Carole’s Golden Corn Bread

I recently mentioned that I’m in the midst of a long-term project of transcribing, organizing, and annotating the recipes of my people—in a broad sense: from family, elders, friends, and from midcentury potluck recipes, church-lady recipes, recipes in well-worn cookbooks, marked with stars and garnished with splatters. Recipes scrawled on the backs of envelopes; recipes passed among friends and passed down through generations. Recipes on tan, antique paper, with the edges crumbling away. It’s my own way of passing them along.

The present recipe is one from my aunt Carole Schroeder’s collection. It’s one of four cornbread formulas I’ve accumulated (so far). I recently shared my grandma Renner’s cornbread recipe.

Carole’s recipe card, which I photographed, is in her husband, Richard’s handwriting: it was probably a big favorite of his. Aunt Carole had put the card into a plastic sleeve to protect it. Probably, it was a favorite of the whole family!

Aunt Carole is a master of fantastic soups. Often when we’d visit, she’d serve bowls of delicious homemade soup, plus all sorts of lovely nibbles alongside: crackers, bits of cheese or a spread, like her homemade hummus or pesto, plus fruits and veggies. She’d make these soups “by feel,” using what she had on hand. For example, she’d make a chicken soup inspired by southeast Asian flavors (I’m thinking lime and ginger), with vegetables and some cilantro from her garden.

This cornbread would be especially good beside bowls of chili, bean soup, split pea soup, or lentil soup. These days, I enjoy cornbread with breakfast: fried eggs, bacon or ham, or cooked tomatoes, or cooked greens.

This is a perfect straight-up cornbread. It strikes a balance between the southern and northern styles. It is not especially sweet, fluffy, and cakelike, but neither is it dense and entirely lacking in sweetness.

When you are evaluating cornbread recipes, look for ratios of flour to cornmeal, and the amount of sugar. “Northern” recipes use ample flour and sugar, producing a tender, cakelike bread that almost falls apart—lovely in its own way. “Southern” recipes, with proportionately more cornmeal, are much denser, approaching polenta, with only enough added sugar to ensure the sweetness of the cornmeal comes through. They are hearty and perfect for crumbling onto your plate and ladling soup beans and cooked greens, and their delicious juices onto.

I think this cornbread is what Jiffy cornbread mix would be like if it backed down on the sweetening and the factory ingredients, and if it was moister and tasted more purely of cornmeal. What’s not to like?

Provenance: Knowing that Aunt Carole used the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book (revised edition, 22d printing of the De Luxe Edition), I looked it up in my copy of that edition (the 11th printing, inherited from Grandma Schroeder), and there it is exactly: chapter 6, page 16, right above the recipe for “Southern Spoon Bread” and below the one for “Blueberry Buckle.”

So this is not some original, heirloom recipe that was passed down in Carole’s family, unless her mom had the cookbook (which is a real possibility; Grandma Schroeder, of Mrs. Schreen’s same vintage, had the book). To say that the Better Homes and Gardens De Luxe edition served generations of American cooks is a massive understatement. Those recipes are still being used today . . . as in this case.

Reflecting on recipes like this . . . so, it’s from a book, but it’s a classic worth passing along. Put a star by it. Its ease of preparation frees up mental space for more creative dishes, like Carole’s wonderful, creative soups, or a perfect pot of chili.

My only tips are that I use a Pyrex dish, and I just spray it with Pam instead of fussily lining it with waxed paper. I like larger hunks of cornbread, so for me it makes nine pieces, not sixteen. Also, my antique oven runs hot, so I set it slightly lower, at 375°, and start checking it at 12 minutes. (You know . . . experience; know your oven.)

• 1 cup flour
• 1 t. salt
• 3 t. baking powder
• 2 T. sugar
• ¾ c. yellow corn meal
• 2 well beaten eggs
• 1 cup milk
• ¼ cup melted shortening

Sift flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar; mix with corn meal. Combine eggs, milk, and shortening; add to dry ingredients; stir just until moistened. Bake in waxed-paper-lined 9-inch square pan in moderately hot oven (400°) about 20 minutes. Makes 16 squares.

