Spicy

A colleague of mine recently asked if I was ever going to spice up my blog. He was referring to another blog he was following that had become.....well, let's just say, "informational."  I reminded him that my blog is for those who are not afraid to live with beige and I am an old school girl. Some things are best said only in a diary with a little key attached.

Just to be clear, even the lives of beige people can contain a little spiciness. In fact, just this week I experienced a few heart pounding moments as I drove my car well beyond the recommended mileage for gas consumption.  Idling at a very busy intersection with the little red gas pump symbol flashing at me and the zero-miles digital reminder is all it takes to get my blood racing. Trudging to a gas station with a red can is akin to wearing a scarlet letter "S" for stupid. I made a mental note to be more proactive at the pump.

Teaching middle school students has its snappy moments as well. There is nothing that says trauma better than herding 350 fidgeting adolescents into a stuffy auditorium for a group presentation. My fellow teachers and I post ourselves strategically throughout the aisles as our eyes furtively seek out malfeasant activity. We zoom in with laser like precision as we pluck out any stinkers, all the while smiling and nodding along with the presentation. Middle school assemblies are always just one rabble rouser away from chaos, therefore, vigilance is not optional.

Filing income taxes is another Bates motel event. It is anybody's guess how that will end. Each year I confidently pull out my file folder marked "Taxes" and smugly believe it will contain all the information we need for our accountant. Each year I realize that pride goeth before a fall as my husband and I slog through piles of random receipts, only to realize a few of the most important documents have gone AWOL. And each year I wonder if our marriage can survive another year of filing taxes. Miraculously, vital scraps of paper are located, numbers are crunched and a check is grudgingly written. We emerge from the tax office, vowing to read the tome called Taxes and You. (I am not even going to address the brochure my husband picked up at the office entitled, Divorce & Taxes.) We continue to cling to our dream of becoming tax savvy citizens, despite our dismal track record.

Last, but not least, we have rhubarb, a fruit/vegetable/greenish-red plant that has enough pucker power to shame a lemon. We live on the edge of toxicity each time we pull the leaves off the prized stalks, wondering if anyone has ever died from a rhubarb plant. An hour later we have the smell of a pie edging out our horticultural fears and we happily dish up another piece of dessert goodness.

There you have it. Life in the fast lane with a beige person. If you need a little more spiciness, you are just going to have find the key to my diary. Be prepared to weep.

Tomato Jam

Some combinations defy logic and good sense. Avocado ice cream. Quiet children. Easy puzzles. Shadeless windows. Smooth transitions. Lowfat cheese. Small problems. Four season porches in the upper Midwest. My husband and me (almost 40 years of opposites attracting).

Recently, I stumbled upon another interesting combination, tomato jam.  I vaguely remember some such jam recipe many, many years ago in an attempt to tame a bumper crop of tomatoes. Blame it on a poor recipe or an unrefined palate, the jam never made it to the table. Fast forward thirty plus years and I am back at the stove watching a burbling mass of tomatoes, onions, sugar and ginger work its way into a jammy concoction. I am skeptical and intrigued as I taste and retaste. To be sure, this is not your mother's toast topper. The crimson jam's savory sweetness is best reserved for its true destination, meat. Lamb, to be precise.

I am on a determined quest to conquer the world of lamb, despite no background whatsoever with the bleating little hoofers. My protein needs as a child were provided by our farmstead homies, chicken, beef, pork and an occasional pheasant. Not a lamb in the herd. It wasn't until I ordered lamb chops at a restaurant that I discovered there was nothing to fear from the sheep. In fact, the taste was delightful and I needed more.

Thanks to the lamb procurement adventures of my brother-in-law, I currently have a freezer filled with lamb options. Marinated lamb chops, braised lamb shanks and Moroccan lamb stew deliciously warmed our bellies this winter. The lamb spareribs were tested and will not make another appearance on our table. The leg of lamb surprised us with less flavor than expected and challenged me to look for a flavor punch.

Enter, tomato jam. And an adventurous husband. We sliced the leg of lamb leftovers and layered them on homemade focaccia bread with a generous helping of the peppery sweet jam. Munch. Taste. Determine flavor profile. Nibble. Another bite. More jam. Add a little cooling yogurt sauce. Taste again. One more bite. Heads nodding. Mmm, leg of lamb sandwiches with tomato jam and yogurt sauce. Add it to the recipe repertoire.

