I provided a potato soup recipe for Jakk’s Magic Beans Life recently. Click over there and have a taste. [If you hurry, you can also get in on Julie's 12 Days of Christmas, Magic Beans-Style giveaway.]

If you have hungry eyes my e-chap of food-related flash fiction, Flash in the Pan, is still available for free.

I think it’s always a good idea to get the family together in the kitchen. Food is a primal need and sharing its preparation may be more important than sharing its consumption. Kids learn to respect the power of hot surfaces, the importance of followng instructions, concepts of measurement and time, and cooperation. And cooking has the built-in incentive of something to eat when you finish.

In my family we have always made spritz cookies around this time of year. We aren’t sure where we first got the recipe; we all have hand-written copies of it now. I’ve seen recipes that use almond extract in addition to or instead of the vanilla. And sometimes they add 1/4 teaspoon baking powder to the flour. The mixing is the most difficult part; the butter has to be slightly softened but if it gets too soft you’ll have a sticky mess. You need a cookies press and kids find that a lot of fun. (Okay. I think it’s fun too.)

Spritz Cookies

Ingredients:
(Makes 6 dozen cookies)

• 1 cup butter
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 3 egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2-1/2 cups flour
• food coloring (optional)

Instructions:

• Set oven at 400°
• Mix butter, sugar, egg yolks, and vanilla
• Mix in flour gradually
• Add food coloring a few drops at a time
• Press onto ungreased baking sheets
• Bake for 7-10 minutes

Keep an eye on the cookies and remove them as soon as the edges start to brown. You may need to lower the oven temp to 375°. I like the cookies to stay soft so I tend to undercook them a little. Actually, one of my favorite things is to skip the baking altogether. Keep the raw dough in the refrigerator and eat a spoonful of that with a cup of hot tea or coffee. Mmmmmhhh. Yes. I know the danger of eating uncooked egg yolks. Some things are worth the risk.

Leap and a net will appear.

Today I leaped [leapt? -- nah...].

I have been in Florida long enough. I moved here for the job. The job has been getting increasingly frustrating and decreasingly fulfilling. It’s no longer enough to keep me here. And my family has wanted me to return to Kentucky ever since I left. So today I turned in my resignation.

Given the current economy you might well think I must be crazy to become voluntarily unemployed. [As if you needed another reason to think I'm crazy.] That’s right, not only have I quit, I don’t yet have another job lined up. And I’ll have to sell my house down here. And… and… and… there is just so much more that I am overwhelmed.

Still, scary as it is, it feels right.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. ~Robert Frost

P.S. For you sticklers [like YOU, you know] I know the quote I used at the top is usually stated, “Leap and the net will appear.” But that totally would have screwed the pun I wanted to use in the title. And my puns are often more important than total accuracy in quotations.

Elizabethtown is about an hour south of Louisville. [We always call it E-town, not that it matters....] The Cameron Crowe movie [supposedly] based there was pretty mediocre in my opinion. I found the errors in geography especially distracting.

[rant]Yeah, I know… movies require suspension of disbelief. I suppose exit 60-B was intended to be a comic device. (And it’s really exit 94 anyway; you can even see that in the film.) But Drew (Orlando Bloom) didn’t miss an exit so much as he drove in the wrong direction! I guess taking a wrong turn out of the airport is not as funny as missing an exit later…. And cute young flight attendants that give out their phone numbers to help with directions? Now that’s southern hospitality! I would say that I clearly fly the wrong airlines but you could as easily point out that I am clearly nowhere near as good looking as Orlando Bloom….[end rant]

Anyway, when Drew stepped out of his car after [finally] making his way into E-town the cicadas were there in force. It sounded just like home. “Wow. He nailed that,” I remember thinking at the time. And then… well you’ve probably seen it already. At least it had a good soundtrack.

Come the dog days cicadas are in full “voice”, their whirring almost constant. Their cacophony is truly deafening. Ounce for ounce, I suppose they must be the loudest creatures on earth. Anatomy is all that keeps the bullfrogs from hanging their heads in shame…. [A few species of cicadas are notorious for a 17-year life cycle. After all those years underground they emerge to mate and die in a few short weeks. But there are many more species with life cycles of only one year or a few years.]

At dusk, the light show starts. Lightning bugs blink in the failing light. Deepening shadows fill in and before you know it the show has moved higher — stars peer down and chase away the last outrageous rays of the sun. And still the cicadas insist, “Here here here here here here here here here here….” Pick me.

It was a lovely wedding. They both went through with it. Nobody ran out crying. Well, someone did but it wasn’t the bride or groom. But that’s a different story….