Simple Cooked Apples and Aunt Annie

Here’s another recipe that’s really more about family. As I and my cousins and classmates have slowly become the elder generation, I’ve been sifting through, transcribing, and annotating recipes written on cards, in notebooks, on scraps of paper tucked into church-ladies’ cookbooks, on the backs of old envelopes. These are mom recipes, grandma recipes, aunt recipes, great-aunt recipes.

It’s been hard to complete this project, because I keep acquiring more of these recipes. I open up another one of their old cookbooks, and another little recipe falls out.

Then there are “recipes” that no one bothered writing down, because they were so standard, so simple, or so memorized they didn’t require it. But as I think back to how we used to eat, and compare it to how we eat today, I find I want to include these dishes.

This post is more about a person than it is about a recipe, and it’s only marginally a recipe, anyway.

This time, we’re featuring Aunt Annie—my great aunt Anna (Eggert) Wilmesherr (1904–1981), who married Emil Wilmesherr (1899–1990) in 1922. Emil was my grandma Clara (Wilmesherr) Renner’s younger brother.

Emil and Annie lived in Washington, Missouri, where his and Clara’s parents, William August and Pauline (Wehmeyer) Wilmesherr, had moved their young family from Kansas in about 1901.

Grandma Renner, though she didn’t have a car and couldn’t drive, still got to see her kin in Washington pretty often, with it only about an hour away on Highway 50. Emil and Annie had nice cars.

Fun fact: Aunt Annie’s sister Ida Eggert (1902–1956) married Clara and Emil’s older brother, Andrew Wilmesherr (1899–1990); they lived in New Haven. Two sisters married two brothers!

With Franklin County a center of the extended Wilmesherr-Wehmeyer-Brinkmeyer-Busekrus family, Emil and Annie often hosted the annual summertime family reunions. Sometimes it was at their house, but later it was held in the basement of the Leslie [now-Zion-no-longer-United] Methodist Church. (That congregation must have split from the mainstream denomination in 2023, but whatever.)

Uncle Emil often made homemade ice cream for the reunions, and when he got too old to make it, he ensured there was plenty of vanilla ice cream from the supermarket (or dairy).

I can picture him, sitting next to the big cylindrical tub of ice cream, professional-quality ice cream scoop in hand, dipping out perfect spheres of ice cream into everyone’s bowls. Between servings, he’d plunge the scoop into a container of hot water, to make the scooping easier. You only had to hold out your bowl to him, and he would fill it, or refill it, smiling, his eyes twinkling. So, so, good.

These reunions were potlucks, of course, so before the ice cream was served, we enjoyed a selection of all kinds of hot dishes, cold dishes, fried chicken, sliced ripe tomatoes, cold cuts and sandwich fixings, Jell-O salads, pies, cookies, and cakes.

While the adults visited, trying to figure out how they were related, and how many cousin-times removed they were, and learning about recent marriages and babies born, we kids visited and revisited the food tables. It was always really hot.

When the family’s formal meeting started, we went outside to play, or carefully explored the church sanctuary above. Being a young pianist, I was amazed with their 1908 pipe organ.

Emil and Annie had fruit trees in their yard, so they often provided bowls, or pies, of fresh peaches and apples.

And here is the “recipe”: one year, I remember that Aunt Annie had served a big bowl full of cooked, cold apples. They were fresh apples (probably Jonathans) from their trees, peeled, cored, and quartered, cooked until perfectly tender, sweetened with a bit of white sugar, chilled, and served in their own juices. Was there a hint of cinnamon? I can’t recall. They were tender, with only enough body to hold their shape just long enough to collapse when you closed your mouth on them.

I recall going back again and again to get more of those icy cold, delicious apples, on that hot day, in that musky church basement. These simple apples blew my mind. Yes, I was pretty young, but I was at an age where I was starting to notice and think about such things.

