The non-biking season has not been kind and of course some food…

Most of the year, I ride my bike to and from work.  Eight miles a day, five days a week.  It’s not really an athlete’s exercise, but it’s good moderate exercise for a person with a fairly sedentary job.   It’s also an efficient use of my time because then my commute is also my exercise.   I’m not a gym person, or a work out to DVDs person, or a person who will ever own a W**, let alone a W** Fit.  Biking in the basement is also boring, so  it’s hard to get enough exercise in the winter when there isn’t enough snow for skiing.  Today, I think we’ll get out ice skating in the afternoon and this past week, one day I walked all the way home from work, but I really don’t have the time to walk nearly four miles every day after work.  I wish I did.  I also wish it was light out.  What I do have time to do though is to take pretty much any bus that will get me a little bit west and then get off when I have about two miles left and walk the rest of the way.  I did that almost every day this week and it made me pretty happy.  I also decided that I didn’t really have any excuse not to take the stairs up at work.  I think I saw the inside of an elevator exactly twice this week.  Once when I had some unwieldy posters and once when what I needed to move was a cart with three large but light boxes.  I hope this helps, because as I said the non-biking season has not been kind.

There will be no baking of bread this week unless you want to count the pizza dough I’ll be making tomorrow.  I did make muffins this morning though.  Cranberry muffins infused with orange and cardamom.  They were good.  If you want to do this, you can basically use any basic muffin recipe you want.    I use one out of the “Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook” or out of “The Joy of Cooking” though I always use whole wheat pastry flour instead of all-purpose flour, the latter only makes cameo appearances in my kitchen these days.  Use a cup of fresh or frozen cranberries.  I like the big pieces, so I only cut them in half.   For the orange, wash and orange and zest it, then cut it in half, juice it and use the juice as part of whatever liquid your recipe calls for.  Put a pinch of ground cardamom in the dry ingredients and add the orange zest when you add the wet ingredients.  Very tasty muffins for the winter.  Sorry no pictures due to the fact that I could not think straight when they came out of the oven since I had only had half a grapefruit and some coffee.  And they just look like what  you’d expect them to look like anyway.

Last but not least, I’m going to talk about yogurt.  This week, the store was out of my favorite whole milk, cream top yogurt.  I eat this most weekdays with fresh or frozen fruit and a little sprinkle of the granola that I make and it keeps me until lunch time.  I knew I didn’t want to get the same brand’s vanilla since I grabbed one of those by accident a while ago and it was WAAAAAYYYYYY too sweet.  That’s why I buy plain yogurt in the first place.  So I decided to buy the low-fat yogurt.  I figured it couldn’t be too bad, after all it wasn’t fat-free yogurt.  (I will just never get what the point is of adding Vitamin D (a fat soluble vitamin) to food that has no fat.)  I had sort of forgotten about the low fat business when I had my first serving of this stuff.  I didn’t really care for the taste, or maybe it was just the mouth feel.  Anyway, I unfortunately bought two tubs of it, so I am stuck with another week of eating this and being hungry before lunch.   That last bit could just be my imagination, but I was hungry before lunch eating something with not enough fat that didn’t have a satisfying texture and taste.  This will not happen again.  I’ll stop at another store on the way home to get what I really want.  That is all.  End of rant.

Ryebread…tasty, but not so photogenic

Yesterday we made rye bread.  Easy recipe.  Yeast and water.  Equal amounts of rye flour, whole wheat flour and bread flour.  A bottle of Guinness, brown sugar, salt, molasses and a little oil.  Yesterday we had it with yellow split pea soup with white and orange carrots, a parsnip, an onion (thank you Primrose Community Farm winter storage share), garlic (still working on the last long storage garlic I bought at the last fall farmers’ market) and celery.  This was really tasty bread and the recipe made two loaves.  We can only eat so much bread, especially since D. was only home yesterday and today is off to work in St. Cloud until Wednesday afternoon.  Tonight, I’ll be eating the bread again with broccoli mushroom quiche and tomorrow with a dinner salad with among other things spicy broiled shrimp, avocado and really pretty beauty heart radishes.  This bread wasn’t as photogenic as the last week’s creation, so no picture.   It came out of the metal bread pan just fine, but not so much with the Pyrex glass bread pan.  I don’t think we’ll be making bread in that pan again.

