Nothing Gold Can Stay

Before the leaves turn or the grain ripens, fall settles in more subtly; the piercing clarity of the summer sun softens slowly to gold, painting everything it touches in such warm, glowing shades that your heart will burn and you'll lift your face to the sky to be painted gold, too.

All the while other things will be absorbing the light until you look around to see the whole world ablaze with possibility. At least that's how it is for me.

Some look to spring for rebirth, but I see it happening now -- partly because I'll always associate fall with fresh notebooks and new pencils with erasers yet unmarred. And there's the way farmers like my dad assess, reassess and plan for next harvest even while bringing in this year's crop. But mainly it just seems a little easier to breathe and dream, to shake off the lethargy -- and restlessness -- of summer and settle in for something new, whatever that may be.

My alma mater had some sort of off-the-books-rule that forbade freshmen from dating their first two weeks, or month, or semester (?) of school. The first several weeks of school were generally very camp-like with strangers thrown together away from home with an itinerary (orientation, then classes and mixer activities) and enthusiastic, if not occasionally overzealous, counselors (resident directors) to direct; the theory, I suppose, was that it was best to avoid the brief-yet-intense romances such a setting could inspire.

Oh but fall in Orange City, which happens to be on the Monarchs' migration path, could be magic, with many a young couple breaking the rule to fall in love over long walks, stargazing and coffee (the three primary dating activities the town had to offer those without reliable transportation). And while I, along with the rest of campus, followed the progress of these romances with skepticism, when I fell in love with Justin it was in the fall, over coffee, long walks and letters, and Linda Hasselstrom.

So there's that.

But I also remember falling asleep in the combine riding with my dad after school; the day may have been biting cold, but the cab was warm and the sound of corn raining into the hopper, soothing -- and my little belly was always filled to capacity with one of the meals my mom and aunt brought out to the field for their crew. How to describe that feeling -- Safety? Comfort? Contentment? In any case, for that little girl sleeping on her daddy's shoulder as he combined corn, everything was right in the world; there were only possibilities, not problems.

So there's that, too.

As I sit here writing now, I'm warm on the couch with J; not everything's right in the world and I'm mourning winter's eminent arrival, but there is an apple crisp cooling on the counter (thanks for the apples, mom) and the day was so beautiful and bright we could walk to the lake without coats even though last week it snowed. Nothing gold can stay, it's true, but there are possibilities, still.

And if you, like me, need reminding on occasion, try these (because even once winter's come, we'll still have Libby's and apples):

Pure Gold Pumpkin Bread

1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/3 cup buttermilk
1/2 tsp vanilla
4 Tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 egg plus 1 egg white, at room temperature
1 cup pumpkin puree (I used Libby's)
1/2 cup golden raisins, if desired
Nuts, if desired
Candied ginger, if desired

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. (My new oven bakes 100 degrees too hot, which I discovered thanks to the 4-dollar oven thermometer from Target.)

Whisk together dry ingredients. In another bowl, beat butter until creamy, add sugar and beat until lightened in color and texture, then beat in the eggs. (I did this all by hand, having failed to pack the hand mixer for the move to Minnesota; it worked just fine.) Add pumpkin puree and vanilla and stir until just blended. Add pumpkin purée, and beat until just blended. Add the flour mixture alternately with the milk, stirring until just combined. Fold in raisins and nuts, if desired.

I made this in mini loaf pans, but you could use a large loaf pan or muffin tins -- either way, make sure your pans are greased. I topped the loaves with candied ginger and if I'd had more on hand, I would have folded some in with the raisins. It's really good.

Bake until done -- about an hour for a large loaf, or 20-25 minutes for mini loafs and 15-20 for muffins.

Betty Crocker's Apple Pie

(with butter)

You can find the main recipe for Betty's apple pie here; however, I don't make a two-crust pie -- I go the crumb-topping route because that's what I prefer. Also, I use butter instead of shortening. I'm not enough of a pie crust expert to have decided opinions other than that. I do have a few basic tips, though.

1) Make sure the water is ice cold.

2) Do not overmix -- it's okay if there are butter smears in the dough, as pictured below; the less you handle the dough, the more tender it will be.

