Using the freshest ingredients in season often involves improvisation, which to me is like music. It's something acted upon immediately and perfect when it's right. The other morning I awoke at 6:05 with a priority --- four large ripe pears --- although I had to be at work before 8:30. The pears with a perfect blush on their skins were beckoning. I had traveled to Hood River to pick up my mother from a week-long trip the day before and didn't have time to deal with the pears then.
Breakfast was improvised, and I don't have a recipe written down, but here goes:
The four large pears were cored and chopped into a thick kettle, not peeled, with one-third cup of white wine and a squeeze of plastic lime ( I know). From the freezer, I took out a giant knob of frozen fresh ginger knob, shaving off about 3 T. of the knob with a paring knife. I added about one-quarter cup of cranberry juice with Splenda and one-half cup of dried cranberries, plus a good squeeze of agave syrup, then put in probably one-half cup of fluffy Splenda (sorry --- that's how I roll. Erythritol would have been better, but I was out.).
I brought it to a boil, then put in one package of Ball low-sugar pectin, stirring constantly. Bringing it back to a boil, I timed it for a minute. Meanwhile, I had taken three pint jars and put them and their lids into hot water, bringing the water to a boil in another deep kettle.
The jars boiled at least a minute before I fished them out one at a time to fill the jars, using a rubber-lined jar lifter I found at Goodwill for about a dollar.
I filled two pints and put the sterilized lids on. There was half a jar left over to use immediately (although the lid popped like it had sealed, too.)
I made sourdough cornmeal pancakes, using the starter I have in the refrigerator for sourdough french bread. I added about one-half cup white cornmeal self-rising southern cornbread mix (fifty cents at Grocery Outlet because it was outdated) plus about three-quarters cup of starter, and one egg (I used Eggbeaters) plus enough buttermilk to thin it to the consistency of pancake batter. I usually put in about one-quarter teaspoon of soda and a little salt and agave syrup to give it balance.
The pancakes were the lightest, perfect with the still warm pear/cranberry/ginger jam remainders.
I still got to work on time, having taken no more than 45 minutes to put up two pints of no-sugar jam for the winter, plus making a gourmet breakfast for my 83-year-old mother.
Maybe microwave oatmeal is easy, but this wasn't that much harder.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
What you see...
I heard a discussion on KGO tonight of how graphic images in the media should be, what is appropriate. This anniversary of 9/11, I saw fewer horrific examples of the carnage of that day, although I heard a recounting by an eyewitness of people jumping from the twin towers. It was on the radio, yet it was to me as disturbing as the earlier photos of bodies hurtling through space, possibly more so. A recently publicized shot of a dying Marine, his leg shot off in Afghanistan, was used by KGO talk host Pat Thurston as another example. Perhaps the public needs to be reminded of the realities of this war, but his family has objected to its use in newspaper around the nation. Where do you draw the line?An editor of an Oakland newspaper called in, and said there are different standards in each community. He referred to photos of the deaths of 15-year-olds due to gang violence --- there are so many examples happening on his turf that these decisions are made nearly daily. He referred to the "cereal test" --- what could be tolerated in print over breakfast without losing your appetite. As editor of a weekly newspaper, I have no editorial board. I have had to work through many of these decisions on my own. On an early assignment around 1986 as a photographer/reporter covering a fatal accident on Highway 14, I blithely snapped away as the remains of a pickup were removed that had been flattened by bins of fruit when a load shifted. I was jolted into the reality of the situation when someone told my that the driver was still in that 18-inch tall wreckage. I stood nauseated by the side of the road, not taking photos any longer, as his limp body, every bone broken into fragments, was extracted. It was a lesson I have never forgotten.
It is hard to balance a family's wishes against the image that may tell the story better than 1,000 words. I once took a black and white photo of a little wheelchair against the backdrop of the blackened ruins of a home. The father, a PUD lineman, had been killed in a house fire trying to save his handicapped son, who was still in elementary school. The mother and daughter came home from a volleyball game to discover half the family gone, along with their home. Members of the family who had seen me take the photo called the publisher, asking that the photo not be used. I thought it told the story in a very powerful, tragic way, but the newspaper owner and I conceded to the family's wishes. I now understand. I know the then-high school aged daughter, and I lived two doors down from the location of that home for several years; the house has since been replaced.
