Healthy, Frugal, Simple, Kind

Yes, we need to exercise more, but a big component has been the food. Sue and I need to be eating more healthfully and more frugally, thanks to a confluence of stimuli. We’re both overweight. My A1C and cholesterol have been heading in the wrong direction. And “frugal”? That reflects national trends and my current personal situation.

There have been other stimuli that are more “carrot” than “stick.” First, the death—no, the memory—of Columbia, Missouri’s shining light of vegetarianism, Leigh Lockhart, founder, owner, and high priestess of Main Squeeze café, has led me to re-re-re-reconsider my attitude toward organic, sustainable, healthy, whole-grain vegetarian cooking. She was filled with joy about a sustainable, organic, healthy vegetarian lifestyle. Her slogan was “Goodness for all.” And she meant it!

Since her memorial gathering on June 27, I’ve been poring over Main Squeeze brochures I’ve kept in my recipe scrapbooks. Juices, smoothies, sandwiches, wraps, bowls, breakfasts, soups, hot dishes . . . the only real reason I stopped going to her café was because it was always incredibly busy at lunchtime. We’re talking lines out the door. And I didn’t work anywhere near downtown. Then, we moved out of town and were never even in Columbia for breakfast or lunch.

Also, I’ve been making my way through a new (to me) book, Johnathan Kauffman, Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat. It describes the historical and cultural ingredients, and movements, that created the cuisine we’d call “health food” in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. This was the culture and the foods I encountered in Columbia at the food coop and with lots of college friends who made dishes such as “tofu and sprouts.” This was long before Whole Foods commodified health foods, added lots of fancy-schmantzy techniques and top-dollar ingredients, and quadrupled or sextupled the price. (Which is why suddenly it’s become a questionably unquestioned “truism” that “only the rich can afford to eat healthy food.” Hmm.)

Did you know that in college and grad school, I often ate a macrobiotic diet? Brown rice and beans with steamed vegetables. I always kept sea vegetables—hijiki and wakame—on hand! I was quite vegetarian. This was before I got really interested in cooking. And yet I was never strict about anything; I could always turn around, visit a restaurant, and enjoy kung pao pork, chicken mole, or yes, the occasional Quarter Pounder® with Cheese. But at home, I was quite frugal. Brown rice, beans, and veggies matched my checking account, for one thing, and it never, um, disagreed with me.

And I liked avoiding “factory food.” I grew up in a house where margarine was favored because, first, it was low in cholesterol, thus healthier, and second, it was a lot less expensive than real butter. But things changed, and by about 2000, I was switching to butter or olive oil for cooking, and relegating “I Can’t Believe” to a role as a basic bread or pancake spread. I quickly grew skeptical of Hamburger Helper and so on. A close friend in college turned me on to simple steaming and stir-frying vegetables, with only a small bit of lean meat.

So that was the diet I ate for several years.

Eating vegetarian food is also a positive for me because it has always made me feel MUCH less guilty whenever I had to see one of those awful livestock semis on the highway. Don’t tell me it doesn’t bother you, too, when you glimpse the eyes, faces, legs, and tails, of see a snout protruding from the holes, amid the excrement seeping around the bottom of the trailer. Don’t tell me it doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable to think about those living, breathing, intensely worried animals, trying to keep standing, breathing nasty diesel fumes at seventy miles per hour as they endure their one-way route to extermination. I’ve seen too many movies about the holocaust, when humans were treated that way, and I’ve never lost my innate empathy toward animals. I didn’t grow up on a farm and have that kindness and sensitivity crushed entirely out of me. Where does our innate empathy toward animals come from, do you suppose? I think we have more in common than we have differences.

The recent national and statewide cyclosporiasis outbreaks also give me pause. I suppose most stupid Americans will take that as an excuse to eat fewer “green things” and more beef and bacon. Look at how the spate of E. coli cases linked to fast-food restaurants’ handling of alfalfa sprouts led to alfalfa sprouts almost completely disappearing from all restaurants and grocery stores. The answer wasn’t to ensure that employees would simply wash their hands after wiping themselves in the bathroom. It was to remove the ingredient that couldn’t be cooked above 160°F.