Wait… I know all the jokes about how young we marry in Kentucky, but this is the ring bearer and flower girl.

There’s the happy couple!

I had some time to visit with family. It was the first time in years that we had all my siblings and all my niblings together. And now a couple of my niblings have young’uns too so we had a four-generation photo op.

The weather was gorgeous — lows in the 50s and highs in the 80s. I also visited a distillery for the first time — Jim Beam.

And now I (hic) need to sleep….

This is another song that was controversial in its time though I never understood why. The most provocative lines are in the chorus:

I wanna kiss you all over
And over again
I wanna kiss you all over
Till the night closes in

Pretty tame stuff really even compared to what was out at the same time. But it was a big hit.

I saw Exile in concert once. I think they were the opening act for Journey. In the late ’70s, that was pretty hot stuff. [As much as I love music, I hate big crowds even more. So I haven't been to a huge number of concerts. But even so they tend to blur in my memory. And I wasn't drugged up at any of them. Go figure.] A few years later I saw them playing in the lounge at a bowling alley in Lexington, KY. The music business has its ups and downs, after all.

But the band had started as a group of high school kids in the early 60′s in the town where I would later go to college, Richmond, KY. They played with the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars in the late 60′s and were a big regional band in central and eastern Kentucky. After their precipitous rise and fall they morphed into a country band. There have been myriad changes in the band membership, but they’ve enjoyed pretty consistent if less conspicuous success over the years.

So anyway, in the late ’70s I was going to school in Richmond, KY and saw a local band hitting it big opening for Journey [I think] in Lexington, KY. And a few days ago I heard a few bars of a song that transported me back there. That was a cold winter… but that’s another story….

When you think “Kentucky” you don’t automatically think horse racing or fried chicken.
You know all four seasons: Almost Maybe Spring, Summer, kind of Autumn and Basketball season.
You think the rest of the world knows what Benedictine spread is.
You think the rest of the world knows what a Hot Brown is.
“Fixin’ to go” makes perfect sense.
You measure distance in minutes.
You give directions based on landmarks that no longer exist or street names that have changed, but your directions never confuse any of the other Louisvillians.

Even though (as I know I always point out) I grew up in a suburb, these ring true for me. I recently went back to my old neighborhood to see some of the sites from my childhood. All of these are a few minutes walk from my parent’s house.

This was a Convenient Food Mart. I thought the chain had gone out of business, but I looked online and there are still a few of them around.

While they kept the marquee, the theater inside is gone now. It closed many years ago when the first multiplex came to town and then had revivals as a second-run and art-house theater. Recently they gutted the whole thing and turned it into office space. (That first multiplex is gone now too.)

Almost next door to the Vogue theater was a Woolworth’s Five-and-Dime and a Taylor’s Drug store. Those were torn down and these stores built several years ago.

A little further down the street was a White Castle restaurant. It was closed years ago, but the building has remained. It’s about to be torn down finally and a bank built in its place.

Around the corner was an Ehrler’s Dairy. This location was mainly an ice cream parlor and all three of my older sisters had jobs there when they were in high school. I looked onlne to see if any of the Ehrler’s stores still exist and [I swear I didn't plan this in advance, but I wish I had] I found this headline:

CVS to begin construction soon on store at former Ehrler’s site

It’s not this store, but you gotta love the description of the site as “a building that once housed an Ehrler’s ice cream store, then a White Mountain Creamery…”. I know just where that is!

Technorati tags: There are Places I Remember~blog~personal~otoh

Residents like to use it to cool off and, despite posted No Swimming signs, allow young kids to swim in it. Since it wasn’t designed as a swimming pool (an obvious oversight), bacteria levels can get dangerously high.

So what does a beleaguered executive director of a Waterfront Development Corporation do to try to discourage (mis)use of the pools? If you’re David Karem (the executive director in question) you put up more signs like this:

According to a story in the local newsrag, the Louisville Courier-Journal,

Karem said he was counting on a lack of understanding about water’s chemical makeup, and he thought that suggesting a link to one of the world’s most dangerous weapons — the hydrogen bomb — might keep them from jumping in.

“I thought that with the word … maybe people would not go there,” he said.

Unfortunately for Mr. Karem, some people in the area actually know that water is naturally two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. (And I suspect they are telling the ones who did not know that….)

Karem acknowledged that he might be fighting a losing battle.

“I could go out there with stun guns,” he said, and it would do no good.

I’m so proud….

Technorati tags: Danger! Decisions Contain Low Levels of Intelligence~blog~personal~otoh

Technorati tags: blog~personal~otoh~photo~hnt~otohPhoto: Wingin’ It