Cooking with Gas

I still remember my biggest cooking flub.

The recipe was my mom's (for spaghetti sauce) and I was a young bride (20 years old), married to husband #1 (whom Mr. G. refers to as my practice husband.)

Anyhow, back to my embarrassing story. The recipe called for a cup of instant coffee. So, I trotted out my Taster's Choice and a measuring cup and poured out a cup of instant coffee grounds and dumped them in the pot. Hmmm. Something wasn't right. A quick phone call to my mother confirmed that I was supposed to make a cup of coffee. The sauce was ruined, I was in tears, and we probably ate out after that because I was too distraught to make anything else.

Anyone who tells you that being a good cook is simple and all you have to do is follow a recipe is full of shit. I'm sorry, but it's true. My grandmother had plenty of recipes, including one for "milk pie." The thing is, I watched her create this concoction, and she didn't measure anything.

"But Grandma, the recipe calls for a cup of milk, and you just poured a bunch in. How do you know that's a cup?"

To which she would reply, "It's just the right amount. You just put in the right amount."

Needless to say, I've never been able to duplicate her milk pie. I've come close, using a recipe I found on the internet, but nothing that really nailed it.

When I was a young lass, Home Economics was a required course. I don't even know if it's still taught in schools. That's where I learned basic cooking and baking skills, including how to measure. I also learned valuable lessons like turning off a mixer BEFORE you lift up the beaters. (Thank you, Holly, my fellow 7th grade student.)

Cooking is an art, and if you consider stick figures and finger painting art, I suppose you could say I'm a cook. Mostly, I make the same recipes I've gathered over the years, the ones that have been deemed acceptable by the Food Approval Committee (aka Mr. Ginley).

One day, I was lamenting to my husband that I'm not a very adventurous cook, that all I can do is read a recipe and put all of the necessary ingredients together. He pulled out my recipe file and pointed to the stained, wrinkled pages. Most of them had notations, adding, deleting or substituting ingredients or altering cooking time or method.

Maybe I got a little something from my grandma after all!

The Oldest Kid on the Block

When did I go from being the youngest person at the office to being among the oldsters?

It's like I woke up one day with cataracts, creaky bones and one unanswerable question on my mind: "How did Justin Beiber become a celebrity?"

I knew I was really out of the loop when I was reviewing material at work last week and one of my co-workers had to explain to me that there really is a "Movember" (Mustache + November). Who knew?

  Admittedly, in some ways I have been left in the dirt as the world moves forward. But, like the old fogey I am, I hold out a certain pride that I can say...

1. I am still able to sing all of the lyrics to the Patty Duke TV show theme song.

2. I enjoyed Beatlemania the first time around.

3. I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and I was pretty good at it. Also, I can still work a 10-key calculator. And balance a checkbook (manually).

4. I understand printing fundamentals because I learned the process before everything was automated. (Although, admittedly, I don't miss mechanicals with type that shifts/falls off and I do like the ease of making corrections.)

5. I grew up with the giants of Saturday Morning Cartoons. Including Bugs Bunny, Wacky Racers and Fat Albert. (And Rocky and Bullwinkle are still awesome.)

6. Although I understand (mostly) modern technology, I can appreciate their predecessors...a la vinyl, black and white photographs and ballpoint pens.

7. I know I could use my wits to survive without all of the amenities that have become de rigeur over the last 20 years. Because I survived before. (Although, admittedly, I would miss the Google.)

8. I get shopping malls. And why it was fun to shop at Pentagon City Mall at 3:00 on Christmas Eve.

9. I knew the joy of snarfing Cocoa Krispies and guzzling Coca Cola with all the real sugar and none of the background noise about childhood obesity. (I was so busy running around the fat couldn't keep up.)

10. I get why books and magazines and newspapers that you can hold in your hands are tactile bliss.

Well, I see by the clock on the wall (okay, on my computer), that it's time to wrap this up. No more allusions to old people stuff. So I'll just gather up my bones and shuffle off to Buffalo.

Oops, I did it again!

Tricks or Treats

Okay, I'm going to lapse into "old-geezer-speak" for this one.

In my day...trick or treating was about the kids.

There were not a lot of adult parties or dressing up in costume at work. It was about children dressing up in (mostly) homemade costumes and trolling door-to-door for candy. Every year the urban legends were dusted off and repeated...stories about people putting razor blades in apples and poison in popcorn balls.

Me and Medusa.

Here is how it rolled in our house.

