R L Benoit – Writer/Artist

Author: R. L. Benoit

  • We Loved to Eat

    An excerpt from “Just Walk Away – a memoir of growing up in the Midwest”

    Mom and Artie had a habit. Every morning as we sat at the breakfast table they would be discussing our next meal.

    Artie says, “What are we going to have for lunch?”

    Then at lunch they would be invariably discussing dinner.

    Mom says, “What do you want for dinner?”

    Our lives seemed to revolve around food. Well, it just seemed that way. We did many other things and focused on lots of stuff that didn’t involve food. I guess. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I just wish everything didn’t revolve around food, but that it really did.

    Food was nourishment but it was also satisfying. A well-made dish got special attention when it was especially good. We remembered these dishes and traded around recipes written on 3 x 5 index cards that would go in a little metal recipe box. It didn’t have to be only home cooked food. We also zeroed in on good restaurants and cafes anywhere we went and remembered where the good ones were so we could go again. Dad had his special Italian restaurants. He loved the Steak de Burgo that he got at Johnny and Kay’s in Des Moines for example. Steak de Burgo was a beef tenderloin pan seared and covered with a sauce of garlic, butter and Italian herbs. There wasn’t much to choose from in Marshalltown but what was there was good old-fashioned American food. I’m 100% positive that life wouldn’t have been as wonderful if it weren’t for the good food we enjoyed.

    Let me get one thing straight: we weren’t gluttons. Only mom and my brother got fat. Mom got fat from having kids and not losing the baby weight. Rol got fat after he left home and went to work at the Watchtower in Brooklyn, New York. I guess they had cafeteria food there and he didn’t get very much exercise. Our food wasn’t what one might call health food but it was healthy enough and the vast majority of it was home cooked. Back then even restaurants cooked from scratch. There wasn’t the Sysco truck pulling up with pre-made foods. We also didn’t have fast food, and I doubt we would have eaten it very much if there was.

    My first memory of food was from the apartment on North Street. Mom made homemade noodles from a simple recipe that she learned from my German grandmother. It was my first favorite thing to eat. It was simple because the only ingredients were flour, eggs, a pinch of salt and water. My mom piled the flour into a mound on the table, plopped the eggs in a shallow well she made in the center of the flour and then proceeded to mix it all with her hands gathering flour from the edges and incorporating the eggs into it gradually. I watched. It was pretty cool how she did it. When it was all mixed adequately, she would roll the dough out thin with a rolling pin, then roll up the flat sheet into a long tube. Then she cut through the dough to make long thin strips. To the strips she added more flour to keep them from sticking together and then she spread them out on the table to dry. She made chicken and noodles or just served them boiled plain with plenty of butter. The noodles were chewy and delicious and there was that delectable sauce. My dad called me The Noodle Kid because I would eat and eat the noodles Mom made. I was 3 or 4 years old.

    We didn’t have Kraft Macaroni and Cheese or Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers. We didn’t have frozen pizza rolls from the dairy case either. They did not exist nor were there any kind of frozen pizzas so the only time a kid could have pizza was when their folks took them to the pizzeria. Our only nod to convenience foods were saltine crackers and canned Campbell’s soup, cold cuts from the butcher – usually bologna. The Fareway store had and has the best deli counter in the world outside of New York City and I loved to go in there and look at all the amazing cold cuts. Baked ham, roast beef, pickle and pimento loaf, chopped ham, mortadella, cotto salami, olive loaf and more. Mom loved liverwurst. I hated it.

    Sometimes we would have cookies – usually sandwich style with icing in the middle like Oreos. Mom liked the almond windmill cookies, and we ate them dipped in milk. We ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches and later some friend showed me how to spread the bread with butter then spread the peanut butter after that to keep the peanut butter from sticking to the roof of my mouth. In those days nothing, not even hydrogenated oils, had been added to the peanut butter. It was a disconcerting feeling to have the peanut butter stick to the roof of your mouth. Not necessarily easy to get it out. You had to work at it with your tongue. The butter did the trick, and I still use it even though peanut butter is made with a new-fangled recipe these days and doesn’t stick to the roof of your mouth. Some people are grossed out by this technique.

    Once Artie got a live turkey as a Christmas gift from Lennox where he worked. He knew what to do with live game because he was a hunter and fisherman, so he took the turkey out to the back yard to slaughter it. Then, as I watched in horror, he chopped the head off the turkey with a hatchet and let go.  The turkey flopped all over the place spewing blood. It was so gross. I guess he then defeathered and gutted it, but I had already beat a hasty retreat back to the house, so I missed that part. All I remember is the flopping. Artie was a hunter trained by his own father to hunt and fish so we had a lot of wild game on our table.

    I developed a disgust for all the game that my dad hunted and killed, which my mom then cooked and served at our dinner table. It didn’t help that Artie would allow us to watch as he skinned and disemboweled the animals right before our very eyes. Ok, yes, this is the “natural” order of things, but nobody explained this to me or helped me overcome it. As a matter of fact, no one ever explained much of anything to us kids. I don’t know why. Maybe it just never occurred to them that anything needed to be explained. Adults came and went and did what they did how they wanted to do it. This was not shared with the children. We would just have to figure it out on our own.

    I was especially repulsed by having to pick buck shot out of a squirrel or rabbit leg that lay on my plate. I’d take a bite and then refuse. Nobody forced me to eat it, which was quite humane of them and I’m glad they didn’t, otherwise I might have had an even worse eating disorder. I wonder what Artie thought about my refusal. His own dad, my grandfather, would have never accepted that kind of disobedience because they had grown up in the Great Depression and food was food and not always readily available. But Artie accepted it from us kids. However, Mom further encouraged my distaste of wild meats. When lake fish was served which was regularly because Artie was a great fisherman, she would harp, “Watch out for the bones. Watch out for the bones. You might choke on the bones.” This was her litany especially when we would go to the fish frys at the Isaac Walton League south of town where Artie kept up with his archery skills. At first, I thought I would like the crunchy fish deep fried and then the beans or cole slaw on the side. I can’t remember if they also had French fries but when Mom started in then all of  sudden I was not interested in the fish. OK, thanks Mom, I’m done with the fish now. It took me years to realize that I wouldn’t choke, and then I could eat it even though I’ll always hear her voice chiming away in the back of my mind.

    The majority of our food was home cooked from scratch. Mom never bought prepared boxed meals or sugary items at the grocery store, for example. I envied kids who had Sugar Pops or Frosted Flakes in their cupboards. If Mom did buy boxed cereal, it would be Wheaties or Wheat Chex. Oh, my god, mom! You are no fun at all! Mostly we had the hated old-fashioned library paste flavored oatmeal. (yes, I knew what library paste tasted like because I sampled some once and only once).  To make it tolerable we added butter, heaps of brown sugar and a little milk. Tasty not pasty. Have I told you about the scrambled egg sandwich she would foist upon me as I was going out the door to catch the bus to school? I would take it because there was no way she would let me refuse it and then when I got out of sight of the house, I would throw it in the gutter or down the storm drain. I was bound and determined not to suffer the embarrassment of eating a sandwich on the way to school in front of all my friends!

    We didn’t have desserts in our house except for the occasional grocery store brand Fastco ice cream that came in a square paper carton. It was most often vanilla, and it was terrible but at that time we didn’t know better and accepted it.  Once in a while she would come home with Neapolitan ice cream, in the Fastco box, of course, which was strawberry, chocolate and vanilla in sections. It was good enough and we ate it. We had nothing to compare it to after all. No Haagen Daz. No Breyers.

