Back in Maine and the sun is shining!

Even though there have been two weeks of rain and fog since we returned to the Maine coast, we still were greeted by the loveliest bunches of spring flowers in the garden.  Note the sneaky dandelion in the midst of these little bulbs.  Today, however, YIPEE!!!--sunshine!


The house was both familiar and unfamiliar after our three months in the motorhome.  I tried out the light switches to remember which one goes to what, looked through the cupboards at what we own, and brought my great knife and cast iron pan, as well as a slew of other things, back from the road kitchen.  It was the same as moving out of a small apartment.  I expect we will get better over time, at knowing what to leave in there and what to bring.

Yesterday I started planting the pots with annuals and brought the bare root geraniums up from the basement.  At the start of winter, I removed them from their pots, shook out the dirt, and hung them upside down all winter where they would not freeze.  Now they have been pruned to nearly nothing and planted in the pots.


Here is one pathetic-looking example, all snug in the perfect Maine coast potting soil that we buy at the local co-op.  It sure doesn't look like anything will come of it, but you can see the beginnings of little leaf shoots.  I just hate to throw away the annuals at the end of the summer.  You tend them all summer long and they flourish and glow and just get to perfection when the frost comes and they are toast.  Saving the geraniums give me a better than small sense of satisfaction that it was not all for naught.  Of course, the pleasure we derived all summer long from seeing the beautiful flowers was not naught... but just that it was so brief.  Especially in this north country,


I am restocking the fridge, making yogurt (I use the Brown cow Plain, Cream on Top) for the starter.  Got the brown rice cooked in the rice cooker.  And slowly getting the groove back here.  That is my pace sometimes...sloooow.  And I have learned that it is definitely so in transitions.  


We ate a lot of soup these past foggy days, but I think now that salads are going to take precedence .  Does anyone have a favorite?

WTF

I would like to talk about the kale-onion-portabello-wild caught catfish-baby greens-tabouli-organic brown rice-lemon sauce dinner that we enjoyed tonite with glasses of fish eye pinot grigio ( 2/$10), beside the tranquil lake reflecting Stone Mountain, with the sound of the Mallards and the Cardinals echoing through the pine trees.  I would like to mention that at some point in the dinner, my husband thanked me.  And that since Sunday's time change, the evenings seem to go on and on in this daylight saving time illusion of time stretching.

However, I am caught with the spectre of the suffering of the Japanese people.  My heart feels broken. I read those Washington's politicians' quotes, before it is even settled over there, saying that this tragedy doesn't in any way impact the drive to build more nuclear power plants in the US... of GE saying that there is no problem with the design of the reactors that are blowing up...like, why aren't they all committing hari kari about now?  There were prominent engineers, who became anti-nuke,  resign their jobs due to the lack of safety of these exact same reactors.

I would like to point out that there is a family of three large box turtles that sun themselves just below our trailer, on a log  that sticks out into the lake like a ramp.  And the rain that continued all night long and then gradually receded mid morning.  And the fog that obscured the mountain most of the day creating a blanket of white sky behind the lake and the pine trees.

But my heart is pining the great sadness, the waves of grief that keep pounding on the shores of my being.  I try to resist the thoughts of in-credulousness that the people who know better than anyone the effects of nuclear poison and destruction, would chose nuclear power to maintain their power requirements.  Really?  No wind or sea or solar power possibilities?

Okay.  Shut up.  It must be that obnoxious American tendency to look for blame rather than to just feel the feelings that are so much harder to live with.

Years ago, when I lived on the southern coast of Oregon, I had a friend named Kyoko Kanazawa.  Her husband, Hiroshi, worked for Daishowa Paper Company who shipped products out of our port, back to Japan.  When their second child, a daughter, was born, Kyoko asked me to be the American "godmother" and give her child an American middle name.  This child,  therefore, was named, Riiko Emelie Kanazawa.  Somewhere in this world, she is there.  Perhaps she and her family are in Japan now.  I imagine she has children of her own now.  That would make Kyoko a grandmother, like me. I think about them from time to time.  We lost touch years ago.