So that's all I've got on pie crust, but this article from the New York Times can tell you more; there are other opinions, of course, but this is definitely a good read.

If you want to use the crumb topping, all you have to do is cut a 1/2 cup butter into a 1/2 cup of brown sugar (packed) mixed with 1 cup of flour; that will take care of a 9-inch pie; you can adjust the amounts up or down slightly, depending on what you need.

It's true that today

the stove caught me on fire. If you notice that my jacket looks a singed on the bottom, that's why.

Great Faces, Great Places:

Where kids run free,
the grandmas laugh
and teach their granddaughters to cheat.
Where wives suffer husbands
who are nothing but pests

and brothers who act like young toughs.
Where little girls are by turns sassy
and incredibly sweet
which they, of course, learn from their moms.



Where little boys wear hats
and ride way up high
while grandpas plot adventures and scheme.
Meanwhile the livestock is content with the occasional treat
as long as there's always grain and hay.

The End

First Things First

My new kitchen is small, as kitchens in 600-square-foot apartments are wont to be, but I have to say that what it lacks in counter space, it makes up in cupboards. Here's the tour:


1. The stove is of undeterminable age, and at first I thought it was unusable -- but that's mainly because the door pulled apart when opened, spilling out insulation. But the landlord replaced some missing screws and I used a can and a half of Easy Off and so far everything has been functional, though I've yet to figure out it's eccentricities: I've undercooked one batch of banana bread and burned another. Even so, I think it has a certain amount of charm.


2. This is where I wash the dishes and microwave my oatmeal. The microwave does take up an inordinate amount of space, but it's a necessary appliance, like the Kitchen Aid, which is in the cupboard on the bottom lefthand side.

3. Here's the other little bit of counter space where I do most of the mixing and chopping and assembling.

4. And here's the whole set up. I'm a big fan of the curtain.

I'm also a big fan of bread and after coveting this cookbook for a year, I finally bought it (with one of those 40 percent coupons from Borders). I recommend buying the cookbook and signing up for the Borders coupons. It will change the way you and make bread and buy books, respectively.

All you have to do to make this bread is mix together a) 6 1/2 cups all-purpose flour b) 1 1/2 tablespoons yeast c) 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt and d) 3 1/2 cups lukewarm water. The beauty of it is that you can store it in the fridge for up to two weeks and make a variety of things -- pita, pizza crust, calzones, rolls, etc. You can find the master recipe here and the accompanying New York Times article here.

This one's for you, Tonya.

Because I do make good on my promises, eventually.

Home, to Minnesota

I am a homebody; always have been. I hated going to summer camp – possibly because the only time I went the other girls were mean to me and I came home with lice (the indignity of it still rankles); hotel sheets creeped me out (still kind of do, just ask Justin) and I hated using strange bathrooms (I’ve mostly gotten over this). My idea of a good time was staying home to read my library books and I only reluctantly attended sleepovers, unless said event was with my cousin Steph, because her house felt as much like home as my own.

I grew up, less shy and more adventurous, but still so rooted to that southeast corner of South Dakota where my big messy family lives and works with varying degrees of harmony and general goodwill that I spent the summer after I graduated college and before I started graduate school at home, making slightly more than minimum wage at the small-town grocery store in the next town over. And I loved every second of it. But I also cried myself to sleep a lot, categorizing everything that would never be the same – watching the moon rise through my bedroom window, walking to grandma’s house for a visit, getting up at dawn to have a cup of coffee with dad. All these precious things, if not slipping through my fingers, would be changed as soon as I left for Creighton in the fall, because then I would be a grown up and my home, though perhaps not my heart, would be in Omaha.

The thing is, you see, that I had always imagined my life turning out differently than that. Before I went to college, my grandpa told me to bring back a nice Iowa farm boy with a half section of land. I laughed it off, of course, but I kept my eyes open, half expecting to find one. Because that’s what people did at Northwestern – they found their farm boy or football star or science nerd or whoever freshman year, got engaged their sophomore year and finished out the next two years in the married student housing. And no, I’m not exaggerating.

