Category Archives: Life at Home

Pie & Shrimp Tales

23 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by in Far Away Places, In the Kitchen, Life at Home

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“… I also remember Grandma baking lots of sugar cookies, lemon pie and candied sweet potatoes, but I’ve no recipes for these.  Grandma just threw these things together from memory.”

— Cousin Nellie Yadon’s recollection of Great-Grandma Taylor’s cooking, published in the Centennial Cookbook of Rock Creek Baptist Church, 1997.

Five days gone from the Florida Keys and I’m not ready to write of my visit in any serious fashion.  Instead, I’ve been catching up on the life I missed and catching up on birthdays I missed, while key memories wash in and away from the shores of my mind.

Celebrating birthdays once had me making home-cooked meals for each of my children and their families — I’d prepare whatever the honoree selected from my standard “menu” of meals.  That stopped in the year of Daddy.   And carried on through the Summer of Sis.  And the very long difficult year of moving uptown twenty blocks and the grief that followed in the wake of dying relationships.  Was that just last year?

The straight-up story is that the part of me that used to relish making birthday dinners for everyone just quietly died.  And that these days, I celebrate family birthdays more quietly.  Smaller gatherings.  Smaller meals.  Sometimes a special restaurant.  Or maybe I’ll make some sweet dessert.  And when desired, I’ll help my children pull together birthday dinners for their families.  But usually, I limit home-cooked birthday meals for the two I share home with — unless away from the home-front, like last week.

My youngest, who still calls my home his, turned 24 on the 12th, when we were  walking up and down the party street of Duval in Key West. So last Friday I arrived home with need of cooking Kyle a birthday meal.  By then, already two birthday meals in the black, he was still happy to redeem my guilt, once I offered up two of three favorites — home-made calzones followed by twenty-four chocolate chip cookies — fresh from the oven.

Only later did I wonder whether Kyle might have preferred his favorite fried shrimp. For some fishy reason, I never thought “shrimp.”  Maybe it had to do with all that seafood my husband and I enjoyed last week? — but the idea never floated across my mind.  Until later.  Until I stumbled across frozen bags of Wild Key West Pink Shrimp while shopping at Whole Foods.

We’d hope to stumble across these ‘not-to-be-missed’, “sweet pink shrimp harvested from the crystal clear waters of the Florida Keys” while IN the Florida Keys last week.  But no.  Instead, all up and down the Keys, not once did we find these sweet pinks offered on the menu.  But being good sports and all, we kept ourselves busy trying conch and stone crab, then dining on shrimp and Yellow-tail Snapper and Mahi-mahi and Grouper, every seafood meal long hoping to catch sight of the words — Key West Pink Shrimp — printed on the menu.

It took dining at Southern Living magazine’s “pick” for Key West Pink Shrimp for me to raise the white flag.   Not finding them again, I asked our server, half expecting they might be an ‘off-menu’ item.  Instead, she gave us a shocking pink shrimp tale —  how they’d been taken off menus due to unsteady supplies.

At the time, the story seemed plausible.  Even though it didn’t mesh with Southern Living magazine’s recent write-up on the Keys, reporting “these succulent crustaceans are available year-round.”  But now I’m not so sure.  Seeing all those frozen tails while fishing the aisles of my local grocers, I’m thinking pink shrimp could be a sister to that other Key delicacy made with limes and a graham cracker pie shell; because both appear to lack straight-up stories.

Who invented Key Lime Pie? Nobody knows.

Who makes the best Key Lime Pie?   “We do.”

