CREAMY PASTA WITH PEAS

Some dishes are so succulent and delicious that I feel guilty even reading the recipe! This is one of those. It is very simple to make, but you do have to go on a little hunt to find arugula, as it isn't a green that the run-of-the-mill big grocery stores carry. I find it odd that in Istanbul it is called "Rocket" and it's abundant and cheap, but here in California it is a delicacy and is quite pricey. However, you dare not omit using it if you want to bring this recipe where it belongs -- in culinary heaven.

CREAMY PASTA WITH PEAS

12 oz farfalle pasta
1 pack (10 Oz) frozen green peas
1/4 Cup heavy cream
1/3 cup canned reduced-sodium chicken brother
1/2 c grated parmesan
2 T pine nuts, toasted
1 bunch arugula

Toast pine nuts in a skillet over medium heat, shaking frequently until golden - 1 to 2 minutes. Set aside.

In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook pasta until al dente. Addpeas 1 minute before end fo cooking. Drain; return pasta and peas to pot.

Meanwhile, in a large skillet, combine cream and chicen broth. Simmer until thickened slightly, about 7 minutes. Stire in Parmesan until melted.

Add sauce to pasta and peas; toss to combine. Season with salt. Add to reserved pasta along with arugula. Season wiht pepper. Toss to combine and serve immediately.

****

How much closer could heaven get?

HATS OFF TO R. CRUMB!

As nearly as I can remember, the only time I ever showed the least interest in comics was when I was little and my dad used to read the “funnies” to me from the evening newspaper. I listened and looked while he read Moon Mullins, Blondie and Dagwood, Li’l Abner, and Dick Tracy; those are the only ones I can remember. Now that I think about it, I do remember always reading Pogo when I was a teenager in the late 40s. But for the most part comics have not been anything I was interested in.

So that is why I am surprised at my glee over the R. Crumb book - “The Book of Genesis, Illustrated” that I blogged about sometime ago. On the cover it says, “All 50 Chapters” and “Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors” and “The First Book of the Bible Graphically Depicted! Nothing left out!” It truly is what it says it is and moreover, it is truly amazing.

Every time I picked it up I would have to interrupt Jerry periodically to say, “Look at this; Listen to this! You’ll LOVE this!” And other times he laughed heartily at the same things I did, which doesn’t always happen. And sometimes he said, “Oh My!”

The illustrations are superb. His rendering of God is perfect, and I will have to say that God appears just about how I would have drawn him if I were an illustrator, (although I can’t draw anything recognizable so I’m off the hook there.) Crumb’s creation sequence is really ‘right on.” My first surprise was about Noah and the ark.


Now who would ever have depicted the inside of Noah’s ark like this? The best way I can describe it is that if Jerry had an ark, his would look like this. Mine would look like every picture I’ve every seen of animals in the ark in picture books and Sunday school papers – full to overflowing with animals running around, getting into things, leaning over the rails – total bedlam! Crumb’s ark is so Jerry-like. And it never entered my mind to think of such a tidy ark. That made me laugh.

Another thing that made me laugh the most was when Joseph was in Egypt – had been in Egypt for enough years that obviously he spoke in an “Egyptian” language, but when his brothers arrived, who would not have been able to understand him, Joseph had a translator – and Crumb’s depiction of the event looked like this.


Don't you think this is hystericallly funny? Crumb didn’t need words of explanation to tell us what was going on. And as these conversations between Joseph and his brothers went on a long time over many sessions, Crumb doesn’t waiver in his hieroglyphics! You get the original and the translation page after page after page – and I have to tell you, both Jerry and I laughed and laughed about this. How clever. What a creator Crumb is.

And then if it is at all possible to make the begats even a tiny bit more interesting than they really are (and if any of you have tried to read through Genesis, including those begats, you’ll know how very tedious and boring they can be) – but Crumb doesn’t bat an eyelash at them. If Genesis says “This is the lineage of So and So” – then Crumb starts drawing faces of each of the people who were begat, and their sons and daughters as well. And they all look different! Can you imagine drawing dozen and dozens of different faces?



Now when I got to Jacob and his twelve sons, I was just very pleased. I’ve always known the story, and when I was in Jerusalem I bought a set of postcards of Marc Chagall’s famous stained glass windows at the Hadassah Medical Center, one representing each of Jacob’s sons. But never would I have expected anywhere to see faces of those twelve sons staring at me from a book. No one knows what they really looked like but Crumb doesn’t let that stop him. Such an amazing bit of art work.

