A butcher, a baker? I think not . . .

I cook, I don’t bake. Those of you who do too (cook and/or bake), know that there is a difference. So when I found myself in the self appointed position of having to create a Cardamom Coffee Cake, I had a sudden rush of panic. Now I say ‘self appointed’ because I actually volunteered to make the recipe knowing full well that I lacked the proper experience to take on such a task. And here I might just wander back a week or so earlier when I’d decided to bake some Whole Wheat Poppy Seed Cookies for another holiday get-together. I figured that all the other snacks would be unhealthy so why not bring something delicious and yet wholesome! I’d scanned through the ingredient list to make sure I had all the stuff it needed and I’d read the suggested prep and bake time. On the night of the gathering, I’d left myself just enough time to construct and bake said cookies. Now, if I’d taken the time to read through the entire recipe, I would have noticed that the final step required a rolling pin (something I thankfully had on hand, albeit the cheap, plastic model). And finally, the recipe called for a cookie cutter. Ooops.

So there I was with my dough all doughy and without a single cookie cutter in the house. I thought of my mother, an excellent cook AND baker, how she would use a glass cup to cut the dough for her wonderful, mouthwatering, made-from-scratch biscuits. So, I thought, if a cup worked on biscuits, why not cookies? By my dough was thin and the lip of my cup was fat, so rather than make clean little circles, my cookies were sort of pinched around the edges which might have been okay but for the fact that I hadn’t floured my surface enough so every time I tried to cut a cookie, it either stuck to the cutting surface or inside the glass cup. I did finally get the damned cookies baked and, although they weren’t beautiful, I took them to the holiday shindig where they stood on the table in sad comparison to all the gooey, chocolate, cream filled, decadent goodies that the other attendees had brought. I know that there were far more poppy seed cookies brought home than were eaten that night.

But this is not about the whole wheat cookies, it’s about the Cardamom Coffee Cake I offered to make. The cookie experience had prepared me, though, and so this time I read the entire recipe beforehand and knew for certain that I had everything I needed:

Bunt pan - check

Egg beaters - check

Large mixing bowl - check

Wooden spoon – check

Ingredients – check

Also unlike the cookies, I started the coffee cake process well in advance which proved to be a wise decision for I’ve come to learn that the writers of recipes who calculate the prep time all have a thing or two in common. They are all A) bold faced liars, and/or B) have the advantage of a sous-chef, and/or C) are writing their recipes with sadistic grins on their culinary faces. Suffice to say, my cardamom coffee cake took a “tad” longer than the suggested 45 minutes to prep. And here you’ll notice all the gadgets I managed to pull from my arsenal for the baking of said coffee cake. I kid you not; I used every single thing you see in this picture. Well, except for the plastic, greenish yellow mug at the top of the sink.

You might notice the hammer, a thing normally used for tenderizing meat, not necessarily for baking. But I’d forgotten to soften the four sticks of butter beforehand so I went where I always go when faced with a quandary like rock hard butter. You got it… Google! I managed to find several suggestions on hastening the process of butter thawing and I picked the one that offered a fusion of baking and exercise. It involved a zip lock bag, a sturdy rolling pin and a lot of butter pounding. But my rolling pin (remember my rolling pin), well, it would never have survived any heartfelt butter whacking so, like the glass cup cookie cutter, I found myself improvising again.

There I was, armed with my meat tenderizer, bashing butter as a hearty start to my coffee cake experience. I suppose it worked okay. The butter was no longer shaped into granite hard cubes. It was now smashed into four flat patties, perhaps not as hard as they’d been in their original state, but sadly, still frozen. So I let the pounded butter sit for a spell as I put together the rest of the ingredients. I sifted the dry stuff but then realized the recipe said to sift it all together. Out came a second medium size bowl to act as recipient for twice sifted dry stuff. I checked the butter, found it was still hard so I chopped the walnuts for the topping, checked the butter, whisked the egg, checked the butter. Although it was a full ten minutes from the ferocious pounding I’d given it, the damned stuff was still hard as a dead carp. I decided to proceed in spite of its stubborn resolve.

Now as many of you may know, when two people who’ve been on their own for a while, get married they tend to end up with two of most everything. Many of them might take an inventory and decide, well hey, we don’t need two sets of egg beaters, do we? But of course, Ron and I are not most people and we have kept our mismatched pairs of everything these last eighteen years. Sometimes our tendency toward packrat-edness proves to be a good lifestyle choice and this was one of those times. For no sooner did I employ my trusty (yet ancient) egg beater to the task of beating the partially frozen butter than my egg beaters began to object loudly. The sound they made reminded me of that time years back when the throw-out bearings in my old Chevy Super Sport were wearing thin. Every time I used first gear, the thing would scream like a dying banshee. One day I was pulling into a tight spot in a strip mall and I had to jockey the car back and forth, in and out a few times to work it into the parking spot, shifting from first to reverse and back again. I watched as people ran from the nearby stores, staring up into the sky. Now I could have been embarrassed, dug my foot into the pavement and apologized for making such a horrible racket. But I didn’t. I simply finished parking, exited my vehicle and then ambled away, gazing curiously skyward as I left.