    Some lucky kids had fudgsicles in their freezers and, boy, did I envy those kids! Mom considered these items extravagant, so we never had any. The most daring thing mom got were the almond windmill cookies from Keebler. They were ginger flavored I guess and there were little bits of almonds in them. They were in the shape of, you guessed it, windmills. While we’re on the subject of cookies, once I came home from school and Mom was not home. I must have been 8 or 9. When I looked in the cupboard for a snack, I saw some boxed coconut cookies covered with chocolate and caramel. What is this? Why are these here? This is very strange and completely out of the ordinary! I was terrified to eat one, this is how rare it was. I thought, “Maybe they were put there by bad guys and they’re poisoned, and they want me to eat one, so I’ll die.” I closed the cupboard and walked away even though they looked incredibly good. Then I obsessed and obsessed about them but kept my composure. I kept going to the cupboard to check if they were still there. They were. Eventually Mom came home, and they turned out to be legit. They were Coconut Dream cookies, and a friend had given them to her. Such was a child’s experience in a home devoid of sweet treats.

    Artie’s favorite pie was Lemon Meringue and when I got old enough to bake, he would ask me to make one for him. I made the crust from scratch with Crisco and the meringue with whipped egg whites and sugar, but the filling was some Jello thing in a box with a little yellow gel tab filled with yellow dye that you pricked with a needle and that colored the filling. Grrrr-oss! Other than that, I don’t remember any actual desserts until the hippie days and then my mom made a killer carrot cake that was to die for.

    In hindsight, I am glad that we never had many sweets. I think that having very little sugar helped me have good teeth and not get overweight. As a matter of fact, unlike everyone I knew I absolutely loved going to the dentist. Dr. Warrington would come in the exam room, take one look in my mouth and exclaim, “You have such beautiful teeth!” I was a vain young child easily overcome by flattery, but it was true. My teeth were straight, and I didn’t have any cavities. I never had to endure the agony of braces like many of my friends. I even had the added advantage of having a little gap between my two front teeth that I could squirt water out of to annoy my friends at the swimming pool. Later on, the gap closed, and this was perfect because it helped my teeth to stay straight, I guess. Room to move, you see.

    It’s not that we didn’t have our indulgences. Just down the street from 15th Avenue there was a small grocery store called Twin Foods with a bakery in the back. It was called Twin Foods because the proprietor thought that milk and bread went together, and they probably do. You went down the street to the corner of Fifteenth Avenue, then you would hang a louie on Nevada (Nuh-Vay-Duh not Nuh-Va-Duh. Remember this is Iowa!) In a couple of blocks, you would arrive. There we would buy frozen Snickers bars and Slo-Pokes in the summer. They also had the best white bread baked in their own ovens, golden crunchy crust and soft chewy white inside.  One of my favorite snacks was two huge slices of that bread with as much Miracle Whip that I could get on it so it skooshed out of the sides when you pressed the bread slices together. Of course one had to lick off the skooshed out MW. Only Miracle Whip. Nothing else. Not mayonnaise. Not butter. Only Miracle Whip. People who are not from Iowa or the Midwest don’t understand the attraction of Miracle Whip. Everybody in the Midwest uses Miracle Whip and I’m pretty sure they still do. It was an ingredient in just about every recipe you can think of. Deviled eggs don’t taste right without it. Turkey sandwiches after Thanksgiving don’t taste right without it. Potato salad doesn’t taste right without it. Coleslaw doesn’t taste right without it. Waldorf salad doesn’t taste right without it. Macaroni salad doesn’t taste right without it. Hamburgers don’t taste right without it. I like mayonnaise now but when I was young it had to be Miracle Whip.

    We also fried bologna to put in a sandwich and ate hot dogs raw and uncooked. My brother lived on Franco American spaghetti out of a can or Campbell’s tomato soup with half a package of saltines crushed in it. On Sunday mornings we had pancake eating contests while Artie flipped pancakes as fast as we could eat them. “Who wants another pancake?” he would yell out. “Me!” we would yell back. These were silver dollar sized pancakes mind you. Not the ginormous restaurant size. You could eat a lot of silver dollar sized pancakes.

    On Sunday night Mom might make Swiss Steak cooked in the pressure cooker and serve it with mashed potatoes. She’d get a cheap cut of steak, dredge it in flour and then pound the dickens out of it with a meat mallet, so a lot of flour was mashed into it. Then she would chop carrots and onions and pour a can of chopped tomatoes on top of the meat in the pressure cooker. Then we watch in fascination and fear as the little bobble thing on top of the pressure cooker would let off steam. Would it explode, or wouldn’t it? We never knew if it would, but it never did.

    When it was all done, we would pile a mountain of mashed potatoes on our plates and then put a big piece of tenderized meat on top and pour the gravy over the whole business. You could eat the meat with a fork it was so tender. No knife was needed. My lifelong enjoyment of liver and onions also began here. I don’t know how Mom made it, but it was never dry or chalky. Of course, we drowned it in ketchup. And, oh, the onions! You had to have a mound of pan-fried onions, slightly caramelized on the whole she-bang. Sometimes she made what she called Neapolitan macaroni which other people call American Goulash. This was cooked elbow macaroni in a sauce of cooked hamburger and canned tomatoes all mixed up. This, too, was good eatin’!

    When we went out to eat, which was not often, we had some choices and one of the choices was a café near the Third Avenue bridge that had a bar in the front and a restaurant in the back. It was kind of seedy, but we didn’t care. Their signature dish was a dinner plate size pork fritter with French fries. The bun was this ridiculous looking tiny thing in the middle of the giant pork fritter which had a couple of dill pickle slices and a dollop of yellow mustard.  The pork itself was pounded wafer thin, breaded and deep fried. Mostly breading and a little meat. You would eat your way to the bun and, boy, did we love it!

    The other treat was the Maid Rite sandwich. Can I write an ode to the Maid Rite! You bet I can! When I was older and had come from California for a visit, we saw that Hilary Clinton was on the campaign trail and headed for Marshalltown. We dropped everything for a glimpse of the famous person and there she was with her big bus pulled up to the courthouse lawn. There, up on the stage, the first thing out of her mouth is, “I’ve been to Taylor’s Maid Rite! And I can tell you they’re made right!” brr-rump-chi! Yeah, right, Hilary, tell us something we don’t know. You could see all the Iowan eyes in the crowd rolling in their heads. After her speech I pushed through the crowd to shake her hand, and it was kind of a limp rag and soft. I guess I might get that way having to shake thousands of hands a day.

    The Maid Rite was and still is a white hamburger bun piled high with ground sirloin cooked until it fell apart in crumbles. My sister Toni once made a very good and reasonable facsimile of a Maid-Rite but generally it is a secret recipe, and no one really knows exactly how they do it. Roseanne Barr, the comedian, called it “loose meats” and had a café in her TV series that served them. Loose meat is a terrible and stupid name for this delicious sandwich. Calling it that makes it sound perfectly revolting because it’s really perfection on a bun with pickle, chopped onion and yellow mustard. NO ketchup mind you. In classic Maid-Rite land this is not allowed. Ketchup had been pulled from the menu in the Great Depression because bums would come in, sit themselves down at the counter, order a cup of hot water then proceed to add a bunch of ketchup for a strange kind of soup. I’ve heard that ketchup is now on the menu but in those days, we did not want or need ketchup.

    To go with your Maid Rite, you had to have one of their amazing, malted milk shakes. A spoon would stand straight up if you stuck one in. It was a heavenly taste, the Maid Rite along with a slurp of chocolate, strawberry or classic malt flavored milk. They did not serve French fries. It was perfection just those two things.

    Sometimes on a hot and humid summer night dad would say, “Let’s go get ice cream.” And then we’d pile in the car to drive to a creamery in Tama (Tay-ma). We’d be driving in the dusky evening light along highway 30 and I’d look out the car window at the miles of corn fields with billions of lightning bugs flashing and wonder why there was so much corn. I didn’t eat that much corn. Why was there so much corn? I didn’t figure it out until much later that everything in the world is made from the miracle plant and also fed to cows to fatten them up. Corn starch, corn syrup, corn oil in various shapes and forms going into just about everything out there. Adhesives, cosmetics, batteries, textiles, and soap. You name it. If you find the modest little plant out in the wild that modern corn was developed from (teosinte) you wouldn’t believe how they could keep going through trial and error until they got modern corn. Modern corn bears almost no resemblance to ancient “corn”. The power of human persistence and ingenuity.

