Scalloped Nerves

Oh, sure, of course I got out my little watermelon-sculpting knife and created this scalloped beauty, which I pridefully carried to the family picnic yesterday.

Ha.  No. It traveled to the picnic in an ordinary Rubbermaid bin. 

Though it would have been easier, I tell you, to cut that shell and each little melon ball, too, using rusty nail clippers, than it was to get this picture out of my disco-era cookbook and onto this blog.

The only thing scalloped around here is my nerves.   

WATERMELON SUPREME

1 large oblong watermelon
1 cantaloupe
1 honeydew melon
1 pineapple
2 peaches or nectarines
2 cups blueberries
Honey-Lime Sauce

Scoop balls or cut chunks of the melons, using about 3 cups each. Remove rind and core from pineapple (or have Kroger do it). Cut fruit into bite-sized pieces. Mix with melon balls; cover and refrigerate. Just before serving, slice peaches. Drain melon balls and pineapple pieces. Mix all fruit in large bowl. Drizzle with Honey-Lime Sauce. Pour fruit into watermelon shell. Garnish with mint leaves, if desired and serve immediately.


HONEY-LIME SAUCE:
1/2 cup ginger ale
3 TB honey
2 TB lime juice

Mix all ingredients.  Drizzle over fruit.

Back in the Patrick Melrose novels, we have finished installment #2, Bad News, in which Patrick constantly shoots drugs into his battered veins while the cask which holds his hated father's ashes falls into his hands.

In book #3, Some Hope, Patrick swears off the drugs but fails to take up anything that might fill the void.  His crowd, some of whom are still unaware that he would gladly have booted Daddy's ashes over a bridge railing, gather for a high-society birthday party.  Romantic treacheries abound.  You'd think Shakespeare had whispered plot hints into the ear of author St. Aubyn.  Add in the modern twist of Patrick's old drug dealer making light of his Narcotics Anonymous meetings and you've got yourself a small village of characters, all of whom regard each other as ghastly, but wouldn't miss that birthday party for the world.  I wonder whose reputations will still be intact the next morning.

Credits:  Betty Crocker Cookbook, ca. 1982

And At Do-Re-Mi, We Find . . .

So, I went back to Do-Re-Mi, so to speak, in Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels and found quite a cow-patty-laden beginning.

In the first of this quadrilogy, Never Mind, poor five-year-old Patrick lives under the rule of a father that charms people only to humiliate them later.  Lured in from playtime by his father's piano playing--a tune the Daddy composed especially for Patrick--he stands before the man, ready to please.  "Shall I pick you up by your ears?" the father gently teases.  With the boy sufficiently softened up, the father makes good on his tease/threat and Patrick hangs in the air, convinced that "his ears were going to be torn off, like the gold foil from a pot of cream."  Dad ignores the boy's whimpers, then caps off the experience with fatherly advice:  "Always think for yourself.  Never let other people make important decisions for you." 

And it gets much worse. 

Much of the first novel is a house party, populated by this daddy-of-bad-surprises and his thoroughly demoralized wife.  Guests include a serially-married piece of British gentry who brings along his hippie girlfriend of the moment; plus a philosopher, who also brings his date, an American journalist, a woman with enough detachment to see through Bad Daddy, at least a little. 

The British gentlemen misses women who can give him intelligent conversation, but at a flash of the hippie girlfriend's legs, he forgets all about intelligence.

And they all meet to drink wine and gossip wickedly.  The weed-fortified hippie girl, too dazzled by the glorious south-of-France estate on which they spend a weekend, doesn't quite catch on to how much fun this isn't. 

Why would I read about such cruel, self-absorbed people?   Well, their world is untouched by the fears and frustrations of mine, so I go there for a visit.

The cow patties are truly distasteful.  I'm not recommending, just reporting.

By now, I have moved on to the second installment, Bad News.  Patrick is now twenty-two.  His father has just died.  Patrick flies from London to New York to identify the body.  Naturally, he doesn't mourn.  No, it's more like a celebration, bingeing on heroin.  Then again, this is a pretty sorry way to celebrate, as Patrick spins out of control.  Shall I call my New York dealer?  No, I definitely won't call him.  I'll leave this restaurant and go straight back to the hotel.  Tell you what.  I'll just ring him up and if he doesn't answer, then Fate has spoken.  No dealer tonight.  D---!  Why doesn't he answer. Well, maybe I'll just swing by and pay him a social call.

I recall a story in People Magazine wherein a rock star admitted that, at first, drugs were fun.  Then, they were fun with problems.  In the end, it was just the problems.

