CHOCOLATE CAKE DAY

Oh yes, today was Chocolate Cake Day or, that is, yesterday was, or I am still on Wednesday time; but the computer knows it is Thursday and so everything gets all confused when I talk about days. Anyway, Wednesday, January 27, was Chocolate Cake Day. And I celebrated with brownies. Well, it made good sense to me.


I didn't set out to eat chocolate cake (or brownies) today. I started out with very good intentions. About 11 in the morning, I ate a very good breakfast with lots of protein, too much fat, and  good carbohydrates. I know that sounds late; but when I woke, I came to the computer and spent entirely too much time here and realized that the morning was over too late for a real breakfast.


Anyway, my plans were to go to the fitness center about two or three and stay for an hour, then come home and get some things done. Because I planned to take my neighbor to the clinic to pick up her medication  and be back home in time to go, I put on jeans and a sweat shirt over my swim suit to facilitate the whole thing. And off we went to accomplish it all this afternoon.




Thus, we arrived at Viola Pitts clinic about1:30 and from there everything went downhill. I have no idea just what all went on down in the pharmacy. All I know is that my friend came back to where I was sitting around 3:30, totally disgusted and promising to write the hospital board  about the situation in the pharmacy. By the time I drove her home, it was four in the afternoon and I gave up the trip to the center. A class takes over the water at 5:15 and I didn't want to fight the crowded time or the crowded pool.


That means that I did not get in my afternoon exercise, did not earn my 350 calorie extension, and didn't follow up on my plans. Instead, I made brownies in order to celebrate Chocolate Cake Day and to give my friend something to compensate for her terrible afternoon. It's OK: I knew that neither of us would eat more than two brownies today. Dieters have to indulge once in a great while. My problem? I indulge altogether too often.


Therefore, I took down a box of Ghiradelli Dark Chocolate Brownie mix and proceeded to mix brownies. But when I use a mix, I never leave it alone. Tonight, I INDULGED with capital letters. I added a cup of pecan pieces. I love pecans with chocolate. I added cappuccino chips and dark chocolate chips and white chocolate chips and even some Heath bar chips. I think that I doubled the amount of the batter in adding all of that. But the result was oh, so good.


I baked those brownies in one of the silicone all edges pans, that is, a pan with dividers, so that every brownie was two inches wide and had an outside edge on two sides. Of course, these brownies needed almost twice as long to cook because they were so packed with goodies; but who cares? When they were finally cool and I removed them from the pan, they were crunchy on the edges and moist and fudgy inside, filled with bits of melted chocolate and crunchy nut and candy bits. Delicious. But even before that, while they were entirely too hot to remove from the pan, I cut out a two inch wide piece about 1/2  an inch in depth (not a 2" X 2" piece) and tried it. Oh ... we all know there is nothing quite as good as hot, thick, runny chocolate. And it was good.


Then, I had to wait so that I could cut them correctly and take them over to my neighbor. You are right. I had to leave the room while they were warm and smelling so of some chocolate Heaven. They are right now sitting on the cabinet calling to me with all of their dark brown chocolaty goodness. And I am resisting with everything I have. In the first place, because I didn't get to the water and earn my 350 extra calories, I went over my chosen calorie count for the day, 200 calories over! Even though those 2"X 2" brownies have a calorie count of 110 calories, the way I made them at least doubled that! Made by the box directions, they are an innocent indulgence; the way I make them is anything but innocent. It is pure INDULGENCE. And I love it.

FOOD, AGAIN!

The other night I wrote that I love good food.  I should have said as a dear friend said about herself, I didn't get this fat on junk food. These pounds are good food pounds. And now I am taking these pounds off with good food. That is so much more difficult. But to do this I have enlisted the help of two web sites: Livestrong.com/thedailyplate/  and Realage.com. These two sites have given me what I needed to lose my good food weight.


For a long time, I had known that something other than just food was involved in my weight gain. Finally, I found the answer only AFTER I began to lose. You see, after my husband, who had been so very ill, died and after I had moved back to Fort Worth and settled in, I found that I was losing weight for no particular reason. I was just losing weight. And my blood pressure which had spiked the winter of 1980 (when I taught one particular class) returned to normal, actually low normal. Something was going on.