Where can I find Key West Pink Shrimp in the Keys?  Here’s a home-made shrimp tale I’ve spliced together:  Nobody knows like we do — at Whole Foods.

~~~~~~~

When it comes to being best in pie-making, the stories coming out of the Keys have nothing on my family’s.  A somewhat friendly sister rivalry had Aunt Jo tops in the categories of Pumpkin and Pecan and Mom with Coconut Cream Pie.  And though both made their best version of lemon pie, no one, but no one, made lemon pie like Great-Grandma Taylor’s.  Why more than fifty years after her death, we’re still talking about that pie, though most of us never tasted it.

But Mother had.  And so had Jo. And I suppose both sisters loved that lemon pie enough to emulate.  Perhaps this explains why Mother especially favored a particular tale about a lemon pie even more, since it raised questions about the fineness of her sister Jo’s pie-making abilities.  Mother told the story often — whenever Sister Jo wasn’t around — and last Monday, while four of us shared a lemon cream pie I made for Jane’s birthday, we relished the tale again.

Jane remembers the story taking place at a long-ago Mother-Daughter banquet held at Rock Creek Baptist Church.  Her mother — the woman we grandkids called Granny — sat with her three daughters — Jo, Mother and herself — with Great-Grandma sitting next to Jo.  It was likely not a catered affair since Aunt Jo contributed a lemon pie for dessert.  And because she knew Great-Grandma’s particular fondness for lemon pie, Jo offered to get her grandmother’s dessert; and, without mentioning she had been the pie-maker, Jo presented Great-Grandma a slice of lemon pie.

To this day, nobody knows why Jo kept her lemon pie-making a secret from Great-Grandma Taylor.   Perhaps she’d hoped Great-Grandma would rave over it, or maybe she wanted her pie to stand the test of an impartial judge.  But never hearing Jo’s side of the story, I can only report that a few bites into Jo’s lemon pie, Great-Grandma leaned into Jo and whispered in her ear, “I don’t know WHO made this lemon pie, but they sure were stingy with the sugar.”

Being on the end of a straight-up answer — Jo might say —  is perhaps not all it’s cracked up to be.  Especially when it’s stingy with the sugar and just a bit tart.  Like Great-Grandma’s famed lemon pie.  Or like Great-Grandma herself.  And maybe like my version of that famous family pie without an official recipe — that for the record, one might call, an ‘off-menu’ item of mine.

Lemon Cream Pie

Meringue

3 egg whites
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
6 Tbsp sugar

Separate egg white from yolk — set aside yolk for pie filling.  In a medium-sized mixing bowl, beat egg whites and cream of tartar with an electric mixer on high until foamy — add sugar gradually, beating until stiff and glossy.  Set aside.

One 9″ Baked Pie Shell

Pie Filling

3 egg yolks
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp water
~~~
1/3 cup cornstarch
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups milk, heated in microwave (do not boil)
~~~
2 tsp grated lemon rind
6 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 Tbsp butter
1/4 tsp vanilla
 

In a small bowl, beat egg yolks with salt and water and set aside.

In a large saucepan, mix cornstarch and 1 cup of sugar.   Add hot milk and mix with whisk — cook over medium-low heat until thickened.  Add enough cooked filling to bowl of egg yolks — when well-mixed, return egg mixture to the remaining pie filling and simmer until egg sets, stirring constantly.  Add butter, lemon juice, rind and vanilla and stir until mixture begins to bubble.  Remove about a half cup of meringue and stir into pie filling.  Blend until lumps disappear — over beating will cause the mixture to lose its fluffiness.  Pour filling into baked pie shell and top with remaining meringue.  Bake in a 425 oven for 5-7 minutes, watching closely, until lightly browned.

Alarm Clocks and Prizes

08 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Life at Home, Writing

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The cover of the old paperback came worn.

More than a slight musty, it was lovely anyway, a dusty pink on both sides, except where edges had frayed and the pink had curled back into the crinkled parchment beneath.  In these threadbare spots of its reduced state, it wore the color of old undergarments, many washings faded.

The cover was bare of words, offering no hint of its subject matter or author. Yet, in spite of great age, the spine and binding held tight to its pages.  Each sheet felt heavy though only few showed signs of heavy pressing, and on these, French words rose up like goose-flesh on thick skin.

Opening the book to the title page, my eyes ran down lines of words written in an unfamiliar tongue, before tripping over the last two — “Voyage du jeune Anarcharsis en Grece,”  “En Grece?”  “In Greece,” it read.  This old paperback, published in 1789, —  which I’ve since come to know written by Jean Jacques Barthelemy (1716–95),  — describe on Wikipedia as “a highly esteemed classical scholar and Jesuit” — had traveled many miles and years to find a new home with me.

I won the book through a blog giveaway entered January 12th.  It had been a long spell between prizes.  Ignoring two winning hands at a San Juan Blackjack table in the mid-eighties, I was thirteen last time I’d won anything.  But, oh what a win that was.  The prize was a true sign of the times in which I lived, since I received two free tickets to go see and hear the Strawberry Alarm Clock perform in Oklahoma City.

