famous

Famous Beethoven's famous Eroica symphony has recently been recorded by the Minnesota Orchestra, and very nicely so, I might add. I was listening to the radio in the car the other day and heard the last movement (my favorite part, maybe) played wonderfully but with two tiny quirky things, so I knew it wasn't a recording I was familiar with. I was pleased to find out it was our local group. Think I mentioned seeing the Mahler fifth a month or so ago and how wonderful the orchestra is sounding. My game when I happen to turn on classical radio (which I rarely do, since I generally listen to books -- this all in the car, of course) is to see how many notes it takes me to identify the composer and then the work. Not usually very many (with the Eroica it was one). Makes me think of Marty (happy birthday!), who knows every note of the standard rep (having been surrounded by it for years) but has a hard time identifying things. I am amused by your mental jukebox, Suzy, and I'll bet Mom has one too. One of the reasons I don't listen to music much any more is that I just have to think it. (And here's a tough earworm: "She said that she was working for the ABC News/But that was all the alphabet that she knew how to use./Her perfume was unspeakable, it lingered in the air . . . ." I've had this stuck in my head for days. Maybe it's triggered by this thought: "Now I try hard not to become hysterical.")

But I digress, and I haven't even started.

Charlie is working today, and my goal is to finish weeding the poppy bed. This will keep me up by the house, which is good, since I'm doing laundry. It's cloudy but not supposed to rain, so I assume it'll get dry. I hate to use the dryer in summer because I prefer the feel of outdoor-dried clothes, particularly towels. And, hey! If it rains, that's good. When Mom got half an inch on Saturday night we got one tenth. Watering will resume tomorrow.

Mario Batali is the only TV chef we like, and I guess we've only seen him a couple of times. We don't watch foodie TV for two reasons: too many ads, too many moronic chefs. The good food shows are on public TV anyway; that's where we discovered Jacques Pepin, whose cookbooks are quite wonderful. Anyway, Mario is almost a cult figure. You could follow this link: http://topchefs.chef2chef.net/recipes-2/batali/, and I'm sure there are many many more. But on this site is the tomato sauce recipe, if anyone's interested. Be sure not to use "crushed" tomatoes, an inferior product that has lots of skin in it. I'd use four cans of diced tomatoes in juice, if I didn't have my own in the freezer. There was a good profile of Mario in The New Yorker a year or so ago.

Lunch out on a Sunday! We never do that either. Your stirfry sounds good, Suze. I've got to get my hands on some skirt steak. Marty's cooked it recently and liked it a lot.

Now dig this (think all caps, dot matrix, please):

The wizards of WAAC welcome you to

*Adventure*

Good luck to all who dare enter.

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully . . . .

Yesterday when I was looking for old letters, I ran across a mile-long printout of this, my first experience of a computer game. I used to go over to the fine arts building at night to play it (I didn't dare get involved during the school day); Christopher Lonie (Marty's age) would often accompany me. So when would this be? 1977? Computers reached out and grabbed me very early, as they did my siblings. When Chris sent me a very simple word processing program (by this time there was a primitive screen; Adventure was played from the mainframe with only printouts, which I loved), I learned to use it right away, and despite the fact that it was hideously primitive, I put my typewriter up for sale the next week and never looked back.

As for the chicken question. I don't remember buying or cooking much chicken then, but I'm sure you could always buy it cut up. Mom? Or the butcher would cut it up for you. My basic menu for the week started with a sirloin tip roast, which we'd eat twice more as leftovers. And this was three pounds (or less) of meat. Other standbys: lamb patties, the occasional lamb chop, mock oysters, Soares beans, some weird dishes out of the cookbook Pa gave me (like hot dogs arranged on a bed of canned corn), and of course meatloaf. Here's the meatloaf story: I'd made it a few times before, probably from some recipe, but on this day I decided to be creative. I'd heard that real cooks did without recipes, so why not me. So I made meatloaf, flinging in this and that, whatever seemed appropriate. When I served the gloppy mess to Dad, he said: "Don't ever make me meatloaf again!!" I didn't. In fact I didn't make meatloaf for years and years, and I VERY rarely cook without a recipe!

The Troy-Bilt horse is a monster tiller. I can't even consider using it; it's too heavy, unwieldy, awkward, horrible. Charlie hates using it (it's hard work!), but it does the job. The main tilling is done with one that goes behind the lawn tractor, but the Troy-Bilt fits between rows. We also have an old one that was the original snowblower/tiller from River Falls. That one I could use and I rather liked it, but it barely runs now. So here are some answers to your questions. When you begin your garden, absolutely hire someone to do the initial tilling. In RF I had someone come every year to do that, and that's what I'd advise. Even a small garden is hard to get started each year without some serious dirt turning, and you don't want to do it with a shovel. As far as getting a tiller is concerned: Small ones stink. The Mantis, such a nice idea, will only turn soil that is already thoroughly broken up. And it's so light that it prefers to skip along the surface of the ground. I've tried them several times (it would be so nice!), but they really don't even work for minor weeding. Mom has an electric one (even lighter) that I struggled with there once or twice. A couple of years ago I was getting serious about getting a tiller I could handle, but we never found one. Your best solution is a season-opening tilling by someone else, and then weed control with mulch, plastic, back-breaking labor, or some combination of the above. All that said, maybe the smallest Troy-Bilt (above the Mantis) would work.

Having fun with the Mario cookbook, though I did have a failure yesterday. There's a wonderful-looking polenta loaf, with sausage, red bell peppers, garlic, and mozzarella. Took me a while to put it together yesterday morning early (we deemed it too wet to go to the garden, though we ended up there later for a couple of hours). It was a fair amount of work. Mario wanted it to sit overnight in the fridge to set up, so we decided we'd better have it for supper. For lunch I made a fish dish from Mario (fried sole, supposed to be monkfish, but anyway) with a terrific sauce using red wine and a little of his tomato sauce. I don't like tomatoes with fish, and who would use red wine with fish?, but it was delicious and was perfect with the sole. So suppertime rolls around, and we carefully unmold our polenta loaf. It looks a little wibbly, and cuts badly. Instead of neat squares to bake we had messy piles. And once it got into the oven, it melted and moogled into one single blob on the baking sheet. When we deemed it sufficiently heated, we scraped it off into a bowl. It was positively delicious (I had a blob for breakfast today), but hardly the beautiful presentation we'd hoped for. (Don't ever make me polenta loaf again!) Actually, I'll try it again, but I'll use different corn meal (I used very coarse) and proportions for firm polenta. I was suspicious of Mario's 10 cups of water for 2 cups of cornmeal. I'm sure he uses something different as polenta.

So anyway. I've managed to put off weeding for an hour and a half, what with laundry, this, and other puttering. Time to go to work!

But I shall append a couple of food photos: This will make me feel better about the polenta failure.


Here is Vera helping with the salad. Notice, Suzy, the nice things you gave me hanging on the wall behind her.


Mise en place for the salad.


And the salad itself.