Tag Archives: Writing

It’s Meatloaf Tonight

05 Wednesday Aug 2009

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home

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When life gets uncomfortable, I crave comfort food.

I want what I can make from fresh ingredients with my own two hands.  Nothing fancy, but stuff like scalloped potatoes and macaroni and cheese, that with one taste, will carry me back to simpler times when I had nothing more taxing on my plate than attending elementary school followed by a little piano practice (note the emphasis on little) and a lot of playing outside.  With our scalloped potatoes this evening, we’re having two sides:  Meatloaf  and a little saute of fresh summer squash, compliments of a mysterious but generous home gardener that my Aunt Jo knows.

It’s funny to think that I associate meatloaf with the carefree days of childhood when my mother never made meatloaf.  At least with any measure of success.  And though she tried, she was never encouraged in that department because my Yankee Daddy could barely tolerate the stuff.  Daddy also discriminated against Mom’s fried chicken and I know for a fact that Mother’s fried chicken was wonderful.  In fact, everything Mom cooked was great, because she came from a long and wide line of great cooks who believed in the importance of scratch-cooking.

Mom’s story on her rendition of tasteless meatloaf went something like this:  In the days of early marriage, her meatloaf had been good.  But then she began to change up her recipe a bit in hopes of pleasing my father’s taste buds.  I do vaguely remember a couple of Mom’s experiments–like the one that was covered in mushroom sauce instead of tomato-based sauce and the one that cooked with cheddar cheese in the middle, which I guess was sort of like Meatloaf Kiev.  Ultimately, all the experiments fell short of pleasing Dad; so Mom gave up trying.  Then, for years, every time the subject was raised, she’d pass the buck for her barely passable meatloaf onto Dad’s tasteless palate.

So, unlike many, I don’t cook my mother’s meatloaf because she never successfully conjured one up.  But I didn’t venture too far from home; my recipe, which cooks in a home-made barbecue sauce, comes out of the kitchens of Mom’s two sisters.  Both Aunt Jane and Aunt Jo have made this meatloaf recipe for more years than I can count, especially given that I’ve made the recipe on my own for over thirty years now.  I’m not sure who found the recipe first.  If you get them alone, I think they both claim it.  (You know how it is with any good recipe or success story.  Just as my dad knows only too well how it is with any story of failure.)   And if you feel the need to experiment like Mom did, go right ahead; add some cheese in the middle, or even some chopped jalapenos or bell peppers.

Just don’t serve it to discriminating palates.   

Auntie’s Meatloaf

Preheat oven to 325.  Cook for 1.5 hours.  Baste last hour.

Mix and form into loaf shape.  Place into a greased casserole dish:

2 lbs lean ground beef
1.5  tsp salt
.25 tsp pepper
1/2 cup minced onion
1 egg
1/4 can tomato sauce (15 oz size)
1 cup of oats (or bread crumbs, if you prefer)
Cover with home-made barbeque sauce:
3/4 can tomato sauce (15 oz size)
1/2 cup of water
6 T. vinegar
6 T. brown sugar
3 tsp prepared mustard
2 T. Worcestershire sauce

Belonging

03 Monday Aug 2009

Posted by in Prayer, Soul Care

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In honor of my 100th post, I joined Blog Oklahoma late yesterday evening. 

Before joining, I traveled through all seventy-one pages of blog descriptions of other members.  A dozen enticed me to pay a visit; three ended up on my blogroll. So I thought, “Why not”.  “I’ll come out and play.”  But other than this, I’m not sure what will come of my membership.

Memberships are funny animals.  In joining a club or society or whatever, we satisfy this inate desire to belong to something bigger than ourselves.  I belong to the AICPA and the OSCPA, though my life as a certified public accountant rests on an unlit back burner.  Yet I hate to drop this long-term affiliation, even though I’ve no dreams to ever practice again.  I confess:  I enjoy being on my husband’s payroll.

More recently, I joined the Oklahoma Country Master Gardeners.  Now this membership requires me to do something other than to breathe and pay money once a year.  Twice a month I go sit behind the county extension help desk, what I have affectionately renamed the ‘hope desk’, as my callers are always looking for a ray of hope.  When the phones grow silent, I visit with two other on-duty gardeners.  And when my phone rings, I listen to the caller’s latest malady, as I play a bit of plant detective to uncover the mystery of why this or that is not performing as expected.

