Roux – that ubiquitous mixture that forms some of the great flavor in gumbo. Photo, by the way, is from wikispaces.com. In  the October ‘14 issue of Saveur Magazine, a little photo illustrated the making of a roux in the oven. Yes, really.

The method is Alton Brown’s. Heat the oven to 350°F. In a large 8-quart Dutch oven or deep iron skillet, mix equal parts canola oil and all-purpose flour. Whisk it, cover it, put it in the oven for 1 1/2 to 2 hours until it’s deep brown. Move the pot from the oven to the stove top and make the gumbo from there.

Quicker Cooking of Beans – Had never heard this recommendation – soak dried beans overnight in water with one teaspoon of baking soda added per quart of water – and the beans will take much less time to cook, in nearly half the time. It has to do with the alkalinity (the soda) breaking down the cell walls of the bean. This was also in Saveur, but the info comes from Harold McGee’s book, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.

Removing Red Wine Stains from Linen or Cotton – In the same issue here’s a recommendation about removing red wine stains – forget the salt, seltzer or baking soda . . . this one says apply a high-enzyme liquid detergent or stain remover (look for the word enzyme on the label). Work that mixture into the stain with a brush, pour boiling water onto the stained area and allow it to soak for 30 minutes. The advice came from two women who have a laundry product line called The Laundress – www.thelaundress.com

Very little cooking is going on in my kitchen. I’m now getting around in an orthopedic boot (meaning my plantar fascia IS torn, not just stretched). Must wear it for 3 weeks, then graduate to good, solid athletic shoes with good arch support, doing exercises very gingerly at first. I’m off pain killers (a good thing) but only because the boot kind of rocks my foot forward so I don’t land on the heel (where the major pain is). The boot isn’t uncomfortable exactly. Just cumbersome. I can’t stand for more than a minute or two, then my heel starts to hurt. All that to say that I can’t begin to stand at my kitchen counter to prepare a meal. Forget it! So I’ve been eating out more than usual. Am eating some stuff from my freezer too.

I still can’t believe it’s been 6 months since my darling DH passed away. How can it possibly be 6 months ago. My cousin Gary is visiting me and I asked him, yesterday, to drag out of the closet two big storage boxes that say “Fall Décor” on them. In my dream last night I came home from somewhere and saw that Dave was putting out Christmas décor in the house (stuff he usually didn’t do anyway – he did outside stuff, not inside stuff). I was just going toward him to tell him no-no-no, honey, not yet,  wrong holiday, when I woke up. I wanted so badly to fall back into that dream and have a conversation with him, to hug him, to kiss him, but alas I couldn’t seem to do it.

My cousin has been so helpful – he’s visited because he had a family wedding to go to over the weekend. I had him work on a TV-cable-tuning-adapter-Tivo problem and he finally, after several hours, one trip to the cable store and multiple phone calls to both Tivo and Cox, to get it fixed for me. He’s moved some things around for me, and he’s very fun company.

I had my first cataract surgery 11 days ago. It was cinchy easy. You’re awake all through it, but it wasn’t scary. It didn’t hurt at all. You can’t actually “see” them do it. My vision out of that new lens is certainly better than it was – brighter colors and more clear – but I can’t wear my old glasses. I wore trifocals, had been for years, and this interim time between now and mid-October when I have the 2nd eye done, is really hard – eye strain and poor vision. A friend finally suggested I buy two pairs of readers, with different magnification and put them together in one glasses frame. I’ve done that. I can barely see close-up stuff through the new lens through the readers. The other eye, well, that one’s awful. Can’t see a thing. I can’t wait for the other surgery. Then I must wait another month before they’ll test my eyes and see whether I need to wear glasses or just readers. I suspect I’ll need glasses for mid and close range. I’m having an awful time reading the computer during this in between time. And music – it’s hard being in choir and barely being able to read the music. My Kindle has an adjustment for type size, so I am able to read that fairly well.

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When I mentioned last week that I’ve been fixing some of my old, tried and true recipes, I thought I’d just tell you what those have been. I haven’t made all these in the last week, but over the last 2-3 months, really. There’s one new recipe near the bottom. I’m not writing up a post about it – it was really good, King Arthur’s Classic Peach Cobbler. I liked it.

