Past Blogs

It’s been a tough year for the trees along our shoreline. Many of them have been upended by the waves and are scattered helter-skelter along the beach. Taking a beach walk these days involves much climbing over felled tree trunks, ducking under limbs at rakish angles or parting branches to make an opening big enough to squeeze through.

The wonder of living beside a huge lake is that the scene constantly changes. Some days the beach will be an expanse of pure, smooth sand without a rock or shell in sight. Other days are a rock hunter’s paradise with the sand completely hidden by piles of stones, shells and beach glass. Uncertainty is the only certainty.

Like many people, I navigate through the world dependent on landmarks. I can usually return to places I have been by remembering visual clues….a church on a corner, a prominent building, a stand of pines, a river. The beach plays havoc with landmarks.

Our neighbors to the north had a porch swing on their beach. Last week I discovered their swing south of us and almost completely buried under piles of sand. Wide beaches become small and small ones grow large overnight.

This perpetual re-creation of the shoreline is the result of wave energy. While the results of wave energy are explicit, I have always found the physics of waves difficult to grasp. Here is the most accessible definition I have come across:

Waves involve the transport of energy without the transport of matter. A wave can be described as a disturbance that travels through a medium, transporting energy from one location to another location without transporting matter.

Think of people doing The Wave in a stadium. They don’t all rush forward on to the field. They move up and down in place which is what water does when the wave energy passes through.

Everyday, giant engineering projects are happening on beaches all around the world. Mother Nature likes to keep things moving.

When it comes to appetizers, I flunk. I simply don’t grasp the concept. Eating 1000 calories of delicious little tidbits doesn’t work like an appetite stimulant for me. I get filled up, not appetized.

Appetizers at a party can turn into the equivalent of dinner with great speed. But at a restaurant, they behave much better. I frequently order an appetizer and an a la carte potato and call it an entree……which it is for those of us who can’t handle super sized portions.

I love to cook meals for family and friends, and I do not want them to starve before dinner. I try my best to make some pre-dinner nibbles to assuage hunger pangs. But my lack of culinary imagination here is embarrassing. Guests usually get cheese and crackers. I live near a dairy that sells 100 varieties of Wisconsin cheese. I may lack originality, but I do serve great cheese.

The origins of my appetizer problem can be traced to my parents. They were not snackers. Both relished good food, and my father firmly believed that, “hunger is the best appetizer”.

Fortunately for me, my guilt about appetizer inadequacy has lifted. I recently read a delightful article about being a guest at Julia Child’s house at Thanksgiving:

“Even on Thanksgiving, dinner was served at the big kitchen table, with guests stuffed elbow to elbow around its perimeter. Mrs. Child put out Goldfish crackers, not foie gras or canapés, to nibble on with her favorite ‘reverse martini’ cocktails: vermouth on the rocks with a floater of gin.”

I love that woman.

In his lifetime, Jan Steen painted six large, exuberant paintings of The Feast of Saint Nicholaas. Jan Steen, the son of a brewer, was born in Leiden in 1626, twenty years after Rembrandt’s birth. It was the Golden Age of Dutch painting.

Steen was a prolific artist, creating over 800 paintings in his lifetime. Many of his canvases are genre paintings of happy people having a good time. He has been called “the humorist among Dutch painters”.

To supplement his meager income from painting, Jan Steen started a brewery in Delft and opened a tavern in his house. Both ventures failed, but they did provide him with subject matter for his art. Many of his canvases portray people drinking, merrymaking and uninhibited.

The Feast of Saint Nicholaas is a beloved holiday in the Netherlands which is celebrated on December 6th. The traditions today are little changed from Jan Steen’s time. Children set out shoes on Saint Nicholaas Eve, December 5th. In the morning, the shoes are magically filled with pepernoten cookies, gingerbread (speculaas), marzipan and little gifts.

