Raisins

I once asked my Mom why she didn't like raisins very much and she said that she had a cookie once that she thought was chocolate chip and it was really oatmeal raisin.  And that she has never forgiven those raisins.

So it's really a pity that I can't show this to her.

My people*

I am German and English on my Mom's side and English and Irish on my Dad's side.  So I am one quarter German, half English, and one quarter Irish.  Nonetheless, I ascribe 90% of what I am and what I do to either my German background or my Irish background.

As I never wear socks with sandals and never would, I don't tend to attribute any of my character or behavior to being of English descent.



"9 Chickweed Lane" by Brooke McEldowney

*The Germans, not the Nazis.  Just ... thought I'd clarify that.

Doing what I thought I would

I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too.

---  Steve Martin

My mother passed away a few months ago and left me some money.  I didn't expect this because when she died, I was scheduled to meet with the finance people where she lived in a few weeks and get the ball rolling to sign her up for Medicaid.

We'd have conversations, Mom and I, where she would fret about having nothing left to leave me and my nieces.  And no matter how I answered ("You don't have to leave us anything.  You raised me and have given me lots of good memories as well" or "We didn't earn the money, it should go to keep you comfortable." or "Don't worry, you *won't* have anything to leave us and that's really okay."*) she still fretted about it.  Which meant that even though I was in charge of her bank account (which was larger than mine) and received the statements for her (reasonably small) mutual fund, etc., Mom and I had trained me to think of her as inches away from destitute.  So I figured that when she died, she would be poor, I would pay for her funeral, even more stuff I have no room for would end up in my apartment, we would miss her, the end.

In addition to fretting about running out of money, Mom said many times that she didn't like living there and hoped that she wouldn't have to do it very long.  I can't say that I blame her because I can't think of anyone who has ever expressed a hope to spend their final years in a nursing home, no matter how nice it is.***  So in my heart of hearts, I guess I wasn't too surprised when she passed away in January.  I'm grateful that it was a relatively easy passing and not the scary and horrible one I'd feared for so long.

And in the end she got her wish.  She had something to leave us.  I got 50% of her estate and my two nieces got 25% each.  I was so prepared to left just mementos that my first response was nausea.  I was literally nauseated.  And then I was scared because I've seen how not very good with money I could be.

For years I would think off and on about what I would do a with a "windfall."  What if I won the lottery?  What if I found bags and bags of money?****  But, okay, let's assume some strings-free money, what would I do.  The fantasies always ended up having three elements:

1.  I'd get rid (finally) of my student loans.
2.  I'd buy a new car because the Protege which has served me so well is a little old lady now.  She's 12 which is, what, 96 in human years?  120?
3.  Fund my retirement.
4.  I'd give more more to charities I care about, especially theaters.
5.  Other.  Often other included stuff like pedicures or massages or a personal chef.  When I was thinking really huge sums of money than #1 was "move Mom out of the nursing home and get her in-home care."

But I always assumed in the way back of my mind that I manage to fritter the money away.  Theater tickets, meals with friends, impulse purchases, having the No Money for Leta fairies steal it in the night ...

Now that I've inherited Mom's savings and her annuities, though, I am rather proud that I'm doing what I hoped I would do.  My desire not to waste this final gift from my mother has meant that I am being more careful with it (I think) than I usually am.  The scorecard so far:

1.  The student loan monkey is off my back.  This is like having a hefty raise in pay.  Half of that money is going to savings, so it feels as though I've turned my loan debt into a dollar-cost-averaged savings plan.  That happened first.  The brunette you saw dancing in the streets?  That was me.  So, check.

2. I bought a shiny, new Jetta.  Sunroof.  Manual.  Elegant charcoal grey color.  And an Equality Maryland affinity license plate, so that's a few bucks that went where my mouth is.  Check.

3.  My (very attractive, how can there not be an extra fee for that?) new financial planner and I have already started deciding what's gonna go where so that I won't have to eat cat food when I'm older.  Check.