    Sometimes we’d go to the Tastee Freeze south of town on highway 14 and get soft serve ice cream that was dipped upside down into chocolate and the chocolate would then harden. You’d eat a hole in the top of the chocolate and then suck the soft serve out while your tongue was trying to keep up with all the ice cream drips down the side of the cone. John Mellancamp immortalized the Tastee Freeze in one of his songs called “Jack and Diane”. “Suckin’ on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freeze.”

    On the north side of town on highway 14 was the A&W root beer stand. The car hops would come out to your car and take your order and then come back with your food on a tray that attached to the side of the car. That root beer came straight from heaven. I kid you not. The mug had been in the freezer, and the sides of the mug were frosted over. Maybe there would be a hot dog alongside the root beer, but you didn’t really need it. The root beer was outstanding all by itself. No other root beer is as good. I tried making root beer once, but it didn’t taste anything like A&W. True old-fashioned root beer tasted very different from the recipe Mr. Allen and Mr. Wright developed, then broke the mold, and threw away the key in 1919.

    Another summer excursion would be a trip to the outdoor drive-in to watch some cowboy movie and go to the concession stand and get a bag of their terrible salty popcorn which, of course, I loved. We’d park next to the speaker which was attached by a long wire cord to a pole. Mom would take the speaker off the holder and hook it over the door window. The sound was awful, all grainy and crackly, but that didn’t matter. It was all part of the drive-in experience. We’d watch until we fell asleep in the back of the car and then somehow arrive home and wake up in our own beds the next morning.

    There was only one pizza place in town at the time. Luckily it was and still is the best pizza on the planet. It rivals any pizza you can think of including Chicago pizza, New York pizza, and wood fired pizza. None of them hold a candle to Zeno’s pizza. Am I prejudiced? Only a little bit. I think they use provolone instead of mozzarella or maybe a combination and it was the cheesiest greasiest saltiest pizza on a thin crust you ever had. The atmosphere was great. Everybody had their little booth, and the decor was kitchy Italian with fake grapes and flowers garlanded on the walls. It was a ritual to go to Zeno’s after every football game at Franklin Field. Sometimes it was a place to take a date. You could get spaghetti there, but it was the pizza that everybody loved.

    At Shady Oaks restaurant east of town on Old Highway 30 (and if you didn’t know, this was the famous coast to coast Lincoln Highway built before interstate freeways), I would always have a giant wedge of iceberg lettuce with Roquefort cheese dressing poured all over. I thought it was quite special and unique that they brought those triple dispensers of salad dressing to the table with a choice of thousand island, Roquefort and Italian dressing. You could ladle out the dressing to your heart’s content, and this made me very happy.  It wasn’t sanitary but that didn’t cross our minds. At home we didn’t have salads. We had vegetables.

    I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Milt’s on S. 12th Avenue. This was a hamburger joint, but the attraction was Milt himself. We kids watched in amazement as he poured our milk into the glass going higher and higher until he was pouring it from what seemed like 3 feet above the glass. When Milt retired the restaurant became a Chinese restaurant and dad would say, “Let’s go get flied lice.” He thought this was funny and didn’t realize how derogatory it was to say it that way. The food was actually pretty good for standard Americanized Chinese food. They had Egg Fu Yung which was smothered in some kind of beefy gravy and pork fried rice as well as Chow Mein. I really liked the Egg Foo Yung and deep-fried egg rolls dipped in the red dye #5, I mean, sweet sour sauce. Oh yeah, and of course, the flied lice. Not your gourmet fare but we had never had anything gourmet, so we had nothing to compare it to.

    Everybody in Marshalltown considered that Stone’s under the third street viaduct next to the old train station was the piéce de la resistance and gourmet meal for special occasions. It had to be Stone’s restaurant. My grandmother would ride the train from Illinois to visit us and we would meet her at the station. I particularly remember the gigantic locomotive bearing down on us in a threatening way and pulling into the station while making a hell of a racket. Then grandma would get off, and we would walk over to Stones for a quick bite. Stones was famous for their prime rib and traditional side dishes. It had an old timey feel about it, and well it should have because they had been in Marshalltown since the beginning. If you wanted to wine and dine your business associate or impress your date you took them to Stone’s.

    Sometimes we would drive to Gladbrook to indulge in smorgasbord Iowa-style. “Smorgas” is “bread and butter” and “bord” is “table” in Swedish. Gladbrook was a half-hour drive north of town through the cornfields. Smorgasbord in Iowa was/is a Swedish buffet with Iowa favorites added. The Swedish part is pickled herring with sour cream and chives, and then there were cold sliced meats that you could make a sandwich out of, the most important being ham with mustard. Sliced cheese, pickled cucumbers and sliced bread or rolls with butter. Swedish meatballs, warm potato casserole. Beet salad in sour cream and stewed red cabbage. If you weren’t about to explode after eating all that stuff you might be able to get down something for dessert. Jello, brownies, apple pie, and rice pudding sprinkled with cinnamon.

    Other times we would drive to the Amana Colonies of the Amish people who lived west of Iowa City and have a meal at one of their restaurants. We’d drive east on highway 30 and then veer off just past LeGrande on to road E66 and then drive east through the Chelsea bottomlands to Belle Paine and then Marengo. I thought this drive was particularly beautiful. I imagined how the native Americans might have lived here and enjoyed it. The Amana Colony restaurants were special because they served everything family style, which meant the side dishes were brought to your table in bowls and you served yourself whatever you wanted and however much you wanted.  Not so sanitary but people back then had no knowledge of sanitary the way we think of it today. Pickled beets, sauerkraut, pickled ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls and butter. Only your main course, which might be Wiener Schnitzel or fried chicken, was served individually on your plate.

  • Mockingbird Days

    An excerpt from my memoir entitled “Just Walk Away”

    Let’s go back a little to when our family first came to Iowa. We had lived in Chicago for about a year and then we packed up and moved to Marshalltown, the county seat and the most populous town in central Iowa with about 20,000 people. Marshalltown was and still is a small Midwestern town with corn, alfalfa and soybeans fields all around it as far as the eye could see. My dad had gotten a good job as an art and marketing director at Lennox Industry headquarters which was in Marshalltown at the time. Those were the days when if you wanted a special image for your advertisement you had to have an artist paint an actual picture. Well before the days of computers, AI and digital drawing. So, my dad honed his painting skills while he worked. My mom took care of me and when my brother and sister came along, she held down the fort at home. Mom washed dishes, kept the house cleaned well enough, talked on the phone with her friends and kept us kids in lunches and halfway decent, clean clothes. We were smack dab in the middle of the middle class. We didn’t have luxuries, but we had food on the table, medical care, a car to drive, one bathroom to share, sidewalks to draw hopscotch on and for bike riding, a yard to play in in a housing subdivision of similar folks. But that housing subdivision house came later.

    The first place we lived was a rented apartment on North Street. It was just me and mom and dad at first. My sister Antoinette Jean (whom we call Toni) was born a year and a half after me and my brother Raoul James (whom we called Rollie) was born two years after Toni. Oh yeah. Those god-awful names were another way we were different from everybody else. Mom said she gave us those names because, “I wanted to give you kids an appreciation of things French.” That’s exactly how she said it. So, did we get an appreciation of “things French”? I’ll say no effing way! What a pain in the butt those names were!