Thank you, to all of you who have left comments or sent me email notes. Your very kind compliments warm my heart and lift my grieving spirits. Today, as I write this, I’m feeling pretty well. On that grief-scale of 1-10, I’m at about 5 1/2, I guess. Maybe a 6. I had a bad patch a week or so ago and sunk down into the abyss, but after several days I crawled back up into normal-ness again. I functioned – I went to things, kept appointments, but in between I was wretched. Crying for no particular reason. And it lasted for days. I cooked because I had to, and made things to take to gatherings because I’d promised I would. This grief thing is so very unpredictable. Someone told me the other night that grief experts say the 2nd year is the worst. Oh my, I can’t imagine it being worse. Heaven help me if that’s true!

I’m busy, which is a very good thing. I need to be busy. I actually sat outside on the patio last night and ate dinner. I turned up my Sonos speakers in the house, tuned into the Pandora channel I created with classical music, mostly by John Rutter. Lots of choral music comes up on the channel that keeps evolving when I tell Pandora I like a particular piece of music.

Here in Southern California we’ve had very hot weather this summer – so hot that 13 out of every 14 nights when I’m ready to eat dinner it’s still in the 80s outside with very high humidity, and that’s too hot for me. I had left overs from the dinner I did the other night when I invited 9 women friends over, most of them widows. We had a very nice time that night. I started the dinner right at sunset and God granted a lovely one that night. My new outdoor patio and kitchen looked lovely bathed in the soft light and candles, along with some regular lights too. I’ll post photos of the kitchen one of these days. I promised I’d do that and I need to honor my promises, right?

Minted Watermelon and Feta Salad – so refreshing, while watermelon is still in season.

Watermelon Gazpacho – I just posted this last week, but I’ve made another batch of it. Love this stuff.

White Sangria with Tuaca – so refreshing! It’s great for a warm summer evening. I served this at the dinner.

Creamy Garlic Blue Cheese Dressing – my old standby salad dressing that I go back to over and over and over again.

Garlic VIP Dressing – my other go-to salad dressing. I made this for the dinner the other night and served it over mixed greens (sturdy type) with cauliflower bits, Feta and toasted almonds.

Marinated Tomatoes – when tomatoes are in season, this is a favorite. Looks pretty too.

Meyer Lemon Grains Salad with Asparagus, Almonds and Goat Cheese – such a great salad to take to a potluck lunch or dinner.

Pasta a la Puttanesca – this was my main dish for my guests for the dinner the other night. I served the pasta hot with the Puttanesca sauce, room temp, on top.

French Hamburgers – Julia Child’s recipe. Such good comfort food.

Syrian Pita Bread Salad – I took this to a potluck on Labor Day. It’s a favorite of mine (thank you, Joanne, again, for that wonderful recipe!).

Garlic Green Beans – these are a regular now. I can’t tell you how many of my family and good friends now claim it as their own too. SO easy.

Purple Plum Torte – this was the one from the New York Times.

Dario’s Olive Oil Cake – a real favorite with 1 1/2 whole oranges in it and made solely with good EVOO, pine nuts and rosemary.

King Arthur’s Classic Peach Cobbler – I made little tiny cobbler biscuits for the topping because I knew the women would take small portions, so everyone got a little bitty sugar-topped biscuit.

Chocolate Syrup – I make it in a double batch so it’s always on my refrigerator shelf. Ice cream is so comfort food for me when I crave a little bit of sweet, I top it with this syrup and a few chopped nuts.

See, I told you my old recipes are what I’m cooking lately. I’m still augmenting my diet with ready-made food, something I generally (in the past) just didn’t do. I had Trader Joe’s frozen Chicken Tikka Masala the other night and it was delicious. The link is to my recipe, which is wonderful, but since I didn’t feel like cooking, heating up TJ’s tray was great. I’ll be back in a few days with pictures of my kitchen and patio. Tonight I’m having my DH’s and my bible study group here at my house – that’s why I baked 2 desserts the other night – knowing I’d have left overs. So I don’t have to make or bake anything today. I have peach cobbler and the orange olive oil cake to serve.

