Knedlíky a zelí

We spent the last night of our recent vacation in Vermillion, Ohio, a pretty little town on Lake Erie with many marinas and a gazillion boats.

We wanted our last meal on the road to be special, and we found a restaurant called Old Prague which boasted of serving authentic Czechoslovakian cuisine.  That piqued my Bohemian interest, so we decided to Czech it out.  (Sorry.  I couldn't help it.)

It turned out to be a lovely meal, and very Czech: an appetizer of potato pancakes with sauerkraut, then pork roast for my wife and Wiener Schnitzel for me, all served with bread dumplings and sauerkraut.

Back out in the parking lot, we were about to take pictures of each other when a couple came by and the woman volunteered to take a picture of us together, an offer we gratefully accepted.

It reminded me of a similar experience we had in California many years ago when we visited the Inglenook Vineyard in Napa Valley. We were taking photos of each other in front of the place when I saw a man approaching, and I thought we might ask him to take our picture together. Then we noticed he only had one arm, so we nixed the idea. As he came closer, he called out, "Would you like me to take your picture?" Well, sure. I handed him the camera, pointed out which button to push, and he had no troubling at all handling it with his one hand. Just goes to show you.

Home Again

My father always said -- and I mean, always -- after we had been away somewhere, "It's nice to go, but it's better to come home."

Yes, indeed. I am so very happy to be home from our most recent motoring excursion. Three years ago we were gone 30 days on a trip out west, and I now wonder how I did it. We were only gone two weeks this time, and I was ready to come home by day 12.

It was a wonderful trip, however. We saw many fun and interesting sights and a great deal of spectacular scenery. We drove through Ontario and Quebec to Maine and then ate our way through New England on magnificent seafood. Haddock is now my fish of choice.

I visited six states I had never been to before (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut) and added seven capitals to my collection -- those six, plus Albany, New York. I also added Nos. 98, 99 and 100 to my list of casinos visited.

By sheer serendipity we ended up in Kinderhook, New York, where we saw the home of President Martin Van Buren, and in Plymouth, Massachusetts, we took pictures of ourselves at Plymouth Rock.

We also visited Lubec, Maine, the eastern-most point in the contiguous 48 states. Having been to the western-most point, in Washington State, it can now be said I have spanned this country from one end to the other.

As for accommodations, we stayed in ten different hotels, and, on the whole, they were fine. I have, however, been able to determine from first-hand experience that the level of one's satisfaction with any hotel depends almost entirely upon whether or not the location of the toilet-paper holder puts it within easy reach.

Yes, I am glad to be home.

And I don't mean Easter seals

One summer day when I was three years old (that would be 1950), my father’s two unmarried sisters (that would be Aunt Mae and Aunt Blanche) took their nieces and nephews (that would be me and my brother and our two cousins) to Brookfield Zoo. We saw a lot of animals, but there are two particular sights etched in my memory. One was a large elephant in the Pachyderm Building that was shackled by one of its hind legs to the wall. And the other was the place where the seals lived.

There was a footbridge that crossed above what was apparently intended to approximate the seals’ natural habitat. It consisted of a large pool of water surrounded by rock formations which actually looked to me like giant slabs of concrete. (It might not have been that crude, but this was three years before anybody figured out how bad my eyesight was.)  Visitors could stand on the bridge and look over its pipe railing to watch the seals at play.

Which is what I was doing – leaning through the railing rather than over it, since I was so small – when I suddenly threw up all over the seals below me.

I remember Aunt Blanche talking on a pay phone to one or the other of my parents about what had happened and what should be done. Probably the zoo visit ended early.

Now, in those days, it was not unusual for me to suddenly throw up for no apparent reason. This had already been diagnosed – it was, of course, tonsillitis. The tonsils would swell, and I would gag, and emesis ensued. Simple as that. Surgery had been deferred because I was so young, but after the zoo incident, my folks decided enough was enough, and a tonsillectomy was performed in September, a couple months shy of my fourth birthday. Once the tonsils were gone, the vomiting stopped.

I was eight or nine years old, however, before I could be convinced that it wasn’t the seals that made me puke.

Collected, and calm

A recently-purchased kitchen utensil had a rather substantial tag attached to it with a ball chain, which I removed, throwing away the tag and adding the chain to my collection. I keep them in a small metal box all hooked together in one long chain. I don’t know how many there are, but the last time I tried to measure it, it was over 24 feet long. I have no idea how or when or why I started keeping every ball chain I come across.