    I got called Ree-Nee or Eye-Reen over and over again. My last name was even more difficult for the troglodytes (sorry, troglodytes, I guess I’m a snob). People said Ben-Noor or Ben-Nore in a half assed way trying to pronounce it correctly, but they didn’t have a clue. At least they tried so I’ll give them that. The phonetic pronunciation of Buh-Noit became the norm. What can you say? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet so it really was no big deal what we were called.

    I had to move to California to overcome the bumpkins and when I did, I decided to uphold “cultural integrity” and pronounce my last name Ben-Wah the way it’s supposed to be pronounced in French. A part of me wanted to shove it back to all those people who mangled my name growing up and just give it to them in spades. I’ve never looked back, and I will defend my pronunciation until the end.

    The streets in the North Street neighborhood were lined with towering elm trees, and their branches were like cathedral arches over the streets. This made it shady and more tolerable in the hot, humid summers. We listened to the cicadas in summer that buzzed in the trees all day droning their mantras, and we rode our trikes up and down the wide sidewalks pumping our little legs as fast as they would go. These were our “To Kill a Mockingbird” days. We even had a Boo Radley character in our neighborhood who would walk the streets stopping at street corners and peer around uselessly like he was lost. We called him The Crazy Farmer much the way the kids in Mockingbird might have spoken. He was dressed up in dirty old worn-out baggy overalls, and a wrinkled shirt. His arms hung down the sides of his body and his lower lip stuck out like a ledge. He was just as mysterious as Boo and also just as harmless.

    Mom had a big old-fashioned pram, and she put us kids in it and pushed us fast for fun. I can still remember sitting inside on the mattress with the sides coming up high so I couldn’t see anywhere but straight up. I looked up at the trees streaming by while hanging on to the sides. When I was big enough, my little sister and brother got in it, and I pushed them myself.

    When you look at the picture of the house at 101 W. North Street you see three windows on the diagonal. This was an interior stairway that went up to the second floor where our apartment was. The outside door went directly to the basement. Filtered through the tree’s leaves you can see the two windows above the sink in our kitchen, and at age 1 or 2 I sat in the sink to have a bath and looked out those two windows. I also remember that my folks had a tiny art studio on the third floor where that dormer is. If I went there again, would it be as I remember it, or would it be different? We played on the porch and when Grandma Frieda came to visit, she snored so loud she scared the ever-livin’ beejesus out of me. I thought there was a bear coming to eat us. I wasn’t even 5 years old yet.

    Mom took us to play at the lush and beautifully landscaped Riverview Cemetery a few blocks north of our apartment. It had a decent-sized central lake with a fountain in the middle with big white swans sailing gracefully around. The swans on land were territorial and mean and would chase you to try to peck you if you got too close. So, we kids would taunt them, and they would charge at us all puffed up as we screamed and ran away. There were very big monuments and mausoleums in that cemetery as a tribute and memorial to who I don’t know. Probably the rich and famous of Marshall County. On the northern edge of the cemetery there was a bluff overlooking the Iowa river bottom and flood plain. Standing at the top of the bluff you could see down there, and I always wanted to explore but I never did. It looked like nasty, scary things lived there, and they probably did. Anyway, if you consider muskrats and beavers nasty and scary, then, yeah.

    As we got a little bit older, one of our regular destinations was Mayer’s North Street Market, a half block away from our house. We could see it from our porch steps. I remember they had blue popsicles in the ice cream freezer, and they were my favorite. I think the flavor was raspberry. The Mayers were a kindly older couple who were like grandparents to us kids and they had no objection to us wandering up and down the aisles of the tiny store looking at all the items on the shelves.

    Raymond Cartwright and ShariFern Judge were my playmates. Raymond, my mother told me, would come to our door and plead, “Cuh May cuh mout?” Remember, nobody in Iowa could pronounce my first or last name but he had an excuse because he was probably only four years old. I was Scout and he was my Dill.

    As I said before, we kids had the run of the small vicinity around our house and in the summer, we’d troop over to Mayer’s and I would always get the blue popsicle. The blue stained your tongue. We’d go around sticking our tongues out to gross everybody out. Who knows what made it blue or if the blue was safe to eat? In those days people didn’t know what they know today. For example, mom cooked in an old fashioned aluminum skillet without a second thought.  When we got older, we rolled mercury around in our hands as a toy and our folks sprayed snow-like asbestos and threw tinsel on the Christmas tree as a decoration. Almost every man smoked, of course, and a lot of women did, too – no one knew about secondhand smoke – and there was lead in paint, DDT for mosquito abatement, and no seat belts in cars. Every summer the mosquito abatement truck would drive around the neighborhood belching a giant cloud of some poisonous, noxious smoke from a sprayer in the back end. Nobody went outside to play in it, but nobody kept us locked inside with the windows sealed shut either.

    Anyway…

  • Just Walk Away

    A memoir

    Tomorrow I am three-quarters of a century old. Yeah, you heard that right. Seventy-five years old. Can it be? Seems like just yesterday I was messing around in the back yard at Fifteenth Avenue in Marshalltown, Iowa playing with my sister and brother. In honor of this momentous occasion here’s an excerpt from my forthcoming memoir. In a week or so I will post anther excerpt.

    Beginning

    I was born in Chicago, Illinois on Friday, October 13, 1950. Friday the 13th is supposed to be an unlucky day according to superstition. Later when I was older, I made up my mind that Friday the 13th was lucky for me and that everything that was unlucky for everybody else was lucky for me. I could walk under ladders. I could break mirrors. I could step on sidewalk cracks and not break my mother’s back. I could own all the black cats in the world, and nothing would come of it. Just about as silly as the superstition but, oh, well. It doesn’t matter really, does it? Neither one of those things are true, but you know how people like to make things up and I’m no different.

    I was the first kid, and when I was born my mom and dad lived in the Bohemian artsy part of Chicago. Our first home was 1738 N. Park St. in the area known as Old Town Triangle. Mom called it “Bug House Square.” She said at night, with all the lights on in the kitchen, she would spray bug killer up and down and all over. Then she would turn out the lights, slam the door behind her and immediately stuff rags at the bottom of the door. In minutes she would hear scuffling and, in the morning, upon opening the door, would find a giant pile of dead cockroaches that had tried to flee the poison. Such was our existence and because I was a baby I knew nothing of this. Too bad I wasn’t older so I could remember it first-hand. It makes a great story.

    In the early days my mom and dad still liked each other. You can see in the picture an easy familiarity. Mom liked being married. I don’t know about Artie, but he probably did, too. However, it didn’t take very long for discord to rear its ugly head. Then my extraordinary mom felt that she might have married in haste only to repent at leisure.

    At first Mom had her art teaching job at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier and Artie went to school at the Chicago Art Institute. Mom was a little older than most girls who were already married. She had been going to school, gallivanting around New York City and Philadelphia having a career that wasn’t a schoolteacher, secretary or nurse, the only jobs that was acceptable for a woman to have in those days. But she was in her late twenties and was feeling pressure to get hitched. Here came Artie, suave, confident, handsome, funny. I’m pretty sure he swept her off her feet and since she was getting older, what the heck.

    After they married Artie got a job somewhere, I don’t know where. In his free time, he would play golf because he would have loved to have been a professional golfer. He was pretty good at it, but he didn’t have that ambitious fire in his belly or maybe he felt that his duty lay elsewhere. He didn’t pursue it. Maybe it was my arrival that made him give up that particular dream, but he didn’t give up golf. Oh no, he played golf all his life, chipping practice balls in our back yard and going off to the golf course every chance he got.

    The unfortunate part for Mom was that in Chicago he would play golf with women he met somewhere. Somewhere respectable, I hope, but I don’t know where for sure. Mom stayed at home with me because she wasn’t into golfing, but the fact that he would invite other women to play with him made her pretty darn mad and jealous. She kept her mouth shut and didn’t complain but boy was she building up resentment. Wouldn’t you be mad? I would! He kept on doing it and they never came to a suitable understanding about it. Years later when I was almost grown, she complained to me, so I know how she felt about it.