They weren’t apple pie, apple dumplings, applesauce, or baked apples. I asked Mom about them. “What do you call these?” She said she was pretty sure Aunt Annie had brought them. “Ask her.” So I did.

Aunt Annie kind of laughed her bubbly laugh and shook her head, with its snow-white hair, and told me, “Why, they’re just plain cooked apples, honey! How do you make them? Well, you just cook your apples, like you’re making applesauce, but you don’t mash them up!”

I must’ve expressed to her that I thought they were the best things on the whole potluck. She was flattered, but had to chuckle. She was always kind to us kids. And she had the sweetest smile.

Today I understand her bemusement, since at that point, for all I knew, applesauce was something everyone bought in a can. Only old-fashioned country people, it seemed, made homemade applesauce. But in Aunt Annie’s world, every female probably knew how to make applesauce from scratch by the age of eight. The simplest thing on earth.

I’ve been making them for myself for as long as I’ve had a kitchen. I use a steamer. I don’t turn them into applesauce—you can buy applesauce, right?

But each time I make them, I think of Aunt Annie, and her smile.

Another Kind of Air Show

Two Sundays ago, on the thirteenth, Sue and I did something unusual for us: we left the house, and not only did we leave the house, we did something that was strictly for fun! We weren’t procuring food or dry goods, or running errands, or driving anyone to an appointment. We just drove north of town, across the river, to see the weekend’s air show more closely.

We’d been hearing and seeing the planes pretty well from our yard; we’re only about three blocks from the Capitol, and thus the river, and the airfield is just north of the river. Some of the planes even flew over our house. As they do.

We didn’t want to pay or anything, and we didn’t need to see any patriotic signage or whatever. We just parked in a gravel lot between US 54 and the airstrip and looked up.

It was okay.

Sue always waves when she sees a small plane flying fairly low. It’s leftover from her childhood, flying on Island Airline’s Ford Trimotor to visit her grandma Bower on North Bass Island in Lake Erie.

When the air show seemed to be winding down, we took a brief, leisurely walk on the Katy Trail nearby.

The Katy Trail is a fun way to be out in nature, sort of. Most of the plants are what you’d call weeds. Many are nonnative. I mean, look, they’re growing along some old traintracks. And in many places, the trail goes by agricultural fields (perpetual soil disturbance), and the whole shebang is in bottomlands: moisture.

But although the vegetation is weedy, the growth is rank, and there are many nonnative and invasive plants, it is fun to see the insects that are drawn to all the jungley vegetation.

Here are a few little “friends” I saw along the trail, putting on their own brilliant air show.

First, a dolichopodid, or longlegged fly. I have no idea of the genus, much less the species. But it was so pretty, like a tiny jewel-bird, perched on a leaf. On close inspection, I could see it was dining daintily on a gnat.

I usually take a whole bunch of pictures, hoping that at least one turns out okay. In the process, I accidentally jostled the leaf, causing the fly to launch upward a few inches, but then it lit again near where it had been. It hopped a few times before it settled more comfortably. But for a few seconds, it looked like it was performing some kind of interpretive dance, its long legs hopping and landing, hopping and landing.

So that’s the first little air show.

The second was a surprise for me: I’m usually not fooled by flies that mimic wasps, but boy, this was a good one! This was a fly, but as it crept around on several big clusters of goldenrod, I thought surely it was a yellowjacket.

Now, yellowjackets are very common this time of year—they’re drawn to juicy, rotting fallen fruits, to whatever sweet things are in outdoor trash containers, and to untended, open soda cans. Be careful when you sip!

But, yeah, no! This lovely insect is a type of syrphid, or flower fly. Just like the longlegged fly, it is a true fly (family Diptera); it is no more harmful than a housefly. Bees, ants, and wasps are in a completely different family.

