From My Bedroom Window

I opened my eyes this morning to the view I often have now, to the window on my left that lets in morning light through its top two panes while shielding me from the view of the row houses across the shared backyard gardens. Bless those honeycombed blinds that can be lowered to hide the bottom and reveal the top, which were already installed in the bedroom when we took over the house in February. I make sure that they are positioned with the bottom half of the window covered and the top half open before I go to bed each night, because I love to lie in bed in the morning and watch the sky come to life, sometimes with clouds moving across, sometimes with breezes blowing the leaves and upper branches of the trees, sometimes with streaks of sun shining through. No sun this morning, but the expanse of the sky was there, and pretty soon a cup of hot coffee appeared magically at my bedside, too, so my reverie could continue.

This morning I was remembering how I used to wake up in the bedroom in our house in Spain, where the window was on the right (and so was I) and where, if I had been able to look out the full-height glass doors to the French balcony, I would have seen tall yucca trees instead of the broadleaved trees we have now. Of course, I never saw those trees when I woke up because in Spain windows are covered for the night with rolling metal awnings to keep out noise, temperature, intruders and, alas, any morning view. We will be going back to that house in three weeks to close its sale to new buyers, and fortunately we have decided not to stay in the house for the few days we are there. A few months ago the yuccas were cut down on the advice of the real estate agent, who had listened to potential buyers note that the house seemed dark with their foliage. I was devastated, because the yuccas had shielded us from the view of the neighbors across the street and passers0by along the street during the day when the awnings were open, to the extent that I felt perfectly comfortable changing my clothes without covering the window. No one will be able to do that now, with the trees gone, but the new owners won't know that you once could. I think they are going to be an awful lot hotter during the summer months with the sun boring in than we were, too, but that's not my fault.

Final Friday at the Pendleton

It had been a long time since we were able to get to the Final Friday-of-the-month open gallery evening at the Pendleton Arts Center. We first went last summer, but our attendance dropped off when the evenings got darker earlier and also when other social engagements and travel intervened. So we were happy this past week that an empty spot on the calendar showed up on the last Friday of May and that it was good weather for driving into Cincinnati. We drove down Winton Road, avoiding the interstate at rush hour. Then with the help of Gladys, our GPS lady,  we maneuvered through the twisty, curving and unknown (to us) streets of the inner city, and arrived on Pendleton Street just around 6:00 PM when the galleries were opening. The parking lot was already full, but we found on-street parking a couple blocks away in a residential neighborhood, in front of some old brick houses where families were sitting out on the stoop to enjoy the evening breeze, and small children were blowing soap bubbles.

One of the nice things about Final Friday is the opportunity to talk with the artists. We met and had a nice discussion with Katherine Thomas in the gallery she shares with seven other artist members of  the Cincinnati Art Club on the first floor. I was enchanted with her realistic paintings built around a bit of fancy--the row of houses built by the side of a piano keyboard and surrounded by sheet music, currently shown on her homepage, really caught my eye and brings music to my imagination as I think back on it.

We popped into the gallery of Philip Compton, who does "iPhoneography," because I remembered him from previous visits. Alas, he wasn't there when we were, but his business manager gave us a glass of wine and we chatted about his technique and his subjects. All his work starts as digital photographs taken with his iPhone; then he works with 20 or so different apps and his creativity to produce vastly different works, some recognizable from the original photo, some not.  All are striking or beautiful or surprising, and many are two or three of those. A few are available for viewing on his Facebook page.

We chatted at length with glass sculptor Joseph Drury, who works in recycled glass to produce gorgeous works of art that you can see on his homepage. He collects used glass from everywhere he can and told us that when he came to open the gallery this week, there were bottles and sheets of glass waiting at his door. I didn't know that European and U.S. glass manufacturing used different techniques in production and thus need different techniques in reworking them, but Joe told us how he had found out the hard way not to blend the two. We then had a far-ranging discussion of which beer bottles are the preferred, both for art work and for their contents. Now I am wondering whether the green Carlsberg bottles we collect slowly but regularly at our house will be useful for him in his domestic or international works.