    Because I was a baby I don’t remember anything about all this. Instead, I was told later, Mom took me to nearby Lincoln Park and North Avenue Beach to get away and have some peace. Everybody said I was a pretty baby, and Mom must have thought so too because she took me to audition to be a Gerber baby. She got nervous when they said let us take her into the next office to show the boss. You wait here.  I didn’t get the part, but I came back to a very much relieved Mom. My uncle Bob watched me as I slept and called me a “real sack artist”.

  • We Loved to Eat

    Memories of Midwestern Family Recipes and Café Food

    Foreword

    My mom and dad had a habit. Every morning as we sat at the breakfast table mom and dad would discuss our next meal.

    Dad says, “What are we going to have for lunch?”

    or

    Mom says, “Art, what do you want for lunch?”

    Then at lunch they would be invariably discussing,

    Dad says, “What are we having for dinner?”

    or

    Mom says, “What do you want for dinner?”

    Our lives seemed to revolve around food even though this wasn’t strictly true. It just seemed that way. We did many other things and focused on lots of stuff that didn’t involve food. I guess. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I just wish everything didn’t revolve around food, but it really did.

    Anyway…

    Food was nourishment but it was also pleasure. A well-made recipe got special attention and everybody ooohed and aahed when it was especially good. We remembered these dishes and traded around recipes written on 3 x 5 index cards that would go in a little metal recipe box. “Margie, can I get that recipe for the potato salad you made? It was really good.”  It didn’t have to be only home cooked food. We also zeroed in on good restaurants and cafes anywhere we went and remembered where the good ones were so we could go again. Dad had his special Italian restaurants in Des Moines that he liked. There wasn’t much to choose from in Marshalltown but what there was was good old-fashioned American food. I’m 100% positive that life wouldn’t have been as wonderful if it weren’t for the good food we enjoyed. Memories are made of good food. I think back and many of my best memories are of a special dish someone would make and serve. It’s just that way.

    Let me get one thing straight: we weren’t gluttons. Nobody got terribly fat except my brother but that was when he left home and went off into the wide world and it wasn’t because of food per se. It was because he had some psychological problems and that’s a whole other story for a whole other book. Also, even though most of the food we ate wasn’t what one might strictly call health food it was healthy enough and that was just fine. We didn’t have fast food back then and I doubt we would have eaten it very much if it was. Fast food hadn’t even been invented yet when I was growing up and when it was finally introduced, we ate it on very rare occasions.

    Here I offer you my memories of what we ate and enjoyed when I was growing up and then a bit into what I ate as a college student. I include recipes. Maybe you will relate to this and have a few memories of your own.

    Chapter One

    My first memory of food was when we lived in a second-floor apartment in a big Victorian house in Marshalltown, Iowa on North Street. I have other fond memories of North Street that don’t revolve around food. For example, North Street, when I was a toddler and then just before we moved to Fifteenth Avenue and kindergarten, was lined with towering elm trees with cathedral-like branches over the street. It was a great place to live. These majestic trees eventually succumbed to Dutch Elm disease, so they are there no longer but we enjoyed them as long as they were there. Mom took us to Riverview Cemetery that was a few blocks away, because it was beautifully landscaped and the best park you could think of even though it was a little bit weird with all the tombstones to look at and play around.  Other than that, food was central. In that second-floor apartment my mom made homemade noodles from a simple recipe that was handed down to her from her farm wife mom, my German grandmother. It was my first favorite thing to eat.

    It was simple because the only ingredients were flour, eggs, a pinch of salt and water. Maybe a little oil. My mom piled the flour into a mound on the table, plopped the eggs in a shallow well she made in the center of the flour and then proceeded to mix it all with her hands gathering flour from the edges and incorporating the eggs into it gradually. When it was all mixed adequately, she would roll the dough out thin with a rolling pin, then roll the flat sheet into a long spiral. Then she cut the dough into thin strips. To the strips she added more flour to keep them from sticking together and then she spread them out on the table to dry a little bit. She made chicken with the noodles or just served them boiled plain and with plenty of butter. The noodles were chewy and delicious. My dad called me the Noodle Kid because I ate them with gusto! I was 3 or 4 years old.

    Homemade Egg Noodles

    Ingredients

    3 large eggs

    1/2 teaspoon salt

    1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil

    2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

    Instructions

    Mound on a clean counter 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour. Make a well in the center and add to the well 3 large eggs. Beat the eggs lightly with a fork incorporating a little flour as you go until the eggs are mixed and slightly thickened. Using the fingertips of one hand gradually incorporate the flour into the eggs and blend until you have a smooth but not too stiff dough. If the dough feels too dry you can add a little water. If it’s too sticky you can add a little flour.

    Let the dough rest for 10 minutes.

    Roll out onto a lightly floured counter until it’s thin — a 1/4” thick or less. Sprinkle a little flour over the whole thing and roll the sheet up like a cinnamon roll.

    Using a sharp knife or pizza cutting wheel to cut through the noodles roll into long strips, however narrow or wide you like. Let them dry on the table for an hour.

    You can cook them immediately by adding them to a pot of boiling water to cook until tender to the bite, about 2-3 minutes. Using tongs remove them from the cooking water. These noodles are great in Chicken and Noodles, with Beef Stroganoff or with Swedish Meatballs. They’re also outstanding with just butter and a sprinkle of parmesan cheese.

    ***************

    We didn’t have Kraft Macaroni and Cheese or Pepperidge Farm Goldfish that everyone feeds their kids nowadays. Pizza rolls did not exist nor were there any frozen pizzas in the dairy case so the only time a kid could have pizza was when their folks took them to a pizzeria. There were saltine crackers and canned soup, cold cuts from the butcher – usually bologna; sometimes cookies – usually sandwich style with icing in the middle like Oreos. My mom liked the almond windmill cookies, and we ate them dipped in milk. Peanut butter sandwiches ruled the day and later some friend showed me how to spread the bread with butter then spread the peanut butter after that to keep the peanut butter from sticking to the roof of my mouth. In those days nothing, not even hydrogenated oils, had been added to the peanut butter we ate. I did not know this at the time, but it turns out that the proteins in PB absorb water and make it thicker when it’s in your mouth. It was a disconcerting feeling to havethe peanut butter sticking. Not necessarily easy to get it out.

    Turkey Tragedy

    Once my dad got a live turkey as a Christmas gift from where he worked. He knew what to do with live game so he took the turkey out to the back yard to slaughter it. Then, as I watched in horror, he chopped off the head of the turkey with a hatchet and let go of it.  The turkey proceeded to flop around spewing blood all over the place. I guess he then defeathered and gutted it, but I had already beat a hasty retreat back to the house, so I missed that part. All I remember is the flopping. My dad was a hunter trained by his own father to hunt and fish so we had a lot of wild game on our table. More about that later. This turkey tragedy set me up for a predilection for not eating wild game.

    Mayer’s North Street Market

    We kids had the run of the neighborhood and in the summer, we’d troop over to Mayer’s North Street Market which was a half block from our house. In the market we would wander up and down the aisles looking at all the items which to our youngster minds was fascinating. After we had seen enough, we would end up at the ice cream freezer where I would choose a blue popsicle. I think it was raspberry flavored and it was my favorite. The blue would stain your tongue blue. Who knows what made it blue or if the blue was safe to ingest. In those days people didn’t know what they know today. For example, mom cooked in an aluminum skillet without a second thought.  When we got older we rolled mercury around in our hands as a toy and our folks sprayed asbestos on the Christmas tree as a decoration. Almost every adult smoked, of course – no one knew about secondhand smoke – and there was lead in paint, DDT for mosquito abatement, and no seat belts in cars. I wonder if blue popsicles are still sold. I haven’t had one since I was 4 years old and I’m 73 now so who knows?