And then I saw an advertisement for some miracle pill that was going to help everyone lose weight. I was not as interested in the pill as I was in their comment that stress causes women to produce more cortisol (a hormone produced by the adrenal gland) and that cortisol caused women to add fat around the middle and to gain weight rapidly. Well, I thought if stress causes cortisol that causes weight gain, then a lack of stress must act in reverse. I knew that I wasn't eating enough to gain weight before and that I wasn't eating enough now to retain the fat I had. Finally, something was going on. For the first time in many, many years, what I was eating was allowing me to lose weight.


I knew that probably wouldn't last forever because the body sometimes thinks it is going to starve, particularly those of us with bodies with a Northern European heritage. My ancestors lived in an area where food was extremely scarce throughout the winter months and my inheritance from them is a body which, if it thinks it isn't going to be fed, holds on to every ounce of fat that it can. And so I had to do more than depend on lack of stress to lose the rest of the weight.


I'm not sure how I found it, but I did find the My Plate website, which is a part of  Lance Armstrong's Livestrong.com website. His site is a source of all kinds of health and fitness information and is a place where everyone can find whatever they need that has to do with these two topics. At the My Plate site, a person wanting to lose, gain, or stay at their weight can find all of the tools he might want or need. 


First of all, he can go in and set up a daily calorie goal that suits his individual situation. For example, I  put in my height, weight,  activity level, and desired goal. The site quickly determined the number of calories I should consume each day and sent me to a MYPLATE page all my own where I entered whatever food I had eaten. 




There I found a box into which I typed the each food I had eaten. From there, I went to a page where I could narrow down that food in exact terms, including brand names and restaurant names. When I prepared my own food, I entered the recipe and the site treated it as any other food, coming up with the calories, the grams of fat, carbohydrate, protein, fiber, salt, cholesterol, almost anything anyone might want to count. That information was then entered on a chart on my myplate page; and I was on my way.


As I charted each food, the page told me how many more calories I could eat that day; and if I didn't plan ahead, I did have a warning ahead of time about what I could eat yet during the day. After I had been charting my food for a week or so, a list was added to the page that contained those foods I seemed to list the most, so that rather than typing in the same food every day, I only had to click on the food in the list and it was entered into my chart. At the end of each day, I had the totals of all I had eaten that day as well as the totals for the last seven days.


But that is not all. I could also chart all of the activities during that day that were above my usual day's work. For example, I listed my activity level as sedentary, meaning that although I do get up and walk around, mostly I sit and read or type, or watch TV. That means that whenever I have done something else, I entered that as an activity. The site calculated the calories burned during 30 minutes of that particular activity, prorated it to the number of minutes I did the activity, and subtracted that number of calories from the total number of calories I had eaten that day. 


For me, that means that if I go to the Fitness Center and work or if I  do laundry or iron or vacuum or clean the kitchen, the number of calories burned in those activities is virtually added to the number of calories I can have that day. That's good! And so after every meal, I come to the computer and enter the food I have eaten. By now, most of the things I regularly eat are on my list and it goes fast. If I do eat something new and it does not have a listing, I can add it to the list. If it is some product I have here at home, I add it from the back of the package. If I eat out, which I seldom do, most of the time, that restaurant's foods are listed; and if not, there are several things I can do. I can go to the restaurant's website and add the foods from there. I have found very few foods that do not have nutritional facts listed somewhere. All of those daily charts are kept on site on a page called Food Diary. I can go back and check what I ate a year ago or last week if I wonder why the scale doesn't read the way I wish it did.


And so, for all those who have asked, this is how I am continuing to lose weight: I write down everything. I always knew that was important; but before, writing down the food did little unless I knew what was in it. Now, all of us have a resource which knows it all and I gladly use it every day. Come on in and join me.

WATER WOMAN

When I first began going to Carter Rehab and Fitness Center (hereafter known as Cater), the therapist with whom I was working said that I really was a "water baby,"  meaning that I seemed to love being in the water. And I do. There is absolutely nothing I have found that brings such a tranquil and peaceful feeling as that I get when I am walking in the water at Carter.


It all began when I went to my primary physician and told her that I had lost all the strength, stamina, flexibility, and balance I had once had. I needed help. She sent me to Carter where I was assigned to the most wonderful therapist in the business, Glenda.  In other words, she was exactly the right one for me. When we first met, she had read my background, knew my situation, that I had Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue, that I was over 70, that my knees were shot, that there is arthritis in all too many joints; and everything she did with me, she determined from what she knew about me.