If the scanner goes off and it is a motorcycle crash, I will not go. The carnage is inevitably too great to depict in print. I have run some photos that were possibly problematic due to their subject matter. A woman once jumped off the top of Beacon Rock in a suicide attempt, only to become lodged on a ledge one-third of the way down. Her rescue involved a helicopter, which was buffeted by wind shear as it attempted to come to her aid, and a Vietnam vet, who was able to rappel down the rock to her position to administer first aid. She was dressed in white, and I ran an image of a tiny white speck on the rock, with a helicopter hovering. She lived, although she had a broken pelvis and many other injuries.
I generally do not include accounts of suicides unless they involve use of public resources in some way, such as the search for a man who jumped from the Bridge of the Gods, leaving his car's motor running halfway across.
I am now 60 years old, and have been doing this a long time. I am much less likely to use a disturbing photo these days. I am also much older than the preponderance of J-school grads who do the equivalent of my job, likely for much more money.
I have to live here. I run into their families every day in the grocery store and at the post office. However, there is something to be said for publishing images of things that should be disturbing --- the results of gang violence, or the horrors of war.
My nephew came back from a year of service in Iraq with photos that were truly upsetting. The most horrific to me was a photo of him standing with his weapon cocked against a ruined wall while on patrol, with giant graffiti of a skull wearing a helmet behind him. It illustrated what he saw every day, no blood necessary.
It is hard to balance a family's wishes against the image that may tell the story better than 1,000 words. I once took a black and white photo of a little wheelchair against the backdrop of the blackened ruins of a home. The father, a PUD lineman, had been killed in a house fire trying to save his handicapped son, who was still in elementary school. The mother and daughter came home from a volleyball game to discover half the family gone, along with their home. Members of the family who had seen me take the photo called the publisher, asking that the photo not be used. I thought it told the story in a very powerful, tragic way, but the newspaper owner and I conceded to the family's wishes. I now understand. I know the then-high school aged daughter, and I lived two doors down from the location of that home for several years; the house has since been replaced.
If the scanner goes off and it is a motorcycle crash, I will not go. The carnage is inevitably too great to depict in print. I have run some photos that were possibly problematic due to their subject matter. A woman once jumped off the top of Beacon Rock in a suicide attempt, only to become lodged on a ledge one-third of the way down. Her rescue involved a helicopter, which was buffeted by wind shear as it attempted to come to her aid, and a Vietnam vet, who was able to rappel down the rock to her position to administer first aid. She was dressed in white, and I ran an image of a tiny white speck on the rock, with a helicopter hovering. She lived, although she had a broken pelvis and many other injuries.
I generally do not include accounts of suicides unless they involve use of public resources in some way, such as the search for a man who jumped from the Bridge of the Gods, leaving his car's motor running halfway across.
I am now 60 years old, and have been doing this a long time. I am much less likely to use a disturbing photo these days. I am also much older than the preponderance of J-school grads who do the equivalent of my job, likely for much more money.
I have to live here. I run into their families every day in the grocery store and at the post office. However, there is something to be said for publishing images of things that should be disturbing --- the results of gang violence, or the horrors of war.
My nephew came back from a year of service in Iraq with photos that were truly upsetting. The most horrific to me was a photo of him standing with his weapon cocked against a ruined wall while on patrol, with giant graffiti of a skull wearing a helmet behind him. It illustrated what he saw every day, no blood necessary.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
I first learned to walk at the age of nine months, when according to my mother, I fell in the kitchen of the little house my father was still building and hit my head on a nail sticking out of an interior wall. I didn't try again for months.
The scar is still there above my right eye, right at the spot where I eventually began plucking my eyebrows. You can hardly see it any more, because I plucked my eyebrows long enough that they will never grown back.
During this same time period, I learned the hard way about "No." I was repeatedly told by my mother not to touch the hot woodstove, and then I did. I seared my little hand quite badly, I am told.