Thankfully, this is not how it went for me, friends. Though I can’t say exactly – my memory’s starting to fail with my advancing years -- I don’t think I had even one real date with a NW boy, though there was a close call or two. However, I did find a farm boy back home who pursued me rather relentlessly and for the few weeks I convinced myself I liked him as much as he liked me, I could see my life unfolding as I’d always expected: Planning meals to take out to the field, getting together with mom a couple times during the summer to can produce from the garden I’d planted, perhaps working a part-time job somewhere, but mostly tending my babies and my other responsibilities on the farm -- like the horses, of course.

And honestly, there are things that sound so lovely about that life even now, except the farmer. He was nice enough and all, but he was also all wrong. Completely wrong.

And so, like many humanities majors before me, I went to graduate school, because that’s what humanities majors do when their other prospects are limited.

(An aside: As much as I poke fun at my English major, I can’t say that I’d change it; I’d maybe do something in addition, but not instead, but how do you know that at 17 or 18 when you’re just figuring out who you are, let alone the direction of your life’s work?)

This meant Creighton because of the scholarship and stipend (I do have some business sense). My parents took me down to look at apartments one day in July. We left home at 6, pulled into town around 9:00 and before noon, we had the apartment secured and a sofa, loveseat, bed and mattress purchased at Mrs. B’s. We ate some lunch at Applebee’s and were back home well before 5 because that’s how my dad rolls. A few weeks later they moved me down for good and after they’d left, having helped me unpack the U-haul and assemble the Walmart furniture, I sat in the empty apartment, listened to Counting Crow’s August and Everything After and cried.

But then I took a nap and got on with it, because that’s how I roll.

And slowly, slowly the apartment started to feel like mine and Omaha, if not like home, exactly, something close. I met Justin in October and suddenly there were all these places that took on new significance. The Barnes and Noble in Crossroads where we first met up for coffee; Romeo’s, where we went on our first non-date date; The 13th Street Coffee Shop where we got hot cider once and walked around the Old Market not holding hands but wanting to; Delice, where we share a pot of tea on the occasional Saturday morning; Taco John’s; Friendly’s Used Books; Borders; the 90th Street Bag and Save where I once drove J to drink with a list-free shopping trip, and then, finally, a little brick house on Ohio Street with a retro black and white bathroom and peony bushes.


I knew in fairly short order after I met Justin that we would end up married and we did, a year and a half or so after we first met sharing a theory textbook in class. And my life, let me tell you, my life has turned out different and better and more than I ever could have imagined it to be.
That’s not to say I don’t still get homesick for South Dakota; I do. I miss the endless wind and the sky and my family so much so that sometimes it’s easier to stay away than it is to visit. I’ve even looked at possibilities for moving back, but there’s not as many Lutherans there as there are in Minnesota. And since J insists on being a Lutheran and since he’s called to church work, we’re moving north to a tiny apartment on main street with a balcony that overlooks the park and the bar. It’s pretty much perfect, especially since we got the cat pee smell out.

J’s been up there a month already, and I’m going this weekend and while there have been some nice perks to having the house to myself these past weeks (including, but not limited to, fixing cereal for supper pretty much every night, watching the occasional Lifetime movie and listening to country music without being shamed or mocked, buying almond butter – yes I know it’s expensive, honey -- without censure, and having no undershirts in the laundry to fold), I'm thrilled beyond words. Truly.

There are details to work out yet, a house to sell and such, but I’m not worried. I’m going home.


It's likely to be awhile before I get the kitchen in the new place up and running, but when I do, I promise you all sorts of good things like pizza and, at long last, turtle cookies. But in the meantime, make these. I've tried them, twice, and I plan to make them again in a side-by-side comparison with mom's Perfect Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies, which I've always loved and once used to impress J early in our courtship; only I put in twice the flour and they turned out very biscuit-like. God bless him, he ate them anyway.

But here I am getting carried away. Back to the NY Times recipe: Don't worry about the fancy chocolate disks; use whatever chocolate you like -- for me that's Ghirardelli 60 percent cocoa chocolate chips. Also, I used all-purpose flour, though I did weigh it.

Qualifications

I.