It seems one of the best ways to avoid cyclosporiasis is to eat produce that comes from our local farmers markets. It’s not that I ever fully trusted that prerinsed, pretrimmed, prebagged, “where-did-this-some-from” greenery from the big groceries. I’m guessing those giant-ass nationwide produce companies rely on hardworking migrants who are given few potty breaks and nowhere to go when they are. And yes, I have trusted, even admired the produce department of my local Schnuck’s grocery. . . . But beyond that, our local farmers markets are happy places for me. For sheer shopping fun, I’d rather go there than, say, to any mall. Yeah, give me a little more of a push to go to the farmers market!

I’m sensing a new direction. I’ve learned a lot more about cooking since the first time I plunged into healthy eating. I know how to deploy a wide range of spices and how to make masalas, how to cook without scorching stuff, how to make crêpes and sauces and omelets, how to adjust baking times and temperatures to my old, idiosyncratic oven. I know how to make my own sprouts, which will of course be completely free of cyclospora and E. coli. The only thing that can’t really be shortened is prep time, but it appears I might have some extra time on my hands. Healthy, high-fiber food is filling. So be it. Time to lose some weight, anyway.

Hurricane Eyes

Hello, there. It’s hard to figure out how to jump back into this blogging thing, after so much time away. I mean . . . I’m still here, but I’m been busy with other things. It’s the same story as the last several “where have I been?” posts. Skip this post, and hope I post a new, better one soon, unless you’re really curious.

It’s been like moving from one hurricane eye to another: Just give up on the idea of more than a few weeks of relative normalcy. Chaos is the new normal.

But first, the requisite pretty picture, because the Internet loves pictures. It's a dickcissel that was dickcisseling at us at Friendly Prairie on May 31.

Okay. So. Basically, Mom and Dad have required a lot more attention and help than I had expected. They’re basically helpless. It’s been exhausting, physically, mentally, emotionally. It turns out that being in charge of two people’s lives and affairs (in addition to your own), and being in charge of a second house (in addition to your own), and having it all fall on your shoulders abruptly, is basically overwhelming. This doesn’t even count the parade of maladies that require medical attention, a litany of follow-ups. Teeth breaking off; outpatient Moh’s surgeries; and then Mom fell and broke her hip in early March. And it wouldn’t be so bad if both of my parents followed the doctors’ and physical therapists’ instructions (and not just Dad).

With all the time they require, and me feeling wiped out all the time, it’s been hard to find the blocks of hours I need to focus on my job, which is editing. Turns out you need to use your mind in order to edit things . . . or, for that matter, to write blog posts. Obviously, my job, and income, has to be Priority One. . . . Our yard has kind of gone to hell this spring; Sue has stepped up to do some of the yard things I used to do, in the Before Times.

Meanwhile . . . I have found time to write things in my actual physical journal. With it, I take a lot of notes, and I do a lot of “processing,” at odd times here and there. As always, I carry it and a pen with me everywhere. So if I stop at a restaurant for a bite, or get dinner to-go for Sue and me, I’ll sit there while I wait, and set down the frustration or vexation du jour. My theory is that if I write it down, it removes it from my immediate mentality. It sets it in the past, and it lightens the load.

I also write about the funny stuff, and the sweet stuff, to balance it out. I write about the “here is where I am right now,” for the historical record. One day, I may look back on this and think, Wow, wasn’t that a time.

One of the bright things about the journaling this year has been thanks to some lovely new inks Sue gave me for Christmas. There’s an outfit in Pittsburgh, the Birmingham Pen Company, that makes handmade ink colors. They’re really nice, and Sue got me a five-pack: Heron (blue), Tiger’s Eye (yellow-brown), Burlywood (a different yellow-brown), Pitted Nickel (gray-green), and Byzantium (gray). I had previously tried out the company’s Waterfront Dusk (maroon), and decided I loved it.

Over the years, my inveterate journaling has included various writing implements, but I usually circle back to traditional fountain pens. I’ve used the same one since about 1995, I think. Before I got it, with its refillable cartridge, I used ones that had prefilled disposable plastic cartridges, and I was always trying to squeeze a drop or two of black into the bright blue, bright green, or bright red cartridges. “Tube” colors never did much for me.