I was also reported by the neighbor across the road in Buena Heights as an incorrigible stripper. I loved to run about in the front yard naked around age two because it felt so good, taking off all my clothes as soon as I was left alone to play.
There was a neighbor boy, and I remember sitting in the yard making mud pies with him ---- and eating them. He was the kid who sent the whole neighborhood on a treasure hunt, looking for the other shoe from a brand new pair that he had taken off and abandoned somewhere.
We moved to Boise, Idaho, where my parents worked for a children's home, then as house parents at a juvenile delinquent home run by the same church and Bible school that my father attended.
I remember my sister and I sitting on a blanket in the side yard at the children's home in Boise, as my 18-month-old brother became fascinated by a spider crawling on the wall. It was a black widow and we told him not to touch it, but he did. He was bitten and was in a coma. He came to in the hospital, singing "Jesus Loves Me" to the nurses from his crib. He still sings, and is now a hospice chaplain in Louisiana.
From age three or so, I was raised as just another one of the orphans or other abandoned children, at least during meal times and during group activities. I remember being under the supervision of a woman other than my mother, who tried to hurry me in the bathroom right before church service. I would not be hurried, and so produced a tiny pellet in my underpants during the service, to my utter humiliation. While my mother was in the hospital having another sister, I was placed in the charge of one of the 'big kids,' an 18-year-old boy who put me on the back of his bicycle to ride double. I got my foot caught in the spokes, and spent the next six weeks unable to walk. My mother had a new baby but also had to carry me to the bathroom. The doctors thought I might never walk right again. At age 60, that same ankle, which I have broken two more times at the same weak spot, is giving me problems and I may be reduced to using a cane soon.
In Iowa, we lived in a single-wide trailer, first in an Ottumwa trailer park with the gypsies, who stole things from us, then at the edge of the woods next to a cornfield on the property of friends. My father was attending the Midwestern School of Evangelism, learning Greek and Hebrew fulltime while also working as a grocery bagboy, then as a mechanic, with four, then five kids to support. My mother was an RN and worked at the hospital, leaving us youngsters in the care of Sadie Hooten. She was a widow whose husband had been a miner, less than exemplary while he was still alive. She played with us using shoeboxes and Sear's catalogues to make homemade doll houses. She also made us sugar cookies with caraway seeds, the inspiration for my failed attempt at age 10 or 11 to make a chocolate cake with caraway seeds in it.
While in Iowa, Mom tried to learn to drive a stick. She took us to school at the one-room schoolhouse at Dahlonega in the pickup, and also came to pick us up to go home. as there was no schoolbus. We rattled around in the back of the pickup bed as it lurched wildly while she attempted to change gears on the Iowa backroads.
Our trailer next to the woods was also near the crazy house or "poor farm," where people were sent when their families couldn't care for them any longer, or they had no one left to care. I'm sure some of them had Alzheimer's. One old man was fairly harmless and wandered away repeatedly. He was always found in the cornfield near us, feeding corn off the stalks to his pet groundhogs.
Our dog Duke, one of a loyal succession of black cocker spaniels, had the end of his tongue bitten off by a groundhog. He also successfully chased off ---- and drew quantities of blood from --- the burglar who broke into the shed next to the trailer containing my father's tools.
We moved back to the Northwest one semester shy of my father's graduation from the seminary when my brother was born with breathing difficulties stemming from the Iowa weather and an enlarged thymus gland. As we went over the Continental Divide, his labored breath grew easier.
We lived in the trailer at the bottom of my grandparents' driveway at first, then moved into a stucco, flat-roofed house in Yakima on 11th Avenue. For my tenth birthday, my father bought an old Schwinn bike, completely taking it apart and painting it red. I rode that bike everywhere. I especially liked to ride out to the Yakima Airport and watch the planes take off, a ten-mile round trip. Would parents these days allow a child to do that? I don't think so.
We traded the house in town for my grandparents' place in the country. It was a former chicken ranch, with long outbuildings and a giant barn. We used one of the chicken houses as a playhouse, with old car seats for couches, dishes and books. I was hiding from chores one day, sitting in a milking stanchion in the barn reading a book, when a rattlesnake slithered up the wall right next to me. I jumped up and ran straight up the long flight of stone steps from the barn to the house, collapsing on the front porch while muttering, "snake, snake."