A while back, I made some disparaging remarks about cake mix. It wasn't very well done of me, really, and it was a little disingenuous considering that there are two cake mix recipes that I use all the time, and the one for coffeecake is so darn good that I've been accused of buying it from a bakery. My Midwestern work ethic says that a store-bought cake and a cake mix are pretty much the same thing (and that both are somehow morally -- yes, morally -- inferior to their counterparts that call for fresh hand-churned butter; I'm only kind of kidding), so it was a shock that someone would consider a cake too good to be homemade.

But don't despair, this isn't about my -- or anyone's -- twisted psyche, it's about cake. This cake, to be exact.
It’s from the Willing Workers' Extension Cookbook -- I think my aunt Janet submitted it -- and is called Hospital Coffee Cake. An odd name, I know, but I have a couple of theories about that. 1) The cake is so blissful it has, if not healing properties exactly, definitely restorative and fortifying ones, like a swig of whiskey, for medicinal purposes, before bed-- or is it breakfast? Not that I do that. But I have heard that some people's grandmas do; not mine, though, as far as I know. 2) The cake is so rich with fat and sugar that it becomes a health risk, but only because it's also extremely addictive.

You'll have to make it and decide for yourself, but be warned, I hold this coffeecake responsible for some of the more-than-a-few extra pounds I carried around in junior high and high school. Later, however, it also helped me snare J., so in my case, the risk was definitely worth the reward.

Hospital Coffee Cake
(from the Willing Workers cookbook*)

1 package cake mix (You can use any flavor, but I've only used yellow; when something works that good, you don't go screwing it up.)

3/4 cup water
1/4 cup oil (I use canola oil)
3 eggs

Beat the above ingredients together and set aside. While the oven is preheating to 350 degrees, assemble the streusel filling:

1 1/2 cups crushed graham crackers (I use cinnamon grahams.)
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup nuts (I use walnuts or pecans, whatever I have on hand.)
3/4 cup butter, melted

(This makes a generous amount of filling -- more than you really need -- so I often cut it back slightly, or put the leftovers in fridge -- it'll keep a day or two -- to use as a muffin topping.)

Pour about a third of the batter into a greased and floured cake pan, then sprinkle a third of graham cracker filling on top. Continue layering the batter and filling; when you're done, you can cut through the batter with a knife to swirl the layers, but I don't think its particularly necessary. Bake according to the directions on the cake mix package (I've made this in 8-inch rounds and a 9x13; both work well).

While the cake is still warm, drizzle it with a powdered sugar glaze (powdered sugar, a little milk, a little vanilla or lemon juice, depending on the flavor you're going for). After that, it's best to take out just a little corner to taste.**

*The Willing Workers was an extension club (similar to this) in McCook County. As I understand it, extension clubs were like 4-H clubs for adults -- they focused on education and had snacks after the meetings. Plus there were field trips. I'm not going to go into it here, but don't you just love the can-do attitude of a group of women who decided to name their club the Willing Workers? My guess is that it was some brown-noser's idea and though the rest of the women hated it, they didn't say anything lest word get out that they didn't work willingly, worked only under duress or somehow otherwise objected to work. That'd ruin a reputation for sure.

**Bear in mind a willing worker would never take a cake with a little corner cut out anywhere; so If you're planning on going to the church potluck, you'd better patch that corner with some leftover streusel and powdered sugar glaze. However, if you're not worried about gossip mongering, don't bother. Besides, any good Christian, like my mom, knows that pride cometh before a fall (i.e. forgetting to put sugar in the pumpkin pie).

II.

At some point in college, I decided I was going to lose some of those more-than-a-few extra pounds via Weight Watchers, which I'd followed on and off starting when I was 8 or so when mom and I went to meetings behind the Kmart in Sioux Falls after which she bribed me to exercise with the promise of a new Saddle Club book. (To be fair, I suspect it was a lot like herding cats.)

