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an everyday life

an everyday life

Tag Archives: Aging

Lost and Found

24 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by Janell in Life at Home

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Aging, Cooking, Everyday Life, In the Kitchen, Recipes, Sauerkraut Relish

IMG_0428It’s been months since I shared a recipe.  But having lost this bit of cooking treasure for a few hours last month, I’m posting it here for you and for me and for posterity, too.  There are some recipes I don’t want to think about losing. This is one of them.

Part of our lives since the mid-nineties, it came to us out of the glossy pages of a recipe magazine, the sort stacked in wire racks near cash registers, that I once picked up during busy career days…to peruse to pass away minutes till time to check out my cart full of groceries.  In one of those odd life ironies, now that I have more free time, I no longer shop at Walmart…which means I rarely stand in grocery lines.

We prepare this recipe along with a skillet of fried potatoes to serve as sides with grilled or broiled bratwurst, which makes a nice winter meal.  In summertime, it becomes a tasty relish for brats (or hot dogs) on buns.

When I say ‘we,’ it’s a way of saying that it’s my better half that’s in charge of preparation.  He makes the kraut and brats and I get out the buns and potato chips 🙂  Or fry the potatoes… just like Mother did more suppers than not, all those years ago when I was growing up.

With my husband entering retirement next week — how can this be??? — maybe we’ll team up in the kitchen more often.  I hope so.  Having that chemistry background, he likes to experiment with new recipes where I tend to love the same old things.  Like this recipe lost and found.

Sweet German Sauerkraut

1/4 cup oil
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups coarsely chopped onion
1 16 oz can sauerkraut, well-drained.
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/2 tsp caraway seed

Heal oil in large skillet over medium heat.  Add sugar.  Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture turns a light caramel color — about 10 minutes.  Add onion, sauerkraut and salt (some sugar will harden, but will eventually melt while cooking).  Cook over medium heat for 15 minutes, stirring frequently.  Add vinegar and caraway seed and simmer for 30 minutes.  Serve warm.  Leftovers freeze nicely.

Serve warm.  Leftovers can be frozen.

Winter Mulling

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by Janell in Good Reads, Life at Home, Soul Care

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aging, Amor Towles, Barabara Kingsolver, Books, Flight Behavior, Rules of Civility, Soul Care, Truth, Writing

IMG_0481“”It’s not good to complain about your flock,” she advised.  “A flock is nothing but the put-together of all your past choices.””

— Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

 

It happens rarely, but sometimes, words I’ve read from a novel will linger within me.  To be sure, it is never the exact line of prose that I remember, the one rendered so beautifully by the author.  Instead, it’s something all together better since the author’s lines point to a living truth.

It happens something like this:  I’m going along reading, reading, reading, really involved in the story, words flying and zooming past my eyes before I realize, a few sentences too late, that I’ve passed an important turn or perhaps a yellow blinking light that was cautioning me to slow down and take note.  I have no choice but to pull over and take myself out of the story.  I know from experience that I cannot proceed without circling back up the page to reread the unmarked but blinking passage.  I return long enough to pause over it.  Not too.   But long enough that some bit of truth flies off the page to live within me.

Usually, the words, like those above written by Barbara Kingsolver, seem too small to fuss over.  I don’t know what deeper meaning, if any, they are suppose to possess.  Or what I am to make or do with them.  But two days ago, more than a week after finishing Flight Behavior, I saw that if I substituted the word ‘flock’ for ‘life,’ how the meaning of Kingsolver’s two lines came close to thoughts I’ve been mulling over since …. well, whenever I last wrote a post in this blog.

IMG_0485I’ve been reading more than mulling here of late.  Lots and lots of good books —  not good enough to keep but good enough to donate to the local library for the good of a larger reading circle.  Or so I thought, until today’s lunch, when I decided I’d been too hasty or perhaps moving on autopilot, when it came to my most recently stacked book, Amor Towles novel, Rules of Civility.

Six chapters into my latest read — E.L Doctorow’s award-winning Ragtime — I kept on thinking about Towels novel.  Not the story, as good as it was, but two blinking passages I decided important enough to turn around for, to pick up, like hitchhikers off the side of the road.

The first passage reminds me never to give up on my dreams… and really, some things in life are too good not to share…

“You look back with the benefit of age upon the dreams of most children and what makes them seem so endearing is their unattainability–this one wanted to be a pirate, this one a princess, this one president.  But from the way Tinker talked you got the sense that his starry-eyed dreams were still within his reach; maybe closer than ever.” (p. 300)

The second speaks around the same truth I tripped over in Kingsolver’s two simple lines.  But since the passage is followed by a one sentence paragraph that reads — “Maybe that sounds bleaker than I intended — I’ll stop here.  The second slice is good  enough to keep for another day.  My memory, unfortunately, is not.  So note to self:  the second can be found hiding on page 323.

 
 

Feather-Weight

04 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by Janell in Life at Home

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aging, Childhood Memories, Death, Writing

The last two months I’ve immersed myself into the part of my father’s life he lived before my birth.

Strange that now, out of left-field, comes another thought — maybe because it was Dad’s birthday not long ago — and the second anniversary of his death not long ago, too —  and Father’s Day coming up making three — a thought about the part of life we did share together;  especially words I finally shared when Daddy laid dying — of how I’d always found him handsome, from the time I was a little girl, and how I always wished that somehow I could marry a man as good-looking as he was — and I think — no, I’m sure — I surprised my father with that wobbly left-field confession.

Why is it, I wonder — I mean, what caused me to wait and sit on these lovely words rather than sharing them with my father in real-time?; why did I instead choose to speak of bank statements and pancakes and old black and white movies rather than speak aloud of childhood dreams which carried the greater weight?

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