One day, also probably trying to avoid chores, I became angry at my mother over something and rode the red bike straight down that steep hill between the row of poplars, gathering speed as I went. At the 90-degree turn at the bottom of the hill, I lost control and wiped out.
The tire guard sliced my left knee to the bone, and I staggered up the hill to the house, bone showing and blood streaming. My mother, the RN, nearly fainted as I appeared at the house singing "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf," (don't ask me why). They couldn't take me to the hospital right away because my father was in the middle of burning off half the pasture, and she still couldn't drive a stick properly.
When they finally got me to the doctor in Yakima. I was still in shock, and he sewed me up in without any sort of anesthetic. He had been a missionary in China, and was an intrepid mountaineer who had been best pals with then-Justice William O. Douglas, who at the time had just taken up with a waitress thirty years younger.
In high school, one of my first boyfriends was an Eagle Scout who worked summers for Douglas, cutting firewood and hanging out at his cabin near Bumping Lake.
My grandparents ran a boat landing and concession at Bumping Lake for several years, when Grandma wasn't cooking for the Forest Service firefighters and they weren't being the caretakers at the nearby Girl Scout camp.
We loved to stay with Grandma and Grandpa for a week or so during the summer, one at a time so as to get us out of Mom's hair while she was working the night shift at the hospital. The boat landing position included free rent on a cabin built on stilts out over the water.
We paddled around the lake half the day in one of the rowboats that wasn't rented out, fishing, swimming and messing around. It was paradise. Grandma caught trout for breakfast off the deck, and made us biscuits in the woodstove.
We went back to to Bumping Lake to visit two summers ago during a family reunion at a nearby campground. While the cabin on stilts wasn't there, the dock was, and the lake was as beautiful as I remembered it.
We survived all kinds of things when we were young. Dad made a third seat for the Carry-All, and we had to wear one of the first seatbelts (there were nine of us by then). He made that thing from webbing, just like he made the 14-foot camping trailer that slept nine from the axle up, with its ingenious folding double canvas bunks at each end. The seatbelt was one belt stretching across the laps of three people, but we were belted in.
When the people didn't immediately move out of the house Dad bought in Wapato, we lived in that trailer at least a couple of months. We must have been their worst nightmare. We moved in next to the garage, living in the camping trailer because we'd already sold our other house. All nine of us were jammed into that trailer, the youngest sleeping in a trundle bed that later became a toy box. We used the outhouse on the other side of the garage, and had to get out of the trailer while Mom was cooking, because there wasn't enough room for us to be in there while she was at work, even if it was raining. I don't remember how we managed showers. I was in junior high by that time.
I remember vividly the day that JFK was killed. Most kids were crying, but the budding John Birchers were cheering.
I later had a 4-H project, a purebred Jersey cow, and got up early every morning to train her to lead on a halter up and down the driveway preparing to show her at the fair. One of the neighbor boys would "moo" at me in the hallway at school. Looking back, I think it may also have had something to do with my 36-inch bustline, which suddenly sprouted when I was 13.
A 19-year-old guy came to stay with my family while trying to help them start a church, and took quite a shine to me. My parents decided it wasn't such a great idea having him live there in the house. Later that year, he married an older divorcee with several young girls. I was devastated.
I wrote poetry and dreamed my way through the rest of high school, picking up a guitar and becoming a folkie by my senior year, which was spent in Arizona,. I left the same seminary in Iowa my Dad attended after the first semester, due to an existential crisis, and ran away to California and the Haight-Ashbury the summer after the Summer of Love.
I then hitchhiked across the U.S. by myself, leaving San Francisco the day after Martin Luther King was killed.
Thinking back on all that now, it's amazing that I am still here, walking around (barely).
The scar is still there above my right eye, right at the spot where I eventually began plucking my eyebrows. You can hardly see it any more, because I plucked my eyebrows long enough that they will never grown back.
