They make some pretty mean soups.  I mean, I grew up with them and so did most of you.  But, it’s time to put away the little kid canned stuff and go for something a bit more grown up.

I’m going to share with you a secret recipe I invented for tomato soup.  It’s easy, extremely nutritious, creamy, low calorie, and delicious. 

Take one can of whole, petite, skinned tomatoes (you can use a similar amount of peeled, fresh tomatoes if you have them).  Put the tomatoes with about half the juice in a blender, retaining the rest of the juice.  I use a ‘bullet’ blender and it works just right.  Add about 1/4 cup of canned pumpkin.  Blend until smooth. If you need to thin the mixture, add some of the juice you retained from the tomatoes.

Pour this mixture into a sauce pan and add seasonings of your choice.  I usually add celery salt and some pepper.  You can add some water or vegetable juice to thin it if necessary or some milk if you like.  You could spice it up with oregano or some garlic or onion according to your own taste.

I make this in less than 10 minutes after work and it tastes like garden fresh soup.  Also, it doesn’t have any of the added sugars or preservatives of canned soups.  So good and so easy to make it just the way your own family likes it.

FYI On the pumpkin.  I often use pumpkin to add vitamins, creaminess, and flavor.  If you work with pumpkin for a while you will find it very useful in all kinds of recipes including desserts.  The canned pumpkin works fine but if you can get a hold of a pumpkin and make your own puree, it’s even better.

So goodbye little Campbell kids and hello robust home made tomato soup.

Eating clean.  This could imply that a person is neat and does not require a bib or drop cloth when they eat.  Or, it could imply that the food a person is eating has been washed first or sanitized.  Or, it could mean something completely different.

The ‘something completely different’ is what I have been studying lately.  I have been a student of nutrition since high school and practiced a vegetarian lifestyle on and off for years.  My natural cravings tend to be for vegetables and whole grains so the eating ‘clean’ idea isn’t totally new to me.

What is new is that it has, once again, become a fad or trend.  There was a time in the early 1970s when the media was telling us that within 20 -30 years there would be no meat left for us to eat and at least half the world would be starving due to lack of productive farm land.  This time around we are getting the same message but it also includes the warning of a world wide lack of water for food production (as well as for drinking, washing, etc.). 

I don’t pretend to know the details about world food politics, although I read about it daily and listen to news reports on the issues.  If people could get past the threats and the fears and simply focus on what might be good for their health, making a decision to ‘eat clean’ would be much easier.  I would take it to another level and say, don’t worry about the health issues either.  Try ‘eating clean’ and see what happens to your taste buds. 

Here is one very easy meal or side dish I make that tastes great:

Boil or steam brown rice or a mixture of brown rice/wild rice/other whole grains, in vegetable stock, according to directions.

Coarsely chop a variety of vegetables (including mushrooms) you have on hand and either stir fry them in a small amount of vegetable stock or olive oil or steam or roast them.

Toss the rice together with the vegetables/mushrooms.

If you are a meat eater, you can add any type of meat or fish.  Best way to prepare the meat or fish would be to oven roast or grill.  I think that type of cooking enhances the flavor without covering it up.

I eat the rice mixture with an egg sometimes or with beans when I need more protein or a more substantial meal.

It’s a very simple way to make a quick meal (30 minutes at the most) and it tastes good.  You just need to determine which vegetables you enjoy and find creative ways to prepare them.  If you like spicy foods, you can add chili or other spices to the rice or vegetables.  I personally like rosemary, thyme, and ginger.

For snacks I like apples and love celery and other raw vegetables like zucchini and yellow summer squash.  If you have more of a sweet tooth, grapes, berries, plums, pears and other fruits are great plus they are easy to take to work or carry in the car as a snack.

I also usually have a trail mix on hand with dried fruit and mixed nuts.  A favorite trail mix is the Wow mix from Trader Joe’s.  It has wasabi peas in it and packs some dynamite flavor.

It doesn’t take too long for your taste buds to enjoy the flavor of ‘clean’ food and the cravings you may have for fried foods and processed foods to go away.  I think the reason most people don’t ‘eat clean’ is because they think it takes too much time to prepare.  Not true at all. Almost everything I make can be prepared in 30 minutes. It just takes some planning and having the right foods on hand.

What I still have to work on is how to ‘eat clean’ when I dine out. I’m still at the point of needing that bib and drop cloth.

Music for Airports.  Lovely.  Brian Eno and his ambient music.

I have listened to Brian Eno’s music for years.  I believe his first ‘Music for Airports’ was released in 1978.  He used an interesting technique in developing the music.  He asked individual musicians to provide parts of the music but didn’t let them listen to the other parts first.  I like collaboration in the arts but I think this technique was interesting.  Brian didn’t want the other musicians to influence or inhibit each other.  He acted as the supreme composer and master minder.

And, it worked.