We know that Patrick will become the father of little Robert, whom we mentioned last week.  So we await better days for this boy who grew up with such a bad excuse for a father.

After a dip into this world, I return to my own, where I cook my Fast Sunday meal:

Broiled Pizza Burgers

Vegetable Trio

Black Forest Parfaits

Doing It Fine On Our Own, Thanks

I need to park myself on a couch and just read, because when I get up and actually do things, disaster ensues.

Last week, my household was assigned to work on the church cleaning crew.  I think the kitchen looked pretty good after I worked it over.  With a sigh of satisfaction, I carried a sloshing bucket of mop water to the janitor closet to rinse it out in the low sink there.

Why can't the water simply come out the spigot?  Why did they have to attach an elephant-trunk-sized hose to the thing?

Most especially, how did that hose slip out of my hands? 

Suffice it to say that, by the time by hands found the spigot handle (blind-lady style) and turned it the right way, the closet ceiling was raining and I was standing in enough water to do a batch of laundry.

On the bright side, maybe they won't ask me to clean again.

I went out for a sunny afternoon walk a few days later.  A few wood slats lay across a sidewalk and I gracefully stepped over them.  What I failed to see was the line strung across the sidewalk right behind the wood.  Before I knew it, I was scraping the sidewalk with my knees, my arms, my chin.

Oh, the bruises.  My star bruise is bigger than a burger bun.

Oh, the aches. I was shopping in Wal-Mart a day later, moaning softly as I clung to my walker  shopping cart.  Somewhere between grabbing a box of Brillo pads and hunting for the Life Cereal, I remembered:  I have big drugs at home.  I believe I'm entitled to them today. 

So God need not threaten me with any destroying angels.  He can just step out of the way and let me destroy myself.

That's why I should shut myself in a safe place and catch up on my reading.  My attention is divided these days.  Sometimes I reach for a real book; in this case, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables.    This is the last time I plan to afflict myself with Hawthorne.  If your reading education is as thin as mine, I'll just tell you it's about a once-prominent family now petered out.

And sometimes I reach for my Kindle, where I'm working through Robert Reilly's Making Gay OK, in which he reasons that normalizing homosexuality is quite possibly about excusing all sexual misbehaviors.   Everybody take a deep breath now and remember that there is a wide difference between throwing bricks through your gay neighbor's window (not OK) and calmly explaining why you think marriage licenses should say "Bride and Groom" instead of "Party A and Party B" (very OK).  Everybody take that deep breath because I've been feeling a lot of Down-with-Conservatives hate lately.  To quote Charles Krauthammer, a favorite columnist, "What’s at play is sheer ideological prejudice — and the enforcement of the new totalitarian norm that declares, unilaterally, certain issues to be closed."

Now, you'd think an accident-prone lady like me would be wise to stay out of the kitchen.  But I can't help myself.  And I did manage to cook Seasoned Potato Cubes without ruining the skillet, nicking off a finger, tripping over a cat or choking on the final product.   I'd pat myself on the back, but I'm too sore for that.

Bad Dudes, Those Vikings

I admit it. I'm a wanderer.

I try to pick the nice areas of town. Million-dollar homes, urban plazas (especially with large, burbling fountains)--that's what I aim for. In fact, I can make one certain assumption about wherever I wander: if I like the neighborhood, I can't afford it.

Sometimes, though, I draw the scary card. Like that day that I walked by the abandoned distillery. True, they were trying to gentrify it into cool office space. It's just that the tenant list looked a little sparse. And they needed to do something about that broken window.

Then there was the time I happened upon the village of homeless men, well-hidden from the passing traffic, but not well-hidden from me. I nodded good day to the scruffy guys and moved on at my most aerobic pace. Surely a woman whose exercise pants have shrunk above her ankles is too ridiculous to attack.

Train stops at the gates of urban hell, being the only white woman for blocks around--been there.

My point is: I've gotten away with it. As full as newspapers may be with stories of people shot, run over and mauled by dogs, it's still a relatively safe world out there.

It's certainly safer than the world portrayed in Bernard Cornwell's The Burning Land. His story plays out in ninth-century England. In fact they weren't even calling themselves "England" yet, probably because they had trouble spelling their place names. The Southwark of today used to be "Suthriganaweorc." Really, how can you run a country when everything on the map leaves you cross-eyed?

Anyway, a walker like me would have wanted to stick real close to the village back then because England had a Danish problem. Those Danes would come over in their ships, steal the nearest horses and silver and castles and set themselves up as mini-kings (while working on becoming maxi-kings). If the Danish horde came riding over the crest of the nearest hill, you would want to take all your sheep and run into the woods. Actually, you got some warning before they appeared; when they set fire to your neighboring village, the smoke wafted your way and you knew it was time to pack the camping gear.

