Family No comments yet

Mungo Bean Haunting

By on August 27th, 2011

morning sky gainesville georgia

Just in case you are completely over me, since my life is too messy for regular posting, I shall now remind you that I am kind of a nutt.

Some people get short of sleep, and just get tired. I however, become insomniac for days, then fall into a deep sleep that spawns really weird dreams.  Like Dad, threatening to haunt me. Dad was a mostly nice guy. But he had a well earned reputation of being the quiet guy who could suddenly lose it and get sent home from work for fighting. Yes really.

Girl Dad Kite

A lot of cussing went into the making of this kite

Add to that endless stories in childhood of taotaomona and you have the perfect recipe for an overtired adult freaking out about mungo beans, at 3:00 AM.

I hadn’t cooked mungo beans since 1991, or possibly never. No need. If Dad wasn’t soaking the achiote, I could find it at Auntie’s house. Then cousin paranoid rubbed her Cold War paranoia off on me. And I had to find achiote, and ham hocks, and make them work together to avoid eternal haunting. Or haunting until Dad got bored with me, which would be painful but not that long.

I forgot that ham hocks smell horrific initially, which is hours. And the only places that sell achiote around here are Indian groceries. And I prefer haunting to curry smell. So I settled for Mexican achote, no “i” and it is crushed with garlic. I consider it substandard to actual seeds. But potential haunting is an emergency.

Shockingly, I did not ruin the mungo beans. The hocks fell apart. The beans remained bean shape. DH ate a bowl of them. And baby ate a gigantic portion and rubbed it in her hair.

Haunting averted.

Books No comments yet

American Chica Book

By on August 26th, 2011

I checked out American Chica, by Marie Arana, mainly because it was available. I had seen the hard cover version in the library. But before I could determine if I might like to read it, DD1 had a meltdown. So we fled the scene.

When I came across the title later in the elibrary, it was the only new title in which I had any interest that did not have a waiting list. Being impatient, needing something electronic to read, and bearing no financial risk, checking it out became a good idea.

I was expecting an immigrant story like many others. But was pleasantly surprised to read what was part memoir, part family history, interspersed with Peruvian American relations and cultural differences. Knowing next to nothing about Peru, I was really interested to learn about Arana’s early childhood in Lima, and later the company towns of Cartavio and Paramonga.

She has an interesting cast of relatives, including a Peruvian engineer father, mother who has no interest in discussing her own past, a loving but intrusive grandmother and an uncle who brings home animals he finds in the Amazon. I was fascinated to discover what they would do next.

I found myself enjoying, more than ever, the laying down of historical facts alongside family events. Having learned more of my own family history in the past year, I would think to myself, ah, so Abuelito Arana is probably older than my great grandfather, who was fighting the Spanish, in another part of the world at that time. This somehow made me feel more connected to the story.

I had associated the word Putamayo with a producer of children’s music. It is also the mountainous region separating Colombia and Peru, currently having a cocaine trafficking trade, and previously a brutal rubber trade. I wonder how, with all of the news about cocaine, I have never learned before the name of its chief growing region. How did that get overlooked?

Eventually, Marie and her family move to the United States, where they enter school in a very homogeneous New Jersey and experience a racism different from that which they witnessed in Peru.

Food No comments yet

Farmer’s Market

By on July 10th, 2011

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To my way of thinking, fresh produce is priceless. I have a six year old who snacks on fresh fruits and vegetables. Don’t get me wrong, if it were too expensive we would still be eating veggies from the grocery. But I don’t judge the value of produce by dollars alone.

DH says he’s not so sure we get a lot for our money with the Cumming Harvest. But I think we actually get more than when we go to the grocery because we typically eat every bite of the farmer’s market vegetables and fruit. Fresh produce from the grocery store often wilts in the fridge. It doesn’t taste so fresh. And I often ignore it in favor of frozen vegetables.

Vegetable experiments from any venue are hit or miss. Among these are anything that only one person likes that I try to arrange into a recipe that more of us will like. And things that we tire of quickly like breakfast radishes and okra.