I am wondering where they are tonight.

A Rose is a Rose but Orange Juice is...

Here is an email I got from my son this morning. 

                                    "I just bought Orange Juice and found something interesting:

                                     It is Tropicana 100% Juice. Listed as ingredients are; 100% pure orange juice from concentrate and natural flavors*. Note the asterisk. In the fine print the asterisk is defined as “Ingredient not found in regular orange juice”. Interesting. Perhaps it should really be called ‘Tropicana 99% Juice and 1% Mystery Ingredient’. Probably wouldn’t be good for sales."

From potato chips to ice cream, the ingredient "natural flavor" is found in just about everything.  But in "100% pure orange juice" what is the "natural flavor" not found in regular orange juice.  The more of this I find, the more I read ingredients and I must say that the number of foods I will buy from the grocery store has dramatically diminished. I have thought for a long time that the FDA was not really on my side, but this is really insulting.  How can they allow a company to say 100% pure when it is not at all true?

GOOD ONES:   I love this broth which is very flavorful and has no unnamed ingredients.  I have used it as a base for many soups as well as fish chowder.

The other one today is a sauce packet for when you are not into doing it al yourself which in this little spaceship, I only have room for a very small pantry.  It is Indian or Thai and really wonderful on rice, grains and veggies as well as noodle dishes.

Today for lunch I baked some potatoes, sweet potatoes and cauliflower seasoned with garlic, tarragon, ginger and sesame seeds.  The potatoes, brought from Maine, were grown from a local farmer.  The sweet potatoes and cauliflower were organic from California.  Salt, garlic, olive oil, tarragon (from my own pot that grows on our deck in the summertime).  These were the natural ingredients.

I am tired of reading articles of what is toxic about this "food" and what is bad about that "food".   I just want to focus on the goodness of real true honest to goodness foods that are simply what they say they are.  If I can do it in our motorhome, I can do it anywhere and so can you.

Here is my entire kitchen.

During a Tornado Watch, You Go Where?

Last night at the Roanoke Camping World parking lot we slept like babies.   And I mean the kind of babies that sleep “like babies”, not the other kind.  (We have a lot of the not much sleep babies in our family.)   But John and I slept peacefully and got to sleep really early because we had no internet.  Maybe that helped, I don’t know.

This morning, the sun was shining, it was sweetly warm and we had the garage fix us up for spring and summer weather!  They de-winterized our motorhome, meaning that they reconnected the water pipes, drained the pink marine antifreeze out and filled the fresh water tank with fresh water so that now when we turn on the faucet, we get water. I am amazed at how much water we actually go through just to do the minimal things. I think we used about 12 gallons of water in the past three days from gallon jugs and plastic bottles!  Now that we are back in summer mode, we have running water in two sinks, a flush toilet and a good shower and we even have a special drinking water filter in here with a drinking water tap so no more plastic bottles!

As soon as we left the shop, we hit rain and then buckets of rain and gusts of wind. It's not so easy to drive this 38 foot wind sail anyway, but in that weather it is just white knuckle every second so after driving only 80 miles we pulled into another Flying J truck stop and said that's that for the day.  We went into the Denny’s for a meal and good thing we did, because the weather channel on their television there in the dining room was telling us that we were under tornado watch until 4pm.  We knew it was nasty, but didn't know we were possibly in the path of a tornado!  Fortunately for us, it was passing by west of us and we waited it out safely in the Denny's.

John had pancakes and I had a veggie burger.  Yes, a Denny's concession to the vegetarians of the world.  Otherwise all the other entrees included bacon or chicken. or both.

