LOVED MUSIC, LOVED TO DANCE

I wrote the following early in the morning of September 30^th.. 2000. It was a way of dealing with my grief, of paying tribute to my mother’s life.  I sent copies to family members, not anticipating, but thrilled by outpouring of thoughts and memories shared by other family members, all wonderful testimonies to my mother’s life. My sisters and I put these together with some photographs, to share with the family.  I called my essay

“LOVED MUSIC, LOVED TO DANCE”

On September 29, 2000, Viola Beckman Schmidt quietly died in a nursing home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She was 83, and thus ended a long battle with Alzheimer and Parkinson’s disease.  My mother spent the last four years of her life at Luther Home, old and frail, a mere shadow of the person she used to be. I visited her twice at Luther Home; I don’t think she ever knew who I was.  I prefer to remember my mother as she once was.

Viola Schmidt is survived by seven children, twenty-five grandchildren, twenty-four great-grandchildren and two great great grandchildren. Her husband and sisters and brothers have all gone before her.

Viola was eighth in a family of nine children in the Beckman family. As a young girl she was called Ola, a name she never liked. She began calling herself Vi.

My mother loved school, loved to learn. She chafed at being held back a grade by her mother, so that Viola and her younger sister Lorraine could share the same books. After 8^th grade graduation, my mother had to leave school to go to work in a Jergens factory. She had to give her pay packet to her mother. I think mom resented her own mother’s preferential treatment to her sons, my mother’s brothers—but in the end, it was my mother who took care of her mother.  She also helped nurse two of her sisters as they died of cancer.

My mother was seventeen years old when she married my father. Not until recently did I learn, through my cousin, Irene, how my father had met her father when they were young boys, and became best friends. They went on to take dancing lessons so they could “impress those pretty Beckman girls”. The two best friends married the two sisters.

As a little girl, I thought my parents were the strongest, most forceful people on earth. My mother was always a whirlwind of activity, washing clothes, cooking, baking (two huge loaves of bread, weekly, baked in a large roasting pan). Mom was constantly sewing or darning socks She made twin dresses for my sister Barbara and I – she made most of our clothing. My mother made the dress I wore to make my first Holy Communion, the dress I wore to my 8^th grade graduation and the dress I wore on my high school graduation day. She made graduation dresses for Barbara and later on, for our younger sister, Susanne.  (I think we took those homemade dresses for granted).

My mother was a beautiful woman, with dark curly hair and high cheekbones, who—despite WW2, rationing and hardships, always dressed stylishly. She wore starched housedresses that she made herself.

I have a picture in my mind, of my parents descending the stairs to the dining room on Sutter Street, dressed in their Sunday best as they went out to a party. Both my parents loved parties and they loved to bowl.

For years they bowled as many as three leagues a week. (When I was little, I thought my father bowled for someone named Mica, because he was always going to bowl “Formica”).

My mother loved music and played piano “by ear”.  She couldn’t read a note of music but could sit down – and play. My favorite memory is my mother playing “Silver Bells” and “Glow Worm” on the piano, an upright that stood in our dining room on Sutter Street. She had a great collection of 78-rpm records, which I played whenever I was dusting furniture. Somehow Mom saw to it that we had music lessons. Barbara and Susie and I took piano; Jim played clarinet.  (Did it ever occur to any of us that we were being given what she had been denied?)

 When I was about eight years old, we children took it into our heads to put on a “show”. We charged a penny admission; my mother made popcorn and Kool Aid for us to sell. I remember her sitting on a hassock in the living room, teaching us the words to “Red River Valley”. Whenever I hear that song, I remember my mother, patiently teaching us the words.

My parents gave us a wonderful amount of freedom. They encouraged us to think for ourselves, to take care of ourselves and each other. Times were hard, during World War 2 and for some years after. You want something? Go out and earn the money for it!  And so we did. I think I started selling greeting cards to the neighbors on Sutter Street when I was about seven years old. I wasn’t much older than that when my mother sent me by bus to the Cardinal Craftsman Greeting Card Company to pick up her card order. This required changing buses under the Western Hills Viaduct!

Around the same time, my mother began sending me downtown to pay a dollar a week on a coat she had in layaway at Lerner’s. I’d have a dollar to pay at Lerner’s, two nickels for bus fare, and—sometimes if I were very lucky—a few pennies to spend at one of the Dime Stores in downtown Cincinnati. I fell in love with “downtown” and began taking my younger brothers with me on annual pilgrimages, to do our Christmas shopping and visit the Nativity at Garfield Park. What enormous freedom we had!

I was a mere four year old, my brother Jim seven, Barbara eight, and Biff a 1-year old baby when my parents bought their first home on Sutter Street. They had spent the first 9 years of married life living with my father’s parents.  Jim had the assignment of walking me (and our baby brother!) to the new home from my grandmother’s house on Baltimore Avenue!   Jim pulled a red wagon with the baby sitting inside.  (at this time, Biff was the baby of the family)

My eight-year-old sister was responsible for her younger siblings. Later, I would become responsible for my two younger brothers. I don’t remember ever resenting this responsibility. It was just something we all did. My brother Jim was responsible for me when we began dating.  (Little did I know! or I might have complained. But as far as I was concerned, we were just double-dating).

When I got married, my mother baked my wedding cake and threw together a reception on very short notice.  A couple of years later, when I told her we were thinking of moving to California, she said, “If there’s something you want to do, do it now, while you can. Later on, you may not be able to do what you want”.  It wasn’t until many years later that it occurred to me that, perhaps, she was talking about herself when she said those words to me.

My mother loved music and loved to dance. After my father died in 1984, my brother Jim asked mom what she wanted to do. She replied, “I always wanted to dance”. And so, when she was in her 60s, my mother “took up dancing”. I think, despite my father’s death, this was a happy and satisfying period in my mother’s life. She loved to perform, to get up on a stage and “strut her stuff”.  In another place and time, she might have been an actress or a dancer.

My parents made several trips to California, the first in 1965 when Scott and Susie were very young. What I remember most about this visit was our trip to Disneyland. My parents were tireless; they were determined to go on every single ride at Disneyland. While my husband and I rested on benches, they darted from attraction to attraction. It was also during this visit that my parents went to a television game show called “Truth or Consequences”, where my mother became a contestant and won $100.00. She was never shy about jumping up and down and making herself noticed! She wanted to be a star!

Another thing I particularly remember about my mother was our family Christmases. I think it is from my mother that I inherited a great love for Christmas. My mother always endeavored to make it perfect for all of us, surely not an easy task during hard times. I remember how, one year, all of my dolls disappeared before Christmas, and re-appeared Christmas Eve with brand new dresses.  I remember my longing for a desk of my own, and receiving it on Christmas. I remember how, one year my mother was so sick and had been in the hospital – but she somehow came home to spend Christmas with us. The Christmas tree never went up until Christmas Eve, and none of us ever participated in decorating it. Not until many years later would I learn that the reason our tree didn’t go up until Christmas eve, was because my mother waited until the last minute to get one as cheap as possible. My mother was a child of the depression and was, if nothing else, very frugal!  (Once, when they were here in California for Christmas and we were taking down our tree, my mother said “Sandy, aren’t you going to save your tinsel?” and I replied, “Oh, gosh no, Mom!  It’s so cheap – we’ll just get new tinsel next year”. To which my mother replied, loftily, “Well, that’s why I get to go to Hawaii and you don’t!”  AHA!

My mother gave us wonderful birthday parties. She took us—and sometimes our friends—to Cincinnati’s Coney Island, an amusement park, once a year on Findlay Market Day, where all of us, my mother included, participated in games and contests to win prizes.  Surely it was from my mother that we all inherited such a fierce sense of competitiveness!  It was never enough to simply participate -–we had to win – and we did.