  • Welcome to Mojave

    In Southeastern Arizona….

    When I was about 10 years old our family took a road trip to visit my mom’s sister who lived with her family in Culver City, California. On the way we pulled over into a parking lot somewhere around Barstow on route 66. This was in 1960 or thereabouts. It was night and there were no lights for miles around except one bare bulb outside the lone rest stop building. We had to make a potty break, I guess. Barstow, if you don’t know already, is smack dab in the middle of the Mojave Desert. When we debarked from the car a very hot wind was blowing. A wind that grabbed my attention. A wind that I’d never felt before and I’ll never forget the feeling.

    This could be my back yard, thank God. It isn’t but it could be. This is the Mojave Desert outside of Barstow, California.

    The wind that is blowing outside our house right now here in Southeastern Arizona is just like that Mojave wind. Dry. Hot. All encompassing.

    I was fooled the first two summers we were here. I was so fooled that I wanted to rename Arizona Verdizona. Because arid did not seem to apply there was so much rain and green everywhere. I would have been wrong, oh, so wrong though. Those two years were an anomaly of heavy monsoon rains. Last summer it was more like what it normally is. Unless you ask a local. They say, “It used to rain every afternoon like clockwork! I want to scream what are you talking about? Where did you live, I’d like to know? Not here!

    Still I’m glad I don’t live where there’s a lot of humidity. I remember that all too well from when I was growing up in good ole Io-way.

  • You Make Me Sick

    I’m ready to go 100% organic (not just part-time organic) and grow all my own food and never buy anything from the store….

    Hey! Another thing to get incensed about. Watch “Dark Waters” or read lengthy articles in the New Yorker entitled “You Make Me Sick” and you’ll know what I mean. To summarize: the leaders of the corporate world are actively, at any given moment, trying to get away with murder. Literally.

    Did you know your body is reeking with PFASs? They’re 8-carbon chain molecules that are impossible to break and they’re called “forever chemicals”. Completely manmade. Don’t exist in nature. Cause all manner of problems.

    Scientists created a chemical compound capable of repelling both water and oil in the 1940s. They believed it was a revolution in materials sciences and it was.

    That class of chemical compounds, called per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), were quickly used to create useful domestic products like Teflon and dental floss, along with industrial agents like firefighting foam. They even found use in parts of the Manhattan Project.

    Decades later, PFAS are still around. Because of their impressive surface density, these “forever chemicals” don’t break down in either the human body or nature, causing health concerns like cancer, thyroid disease and reproductive impairment.

    The Environmental Protection Agency reports that most people in the United States have been exposed to PFAS in some capacity. Exposure happens when touching, eating, drinking or breathing in materials containing PFAS, commonly from drinking water, waste sites, and consumer products.

    Even if we were able to immediately stop the use of PFAs, what we’ve already put out there are going to be with us a really long time.

    The only way to limit one’s risk of contamination is granular activated carbon and reverse osmosis filters to reduce PFAS levels in drinking water. It’s too late to do anything about what you’ve already got in you. What you got, you’ve got.

    Where are they found? Pretty much everywhere.

    Yep, you guessed it. There’s PFASs in those french fry containers.

    • Cleaning products, degreasers for appliances, carpet and floors, counters and other surfaces, glass, restrooms, toilet bowls, and vehicles, as well as furniture and metal polish.
    • Water-resistant fabrics, such as rain jackets, umbrellas and tents.
    • Grease-resistant paper as in compostable food service ware: molded fiber plates, bowls, trays, clamshells, and portion cups, as well as non- plastic deli wraps and bags.
    • Nonstick cookware: frying pots, pans, baking sheets, waffle irons, air fryers.
    • Personal care products: shampoo, dental floss, nail polish, and eye makeup, foam and lotion products.
    • Stain-resistant coatings used on carpets and carpet tile, broadloom carpet, and carpet padding, upholstery, and other fabrics, ceiling tiles, insulation, and wallboard.

    Effects

    Increased cholesterol levels, decreased vaccine response in children, changes in liver enzymes, increased risk of high blood pressure, increased risk of pre-eclampsia in pregnant women, decrease in infant birth weights, increased risk of testicular or kidney cancer.

    So, there ya go. Like the guy in Dark Waters said: we gotta take care of ourselves because they aren’t going to.

  • I Didn’t Know That!

    Someone posted this on Facebook and I was so enthralled with it that I had to re-post it here. I love researching and finding the origins of the obscure things that we say. Do you know any obscure sayings?

    A Necessary Pot

    They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were “piss poor.”

    But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot; they “didn’t have a pot to piss in” & were the lowest of the low.

    Bouquet

    The next time you are washing your hands & complain because the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s.

    Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June. Since they were starting to smell, however, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

    Bath Water

    Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women, and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the Bath water!”

    Raining

    Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof, resulting in the idiom, “It’s raining cats and dogs.”

    Canopy

    There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed, therefore, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.

    Dirt

    The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, leading folks to coin the phrase “dirt poor.”

    Threshold

    The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance way, subsequently creating a “thresh hold.”

    Porridge

    In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while, and thus the rhyme, “Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.”

    Fat

    Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, “bring home the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and “chew the fat.”

    Crust

    Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

    Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the “upper crust.”

    Wake Up

    Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up, creating the custom of holding a wake.

    Saved

    England is old and small, and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive, so they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.

  • Something Korean and Delicious

    I had my first taste of Bibimbap when I worked for Televideo in San Jose back in 1982. Televideo was a Korean owned company led by the illustrious Mr. Wong who would walk around the company and the employees would, meerkat like, keep an eye out for him. “Here comes Mr. Wong! Look busy!” The company was going downhill and since I was one of the most recent hires, I was one of the first employees to be let go. Because of these layoffs we wanted to make a t shirt that said “I’ve been Wonged” when we found out that Mr. Wong was replacing the doors to his office with big expensive solid oak doors instead of putting the money back into the company.

    One of the best things about Televideo was the cafeteria downstairs. They served delicious Korean food and bibimbap was one of the popular dishes. Bibimbap is not bibimbap without gochuchang sauce so do your best to find it. Otherwise, this is just rice with vegetables.

    Bibimbap

    (Korean Rice with Assorted Vegetables, maybe meat, definitely a fried egg)

    Ingredients

    Typically, bibimbap is made with beef but it’s perfectly scrumptious with just an egg plopped on top. In case you eat meat, and you want to be authentic I’ve included how to add meat. Otherwise just skip over it and go to the egg or just the veggies.

    3-1/2 oz. beef (round steak works well) minced

    Beef Marinade

    1 Tbsp soy sauce

    1 Tbsp sesame oil

    1 tsp brown sugar

    1/4 tsp garlic put through a garlic press

    Vegetables

    1 bag of spinach

    1 bag of bean sprouts

    1 zucchini thinly sliced on a mandoline

    3-1/2 oz shiitake mushroom (optional)

    1 small carrot julienned

    sea salt

    3 cups steamed rice

    3 eggs

    Some cooking oil

    Optional: toasted seasoned seaweed shredded (long thin cut)

    Bibimbap sauce

    2 Tbsp gochujang

    1 Tbsp sesame oil

    1 Tbsp sugar

    1 Tbsp water

    1 Tbsp sesame seeds toasted or untoasted

    1 tsp apple cider vinegar

    1 tsp garlic put through a garlic press

    Instructions

    If you’re using meat: mix the minced beef with the marinade and let it set for about 20 minutes while you are working on other ingredients. After about 20 minutes add some cooking oil to a fry pan and cook the meat on medium high until it’s cooked through. Set aside.

    Mix the bibimbap sauce ingredients in a bowl. Set aside.