This species is the eastern hornet fly, Spilomyia longicornis. It’s simply fantastic, even compared to other syrphids.

The mimicry is brilliant. Look at the crisp black and yellow bands, and even the smooth surface sheen of the body. The swirly, mottled eyes disrupt their huge size that would otherwise help us see this as a true fly. Also, notice how the middle and hind pairs of legs are yellow, while the forelegs are black—at a glance, they give the impression of a wasp’s long, busy antennae, downplaying the little V of tiny antennae characteristic of flies. Finally, the fly’s two wings are two-toned, giving the impression of a wasp's four slightly overlapping wings.

For that matter, the timing is brilliant: this is the peak time for yellowjacket activity and numbers, and here are these flies, making the most of their resemblance.

As I ponder this, what really gets me is that this mimicry evolved and functions to fool animals incapable of logic. And this camouflage will certainly fool most people, whether they’ve taken any biology or not.

You’d think that black and yellow bands, and “buzz-buzz,” should be enough, but the mimicry of this insect goes above and beyond. It disrupts many of the anatomical hallmarks of a true fly: the two wings, the short antennae, the enormous eyes, as well as the body shape and color pattern. These are the kind of characters you’d learn in “Zool. 350: Invertebrate Zool.”

I actually did not see this insect fly; it was so addicted to the goldenrod’s nectar and pollen, it just crept from flowerhead to flowerhead, pigging out. But this spiffy flier was certainly a highlight of my own personal air show that day.

And yeah, this is a great time of year to look for cool insects on goldenrods. Bring your camera.

Grandma Renner's Southern Cornbread

My grandma Clara Renner’s recipe, as my mom typed into her own recipe notebook. Mom said that her Grandma made cornbread frequently.

As usual, although this post is about food, it is also about the connection: my grandma. Therefore, I’m sprinkling in some photos of her, taken by Mom in the 1950s.

A note on the photos: About fifteen years ago, Mom diligently digitized her old slides, but she didn’t clean the slides before scanning. So there are zillions of unfortunate specks and spots. Sue color-corrected some of them for me, but others still retain a pinkish red color shift. She did all she could. Sorry about that.

Better to have imperfect pictures than none at all. Sometimes soft photos have a perfection all their own, you know?

Grandma was born in Kansas and grew up in Washington, Missouri. From the time she was a teen and throughout her adult life, she lived in Jefferson City. She worked hard, raising four children and taking care of her husband and his father during the Great Depression and then World War II. Grandpa worked at the local printing company.

Like I said, Grandma worked hard. She had a garden, she raised rabbits for cash, she took in laundry and ironing for cash. She had to hide her grocery money from Grandpa. (I didn’t learn about Grandpa’s depression and drinking problems until long after he had died.)

Grandma had German heritage; her dad’s grandfather had immigrated to America in 1858, and her mom’s mother had been born in Germany, too. She grew up speaking German in the Lutheran church she attended. (If you struggled to learn the Lutheran Catechism, just imagine learning it in German!)

Unlike my other grandma, who was the daughter of German immigrants, Grandma Renner seemed much less Germanic. Culturally, she was more rural, or more Americanized. Grandma Schroeder would make split pea soup served with rye bread, and Grandma Renner would make ham and bean soup served with cornbread. At Christmas, Grandma Schroeder would make sauerbraten; Grandma Renner would make roast chicken (or turkey, though she greatly preferred chicken) . . . or a plain pot roast.

Or she would grill steaks out in the backyard, basting it with homemade BBQ sauce.

So, I find it interesting that she’d have a recipe for southern cornbread: southern. Most people would just call their cornbread “cornbread,” right?

Therefore, we need to talk about southern cornbread.

First, the sugar. Always the sugar, with those southerners. Can’t have too much of it in the iced tea, but can’t have a speck of it in their cornbread.

There’s a lot made out of the idea that “true” southerners never, ever, ever include sugar with their cornbread. But then, many southerners “admit” that they use “just a titch” of sugar.