 And thanks to her love of photography, we all have wonderful huge collections of photographs, images of the birthday parties and Christmases and special events in our lives. It was surely from my mother that we all inherited such a love of photography. At any Schmidt gathering, dozens of cameras will be flashing pictures.

My parents moved to Florida in the late 70s, after dad retired from Formica. There, at the Four Seasons Estates, my mother was the Sunshine Lady, who rode her bike around the park delivering get well cards to those who were sick or not feeling up to par. In 1979, when we moved to North Miami, I was able to spend a lot more time with my parents—either they drove across the State to see us, or the boys and I would take Greyhound Buses to Tampa to see them. One of my favorite pictures of my mother is one I took at the beach at Biscayne Bay during this period of time.  I keep a copy of this photograph on my desk at work.

 So much of who we are and what we are comes from our parents –not only their genes and their flesh and blood, but their ambitions and values, their hopes and dreams and desires, their love of challenges and the fearlessness to meet those challenges head-on are passed along to us as well. Maybe some of their favorite past times, too, like reading, bowling, and crossword puzzles.

I like to think that maybe, my mother and father are dancing somewhere in heaven. He may be saying to her, “It sure took you long enough to get here!” and maybe my mother is responding, sassily, “Well, I took dancing lessons along the way”.  My mother always wanted to be a star.  Now she is, in heaven.  –  Sandra Lee Schmidt Smith

REMEMBERING MY MOTHER, ON MOTHER’S DAY, MAY 12, 2013

I wrote this over a decade ago; every so often, I rummage through my WORD files and figuratively speaking, dust off the pages to share with family and friends yet again. The reason I do this is because many of my mother’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren were either not born by the time my mother passed away in September 2000, or they may have been too young to remember this Grandma Schmidt This, then, is for those children, the grands and great-grands who never knew my mother, Viola Barbara Beckman Schmidt:

George Washington wrote, ““My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw.  All that I am, I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her”.  Those words could have been applied to my mother.

As a family, we were probably not very different from many other families of our generation.  We were the children of parents who lived through the depression and a World War, people who perhaps had a hard time letting us know that they loved us. I don’t recall either my mother or my father ever telling me that they loved me until after I was an adult, married, with children of my own. I think now, that maybe they didn’t know how.  It started to come about after dad had his first heart attack in 1968; we started to tell him and mom that we loved them, and they responded.

But talk can be cheap. Words don’t mean very much if nothing is behind them.  My mother showed her love in many different ways, even if she found it difficult to say those words to us when we were children. She made a big deal of our birthdays and all holidays.  She really put a lot into making our Christmases special, despite financial hardships.

I think my mother truly was a child of the depression.  She was born in 1917 and would have been eleven years old when the stock market crashed and America fell into the throes of the Great Depression.  Like so many other people who were children of that great Depression she never quite got over it. She would always be frugal and thrifty; she would never throw anything out or waste anything. If you ever talk to other people who grew up during the Depression, you would hear similar stories from them, and discover that they had similar attitudes. There was always the fear that it could happen again.

The Depression was still going on in 1935 when my parents married and in 1935 when my sister Barbara was born. What ended the Depression was the onset of World War 2.

Life wasn’t a bowl of cherries, being born during the depression and war years, growing up in the 40s and 50s.  However, none of us, I think, thought of ourselves as poor. We had no more or any less than anyone else we knew.

But we had each other and we forged a bond that nothing in this life could ever break. Yes, we sometimes walked to school in shoes that had holes mended with cardboard. But you know, we always went to school with a hot breakfast in our stomachs and our sandwiches made with homemade bread wrapped in wax paper, or we went to Grandma Schmidt’s for lunch. In retrospect, I realize now that many people in Europe were still suffering from the ravages of war, and didn’t have enough to eat. Rationing continued in England until the 1950s.   We always had enough to eat.  My mother once told me she had $10.00 a week to spend on groceries.  No one ever stretched ten dollars further than my mother. How she accomplished this has been recalled by my sister Barbara (who, although she was loathe to admit it, was older than I and remembered more).

It could not have been easy for my mother, raising seven children and providing them with many of the things she, herself, had been denied, like music lessons, and nice dresses, birthday parties and trips to Coney Island. But she did it.

The writer Marcelene Cox wrote, “To raise good human beings it is not only necessary to be a good mother and a good father, but to have had a good mother and father”.

My mother was a good woman who did the best she could with what she had.  But she gave special gifts to us, whether we realized it or not.   When I was in the fourth grade, I began taking piano lessons. I could barely read music, much less play, when Paul Whiteman’s Amateur Hour advertised that they would have auditions for children somewhere in downtown Cincinnati – the winning person would appear on his television show.  I submitted an application and my mother took me to the audition. She never pointed out to me that I could barely read music much less play.  I somehow stumbled through my piece of something very somber by Franz Listz. The point of this story is simply this, my mother never discouraged me, never told me I didn’t have a prayer in this competition. Thinking back on this incident, I find this kind of support absolutely remarkable. Our parents gave us confidence in ourselves, and taught us to be self-sufficient. They taught us to believe in ourselves.

All of us have memories of going to Coney Island on Findlay Market Day and competing in the games. Schmidt kids were bound to win – and we did. None of us was ever afraid of competition. Barb has recalled that even mom would enter these contests – determined to win. Once, she won a silver tray.

When I was 17 years old, my brother Scott was born. And when I was 21, my baby sister, Susie, was born. My mother told me. “your father and I can’t imagine a house without children in it”. What may have been most remarkable about my baby sister’s birth is that my sister Barbara and my mother and I were all pregnant at the same time. David was born in June, 1960; Michael in September, 1960 and Susie in February 1961.  I can’t imagine a life without my youngest sister and brother in it. My parents gave us many gifts. Perhaps the most wonderful gift they gave to us was – each other.

I spent weeks searching through reference books and the Internet for the perfect quote to describe my mother. I found the following in an Ann Landers column:

“My mother taught me there’s a time and place for everything. ‘If you are going to kill each other, do it outside; I just finished cleaning the house’.

My mother taught me religion: ‘You had better pray that the stuff you spilled will come out of the carpet’.

My mother taught me logic: ‘Because I said so, that’s why’.

My mother taught me foresight: “Make sure you wear clean underwear. You never know when you might be in an accident and be taken to the hospital’.

My mother taught me control: ‘Keep laughing and I’ll give you something to cry about’.

My mother taught me the science of osmosis: “Shut your mouth and eat your supper’.

My mother taught me about being a contortionist: “Look at the back of your neck. It’s filthy!’

My mother taught me about stamina: ‘you will sit there until all that hasenpheffer is eaten’.

My mother taught me about weather: ‘Your room looks like it was hit by a tornado’.

My mother taught me about straight talk: ‘If I told you once, I told you a million times, don’t exaggerate’.

My mother taught me it is more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.  My mother taught me the quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.

My mother taught me a closed mouth gathers no foot.  My mother taught me that some days you are the bug and other days you are the windshield.  My mother taught me never to test the depth of the water with both feet.  My mother taught me if you always tell the truth, you wont have to remember what you said and to whom.”

A writer by the name of May Sarton wrote, “I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life.  It is the tree’s way of being. Strongly rooted, perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind..”  We are all here, today, because Viola Beckman Schmidt lived.

*Bunny was my sister in law who lived in Florida

**Sister referred to the Catholic nun who helped with the Memorial Service which was held 6 months after my mother died, because my sister Becky was undergoing surgery for cancer. – sls

–Sandra Lee Smih

MEMORIES OF MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN

Memories of my mother’s kitchen revolve around the house on Sutter street. I am aware we had a kitchen in my grandparent’s home on Baltimore Street but I don’t have any memories of my mother cooking in it. I do have memories of my grandmother deep frying doughnuts over her kitchen stove, while I sat on my grandfather’s lap, a safe distance away, where we could watch and wait for the first hot, sugar-coated doughnut to be handed to us. I posted the following about a year ago and one of my Sandychatter subscribers wrote and told me about her earliest memories of her mother’s kitchen, which will follow my essay about my mother’s kitchen.

MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN

In my mother’s kitchen at 1618 Sutter Street in North Fairmount, we all sat around an old white wooden table which was covered with oilcloth (that I believe my two younger brothers at one time started a fire on or under, I’m not sure which) and it was at this table that my sister, and brothers and I did our homework while my mother ironed our clothing and a small Crosley radio on top of the refrigerator was tuned to the radio “shows” we listened to every day and night–Programs  like The Lone Ranger and Mr. & Mrs. North, The Shadow and Lights Out, and some of my favorites, Baby Snooks, My Friend Irma, and Our Miss Brooks;  These programs were on every day and every night, along with shows like Jack Benny, and Amos and Andy. There were dozens of these programs which we listened to while working on essays, or spelling and arithmetic lessons.

My mother’s kitchen was not, actually, a very large room, but along one wall, on the left side, there was a stove, and a tall narrow cabinet where my mother stored spices, and bottles of things like vinegar and Kitchen Bouquet.

Next to that was a large ceiling-to-floor built-in cupboard with Curious smoky stained glass in the upper cupboard doors, and then an open work space for canisters, and underneath that was a drawer where all sorts of things were tossed, from rubber bands to Wilson Evaporated milk labels (which could be redeemed for free things like dish towels or pot holders), as well as paper clips and crayons and bobby pins, pencils and erasers and old used envelopes, my mother’s one and only cookbook, Ida Bailey Allen’s Service Cookbook, that she bought at Woolworth’s, a pair of kitchen scissors and World War II ration books for each one of us that she kept long after the war was over. Whenever you needed something like string or a rubber band, you looked inside the kitchen drawer.

Next to this big built-in kitchen cupboard there was a narrow built in cupboard where canned goods and staples were stored and where my father had ingeniously cut a square hole into the floor so that my mother could drop  in soiled laundry collected from the second floor bedrooms and bathroom.

In the basement, my father built large cupboards, one of which contained the laundry that had been dropped in the hole from above. Once, my brother Biff got stuck in the hole when we were playing hide & seek and our parents were not at home.

There was a back door, outside of which there was a box where the milkman could leave bottles of milk, (although I don’t think we often had milk delivered—I remember a lot of powdered milk, Starlac, being mixed with water for us to drink.) Next to the back door, was my blackboard, nailed to the wall, on which my two younger brothers and I played a game called “war”—a not very creative game of drawing ships and airplanes with chalk and taking turns sinking one another’s battleships and fighter planes—a game I am surprised to remember as it indicates we were actually aware that a war was going on. (I have always maintained that I didn’t remember anything about the War years).

Next to the blackboard was a kitchen window that looked out onto the back yard.  In the corner along that wall was the refrigerator, on top of which was the little radio; Looking out on the side yard was  a window opposite the great kitchen cupboard–there may have been two windows on that wall but I can’t quite envision it. Along that wall my mother had a mangle ironer that she seldom ever used and it was a catchall for things piled on top of it.

On the 4^th wall, opposite the back door, was the kitchen sink where my sister Becky, brother Jim and I washed, dried and put away dishes and memorized the lyrics to popular songs from a songbook Becky bought each week for ten cents from Carl’s Drug Store.

This was my mother’s kitchen, where we ate supper every night at six o’ clock sharp and you did not eat If you were not at the table. I never missed supper and sat to my mother’s right at the kitchen table because I was the leftie in the family.

It was in my mother’s kitchen that I learned to cook, studying recipes in the Ida Bailey Allen cookbook and making sure we had all of the ingredients in the pantry.  It was in my mother’s kitchen that I began making muffins and brownies, peanut butter cookies and a cookie called Hermits and another called Rocks. If you could read directions, I discovered, you could cook.

Sometimes when my mother was at work, my two best friends, Patti & Carol, and I baked cakes or cookies while my two younger brothers sat on the back steps outside the kitchen door, waiting to eat our mistakes, such as burnt cookies. I had an enormous amount of freedom in the kitchen, with the only requirement  to clean up after myself.

In the summertime, when my mother was at work, I made menus out of the leftovers in the refrigerator, and played “restaurant” with my two younger brothers who could then “order lunch” from the menu.

We also did some crafts sitting at the kitchen table; I remember coloring uncooked macaroni with food coloring to make a necklace.

It was also in my mother’s kitchen that I began to write stories on an old Under wood typewriter  that my father bought for my older brother and me to use; it was too heavy to carry upstairs, and so I typed, using two-fingers, while sitting at the kitchen table.

These are some of the things I remember about my mother’s kitchen.  It was, I think, the hub of the house. –Sandra Lee Smith

My new friend Jean, who lives near Boston, wrote the following:

“My Mother’s Kitchen

We moved when I was five years old, so I don’t have much to say about the kitchen of my youngest years.  Here’s what I remember.  I believe there was a little entry on one wall, which led out to the driveway.  As you entered, to the left, there was a passage into the dining room.  The kitchen was not, if I recall correctly, big enough for a table.  All I can remember is that the sink and some cabinets were on the wall that stretched in front of you to the right, as you entered.  The sink overlooked the back yard.  The floor was white linoleum with a red leafy vine snaking its way through the room.  I still remember lying on my back on that floor, drinking a bottle.

I still drool, mentally anyway, over the kitchen in the house that we then moved to.  It was an antique house and the kitchen was shaped like an ell with a chubby base.  Coming from the outside via a covered porch, one would enter the door and turn right to enter the kitchen.  On the facing wall was a large fireplace with brick ovens.  (I STILL want those in a kitchen!)  To the right of the fireplace on the same wall, was a microscopic but handy half bathroom.  Rounding the corner, on the wall to the right, there was a window, then the freezer.  Then a bit of counter space and the sink, which overlooked the circular driveway, which featured an apple tree growing within easy view.  There was then a bit of counter space rounding the corner to the aforementioned entry.  Skipping past that, there was the stove.  That was A GOOD STOVE!  This was in the days when stoves regularly had two ovens, and this one did.  This stove with its ovens played a role in my most-memorable punishment….  Now, moving past the stove, you are in the upper part of the ell.  Fairly narrow, with cupboards and counter space on both sides.  This led to one of the doors into the dining room.  Back down the ell, I am not sure what was at the end, perhaps the refrigerator.  After that was a doorway that led to a hall and also to another entrance to the dining area.

In the center of the bottom part of the ell, there was a round maple table with four maple chairs.  At least for some of this time, there was a lazy susan in the center.  My sister and I did not do homework there.  We did it in our respective rooms, because we were not to be seen or heard.  We did, of course, eat there, sometimes with the fire lit.  On rare occasions, we roasted marshmallows in the fireplace. My sister and I did the dishes.  When I was young, she washed and I dried.  We would joke around.  Not too loudly, or dad would be furious. Ah yes, another memory of that kitchen.  If we didn’t eat something, it just kept appearing until it disappeared.  Cold lumpy Cream of Wheat?  Yuck!  I forget who started it, but we eventually would shove some things under the freezer, or, if we could get away with it, we would dash out and shove the unwanted food into the stone wall….Better memories, this is where I started cooking….”

Thanks, Jean! You and your sister were a little more ingenious than I was. I do remember feeding some vile canned tamales to the dog because I hated them so much; then I had a fit of remorse and kept giving the dog fresh pans of water, afraid the tamales would be too hot for him too. Does anyone want to weigh in on their mother’s kitchens?

–Sandy@sandychatter

 

AN ALPHABET FOR MOTHERS

AN ALPHABET FOR MOTHERS (Adapted from Mothers and Mothers of Invention) 

I didn’t create the following list; I read it somewhere in 2008, and thought it might be nice to share for mother’s day, which is creeping up on us with alarming speed (assuming it’s possible to creep speedily!