4.  Silver Spring Stage got a check from me.*****  So did several other theaters I like.  My favorite was when I walked up the lady running concessions at Forum Theater during intermission and when she said "May I help you?"  I said "Yes, you could give this check to the right person for me, please."  And she looked at it and "Oh my, yes!  Thank you!"  And it wasn't even that large of a check.  I felt like a patron of the arts for the rest of the evening.  Check and check.

5.  See the Steve Martin quote, supra.  Mainly I've bought some new clothes and picked up the check more often.  But even so.  Annnnnd, check.

One of the nice things about having some extra disposable income is that when I went to see a show at the Hub Theater and the nice lady selling tickets accidentally overcharged me (not by much, just a few bucks) I suggested that instead of going through the effort of cancelling my transaction and re-doing it, she just code the overage as a donation and send me a thank you letter (because I think I *will* be itemizing this year).  She was delighted to comply. And once again, I feel like a patron of the arts.

I could get used to this.  I really could.


*Multiple Sclerosis as severe as my mother had it is very expensive.  The "continuum of care community" where she lived for the last ten years of her life started out costing about $5,000 a month when she was living independently and having aids come in a few times a day and, when she had to move over to the nursing home section and having skilled nursing ended up costing $313 dollars a day.**  (For people who do math as well as I do $313 x 30 = $9,390 per month or $114,245 per year).  This was significantly more than her income.

**Of all the folks I have met with MS, I haven't seen anyone with a worse case than Mom's, so most people with MS diagnosis should not look at Mom as a pattern for their own futures.

***And, as nursing homes go, it was very nice.  But still depressing.

****Not that I buy lottery tickets, but fantasy doesn't require that.  And if I found bags and bags of money, I'd call the FBI.  I grew up in America. I watch TV.

*****The Stage is my theatrical home, so they got the biggest check.  By far.

The Official AN/SPS-30 Cigarette Lighter

This post from Silver Spring: Then and Again is another one of those areas where elements of my personal history come together.

I live in Silver Spring (or at least moved here as a child) because APL was here. The Navy assigned Dad to APL, possibly as a Tech Rep, so my parents bought a house a couple of miles away. We expected to be here for two to three years. Naturally, I therefore ended up doing all but a few months of my schooling in Montgomery County schools.*  (I'm not sure but I think if I asked Daddy why the Navy assigned him there, he would say that it was to put him in proximity to Crisfields for lunch every day.)

So I grew up in Silver Spring, Daddy worked at APL, and the third leg of this triangle is, of course, that the company I work for now does radar here in Silver Spring, blocks from the old APL site.

Looking at the plaque, I can even understand most of what it says because quite a few of our contracts say much the same thing.  The numbering system for contracts hasn't changed, probably since 1781.

Not that I smoke, but if one of those were to show up at yard sale, I think I'd buy it in a hurry.


*I started kindergarten in at Quidnessett Elementary School in North Kingston, Rhode Island and we moved to Silver Spring in November of that year.  The year that I was 14, I spent six months living with Daddy in Belgium and attended the base school from March to June. Other than those brief lacunae, teachers at Parkside Elementary, Eastern Junior High, and Montgomery Blair High School had the daily struggle of getting me to stop daydreaming or surreptitiously reading.

Thanks again, Dad

I got to be teenager-y and blame my parents (specifically, my father, who provided my Irish genes) for my problems when I got diagnosed with Celiac Disease because CD is very common in Ireland and people of Irish descent.*

Well, fate has offered this opportunity again. I was told today that I have Rosacea **and, according to those strangers on Wikipedia, "It primarily affects Caucasians of mainly northwestern European descent and has been nicknamed the 'curse of the Celts' by some in Britain and Ireland.


*So far the only thing I've gotten from my mother's German genes are a somewhat "Achtung" approach to kitchen organization and a fondness for rules.


**And I was told this in the same way that I am told lots of medical information: as though it were something that the doctor has noted in my file long ago and assumed that I knew. What is up with that?

