenty-Seven (Read ’em – 27) different Oreo Cookies! How am I supposed to make a choice for my evening snack when I am faced with that?
Jesus only had 12 Apostles to deal with. I have 27 Cookies staring at me. This is gonna be rough.
Ever since I was knee high to a Cookie Jar I loved the Oreo cookie. It was a simple chocolate cookie with a sweet layer of white stuff. Pulling the Oreo apart and eating the “White Stuff” side first was half the fun. I still do that. It’s Tradition! Now, with 27 different Oreos I am going to be hyper-busy pulling them all apart in the Krafty Oreo Test Kitchen. Here is a list of all the choices I am now faced with. Brace yourself.
1. Birthday Cake 2. Fudge Dipped Thin Bites 3. Mint Thins 4. Thins Bites 5. Chocolate Thins 6. Chocolate Oreo 7. Peanut Butter 8. Fudge Dipped Mint Thins 9. Red Velvet 10. White Fudge Dipped Thin Bites 11. Mint Oreo 12. Oreo Thins 13. Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie. 14. Spring Oreo 15. Dark Chocolate 16. Golden Thins 17. Fudge Covered Oreo 18. Carrot Cake 19. Mega Stuff Oreo 20. Pistachio Thins 21. Golden Oreo 22. Most Stuff Oreo 23. Oreo (The Classic!) 24. Lemon Oreo 25. Double Stuff. 26. Toasted Coconut 27. White Fudge Covered Oreo.
I had originally thought that there were just 25 varieties, but I was corrected by the nurse at my doctor’s office. I told the Doctor about my personal obligation to sample all of the Oreo varieties. He looked at me…then smiled. I think he was seeing himself behind the wheel of a brand new Ferrari.
It is going to take a while for me to sample all of these new Oreo cookies. I’m not going to try to get it all done over a weekend. I’m going to have to pace myself. Every night I’ll sample a few cookies along with my coffee. I am not a glutton, but I assure you that none of the cookies will go stale.
I have cleared a space in the kitchen where I can store all 27 packages of Oreos. We don’t use oven all that much.
As I have mentioned before my wife, the lovely and talented, Dawn, and I have been watching a lot of cooking shows recently and we have had some really tasty dishes cross our table as a result. I think part of these new and delicious meals is an attempt to expand my diet beyond frozen Mexican food and Manwich.
Inadvertently, I think that I may have killed that golden (and crispy) culinary goose.
Can I help it if I mentioned a news story that has been voted an appetite killer in our home? Yes, I suppose I can.
“After spending almost two decades underground, Brood 10 cicadas are due to appear in U.S. states between Georgia and New York this spring…”
And Indiana, and a bunch of other states.
It wasn’t so much that I mentioned this story about these pesky bugs, it was that I reminded Dawn about a visit to an Indiana State Park we enjoyed (up to a point) a few years ago.
We had rented a cabin in the Park and were just kicking back and relaxing when the State Park Rangers announced that there was going to be a presentation open to all Park visitors…a presentation of recipes on how to cook, eat, and theoretically enjoy, the millions of Cicadas that were infesting the Park.
If you are unfamiliar with Cicadas allow me to inform you about them.
They are a truly ugly, noisy, and prolific species of insect. There entire purpose seems to be to hatch from their buried eggs by the millions, fly into the trees, bushes, and any place they can. They then start making a loud and annoying mating call (up to 100 decibels). They mate. Then they bury their eggs underground, and then they die. Their ugly little corpses pile up until they are eaten by other critters. Actually, that’s a lot like the life cycle of Hollywood Starlets and some Comedians I’ve known.
The very thought of cooking and eating them is enough to make my body trigger a number of unpleasant reflexes. We did not attend the Park Ranger’s presentation. We’ve never even been back to that State Park.
Now I am seeing news stories about this year’s expected inundation of the ugly little bugs. There are different kinds of Cicadas that have different hatching schedules. Some hatch every year while others stretch it out as long as seventeen years. That’s the bunch we are going to get this year. Billions and Billions of noisy seventeen year old teenagers. Thank God they don’t drive.
Even though the very thought of eating Cicadas does not appeal to me I know that there are some people walking the streets like zombies for whom a Cicada Sandwich sounds tasty. I don’t care if they are crunchy, low carb, and gluten free, I’m not going there. I’ll stick to my frozen burritos and Sloppy Joes.
For those of you who are interested in chowing down on Cicadas I am including some disgusting information for you.
Ordinarily I would wish you a cheerful “Bon Appetit,” but in this case all I can come up with is “Save Yourselves!”
Here is a ten hour loop of Cicada Sounds. Pleasant dreams.
Cooking With Cicadas
DON’T CALL ME SCROOGE, but I am glad that the Holiday Season is over. It’s not that I don’t enjoy getting together with family and friends, sharing good memories, and hopes for the future. I truly do love all of that. It is just that I find it all so very exhausting.
