One would think that with the wars going on in the world and the bitter fighting between political parties, we have nothing to be thankful for. The opposite is true. If we woke up this morning, and all of our friends and relatives woke up, we have them to be thankful for. If we had a meal on the table, and a place to sleep we are grateful. The sunshine is also a gift, as is the lack of sleet and snow. We are thankful if we have gas in our cars and places to go. Most of all, I am grateful I can write this ode and wish my internet friends happy Thanksgiving Holiday.
These two tom turkeys are looking for attention from the hens of the flock.
Turkey joke: Female turkey to her partner,
“Is that your meat thermometer, or are you glad to see me?”
This morning was different for me. For once, Lovely was up by nine o’clock and ready. to go. I finished my bowl of Cheerios, and we were off to Darien, about forty minutes away. She had an appointment with a Paralegal who helped her submit a document to the government of Lithuania. The document states that she is still alive, living in a foreign country, and she still needs her pension.
On the way home, we stopped at a delicatessen called Old Vilnius. We cannot ever pass by a foreign delicatessen. Lovely shops for her dark rye bread, which she swears is only available in this store, and some other European foods, which she swears are superior to the same item made in America. Believing that European butter is better than American butter is hard, but I play the game to keep the peace. While she shopped for her goodies, I shopped for mine. I found two items, which I put into our basket. We have had a long-standing argument about what vodka is made from, and I always lose because Americans don’t know about European liquor. I found a bottle of potato vodka that went into my basket. In the cooler section, I found some slab bacon cured in salt. My parents made this delicacy at home when I was a kid, and I often sat with my dad when he had his after-work snack, and we enjoyed pieces of salt-cured bacon fat on pieces of heavy rye bread. It is delicious.
Once we left the deli a hundred dollars poorer but with a hundred dollars worth of delicious junk food, we happened upon the Frankfort Farmer’s Market. Although it was a chilly 50 degrees with a wind to make it even more refreshing, we stopped. We found some fresh organic garlic. At that booth, they also featured smoked garlic, which I had never had before, so I bought smoked garlic, Lovely bought regular garlic to make her pickled cucumbers. The young lady who waited on us was from Wisconsin, and I discussed how to plant and grow garlic with her. I learned a lot. She then sold me a loaf of freshly baked garlic rye bread.
At the next booth, I bought a couple of ears of sweet corn and a single Hungarian banana pepper. The wind chill affected Lovely’s attitude, so we made a beeline for the car. Except, I stopped at a booth selling apples, blueberries, and a few vegetables. I made the fatal mistake of asking where the man in the booth was from. It turns out he, lived within two miles of our family farm in Covert, Michigan. I’ve never found anyone who knows that Covert actually exists, much less to be your neighbor. We talked about the chilly weather, and he told me that last night in Covert, they had sleet. Sleet, for the uninformed, is frozen water falling from the heavens. Talking about frozen water was the final nail in our Farmer’s Market coffin, and we then did high tail it to the car.
Once back home and warmed up, I had to try my purchases. I made a small plate of garlic rye bread topped with chunks of salt pork, and a shot of potato vodka on the side. It was delicious and reminded me of sitting next to Dad while he cut the bread and the pork into little chunks for us to eat. Dad never drank vodka with his snacks, and come to think of it, he didn’t drink vodka at all. The next generation always has to add a new dimension to the story.
Today is one of those days when I am falling asleep on my feet. My body missed an hour of sleep last night and now it takes the initiative to make up for it any way it can. Usually, it in in the middle of a sentence as I am writing or reading. If you see a string of a single character running across the screen you will know that my body just went into rest mode. The single character comes from my thumb which has stopped while in the middle of a stroke and is resting on one key.
September days can be outstanding in, Illinois and today is one of them. It is sunny bright with sparsely spaced billowy white clouds streaming across the sky. The temperature hovers around eighty mid-day and then quickly descends into the sixtes after sunset and finally bottomming out in the fifties near sunrise.
I should be out riding my bike, but that is a sport I gave up fifteen years ago and now it would take me a better part of the afternoon just to prep the machine for riding. At one point cycling was my life, I belonged to a bike club that went of regular rides several times a week, and in between I commuted to work by bike. I scare myself when I think about the number of hours I spent riding and enjoying the physicality of it all. I also realize how lucky I was to have an understanding wife who tolerated my sport. We spent many hours apart because of my selfishness in choosing to pump the pedals instead of spending time with her. That is one regret that I have which I have compensated for by abandoning the sport.
Today, I spent the afternoon cooking my supper. As I write there is a pot of beef stroganoff simmering on the stove, and next to it is a pot of water in a very slow boil ready to accept the wide noodles to compliment the dish. This is certainly not a KETO meal, but it is so very delicious that I have to forget KETO once in a while. I use a recipe from Paula Dean who showed me how to do it on the Cooking Channel. It is way too simple but tastes like a very complicated affair. It is my favorite recipe. Next to the stroganoff my next favorite is chicken parmesan cooked in home made tomato sauce. It is another a recipe downloaded from the cooking channel years ago. I learned from these two recipes that cooking can be much like chemistry. Pay attention to the details and measure the ingredients to make it taste like Emiril made it.
My plan is to chill until it is time to eat, then afterwards go for a walk. The walk will take off the edge of a big meal and allow me to enjoy the evening watching a few episodes from two series that I have become attached to: Bosch, and Downton Abbey. I have to control how much I see of the detective program because it is very explicit in showing murder scenes. A month ago I overloaded and decided to take a few weeks off to unload the depressing story and the scenes that come with it. The stories are so enthralling that It is like being hooked on a drug.