I hunted around on the internet last night for some good bread pans and I think I found them.  I’m getting two more bread pans as well as a baguette pan.  The reviews for the pans that I found were good from people who sounded like they knew what they were doing.  Of course also a couple of bad reviews from people who either didn’t sound like they knew what they were doing or the obligatory review from someone who felt the need to complain about the price.  Whatever.  The most interesting thing in the reviews about the baguette pan and the very similar French bread pan (just different dimensions) both of which are perforated was that many people mentioned that it was good for making gluten-free breads.  I don’t know if this specifically meant gluten-free French breads or gluten-free bread in general because of the different characteristics of the flours used to make gluten-free bread.  Perhaps I can get a comment out of fidgetybudgie to explain this…   We’ve not made a gluten-free bread yet because celiac and gluten intolerance aren’t issues for us, but I certainly want to get that figured out for the future in case gluten-free bread needs to be on the menu for a guest some time.

The weekend otherwise has been pretty good.  I think the skiing is pretty much ruined, so yesterday, we went to the Chazen Museum of Art on the UW campus  to see the Automata exhibit.   You can’t actually play with any but two of the demonstration pieces, but they have little videos of most of the other works in motion.   A lot of humor in the Automata art.  This afternoon, I need to walk to the library to pick up a couple of books, “Turtle Feet: The Making and Unmaking of a Buddhist Monk” by Nicolai Grozni and “Winter Count” by Barry Lopez.  I’m almost done with “Milwaukee: The Selma of the North” by Patrick D. Jones.   It’s been quite an interesting read.  What happened in Milwaukee with regard to open housing laws and access to employment and education for the African-American Community within the span of one lifetime is really thought-provoking.  It makes me think that we’ve come a long way, but the conditions that I get a glimpse of now and then and the things I read about certainly suggest that as a society, we also have a long way to go.

The Learning Loaf

I make pizza dough on a fairly regular basis, but really haven’t made any other yeast breads either frequently or with great results.  A couple of weeks ago, I made what was supposed to be an Italian herb loaf with rosemary.  It tasted o.k., but was a little on the heavy side.  Basically, I think after I punched it down, I didn’t let it rise long enough the second time.  Enter “The Wooden Spoon Bread Book” by Marilyn M. Moore.  I had decided that I wasn’t satisfied with the baking sections of my other cookbooks, including a book that I have that is all about baking, but not enough about bread.  I had been thinking about making bread and getting a book to help me.  One morning not too long ago, we’d heard a segment by the artisan bread in 5 minutes a day people and I looked into that, but I really wanted to make bread in the traditional way even if that mean only making it on weekends. Without a bread machine.  Kneading by hand instead of using the food processor.  I am, however, willing to cheat by using the fancy proofing feature on our oven since it is only 62 degrees in our house right now and that doesn’t really make for happy yeast action.

After poking around on the internet for a while and reading reviews, I settled on this book and bought the cheapest “like new” used copy that I could find.  After reading the book for a while, it also occurred to me that buying some bread flour might be beneficial.  D. has also taken an interest in this project now and while I would have been comfortable making any of the basic loaves, we settled on trying out the “learning loaf” recipe.  It has a little of everything from a fun exercise watching the yeast proof in a measuring cup, to an egg yolk in the batter and no worries about wasting the egg white because it also asks for an egg wash.