    Bring a pot of water to a boil and wilt the spinach in it. With a slotted spoon take the spinach out and put it in a colander to drain most of the water out. (Don’t throw the water out.) Once the spinach is cool add ¼ teaspoon of sesame oil, a pinch of salt and some sesame seeds. Set aside.

    Blanche the bean sprouts in that same water and spoon them out while they’re still crisp. Add ¼ teaspoon of sesame oil, a pinch of salt and some sesame seeds. Set aside.

    Saute the zucchini in a little oil until just barely cooked. Set aside.

    Rinse, peel and julienne the carrots. Add some cooking oil to a fry pan and saute the carrots on medium for 2 to 3 mins. Set aside.

    If you’re using shiitake mushrooms clean/rinse them and thinly slice. Add some cooking oil and a pinch of sea salt to a fry pan and cook the mushrooms on medium high until they are just barely cooked.

    Make fried eggs. Sunny side up or easy over is fine whatever you prefer.

    Put the cooked rice into a bowl and (if using) add the pile of meat in the middle. Put some vegetables, and seasoned seaweed (if using) around the sides of the bowl. Plop the egg on top of the rice (or on top of the meat) in the center. Drizzle the gochuchang sauce over the whole business to your liking (it’s spicy so go easy if you don’t already know that you love it like I do.)

    You can mush everything together or eat separately. With chopsticks is best I think.

    Other vegetable options – raw julienned Daikon radish and/or thinly sliced English cucumber. If you add cucumber slice it on a mandoline, sprinkle with sea salt and let it macerate for 20 minutes. Then rinse and use.

  • Powers of Ten

    A Walk Under the Tall Trees Near the Shores of Lake Michigan…

    Years ago, I saw a short film called “Powers of Ten” that made a big impression on me. Here’s a link if you haven’t already seen it.

    The zooming out in this short film is pretty amazing but it’s the zooming in that blew me away. In my alternate life I would have loved to be a theoretical physicist.

    Here’s the connection: on a recent visit to the suburbs of Chicago I walked the neighborhoods near the shores of Lake Michigan. In the suburb I was in the leaves were coming out on some trees but on others the leaves had not yet appeared or were barely appearing. The trees that impressed me most were the giant Burr oak trees. Leviathan comes to mind. You feel humbled standing underneath them in much the same way that one feels humbled when thinking about the Universe of the micro and macroscopic.

    I craned my camera up to get an image of the magnificent canopies. They could have been the veins of a human or other animal, rivers and streams of the Earth, rivulets and gullies in the desert. Isn’t nature wonderful?

  • Teen Years in the Twilight Zone

    Junior High

    In Junior High and High School everything changes for me. I‘ve entered the Twilight Zone of disconcerting physical changes and scholastic expectations that I’m not prepared for. In elementary school I was awkward and shy but in Junior High awkwardness takes a quantum leap into the stratosphere. Looks are important. Popularity is important. Grades are important.

    To get to Anson Junior High we ride the bus. Sometimes I walk and I even walk when the weather is really cold but mostly we ride an old bus with a friendly driver. On the bus I wait to see if a certain boy will board the bus but then I am too shy to say hello if he does. I just sneak a peek and hope he doesn’t notice me peeking.

    I think the bus looked something like this.

    Once we get to school, a crowd gathers outside the front door until the bell rings. To pass the time we tease each other or some hapless individual. Maybe we decide that we don’t like their hair or clothes. My god, we do not have a conscience. (Welcome to Junior High. Now go home.) It’s sort of like the Mark Twain short story (“The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut”) about the man who conquers his conscience and then goes on a crime spree. Yeah, that is us. Eventually the victim complains, and we are hauled into the principal’s office where we get a proper finger wagging. After that we behave. Well, I know that I behave but I can’t speak for the other little Heathers. I’m not like that. Instead, I am a natural follower of Heathers.

    In class I spend all my time seated in the back row drawing elaborate cartoon stories I’ve made up about the exploits of the Beatles. It looks like I’m taking notes, but I’m not. I’m drawing like a house on fire. This is 1963. The Beatles have just been on the Ed Sullivan Theater show. When I’m done I fold the note into a little bundle and sneak the note to a friend who then draws a response and sneaks it back to me. We are inspired by the Beatle movies we’ve seen, A Hard Days’s Night and Help! We have seen these movies many, many, many times at the Orpheum Theater on Main Street on a Saturday. I’ve gone to see A Hard Day’s Night 10 times. Looking at these cartoons years later I realize how creative they were.

    We loved The Beatles so much!

    The only class I like is Latin. This is because our teacher, Miss Rose Sadoff, is so nice and such a character! There she is at the head of the class declaring, “Latin is not a dead language!” and then she goes on to explain why. She inspires me to love language. As I get older, I’m still enamored. (Ha! Latin there!) I love studying the etymology of words and one of my favorite books is The Story of English. I still remember Latin verb conjugations set to the tune of One little, two little, three little Indians. How’s this for memory? The verb “to love” – (I can recite it with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back.)

    amo, amas, amat, amare; amamus, amatis, amant, amare,

    “o”, I; es “you”; t “he”; mus “we”; tis “you”; ent “they”; amare!

    She instructs us to greet each other, “Salve!” (sal-vay) to which we respond, “Salve et tu quoque!” (sal-vay et too qwo-kway). “Salutations!” “Salutations to you also!”

    I enjoy Home Economics, but I’m terrible at it. My A line skirt sewing project is a disaster and the purple cow milk shake I make tastes, well, like purple. Somehow, I manage to acquire skills but I don’t think it’s because of Home Ec class. I think it’s because my dad threw me in the deep end of cooking at home. More about that in another chapter.

    Ellen demonstrates how to make a salad in science class, and I use her technique to this day. David pulls the wings off a fly in homeroom to gross out the girls. We are properly grossed out and disgusted. We perfect our swimming technique in the underground swimming pool. One day we swim laps and for some reason I’m super tired. I probably have not eaten breakfast because I’m in the habit of throwing in the gutter the fried egg sandwich that my mother gives me to eat on the way to the bus. I hate fried egg sandwiches. I think they make me look stupid. Anyway, she won’t listen and keeps giving them to me and I keep throwing them away once I’m out of sight of the house.  The neighborhood dogs are happy to see me in the morning. Anyway, in swim class I’m in the throes of low blood sugar because all of a sudden, I can’t make to the edge of the pool and I’m going under. The teacher doesn’t notice but Ellen does and she jumps in and pulls me to the edge. Saved by the mayor’s daughter! That is the first time in my life I might have drowned but it will not be the last. And I’m not a bad swimmer. Just a bad decision maker!

    We girls have all seen “the movie” in grade school. Ya’ll might know the one called “Very Personally Yours”. It’s a movie all the girls are required to see and most of us just put the whole thing out of our minds afterwards because it’s so embarrassing! We’ve all seen “Carrie” and we know what happens to that girl! Eventually the grossness happens, and we aren’t prepared and it’s 100% embarrassing. We get passes to not participate in swim class and we hide in the locker room when we change our paraphernalia. Marjorie shows me how to use the tampons because the pads are unbelievably annoying and it’s a giant CF. It’s too much and nobody talks about it.

    Anyway…

    I join 4H but it’s “town” 4H so it’s not really that much fun. No farm animals or anything. I learn more cooking, but it’s still on a rudimentary level. I demonstrate how to make egg salad sandwich boats at the county fair. It’s at the old fairgrounds in town which is a throwback to earlier days when fairgrounds were really cool and there’s not a speck of modernity to it. It’s just like the state fair in the musical except on a smaller scale.  I get up on a tiny stage in the demonstration building and show the judges what to do. Chop hard cooked eggs, mix with mayo, scoop into a hollowed out hot dog bun and top with a little sail made out of paper and toothpick! How quaint! It seems like the next thing they’ll ask me to demonstrate is Jello salad, or something with Miracle Whip in it. I have absolutely no recollection of what the judges think of my presentation. I’ve blocked it out. I’m just glad to get it over with. Anyway…

    At thirteen this would have been a very cool dress for me.