I don’t have a mother to buy flowers or candy for anymore—but there are always some friends to send a card to, or – if I have a little money to spend, to buy flowers or candy for. It grieves me how many women (I was one of them) who don’t received flowers—or anything for that matter--from their husbands on mother’s day (because you aren’t their mother—despite you being the person who ordered the flowers or candy for their mothers over the years. And admittedly, I didn’t like going to a restaurant on mother’s day – it’s the one day of the year when guilt-ridden women and men take their elderly mothers out for breakfast or brunch on mother’s day, even when said mother doesn’t know who they are.  Bob and I witnessed a lot of this when we’d be at a favorite little restaurant on Sherman Way for breakfast (often forgetting it was mother’s day) and a nursing home was right across the street. At any rate, here is a list someone compiled:

A.  a  mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary— Dorothy Fisher.

B.  An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest--Spanish proverb 

C. For a short while, our mothers bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world. Once we no longer live beneath our mother’s heart, it’s the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship—Louise Erdrich (author)

D. most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.—Kate Douglas Wiggin

E. God could not be everywhere and so He made mothers.-Jewish Proverb

F. Heaven is at the feet of mothers—Persian Proverb

G. I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity – Eleanor Roosevelt.

H. In the creative process, there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born. – konstantin Stanislavsky

I. No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of motherwit, either in science or in practical life – Thomas Huxley

J. It’s easy to pick children whose mothers are good housekeepers; they are usually found in other yard. – Unknown

K. My mother said to me, “if you become a soldier, you’ll be a general; if you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.” Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.- Pablo Picasso.

L. Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own. – Aristotle

M. Necessity is the mother of invention -  Jonathan Swift

N. Necessity may be the mother of invention but play is certainly the father – Roger von Oech

O.Poverty is the step-mother of genius. – Josh Billings

P. Necessity is the mother of taking chances – Mark Twain.

Q. The mother eagle teachers her little ones to fly by making their nest so uncomfortable that they are forced to leave it and commit themselves to the unknown world of air outside. And just so does out God to us. – Hannah Whitall Smith

R. The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.- Henry Ward Beecher

S. There is no influence so powerful as that of the mother, but next in rank in efficacy is that of schoolmaster. – Sarah Josepha Hale.

T. To a mother, a son is never a fully grown man; and a son is never a fully grown man until he understands and accepts this about his mother – unknown.

U. The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother – Henry Ward Beecher

V. Diligence is the mother of good luck.-Benjamin Franklin

W. You’re not famous until my mother has heard of you – Jay Leno

X.  Who ran to help me when I fell, and would some pretty story tell, or kiss the place to make it well? My mother – Ann Taylor

Y. In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own – Alice Walker.

Z. My mother and I could always look out the same window without ever seeing the same thing. 

Compiled by Sandra Lee Smith, in memory of my mother, and my sister Becky who was like a mother to me.

EATING GERMAN FOOD IN GRANDMA’S KITCHEN

When I was a child, growing up in a predominately German-immigrant neighborhood, we all ate whatever my grandmother cooked and we called it all “German food”. Little did we know!

It wasn’t until many years later that I began discovering that Grandma’s cooking was really a hodgepodge of German and Hungarian cuisine with some influence from a Jewish family Grandma cooked for, before she got married and had children of her own.

One of the first indications that what we were eating wasn’t just “German” cuisine was my grandmother’s pancakes. We called them pancakes and sometimes had them for lunch at Grandma’s.  She would put jelly on a big thin pancake and roll it up for one of us to eat on our way back to school – her house was just up the street from St. Leo’s church and school.

In the mid 1960s, my husband and I, now living in Southern California,  became acquainted with a group of Hungarian political refugees from the Hungarian uprising in 1956. One of their American-wives would make a dessert called Palascinta— a stack of paper thin pancakes with a filling, such as poppyseed. When the stack was tall enough, the palascinta would be cut into thin wedges. “Hmmm!” I said, “These palascintas look and taste just like my grandmother’s German pancakes…”  (I had not yet begun to collect cookbooks).

A few years later, I became friends with a Jewish girlfriend whose youngest daughter was in the same class as one of my sons. I attended the wake and funeral of her father when he passed away.  While at the Wake, I watched her aunt making blintzes–particularly cheese blintzes!. When I tasted one of these I said “Oh, this filling tastes just like my grandmother’s German Cheese Strudel”.

I was beginning to learn that what my siblings and I loosely referred to as “Grandma’s German cooking” was far more than that. Grandpa was Hungarian, so she learned to make a lot of Hungarian recipes—especially Hungarian Goulash!

As a young single woman, Grandma had worked as a cook for a Jewish family, acquiring knowledge of many foods and recipes that are served in traditional Jewish families. And then, of course, there was Grandma’s own German heritage.

I think of all the things we ever enjoyed eating as we were growing up and having many meals at Grandma’s was the German sausage, wurst, that would be fried in a skillet and eaten with homemade salt bread. When my grandfather was still alive, the family would butcher a pig once a year; Grandpa and his sons would make hams and sausages and Grandpa converted one of the garages next to the house into a smoke house!  My sister Becky remembered sitting on the basement steps watching the men make the sausages.

While most of our childhood memories were intertwined, in some instances one sibling’s memories differed somewhat from another’s. For instance, I only remembered watching Grandma Schmidt make diamond shaped Christmas cookies, that were studded with a mixture of sugar and finely chopped walnuts (and always thought those were the only kind Grandma made.) Becky chastised me, saying that Grandma made lots of different cookies for Christmas. Grandma baked, Becky recalled, thumbprint cookies with raspberry jam, and a fold-over cookie filled with apricot or peach jam. Grandma made Springerle cookies that were so hard you could not even bite into them, and a small pill-shaped cookie with colored sprinkles on top. Every family member got a dress box full of cookies for Christmas. All I could say was…I only saw Grandma make the diamond shaped cookies and someone else must have eaten up all those other cookies!

To the best of my knowledge, there are no Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors in my family tree—and yet, my grandmother, who cooked and baked an array of foodstuffs ranging from German to Hungarian, did include some Pennsylvania Dutch recipes in her culinary repertoire. For instance, I have often wondered why it was that grandma—who made hundreds, if not thousands—of butter cutout cookies for Christmas – always made many of those diamond-shaped cookies with a diamond shaped cookie cutter that I now own. There, on page 167 of PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH COUNTRY COOKING is a recipe for Mahantongo diamond doughnuts – with the information that the diamond shape for All Saints cakes can be traced to the ninth century.  I can’t help but wonder if that’s not the answer. I vaguely remember us going to Pennsylvania and visiting some distant relatives one time. Grandma often traveled with us (or anyone else in the family going somewhere and inviting her along.) My brother Jim has speculated that we must all have some gypsy blood somewhere in our background

In any case, these were some of our memories, of being children growing up in Fairmount, a suburb of Cincinnati, when Fairmount was still a nice neighborhood in which to live, of our relationships with Grandma Schmidt and each other, of going to St. Leo’s – where even our father, Uncle Hans, and Aunt Annie went to school and where we all had the same First Grade teacher, Sister Taursisius, who taught first graders for 50 years, until she retired to the  convent in Oldenburg, Indiana.

Fairmount was at that time a stable, friendly neighborhood, heavily populated with German and Italian immigrants, where it was safe for children to play in the streets on summer nights or walk to the pony keg to get a bottle of “pop”, where you knew families for blocks around and very often, the children you went to school with had gone to school with your parents.