We worked on the loaf together.  I put the butter, salt and sugar in a bowl and scalded the milk.  I also heated some filtered water in a glass measuring cup and added the yeast and a little more sugar.  The temperature must have been right, because we had crazy, happy, foaming yeast.  Then all of this and the egg yolk got mixed together and we started adding flour as prescribed.   Mixing (of course) with a wooden spoon until it was time to knead by hand.  D. took the directions for the kneading very literally and folded one-third of the dough back on itself, turned it and kept going.  Must be his inner chemistry student following the directions for the experiment exactly.   When I agreed the dough was smooth, we put it in the oven to rise.  It looked great when it came out and on we went with the punching down and shaping it into a loaf.  Into the prepared pan it went for another bout of rising.  If anything, our oven’s proofing feature may be a bit too efficient because at the minimum time, it had actually risen above the rim of the pan and was slightly stuck to the wax paper separating it from the damp towel.  We proceeded with the egg wash, cut a slit down the middle of the loaf and put it in the oven.

We’ve just now tasted the bread and it has a great crust and was really soft and tasty.  It will go nicely tonight with the chili that is in the slow cooker right now.    D. says we should do something a little more complex next time, but that is what rye flour, Guinness and molasses are for.  We have those things and we’ll be giving that a shot next weekend, probably to go along side a squash and peanut stew.

Apologies to my gluten intolerant reader, but I’ll probably be back to your blog some time soon to check out that gluten-free sandwich bread recipe as I widen my bread repertoire.  Another thing I’d like to make soon is cinnamon rolls.  Much as I loved the cinnamon rolls that come in a can when I was little, when they’ve been served in the last few years, I think they taste of chemicals.  New Year’s day we were at P & A’s for New Year’s Day brunch and the cinnamon rolls were fantastic.  Sure, more refined flour and sugar than I generally like to eat, but definitely a great treat to have once in a while.  I’d be way happier serving cinnamon rolls from scratch to the little nieces than the stuff out of a can, marketed by the dough boy.

Indoor Herbs for the Winter

Indoor Herbs, January 2010

Since my (now deceased) cat sat on my aloe plant (because it was the highest seat in a bay window) of my apartment from which to view who might be coming to visit while I was in Arizona for a couple of weeks, I haven’t been much for houseplants though at the time, I had quite the jungle.  Then I moved somewhere a lot less sunny than that apartment.  A few years later, I acquired a husband and along with him a jade plant.  Some time after that, we had some bamboo which was a center piece at someone else’s wedding.  I always figured that we’d give it back to them as an anniversary present some year, but then we gave it back earlier as a housewarming present when they bought a house and when I found that while it seemed everyone else had bamboo from their wedding they did not.

Last summer, I decided that some of the plants in our little front garden, left over from the previous owners of the house were not suiting me and that the herbs I had in the back yard could benefit from the increase in sun that they’d see in the front yard.  So I moved the lavender and the rosemary out front.  Before it got really cold (and subsequently snow-covered) I decided that I didn’t want to lose the rosemary over the winter (it always dies in this climate) and that maybe the lavender would benefit from coming in too.  Then I decided that the thyme and lemon thyme might as well come in and around that same time some basil that we had from our CSA (after I had already made all the basil that we grew into pesto) sprouted roots while it was in a glass of water for about a week.  I planted that too.  All great decisions.  The basil is kind of pale compared to the sort of basil that grows outside in August, but it’s still nice to have it to snip over home-made pizza, mix into the eggs for an omelet or into home-made salad dressing to be used minutes after it is made.  The thyme and rosemary have been great to have with roasted potatoes and I suspect a bunch of the thyme will end up in a chicken pot pie later today.  We haven’t been eating the lavender (though we could), but it is absolutely going crazy and will a very vigorous plant when it goes back outside in April or early May.  I also love to smell the lavender and will rub my hands over the leaves every once and a while just to do so.

All of this will set me up really well in the spring when the plants go back outside as a much more densely planted herb garden.  I plan a border of chamomile for the front, possibly some white chives if I can find them all in place of the two plants I pulled out which looked nice when they were blooming and straggly the rest of the time.    In the spring the two straggly wild rose vines will also go.  I don’t know if they will go somewhere else or just go away.  All of this fits into my philosophy that things planted in the yard will either be edible or will be native plants.  I haven’t yet decided whether the oregano, marjoram and two kinds of parsley growing in the back are too messy to be part of this front garden herb planting  which will be as decorative as it is edible.

