True Stories

I have been re-editing my cookbook. See, when I was a cute, little newlywed I decided I was going to make my own cookbook with all my family recipes in it—so that "other people (like Bruce and my kids—when I have any) could make them too."  And it worked; all my kids cook. Even Bruce does! And they do use my cookbook.

The last time I edited my book was just before I started school. Apparently I edited lots of stupid mistakes into it—mistakes like "Heat oven to 35 degrees." Hm. Plus it's only printed on regular printer paper and stuffed into a three-ring binder, so it's falling to pieces. It's time for a new cookbook. But this time I am going to actually print it and bind it with the same company that I have bind my blog-books every year. (Or a different, less expensive company if I can find one that does the same quality work.) Loralee's Cookbook  will look just like any 300-page cookbook that you'd buy at the store!

Well, anyway, here are some true stories that I want to put in (to fill up some blank spaces):

Loralee Yields
(originally titled "Loralee Yields to her Husband" —but is that too weirdly suggestive?)

One day when Bruce was looking through my cookbook, trying to figure out what we were going to feed the family, he said it would be really helpful if I would include the yield (servings per recipe) for each recipe. 

>sigh<

I had intentionally not included yields because I think how many servings per recipe depends on how hungry you are (starved or munchy?), or how big you make your cookies (is it one GIANT cookie, or 300 dime-sized cookies?). I also know from years of experience that on some days cooking 2 cups of rice doesn't come close to feeding my family, but on other days preparing 2 cups of rice leaves me with 1½  cups of leftover rice. And, besides all that, figuring out recipe yields meant I'd have to cook every. single. recipe, and measure out the whole thing to see how many cups it made, and then decide how many cups constituted a single serving before I could really know an exact yield. This could be a monumental pain! I just wasn't going to do it.

But then a funny thing happened: Bruce was making Chicken & Broccoli which I've learned—and told Bruce—is a recipe we need to triple to feed our family. So as he made the recipe he crossed out the original amounts of each ingredient and wrote in the tripled amounts.  Several months later Bruce was making Chicken & Broccoli again. He knew that if I made it I'd probably at least double the recipe, so that's what he did. Only he doubled the triple amounts that he'd written in. We had lots of Chicken & Broccoli that night!

Well, at last I could see the real value of including yields, but I'm not patient enough to go through the afore-mentioned process. Instead [This is the important part—pay attention!] . . .

Instead I just looked up portion sizes for different ingredients as I re-edited my cookbook. I learned things like:  2 oz. uncooked pasta = 1 serving, and ¼ cup of uncooked rice = 1 serving, and 4 oz. meat = 1 serving. Then I perused my recipes; if a recipe called for 12 oz. pasta, I wrote that it made 6 servings. See how I got there? (Of course, 12 oz. pasta mixed with a couple pounds of veggies and a pound of meat might make 6 really big servings—or maybe 8-10 smaller servings.)

So you need to realize [Hmmm. Maybe this is the important part] . . . You need to realize that the yields (servings per recipe) are more like guidelines than cold, hard facts.

And now that you have that in mind, good luck figuring out how much food to make!

Next story:

Well I'll Be Frittered!

When I was little my mom often made us Rice Freeters (you'll see the recipe in this section). Spicy little deep-fried Brasilian dumplings with rice in them—we loved them! Sometimes she made us banana freeters too. Yum!

One day, when I was probably six or seven, my mom was rearranging her bedroom and I was sitting in her chair reading Disney's version of Johnny Appleseed. In the story, as Johnny went across the USA sowing apple seeds he sang this song:

"Apple pies and apple fritters,
Apple cores to feed the critters,
Tasty apple cider in a glass,
Apples baked and boiled and frizzled,
Taffy apples hot and sizzled,
And there's always good old apple sass."


"Fritters?" 

I thought about that. "Fritters?"  What in the world were fritters? He was talking about food—could he mean "freeters?" Was F•R•I•T•T•E•R•S the correct way to spell freeters? That didn't make any sense. And anyway, freeters didn't rhyme with critters. Hmmm. I finally decided it was kind of a silly thing—they just used "fritters" instead of "freeters" so that it could rhyme with "critters" . . . in the same way they said "sass" instead of "sauce" to make it rhyme. I was a very smart little girl.

Fast-forward to the time I was dating Bruce: We went to a store bakery to get some donuts and the like. I don't remember what I got, but Bruce ordered an apple  fritter. And then it dawned on me—it really was fritters (rhyming with critters).  And fritters were the same thing as freeters! I finally realized that it was just my mom's Brasilian accent shining through. I always knew that she said "tree" for "three," and "gaz" for "gas," but it hadn't occurred to me that "freeters" were really "fritters" until a good ten or more years after I read that little rhyme.