"Hiking Maryland and Delaware"

Mom was an avid hiker and backpacker.  The energy, time, enthusiasm, and love that I put into theater, she put into being on trails, maintaining trails, and promoting enjoying the outdoors.  I've been saying for a while of our two obsessive hobbies, hers was the smarter because it meant that she spent beautiful days outdoors, while I spend them shut up in windowless rooms.

So I was very touched to run across this letter in Mom's first edition of Hiking Maryland and Virginia by David Lillard and Chris Reiter:

August 24, 2000

Ms. Ann Hall

Dear Ann,

Thank you so much for allowing Ed and me to use your library of trail resources in the research for "Hiking Maryland and Delaware." The books were a tremendous help to us. We were able to include in the book a combination of many hikes that had not before appeared in a single source.

I want you to know also how much I appreciate your dedication and service to the hiking community over these many years. I understand that you are not able these days to put in the kind of "sweat equity" that you once offered. I hope you will be heartened to know your kind assistance on this book is itself a wonderful service to hikers. It will help thousands of novice hikers discover the outdoors that you have so lovingly stewarded.

Enclosed is a copy of Hiking Maryland and Delaware, a small token of my appreciation for your help.

With sincere thanks,

/s/ David
David Lillard
AHS President 1994 - 2000

The first edition was dedicated to all of the people who have done trail maintenance and all of the other volunteering that keeps the trails available for anyone who wants to walk them.

It was the dedication in the second edition (2006) that made me cry. I don't cry very often, but this made me get the kind of teary where you can't talk for a couple of minutes, which was inconvenient because I was reading the dedication out loud to Mom, just so that she could hear it again.

For Ann Hall. When her legs failed her, she did her volunteer trail work from her bottom, sitting in the trail to cut brush, clear water bars, and tend the path. How she got herself so far into the woods no one can imagine. That's love.

And it's inscribed: Dear Ann, You have inspired more than you know. With appreciation, David

And David* and I used the second edition today planning our hike at Little Bennett Park.

Need a good book on hiking in Maryland and Delaware? I have one that I can recommend.


*my David, not Lillard

How to make my parents laugh

This past weekend David and I stayed with Dad and Audrey while we attended the Contemporary American Theater Festival in nearby Shepherdstown.*


As Dad and I were sitting around catching up, he told me a bit about the skin graft that he had to deal with a wound on his leg. Typical of Dad's sense of humor he told me that he told the nurses that they were ruining his once perfect body, since the graft would leave scars on both the wound site and the donation site.


"Huh." I replied. "So I know this means that we can't show you any more. Can we still breed you?"


And we were greatly amused by each other and proved - again - that while I look just like my Mom, I am still related to my father.




* Highlight for this festival?  Discovering I was sitting next to David Remedios, the sound designer for two of the shows.  And then watching him not even flinch, let alone turn around and kill, the patron who spent the first five minutes of the show we were watching (not one he designed, but even so) slowly and loudly open something wrapped in cellophane.

I am my father's daughter

"I often don't know what I think until I've heard what I have to say."


from a This I Believe essay that Daddy wrote this year.  

Nominated

Back in November, David and I took a trip up to New York to spend Thanksgiving with my cousin. Normally, he and his girlfriend come south to stay at my Dad's but my cousin got a job working sound for a show which was scheduled to open right around the Autumn harvest holiday.

So we had a lovely Thanksgiving Dinner in their new apartment and on Friday we saw the show he was working. We took up most of a row and the famous director/choreographer was in attendance the night were there. Very exciting!

Fela! is bright and energetic and got lots of good buzz after we saw it (including an interview on The Daily Show for Bill T. Jones), playing to good houses even in a down economy.

On Saturday David and I went to see The Royal Family, one of my favorite pieces of "antique theater," which was then in revival in a lavish production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.

It was a wonderful theater weekend and I enjoyed both shows thoroughly. And, it seems, I wasn't the only one: Both have been nominated for multiple Tony Awards in both performance and technical categories and both were nominated for the top honor in their discipline: Best Musical (Fela!) and Best Revival of a Play (The Royal Family).

