Who's in charge in Sleeping Beauty?

Almost every girl that I know wants to be a princess. I’m sure that when I was younger I wanted to be a princess too but from my vantage point of age and wisdom—well at least age—I’ve discovered that the supporting characters have all of the fun. In the classic tale of Sleeping Beauty a wicked witch comes to SB’s baby shower and presents her with a curse. The GOOD fairies then present their gifts and offer to raise and safeguard the princess for her protection. These fairies have the best roles of the movie. They are the heroes (heroines?), they step out of their comfort zones and adopt a foreign lifestyle, and they spend their days playing house in the woods.

One of my favorite Halloween traditions is the Halloween concert with the Utah Symphony. This bubblegum concert is designed for kids so the music is fun and scary, the concert only lasts an hour so I never become bored (not that I ever would at the Utah symphony), but best of all the audience and the orchestra all come in costume.

This past October my sisters and I went dressed as the Good fairies. My middle sister, Susan, made the costumes and argued that we were perfectly typecast. I was Flora and dressed in pink. Flora is the bossy fairy (am I bossy?). Flora always knows the answer to everything and everyone eventually accepts her wishes (don’t I wish!). Susan was Fauna and dressed in green. Fauna is the quiet fairy and people mostly ignore her. Susan was definitely not type cast. Mariann, our youngest sister, went as Meriwether. Meriwether is excitable and busy—Mariann to a tee!

So, am I like Flora? I see connections. I like to be in charge—especially of myself. I like to be organized and plan ahead. I need to know what I will be doing tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. Although I hate to be thrust out of my comfort zone I am old enough to have learned that I grow the most and have the best adventures when I’m out of my element. I’m afraid that I also resemble Flora in shape. As a middle age woman, Flora’s figure has filled out a bit. Polite individuals would call her round—mean people would call her fat. On the upside Flora is the brains of the operation. She always comes to the rescue with a plan, and she loves, nurtures, and guides the rest of the group.

All things considered, Flora is a pretty good egg—just like me!

Crunch Time

Well, we have reached semester crunch time--help! With papers due and tests galore the mundane tasks of life fall by the way-side. If you are like me that includes healthy eating practices--when I'm under stress I snack rather than dine. So what do you eat when you don't have time to prepare healthy meals? In the past few years I've tried to upgrade my snacking--fruit, cut up vegetables, yogurt, jerky--sometimes these satisfy and sometimes they don't. What do you recommend?

Chicken Soup

I don't want to brag--BUT, I make the best chicken soup on the face of the earth. If you don't believe me I can provide testimonials from my husband, my kids, and my neighbors. Last night we had chicken for supper and I couldn't go to bed until I had "boiled the bones." Chicken soup experts (even Alton Brown) argue that you can't make a great chicken soup without boiling the bones, it seems that the cartilage and calcium add both nourishment and flavor to the broth.


Side note: Recently my sisters-in-law were reminiscing about their great aunt Vera and commented that the weirdest thing about her was that she always boiled the bones to make soup instead of buying stock at the store. Well, of course she did--that's what soup experts do!


Anyway, I keep a stock bag in my freezer where I save leftover vegetables and chicken bones to make chicken stock. Once the stock is completed (Bobby Flay calls this broth "liquid gold") I refrigerate it overnight to allow the fat to solidify on the top. Once skimmed the broth is the perfect base for chicken soup.


My family's favorite is chicken noodle soup. I start with liquid gold and to that add chopped carrots, celery, and onions. Once the veggies are tender I add chopped chicken, whatever herbs are ripe from my garden (my favorites are parsley, basil, and rosemary) and homemade noodles. I simmer the soup until the noodles are done. Ambrosia.