If there is any energy left in me after the walk I may forget TV and choose to descend into my wood shop to work on my bird. My latest Intarsia project is an owl in full flight going after prey. I started this project in December of 2020 and feverishly worked on it to about 75% complete in March 2021. The devil is in the details however, and after taking a break from the wood shop to concentrate on a number of other projects one being my garden, and another my wedding it was not until September that I resumed. Now I am competing with beautiful days and the regret of not spending those hours with my partner. Thankfully, my body tells me how much time I can spend in the shop just as it tells me when I need to rest.
My goal to read a book a week for the year is finally becoming real. After a non-stop reading marathon to catch up to four books a month I am at thirty-three and on track to reach thirty six by the end of September. To give myself some variety I’ve decided to mix non-fiction with fiction, male and female authors, old and new. Mostly they are stories copyrighted in 2020 and 2021 because I zero in on the large print section and they are recently published. I love historical fiction because it blends facts with characters and story’s that become real. For instance, last week I finished Kitchen Front which takes place in England during WWII and deals with the population that didn’t fight. They are the ones who contributed to the war by dealing with rationing of food and other necessities like gasoline, and tires. At the same time I have been watching Downton Abbey, a story about how an aristocratic family living in a huge manor deals with World War One. The two stories mirror each other and the difference in life between 1918 and 1940 were not very large. One thing that did change was the attitude of the people who were serving the aristocrats. The servants began to realize that maybe they had the short end of the stick and were itching to change their lives to become something better than a maid, butler, or valet.
It is time to blend the sour cream into the stroganoff and to drain the wide noodles. It has been pure pleasure staying awake throughout this report.
Chicago is a city surrounded by many suburbs. In fact the ring of suburbs encircling the city is quite varied in ethnicities. At the same time these same suburbs are examples of Americans using their freedom to engage in businesses that fill needs. Last week I traveled sixty miles, yes sixty miles, to get to a place called Buffalo Grove. My life partner is from the northern suburbs and as such all of her doctors and services are located sixty plus miles from where we live. The same services exist within a twenty mile radius but they aren’t the same. Why? Because they don’t speak the languages my soulmate needs to speak to explain her problems. (Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and least of all English) I digress.
The small shopping center we landed in to pick up a her new glasses had a very large food store called in the middle. Similar to a Jewel or Meijer’s. The next step on our agenda was to do our weekly shopping for groceries, at our Frankfort Jewel. So why not use the Garden Fresh Market store right where we were? We decided we needed an adventure.
Random Selections From The Garden Fresh Market in Buffalo Grove, IL
The store is amazingly loaded with foods from many ethnic groups, but mainly Russian. Fresh foods, meats, fruits, vegetables, you name it they stocked it. We perused the aisles for two hours and selected many ethnic varieties. After paying in US dollars via American Express we passed several kiosks containing more unique Russian goods. Magazines, toys, videos, you name it they had it. Even plastic model kits of Russian fighter aircraft and tanks. I thought to myself, only in America will one find a pocket of Russians living freely in a neighborhood where they can continue to be Russians without worrying about Putin knocking on their door.
When we finally loaded the car we were hungry, and there right near the eyeglass shop was a Korean restaurant. I asked if she wanted another adventure by trying Korean food. Yes, why not. We donned our masks and entered The Golden Durebok. There were about ten people sitting in booths scattered all around the place. All appeared to be of Asian ancestry. We found a booth toward the back and waited for a waiter to show up. After a few minutes an old man wearing a baseball jacket and a short white apron dropped a couple of menus on our table then proceeded to clean tables.
Thank God there were pictures of food in the menu. There was also english descriptions but they were intended to address Asian customers. We looked through the eight page menu and selected something from the appetizer page. We ordered thinking we had picked soup. Wrong, it wasn’t even close, and my lovely was very disappointed. We asked the old man if they had soup. He just gave us a dumb stare. I finally told him to bring us some soup, he left miffed. It took several minutes for him to return with two small bowls 1/3 filed with something that looked like chicken consume with a few pieces of green onion floating in it. We thanked him and he left. Lovely just looked at me and her entree as if expecting me to turn it in for another dish. I took a piece of what was on her plate and bit into it. Not bad, I said. She did the same, then reached over to take one of my fried dumplings. She liked the dumpling, so we traded dishes and ate.
Meanwhile, across the room from us sat two asian men, one very large in size, the other rather skinny. Both were eating with ravenous zeal. The skinny guy kept picking up a fresh napkin about every two mouth fulls to wipe his forehead and face of sweat. He did this throughout his meal. It brought back memories of when I ate with my Singaporean friends in Singapore. They loved very spicy hot food. I asked why. One answer was that Singapore is very hot and humid, but asians don’t sweat like caucasians. To compensate they eat spicy hot things that make them sweat so they could enjoy the evaporative cooling provided by the ceiling fans.
We finished our meals and I took the bill to the register to pay. I looked at what it said. What I ordered for lovely was listed as Kimchi Pancake and not soup as described in the menu. I paid and we got the hell out of there as fast as we could.
Kimche Pancake
How appropriate that I am reading the book Out of Many. One. How many more ethic pockets exist around the metropolitan area, and in how many cities of the country do they exist? I know for fact that there isn’t a city in America without a China Town, but how about Hungarian town, or Polish Town? I know they exist in Chicago and there is no limit to others as well. I attest to how they contribute to making America great, and interesting to say the least. It is also fun to explore these areas and to eat in their restaurants. The opportunities for adventures are endless.
