…not not the weather kind, the bridal kind…or ANY kind of shower along those lines. I think whoever created the 20th century concept of showers should be taken out and SHOT!!!
I have to go to my step-daughter’s bridal shower today. First, let me say that I am delighted to be celebrating her coming nuptuals. She’s found a swell guy to marry. I’m pleased to be able to give her a gift that I know she will like. I don’t have any problems with brides being registered, or the the idea that we are gathering to give her household items (or lingerie, or cooking tips, etc.).
What really bugs me is the stupid games! My sisters were rather busy procreating, so I was invited to bridal showers, baby showers, eight grade, high school and college graduations, and then bridal showers for my nieces and future nieces-in-law and baby showers and so on. At all the wedding oriented activities, women get together and play the silliest games, all for the purpose of distributing token gifts to the participants. I finally tried to beg off on some of those showers, but it never worked.
This is my idea of a great shower: NO GAMES. Maybe you could organize a pot luck supper, or go out to eat, and then open gifts. NO GAMES!! Sitting and chatting, or putting together a personal book of recipes, but NO GAMES!!!! Going out to a Chippendale performance and having a drink or two, then sending the bride home to open the gifts the next day, but NO GAMES!!!!!
<muttering as I walk away……..no gamesnogamesnogames>
Wuve..TRU wuve…
We are aficionados of some very silly movies. “Princess Bride” is surely at the top of that list. Who can ever forget Billy Crystal saying “To blathhhhe” trying to avoid the subject of True Love. And then there’s the Bishop with the speech impediment…”Wuvvvve…TRU Wuvvve.”
Someone once said:
“Once in a while, right in the middle of an ordinary life, Love gives us a fairy tale.”
Perhaps that’s why I enjoy the movie “Roxanne” so much. Love lifts Steve Martin’s character out of an ordinary life, and wraps him up in a fairy tale of joy and hope. We all hope for the same kind of luck; luck that makes our fairy tale come true.
Another wise, but anonymous person said:
“You don’t marry someone you can live with, you marry someone you can’t live without.”
I wonder how many of us have settled for less than true love sometime in our lives? There are SO many things that confuse us as we look for a life partner…great sex…security…friendship, that perhaps we are lulled into accepting less than true love. Shouldn’t your true love be the one who supplies those pieces of you that are missing, and makes you whole?
Bertrand Russell said: “Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.” I love him..I love him not…I love him…I love him not. Or maybe the thought goes…Will my family like him, will my business partners think I’ve made a good choice, will my friends like him, or will I loose my friends if I commit to him? All those things interfere. They keep us from listening to our hearts.
Here’s a line in a movie titled “Dream for an Insomniac:”
“Unless it’s mad, passionate, extraordinary love,
It’s a waste of your time.
There are too many mediocre things in life.
Love shouldn’t be one of them.”
I’m still pondering the subject of love. Pardon me while I try to figure out just what I think about it. <G> You’re welcome to weigh in on the subject.
Minestrone
Ya know, every cook worth her salt has a minestrone recipe she prefers. Minestrone is one of the most forgiving soups around, and I prefer it to vegetable soup because the seasoning is more interesting, and the floaters have more variety. One of the best Minestrones I’ve ever had is a baked version with an incredibly beefy broth and mozerella baked over the top.
I’ll give you a basic recipe, and then I’ll tell you how mine has morphed from it.
1 cup dried kidney beans or white beans
2 cups bouillon
6 cups water
1 large onion chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
3 large carrots, finely diced
3 stalks celery with leaves, diced
1 cup diced raw potatoes
1 cup cooked macaroni
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 cup cooked tomatoes
Okay….this is how I made it this evening, when I was pressed for time:
1 can white beans (or kidney beans), drained and rinsed
5 cans of College Inn Beef broth (low fat, low sodium if desired)
1 large onion, sliced in half and then slivered vertically
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 cup julienned carrots crosscut into 1″ lengths
1-2 stalks of celery with leaves, diced
1/2 a red pepper sliced into narrow strips and diced
1 large potato peeled and diced
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 pkg. fresh pasta: 3 cheese ravioli in mini size
(or 1 cup cooked miniature pasta shells)
1 TEASPOON salt…..cut way back on the original
several twists of fresh ground pepper.