I have mixed feelings about WW. I'm definitely healthier because following the program taught me about proper nutrition and portion sizes, but it also inspired an obsession with numbers and how to "trick the scale" before each weigh in because that number was important. Really important. In the same way, a lot of the recipes are designed to trick the body into thinking the food is something other than it is. Fat-free cheese and the plethora of artificial sweeteners aside, there's the pumpkin-based taco dip, the bean brownies, the Guaranteed to Keep you Running (on All Four) Chocolate Bran Muffins.

So remember how the coffeecake should come with a warning label? This recipe should, too. It's a real workhorse: The main ingredient, besides the reduced-fat brownie mix, is All Bran. Three cups of it.

So what we've learned here is that three cups of All Bran have 78 grams of fiber. Don't freak out, though, the recipe makes 18-24 muffins, and that comes out to 3-4 grams of fiber apiece.

Fiber, as we know, is healthy, and, using Weight Watcher math, fiber gets you more for your buck (i.e. point). That's why the common factor in the dip, brownies and muffins is fiber; insane amounts of it. WW even puts fiber in its ice cream. Yum.

But ethical qualms aside, oh man are these muffins good. Like crack. And that can be very, very bad when your friend from college comes to visit and her toddler consumes three of them (at 4 grams of fiber each, that's practically 50 percent of an adult's daily fiber needs in one go). I never did hear how that one turned out, so I'm assuming (hoping) it wasn't as bad as I imagined it would be.

Chocolate Fiber Crack Muffins
(from my memory of a WW recipe)

1 package reduced-fat brownie mix (Betty Crocker or Krusteaze)
3 cups All Bran cereal
2 1/2 -3 cups water
1 small container (8 ounces) of fat-free yogurt (vanilla works, as does pretty much any flavor)
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla
chocolate chips, optional

Let the All Bran soak in the water for about 15 minutes; once the cereal has absorbed the water, stir in the yogurt and vanilla. Then add the brownie mix and baking powder. This recipe will make 18-24 muffins. I like to top each one with three Ghirardelli chocolate chips (60 percent cocoa), but that will up the points, if you care about such things.

Bake at 350 degrees for 22-25 minutes.

I like to eat mine with peanut butter for an after work/pre run snack.

And sometimes I eat them for dessert, with ice cream. Other times for breakfast, also with ice cream. Ice cream only adds to their healthfulness, especially if you get the fiber-enriched kind.

What the Bear Found in the Buckwheat

But first, a digression:


My dad (pictured above) has a few signature turns of phrase. There's "dreck," a nod to the Hutterish he heard grandma use on the phone with her mom for private conversations amid the chaos of seven children. Dad claims it means "dirt," and it does, along with things much dirtier, like smut and excrement. Only I didn't know that until Justin, who speaks some German, explained why it wasn't necessarily appropriate to trot that word out in polite company. When I confronted dad with this information, he was very noncommittal, which we all know is the next best thing to a straightforward confirmation.

There are others, too, but my favorite involves bears and buckwheat. Here's how it works: Say, for example, you beat out your arch rival at the Davidson County 4-H warm-up horse show one year. That victory might be celebrated for days with exclamations of "You sure showed her where the bear went in the buckwheat!" In this case what you've done is given your friend a good-natured schooling. Here's another example: An ex-boyfriend, after breaking your heart, suddenly decides he wants to undo what he calls this “terrible mistake.” Only you've moved on, and so you walk away, leaving him standing in the street, crying. This incident might upset you, but your dad will ponder it with relish, saying, as if he can't believe his good fortune, "You sure showed him where the bear went in the buckwheat." Only this time what you've done is flipped some poor sap the bird.

Make sense?

The beauty of this whole process is that the hows and whys and wheres can be planned and schemed for weeks, even months, in advance, in which case it becomes a rousing call to arms. Like the scenario below.

That’s me, circa 1990 something, with Sparkle (no I didn't name her), the 18-year-old horse that I got as a present for my eighth birthday. Sparkle is what we call an old-style Appaloosa, distinguishable by the massive build and barely there broom-like tail. These are what Appaloosas were like before being inundated with Quarter Horse bloodlines. Another distinct Appaloosa trait is an all-out, down-and-dirty pigheadedness.

