Maggie and Her Grandma

family, ,

P1110167 maggie wash car 14After the hubbub of the wedding and the excitement of being a bridesmaid, after playing with cousins and chatting with numerous aunts and uncles, after her dad and brothers departed for home and school, our granddaughter Maggie and her mom Pearl stayed on for another week.

It had been close to two years since I’d even seen this girl, and the change from nine to eleven years is a big one. I’m so thankful it worked out for her to be around all those lazy summery days, so we could enjoy just living our lives together. It didn’t seem necessary to plan interesting outings — Maggie had plenty of ideas in her head and resources at hand, for creative and homey things.

thedollshouse

The first thing the two of us did in the relative quietness was to start reading The Doll’s House by Rumer Godden. I read aloud to her as we snuggled on the couch or on her bed in my sewing/prayer room. It seemed to be the perfect book for our limited time — just long enough, and with a dramatic plot. The doll characters were very well drawn and complex – not fluffy.

We went to the craft store where Maggie bought a big pad of paper to go with ribbons and bows I had on hand, and she created some pretty cards for her grandpa and me.

I mostly forgot about my chores that week. I could do that because Pearl was always loading and unloading the dishwasher and clothes washer. She climbed a ladder to prune the unruly and invasive wisteria, and one morning she and Maggie washed both of our very dirty cars till they were shining.

Maggie did a lot of flipping, diving and acrobatics in the pool. She had the idea of baking some brownies, but “only if your recipe is the same as my mom’s…?”  Our family has made “Anne’s Brownies” for so many decades, I thought it likely that Pearl was still using the same, and when I handed Maggie the card she said it was the Right One. (Anne, when you read this, you will know who you are.)

She added the peppermint extract and a buttercream icing she makes kind of free-form, and Voilà! we were blessed with mint brownies that she decorated with findings from the garden. Mr. Glad thought he didn’t like something chocolate mint, but he gave them a try and said they were yummy like Thin Mints, so he is still finishing the leftovers.

P1110178 mint brownies

At the time of The Brownies, we were getting down to the last day or two of our extended reunion, and Maggie and I both were feeling some anticipatory pain of separation. We started watching more episodes of “Bleak House” with Grandpa — even though Maggie hadn’t been around to see the beginning of the series — and playing marathons of Bananagrams, which we both love.

Maggie makes us word-lovers proud with her skill at discovering words among the tiles. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, words may be formed going up as well as down, and from right to left as well as in the usual direction. This was one of Maggie’s crossword arrangements, and I think it was for a game that she ended up winning.

P1110189 b-grams Maggie

I have a dream of someday offering my services to families as a spelling tutor for young readers. I would go to their houses with nothing but my bag of Bananagram tiles and a dictionary, and just play this game side-by-side with the kids. It’s excellent for a broad range of ages, because each player is doing her own thing, competing against herself, and winning a game has nothing to do with how many words you’ve formed by the end.

I won’t be playing with Maggie anytime soon, though, and we will go back to writing e-mails or talking on the phone about our gardens and books and cooking projects, and about her busy 6th-grade life. I love being a grandma!

lemon trees and cake

agriculture, food and cooking, ,

lemon cake 7-27-14My father scorned Meyer lemons. Growing his own lemons made him, and all of our family, partial to the intensity of a Normal Lemon. If anyone wants to give me lemons, Meyer or otherwise, I will never turn them down, but I also prefer what I grew up with.

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When I cook with lemons I usually think of my father and our trees. If as I child I ever found my father lying on the living room floor it was not because he’d been wrestling with my brother, but more like he’d been wrestling with those trees. During pruning season he’d invariably put his back out doing that necessary work on our ten acres (We had twenty more acres in oranges.) That would be more than a thousand lemon trees.

I learned to drive a tractor before I was old enough to drive a car, because Daddy needed me to pull a trailer between the rows when my sisters and I were picking the second, smaller crop of lemons that wasn’t worth hiring a whole picking crew for.