Adding to my curiosity about the dishes Grandma served to all of her adult children and grandchildren was a chicken broth which contained something WE called “rivillies” but which, I discovered in one of William Woys Weaver’s books—was a tiny Pennsylvania Dutch dumpling called Rivels or Riwweles which is probably much the same as my grandmother’s Rivellies. We also grew up on Spatzle and homemade noodles, dumplings, sauerkraut and hasenpfeffer. I have a distinct memory of going to Grandma’s and finding noodles drying on all the backs of the wooden kitchen chairs. Ok, I never liked hasenpfeffer—a sweet and sour rabbit that you could smell from the bottom of the steps coming home from school. I don’t recall my grandmother ever making hasenpfeffer but my mother did, when my father went rabbit hunting once a year. I don’t know which was worse—seeing him clean the rabbit in the kitchen sink or finding BBs in the gravy. I loathed the smell of hasenpfeffer cooking on the stove.

When we had this chicken soup with Rivels, we would have hunks of hot homemade salt bread to go with it.

Anytime we had a stew at Grandma’s, it would be Hungarian Goulash. (My mother made a stew that always had a tomato base but it wasn’t goulash).  Possibly the most famous of all Hungarian recipes is Hungarian Goulash. Authentic gulyás (Goulash) is a beef dish cooked with onions, Hungarian Paprika, tomatoes, and some green pepper. Potato and/or noodles (csipetke in Hungarian) may also be added according to some recipes.  Authentic Hungarian Goulash is Hungary’s national dish and is probably the most famous of all Hungarian meat dishes. Its origin can be traced back, over a thousand years ago, to the Magyar migration across the Great Plains. The origin of the word “gulyas” meant cowherd or cowboy.  The men and boys gathered around an open fire under an open sky in the evening and created a meal with meat and vegetables in large kettles suspended over the campfires. The soup was referred to, in Hungary, as “gulyasleves” meaning cowboy soup. Another interesting fact is that the use of paprika was introduced to Hungarian kitchens during the years of Turkish rule and was first referred to as “Torok bors” meaning Turkish pepper. It was only in the 18^th century that the name paprika was used.

Hungarian goulash is neither a soup nor a stew; it’s somewhere in between. However, in Hungary it’s considered more a soup than a stew, so look for it among Soups on Hungarian restaurant menus.

When cooked properly, goulash will have a nice and evenly thick consistency, almost like a sauce. In Hungary gulyás is eaten as a main dish. Even in Hungary, most housewives and chefs have their own way of cooking it, by adding or omitting some of the ingredients, or changing something in the preparation process; however they would all say their gulyás is authentic.

This first recipe is an adaptation from one I found on the Budapest Tourist Guide website (the website is no longer valid).  To make this Goulash you will need:

• 1-2      pounds of  chuck, or any tender cut      of  beef cut into small cubes
• 2      tablespoons oil or lard
• 2 medium      onions, chopped
• 2 cloves      of garlic
• 1-2      carrots, diced
• 1      parsnip, diced (*I consider this optional. Grandma’s goulash never had parsnips in it to the best of my knowledge)
• 1-2      celery leaves
• 2 medium  tomatoes, peeled and chopped, or 1 TBSP tomato paste
• 2 fresh green peppers (sweet bell peppers, not hot peppers)
• 2-3      medium potatoes, sliced
• 1  tablespoon Hungarian paprika powder*
• 1  teaspoon ground caraway seed
• 1 bay leaf
• ground black pepper and salt according to taste
• water

1. Heat up the oil or lard in a pot and braise the chopped onions until they are a nice golden brown color.
2. Sprinkle      the braised onions with paprika powder      while stirring, to prevent the paprika from burning.
3. Add the beef cubes and sauté until they turn white and get a bit of brownish color as well. The meat will      probably let out its own juice. Allow      the beef cubes to simmer in it      while adding the grated or crushed and chopped garlic (grated garlic has stronger flavor), the ground caraway seed, some salt and ground black pepper, and the bay leaf. Pour water enough to cover the contents of the pan and let it simmer over low heat for a while.
4. When the meat is half-cooked  (approximately 1 1/2 hour, but it can take longer depending on the type and quality of the beef) add the diced carrots, parsnip and the potatoes, the celery leaves and additional salt if necessary. Taste and then adjust seasonings. You may have to add additional (2-3 cups) water too.
5. When the vegetables and the meat are almost done add the      cubed tomato and the sliced green peppers.  Let it cook on low heat for another few minutes. You can remove the lid of      the pan if you want the soup to thicken.
6. Bring the soup to a boil and add (if you are including it) the csipetke dough; allow about 5  minutes for it to cook.

Csipetke (Pinched noodles added to goulash or bean soup in Hungary) comes from the word csípni, meaning pinch in English, referring to the way of making this noodle. Goulash is hearty enough without csipetke, especially if you eat it with bread, so you can skip making csipetke. (I believe that csipetke is similar to my grandmother’s rivels). We didn’t have Rivels, or Csipetke with Goulash; however, the tiny dumplings were always included in Grandma’s home made chicken soup.

TO MAKE CSIPETKE

You will need:

• 1 small egg,
• flour,
• a pinch of salt,
• 1  teaspoon water

To make the tiny dumplings, beat up a small egg, add a pinch of salt and as much flour as needed to make a stiff dough (you can add some water if necessary). Flatten the dough between your palms (to about 1 cm thick) and pinch small, bean-sized pieces from it and add them to the boiling soup. They need about 5 minutes to cook.

*One final word about paprika – don’t even bother with commercial American-made paprika. It won’t be the same as authentic Hungarian paprika, which I have been finding more and more frequently in major supermarkets. Look for a red and white and green tin labeled “Pride of Szeged Hungarian Hot Paprika”. The last paprika I purchased was from World Market and a 5 ounce tin was only $3.19.

The following recipe is my Aunt Annie’s Hungarian Goulash – and I am assuming, since she was the daughter of my paternal grandmother, that this was the way Grandma made Hungarian Goulash also:

To make Aunt Annie’s Hungarian Goulash you will need:

• 2 lbs cubed beef
• 1 large onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 carrots
• 2 large potatoes
• 1 cup tomato juice
• 1 cup beef broth or 1 cup water & 1 bouillon cube
• 2 tsp dried parsley flakes
• 2 tsp paprika
• 1 ½ tsp salt

Brown beef, add chopped onion, garlic, paprika, salt & parsley. Then add juice and broth. Simmer 1 hour. Add sliced carrots. Simmer ½ hour. Add diced potatoes. Simmer 1 hour.

My grandmother frequently made pans of strudel (generally a fruit strudel) – she had sour apple trees which often became the filling for apple strudel. I remember a cherry strudel and my absolute favorite—one I have never been able to duplicate—was a pumpkin strudel. The raw pumpkin slices were seasoned heavily with pepper, I think. There were enough apples to enlist the help of Grandma’s daughter and daughters-in-law to peel and cook apples to make apple sauce. Any overflow of apples would be loaded into a wagon and Grandma would have one of the grandchildren tote the wagonload of apples to the nun’s house behind St. Leo’s school. The sister who was cook might (or might not) reward you with a cookie. During World War II when sugar was rationed, the apple sauce was made without sugar! When a jar was opened to be eaten, we were allowed to sprinkle a little sugar on our helping of applesauce—we ate it like this for many years after the war (and rationing) ended.

Sometimes Grandma made Sacher Torte; sometimes Dobosh torte. I think we all loved the Dobosh torte the most – seven thin layers of sponge cake with layers of bittersweet chocolate frosting between each layer; the whole thing encased afterwards in the same chocolate frosting.

My grandmother often made doughnuts and on the Feast of the Three Kings, you could expect to find a coin – a nickel or dime – inside your doughnut. One of my earliest memories is sitting on my grandfather’s lap in the kitchen on the second floor, overlooking the back yard, while Grandma fried doughnuts.

Most of my grandmother’s recipes died with her – she never wrote anything down…but her youngest daughter in law wanted to learn from Grandma and stood by her elbow watching, repeatedly, to see how things were made. My aunt was the only person left who remembered how some of these dishes were made. In January, 2012, my Aunt Dolly (whose name was actually Evelyn) passed away.