Lately I've been making chicken tortilla soup and it's delicious. In fact, it was the hit of the night at our Relief Society birthday party last week. I start with liquid gold, add carrots, celery, and onions and simmer until tender. Next I added a jar of salsa, 2 cans of black beans, 1 can of corn, and some chopped chicken. For Relief Society I spiced it up with a few pepper flakes but I don't do this at home because Johnny doesn't like spicy food. When I serve the soup I provide tortilla chips, chopped green onions, sour cream (fat-free), and chopped avocado. Consumers can add as much or as little as they like. Heaven!

Tonight I'm making chicken tortilla soup (it's fast and easy) and I can't wait to eat it. This craving stems from 2 reasons--1) my chicken soup is the best! And 2) I'm unexpectedly substituting for another teacher. Hence, I missed lunch and I'm starving!

GREEN

My favorite thing about the month of March is GREEN. On St. Patick's Day I get to wear green in memory of my Irish ancestry (ironically their name was BLACK but I'll leave that color/name for another blog). In my garden little green shoots are popping up heralding new life, new growth, new hope (I've always argued that this is proof that Heavenly Father's favorite color is also green). Spring picnics are back after a long winter's drought and I always volunteer to make my famous green salad--a little lettuce and every other vegetable under the sun--smothered with creamy green goddess dressing. I guess that you have figured out by now that GREEN is my favorite color--what's yours?

Tag, your it!

Keith answered the following questions on his blog. I thought it would be fun to see how some of the rest of you would answer them.

TEN YEARS AGO -
5 THINGS ON MY TO-DO LIST -
THINGS I WOULD DO IF I WERE A MILLIONAIRE -
3 BAD HABITS -
SOMETHING PEOPLE DON'T KNOW ABOUT ME -

I Love Pizza!

When I attended Greenwood Elementary I loved school lunch. The white garbed and hair-netted lunch ladies whipped up the best lunches! My favorite day of the month was pizza day. School lunch pizza was not the whimpy offering delivered by Caesar or the Hut. No! This culinary masterpiece was a 2 inch thick master piece of doughy bread, greasy hamburger, tomatoe sauce, and stringy cheese. Ambrosia!
Today my mature tastes prefer a thin crispy crust topped with tangy pesto, juicy dark chicken chunks, grilled sweet red onions, and flavorful crumbled gorgonzola. My favorite pizza repository is Citrus Grill, but Wasatch pizza also serves up a good pie. I also whip up a killer grilled version at home.
Do our tastes physically change as we age? Or do we just get more adventuresome? Or are we victims of changing food fads? I can see evidence of this—pesto pizzas were unknown in Utah in the 1960’s. On the other hand, my grandchildren are unadventurous connoisseurs preferring plain cheese pizza to the gourmet versions I love.
Last night on the food network program "Unwrapped" they visited a pizza test kitchen where 6 top notched chefs work to create new pizza taste sensations. How many different versions do we need? On the other hand how sad would I be if I no one had invented my favorite Chicken Pesto Pizza?
What is your favorite pizza? What's your favorite pizzeria? Have you noticed that your tastes change as you mature? Can you give some examples?

Goodbye Grandma Black

My grandmother's death last week has left me in a reflective mood. She was 97 years old and had lost both her sight and most of her hearing in the last 18 month. Up until that time she was the goingest lady I knew--I want to be like her when I grow up. I'm so grateful that she was a part of my life.

For this blog I want to reflect a little on funerals. Funerals are opportunities to commemorate and celebrate someone's life. When someone dies unexpectedly and at an early age many funerals are sad and the "why?" factor needs to be addressed. When someone has lived a long full life a funeral can be, well. . .if not exactly fun then at least satisfying (I struggled to find the right word and this is the best that I can do).

Following most Utah LDS funerals the local Relief Society Sisters provide a luncheon for the family. The menu is set in stone and is rarely deviated from--ham, funeral potatoes, salad, roll, and cake. I'm willing to bet that if you attended 10 funeral luncheons a week that you would find realitively the same menu at every one. Is there something chemically or emotionally comforting about this food combination or is the menu simply a solid tradition. Don't get me wrong, the food was delicious and I really appreciate the wonderful sisters that prepared it but I wonder how this particular menu came to be designated "funeral luncheon food."

