Cooking with Dee

My mother’s family never could sing, so my father’s mother (both died before I was a year old) sang to me “Pack up all your cares and woes, here we go, singing low, bye bye blackbird.”

I would need the lyrics and can figure it out myself, for her. When we moved to our first home I heard scrambling between the sheetrock and the other barriers outside. We had tons of mice. I’d go to sleep and be awakened by them and be so scared I’d go and wake up my parents. After a couple of weeks it was a lullaby.

When I was finally on my own at 21 I sang Dad his father’s song to him, the one his father did on his 21st birthday. They were both musicians but Dad became more than that of a carpenter’s son, learning, teaching and leading worthy organizations.

That year I got my own place and it was blissful, an old place with shutters that folded into the walls. Two blocks from work so I could always be called in the middle of the night for them to say to others, Dee’s home, she’s single, and can be there in five minutes!

I had a lullaby back then. I had a great old place and could walk to work but it was on the 2nd floor on the only two-way street downtown. Semi’s would grind their gears down and up at the light. Like the mice, it was a lullaby at night. Guests on my new pull-out sofa did not agree. I just didn’t see it that way, or even hear it anymore.

Now we’ve a lot of other sounds, but up here we only hear sirens, squealing brakes, car horns and Harleys as we don’t hear the smaller bikes or any car. Mostly early morning when I’m well done with some deep sleep and I’m ready for REM and up. Get dressed for whatever weather and be ready to take out then feed the dog.

There was a thief in our place for a while who broke into open doors and stole money and jewelry, cell phones et al. Nothing big to carry. She was caught red-handed, even on camera, but the District Attorney decided not to prosecute. Let’s see, there was also a killer in our midst. And one guy crashed through the lobby window trying to steal a plasma screen not knowing that it actually needed a brain to run it and that the brain was locked up elsewhere.

My husband bought me a “stick” to keep under the front door to keep us safe when he’s off on business. Sirens and Harleys (while they’re both great) are not a lullaby but then I’m older and not sleeping as soundly as I was as a baby. Rockaby, sweet baby, Dee

Zoe Angelicus, a gift from God to us

Why do we love her, of course we love her and thank you for your trust

You chose her as our dog,,we must trust to you

The hipless wonder, we took it in stride

Splendido cane

Cucciolo dei nostri sogni, the pup people love the most

I sang this song at seven

Supposed to sing a song by Lennon

It was nixed by upstairs, they thought it was about pot

I was seven and a clue I had not

Panis Angelicus, you shaped my life and art

We had a day to practice, second in our State

First time in Chautauqua

Father was named president

His qualities were evident

He had a dream and saw it through

He helped ours come true, too

Panis angelicus, and may John Lennon allow Mother Mary to come to you, as she’s never been around here. I thought a pot was what I handed Mom to put over the stove. I was seven, and can’t believe we came 2nd in State with two afternoons of learning the real hymn. Dee

ps They’ve torn down the structure I’ve known for over 50 years. I never took a photo of it but know the exact seat where I stood and sang and will keep it in my mind as long as I have one.

My cousins worked ships on the Seaway during high school and college summers. One stayed in the business. Now, occasionally I see barges coming into our ports or headed for others.

It appears that there has been significant flooding and damage due to a storm. There is an international organization that regulates a dam. It’s going at 10,400 cubic feet per minute. We did a rafting run with guide at Cat 5 rapids at 3,000 CFM and did a five-hour ride in two. It was almost as exciting as my first run. when I was with my young brother and a rock kicked me out of the boat and my only thought was to propel my way downstream and find him. He was on the other side so stayed in and was OK.

Whenever I see a barge I think about my cousins when they were young. I’m sure they’re still adventurous and play sports but none of us are young anymore. My Auntie L gave me a tripod walker with brakes for the holidays. I’m practicing with it. It’s been too cold for the brake pads and tires, they freeze.

Here’s to the sixty year-olds, Cousin S. I love all y’all. Dee

I’ve a cool rubber stamp with four paw prints on it, and brown environmentally-friendly ink, that I sometimes add to notes and letters. Yes, I’ve a Nun Desk now with a drawer full of note paper and cards and the paw stamp and I do more than email and blog.

Imprints of your life are a different matter. You’ve a genetic history and a personal one. Nature and nurture. How can we all make a difference?

I vote. I’m an Independent in most states but not in mine. I get all these questionnaires asking me to answer a few questions then when I do, they say they need $3 to process my information. I delete everything.