Like Ko-Ko, I am always very glad to hear my opinion backed by a competent authority.

Brussels Sprouts with Bacon

Last year I resolved to make one new recipe a month during the year, using the cookbooks that take up an entire baker's rack in my kitchen. Somehow that didn't happen,* although I did make some fresh peas at one point and had to look up how long to boil them.**

But a new year doesn't require new resolutions, just renewed resolve...

I had bought some Brussels sprouts at the local farmers' market which I had recently learned was now year-round. I had needed to pick up a pound of ground bison meat for some chili I would be making for the office chili cook-off and the Brussels sprouts were just a happy surprise. I rinsed them when I got home the day I bought them and popped them into a bowl in the fridge. I ate a few raw now and again (crunchy and yummy!) as I was doing other things, but tonight I decided it was Time to Cook the Brussels Sprouts.

One of the reasons that I love Brussels sprouts is that my Mom made them beautifully. She'd cut the stems off, make little Xs in the bottom, boil them in just enough water to cover, drain them and replace in the pot, add butter, salt, and pepper, and then cover lightly with a wax paper circle for a few minutes. They were the definition of "crisp-tender" and sooo tasty.

I knew the basic premise, but - again - needed specifics.

As I also had some bacon that was also reaching its Use It Today point and figuring that I could accomplish several things at once, I pulled out the cookbook that is upper left in the bakers rack: The James Beard Cookbook (1959. Well, 1967 in paper).*** It had been Mom's and several of the recipes have her mark, i.e., the date of the first time she made the recipe. Mr. Beard eschews both the Xs in the bottoms and the wax paper circle, so his recipe is a trifle simpler than Mom's but I think her Brussels sprouts are still the best. Also, the next time I make this I think I won't boil them as long as Mr. Beard suggests as the sprouts were softer than I prefer. But all in all? Pretty darn tasty.

Brussels Sprouts with Bacon
The James Beard Cookbook, page 446 & 447

1 quart or 1 pound of Brussels sprouts
Water
Salt & pepper
4 tablespoons of melted butter (not necessary for the bacon variation)

Trim the stems off close to the sprouts and remove any discolored leaves. Put the sprouts to soak for 15 to 20 minutes in water to which you have added 1 teaspoon of salt.

In a kettle put enough water to cover the Brussels sprouts and add 1 teaspoon of salt. Bring this to a boil and add the vegetable. Do not cover. Cook gently until just tender when pierced with a fork. This should take about 15 minutes.

Drain well and seve with melted butter and salt and pepper to taste (skip for bacon variation)

Some people like a dash of vinegar or some lemon juice added.

With Bacon

Prepare as for Boiled Brussels Sprouts (see above), and while the sprouts are cooking, fry 6 slices of bacon. When crisp, remove and chop fine. Drain off all but 4 tablespoons of the bacon fat. Return the chopped bacon to the pan and add the cooked and drained sprouts. Season with 1 tablespoon of grated onion.

I added the BSwB to some gluten-free rotini pasta. It was, in all, a lovely dinner that I look forward to making again some time.

Next up? The Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook.

*I also resolved to walk to work on days when a) the temperature was above 40 degrees as I was getting dressed and b) if I didn't have to be somewhere immediately after work. That one worked out rather well, so I'm repeating it again this year as well.

**About ten minutes, up to 15 for larger peas.

***All of the books in my home are filed alphabetically by author except for cookbooks which are by size, smallest to largest. If I am able to stick with this project, the one on the bottom shelf right is my Provence the Beautiful Cookbook**** Technically, the cookbook to the absolute left is another James Beard cookbook dealing with Hors d'Oeuvre and Canapes, but that sort of book is usually rather thin on recipes for Brussels Sprouts.

****By which, I assume, was meant a cookbook about Beautiful Provence, rather than a beautiful cookbook, although as it is a coffe-table type book with lots of food-porn illustrations, it's certainly a darn fetching book.