Not once did I ever hurt, not once was I ever angry or defensive. Nothing she did was anything but the very best way to "handle"  me. And she gave me the weapons with which to fight allowing "old age"  to completely take away all of my ability to move. She gave me stretching exercises which were easy on my poor knees and balancing exercises that I finally mastered after a year. The end of January marks two years that I have been going to Carter and all that, I owe to Glenda. She made everything so enjoyable, so pleasant. How could I not go at every opportunity?

 Now, look at that pool. It is just as beautiful and blue as it looks and the pool is almost always just as uncrowded as it is in the photo.  Everyone is happy and pleasant from the  students who work at the front desk checking in those of us who go to Carter for all sorts of reasons to the household staff who clean the facilities at the end of the day. Everyone cares about the people who go to Carter.  And a lot goes on at Carter. There are therapy rooms and class rooms; a huge, mirrored room where yoga, pilates, floor exercises,  and tai chi classes have plenty of room to work ; there is the pool area where I work; and the big gym that contains all of the machines I have heard about for years and where the personal trainers work with those who want to do that. The dressing areas, the showers, the locker area: everything is so nicely appointed that going to Carter is a real joy ... even before I get into the water!     

I don't think that I could ever have walked into a 24 hour fitness center and just started. I do not look like someone who would go to a fitness center. I am old and overweight, I cannot walk well, cannot climb stairs, would look horrendous in the cute little leotards they wear. But Glenda took me around and showed me every area in the Center and talked about how to become a part of it all, what I could do, and what it would cost. After two months of working with her, I knew that I wanted to go to Carter for the rest of my life and that I could. It was something I could do.


And so ever since that time two years ago when I joined the aquatics program, I have gone to Carter and done those stretches in the warm, comforting water. I have stretched muscles  that won't even move out of the water and used joints that are so stiff and painful I fear having to step up on a curb or walk around Wal*Mart. I step down into the warm pool and begin to work. The two or three women, who are usually there at the same time, and I briefly exchange the pleasantries and I begin to stretch those muscles and prepare to walk. And that is the way it is: pleasant, comfortable, non-threatening, doable.


The primary focus of my being at Carter is all about teaching my legs to walk. Oh, I could walk before, but I hurt and I could walk a short distance and call it over; since about four months after I began at Carter, I can walk far longer and in much less pain. I walk in the warm 88 degree water that is chest high. That is the optimum depth for getting the very best use of my time there. 


Good posture, head up, shoulders back, slowly and gracefully, I walk the first lane of the pool, up and down each lane for about 30 laps. I can walk 30 laps in 45 minutes if I do not stop and talk or slow down, but stick to it. 53 laps makes a mile and thus you can see that I am walking more slowly in the water than I would be on a track.  That chest high water really provides resistance, much more resistance than air. It is sometimes hard to just keep pushing through the water. Water walking is a great easy, effective, low-impact exercise that anyone can do, no matter their physical fitness level; and depending on just how fast you walk, it burns about 500 calories an hour.

As you look at the photographs of Carter, I hope you can see the reason I so enjoy going there and how wonderful the afternoons are there in the warm water.


                    

GOLDEN PULL- APART DINNER ROLLS

 

14 3/4 ounces King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour

2 teaspoons instant yeast

2 Tblsp  potato flour or instant potato flakes

3 Tblsp Baker's Special Dry Milk or nonfat dry milk

2 Tblsp sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

4 Tbsp soft butter

2/3 cup lukewarm water

½ cup lukewarm milk

1 ounce melted butter

Combine all of the dough ingredients in a large bowl, and mix and knead — using your hands, a stand mixer, or a bread machine set on the dough cycle — to make a soft, smooth dough.

Place the dough in a lightly greased container — an 8-cup measure works well here — and allow the dough to rise for 60 to 90 minutes, until it's just about doubled in bulk.

Gently deflate the dough, and transfer it to a lightly greased work surface.

Divide the dough into 16 equal pieces, by dividing in half, then in halves again, etc. Round each piece into a smooth ball.

Lightly grease two 8" round cake pans.

Space 8 buns in each pan.

Cover the pans, and allow the buns to rise till they're crowded against one another and quite puffy, about 60 to 90 minutes.

Towards the end of the rising time, preheat the oven to 350°F.