No-one tells me how to vote or that I have to pay to give my opinion to a specific political party. I refuse to do so. Voting is an important part of being an adult that lives in the USA. Political parties are hiring pollers and pollers are trying to make their money off voters to find votes. I believe that is wrong.

We have a dog who can’t vote and a husband who will not do so because of potential jury duty and he is out of state much of the time. I was up for jury duty late last year but was injured and got a reprieve ’til Spring. They’ll never choose me. My husband usually says I’m emotional, but rational and thoughtful. I’m a leader, a professional, friend and volunteer.

At the beginning I was imprinted. Not with a political life but with a life of learning, chores, work, independence and freedom. Dad, may he rest in peace, told me I could be President or an astronaut or anything I wanted to be. In the end I became many things, including a good cook. I believe his most favorite dish I ever made was cassoulet. A la Simca Beck and others, my riff. I’ll have to spend a couple of days making it for my husband.

Recently I found a bag with a petit-point flower arrangement. That’s needlepoint with thin cotton thread that I used to do before I had arthritis and bad eyes! I was afraid to finish it as I got down to the details of the flowers. Fewer abilities, gaining insight from many mentors along with appreciation of life, and wisdom don’t make me want to finish this piece right now, there’s no time to do so. It does mean I’ve the wisdom to make decisions, am not afraid of that any more and then when it’s completed it will go to a special person. Imprint. I hope I give back to the Dee lifelong community at least as much as it has given to me. Dee

As I learned to cook, I learned to go toward the middle aisles when I needed rice, pasta, canned tomatoes or cereal. Flour and sugar of course, and herbal tea.

If you really cook, everything is on the exterior. Produce, fish, meat, yogurt, milk, eggs…. and every so often I go to the deli for pepperoni for my homemade Friday night pizza. Yes, I use Italian OO flour for my dough and love MYOP parties for neighborhood kids, that’s Make Your Own Pizza where I make dough and toppings and they roll them out and top them and I bake them. After they’ve eaten they get to make their own dough to put in the frig overnight to rise. I guess it’s also Bring Your Own Bowl. I’ve enough plastic wrap to last a year.

The grocery produce folks are getting to know me. The fish people have inferior product from my eyes. I have a tiny cataract but still know that by looking at its’ eyes this fish has been dead longer than three days. You know the adage about guests and fish.

My butchers know me by name and call me out when I’m going veggie. Yes, they’re saying thanks for the Texas chili, cornbread and fixin’s  (lime and sour cream) I gave them last week. Their turkey (please don’t tell my father-in-law who owns a cattle ranch in Texas that I made turkey chili} with my spice mix was right on. I do believe I’m the only customer who brings food into the market and buys more to give to my butchers.

There are no beans in Texas chili. Lady Bird Johnson taught me that from her recipe for this chili in 1962, about the time I started to learn to read. I just made my own riff on it with more tomatoes and my personally selected chiles, instead of 1962 “chili powder.” Who knows what’s in that, anyway? Certainly not me, who according to my father-in-law, personally started the War of Northern Aggression, in the 1860’s. Up North, we call it the Civil War, and I had nothing to do with it. I’m not nearly that old.

Today I made St. Louis-style ribs. Oven for two hours after a dry rub of equal parts salt, pepper, and I used smoked paprika (pimenton) this time and our home is still redolent of it, then for pork ribs I use 1/3 the amount of sugar. Two hours in the oven, covered with foil, then baste on your favorite BBQ sauce, Grill for a few minutes and done. Check out my cookbook blog, Jeanne Volt’s “Smoked Butts….” She has great recipes and is listed by me as a reference, the book. It’s featured on the blog, classic cookbooks make great wedding presents.

I only took a bite of the ribs, it was tasty but I wasn’t in the mood for meat so ate some couscous and may have some peach yogurt. Perhaps a salad. We’ll see. I can’t sleep, again. Dee

How do I eat this? My first date at age 16 was fraught with danger. When Dad looked up from his evening newspaper and placed his bifocals down his nose even my date was afraid of him. My parents made sure we were seeing a PG movie and would be back by ten.

We went on two dates, then came spring break and we were all in Florida but he was in Lauderdale and I was near Cape Canaveral in a senior community. He hooked up with Sally V, a cheerleader from our school, and was with her for two years. OK with me.

I came back home for the summer after my first year of college and he called me. I was no longer 92 lbs but nearing 110 and his first question was to ask if I was on birth control pills. I go to a Catholic college, NO! I just hated the cafeteria food so loaded up on cereal and what little fruit they had (raisins) in the morning and dessert in the evening.