The reason behind his interest in airport music was this:  airport music was scary at best.  It was not good music to begin with and was played out by scratchy sounding systems and always interrupted by barely audible instructions to go here or go there.  It seemed to Brian to be an afterthought when it should have had a major position like the soundtrack of a really good movie.  After all, aren’t most of us a bit on edge as we wait to board a plane or wait to welcome an incoming passenger?  Shouldn’t the music be soothing and a bit interesting?

It wasn’t.

Brian found a way to make it be exactly the way he would like it to be.  And, I think it is what most of us would also like.

Take a listen to his music, in four parts now, and let me know what you think.

Cooking is pretty much like everything else you do.  You’ve got to go through a few failures, and I mean some pretty nasty ones, before you get good at it.  I’ve had some spectacular failures, mostly because I was not paying attention to what I was doing, or not following directions, or not using the right ingredients.

Here’s a good one.  My Mom and Dad had a recipe for the most perfect custard pie with a silken consistency and just the right sweetness.  Since my husband and I both love custard pie, I thought I would try it.  Dad said I couldn’t possibly go wrong with the no-fail recipe.  That should have been a tip off. OK, I figured I would give it a try but I wouldn’t attempt the crust.  At that time in my life, I was just not a pastry chef type person. Not that I am now.

I bought the pre made 9 inch crusts that come two to a package. I mixed up the custard ingredients and had the oven preheated. Everything was on target. Then, I got the pie shells out of the refrigerator, opened the package, discarded the wrapper, separated the two pie shells and poured in the custard. I sprinkled on just the right amount of nutmeg, then carefully put the pies in the oven. All was well. The reason this recipe works is that it starts out at a high temperature to set the bottom crust, then the temp is decreased for the custard to cook.

After the pies were cooked and out of the oven and cooled, I sliced into the first one and it was, as promised, perfect. Unbelievable. I had done it. We ate the pie that same day. Yes, I know that was gluttonous. We couldn’t help ourselves. Next day we were having company and I was so happy to have an excellent dessert to serve them. Fortunately we had controlled ourselves enough not to dig in to the second pie.

Here’s where the disaster came in. I was chatting with our friends as they were sitting at our kitchen counter/bar and I got the pie out. It was beautiful. I put the knife in and felt a little pull back as I was slicing. Sure enough, I had left the paper liner in the bottom of the pie shell. Well at least I got some laughs and we all have a story to tell. I don’t like to be the butt of this type of story but maybe it was just my turn. The neat thing was that I managed to lift out the custard part of the pie, remove the paper, and slide the ‘guts’ back in to the shell. It still tasted good and we had some fun over the deal.

I remembered with some embarrassment that I was the one laughing the loudest when a friend left the package of giblets inside her Thanksgiving turkey. She was mortified that she did that and served the turkey to her in laws. At the time I thought, ‘How stupid. I would NEVER do anything like that.”

Live and learn.

I’m a long time star gazer.  I’m not a student of the sky and don’t know all the star formations but I love to go out at night and see what there is to see.

Usually, and I am not sure why this happen, if there is going to be a major sky event, it is either cloudy or raining or bitter cold.  This week, however, I got lucky.  The comet Pan-STARR has been visible several evenings, right after sunset, in the western sky.  The first evening the sky was clear and I didn’t know about the comet.  Learned about it on the TV weather about 4 hours too late.  Second night, it was cloudy.  Third night, I not only saw it but took a picture.  Very nice.  It barely shows up in the picture but I know it’s there and I’m glad I was able to see and capture it.  Fourth night, cloudy again.  The next comet visible in North America will be ISONS this November. 

If you like to look at sky spectaculars, there are some good websites to help you out:

www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013 and www.stardate.org

There are many others, of course.  These two have good information and nice pictures and some videos.

 You may also, like me, be a fan of meteor showers.  The Quadnantids are in January and I froze sitting out on the deck in the middle of the night to see them this year.  But it paid off big time.  Saw some beauties.  Coming up are the Lyrids, best seen on the night of April 21st and Eda Aquarids on the nights of May 4th and 5th.  Those will probably be best seen early morning.

I wish you clear skies, warm evenings, and a good pair of binoculars.

Housework.

Ugh.

There is something satisfying about cleaning a house but I still have a problem with it.  I like to be in the mood to clean house and somehow the dirt doesn’t go along with my mood schedule.  I have seen some very nice articles on how to organize cleaning so you do just a bit each day and by the end of the week the house is all clean.  Not for me.  I work during the day and serve on boards and have other duties at night so Saturday is my cleaning day.  Sometimes I can sneak in a load or two of laundry on a week night but not too often.

My big plan of attack on cleaning is to figure out ahead of time what my major cleaning project will be for Saturday a.m.  Each week I do one major clean up like emptying the china cabinet and washing all the ‘fancies,’ or switching out the closet from winter to summer clothes. I keep things picked up during the week so the house usually looks pretty tidy.  The routine cleaning just involves dusting, running the vacuum, sweeping, floor washing, cob web removal, and bathroom upkeep.

Somehow though it still seems overwhelming.

