Be Back Soon

This cold of mine seems to have settled in and made itself at home.  As a result, I am taking a few days to be a layabout.  Lots of liquids, mostly of the tea and juice variety, chicken soup and rest.  There is nothing life threatening going on here - just a bugger of a bad cold.  Which leaves my body tired and my brain foggy.  If it doesn't start to clear up in a few days I will drag myself to my local pill-pusher's office.  I have never understood why a person who is too sick to function normally should have to sit in a waiting room full of people who are too sick to function normally.  If doctors still made house calls, I would likely be more apt to see one when ill.

I'll be back when the aches subside and the fog lifts.  Until then, visit those folks on the side bar.  They have lots of good things to say.

Charlie Was a Good Old Dog

Last evening I received a phone call that I knew was coming but did not want to hear.  My youngest son called to tell me that the time had come when the quality of life of their family dog, Charlie, had deteriorated to the point where the only option left was for their vet to help Charlie pass peacefully on to his reward.

Charlie came into their lives over 15 years ago.  He was the cutest little bit of fur who endeared himself right off the bat by chewing up some of the woodwork in their rented house while they were at work.  Thankfully he outgrew that habit.

Charlie was there to welcome each of the three children born to my son and his wife.  He was so good with the kids and they loved him dearly.

I often thought his name should have been "Hoover" for he was like a mini vacuum cleaner, cruising the kitchen whenever there was a remote possibility that some stray piece of food would hit the floor.  This earned him jail time when meals were served.  I always felt sorry for him, so I would sneak him a treat whenever I could.  I don't think I was the only one.  Those eyes would get me every time.

I babysat Charlie more than once when my son and his family were going out of town for a few days.  On one occasion, my son brought the large wire kennel for Charlie to use while I was at work.  Well, that didn't go over too big with Charlie.  I could hear him barking and howling all my way down the stairs and out to the street.  I was working at a dog grooming shop next door at the time, so I caved and brought him to work with me.  He was in his glory, meeting and greeting all those people and dogs who came to the shop that day.

After a while my son wouldn't let me babysit Charlie any more.  He claimed that whenever Charlie stayed with me he gained 5 pounds.  I said it wasn't my fault that Charlie loved french fries.

It doesn't seem fair that a dog's life span should be so short.  They give us so much more happiness than we can possibly give them.  They love us no matter what.  That's something we can't say about most people.

Charlie, you were a good old dog.  You will be missed.

Another Fading Memory Surprise

I have a cold.  Nothing serious.  Just mildly irritating.  Caused me to sleep most of the day away.  Which causes me to be bright-eyed at 2 AM.  Good thing I am retired and don't have to explain my odd sleep patterns to a boss.  Or to anyone else, for that matter.  I have found that 2 AM is a good time for writing another blog post.

I am maybe one of the few who actually likes being my advanced age.  Take for example this fading memory.  The other day I had finally dug my way to the back of my Fibber McGee's closet.  I had dragged out a tub full of fabric.  If you are one who sews, or more particularly, one who quilts, you have a stash of fabric.  And you never, ever throw any of it away, not even the scraps.  Because you might need it.....someday.  And if the fabric shop has a really good sale on cotton quilt fabric, you buy more.  Because you might need it.....someday.

Anyway, about halfway through sorting and folding, I found these.

Yep...my fading memory handed me 30 quilt blocks that I had completely forgotten about.  Once I saw them, it came back to me how I had cut the squares from a set of fat quarters that I bought a long time ago for a project long forgotten.  I had sewn the squares into simple blocks and then got busy with something else and had put them away.  So as soon as my nose unstuffs and I stop sneezing, I will sew the blocks together into a quilt top.  I'm sure I have fabric for the back, but I will need to make a run to the fabric store for quilt batting.  These blocks will make a nice sized quilt - just right for snuggling under on a cold winter evening.

I just love this kind of surprise!

Canning Apple Juice

I like fruit juice.  So when a good brand of apple juice went on sale I bought 10 of the larger frozen cans.  I stored them in the fridge for a couple of days to thaw.  Then I made up all ten cans at once in my stock pot, heated the juice to the simmering point, ladled it into hot pint jars and processed them in a boiling water bath for 5 minutes, according to the instructions on the National Center for Home Food Preservation website.  (That website has lots of good information for canning, freezing and dehydrating foods.)  I got 36  pints of canned apple juice.

Now some would wonder why I don't just put the juice cans in the freezer and mix the juice up one can at a time like normal people do.   Here's why.

Each frozen can makes 48 ounces of juice.  That's just too much for me to use up.  A pint jar of juice is just right for one person.

Should I lose electricity for any length of time in the warmer months, I would have to do something with the frozen juice when it thaws or lose it.