1 can recipe ready diced tomatoes with Italian seasoning
1 teaspoon dried basil, crumbled
fresh grated Parmesan (optional)
Put the rinsed beans, Bouillon and diced tomatoes into a large stockpot and bring to a boil. Heat the olive oil (I happen to like Colavita brand, but you can use whatever suits your taste) and saute the veggies until they have wilted, but not browned. Add the veggies, salt, pepper, and basil to the broth, return the soup to a boil and then reduce the heat to simmer for 30 minutes. Add the macaroni and simmer for another 15 minutes. If you prefer a thinner soup, add more broth. Serve with Parmesan sprinkled over the top.
There are some considerations. First, if you are a purist, you can soak the beans overnight. Most of the beans have instructions for this, but generally you rinse the beans and pick out the rocks, and then cover the beans with a couple of inches of cold water. Cover the pot and let it sit all night, and then drain the beans when you are ready to start the soup. You can also follow the same steps in the morning, but boil the beans for 3-5 minutes and let them stand for an a hour. Again, drain the water off the beans before preceeding. I prefer Great Northern beans, but you can use any variety you like, or even mix several types together.
We choose to use the Buitoni mini ravioli as our pasta. It makes a slightly heartier soup, and must feel more Italian to the men in my family. Besides, the shell macaroni becomes rather shapeless when it’s over cooked. If you choose to use dry pasta, be sure to cook it first, or it will absorb all the broth and dry out your soup.
Use fresh ground pepper, and grate your Parmesan fresh. Don’t use pre-grated Parmesan; it’s much more flavorful if you grate it just before using.
I also cut back on the salt in my soup. I figure that each person can salt to taste, and most of the older recipes call for way too much salt for today’s palate.
Make this soup personal. You can vary the ingredients to suit your own taste, or change them to take advantage of summer’s bounty. I have a summer and a winter version of this soup. Enjoy!
Books
I’m addicted to books. If there was a Bookanon, I’d have to stand up and say “Hi, my name is Buffy and I’m a bookaholic.” I love fiction but I can be pursuaded to read non-fiction. I haven’t joined a book club because I was afraid it might feed my habit, but I was sorely tempted on Easter when my sisters were all talking about the books they had been reading.
An online friend introduced to me two sci-fi series. One is the Honor Harrington saga by David Weber, and the other is the Miles Verkosigan series by Lois McMasters Bujold. Honor is a superb miliary officer who has half the galaxy lined up against her, including a number of politicians from her home world, who continually rises to the challenge to save the allies despite incredible odds. She has great personal loss, and a fair amount of personal gain. These stories are heavy on science and technology and military strategy and politics, but Weber has written them so well that I wade through all that to get to the charachter development. I read about six or eight of the books one after the other, and then had to wait for the most recent volume. With the last book, I had to take notes and keep a chart of who was who, just so I could follow the action. There were hundreds of characters! Still….I highly recommend them to anyone who likes sci-fi. Be sure to look for the Tree cats who communicate via sign language. <G>
Bujold’s characters are incredibly addictive. Miles is everyone’s favorite underdog, who manages to live by his wits in a mostly fictitious world of his own creation. Miles gets into trouble in his late teens while on a trip away from home and tries to bluff his way out of trouble pretending that he is an admiral. The bluff works and becomes his alter ego off planet for the next ten years. Trying to juggle the “Admiral” with his real life provides most of the humor in the books and almost all the delimma. Miles’s take on the world is sufficiently off center that he sees options that others miss, and it’s that creative thinking that will bring you back to these books again and again.
There are other series that I like. I think I have every one of Nora Roberts books, and maybe those by Linda Howard, too. I prefer the sensual or erotic romance to the ones where helpless women are saved by big strong men and then they go to bed as you read the last page. Save me from Harlequin and Siloutte books!