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It won’t come as any surprise to most of you – my regular readers – that the last 5+ months have been very hard for me. Losing my husband has been and still is just devastating. We had a wonderful, loving partnership and marriage for over 31 years. The first 3 months after his death are kind of a blur. There was SO much to do. So much paperwork I needed to prepare for the trust attorney (and still is ongoing each month until the estate files a final tax return early next year). For a long time I had trouble concentrating on anything, and until my doctor gave me a prescription, I was hardly sleeping, which left me struggling each day, when I’d had but 4-5 hours of sleep the night before. That’s improved with meds, but I can’t take those forever. I’ve tried to not take them and I just wake up 6-8 times a night and in the morning I’m not rested and not altogether here. I miss my husband so very much. He was my partner, my best friend, my helpmate in everything. We shared so much together. The silence in my (our) house was deafening at first. That part is better now, thankfully.

Cooking was the last thing on my mind in those first few months, and to tell you the honest truth, it still isn’t very important in my daily grand scheme. When Dave was alive, I cooked for him. He was – as I tell people – my greatest fan. He was my fan club at the dinner table. He loved whatever I prepared. He selected wine to go with the dinner and occasionally I’d have some. About 10 years or so ago I kind of suddenly lost my appetite for wine. I still drink it very occasionally – and usually only if it’s a good bottle and it’s red. I’ve never had more than a glass of wine, hardly. Maybe a glass of champagne and then a very small glass of red with dinner. That was/is a lot for me. I have a huge wine cellar full of wine – probably 400-500 bottles. I can’t sell it because it’s health has been compromised twice in recent months when the A/C quit and the temperature in the cellar hovered at about 76-80° for days and days waiting to be repaired. That can be a death knell for wine. Several bottles I’ve opened, or guests have opened, have been bad and we’ve had to pour them out.

I’ve still done some cooking here and there. Not every day. I meet friends for lunch frequently, and often I have left overs to take home. Some nights I simply have no will to cook. I’ll make myself a scrambled egg, or I’ve even eaten cold cereal, though that was only once. I’ve cooked when I’ve had houseguests, but my heart isn’t in it. What I crave is comfort food or my old favorites, recipes I’ve posted here before. Or I go to a local Mexican place to have a taco. Or I pick up something at Trader Joe’s or Costco and eat on it all week. I still enjoy eating. I just don’t enjoy making it.

The house has required a lot of care – numerous projects have needed doing. I now have a regular electrician who identified a couple of very dangerous issues with the wiring for the big pool and the jacuzzi. About $2,000 each to replace and get them working safely. I now have a handyman who is working on a long laundry list of things for me, and I’ll be having him come now and then to help with other things. The junk in the garage is daunting. It’s not stuffed full by any means – there is room for 3 cars – but the built-in cupboards are full of things I know little about – tools, equipment from or for the boat, and boxes and bags of bolts, screws, pieces of plastic pipe, wires, etc. All things that need going through and disposing of, or giving away. My cousin Gary is going to help me with that, I think.

I haven’t even been able to face doing anything with Dave’s clothes. Sometimes I still go in there, to his walk-in closet, hunting for his scent, but I can’t find it. I have no will to sort and go through it. Not yet anyway. Our/his sailboat has not sold, and it sits at our yacht club, costing me about $500/month just to float at the dock. So far it hasn’t needed repairs, but then it’s not being used.

My outdoor kitchen is done, and I do hope I’ll have ongoing interest in entertaining. Right now it’s almost overwhelming thinking about it – to invite people over and to prepare a big meal without Dave’s help with planning, doing the grocery shopping (remember? he loved to buy all the food), getting the patio all slicked up and with him at the kitchen sink washing all the piles of dirty dishes I make when I cook, drying them and putting them all away. I owe dinners, or thank-you’s, to many couples who have invited me to dinner at their home, or done something special for me. I’ve written over 200 thank you notes – oh my – was that ever a big job. I just finished that a few days ago. Somebody told me there is a 6-month window to do the thank-you notes. I got it done under the wire.

All this to say that in a few weeks I think I’m going to stop blogging. It’s been 7 years. It’s just too big of a burden for me now. The blog will still be here for awhile – how long, I don’t know. And maybe once in awhile if I cook and make something really wonderful, I will put up a post about it. Maybe I’ll tell you about a movie or a book. I just need a rest. And maybe a permanent rest from blogging. The writing of my posts is fun – that’s what I enjoy the most. It’s therapeutic for me, I think. But for now, cooking isn’t, and that’s what this blog is all about.