We do have our pesky expectations, don’t we?  Expectations have sent me to question my local church membership.  The last three Sunday mornings I have played musical pews, to see if  I can find a better fit than where I currently ‘belong’.  So far, no dice.  Each church has its own personality, it’s own way of conducting the business of church, and I’m starting to wonder if I’m looking for that mythical mystical unicorn.  

I’m looking for a church that conducts less business and more church, at least during the worship hour. My biggest gripe about church is not the passing of the plate, or even the dreaded passing of the peace–a nightmare for introverts like me, and even some extroverts like my friend Laure who always dabs on a bit of hand sanitizer afterwards, just in case she got a little more than bargained for–but rather it’s the spirit-grating advertisements that come in the midst of the worship service.  We’ve prayed, sang a few hymns and then, low and behold, here come a few ‘announcements’ or two.  Ecclesliastes 3 teaches us there is a time for everything under the sun; in my book, commercials, even if related to the business of the church, should not reside anywhere near  a worship service.   To them, I say:  Be gone.  Find your own time and space.

Ironically, for this writer-wannabe, the perfect church service would be practically wordless — certainly no sermon or commericals.  Just music, a few chants, the barest of homilies.  I had hoped to find this animal alive at the montly Taize service at St. Paul’s Cathedral yesterday evening.  But what I remembered at 3 pm was gone by 5pm.  So it will be September before I can satisfy my curiousity.  And I hope,  this unmet desire to join with something bigger than myself.    

But make no mistake.  If Taize meets my dreams of church, I’ve no plans to join St. Paul’s.  And I hope the real members of St. Paul’s don’t mind.  But if they pass the plate, I’ll pay.  And if they pass the peace, I’ll play and even keep my hand sanitizer at home.  But mostly, I just want to pray, surrounded by a few others who mostly want to pray.

Come Holy Spirit.  Come out, come out, wherever you are.  To you and you and you, Trinity of One, do I truly wish to belong. 

Wallflower

25 Saturday Jul 2009

Posted by in Life at Home

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I confess to joining Facebook–at my sister-in-law Nancy’s urging late last winter–with no real plans to use it.  My thinking was: I’m already challenged enough when it comes to keeping up with friends by phone and email; Why would I ever want to complicate my life with one more tool? 

But then, I began to receive a few isolated reminders from Facebook asking me to confirm a friendship or two.    And so I did, mostly to be polite.  But now, based on the last few weeks, my days of isolation could soon be over, as more and more of my past is catching up with me.  While most are friends from Texas, a  few date back to my high school years.  And I confess to being pretty wowed at the power of this tool that can re-connect me with people I’ve almost forgotten.  

Most of my Facebook friends are extroverts.  It looks like about half are serious about it.  And a few have confessed to being addicted in some form or fashion.   By looking at the grafitti left behind on my wall, they may be right.

I like to write though I’ve not yet written on any walls.  Not even my own.  No surprises here.  I’ve always been a bit of a wallflower.  If you were to spot me at a party, that’s where you’d find me:  holding up some wall.  And it’s no different in Facebook.  I respond as people buzz over or buzz by, if they call me by name.  But being the introvert I am, it will take me a while to work up to writing on walls.  

Facebook walls are one big digital party.  My wall reveals idle chitchat as well as a few mixed digital drinks and games.  I received my first digital drink about a month ago.  And because of the chitchat…I feel more like a next door neighbor to some friends who wrote on my wall to tell me that they were on their way out the door to mow their yards.  Before Facebook, I would have never known people cared when I mowed the yard. 

But to be honest, rather than chitchat about yardwork or whatever, I’d much rather curl up on a couch with a good freind or two and just listen to their lives.  But these days, few have the time or even the desire for meaningful conversation.  I guess they’d rather  ‘work’ a room, even if it’s an internet room with iconic faces.   And I ask, does working a party sound like fun?  Not to this introvert.  In fact, working a party sounds like an oxymoron.

My extrovert brother Jon joined Facebook earlier this week.  Already he has over two hundred friends.  Driving down to see Daddy on Wednesday, we laughed about the fact that I had only gathered twenty friends with six months work.  And it is work.  I was never good at networking.   My lack of networking skills was just one of the reasons I found it easy to leave the ranks of accounting management for the greener pastures of retirement.   

So what does retirement look like, according to my Facebook profile?  Reading and writing and no arithmetic.  And while it’s a ‘no’ to arithmetic for now, my wallflower of a CPA certificate is still hanging out on my basement wall.    Just in case.  And just in case anyone out there in the middle of the electronic room is interested, I mowed my neighbor’s yard this morning.  🙂