Next winter I’d also like to have a bay laurel in the house.  I won’t order one now, because I think it’s too cold and it might not survive the trip, but fresh bay leaves to add to simmering broths and to stick in the flour to keep insect pest out would be better than dried bay leaves.

The Quality of Food

As usual, I’ve been thinking a lot about food.  With our meat supply running low, I managed to get to the indoor farmers’ market this morning.  We were down to a pound of bacon, a chicken and today I actually found an elk steak when I was rearranging the freezer in the garage.  I’ve never been before, usually confining my farmers’ marketing to the April-October time of year.  Even last year when I was already picky about the source of our meat, what I didn’t get directly from Jordandal Farms during the out-door market season, I bought from the now defunct Artamos Meats and Deli.   Just a couple of weeks before they closed I had ordered and picked up a 20 pound box of mixed cuts of grassfed bison meat.

We made the customary winter cranberry pancakes this morning and then I drove down town.  Even before I parked in the ramp, I could see people swarming around, many headed to or from the market given the number of reusable bags that were being carried.  As soon as I got in the door, I found that it was very busy.  Besides the expected farmers selling things, there was a lot going on.  There was live music, people were sitting at tables eating the farmers’ market breakfast.  Apparently, the cooked breakfast is an event in and of itself.  My husband said our friend La’s FB status mentioned the breakfast this morning.  I wandered around until I found Carrie and Eric at their stand and Eric recognized me right away.  They were out of a couple of things that I was hoping for, but it doesn’t matter.  At the shopping stage, I just want a few different cuts of meat, probably involving beef, chicken and pork.  I have never bought their lamb, though I probably should.   They are done with turkeys until next year.  I walked away with two butterflied porkchops, a chicken, a pack of two chicken legs and thighs and beef petite tenders.  Tonight, we’ll use one of the pork chops in stir fry that we’ll eat for dinner and it will provide probably four leftover servings since we use such large quantities of vegetables in the stir fry.  Tomorrow, we’ll splurge and eat the petite tenders.  Monday we’ll have a mixed bean and barley soup with leftover ham that I froze after Christmas.  Tuesday, I will roast a chicken.  I’ll broth out of the chicken next and the giblets and a really good stock out of the rest of the carcass.   Wednesday, I don’t think meat will be involved in a curried squash stew, I will make a pot pie or enchiladas with the leftover chicken which will probably yield not only dinner, but another four servings of leftovers for lunches.  I should have bought beef stew meat since we still have a lot of root vegetables that need to be made into Cornish pasties soon.

All this talk about meat brings me back to a conversation we had last weekend with my husband’s family.  His father either gardens on a very large-scale or is a small-scale vegetable farmer.  He doesn’t hire much help, but some of the work does involve a tractor.   He was talking about his difficulties distributing his vegetables since he doesn’t take his produce to a farmers’ market, thinks that people don’t want to make a special trip to somewhere other than where they buy the rest of their groceries.  Part of the problem with getting things to a market is that in order for things to be as fresh as he thinks they should be, they really need to be sold the day after they are picked.  I see his point, especially with things like raspberries and tomatoes which are fragile and things like peas where the sugars start changing after picking.  He mentions watching people buy hydroponic tomatoes which were probably trucked a couple thousand miles from California during the height of his local tomato season.  He doesn’t think these two products are equal and I agree.  On the other hand, while I’ve seen a magnet advertising a local meat producer on their refrigerator, I’ve never heard them talk about buying the local meat.  As far as I know their meat usually comes from the local grocery store where the meat is anything but local.  Another conversation which seems to repeat itself is comparing the price of a gallon of milk with a certain triumph in finding the cheapest milk around.  This means it is from a large dairy where (probably) grainfed cows from many farms possibly treated with rBGH and almost certainly treated with antibiotics because of their unnatural diets are the norm.    I always stay out of that conversation since I’ll only buy milk from a handful of small on-farm dairies where the cows graze like the ruminants they are supposed to be.  Admittedly at this time of year, that probably means mostly hay rather than grass.  The milk isn’t cheap.  It also doesn’t taste like the cheap milk from the grocery store.  For starters, the diet of the cattle.  Add to that the fact that the milk is not homogenized so there is a cream line.  I’ve noticed that the cream in the spring and early summer is a lot thicker than it is at this time of year.  It is also pasteurized in small batches at a lower temperature than what is customary at the large dairies where the milk comes from many farms.

