Sweeties

21 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home, Mesta Park

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I could have been June Cleaver yesterday when the boys arrived with Amy to find me in the kitchen baking their favorite childhood cookies.

In our house, these pink and white swirled cookies never stick around for long.  Whether warm from the oven or not, people find them hard to leave alone.  I’m not sure whether the boys and Amy had taken off their coats or not before they enjoyed that first warm cookie.

An hour later, Don’s mother and stepfather came in just as I was putting the finishing touches on supper.  It wasn’t long, before out of the corner of my eye, I saw another Sweetie go by with a few words on how hard these cookies were to resist.  Then Kara and Joe arrived  — and I won’t tell how many Joe confessed to having before the night was over.

With fifteen gathered, it didn’t take long for the Sweeties to disappear.  Yet, to say that we gathered is a bit of a stretch, as the party was more like three gatherings in one.  As I traveled the circuit, I walked in and out of pockets of conversation.  Don and his parents were visiting in the kitchen; my children and their mates were gathered around the television watching a ball game; and my three youngest grands were playing ‘zombies’ in the basement.

At one point, I noted Kyle talking to one who  might as well  have been a zombie, for their lack of attention to his words.  This is the downside of big gatherings:  there’s just too much going on to take it all in; separate worlds collide, but then soon break apart to converse in more intimate settings.  Meanwhile, I floated from one room to another, trying to experience a little of all the parties.

When I finally sat down, my granddaughters came to see if they could extend their party by spending the night.  I was tired after cooking all day.  And while having no definite plans, my after-party most likely would have involved a rendezvous with  my favorite chair.  But I couldn’t resist after one long look at their sweet hopeful faces.  The girls were having so much fun playing together; and if they didn’t want it to end, I didn’t want to end it.

Someday, not too far off in the distant future, these sisters who admit to being best friends, will not want to spend their Saturday night with their grandmother.  So it was not too hard to put that favorite comfy chair on hold  to let their young world collide with mine.  They ended up having the best time, filling the house with happy noises, as they trampled up and down the stairs from basement to second story.  The girls played house, opened a restaurant, become artists with a set of watercolors and  built a fine set of tracks with my sons old wooden train set.

This morning, before they left, the girls told me how much fun they had playing at my house.  I learned that after I die, they are hoping that their mother will come here to live so that they can too.  But my youngest granddaughter will be repainting my wall colors.  And though she didn’t say, I’m guessing she has in mind her favorite pink — just like these Sweeties.

Sweeties

Makes 5 dozen

2 sticks butter, softened
2 cups sugar
2 tsps almond flavoring
3 eggs
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
1 Tbsp baking powder
4 cups all-purpose flour
3 drops of red food coloring

Mix butter and sugar until fluffy.  Gradually mix in eggs and almond flavoring, then the dry ingredients until well combined.  Stir in drop of red food coloring, swirling the dough, until streaked with pink.  Chill in fridge for two hours.

Preheat oven to 350.

Shape dough into small balls, a little larger than a walnut.  Slightly flatten with hand on cookies sheet, covered with parchment paper or silicone baking sheet.  Bake 10 minutes at 350.

While still warm, glaze cookies.

Cookie Glaze

Mix until smooth:

1 cup powder sugar
1/2 tsp almond flavoring
4 Tbsp evaporated milk  (I use water instead)

French Onion Soup

19 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home

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Like so many new experiences I had upon entering the business world, I discovered I liked French Onion Soup.

My first sampling came in a cup at the original Interurban Restaurant in Norman, just a short walk down Main Street from the office where I worked.  I didn’t know then that the building that housed the restaurant was, in a previous life, an old inter-city trolley station for a commuter rail that ferried people from Norman to Oklahoma City before it closed in the early forties.  It was part of the same trolley system that also ran through the heart of Mesta Park,  just a little west from where I now live.

Though I didn’t know it then, Mesta Park was known as the Comeback Neighborhood when I first tasted that soup.  But there were so many things I didn’t know then.   I didn’t know whether I liked tax work.  I didn’t know that I would dream of numbers when I fell asleep at night.   And I didn’t know I was pregnant with my first child the day I reported to work at that small accounting firm that took a chance on hiring me.

It took two pregnancy tests to confirm my pregnancy.  And it took a few weeks to gain the courage to break the news to the managing partner.  Fearing the worst, I thought Mr. Stephenson might fire me on the spot, untried and unproved as I was.  Pregnancy in those days, when women were first breaking into the ranks of professional firms, was widely viewed —  what in my Arthur Andersen days came to be known as a “CLM”  —  as a “career limiting move.”  So when my boss merely chuckled, assuring me that “it” happened in the best of families,”   I never forgot it or him.  To this day, I still keep up with Mr. Stephenson.  He even helped my son Bryan land his first job at another local accounting firm three years ago.