Grandma’s recipe includes one tablespoon of sugar for four cups of corn meal and flour. That’s not very much.

I think it’s reasonable to include a small amount of sugar with cornbread in order to correct deficiencies in the sweetness of the cornmeal being used. If it’s super fresh and high quality, it’s probably sweet enough on its own. But if your cornmeal sits around on your shelf, or if it’s been in a warehouse for who knows how long, it might need a little help. In fact, what you bought at the grocery store probably does need a little help.

The overall idea, however, is that southern cornbread is not obviously sweet; it shouldn’t be like cake; it should be sweet only in the sense that corn itself is sweet. It’s a lot like adding a small amount of sugar to a tomato sauce.

Another southern thing is to make cornbread in a cast iron skillet. The old-fashioned technique is to preheat your oven, then heat your well-seasoned iron skillet on the stovetop, mix your batter, dollop some butter or lard into the skillet (which is so hot it immediately starts to sizzle), and right after that, put your batter into the skillet; it sizzles instantly. Then you transfer it into the oven to finish. This way, it develops a buttery, crisp, golden crust on the bottom, which you can make the top by inverting it upside-down onto a serving plate. Or serve out of the skillet, as you prefer.

But I’ll bet my grandma didn’t fuss with that. She wasn’t a southerner, anyway. For goodness’ sakes, her immigrant grandpa had served in the Union Army from 1861 to the end of 1864. And she was a modern midwestern homemaker. I bet she made it in a cake pan or a baking dish, in the oven.

So, what’s better, northern or southern cornbread? Southerners apparently see it in black-and-white: southern style is best, doggone it! Meanwhile, northerners usually don’t get so het up over it.

Me, I prefer to have all the colors in my coloring book. I like both the sweet kind and the unsweet kind. I like cornbread with blueberries, cheese, jalapenos, peanut butter, jam or jelly, split and toasted with butter and caraway (or poppy) seeds—you name it.

And I like corn griddlecakes with sorghum molasses!

As always, I have some comments on the recipe:

First, with its 3-to-1 ratio of cornmeal to flour, it will be dense and rather dry, not delicate and cakelike as in northern cornbread. Cracks will develop on the top, like the Dry Tortugas, or the Nevada Proving Grounds. . . . Rub some butter on the top surface.

This is perfect for crumbling into a bowl and topping with cooked beans and their juices, or with bean soup, or with thin, soupy chili.

As with most quick breads and muffins, mix the drys and wets separately, first; then combine them together.

Grandma’s recipe doesn’t give a pan size, precise temperature, or baking time. I use a 9 x 13 Pyrex baking dish, set the oven at 425 degrees, and start checking it at around 12 minutes; it’s done when it starts turning golden brown on top and a toothpick comes out clean.

• 3 cups cornmeal
• 1 cup flour
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 heaping teaspoons baking powder
• 3 or 4 eggs
• 2 cups sweet milk
• 1 tablespoon lard [melted, surely; or melted butter or vegetable oil]

Mix all together and bake in hot oven.

Railfanning the Big Boy

Wow, was it fun to see the Union Pacific Big Boy 1440, as it chugged though Missouri in July.

The “Big Boy” steam engines were built in the 1940s in order to haul incredibly heavy loads around (including across the Rocky Mountains) for the war effort. These engines weighed 1.2 million pounds. Eight of these crazy-huge locomotives still exist, and Union Pacific’s restored Big Boy 1440 is the only one that runs. So they take it around the country every so often for publicity purposes.

Its 2026 tour is over, but you can find tons of YouTubes showing it at various points on its journey. I decided to add my little video (belatedly) to the fray. I think I was the only person videoing it in Bonnots Mill.

Railfanning is a thing; I’ve blogged about it before. A lot of railfans seem to video every train they see. I’m not that nutty about it, but I couldn’t help myself once I realized the massive train would be crossing the little trestle that crosses the drive connecting Bonnots Mill’s Old Mill Road and Osage County Road 416.