Nevertheless, those tasty rice dumplings always have been and always will be "Rice Freeters!"

Story three:

The Legend of the Green Jello

When I was about nine years old I took a keen interest in cooking. I started out by sneaking out of bed early one morning to fry some eggs (I had to sneak because I was sure my mom—and my grandma—wouldn't let me use the stove. But I'd seen my mom fry eggs, and figured I knew how. And I did a fine job!) Another time I made some kind of dessert concoction with canned peaches, whipped cream and maraschino cherries. I was in to this cooking thing.

One day I decided to make green jello. I carefully measured the water to boil; I mixed the jello powder into the boiled water; I added the cold water and put it into the refrigerator to set up. I was very pleased with myself. After dinner Mom got the jello out and brought it to the table; I was so proud!

But there was something terribly wrong with the jello. It had this thin, gritty, rubbery layer on the bottom while the rest of it was the consistency of runny nose. Nevertheless, Dad served some up in little dessert dishes for everyone and they all bravely—and politely—dug in. And there we sat around the dining room table, all ten of us eating our "treat" in miserable silence. Finally Mark said, "Mmmmm. This is good!" And Melanie lost it. She started laughing—hard—and inhaled some of her snot-textured jello, and then she started coughing, gasping and wheezing. Then Mom lost it.

"She's shoking!" (choking—said in Mom's Brasilian accent) . . .

"Orlin, she's shoking!" Then she started issuing orders. To Melanie: "Put your hands up!" To anyone who would do it: "Slap her on the back!" and "Get her some water!" And all of Mom's panic just made the situation funnier, so Melanie couldn't stop the coughing fit.  Finally, just as she was able to gasp for breath, Mom cried out, "Orlin! Take her outside and squirt her with the hose!!" And Melanie cracked up, and started hacking and gagging on that awful green jello again!

Well, eventually Melanie did catch her breath. She survived to tell the tale. And so did I.

Just like every great tale, this one has a lesson: When making jello, be sure the gelatin is completely dissolved before putting it in the refrigerator!

Well, those are the stories. I'll have to come up with a couple more (still thinking on that).What do you think? Do they belong in my cookbook? Are they written so that you know what I'm even trying to say?

Luna

I went and did it now. I took my kids and got a new cat.

That wasn't exactly the original plan. Bruce and I had been considering getting a new pet, but not necessarily right now. So here's what happened:

Last Tuesday the girls and I had to run some errands, and I thought they might like to go to the animal shelter and just look. Of course the girls were delighted with the cats (dogs too, but we're not getting another dog until the yard is fenced in). The West Valley City Animal Shelter probably has about 50 cats and kittens right now, and they are having a June promotion—you can adopt any cat older than 9 months for only nine dollars. So I was beginning to think that maybe this would be a good time for a new cat after all—$9 for a neutered, vaccinated cat isn't a bad deal.

On Wednesday I had to go grocery shopping, and I wanted all the kids to go with me so they wouldn't just be home watching TV or on the computer. The boys didn't want to go so I bribed them with a trip to go look at cats.

Michael took his laser pointer to the animal shelter. It was pretty hilarious when he got into the cat colony—a room with about ten, uncaged cats.

On Thursday Bruce and I had to make a trip to Duchesne (say doo-shane) County. Bruce doesn't know this, but I told the kids that if they paid for the cat and all the cat trappings (litter box, food, etc.) then they could go get one that day. Later I realized that they probably needed an adult to go adopt a cat; Lindsey could drive everyone there, but she's still only 17.

Anyway, I called home to see how things were going once we got to Duchesne. Lindsey was prepared to take everyone to go get a cat, but Michael didn't believe that it was OK, and he didn't want to go with them. And then I started feeling guilty anyway. So I told Bruce that the kids were going to go get a cat while we were gone, and he said no; he wanted to be part of it if we were going to get a cat. So I relayed this message to the kids. But I told them that if they bought the other stuff, we'd still get a cat. When we got home that evening there was a shiny, new litter-box, a scoop, a box of cat litter, and a bag of cat food all stacked neatly on Bruce's side of the bed.

Before Bruce went to work Friday I asked him about bringing a cat home, and he said OK. We spent the day doing house work and I finally got the girls together and went to the animal shelter at 4:30. There had been two cats we were interested in, "Nova" and "Wednesday". But Wednesday had been adopted the day before and when we took Nova into a "getting-to-know-you" room she wasn't interested in us at all. So the nice lady at the shelter started introducing us to other cats.