Which is why I like the Birmingham Pen Company’s inks; they’re complicated, natural, intriguing colors. If you like using a fountain pen, do check them out.

On the subject of journaling . . . a few years ago, I prepared a series of blog posts about journaling. They’re literally all done; I even had the photos cropped, sized, and ready to go. I just never pulled the trigger on posting them all.

I don’t see what I’m waiting for, except that every time I sit in front of a computer, I feel like I need to be working, and not farting around with my blog.

Maybe I should try to fit in a little blogging, though. Maybe it’d make me feel like I’m doing something kind of fun.

Update: Where Have I Been?

Just in case anyone's wondering, I'm still alive. My parents have needed a lot of help since the beginning of April. Dad was hospitalized from April 1 through the 18th. I've basically been helping them almost every day since then. Paul was in Missouri for six weeks to help. Neither of us could have gotten through these few months alone. I'm flat-out exhausted. Hopefully they are in a place, now, where they don't need me to care for them on a daily basis. There is still a load of work to do. Now that my shoulder's good and messed up, and all the joints and muscles in my legs, arms, and back ache, no more furniture needs to be moved. (Good, but not surprising timing, there.) But there's a lot of administrative work to do, financial, logistical, healthcare, etc.

I haven't been able to get billable hours, to speak of, for this whole time. So naturally, no time to blog. And I'm not ready for any kind of Jar of Goodness crap.

Except . . .

For all of those who helped me, and helped us, and helped my parents, these past months. Far too many to mention right now.

I don't have the time for gratitude now. I shouldn't even be writing this now, because I need to WORK. And I need to mow the lawn before it rains again. And so much more I need to do. I need to make dinner. The beat goes on.

In closing (for now), here's a gratuitous picture of Brenda sleeping on the sunporch. Gggggghhh.

P.S. Oh yeah, we still need to take down those storm windows and put up the screens . . . so much for my sore shoulder . . .

Jar of Goodness 3.30.25: Brenda

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for Brenda.

Or, as we sometimes call her, Brenda Hoover. Or Brenda Hoover Kirby Eureka Dyson. (Because she’s always ready to eat.)

I mentioned her earlier, but she’s overdue for a formal introduction. I’m including several pictures of Brenda taken since September 2024.

We more or less adopted her sometime last September. She was one of the “neighborhood” cats—you know—the ones that appear, first on the outer margins of our yard, then gradually encroach nearer our house despite our few TNR cats that mostly repel new cats from forming a tribe in our yard.

It was about a year ago, in February 2024, that she first appeared; we guess she had lived with people who lived along the creepy alley on our block. On the other side of our privacy fence, we heard the woman who lives in the house just north of us hollering at a child: “That cat is pregnant! She gonna have kittens!”

It had to have been Brenda, but no, Brenda wasn’t pregnant; she was just overweight, and she has a nervous overgrooming condition that makes her lick and chew the fur off her belly. Brenda is ear-tipped, for goodness sake; she's been spayed.

Sue started calling her “Brenda” early on; she makes up these little names for the neighborhood kitties spontaneously. They are already named before I even notice them. Brenda started sneaking around one end of our fence, sitting or standing there, watching to see when our regular TNR cats were done eating, then moving in to, well, hoover up whatever food was remaining.

But Berry, the empress of our TNR cats, made her feel pretty unwelcome. So Brenda figured out that she would be okay if she kept to the southwest corner of our house. And Sue figured out that she could put a separate bowl out, on that side of the house, just for Brenda.

(This is Berry, a miniature black panther; would you want to cross her? I didn't think so.)

We had always figured that Berry, the empress, who is the oldest of our TNR cats, would be first in line to come live with us inside the house (she already spends most nights, and all severe weather, inside our downstairs sunporch). But Brenda moved quickly. We’re not sure how old Brenda is, but we think she’s old enough—or at least, had a hard enough life—that it pained us to think of her trying to live outside during the winter.

We basically held the front door open for her, and she came right in.

In addition to her weight and nervous overgrooming habit (which I chalk up to PTSD, anxiety, or whatever gives cats nervous behaviors), she seems to have spine, hip, or leg problems. I’m not sure she sees really well, either. Her eyes often seem dilated more than necessary. Also, I wasn’t sure her hearing was very good, but I now realize she hears just fine, since she hears a cat food bag opening, or the sound of spoons clinking on dishes, from two rooms away.