What helps me get through the tedium is singing. I make up songs as I go along based on the chore I’m doing. Sometimes they are re-worded popular tunes, sometimes re-worded show tunes, and sometimes just tunes I come up with. I also like to repurpose snippets of poetry I have memorized. Sonnets of Shakespeare, or Blake, and old nursery rhymes. I’ll write some of them down and share with you later. Not that there is a high demand for that type of ‘literature.’

In the mean time I will remind you of one of the best cleaning tunes of all time. From the 1937 Disney film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:

When there’s too much to do
Don’t let it bother you
Forget you troubles, try to be
Just like a cheerful chick-a-dee
And Whistle While you Work

Last week I was driving through an unfamiliar neighborhood in St Louis looking for a friend’s house, and happened to notice an area with streets named after authors.  I hadn’t thought about Tennyson for a long time.  Or Cooper, or Longfellow, for that matter.

I wondered if kids now learn about them in school or read their works.  My guess is–they don’t.

The way I first learned about famous authors, even before I started school, was through the card game ‘Authors.’  We had a few card games we played quite a bit:  Crazy 8s, Old Maid (how terribly non PC that game is now), and Authors.  I loved all three but Authors was my favorite.  It may have even been the reason I became a passionate reader at an early age. 

With the help of Google, I was able to find the original Authors card game and remind myself of the featured writers. Alcott, Scott, Twain, Dickens, and more. They all looked like such strange, ancient people when I was a kid. They still do. The picture of Alcott in the card game depicted her at about age 25. Not a bit of youth shows in that picture.

I didn’t read everything Wikipedia said about Authors but did see that there had been updates and a few authors had been added. If I were to make up a set of Authors, I would include Jane Austin, Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare, Burns, Dickens, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Galsworthy, Wouk, Michener, Bronte, Woolf, Angelou, Elliot, Shelley, Wharton, Sand, Dinesen, Shute, Hersey, and on and on and on. The deck would probably be so big, no child could hold it. And that list didn’t even include Sci-Fi writers. It could be a separate deck: Bradbury, Heinlein, Cummings, Vonnegut, Huxley, Verne, Clarke, Poe, Shelley, Wells, Asimov.

Interesting to think about. So many wonderful books and writers. Hard to narrow down the selection.

What authors would you include?

With the fresh air of spring chasing after me, it’s time to pick up my pace when I walk in the morning.   As I said several weeks ago, I have had a problem with a pinched nerve for about three months and haven’t been able to do much physical activity.  With that problem and a small, ahem, problem of winter comfort food consumption, I have put on a few pounds.

I need to get rid of them.  They are weighing me down and making me feel like a slug. 

Speaking of weighing me down, I do lift free weights. That is one thing I have been able to continue through the long ordeal and I have increased my reps and increased the weight a bit from 3 to 5, now to 8 pounds. It does seem harder now but I don’t really see any results.

Yet.

I don’t give up easily.

I started doing upper body strength workouts quite a few years ago because I read that it would strengthen my bones and help prevent breakage as I got older. So far, no broken bones, but not that old yet either.

The walking has gotten better and my limp is only slightly noticeable now as I do my morning routine. Before the ‘pinch’ we used to walk 3.5 to 5 miles daily. I’m at 1.5 miles for my morning walks and can do another 1.5 in the evening without much effort. If I try more than that at any one outing, the limp gets more pronounced and I know I shouldn’t push it too hard.

I’m also doing floor exercises and some yoga and spend about 15 minutes on a little trampoline each day. That’s more for fun though. If you haven’t tried one, you should, especially if you have bad joints. It will put a smile on your face and maybe even a few giggles.

If the weight doesn’t come off in a few months, at least I’ll be strong and chubby instead of just . . .

chubby.

Over the years I have developed what I refer to as ‘creative vision.’  It has nothing to do with needing glasses or having any kind of eye problem.  It impacts how my brain processes what I am seeing and reading and often turns the subject into something funny or, at the very least, non-sensical. 

Some examples:  Church sign:  Lent Services 7:00.  My interpretation:  Loan Services 7:00.   My first thought was, “When did the church start making loans?”

Fresh white rock piled up at the edge of a parking lot.  My interpretation:  Big pile of snow from clearing the lot.  This was during a time when we hadn’t had snow for a month.

I have learned not to question what I ‘see’ out loud for fear I am wrong and the person I am with will correct me.  I’d rather continue to go through life with unusual and interesting visions and have a good laugh.

And now for the skeletons. When I get up too early some mornings I migrate to our sun porch and listen to the radio in the dark. It’s an all season porch with a nice heated floor so it is pleasant in the winter. Sometimes I doze off and when I wake up I look through squinted eyes to our back yard. When it is just barely light on early winter mornings, all I can see is outlines of trees. They strike me as bones. As skeletons. And I guess they kind of are, in a way. It takes my eyes about 10 seconds to discern that what I am really seeing is tree silhouettes.

How many times can my eyes/brain be fooled? I’ll let you know. At this point, I am still seeing skeletons.