I was 18 then and allowed to come home by eleven. He took me to dinner at this swanky place nearby and I ordered salmon, never having heard of a salmon “steak.” When we ate fish at home it was always a fillet.

Having no idea where the bones were, I tried to look elegant making the best of a bad situation. A few years later we got engaged, I gave back the ring, we maintained a long distance relationship for years until he asked me to dinner at the best place in town when I was visiting. That was to tell me he was getting married, another former cheerleader, friend of my younger sister. I offered hearty congratulations and asked him to my swanky hotel’s bar and asked if I could have my assistant join us.

You have an assistant? Wow, I’d love to meet her (of course you would). “Hi, I’m Rudy, Dee’s assistant.” WHAT????? He was floored and went out of my life in moments. I miss his mother. She was a great gal who sacrificed everything for her family. And his Dad, who ran a great race and was gone before his time.

As to the salmon, let’s get back to it. I spent my life savings getting out of the rat race and doing something I always wanted to do. I love fish, especially salmon, but can’t cook it at home because my husband is highly allergic even to the scent of fish.

Give me a salmon steak today and I’ve a fish knife that will go all around the bones and then skin it, place it like a heart with two toothpicks, season and make a heart-shaped papilliote and bake it at 450 for 8 minutes. Ingredients are salmon, inverted so it goes together and cooks evenly, salt and pepper and slather it with grainy mustard.

To gild the lily, I like to saute some leeks in butter, salt and pepper beforehand and place them under the salmon in the package. It’s a great dish. I learned how to make it by being uncomfortable on a date! Cheers, Dee

We all feel it, even when we’re kids and our parents try to keep us from it. Aunt Anna came a long way to see us, nurtured and loved us, the first two, me and my younger sister. Two weeks later back at her home she had a heart attack and died. My parents left us with a horrible old babysitter who yelled at us and actually her weight broke one of our chairs.

We never knew about death until friends and family died. My husband is tall and strong and is always called upon to be a pallbearer. I could not do that for a loved one, I’d cry throughout. What happened with Dad is that everything was messed up.

Rick was 17, a fellow gymnast. He was showboating in his cool car and was pulled over by several drunk off-duty cops going home from a bachelor party. They kicked his head in and killed him. Very little happened to them, a couple of days off, a pat on the back.

This was my friend. I went to see him at the funeral home and knew he’d been made up so his mother could take some solace. He was a risk-taker but would not have been my friend had he not been a good kid. I was devastated and couldn’t go to the funeral. I cried for days. He was like having Dog Town and Z Boys all together in one individual.

Men, including my brother, were called upon to wheel my father’s casket to the front of the chapel. Instead, the cemetery guys did it. I would have liked to be by my brother’s side and that of our siblings and co-siblings to roll him down that aisle. At the time we didn’t know we had that choice. We did not at the time.

So now I make my choices. I need to make my living and other wills for my husband and family. Family includes the dog, of course. I love my family. Call this planning, it’s not a sad thing, just something I have to do way, way in advance. Cheers! Dee

I’ve been a cook since I was seven years old. My mother did not want to let her eldest child into her kitchen. To this day I do not know why, but know it was not safety, I’m thinking companionship and mother/daughter bonding. Heaven help us.

When I kept the Betty Crocker Boys and Girls cookbook I was lent by the local library and garnered $.32 in late fees I had to take it back and apologize and use more than half my allowance to pay for the transgression. Three weeks later my parents bought me a new book, same name, and I started cooking.

Not cooking, really. I was not allowed to use knives or heat. I peeled some carrots and placed them in ice water in the refrigerator to curl up, and that they did. I served them to my grandfather and he called them “suicide carrots.” He was just making fun of me as many men do today, my husband says they like me. I give food and rarely ask the employees here for anything. Some folks have everything delivered and have dog walkers. I pick up packages and walk our own dog 4X per day when my husband is traveling for work.

I started reading Gourmet magazine in high school, a dear family friend had gotten Mom a lifetime subscription, I read it after she read it. Then college, first jobs, post-grad I was in politics (thought I was in policies), lobbyist, consultant to non-profit organizations and veteran volunteer I was insecure in my own skin. I quit the rat race after lobbying and paid my life savings to go to a good cooking school.

Chef? No. Good cook, yes. Think about “Chopped.” I would be too nervous on camera to function. That means my brain would not process the four items in the basket and once I figured it out I would be already in the weeds. Frozen. That’s me in front of a camera or 250 people.

My Dad was always on stage. He even danced on stage with Ginger Rogers once, after she gave the line that she danced with Fred Astaire but “backwards and in high heels.” He got her off-stage on that one, but played the fiddle, classical violin but fiddle also and called square dances to pay tuition and be the first kid in his family to ever go to college. I was second fiddle trying to make him and anyone else I worked for look good.