    Then there are the school dances, and I get all dressed up and stand at the edges of the gym terrified that some boy might ask to me dance. No one ever does and this is a great relief. Then one of my friends tells me that her older brother who is already in high school thinks I’m cute and this makes me feel good, but I have no idea what to do about it if anything. Boys are an exciting idea, but the reality is overwhelming. No one ever sat me down and told me what was expected of me. My mom is busy doing other things and dad, well, he would never, ever have such a personal talk with me. No. I am 100% on my own. I rely on my own devices all through junior high, high school and on into college. All I can do is watch what my friends do and try to stay out of trouble.

    Then President Kennedy is assassinated, and we all sit there stunned not knowing what we should think or how to feel. I remember being in class and the principal comes in and tells us the news and then tells us we can go home. A few days later we watch the funeral on TV when we should be having Thanksgiving dinner. There’s the unforgettable image of the handler barely holding on to the riderless black horse jigging down Pennsylvania Avenue with the cavalry boots turned backwards in the stirrups. It’s so sad to see Jackie with her widow’s veil barely concealing her tear-stained face and the sight of little John-John, their son, fumbling his hand under the flag of his father’s casket and then saluting. I am aware of politics for the first time.

    High School

    In high school my dad refurbishes a Volkswagen convertible which he paints cherry red and gives it to me to use. Dad shows me how to drive it and I remember stripping the gears before getting good at 4 on the floor. When I am finally good then my friends and I go nuts Scooping the Loop every Friday and Saturday night American Graffiti style. It’s me with Chris, Kathy and Tani and we drive down Main Street and South Third Avenue from the Times Republican building to the A&W root beer stand, then turn around and do it all over again. We heckle our friends as they drive by and sometimes, we throw stuff at them like the canned figs that Chris stole from her candy striping job at the hospital. Not quite juvenile delinquents but close.

    Pretty damn cute, isn’t it?

    In senior year we experiment with booze and we go out to a lonesome dirt road west of town and someone brings a bottle of Cherry Heering to which we add SevenUp and drink that. Yuck. But isn’t this what country kids do in the summer? Sometimes we drive down to a sand bar on the Iowa River north of LeGrand threatening to convince someone that they need to go on a snipe hunt, but we never do. Sometimes we drive east of town out Main Street and then up on the bluffs above the river to a place we call Twinkle Hill because we get a good view of nighttime Marshalltown up there. It’s twinkly down below and if we have a boy in the back seat we’re twinkling on each other. Workin’ on the Night Moves.

    After a night of wasting cheap gas, we make it over to Chris’s mom’s house and watch Gravesend Manor which shows scary movies like Masque of the Red Death and The Tingler. Gravesend Manor is corny as all get out but we love it anyway. I mean, we know of nothing better. We’re just the kids John Mellencamp sings about later on. Gravesend Manor is hosted by Malcom the Butler, and is joined by The Duke of Desmodus, Claude the Great, Clyde, and Esmarelda. Where are they now? Are they sitting in a rocker on a porch somewhere? Think about if your glory days were pulling pranks on WOI Channel 5 and that’s what you have to reminisce about. Could be worse.

    The host of Gravesend Manor: Malcom the Butler with the Duke of Desmodus, and Claude the Great

    Sometimes we have slumber parties at somebody’s house. To call them slumber parties is beyond absurd because the point is to get as little sleep as possible. One night Maribeth has a slumber party at her house. First, we drive all over town and doing the usual Scooping of the Loop. While scooping we play the radio in the car. We hear Chug-a-Lug by Roger Miller and then stop at the root beer stand for some food. When we turn the car back on Chug-a-Lug is still playing! Whoa! That’s weird! We decide to try an experiment. We turn off the radio and then wait a while and then turn it back on and see what happens. A half hour later… Chug-a-Lug! Now our 16-year-old minds are racing to thoughts of a diabolical plot by aliens from outer space. We drive over to Maribeth’s house, get out of the car, go upstairs to Maribeth’s bedroom and turn on the radio. Chug-a-Lug!

    Imagine 5 teenage girls screaming at once.

    One of our favorite idiocies is making each other pass out. How you do it is one person breathes hard, in and out, in and out, in and out, for a minute and then someone grabs them around the abdomen and holds hard. If all goes well the breather passes out. We think this is fun! Imagine what genius achievements we could have had had we not killed half our brain cells!

    Of course, the “evening”, because by now it’s 1 or 2 in the morning, ends with all of us in our sleeping bags on the floor telling ghost stories. Here’s a favorite: (Delivered slowly and ominously). “I am the viper and I’m on the first step, (pause) I’m the viper and I’m on the second step, (pause) I’m the viper (all the way to the top). (pause) Anybody vant their vindows viped?”

    Gli Capriciosi

    I am actually a pretty timid person and to be outgoing is a skill I need to learn. I want to be popular and have people like me but there’s seems to be no clear path. So, I think, well, I’ll join clubs. So, I join the drama and art club and somehow it seems that I have innate leadership skills. Eventually I become president of both.  But mostly I’m content to work behind the scenes painting backdrops or pull the curtain when I’m stage manager for our theater production of Plain and Fancy. I’m chosen to be a cast member in the improvisational theater group that our drama teacher Stan Doerr directs. He calls it Gli Capriccioso (The Capricious Ones) and it’s in the style of Italian Commedia Dell’arte theater. Pretty sophisticated for a podunk midwestern town.

    Stan Doerr was a wonderful drama teacher.

    What a character Stan is! He has the most expressive face on the planet, and I can still see him making a surprised look to demonstrate some concept he has. He makes it a blast to be part of the troupe. He yells and fumes and the actors and stage crew cower but eventually it all turns out and he lets us know that we did good. I play Isabella, a female innamorata, and we make masks out of a rubber substance to be authentic. We dress in period costumes that we’ve made ourselves or that the stage moms have made. In Commedia dell’Arte there’s no script. All we have is a loose scenario, so we have to ad lib our lines. The scenarios are from basic Italian stories, and it’s slapstick and a blast. There’s one scene where Ralph, playing the part of Pulcinello is to give me, as Isabella, a big comedic wet one right on the mouth. The comedic part is trying to negotiate the giant noses of our masks. But when Ralph finally makes it to me, he opens his mouth wide, wide open and I, having never been properly kissed have no clue how to kiss back. Allrightey then.

    Dan Rovner and me at the Prom. Don’t we look sweet? My mom labored over that dress. It was supposed to be a copy of a dress I saw Mia Farrow wearing in a magazine, but we couldn’t find the exact fabric, so this was a compromise. Otherwise in design it was Mia’s dress.

    Our hair style was long and straight. But before long straight hair was fashionable, we had ratted bouffant with the flip ends and a bow placed smack dab in the middle between the bangs and the bouffant for garnish. I’m so glad that fad passes. The long straight hair looks good on me but the bouffant does not. I try to make my hair into a bouffant, but I can never get my flip to come out even. One side always sags lower than the other. Such a disaster. To achieve the look, we wear curlers to bed. The curlers make sleep impossible because the plastic teeth poke into your head. Sometimes we wear the curlers to town covered with a scarf. I remember mom telling me that all this discomfort is necessary. She says, “You have to suffer to be beautiful.” OK, mom, sign me up.

    After the bouffant deflates and is replaced by English style, straight hair rules. Marjorie and I decide we need our hair to be straighter than nature has given us. We put an iron on low, drape our hair over the board and irone so it is stick straight. I hear of some girls accidentally burning their hair this way, but we are careful, and it works!

    Note: My full-length memoir comes out in the next 6 months – if I’m lucky – and will be available on Amazon. In it I go into much greater detail about my life growing up in Iowa.