First was "Dubs." Apparently people will trap feral cats and take them to the shelter where the cats are neutered, have an ear tipped to mark them as feral cats, and then tested to see how they behave with people. If they seem OK with people they stay at the shelter, if not they are released back into the wilds of Salt Lake County. Dubs was marked as a feral cat and he was dirty enough to be one, but I really have to wonder. All he wanted to do was crawl into your lap and be petted to pieces. In fact, even that wasn't enough for him; after some petting he had to climb up to your shoulder and bump his head on your chin so you would pet him more and more. I liked Dubs.

Then we looked at "Corinne." She is a pretty gray tabby who behaved almost like Dubs—she took a little longer exploring the room before she settled down to be friendly. Kaylie and Lindsey liked Corinne.

Then we saw "Queenie," a little toroise-shell cat. She was a very curious kitty—about two years old. She didn't mind us petting her, but she didn't want to sit in our laps; she was more interested in the toys and in seeing what was going on in the world. Rachel liked Queenie.  I think Jessica liked all the cats.

Well, after two hours of alternating between the three cats in the "getting-to-know-you" room, Lindsey, Kaylie and I all decided that we just liked whichever cat was in the room with us, but Rachel really liked Queenie. So we would get the tortoise-shell (although we agreed that she needed a less stupid name). We finally left the shelter at 7:00 with our new kitty.

That first evening she sought out places like this—small and a little difficult to remove her.

She spent most of the evening hiding from as, as I suspected she would. But she came out at night to wander the house, and meowed all. night. long. I was ready to kill her in the morning. We were given 30 days to take her back and make an exchange, and on Saturday I was thinking of how friendly Dubs was, and how our new cat hadn't made herself seen at all yet, but how she kept me awake all night, and things weren't looking too good for her at our house. I even took Bruce to the shelter that afternoon to meet the other cats we'd been considering.

However I am a mostly reasonable person and I could still attribute our cat's apparent unfriendliness to being in a new place. I thought we'd give her some more time—although if she remained standoffish and kept me awake at night for the rest of the weekend I would have no qualms sending her away.

But by late afternoon she was hanging out with us, exploring the house, letting people pick her up and pet her, and just being cute in general. The only real test would be if she kept meowing all night long. In the meantime, we had to come up with a better name than Queenie, or Kitty (which is what we'd been calling her).

on my bed, of course

I always think of magic/witch names, or Greek myth names, or Bible names, or ancient Egyptian royalty names for cats, and I've been re-reading the Harry Potter books and thought that Molly would be a really cute cat name, but the kids didn't care for it at all. None of them. Ryan looked up cat names on-line and found a few that were OK as well as some really stupid ones. Then Brandon came up with Luna; I liked that pretty well. At dinner on Saturday night I told the kids to choose between Molly or Luna and (of course) they all chose Luna.

Luna seems to disappear on every background; she blends in with the couch, with the carpet . . . 

Seriously, if we had counters like this one, she could hop up and we'd never see her again. Maybe we should have named her Camo.

Anyway, we have a new pet; Luna is going to be part of our family. :-)

More Lindsey!

Well Friday, May 30, 2014, was Lindsey's big day! She graduated from Paradigm high school that evening. Bruce and I took her to dinner, and then to Kingsbury Hall where the commencement ceremony was held. She graduated in a class of 121.

Before the ceremony the entire graduating class stood on the steps for a class photo.

waiting in line to enter the auditorium

Lindsey sang with the choir, but you can't see her—we couldn't see her either; she's on the left, second or third row back.

After the ceremony we took lots more pictures—of course!

I think this is a funny picture. :-)

Entheosers who moved on to Paradigm:
Lindsey, Jonathon Clawson, Brian Carreiro,
Alyssa DeArman, Erica Ferrin, Clellie Irwin
(There were a few other Entheos/Paradigm grads, but we couldn't find them for pictures.)

When Lindsey sat here, this cute little boy ran up and gave her a hug. :-)

After pictures we stopped at the store to buy ice-cream to go with her celebration cake. There was a lady with cute, tiny little kittens there, and we were mightily tempted to take one home, but that would have meant going back into the store to buy kitty essentials and we were ready to go celebrate with the family.

Then, on Sunday, Lindsey graduated from seminary. Yay!

Seminary grads from our ward:
Jake (or Matt?) MacIntosh, Megan Patterson, Lindsey and Matt (or Jake?) MacIntosh

seminary graduate :-)

And yesterday (Monday, June 2) we drove down to Ephraim with her so she could tour Snow College—where she will be going this fall! We had a nice day—got to see what her dorm/apartment would be like and tour the campus, had some lunch, and got malts at The Malt Shop (the burger joint on Main Street Ephraim) before we headed home.

This is what Lindsey's room will be like.

And today Lindsey has a job interview. This girl is working hard and on her way to super-amazingness!! I am very proud of my Lindsey!