Annual post

Kushies

Yesterday I ran across some baby booties by Kushies in the Carnegie Museum of Art store (they are branching out and diversifying I suppose). They were very stretchy and so perfect for clothing babies. At two for $11 I didn't think they were too overpriced but since our splurge over the weekend at the Japanese store in DC, I was reticent to continue buying. Plus they were sized 0-3 months and yet had non-slip soles - what baby walks before 11-12 months? But there were cute enough for me to look up their website http://www.kushies.com/ and browse through it and their online catalog - which is very well done in Flash with turnable pages. That's the way online books should be and maybe in the near future they will be. Then will fingers get fat for lack of exercise? Hardly, since with typing at the computer, they already get more exercise than in the past. The only problem with the Kushies catalog is that you can't order directly from the catalog pages but have to go to a separate online buying site.

They have reusable fitted cloth diapers. I'm not sure how to convince Will and Jen to use cloth diapers rather than disposables. I did it for all 3 kids and was very dissatisfied with disposable diapers when I did use them on trips. Plus the Kushies diapers are so colorful and cute - ours were just plain white.

Skunk Cabbage

I went for a hike in Boyce Park this morning and towards the end of it, as I was forging Pearson's Run, I came across a patch of Skunk Cabbages (Symplocarpus foetidus) peeking through the oak leaf litter. Naturally I was tempted to pull one up and take it home but I didn't because basically I'm a good person. It has been a relatively cold winter with few warm days and so there are still no leafbuds out, except for the skunk cabbage and some nubs on the wild roses. Not even any mushrooms, no chipmunks or squirrels or deer but a lot of birds singing, especially cardinals, and a flock of about 30 Canada Geese flying north. More information on the skunk cabbage from the US Forest Service.
Although we were supposed to get sleet and freezing rain (what's the difference?) last night, we've only had light mist. The ski and tubing slopes at Boyce are still operating and they have torn up a lot of the land with the construction. They also have put in settling basins that look pretty stagnant so I wonder what their plan is for those and whether any environmentalist was consulted.

1001 Foods to Die For

This is one of those big heavy 1001 books that are full of photographs and slick paper. Since they are compiled by a group of English schoolmates, you have to take them with a grain of salt but then you have to take any book like this with a grain of salt no matter who writes it. Oh, wait a minute. This isn't the English "1001 Foods to Eat before you Die" but a Kansas City upstart compiled by Corby Kummer from contributions by a number of well known food experts like Mario Batali, Mark Bittman, Julia Child, Elizabeth David, Donna Hay, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy, Nigella Lawson, Claudia Roden, Jane and Michael Stern and Alice Waters (plus a bunch I am unfamiliar with). At the beginning of the list of Contributors, Kummer writes "The original entries were written by the specialist contributors listed below; subsequent versions of the entries may have been altered." Unfortunately no article is attributed to the contributor so one has really very little idea of where it came from and so has no place to go to. A dead end, as it were, which is very frustrating to librarians.
Should all be forgiven because he includes Chiles Rellenos?

Apparently there is a British version of this afterall: 1001 Foods You Must Eat Before You Die, although the cover at amazon says 1001 Foods you Must Taste Before you Die (you wonder who made the change). We must have a taste comparison! The library doesn't have this one, which isn't surprising since the publishing date is September 2008.

Tree Houses

Last night I ran across an article on tree houses in the Costco circular: "Life out on a limb: treehouses for the upwardly mobile". I also have a tree house calendar for this year so it seems that this is the year of the tree house. I've always been fascinated by tree houses: the McPhersons out in Bardsdale had one and we'd play in it when Penny and I would play with Susan and Anne ____ when we were kids. What was their name? It will come to me. My grandfather Bill cut down two flowering peach trees trying to make me one and finally put it up in another larger flowering peach tree. It had a trap door and I backed off the side of the platform once (no walls) and fell about six feet. I was scared more than hurt.

The Swiss Family Robinson tree house at Disneyland was interesting but you could tell it wasn't a real tree so I was always slightly disappointed. I think I saw the movie but never read the book, since by the time it was popular, I felt I was too old to read it.

One of my professors at Santa Cruz in the 60s supposedly built a tree house and was living in it with the wife of another professor but there were a lot of flakey and unstable people around at the time. I remember him saying that we students were all losers because the really successful and ambitious high school students were jocks - football players. And I suppose cheerleaders because our high school didn't have any sports for girls. Thank goodness for title IX. That statement was not popular with the students who were overwhelmingly the independent loners. He, of course, may have been right, perhaps speaking from his own experience as a loser.