Its not that I am a totally committed vegetarian.  It just seems that I feel better if I don’t eat meat.  John eats meat occasionally. But this is the best part:  he has stopped taking Lipitor, which he took for quite a few years.  Three months after stopping it,  his doctor tested him and he had a nice healthy cholesterol level.  No problem and no need for drugs. We eat mostly whole grains and legumes, lots of fresh organic vegetables and fruits and some fish and shellfish.  We eat a butter and cheese occasionally, cream in the coffee and tea, ice cream sometimes and chocolate regularly.

However, when I do buy chicken, I buy it from a local organic farmer.  Same with any meat.  So clearly meat at Denny’s would not qualify even if I did eat meat.  The tragedy of how animals are treated really bothers me.  The additives such as hormones and antibacterials really bother me.  The high levels of pesticides and herbicides and fungicides, not to mention inappropriate foods like other ground up animals, really bother me.  And bottom line, I cannot /will not support that industry any more.  Uh-oh.  This is starting to sound like a soap box.  End of tirade.

So we are sitting in the parking lot of the truck stop just to the side of the lines of huge semi's going through the 10 or so diesel pumps here and completely amazed at the sheer numbers of trucks that keep coming.  We admire the shiny ones or fancy ones with tons of little lights along the sides and edges, as if we are just sitting by a parade and in the process, are having a glass of wine and watching this beautiful sunset through the raindrops on the window, after the storm has passed.  

The Diner Has Left the Building

Surrounded by piles of snow, brown and black ice really, brown hard-as-a-rock snow-ice,( snice?--nope, sounds too "nice"...frush, maybe ... frozen+slush).  Let me begin again.


Surrounded by small mountains of brown and black frush, we took advantage of the clear sky and finished loading up half of our total earthly possessions, and headed down I-95 towards Atlanta.  The youngest son, his wife and their 6-month old son, Asher, just moved there a couple of months ago.  After that, it will be back to Nashville to reconnect with our wonderful friends there and do some music (me) and play some golf (John).  Back to the stomping grounds!
In the meantime, here we are parked in Jellystone Park in Sturbridge, Mass, surrounded by piles of more "frush" and sitting in about 2 inches of rain water on top of the slush underneath it, pouring rain all around, and yet warm and cozy inside.  So there you have it, you can take yourself out of Maine, but it is more than a day's drive to take yourself out of New England weather.
We are spending today staying put because we will have another good window of clear weather beginning tomorrow.  Maybe.  I'm thinking that we should have held out for an RV with a fireplace after all.  At the time we were looking, it seemed a little silly, but not so silly now.
This RV has a slide out which we are not sliding out, because when we will be getting any kind of ice, which we will be, we would not get it to slide back in.  Just in case an explanation is needed, the wall all the way from behind the driver's seat back to the end of the kitchen actually slides out about two feet which makes the space inside feel palatial, compared to the tight configuration that we have when it is slid in.  Not bad, but a little tight.  This rig is 38 feet long and about seven and a half feet wide.  This a big vehicle but only a small house.
We have a nice little three-burner gas range with oven and a microwave for our cooking.  The refrigerator with wood paneled doors has a nice large freezer above it.  In preparing for this trip, I cooked extra of a lot of dishes, and froze them.  We have vegetarian white bean chili, fish chowder, and other things that I can't remember so will have to report on when they thaw and I can recognize them.  Hopefully.
I had one meal ready to go and last night when we pulled into the spot, I pulled a dish of curried lentils and rice out of the fridge and it was ready in less than 10 minutes. Talk about fast food!

Here is what I made.

1 large onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 bunch of kale, chopped
some olive oil
a little red wine
juice of one small lemon
1 T good curry powder (I like Penzey's)
salt and pepper to taste
a handful of chopped cilantro
3 cups cooked lentils

Cook the onion in the oil until it is transparent, about 5 minutes.  Add the garlic and stir around for another minute and then put in the kale until it "melts down".  Add the curry powder and stir then pour in the wine and let it cook until the liquid is mostly gone.  Serve over brown short grain rice.  Sprinkle the fresh cilantro on the top. Yum.  And the best part is, it tastes fabulous the next day as well as right away!