In those pictures that I retain in my mind, my brother wasn’t old enough to buckle down and help yet. He was sitting under a lemon tree crying, and the dust mixed with his tears to make a miserable face.  I must say that he’s more than made up for it in the years since, and is one of the most buckled down and hardworking people on the planet.P1100844eggs

The latest thing I cooked with lemons is this meltingly appealing cake, which Mr. Glad requested for his birthday last month. That he wanted cake was very strange, because it’s been Blackberry Pie as long as anyone can remember, and a good month to be born if you want that. But I was happy to oblige with the cake, and I devoted most of one Saturday to making it, so I had plenty of time to enjoy the process.

In the past I’d only baked this glazed cake for tea parties that I used to have in a bygone era. Now that it’s been revived in my repertoire I’ll want to make it more often. It uses a lot of lemons in the form of juice, and in this recent case, even more fruits to get enough lemon zest to impart the deep lemony flavor. It can be made up to three days ahead and freezes well.

Lemon-Sour Cream Cake

INGREDIENTS:

1 3/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
3 large or extra-large eggs at room temperature
1 tablespoon minced lemon zest
2 teaspoons lemon extract
1 cup sour cream

The Glaze:
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 cup strained fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons finely minced lemon zest

INSTRUCTIONS:

Preheat the oven to 350°. Butter and flour a 9-inch lightweight Bundt pan. Sift the flour, baking soda and baking powder together into a medium mixing bowl. Set aside.

In a medium mixing bowl, using an electric mixer on medium speed, or in a food processor fitted with the metal blade, beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Beat in the eggs, minced zest and lemon extract and mix for 2 more minutes.

Reduce the speed to low or pulse with the food processor. Add half of the flour mixture and mix until well combined. Add half of the sour cream, mixing constantly, then add the rest of the flour and sour cream, ending with the sour cream.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for about 35-40 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then invert onto a wire rack and remove the pan. Make the glaze while the cake is still warm.

To make the glaze, using a fine-meshed strainer, sift the powdered sugar into a small, non-aluminum bowl. Add the lemon juice and lemon zest and whisk to break up lumps.

Transfer the cake to a rack placed over a rimmed baking sheet lined with wax paper. Using a long skewer, poke holes in the cake at 1-inch intervals, almost going through to the bottom. Slowly pour the glaze over the cake, giving it time to absorb as you pour. Let the cake cool to room temperature. Cut into wedges and serve.

Every time I make this cake, about 1/4 cup of the glaze ends up on the baking sheet under the cake, and would be wasted and washed down the drain in all its precious lemonzestiness if I didn’t find a way to use it. This time I whipped some heavy cream and slowly drizzled the syrup into it at the end when it was getting nice and thick. I froze the mixture in custard cups, and ate one of them the next day. It was quite delicious!

The Secret Language of Girls

books, ,

I listened to The Secret Language of Girls in the car on my trip to Nevada earlier this summer. It had been on my Amazon wish list for a year, so when I saw it at the librarsecret languagey it was an easy decision to grab that one off the shelf. I had started my browsing in the section with the adult CD’s, but so many of those would be longer than I could finish on most of the trips I take.

This is the story of a year in the lives of some middle-school girls, which is not something I would normally like to read about. But I’ve appreciated the author’s voice in other books I’ve read by her, notably Chicken Boy, which I reviewed here.

I’m comforted knowing that Dowell’s books are on the shelves as a wholesome alternative to the slime that is oozing ever lower into nihilism, and into the younger age-range, the kind of thing Meghan Cox-Gurdon critiques in this article: Darkness Too Visible. Through her characters’ stories Dowell explores the issues that are common to every generation of modern adolescents, without any of it feeling antiquated. I assume that this is how the children themselves feel about the books — if they are still on the library shelves after ten years, is it not because they are actively in circulation?