While I agree with my father-in-law that his vegetables which I have eaten both at their house and at ours are superior to those found at the store which certainly weren’t as recently harvested and  about which it is hard to verify the growing conditions, It is hard for me to sympathize with his frustration over the fact that his neighbors and people in their small town don’t appreciate  the difference or that they don’t know or don’t care.  I certainly know the difference since I’ve eaten his produce both at their home and ours.  I’ve worked in his fields.  Last year, I spent a good part of the day picking five gallons of peas and five gallons of beans.  The year before I spent four hours of my morning one day weeding the onions.  I spent the afternoon helping with cherry picking, running cherries through a pitter and making a pie.  I think the more we know about the food we eat, the more we appreciate the  quality of it, the seasonal changes in food and how it gets from the field to the table.  The reason I have difficulty sympathizing with him about his frustration is because he and my M-i-L don’t seem to appreciate the same qualities in meat and dairy that they could be purchasing directly from farmers instead of from the Walmart Supercenter or from the County Market.  For all the talk about how conscientious he is about the vegetables he grows, he doesn’t appreciate the same benefits of buying local good quality meat and dairy.  It would be one thing if he acknowledged the difference between the products, but they decided they couldn’t afford it.

Given the fact that pesticides are going to be more concentrated the higher one is eating on the food chain, it seems to me that organic, grassfed meat and dairy are more important than organic vegetables.  Most of the year, we get the bulk of our vegetables through a CSA which was certified organic last year, but we understood and accepted their farming methods even before they had met all the conditions for certification.  I’ll have a separate post about that soon.  At this point, I’d probably go mostly vegetarian rather than return to eating conventionally produced meat  except rarely.  While we do eat meat several times a week, we don’t usually eat very big portions.  I stretch a cut of meat that could easily be eaten by one or two people at a meal across four to six portions most of the time.  We don’t eat out often.  We almost never (maybe occasionally on a road trip) eat fast food.  We also take our lunches to work most of the time.  To be sure all of these habits save us money where our food is concerned, but they are driven more by taste, qualilty and health than they are by finances.

Michael Pollan, again?

This morning upon opening my email, I had one of those emails from A*azon.co* suggesting a book I might like to buy since I’ve “recently purchased “nutrition and gastronomy books”.  Michael Pollan is at it again.  The little blurb describes the book as “a new pocket compendium that offers practical nutritional guidance.” For the most part, I like Michael Pollan.  I read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food”, the second of these mostly because I was curious about what was actually in it since it was getting so much press even before it hit the bookstore shelves.  I had also pretty recently read Marion Nestle’s book on nutrition, Nina Planck’s book, “Real Food: What to Eat and Why” and Gary Taubes’ book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories”, so I’m pretty sure by that time, my own philosophy on what to eat (and where it should come from) and why were pretty well ingrained before “In Defense of Food” came along.  I enjoyed that book well enough but didn’t feel the need to buy it after reading a library copy.  I’ve referred to it as “starter Michael Pollan” when talking about it and I do think it was a reasonable choice for UW-Madison’s “Go Big Read” program, but  I doubt I will even pick up the new book.   I’m sure plenty of Michael Pollan fans would like to have a pocket-sized Michael Pollan that they can take everywhere they go.  This new book may be the closest they can manage.

