1. It had been a while since the Westminster Basementeers jumped on the ZOOM machine, but Bill, Diane, Val, and I talked to each other this morning around 10:00.
As we age, as we face medical challenges, both for ourselves and our animals, that tends to be, for a while, what we talk about. Val has a hand/wrist injury. Diane is recovering handsomely from cancer treatment. Bill has a day surgery coming up. Val's dog has been beset by seizures. I continue to wait for the next kidney call/offer.
I had to leave our conversation early so I could get to the Fitness Center before it closed at noon.
I'm grateful I got to stay long enough to learn about the trip Val has planned to Eastern Europe later this year -- it sounds fascinating and challenging.
2. I almost always start my time at the Fitness Center on the Nu Step machine and today, propelled again by another episode of Tom Petty's old show, Buried Treasure (not Treasures as I have errantly written in the past), I stuck with the Nu Step machine for the entire fifty-five minutes I exercised.
3. We did our best tonight to have a retro dinner as the focus of our Sunday family dinner.
We started with bite-sized celery bits, some stuffed with whipped cream cheese, others with cheese that sprays out of a can like whipped cream.
I used the tall narrow highball glasses Cas lent me and fixed everyone a 7 & 7 garnished with a (not so retro) Luxardo Maraschino Cherry.
Carol brought wedges of iceberg lettuce dressed with bacon, cherry tomatoes, green onions, and bleu cheese dressing -- this was our retro salad.
For our main course, we enjoyed pot pies. We fudged on our entree a little bit. Truly retro pot pies, at least this was true in our family's household, would have been made Swanson's pies or Banquet. We, however, enjoyed Marie Callender pot pies -- Christy enjoyed a beef pie and rest of us loved our chicken pies.
Our table wine: Carlo Rossi Burgundy served from a carafe and a bottle of Rose -- I wanted to serve Lancer's, a favorite of Dad's, but not available at Yoke's.
Christy has many fond memories of a dessert Mom used to make called Lemon Fluff. She made individual servings of lemon fluff in small aluminum pie containers lined with (I think) a graham cracker crust. Mom used crushed vanilla wafers, as I understood it from tonight's conversation about this dessert. I thought the graham cracker crust worked great.
Since our dinner was a nostalgic one, so was much of our conversation. Christy shared vivid memories of Mom making lemon fluff, of it being her dessert when she and Dad participated in the Camp Fire Girls' Father/Daughter Banquet. She also discussed her ongoing detective work trying to determine where the recipe originated. We reminisced about the Rena Theater in Kellogg. Somehow, we even had a brief discussion of Glasgow, MT! Is it the USA's most remote town? I'm not sure that question really got settled.
As our dinner party broke up, we went our separate ways with Kentucky on our minds.
As the host for next week's family dinner, Christy will assign us Kentucky dishes to prepare -- it is, after all, Kentucky Derby weekend!
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