Adventures in Cooking

From "Lurking Back" by Peg Pyner

 

There’s a book called "Adventures in Cooking with James Beard."  Well, I had one of my typical adventures in cooking and I don’t think James Beard would print it. Down the tube, into the compost that is, went three cut-up sausages, one slice of smoked ham, a gob of molasses, brown sugar, ketchup, water and two cups of beans. Who but me could ruin baked beans?

I relaxed on the chesterfield the other night, reading the newspaper while a clicky corner of my brain was asking, "What shall we have for supper all week?”  I know this is grounds for divorce but Jimmy never minds. When it's slop like stew, Swiss steak or beans, he’ll eat it all week happily and I add my own variations, a dash of garlic or a piece of toast.

I read a cozy little piece in praise of slow cookers.  I was fascinated by the recipe sent in by one woman.  She, like me, always forgot to soak the beans.  She dumped them in her slow cooker unsoaked and said in seventeen hours she had Lovely Baked Beans.

With a cry of delight I leapt up, turned on my slow cooker, tossed in beans, plus molasses and stuff and again relaxed.  Seventeen hours, I thought, that's tomorrow night.  In the morning I bethought myself of salt pork which I never have, so tossed in three leftover sausages and a slice of ham.  The beans at this point were very, very hard, about the same as when they went in and I felt a tremor of unease, which I shook off.

That night the house smelt lovely.  The sausages and ham had overcooked to a deep dark brown; the beans were still very hard. We had an omelet, which Jimmy doesn't much like. He begged me to fry some bacon and open the canned beans but I wouldn't.  What's the sense, I asked him, of opening canned dumb beans one night then eating lovely home-cooked baked beans all week?

On the third day the meat had turned black, the beans were still hard.  We had poached eggs for supper and Jimmy looked broody which may have been all the eggs but why did he eye me so malignantly?  On the fourth day with fears of botulism in mind, I tasted the beans and they were still crisp, so I've given up.  Even the dog can't have them.

Seventeen hours for unsoaked beans forsooth! Where do they get these fantasies? I'm for responsible journalism and if unsoaked beans can't cook in over 100 hours, all I can say is, “Don't leave today, Jimmy! I'll open the canned beans.”

Frozen water pipes Cortes Island circa 1950

I just finished my biddling around housework and am asking myself what to do next and feeling irresistibly drawn towards the new Journal or mayhaps another seam or two of my new shirt, howsoever I will fill the wondering time with a line or two to you. The curses are standing on cardboard cartons nosing around the counter. Pretty soon one will collapse and they will howl or find something splashy or breaky and I will have to remove them but let's not borrow trouble. I just went and put the brats on two eggs to coddle and they are slugging and guzzling them down. A gory mess but like I say, let them be.
The G.D. pipes froze up three days ago and the boys can't find where. There is 600 feet of pipe which is a lot of digging and Jimmy is furious. I am washing out baby stuff here and there by hand but life is very difficult. I hope it doesn't last much longer. I'm afraid they'll say that it's all so frozen they will have to leave it until they thaw out by themselves. Can't even let the kitchen fire get too hot in case the tank gets overheated and bursts. However the front room fire keeps going and with the kerosene heaters in the bedrooms we keep warm enough.
Barbie hurt her hand or thinks she did and is showing it to Nancy. Nancy rubs it for her and says poor little kid about 60 times. She also rubs her other hand and goes to the extreme of trying to tell Barbie she is going to call the hospital. They are very amiable with each other but daresay it is but a passing phase. A while back Barbie was in the car pushing herself back and forth with her feet. Nancy came along and draped herself across the radiator and Barbie happily pushed them both along, still with her feet.

Barbie & preschool circa 1950 Mom's letters

Breathes there a mama so baffled, so beset upon as the mama of a lonesome preschooler?  I think not.  For the mama of said lonesome pre-schoolers cannot knead a dough, beat a batter, wash a clothe, dampen ironing or toil at any other such task without great gobs of chatty hindering help from the lonesome little one.  And patient as the mama may be about being helped and even though she reads “Porky Pig” aloud fifty times a day, the child is still not content and would much prefer it were Saturday and Big Brother or Sister were pushing the pre-schoolers head into a mud puddle.  And, besides always the mama knows that some day soon there will be that icy plunge into grade One and better mama’s apron strings be loosened beforehand.   
Which leads up to the fact that five of the beset upon mamas of lonesome pre-schoolers are doing something about the situation.  We decided to hold a play school four days a week at one another’s home.  