A Bright Side

When Mom moved to Very Assisted Living boxes and boxes of her papers came to me. I am packrat but Mom is even more of one.

The central part of my study has been filed with boxes for the past year and I'd frequently walk in there on a Saturday morning, fully intending to sort, ditch, file, and generally reduce the level of the worst Disney ride ever, Paper Mountain. I'd take one look at it, desultorily move a few items from one place to another, feel totally overwhelmed, and find something else to do. Often something really productive, like play FreeCell.

Well, with Mom running out of money, it's time to submit the paperwork for a "spend down." Mom paid a pretty steep "deposit" when she moved into the facility where she lives and now that she does not have the income to pay the $295 a day that it costs to live in VAL, they will help me organize spending down the deposit. When she runs through that and uses up all but $2,500 of her assets, they'll apply for Medi-whichever it is.

The people in the Finance office are very nice, but it turns out that they actually do need to see paperwork. Lots of paperwork. So I've been spending time in the study and because I have a goal - find X, find Y, find Z - I'm not being dissuaded by chaos and dispair.

So while it doesn't look like it to the average passer-by, the study is tidier and more organized. And I've been getting rid of things outside of the study as well.

Except for the fact that I know it's too much hope for, I'd say that maybe by the time that my nieces have to do this for me, I'll have broken the packrat habit.

It also happens to be true

Living in Very Assisted Living ain't cheap. It's costing my mother $295 a day to be kept in the style to which she would have preferred not to become accustomed. $295 a day is more than her income, so we're starting the process to spend down the deposit she paid when she moved there seven years ago. When that money is (too soon) gone, the facility will help her apply for Medi-whichever.

It depresses Mom to think that she won't have anything to leave me and my neices. I've tried different ways to tell her that, while it is too bad, it's more important to take care of her than to worry about any kind of financial legacy.

Today I may have found a way to phrase it that works for her:

Mom, you worked hard all your life and saved a lot of money, which will be spent to keep you safe and comfortable. You're money should be spent on you. And knowing that you are safe and comfortable means a lot to me.

She said that was "a nice way to put it." Had Mom been more of a fan of Hemingway, she might have said "Isn't it pretty to think so," but I doubt she would have gone to far as quote Brick's "Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?" Mom's never been as much of a cynic as Mr. Williams.

It pays to have smart assy friends

Because then you don't get in trouble for saying stuff like I did yesterday. I would probably never say anything so snarky to my very nice and not Smart Assy Friends.

Smart Assy Friend: So how's your Mom doing?*
Me: Oh, pretty well. She was pretty incoherent there for a while but she's recovering nicely.
SAF: Yeah, I spent some of the weekend incoherent, too.
Me: Yes, but with my mother, we can tell the difference.


*Mom spent a few days in the hospital with the UTI. Between the infection and the dehydration, she was not very lucid for a couple of days, scaring the bejeebers out of me. Yay both for anti-biotics and Mom's dislike of superbug-creating anti-bacterial everything.

What I learned at the Neurologist

Mom had an appointment at the neurologist's office the other day and I went along for moral support and, possibly, practical assistance.

Mom has been living with Multiple Sclerosis for the past twenty years. An auto-immune disorder, MS is a particularly vicious foe which attacks the nervous system of the body, destroying the myelin sheath which covers nerves - effectively cutting the phone cord in the house of the body, like the villain in a thriller. Only MS isn't all that thrilling.

Mom has chronic progressive MS*, and suffers from spasticity and muscle loss. She hasn't walked at all in nearly ten years, her vision is affected, and her cognition is somewhat impaired. She can't write legibly very often and cannot remember things long enough to tell them to me if I'm not standing in front of her when they occur to her, which means that when she does remember, she tells me things over and over.** I know quite a few people with MS and Mom has it the worst of all of them. She now lives in a "skilled nursing facility" which wasn't how she intended to spend her retirement years.

