Saturday, October 29, 2011

Marks of Success

About a year ago I took an interest in cooking.  It turns out that I'm pretty good at it.  I have a good instinct for it.  It's been a ton of fun building my own cookbook and trying new recipes.  I love planning menus and organizing the grocery list so that I have a plan when it comes to dinner every night.  I feel like I am doing something good for my family as well as for our household.  It's funny how what I see as being a success was one of the trappings my own mother and especially her mother broke free from.  Grandma was a professional woman.  In the 40's darned few women went back to work after having children.  Usually if a women went back to work after she had kids, it was because, for some reason, her husband couldn't or wouldn't support the needs of the family.  With Grandma, that wasn't the case.  I mean sure, they struggled through the depression like everybody else, but Grandpa had a pretty good nest-egg stashed.  Grandma didn't cook much.  I remember a few breads and things, our joke was always that our favorite family recipes could be "found on the back of the box" of brownies, or cake or whatever.  In a lot of ways, to a lot of people, Grandma had made it.  She had a good marriage, family and a career.  My own mother was a stay at  home mom, but she was really involved with a lot of things and rarely stayed at home on any given day.  She was a lousy cook.  To be very honest, I don't even think she really enjoyed what she cooked.  I think "eatable" was really her highest goal in cooking.  She had one cookie dough recipe she used for everything.  It had variations for peanut butter cookies, chocolate chip, and sugar cookies.  It was the only recipe she ever used to make cookies.  Ever.  She tried lots of new recipes.  But in the end, while mom was good at a lot of things, cooking wasn't one of them.  It was never a priority for her.  She had other things she wanted to spend her time on.  It's funny to me to look at how the marks of success change.  My grandmother "got" to work and didn't cook.  Just a couple of generations later I "get" to stay home and love cooking.  I wonder what my daughter will do.  :)

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Me learning to cook & the Visa commercial

So I only started to cook about a year ago.  It has been fun, I seem to have a good instinct for these things.  The best story, however, comes from last Christmas.  I wanted to revive the Norwegian tradition of making 7 different kinds of cookies for the holidays.  I found one recipe that looked really good, but I had to order one ingredient from Amazon.com.  Bakers Ammonia is hard to find, and stupid expensive when you can find it.  So, there I am making these Norwegian almond cookies and rolling the dough into little balls and sticking them in the freezer and my husband had a childhood flashback: he remembered those little dough balls in the freezer.  So after they had frozen, and I cooked them, yep, they were exactly what my husband remembered from his childhood.  A recipe that they thought they had lost with their Grandma, and I had pulled it off of the Internet.  Who would have freaking guessed?  It was better than a visa commercial, cause I had made the cookies-and they were perfect.  We sent goodie boxes to all of his family for Christmas.  For me, the best thing ever was giving them a little of their past as a Christmas gift.  I hope to do it again this year, I have another recipe I need to try.  :D

women like that

I hate women like that.  Even today in our modern world sometimes simply being a women puts us gals at a disadvantage.  My husband's best friend has had the misfortune of having been married to two of those women who give the rest of us a bad name and it pisses me off!  Wife #1 cheated on him, got credit cards in his name, and of course ran them up to the limits, and when he finally found out about it all, she wouldn't even talk about anything.  She just bailed.  He never saw it coming.  He pretty much lost everything-and his credit.  So after living on hot-dogs for a couple of years, he pulled himself out of debt and went back to working only one job so he could have a social life again.  Enter wife #2 (current wife).  I'm sure she has redeeming qualities, but for the life of me, I cannot understand how anyone can have such a one sided view of the world.  The first Monday of EVERY month she has a standing hair appointment.  Every Tuesday she has her nails done, every other Tuesday she gets a pedicure, too.  She doesn't work outside the home and her one child is long since out of the house (I think he's nearly 30 now) and she constantly complains about how busy she is.  The kicker?  The once or twice a year my husband and his best friend get a chance to go out and have a couple beers together, she gripes about the cost of him going out!  My husband said the last time he was at their house she acted like he (my husband) was stealing the bread from their table.  And given that my husband has to drive an hour and a half each way, it's not like they go out and hit every bar in town!  Seriously, there's this little Mexican joint they head to, have a couple of beers and the fish tacos.  That's it!  And she complains about him spending the money to go out-with his best friend since high school-like once every 10 months or so.  I hate women like that.  Don't you?

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

I'm still a little twitchy

I used to like October.  The change of seasons is refreshing.  Leaves turning colors, crisp air, all that sort of stuff.  Now it seems that October just makes me apprehensive and uneasy.  Two years ago my husband and I had the October from hell.  There is no explaining the build up of pressure that happened all around us.  A lot of it didn't happen directly to us, so much as it seemed like every thing around us crumbled.  Over the course of one month six people we knew died.  Some, like my Aunt's passing was sad, but not tragic.  My friends niece dying at age 12 in a car accident was tragic.  Lenny OD-ing in a hotel room came as a shock, too.  Another two were lost to cancer.  Our neighbor had been unhealthy for a while, but none of us thought he was gonna up and die right then.  Two others were injured in a way that neither of them will ever fully recover.  With one of them we still don't know exactly what the hell happened, head injury, possible bear attack, unfortunately when our friend came out of his two month coma, he had no clue as to what happened.  My husband and then 4yr old daughter got H1N1.  Pretty much the highlight of the month was the cat breaking his leg. 
     I've been thinking about some of them a lot lately.  I miss them.  So I'm gonna try to keep a lid on it, but every once in a while I look back at that month and still get a little shakey.  October sure ain't what it used to be.