I’m a good cook. Everyone knows me and my food. First, they know the dog. “It’s Zoe!!!” Now, sometimes I hear “that’s Zoe’s mom.” Fourteen years of that and finally they recognize me. Cooking school changed my life. It made me walk around the aisles of a great grocery and only head into the interior for rice, soy sauce, chicken broth, sugar or flour. I get my spices elsewhere and even go to an Italian grocery for OO flour for my homemade pizza dough. Yes, we have MYOP every once in a while. I make dough, all the toppings and the kids roll their individual dough and make their own, then before they go back to grandma and grandpa’s they make their own dough to refrigerate overnight.

I love teaching. A psychic once told me I would be a teacher. I already was a teacher and had been since I started teaching gymnastics at age 14. I just didn’t know it. What she (a birthday seminar gift) did not tell me is that I would marry a physicist! No, not a psychic. Keep cooking. Take something good and do a riff on it. Dee

That means in paper, parchment paper. Roast or grill some cleaned leeks, really cleaned of sand and grit. Saute, ok. Coat a salmon fillet for one, 4-8 oz and season it with s&p, then slather with grainy mustard.

I do a heart-shape. Fold parchment paper in half. Cut in the shape of a heart. Great St. Valentines’ gift) and mound the leeks and slathered salmon. Lemon. of course.

Fold the paper over and with the back of your thumb, fold it over gently and encase it so it steams and does not leak. Tiny folds, crease, go around the folded heart and twist the parchment to encase.

Valentines’ day would not be perfect without a Coeur a la Creme. Go to your local cooking specialty store and ask for two ceramic heart molds and follow the recipe and bring to it a special fruit or chocolate sauce (or both, I love raspberry and chocolate cooked separately and drizzled) and voila, you’ve dessert a deux. It’s OK to send the kids out to old folks like us, just have dinner together. That’s your Hallmark card, better.

All I can tell you is that my husband likes food, not a Hallmark holiday, Dee

Dad did it. He traveled for work and ate in restaurants and just chose off the menu. Now my husband does it. He packs himself, sets himself up for regular laundry and dry-cleaning and leaves his bags with the bellman so he can come home to us for the weekend.

He knows every waiter in town and bell-person for room service. Honey, you don’t get that at home. When he’s gone I cook fish until Wednesday (he’s highly allergic to even the smell) or just eat vegetarian, salads et al.

He comes home Friday and sometimes still smells the salmon I cooked en papillote in the oven with grilled leeks and a coating of grainy mustard.

Home is not a restaurant to order meals willy-nilly. I can’t have steak or burgers for this meat and potato guy every day of the week. So what do I do for the entitled? Husband goes through phases, we’ll be married 15 years next week. Together well over 16 years. Crystal Light, yogurt, fruit bars, he still dates Cherry Garcia.

I buy him pummelos, French breakfast radishes, heirloom multi-colored carrots, cherry and Kumato and other tomatoes, and many different varieties of apple. When he says he’s getting hungry I ply him with one of these instead of a chocolate bar or ice cream.

When he is around 24/7 it becomes a kitchen nightmare as he has decided to cook (the furthest he got was making toast at age four and he still is amazed that I can make a tasty grilled cheese sandwich years later). He can make spaghetti and meatballs on his own using bottled sauce and either I or the butcher provide the meatballs. There are still spatters of tomato sauce on our kitchen walls.

The other is pancakes with a complicated recipe and I supervise while he uses every bowl and pan and I just whip the egg whites and enhance the mix with vanilla and cinnamon.

We do get along, most of the time, unless entitlement takes over. I’m the “dog mom” and cook and manager of our home. I am also his partner in business. A certain one has stymied us because of legal issues for one paragraph in a contract. I wrote a full revision of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in two weeks so that a 12 year-old could spend weekends with his father re-enacting Revolutionary War battles. Anyone who signed in for the weekend was eligible to be conscripted, no matter the age. We didn’t want a kid to go somewhere like Afghanistan.

One paragraph has taken these lawyers two months. I’ll tell you more later, or not. OK, it is about hirers sucking the life out of people. They own everything you ever thought of from the day you were born until the day that you die even though you work for us for six months and your contract ends.

As a human being, how many contracts can one sign, essentially signing one’s life away every time for nothing? He will not do it. My dear old Dad would not have done it when he was alive. I was born of a gifted, educated, supportive and stubborn man. I married one. Aye, there’s the rub. Dee