A week or so before the big day, we decided what we were going to be for Halloween. The choices were limited. We had a box of stuff my mom kept, odd masks and old clothes. The basics were: witch (me for several years running), hobo, ghost, devil and pirate. We had a couple of scratchy plastic masks with slits for eyes, nose and mouth, that held onto the head with an elastic string. But my mom did not go out and buy a new costume every year. And we used old pillow cases to collect the loot. Or our book bags from school.

There were a few times when the costume restrictions were lifted. One year, my sister was Medusa in a school play, and she wore the costume my mom made to trick-or-treat. (The downside was, no one could guess who she was.) One year I wore an old suit of my dad's and was Groucho Marx. But that was in high school, and I didn't trick-or-treat, so I'm not sure that counts.

One of my favorite snapshots from our childhood is of my brother, Paul, sitting at the kitchen table surveying his loot, still dressed in his devil costume. 

The upshot is, Halloween was fun. Mom carved the pumpkin, stuck a candle in it and placed it in the front picture window. My folks turned on the yellow porch light and handed out candy while we did the hunting and gathering.

We walked through our neighborhood, and, when we were older and had more stamina, we trolled farther afield, onto the streets of the slightly more affluent, although the pickings weren't necessarily better. There were some houses you made certain to visit to because they had a reputation for good stuff, and others you avoided because the people were just mean about it. And you only went to the houses that had their porch lights on (which is still de rigueur). 

One of Mom's creations.

The night was fun, the candy plentiful, and we ate until Mom put the kabash on the feeding frenzy and made us brush our teeth and hit the sack.

When my son reached the age when trick-or-treating was appropriate, either I or his Dad took him out while the other handed out the goods. We called a halt to trick-or-treating when he hit the teenage years. There has always been controversy over this, some people feeling there should be an age limit, others not. But we've always held the belief that the night is for little goblins, not surly teenagers who wear tee-shirts and jeans and thrust a bag at you and growl menacingly.

These days, we can't have bags of candy around for health reasons, so we don't participate. I miss it, but I don't miss the day-after guilt of having ingested one-too-many Snickers. I do make up little goodie bags for the neighbor kids, just because.

I still like the idea of trick-or-treating. I suppose one day, Halloween celebrations will be reduced to parties at school or at the local rec center and that will be it. Because parents are afraid.

Oh well.

I'm going to end my ramblings with the last stanza from my favorite spooky poem, oft read aloud by my sister, Denise, which used to scare the crap out of me (especially when she got to the last line, which she acted out to great effect). It's by James Whitcomb Riley, and it was written in the late 1800's. It's called Little Orphant Annie:

An' little Orphant Annie says when the blaze is blue,
An' the lamp-wick sputters, an' the wind goes woo-oo!
An' you hear the crickets quit, an' the moon is gray,
An' the lightnin'-bugs in dew is all squenched away,--
You better mind yer parunts an' yer teachers fond an' dear,
An' churish them 'at loves you, an' dry the orphant's tear,
An' he'p the pore an' needy ones 'at clusters all about,
Er the Gobble-uns'll git you
  Ef you
     Don't
        Watch
           Out!

Word Nerd

I have this weird habit. I'll be talking to someone, and I'll see a sign or a box or something behind them, and I'll automatically take the words and read them backwards.

Why do I do this? I have no idea. It's something I've done for years, a habit. Most of the time I don't even know I'm doing it.

It's just part of my obsession with words.

Everywhere I go -- on the street or in restaurants or, sometimes, in the ladies' -- I read signs or menus or messages scrawled on stall doors. I critique the writing, the flow of words, the placement. Is the type too big? Too small? Is the spelling correct? Is the grammar spot on?

I know this is more than an occupational hazard. It's a little bit nuts.

At home I work on puzzles. I unscramble. I crossword. I jigsaw. Keep the puzzles coming. I say it's to keep my mind sharp, and I hope they do improve my brain power.

But honestly, I just get a kick out of words. Even malapropisms. Even the word "malapropism."

Or "bloviate," which is ironic, because I realize that's what I'm doing right now. Right here at 1:22 a.m. Because I can't sleep. Because the words are filling my head, spilling over in their attempt to come together in a meaningful way.

Yet, I suspect when I read this at a more reasonable time in the morning, I will wonder what possessed me. Was it the spirit of Noah Webster?

I wish it was Oscar Wilde.

Or Dorothy Parker.

Who aptly quipped, "A girl's best friend is her mutter."

You and Me and Leslie

"Who's Leslie?"