It's interesting that funeral luncheon menus change based on location. My daughter Michelle moved to the Hudson River Valley in New York a few years ago and was called to serve in the Relief Society. During the first funeral she was assigned to organize she started calling sisters and assigning funeral potatoes--they had no idea what she was talking about "what in the world are funeral potatoes?" She soon learned that the standard funeral luncheon menu for that area is spaghetti and garlic bread.

I have a question for all of you: what is the standard funeral luncheon menu in your home area? and do you know what "funeral potatoes" are?

Food Glorious Food

As most of you know that my daughter Samantha is getting married on Saturday. Most of the preparations are completed and all that I have left to do is to sit back and enjoy the festivities (don't I wish). One of the big choices that I had to make was what to serve the guests that come to the reception on Saturday night. Jon's (the groom) Mom is stressed with the last minute guest list for the wedding luncheon at the Lion House. She can only invite 54 guests--who to include and who to leave out? Once again the question: why is everything that we do all about the food? What we eat at the wedding luncheon or what I serve at the reception has little bearing on the mechanics of getting married (the important stuff happens that morning in the Temple--anything else is just fluff).
Well enough reflection. I'm getting smarter (that should surprise some people) but instead of baking for weeks on end, like I did for my oldest daughter's wedding, I just went over to Costco and ordered 30 cheesecakes. My son Steve will pick them up Saturday afternoon and my sisters will slice them and put them on a serving table so that the quests may help-them-selves. I hope the guests like cheesecake, but if they don't I really don't care. Providing a wedding refreshment is simply a convention and won't make or break the day. I keep repeating this to myself--maybe by Saturday I'll believe it.

Picking Grapefruit Right Off the Tree

This past weekend I traveled to Yuma Arizona to visit my Dad for his birthday. The weather was beautiful--warm and pleasant. We went to the swap meet, traveled to Mexico, and took a long drive through the field just outside of town. Yuma sits right in the middle of the Imperial Valley--acres and acres of lush farmland created by silt from the Colorado River depositied over centuries of time. The local agricultural buraeu claims that 90% of the US winter vegatables consumed in the United States are grown in the Imperial Valley--and I believe them. We drove past fields of lettuce, cabbage, califlower, radishes, broccoli, alfalfa, and wheat. The weather is so warm and the water is so plentiful that most of the feilds produce 11 crops a year. My favorite fields are those growning lettuces mixes. There are several rows of each lettuce variety making it possible to mix and pack the bags right in the field. The fields resemble green and red striped rugs.

Yuma is also known for its dates and citrus fruits. There are miles and miles of trees heavy with ripe oranges, lemons, and grapefruit. My Dad has a grapefruit tree in his back yard. I went out Saturday morning and picked my breakfast grapefruit right off the tree. It was delicious--far superior to one that has languished in my local grocery store for a week. This is the point to my rant--have we lost touch with our nutrition origins. Do consumers today even know where our food comes from--and I don't mean from the grocery store, I mean how does it come to be in the first place?.

When I was 8 we moved out of the big city of West Valley to the small rural farming community of Highland, Utah (those of you that are familiar with Highland today will find that description humorous, but it was true). We had only been in Highland a few days when we were invited by our new neighbor friends to help "butcher a hog." We hung on the fence watching as Dale and Robbie's Dad shot a very large pig in the head, dragged the carcass behind the tractor to a large tree, and hung the body upside down from a stout limb. In respect for those of you with squeamish stomachs I won't describe what happened next, but my ghoulish 8 year old mind found the entire process fascinating. I thought that meat came already cut up from a butcher shop. I'd never seen the process from the beginning.