The kids love the Play School and crabby is the kid who gets a bad cold and has to miss a few days.  They get a variety of active play, mid morning cocoa, story time, sometimes records and/or singing, followed by cutting out or plasticine, the latter being very popular.  They leave for home by 11:30.  Little Dinah Armstrong calls it Plasticine School; our Barbie, after her first day or so, said Play School was fun but when were we going to put on a play?  Must have thought it a Junior Little Theatre. 

The Pipes are Calling - by Barbara Warman 2005

The Pipes are Calling

Fog approaches, tickles the air, grips branches, tarmac, pulls itself out of the black above until it reaches those who live with cracked childhoods, broken souls who welcome lost horizons.

One of these souls touched my life, fleetingly.  His fog of choice was alcohol.  He turned to the streets at fourteen, wandered to my city.

I met twenty-two year old Danny in a writing group.  He wrote in anger, singed the ears of all who listened.  He spoke of the damage of a child who filled his mother’s vodka bottles with water, hid them.  He talked about the life of a panhandler and how it destroyed the small amount of soul he treasured.

I approached him in class and said, "I know more about Islam than I know about street kids.  Do you want to go for coffee and talk so I can learn about your life?"

For a year, we met weekly.  Danny always had a job – he drove the outreach van for a local society and, when they lost the grant money, he carried on for nothing. He spoke to young streetkids about options – education, housing. He told them the stories he also shared with me about the Christmases drinking himself blind and sobbing, outside, alone, while sleet fell around him.

When the outreach job ended, he cooked at a coffee shop close to downtown on the weekends. He knew the owners because the business was very generous to the streetkids, gave them coffee and meals whenever they could. They gave Danny the chance and he never let them down. I would meet him there as he closed up at the end of the day. Sometimes other friends with names like Lazar or Dogpatch arrived and, as we waited, I bought them coffee. The conversations bounced off the borders of any life I knew.

I still didn’t understand why and how he was there, but I saw the suction of that life.  I met some of his friends and felt their vacuum, their brokenness, and their fractures.

There were times when Danny stood proud, faced down the fog, believed he could find the horizon, step over it and magically become whole.

"I haven’t had a drink in four days," Danny said, but I knew the haze was around the corner with his friends ready to pull him back and he always went.

Danny shared dreams of a different life but he was unable to draw a picture of that dream.  It was foreign, beyond reach.  The anger that stretched beneath his words and smiles remained unfixable, entrenched.

I invited Danny to have dinner at home with my husband and me. 

"Yeah?" he said, "Really?"

"Really."

Then he vanished.  I couldn’t find him. 

I accepted that Danny had moved on from our friendship. After all, what could I offer. Then the phone rang.

"Are you the Barbara that Danny spoke about, the girl he met in writing class?’

"Yes, I’m that Barbara."

"I’m Danny’s father.  I’ve been looking for you."

Danny had phoned his father a week before.  "My friend Barbara has invited me to have dinner in her home," he said, "He was thrilled."

"I want to thank you, but now I need to tell you something else," Danny’s father said, "Danny hung himself a week ago – I wanted you to know.  I found your card in his wallet."

The fog filtered into an abandoned building where Danny drank.  It wended its way through across the concrete floor to a staircase where it formed a sheet, wrapped its tendrils around the railing and around Danny’s neck.  It crept into the cracks in his broken soul, swelled and finally broke him.

Now the fog is here, it touches my face and stings my eyes.

 

Mom and the fire warden cortes island circa 1950

Oh Heavens, I just had a most humiliating experience.  The new agitator for the washer came and the washer was going bang bang and I never hear cars come or people knock.  There is always a lot of mess the day after mail day and I was cleaning it all up and piling paper and envelopes on a big piece of corrugated, then I rolled the corrugated up with the papers inside it and went to burn it outside although it is fire season.  It was a bit windy outside so I took a match and lit it inside then carried the mildly burning stuff out to plunk it in the yard to burn and I ran into the fire warden at the door.  I let out a bona fide girlish scream and blew my flaming pyre out.  He laughed.  I couldn’t very well stand and talk and let it blaze up, nor could I bravely stick it in a corner and let the house burn down, nor could I nonchalantly keep on going out in the yard and burn it.  He was looking for Elton and Jimmy to see if they have the right fire equipment and I daresay he will order them to get a set of picks and shovels and extinguishers for our yard. 

