The Great-Floor-Egg-Disaster (or Hardwood Eggs, Anyone?)

 I’m not a morning person. Let’s just say, I struggled to convince myself to get out of bed this morning by reading an article about the ten best ways that helped a sleepaholic get out of bed. That hadn't really helped.

I’m the kind of person who shouldn’t try to cook breakfast until I’ve had a cup of coffee. I shouldn’t even try to make coffee until I’ve had a cup. My spouse knows this.

As I stumbled into the kitchen, he had three frying pans full of food cooking—onions and peppers—which he alone eats nearly every morning, corned beef hash, which he hadn’t made in some time, and a pan for fried eggs.

He started my egg first since I like mine “over easy”, which takes longer and requires greater subtly than hard- fried or sunny-side up. As a result, when that egg was almost done, but before I had sipped any coffee, he consulted me on whether my egg was ready for flipping for its eight seconds over.

I said it was about ready and took the spatula in hand. As I did so, I noticed there was a lot of oil in the pan, so I pulled a paper towel to blot the egg before its planned landing on my nearby plate.

You know what’s coming next. Somehow between pan, paper towel and spatula my egg, with the yolk perfectly runny and the white just set, did a belly-flop on the hardwood floor of our kitchen.

My two pandemic passions have been baking and cleaning. Granted they usually overlap in expected ways. This morning they overlapped in unexpected and nearly spectacular synchronicity.

The night before, in the hopes of having dinner prepared for several nights to come, we had cooked a lot of foods, resulting in major messes on all counters and the floor.

So, I had run our robot vacuum-mopper not once, not twice, but three times. The floor in the kitchen not only was cleaner than the countertops, but also most surgery suites. So, yes, I used that spatula to slide my egg off the floor and onto my plate, wiping it lightly with my waiting paper towel. I had invented the over-easy-onto-the-floor egg, not a dog hair or bit of grit in sight.

The floor had taken most of the runny yolk and also excess oil. Not only have I invented a way to produce a healthier egg with much less cholesterol, but perhaps a way to make your breakfast overall better for you.

Stay with me for just a moment. There are those who claim many of our modern auto-immune diseases, allergies and the like can be traced to our too-clean environments.

Of course, my recipe for “over-easy-onto-the-floor-egg” will only test that hypothesis if one omits the three-moppings of the floor before making the crucial flip. Perhaps I’ll try that tomorrow.

A Deadwood State of Mind

 

The world is quickly going to hell in a handbasket. Questionable elections are underway. People are walking around, armed and angry in the streets. And to make matters worse, a highly contagious disease is ravaging the population. Some folks are recovering, though not all to their pre-illness state of health. But many others are not, and often they are buried with little ceremony up on the hill, just out of town. 

And then I wake up.

To escape the anxieties of election night, November 3, 2020, we binge-watched “Deadwood”. Timothy Olyphant’s Seth Bullock’s efforts to do right, at least most of the time, in opposition to Ian McShane’s Al Swearnegen’s greedy, cutthroat grasping is perhaps a morality play for our time. That’s right, I had been dreaming I was trapped in Deadwood in the late 1800’s rather than living in Kentucky in 2020.

In an effort to forget the current traumas of 2020—pandemic, election fears in the times of Trump, and confrontations between armed and angry people in the streets— the mud, blood, and liquor-soaked noir we’ve been streaming is not that much different than the reality we’ve been trying to escape.

The real-life events of the gold rush in the South Dakota Hills make a striking setting for Deadwood’s poetic, profane, and vulgar dialogue. If all four-letter words and derivates were eliminated, the script would be half as long. But that dialogue and setting, together with the portrayal of the human struggle for money and power produced an award-winning western drama that, to date, we had not gotten around to watching.

Despite the undisputed charms of Olyphant’s character and the opportunities to strike it rich in those South Dakota hills the claustrophobic Deadwood-dreams in which I found myself enveloped, are more nightmare than escape.

Later, having analyzed the available gender roles in the “Deadwood” episodes we’ve seen, my conscious mind concludes that limited opportunities for women may be the reason the thought of living in the actual town of Deadwood is so frightening. Per the series, it seems a woman in 1870’s South Dakota had few occupational choices: prostitute, supervisor of prostitutes, broom-pusher if crippled, or fine lady required to sit in her room and wait for a man to help and protect her.

With Calamity Jane as the exception. Of course, as a non-conventional-for-the-times woman, she was mocked and derided for dressing in sensible clothes, carrying a weapon to protect herself, and speaking as ruggedly as the men. An interesting side note, in real life, just as portrayed in the program, Jane was credited with nursing back to health many of those stricken by the plague of the day, smallpox.