Black River Falls. Just what the doctor ordered…

…but not enough.  O.K., so there’s no doctor, but I really needed some down time.  After driving up to the Twin Cities to see  family, we thought we’d stop at Black River Falls and stay a couple of days on the way back.  I made a reservation for a couple of days at Caballete Retreat, a quirky cabin owned by the Scholze family.  A couple of summers ago, we’d stayed up there with M&M, P&K for a weekend that included some paddling on the Black River and some Mountain biking at another nearby park.  We stopped by Scholze Ace Home Improvement Center to pick up the keys, bought some groceries at Burnstad’s, arrived at the cabin just after dark and set about unpacking and making dinner for Sunday night.  We planned on skiing the next day at Levis/Trow in Clark County the next day, so we kicked back and made salad and pasta and drank some wine and relaxed after the family ordeal in Minnesota.

Monday, we made an egg scramble with a lot of vegetables and some bacon and got out to ski mid morning.  It was still really cold and the warm building at the ski center was a great thing to have.   We skied a couple of hours with the trails mostly to ourselves.  There were two women there when we got there and another couple skiing late in the afternoon when we were leaving.  The trail conditions were pretty good if a little icy and we had a good time.  Afterwards, we stopped at Del Bean Coffee and Cheese to pick up some coffee and beer as well as to see if they had any of the farmstead butter that they  sometimes have.  We were lucky with regard to the butter and of course they had Mississippi Mud coffee which is roasted and packed in Pepin, Wisconsin as well as a good selection of Wisconsin Microbrews.  We settled on the New Glaurus Snowshoe Ale.  Then we stopped back to the cabin, got clean and made some dinner.  In the morning, I made scones for which I’d mixed up the ingredients before we left home, rehydrating dried blueberries in hot water and adding them to the batter.  We washed some dishes and tidied up around the cabin and I signed the guest book.  I browsed through some of the previous entries and the last one before ours caught my attention.  It said, “Sara and Dan you are nice people.  But you really need to declutter.”  It then went on and on about how there is so much stuff in the cabin that these people who only signed with initials and noted that they were from Illinois were afraid to unpack their stuff because they were worried they wouldn’t find it when it was time to go home.   (This is certainly illustrative of why people from Wisconsin sometime call people from Illinois “FIBS”.  Perhaps they should just go and rent some sterile cabin or resort suite where kitchen implements are minimal and there is no “clutter”.   It’s not like there aren’t any of those around.  To be sure Caballete is full of books, family photos, artwork and everything one could need while staying there.  I also think that a lot of thought went into what is in the retreat.    Really, you could show up there with a supply of food, the clothes you need for your activities and the weather and you wouldn’t need anything else.  Maybe a better vegetable peeler and your own knives (I always bring at least a couple of my own knives when we rent for a weekend) if you are picky about kitchen stuff like I am, but really, they have everything.  In the late morning we left and headed for more skiing at Mirror Lake with me wishing we had another day to relax at Caballete and to think that another day off  wandering the ridge and trying to see if I could see a fox would have been a good thing.

She got you little shorts?

Oh, dear.  This past weekend, we had the post-Christmas gift exchange weekend with my in-laws.

It was really cold out this weekend and bowling had been offered up as an alternative to x-country skiing.   I hate bowling.  Now you could ask, “What is wrong with me?”  I grew up in the Milwaukee suburbs, “Bowling with the Champs” hosted by Eddie Doucette was on a local TV channel every night when I was in grade school.  I know this because it signaled the end of “Bewitched”, “I Dream of Jeannie” or “The Brady Bunch”, syndicated crap that I loved in those hours after school and before dinner.  Anyway, we got up to Minnesota a bit late, due to a late start.  It’s hard to get up before 7:30 when you spend 4 hours awake in the middle of the night.  It was good catching up with my sister-in-law, my husband’s brother and the tiny nieces.  I’ve got limited tolerance for the parents though.  And the playing field isn’t equal since I no longer have parents.  And my dad went out of his way not to be annoying.  Maybe to the point where he refused to ask for everything to which he was entitled, but that’s another topic.