During this same time period, I learned the hard way about "No." I was repeatedly told by my mother not to touch the hot woodstove, and then I did. I seared my little hand quite badly, I am told.
I was also reported by the neighbor across the road in Buena Heights as an incorrigible stripper. I loved to run about in the front yard naked around age two because it felt so good, taking off all my clothes as soon as I was left alone to play.
There was a neighbor boy, and I remember sitting in the yard making mud pies with him ---- and eating them. He was the kid who sent the whole neighborhood on a treasure hunt, looking for the other shoe from a brand new pair that he had taken off and abandoned somewhere.
We moved to Boise, Idaho, where my parents worked for a children's home, then as house parents at a juvenile delinquent home run by the same church and Bible school that my father attended.
I remember my sister and I sitting on a blanket in the side yard at the children's home in Boise, as my 18-month-old brother became fascinated by a spider crawling on the wall. It was a black widow and we told him not to touch it, but he did. He was bitten and was in a coma. He came to in the hospital, singing "Jesus Loves Me" to the nurses from his crib. He still sings, and is now a hospice chaplain in Louisiana.
From age three or so, I was raised as just another one of the orphans or other abandoned children, at least during meal times and during group activities. I remember being under the supervision of a woman other than my mother, who tried to hurry me in the bathroom right before church service. I would not be hurried, and so produced a tiny pellet in my underpants during the service, to my utter humiliation. While my mother was in the hospital having another sister, I was placed in the charge of one of the 'big kids,' an 18-year-old boy who put me on the back of his bicycle to ride double. I got my foot caught in the spokes, and spent the next six weeks unable to walk. My mother had a new baby but also had to carry me to the bathroom. The doctors thought I might never walk right again. At age 60, that same ankle, which I have broken two more times at the same weak spot, is giving me problems and I may be reduced to using a cane soon.
In Iowa, we lived in a single-wide trailer, first in an Ottumwa trailer park with the gypsies, who stole things from us, then at the edge of the woods next to a cornfield on the property of friends. My father was attending the Midwestern School of Evangelism, learning Greek and Hebrew fulltime while also working as a grocery bagboy, then as a mechanic, with four, then five kids to support. My mother was an RN and worked at the hospital, leaving us youngsters in the care of Sadie Hooten. She was a widow whose husband had been a miner, less than exemplary while he was still alive. She played with us using shoeboxes and Sear's catalogues to make homemade doll houses. She also made us sugar cookies with caraway seeds, the inspiration for my failed attempt at age 10 or 11 to make a chocolate cake with caraway seeds in it.
While in Iowa, Mom tried to learn to drive a stick. She took us to school at the one-room schoolhouse at Dahlonega in the pickup, and also came to pick us up to go home. as there was no schoolbus. We rattled around in the back of the pickup bed as it lurched wildly while she attempted to change gears on the Iowa backroads.
Our trailer next to the woods was also near the crazy house or "poor farm," where people were sent when their families couldn't care for them any longer, or they had no one left to care. I'm sure some of them had Alzheimer's. One old man was fairly harmless and wandered away repeatedly. He was always found in the cornfield near us, feeding corn off the stalks to his pet groundhogs.
Our dog Duke, one of a loyal succession of black cocker spaniels, had the end of his tongue bitten off by a groundhog. He also successfully chased off ---- and drew quantities of blood from --- the burglar who broke into the shed next to the trailer containing my father's tools.
We moved back to the Northwest one semester shy of my father's graduation from the seminary when my brother was born with breathing difficulties stemming from the Iowa weather and an enlarged thymus gland. As we went over the Continental Divide, his labored breath grew easier.
We lived in the trailer at the bottom of my grandparents' driveway at first, then moved into a stucco, flat-roofed house in Yakima on 11th Avenue. For my tenth birthday, my father bought an old Schwinn bike, completely taking it apart and painting it red. I rode that bike everywhere. I especially liked to ride out to the Yakima Airport and watch the planes take off, a ten-mile round trip. Would parents these days allow a child to do that? I don't think so.