So, anyway, one of the staff where she lives noticed that Mom hadn't seen her neurologist in the last five years and suggested an appointment. The appointment was duly made and I met her there and we saw the neurologist. He asked some questions, checked her muscle strength in her arms ("Push against my hand. Uh-huh.") and her coordination ("Touch my finger. Now touch your nose. Now touch my finger. Uh-huh."), and then sat down to talk to us.

What he told us I essentially regard as good news. My biggest fear about Mom has been that she would get worse and worse and eventually be in a lot of discomfort all the time. But the doctor told us that if we could see her the nerves coming off of her spinal cord, we wouldn't see any active lesions, just areas where the nerve had withered. Mom has stabilized. In other words, he said, she is a paraplegic, and could be compared to someone who had been hurt in a riding accident as Christopher Reeve was, rather than to someone with, say a slowing progressing cancer, such as Elizabeth Edwards has. The flood has been and gone; Mom won't be living in the middle of a river with the water getting ever higher.

Which is good news for appropriate values of good news.

After the appointment, we went to Baja Fresh for lunch and I learned that while Mom zips around the nursing home in her electric wheel chair at speed, she is much more sedate on the sidewalks of Wheaton. And that when she crosses the street at less than a mile an hour, the kindly drivers wait for her very patiently. Thank you, Kindly Drivers!

A very educational trip. If one is supposed to learn one new thing every day, I'm up two.



*The other kind is relapsing/remitting where the patient has good days and bad days. Mom generally has bad days.

**Of course, I tell people things over and over and I don't have MS. Maybe it's a mother-daughter thing.

On the shopping list

My church, like most churches, has baskets in the narthex* to collect nonperishable food for the hungry. As the food went to Silver Spring HELP, the baskets were informally known as the HELP baskets.

I've been contributing off and on all my life, usually whatever random staple I happened to have on hand as I was leaving for church. And after Mom moved from her apartment to Old People's Prison**, I put all the gluten-containing food from her kitchen in the HELP baskets, which was rather a bonus because Mom had pretty wide tastes in food and she didn't buy store brands too often.

I haven't worried too much about what I was putting in the baskets, but ITE*** food and money are walking a little closer together in everyone's minds. I've mentioned before that gluten-free food often costs more and is harder to find than "regular" food. I'm not talking about gluten-free cupcakes, but a more standard cupboard item: breakfast cereal. I gave up eating breakfast cereal when I couldn't find any that either wasn't sweetened with barley malt (which has gluten) or didn't cost a depressing amount of money.

Chex Cereals (owned by General Mills) has recently taken the barley malt out of Rice Chex and replaced it with molasses. They also work to prevent cross-contamination, making these cereals appropriate for Celiacs. This is good news, but cereal is still - comparatively - an expensive food item and food pantries often mention that it is something that they run out of quickly.

So if you read this blog and if you contribute to your local food pantry, I am asking a favor. Please consider buying a few gluten-free items when considering what to donate.

Some suggestions:

Nature's Path - they're Canadian! They must be nice.

EnviroKidz cereals**** - Thanks to my friend Doug I have a sentimental attachment to the Leapin' Lemurs cereal;

Rice Chex;

Amy's Organic soups - Several soups are gluten-free (and clearly marked so) and a few are even corn-free. (And if there is an allergy more annoying than gluten, it's corn because HFCS is in every damn thing.)



*lobby
** Come on, really, if the door to your room gets shut and someone else has to open it, or else you can't leave your room, isn't that rather prison-like? If you can't go into the courtyard unless someone holds the door open; if your vitamins are confiscated by the staff; if you get out of bed and go to bed on their schedule - doesn't that justify the phrasing?
***ITE = In This Economy. Thanks, David for the initialism.
****Nature's Path owns Envirokidz

Treat of the Week

When Sara and I were kids my Mom instituted something that even then I thought was really smart and admire more as an adult: The Treat of the Week.

We would go to the grocery store with Mom every Saturday and would each be allowed to pick out one treat. One. It could be anything we wanted - and thank goodness we weren't required to share - but it could only be one. One box of sugary cereal? Sure, fine. Two? No. One box of Pop-Tarts filled with chocolate frosting? Sure, fine. Two? No. One entire baked ham? Sure, fine.

