Mid-West Gourmet

Jul22
Escargot, a.k.a. snails

The hostess led me, my daughters, and granddaughter though the busy dining room to an empty table. Outside the many dining room windows that lined the huge room, we could see choppy, blue-gray water rushing past our ship, the MS Zuiderdam. We had left port hours ago, and were now traveling through the open, northern Atlantic Ocean.

Once seated, and with cloth napkins spread open on our laps, our waiter handed us menus. The starters listed that evening were jumbo shrimp cocktail, tomato and red bell pepper bisque, escargot Bourguignon and lentil Tabbouleh salad with feta. I ordered, “The escargot, please.”

I knew what I was ordering. My appetizer that evening would be snails floating in garlic butter, accompanied by a four-inch-long bun that looked like a small loaf of French bread. Many people refuse to eat escargot because they think they would be slimy and disgusting. I discovered that the little snails are delicious, and not slimy at all! I ordered escargot twice on my most recent cruise.

Having grown up on a dairy farm, I know where milk, cheese, butter and ice cream comes from and how it is made, but when I got home from my trip, I started to wonder if there was such a thing as a snail farm. I knew I had to do some research after a person asked me, “Was the escargot slimy? Because, after all, a snail is just a garden slug that wears a shell.”

Continue reading →

Know Your Neighbor

Jul15

Rain splattered against the kitchen window. I peered through rivulets streaming down the screen. Water-logged trees and bushes in my backyard were whipping back and forth in strong gusts of wind. Feeling chilled despite the warmth of a summer afternoon, I picked up my sweater from the kitchen chair and pulled it on. I felt bored and restless. There were plenty of household chores that I could do, but I didn’t feel like doing them. 

My daughter, Tammie, was sitting on the sofa in the living room busily doing a Japanese thread craft called kumihimo. I glanced around at the dim lighting and turned on a lamp. Chuckling, I said, “I’m turning into Grammie Altmann. Do you remember how she’d always tell us to turn on the lamps because doing close-up work in poor lighting would ruin our eyes?” 

Holding up the braid she was working on for me to admire, she admitted, “Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I’m starting to understand where she was coming from. My eyes feel a little less strained when the light is on.” 

Pulling the drapes shut and turning on another lamp, I complained, “I feel bored. There are plenty of things I could do, even fun things like working on my latest jigsaw puzzle, but I don’t feel like doing any of it.” Sinking down onto my favorite chair, I pointed the remote at the television and turned it on. Flipping from one channel to the next, I quickly concluded that there wasn’t much that was interesting to watch.  

One channel featured a reporter standing on a busy, big city, street corner, asking people passing him to answer some basic questions. Curious, I paused my channel flipping. The reporter asked a young woman which country was north of the United States.  She frowned, scratched her head and after a long pause uncertainly questioned, “Ummm. Alaska?” My daughter and I exclaimed in disbelief. 

Other questions the reporter asked were just as simple. He asked, “How many eggs are there in a dozen?” “How many quarters would you need to have two dollars?” “How many ounces are there in one cup, one pint, one quart?” “What country borders the USA to the south?” No one gave the correct answer to any of the questions.  

I exclaimed, “Don’t people learn any of these things in school anymore? This show makes me wonder. At the hospital, to determine if a patient is confused, nurses often ask patients questions like, ‘who’s the president of the United States?’ If someone just doesn’t know, does that mean they are confused?” 

Continue reading →

Vacation food

Jul8

Our daughters had wandered away to play in the living room when they finished eating. My husband and I continued to sit at the table discussing our plans for the rest of the day. Arnie told me where he was going and what time he’d get back home. My response was, “What would you like for supper tonight, hamburgers in mushroom gravy or chicken?”

Arnie turned to look at me with a startled expression on his face. He exclaimed, “My gosh, woman! Don’t you ever stop thinking about food? We just finished eating a meal and now you’re already thinking about eating again!”

I responded indignantly, “Do you somehow think that the meals I make are whipped up in half and hour with no planning? The meat is frozen. It needs to be thawed out. Then it must be prepped and roasted or fried long enough for it to get done!”

To be fair, the only ‘meals’ that my husband ever made were fried eggs, fried freshly caught fish or cheese and sausage sandwiches that he hastily slapped together during a commercial. The ingredients Arnie needed to make these meals were always magically found in the kitchen when he wanted them. He didn’t seem to recognize that it took planning ahead on my part when buying groceries.

Shortly after our daughter, Niki, was married, she commented one day to me about how hard it was to constantly make meals. I knew what she meant. Making one meal is easy, but looking ahead to making a lifetime of meals is intimidating.

Through the years, Niki became a pro at planning and making meals for a large family. Every summer, she takes a vacation with her children. Since eating every meal at restaurants would be very expensive, my daughter makes meals ahead, freezes them, and packs them in ice-filled coolers. Motel room kitchenettes are small and inconvenient, but she manages to provide her children with good, home-made vacation food.