The other thing is that my readership has gone down. WAY down. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’ve written more posts about my grieving, although I’ve really done very few. Google’s search engine doesn’t work the way it used to, either. So when someone searches for something – a recipe – my blog doesn’t come up hardly at all. I have about 400-500 readers. And that’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s not very good in blogging circles. I’ve appreciated all of you – especially those of you who write me notes or post comments. You’re my blog fans. Thank you for being there. Thank you for giving me words of encouragement which I’ve desperately needed, especially in these last difficult 5 months.

My life is really about the same as far as my activities – I do meet friends for lunch frequently. I’m still in 3 book clubs. I’m in a women’s bible study group that meets weekly and takes several hours of homework each week. I’m continuing the bible study group Dave and I started in 2013 as we read through the entire bible in a year. Our small group is going to begin meeting again in about a week. I’m also going to return to singing in our church choir. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a big choir (about 120 voices at the moment) and our choral director has a PhD in choral directing. She’s extremely good at what she does, but being in the choir at our church is a big responsibility – a promise to her of our attendance and attention – and rarely does she select easy music to sing. Each week we have several hours of rehearsal and singing in two services on Sundays. Then there are weekend retreats (one coming up very soon) to get a jump start on singing in the fall months. A couple times a year we have an all-day workday, it’s called. And twice a year there’s a big choir performance of one or several pieces of classical music. C-o-m-m-i-t-m-e-n-t.

Being busy is good for me. I need to keep busy or I fall into a deep emotional valley. It’s a sad place and not easy to climb out of, I’ve found. I trust in God, though, and my continuing prayer, when I’m having a tough day is “lift me up, Lord.” Usually he answers. I’m so grateful for my Christian friends, local and far away. They’ve buoyed my spirits when they flag.

Who knows, maybe in another 6 months I will decide I want to blog again. I don’t know. I just feel that I don’t want to blog right now. I need a rest from it. I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing, and mostly my recipes. If you have recipes you want to download, start thinking about doing it. I’m sure I’ll leave the blog up and available for another year. It does cost money to keep a blog running like mine – under $200 a year, approximately.

If you want to email me privately, it’s ctndt (at) cox.net

Carolyn

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Oh my goodness, you must, you absolutely must go see this movie. This is the one with Helen Mirren and some relative unknowns and it’s about this funny comedic Indian family who cook, and have emigrated from India, moved to London, but didn’t like the cold, rainy weather. So the whole family (papa, and his 3 adult children) go off in a ramshackle mini-van to France. Papa has decided they need to go south, and he has moments when he’s (supposedly) trying to communicate with his deceased wife – is this place right, here? or here? Go further? Anyway, they end up deciding on the cutest little town in Provence and they open up an Indian restaurant right across the street from a Michelin 1-star restaurant. Mayhem ensues. My hat is off to the writers of this screenplay. Go prepared to laugh!

I don’t want to tell you any more about it. Except that there are no swear words. There is no sex, although there is a little bit of romance and it’s ever-so cute. I may even go see it again. It’s adorable. GO SEE IT! And I’m craving Indian food!

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I’ve been home 6 days and seems like it’s taken me that whole time to get back into the swing of things. You know – unpacking my suitcase, doing laundry, grocery shopping (not a whole lot of cooking going on here, however), paying bills, talking to friends, going out to lunches and/or dinners, etc. My cousin Gary arrived on Tuesday and is with me until next week, so he and I have been busy as well. Last night we went to dinner at Ralph Brennan’s Jazz Kitchen in the Downtown Disney near me. It was really good food – I had a bowl of New Orleans gumbo (very good) and a Green Goddess green salad (not very Green Goddessy in my humble opinion, but it tasted fine). We were indoors – the only big negative was that the piano musician was SO loud we could barely talk. So, afterwards, we three (my cousin Gary and an old, dear friend of mine, Carole, who lives in Bel Air and was attending a convention nearby) walked on the downtown Disney street (you feel like you’re in Disneyland, actually, but you’re not) and sat at a table at Starbucks and stayed through the nightly fireworks show. Very fun. The “street” was jam-packed with adults and children. Throughout Downtown Disney there are street entertainers (musicians, magicians, artists).