Omer still has a small accounting practice in Norman though the Interurban location I frequented is now closed.   Many other Interurban locations have sprung up and, while the soup is no longer served, other menu items I liked are still there, like their famous Okie Pig Sandwich and New York Cheesecake topped with berries.  I haven’t been to the restaurant in years, but I know where there’s a downtown location, just a short walk from my Mesta Park home.

Meanwhile, here at home, the soup is always on the menu.  It’s easy to make and a good way to use up the home-made beef broth I always have in my freezer.  I’ve used this particular recipe for over twenty years and have found it to be good anytime of the year — just like it was at the Interurban all those years ago.

I don’t know why I don’t make this soup more often.  But this I know: Next in importance to the three words, “I love you” — are the three words, “I don’t know.”  I don’t know why it’s so hard to say “I don’t know.”  I don’t say it nearly enough.  Nor did I when I was parenting or when I was considered a “tax expert” all those years ago.  And if I had to bet, I’d say the three words, “I love ___,” are said more often than the three words, “I don’t know.”  But….

….I don’t know.  Try the soup.  I love it.

French Onion Soup

2 to 3 bowl size servings

3 Tbsp olive oil
3 cups thinly sliced onions
1 Tbsp butter
3/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 Tbsp flour
4 cups beef broth, strained of fat  (homemade preferred)
Salt & pepper to taste
Slices of french bread, 1 inch thick
Swiss Cheese slices

On stove-top:

Melt olive oil in a large skillet over medium low heat.  Add onions and salt — cook over low heat until onions have softened — about 20 minutes.  Dot with butter and continue cooking until golden brown — another 20 minutes.  Sprinkle flour over onions and stir until well blended.  Remove from heat.

In a large sauce pan, bring broth to a boil.  Stir in onions, cover and simmer for 40 minutes.  Season with salt and pepper (if using my recipe for a homemade broth, very little salt will need to be added)

In a 350 degree oven:

On a cookie sheet, add lightly buttered bread (both sides) and broil until golden and crisp.  Watch closely as toast next to the element browns quickly.  Top the toast with a slice of cheese and bake until cheese melts.

Ladle soup into bowls and top with a slice of cheese toast.

Rosie Posies Ashes Down

18 Thursday Feb 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, Prayer, Soul Care, Writing

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Ring around the rosie,
A pocket full of posies.
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down.
– Old Nursery Rhyme

It was no mystery, yesterday, as to why I couldn’t write.

I had allowed a situation to eat away at me and had nothing left to give.  What began in a blinding moment led in the end to self-betrayal, when I forgot who I was and what I stood for.

I can offer excuses.  I was tired.  With three hours sleep and two hours of tossing and turning, I gave up hope and got out of bed at four o’clock.   And then, tired as I was, I allowed emotion and my being on the right side of the law to cloud my thinking when I made an important telephone call five hours later. None of these rationalizations console me.

So rather than think or stew about the dreadful situation, as tired as I was, I began to clean my house.  The house was due for a spa day and it got what it deserved, —  sweeping, dusting, mopping — that down-on-my-knees deep cleaning that even took me to the scary basement before I circled the house over and over, like an old-fashioned ring around the rosie…. until all I could do was fall down.

Too tired to clean anymore, I collapsed in my favorite chair and cleaned up the backlog of recorded gardening programs on my DVR.  And after that, rather than going to Ash Wednesday services to receive a cross of ashes on my forehead, I watched more television with ashes in my mouth, for words I wished I had not spoken in that early morning telephone call.  With no words to write, I went to bed; and amazing as it now seems, I slept like a young school girl free of trouble and cares.

This morning, I woke up refreshed, ready to face what I could not bear yesterday.  And alone with my thoughts, a cup of coffee and an empty page in my journal, I began to unravel tension into the most marvelous insight:  It was not too late to set the situation right.

It was not too late to stop hiding behind a law that was there to protect me.   This wrong —  that I lost sleep over yesterday, that had so clouded my thinking, which could not be shed in so many acts of housecleaning, this wrong that the legal statutes say is not mine to set right — could still be made right as long as I allowed love to have its way.  And so it happened that I bowed to love.

Something happened shortly after I made the call.  I’ll call that something love — a warmth of love that flooded my insides from head to toe.  I wish I could describe more clearly what exactly I mean by this, but I can’t.  I can only say that I felt washed by grace, that the burden I had wrestled with yesterday was lifted and that these words are pouring out faster than I can now write.

Afterwards, I sat still.  I sat with the phone receiver still beside me, and my favorite biblical passage on love — the one that resides in those first twenty-five verses of the seventeenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel — open on my lap.

I am left with this sense that there are some things we do in life for no good reason but love.  These actions make no common sense.  Nor do they make good business sense.  Love alone can trump all our senses.

And giving in to love, I feel more like my old self.   Or maybe it would be truer to say I feel better than my old self.  For surely something Holy was leading me toward that better way of love, just as surely as something was teaching me that the better way to mark Ash Wednesday was with ashes on my forehead rather than ashes on my tongue.

I prefer those Ash Wednesday words I wrote in the sand a year ago.