Thank the heavens he wasn’t here yesterday. Elton burned a lot of garbage but seeing as it’s fire season I can’t even put this in my column.  After we burn garbage, we put tin cans and anything else that hasn’t fully burned into a sack so we can dump them later.  I went outside and saw smoke billowing from the sack of tin cans we hang on the side of the feedshed.  I tried to lift it off and it burst into flames.  I screeched for Elton and he came out and helped me tow it away from the shed.  He had put the remains of a shoe he had burned into the sack and it was just hot enough to start the fire.  Imagine if we had gone out – everything is so dry.  I didn’t tell that to the fire warden.

This being a day of high drama I’d best go and look for the kids.

Mom's column for Campbell River Courier circa 1950

Manson’s Landing Mirror

I open this column with a scream of protest, high-pitched, shrill, and outraged, like a cougar at bay or perhaps a squirrel protecting its winter store of nuts.  For I have been falsely accused.  I did not deliberately get lost in the woods to avoid attending the stone throwing work bee and the woods are not lovely at this time of year.  Unless you gaze at them from the roadside, the woods are horrible. 

  The Ladies’ Guild had a work bee to throw all the stones out of the churchyard so Ken Hansen can spread some topsoil around on it and make it all verdant, we hope.  I was there at 1pm, starting time, which is more than can be said for some of those others let me tell you.  I threw stones so fast and hard that several hit Dolly Hansen’s car parked out on the roadway.  Dolly, being unable to hit mine, was tossing pretty close to me after a time.  We were about to start truce talks when Jack Summers came up from the store with a message for Brother Elton, who was working in the woods.  I zoomed off in the truck, parked by Elton’s truck, plunged into the well nigh impenetrable bush, found a cat road, cannily followed it towards the sound of a power saw and found Jimmy.  He told me Elton was down at the beach with the Cat, I trudged the extra mile and delivered the message.  Then back to the bee, thinks me.  Followed the cat road back to the power saw, another cat road, a branch, a trail, another cat road, tried a plunge into the bush, back to the power saw, asked directions, tried again, plunged so far I could no longer hear the power saw.  That was it; I was lost, tired and hungry. Finally I sat down, I thought if they want me to get out of these *** woods they have to come and get me.  Then I tried one more plunge into the bush and fell out of a salal bush onto the road, a few yards above my Chevvie.           

  And what burned me up was Elton had come out and driven off in his truck.  He must have known I was lost, did know in fact because he admitted it.  He thought it was funny; he wouldn’t have thought so come supper time I’ll warrant.

  Then I went back to the bee, unfortunately just as it was finished and everyone was walking across and down the road to where the workers had been invited to tea.  The jibes I took.  Oh those catty remarks, I could barely swallow my third sandwich.  Now you know the truth.  I will take the apologies in person, fellow Guild members, or you can mail them to me.

Perils of seaplane travel from Cortes circa 1950

I took the kids to the doctor in Campbell River last week and what a frightening trip we I had.  The plane, just after leaving the water, was caught by a down draft and landed back on the water, hard.  The pilot had to scramble out onto the pontoon to make sure the plane didn’t tip, Barbie was screaming and I did a very sensible thing – I kicked off my boots in case we also had to get out.  The pilot did keep the plane level but we had to take off again, which scared Barbie anew.  Little Nancy was completely contained, but white.  I had to go to the doctor in Campbell River, too and he poked my finger several times but was unable to get any blood.  I told him about what had happened on the plane and he said that fear could do that – makes all the blood leave your fingers and toes.  Isn’t it funny it didn’t bother weevly little Nancy.  Barbie screamed last night and when I went in there she was looking all around the room terrifiedly and kept yelling, “Let me out of here, the water is coming in.”  We had to take her to our bed before she would settle down at all.

Now the kids are playing boat with the two armchairs pushed together and I can hear their conversation.  Barbie apparently pointed out a plane to Nancy in a magazine and said it was no good because planes tipped over and Nancy said they didn’t and told her just one plane did it because it didn’t have a strong wing and it flew again and it didn’t tip over.  Barbie said hopefully that she didn’t cry and Nancy said crushingly that she howled all the way over and then Nancy told Barbie how she looked out of the window of the plane and saw little houses on the sandy beach.  They both talked enthusiastically about planes then.  Maybe Nancy will get Barbie swung over yet.