It was sometime in September when we started letting her in. At first, she spent an inordinate amount of time sleeping. Outdoors, she had slept on the ground under our forsythia and lilac bushes. That can’t have been very comfortable, or restful.

Since she came to live indoors, she has auditioned nearly every surface a cat could nap on. The blue ottoman. The living room sofa. “Chairey,” the green overstuffed chair in the corner. The floor. Any bed low enough for her to jump up onto. Then she discovered the third floor, and the daybed up there. And the chair in my office. And the cushion-covered trunk in my office window. Now that it’s gotten warmer, she discovered the back sunporch and its chairs, the table, the sofa out there. She’s even learned that for a few hours in midmorning, the sunshine beams right onto the floor in the doorway to the outer sunporch. Perfect for a nice morning bask! This place must be like a wonderful, wonderful dream to her. So many new rooms full of comfortable places where she can relax!

It’s really gratifying to see a cat, who’s had such a rough time in life, explore what must seem like heaven, by comparison.

This isn’t to say it’s been smooth sailing. First, Lois and Brenda haven’t exactly been friends. Lois, for no reason whatsoever, went on the defensive and acts like the underdog. She runs from Brenda; Brenda only hisses at her, but Lois scampers away like a frightened bunny. Fortunately, Lois has been learning that Brenda, though much heavier and equipped with a deep, loud hiss-megaphone, is not likely to pursue her more than a few inches at a time. Lois can easily run circles around Brenda.

The other strange thing about Brenda’s integration into our household was the litter box. For the first few months, Brenda never used the litter box, I suppose because it smelled of Lois. But Brenda never had an accident in our house. Instead, she held it until she could get our attention, lead us down the steps to the front door, and be let out only for potty purposes. (She used the mulch in our front flower beds.) She never ventured far from our front door, and she learned to scratch on our aluminum screen door if we didn’t let her back inside after about fifteen minutes.

Just in time for the winter’s first bad weather in November, she started using the litter box. And she really hasn’t been outside since then. She hasn’t even asked.

For her first few months, she got to eat however much food she wanted. She ate all the food in her bowl, plus anything Lois didn’t immediately finish, and she gained weight. That was probably a mistake on our part. In late January, we switched her to “indoor cat” food (higher fiber, lower calorie), and we've been gradually decreasing the total amount of food she gets per day. It’s easy to limit her food, since Lois can get her own food on a high surface that Brenda cannot jump up to. (Yet.)

Brenda has a fun, though crochety personality. Yes, food and napping are foremost, and so is safety. She hates being picked up (I think it’s from fear, and not pain) (someone really mistreated her). When picked up, she mutters “Noooo . . . !” and grabs anything she can to prevent being lifted. When she’s relaxed, she slowly, slyly wiggles her tail tip. When she’s in her full nap “zone,” she snores and she presses her face against nearby pillows. When disturbed from a nap, she lifts up her head and stares at the noisemaker with groggy annoyance.

When she tucks in to her food bowl, she makes a chewing noise like “nyuh, nyuh, nyuh.”

She comes off as a big ol’ grouch, but when she gets a choice, she always chooses to be near us.

Now that she and Lois are starting to understand each other better, Brenda has been inviting her to “play.” First, the good old cat game of “gatekeeper,” where one cat simply blocks the other’s exit from a room. Lois, for instance, might be on the outer sunporch, and Brenda plops down right in the doorway between it and the rest of the house. Staring directly at the “trapped” Lois: “Try to get by me!” Cats apparently find this game great fun.

Another invitation to play is when Brenda just plops down anywhere near Lois, exposing her belly, with her head on the ground. It’s like she’s saying, “come and rub my belly. I’m just resting.” As if. Lois doesn’t take her up on the invitation, but she stares and, on some level, realizes that their relationship is no longer revolves around animosity.

Lois, for her part, has fun creeping around Brenda on the margins of the room, sneaking behind the sofa, zigzagging behind chairs and floor lamps, making a bridge out of a guitar case—getting past Brenda, who can’t help but track Lois as she sneaks by. Lois also likes to approach Brenda quietly as she sleeps, then sniff at her tail or foot or back—whatever is nearest—then back away quickly if Brenda awakens.