So Cornwell's tale follows an English warrior, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, who knows a few good battle tricks of his own, and who also wants to wrest the family castle from his uncle. I haven't finished it all yet, but the fine battles on sea and land, the beautiful-but-untrustworthy women, the fighting men loudly enjoying an evening in the tavern, have all kept me entertained enough to stick with it. And I'm not exactly a war-saga reader. Oh, and Uhtred's a misogynist booger. But he anchors a colorful tale.

Cornwell is one of those prolific authors whose books fill whole shelves in the library. If you like him, you may have found enough books to keep you busy for two or three years. I think Uhtred of Bebbanburg appears in several of these tales, but I'll let you check that out for yourself.

And now for some peasant food, dressed up to make it un-peasant-y:

Slow Cooker Mashed Potatoes

Bash, Ram and Destroy

Oh, you thought we were cheering for That Other Football Game?

Sorry. I'm digging further down in the pile of fame by reading H. G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights.
Bissinger spent a year in Odessa, Texas, following the fortunes of the Permian Panthers, a team that grips the passion of its hometown so thoroughly that one fan, who had to miss a game because of his heart bypass surgery, refused his post-operation painkillers. After frequent phoned-in updates from his son-in-law, he finally consented to the drugs once he knew the game was secure.

A few of you may be far ahead of me in your Friday Night Lights fandom. Maybe you've watched the TV show. I hope to catch up with you (thank you Netflix).

But anyway, the hero boys of Permian High School all hope to be the boys in That Other Football Game. But first they need to round up scholarship offers from some big state college. And before that, there is the Friday night pressure to perform, which makes some of them vomit, or tape up that broken ankle and play anyway. There is the psyching up, the readiness to bash, ram and destroy the opponents, especially if they happen to come from Midland's Lee High School. Oh, yeah, and there's something about keeping grades up too. The author catches the team's biggest star in one of his classes, hard at it over a worksheet on the 95 uses for a microwave.

The Permian Panthers attracted 20,000 fans to their weekly games. Odessians lived for Friday nights, sadly because there was nothing else to live for. Odessa sits far out on a sandy plain. There is absolutely nothing to look at. There is oil to drill but, at the time Bissinger wrote his book (1988), Odessa's high times were over. Yards full of oil rigs sat idle. Bankruptcy and foreclosure ran high. If I were stuck in all that bleakness, I too would show up at the stadium every Friday night and stuff myself with nachos.

An especially poignant chapter checked in with Permian's yesteryear stars. "So, what was it like to be a prince all senior year and then adjust to real life?" Hint: It's a sad thing to peak early in life.
A few cow patties. Football boys ready to bash, ram and destroy don't talk like ministers.

And as for your recipe, how about what I call the Sunday Nap Meal? Throw it together, then crawl under the electric blanket and snooze. Wake up, slide the enchiladas in the oven, and catch up on Facebook while they bake.

Cheddar Beef Enchiladas

Creamy Corn

In Honor of Angela's Visit . . .

Fountains. Vine-covered bridges. Monuments. Handsome old churches. Plazas and shady walking paths.

Thanks to Angela's recent visit, these are all some things I got to see in my home city, things I had forgotten about, things I never visit on my own.

After our tour, we returned home. David showed up soon. He practiced his medical skills on Skooby, and told me all about adjusting to his ward in Philadelphia ("Lots of West Africans. Now that we've gotten to know them, we love them") while I chopped vegetables for:

Summer Garden Pasta

We ate it with grilled chicken and a frothy, frozen dessert of pulverized strawberries and cream.

Over on the Finished Book Pile, we have Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann.

I wasn't sure I would stick with this one. It started with a dinner party of merchant-class Germans, set back in the time when gout was fashionable. As the party guests laughed at jokes I didn't get, and as I felt the 600-page heft of the book in my hands, I promised myself I could ditch it another 20 pages or so if it didn't get better.

Then I met Antonie Buddenbrooks. A young daughter of privilege, she goes around town mocking those beneath her, particularly an up-and-coming businessman whose beard is so yellow it looks painted. And he wants to marry her! And her parents push the marriage because he is obviously headed for great prosperity. It would be so fitting to unite the house of Buddenbrooks with Herr Yellow-Beard, would it not? But Antonie still feels nothing but disdain for him. What will she do?

Antonie, from age 16 to age 50, proved to be quite the drama queen, pulling me through these 600 pages, this fat feast of fortunes rising and falling. Oh, the trials God sends her! she exclaims as she dabs her hanky to her eyes, then recovers just enough to modestly say that she wouldn't dream of telling anybody how to run the funeral/the dinner party/the family business, then goes ahead and tells them how to do it anyway.