Although I’m very tech savvy, I was having the darnedest time trying to transfer my trip photos from my iPhone to my kitchen computer here, where I do all my blog writing. Finally I phoned my computer guru and he told me – oh, once you set up iCloud on your home PC, which I just did this week, it will only transfer photos taken AFTER you set it up. Good grief! No wonder I couldn’t make it work. So he coached me through attaching the phone via USB and hunting for the photos on my phone’s photostream. SO, all that said, I’m now going to start writing up some posts about the trip.

The photo above is just a taste of it since I wrote up yesterday the book I just read about Tiffany glass, Clara and Mr. Tiffany: A Novel. This photo was one of the Tiffany panels at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I stood in front of it for many minutes, up close, looking at the tiny pieces of glass, also examining some of the glass textures too, since the processes were a part of the historical aspect of the book.

So, stay tuned. There will be travel stories up sometime soon, with oodles of pictures. I also need to write up a post about my outdoor kitchen, which is now FINISHED. I’m so very happy with it. I need to take photos, and also find some decorations  (just some simple things) to put on the long, long countertop to break up the length. The barbecue is working. The fireplace works. Only thing I’m waiting for is my patio table and the bar-height table and 4 chairs to be treated and newly powder coated.

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I’ve just returned from a 9-day, 8 night trip to Washington, D.C. and NYC. All of it with my granddaughter Sabrina, and part of it with my son, Powell. It was a fabulous trip (and the weather was ultra-surprising in that it was cooler than usual, and less humidity than normal). I’ve returned to California where it is expected to be in the high 90’s and this morning when I got up the humidity was 86%. A/C weather.

First thing will be uploading all my photos, writing more than one post about the trip (no recipes, but I will have travel stories to tell both about touristy things we did and also some wonderful restaurants we visited). But it will take me a few days to do all that. I have a recipe that will be “up” in a couple of days, something I wrote up before my trip. So bear with me as I get re-organized and back into my routine. I was ever so glad, this morning, to make myself a latte in my most used appliance in my kitchen, my Nespresso machine. Yesterday morning we 3 got up at 4:15 am (in D.C.) in order to leave for the airport by 4:45 am (40 minutes away) and catch a 7 am flight to San Francisco, then we took the short haul to Orange County. It feels wonderful to be home. Home is where I feel the best. Sometimes the most sad too, without my dear husband. His birthday occurred while we were on the trip. I kept busy that day – Sabrina and I spent most of the day at two of the Smithsonian museums, then we had a fantastic meal out. More on that later.

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Today is a holiday. Not usually a day I’d choose to write sad stuff. But it’s what’s on my mind. If you don’t want to know the details about my grieving process, skip this post!

Later today I’ll be with friends, thankfully. I’ve had a few emails, and a few comments this week from some of you, my readers, asking about how I’m doing. With the grief thing. Three days ago I would have said I’m doing really, really well. Today, not so much. There’s simply no predicting. Last week at my grief class I said I was a 5 on the scale of 1-10. I was really proud of myself.  Too proud, probably. Then a bunch of little things happened.

(1) First, I’m still buried in paperwork. We had/have a living trust. And although trusts are designed to protect some of the assets couples own (they do and it will for me), they also carry with them a “burden” of paperwork after the death of the first spouse. My Quicken program just wasn’t cooperating in trying to do the online handshake with my bank. It took me 2 weeks to sort that out with my bank. Way too long. Now I’m starting with the monthly reporting the estate attorney needs, and I must backtrack them, date wise, to when my husband passed away. None of it is difficult. It’s just that every check I write, or arrange to pay online through a new account I was required to open, must be categorized and accounted for. Like many of us, I pay a lot of my bills online and many are automatic. All those have to be changed to this new account. Tedious work. Never the same from one firm or utility to the next. Time consuming. Frustrating. I’m continuing to work on it, but it’s just a whole lot of work and none of it is any fun. I am/was the financial person in our marriage – I paid 99% of the bills, did the tax preparation, etc. My darling husband would have been dumbfounded by all this work. He wouldn’t have known where to begin. He’d have just sent all the bank statements to the attorney and let them charge their $165/hour paralegal and $650/hour attorney fees that would have accompanied that work.