This is all to say, they are getting along. Brenda is fitting in nicely, growing more comfortable, sleeping on beds and sofas with us, running to me when I pick up her comb, and yes, doing a little Brenda dance next to her bowl when I’m opening her food bag.

So, welcome, Brenda, you’re an official member of the Opulent Opossum Elm Street community!

Jar of Goodness 3.23.25: Blue Lights, Firepit Nights

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for our blue lights, firepit nights.

One of the fun things Sue and I have been doing in recent years is flat-out enjoying the backyard in the evenings. In 2018, I bought a bunch of decorative lights: cobalt-blue stringlights and spotlights, and retro-incandescent-bulb-looking stringlights (which look golden-orange when blended with the blue), and hung them around our backyard and sunporch. I do say, they add a nice festive touch, cool and warm. I've tinkered with, added to, repaired or replaced, and improved the lights since then.

And we have a very cheap, old firepit we’ve been using for years. It’s a rusting, shallow saucer on a just-strong-enough stand, with a rusty, decrepit screen that we really don’t use much anymore. This “firepit” is lightweight and tucks away easily when not in use. We always have a pile of miscellaneous sticks that we need to get rid of, and it’s excellent tinder and kindling. We also manage to accumulate a variety of small logs (mostly branches that fall out of trees in our yard, or Mom and Dad’s), which we saw into ridiculously short eighteen-inch sections that fit in our little fire pit. Our firepit is basically a surreptitious way of disposing of woody yard waste.

But it’s also an opportunity to have fun. We have a bottle of wine. We listen to relaxing music on my little bitty Bluetooth speaker. We roast some weenies and have some potato salad. We look up at the sky. We visit with the backyard Wild Things cats. Sometimes an opossum or raccoon ambles through the yard.

Our opportunities for enjoying these blue lights, firepit nights are not great during the winter, since we don’t bother to cover the wood and we won’t try to burn it wet. Plus, we don’t want to have to hover over the fire to even be outside.

But when the weather starts to improve, and the sticks and little logs dry enough to burn cleanly, and we get an early spring day without winds and red-flag warnings, it’s a perfect time to sit and enjoy our backyard, and each other’s company.

. . . Also known as the simple pleasures of life.

Wherever you are, and whenever you’re reading this, I hope you’re finding ways to enjoy your life, too.

Pansies for Edna Day

This is one of the big ways we celebrate the beginning of spring here on West Elm Street: The annual planting of the pansies. This little tradition goes back eighty years to when my dad was a kid. He’d buy a shoebox of pansies from old man Hugo Busch on Dunklin and Madison for his mom’s birthday—which almost exactly coincides with the first day of spring. She would put them in her front planters, for everyone to see. Dad has written about this on his own blog, so I won’t repeat it.

This is one of the first subjects I wrote about when I started the Op Op, too. Look here for that blast from the past.

So yesterday, two days before Grandma’s birthday, I put pansies once again into the front planters. After the drab winter, the pansies, and the flowerbeds full of daffodils, are incredibly cheerful. And we need it.

My little addition to the traditional is to use a little bit of mulch, and to place crystals and interesting rocks artistically around the pansies, which helps hold the soil in place during these sometimes severe spring storms.

Each year I arrange the rocks and stuff a little differently.

As spring always does, there are chilly days mixed with warm ones. Sometimes a chilly day, though, is sunny enough to warm up our front steps, and I can sit on the steps and bask a little after work and before I make dinner. And the pansies are there to make me smile a little bit.

Here's how I arranged them this year.

David’s Pancake

Y’all, this is really good. A friend shared this recipe with me back in about 1987, and I had never made it. She was older than me and had a lot of interesting stories from the 1960s and 70s. For years, I have wondered, “Who was David? . . . Probably an old boyfriend of hers. The Vietnam vet?” Finally, I Googled the recipe and realized she must have copied it right out of The New York Times Cookbook, by Craig Claiborne, published in the 1960s. The “David” is David Eyre, who was a food writer and editor for the NYT. The recipe is actually named “David Eyre’s Pancake.” So it wasn’t some groovy, super-talented, 1960s boyfriend of hers. She just copied it out of a book. See how important it is to cite your references?

