Friday, December 2, 2016

Three Beautiful Things 12/01/16: Fruit Cake and Christmas Stuff, Christmas Portrait, Blueback Loaf

1. I filled up the loaf pans with fruit cake dough and baked six loaves and, in the meantime, I crawled into the storage closet upstairs under the eaves of the north side of the house and pulled out the crates and boxes of Christmas decorations and lights and put them in Mom's tv room, the staging area for it's beginning to look a little bit like Christmas, 2016.

2. Christy and Everett entrusted me to take their Christmas card picture in their back yard in front of their decorated and colorfully painted shed.  I think at least one of the pictures will work.  Good news.  I felt very rusty -- I haven't taken many pictures since arriving in Kellogg -- and I have little confidence taking posed portraits of any kind. But, with Christy and Everett next door, I knew that if I screwed things up too badly, we could always have a do over -- or several.

3.  It seems like every day in the kitchen here at Mom's is a venture, for me, into unexplored territory. The other day Mom was going through a recipe box, looking for the fruit cake recipe, and she happened upon a 1988 recipe from Aunt Ronnie (RIP) for salmon loaf. Mom yanked it out, handed it to me, and said I could use the jar of blueback that Rosie brought us the other day and make this recipe. I had never cooked a fish loaf before, so I put on yet another pair of big boy pants and crushed a couple of cups of saltine crackers, put them in a mixing bowl, and then dumped in the fish, added milk, melted butter, and a beaten egg, and a little onion and salt.  Luckily, the fruit cake loaf pans were clean, so I packed two of them full of the fish loaf goop and baked them -- and the loaves tasted good. Mom was happy with dinner. I was greatly relieved.

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