Uncover the buns, and bake them for 22 to 24 minutes, until they're golden brown on top and the edges of the center bun spring back lightly when you touch it.

An instant-read thermometer inserted into the middle of the center bun should register at least 190°F.

Remove the buns from the oven, and brush with the melted butter.

After a couple of minutes, turn them out of the pan onto a cooling rack.

Serve warm.

Store leftovers well-wrapped, at room temperature.

Yield: 16 buns.

FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD

I love good food. I love to cook. I love to cook simple home made good food and feed people at my table. I love to bake and roast and saute. I don't care much for cleaning the big K, but I do love to cook. And so in addition to the recipes I sometimes blog about ... or as a former English teacher, should I write, "about which I sometimes blog," I also think that I shall write about my real enjoyment of food that is not only good, but good for us.

Since 1971, I have dabbled in healthy foods. Now, I had always eaten more correctly than that with which the American and especially the Texan diet is credited. My mother brought me up on the small protein/ one carb/ green veggies meal plan; and when I married, I took that plan with me. I didn’t know that one was expected to have a stack of bread at the table with the meal and so I didn’t put one out. And that was the way our meals began: my very first meal I cooked that Sunday after we were married consisted of a small broiled steak, a baked potato, and a large salad of lettuce, onion, bell pepper, cucumber, tomatoes, you know … the works. No bread. And that is the way we ate most of the time.

Of course, when we had an “occasion,” we had fresh bread, something special; and that was my doom. I loved fresh bread and soon began to bake, having first begun baking fresh breads when I was 12 years old. That was my summer home making project: baking homemade yeast bread. And it was good. And, of course, when the holiday season, Christmas, came around, I baked a fruitcake… that first year. And it was good also. Friends came to eat with us, students came in to eat with us, family came to eat. We enjoyed the delights of food. Too much so, it seems. But there was always fresh fruit and green vegetables in the house and we did eat those. 

As years went on, food became a subject of the news and health and foods were seen as related; and we ate better and better. And it cost more and more. Remember that first piece of steak I cooked? I remember that I bought those from the very best source in town, Pip’s to be exact, and I bought two for about 80 cents! Those were the days. Now, truth is that we didn’t eat chicken or fish or pork at my house as my dear husband didn’t like them; but we didn’t have beef every night either. Frequently, we had all veggies for dinner: fresh corn as the carb and lots of salad vegetables to accompany it, or a baked potato or a pasta or even home made bread and always the big tossed salads with a little of everything tossed in there or the big vegetable platter of raw veggies.

Now, that I am alone and cook mostly for myself only, I do eat chicken and fish; but oh my, the price of fish is horrendous. How can anyone expect retired persons to eat fish 3 or 4 times a week? I try to eat fish or seafood only once or twice a month as it is far more expensive than other things. Of course, I lightly sauté my fish very quickly and that means that I have to have good fish. Were I frying it or dousing it in butter, a la Julia Child (did you see that fish in all that butter in the movie?), it could be almost anything. But when I try to buy fish that is high in Omega 3’s, then we are talking $10 a pound. Thank goodness, 3 cooked ounces is a portion. That means I could eat three times for that $10 were the fish not so delicious. So often, I simply give in and eat half a pound and love every bite. 


Yes, this is just the first of several comments about food and health and you may expect more to accompany the recipes that have been and will be. In memory of Julia, bon appetite.

SLEEP

"Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care/ ... sore labour's bath/Balm of hurt minds "

Ah yes, sleep is such a good thing. Researchers have long proved that Shakespeare was quite correct when he wrote that sleep heals the wounds of the day, smooths over the mind's hurts, rebuilds the used muscles, restores the body in every way. They have gone on to find that those who do not sleep well have more pain, more weaknesses, less mental alertness. Sad, isn't it... And yet, that is the state in which I find myself all too often.

You see, at bedtime, I am wide awake. It doesn't matter what I have done during the day. At everyone's usual bedtime, I am wide awake; and if I do go to bed at 10 or 11, or midnight, I do not go to sleep as do most people. Rather, I lie there wide awake and think of everything I have done that day, everything I might do the next day, and everything I want to do for the next year. I have spent hours at night replaying things I had done during the day whether that was weaving a lamp shade or teaching grammatical constructions. I have held long, involved conversations with people I might encounter the next day. I have replayed conversations from the past day. Everything except sleep.