The article in the Costco circular mentioned these tree house resources, which I will note here so that I don't lose them, since I will toss the circular. I didn't know where else to store them. ;-) And, WOW, are the tree houses at the sites below fabulous, but you can tell they weren't made by kids, shouldn't they be?

TreeHouse Workshop:
http://www.treehouseworkshop.com/
Forever Young Treehouse:
http://www.treehouses.org/
Out 'n' About:
http://www.treehouses.com/
Treehouse Engineering:
http://www.treehouseengineering.com/

It looks like all the domains for treehouses are pretty well taken...

Back to California home cooking

I was looking for a recipe for split pea soup a la Andersen's in Buellton, north of Santa Barbara. At home we always had it out of a can but after I spent 2 1/2 years in Colombia, I learned that you always make soup at home from scratch. In Colombia you don't use recipes, you cook by taste and according to what you have. Evidently Buellton and the Andersens are too far south to make it into Michele Anna Jordan's California cookbook because the closest recipe is one for lentils and seived eggs. Lentil soup, she says, was popular with the 60s' health food crowd but only seasoned with soy sauce and it did not have the "finesse" of today's cooking, which is influenced by French country cuisine. Hm. Lentil soup seasoned with soy sauce. I must try that.

Jordan did have an interesting aside on "How to Kill a Chicken" about Betty Fussell, "author of wonderful cookbooks and of scholarly books on food in America" who grew up in Southern California, a child of the Depression. I'll have to get the book Jordan refers to, Christmas Memories with Recipes for Mother, who also grew up in Southern California during the Depression.

I'll make my own split pea soup, with a ham bone, onions, carrots and celery but I was looking for a little inspiration. I could try the Swedish yellow split pea soup. I wonder what the difference is between the yellow and the green: are the yellow simply more mature? There is a recipe on the web on a site called "cdkitchen.com but andersen is spelled wrong and the recipe only has 3 out of 5 stars so I don't expect much from it. (Oh, wait, that's 3 out of 5 for difficulty (it has 5 stars from 1 review) but the recipe doesn't look great - no sauteeing of the vegetables and a vigorous boiling of the soup. Might as well do their split pea soup mix...) You'd think the cdkitchen site would display the recipes according to the number of stars they got but they just slap them on the page. So much for cdkitchen.

Second stop on the google search was the blog of the Fat Free Vegan's Yellow Split Pea Soup with Sweet Potato and Kale. This sounds interesting because she uses Penzey's Maharajah Style Curry Powder and anyone who uses Penzeys' spices is ok in my book, even if I've heard that you should grind your own curry powder fresh. And look, you can get a printer friendly version of the recipe. I wonder how she did that. I'll have to investigate. Now, what would happen if I made this recipe with green split peas??

Frugality

Frugality has become popular again, only now it is called "sustainability" and it is by no means widespread or everybody's cup of tea. When I was in college in the 60s it was considered anal and it is often associated with being cheap and/or neurotic. Plus if we were all frugal, it would put much of the US economy out of business: less retail, less marketing, less commerce, fewer innovations to get us to spend more money. Frugality also often entails more time and work, something that Americans feel they cannot give.
I grew up in the 1950s and remember my grandmother saving waxed paper. My mother washed her aluminum foil and plastic bags for reuse and still does to some extent. Recently (within the past week) I've decided that I can easily wash and reuse zipper/onezip plastic bags for my lunches. I've seldom used the ziploc bags because they seemed rather expensive but if I reuse them, then they are actually more sustainable than the regular plastic storage bags.
We've never used many prepared and packaged foods. My mother used lots of frozen vegetables, in fact that was her norm even though we lived in southern California. I find I do too but now primarily in the winter since I can get fresh corn and beans at the farmers market. Now that Fernando is letting me compost my vegetable peelings again I feel much holier. And the shredder means that we are no longer putting all our yard wastes in the landfill but recycling everything here in our garden. In the summer, we used to have 2-3 barrels a week of garden clippings: grass clippings, weeds, branches, leaves, etc. and now we have none. This winter we barely have half a can of regular trash since I am trying to recycle everything: newspaper, mail, paper, magazines at the Abitibi recycling bin a the junior high. Corrugated and other cardboard at Construction junction. Plastic bags at giant eagle. Metal cans, glass and plastic in the biweekly recyclables collection. Fresh vegetable and fruit trimmings go into the compost, coffee grounds go directly on the soil, and softer stuff goes in my worm bin. That just leaves meat and dairy leftovers, dirty plastic, and miscellaneous items for the trash that goes in the landfill. Usable items like clothes and appliances go to the Vietnam Vets or to the Goodwill.