I wondered for years. Every time I heard the song, Groovin' by the Rascals. Then, out of the blue, I realized they were singing, "You and me endlessly groovin'." What a maroon!

There are plenty of examples of times when I've misheard lyrics, or simply could not understand them, so I hummed or added the wrong word. These days, through the miracle of the Google, I can look up a lyric I don't understand.

Sometimes, that is difficult to do when I can't even figure out the title of the song. Some bands are notorious for naming their tunes based on no particular lyric. One day, I had this conversation with my husband:
 Me: I heard Led Zeppelin on the radio.
Him: Which song?
Me: The one where they're singing something like "your distant eyes."
Him: Not helpful. What did it sound like?
Me: (Humming badly)
Him: I have no idea.

I know I'm not the only one who gets the lyrics wrong. According to legend (or the internet) the song In a Garden of Eden became In a Gadda da Vida, when the latter title was written on the demo tape by a drunken(?) guy in the studio. A record company executive thought it sounded all Eastern philosophical (very chichi at the time) and kept it.

And those of us who came of age in the 1970's remember the lyric in Blinded by the Light as "Wrapped up like a douche" instead of "deuce." (Well, okay, maybe that one was intentional.)

Speaking of intentional, there are many of those, too, created after listening to the same song over and over. My friend, Peggy, and I started doing this after playing Steely Dan's Royal Scam album about 500 times. "Luckless pedestrians" became...well, you get the idea.

Mr. Ginley is the master of lyric-changing -- who knew "Schrimpf" rhymed with "nymph"? -- as well as mixing and matching tunes. I will have the songs Mandy and Fernando inexplicably intertwined in my head for the rest of my days.

So much of the music we experience is heard but not listened to. It's everywhere...in stores, at work, at sporting events. And even when I've made a conscious decision to put in a CD or listen to iTunes, much of the time I'm only hearing on a subconscious level while I'm doing something else.

I guess music really is the background of our lives. I wonder what my theme song would be. I like to think it would be something along the lines of, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun or Born to Run.

But I suspect it's more like, Still Crazy After All These Years.

Confessions of a Crystal Junkie

I'm not sure when my love of crystals began. I think there was a hint of it when, as a kid, I would stare deeply into marbles, searching for the secrets of the universe.

Flash forward several years to when I started working for a jewelry company. Then move ahead a bit more to when I took a course and became a guild gemologist. All along I had a fascination with crystals and gems, but the interest didn't really get going until about a year ago.

I found a little store in Lakewood. That's where my real obsession began. They have an assortment of crystals and a list of the properties associated with each. My first acquisition was a quartz, which they made into a necklace for me. I wear it every day now, it's my personal talisman, a reflection of me.

Hematite soon followed (for protection), then the floodgates opened. Now I have a nice assortment of crystals whose mission is to soothe and protect and bring enlightenment. A lot of people will roll their eyes and think I've gone all woo woo. Well, maybe I have.

In the last few months, I've visited the gem and mineral collections at both the Smithsonian and the Cleveland Natural History Museum. They call to me in dulcet tones, their colors, their textures, their vast history.

And carrying the crystals, holding them in my hand, brings me comfort. If you can find comfort in anything in this tricky world (and it doesn't harm you or others), I say, go for it.

We have an errand to run in Lakewood today. Hmmmm. I think I hear another crystal calling my name...

Peek-a-Boo

Funny thing about the internet, it feels so cozy, it can lull you into a false sense that it's just you and your computer. You forget that, unlike writing a little something in the privacy of your home, you might just as well be sitting in front of a camera in your underwear.

It's good to remind yourself that web crawlers and spammers and cookie droppers and other odious types are out there, trying to capture your soul. Then spit it back at you in the form of phrases such as, "you may also like..."

Twenty hits from France and twenty-one from Romania. Really? Are they interested in my having tea with my husband? Or working at the cat shelter? What do they want, and why are they tracking me?

Maybe I shouldn't care. After all, I'm not selling state secrets or planning a coup. I talk about my little life in a little corner of the world. Harmless stuff.

And yet I wonder what the connection could be.

I've never been to France. I don't speak French. And I don't like Jerry Lewis.

As for Romania -- could there be a Schrimpf or two (or 21) living there? I'm told that "Schrimpf" is as common a name in Germanic countries as "Smith" is here.

There's really no point in dwelling. So I'll just continue to post and try not to think about the lurkers.

I'm just going to make sure I'm fully dressed when I sit down in front of my computer!