Oh, I finally sleep after a night or two of this, but that sleep never has seemed to help. My 'ravelled sleeve' of care simply was never 'knit up;' my tired muscles never were restored. I would wake in the mornings as tired as I had been the night before. Mornings were terrible for me. I felt like Garfield without his coffee. And then, I read that those with Fibromyalgia had the problem of non-restorative sleep and I immediately identified that as my problem. I could sleep and sleep (as I so often did on weekends trying to 'catch up' ) and still feel as if I needed to sleep even more. Sleep was not restoring that which had been used up in living and I did not know what to do about it.

For years, I tried everything: valerian, melatonin, herbs of every kind; trytophan, Benadryl; everything anyone thought might help. At one time I resorted to Valium for a short while, another time to Xanax. Finally, my doctor gave me Soma to help the hurting muscles relax at night and I could sleep with that; but still it wasn't the answer. After I retired and it was no longer so important to be wide awake in the morning, I gave up and sat up at night to watch TV and drift when possible, finally sleeping at daylight.

Five years ago, I went to see a sleep specialist who listened to my sad story, told me that most people with Fibro had that same problem, but that he, perhaps, had a solution. He sent me for a sleep study. It was a very good situation: the room was very nice; the bed, quite comfortable; even the electrodes didn't bother me at all. I went to sleep, but I slept the same way I did most nights, waking over and over, suddenly aware of the fact that I was not sleeping. The next morning, the technicians told me that I had actually been awake 80% of the time. And so now we knew. Apparently, much of my 'intractable insomnia' (the diagnosis) is because of Alpha Wave Intrusion which means that as soon as I go to sleep and the brain waves begin to take me down into Delta sleep, those Alpha waves pop up and I am again awake.

All I know is that I simply do not grow sleepy until about 5 in the morning. And so the sleep specialist prescribed a new medication that works, a very expensive medication derived from a herbal remedy once found in every health food store, now a controlled substance. (If I had only known about it when it was inexpensive and sold openly.) I take it and within ten minutes, I am sleeping soundly. I sleep for four hours and wake again. I take the second dose and sleep another four hours. But sometimes, after that second four hours, I still want to sleep on and on and occasionally I sleep another four hours. I hate that.

To do the right thing, the smart thing, the thing that will make me seem 'normal,' I need to stop whatever I am doing at 11 or 12 PM and while I am working well, so often feeling better than I have felt all day, take the prescription and 'knock myself out.' That bothers me also. I hate to do that. So often, I do my best work after midnight, writing, cleaning, designing, sewing, embroidering, reading: all things I have done well into the long night hours. And yet, when I do that, I often then find it just as difficult to sleep during the day, not because I cannot, but more often because I feel that I shouldn't be asleep when things are gong on. Everyone is up and busy. Why shouldn't I be doing the same. It is a very confusing way to live.

Tonight, I should have gone to bed long, long ago; and yet, it is now 6 in the morning and I am wide awake and still going. I haven't slept since 9 yesterday morning and I feel fine. This is ridiculous and I have things to do today; but I had things to do last night that I did. Staying up allowed me to accomplish some things that needed to be done. Of course, I cannot do this over and over every day. I can only hope that staying up all night once in a while will not harm me and that my sleeve of care will not become too unraveled before I sleep tonight. And I will sleep tonight. I will stop whatever I am doing at midnight and take that wonderful medication and sleep. Perhaps, I should do that every night and sleep like most people do.

HOW TEACHERS TEACH

I think that most teachers start out teaching the way they have been taught, developing their teaching methods by imitation of things they liked or saw as successful. A high school math teacher whose algebra II teacher began every class with a fast test over essential basics is very likely to start each of his own classes the very same way. And the English IV teacher whose favorite English teacher began each literature discussion with a quick test over the details of the assigned literature will do the same.

It's how we learn to teach. And it isn't always the best way to accomplish our one desire: to have students who understand and appreciate the matter we have set before them. It wasn't until about ten years before I retired that I really learned how to teach most of what I taught.

First, I finally realized that student's learning the smallest precise details of the plot of a piece of literature was not the important thing, but rather, learning how to read that piece of literature and understand the ideas in it, so that they might enjoy it and possibly become what we have always said we wanted to encourage: life long readers. To that end, I learned to begin a novel or a play much more slowly than "teaching guides" seemed to direct.