Mom didn't put restrictions on what the treat could be,* nor did she parcel it out during the week. We could ration it for the week or eat the whole thing on Saturday when we got home. They were our treats. But once it was gone, it was gone. No more treats until the next Saturday.

Sara and I had a nice sense of empowerment about being allowed to chose our own treats and Mom was the spared an entire grocery store of of us whining for more stuff.

For what was probably several months straight, Sara and I each chose a tube of chocolate chip cookie dough. We'd keep it in the freezer and snack on it, usually making it last until the next week.

Instead of baking the cookies, we'd eat the dough raw**, sometimes cutting off lady-like pieces, sometimes just gnawing on it straight from the tube, which prett' near grossed Mom out of existence but as the rule about not micromanaging our Weekly Treats was hers, she'd just arrange to be out of the kitchen whenever we went looking for a snack. She was probably grateful during that period that she worked a sixty-hour week because if I was awake, I was probably looking around for a snack.***

As an adult I was delighted when Ben and Jerry's introduced Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream and considered it an homage to the Treat of the Week whenever I had some. Then I got that stupid auto-immune disorder and can no longer eat CCCD ice cream.

But thanks to Whole Foods I can at least go back to having random bits of raw cookie dough. Until they realize how much I like it and discontinue carrying it, they have gluten-free cookie dough made by a company called French Meadow that tastes remarkably like anybody else's cookie dough.**** It comes already sliced, which while reducing the level of just-like-when-I-was-a-kid inheirant in consuming raw "food," it does make it more office-friendly.

I buy a couple of boxes, put one in the freezer and one in the fridge, and most days after lunch I wander down to the "coffee mess" and collect one to nibble on back at my desk. Corporate at our company (I work for Corporate) is pretty much a junior UN so no one questions any one's possibly odd-looking food.

It's from Whole Foods and it's gluten-free so it costs enough to enforce a one-per day rationing.

And there are nine per box, so it's more like Treat of the Every Other Week.


* Which is an impressive example of self-control as most of our choices probably made her gag.
** See what I mean?
** This is still true. I am constantly hungry.
**** In the gluten-free world, tasting like the ordinary product is a very good thing.

An RC Cola

The only Mardi Gras I ever attended was in Mobile, Alabama, so it was awfully nice to hear this story yesterday on All Things Considered about Mobile's claim to have been celebrating Fat Tuesday before Neworlens was even a Blackened Cajun spot on the map.

I don't remember catching any Moon Pies, but there were definitely beads, and candy, and trinkets, and dime store junk a-plenty flying through the air. My cousin, Robbie, was living with my grandparents in those days and he was taller than we were, so he caught as much as he could for his younger girl cousins from up North.

And here is a little more about the Land of My Father.

We're agin it

Most of my conversations with my mother these days are practical: things she needs;* things she doesn't like about Very Assisted Living; when am I going to come visit/help her? But yesterday she called me around 9:00-ish in the morning to ask my if I had ever had scrapple. It seems that there was a piece of scrapple on her breakfast tray and she wanted to determine the family policy on foods made out of offal.

We don't eat them, I told her.

She said that she didn't think that we did, because (I paraphrase here) she tried it and said that while it started out tasting a bit like sausage, by the time she was ready to swallow, it's true nature became all too apparent.

Mom put a decent amount of effort and creativity into describing her reaction to finding this on her plate. She wanted to know if she had to finish it. Absolutely not. I agree with the people who define it as stuff "too disgusting to be used or sold elsewhere."

I then told her about a party some years ago where my housemate Jenny took an informal "scrapple: yes or no?" poll.** Maybe it's because I do live in the Mid-Atlantic region, but there were a surprising numbers of yeses - about half the respondents, with no attendees abstaining. It seems that everyone - if they have heard of it - has an opinion on scrapple and it's pretty much a zero-sum: either "yeah, sure, it's good" or "ewww, yuck, no, I don't eat floor sweepings."

