The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,000 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 17 trips to carry that many people.
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My dad always bought our Christmas presents on Christmas Eve. This was before online shopping, so people did actually shop in stores (as some still do.) I’m not sure why he waited until then, but it may have had to do with not having the money until he was paid, which seemed to happen right before Christmas. Once or twice Mother put money in a Christmas club at the bank (now there’s another antique concept!) but usually our Christmas was dependent on credit at the store and Daddy’s paycheck.
I made a Christmas list, being careful not to ask for anything I knew we couldn’t afford, or at least, as far as I knew. Sometimes Daddy’s perception of what fit the bill was a little off. One year I asked for a guitar, and I got a plastic one from Santa Claus. Ooops! Not what I had in mind. But I was grateful and started learning chords. The next Christmas Mother made sure I got the real thing, a 1968 Sears Silvertone Spanish acoustic guitar, so I could look mournful and sing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” an essential for any moody teenager at that point.
Sometimes Daddy got taken with a toy himself. At least that’s the only way I can explain receiving a Charley Weaver Bartender mechanical toy when I was pretty small (see photo above, from an eBay seller.) He was a character on Jack Paar’s Tonight show, invented and played by Cliff Arquette, telling old jokes and stories about “Mount Idy” and its residents. In later years he was on the Hollywood Squares, and a heavy user of double entendres.
My family was teetotaling Southern Baptist. So it was a little odd to get a Charley Weaver toy which shook a cocktail shaker, downed the “drink,” then turned red and spouted smoke from its ears! If only I had kept that thing–it’s worth up to $200 on eBay at this point.
So to all my family and friends who are celebrating Christmas, have a merry one! And I hope your shopping is done.
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I recently found a pecan pie recipe online which was a little lighter than the classic Karo syrup recipe. I made it a couple of times, then I began changing it up a bit. The first time I added more pecans–I’m sorry, 1/2 cup is not enough for any respectable pie. Then I went to bake it, found I was short on maple syrup and dark corn syrup (Karo), and had to improvise. The changed-up recipe is a new favorite!
I’ll give you both the basic and supercharged versions. The basic version is still plenty sweet, but is lighter and has a faint maple flavor. The supercharged gets depth from a little molasses and is mellowed by the blend of corn syrups. Using an egg white gives a lighter texture to both versions. My friends say the little-bit-of-molasses version brings out the flavor of the pecans and goes well with a sip of brandy. I’ll let you be the judge of that.
Pecan Pie, Two Versions
9 inch pie shell, or your favorite bottom-only crust, unbaked
1 cup dark corn syrup and 1/4 cup maple syrup, OR 3/4 cup dark corn syrup, 1/4 cup light corn syrup, 1/8 cup maple syrup and 1/8 cup molasses (not black strap)
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1 large egg white
1 cup chopped pecans
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place the syrups and ingredients through egg white in a large bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until well blended. Stir in pecans and vanilla. Pour into prepared crust. Bake at 350 degrees until center is puffed and edges are brown, about 50 minutes. I usually cover the edges of the crust with foil at the 30-minute point to keep them from browning too much. Cool on a wire rack.
It’s a melancholy day here. I can’t believe it’s snowing this early in December. And it’s snow mixed with freezing rain, forecast to turn to black ice later tonight. Too miserable to go out, but I’m restless inside.
When I was growing up in Tennessee snow was a rare occurance, and greeted with delight. A snow day! We got to stay home from school! I remember one storm when I was small that left over a foot of snow, something that almost never happened. My brother went out sled riding with his friends and got run over by one of the boys. The sled runner must have been sharp because it sliced his knee open and he had to have stitches.
Ice storms were more common. They were actually frightening because the power could go out in addition to the roads getting slick. Once when I was home from college there was a massive ice storm and the power was out for a few days. Mother cooked on the wood-burning stove in the garage, and Daddy hauled water up from the well since the pump couldn’t work without electricity. It was so cold that Mother even let my German shepherd come in the garage with us. He was rarely allowed to come inside since Mother thought having pets in the house was low-class and dirty. Poor Chico was so happy! He always wanted to be an indoor pet, despite his size.