But this isn’t about my old Chevy. It’s about baking a cardamom coffee cake with half frozen butter and ancient egg beaters. And this time, rather than looking up in the sky, I was looking down into a bowl, watching as globs of butter pinged off the sides of my glass bowl, flat refusing to be intimidated by the grinding, complaining metal blades, spinning toward them in slow agony.

Well, I thought, maybe if I add the eggs now, they would have some sort of chemical influence on the butter and perhaps coerce it to soften up a bit. Worth a try, right? Wrong! All this did was lend a new consistency to the globs so that now, rather than pinging around inside the bowl, they clung together into one massive, sticky glob that adhered to the inside cage area of the beaters and then climbed up the shafts, threatening to engulf the grinding motor. I had no choice but to retire my trusty old beaters, use a knife to pry the coagulated butter from the metal blades and then resort to using that second egg beater, the one acquired by marriage. Between the three of us, we finally got the butter beating job done.

While you won’t see that second set of beaters in the sink, I assure you, they’re there. Along with three bowls, every measuring spoon I own, two sets of measuring cups, my flour sifter, two wooden spoons and three rubber scrapers. Not to mention the bunt pan that was happily baking away in the oven as I tidied up the kitchen, a full two hours into my cake making project.

The sad part was that, like my poppy seed cookies, the cardamom coffee cake had some stiff competition and most people opted for the handmade biscotti or the raspberry filled butter cookies. Even the mince meat pie disappeared faster than my large, odd shaped monolith. Thankfully though, my husband works in an office where leftover anything can be abandoned anonymously in the break room where it’s guaranteed to be pounced upon within moments of first being sighted. Ron told me that my two hour cardamom cake lasted about a half an hour. I guess it’s nice to know someone appreciated my feeble (and perhaps final) attempt at baking.

The Fourth Chihuahua

I currently belong to two Boston Terriers and I neither want nor need any more owners, especially little yappy ones with pissy attitudes. So why is the cosmos sending me messages in the form of tiny, quivering taco dogs?

The first one I saw while walking my two Bostons. There we were with the split leash, Sampson (the big one) dragging Piper along. I like to think of it as mentoring but I’m not sure Piper would agree. Anyway, we were a few blocks from home when I saw a little brown Chihuahua sniffing around in someone’s driveway.

Now I don’t like seeing dogs running free and I always stop to see if they are lost and need some sort of assistance. In fact, I once saved a little Schnauzer that way. She’d gotten out of her yard and was romping around a busy street. She bounced her way over to me and I managed to snag her. Then I flagged down a nearby jogger and asked him to read the number on her collar so I could use my cell phone to call her owner (see, I walk with my cell phone but not my glasses . . . it’s a long story, don’t ask). So the nice jogger not only read the phone number on the dog tag but also dialed it for me since I couldn’t see the number pad on my phone. When I talked to the owner he was ever so grateful that I’d found his little Diva but he was all the way up at College Station and would not be home until the evening. He said he’d appreciate if I could hang on to her until he got home. So I said sure and, since I only had one leash and it was attached to my own dog (I only had Sampson back then), I carried Diva the remaining mile home, grateful for the fact that she was only a Schnauzer and not a forty pound Labrador. When Sampson and I got home, we learned that Diva was a) not housebroken b) hungry and c) wound up like the energizer bunny. It was a fun day though. Diva wore Sampson out completely and I was glad to have helped her and the people she owned.

But the little Chihuahua wasn’t wearing a collar so I already knew he wouldn’t be as easy to help as Diva had been. And, unlike Diva, he showed no interest whatsoever in either me or my Bostons. In fact, he scampered about twenty feet down the sidewalk where he stood, staring and trembling and obviously impervious to the little kissy noises I made trying to coax him nearer. Whenever I took a few steps closer, he scurried a little further. Finally I decided that perhaps he lived at the house I’d first seen him at and I’d be exacerbating the situation by scaring him further from it. So I took my two charges home, hoping for the best for the little taco dog.

The next one I spotted from my truck. A different dog, a different day but this one was collarless too. It was headed south on Lakedale, focused on some important doggie mission. It didn’t pay any attention to me as I slowed way down, looking around to see if it had any people with it. It was alone though but very intent on getting somewhere. I didn’t attempt to engage this one in dialog from the truck and figured that, by the time I found a place to turn around, it would be gone.