At first, Sue and I were had thought of seeing it at Morrison, or Gasconade, or Chamois. But those seemed like they might be rather crowded. Also, they were farther away.

Bonnots Mill turned out to be a good choice for us. There weren’t too many people gathered to see the train go by; I think they were all more or less locals. Several of the “advanced case” railfanners were driving along with the train’s progress, stopping here and there to watch it go by again and again. But they were absent from Bonnots Bill.

But Bonnots Mill is off the beaten path. If you were a railfanner following the Big Boy along west US 50, a detour to Bonnots Mill is about 6 miles (one way) from Loose Creek, or 11 from Linn. With that detour, you’d miss the arrival of Big Boy at its majestic entrance in Jeff City!

So we opted to view it at a tiny, historic town, where it would blow past us in less than a minute.

Unbeknown to us, Big Boy was delayed from its published schedule; after departing St. Louis, it was only scheduled to stop for about 15 minutes in Hermann, then arrive at Jeff City directly after that. But it made two unscheduled stops before Hermann: one at the Transportation Museum in St. Louis (where there’s another Big Boy to see), and one in Washington, Missouri.

So we got to Bonnots Mill about fifteen minutes before we thought it could arrive. Then we waited quite a while, wondering what the holdup was. How long did it take to get from Hermann to Bonnots Mill? Should’ve been a half hour, at most, right? But there was no way to know; no cell service in Bonnots Mill.

So we, and the other folks who showed up, waited patiently. Boy was it hot! But we had fun poking around, walking along the gravel road, looking at flowers and roadside weeds, wondering if Krautman’s Korner will ever be used for anything again, wondering if the Hotel Dauphine is getting much business.

Bonnots Mill has so much potential as a quaint getaway, or a stop along a Harley poker-run trail, or maybe a place to hold business retreats. Being right on the Osage River, where it joins the Missouri, it would be a good place for a boating or fishing outfitter. There’s a public river access nearby. I’ve blogged about the Bonnots Mill fall church supper before. But unfortunately, much of the historic downtown is deteriorating. Crumbling.

Anyway, we’ve gone out of our way to see these historic trains before. Like in 2011, when we saw Union Pacific 488 come through. That’s a smaller train, but it was incredibly impressive. In 2021, we saw the Big Boy 1440 as it came through Osage City, then we visited it in Jefferson City, where it made an official stop. The next day, we watched it chug through nearby Cole Junction, where my great-grandpa Renner used to work for the Missouri Pacific Railroad.

So this year, after spending a night in the railyards near the State Capitol, on the morning of July 21, Big Boy left Jefferson City with a whole bunch of LOUD hoots of its horn. It echoed all over town. It made me think about the days when steam engine horns filled the air of this town regularly, and people rode trains all the time.

If you get a chance to see one of these vintage locomotives, go see it, even if you only see it as it chugs by. I know you’ll find it compelling.

Jar of Goodness 8.9.26: Swami Sarvapriyananda and Vedanta

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for Swami Sarvapriyananda and for the wisdom of Vedanta.

I know, I know . . . “who he?” Around here in Jeff City, this is like having green plaid skin. But I encourage you to check this out. Look on YouTube for the Vedanta Society of New York, where you can hear many of his lectures. I’m providing some links at the end.

First, Swami Sarvapriyananda is the spiritual leader of the Vedanta Society of New York, a Hindu religious congregation that dates back to 1894, when it was founded by the incredibly influential Swami Vivekananda, who is credited with being the earliest, most influential Hindu spiritual leader to travel to the Western world. Vivekananda (1863–1902) famously spoke at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, introducing Hinduism spirituality and philosophy and advocating for universal religious tolerance and acceptance. He also played a crucial role in the rise of Indian nationalism.

