1. Tonight, I would be hosting family dinner. Ed had called me yesterday and we agreed to go to the CdA Casino, so I wanted to get my food preparations going Saturday night and first thing this morning. Saturday night, I took out two quarts of ham stock I'd made in August and two ham hocks out of the freezer. When I got up about 6:30 this morning, they were thawed, so I dumped the stock and the ham hocks into the crock pot and put the setting on low. I went to Yoke's and bought salad ingredients, white beans, pinto beans, and some onions, returned home, chopped the onions and some celery, cooked them and put them in the crock pot. Now the the base of the soup would be ready when I returned from being out with Ed.
2. Ed and I stayed at the casino for a couple of hours. I dropped him off at his house around 1:00 and stopped at The Goose n The Tree and bought a loaf of white bread for dinner. I returned home and checked to see if the ham hocks were done cooking. They were. I fished them out of the soup, took the meat and quite a bit of the fat off the bones, put the meat back in the soup, and dumped in four cans of beans. I let the soup cook on low for a couple more hours, lowered the temperature to the "warm" setting, put a small amount of brown sugar in the soup, and it was ready.
I had decided at Yoke's that I wanted to make a variety salad. I combined the following ingredients, chopped or sliced: Romaine lettuce, radishes, celery, Granny Smith apples, and strawberries. I had grabbed a container of cherry tomatoes at the store, but they were all wrinkly and tough so I disposed of them rather than put them in the salad. I filled five bowls with the salad and topped each bowl with five Kalamata olives and a half a handful of cashews. I made a salad dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, Champagne vinegar, Kalamata olive brine, salt, pepper, oregano, Italian seasoning, and grated Parmesan cheese. For better or worse, it was an especially lemon-y dressing and I liked it that way (I hope the others did).
3. Around 5:30, Christy, Everett, Carol, and Paul arrived. I mixed them each a gin and tonic and we yakked in the living room for a quite a while. Christy and Everett are facing a plumbing problem. Its solution might require a small bit of remodeling in their kitchen under the sink. Carol reported on her conversation with former KJHS principal Jim Uhlman whom she saw at Wallace's Fall for History Festival. Carol played the role of Emma Pulaski in the Cemetery Comes to Life program at Nine Mile Cemetery and Jim Uhlman approached her with some history questions and, once Carol identified herself, they talked about some of Jim Uhlman's experiences in Kellogg back in about 1966-69.
We had a lively night filled with non-stop conversation about all kinds of Kellogg related topics and family news. I had fixed this dinner with a bit of family history in mind: one of Mom's favorite dinners to fix on certain Sundays once the weather got colder was ham and navy bean soup. I don't bake bread. Mom always did for this dinner. Buying freshly baked bread from the Goose n the Tree was the closest I could come! Mom sometimes fixed cinnamon rolls when she made ham and bean soup. Honestly, I had no answer for that!
I forgot to tell Christy and Carol one thing tonight. I texted it to them later. On Saturday morning, as I made my way to the South Hill to Rockwood Bakery, I took a short side trip down Addison Street, turned off on Courtland, then turned south on Cincinnati and west on Bridgeport so I could drive in front of Grandma Woolum's former house. I passed it, turned right on Standard and drove down the alley behind her former house, and then went by the front of her house once more. I couldn't study her house closely, but, from the street, it looked like the house is being taken care of really well. There have been times in the past when I didn't think that was true, but I was heartened to see that someone, an American flag flying resident of Spokane, seems to be treating the property pretty well. (I hope I'm right.)
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