Though there was not much room for gender equality some 150 years ago in the wild west, I have to wonder if there couldn’t have been a place for a woman to open a café or eatery that served decent coffee and nourishing meals. At least my dream-mind wondered that.

Despite these thoughts of possible entrepreneurial opportunities in the old west, in the morning I’m relieved to find myself in the year 2020. Who amongst us wakes with that thought these days?

Maybe we need to consider the progress we have made in the last century and a half. We may have a contagious, scary disease, but we also have modern medicine and science to help us limit the spread and the deaths until vaccines are available. Even though we have yet to find a vaccine against the coronavirus, amazing progress with gene-sequencing and trials is being made.

Many Americans and talking heads are arguing about counting all the ballots, or not counting all the ballots, depending on whether their candidate currently is leading, all lawful election ballots are still being counted in swing states. We also have government institutions at the federal, state, and local levels and do not live in a lawless territory where those guns actually would be necessary. And we have institutions and Constitutional norms to determine the election of our legally-chosen representatives.

A lot of healing of the divisions amongst us is still necessary. But we all are Americans, regardless of how we voted and we still have more in common than what divides us. Protecting each other from the virus, reviving our economy, and returning to a time where we can celebrate with our friends and loved ones in person are priorities, we should be able to jointly work for. We can emulate Olyphant’s Seth Bullock and try to do right by those who cross our paths and treat each other with respect. Surely, in 150 years we’ve come a ways from the wild west.

Crazy Times

 

Last week I had an appointment with my oncologist. Not to worry, it was a routine check up after breast cancer last year. The doctor started off the conversation with asking how I was in these “crazy times”. To which I replied, “Fine, since I actually have an excuse to get out of the house.”

 

It is crazy times when a visit to the oncologist counts as cause for celebration. It’s also a bit of crazy times when I count myself lucky to have been diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago rather than now. Back then, all I had to worry about was surgery and radiation.

 

Now, in the midst of a pandemic some people have had to put off treatment; others have delayed medical screenings and may face more advanced diagnoses than they otherwise would have; and some need to worry about their particular vulnerability to a virus, which has claimed more than 215,000 American lives, while undergoing otherwise life-saving treatments.

 

As I told the doctor, I also was happy to discover that I still remembered how to drive—the skill came back, sort of like riding a bicycle. Maybe that will lead to a new saying, “Oh, it will come back—sort of like driving a car.”

 

Contrary to what this may sound like, I am not a recluse or home-bound. We go for a walk in the park every day. Though I found it odd that my husband, who has been out more than I have since he does most of the grocery shopping, said he planned to drive downtown to deliver our ballots, even though there is a drop-off site much closer to our home. He explained, “It will be fun to drive somewhere different.” Who can argue with that?

 

And we have a lot of social contacts, albeit in different formats. We talk with our sons and their families by phone regularly, email with friends, zoom with book club and other groups, and as special treats (for us) FaceTime with grandkids. 

 

I was happy to learn from our 16-year-old granddaughter with her newly-minted driving permit, that she is practicing driving in the car I had used to pick her up at daycare. Many years ago when she was a mere toddler, she told me she liked my car best “because Grandma’s car talked”. (Since I’ve always been “challenged” by directions, I had one of the earliest GPS devices.)

 

Also, since we last saw our teenage grandkids in person BP (during the time Before the Pandemic), we keep track of their heights by asking for comparisons. Not all that surprisingly, our 13-year-old grandson’s height no longer is compared to either his mother or sister but now we ask if he is taller than his father.

 

My oncologist predicted it will be at least a year before life and travel return to something approaching BP. I certainly hope we are able to visit with our grandkids in person before our grandson reaches that milestone and while we can still recognize them. 

 

In the midst of a pandemic there have been other historic disasters. And I’m not even referencing our President. Unprecedented natural disasters are announced on the news every night: fires of over four million acres, hurricanes hitting the same place twice in one year, so many hurricanes meteorologists had to move to the Greek alphabet to name them all.

 

Meanwhile, even as Mother Nature causes destruction in multiple locales, she provides some consolation in others. Despite these crazy times in which we live, autumn in the Ohio River Valley is as gorgeous as ever I recall. The golds, yellows, and reds are particularly vivid. The combination of rain, cool, and decreasing sunlight have worked their magic on the leaves to create a spectacular palate of nature.

 

Last night I chanced to look at the sky just before dark. The sky appeared to be painted with psychedelic bands of reds and purples at sunset. I am trying to sear these images into my visual memory to sustain me until we emerge from crazy times. 