A few years later we had a couple of Missionaries living with us. One day Mom was away and Elder White decided to surprise her by cooking dinner. Elder White was a 1960's farm boy from the back woods of Kentucky so he cooked dinner the same way that he would have if he had been back home. He went out into the backyard and caught a chicken (as it turned out she was Mom's best laying hen). We thought that he was Daniel Boone reincarnated. The rest is history but once again I was fascinated to watch food production from its inception.

Today I grow a garden but that's about as close as I come to the food production cycle. But I'm grateful for the knowledge and appreciation I gained from seeing the process from beginning to end. I feel sorry for my children. I don't know if they appreciate what work and time goes into producing the food in their local market. Nor do they value the farmers that make dinner possible.

Goodbye, President Hinkley

I have all spent a great deal of time this week remembering and celebrating the life of our Prophet--President Hinkley. I have so many favorite memories. President Hinkley's 90th birthday party, General Conferences viewed both life and on TV (we call this pajama church), Pioneer Day parades, Devotionals, the list goes on and on. For my blog this week I'd like to share two of my favorites.
My 2nd daughter was married April 12, 2001 in the Salt Lake Temple. She had planned the date deliberately so that Temple Square would be at its Spring best--tulips, daffodils, locusts, crocuses all in full bloom. We woke up the morning of the wedding to find that instead of a beautiful spring day we were back to winter--it was snowing. Stacy, my daughter, was devastated. Following the ceremony the photographer suggested that we take the wedding pictures in the Joseph Smith Building since the snow continued. He received permission to take us--Stacy and Sheldon, John and I--through the tunnel that goes from the temple to the JSB so we wouldn't get wet. After the pictures were taken we went back through the tunnel to the Temple to collect the Bride and Grooms clothes. We had just entered Temple when the security guard closed the entrance and came to stand in the hall. Luckily we turned around to see what was going on just in time to see the entire First Presidency driving out of the Temple in a golf cart. They were followed closely by 2 additional carts containing the rest of the apostles. The carts passed not 15 feet away from us. If the weather had been as beautiful as we had hoped it would be we would have been outside and we would never have witnessed this remarkable and memorable scene.
For several years I worked on a committee that built the Heber C. Kimball home at the "This Is The Place Park" (work is the operative word, one night we laid sod into the wee hours of the morning). At the conclusion of the project Stanley Kimball, the chairman of the Park Administration, invited us all to a commemorative dinner at the Grand America Hotel. I'm not really sure what I expected but when I arrived at the dinner I was surprised that I recognized many of the other guests as local civic and church leaders. We were seated at a table close to the podium from which the guest speaker would address us (the guest speaker was Brigham Young--but that's another story). Shortly after we arrived I looked up to discover that President Hinkley, President Monson, and President Faust were entering from a door behind the podium. They were coming right toward me and were seated at the table right behind me. I can't tell you what was served for dinner, I know that I was too excited to eat much. Although I didn't speak directly to him I've always referred to this day as the time I had lunch with President Hinkley.

First Impressions

First impressions are so important! When I meet people for the first time--especially people that I want to think well of me, I try to carefully orchestrate the occasion. Last night I invited my new son-in-law-to-be's parents to dinner. My daughter is going to be a part of their family and so I really wanted to impress them. It's interesting that almost every important occasion revolves around food--on second thought almost every occasion (important or not) revolves around food. I've agonized over this menu for weeks. Sam, my daughter, insisited that Jon's parents are quite traditional and I should stick with meat and potatoes--how impressive can you be with meat and potatoes? I finally settled on a menu of green veggie salad, baked salmon with mango salsa, parmesan potatoes, roasted asparagas, whole wheat hot rolls, and carrot cake with slow-churned caramel pecan ice cream for dessert.
I bought a new red table cloth with red napkins to go with my white china. As I ironed the cloth and napkins to set the table it dawned on me that I should have purchased navy napkins for a bit of contrast. For about a half a second I wondered if my Heaven Father would consider this an ox-in-the-mire situation if I ran quickly to Walmart for navy napkins but I thought better of the notion. At the last minute I googled napkin folding and I chose a rosebud fold (http://www.customlinenservice.com/rosebud.htm) and centered the napins in the center of each plate.