Taking time at the beginning of a novel to show students how to see those things they had been shown in short stories such as the beginnings of character development, the background of what would develop into the plot, foreshadowing, all the things we had labored with before, really made a big difference as they read further into the book. If they could see the beginnings of conflict, they could then follow that and see the development of the plot, be seduced into the rising action, be caught off guard by red herrings and blind leads, and enjoy the working out of the story.

That entire focus would be more on learning to make inferences, the one reading goal so many cannot pass on the standardized reading comprehension tests and the primary problem behind the fact that so many high school students cannot "catch" the humor found in comic strips. Good readers who have read everything set before them forever unconsciously infer from their reading all of the time and never give it a thought. But those whose reading experience has mostly been assigned have not learned to think past what is said to what is meant.

I had never thought about the fact that my students, reading a passage in a story, did not have any idea just what that passage was telling them about what was happening or what was about to happen. And so, I learned, far too late, to begin teaching inference very early, with those comics, showing students a strip and asking, "What happened just before this?" or "What is this character going to say/do next?" This way, they became aware of something they had never thought of: the significance of small details, details not to be memorized, but to be understood.

In this way, teaching how to read lengthy literature such as a novel or a play became one of the five or six major objectives I wanted my students to master before they left my ninth grade class. Inference was the primary part of that objective and one I have never found emphasized in any book or guide or class. Yes, it had been mentioned that students were unable to do this, at least on those reading comprehension tests, but I had never seen or heard anything about how to teach students to infer from their reading. That was how I discovered that when they were able to draw inferences, then their understanding of character, the importance of the setting and background, and the conflict and rising action seemed to be much easier. I have no idea why I had not seen that forty years before I did.

There is so much more that I learned in those last ten years of teaching, truly something new every year once my eyes were opened to the fact that what I had always done and what I had seen others do might not be the very best of methods. Those I will save for another time. Right now, I wonder whether my writing a book for beginning teachers would have any meaning or use whatsoever. If so, perhaps, I have found the beginnings of one in what I learned from my students in those last few years.

BAKING AGAIN

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, when I was young and newly wedded and living and teaching in a town far, far from here, someone, and I am so sorry that I do not remember who, gave me a sourdough starter ... and a recipe for sourdough biscuit. Oh my, the result of that was several years of baking what I remember as soft, fluffy hot rolls that smelled so very good when baking.

Because the process of using a starter is more time consuming than complicated, I baked them more often at some time in the middle of the night than any time during the day. That meant they were frequently a breakfast treat; but just as often, they went to school with me and someone other than just family ate them. I can remember taking them to my first period senior English class or sharing them with other teachers who had come to school without breakfast or anything else. (I don't remember who was more hungry, students or teachers.)

Other times, I baked sourdough breads in the middle of the night and I can remember the smell of baking bread in the dark and the sound of the alarm so that I didn't burn the bread. Who else would bake in the middle of the night? But I did. That was the time when it was easy, it was convenient, and there was plenty of time to get it done. Just remembering the smell of that baked bread makes me hungry even tonight.

And for that reason alone, when I saw sourdough starter for sale in the King Arthur baking catalog, I couldn't ignore it. I bought it. Now, I had never taken a dry starter and gone through the process of turning it into the bubbling, sour concoction with which one bakes bread. I certainly didn't know what I was getting myself into when I started one Saturday afternoon before Christmas or possibly I would have waited a month or so. But I read and followed the directions, adding a half cup water here and a cup of flour there for several steps until I had a sourdough starter crock filled with something very close to flour and water paste ... except this paste had a most distinctive odor.

I don't remember just how long that took, but it was mix and let it sit for four hours and then add flour and water and let it sit for another four hours; and add more water and flour and wait for twelve hours; and then do it all again. Oh, perhaps, it wasn't that much; but it was several repetitions of the same several steps several times! And finally, I had that bubbling starter I so remembered.

Now, to make bread. I had several recipes and not one was the one I had used so many years ago; and I really wanted that same wonderful bread I remembered with such fondness. The first batch of sourdough rolls (as the recipe called them) was not bad for biscuit. Fresh from the oven they were delicious. Thirty minutes later, they needed help. They were neither soft nor fluffy. Some I split and called toasted biscuit; some I shared with my unsuspecting neighbor; some, the last dozen or so, were so hard, I tossed.