One of my best memories of sitting at the table with my grandmother didn’t involve an elaborate meal, however. Often, when I was spending the night with her, we would have tea with lemon and some buttered saltine crackers as a snack before going to bed.

To this day hot tea and lemon and some buttered crackers are one of my comfort foods.

So this is what eating “German Food” means to me.

–Sandra Lee Smith

NUTRITION ACTION HEALTHLETTER

While I can’t copy all the explanations for the following 10 super foods, I can provide you with an email address to order a copy of the list.

1. SWEET POTATOES
2. MANGOES
3. UNSWEETENED GREEK YOGURT
4. BROCCOLI
5. WILD SALMON
6. CRISPBREADS (i.e., such as Ry-Krisp)
7. GARBANZO BEANS
8. WATERMELON
9. BUTTERNUT SQUASH

10. LEAFY GREENS

To request a copy of this list, write to orders.cspinet.org

Sandy

 

NEW YEAR’S EVE MEMORIES

My earliest memories of New Year’s Eve are of the parties my parents hosted. On a few occasions, my cousin, Irene (called Renee by the family) and her brothers, along with me and my brothers, had our own little party down in my parents’ basement on Sutter Street.  Renee and I were almost the same age – she is six months older than I am – my two brothers (Scott wasn’t born until I was 17) and her three younger brothers, along with our cousin, Chuck, apparently had a good time together, judging from the few photos I have found from these occasions.

I think by the following year, I was babysitting for my sister and the family who lived downstairs from her. I remember babysitting there when my brother Jim brought me a plate of pork and sauerkraut, the traditional German dish we ate at midnight!  Midnight! It’s a wonder no one in the family suffered from any stomach problems.  I cried when I sat alone eating the sauerkraut. I missed being with my family.  I think my parents hosted a lot of New Year’s Eve parties but these are the few that remain outstanding in my memory. I babysat on New Year’s Eve until I got married in1958.

After Jim & I moved to California, he contacted an old friend of his who was living somewhere near Shell Beach in the central coast. We spent our first California new year’s eve with these friends who took us to a party. I thought I was spectacular in my black dress with white gloves! (What did I know about fashion?). New Year’s Day, 1962, found us down by Shell Beach, where we took some photographs. My favorite is myself sitting on a rail fence; my Canadian girlfriend, Doreen, dubbed this photograph “California Girl”.   I was twenty-one and the mother of a one year old son. I really didn’t know anything about California at the time but I would certainly learn.

Jim (my then-husband, now ex-) & I spent some New Year’s Eves with friends; the one most memorable was with a group of friends at a Hungarian restaurant where everyone ate traditional Hungarian food that night. We acquired these Hungarian friends in a circuitous way—a man named Alex and his wife Peggy rented an apartment behind our first home in California, a duplex we rented in late 1961. Peggy and Alex arrived from New York at closely the same time.  Alex introduced us to some of his Hungarian friends, who in turn became our friends—most notably Neva and Les. Les and his friends were freedom fighters in the short-lived Hungarian revolution in 1956; when they lost their bid for freedom, most of them immigrated to the United States as political refugees. It was through Les and Neva that I began returning to my culinary roots of Hungarian food foods such as goulash and Palascinta, Palascinta layered with poppy seed filling and cut into wedges. Palascinta can be made many different ways—it is a thin crepe-like pancake—it can have sweet fillings or savory.  My grandmother made Palascinta with jelly fillings. (We called them German pancakes—what did we know about Palascinta?) I can remember walking back to school after eating lunch at Grandma’s house, eating a rolled up palascinta filled with jelly along the way.

Another year, we hosted a New Year’s Eve party at our house—it had to be 1974 or later, because the house in photographs was the one in Arleta.  I imagine if I go through all of my photo albums—over sixty of them dating back to my teenage years—I will find other photographs taken on other New Year’s Eve celebrations.

One of the best adventures I ever had on a New Year’s Eve was celebrated after I was divorced in 1986.  A new boyfriend took me to Pasadena on New Year’s Eve – this is a happening event throughout the streets of Pasadena—the streets on which the famous Rose Bowl parade will travel the next morning. People are camped out along those streets, in small tents or sleeping bags, with folding chairs and blankets (it can get quite cold on those streets late at night!). My friend George had a large sleeping bag and a small hibachi that he kept fed with bits of wood; he was a carpenter and had his truck bed (parked near by on a side street) filled with small pieces of wood; it drew people to us throughout the night – and people come to this almost-event from all over the United States. It was one of the most exciting experiences of my life as I was just returning to dating. The next day, all of us had ring-side views of the floats as they came by on Colorado Boulevard. I have many photos of the floats but none of George and I as we sat along the curb drinking wine out of a coffee cup and talking to people who came up to our fire to get warm. I have never again been to Pasadena on a New Year’s Eve (or even a New Year’s Day for that matter) and my relationship with George was brief – I knew he was too young for me, in his mid thirties to my mid-forties – but it was great fun while it lasted.  And I think it was that night that I began to feel like there might be life after divorce.  There was.

In more recent years, Bob & I did not really celebrate New Year’s Eve. And New Year’s Day became my day to start dismantling the Christmas decorations, while watching the Rose Bowl Parade – over and over again throughout the day as KTLA, Channel 5 in Los Angeles, televised the parade with my favorite TV personalities, Bob Eubanks and Stephanie Edwards—and repeated the program throughout the day. What I might have missed one time, I could catch the next time around. What great memories!

Happy New Year 2013 to all my Sandychatter friends!

BOTCHING UP RECIPES & OTHER KITCHEN CULINARY DISASTERS

It’s not as though I’ve never botched up something in the kitchen. Heaven knows, I am the person who set the kitchen stove on fire when we lived in Florida (I was not very familiar with electric stoves)  and I had a strange misguided notion that I would be able to dry out the graham-cracker houses I had constructed with melted sugar. Yikes!  Well, it wasn’t a very big fire and my then-husband had the wherewithal to pour baking soda on the flames. At least I think that is what he did – by then I was out in the back yard prepared to jump into the pool to escape the flames.

When did I start cooking and baking?  Around the age of 10, I think, when I broke my mother’s yellow mixing bowl while making muffins and wanted to hold the bowl just the way I’d seen my mother and grandmother do. Well, needless to say I dropped the bowl and broke it, and ran upstairs crying.  I don’t remember what happened after that. Presumably, I started another batch of muffins, but maybe not. I only remember the incident, not the aftermath. What I also do remember is that it took me about a year to save up enough money to replace the yellow bowl. You couldn’t buy just the yellow bowl – you had to buy the entire Pyrex set, which was about $2.98 plus tax. It might as well have been a million dollars as far as I was concerned, at the age of ten. The set of bowls was on display at Pete’s Camp Washington 5 & 10 and eventually I did buy it. I think my younger sister now has some of the bowls from that replacement set. I can’t even look at a yellow Pyrex bowl without thinking about this incident. Acquiring money in my younger years was always a challenge.

If Grandma gave me a nickel to take the bus  home because it was dark—and I walked home instead—I had a nickel. (A long way from $2.98 plus tax). You could run errands for the neighbors who might or might not give you a nickel for your efforts. Or they might reward you with a cookie. Pop bottles were searched for diligently, because they were worth 2 cents, redeemable at any grocery store. All the kids searched for pop bottles though, so finding one was always a challenge.

I sold greeting cards for my mother, for a nickel or dime each—I am guessing that she paid me for my efforts although I don’t remember receiving the money. She would give me bus fare to go to Cardinal Craftsman to pick up her card order and bring it back. It was somewhere on 8^th and State in Cincinnati, and required my changing buses under the Western Hills Viaduct. I was probably no more than eight years old when my mother began sending me on these errands. But I digress!