I could go on and on. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading and browsing through this book. It is a visual treat, even for a person who normally does not like comics. I can imagine some rigid religious people thinking this book should be left alone. It does depict quite graphically the business of men “knowing” their wives, (which actually I find a little bit easier to take than the slaughtering of sheep and goats for offerings). But I have found myself impressed, delighted and enthusiastic about it.

Hats off to Mr. Crumb and his amazing talent and for taking on a project such as this, which incidentally he says took five years to complete. If R. Crumb doesn't win some top prizes for this astounding book, then life really, really ain't fair at all!

FLASHBACKS TO WWII

This morning we had a short storm pass through, with lightning and thunder (a rarity here in SoCal) and I turned off my computer, just to be on the safe side. Left with nothing to do, I decided to hunt through one of my craft drawers to see if, by any chance, I had the right sized knitting needle for one of my infamous projects. This necesitated removing a large box in which those needles, crochet hooks and embroidery needles are kept.

In taking the box completely out of the drawer, I discovered these old War Ration Coupon books from the WWII, made out in my name. Many years ago my mother had made a display of them for me, and I took it apart so I could put them in an album. I never did, and in the intervening years I wondered what happened to them.

Well, here they are.

*****
Inside the first one it says I am 4'1" tall, weigh 52 pounds, have brown hair and brown eyes and am 6 years old. The date is May 7, 1942. Apparently my size isn't important for the next year's card, as all it says is that I am 7 years old. And then in War Ration Book Three, I am noted as 8 years old and still at 52 pounds.

When I saw that, I thought to myself: No wonder my mother and father were worried about my health if I truly went from May of 1942 to May of 1944 without gaining any weight. But since "growing up" and having babies I've had to fight fat, so obviously there was not a big problem with my being a skinny child.

We kids were not really all that aware of what "war" meant. We knew about rationing, we knew certain things, like shoes and tires and butter, were hard to get. We knew our uncles were overseas fighting but our dad wasn't, so our home life wasn't so disrupted. We knew we had to pour any grease from cooking meat into an empty coffee can and our mother took it to the grocery store to turn it in. We bought saving stamps each week at school and pasted them into a book which, when completed, we turned in for a War Bond. We collected scrap metal, we had a victory garden and blackout curtains, and we knew what all the searchlights around Long Beach harbor were for. Interestingly, both Jerry and I still call them "searchlights" instead of "spotlights" or whatever their real name is now!

In the schools we practiced what to do for air raids (go into the halls and line up outside our classrooms. Later in the atomic area we learned to drop to the floor under our desks). But out on the playground we called each other "Allies" or "Axis", depending on which class got out a little early and ran to get the rings first. They were always the Allies and the slower class the Axis. We knew to insult each other by calling the other Tojo or Mussolini. Kids 6 and 7 and 8 didn't really know what all these terms mean, but we had picked up the names from our folks and knew who the bad guys were.

As "The Greatest Generation" and as we who experienced it peripherally as little kids die off, all this will be forgotten, unless one can dig into a social history of that time. When I saw these books this morning, time telescoped and I remembered being little and watching how my family operated with the wartime constraints on us. It was as if 70 years ago was just yesterday, my mother standing at the stove, an apron over her house dress, tipping the skillet over the coffee can and grease running down into the container. Yes, lots of memories.

*****
So back to reality: Of course I did not find in the box the size knitting needle I needed. Guess it's back to Michael's today to buy one!

THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY

I don’t like to trivialize Thanksgiving, because I am truly grateful for all the things we are supposed to be grateful for – health, family, nation, etc. But over the years I’ve always made a list of things that make me happy, to remind myself that not only is it better to give than to receive but also it is better to count your blessings instead of your woes. So here is my list for 2009.

THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY

1. Jerry’s beautiful grey hair and the new hair stylist who knows how to cut it!
2. Living in Southern California, which I believe has the best weather in the world.
3. Newspapers and books that I can hold while I read.
4. The gift of a used digital camera when the owner upgraded.
5. Music, especially cool jazz, classical, oldies of the ‘70s and anything Dudamel.
6. New friends in Corona and San Francisco and old friends anywhere.
7. Levis, bracelets and long-sleeved t-shirts
8. Squeaky
9. Having such a workable library system in the area.
10. An easy-going, agreeable spouse
11. Discovering wigs
12. Net-flix, which makes reliving movies of the ‘50s accessible, enabling us to
take a great walk down memory lane whenever we want.
13. Patterned socks!
14. My cousins
15. My computer and the gurus who keep it (and me) running.
16. Hot Coffee and Cool Jazz – and those who read it.
17. Grandkids old and young who hug me like they mean it.
18. Two classes of “Beginning Photoshop,” which opened up another world to play in.
19. Walking on the Outer Banks, a lifelong dream.
20. The Internet

Have a good one, everybody!

