Tidbits from a Saturday

 

Cheater's spanikopita

Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art who are over twelve must now be vaccinated—I assume that means show proof. Visitors under twelve must be accompanied by a vaccinated person. And everybody must wear a mask. Yay for institutional responsibility.

And yay for corporate responsibility: when a resort at Jackson Hole, WY held a fund-raiser for Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Mark Meadows, Patagonia said it would no longer supply its products to the resort. It had been their largest customer in the chichi resort area.

Today was a cooking day, as Saturdays often are for me. When I woke up this morning, my first thought, a downer, was that I had all that cooking to do, and I really wanted to get to things on my computer. I thought that was odd for someone who professes to like to cook as much as I do. Maybe, I thought, I like the idea of cooking, the culling of recipes, the thinking about food. But given my puritanical conscience, I was dicing onion by about nine-thirty this morning. Made the filling for what I call cheater’s spanakopita (I use puff pastry instead of phyllo—shh! Don’t tell your favorite Greek aunt!). And I made a tomato soup that Mrs. Electra Waggoner Biggs used to serve at the Waggoner Ranch—yep, it’s for a blog promoting my forthcoming book on the Waggoners, and I had to take a picture of it. Actually, it was pretty good, and I am glad to have some left over for lunch.

But what struck me this morning about cooking was that once I get into it, I enjoy it—even dicing onions (I wear onion goggles). There’s something mechanical and almost meditative about it, and I like the precision when I make myself slow down, read the recipe, take it step by step, and clean up as I go—the latter is a big deal with me, a lesson drummed in by my mother. So it was a good morning, and by eleven o’clock, I was back at my computer where I learned an awful lesson.

I started watching a webinar on making the best use of Amazon and immediately was overwhelmed by the knowledge that I really wasn’t using Amazon to my advantage at all. In the first fifteen meetings, the speaker, award-winning mystery writer S. W. Hubbard, gave me so many chores, I paused the tape and clicked on Amazon to begin to correct my omissions. I’ve decided that will be a week-long project—listen to the tape until I find the next thing I should do, and then click over to Amazon. I’ll watch the webinar in chunks.

These are bad days for our country, days when, no matter our political sympathies, we are almost in agony for the Americans trapped in Afghanistan and for the Afghans whose lives are in danger. The subject of blame is all over the media, and I don’t want to go there, though as you can imagine, if you know me, I have some definite ideas. In addition, the East Coast, around Boston and Cape Cod, is bracing for an unusually severe storm. California is burning, and kids in Florida and Texas are dying. The masking controversy, unbelievable as it is, is tearing our country apart—a phenomenon it is beyond me to comprehend.

It’s definitely a time when everyone needs a Dammit Doll, and Jean brought me one today. When frustration gets more than you can stand, you just bang his head over and over on the nearest hard surface, while yelling, “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” Your guess on who he resembles.