Butter pats

     My husband likes his butter soft.  Room temperature.  Slithery, so he can put a paper thin coating upon every square inch of his toast, or bagels.  He doesn't bother with butter for pancakes, french toast or biscuits.  I, on the other hand, like cold chunks of butter, warming on the toast, soaking in rich yellow puddles.  On cold bread the bits of butter are like rocks in a sea of jam.  Yuummmmmm!
     Mostly, we've left the butter out on the table in a covered butter dish.  If I needed cold butter I resorted to a half-unwrapped stick in the door of the Fridge.
     Last August he began to complain that the butter was "off".  People of our age will have no trouble interpreting this as "inedible", not fresh, saddened, altered.  So I started putting the butter out a half stick at a time.  Winter came and the  question was shelved in favor of another one:  "why is the butter so hard"?  I moved a table over to the wood stove so we could toast ourselves while eating our toasted bread.
     This year spring was long and cool.  In fact I have only now, this week, finally put the winter clothes away.  About the first of June, I turned the air conditioner on.  The house was warm.  The butter spoiled on the table between one supper and the next.  After some thought I came up with the idea of using just butter pats.  Enough for one meal, you see.  Small enough to come to room temperature while I cook the meal (assuming I remember to get them out first).  I even had some tiny plates meant for butter pats which I had purchased for pennies as doll dishes for the Dolls' Christmas party.  But in all this, the fact my calculating brain refused to acknowledge was that the heating and cooling system was not working.  Finally I called a repair service.  Our condenser was only 10 years old.  We'll fix it!  Not so.  Owing to poor installation, it was dead.  And now the problems arise.  What used to cost $1500 now costs $5000.  It's a heat pump and they all appear to be made in China.  The reviews are mostly negative.  I have for some time tried to boycott things made in China on the grounds of health issues.  Now it seems there are quality issues too.  Kerosene furnaces are no longer available (delivered with a snicker suggesting I'm very stupid).  Natural gas is all around me but to have a line run onto my property will cost $9000 if  my neighbor will consent but it seems he doesn't want gas on his property.  I have brought the fans down from the loft over the garage.  I close up the house about 10 am and open the windows again in the evening.  I put a thermometer on the front porch so I could see the exact moment the temperature went low enough to open the windows.  We sleep with a fan on us.  So far so good, but it's not August yet!  Still, our house is partially underground so we're good candidates for doing without air conditioning.  But heating with wood completely means never being gone over-night if it's cold enough to freeze your pipes.  It means getting up in the night to stoke the stove.  Buying wood has it's problems too.      
     Well, I'm still doing research, how 'bout radiant heating?  I like the idea of warming wires installed in the floor, (this does mean I get a new floor?).  There are German and Swedish electric units which are installed room to room like window air conditioners.  I am surprised by the reactions of loan managers and workmen alike that we would take our time and do without the a/c for a month or two.  They seem to think no one could live without it, and I suppose that's true if you live in the city in an apartment.
     We're in our last four days of the grocery saga but we haven't run out of anything.  This week we will be waiting for the flyers to come advertising next weeks sales and if they come by Wednesday we get to choose which sale we'll patronise.  That's the most excitement we're likely to get, at out age.  The mail comes about 2:30 so if I don't like the future sale, I may say, get your shoes on, we're going shopping now!

Blueberries for me, for the winter

     We had an end-of-school party for Eliyah and his Mother.  He picked out the menu:  BLTs, baked pork and beans, corn on the cob and canned peaches and oyster crackers for dessert.  BLTs because he likes bacon.  He accompanied me to the Butcher's Block to get the bacon too.  He set the beans to soak the night before I cooked them.  He liked corn on the cob. And canned peaches because we had just read in Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder that the  family's  first night staying in the Surveyers' house they ate canned peaches as a special treat.  The oyster crackers came from the previous book in the series, Plum Creek, when Pa, trapped in a snow storm, ate all the oyster crackers he was bringing home for Christmas dinner.  After school we went to the grocery store to see if we could find some peaches like Laura's.  We were in luck!  We found Margaret Holmes O'sage peaches, since 1838!  They did not disappoint either.  Because Eliyah's Mother was coming, I made mayonnaise, as well as the yeast bread Eliyah likes.  Eliyah laid out the bacon on a rimmed cookie sheet to bake.  He mixed up the Navy beans cooked with ham bone and the molasses and barbeque sauce and poured them in the casserole.  He set the table.
We were all very merry over this meal!



















     I got the recipe out of a 1948 Boston Cooking School Cook Book which I was forced to buy to replace the 1936 one I've used since I was 17 which finally became too ratty to use.  I really think it has no parallel as an all-purpose cookbook, though I have some favorite recipes in Lulu Silvernail's 1926 One Thousand Successful Recipes.  I went strictly by the recipe but I added two slivers of lemon zest and one tiny clove of garlic, of the size you usually throw away as being not worth peeling.  I like this recipe because it uses only the egg yolk, not the whole egg.  Adding 3/4 cup of oil, along with a little mustard and the lemon juice,  you end up with about one cup of light and delicious mayo, which you have a chance of using up before it spoils.  I put it in an etched glass container that had belonged to my Grandmother,  well, my not-Grandmother, as we call her because she married my Grandfather late in life, just three years before he died in fact.  She was very much a part of our family though, and lived with us for several years and it is an honor to the mayo that I put it in her container!

     Last time I went to the grocery I only spent $180.  So this week, when blueberries went on sale, I had some money left to buy some.  Blueberries for Sal was always one of our favorite books when my children were young.  But these blueberries are for me!  First I made a pie using all the blueberries left-over from last year.  Then I washed the fresh berries and laid them all out on cookie sheets to freeze.  Then they are loosened with a spatula and poured into plastic bags with zippers to put in the freezer and dip out a cupful to put in muffins and fruit salads.  mmmmmmmm

I like the frosty look of ripe blueberries

At the last minute I added more sugar before putting on the lattice.  After the pie was baked it could not be seen any more.