(2) Next, a couple of days ago I had a little phone snit with an insurance company about a very old bill. From 2012. The bill I just received was from our pharmacy – claiming that our insurance hadn’t paid what was owed on this small monitoring equipment Dave used for measuring his blood sugar. All the way back that long ago. Right after Dave died, I paid it just to get it out of my hair ($142), but then got billed again for it. So I started digging. The pharmacy said our secondary insurance company didn’t pay. So I called the insurance company, only to find out that their files don’t go back to 2012. Really? They claim they never received the initial bill from the pharmacy or notice from Medicare. However, to go back that long ago (even though this is a new bill) I’d have to go through some kind of written claim to get the ball rolling to re-bill them. The pharmacy won’t give me my money back. I explained to the kind lady (she really was kind, but couldn’t really help me much) that my husband had recently died and that I’d paid it in error. Well, sorry. No, we can’t give the money back. I hung up and burst into tears. It just was overwhelming. That one thing should not have overwhelmed me, but it did. It became my tipping point, the edge of the precipice. Or the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m detail oriented. I keep notes and records. But Dave’s not here to ask. He probably knew all about it. And would have had a ready answer. And probably would have told me NOT to pay the bill. But I had, just because right after he died I wasn’t coping very well with anything. After I had a good cry, I just said “oh well,” it’s over and done with, and I’m simply not going to fight the insurance company over $142. I’m going to let it go. But it put my emotions into turmoil. After working frantically the night before on balancing the new checking account and laying awake half the night, I was tired and cranky. I don’t cope well when I haven’t slept well.

(3) In the process of calling this insurance company I had to go find Dave’s secondary health insurance card. I went to the “Dave box” I have and found his wallet that I had put there right after he passed away. And memories came flooding into my consciousness. I’d handled his wallet before – it had been on his bureau for the week he was in the hospital, but after he died I put it in a safe place. I hadn’t touched it during that time. The wallet itself wasn’t myundoing – it was looking at his driver’s license (and the picture on it) and handling the few plastic cards (I’d already cut up the credit cards in there), but also a couple of little notes in his handwriting. A couple of receipts from when he’d been to the grocery store for me a couple of days before his stroke. My mind and senses were filled with memories, and tears came afresh to my eyes. In the back was $32 in cash. I’ve left the bills there. I simple can’t take them out yet. Maybe next year. These are silly things – and some spouses would find my actions peculiar, perhaps. Some widows or widowers will identify mightily with my emotions and actions or lack of. For every grieving spouse, the actions and reactions will be different. And that’s okay. But my tears were very real and quick to spring from my eyes.

(4) Then, lastly, the other night my griefshare class had it’s final gathering – week 13. Each person talked, as we always do, and when it was my turn to share about how I am this week, I said “last week I was a 5, but this week I’m a 3.” Not very good. I explained in brief about the accounting stuff I’m doing and the frustration of it all. And about fighting with an insurance company. But also, I said, I need to  say that I’m blessed to have a lovely home to live in, that’s paid for, and hopefully, enough money to live on for my remaining days, however many there are. I didn’t go into any further detail. I do thank God for those blessings. We watched a 30-minute video about heaven. About what scripture tells us heaven will be like. Among many other things we were told that we won’t be married in heaven. Our loved ones will be there, but it won’t be anything like our earthly life.

Then we adjourned to another room for a potluck dinner, which was very, very nice. Lots of good food brought by all the class attendees and the two leaders. During that, we were asked to share a funny story about our loved one. I talked about Dave’s proclivity to never let a few facts get in the way of a good story. He was famous for that. Next we were asked to share something we gained from our relationship with our loved one (two women in the class had lost a father, the remaining are widows or widowers), but not something material. Like many others around the table, I said that Dave gave me the joy of laughter. I’m a more serious person – he was full of jokes and smiles! The leader read 4-5 poems about losing a loved one. Then, the part that these two paragraphs are leading up to, she lit a taper candle and lit a votive in front of her and said “I light this candle in the memory of my husband, Doug.” Then she passed the candle. When it got to me and I struggled to get the words out, “I light this candle in the memory of my darling husband, Dave,” I burst into tears. Lighting the candle was so very symbolic. It was wrenching. After everyone had lit their votive, the leader prayed, then she asked each of us to – in silence – blow out the candle. That was my undoing. I sobbed. And they handed me the Kleenex box that makes its way around the table sometimes. This was my week to need the tissues.