Like the paperback, I won these by random draw; a DJ of a local radio station picked my entry form out of a small box parked on the customer service counter of the grocery store where Mother shopped.  I’m guessing there were few entries that day.  Most Buchanan patrons were not hip — like my parents, they tended to gravitate toward a different period of music, where the meaning of lyrics were easily understood and where words were sung rather than screamed.  Buchanan’s patrons would not have recognized the Strawberry Alarm Clock as the name of a sixties psychedelic rock n’ roll band.  Nor would they have recognized the band’s music as music.  In other words, I had excellent odds of winning that day.  My name may have been the only one in the box.

Yet, I don’t think I had any thought beyond winning.  In my young mind, I never imagined I would go or wouldn’t go.  But if lucky enough to get my hand on those tickets, surely I dreamed of going.  And when I did win, it seemed a clear sign that somehow — in spite of being too young, in spite of having a pair of Southern Baptist parents wary of all the dangers of drugs and booze and the make-love-not-war mindset of the sixties — that somehow, I would go.  Somehow, I would hear this up and coming band on the music scene sing their one hit single live.

But no, somehow never happened.  So somewhere in this house, buried amongst all the scraps and photo treasures of my life, are two unused tickets to that 1968 concert.  And the shame of it?  The shame behind that somehow is this:  that I never ever raised the question.  Oh, to be sure I would have dropped huge hints hard to ignore — for anyone but a parent wishing to dodge sticky situations — but I never spoke the question to life.  There was no “Can I go?”  I never made my parents tell me ‘no.’   Somehow, my dream died a natural death as we all do —  it just ran out of time, that’s all.

Last night, remembering those unused concert tickets, I went to the living room —  where my paperback had laid for the last week — and claimed my newest prize.  And carrying it to the computer, I began to wonder about its origins and how it came to live with me and whether this antique paperback about Greece might symbolize another ticking alarm clock, trying to wake me up from a dream.

I thought about my Greek grandfather and his stories and the stories of his children that my aunt spent hours sharing with me in the months following Daddy’s death.  And I remembered before last year’s move, how I’d hoped to begin writing the stories down, so that Aunt Carol would be around to help edit away inaccuracies and embellish the story with rich details that only she could.

And I thought of everything that had come to pass for this book to arrive at my door last week — how on January 12th, I was inspired to leave a rare comment on a blog that I’ve tuned into everyday for a year for the pleasure of easy ‘listening.’  I thought of how the blog author that day was inspired to write a post, titled, “Yes You’ve Got a Story to Tell – Giveaway.”  And how before she even wrote that post, how she’d been inspired to buy my old paperback at the Brocante fair she frequents most Sundays.  And how her purchase that day had depended upon the antique dealer’s recent acquisition of an estate.  And then I thought of that long string of book owners — over 200 years of ownership deep — who had decided to keep rather than toss the book aside.  And finally I thought back to before 1789, to when the author decided to write this story, about a young man’s journey to Greece, and how he chose to tell the story in the form of a travel journal.

Somehow, all these thoughts siphon down to one last drop of thought — how one hundred years ago last May, my Greek grandfather arrived in New York as a young man with little more than a dream in his pocket.  And though he never bothered with travel journals, he left plenty of footprints — plenty of stories, that for the last year, have been asleep in a storage box in my closet.  Strangely enough, one story Aunt Carol told had to do with stories Daddy had written down in red ink about his life on the road, traveling with my Greek grandfather.  That story ended sometime around 1944, when Daddy was a young man, when he decided to toss it all away into a Kansas City garbage can

I’m thinking it’s time to wake some of these slumbering stories up — and time to push the snooze alarm off so that I can wake up from my dream — how maybe its time to grow thick skin — and stretch the boundaries of everyday life to encompass a larger map.

Can I go?  Only the prize of time and a few worn down alarms clocks can know the tale.

January Leftovers

02 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by in Life at Home

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Few will wish for January leftovers when something fresh and piping hot from February’s skillet of life is so readily available.  But here I am anyway.  Still in January. Because sometimes, leftovers are good.  And my January leftovers were very.  So very very, I’m finding them difficult to toss out with February trash.

My feelings on January’s rightness and goodness don’t arise out of the usual ‘feel goods’ we pick up like lint from life when doing right by others, — like helping Sis paint our aunt’s living room last month — or giving Amy what I believe may have been the best birthday gift I could have given — or helping Kara with the before and after gearing up and tearing down of my granddaughter’s Reese’s first birthday party  — you know, those sacrificial acts where we lay down ourselves and our own plans to serve others, only to walk away with hearts strangely light, lugging more love than we left in our wakes.