Vivekananda was an apostle of his teacher, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–1886), who was a proponent of a philosophical branch of Hinduism called Advaita Vedanta, or nondual Vedanta. I’m not going to go into a long discussion about what it’s about. Most Americans don’t know the first thing about Hindu spirituality or philosophy, and it’s not my place to try to explain everything. Let’s just say, one of its key insights is that all religions will “get you there.” It doesn’t speak ill of any religion. How refreshing.

Indeed, one of the beautiful things about the so-called polytheistic religion is that it permits every person to cherish and worship her or his own deity, while everyone understands that there is a higher Reality that supersedes our human conceptions of deities. They are all avatars of the Eternal, the One. If I’m understanding this correctly, this makes a lot of sense to me. Also, this inclusive view of theistic religions tends to lead you toward tolerance and appreciation for the diversity of religions across the world and through the ages.

Anyway, I’ve been appreciating Swami Sarvapriyananda’s talks on YouTube. He’s an excellent interpreter of a lot of complex and simple concepts and wisdom. He has five thousand years of scriptures and philosophy to build on. He’s incredibly learned, but he’s charismatic and has a lovely, humble sense of humor.

I’ll wrap this up soon. I just mainly wanted to share him with you. I’ve had a rough time the past few years, and there have been plenty of nights when I have trouble sleeping. It helps a lot just to listen to him. Midnight, 2 a.m., 4, 6 . . . When it seems everything’s a mess, taking that enormous, universal view helps take the edge off.

One of the big images of Advaita Vedanta is that our various individual selves are all part of the All That Is, the way that every wave is part of the ocean. We can’t be separate from it. It is in and through us. The Infinite Eternal can’t be defined objectively; as soon as you put a label on it, you’ve objectified it, placed a definition and a fence around it. And it’s no longer infinite and eternal.

I hope I’m getting this right, because I’d hate to misrepresent this great tradition to you.

No one likes proselytizers. So now it’s time for some links to YouTube videos.

“Vedanta in Five Parables” is a delightful telling of five “greatest hits” stories that explain key concepts of Vedanta. It’s simply fun. Swami Sarvapriyananda once taught at a children’s school, and it shows in his storytelling.

“What Is Vedanta?” is exactly what it sounds like. After you’ve listened to the parables, this is a more in-depth discussion.

“Vedanta in America” is a fascinating lecture about how Hinduism has influenced American thought since Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Gives some of the history of Swami Vivekananda’s influential visits to America in the late 1800s and early 1900s./

“Tat Tvam Asi (That Thou Art)” explains this famous phrase of Advaita Vedanta. It helped me to understand the difference between this ancient philosophical tradition and the embarrassing New Age pseudo-Hinduism that misinterpreted this concept as “I am God.”

Julie's Granola

Yes, it’s precious to announce this as my own recipe, since I openly adapt it from Carol Gelles, 1,000 Vegetarian Recipes. I think it’s an unspoken truism that any granola recipe is intended to be altered to fit what you have on hand, and what the saveur du jour happens to be. But I’ve tweaked it enough that it’s pretty much my own. But thank you, Ms. Gelles (or Carol, if I may).

A few ingredients notes: I like to use genuine sweetened carob chips. These days you have to hunt for them, because last time I looked, I couldn’t even get it at our local health foods store. Whaaaaaat—? Yes. But I seriously like carob chips in my granola, muffins, granola snack bars, and so on. I’m not going to try to make “chocolate” frosting, cake, or brownies out of it. But as a flavorful ingredient used like raisins or blueberries, they’re really quite nice. Be sure to used sweetened carob chips.

Cashew pieces: I’ve been buying raw cashew halves and pieces in a bag at the international store. Look for Swad brand, in the India aisle. Since childhood, I disliked cashews, but those were always Planter’s roasted and salted cashews. But when you them raw, you can toast them yourself, and season or not. Much more delicious.

And substitute stuff as you like. Just keep the overall quantities about the same: you need enough liquid-stuff to moisten enough for everything to get a little coated with the oat bran, wheat germ, brown sugar stuff. Also, the original recipe called for raisins. You could swap craisins or other dried fruits, nuts, etc. See notes after the recipe for more tips.