When we left the Pendleton building two hours later and walked to the car, the families were still sitting out on the stoop but the children had used up all their bubble water. We were surprised to discover Reading Road at the next corner and followed it for a leisurely 45 minutes all the way out to our normal driving area.

Gazpacho and More in Cincinnati

I first wrote about gazpacho, the quintessential cold Spanish summer soup, in my earlier blog, Sundays in Spain. The first post, from 2009, was titled Gazpacho! and recounted how I learned that you never order gazpacho in Spain except in the summer time. The second, from 2011, had the same title, with slightly different punctuation: ¡Gazpacho!  I had obviously acquired a Spanish keyboard in the intervening years, and I could add the upside-down exclamation mark at the beginning of the title.

I was mortified that I had actually published two posts with the same title in one blog. Now I have searched back through Sundays in Spain to find references to those two posts so that I could link them in the paragraph above. Two interesting facts manifested themselves. First, the Google search engine on the Sundays in Spain blog was not able to find the 2011 ¡Gazpacho! post--probably because of the punctuation, and--with a new U.S.-style keyboard--I am unable to make the upside down exclamation mark. Since I was unable to find that post by searching for it, I decided to browse through all the posts that I had labeled "food" in that blog. The second interesting fact is that I wrote an awful lot about food during the six years I wrote that blog in Spain. Sixty-five posts to be exact! You might wonder whether I did anything else other than eat and drink and write about it!

Here I am now, in Cincinnati, in the middle of Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial beginning of the summer season, and I am thinking and writing about gazpacho again. I have already had my first gazpacho of the season this year. That's because I have begun preparations for a special afternoon of tapas for a group of people from St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, to be held in two weeks. After much thought and discussion we have selected the menu, depending primarily on my memory and a cookbook called Classic Tapas: Authentic Spanish Recipes, translated into English (and other languages in other editions) but including the Spanish names and pictures.

Having selected various tapas, however, I had to learn how to make them. After all, as my trip through the 65 Sundays in Spain blogposts on food revealed, I had done a lot better at enjoying eating tapas than in preparing them myself. Among other things, we are having Spanish tortilla, paella, albóndigas (meatballs), and, of course, gazpacho. All things that are typical and that I have enjoyed often, but none of which I had ever actually prepared before. Tortilla and gazpacho are ready-made staples in most Spanish grocery stores, and that's exactly the method of preparation I had always used when serving them in my home. I never made albóndigas at home because they are almost always available as a tapa at a bar, and eating a tapas-sized portion is so much better for you than cooking a family-sized recipe for two people. Nor did I make paella at home the Spanish way (in a topless paella pan), because it was so much easier to have it out at a restaurant, prepared by experts, and also because I was sure, from many years of cooking, that you had to cook rice in a covered pan.

So it has been an adventure to find the recipes, locate the equivalent ingredients, and experiment making the various dishes for our tapas. In the last few weeks we have had a feast of Spanish evening meals and I have perfected my techniques for the upcoming afternoon of tapas. I even am comfortable now in cooking paella in a pan without a cover (my un-used paella pan being one of the few cooking utensils I brought back with me. We are holding a respite from eating Spanish for the next week or ten days, but I will then swing into full gear to prepare for the party. I might read through some of those 65 food posts from Sundays in Spain in the meantime, however, for vicarious enjoyment and inspiration. But I will not allow myself to change the menu!

Inspiration

I went to two OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, sponsored by the University of Cincinnati) sessions this week and left both uplifted in knowledge and spirits.

Thursday a woman by the name of Tambura Omoiele spoke about "Blacks in the Holocaust: The Rhineland Bastards." I was not the only person in the audience who, having read the description lightly and long ago, came to the class thinking we were going to hear about the children of black American soldiers who had gotten involved with German women. We did not. And when I did read the class description, I discovered that I was a little too late to read the recommended (advanced) reading: Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany, by Hans J. Massaquoi.