The “Holiday Season” starts with Halloween (Like it or not.) and doesn’t end until after the New Year’s Day festivities. For some people the end doesn’t come until the Super Bowl. Personally, I could not care less about that. I might care if the Cleveland Browns were in the game, but I‘m not holding my breath on that.
For over two months everything is in a whirl of shopping, eating WAAAAY too much, traveling, being pleasant with everybody, and wading through the tons of catalogs that overflow the mailbox. I find it all more than I can deal with calmly, maintaining a clear brain, and a digestive tract that doesn’t resemble Krakatoa West of my Liver. By the time the New Year starts I am a shambles. This year was even more difficult. I think I now know what all of those discarded Christmas trees feel like after a ride through the wood chipper.
This year we spent most of December in Texas. We drove there and back. Let me do the math for you – that was a round trip of about 2500 miles.
Ho Ho Ho
We split The Going and The Coming into three days each way. I can no longer do those marathon drives of 700 miles in a day. My butt just can’t take it anymore. Fifty years ago I could have made the Texas trip in two days, but no more. Back in 1970 I drove from Bar Harbor, Maine all the way to the Washington D.C. burbs in one day. That was about 750 miles in one day! I was young and foolish.
I’m not young anymore.
After traveling like that I need several days to recuperate. I can’t get up at 7 AM, make tea and coffee, and be a sociable breakfast companion. I need to stay in bed unconscious and eventually be a passable lunch companion.
I think what I need to start doing as the Holiday Season approaches again is to go into training as if I was going to compete in the Olympics.
I’ll start in July. I will spend hours sitting in an uncomfortable chair. I will start practicing on my Christmas present wrapping skills. This year everything I wrapped looked like it was done by an arthritic Orangutan.
Another area I’ll need to work on is Eating…Holiday Eating. That means eating too much, doing so at odd hours, and having a severely unbalanced diet. Cookies will become one of the major food groups. Did you know that there must be twenty different kinds of Oreo Cookies?
So you see…it’s not that I don’t like the Holidays. It is more like the Holidays have passed me by. I find that all of those things I took in stride in my youth now require some serious preparation. I’ll be ready when this year’s Holiday Season rolls around. I don’t want to face another year with my intestinal tract taking no prisoners.
Enjoy this day with your Family and Friends!
Fa, la, la, la, la.
SOME THINGS ARE WORTH EATING.
Other things are not.
A nicely done “medium-rare” steak – Yes. A “well-done” steak – No.
Fried Chicken – Yes. KFC – No.
Airline Cookies, Cheap Mexican Food, and Beets – No, No, and No.
Kolaches – YES!
Kolaches? Wazzat?
Sit and learn, my child.
Few places in the world produce more delicious pastries than the kitchens of Eastern Europe. I grew up enjoying the wonderful delights from my Aunt Annette’s ancient cookbook. That may also be part of the reason I graduated from size Medium to Large before I could read.
Kolaches are a Czech creation I believe, although there are variations from all over Eastern Europe.
When we were down in Texas with Family for Christmas I learned that kolaches are BIG in Texas. A flock of Czech bakers must have avoided Ellis Island and came into the country through Houston.
A few days before Christmas, with all of us caught up in a severe holiday hunger, it was decided that kolaches were needed – Now – and lots of them. Somebody had the phone number of the local Tex-Czech Bakery and – Poof! Kolaches appeared on the dining room table. More like 6 dozen.
These Czech Old World pastries that are as popular as Dr. Pepper and Barbeque in South Texas are a phenomenon. Some people might say that they look like your basic Danish pastry, but I wouldn’t say that in front of any Tex-Czech baker. They take their Old Country kolaches roots very seriously. I think wars have started over less.
There were about a dozen people around that table, ready to pounce on the six dozen kolaches. Those kolaches didn’t have a chance.
Picture, if you will, a school of Great White Sharks circling six dozen wounded sea bass. Apricot, Cheese (Not Danish), Prune (Still not Danish), and Cherry sea bass kolaches were devoured at a frightening rate.
Yumilicious!
Now, in complete honesty, I am not a big sweets person all that much anymore. Advancing age and A1C have tempered my childhood appetites – but I joined in the Great Kolache Feeding Frenzy of 2016. My personal score that day remains a family secret. I held my own, but there were a couple who could easily consider turning Pro.
There were six dozen kolaches at the start. By the end of that session there were five dozen MIA. In its own way it was both soul stirring and frightening. The surviving kolaches quickly disappeared under aluminum foil and were secreted away only to be wolfed down in a midnight raid on the kitchen. There were no survivors.