In recent years we’ve had ice storms here, which used to be uncommon. One of my friends calls it “global weirding,” to explain the more violent weather we seem to get. Big parts of Connecticut were without power for weeks due to tree branches taking down power lines.
So I guess a relatively mild snow and ice event is nothing to complain about. Still, I feel grumpy and blue. So I’ll post a picture of a Christmas tree and go watch some cat videos. Light activities for dark days! Any hints for cheering yourself up in the winter weather are welcome!
I wanted this to be a recipe but realized I don’t have any quantities, so this is more a description of a recipe, or a memory. My mother made the best cornbread dressing ever. She did not believe in stuffing a turkey or chicken, feeling that the stuffing took much longer to cook and that it was unlikely to get done and be safe to eat. I know a lot of people are fond of stuffing, but not my family! So the way we always had it was baked separately in a pan, after the turkey was done and was resting.
Here’s what I recall went in it:
1 skillet cornbread (homemade), crumbled
1 pan biscuits (either homemade or canned), crumbled
1 or 2 onions
celery
boiled eggs, chopped, I think about 4
salt
pepper
poultry seasoning
sage (just a little, she did not like too strong a sage flavor)
some juice from the cooked bird to stick it all together and make it soft
maybe a little bacon grease or melted butter to give flavor (margarine, in those days)
All this was mixed up in a huge bowl. Then she spread it on a baking sheet with sides or another roasting pan, and baked it in the oven, I think at 350 degrees, until browned.
Mother also made gravy to pour over it, from the pan drippings, the giblets and neck (which she sauteed and chopped), more onion, celery, butter, salt and pepper.
I was always pleased when we had chicken and dressing, and the dressing was my favorite part of Thanksgiving. We always ate it until we felt sick the next day, because Mother insisted on throwing out the leftover dressing after Friday. She thought it wasn’t safe to keep because of the eggs.
So I’m remembering my mother, and wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving! I’m grateful for my family, my friends, my cat and all my other blessings.
All Americans are not cowboys, but sometimes we think we are. This story comes from the summer when a group of us rented a villa outside Panzano, Italy for a week. The villa was on a working farm.
The owners lived in the other wing of the house and grew grapes and olives. They had two little girls and an extremely friendly dog who loved to visit at mealtimes. They also kept a couple of horses, Oskar and Luna, for riding. Our group enjoyed looking at the rolling hills and watching the horses graze while we sat on the terrace sipping wine.
One day half the group went to San Gimignano. The rest of us decided to have a lazy day at the villa’s pool. Sally had broken a bone in her foot six weeks before we left for Italy. She had walked through Rome, Florence and Siena in an orthotic boot, so she thought a day at the pool would be a nice break.
Sally, Scott, Nancy and I were sitting on the terrace reading and relaxing when we heard a clopping sound. Oskar and Luna were standing in the yard looking at us, and the fence was down. Sally jumped up and caught both horses by their halters, while I tried to find some rope so we could tie them up. There was no rope to be found, so Scott closed the farm’s electric gate to keep them from straying onto the road. The owners were away in Florence for the day, so Nancy called them on their mobile phone and reported the problem.
Oskar and Luna were patient with us, but they didn’t stand still, and they had big, heavy hooves. One of them shifted his weight and stepped on Sally’s broken foot! She yelled and let him go. The horses drifted to the front yard, and Sally put an ice pack on her foot.
Then a real Italian cowboy arrived, on a motorbike. The owners had called him to come fix the fence and get the horses in. He had a ponytail and a tan, and wore cargo shorts, sunglasses, and hiking boots. He was quite handsome. He said something like, “Los cavallos escapa,” and we said, “Si, si.”
The horses had broken their water pipe and were thirsty. So our cowboy fixed the pipe, repaired the fence, put the horses back in their field, and buzzed off on his motorbike.
Fortunately Sally’s foot was only bruised, not broken again. She elevated it and daydreamed about the cowboy.