And then there are the mysteries and thrillers…..Carol O’Connell, Patricia Cornwall, Earlene Fowler, Susan Albert, Sue Grafton…and endless others.
We built our own house about 14 years ago, and we arranged to give up one foot of the depth of the master bedroom so that we could put a bookcase in the hallway. It’s been filled about three times over in that time. We cull books to give to the library and to pass on to family and friends. I’ve had to stop buying gardening and quilting books, because there’s no place to put them any longer. And then DH starting buying books on boats, and now we’re REALLY in trouble!
In the kitchen, I have a floor to ceiling bookshelf overflowing with cookbooks. Mother has gone overboard and purchased every slow cooker cookbook she could find. We have a lot of the cookbooks published by Southern Living, and an entire section on Christmas cookies and holiday meals. Fred has studied Cantonese cooking, so we have a few of his cookbooks, and there are Mexican and Italian, soup, and bread cookbooks. I have cookbooks dedicated to potatoes, chicken, garlic, tomatoes and BEANS to mention a few! We may be one of the few households in the US who can provide FOUR recipies for Bagna Cauda! I gotta give some of them up or be found ten years from now when someone decides to clear away the mound of cookbooks in the kitchen!
Soooooooo….you could say I’m a bibliophile. Maybe I was supposed to be a librarian in this life! “Marian”……..nah……that’s no better than “Buffy” <G>
Generosity Begins At Home
Earlier this month, when the U.S. government was voting on the President’s budget, I think I heard that we were giving a BILLION….that’s right a billion with a “b”….dollars each to Jordan, Israel and the Philippines. Unfortunately, our largess didn’t stop there, but those three caught my attention.
I would be the first to admit that I am not well versed in international politics. I know that administrations prior to this one have paid out huge sums in an effort to shore up friendly countries, or to try to bribe unfriendly ones into seeing us more favorably. It seems to me that most of that has backfired and left us with a large part of the world assuming that there will be never-ending handouts. Despite our generosity, we are now hated across the world.
I don’t understand why we are giving such large amounts to these countries. What have they done that warrants us supporting them? Are we paying Israel because it kept out of the war and kept a low profile? And why are we supporting the Philippines? I just don’t understand. Even more, I object to the blackmail coming from North Korea. “Pay us, or we’ll send a nuclear suitcase bomb to you!”
We’ve helped to free Afghanistan from the tyranny over there, and we’re told that if we don’t rebuild their country faster, they will let the tyrants back in. What ever happened to the concept of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? That’s what we’ve done. It’s how we’ve become the success that we are. Generations of Americans have worked long hours, and saved pennies, and done without until they could afford things. What’s wrong with applying that same concept in other places?
At the grocery store where I shop, there are men who hold up signs saying that they will work for food. A man who shops when I shop, will invite them to come in with him, and then he buys them meals and juice or milk. He does this to be sure that the money he gives is used for food, and not siphoned away for drugs or alcohol. This is generosity that I can understand.
With countries, I’d like to see us send food or medicine or technology, rather than cash. I realize that some places are in such dire straits that they need help to feed their people, but once the populace is stabilized, we need to assist them in ways that will make them independent. We don’t need to collect satellites; we need to create partners in a healthy economy.
Or, and this is a thought…..we might keep the money and start taking care of our own problems. We could see to it that students in poor school districts received a quality education, or we could subsidize more college education. We could provide basic health insurance for those who currently have no coverage. We could provide temporary shelter for the indigent, or create training programs for those on welfare. We could even recreate a Works Progress Authority to rebuild our deteriorating infrastructure. We would create jobs, train people, and improve our situation.
I suppose that those who are involved with politics or government will have dozens of reasons why we can’t do this, but I think that they are geared to the status quo and are unwilling to see that we have other options. We need fresh thinking in our government, and some new direction, and I hope we can bring about a better reputation for our country, too.
I don’t have the answers, but I can see the need for change.
I’m HERE! I’m HERE!!
Arrrgh