And here is the best part. Old people can try new things. And like them. We may look longingly at the pasture across the fence and wonder if that is where we should be spending our time. But deep down inside we know that we still want to nibble on a little tomato jam once in awhile.

Keep your gates open. You never know which herd is going to show up.

Falling Star

One joy of living on the prairie is space. As much as I enjoy trees, mountains, oceans and lakes, my heart always settles when I am back on a grass studded landscape and my eyes can relax into a sea of subtlety. It is a place where shades of green, brown and gold are punctuated by a wildflower or two. It is a place that can be much maligned or valiantly revered. It is a place that sets forth no pretense of being flashy or instantly gratifying. Its harshness rasps off the unsubstantial and its gentleness nurtures the delicate. It is, most assuredly, not a terrain for the faint of heart.

Finding treasures on the plains is about contrast. Scanning a calm night sky can result in a gasp inducing falling star. Tromping through knee-high vegetation can stir up a circus of jumping grasshoppers. Listening to silence is quickly accompanied by a meadowlark's lilting ditty. Abandoned country roads are traversed by pickup trucks bobbing along with a determined purposefulness.

Perhaps one lesson of the prairie is learning to appreciate the mundane. Despite a steady stream of Facebook posts and Twitter feeds to the contrary, I suspect many of us live relatively flatline lives. We do laundry, dust furniture, go to work, sit in the dentist's chair, watch television, unload the dishwasher, mop up spills and make soup. Our eyes scan another ordinary day with a sigh. We wonder if a life of duty will make us dull. We long for a falling star.

It is time to embrace our inner prairie. Do not be afraid to rejoice in the balm of the ordinary. Celebrate duty as an opportunity to serve and obey. Smile when a bird sings. Fling open the curtains to peek at what will paint the sky today. Send a real birthday card and sign it in cursive. Drink two cups of coffee in a row. Skip a week of dusting, or two, or three. Eat cheese curls in the car. Play the piano. Sew on a button. Water a plant. Read casserole recipes. Buy a new broom. Pray.

Give the prairie a chance to send down deep roots and do what needs to be done. And, hey, if a falling star comes your way, stop and enjoy a moment even Pinterest cannot duplicate.

Baton

Spring is track and field season, or so they say. I have never had the skill or competitive inclination to run in oval patterns, jump over mini-fences, free fall from poles or hoist big stones. I am content to participate in less vigorous activities and eat cookies.

Spring is also the season of teacher fatigue. After grinding away through three quarters of hope, mercy and prodding, reality sets in with a deafening thud. Students continue to hand in late assignments, if at all. Class clowns find their audiences ever ready for another show. Copy machines squelch out obscene messages such as "paper jam". E-mail inboxes fill up with lists of students who are traveling thither and yon. The number 2 pencil of standardized testing is replaced with computers, earbuds, passwords and fickle internet connections.  And, perhaps the most challenging of all is the realization that there are a few students who might not win the school game this round.

They are the students who go home with us in our heads. They take up mental space as we drive to and from work. They force us to play the "What If" game. What if I moved her closer to my desk, or if I worked with him during lunch or if I called his mother again or if we started a new behavior contract. If, if, if. The perplexing swirl of uncertainty grates away at the bedrock of progress and makes us weary with doubt.

Maybe, it is better to take off the teacher glasses and put on a coach's hat in the spring. The school year is really a lot like a relay race. Students are handed off to us by their guardians and their previous year's teachers. We read the rule books and practice our hand offs, we know how all of this should work. We grab the baton with gusto and begin the run. Run, breathe, run, breathe. Make it happen.

Then the variables set in. Unforeseen slippery spots appear on the track.  Headwinds buck our progress. Opposing teams get into our heads. Fingers feel numb to the baton. Legs feel like jello. Self talk turns incriminating. The finish line is nowhere to be found. Give it up, give it up. Gut it out, gut it out. What's it going to be?

