The Formula

So, last weekend, I got chubby. I hate that. You’re going along, merrily enjoying your life, then boom. You wake up and your jeans are uncomfortably tight. Then you think, oh crap, I forgot to do the formula. I’ll admit that last weekend, being my birthday weekend, included a lot of eating a lot of my favorite things. Stromboli, cheeseburger, fries, spicy crispy beef, frozen custard (does a more perfect food even exist? Anybody? I thought not), popcorn. Oh, and I tried a new and amazing new scotch: Scapa 16year. The scent is almost better than the taste. So maybe all that celebrating has a little something to do with my situation. Whatever.

So now, it’s on to the formula. The formula is the creation of my friend, Monica. I call her my fitness guru, and she is. (She’s also a personal trainer.) Monica has taught me a lot. (I now realize that basically everything I know is from one friend or another. Thanks guys.) She taught me that one must incorporate weights, and one’s body can do more than one thinks, especially if one has Monica leaning over one’s shoulder shouting, “DO IT!” Monica has about one-fifth of one percent body fat. (Boo, hiss.) One day, she told me her own eating plan, which I’ve tried to, more or less, go by ever since, except for on super-fun weekends, or third Tuesdays.

     I call it The Formula. It is simple. Small breakfast, like a smoothie, or some nonfat Greek yoghurt with walnuts. Lunch is a salad. This is the interesting part, cause I throw anything I can find in the fridge in it. You need to have a protein in there, like an egg or tuna. You can have a few crackers, too, or a piece of bread. Dinner is just a regular dinner: meat, veggies, starch. You can have a glass of wine, and a small bit of low-fat ice cream also, but you need to work out about 5 hours a week, or more. That’s it. As I was making my lunch salad today, I was caught up short, and thought, preetttty.

      I had to run and get my camera so I could remember the lovely color/texture combo forever. Then I noticed the pretty gift bag from the candle my friend, Michelle gave me, then the candle holder in the window…. 185 pictures later I sat down for lunch, but not before snapping the place setting.

 Here are a couple of my favorites.

And remember, the next time you feel the need to “call in fat” for work, think of Monica, and try The Formula. DO IT!

best...bread...ever

So, I wanted give you my recipe for the best bread ever. Bread making is so exciting. I got into it a last winter thanks to my good friend, Lynne. Okay, so maybe Lynne wouldn’t  know me from a hunk of cheese, but I think of her as a friend. Here’s why.

          After the accident last year, some days were tough. I found comfort from clinging to all the cozy and homey things, like ironing and cooking dinner. (I actually enjoy ironing – how lame is that?) I discovered The Splendid Table with Lynne Rossetto Kasper, which is an NPR show. Listening to this show always cheered me up, and got me scheming about what food to create next. Also, it’s educational. Ask me anything about salt, or olive oil. Anything, I tell ya.

          One day, Lynne had a bread guy on, talking about slow rise bread, and how this method caused intensely flavorful bread because it collects yeasts from the air. I got some books from the library and began experimenting. He was so right. Here is a recipe I developed based on all those I tried.

          First, supplies. You will need a heavy ovenproof container with a lid. I have two, both work great. One is a vintage crock, which I picked up at a flea market in Canton, Texas. The other is a clay container, which I got at Goodwill.

          You will also need a cotton or linen towel. I use a linen dishtowel which my friend, Carolyn got me in Guernsey. Every time I make bread, I think of her fondly.

          Okay, here’s what to do. Take 2 & ½ cups of bread flour, ½ cup of whole wheat flour (I use white whole wheat), ¼ tsp. yeast, and 1 tsp. salt. Mix them in a large non-metal bowl.

Next, take 1 & 1/3 cups water (room temperature) into which you have well-stirred 1/2 tsp. of molasses, and dump it into the flour mixture. Glop it all together into a big moist ball. It should be a bit tacky. You may need to add a little more water.

Throw a plate on top of the bowl to cover it completely. Let it sit for 18 – 24 hours. If it is not too cold out, I take it outside for 15 minutes or so to let it collect some of that yeast before covering it and bringing it inside.

          It should be kind of bumpity (don’t you just love that word), or dotted with air bubbles, and moist when done rising.

Lay out your towel, and rub a little flour into it, then add a thin layer of cornmeal. Scrape the dough from the sides of the bowl as you collect it into a clump. You may need to flour your hands.

Now turn the edges under like you are making a mushroom cap. Place that on the towel over the cornmeal. Slice 3 slits into the top. Put a tiny sprinkling of flour on it, and fold the towel sides over it. Let it rise for 2 hours.