Back in Terre Haute (That’s French for “I want another kolache.”) I had my mind set on visiting the one place in town I knew of where kolaches could be found. As I drove up to the front of the building I saw a sign in the window – Closed! Just shoot me now. Go ahead, get my taste buds all worked up into a dither and then close down my one and only hope.
That was no way to end 2016 or start off the New Year!
Illegal drugs can be found almost anywhere, but … but … I want my kolaches! What do I have to do to get some kolaches? It’s a long drive to both Texas or to the Czech Republic, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!
Everything is up to date in Indiana. If there is a Trend, Fad, or Fashion floating around it will eventually bob to the surface of the Wabash River in Terre Haute. It may take awhile to get there, but it will. The latest example of this is – Fanfare Please – A Vegan Restaurant.
The only reason that most people in this town might look into a Vegan Restaurant is to see if the diners are using utensils or are they just grazing? I wish the owners of this new eatery success, but let’s be honest, Terre Haute is “Carnivore Country.”
And I am a Carnivore. Thank you. Thank you very much.
It was just recently, in the middle of all of this stay home and don’t even think of going anywhere business, that my wife, the lovely Texas Carnivore, Dawn, discovered “The Boulevard of Beef, The Highway of Heifers, and The Supernova of Steak.” Sitting in our mailbox was an ad trumpeting the glories of The butchers at Omaha Steaks.
We had seen ads for Omaha Steaks for years, decades even, touting really expensive meat. Their prices were so high that it would have been cheaper to buy a cow, keep it in the backyard, and slaughter it in the garage. Then a couple of months ago things changed when we got that Virus Season advertising brochure. Included in the ad was a hefty coupon that lowered the prices into a range that wouldn’t make our wallets explode.
We ordered. We ate. We smiled. We decided that we wanted more. One thing that those folks in Omaha knew how to do was to lure us into becoming repeat customers. Offer us a lot of really good Carnivore Candy – Sirloins, Strip Steaks, Filets, and everything but the hoofs, and you have our attention.
So, for the last month or two we have been eating well and enjoying every bite. I grant that looking forward to a Friday Night Meat Feast is not everybody’s idea of Heaven but they didn’t have a barrel of A-1 beside them like I did. Dawn and I were enjoying every bite.
One thing we learned very quickly was that once we placed an order for a bunch of stuff it was like we had erected a billboard with our mailing address on it. We have been getting ads from every meat maven in the country offering us steaks often at ridiculously low prices. Some are such apparently good deals that I have my doubts about their origin. Did this Sirloin come from a cow or some other miscellaneous creature? I don’t want a steak with tire tread marks on it or a burger that died a natural death.
Like I said, we are happy and enjoying this Carnivore Carnival. If it isn’t your thing and you are someone who thinks “Meat is Murder” then go ahead and drop into Terre Haute’s new Vegan restaurant and have an Eggplant Burger with a side of French Fennel Fries.
Oatmeal and Ham
Tradition! It’s more than a song from “Fiddler on the Roof.” It is what has us doing things from generation to generation even if we don’t really know why.
“We’ve always done it that way.”
For example: From my youngest days up until this very morning I have always eaten my nice steaming bowl of oatmeal covered not with fruit, sugar, or maple syrup, but with salt. I’ve never known anyone else who does that, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I like it with salt, but why?
I wondered about that for years without ever finding a satisfactory answer. Finally, after decades of eating my salty oatmeal, I asked my Mother. This is what she told me.
My mother was born in 1911, one of nine children in an immigrant family. Oatmeal was a cheap way of filling those tiny tummies before sending them off to school. What wasn’t cheap was enough sugar, fruit, or syrup to sweeten up all those bowls of oatmeal. So, in an effort to give the kid’s breakfasts some flavor my grandmother salted their oatmeal.
My mother ate salted oatmeal in her youth and when she had kids she passed that recipe on to her children. It became an instant tradition in our family. Even though I could afford some sugar or some other sweeteners I still reach for the salt shaker more than a hundred years after that poor family of Lithuanian immigrants didn’t have the money for sugar.
Tradition!
Someone told me, over coffee, about a mysterious tradition in her family.
This is where the Ham enters the picture.
The woman told me that whenever she bought a ham she would cut off a sizable chunk from one end before cooking. She’d been doing that for years…because that was the way her mother always cooked ham. It had become a family tradition.
After a number of years her mother was visiting her daughter who was going to serve ham for Sunday dinner. When the mother saw her daughter cut off the end from the ham and set it aside she asked her why she was doing that.
“I learned how to cook watching you and I always saw you cut off the end of the ham before putting it in the oven. I figured it was part of your secret recipe.”
When the mother finally stopped laughing she explained that her practice of cutting off part of a ham was because she never had a pan large enough to hold a full sized ham. She always trimmed it down just to fit the pan she did have.
Tradition!