We had a pretty nice dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy a few optional raw veggies, a green salad that I made and a c**l whip, Sn*ckers and apple salad  (which I would never make) that for me doesn’t constitute food, so I didn’t touch it.  After dinner, we opened gifts.  We coughed up the requested DS games for the little nieces, but we also gave the older one a pretty nice children’s bird book and the younger one a game of the non-computer variety.  We played it and it was pretty fun.  Then went the adult gift opening where names had been drawn.  I gave my F-i-L a selection of nuts.  The tamari almonds that I always make, some Spanish Marcona almonds and a spiced nut mix which I also made.  I know he likes nuts and I think he like them.  My M-i-L even tasted the spiced nuts and said they were good and she generally doesn’t like spicy things.   I did scale back from the amount of spicy I would make for us.  My husband had his S-i-L and we gave her a bunch of games they could play as a family and that she can take to work as a school SW and I put a set of three winter-themed dish towels in her bag too.  I have the ones that I gave her and I love them and I figured she’d like them too.  She did.  My F-i-L had me and gave me some rather odd foldable shoes he thought would be good for paddle sports being that they are made out of mesh.  I don’t know that they’d be great for boating and they were way to big, but I asked that they get the size that fits me because I could see them for “stream crossing shoes” for backpacking.  I also have about four pairs of shoes just for paddling depending on the conditions.  Two pairs of  Chacos with and without the toe loop, pull on Keens that couldn’t possibly come off and a pair of booties from NRS that come up over the ankles with a tight neoprene cuff for the coldest weather in which I am willing to paddle.  The gift was sort of odd, but I knew he tried, so I wanted to make it all right.  Then my husband started to open the two packages from our S-i-L.  The larger one was a puzzle book of sorts.  Then he opened the smaller one and said “Will Shortz, cool!”  My M-iL said “Little Shorts?  She got you underwear?”  Dear Dog.  My S-i-L was sort of mortified.  She said, “I wouldn’t buy my B-i-L underwear, that would be weird.”  D. said, “Thanks for the puzzle books, and for not buying me underwear.”  My M-i-L was a bit undeterred, going on saying that she figured that A. bought C’s underwear.  (Yep, be sure and reinforce those gender roles in someone else’s marriage, where being the wife apparently picks up where the mommy left off.)  Gack.  I guess we all just need to remember that my M-i-L has no filter for what is appropriate.   Like in August when they were all here and she queried about the pull up bar mounted in the door way of our computer room was some sort of apparatus for wild sex.  Yep, she asked this at the dinner table with the whole extended family there.  Ewwwww!

After the little girls went to bed, the adults stayed up and talked for a while and eventually we got to go downstairs to go to sleep first which to us actually meant reading books and drinking the single serving bottles of wine we’d smuggled in.

The next day we had breakfast, played some games and tried to help out with the parents’ car which wouldn’t start Sunday morning.  After that, we were on to a couple of days of real R&R.

2009 meme

I got this meme from my friend Melanie over at Sunshine is Free.  Not a bad way to sum up the year.  If you do the meme, let me know.

It comes as no surprise to me that quite a number of my answers reference paddle sports.
1. What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?
Solo kayak trip down the last 80+ miles of the Wisconsin River from Mazomanie to Wyalusing State Park on the Mississippi River
2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Never make New Year’s resolutions
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Not this year, but very soon in 2010

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Nobody close to me died in 2009.

5. What countries did you visit?
none

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
A bigger wildflower garden and an orderly herb garden

7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Our summer solstice canoe camping trip
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Again the Wisconsin River trip
9. What was your biggest failure?
I never did finish the blog entry I meant to do from my notes from the solo 4 day kayak trip.  I think I should still do it even though it’s not timely anymore.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing major, but one nasty insect sting sustained while biking to work which made part of my face swell up for nearly a week.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Definitely the new kayak.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My husband’s.  He makes good stuff great and bad stuff not so bad.
13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Nobody

14. Where did most of your money go?
Besides the necessary stuff, probably REI and Rutabaga.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Kayaking on the St. Croix. A backpacking trip to Southern Illinois that ended up turning into a different kind of camping trip due to tornado damage where we intended to go.