Teachers gut it out. We know this race called a school year. Some variables can be controlled and others are out of our reach. We are handed batons of regulation size and we are handed batons that are too heavy or too slippery or too large. We start around the track, believing we can win and resist the urge to look back and ask for a new baton. Win or lose, we chug forward.

And when the time comes to hand off the baton to the next team player, we know that we had a part in whatever the scoreboard eventually displays. Maybe it isn't our turn to have the best career stats. Or maybe the variables will get the best of us on occasion. But, by gumby, we show up and we run. We run with the belief that races can be won and that no baton is ours to keep forever. Pass it on and take a breath.

Wild Plums

Fruit. The botanical temptress of both man and beast. Those of us living in the upper Midwest are all too aware of this fact. Yes, we can purchase squishy berries shipped in from Chile or sad little mangoes from...I don't know where, but the taste will never be the same as eating a peach or strawberry recently harvested from nearby locales. During the winter months, many of us resign ourselves to eating apples, oranges, apples, oranges and bananas. Occasionally, we might pick up a pear or two to spice things up and if we are really feeling exotic, we will go for a parsnip. Technically, not a fruit but they look dangerously able to keep scurvy at bay.

The most delicious fruit memories for me happened during my youth. The countryside was a perfect playground for foraging little vagabonds and we took full advantage of the seasonal opportunities. Our grove of trees included a few wild plum bushes, Prunus americana. Late spring saw the plum bushes sprouting sweetly fragranced white flowers with the promise of abundant fruit a few weeks later. Our daily trek to the mailbox at the end of the grove included a spot check on the plum situation. When the word went out that the fruit was ready to go, the urgency to beat the birds began. We brought out the little buckets and did our best to fill them fuller than our stomachs. No easy task. The branches on a wild plum bush are armed with thorns, demanding a deft hand and a keen eye. The first plum picked was ceremoniously popped into the mouth and the tart sweetness was declared delicious. We proceeded to pick and eat, pick and eat until our bellies could hold no more and our buckets had a reasonable amount of fruit for a jar or two of jam. In reality, wild plums are a thick skinned, mealy and sour fruit, hardly the food of gourmet distinction. We didn't know that. All we knew is that winter had released its glacial grip and spring had offered us a gift of juicy pleasure.

A little later in the season, the mulberry trees, Morus rubra, began sharing their bounty. Our jackpot tree was located down a rutted dirt road, through a barbed wire fence and across a few yards of prickly, stickly pasture land. The trek usually involved a jumbo-tired bicycle and a selfish doggedness to beat the rest of the siblings to the treasure trove. Occasionally, we brought a bucket with us but that was for prop purposes only. We all knew that the sticky sweet berries had only one destination and that was our stomachs. My mother was a wise woman and our attempts to convince her that the birds had gotten most of the fruit were trumped out by our blue stained fingers and shirts. I don't remember that she ever scolded us for our greediness but I also know that we never had an abundance of mulberry jam.

Our most prized culinary harbinger of spring wasn't a fruit at all. It was asparagus, Asparagus officinalis. The precious little spears nuzzled their way out of the cool ground and we watched them with an anticipation given to most newborns. When we could stand the wait no longer, the stalks were snapped gently at the base and gingerly taken up to the house for the first fresh green treat of the season. Usually the diners outnumbered the spears so each asparagus gem was parsed out with great care. To this day I enjoy the buttery "juice" left over from the boiled asparagus because that is often all that was left after the bowl had made it around the table to me. (Full disclaimer: My siblings often disagree with my table memories.)

We are just a few days away from the official vernal equinox and it is not too soon to get the fruit dessert recipes ready to go. Rest assured, we will enjoy every bite of what the sun has to offer.

Peevish

Pet peeves. We all have them. They don't have to make sense but they do drive us senseless. No matter how much we try to ignore them or sing another refrain of "Let It Go", pet peeves continue to niggle us. Occasionally, we are able to set one aside, but most often we are plagued with a persistent few that set our teeth into a grinding motion. Here are a few of mine.

1) Encroachment--I prefer to grocery shop when the rest of the world is sleeping in, but when I find myself caught up with the masses, I am quickly subject to muscle tension. This is especially true when I am going through the checkout line and the customer behind me insists on nudging a cart into my space. It is not like there is any doubt where their cart ends and my ample behind begins. It is more a case of urgency without respect to boundaries. It is difficult to sign my name on the card dealy-bob when I have a cart stuck in my rib cage and and my body is askew. Manners, people, manners.

