Eating the Opponent goes Purple

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It was a day that wasn’t quite going right – a day to make the best of less-than-average situations. I decided to make our Eating the Opponent San Francisco from scratch instead of going to the store. We combined a home-made rice-a-roni style dish with a simple fish pan fried in butter to suggest Fisherman’s Wharf. I picked a few carrots, parsnips, and one turnip from the garden to enhance the rice-pasta dish. Rice and vegetables could cook well together, I thought.

The carrots were purple. The rice became purple, too.

Purple rice

Purple rice

It was delicious. After cooking in chicken broth, then adding a little maggi sauce, onion, garlic, and despite its hue, we enjoyed every bite.

I must remember these carrots when we play the Minnesota Vikings.

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Call the little girl with pigtails.

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I am a geek-type person. I work in a geek-type office full of people just like me. We’re not all alike, though, and sometimes there is a lack of understanding or odd communication.

Take our phones – please. The phones switched to a new provider with new highly-visual dial-pads. (That is a word. Dial-pads is a word. Hyphenated, even.) Here’s what it looks like.

Hello? Hello?

Hello? Hello?

I am a verbal-linguistic type. I would rather see an abbreviation on the phone or even a passcode to use the many features. As an example, it took me over a year to figure out how to transfer a call. On the old phones, I would put the caller on hold, dial the extension of the next person, and when that person answered, release the hold and let the two of them talk while I hung up and got back to work.

Deep sigh. I lost a few calls and I had to admit to more than a few parents that I didn’t know how to forward a call. I finally asked another teacher how to handle the task. She, another verbal-linguistic type, said:

  • Push the button with the little girl with pigtails on it.
  • Then push the button on the screen for the teacher you want.
  • Then push the little girl with pigtails again.

Got it! I responded. I had been messing up the process by using the hold button, the way we used to do it. Ahem. I can do this.

Which icon? Can you see the little girl?

Which icon? Can you see the little girl?

And then my verbal-linguistic friend and I found out we were interpreting the graphic all wrong. It’s actually three people. One person in front, with the outlines of two others behind him or her. Or it.

Readers, your opinions? What do you see — a group of people or a little girl with pigtails? I’m sure there’s deep meaning here. Let’s have an analysis party in the comments. Meanwhile, I’ll get back to work.

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Fortunately, Unfortunately

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Andy Borowitz, satirist for the New Yorker, posted this on Facebook last Saturday.

You can’t complain about a week in which the Pope came and Scott Walker and John Boehner left.

I beg to differ – slightly. Scott Walker may have ducked out of the national scene, but he’s back in Wisconsin to wreak whatever havoc he can. The Pope? I’m glad the Catholic faithful have a leader that is open-minded and considers serving the poor a priority. However, I am not and have never been Catholic, and I see their view of women as negative and demeaning. Boehner? Let’s see how he does as lobbyist. He understands Congress and loves power, so I’m sure he will still support the same conservative issues he pushed while in office.

Deep breath. In, out.

Fortunately, Walker left the race for president. Unfortunately, he’s now refocused on his ridiculously conservative agenda in my state.

Fortunately, Boehner left his post as Speaker of the House. Unfortunately, there’s still a Republican majority in the house.

Fortunately, the Pope is visiting the United States and spreading his word of peace and care for the less fortunate. Unfortunately, women still play a second class role in his church.

Back to the top – the issue that worries me the most. What will Walker do next? Don’t answer that; I’m really, really afraid to find out.

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Oooooooooh, tomatoes!

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There really ought to be a theme song for tomato season. We could sing it to the tune of Oklahoma.

But back to reality, I’ve had a lot of tomatoes become ripe and on the way to ripe. I pick most of them so we can eat them and the wild things in the neighborhood can not.

Tomatoes in the sun

Tomatoes in the sun

from left to right - ripening

from left to right – ripening

tomatoes for freezer

tomatoes for freezer

and last but not least, yellow pear.

and last but not least, yellow pear.

And there’s more where those came from, folks. Lots more.

Readers, do you have an abundance of tomatoes? What will you make with them? You can leave a comment here, and you can see more gardeners with an abundance of something on Harvest Monday at Daphne’s Dandelions.

 

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To Market, To Market – the Meat Market, that is

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Saturday’s usual downtown farmers’ market took a week off while the downtown held the fall festival we call Octoberfest. I dropped Amigo at his barbershop chorus’ booth where he volunteered as food prep, wrapping hot dog and hamburger buns in napkins. As we arrived, the guys already on site were singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to a young woman who had just bought a hamburger.

I left to the tune of “On, Wisconsin” played by the nearby polka band, and Chuck and I stopped at the neighborhood meat market. We love this place. We can wander back to the butcher’s counter and discuss our Eating the Opponent menus and ask for their advice. We came home with this.

Saturday Market

Saturday Market

Okay, I admit it. We didn’t just buy meat. We bought the meat for KC style chili, I picked up a container of hot beef and two mini-lasagnas for those days when I don’t have time or energy to cook. The bread, a good nuts & twigs variety, was day-old and on clearance. What else? Oh, ham salad for Chuck – he just had a tooth pulled, and he’s eating soft and smooth whenever he can.

No fresh vegetables – at least not from this market. My living room and dining room are full of tomatoes in various stages of ripeness. I predict salads and BLTs and anything else that uses tomatoes on our menus this week.

Okay, readers. Do you have a creative way to use tomatoes? I’ll take suggestions.

 

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Hillary – it’s complicated.

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Facebook offers choices for indicating relationship status. Married, single, in a relationship, or “It’s complicated.”