16. What song will always remind you of 2009?
Not one that I can think of

17. Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder? b) thinner or fatter? c) richer or poorer?
a) sadder; b) about the same; c) I’m not really sure.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
cross-country skiing and paddling.  kitchen remodeling got in the way of some of the good snow and no matter how much canoeing and kayaking I get, I always want more.
19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
procrastinating

20. How did you spend Christmas?

Quietly at home which was nice, especially since we had freezing rain.

21. Did you fall in love in 2009?
I think we both fell in love with southwestern Wisconsin this year.

22. How many one-night stands?
I don’t think this question has ever applied to me.

23. What was your favorite TV program?

30 Rock


24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No.

25. What was the best book you read?
I read a lot of books, so it’s hard to pick, but probably “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver or “The Revolution Will not be Microwaved” by Sandor Ellix Katz

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Didn’t make one

27. What did you want and get?
Lots of good opportunities to get outside.

28. What did you want and not get?
I’m not sure.

29. What was your favorite film of this year?
Probably Slumdog Millionaire.  We didn’t make it to a lot of movies this  year, but I had wanted to see this one since before it opened in Madison.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I enjoyed another Friday the 13th birthday for my 41st birthday.  We  spent the weekend moving stuff back into our remodeled kitchen.
31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Immeasurably?  That’s a tough question.
32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
Casual.

33. What kept you sane?
Out door time, solitude and my husband’s ability to even things out when I get wound up about things.
34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I’ve never been one for celebrity crushes.

35. What political issue stirred you the most?
As always, environmental issues.

36. Who did you miss?
I miss my parents now and then.


37. Who was the best new person you met?
It’s hard to say, but probably Celia or Yi-Chian.

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009 .
I’m not sure I could answer this question even if I thought about it for a long time.
39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

Ugh.  I’m just not good with these music questions.

Come Sunday, I’ll be needing that retreat

This Saturday, we’ll be headed up to my husband’s brother’s place for a post-holiday gift exchange.  It will be my brother-in-law, his wife, their daughters who are now 6 and 8 and my husband’s parents.  Concerned about the lack of vegetables (some disgusting corn, egg and sugar concoction passes for a vegetable and salads generally involve J*llo and C**lwhip) at most meals up there, I asked my sister-in-law  if I could bring something of her choosing a salad, or a dessert since I also love making desserts.  Today, I got the email from my s-i-l.  They’re planning on turkey, potatoes, etc. and would I bring a side dish or salad.  Sure, I can throw together a green salad with apples and walnuts and I can make an apple cider vinaigrette pretty much in my sleep.  The same email sent to my mother-in-law asks if she’d bring a pumpkin pie.  *Shudder*.  Oh, and although the official plan presented to us a while ago included cross-country skiing at a local park,now we are told that even though there is plenty of snow, it might be too cold.  So we can go bowling instead.  Enter my personal version of hell.  I personally don’t think that there is any too cold for the cross-country skiing, just inadequate clothing.  But then I am a more durable than average outdoors-person.  The younger of the nieces is pretty wimpy when it comes to cold weather, but she’s a native Minnesotan, so maybe she’ll toughen up eventually.  The older one is brute when it comes to cold weather.  We’re still planning on bringing skis and skates since (A) I hope we will still get the opportunity to ski  or skate and (B) once we get away from there on Sunday, there WILL be skiing probably at Hoffman Hills near Menomonie that afternoon and Monday and Tuesday at Levis/Trow Mound closer to where we are staying.  On to the bowling.  I hate bowling.  I can’t even muster up an appreciation of bowling based on the camp value it is supposed to have.  Besides that, I’m sure that bowling with his family will involve no beer.  I’m thinking that a beer might ameliorate some the annoyance which I find bowling to be.

I know I sound whiny, that this is only for one day and that I should try to muster up a better attitude, but at this point, once we get on to Saturday, Sunday at the cabin retreat can’t come soon enough so that we can have some “fun” that I will actually find fun and where multiple well-prepared (and not murdered) vegetables will appear on the table along with some tasty meat AND a salad.