Few people know that between 400 and 600 black German children were castrated, sterilized and/or sent to concentration camps during the Hitler years. They had lived in Germany since the migration of many Liberians to the Rhineland in the early 20th century. Hans Massaquoi was born in Germany in 1926 of a marriage between the Liberian consul and a German mother; somehow he managed to escape the fate dealt to many of the black children. After WW II he left Germany and came to the United States, where he served in the army, married and had children, made his living as a journalist, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and became managing editor of Ebony magazine. His book on his life in Germany was published by Morrow in 1999 and is still in print.

Tambura Omoiele is on a mission to inform people about the forgotten black people in major world events. I certainly did not know that black German citizens were among the 11 million people who died in the Holocaust. Now I do. Tambura mentioned in passing that a black couple had also been on the Titanic, but we never knew that, did we? Maybe that will be her next speech. At any rate, her telling of this event of WW II history was passionate and profound.

The next day I drove to another OLLI location to hear Jonathan T. Reynolds speak for three hours about "Every Bite a Taste of History: Food in History." Not only did Professor Reynolds, a specialist in West African history and Islam and currently on sabbatical from Northern Kentucky University, impart many facts about food in history, he treated his audience to a history of the teaching of history since the years that many of us had studied it in high school and college. Dr. Reynolds theorizes that one can teach the history of the world using a cookbook as a text. He hasn't gotten approval for that yet, but if he ever does, I'd like to take that course! And when he finishes his current textbook (his sabbatical project), World in Motion: A Dynamic History of Humankind, I may give that a shot, too.

Again this one-shot lecture was given with passion, and it taught me things about historiography and the origins of foodstuffs that were brand new to me. He inspired me.

Book Binge

Half Price Books, a store that I have sold to and bought from liberally over the years, had announced a clearance sale at Wright State University in Dayton this weekend. The last thing I need is more books, but I was intrigued by a reason to go to Wright State University, a college that I think did not exist during the years I was growing up just 40 miles to the north, and which now has actor Tom Hanks as a long-term supporter and co-chair of a major fund-raising program for the university, according to the ads I see during the news on my television most mornings.

So off we went to Wright State on Saturday morning. I did not expect to run into Tom Hanks, but I did think I might find a few books, and how could I go wrong when nothing would cost more than two dollars?

It took only 40 minutes to find our way up I-75 and I-675 to the Nutter Center, where the sale was. Once inside this sports arena, there were tons of books, all on 30 or more tables, each marked by subject: Fiction, Children, Young Adult, History, Cookbooks, Home and Garden,  DVDs, and more. I have to admit that I went crazy at the cookbook tables. I was probably inspired by the Food History lecture I had listened to on Friday, as well as by my preparations for both a Danish smørrebrød and a Spanish tapas dinner next month. I didn't find any cookbooks to complicate my already-planned menus, but I did see a few to feed my addiction to "company cookbooks" sponsored by the big food brands. Here's a selection of what I spent two dollars apiece on:

• The Heinz Tomato Ketchup Cookbook (complete with a little Heinz history).
• Betty Crocker Ultimate Bisquick Cookbook (a heavy volume of over 400 pages with, surprisingly, a handy metric conversion guide on the back page).
• Great American Favorite Brand Name Cookbook, Collector's Edition. This 600-page giant has recipes for brands that I may never buy, but the recipe is not the thing--it's the indication that those brands probably created their own cookbooks that I can be on the lookout for in the future.
• The Garlic Lovers' Cookbook, volume II, from Gilroy, California, the Garlic Capital of the World.
• Flavoring with Olive Oil, a small volume with nice pictures. I can't imagine how I can use more olive oil than I already do, but maybe...
• Cooking in Style the Costco Way and A Decade of Cooking the Costco Way. Who knows whether any of the Costco products in these books from 2006 and 2011 are still in Costco's inventory, or if I would want to buy them, but I love company histories!
• The Food and Cooking of Malaysia & Singapore. I rejected purchasing this big book--or one very similar to it--when we were in Malaysia and Singapore two years ago, because it was too heavy to carry back. Now it was not.
• La Cocina Cubana Sencilla / Simple Cuban Cooking. Even though I have not yet gotten to Cuba, I can start looking forward to it.
• Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, by Mark Pendergast. Definitely in line with the food and world history theme I had experienced the day before. And besides that, I like coffee.