2) Pop-up ads--One does become numb to the barrage of ads that troll around on our computer screens on a daily basis but there are occasions when it is difficult to ignore the flashing, spinning, cannot-find-the-close-button ads. In addition, there are the belly fat pictures, miracle cures from strange tropical fruits and, in my case, old age stuff. Creepy. And not tempting.

3) Dust--How is it that two people, living extremely dull lives, can generate a coating on so many surfaces in so little time? Nancy Neatnik, I am not, but I do feel slovenly when I see my butt print on the piano bench after I stand up. Not sure if I am more depressed about having to dust again or the size of that butt print.

4) Dibbles--Strictly defined, a dibble is a gardening tool. In my world, dibbles are the leftover bits and pieces from meals throughout the week. Cooking is not an exact science. There always seem to be a few leftover beans, one stray pork chop, a half container of yogurt, one clump of grapes and other such non sequitur items. Thus, there are times we have a dibbles meal with all the gusto of a sloth. More likely, I do the fridge purge and say a prayer for the starving citizens of the world.

5) Prescription drug commercials--They always start out with happy, smiling folks embracing a life free of some malady. And then the shoe drops. Boy Howdy. It is hard to stay focused on contentment when the list of possible side effects is finally disclosed. I am not sure I could muster up the courage to ask my doctor for a drug that can potentially cause double vision, leprosy or persistent diarrhea.

Hope you have a peeve free week. And if you like to dust, just let me know. I can make you really happy.

Popeye

Power foods. Nutritional wonders. Cure-alls.  Secret remedies. Call it what you may, the list of miraculous foods seems to cycle through year after year. Some foods stay on the list for a while and others have a short claim to fame. The guaranteed-to-lose-weight diets are no less fickle. There is the cabbage juice diet (delicious on the first day, not so much by day twelve), the Atkins diet (great for bacon lovers, hard on toast munchers), the gluten-free diet (necessary if you have a medical condition, questionable if you just want to "feel" healthy) and last but not least the pre-packaged food diets (the pictures on the boxes look delightful, starvation can make cardboard taste good),

I don't know how it happened, but my generation somehow managed to grow up without miracle foods. When we were hungry, we ate whatever was put on the table. If it was liver and onions night, that is what we dined upon. If the garden was producing an abundance of swiss chard, we munched away on the boiled green mass. Chicken butchering day meant a sizzling pan of fried chicken and a fight over a limited number of gizzards. Jars of home canned green beans made their way to our table throughout the cold winter months. Lugs of peaches sent us all into high gear as we started our assembly line of blanching, slicing and funneling slippery fruit pieces into sterilized jars. Homemade bread greeted us with a come hither fragrance as we tumbled into the house after a long day at school. The family cow kept our glasses full of milk and our desserts topped with fresh cream. Grunty, rooting pigs gave us salty, smoky bacon for lunch box sandwiches. The kitchen oven cranked out comfy casseroles, tasty bars and a never ending supply of chocolate chip cookies. Never once were we told that what we were eating was Dr. Oz approved.

We did, however, take one recommendation seriously. We listened to Popeye. Popeye was a cartoon character we watched on our black and white TV, snowy reception and all. He was a rather hapless fellow who found himself in situations that required enormous amounts of courage and strength to save the day. Just when we thought he would not overcome defeat, Popeye would grab a can of spinach, chug it down in one gulp and sing, "I'm strong to the fin-ich, cause I eats me spinach. I'm Popeye the sailor man!" And, sure enough, the can of greens made his muscles bulge and his eyes sparkle as good triumphed over evil. If spinach was good enough for Popeye, it was good enough for us.

To this day, I believe in good old-fashioned spinach. It is not fashionable like kale. It doesn't sparkle like pomegranate seeds. It doesn't have celebrity endorsements like pistachios. And it certainly doesn't claim to cure hangnails and warts.

But, the next time you are feeling a bit peckish, I recommend a hearty spinach salad. And if you need to keep up with the latest food miracle, throw a pickle on top. I hear fermented foods are really in this year.