The recipe card has languished in my recipe files all this time.

Actually, I think I tried to make it once, but it was a disaster because I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t have the proper equipment. I’m surprised I kept the recipe.

Over the past few years, I’ve been compiling and typing old recipes into a big Word document, and (not knowing if this recipe had gotten a fair shake in my kitchen back in the late 1980s) I decided to try it again.

And hey, it’s really good! Another name for this kind of preparation is “Dutch baby.” It’s like a big popover made in a skillet, or like a soufflé. And just like a soufflé, it can go in a sweet or savory direction. You need to pay attention to technique, but it’s not hard. (If I can do it, then anyone can.)

Here’s how I’ve made it into a resounding success.

Equipment: I use an approx. 6-inch diameter (seasoned) iron skillet (it’s heavy, it holds heat, and it’s fine to go into an oven); also, I use our little toaster oven/convection oven, on the convection setting. The little skillet fits perfectly in there. (Or, if you’re making more than one at a time, or using a larger skillet, use an actual oven; but it must be fully preheated.)

So here's the nutshell version: Preheat your oven. Mix the batter. Then, start on the stovetop: heat a couple tablespoons of butter in the skillet (the skillet should be on a pretty hot burner; once the butter foams, and before it turns brown, it’s ready); pour the rather liquid batter into the skillet; then place the skillet into a preheated 425-degree oven and let it cook, undisturbed, for about 15 minutes.

That technique I just wrote? That’s the part I didn’t understand before, but it’s the principle that makes it turn out well.

Here’s what happens: The batter starts cooking as soon as you pour it into the hot-hot pan. Then, during the 15-minute oven time, the pancake cooks and puffs up. With a 6-inch skillet, some of the butter may seep over the side as the pancake rises, but let it. The pancake usually doesn’t quite get entirely solid in the center. I mean, I don’t think you even would want it to get completely “done” in the middle. The edges balloon up and get done faster, and may even get a little crispy. The eggy, custardy, soufflé-like center will deflate when you pull it out of the oven.

You’ve got to eat it hot, right out of its miniature iron skillet. Very cozy. To protect your tabletop, serve it atop a potholder or trivet.

I like sprinkling over it some fresh lemon juice and powdered sugar, which makes the center kind of like lemon curd. It can be a breakfast, lunch, or snack, or possibly a dessert, if you added, say, a sweet fruit compote on top, or chocolate and whipped cream, or whatever. But see the suggestions at the end.

I think this makes one serving, but if you’re eating it with other foods, such as a fruit salad, it could be enough for two. Especially if you make it in a pan larger than a 6-inch skillet . . . but then you need to slice it in half (very unpretty). Better to use individual little skillets.

• ¼ c. flour
• ¼ c. milk
• 1 egg, slightly beaten
• pinch of nutmeg
• 2 T. butter
• 1 T. confectioner’s sugar
• Juice of ¼ lemon, or jelly, jam, or marmalade

Preheat the oven to 425°F.

In mixing bowl, combine flour, milk, egg, nutmeg. [I would add a pinch of salt, too.] Beat lightly/don’t overbeat. Leave batter a little lumpy.

Melt butter in a 12-inch or smaller skillet with heatproof handle. When butter is hot [foams/stops foaming], pour in the batter. Bake in oven for about 15 minutes, or until golden brown.

Sprinkle confectioner’s sugar and return to oven (to warm it, if desired).

Sprinkle with lemon juice; maybe add more confectioner’s sugar, or jelly, jam, whatever.

Yield: 1 or 2 servings.

Alternate treatments: Instead of lemon juice and powdered sugar, or jelly or jam, you could top it with chocolate or maple syrup, fruit compote, whipped cream, butter-sautéed sliced banana with brown sugar (and maybe a bit of rum) . . . anything you might put on any other pancakes.

But! You can also stir small-diced ham or crumbled bacon and grated cheese into the batter before pouring it into the pan. Or some chopped baby spinach and herbs. Or a duxelles of mushrooms. Or whatever . . . as you would an omelette. Yum!