My other daughter, Tammie, and I took a cruise last year. When we got home, we talked non-stop about the wonderful meals that we were served aboard the ship. This year when the opportunity for us to take another cruise came up, I invited Niki to join us. She accepted the invitation and commented she couldn’t remember when she last took a vacation that didn’t require her to make meals ahead that had to be frozen and packed in an icebox.

Continue reading →

Destination: Cubby-Holes

Jul1

A growl of thunder woke me up. Rain pounding on my bedroom window clung to the glass and transformed into long rivulets that traced the same path over, and over again. My sister Mary, with whom I shared the bedroom, was already up. I crawled out from under the covers and wandered downstairs and into the kitchen. Two of my sisters were there finishing the breakfast dishes.

Mary said, “You finally decided to get up?”

My other sister made fun of my tangled hair by pointing out, “You have a rat’s nest on the back of your head.” A flash of lightning was followed by a long, low grumble of thunder. The windows in the kitchen were open. A warm, slightly damp breeze caressed my cheeks.

Mom walked into the kitchen and commented, “It’s dark in the house as though it was early dawn instead of ten in the morning.” Turning to me she said, “Go on and get dressed, Kathy, and try to get those tangles out of your hair.” I nodded as I spread butter on a slice of bread and took a huge bite.

After our noon meal, Mom announced, “Since I can’t work in the garden today, I’m going to spend the afternoon sewing.” I slowly followed her upstairs where she had her sewing machine. Since rain was forecast to come and go all day, that meant I’d be spending the day inside the house, too.

One of the small closets in our house that my family called cubby-holes was near the sewing machine. I pulled the door open. Even I had to bend over to enter this storage space. On the right side of this closet were boxes of clothing patterns and scraps of material. Down the center, there was a taut wire filled with clothes hangers holding fancy clothing like prom and wedding dresses. I instinctively didn’t touch my sister’s wedding dresses but took down the prom dresses to play dress-up.

Continue reading →

What is weird?

Jun24

My late husband Arnie and I met at age eighteen and married within the year. Being so young, we fought like name-calling little kids when we had disagreements. One weekend while playing Scrabble, we disagreed about a word I used. My old, ragged dictionary came out to prove a point. In a huff, Arnie took the thick tome and wrote on it, “Kathy The Weird-One Altmann”.

I didn’t know what made me angrier: that he called me weird, or that he used my maiden name, or that he wrote on a book! We came from similar backgrounds, but we were very different in nature. Arnie always insisted that my family had a weird sense of humor.  He held to this point of view right to the end.

Continue reading →

Countdown

Jun17

My daughter Tammie cheerfully announced, “Our cruise ship will be leaving the dock in seven days, eight hours and thirteen minutes.” Looking down at the cruise ship’s navigator app in her phone, she questioned, “Have you looked at the dining room menu? What would you order if you were on the ship today?”

I complained, “The closer we get to leaving for the cruise, the more anxious I feel. I feel like a child waiting for Christmas Eve and Santa’s visit.”

“That’s wonderful, isn’t it?” exclaimed my daughter, like a true high school cheerleader.

Frowning, I slowly shook my head no and explained, “When you and your sister were little, the last few days before Christmas was painful. Your anticipation and hopes made you emotional, anxious little people, which made me feel sad. The holiday was supposed to be fun. Instead, you wished away all the days and the fun things we could do leading up to Christmas. You just wanted that one day to arrive.”

Holding up her phone for me see the screen, Tammie asked, “Doesn’t looking at the navigator app make you think about the fun things we will get to do, to see, to experience?”

I insisted, “The app does make me think about all those things, but since I can’t do them until we get to the ship, I feel like I am spinning my wheels and getting nowhere. I feel like I am wishing my life away.”

The phrase, ‘wishing my life away’ made me think of my mother. When I was in third grade one evening before Christmas, I lamented to my mother how I didn’t like waiting for Christmas Eve and wished it would hurry up and come. My fifty-five-year-old mother’s sage advice was, “Don’t wish your life away.”

Continue reading →

To Bend Again

Jun10

The minute I turned into the parking lot I saw them: tall, shelved carts filled with colorfully blossoming plants. The store’s garden center appeared to have more plants than room, so the workers had lined the sidewalk beside the store with the overflow.
Usually, going to a garden center fills me with excitement and anticipation. Today, remembering that I was only two and a half months post hip replacement, I felt ambivalent. I wanted to buy plants, put in a garden, and take care of flowerbeds, but I didn’t know if I could physically bend over far enough to do the necessary work. Immediately after the surgery, bending at the waist more than 90 degrees was prohibited.


I’ve been feeling afraid to bend down to weed my flowerbeds for fear of hurting myself and find that I quickly tire after a very short spell of work, but I keep trying. Slowly, I’m hoping to build my stamina back up.


As I walked though the aisles of plants, picking out a modest amount of baby plants that needed to be tucked into a moist, earthen bed, my excitement mounted to the point where I ended up buying more plants than I had originally planned to buy. When I reported my purchases to my daughter I explained, “Do you remember the comedian who liked to claim, ‘The devil made me do it!?’ Well, the devil had nothing to do with my plant purchases. What happened was that an able-bodied gardener temporally took possession of my body and made me do it.”


