A recipe a week

---

Partner and I watch “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!” almost every night.  “Jeopardy!” is one of our retirement plans: I’m supposed to go on the show and do a Ken Jennings and win a million dollars.  As the years pass and my mind turns to coleslaw, however, this is becoming less and less of a possibility.  Then there’s “Wheel,” with the genteel Pat Sajak and the lovely Vanna White.  One of my favorite moments of the show is the very ending, where Pat tries to make conversation with Vanna; she is amazingly obtuse in a Gracie Allen way (without seeming to realize it), and says the most charmingly silly things.

 

 

But I respect her for this: just before the New Year, Pat asked Vanna for her New Year’s resolutions, and she said that she was going to try a new recipe once a week, every week.

 

 

What an excellent idea!

 

 

I collect cookbooks. I rip recipes out of magazines and newspapers.  Sometimes I go online just to see how one prepares stewed dog or roasts a gazelle hump.  But do I make these recipes?  I do not.  I just allow them to accumulate.  For a while I was pasting them in a big notebook (yes, I know, I’m an elderly housewife, I do things like that), but that got tiresome too.  Now I just keep piling them up in a big heap.

 

 

But if Vanna can do it, so can I!

 

 

I made ricotta cookies (AKA egg biscuits) at Christmastime, and they were very nice.  I will make them again.  They have definitely joined the regular rotation.  (I will post the recipe soon.  I recommend them.)

 

 

In search of the next interesting new recipe, I pulled out the Ladies’ Society cookbook distributed by the Methodist Church in Overton, Nebraska circa 1950.  (I think I got it on eBay; I bought one cookbook, and the person I bought it from asked if I wanted a whole bunch more, and I said “Why not?”, and she sent me about twenty bizarre and wonderful cookbooks from all over the USA.)  The Nebraska cookbook was well-loved by its previous owner; it has little notes like “Good!” and “Needs sugar” and “Try with black walnuts” written over some of the recipes.

 

 

One – a recipe for lemon refrigerator cookies – was marked “TRY.”

 

 

Who am I to argue?  I tried.

 

 

Mmph.  A little too lemony, if anything, and the second batch burned to a crisp.  Apparently “ten minutes at 400 degrees” meant something different in 1950 than it does now.  But they had a nice light texture (they reminded me of my mother’s refrigerator cookies, but they were better, if anything), and I brightened them up with a little powdered-sugar-and-milk glaze.  I will refine them further and let you know when the recipe is a complete success.

 

 

Next week: who knows?  Sachertorte?  Tarte tatin?  Sand tarts?  Fairy cake?

 

 

Ideas are welcome.  So are recipes. 

 

 

Write me, kids.  And make it interesting.

 

---

 

Getting old with Sara Teasdale

---

Partner and I have lots of interesting retirement schemes. Most of them rely on non-traditional methods, like keno and Powerball.

 

 

One plan is that I win big on "Jeopardy!," the TV game show. I've auditioned four times. I have high hopes.

 

 

But I didn't get called for an audition this year.

 

 

I know I did poorly on the online test. I used my laptop, which was a mistake; I skipped over a couple of questions just because the keyboard was balky.

 

 

But I can't blame it entirely on my laptop. The truth is that my memory is deteriorating very rapidly.

 

 

Once, not long ago, I was encyclopedic. I knew who was in what movie, and who wrote what, and what characters were in what books, and what year who did what. I was unstoppable. The other night, however, I was watching "Jeopardy!" while on the treadmill in the health club, and presumably my blood was pumping to all relevant sections of my brain, but my recall was patchy at best.

 

 

It happens, they say, with age.

 

 

You know the Sara Teasdale poem about climbing the hill?

 

 

I must have passed the crest a while ago,

And now I am going down -

Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know,

But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown.

 

 

All the morning I thought how proud I should be

To stand there straight as a queen,

Wrapped in the wind and the sun, with the world under me -

But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.

 

 

It was nearly level along the beaten track,

And the brambles caught in my gown;

But it's no use now to think of turning back,

The rest of the way will be only going down.

 

 

Sigh.

 

---