Every book needs a good drama queen.

Thomas Mann's most famous book is probably Dr. Faustus.

A Cool Celtic Name Isn't Everything

Aiobheann Sweeney. That's the author of the book that I'm about to not recommend to you, Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking. I looked forward to seeing a picture of this person. What does an Aiobheann look like?

She was a nice brown-eyed, brown-haired Celtic type.

Her book rode along rather aimlessly, even sleepily. A motherless girl lives on a Maine Island with her father. They don't converse much. One day, he finds her a job in NYC and she goes to the big city to learn about life. (By then, I wasn't sure why Ms. Sweeney wrote the Maine half of the book. I guess it's fun to write about fog and boats.)

Anyway, off to the city. Our heroine, Miranda, faces a choice: boyfriend named Nate? Or girlfriend named Ana?

Many cow patties to skip over.

So let's talk about food instead. Here's a meal that went together pretty quickly on a Sunday packed with meetings and appointments. I was literally running from the moment I raised my head off the pillow until sunset. Oh, wait--there was a quiet half-hour after church, when I brought my sleeping grandson home, leaving the rest of the family in extra meetings. I sneaked myself a pudding, then donned my apron and started banging cupboard doors.

Which woke the boy up.

Honey-Dijon Chicken

Creamy Italian Noodles

Sunny Broccoli Salad

And how about cookies 'n cream ice cream for dessert?

Natalie says it tasted just right on a summer day.

I Need a Laugh Track

By now, we know that Scooby likes Cheerios, peanut butter, ice cream, brownies and, most especially, Honey Butter Ritz crackers. But anything pungent or garlicky makes his face screw up as if we had waved something three-days-dead under his nose.

He wouldn't have liked what I'm sharing with you this week. However, you are all adults. You are expected to appreciate flavor.

Vegetable Cheese Tortellini


As suggested by the Taste of Home page on which this recipe appeared, we ate it with burgers and banana cream pie.

And Scooby demanded some of that pie.

Over on the Finished Book Pile, we have Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. Waugh (it's a guy) was a master of British humor. And while I'm convinced that the British are pretty funny (I've watched my share of BritComs), someone had to tell me that Pride and Prejudice was a comedy. I just didn't realize it when I read it. All that propriety gets in the way.

Now, if I see actors playing out the story, I get it, yes I do. I think I need the laugh track.

Anyway, I tackled Waugh, telling myself, "This is comedy. You watch out for it now." I actually caught myself bursting into laughter about three times, though I'm sure Waugh deserved more out of me. It's just that I'm one of his more handicapped readers.

So I recommend Handful of Dust, knowing that you are a little more loosened up, a little quicker on the uptake than I am. Have fun with it.

LIttle Colored Things in the Rice

Would I be bragging if I say this meal came out just like the magazine pictures? Or could it be that the dishes were so easy, any dummy could make them look nice?

First, we feature Chicken Parmigiana.

May you enjoy the aroma as this bakes. I sure did.

While it's in the oven, you have time to fix Zucchini Rice Pilaf 

I love restaurant rice or box rice mixes with colorful stuff in them. But I don't want to have to think of stuff to add in. Someone just tell me please. So here it is.

The recipe contributor suggests that if you abhor zucchini, you might substitute squash or mushrooms instead. If you abhor squash and mushrooms, I really don't know what to tell you.

Over on the Finished Book Pile, we have Living It Up at National Review by Priscilla Buckley. This is a fun look behind the scenes of running a magazine. I especially like the chapter on the young interns that crossed the office threshold over the years. In between the chapters on work, Priscilla squeezes in some chapters on play. Money was no problem; the Buckleys were the WASP-y sort with a named country home in Connecticut and a winter place in South Carolina.

Follow Priscilla as she bumps along on safari in Africa, or yachts around the Mediterranean, or rides a hot-air balloon over the hills featured in The Sound of Music. Then head back to the office with her as she directs traffic between the secretaries, the writers, the printer, etc.

Oh, my goodness, two books on the Finished Book Pile are unfinished! Yeah, I was just not in the mood for them. At one time, I would have thoroughly enjoyed Storm Over Rangelands by Wayne Hage, but I've exhausted myself on Hage's topic. Ten or fifteen years ago, I devoured everything I could find on the West, mostly to figure out for myself if all those childhood dinner conversations about danged power companies and doubled-danged environmentalists were John-Bircher-style rants, or legitimate complaints. Conclusion: the dinner rants were a little of both.