In Sparkle's case this meant that every year she earned her previous owner a purple ribbon in trail (a class where horse and rider have to navigate obstacles that might be encountered along the trail, and some that never would) at the county 4-H horse show, which qualified her to move on to the state show in Huron. Only Sparkle then refused to go through the gate (that the rider had to open, ride through and close in less than 30 seconds, ideally without taking her hand off the handle). Failure to complete the task within the allotted timeframe meant automatic disqualification (and one of those shameful white ribbons).

Sure enough, my first year in 4-H, Sparkle and I purpled in trail at the county show. Unbeknownst to me, my dad, grandpa and uncle Kenny, who were all familiar with Sparkle’s state show track record, debated about what might be done to prevent a repeat performance. They concluded that Sparkle didn’t do well at the fair grounds in Huron because she didn’t care for the acoustics and feel of the indoor show rings in the Hippodrome or Beef Complex buildings, and though they, with the possible exception of my dad, agreed success was unlikely, they devised a month-long training regimen in a simulated state-show-like environment. (i.e. They set up a wooden gate in the quonset, which I had to practice over and over again, with a radio blaring in the background.)

In the end, Sparkle went through that gate like a trooper (that's a blue ribbon I'm holding), but then I didn’t expect her to do anything less than that because, to their credit, my trainer triumvirate didn’t reveal how poorly they thought things would turn out until after the fact. But for all their planning and scheming, I don’t know who showed whom where the bear went, but I suspect it was Sparkle that taught the lesson: A good horse like that will never push a rider beyond what she’s able to handle.

Unfortunately, my next horse wasn’t so generous. Pepper (again, not my choice of name) taught me the difference between dying and only having the wind knocked out.

I can’t tell you much more about the bear in the buckwheat than that. As for the phrase itself, preliminary research (per Google) indicates it may have originated in a Russian fairytale about a beekeeper and a honey-stealing, marauding bear. There’s treachery and drunkenness and vengeance involved, but I don’t know what happens because that darn Google cuts off the end! So now I’m going to have to resort to inter-library loan. (Also, I found there's a variant of the phrase in which one indicates where the bear made dreck, if you know what I mean, in the buckwheat, but that just doesn't have the same ring.)

In the meantime, you can get your buckwheat fix elsewhere. You won’t be sorry; I promise.

First, Bear in the Buckwheat Pancakes:

I got the recipe from the New York Times.

J. was skeptical at first, but has since deemed them "company" pancakes, meaning they're good enough for guests.

And then there's these:

Buckwheat Bear Butter Cookies, or Bear in the Buckwheat with Butter Cookes, or Bear in the Butter Cookies, or Butter, and Buckwheat, Too, Cookies.

I could go on, but I won't. Suffice it to say these cookies are way more wonderful than you could possibly imagine just looking at the ingredients on the page. Though some initial reaction to the first batch indicated they'd be even better with a good sprinkling of sugar on top.

You can find the recipe here, though its been featured on several other blogs as well.

ps--

My aunt took these pictures the winter of 1991 when Sparkle wintered with her horse, for company. When it comes right down to it, she wasn't exactly an attractive horse with her mangy tail and cataracts, but she made a very awkward little girl feel graceful. And in these, you can see why.

The thing about my grandma,

or one of the things, anyway, that I truly admire is that one is never in any doubt of what it is she really thinks about things. In my case, for example, I know that she thinks (a) I troddle (i.e. a combination of trotting and waddling, very difficult to achieve), (b) that I'd be surprised how many people got fat by eating too many grapes (this particular revelation happened to come while I was sitting at her kitchen table, eating grapes), and (c) my hair, if not ugly, is in sorry shape at best.

She broke this latest bit to me on Saturday. I was home for a visit and spent the morning over with her and grandpa. I gave her a hug as I was leaving, and she asked, earnest as ever, if I was going to go home to do my hair.

My hair, keep in mind, was washed and dried and even, I thought, looking pretty good. But grandma didn't and apparently she doesn't like poor Nancy Pelosi's hair either because she said mine looked like hers. That's my grandma -- just keeping it real.

Fortunately I have enough ego to handle it, and then there's this:

Not just anyone will hold child dripping wet from the pool, but my grandma is unafraid. That's another of my favorite things.