THE BURDEN OF UNFINISHED PROJECTS

As many of you know, I am engaged in a big genealogy project of my own making: the goal is to get everything I know about the ancestry of each of my four grandparents into a written and illustrated booklet and into my kids’ hands. I figured it would take me two months to complete one grandparent’s book, so the overall project would be, allowing for slight variations of time available to do this, done in a year’s time. I finished up my Grandma Maud Susan McConnell Dobbins’s family in two months. I finished up my Grandma Jessie Davis Ryland’s family in two months. I’m now working on my Grandpa Byrd Ryland’s family and I may need to use a little bit of that built-in variation time for him, because his two month period spans both Thanksgiving and Christmas, never a good time to find oneself at a loss for something to do. Anyway, I’m still on schedule as of this writing.


This morning I was at the Laundromat knitting furiously while the machines did their work and I was thinking about when this knit-hat project was going to be done. The hat I made for Olivia didn’t fit well, so I’m knitting another one. It needs to be done by Saturday, because that’s when I’ll see her next. I thought to myself, “Projects, projects, projects!”


Lurking in the back of my mind is an unfinished cross-stitch piece that I set aside some time back and just haven’t returned to finish it. I thought how unlike me to not finish a project. And at that point I felt my nose growing longer and my tongue turning black, both signs of a big, fat lie. And once I acknowledged to myself that I had more than one unfinished project, my mind’s eye remembered what was in one of my office drawers. In addition to the three unfinished cross-stitch pieces I’m showing, I found two that hadn’t even been started yet, and found four that I had started but didn’t like and know I’ll never get back to them. Those four are now residing in my trash can.


And because I DO know that I will keep doing the cross-stitches I dare not throw away all the threads that I’ve collected over the years. I started putting them into nice little cubby-holed boxes but finally rather than buy MORE boxes I decided to chuff them in zip-lock bags. That quantity of possibly usable embroidery threads takes up a great deal of space; I am not able to let even 1 of them go!

I do hate to have unfinished projects hanging around. Whenever I used to go housesit for Kerry I always took a bunch of projects with me. I never knew what I would feel like working on. “Feeling” is not a good rationale for completing projects. But if I assign myself too many deadlines for completing things, I feel that I don’t have time to smell the roses.

I am definitely not going to buy any more pieces to cross-stitch, nor am I going to do any more hats once Olivia’s gets finished. I AM going to make a little something for the newest Great-granddaughter, but I think I’ll draw the line there. One by one I’ll finish the projects I’ve started, finish up Grandpa Scott Dobbins’ family report by February 2010, and just maybe do nothing for a while except read. And smell a few flowers, too.

CURING DEPRESSION QUICKLY

I subscribe to PCWorld.com. For every 100 words they print, I understand about 20 of them. The headlines to their articles are so very enticing – like yesterday’s article “Technology We’ll Miss When It’s Gone.” Oh no, I thought. What now? Reading their article is like wearing a haircloth shirt – there may be some value to it but darned if I can figure out much of what it is. Nevertheless, these things, whether you know what they are or not (I am addressing us older people now) MP3 players, optical drives, the mouse, dumb phones, digital cameras, Microsoft Windows, MySpace, pay phones, packaged media (CDs, DVDs) vs. downloads, and good manners are all scheduled to be things of the past, and with the 20% that I understood, I found myself getting seriously depressed. NOT MY MOUSE, PLEASE!

My intent originally was to share all this with you, but not wanting to lay depression on my readers, I decided instead to share something that really makes me happy. And that is the website called Abebooks.com. It is a site that acts like a broker for independent used bookstores all over the world. I am always wanting or needing a book that I no longer can find anywhere. And instead of driving to every used bookstore in town, I simply tell Abebooks.com what I want and almost instantly, voila! I see on my screen a list of bookstores which have that book and all the details about it and the vendor.