If the electricity is out, that means the pumps that bring water to my apartment are not working either.  I need water not only to make up the juice, but to fill the water bath canner as well.  As an apartment dweller, I have limited space for water storage.  I store enough to keep me in drinking water for a long time, but not if I have to use some of it to can juice.

And fruit juice is a liquid, which means that if I have several kinds of juice canned and on my shelves, they will serve to keep me hydrated in an emergency and save some on my water storage while giving me a flavorful change from drinking plain water.

As frozen juice goes on sale, I will buy other flavors and can them as well.  Even if I never need to use them in an emergency situation, they are still a good addition to my food storage.  I keep a couple of jars of juice in the fridge all the time and sometimes it is nice to open one for breakfast or for a bit of a treat.

The Minnesota Shuffle

One morning before this latest cold snap, I went out for a walk.  The sun was shining and the temperature was only a little bit below the freezing mark.  Tolerable for a Minnesota winter day.  When I got back to my building, I sat on the front steps, enjoying the sunshine.

Here we often see the "Minnesota Shuffle."  It is a way of walking in the wintertime that is sort of a cross between a shuffle and an upright duck walk.  It is practiced mostly by us old folks, who are convinced if we slip and fall on the ice, we will break a hip.  And we know that if we break a hip, the kids will be checking out the dreaded nursing homes within 24 hours.  So we walk very, very carefully on the icy sidewalks.

As I sat basking in the sunshine, I noticed an old lady headed my way, doing the Minnesota Shuffle.  As she got closer, I saw she was talking to herself.  I thought maybe she was just a garden variety crazy, but changed my mind when she got close enough for me to hear what she was saying.

"Florida," she said.  "Why didn't I move to Florida.  Arizona is warm.  Should have gone there.  Or maybe Texas..."  And on she shuffled, eyes downcast, watching the sidewalk, skirting around the patches of ice.

I can relate.

Waste Not, Want Not

I guess I will never get the hang of cooking for one person.  When you spend several years cooking meals to feed four hungry kids it is not easy to scale back, even when the kids have been out of the house and on their own for a goodly number of years.

I have had three meals of the turkey vegetable soup I made on Sunday.  That's pretty much my limit of how many meals of leftovers I can handle.  So I dumped the remaining soup into the crock pot this morning and added another quart of turkey broth.  I thought maybe some peas and corn would taste good in the soup, so I tossed in a pint of each, too.  Let it heat on the Low setting the better part of the day.

This afternoon after I had put my grocery order away and had the salad fixings in the dehydrators, I heated some pint jars and filled them with soup.  They went into the pressure canner and were processed at 10 lbs. pressure for 75 minutes.  I got 7 pints of soup to add to my canning shelves.  That might not seem like much, but I just hate to waste perfectly good food.  Those 7 pints equal a weeks worth of lunches.  I may be a bit tired of it now, but it will look pretty good to me after a while.

Remember when TV dinners first appeared in the stores?  I think every family on the block owned a set of TV trays and we would take our TV dinners and put them in front of us on the TV trays in the living room and eat supper watching the Ed Sullivan Show.

Mothers everywhere loved TV dinners because they could serve their family a meat and potato meal just by popping the frozen dinner in the oven.  My parents, being frugal, bought just enough TV dinners to collect maybe a dozen or so of the aluminum trays.  They washed them well and then filled them with leftovers, covered them with aluminum foil and stacked them in the freezer.  I have to say that the TV dinners made with home cooked food tasted way better than the store bought variety.

I sometimes think my parents were the King and Queen of Waste Not, Want Not!

Outside the Box

So today was my grocery order day.   I had gone through the weekly store ad and my list was ready.   Before the guy who takes my order called, I looked the ad over again to see if I missed anything.  I  had.

The store had those 1 lb. bags of shredded salad fixings on sale for cheaper than buying the ingredients and making them myself.  I usually don't get pre-packaged food, but I thought I could make good use of these.

I ordered 4 lbs. of what they call salad greens.  This is just shredded leaf lettuce.  I will dehydrate all of it and store it in a canning jar.   A small amount added to ham salad, egg salad or chicken salad for sandwiches will be good, or sprinkled on top of a pasta salad or a potato salad for flavor.

I also ordered 6 lbs. of shredded coleslaw mix, which is a combination of green cabbage, red cabbage and carrots.  When dried, a handful in any homemade meat and vegetable soup adds extra flavor.  And that combination is good in any number of casseroles.

The experts tell us to store beans and rice, and I do have those items in my food storage.  But mostly I store ingredients to make the meals I like.  Beans and rice are good to have for they provide nutrition necessary for survival.  But a steady diet of them would get old in a hurry.  I like to have as much variety as possible.  Sometimes it is good to think outside the box a bit, like dehydrating salad and coleslaw mix, especially when it is on sale for cheap.

Even a small thing like dried salad mixes to flavor a meal, or a variety of herbs and spices to use for the same reason, can make life during hard times just a little bit easier to take.