Social Distancing—New Approaches

I know this post is supposed to be about new approaches to social distancing. I promised I will get to that if you bear with me. Plus, bears will come into play,  sort of, before I am done.

Despite the pandemic, those of us with our five senses more or less intact can enjoy nature and our immediate environment.  Hearing beautiful music. Seeing a spectacular sunset or just the smile on a loved one’s face on Zoom. Smelling chocolate-chip cookies baking. Tasting those cookies, sizzling sausages, or sweet chilis. Touching your dog’s soft fur. Each sense in in its own unique way enhancing our experiences of life. Or not.

My spouse claims I have a sense of smell as good as a bear. He heard on one of those National Geographic’s programs that a bear’s sense of smell is ten, or a hundred, or some multiple, times keener than a dog’s. I suppose he means by this exaggeration that I should count myself lucky. My husband needs to set a timer if he’s cooking, and have me sniff the milk to see if it’s gone sour. On the other hand, I can tell by smell alone when those chocolate-chip cookies are ready to come out of the oven. I could have picked our sons from all the other babies at the hospital nursery by smell alone. You get the picture—not exactly bear-like. But I do tend to notice smells.

Today I do not feel at all lucky to have a good sense of smell. Our collie was skunked when I let her out in the yard late last night. The poor dog was dripping skunk juice from her face when she ran back to me. 

She must have seen the skunk from our deck because she flew off of it and chased the critter until crashing into our fence. Sometimes I wish my sight were as keen as my sense of smell. Even with the outside lights on I didn’t see any critter. 

After the too close encounter with the skunk our dog and I took a midnight shower.  Again, despite not feeling all that lucky, we had a bit of good fortune to still have de-skunking shampoo from long-ago skunk encounters by a previous collie. And even more amazingly, my spouse could locate said shampoo on short notice. 

Until the pandemic we had grown accustomed to having our dog bathed and brushed by a groomer. Our technique for showering a large collie dog came back to us. I got in the shower first. My spouse pushed our recalcitrant and extremely smelly, 70-plus-pound dog into the shower with me and closed the door. After I bathed her I let her out to be dealt with further by my spouse while I thoroughly showered and scrubbed myself.  

It was well after midnight by the time we had washed everything our dog or we had come into contact with. Even though our still-skunky smelling dog was relegated to sleeping in sunroom with the windows opened and the door to the rest of the house closed, I had trouble sleeping because of the skunk smell. 

My at-times-saintly spouse got up early and walked skunky dog and then gave her a second bath, utilizing a method very similar to what we had used the night before. When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I drank a cup of coffee, which was ruined by the persistent skunk smell, and went back to bed.

I now have taken a second shower with scented body wash, washed my hair thoroughly, put just about everything into the washer again and have sat down to tell you the best way to social distance. I doubt anyone with a nose will want to get within 20 yards of us. But I empathically do not recommend it as your first choice. 

Happy skunky 4th from us. I’ve had more than enough fireworks. I sure hope yours smells better than ours.

Two Brilliant Ideas for Surviving in the Time of Coronavirus

I have two unrelated, but brilliant ideas. Both are almost too good to be true, but for totally different reasons. 

I am a little reluctant to share these ideas, again, for totally different reasons. Nevertheless, an obnoxious sense of do-goodery compels me to share them here with you, dear readers. Make of them what you will. 

First, and most importantly, is an idea that definitely will slow the spread of coronavirus. Since I don’t tweet or reddit or whatever it is most non-senior citizens do, this idea will require a little help. Perhaps a younger person could make it go viral, or, alternatively, someone who is on Fox TV and is willing to help out for the good of America. Please share this idea. You can even claim it as your own: 

President Trump or his campaign needs to start making and selling “Make America Great Again” masks. 

Dr. Fauci testified today that new coronavirus cases could hit 100,000 a day in this country if we don’t do something. The half of this country where the virus is spreading faster than wildfire also is where many people are unwilling to wear masks. Is it because of whatever political statement a mask may imply? Or because they watch only Fox news and listen only to the President and believe their lies? Or because they just don’t care about their fellow humans. Or some other undecipherable reason?

I don’t know the reasons for their refusal to be guided by scientific facts. But if President Trump were to combine his greed and his campaign slogan with just an ounce of concern for his followers, he would have a recipe for slowing the spread of coronavirus. His followers would buy and wear masks and forget that he ever said masks weren’t needed. The virus would ease its spread in Trump-country and maybe we could all go back to something approaching normalcy a little sooner. 

