Haute Cuisine Friday Round-Up

I don’t have the same haughty attitude toward food in a can that some folks have. This is a function of my dime store roots, no doubt. I like canned hash and chili, always have Spam in my cupboard, and keep the Campbell’s soup people in business. Lately, I have discovered SpaghettiOs with tiny meatballs as the perfect post-tooth extraction food, especially when topped by a perfectly cooked poached egg. Don’t even shake your head. I refuse to be canned-food shamed.

It’s been a good week on the writing front. I’m not writing a book. I’ll never write a book – it requires a consistency of devotion foreign to me – but a compilation of stories about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a possibility. I love reading my stories to my little writing group and there’s a big part of me that says that’s a plenty good enough audience. I watch local authors go all over the place doing signings and shows and I know that’s not me. Putting a stack of books out on the front steps for people to take, maybe.

We are doing No-Mow-May, but we almost always do. Not intentionally, that’s just the way it works out. My husband says it only works well for the bees if there are flowers, and, of course, we have flowers – the dandelions, they are a bloomin’. So it is lovely to have what we would typically do become very socially conscious and environmentally hip. Once again, we are ahead of our time.

I talk to my daughter in California while she is driving to work. I like this an awful lot although sometimes I am in a meeting or doing something and can’t answer the phone. What she doesn’t know is that I gave her another name and wrote her into a story about the U.P. In the story, she rolls her eyes at her mother’s plan to put a hex on the new neighbor next door but then pretty much moves on to other business as if everything is cool, everything is normal, and then she’s at work and Poof! the call is over.

A few blocks from here, there is an encampment of students supporting the Palestinians. Like me and every other thoughtful person, they are urging the end of the Israel-Hamas War. But it doesn’t stop there, you know it doesn’t. There is the implicit and not so implicit blaming of Jews – not just today but forever – for being in the wrong place, for assuming they should have a place anywhere in the world. And so, there is the entitlement of blaming, of hating everyone but themselves. Kind of like we all were in the 60’s when we protested the Vietnam War and hated the men and women who served in the military. It is so easy to demonize. I remember that but grew out of it. Sadly, it took a long time.