• 3 T butter
• ⅓ cup brown sugar (packed)
• 1½ to 2 T juice (apple, orange)
• 2 c. plain, rolled oats
• ⅓ c. sunflower seeds (or pumpkin seeds)
• ½ cup wheat germ (I use Kretschmar’s toasted wheat germ)
• ½ cup oat bran
• ⅓ cup raw cashew halves and pieces (or other nuts)
• powdered cinnamon (to taste)
• ⅓ cup sweetened carob chips (or chocolate chips)

Preheat oven to 350°F. (If your oven runs hot, set it at 325.)

Spray a 9-x-13-inch baking pan with Pam (Pyrex casserole dish is good). In a microwave, melt the butter, then stir in the brown sugar and juice until dissolved.

In a big mixing bowl, combine all the rest of the ingredients (except for the carob or chocolate chips, or raisins or any other dried fruit you might use). Pour the liquid ingredients over the mixture in the bowl and toss to get everything moistened. (Texture: you don’t want it soggy; if it seems too dry, you can add a little honey.)

Spread the granola mixture into the prepared baking pan and spread evenly. Bake, stirring and checking often, until dryish. The edges will brown first. Don’t let it burn.

Take it out; while it’s still hot, sprinkle cinnamon and the carob (or chocolate) chips over the top. The chips should melt a little bit, which is good. When it cools further, stir in any dried fruits you’re using.

Let it cool completely before storing in an airtight container.

Tips:

• I suggest adding raisins or dried fruits after baking to avoid them burning. Burnt raisins are evil. I like chopped dried apricots, chopped dried, sweetened pineapple chunks, dates, craisins, etc.
• Any kind of nuts or seeds are a great addition; the original recipe calls for 3 T. sesame seeds, but I usually don’t keep those on hand, and they go rancid quickly. But I keep sunflower seeds and pumpkins seeds in the freezer; they’re right next to the sweetened carob chips!
• Granola: you know what to do. Sprinkle on yogurt with fresh fruits. Eat some out of hand as a snack. Eat it with milk as a dry cereal, or mix it in with other dry cereals. Sprinkle some on ice cream. This would be a nice garnish of a cold fruit soup or a fruit smoothie. And so on.

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, or 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.

Aunt Sally's Rhubarb Sauce

This is an awesome, classic jam recipe, for whenever you can get your hands on some fresh rhubarb. Wow, it’s delicious!

In recent years, I’ve been compiling, transcribing, and annotating the trove of recipes I’ve accumulated from all my relatives. This recipe had several iterations, since Mom had a copy, Grandma Renner had a copy, and Great Aunt Lyddie had a copy. Aunt Lyd’s was handwritten and tucked into her copy of Cooking with Faith, the 1975 church-ladies cookbook from her Faith Lutheran church here in Jefferson City. “Sally” in the title is my aunt Sally Renner, my mom’s sister-in-law.

This is made with Jell-O, but it’s definitely supposed to be used like jam. The recipe ends with: “Good on hot rolls.” Or biscuits! Or pancakes and waffles! Or ice cream! Or . . . !

• 3 c. rhubarb, cut in small pieces
• 1 c. frozen strawberries, or 1 small can drained, crushed pineapple
• 2 c. sugar
• 1 3 oz. pkg. banana-strawberry Jell-O or mixed fruit Jell-O [see below]

Cook rhubarb, strawberries (or pineapple) at a rolling boil for 8–10 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in package of Jell-O. Pour into jars or molds, and chill overnight until set. Can be left, covered, in the refrigerator for a week or more. Good on hot rolls.

Julie’s notes:

• They don’t make “Mixed Fruit” flavor Jell-O anymore, do they. The strawberry-banana flavor works really well; strawberry Jell-O works fine, too.
• I’ve used thinly sliced dried pineapple instead of canned, and that works, too.

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!