 My only hesitancy is I will hate to see that sea of red MAGA masks on his followers’ faces. Don’t get me wrong: we do need to make America great again, after the destruction Trump has brought to American lives, our economy, and Constitutional safeguards. But I’m hoping we will get that chance in November. In the meantime, I would like to save MAGA lives. See what I mean about my tendency towards do-gooderism?

I also am reluctant to share my other, totally-unrelated suggestion. For a totally different and much more selfish reason: I do not want to create a toilet-paper-like “run” on a product I have decided is miraculous. Chia Seeds. Please be assured that chia seeds’ potentially new-found popularity and shortages are the only relationship they have to toilet paper.

I discovered that chia seeds are the easiest “cooking” product ever. I’m still not sure how you pronounce the name (much like my problem with quinoa for quite a while). I can’t recall what led me to buy two pounds of organic chia seeds on Amazon during one of my online shopping frenzies at the start of the shutdown. I think perhaps I was envisioning a bunker with our kids and grandkids staying with us and someone knowing what to do with chia seeds. That never happened. 

Our kids and their families stayed safely ensconced in their own homes, many miles from us. We all sort of established our own home bunkers. And I was left to deal with the results of many ill- or well-advised hasty, online purchases. Though I will say I never acquired a humongous stash of toilet paper I now have large quantities of strange items in our pantry and cabinets.

Yesterday, because my spouse was getting tired of moving the two-pound jar of chia seeds around in the pantry, I looked up chia recipes for the first time. The results of my experiments, unlike some of my other baking and home projects, turned out great. I now am keeping the chia seeds in a place of honor and prominence. 

You can mix a few chia seeds with water (Online recipes tell you how much to use.) in substitution of eggs in baking recipes; you can make very easy puddings with them—mix with any kind of “milk” and whatever and let sit in fridge for a couple of hours or overnight. You can add all kinds of things to your chia creations, make smoothies, eat the chia seeds either dissolved or as a crunchy topping. After the seeds sit in liquid for a while and develop into a pudding-like consistency you can blend the pudding if you want it to be smoother. Either with or without add-ins like fruit. According to reputable online info chia seeds also are amazingly nutritious and good for your digestion. 

All of that would be beside the point if they tasted terrible. But they don't. I put just a few in banana bread and they improved the texture and taste. I also made two kinds of chia seed pudding—for both I mixed four tablespoons chia seeds to a cup of milk. You also can use other, milk-like products. I mixed one chia pudding with dark cocoa and maple syrup. The other I mixed with just maple syrup and vanilla. The chocolate pudding was delicious and I had some of the other with fresh fruit this morning. They both tasted great and gave me a feeling of fullness without any stomach issues. And since I have celiac disease and gastritis it’s a big deal for me to not have stomach issues. 

I checked on Amazon and the two-pound jar of organic seeds is less than $7. For now. 

If you know all about chia seeds please disregard all of the above about chia seeds. I know it sounds a bit like it’s written by a new religious convert. If you haven’t tried chia seeds yet, try them. But please do not hoard all of them like you hoarded toilet paper a few months ago. Leave some for me when I’ve used up my two pounds worth.

The Great Baking Disaster, Time of Coronavirus Series

Yesterday my project was baking bread. I have celiac disease so I counted myself lucky to find and order a box of gluten-free bread mix with hard-to-find yeast. I carefully followed the directions, making substitutes only when necessary because of the limitation of ingredients we had on hand.

I set the loaf carefully in the oven to rise, utilizing the “proof” setting on the fanciest oven I’ve ever had. When the dough had nicely risen above the level of the pan, I pulled it out of the oven and set the temperature for baking. In the meantime, I sat and rested as I again checked Amazon to see if they might have one of the items for which I had been searching in vain.

The oven beeped to signal the correct baking temperature had been reached. So, I opened the oven door, picked up the glass pan of bread dough, and, oops, it slipped from my hands, just as I was setting it on the middle rack. The glass pan did a sideways landing. As I tried to right the pan it tipped all the way over (another “oops") and very sticky bread dough dripped from that rack onto the rest of the racks. If this had occurred on I-65, the guy in the traffic copter would have called it a rollover accident with probable fatalities. I must have said something, (probably not “oops”) as my spouse, god love him, came running.

If I’d had my wits about me, I would have taken a photo or just sat down and cried. Instead, using spatulas, knives, pot holders, and our hands, we both tried to scoop the dough back into the pan. In doing so we only made the mess worse. I felt like I was in an old Woody Allen film, back when they were slapstick funny. We had spread the sticky dough everywhere, including on the oven door, between the oven door and the frame, and the floor.