Did I make a good impression? I don't know--I'm dying to talk with Sam and get a report. In retrospect I wonder if I have my priorities right--was the night really all about the food?

I have a couple of challenges for this week: What does your mom (or spouse or even you) cook when you want to make a good impression? Include the recipe if possible. Or based on our reading from How We Eat, what is the strangest food that you have ever eaten and what were the circumstances?

I'm Hungry Mother, Really I Am (from 101 Dalmations)

I'm a Disney nut! I love Disney movies and I LOVE Disneyland. One of my favorite Disney animated features is 101 Dalmations. This is the story of 2 dogs, Perdita and Pongo, their children (puppies) and their struggle against the evil Cruella DeVil. When the puppies are born the runt of the litter is thought to be dead, but with a little massage--and luck--the puppy survives and is named Lucky. Well. Lucky has a lot of catching up to do so he eats constantly and all through the movie repeats the line "I'm hungry mother, really I am."

Whenever I reread Rappoport’s introduction about the impact that food has on our lives I’m particularly struck by his images of starvation and the Holocaust. He writes that “[w]ithout an adequate diet, a person’s behavior deteriorates to a primal level, and basic dimensions of human dignity may be lost” (16). I’m not sure that I agree with him. I’ve read innumerable stories of people behaving nobly and even heroically in dire circumstances; stories of people who didn’t lose their dignity in the face of an absence of food. And I wonder “how would I react if I were starving, or if my children or grandchildren were starving? I really can’t say. I’ve never even been remotely hungry. I sometimes think that I’m hungry (especially about 5:00 p.m. on fast Sunday) but I’ve never known what it is like to be truly starved and to have no idea where my next meal is coming from.

There is such an abundance of food all around me. Today in class we talked about our favorite foods, and our favorite restaurants. I walk into the grocery store and find myself surrounded by so much food that I have a hard time deciding what to buy. I can’t even stop to fuel my car without being inundated by culinary choices. My refrigerator is full, my cupboards stocked. When I’m on top of things--and listening to the advice of my church leaders--my storage shelves are packed (I’d better go downstairs and check on that, I’d hate to be unprepared). Can I even understand what it means to be hungry? How would (or--Heaven forbid—will) I act when that day comes? Will I retain my dignity? Or will I deteriorate to a primal level? Will I?

Welcome to English 150H food blogging

Welcome to the wonderful world of food blogging. I'm really looking forward to reading your posts this semester, and to learn from and be entertained by you. I don't watch much television (I don't have time) but when I tune in it's usually to Food network (I tell my husband that I'm doing academic research for this class but he doesn't buy it). My favorite Food Network celebrity is Emeril Lagasse. I rarely attempt to duplicate his creations but I find him so entertaining (how many people do you know that cook accompanied by a live band?). I also love Rachel Ray; I love how she dishes up gourmet fare in less than 30 minutes. I often try her recipes, using my family as guinea pigs. They aren't very adventuresome so they are a tough crowd to please. Last, but by no means the least, I watch Iron Chef America; I find it amazing that the chefs can create such exotic and delicious dishes out of the most bizarre ingredients (I'm not sure that I believe that the unveiling of the secret ingredient is a surprise. How do the chefs know to bring squid ink or squash blossoms--both ingredients on last Sunday's challenge--if they don't have some prior knowledge of what they plan to cook?). Who could have anticipated that cooking would become a source of entertainment? I hope as we wade through this semester that we discover or simply realize the impact that what we eat exerts on our lives. I'm new to the wonderful world of blogging so please feel free to make suggestions, comments, challenges, and whatever! Have fun and bon appetite!