No, January was memorable for reasons much to do with the way my life carried on the most delicious dialog with works of art.  I watched films galore and read books and went to the art museum and lived my everyday life in between it all.  And I noticed something along the way as I was attending my private January Art Festival of Life: I noticed, for the first time in forever, how art informs life and how life informs art — and how it does this everyday, whenever we bring the two together.  And I noticed how art doesn’t just inform, but how it helps us sometimes to even conform, softening our hearts to receive messages that life alone just can’t.

When my husband asked me his leftover question last month — the one posed last winter, and the winter before that and the winter before that — if it wasn’t time for us to make our own funeral arrangements? — I finally talked to him about it.  I looked him in the eye and begin thinking out loud about what I want to happen and what might help the children, when the time comes — rather than responding as I have for the last three times with a ‘yes I suppose so’ but then doing nothing to make good on that supposed-so yes.

Did this new receptiveness arise out of the recent death of his mother?   No — not even close.  I listened to that tired, wilted question only because I had spent five evenings in January watching films where Death played a leading or supporting role — films like “The Winter Guest” and “Wit” and for the second time, “The Hours” and “Marvin’s Room” and “Evening.”  And I don’t know why I ended up watching so many beautiful stories about death.  I only know, that in ways I cannot fully explain, those movies helped pave the way for me to finally hear my husband’s hard-to-face question.

Another art-life conversation grew out of last week’s surprising encounter with a wasp.  I was stung Tuesday.  Then stung again by words I read on Wednesday — another live-giving passage from An Altar in the World  — on the importance of feeling pain.  And as my index finger throbbed and itched and swelled with leftovers of wasp venom, I endured the discomfort rather than easing it with a dose of Advil.  For three days I lived with a pain that spoke of my humanity.  I heard little whispers  — like how wasps are worth my awareness — how hurting is helpful, because the pain shows us we are still alive, whether our injury is physical or emotional — how life goes on even when injured and even when death is the outcome.  It’s an old lesson that we must learn over and over to death because it never quite sticks. And who could have imagined that a wasp would come out of its hive in January to begin teaching me this lesson on pain and humanity and life and death?

January has borne witness to many exchanges between art and life.  Too many to tell but for one more —  about that pretty antique mesh purse, made of German Silver, featured in the photo above, that became Amy’s birthday gift two weeks ago — that needs to be shared.  The purse came from a collection my mother treasured — which is funny in itself, because Mother not only never carried purses, but she never cared for glitzy, fancy stuff.  She preferred a life of everyday casual — she dressed herself in many-times washed denim —  she never wore cosmetics — and kept her hair cut in a carefree style that allowed her to leave the house with minutes notice.

Anyway, Mother left her prized collection of purses to my sister, who has been trying ever since to sell them to whoever might want them.  And I don’t know why I finally connected Amy to Mother’s purse’s collection, but I believe it had much to do with immersing myself in art.  I was helping Sis paint our aunt’s living room when the dots began dancing together in my mind: I was thinking about Amy’s upcoming birthday…what special thing I might give her as a gift… then I remembered Sis’s unwanted inheritance and how Amy had just borrowed my copy of “Midnight in Paris” which featured an actress portraying a flapper carrying a purse similar to handbags in Mother’s collection.  And somehow, all these leftover dots of dialog came together — and just like that — I had Amy’s perfect birthday gift.  Not only was I giving Amy something she would love, but I was giving her something Mother loved, and something my sister did not — making it a special, three for one moment that forms a perfect trinity.

And now, January is all used up. The month — full of moments mixing magic and mystery — is over.   And there’s nothing I can do about it.  Nothing at all.  Except live like it’s still January — by regarding this new month as a new little art festival of life.  So, then.

Hello, February.  How good of you to drop in for a visit.   No, I know you can’t stay long.  But have a seat, won’t you?  Now tell me — have you read any good books lately?  Seen any good movies?  Oh, “Hugo” — yes, of course, I saw “Hugo” the last day of January.  Of course, in 3-D!  Hey, any thoughts on who might win the Oscar for Best Picture?  Oh, yes, I know you know and can’t tell.  But, what?  You think that ending scene of “Hugo” — showing a close-up of Martin Scorsese’s automaton — looked a little like ‘Oscar’ too?   Oh, I can’t wait to see what happens.  What’s that?  You want to know what’s going on in my life?  Oh, I see — you’re just trying to change the subject — but I’ll be a gracious host by saying —  oh, lot’s.  Lot’s is going on.  And we’ve all month to talk about it.