1. This house Debbie and I live in has been in our family for sixty-one years. It's solidly built. This week, it has stayed fairly comfortable for much of the day during this current four day heat wave. I'm grateful this heat wave has been relatively short, that it looks like the days will start to cool down on Friday. I'm also grateful that Debbie and I decided to go all out and have a heating/cooling system installed in our house in the spring of 2022. By the time this week's temperatures went over the 95 degree mark and began to hit 100, the sturdy walls of our house needed help keeping the house's interior cool and the cooling system has worked superbly.
2. I've never been a very talented actor. I know that. I was fortunate, though, when we lived in Eugene, that I was invited to play small roles in a handful of plays and I loved being involved in these productions.
I learned early on that a character, however large or small its role in a play, cannot truly come to life until the actor knows the characters' lines, is off script, and is free to actually act.
Watching a few episodes of Chopped today, I thought how it's much the same thing with cooking. Until I know food and seasonings so well that I don't need a recipe, I won't be truly cooking. I'm not even close to that point right now.
I've been thinking a lot about how cautious I am with seasonings, especially when cooking for family dinner. I'm always concerned that I'll overdo the turmeric or lemon juice or black pepper. I realize that much of my life, growing up here in Kellogg, eating fast food and dining hall food in college, and going out to eat at many restaurants that serve food pitched to the middle of the flavor spectrum, that I am inexperienced with flavors and, when I try to cook with new and different seasonings, have become way too dependent on recipes to dictate the proportions of my seasonings.
Watching the chefs on Chopped, I love how they fire herbs and spices into their dishes without the aid of measuring cups or spoons because they know how these seasonings work, they can anticipate and imagine how their creations will taste, and they know how to balance, say, bitterness and sweetness, heat and coolness, and so on.
I'm not literate in very many cuisines. I should watch/rewatch Chopped episodes with a notebook and pen and, at the very least, write down the names of dishes they prepare. I've never, for example, prepared a ragout at home (or ordered it in restaurant), and, when I start thinking about cooking at home, it's a good example of a dish that never crosses my mind to prepare.
There are countless other dishes like this that the Chopped chefs know, that are ingrained in their mental inventory of cooking possibilities.
I'd like my mental inventory of possible dishes to grow, if possible.
3. Over the last few weeks, different residents of the Silver Valley have been giving Front Porch talks uptown on Wednesday at 6:00. These talks are occurring at the same time that a Smithsonian exhibit, Spark, is on display uptown.
Tonight, Carol and Paul were the Front Porch speakers, but with the temperatures still in the mid-90s when they spoke, I played it safe and did not attend.
Today, though, is also the six year anniversary of the day Mom died.
Christy suggested that we got together somewhere in the Silver Valley after Paul and Carol finished their presentation and have dinner and raise a toast to Mom.
So we did that.
Carol, Christy, Paul, Molly, Brian, and I met at the Broken Wheel for dinner and cocktails and we not only raised a toast to Mom and talked about her, we also tried to sort out some of the details of Dad's life in the Silver Valley and of our Grandma Woolum and her life back in Tennessee, later in the Silver Valley, and, finally in Spokane.
We couldn't remember everything, but we pieced together several things as well as we could.
Carol and Paul had told family history stories during their presentation and, in that spirit, we continued such conversation as a way of paying tribute to Mom's life (and Dad's and Grandma's) six years after she died peacefully here in Kellogg.
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