Today we got tomatoes from the first local harvest of the season. They are delicious. I pre-ordered a pint of cherry tomatoes. And happily picked up yellow slicing tomatoes from the Extras bin. We also get to enjoy blueberries, pattypan squash, zucchini, bacon, onions, garlic, yellow beans and pole beans.

I already cooked an onion, the pole beans and bacon. And served it over rice for lunch. For dinner I shredded a zucchini and a pattypan and made a pilaf.

DH and DD6 made a tart with the blueberries that were left. DD6 devoured half of them minutes after I brought them into the house. Then she, DD1 and I ate all of the cherry tomatoes. We’ve definitely each eaten five vegetables today.

Other goodies I like to pick up are soap, bread and coffee beans. Our friend the beekeeper makes the soap. I consider natural soaps a necessity. Eczema is much less of a problem now than when we were using commercial soaps. The bread and coffee are luxuries that we really enjoy.

Blah blah blah. Just wanted to share my experience because I don’t want anyone to miss out on such delicious vegetables. Anyone like me who doesn’t have the dedication to properly tend a garden that is. Or can’t seem to rise early enough to get to a traditional type of farmers market.

Books No comments yet

My Helmet for My Pillow Book

By on July 1st, 2011

My Helmet for My Pillow is a great read. It is neither uplifting, or depressing, but rather insightful. Robert Leckie really shares his experiences as a Marine during WWII, and did not leave me with the feeling that he was leaving out unflattering bits and pieces of the story.

Several times while I was working at the Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton, friends recommended it. It was out of print, but not difficult to borrow. I was busy working and studying. I didn’t have time to read anything that wasn’t required for my degree program. And being surrounded by Marines did not inspire me to read about them too. The information seemed all too available.

When I watched The Pacific, I remembered the book title and name Robert Leckie, and many compliments of his work. So I checked it out from the elibrary when it became available. I think I would have enjoyed it even more if I had purchased it and read it on Kindle where I could just depress the fact of interest and look it up easily, instead of what I did – hop back and forth from Overdrive to dictionary.com to Wikipedia. It is an English teacher’s dream.

Leckie’s vocabulary is massive, but in a way that seemed to me descriptive and applicable, not wordy. I would recommend the book to anybody studying for the SAT or GRE. Or any other test of ones English vocabulary.

That probably doesn’t sound inviting. But I did enjoy the book. I could have looked up fewer words. But I was engaged fully, and did not want to infer meaning.

There are maps and photographs in the text. I didn’t get to enjoy them much, because I read on an Android phone (HTC Droid Incredible II). The small screen is fine for reading text. For viewing photographs, not bad. For viewing map illustrations the screen is just too small.

I also picked up a bunch of random information, such as what kind of grass grows in Micronesia and Melanesia, that not all human toes are prehensile toes, that Pelelieu has an area of only five miles by ten miles and has no source of fresh running water – no rivers. This fact about Pelelieu probably surprised me the most. Human beings actually live in a place whose only fresh water source is rain.  And survive?

Health No comments yet

Prehensile Toes

By on June 30th, 2011

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Did you know that not everyone can pick things up with their toes? I did not. I did not realize that it is an actual genetic trait, like whether or not a person can curl their tongue, and possessing of an official anatomical name and medical definition.

I guess the fact that  having extra teeth has a name (supernumerary) and definition should have tipped me off.

Strangely (as if there is another way) I discovered this in a book having nothing to do with anatomy. I was reading Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow. He comes across a footprint, while in Melanesia, and describes it as somewhat small, with prehensile toes, native feet.

What!? So I searched the net for prehensile feet and found two different types, each having two varieties. And drawings and pictures too. Clearly I never studied podiatry. Apparently, the toes of a prehensile foot are slightly wider spaced from big toe to the next toe. And sometimes the big toe is the same height, or much shorter than the next one. If you have feet that slant artfully down from the big toe, those are pretty but unable to pick up socks.

Being the freak that I am, laughing, I immediately called an auntie and asked if she could pick things up with her feet. She said, “Of course, I can sort laundry with them. Why do you ask?”

I told her about the book, and quick internet research. And all the while we are laughing about what bizarre human specimens our family has produced.  Who knew that we had special feet?