Category: Family
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And now, Father’s Day. Also, best fruit salad ever. With no added sugar!
OK, the good thing is: We get Mother’s and Father’s Day over within a few weeks of each other. Then I can revert to standard grump mode, as opposed to raging about the nonexistent parenting in my long-ago past. Even I realize this last hurts me as opposed to anyone else, especially those no longer…
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Guilt and lamb
Amazing how one sentence can bring someone back from the dead and slap you up’side the haid. My mother’s been dead for 18 years, and yet when I found an old letter of hers this morning, boom! This letter’s at least 20 years old, maybe more. She’s talking about a much disliked sister-in-law’s back surgery…
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It was I all along or, even better, I was in here the whole time
That’s a grammar police swipe at It Was Me All Along, Andie Mitchell’s memoir of coming to terms with her food addiction (clarkson potter, 2015). Mitchell is a (now) beautiful blogger (canyoustayfordinner.com) who, like so many of us, has had her more than whale-size phases. I wanted to like this book for many reasons, including the…
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C.S. Lewis, gluttony and white bean dip
For our Lenten reading/discussion, a few of us read C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters” (1941). I only made it to one discussion but I did enjoy reading this, especially the devil’s letter on gluttony. Old Screwtape reminds his nephew Wormwood that there are two types of gluttony: Gluttony of delicacy and that of excess. Holy…
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Spicy lentil chili, college graduation!
There’s no close-up of this chili because there is no photogenic lentil chili. It all looks like sludge, no matter how fabulous it tastes. However, this recipe, adapted from Milwaukee restaurant Sauce via Gourmet magazine and thespicehouse.com, was the centerpiece of a graduation potluck picnic at Gettysburg College last weekend. Surprising people really enjoyed it,…
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Seduced and abandoned
Spring, that brazen hussy, sashayed through the open windows yesterday without a care that soon we’ll be ravaged by summer’s awful heat. Every year I forget. Every year I throw open those windows and smell the turned earth, the pear blossoms and the cows. Every year I hear the meadowlarks and the peepers and think, “This…
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Chicken corn soup and cranberry-orange bread — who I am
My father’s mother was so Pennsylvania Dutch she spoke it. My mother’s mother, so Northeastern WASP she spoke that! My father loved Pennsylvania Dutch food so my passive-aggressive mother never fixed it. (Her friend Doris G. made this soup.) She loved struggling with cranberries to see if she couldn’t get her smooth sauce to gel…
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Food & family
Thanks to FaceBook and e-mail, I’ve reconnected with cousins who were once a part of every trip to my mother’s mother’s hometown in northern New Jersey. Their father and my mother were first cousins but even though I’ve lived in the South for more than 30 years, I don’t know if that means we’re first cousins…
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Vegetarian vacation
As wonderful as it is when the children come home, it stinks when they leave to go back to college or work or both. Our youngest drove off in pouring rain this morning, leaving the house feeling chillier and duller. We had a wonderful time, saw 9 movies during the 8 days and 9 nights she…
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