Speaking of the devil, besides worrying about my post-surgical ability to bend enough to garden, I also worried about the overwhelming number of blood-sucking insects in my yard.

Continue reading →

Hung-Up on Hangers

Jun3

Stepping back, I scanned the closet with satisfaction. I’d drastically reduced the contents which had been hidden for so many years behind its two 1970-style folding doors. There were two piles of closet contents on the bedroom floor behind me. One pile would be gathered up and placed in the garbage. The other pile would go to Saint Vincent de Paul as a donation. All that I had left in the closet was sorted and neatly stored in boxes.

When they were little, my two daughters shared the bedroom with this closet. I smiled, remembering one summer in their childhood. I would tuck them into bed each night and they never failed to request that I shut the closet doors. When I asked them why having the closet doors ajar bothered them, they explained that a giant frog holding a huge trident was in that closet at night. They didn’t sound scared but were insistent that the doors be closed.

Before shutting the doors on the newly cleaned closet, I gave it one last satisfied glance. Something I hadn’t noticed before suddenly came into focus: high in the closet, all shoved to one end, hanging on a mounted water pipe was a huge collection of wire clothes hangers. I’d stopped hanging clothing in this closet years ago but kept the wire hangers.

There were two different types of hangers. One third of them had spring-loaded clips on each end, which was ideal for hanging skirts or pants. They were good, sturdy old-fashioned hangers made to last. The rest of the clothes hangers were all made of heavy gauge wire. No matter how heavy a coat is, the weight wouldn’t make the wire bend.  I couldn’t bear to throw any of them out. You can’t buy new ones of this quality anymore!

Later that day, I started to think about my obsessive determination to keep the old-fashioned clothes hangers. On a recent visit to a store, I’d seen sturdy plastic clothes hangers in various colors. It made me wonder if people color-code their wardrobes or match the hanger colors to their bedroom walls. Clothes hangers certainly aren’t hard to replace.

Continue reading →

Woolworth Treasures

May27

I stared, mesmerized by the small turtles climbing around in the display box. I wanted to touch the darling, small creatures. I reached out my hands but didn’t touch them because they didn’t belong to me. A sign by the box said the turtles cost 15 cents each. That wasn’t very much. I knew I had that and more in my piggy bank at home.

When we had entered Woolworth’s store a little while earlier, Mom stopped to look at the clothing and houseware displays. Impatiently, I scooted ahead to pass all that, plus the hardware section to get to the back of the store where they kept fish tanks and parakeets. I never wanted a fish or a bird but enjoyed looking at them. This store was so much more interesting than the dreadful fabric stores Mom spent most of her time at when we shopped in Marshfield.

My family lived on a farm twelve miles from Marshfield, and we very infrequently came to this town, since the small town three miles from our farm could supply most of our needs. About the time I was about to search for Mom to insist she come look at the turtles, Mom finally showed up. I immediately began begging, “I want a turtle! They’re only 15 cents! Aren’t they the cutest little things? Can I have one? Please?”

Mom watched the small, shell-clad reptiles climb over each other, as well as the damp sand and rocks for a minute before admitting they were cute, but emphatically stated, “No! We will not buy one! I’ve heard that people can get sick with salmonella from handling turtles.”

My heart was broken. The only thing that would have made me feel better would have been to sit and eat at Woolworth’s lunch counter. The smell of fried hamburgers and onions filled the store and called me to sit on one of the stools at the long counter which ran nearly the whole length of the store from the front to the back. The thought of eating somewhere other than at home seemed exciting. Mom quashed that idea even faster than my turtle idea. “No, we have food at home.”

Continue reading →

Applying Myself

May20

Recess was over. Instead of quietly filing back to their assigned desks, a handful of students got into a scuffle in the closet at the back of the room where we hung our coats and left our wet boots. Sister Florance called out the names of the usual classroom trouble-starters and the noise level dropped. The second time she called out the names, everyone returned to their desks.

Our teacher, a nun I considered elderly because she had a very wrinkly face, stood at the front of the classroom studying all 50 of her students, row by row before saying, “I’ve decided that we are going to do an art project for the rest of the afternoon. You need a rest from all the end of the semester tests you’ve been taking this past week.”

I sighed gratefully. I knew I had done well on some of the tests but felt ashamed of how poorly I had done on others. The tests that I hated the most were the story math problems. For example, instructions on how to figure the measurements of a room just by being told the room size were impossible to understand.

Forgetting all that, I threw myself into following Sister’s directions. She demonstrated each step. This was my favorite way of receiving instructions. As usual, a few of the students in the class jumped up from their desks to wander around the room like untrained feral children. Sister repeatedly reminded them to sit back down. They continued getting up to sharpen their pencils and poke their friends. Some of the students were doing the art, but not according to the directions.

That year when parents visited their children’s classrooms and talked to their teachers, my mother was told that, “Kathy has what it takes to get good grades in all subjects…if only she would just learn to apply herself.”

Continue reading →