          A half hour before the rise is done, turn the oven to 470 degrees, and put the baking container, with lid on, into the oven.

After a half hour, take the container out, take off the lid, and place the dough mound into it, cornmeal side down. Quickly put the lid back on, and pop it into the oven. After thirty minutes, take the lid off, but leave it in the oven.

Bake it another 5 to 15 minutes, till it is nicely browned, somewhere between acorn and pecan in shade. Place it on a cooling rack for at least half an hour before slicing it.

          Oh, and don’t seal it in a plastic bag, or it will lose its crackliness. After cutting, lay it cut-side-down on a plate, and cover lightly with a cotton towel. After 2 days, you can cover it loosely with a plastic bag, but don’t seal it.

dog & poem

Yesterday, I forgot to introduce my dog, so now I'll tell you about Jamie. That's her name, but we usually call her Jimbob. I don't know why, exactly, as she's a girl, but the name seems to suit her. I almost didn't get to have her.

     She came along eleven years ago. I was shopping in McKinney, Texas with two friends. Jamie came up to me, all scroungy and skinny. At the time, I was looking for a dog, as my beloved Oreo had died a few months prior at age twelve. I was already scheduled to look at a dog the next day and had convinced myself that I would take that one. It was a rescue being fostered. So Jamie spoke to me with her eyes, but I was uncertain. What did I know of her? She was obviously a stray and mangy.

     I deliberated. One friend said take her, the other said don't. Jamie kept following me into a garden shop. I couldn't decide what to do. Next thing I knew, the sales lady had called her husband to come get the dog. She wanted her. I figured it was fate, and let the dog go, despite my instinct to grab her and run.

      Next day, the foster dog turned out vicious, so I knew I'd made a mistake. I felt that God had tried to give me the dog, but I had not accepted the gift. A friend at work said to try to get her back. This had not occurred to me, as I am a person that usually just accepts my lot. I couldn't sleep for thinking of that dog and her eyes. I tracked down the sales lady (which took a whole week), and she agreed to hand Jamie over to me. Jamie was a good girl, but had been eating the chickens, as the woman lived on a farm.

     Honestly, the moment she said I could have the dog was one of the happiest of my life. I kept pondering the fact that sometimes something is meant for us, and God clearly hands it to us, but we make a mistake and don't receive it. Even then, we can learn to open our hand and that thing meant for us can still find us. I sometimes wonder if Jamie is some kind of angel. That sounds silly, but really, she's no ordinary dog. She's the sweetest girl ever.

Here's a poem that I wrote recently:

Invisible

And now we

come to

the beauty of

a peach,

wind

on skin,

piano notes

absorbed,

the brilliance

of sun.

Too much

for only one.

Too much

for everyone

here swaying,

swaying,

to a tune

so exquisite

it hurts.

This poem is kind of about how incredibly beautiful the world can be sometimes if you can let yourself go slack, or invisible and absorb it. Sometimes those moments just happen. The day I got Jamie was something like that.

Fifty-one

Today, at 1:21 pm, I turned fifty-one. I decided to start this blog as a way to record my voice. I’ve been writing for years. I have seventeen notebooks full of stories and poems, but have not had the courage to put any of them into the world. I am tired of being such a wimp. Here I will tell my story honestly. I will also share fun stuff, like crafts, photographs, recipes, and random ideas. Bear with me, as I am technologically impaired, but trying to improve. I hope that someone will leave me a comment sometime. Here goes. 

 My life has been a collection of tattered bits. I was raised by a single mom. We’d moved thirteen times by the time I turned eighteen. Moving was something of a hobby with Mom, which, over the years, she’d pretty much honed to a minimalist art from. Her strategy was to send my sisters and me on ahead with some relative, while she stayed behind to “pack our stuff,” which was code for “have a giant yard sale”. But I was a dumb kid, and never caught on as my stuff increasingly got lost in the move. I have one memento left from childhood: a troll doll with pink hair named Iggy. I got it in second grade, and used to crochet little outfits for it out of variegated yarn. I always carried this doll in my pocket on moves, so maybe I wasn’t entirely dumb.

 Mom divorced my dad, an alcoholic, when I was a baby, then proceeded to court a dying man, a priest, a gangster, and a prisoner (in that exact order). Her taste in men was not boring. I was off and grown by the time she married the prisoner, then died within a year or so, at fifty-two. Sometimes I almost forget these events of long ago, but I tell them here because they are where my story starts.  And because I’ve discovered that everything that happened is carried in my bones.