I’m better today, but far from okay. As I keep telling myself, this is a process, and I can’t expect every day to be better than the last. It’s up and down, cyclical, but generally in an improving direction. Three months isn’t all that long and I need to give myself plenty of opportunity to grieve and cry. As my close friends know, I cry easily and I do. They’ve been kind to let me and not tell me things like “buckle up” or “it’s time to get over this.” Grief lasts as long as it needs to and can’t be rushed or predicted. So today is a better day and I’ll hope to have more of them. Thank you, dear readers, for listening to me. I hope that what I’m experiencing will help some other widow or widower who goes through the same feelings.

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My friend Maggie sent me a link to a video the other day. Do I eat bananas regularly? Well, every week or two for sure, but by golly, I never knew how complex they are to grow, harvest, sort, pack and ship the product from Costa Rica here to the U.S. I found the video fascinating. And no, Dole didn’t pay me to post this! The image above I found online.

YouTube video from Dole

Click on the “Skip the Ad” at the beginning to get right to the video. It’s about 5 minutes long.

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Are you ever just on overload with information? I get that way sometimes. And I was feeling information overload yesterday when I decided to catch up on reading blogs. I subscribe by RSS to a lot, including America’s Test Kitchen. Oh, I’m so glad I didn’t just skip this particular one.

One of the cooks/chefs at their kitchens had a thought . . . he observed that all over the test kitchen different chefs, when they used a wire whisk would use different motions with the whisk.

If I’d been working at their kitchens  you would have always seen me using a whisk/lift/circular kind of motion. I do that for everything I whisk just because I thought that probably was the right way. Ha, was I ever wrong. He saw people doing (1) back and forth; (2) stirring (with the whisk always in contact with the bottom of the bowl); and (3) my style, the around lift type whisk motion. So, to figure it out, they set up a test of making a vinaigrette, whipped cream and satiny whipped egg whites.

There’s a video about this – if you’re interested go watch it. It’s not long.

I was right in making just one thing – the egg whites. The round, lift motion of whisking IS the proper one for incorporating air into egg whites. You’ll get a lovely mound of satiny egg whites by doing it that way. Well, good. But then, on the other two – the vinaigrette and the whipped cream – no question, a back and forth motion is THE one to use. They give a scientific explanation for it – if you’re a chemist type you might like to read about it. Anyway, back and forth it will be from now on. Cream whips much faster with a back and forth motion. Vinaigrettes stay stable (emulsified) longer when using and back and forth motion. Okay. Learned. Done. Another nugget I need to store in my brain from now on.

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In this grief period I’m going through, there’s a word that’s used (learned at my grief class) that we get ambushed by life’s little moments. You never know when it’ll happen, just like in the old-time Western movies when the solitary rider was trotting along on his horse, thinking he’s safe and boom, the enemy found him, ambushed him when he least expected it. Not that grief is an enemy. Grief is a process, but it is something to get through, just like a valley where you never know what’s around the next corner. You understand what I mean, I’m sure.

That’s me. I was looking for something in the refrigerator. And when I moved something else, right there was this bottle of Smucker’s sugar-free strawberry preserves. You’d probably not think much of it. But the last time that bottle was touched was March 10th when my DH took it out to have on his toast. That was the day before he had his stroke. You’ll recall, perhaps, that he was a diabetic. I reached for that jar and I hugged it to me. And I cried. Not for a moment had I expected to open the refrigerator and end up in tears. My house is full of his touch – his handprint – his fingerprints. I can’t see them, of course. I go into his walk-in closet every few days still seeking out his scent and rarely do I find it, unfortunately. The closet is cedar lined and that’s what I smell. The other day I went into a hall closet where Dave kept his jackets. I did find his scent there, in a beautiful leather jacket he bought a few years ago. I wish I could bottle it! Don’t think I’m crazy – this is a commonplace thing for spouses to do. A widow friend of mine told me she’s still unable to dispose of her husband’s clothes, even though it’s been 2 years. I’m not nuts. Honest. Just set back by a little ambush. But I’m getting right back up and going forward. I want to, and I know Dave would want me to.

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