Collecting in my family was limited to the women, as far as I can remember, and they all pretty much limited themselves to one collectible each. My mother collected plates, which she hung on the walls of her kitchen and dining area. Her mother collected small cup-and-saucer sets, which I remember being displayed on shelves with the saucer standing up behind its matching tea cup.

I don’t remember Grandma Knez ever collecting anything, but Aunt Blanche collected salt and pepper shakers numbering in the hundreds, and Aunt Mae collected milk glass.

I, on the other hand, did and/or do collect all kinds of things, although some of my collections, like the ball chains, are more accurately described as accumulations. I don’t seek the items out but do add them whenever they come my way.

Except for the cribbage boards, of which I have a couple dozen, including two or three large ones, all the things I used to or still do collect are small: salt cellars, golf course pencils, bookmarks, shot glasses, squished pennies. Storing and displaying, therefore, does not require a great deal of space.

Then too, as an amateur genealogist, I also collect dead relatives. They take up no room at all.

Salt and pepper, to taste

There was a posting on Facebook yesterday in which someone wanted to share his or her pet peeves regarding recipes. I never found out what they were since the link didn’t open. But, of course, it got me to thinking about the things that irk me when reading recipes. (I bet you think I’m going to list them for you now, don’t you?)

Well, yes, I am.  Here are my recipe peeves, in no particular order:

The ingredients are not listed in the order they are used.

An ingredient is listed but we are never told what to do with it.

All the instructions that assume I am a complete idiot, some of my favorites being:

“Remove from oven and serve. ” Seriously? Take it out of the oven?
“Cover with a clean kitchen towel.” Won’t a dirty one do? I mean, really.
“Mix eggs and milk together in a bowl.” Why not in the sink?
“Ladle soup into bowls and serve.” Oh, so that’s how you eat that stuff!

I admit that it’s not just recipes that cause me to bristle when common sense is ignored. I hate being asked a question to which the answer is obvious, mostly because of the effort it takes to restrain from uttering the acerbic retort that bubbles to my lips.

When, for instance, someone asks me what I am doing when it is palpably apparent that I am washing dishes or reading a book or eating a sandwich, I have learned to reply very politely, “I’m sewing buttons on pancakes.”

And that seems to settle it.

Leaping Potatoes

At various times in my life I have saved recipes on index cards, in small ring-binder notebooks, and loose pieces of paper, hand-written or cut out of magazines or off packages. But nowadays I keep all my recipes in Word documents in a folder on my hard drive called "Cookbook."

I have tried recipe software for my PC and my iPad, and I don’t like any of them. So, all recipes, old and new, live in my computer. When I want one, I print it out.  When I’m done, I throw it away; I can easily print it again. If a new recipe disappoints, I delete it.

There are a couple dozen documents in my “Cookbook” folder, dividing the many recipes into culinary categories such as seafood, biscuits and rolls, soups and stews, casseroles, etc.

The category with the fewest recipes (5) is for condiments and garnishes. The biggest collections are for appetizers and snacks (45), cakes and muffins (34), and meat and poultry (36). By far the largest collection, however, is cookies and candy, which provides recipes for 68 delights.

Another big one is for vegetables, comprising 49 recipes. Or, at least it did until this morning. I have separated it into two: one for potatoes (39) and one for all other vegetables (10).

Okay, I love potatoes. I can’t think of anything you could do to a potato that I wouldn’t like, with the obvious exception of mixing it up with something repulsive.

I would not even be able to say what is my favorite potato preparation. I like them fresh, frozen, and canned, white, red, and yellow, whole, sliced, diced, chunked, grated, and pulverized, boiled, broiled, baked, pan fried, deep fried, grilled, sautéed, steamed and roasted, in soup, in stew, en casserole, and manufactured into chips, crisps, and sticks.

I believe that in another life I starved to death during the Irish potato famine. That’s why I can never get enough potatoes.

It’s Leap Day today, which I think we should celebrate. By eating potatoes.

Participation

I got an email last week from a dude who says his name is Christopher Wienberg and that he is a doctoral student at USC who is researching the experiences of people who write about their everyday lives on the web. "Your weblog came to my attention," says he, and he would like me to participate in his research.

He provided all kinds of contact information, including the email address of his adviser, so I figured it was legit and decided to partake. I took a short survey, and Christopher is going to analyze what I write "using natural language processing technology" (the kind companies use to search their employees' emails for dirty words) in an attempt to correlate my survey responses with what I write about in this here blog thing.

I don't quite get what he's after.  He wants to see "how the thoughts and experiences written by people like you on weblogs ... can be used to make conclusions about society as a whole." Okay, well, good luck with that.

I suppose this is what sociology majors are doing these days to stay trendy. I don't know if I want to hear what he concludes about me or not.