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Day of the Dead, or Dia de los Muertos, is celebrated in Mexico after Halloween to honor the spirits of their ancestors. Family members and friends gather to pray for and remember family and friends who have died. Families prepare special breads, cakes and candies to honor the day, the familiar skulls and skeleton shapes you may have seen. They also cook favorite foods of their loved ones and have a feast in honor of them.
This season made me try to remember the favorite foods and meals of the family members I have lost. Some are easy to remember. Aunt Eunice, one of Daddy’s sisters, loved the creamed corn that Mother would cook in the summer. Fresh corn just picked from the garden, creamed and cooked with a little bacon grease in an iron skillet just until it stuck a bit–what’s not to love? Sometimes Aunt Eunice loved it too much and would actually get sick from eating so much.
Daddy had a lot of different dishes that he loved. For some reason, today I remembered how he liked buttermilk and cornbread. He would crumble cornbread fresh from the oven into a large glass, then pour buttermilk over it and eat it with a spoon, drinking the last few bites like a corn mush. He was also fond of fried chicken with mashed potatoes and brown gravy, as well as slices of country ham fried in the skillet and served with biscuits and red-eye gravy.
Mother loved anything she didn’t have to cook, since she spent much of her time growing vegetables, canning, freezing, making preserves and pickles, and cooking our meals. Don’t let anyone tell you this homemade stuff was fun to do–it was hard, tedious labor. The fruits of her labor were delicious, but it was hard work. So she adored eating out, especially going to the Pic-a-Rib for pit (pork) barbecue after church on Sunday. She also liked being invited to other people’s houses for dinner. It was a big treat when Aunt Eunice would do a fish fry and have us over, or when Aunt Mattie Lou (one of Mother’s sisters) would invite us and make her fabulous biscuits. They were kind of a thorn in Mother’s side, however, because she could never get her biscuits as light.
Uncle Preston (one of Daddy’s brothers) had a special treat he adored. Back in the day, fresh seafood was nonexistent in our area. Whenever anyone went to Florida or anywhere on the Gulf Coast, he would ask them to bring back a bucket of oysters in salt water. With luck, most of the oysters would survive the trip. Aunt Mary Emma would dip them in cornmeal and deep fry them.
You’ll notice most of this was fried and pretty high in salt and fat. In recent years this has come to be known as the Southern stroke diet, it is so highly correlated with strokes and heart disease. At least at our house the ingredients were mostly unprocessed and fresh, although a lot of salt went into preserving that country ham.
Aunt Geneva’s coconut pie (a custard one, not cream), Mother’s chess pie, my grandfather’s favorite country ham, boiled in a lard stand in the back yard–and always biscuits and cornbread, it all brings home back to me. So on this chilly fall night I think of the ones who are gone, I miss them, and I remember what they loved.
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I was just thinking of last year’s Halloween experiences in my village and what was happening a year ago. My friend Caroline was here from the Netherlands to see the sights and visit NYC. We’d heard warnings of the storm, and my friends who worked in the city were hustling to get home before it hit. It didn’t seem that serious until later in the day, when Caroline and I stood at my balcony door and watched the Hudson River overflow its banks. No trains, no subways, no power in lower Manhattan for days–far beyond anything we had expected.
Fortunately up on my hill the power never went out, and we were safe through the storm. All the Halloween attractions were shut down until the day poor Caroline was flying back home. She did manage to get a couple of days of shopping in by taking a combination of trains and buses into Manhattan. The only Halloween event she got was the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor, which reopened the day she was leaving, so we saw the pumpkins and I took her to JFK.
This year the only storm has been an onslaught of tourists! But on a weekday it’s fairly placid. The leaves have finally turned. The village Halloween parade was filled with revelers last Saturday, packing the streets afterward. It’s fun to see your neighbors dressed as Annie Oakley or wheeling the mechanical spider they built on a gurney through town. I discovered there are at least three Headless Horsemen currently working in the village, not counting the one on the Fox TV show.
So I’m counting my blessings this year as I look back at last year. I hope we don’t see a storm like that again! And a Happy Halloween to all.