All in all, it was a fun conversation, one of the sort that I miss having with my mother these days.


*And if she says "desperately needs" one more time about something that is neither bleeding nor burning, well, things are going to get a little fraught.

**No, I have no idea why this particular entertainment happened at that party. Mostly our parties were pretty normal.***

***Okay, that last bit probably isn't true. Our parties were probably pretty weird, but we enjoyed them.

Ann's daughter

As I was helping Mom move from Independent Living to Very Assisted Living I spent more time wandering around the community where she lives without having her with me. I had noticed over the years that people knew that I'm "Ann's daughter" -- we look very much alike, it's not that great a logical leap -- but I hadn't realized how throughly until they would stop me in the halls every other day or so and ask about her.

I told her at dinner the other night that it was a darn good thing that she had raised me to have a decent set of manners because had I been a rude, obnoxious daughter, everyone would have known exactly who had fallen down on the job.

Leta hates ---

When I was a young teenager and had braces, Mom would forget when my appointments were, and when, therefore, my jaw would be very tender, and would often make something for dinner that: a) I loved and b) required chewing. (Roast beef, for example.) This made both of us sad, me because, in some kind of horrible foreshadowing of the whole Celiac Disease-based Deprivation, there was wonderful food that I couldn't have, and Mom because good roasts are expensive and she was a single parent, so not having me fall to with my usual enthusiasm sort of undermined the pleasure of making a special dinner.

I only began to regard the whole process as slightly vindictive when Mom fell totally in love with home-made vinaigrette (with, I swear, extra vinegar) because in addition to my jaw being tender, the insides of my cheeks were pretty torn up by the wires holding the braces in place. My pleas for something closer to cream than Hydrochloric acid fell on deaf ears. Largely because Mom worked something like 60 hours a week and, let's face it, I talk a lot so remembering any one of my specific teenage complaints of the dozens and dozens I dreamed up each day would have taken quite a lot.

So later in my teenage years (the handwriting seems to narrow it down to about my junior year), I wrote a list of foods not to serve me any more because we were both tired of the "but I thought you liked this" / "No, I hate it" back and forth.

Mom found the list as she was going through stuff and gave it to me. And I've updated it a bit. I think that the parens meant that I willing to consume them in small amounts if they were cooked. Black is then and now, red is then, blue is now.

Leta hates:
beets
black olives
liver
(onions)
(green peppers)
cooked cauliflower
cooked carrots
veal
fish
seafood
ricotta cheese
cottage cheese

So I only added one vegetable and I've removed the others. And, almost just in time to no longer be able to eat regular lasagna, I'd learned not to dislike ricotta cheese. For years and years every time I went to stay with friends of other friends such, dinner would be the hostess's special recipe lasagna. It was made special with the addition of extra ricotta. Hoo boy.

The list of foods that I love but should not eat, by the way, is:

wheat
barley
rye
spelt
triticale
kamut

Useful substitute grains are:

Amaranth
Arrowroot
Buckwheat
Cassava
Corn
Flax
Indian rice grass
Job’s tears
Legumes
Millet
Nuts
Potatoes
Quinoa
Rice
Sago
Seeds
Soy
Sorghum
Tapioca
Wild Rice
Yucca

And some of these? I have no idea what they are. I'm willing to try them, though.

My other big rule for food these days if I'm allowed to eat it, I do. At dinner at the 4 Provinces after the NVTA awards on Sunday I asked if I could substitute something for the exceedingly-yummy-looking-but-made-with-flour blue cheese potato cake. I was offered, and cheerfully accepted mashed potatoes. Mary, who was sitting to my left asked if I wanted them to put any blue cheese on my mashed potatoes and I said, oh no, I was going to have them as God intended - with about a half a stick of butter and some salt and pepper. And I did. Because the "Leta loves" list would look something like this:

Tea
Butter
Cheese
Bacon
Sausage
Garlic
Caramel
Spinach
Tomatoes
Salt
Steak
etc, etc, etc, etc.