Dowell captures the self-conscious angst of adolescent girls, revealing the cattiness, unkindness, confusion and downright meanness, without passing judgment on what is a difficult time for everyone. She wrote this book about ten years ago, when perhaps it was all too fresh in her own memory. Girls are best friends in 5th Grade, and then because of their personalities and choices they grow apart, sometimes so distant that they forget to treat each other as fellow humans.

“Let’s humiliate someone,” says one girl to Marilyn, and one of our heroines reluctantly agrees to humiliate the girl who not long before was her best friend. It’s because she feels trapped by the choice she’s made to be in the popular group and pay obeisance to the leaders of that pack. Otherwise they may turn against her….

Boys are often what comes between friends. Although I’m dismayed at the sexualizing of our society to the point where this most wholesome book has to include events  such as kissing games between eleven-year-olds, this (and much worse) is the reality many children have to deal with, and Dowell does everyone a favor by showing us what goes on in Marilyn’s mind and heart at a barely-chaperoned party, and how she gains self-understanding.

The older brother of the party-giver is an amputee, and all the other girls say, in effect, “Oooh, that’s creepy.” They are disgusted, while Marilyn finds him very nice. But of course it’s her peers, the gangly adolescent boys, who end up awkwardly pecking her cheek or lips when the spinning bottle stops and points to her. She finds it very unsatisfying.

“She decided she didn’t like this game very much. She wanted to choose whom she got to kiss. Other people shouldn’t be able to choose for her.”

“She also knew that legs didn’t have anything to do with kissing. In fact she was starting to think lips didn’t have much to do with kissing either. Kissing was about hearts….As far as Marilyn was concerned, she was still waiting for her first kiss.”

Considering the likelihood these days of young girls getting physically involved with boys way too early for their good, there is a need for this kind of vicarious lesson. Girls can go with Marilyn to the party and leave smarter. They will be further on their way to knowing the truth that sex and all that leads up to it are about more than recreation and experimentation.

I remember how it was at that age — you fall in love with boys right and left, because you are falling in love with the whole experience of falling in love. It’s hard to be true friends when all that is going on, but in this book there is a new girl in school who is an little unconventional, and  also refreshingly sensible and kind, as she tries to help another confused protagonist.

“Paisley laughed. ‘Why don’t you quit thinking about love and boyfriends and girlfriends? Why don’t you just think about Andrew O’Shea, the human being?'” Out of the mouth of babes! Isn’t that what we all should do, what it means to grow up — to think of the other person as he is in himself, not just as someone useful for our own ego or enjoyment?

My listening to this book in audio instead of print format added an extra level of complexity to my response. I kept wondering if the narrator’s interpretation of the characters was in line with the author’s. Michelle Santopietro narrated this Random House audio edition, and I found it hard to believe that the young people spoke in a sarcastic tone half the time.

Some of the mothers in the story are obviously so consumed with their own drama that they can’t shift their focus and notice what is going on with their children. I also recall from that age the vague feeling that I was on my own. But the voices that Santopietro gives to the mothers make them sound stupid to me, not just out of touch.

Just the other day I read Arti’s thoughts on what makes a good audiobook narrator, and another post on how different the experience of reading the text yourself is, from that of listening to a recording. I know I was very aware of the narrator coming between me and the author in this case, and I didn’t enjoy that aspect at all. I began to wonder all sorts of things about the narrator, while normally I’d aim my extra curiosity toward the author. “Is Santopietro a mother herself?” was one of the central questions raised.

The box of CD’s of The Secret Language of Girls says that it’s “Recommended for listeners ages 13 and up,” which is odd for a book about 11- and 12-yr-olds. I thought perhaps that was a strategy for getting the intended age group to be more curious about it. But on Amazon the book info says for age range 8-12 yrs., or grades 4-6. That’s more like it.

So far my granddaughters are homeschooling and I can’t see them having time or need for this kind of story. They have wise mothers who are paying close attention. I wish I had found a book like this on the shelf when I was young, and if I get to know some distracted or overwhelmed mothers of pre-teens, I’ll be buying a few copies for their daughters.