The gift that keeps on giving

Around Thanksgiving time I was asked to make a Christmas list. I resisted at first as I really don't need anything, and if I want something, I generally just go buy it.

But who am I to deprive my loved ones of the joy of giving? So I made a list of things it would be pleasant to have. It wasn't until last evening when I came across my list that I realized I got pretty much everything on it. I am delighted with and grateful for every gift I received, but guess which present I have gone absolutely bonkers over. Yes -- the one not on the list, the one, in fact, I would never have listed because I would never have known about it. And what is it that brings me such joy?

BuckyBalls.

That's what I said: BuckyBalls -- 216 small, round rare-earth magnets that you can string together, pull apart, form into shapes (hexagons a specialty), and just generally play with.

The magnet/toy/puzzle BuckyBalls are different from but based on the chemistry/physics/phi buckyballs which are named for Buckminster Fuller (of the ball-like geodesic dome) and which are all about Carbon 60 molecules, truncated icosahedrons and other scientific gibberish.

Science, schmience -- all I know is BuckyBalls are a gas, and I own my very own set now.

Another one of my favorite Christmas presents, the knife sharpener, works real well. That dull old knife I sharpened with it yesterday now slices fingers effortlessly. I'll be back playing with my BuckyBalls again just as soon as the Band-Aids come off.

'Tis the Season

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
And pretend that he is Parson Brown...

Been hearing that song a lot lately, of course, and that particular snatch of lyric always puts me in mind of a misconception I held as a small child.

I didn't know the word "parson," so I ran with what I did know and just assumed that "parson brown" was a color -- in fact, a particular shade. You know -- dark brown, chocolate brown, parson brown.

Apparently my young mind required only some interpretation of individual words, but not that they make any logical sense. I do not recall ever wondering why someone would make a snowman and then pretend it was brown.

There was another Christmas song that forced me to rethink when I got older. From it, I concluded that history was some sort of deep hole in the ground because, as the song said, Rudolph was going to go down in it.

If only my mind was as supple now as it was then.

Inventor Wanted

Somebody needs to invent something that can make things dry as fast as water can make them wet.

I'm picturing an open but defined space between two things -- a sender and a receiver, that sort of thing. You put something that is wet between the putter and the getter, and some sort of technologically miraculous conductor-thingies pass between them bombarding the wet thing with some sort of sub-nucleic particles -- probably with a nice glow of white light -- and ZAP! Completely dry, whatever it is.

We could call it the DryBoneBlipper.

You'd want a small one in the kitchen. Wash a dish in sudsy water, rinse it under the tap, then pass it through the DryBoneBlipper and -- Flash! Put it right back in the cupboard, because it's dry as a bone.

You'd want a big one in the bathroom. You would step out of the shower dripping wet, stand on the combination emitter/acceptor with the combination blower/sucker above your head, say "Dry me now!" and the voice-activated on-switch would flip itself, and WHAMMO! Dry! Go get dressed!

Once we get this thing working, we start selling franchises for the DryBoneAutoBlipper -- an industrial-sized sub-nucleic-particle thrower/catcher mechanism that comes at the end of the traditional wet car wash. Oh yeah, baby -- no more of those honkin' fans for us.

I mean it. Somebody really needs to invent that.

Homophone T.E.

A reader has questioned my use of trouper in the previous blog, suggesting I might have meant trooper when I complimented my tiny dog for going out in the snow.

Willing to consider the (remote) possibility that I could be wrong, I dutifully looked up both words. All definitions of trooper relate to military-type troops while trouper refers to an actor in a troupe (think Vaudeville) and, by extension, therefore, is said of someone who is dedicated to the proposition that the show must go on.

I will head off the only possible source of homophonic confusion that I see in this blog by stating that I do mean compliment (say something nice) and not complement (full quantity).

I also know the difference between effect and affect, but I don't think I will ever straighten out lie, lay, laid and lain. Lost cause. I'll never get it. So, I will avoid those altogether and use set when I mean lie, lay, laid or lain and repose supine or repose prone when I am too tired to think about it anymore.