Now I am not looking for books like a collector of old books does, but I’ll tell you what I’ve picked from their offerings. I wanted a book that was referenced in an article I read about the meteor shower of 1833. The book was published in 1998 in England, published by Cambridge Press and entitled “The Heavens on Fire.” For $7.00 plus shipping I got a book that had been in the DeKalb (Illinois) County Public Library and later had been de-accessed. It obviously hadn’t been used much. I used the book to learn all about what it was that my great-great grandmother had seen.

I used Abebooks to find a copy of a book called “Goodnight Children, Everywhere: Voices of Evacuees” about the little kids in London who were sent to the countryside to live with other families during the Second World War. It was published very recently in England. I just learned a friend of mine was one of those kids, and I wanted to know more. This book was a real eye-opener.

I used Abebooks to find a copy of Ken Starr’s new book “Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963.” Yes, I could have found it at B&N or Amazon, but the price was within my budget at Abebooks.com, enabling me to purchase it instead of just borrowing and re-borrowing it through the library systems.

And yesterday I just ordered another book. A year or so ago a beautiful new coffeetable-type book about Tony Duquette, a California artist and interior designer, was published that sold for $75.00. It’s now selling at about $50. In 1980 Duquette mounted an exhibit of Angels that celebrated Los Angeles. Jerry and I went, and I was so enthralled by what I saw that I went back for a second time, insisting that my mother needed to see it too. She was not very healthy at that time and she hadn’t been able to get out much, certainly not to Los Angeles, so I wanted her to see this really amazing display. We took it very slowly, and she loved it as much as I did.

Yesterday I decided to see via Abebooks if one of these big fancy books had come down in price to fit my pocketbook. I knew the book encompassed much more than just his Angel exhibit, but the angels were what I wanted it for. Abebooks let me know that for a mere $16.00, which included shipping charges, they could supply a book specifically about the Angel Exhibit – with color illustrations. Needless to say I bought it. And got undepressed really fast!

So in spite of what PCWorld said that causes me to be distressed (DON’T TAKE MY MOUSE, PLEASE!) I now know that a romp around Abebooks.com is good for what ails me. If you haven’t had a reason to look for an old book you are interested in, do yourself a favor and snoop around on their website. You never will know what you might find that will brighten your day in an very affordable way!

NEVER ENUF SPACE!

Jer and I got into a funny discussion the other night as to whether we sidled or slithered around in our tiny apartment. There was some minor disagreement as to which was closer to what we have to do but no disagreement at all that both of them are appropriate.

The problem is that we have 1000 square feet of furniture and a 750 square foot apartment to put it in. And we've gotten rid of the big stuff! So you can see that we have to do some fancy footwork to get from here to there.

We have a one-person-wide kitchen. It is a much better kitchen than the one we had in our larger Loma Linda apartment, so I have to keep this in mind whenever I say "bad" things about this kitchen. It's a galley kitchen, so we can work side to side quite easily. We just can't change places easily. Only the cat can walk past us. For Jer and me, the mode is either to slither or to sidle.

We gave away our beautiful big dining room set with 8 chairs and china cabinet, and replaced it with a small wooden round table and 4 chairs. We have a little dining area at the juncture of our kitchen and living room, but again, even that tiny set is too big for that area. Whoever gets up from the table has to either sidle or slither into the kitchen because one of the chairs, when occupied, blocks the ingress.

Our "master" bedroom would not be quite so tight if we didn't have Jerry's desk and file cabinet in it. But as this was the only room that could hold it, there it sits, and it too causes a lot of fancy footwork to happen. To get to my bed I walk through the bedroom door, turn sideways to pass between the foot of Jerry's bed and the double-dresser and then make a sharp right hand turn to reach it. To open the drawers, we have to stand to the outside of the drawers and pull them out in front of us into the narrow little passageway at the end of our beds. If one of us is rummaging in a drawer for something, the other one either has to bide his or her time or else crawl over Jerry's bed if it is imperative to get to the window quickly. (As an aside, Jerry never has to rummage in a drawer. His are so neat he doesn't know what the word "rummage" means. I am the rummager).

I wrote a poem once about that very subject. It's called Honesty.

I place my books back on the shelf
instead of let them rest
upon the couch or table where
I think they suit me best.

My clothes get put on hangers,
not just tossed upon a chair
or dropped upon the closet floor
and then left lying there.

I promptly do the dishes so my
drainboards always shine.
In opening cupboards high or low
you'll find no mess in mine.

My house is always spotless
so it satisfies my mate,
but don't be fooled: this tidiness
is not my natural state.

You'll only see my image in
my waxed and polished floors.
The real me is hidden in
my messy dresser drawers.