Viewing  Steen’s lively painting, The Feast of Saint Nicholaas, tells the entire story of the celebrating. He used his own children as models…..the crying boy who did not get his shoe filled with treats, the little girl with her new doll and a bucket of treats, the child in the arms of his big brother who is pointing to the rooftop where Sinterklaas has dropped the gifts down the chimney.

The Dutch have a phrase for a messy, happy, disheveled household, ‘Een huishouden van Jan Steen’……a household by  Jan Steen.

Every year, my husband and I put up our stockings on the night of December 5th. Here  is our version of ‘Een huishouden van Jan Steen’ the next morning.

I love cookbooks. Despite the fact that my iPad gives me access to every recipe in the universe, I prefer my well worn, splashed, stained, penciled, dog-eared and beloved cookbooks.

Michael Perry, the Garrison Keillor of Wisconsin, in his autobiographical book, Truck, A Love Story, veers off from his tale of restoring a pickup truck into the subject of cookbooks. A bachelor at the time, he owned 13 cookbooks with a grand total of 2,320 recipes. He describes his cookbook dilemma as follows:

“Combine a guilt-ridden sense of duty with terminal indecision and you will understand why I resist bringing any more cookbooks into my house. I look at my stack of thirteen and I hear an austere Depression-era voice in my head saying, ‘Hundreds of perfectly good recipes in there, and you haven’t even touched them. There is work to be done, and I am way behind.'”

I immediately headed to my cookbook shelf and counted twenty-one volumes. The task of calculating the total number of recipes was too daunting.

My cookbook collection falls into two main categories: the ones I use to cook and the ones I use to read in bed. I value both equally.

In the utilitarian category are America’s Best Vegetable Recipes and Home-Made Ice Cream and Cake. Both of these recipe collections are from the Farm Journal magazine. They were contributed by farm women long before the phrase “locally sourced” became chic. All the recipes are easy, dependable and full of flavor.

Michael Perry notes that he relies on Let’s Start to Cook by the Farm Journal when he is in need of basic cooking information.

In the second category are the books featuring gorgeous photos, lovely artwork and delightful stories. I will never make a recipe that takes two hours and requires 21 ingredients, most of which aren’t available in the rural area where I live. But I truly can enjoy reading and dreaming about these food fantasies before I drift off to sleep.

Perhaps I need to add a third category, cookbooks that make me laugh. Cooking for Crowds by Merry White would fit here. I have no need for the 95 recipes in this book that feed hordes of people. I spotted the edition at a thrift store and snapped it up for one reason: the whimsical Edward Koren illustrations. Feel free to borrow it if you are feeding 100.

I recently read that Cat Cafes are a new trend. These are not bistros for cats, but cafes which have many in house cats. People come to have the companionship of a cat as they sip their coffee, snack, relax or work.

The  idea of a working cat in an establishment that serves or houses food is not new. Over 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians probably got tired of rodents raiding their stores of wheat and decided to entice wild little desert cats to try out a domestic lifestyle. More recently, in late night strolls in Amsterdam, I’ve seen cats in darkened restaurants, patrolling under the tables and upturned chairs.

The new breed of Cat Cafe was popularized by the Japanese, although the first establishments were in Taiwan. The Japanese cats (nekos) are not hired as mousers. Like Hello Kitty, their main function is to be adorable. Can’t have a cat in your apartment? Having a bad day? Come to our cafe and cuddle with our kitties.

Some politically correct Americans will be aghast at the feline cafe concept. “I’m allergic, I don’t want cat hair in my food and animals are dirty”, they will loudly exhort.

Europeans, most of whom aren’t animal phobic, are welcoming the Cat Cafes. I love the nonchalance with which Europeans accept animals in their midst. Heads did not turn in the French supermarket where I saw a woman pushing her cart through the aisles with her small dog ensconced in the child seat.

Here are some photos we’ve taken in European restaurants and stores with resident cats. These are cafes with a cat, not Cat Cafes. Regular visitors greet the cat as warmly as they do the proprietors.

Note that my husband and I have no need to visit a Cat Cafe…….we live in one everyday.