Today's Question

We got about eight inches of snow Sunday, not as much as some other places, but enough to close the schools (as usual), and then, of course, the temperature dropped significantly. The sun shone on Monday, but the high temperature for the day was 16ºF. The roads were a mess for the morning and evening commutes. It was not a lot better this morning.

And here I am again – wondering, as I have for decades, just why it is that anybody would choose to live in a place where this sort of thing can happen. Why doesn’t the entire population of the earth live within 200 miles of the equator?

Yes, I know why I’m living here, and if I have my way, I won’t be dying here.

As for closing the schools every time a flake falls, don’t get me started.

But here’s the news that is really worthy of note: At 6:30 this morning when it was still dark out and the temperature was a brisk 8ºF, my tiny dog, my delicate little princess of a pooch who hates to get her precious little toes wet and spends most of the winter sleeping under a blanket, went out the door and stood in two inches of snow to pee. I don’t even care that she did it on the deck. What a little trouper she is.

Good girl! Good dog! Way to pee!

Retail Tale

I left J. G. McCrory out of my list of dime stores the other day. It seems that a bunch of guys (Kresge, Murphy and Newberry) got their starts working at McCrory stores.

Speaking of retail, I heard on NPR this morning that The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P, has filed for Chapter 11. Not going under, just looking to fix themselves up.

A&P was never my favorite. My mother preferred Jewel, possibly because her father once worked for the Jewel Tea Company, so I did too. I don't know what Grampie did for them. Maybe he was a Jewel Tea Man. I remember the Jewel Tea Man coming to our house in his brown truck when I was quite young. Actually, I think the National Tea Man did too. After a while they gave that up and just opened stores.

It’s interesting that most grocery store chains are local or regional, although many of them are subsidiaries of others – Kroger owns a bunch with different names.

How about this bit of oddball trivia: Winn-Dixie, which is the iconic grocery store in the deep south, was founded in Idaho.

When I was a small child, I decided that Piggly Wiggly was the stupidest imaginable name for a grocery store. I still think so.

Another One

It's 12-11-10. I had something to say about this a few months ago -- I think it was around 8-9-10, maybe. I don't really remember.

Holiday cookie baking is in full swing. So far we have chocolate chip, peanut butter, and Margarita cookies, and a couple bushels of Chex mix. Oh, and a small bucket of oyster cracker snack mix too, ranch flavor, of course.

My grandmother used to call them oisture crackers (rhymes with moisture). She also called Kresge's "kress-idge." How many of us are old enough to remember S. S. Kresge? That's what became K-Mart.

What was it with the initials for five-and-dimes? S. S. Kresge, F. W. Woolworth, J. J. Newberry, W. T. Grant, G. C. Murphy, Ben Franklin. Oops. Well, lots of them had initials.

I wonder how J. C. Penney got upgraded to a department store.

Back to holiday baking. Peanut brittle next.

Fighting TB My Own Way

According to the New York Times, it was on this date in 1907 that Christmas Seals went on sale for the first time, at the post office in Wilmington, Delaware, to raise money to fight tuberculosis. When I read that this morning it brought back a memory ...

I was very young, probably under three. My mother and I had stopped (while walking home from shopping, probably) at a house up the block, just for a minute, my mother said, because there was something she had to say or do or give to the woman who lived there. We didn’t take our coats off, because we weren’t going to stay long.

Well, those two young housewives got to talking, of course, and I was bored out of my mind, of course. The woman had a little boy about my age, and while our mothers chatted near the front door, he and I entertained ourselves in a nearby room by licking the back of several sheets of Christmas Seals and gluing them to the top of the table.

I don’t remember what happened after that. Perhaps our mothers’ reactions were so violent that I’ve repressed it, or maybe they just thought it was funny.

But every now and then over the last 60 years, I’ve wondered how that woman was able to scrape those Christmas Seals off of that table top. They were glued on there good. I saw to that.