Back to the Internet and more recipes; but there was no way to determine which would be the ones I wanted. Should I try one with added yeast or not? one with milk or one with water? Finally, I chose a recipe that, although not what I remembered, sounded as if it might be very good for it contained beaten egg and melted butter, the starter, flour, salt, and a little yeast. The dough was soft and yielding; it felt good in my hands, ready to be bread. The recipe said it would make 24 rolls, but there was nothing near that much dough there. I patted it out, too thin it turned out, and cut the rolls quickly with a biscuit cutter, not the usual way to make rolls, but ...

When they came out of the oven, they did smell wonderful; and with butter, they tasted terrific. But they weren't as soft and fluffy as I remembered. What did they need? I should have patted the dough out into a much thicker round; and I should have made the rolls much thicker to begin. 24? I made a dozen and they needed to be much thicker and not so big around. And now, six hours later, they are flat biscuit with nothing fluffy about them.

I shall try that one again, never fear. But when I hunger for soft, fluffy dinner rolls, I have a wonderful recipe for that. It just isn't made with sourdough and that disappoints me. I remember those rolls from the sixties and how wonderful they were. I'll try one or two more times before I give up and go on with the King Arthur Flour Golden Pull Apart Dinner Rolls. Those are delightfully delicious and everything we should not eat. I can be perfectly contented with those. And I suppose that I can use my bubbling starter for paste ... if I had any need for flour paste.

FEMINIST? OR WHAT?

Now, I have never associated myself with the women who refer to themselves as feminists. In fact, so much of what they have said and done I have disagreed with vehemently. But the more that I think about it, the more I realize that in so many ways I am and have been for many, many years a real feminist of my own kind.

In the first place, I am definitely not what most women my age have seen themselves as. I never hated my mother, never broke free from her and tried to forget her, never saw her as any kind of enemy. Funny, but that is almost always the first impression I have gotten from the writings of most feminists and that was never me.

I am a child of the 40's, a teen from the '50's, and my childhood was nearly perfect. Although I always think of my mother as a working mother, she did not work during the years when I was between 5-13. She was an RN and she worked when I was quite young and began to work again when I entered high school. I always saw her as a very successful woman who even during the years when she didn't work was always in demand in our little town for her skills, not only for her nursing skills, but when our church had a visiting minister, she was the hostess. She was the room mother who made the most interesting goodies for us and the Bible teacher who made Scripture come alive in the minds of her students.

Besides that, she was a very good role model for me as she was a very involved woman in town, organizing the first PTA in our school system and serving as its president, organizing the women's group at the church and serving as that president as well as being very active in the Sunday School of the church, teaching teens and organizing the classes for that age.

It seemed that mother could do everything: she sewed, making all of our clothing; she crocheted, she painted china, she baked delicious goodies for everyone; she made handcrafted centerpieces, even making a wonderful abstract Christmas tree for our wall one year. I cannot think of anything that was ever written about in a woman's magazine that she was not quite successful at doing. One year she shaped and painted marzipan fruit and vegetables just to see if she could do it. They were so very lifelike and far better than any I have ever seen done since then.

And yet, uppermost in my mind is the fact that she was a working mother long before that was a common thing. She began working at the local hospital when I was first in high school and two years later, she was a floor supervisor in that hospital. By the time I was in college, she was the nursing supervisor at night for the entire hospital and those who worked with her and for her seemed to admire her as much as I did.

I wanted to be just like her. She was everything I wanted to be: a good wife, a wonderful mother, a great cook, a delightful hostess, an excellent teacher, and such a beautiful person. My husband loved her and all of his friends enjoyed going to her house for coffee and her fruit cake during the holidays. She was a very complete woman who brought me up to know that I would and could be the very same.

There was never any other thought in my mind than that I would attend college and have a profession, this is those days when supposedly, all women were learning that all they needed to do was to get married. You know, that was never a part of my education. My mother taught me from the days when I could first understand that I had to be able to take care of myself, that I did not need to depend on anyone else ever. Seems that I was brought up to be a feminist.

And yet, when feminism became the rage, what those women were saying was NOT what I wanted to say. They did NOT define me. I suppose that I have always been my own woman and I always will be.

FINALLY

I am at long last able to write in my blogspot. For so long, I had not been able to use this, for it was all scrambled and I could not access my "Dashboard." Now, all is well. Some volunteer at Google did something and here I am again.

Now, to make up for all of that lost time, I may be commenting every day. Until later, I am back.