Lost Arts - Cooking & Meal Preparation

When I was a teen I wanted to learn to cook, and I did, badly. Later I learned from a neighbor to love Mexican food, so I started buying regional Mexican cookbooks. From there I gained an interest in all kinds of cuisines. I've quite the collection now, it even includes a Transylvanian cookbook. The recipe for sheepshead makes for good reading, but it will remail good reading, I ain't cookin no sheepshead.

My mom cooked because she had to, not because she loved to, she had a family of nine to feed, and so her cooking was perfunctory at best, at the worst it was succotash. That was bad, but she loved it. Dad can manage in the kitchen and is at his best with the grill. I think that's because it's a really big power tool that cooks steak. My older sisters can all cook, with varying degrees of skill and specialty, Jen can make cake and pie, Martha is the goddess of the vegetable, Laura can do Sri Lankan curry and Camy can casserole anything. Because there were so many in my family, we had to cook, and we had to cook from scratch if we wanted something like cookies more than once in a blue moon, because we just didn't have the extra money for bought cookies. I'm comfortable around raw ingredients and actually prefer to make things from scratch. I know how I want it to taste and can usually get there, occasionally failing, but mostly able to produce realiably edible meals.

Watching commercials and walking through the grocery store I'm constantly assulted (to me) by convenience foods. I'm glad they are available for the people who need them, but I worry that we are losing something wonderful to gain something questionable. Home cooked chocolate chip cookies are incredible, and incredibly easy, they contain no preservatives, only the pure and happy ingredients and the difference is in the taste. They really don't take much longer and are sooooooo much better. The same is true with roasted chicken, at least the taste part, that does take time and some know how. Not a ton of know how, just enough to know when the chicken is done. But seriously, even just rinse and thrown in the oven without any seasoning, no salt no nothing, the chicken is so much better than the bird with the fake sauce in the plastic from the store.

Maybe it's just me, maybe it's that I can taste the preservatives and just don't like that flavor, but it makes me sad to see how many boxes of waffles, cookies, pancakes, ready made rice, mashed potatoes, insta-bag meals are sold when I'm in the grocery store. I'm not advocating a 6 course French high cuisine meal. Just fresh happy ingredients, simply prepared in healthy portions, that's all.

Fictional History

Often, too often really, I run into someone who thinks that they understand something, an issue, subject, era in history merely by virtue of reading a book or seeing a movie. And by book I don't mean a history written by a responsible historian with appropriate citations of source material, no I mean fiction.

I have watched a movie and become fascinated by some aspect of the movie, after I try to find out more about whatever it was that sparked my curiosity. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be true of many people. I can not tell you how often I have listened in confusion to someone outraged over some issue or another, trying to figure out what the heck they are referring to only to discover during the conversation that it was something they saw in a movie or read in a book.

Nonsense abounds in movies, like the junk about Che Guevara in "Motorcycle Diaries", dude was not a revolutionary liberating the masses, he was a brutal executioner working for Castro to subjugate the Cuban masses. Fashion is even worse, everytime I see a t-shirt with Che on it I want to scream and then educate the idiot wearing the shirt as quickly as I can. I say "idiot" because most of the people wearing the shirt would have been quickly put to death by Che. It's akin to wearing the image of the Granddragon of the KKK, or Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler or Amin.

Insomniac Dreams: Beds

Okay, mostly it's daydreams, or fantasizing in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping. It's beds of which I dream. There are some beds I've seen that I imagine it would be sensuously lovely to attempt to sleep in. And I mean sleep.

Just a note on bed clothes: I spend enough time not sleeping, waiting to sleep, longing to sleep, in my bed that the sheets have got to be really soft. Otherwise they get irritating. No pilly flannel because they also have to stay cool, so it's linen or cotton. Jersey doesn't work either because it's too stretchy when I flip around trying to find that spot/position that allows me to slip away. Pillows have to be feather and squishy firm, if that makes sense. Supportive yet conforming.

Now for my list of beds I covet:

1. There is a commercial for an island resort, I can't remember which, that shows a canopied bed with full billowing linen curtains outside catching the sea breezes under a gazebo on the beach. Oh how I long to sleep there, big fluffy pillows, the smell of the sea, birds calling......

2. In LOTR-ROTK at the end, after destroying the ring, Frodo is taken to the houses of healing in Minas Tirith, the White City of Gondor. He wakes in a bed that I have longed to take a nap in since I saw it. Fluffy feather bed, lots of pillows, soft light seeping in through the windows, warm quilt.

3. Princess Buttercup's bed in The Princess Bride. It's lovely, beautifully clothed in silk, again with a feather bed, soft pillows and a large fire place in the room. The perfect place to sleep in winter.

4. Back to LOTR, but this time it's FOTR. The bed in Rivendell where Frodo wakes after his stabbing by the Witch King of Angmar. That is the bed I most covet. All the best of the other three, but adding the sounds of the forest and a nearby river and you've achieved perfection.