But would Ogden Nash have liked it?

Looks like cookies have dominated the blog lately. Well, cookies dominate my life sometimes, like this coming weekend, which is our annual holiday cookie-baking extravaganza. That’s when even we don’t have enough measuring cups to go around.

And speaking of measuring, I came across a recipe on the internet with this direction:

Roll out to a thickness of about 5 mm, and cut into 3" triangles.

Excuse me? Wouldn't that be 8 cm triangles? Or 1/4" thickness? Pick one or the other and stick with it.

There should be a name for that. How about mixed metric-phor?

How To Make A Stale Cookie

I began to believe that Lofthouse cookies could never go stale. I thought that each and every one of them would always impart its own delightfully soft, crumbly sweetness with each bite every time, all the time.

But the one I just ate, although permissible from a food-poisoning point of view, was actually...well, not quite fresh.

I put that particular cookie in my lunch box, safely sealed in a sandwich-size Ziploc baggie, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. For some reason I didn't eat it that day. I didn't eat anything out of my lunchbox until Monday of this week, at which time I discovered that my habits of consumption over the long holiday weekend had pushed the needle on the bathroom scale past acceptable limits.

I, therefore, embarked upon a sort of quick-fix pretend diet where I ate celery instead of chips with my sandwich and abstained from those things generally referred to as "treats" that I always have in my lunchbox, like little packages of cheesy crackers, Hostess cupcakes, and, yes, Lofthouse cookies, and tried to eat almost nothing after supper each evening.

Having found this morning that the bathroom scale was no longer overly burdened, but not wanting to undo what I had worked so hard all week to achieve, I still brought celery to provide the crunch with my lunch. I was still hungry, however, and I decided a sweet treat was allowable.

So I dug the Lofthouse cookie out of my lunch box and ate it. With the results already discussed.

I think I thought Lofthouse cookies never went stale because we never had them in the house longer than a couple days.

But as promised -- I believe I have provided adequate proof that you can make a Lofthouse cookie go stale.

Russian Tea Cakes

In my mother’s recipe box, there is a card with a recipe for cookies called Russian Tea Cakes. The recipe is attributed to one Agnes Scebold. My mother rented a room from Agnes when she worked in a defense plant in Chicago during World War II. I remember the recipe because it is so similar to a cookie that I make.

I got an e-mail today with links to various cookie recipes at bettycrocker.com. One is called Russian Tea Cakes. Hm. I checked it out, and it is exactly the same as Agnes’s recipe, to the letter -- same ingredients, same amounts, same oven temp, same baking time, same every detail.

These cookies are short, contain finely chopped nuts, and after baking are covered in powdered sugar.

This is not a unique cookie. Apparently any chopped nut will do for Russian Tea Cakes, but if you use pecans, you get Mexican Wedding Cookies. If you use almonds and shape them into horns instead of balls, you get almond crescents. That's what I make, but I call them rohlíčky, which is Bohemian for "horn" and is what my Bohemian family always called them.

So how did Agnes and Betty end up with exactly the same recipe for a cookie with exactly the same name? Well, I can't see Betty Crocker stealing a recipe from a Chicago housewife who has probably been dead for 50 years.

So I am forced to conclude that Agnes got the recipe off a bag of Gold Medal flour, or some other General Mills product. But obviously Betty Crocker has gotten a lot of mileage out this recipe over the years.

Here it is:

Russian Tea Cakes
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2-1/4 cups Gold Medal® all-purpose flour
3/4 cup finely chopped nuts
1/4 teaspoon salt
powdered sugar

Heat oven to 400ºF.

Mix butter, 1/2 cup powdered sugar and the vanilla in large bowl. Stir in flour, nuts and salt until dough holds together.

Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Place about 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until set but not brown. Remove from cookie sheet. Cool slightly on wire rack.

Roll warm cookies in powdered sugar; cool on wire rack. Roll in powdered sugar again.

Makes 4 dozen cookies


I'll bet mine are better, though. Want that recipe? Let me know.