We wiped the mess as best we could and I looked at the dough we had managed to recover and put back in the pan. It was a lot less dough and the top of the dough was covered with little black specks of burnt-on food picked up from its adventure on the oven shelves and door. You clean-food people will be happy to know we tossed the dough that had landed on the floor or outside the oven.

If you truthfully are repelled by a little dirt, do not read the rest of this post--REALLY! STOP READING NOW!--because I scraped some of the black spots out of the dough, smoothed the top, and put it back in the oven.

By dinner time the smell of fresh-baked bread filled our kitchen. I carefully took the bread pan from the oven and, after letting it rest, removed the loaf from the pan.

The great baking disaster ended well. We each enjoyed a slice of the bread with a little butter, proclaiming the taste excellent. No apparent traces of oven debris were found in the loaf—at least so far as we could tell. Maybe it’s helpful our old eyes don’t see as well as they once did. We also concluded, with some scientific-sounding pronouncements, whatever bits of previously burnt food that might remain no doubt were safe to eat after baking.

Belatedly, I realized my error that had caused the calamity. Following the bread-making directions, I had spread butter on the top of the dough as it proofed in the oven. But I had not covered the bread. When the dough rose, the butter had melted and apparently dripped down the outside of the pan making the glass pan slippery.

There were many beneficial outcomes from the great baking disaster. In addition to having fresh bread for dinner, giving the kitchen floor an extra cleaning, needing to wash all the towels, pot-holders and the like that had become bread-dough encrusted, I also learned a lesson of what not to do when baking bread. And perhaps most significant, I don’t have to worry about my next project: reading the manual for cleaning the oven.

Happy fun in the kitchen to all of you.

Staying Busy in the Time of Coronavirus

Heroes live amongst us. At hospitals, emergency services, grocery stores, trucking, meat-packing plants, farms, and the hosts of other occupations that until recently we have failed to recognize, these heroes have been more than busy. The rest of us who are not on the front lines have mostly been stuck at home.

John Milton wrote, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” I doubt he was talking about staying home during coronavirus, but who cares? The quote sounds appropriate to this time. And a lot of us are getting tired of “standing and waiting”, especially with masks on and at least six feet apart.

If we are honest we know that in comparison to the front-line heroes’ sacrifices, our small inconveniences are miniscule and petty. So, I offer some encouragement to those of you itching to get out and about but knowing it’s a bad idea to race to the nearest, newly-opened bar, restaurant, or other non-essential place where you can become part of the second wave of coronavirus.

There have been so many articles and stories written on how to amuse yourself at home, how to fix your own appliances or plumbing, how to cook gourmet dinners, clean your house like a professional, or preserve your home-grown produce I won’t add to them. Personally, I’ve seen so many ideas for these amusements I’ve had to pace myself. After all, I’m a retired senior.

As Al Pacino would, and did, say, In Scent of a Woman, “I’ve been around, you know.” At one time I cleaned my own home, including scrubbing the front steps and my kitchen on my hands and knees, baking bread and making homemade granola, cooking dinners, making jams and juice, as well as working at least 40 hours outside our home. Until we had the financial wherewithal to send shirts to the cleaners, I also ironed my spouse’s and sons’ shirts. Since then, I’ve endured a tiny bit of well-deserved complaint from my daughters-in-law for our sons’ lack of domestic experience. A true Wonder Woman would not try to do most everything herself but teach others how to do for themselves.

Now, my knees, hips, back, and the rest of me aren’t what they use to be. I try to walk a bit in the park every day. The rest of the time I sit and read, interspersing a project or a chore per day. Oh, and I also spend some time nearly every day seeing what necessities I might be able to order online. I found trail mix and cloth face masks online and ordered both. Though not the type of trail-mix my spouse prefers.

We have all gotten used to not just settling but being happy to find anything close to what we want in some categories: different cuts of meat, different types of household cleaners, as well as more expensive prices for ordinary things. I for one, can’t figure why the pandemic has caused toilet paper to be scarce and the price of body wash and contact lens cleaner to both increase by a factor of ten. But we celebrated my husband’s last shopping trip when he scored not just disinfecting wipes but Charmin toilet paper. Woohoo!

I also was successful in ordering gluten free bread mix, complete with yeast. Who knew celiac disease would turn out to be a blessing. Soon I will tell you about my baking project. For now, I hope you stay healthy and can continue to try to keep yourself and others safe by staying home and waiting awhile longer.