The third one must have followed me home from another of my dog walks. I’d just gotten back into the house and was washing my hands in the kitchen sink when I happened to glance out the window. Lo AND behold, there was yet another Chihuahua! This one was white and a bit larger than the other two had been, but also collarless. I dried my hands and went out the back door, once again, the good Samaritan trying to assist a lost dog. But by the time I got out there she was gone. I wandered around the cul-de-sac, but she had apparently made it around the corner before I’d gotten out the door.

The final one (dare I use that word?) was spotted from my truck as I drove to the coffee shop last Friday for a meeting with my writing group. There were a number of kids playing in yards and I thought surely it must have belonged to one of them so I didn’t slow down, stop or even give it more than a curious glance. The thing I did notice was that, like the other three, it wasn’t sport any bling.

So how weird is it that collarless Chihuahuas keep popping up out of the blue? Am I just imagining them, like those infamous pink elephants? Or maybe there was a surplus of them after that Beverly Hills Chihuahua movie and now they’re being snuck into random cities and dumped, dropped from low flying helicopters like Dumbo Drop or something (not to imply that movie makers would ever do such a thing - heaven forbid.) And why do I keep comparing yappy little taco dogs to elephants? I don’t know. I just hope nothing comes of this recurring Chihuahua phenomenon. Lord knows, I don’t need another owner, especially a little yappy one with a pissy attitude.

The Home Run

The Home Run

To cruise the Internet means to find all sorts of gems. I can open an e-mail, click on an embedded link, then another and another and soon I'm buried in great stuff. Well, maybe not all of it is "great." Sometimes my on-line journey can be pretty frustrating. But other times it's a wild, insightful adventure, one I'd love to share with everyone I know! But of course that's not possible. Not everyone shares my same interests and passions and would get as excited as I do with some of the stuff I find. Not everyone has time to sit through 'my stuff' when they have plenty of stuff of their own! But sometimes, sometimes . . . I find something I just can't keep to myself.

This film depicts an actual event.

On the Occasion of a Three Day Retreat

It’s one thing to spend three days sitting in guided meditation, chanting sutras, holding poses and trading mantras, returning home long enough to grab what’s needed for the next day, completely oblivious to how my behavior neglects and abuses my environment. Why should I concern myself with any of that while I’m so inwardly engaged?

It’s quite another thing to be here at home, trying desperately to catch up once the retreat is over. Here I’ve taken some time off, turned my back on daily obligations, put everything off until “later.” And now that later has arrived, I’m fearful that I’ve let things go too far. The question becomes: how can I neglect the necessities of my own survival (healthy food choices, caring for those who share my home, tending to my own clutter.) How long can I ignore these things before there’s no way back?

I see my weekend as a microcosm, like the world itself, like our country, our home. We’ve all been turned inward far too long, thinking of only ourselves, ignoring the needs of our environment, unconcerned with the future we’ve created. I can’t help but wonder whether fixing myself might somehow have larger implications. And I can’t help but feel the powerful need for something as simple as balance.

Victim of the Wire

Today the internet died - a saturation of the cable sunk in the back yard where a deluge of rain has soaked the lawn to the bone - and I found myself suddenly alone, utterly, completely isolated, without a voice to speak or ears to listen. Completely closed off from my world, abandoned.

I kept telling myself, ‘it’s okay, the conversations you have with friends can wait. It’s not like they hang in mid sentence, waiting with baited breath for your words of worldly wisdom. And it’s not like you stay plugged in all day, every day.’

Yet, the fact that the outside world was unreachable added a sense of urgency to my need to reach it! I tried to focus on something else but my mind kept drifting back to the empty screen. I wandered the house in a distracted fog, touching this, reaching for that. I picked up a magazine, shoved it aside. Tried the book I’d been reading but the words swam in front of my eyes, blurred and unreadable. I phoned a couple friends but only got their voice mail. How suddenly I’d become desperate for a voice, new words flashing across the screen, that little red icon in the lower right corner! But I was shut off from the world, a victim of the broken wire.

I tried to work on something local to my machine, Photoshop or the book I’m writing. But I kept getting distracted by the Internet Explorer icon sitting in the tray at the bottom of my laptop. It kept calling to my mouse, ‘click here, click here!’ And whenever my mouse wandered over of its own accord, not a thing would happen. It was then I decided how desperately I needed an intervention. My life had been hijacked by Facebook, Blogspot, Gmail, Youtube and MSNBC.com.

I tried positive self talk: ‘Ah, Linda, life is much larger than the seventeen inch screen, is it not?” And this helped to calm my angst. My gaze wandered out the window to the yard, still glistening from the morning rain. Where a cool, fall breeze ran its fingers through the fronds of the palm tree and then rippled the surface of the pool. Where a cardinal sat eyeing me from its place in the yaupon holly and where my two dogs romped around, playing keep-away with a small, pink Frizbee. But soon my eyes moved down, down to that strip of lawn where I knew the traitorous wire lie buried in its shallow trench. And I wondered how long it would take the cable guy to get here.