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My village has officially become a tourist destination. When I saw the first tour bus parked on Main Street a few weeks ago, my first thought was, huh? The walking tour with a microphone-wielding guide kind of threw me yesterday. Maybe it was the tourist carrying a chihuahua in his backpack (so not Tarrytown.) Then I realized it was inevitable.
The first step was when North Tarrytown changed its name to Sleepy Hollow a few years ago. In fairness, the area really was known as Sleepy Hollow long before the time that Washington Irving wrote about Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. But for some reason that village was incorporated as North Tarrytown. It’s also not apparent to me why there ever were two villages (Tarrytown and North Tarrytown), but that has been the case for many years. They have separate police and fire departments and each has its own mayor, village trustees and judges. However, they do share a school district.
The name change was a smart marketing move. There are a number of historic properties in each village, including Philipsburg Manor (Sleepy Hollow), Kykuit (Tarrytown/Pocantico Hills), Lyndhurst (Tarrytown), Sunnyside (Washington Irving’s home, also in Tarrytown), the Old Dutch Church (Sleepy Hollow) and the Old Dutch Burying Ground (Sleepy Hollow). The Union Church at Pocantico Hills with its amazing stained glass windows comissioned by the Rockefellers is nearby. And the Headless Horseman’s ride was reputed to be close by the cemetary. Both villages began to market themselves in a small way, and Historic Hudson Valley, a nonprofit which owns and manages many of the historic properties, began to advertise a bit and get the word out. Tourist traffic had been building slowly, and the local restaurants were pleased to see an increase last year–until Superstorm Sandy hit town. Historic Hudson Valley also souped up the events at its properties and created new ones, like the Great Jack o’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor.
But what really stuck a match to the firecracker was the new TV show, “Sleepy Hollow.” Granted, it bears basically no resemblance to Washington Irving’s characters or to the real villages. One of my neighbors was joking that the two villages between them don’t have enough police cars to fill up one scene in the show. As a result of the publicity, however, we have tour buses, walking tours with guides on Main Street in Tarrytown, and foreign tourists showing up on the River Walk by the Hudson.
It’s kind of fun but a little weird when you’re used to living in a (really) sleepy albeit beautiful village like Tarrytown, named one of the 10 most beautiful in the country by Forbes last year. I’ve always enjoyed the feeling that it was our own special secret, living in such a historic, lovely and low-key place. The big event of the Halloween season used to be the Ragamuffin Parade, when the little kids would wear their costumes and walk from Patriots Park to the Y (early years) or more recently the fire station on Main Street and see the fire trucks. I’m told that years ago a person dressed as the Headless Horseman used to ride through the neighborhoods on Halloween and scare people. Now the Headless Horseman figures in our Halloween Parade and appears at events.
The locals curse the traffic, but we’re all glad to see more revenue coming to town. And with any luck, once Halloween passes and the autumn leaves have fallen, we’ll go back to being a couple of quiet, charming villages once again.
I still think of fall the way it was when I grew up in the South. The weather grew gradually cooler, the leaves turned red and gold and brown, and slow, heavy rains washed them off the trees. By late November the leaves were gone, the branches “bare ruined choirs” as the poem says, and we settled in for the chill of winter. I don’t recall violent storms or tornados once we were past the summer.
Living closer to the ocean has taught me about hurricanes and tropical storms. I always pictured them as a phenomenon of Florida or the Gulf Coast. Picture Bogie and Bacall in “Key Largo” (a really great movie to watch during hurricane season.) Until recent years I never realized those storms could do damage not only at the shore, but several miles inland. They can even carry their violence and damage for hundreds of miles from the ocean. Who knew? I saw it last year outside my window, watching the Hudson River overflow its banks during Superstorm Sandy.
So now the fall brings with it a shiver of unease. I hadn’t really thought about it until some friends were discussing the date of the village Halloween parade for this year and how it’s been cancelled for the last two years, due to a snowstorm (yes!) and then Sandy last year. Another friend remarked about the storm that roared through yesterday, “Trees are not our friends.”
But today is a placid, blue-sky autumn day. No signs of clouds or winds or witches on broomsticks blown past the window. A perfect day to sky-write, “Surrender, Dorothy.”
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