We traded the house in town for my grandparents' place in the country. It was a former chicken ranch, with long outbuildings and a giant barn. We used one of the chicken houses as a playhouse, with old car seats for couches, dishes and books. I was hiding from chores one day, sitting in a milking stanchion in the barn reading a book, when a rattlesnake slithered up the wall right next to me. I jumped up and ran straight up the long flight of stone steps from the barn to the house, collapsing on the front porch while muttering, "snake, snake."
One day, also probably trying to avoid chores, I became angry at my mother over something and rode the red bike straight down that steep hill between the row of poplars, gathering speed as I went. At the 90-degree turn at the bottom of the hill, I lost control and wiped out.
The tire guard sliced my left knee to the bone, and I staggered up the hill to the house, bone showing and blood streaming. My mother, the RN, nearly fainted as I appeared at the house singing "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf," (don't ask me why). They couldn't take me to the hospital right away because my father was in the middle of burning off half the pasture, and she still couldn't drive a stick properly.
When they finally got me to the doctor in Yakima. I was still in shock, and he sewed me up in without any sort of anesthetic. He had been a missionary in China, and was an intrepid mountaineer who had been best pals with then-Justice William O. Douglas, who at the time had just taken up with a waitress thirty years younger.
In high school, one of my first boyfriends was an Eagle Scout who worked summers for Douglas, cutting firewood and hanging out at his cabin near Bumping Lake.
My grandparents ran a boat landing and concession at Bumping Lake for several years, when Grandma wasn't cooking for the Forest Service firefighters and they weren't being the caretakers at the nearby Girl Scout camp.
We loved to stay with Grandma and Grandpa for a week or so during the summer, one at a time so as to get us out of Mom's hair while she was working the night shift at the hospital. The boat landing position included free rent on a cabin built on stilts out over the water.
We paddled around the lake half the day in one of the rowboats that wasn't rented out, fishing, swimming and messing around. It was paradise. Grandma caught trout for breakfast off the deck, and made us biscuits in the woodstove.
We went back to to Bumping Lake to visit two summers ago during a family reunion at a nearby campground. While the cabin on stilts wasn't there, the dock was, and the lake was as beautiful as I remembered it.
We survived all kinds of things when we were young. Dad made a third seat for the Carry-All, and we had to wear one of the first seatbelts (there were nine of us by then). He made that thing from webbing, just like he made the 14-foot camping trailer that slept nine from the axle up, with its ingenious folding double canvas bunks at each end. The seatbelt was one belt stretching across the laps of three people, but we were belted in.
When the people didn't immediately move out of the house Dad bought in Wapato, we lived in that trailer at least a couple of months. We must have been their worst nightmare. We moved in next to the garage, living in the camping trailer because we'd already sold our other house. All nine of us were jammed into that trailer, the youngest sleeping in a trundle bed that later became a toy box. We used the outhouse on the other side of the garage, and had to get out of the trailer while Mom was cooking, because there wasn't enough room for us to be in there while she was at work, even if it was raining. I don't remember how we managed showers. I was in junior high by that time.
I remember vividly the day that JFK was killed. Most kids were crying, but the budding John Birchers were cheering.
I later had a 4-H project, a purebred Jersey cow, and got up early every morning to train her to lead on a halter up and down the driveway preparing to show her at the fair. One of the neighbor boys would "moo" at me in the hallway at school. Looking back, I think it may also have had something to do with my 36-inch bustline, which suddenly sprouted when I was 13.
A 19-year-old guy came to stay with my family while trying to help them start a church, and took quite a shine to me. My parents decided it wasn't such a great idea having him live there in the house. Later that year, he married an older divorcee with several young girls. I was devastated.
I wrote poetry and dreamed my way through the rest of high school, picking up a guitar and becoming a folkie by my senior year, which was spent in Arizona,. I left the same seminary in Iowa my Dad attended after the first semester, due to an existential crisis, and ran away to California and the Haight-Ashbury the summer after the Summer of Love.
I then hitchhiked across the U.S. by myself, leaving San Francisco the day after Martin Luther King was killed.
Thinking back on all that now, it's amazing that I am still here, walking around (barely).
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Pause that refreshes
taken at Trout Lake Arts Fest