Tradition is a shared memory that is passed from one generation to the next. It can serve to teach or to warn by passing on what the older generation had to learn the hard way. Whether it be an oversized ham, a bowl of salty oatmeal, or something equally mundane it is the simple traditions that glue the generations together and make us all Family.
Tradition!
WELL, I’M GOING TO ASSUME THAT, IF YOU ARE READING THIS, YOU ARE STILL ALIVE. In some cases I know that that may be a bit of a stretch, but it does look as if you made it through another Christmas.
Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Christmas Dinner – and then there is a day of Christmas Leftovers and Batteries not included. That seems to be the Order of Battle
For me that day after Christmas usually involves multiple trips to the supermarket for a can of this or that and a Dollar Store Safari for batteries of the size I failed to buy before Christmas. How was I to know that nothing uses “D” size batteries anymore? If you ever find that you need some “D” batteries let me know because I have a boxcar load of them out in the garage. Most of them may be thirty years old, but they can be yours at a reasonable price.
OK, WE HAVE CHRISTMAS OUT OF THE WAY. The eggnog has been thankfully disposed of until next year. Christmas carols are over until Thanksgiving – except on the Hallmark Channel. New Year’s Day kind of takes care of itself with football, aspirin and drawn shades. I guess our next societal obligation is the making of New Year’s Resolutions. I suggest doing that before going out on New Year’s Eve. Doing it after that carries the danger of it being a product of desperation, shame, and physical pain.
WE ARE BACK IN TEXAS AGAIN. We come down here every Christmas as the entire family gathers at the Family homestead.
Everyone calls it “Gramma’s House.” Married in 1941 just before the start of the Second World War the house finally got built in 1947 when the chaos subsided. It was a small house, but when the first baby arrived it was obvious that expansion was needed. When babies #2 and #3 showed up in 1949 and 1954 it became time for some serious additions to the original floor plan.
HOW SOON AFTER GETTING UP IS IT ALLOWABLE TO TAKE A NAP? I think I may be pushing it a bit, but I got up at 7:30 this morning. It is now 11:10 AM and I’m seriously considering a little nappy-poo. I know that sounds nasty but…I don’t care.
It is now 3:37 PM.
It was a good little nap. I agree with you. A four and a half nap does border on a coma, but I felt it was also somewhat medicinal. Take a pill or two; lay down for just a minute…BOOM! Its late afternoon. I had plans. So much for them.
It is time to go on to Plan B. Get up, put on pants, and go buy a couple of souvenir T shirts. It’s obligatory in Florida. There is probably a law on the books here, “Don’t buy a cheap T shirt and we feed you to the gators.” People disappear all the time down here. They vanish forever or just show up at the Mayo Clinic. “I was standing in the buffet line when, all of a sudden, I blacked out and woke up in Minnesota.”
I’m going out to hunt for cheap T Shirts. Wish me luck.
ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS I DID ONCE I LANDED IN FLORIDA was to locate the nearest Starbucks. No matter where I am I gotta have my morning coffee. My afternoon and evening coffee too, but that should be obvious. The closest Chapel of St. Arbucks to my lodging is about two miles away. I can live with that. I have to. But all Starbucks are not the same.
While the buildings vary little from state to state, country to country, but the clientele is unique to each store. On a college campus most of the customers will have just finished puberty, while in Midtown Manhattan the majority of the sippers will have high blood pressure and be paying child support. This week I am in sunny South Florida.
SOME SAY THAT THE WHEEL IS THE GREATEST OF ALL INVENTIONS. Others say it is fire, or the printing press. I disagree. I think that the greatest invention in the History of the Human Species is The Dollar Store.
Let me explain…
I LIKE TO EAT. I DO IT EVERY DAY. There are times when I do it too often and too much. My most dangerous times are the Holidays. I don’t mean just Christmas and Thanksgiving – those are holidays that have become celebrations of Gluttony. I’m talking about other holidays. I can do some serious eating during the festivities around Groundhog Day and the Commemoration of the Founding of the National League.
I don’t need much of an excuse.
One of the things that I really like (and in some cases dislike) are those special dishes that are only ever prepared for a specific holiday. I like Turkey and dressing in November. I do not like it in July. In July I like Hotdogs and Bratwursts. I do not want them at Christmas. I do not enjoy that quivering jellied mass of cranberry sauce (Which is not a sauce!) at Thanksgiving. It is an abomination and should be dropped into the depths of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean.
Today is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States.
It is a day to be with Family and Friends.
Wherever you are – enjoy this day and we will see you tomorrow.
I’M FEELING IN A MAGNANIMOUS MOOD TODAY.
I feel like reaching
out to my fellow bipeds and seeing if I can be of help. So, I have declared that today is officially:
FREE BAD ADVICE DAY!
For today – and today only – I will be dispensing free bad advice on a wide range of topics.
Let the games begin!
Down the Hall on Your Left 