I married my college sweetheart at twenty-one. I always say he was a bargain. He is quiet and unassuming, so most girls did not notice his stellar qualities which I, on the other hand, immediately zeroed in on. It was easy. I’m nothing if not a natural born treasure hunter. I’d been studying the men in my family for years, so basically all I had to do was sniff out their opposite. Kind? Check. Hard-working? Check. Sober? Check. Law abiding? Check. Sane? Check. The handsome part was a bonus. The quiet man and I have been married almost thirty years now, making him my all-time best bargain ever.

We have two daughters. The oldest is in business school. The youngest is a civil engineer. They are the finest things I’ve ever made. Okay, so maybe I can’t take all the credit for their awesomeness. I’d be happy with a tenth or so. They’re both grown and independent – that’s the good news. They both live on the west coast, and that’s the sad part, as I live in Texas. To say I miss them is a bit of an understatement. Cellphones and skype help a little. Visits help more.

I develop new interests all the time. I’m verging on a new photography obsession right now. Taking photographs seems something like wakeful dreaming to me. So interesting, even mesmerizing at times. I’ve realized that I need a new (better) camera. Luckily, today is my birthday, so we’ll see how that goes.

Two years ago, I developed an interest in scotch. Scotch is a world unto itself, what with all the regions and types, not to mention the history and production process. In my opinion, the Islays are best, especially Laphroaig quarter cask. There is no such thing as too peaty or too smoky. I hope to get to Scotland one day to tour the distilleries.

I’ve been through hard times, but I try not to let disappointment stick. I took up running at forty-seven, then kickboxing and hip hop dancing. These activities made me happy, helping with the empty nest thing. I could lose myself, becoming the whoosh of my stride, the power of my roundhouse kick, or the rhythm and words of a song. Then, one day, something happened and all of these activities were taken away.

I was not ready for the thing that happened. It left me searching my pockets, once again, to see what I still had. In life, one must always carry something along to the next place.  The thing happened on a September Saturday at dusk.  I was sitting in the backseat, riding home from a barbeque dinner out with friends, Quiet Man to my left. I didn’t see anything coming, never got to brace myself. In midsentence,  I went catapulting from side to side: spinning, spinning, unable to control the motion of my head, as it knocked around like a bowling ball, or my body as it, at once, fought against and was subsumed by a force seemingly beyond a tornado. My body shot ahead of my thoughts, beyond reach, and I was suspended somewhere in between.

Next, the car was still. I heard myself screaming, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” again and again. I thought I would die from suffocation. My lungs would not work. Quiet man squeezed my hand telling me he was okay. He was not. His hip was shattered, his neck broken. The friend to my right was passed out, drooling on my shoulder. He seemed lifeless, which was terrifying, but came to while the medics extracted him and quickly recovered. We’d been T-Boned by a car running a red light at fifty five miles per hour.

In the accident, I broke fourteen bones, some shattered, some broken in several places, and my spinal cord got tweaked. The recovery has been physically painful, obviously, but hardest mentally, as I tend to overanalyze and fret over every little aspect of every little thing. I’ve had to fight hard to regain my cheer while working equally hard to accept that crappy days are okay: a part of life. I’ve had to find new gentler ways to enjoy exercise. I’ve discovered walking instead of running, and yoga to replace hip hop. The Quiet Man is doing great. He’s even planning to hike a portion of the Appalachian Trail this April.

I have a lifelong obsession with rooting through other people’s junk. Give me a Goodwill store, or an estate sale, and I’m happy for hours. It’s not the buying that attracts me so much as the looking. I like to think about the objects, and ponder the people that owned them. Several times I’ve come across funeral tee shirts, with a picture of the departed on the front with birth dates, death dates, and slogans. It never occurred to me to print up such a thing when any of my relatives died, but the idea is extremely interesting.

I try not to buy too much, and often leave empty handed, but the items that call to me most loudly, I snag. These are mostly handmade items, art, old ties, retro kitchen items, or carved wooden containers. When someone makes a thing by hand, they leave a bit of themselves behind. I collect these bits, and make sure they get appreciated. My great uncle Vic lived with us when I was in high school. He had bowls he’d carved out of mahogany when he was in World War II, and a beautiful walnut sewing cabinet he’d made. I always loved those things. There’s something so beautiful about wood grain.

In some odd way, writing helps me collect the pieces that got scattered before I had a say. At least, that’s what seems to happen. Today I am fifty-one, and these are my thoughts. Some are random, some are wrong, but in the end, I hope they turn out good. I am a hoper.