We never got to the main campus of Wright State. By the time we emerged from the book sale we were dying for coffee, and in the words of one of us: "There were two long tables marked Coffee Table but no coffee anywhere to be seen!" We escaped and made straight for coffee. The rest of Wright State will have to wait until another day.

Sharing Shopping

This week I did something that I have wanted to do for more than twenty years: I shared a purchase at Costco with my sister.

I first visited Costco back when we lived in Connecticut, so by my calculation, that must have been in the early 1990s. It was a huge, barn-like store there, in Danbury, I believe (we lived in Woodbury), befitting its description in the history section of the current Costco website as "a warehouse store." Back then Costco only allowed small businesses to become members, and I was running my own small business as an information professional. So I was able to purchase a membership--I think it cost $40--and go shopping for all sorts of products useful for some businesses: food, cleaning supplies, office products like file folders and--this shows how long ago it was--fax paper, and computer supplies like floppy disks and software packages.

Although I was running a business, I was a sole proprietor and sole employee, so I wasn't too interested in--or trustful of--the software sold at Costco. I was interested in the food. And in that category, everything was in quantity. In gross quantities, actually. No way could I ever made use of the savings by buying chicken breasts in quantity or the huge slabs of beef or pork for roasts--even then our two-person household ate comparatively small amounts of meat over the course of a year. We had no place in our two-bedroom condo to store the 30 rolls of toilet paper and paper towels that you had to practically crawl onto the shelves to pull down anyway. Most importantly, I did not have anyone to go shopping and to share the big packages with. All my family lived 1000 miles to the west; since I worked from home I didn't have work colleagues that I saw every day; my professional association colleagues were all in southern Fairfield County, more than an hour south of where we lived; and we had just recently moved to Connecticut, so I didn't know many people anyway. So the things that I bought at Costco were few and far between. I don't remember deciding to stop going there, but I don't remember renewing my membership, either.

Now we are in Cincinnati, within short driving distances of three sisters. The Costco store is closer to my house than to the houses of any of my sisters, but I had not yet darkened its doors--except to buy a membership  for the next closest-to-Costco sister last Christmas. You no longer have to be a business to be a member of Costco; indeed, now there is a bewildering slate of membership options available for the general public, and it really makes no sense for a very small sole proprietorship to purchase a business membership. For one reason or another my sister had not used her gift card yet, so we celebrated May Day by making a joint excursion to activate her membership,

Much has changed in the last two decades. In this Costco, anyway, there is not even a pretense of a B2B focus. It's all about consumer items, and the inside of Costco now looks like any of the other big box behemoths in suburban commercial areas. Pallet stacking has given way to standing freezer and refrigerator cases and regular big bins. Food--much of it prepared meals--takes up the most space, but there are whole sections demonstrating that Costco wants to be your pharmacy, your travel agent, your home renovation provider, and your auto membership club, too.

My sister, who does major-league cooking for various church groups,  and I had a great time making our way through the aisles, accepting food samples and scouting out items that we both would like and might be able to split to "have on hand" for those times when we don't feel like really cooking. I was ecstatic to find fresh panko-breaded tilapia filets that need baking only for 18-20 minutes--they sounded like a possibility for one of the sandwiches in a Danish smørrebrød dinner for twelve that I am preparing for in June. This sister was not interested in fish, but we did fall for a package of 20 spinach-potato patties, frozen, that only needed heating in the oven.

Having made our first surveillance trip, we made our few purchases and drove back to our house. I got half the spinach-potato patties, individually wrapped, and stuffed them and a hand-written copy of the oven instructions in a freezer bag. For dinner that night Johannes and I enjoyed the baked tilapia (it is going to be perfect for that Danish stjerneskyd sandwich) with a potato patty and more vegetables. It was a treat. But the best treat is that I now live close enough to my sisters to be able to share the booty from occasional shopping trips  to the warehouse stores.