The development of the West is a fascinating tale, not that I expect anybody to corner me at the next family reunion to hear all about it. Joseph R. would have enjoyed this book but, unfortunately, he's gone off to his great leather recliner in the sky. Seeing as how it talked about grazing rights in the West, I can also imagine Uncle Grayson reading it, shutting it in disgust, picking it up again, talking back to it.

I gave it the old Read-10% try but I just didn't have the patience to finish it.

So, moving on, I also read 10% of Irish on the Inside by Tom Hayden. You baby boomers remember Hayden, right? Disrupter of the '60s political conventions? Senator from California? Husband of Jane Fonda? Aha, you do remember that one, don't you?

Hayden's worldview is all about identity and power and protest. "If the blacks get to complain about how they're treated, why can't we Irish complain too? We're not all about fiddles and Guinness Beer, you know."

Hey, I enjoy complaining. But going through life with your fist raised in the air? What's fun about that?

If I were Hayden, I would get a kitten and a laser light and mellow out.

Suspense and pathos

The spy book has me gripped.

It bogged down in the middle.

Then the author got involved in Watergate. Since he was a novelist as well as a spy, his story skillfully unfolded as he met G. Gordon Liddy, embarking on White House-assigned projects that may have been legally questionable, but felt perfectly normal to a CIA man who once organized the Bay of Pigs operation.

Then, as Watergate commences and builds in increments, he portrays small moments when he can feel that he's in a little bit of trouble, nothing big, he can clear it up soon. Then the trouble feels a little bigger, but he still doesn't get the whole picture. Then a reporter from the Washington Post calls and he's like, "Wait a minute. Why is this so interesting to you?" The sense of "Uh-oh" just grows.

For your recipe, here's what we enjoyed with soup and biscuits yesterday:  Bacon-Cheddar Deviled Eggs


Skooby wasn't sure he liked his little taste of deviled egg, but the rest of us chowed down.

Prom Dining at the Food Court?

Ah, Memorial Day. Best one in a long time. Mercy introduced us to Bexley, where the streets are shady, the vast lawns are landscaped by skilled hands, the driveways are long, curving, bricked, and the houses -- excuse me -- the manors are dignified. At one of the larger ones, I expected Captain Von Trapp to pop around the corner and scowl at me.

That is not all. We found what appears to be the favorite mall of Columbus' teenage girls. At one table in the food court, eight kids were dressed for prom night--sequins and dramatic eyeliner on the girls, bow ties and nervous clowning on the boys. A few tables away, another young group dressed for the Goth prom looked like they were all peeved at each other.

On Monday, Mercy directed us to a shady park. We met Martha and her boys. We ate. And here is what we ate, so you can eat it too:

Curry Chicken Croissants

Country Baked Beans


Fruit Salad w/ Apricot Dressing

COCOA FUDGE CAKE (It was John's birthday. Thanks, John, for giving us an excuse to eat cake)
1 2/3 cups flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup cocoa
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup shortening
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla

Heat oven to 350'. Spray a 9x13-in. pan with PAM. Beat all ingredients in large mixer bowl on low speed, scraping bowl constantly, 30 seconds. Beat on high speed, scraping bowl occasionally 3 minutes. Pour into pan.

Bake until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes; cool. Frost with Vanilla Butter Frosting.


VANILLA BUTTER FROSTING

3 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup margarine
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
About 2 TB milk

Mix all ingredients until frosting is smooth and of spreading consistency.

Over on the Finished Book Pile, I really have finished Alice Munro's View From Castle Rock by now. In the second half, I liked "Hired Girl" and "Home."

"Hired Girl" is one of those stories that, while I read it, I kept saying, "Yep, that's the way it is." The young heroine spends the summer working for people that own an island. In her mind, she's a person. But when she prepares lunch one day for the mistress, the mistress' daughter and herself, she carries the three plates out to the patio. "Oh, no, no," says the mistress. "Only two plates. You'll be eating in the kitchen." Great examination of class boundaries.

"Home" is the kind of story that, while I read it, I wondered how it would have been if it had happened in our family. The narrator visits home. Her mother has died. Her father has re-married. The sights along the route are the same, the kitchen is the same, but the table and chairs have been moved to the barn, the front rooms re-papered. "I don't go into the front room now to rummage in the piano bench for old photographs and sheet music. . . . The books that used to lie under beds and on tables all over the house have been corralled by Irlma, chased and squeezed into this front-room bookcase, glass doors shut upon them." It was a story about change, and what the changes say about who is in charge, about who hangs on to sentimental feelings and who lets them go.

No cow patties in Munro's stories, only some strong whiffs.