My intention was to write about culinary mishaps!  I should mention that around this age, between eight and ten, I began experimenting in my mother’s kitchen. Some of   the recipes didn’t always turn out just right. I remember a battle between myself and my childhood girlfriend Carol Sue, when she wanted to make frosting one way and I was adamant about making it another way. Hers turned out green and runny and we fed it to my two younger brothers, who sat outside the back door just waiting in expectation for such opportunities!

I also remember ruining all of my mother’s kitchen dish towels, when I decided to make grape jelly. Uncle Cal brought us the concord grapes and I decreed that I knew how to make jelly from those grapes. Did I make grape jelly? More importantly, did we EAT it? I guess I’ll never know. I’m inclined to think we ate it – food was never wasted in my mother’s kitchen. We often ate a lot of borderline bad food—but no one ever died from it.

The episode with a can of salmon is remembered by three of my brothers; I was about 12 at the time. My parents were going somewhere for dinner and I was to make supper for myself and three brothers (Scott wasn’t born until I was 17). I knew how to make salmon patties, macaroni and cheese, spinach (from a can) and cottage cheese.

When mom and dad came downstairs dressed in their going-out-somewhere finery, one of my brothers implored, “Do we really have to EAT this?” as I was busy cooking the salmon patties.

“Yes!” said my father (he knew he wasn’t eating any of it). “Every bite!!”

And so my parents left and I prepared my first dinner (we called it supper) and put it on the table. My brothers ate the meal and then, standing up (they had planned this part beforehand) they clutched their stomachs and fell to the floor. I think I may have kicked one of them and I surely burst into tears.  They all remember this story and love to tell it. (Salmon patties was, back then, one of my comfort foods and it remains so even to this day—despite the incident related above).

I don’t remember any other major culinary catastrophes of my childhood—I did begin collecting recipe booklets, offered free on the backs of cans of food and boxes. You could get almost anything free, just for writing and requesting it. I’d buy ten penny postcards and send away for these recipe booklets and pamphlets and got myself into a heap of trouble sending for free stamps—with approvals. I had no idea what approvals were, but I understood “free” and sent away for free stamps, putting them all in a big box. Then letters began to arrive demanding payment of the “approvals” and since I didn’t have any money and wouldn’t have even known which stamps belonged to which company, I tearfully confessed to my mother, who wrote to the stamp companies and told them their customer was ten years old and didn’t know any better. After that, I loathed the stamps (many of them quite beautiful) and gave them all to my cousin Margie when she was visiting us one summer. Out of sight, out of mind.

I thought myself quite an accomplished cook/baker by the time I married at the age of eighteen. My brother and his girlfriend came for dinner one Sunday and I made a pot roast, which my then-husband later claimed it was as tough as shoe leather. My brother, being used to my cooking I imagine, claimed it was delicious and chewed away.

I’m sure there were many other culinary disasters along the way – one time it wasn’t so much a culinary disaster as it was kitchen-related. My friend Connie and I decided to have our children—her three and my four—make ornaments out of baking soda or flour, or whatever it was that you used to make these things. We may not have followed the directions carefully (not unusual with seven children underfoot) and we both had ornament dough in our hair, under our fingernails, all over the table and the floor – not to mention all seven children.

Another time I thought it would be “FUN” to have the two daughters of two of my close friends come and make cookies with me. I hadn’t counted on rivalry between the two girls who bickered constantly and fought over whose turn it was to use the electric mixer.  I was raising all boys, what did I know about girls?  We only attempted that project once.  One of those girls is my goddaughter and now the mother of two little boys; I’ll have to ask her if her boys bicker for attention—and remind her of the time she and Jennifer  bickered constantly when I invited them over to make cookies. I should mention that I have a history of burning the last batch of cookies—this goes back many years; when  you put the last cookie sheet into the oven and start cleaning up the kitchen, It’s easy enough to get distracted. Nowadays I try to remember to turn two (yes, two) timers on every time I put cookies into the oven.

I’ve mentioned my setting the kitchen ablaze when I started a fire in the oven when we lived in Florida—I should mention that I had a tough time mixing and baking almost anything in Florida. The sugar was different from what I was used to using—in California we got cane sugar from Hawaii. In Florida, the sugar was made from beets. I thought it was grainy and hard to get it incorporated with the butter. That was many years ago and might not be an issue today but I was so put out with beet sugar that I had a girlfriend bring me some bags of C&H cane sugar when she and her husband came to visit us.

More recently, I thought it would be easy to make two different kinds of oatmeal cookies at the same time, since I had most of the same ingredients out of the pantry and on the kitchen counter. My reasoning was—I’ve made the one kind of cookie, oatmeal raisin, for over thirty years. The other cookie came from an All You magazine and makes thin and crisp cookies, which I love to dip in melted chocolate, like a Florentine.  Well, the oatmeal/raisin/walnut cookies turned out just fine. The thin and crisp cookies, however, were a disaster – they didn’t spread at all and were not the least bit thin and crisp. I thought I could “fix” the recipe so I added more ingredients – first more apple butter, then more melted butter. Nothing worked. Then I sat down one day to read the recipe again, line by line, comparing the original page from the magazine with what I had written on a tablet so I could read it better. I had the granulated sugar and brown sugar amounts completely wrong. (I could blame it on my eyesight—I know I need new glasses—but I think the problem was getting cocky in my old age, thinking I KNEW the recipe) – but at some point in time, I had copied the recipe and doubled all the ingredients—the original recipe only makes 3 dozen cookies—and I wanted to be able to make more..but I had the amounts of sugar completely wrong. To prove to myself that I did know how to make these cookies, I carefully copied the recipe again and then made the cookies. They turned out perfectly thin and crisp and a perfect size to dip halfway into melted chocolate. My friend Iona’s son Michael liked the “wrong” oatmeal cookies and happily ate them—the rest I gave to the birds which aren’t especially picky how cookies are made.

I suddenly remembered the first time I made peanut butter cookies—when I was a child. My mother was in the hospital one winter and I made these plate-sized peanut butter cookies for my father to take to her at the hospital. I never asked if anyone had eaten them. My two younger brothers happily ate the rest of the cookies. They were never especially choosy about cookies—our motto was quantity, not quality. And now I remember that my brother was working part-time for a few years for Durkee Foods, which had a warehouse in nearby Camp Washington. Jim brought home foods that had expired dates. There were a lot of canned biscuits which were fairly new to the marked about that time—they often exploded in the refrigerator or when you started to open one of the cans. We made a lot of doughnuts out of the canned biscuits. Jim also brought home boxes of Nestle’s cookie mix; I think all you had to add was water or maybe an egg. I had a good time experimenting with those. If something turned out reasonably well, I presented it to my parents. If not, I fed it to my two younger brothers.

I should mention, the only cookbook to which I had access was an old Ida Bailey Allen Service Cookbook (I have written about Ida Bailey Allen before) – I’d go through the cookbook looking for recipes that contained ingredients in my mother’s pantry. Mom didn’t care what I cooked – as long as I cleaned up after myself – and she never went shopping for ingredients. It was what was in the pantry or nothing. Many years later, I inherited that cookbook of my mother’s and then embarked on a search for a better copy, which I did find, and other cookbooks written by Ida Bailey Allen. That, and the free cookbooklets I sent away for were my culinary library. That, and watching my mother and sometimes my grandmother as they cooked, baked, mixed, stirred and created food for all of us to eat.

If mom or grandma had any culinary disasters, I never knew about them.

Happy cooking!

Sandy

 

I

 

WHEN THINGS GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT AND DISAPPEAR FROM SIGHT

In Real Life Adventures years ago, there was a cartoon of a woman sitting on the floor surrounded by dozens (hundreds?) of recipes or pieces of paper with the caption “The biggest problem with following the recipe is finding the recipe” – and that is me to a “T”.  You know your collection of recipe cards (or cookbooks) has grown to mammoth proportions when you can’t find the recipe (or the cookbook) you are looking for.