Complicated – that’s how I feel about Hillary Clinton running for president.

I’ve admired Hillary since she spoke up on 60 Minutes and refused to stay home, bake cookies, host teas, and be the little woman standing by her man.

I read her first memoir – I didn’t bother to read Bill’s.

I mourned her loss in the primaries of 2008. I had to grieve the fact that her party was over before I could support Barack Obama. And support him I did, with my vote and my blog and my volunteer time.

Now I’m feeling very conflicted. Hillary has all the traits I value in a leader. She’s intelligent, strong, experienced, knowledgeable, and the list could go on and on. Hillary Clinton would be an excellent president of the United States.

The trouble is this: Hillary may not be the best candidate.

She has baggage. Lots of baggage. Benghazi. Email-gate. Her age and gender (damn, I wish those didn’t matter). Her outspokenness.

I’m really stuck, people. Bernie Sanders may be the stronger candidate. He supports the issues that matter to me. He is intelligent, strong, knowledgeable, and more. He doesn’t have the experience that Hillary does, but neither does he have the baggage. And yet –

To leave Hillary’s side after following her through thick and thin and Monica Lewinsky feels disloyal. I feel like leaving her now is like kicking her when she’s down – at least when her polls are down. It’s a paradox, that’s what it is.

I didn’t aim to write a review for Joanne Cronrath Bamberger’s book Love Her, Lover Her Not: The Hillary Paradox. Indeed, I haven’t ordered my copy – yet. But I am definitely feeling that paradox. I admire Hillary Clinton to the moon and back, but I can’t quite put my vote in her corner – yet. She would be a great president. I have no doubt of that. But first, she has to be electable. And no matter how high her pedestal in my opinion, I’m not sure she can will the general election.

And that, my friends, is my dilemma.

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Happiness – for gardeners & canning fiends

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Happiness, simple pleasures, you name it – it’s all in how you see it. For an avid gardener and one who cans, an autumn Sunday brings simple pleasures such as these.

Tomatoes - enough to make salsa

Tomatoes – enough to make salsa

canning jars in the perfect size and shape for salsa

canning jars in the perfect size and shape for salsa

Good coffee - for a good reason.

Good coffee – for a good reason.

A good reason to pick up Starbucks Pike Place blend coffee: Eating the Opponent, Seattle. Go! Pack! Go!

 

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Kindergarten, already?

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She now has a full head of hair. She speaks very articulately, for a five year old, which means she can hold her own in any conversation. Is she really old enough to go to kindergarten already? It seems just yesterday that we were celebrating her first birthday…

The best toys, of course, are the simple playthings.

A handful of curling ribbon.
A lap full of tissue.
Here, grandma, this is fun. Want to share?

Remember your first birthday, little sweetheart? We do.
And we’re watching your first days of kindergarten – days that will also go quickly, much too quickly.

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Knowledge, What a Concept

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“It’s hard to keep up with how much the guy doesn’t know.” We’d just seen another example of GOP presidential candidate wannabe Scott Walker sticking his foot in his mouth – again.

It’s also hard to keep up with his idiotic statements and unrealistic plans.

He proposes building a border wall – at the Canadian border.

He has a to-do list for wreaking havoc on his mythical “first day in office” that includes:

  • Terminate the Iran negotiation deal.
  • Reinstate sanctions on Iran.
  • Repeal the Affordable Care Act.
  • Eliminate federal employees’ unions.
  • End President Obama’s executive orders on immigration.

In his speeches, Walker keeps pointing to Reagan’s firing air traffic controllers on strike in 1981 as an example of strong foreign policy. Seriously? Did busting the union really end the Cold War? I don’t remember it that way. Anyone else?

Walker has also shown he needs a script in order to speak clearly. One foreign policy talk made no sense: “You look at Egypt, probably the best relationship we’ve had in Israel, at least in my lifetime, incredibly important.” Did he really imply that Egypt is in Israel? Did he use “Israel” as a synonym for the Middle East region, perhaps? Was it his grammar or his lack of knowledge that made him appear confused? Never mind. Don’t answer that. I’m not sure I want to know.

 

As it stands today, Walker needs to study. He needs to surround himself with educated advisers that  understand the world outside of Wisconsin. And yet, Walker didn’t finish his bachelor’s degree. He doesn’t really know how to study. As for advisers, he is more likely to listen to ALEC and the Koch brothers than he is a truly knowledgeable foreign policy analyst.

And any poor analyst or adviser will have to meet a major challenge: the challenge of keeping up with what Walker still doesn’t know.

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Tomatoes, Tomah-toes, guerrilla gardeners

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I planted cilantro – in shifts, so we’d always have some. And then, as the cilantro went to seed, I replanted it. I kept replanting it. The new planting didn’t come up and didn’t come up. Eventually, the cilantro started growing again. But wait – something else came up, too.

Say what?

Say what?

There seems to be a guerrilla gardener in the neighborhood, and I suspect he or she is very sneaky and very furry.

Meanwhile, I started rescuing tomatoes a little early, as soon as they start turning orange. Another (or the same) furry critter likes to grab the low-hanging tomatoes. This critter is picky, however. He or she doesn’t pick the green ones, but aims for those that are turning color. I thought most animals were colorblind?! But anyway, the tomatoes are ripening well in the sunshine from the window.

Yum. Looks like salsa.

Yum. Looks like salsa.

Readers, what do you think? Is the same sneaky creature responsible for both?

After you answer, take a trip over to Daphne’s Dandelions for more Harvest Monday posts.

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