I decided to write about this in the hopes that, by putting it out “There” (in the universe), enlightenment will strike me like lightning and I will sudden remember what I did with the three things now missing.

The first to “go missing” (an expression that Grandpa Bob loathed, by the way) was my green shirt, one I bought in South Dakota in June. I have a dark pink one just like it. I remember putting the green shirt on a hanger thinking it needed to be ironed before I could wear it again. So when I got out the ironing board (seldom used these days) and the iron, to press my shirts and tops, I looked for the green shirt – and it was missing. (And I have all of my tops and shirts grouped by colors. It should be with the green tops and shirts. It isn’t. but I looked through ALL of my shirts and tops not once or twice but five or six times. I also looked through Grandpa Bob’s closet, where I am now storing jackets and coats, and Savannah’s closet, which is in the spare bedroom. NO SHIRT. I have gone through all the laundry and looked in drawers. NO shirt.

Then  about a week or two ago, I lost my new jacket – also purchased in South Dakota in June. I thought maybe I had left it at the bowling alley but no one I talked to (or the girls in lost and found) knew anything about it. It’s just gone. Or gone missing if that expression doesn’t bother you.

NOW, since yesterday I have been searching for a cookbook to respond to inquiries from a woman living in the U.K. regarding my post Court Favorites.  Well, I finally found the cookbook but it didn’t contain the recipe I was looking for. L yikes!

Most recently, while unpacking Christmas decorations, I began searching for a green depression glass bowl that always looked pretty filled with glass tree ornaments. It’s gone. Did I give it away or did it just disappear like my jacket and shirt? I called the one girlfriend I would have conceivably given it to, and she doesn’t have it.

Well, last week I went shopping with my daughter-in-law and while I used the restroom (something I invariably have to do when I am out shopping), Keara went to the Christmas decorations—we were searching for a pig ornament for her niece, who is six, and auntie Keara nicknamed her piggy when she was a toddler. As I was walking through women’s wear – I spotted MY JACKET. Well, it wasn’t really MY jacket, of course, but it was identical so I bought it even though I have a closetful of jackets. We had coupons for 20% off and some other discount incentives so that the jacket didn’t cost me nearly as much as the price on the jacket. And no, they didn’t have a piggy ornaments. No one did.  We came close at Target, found a wonderful piggy ornament but the one on display was broken and there weren’t any more. (I can easily go into another whole tirade about the pitfalls of shopping during the holidays or any other time of the year. Actually, I prefer to do my shopping online any time possible). After a few hours of searching for gifts – we did find shirts for my youngest son, who is over six feet tall and needs specific shirts or tops for Big & Tall men. I found a wonderful baby doll for my youngest “adopted” granddaughter, Abby, who is Keara’s sister Sara’s daughter. Keara’s sisters’ children have adopted me as their grammy so I have adopted them as my granddaughters. (This is all confusing for long time friends when I write about my two little granddaughters, ages six and two).  I have been blessed. This is as good a time as any, as Christmas draws near, to remind myself that you don’t have to have a blood relationship with children who want to call you “grammy”.

So as a final note, when things go bump in the night or disappear from sight—is it really important in the great scheme of things?  Oh, yes, and now my little ceramic thimble with a lighthouse painted on it – has gone missing too.  I was using it to make thumbprint cookies. Now it’s GONE MISSING” (Grandpa would be having a fit if he ever heard me say this!)

Merry Christmas! I say this to every person I come in contact with, mostly in  stores, but my bank and supermarket, and other stores as well. They say “thank you” and I call out “MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

Somebody has to do it.  I hope you do, too.

Sandy

 

THE CHRISTMAS DOLL HOUSE

(Originally titled “Something about Doll Houses 2006” and featured in the Inky Trail News Newsletter)

When I was a little girl, Santa brought me a dollhouse for Christmas one year. I think I was about five years old.  It was one of those 40s tin-dollhouses, furnished with Bakelite furniture and a bendable family of four. I loved that dollhouse and spent many hours playing with it and rearranging the furniture. Then when I was about twelve, I came home from school one day to discover that my mother had given my dollhouse to an acquaintance for her daughter. I was horrified.

“You never played with it anymore!” my mother claimed. (It was the bane of my existence, as well as that of my siblings, that our mother would arbitrarily decide which of your possessions you could keep and which she would decide to give away. While she kept things like used envelopes (to make lists), all shapes and sizes of plastic containers, empty lipstick tubes  and all string and rubber bands—she gave away my brothers’ baseball card collections and collections of comic books—or equally perversely, she would decide to burn those things. If something was in her basement or under her roof, it was hers to dispose of. That was my mother. One time my son Steve asked her if he could have a few of the comic books that were stored in the basement. She said no, and later got rid of all of them.)

She was mistaken about the dollhouse. I did play with it. I never tired of rearranging the furniture and moving the dolls around. I had a tiny little lamp that you could hold close to an actual light and then the tiny lamp glowed in the dark. (Needless to say, this dollhouse didn’t have real, working lights!)

I never quite got over my mother giving away that dollhouse. Obviously, I was ripe for collecting dollhouses. I didn’t intend to collect dollhouses but I’ve heard that if you have more than three of something, it’s a collection.

I found the first dollhouse in a thrift store in Burbank. It was in five or six pieces and the price was ten dollars. A girlfriend helped me carry the pieces to my car. Bob put the frame back together and it sat on a coffee table in the living room for several years without any additional remodeling.  We began collecting an assortment of tiny dolls and dollhouse furniture. My niece and nephews and grandchildren played with it whenever they visited. But I wanted a Christmas Dollhouse. Bob began working on the dollhouse in his spare time. It became his hobby.

In 1997, we finally got the dollhouse up and decorated. It turned out too cute for words. We bought some strings of itty bitty lights and put up a Christmas tree in the living room of the doll house along with a Santa and his sleigh on the rooftop, taking off with his reindeer.

We spent two weeks adding fine touches; one night I was laying on the floor in front of the doll house, sticking furniture inside, and Bob was handing me pieces from a basket of “stuff” we had collected..when he suddenly says, “You know, we could be committed for this. Most people would say we’re crazy.”  But we had such a good time with the dollhouse – not just the decorating and remodeling, but spending hours poring over miniature catalogs we received in the mail. It became our joint hobby.

Another time, he said to me, “You should take that bed out of the master bedroom” and I said “well, gee, then we wouldn’t have a BED in the master bedroom” and HE says “yeah, and then you wouldn’t have all those BABIES in the nursery.” (Our nursery had about 10 little babydolls in it. I think 3 are triplets. They started taking on a life of their own).

That house looked darling alongside the tree!  The following year we began to finish off the 3^rd floor, creating a teen-age girls room and a bathroom. One time I found miniature ball gowns at a shop in Disneyland—creations patterned after the various Disney princesses; I bought two of the dresses which I think were intended to be Christmas ornaments—and then decided that, since we had those dresses, the two teenage girls were going to a ball that night. Since the two teenage girls were getting ready to go to a dance, a girlfriend made petticoats for them to have on.

The Christmas doll house became an on-going project for many years. The dollhouse mother is in the kitchen putting finishing touches on a gingerbread house; the dollhouse father is about to eat a Dagwood sandwich and sits in the living room which has a Christmas tree and a lot of presents and toys – the babies are all snug in their beds while Santa Claus is taking off in his sleigh, on the rooftop.

Every so often I’d find something perfect for the dollhouse–one year a Hallmark ornament that is a refrigerator, just the right size for the dollhouse—another year a Hallmark stove.

The rooms light up and we calculate that some of the lamps, and the chandelier, cost more than some of our real household lamps. That Christmas dollhouse became our pride and joy.

*This post was originally written some years ago, for Inky Trail News, a newsletter for women and seniors.  Since writing the original version, Bob passed away, on September 22, 2011.