Paying Attention

I am not a person who makes new year's resolutions.  At least not the traditional ones.

This year, 2018, is The Year Of Paying Attention.  So far--almost halfway through January, I am still on course.

Paying Attention to the Antiques Trade:  People buy what they like--they do not buy what I THINK they should like.  Our sales at Odana Antique Mall in Madison have increased markedly--as we are stocking what the shoppers are looking for--not what we want them to like.  The midwest Madison crowd wants room ready.  No project pieces.  Fairly priced artwork.  Our experience--no furniture before 1900.  And not too off beat.  They actually buy conservative furniture--it's the creative accessories that they like.  A compromise for me.

Paying Attention To Food:    Readers of this blog will know I am an Aldi nut.  It is rare that I venture  to other stores these days.  The expansion of creative organic produce and gallons of milk with three week expiration dates for 95 cents are enough reasons to keep on shopping there.  Oh yes--and the gruyere cheese and pine nut hummus and raspberries and butter lettuce salad kits and.....

Paying Attention to Friends/Family:    But there are just so many hours in the day--evaluating and nurturing healthy friendships and giving those my attention.  Good friends are like gold.  One hundred and thirty five facebook friends including the pharmacist clerk?  Not so much.

Paying Attention to Who/What is Driving My Narrative:  I have found it too easy to let my thoughts be driven by the local and national media and the latest tweet, you tube video, television screen crawler or facebook posting.  Politicians, Hollywood Types and Otherwise Just Loud People have every right to express and act on their opinions although very different from mine. The actual definition of tolerance is the ability or willingness to permit something, particularly the existence of opinions or behavior that do not agree with mine.  I am not sure when secular society changed the definition of tolerance to mean that all ideas and opinions are equally true and must be universally accepted..  I choose, this year, for my sanity, not to be the squirrel chasing the nut.

Right Under My Nose

There is a battle going on in our house.  The quiet but furious fight is happening on a bookshelf in my kitchen.  The battle of the cookbooks.

The Christmas and New Year's holidays and their necessary festive preparations always send me to my shelf of new and vintage cookbooks searching for the "Just Right, Sort of Vintage, Not Overly Decadent But Decadent Enough Recipes" to prepare for family and company.

I spend a great deal of time searching cookbooks, internet entertaining sites, and food channel host sites looking for recipes.  Which cranberry sauce to make? Pork roast, ham or beef roast recipes?  What kind of salad dressing?  Hot vegetables?  jello based favorite?  Dessert?  oh my gosh--don't get me started on dessert.

Right in front of my nose.  I just realized the oldies but goodies are not found in new cookbooks or on slick websites.  Right in front of my nose. No. 1, 2 and 3.

The Settlement Cookbook, the Festive Foods cookbook from the Milwaukee Gas Company and a Junior League cookbook from the 60's called Be Milwaukee's Guest.  Look no further.

The Settlement Cookbook--Actually titled The Way To A Man's Heart was the biggest revelation to me.  Filled, FILLED with practical recipes--and good directions. Actually, tonight we are having the Welsh Rarebit over toast points.  Version Number 2--if you please--with beer. This cookbook DID originate in Milwaukee dontcha know. 

Lizzie Black Kander was a progressive reformer in Milwaukee and founded the Settlement House.  On March 27, 1900, Kander’s Milwaukee Jewish Mission was combined the Sisterhood of Personal Service to establish a settlement house on North 5th Street. The Settlement was financially supported by Milwaukee’s business elite. Her husband, Simon, real estate business and short tenure as a Republican State Representative, had many connections which gave her the opportunity to solicit contributions for her settlement work.

Kander was elected president; in addition to her administrative duties, she taught cooking classes. These cooking classes were used to help Americanize the family and educate immigrants on nutrition. The immigrant girls would bring “American practices and values back from the settlement house into their homes.” These cooking class helped break poor cultural diets through nutritional education of the young women. To keep the Settlement House in operation longer, it had to find a more stable source of funding. Kander suggested creating a cookbook with her cooking class’ recipes supplemented with recipes by her fellow club-women. However the Settlement’s Board of Directors refused to provide the $18 needed to publish the book. Kander approached Metron Yewdlale, a Milwaukee printer, to help publish the cookbook. and he agreed to undertake the work, which was supported by selling advertisements. Although the complete title of the book was The Way to A Man's Heart ... The Settlement Cook Book, it is generally known as The Settlement Cook Book. She compiled a 174-page collection of recipes, household hints, and advice on housekeeping.(thank you wikipedia)

And yes indeed--the cookbook was originally titled,  The Way to  Man's Heart.    Now--Dear Reader- any of you with a hair trigger for women's rights or political correctness or pronoun/noun offenses-- dial it back a notch or two.  Any female who does not understand that tasty cooking is appreciated by men and supports a good relationship--needs a little more life experience under her belt.

These cookbooks are still available for purchase on the internet.  Enjoy!

The Ghost of Christmas Past

I start out by fully acknowledging that I am part of the problem.  Until today, it had been 13 years since I set foot in a department store.

Necessity required me to enter a department store today.  Unfortunately, Give The Lady What She Wants Department Store is no longer  in business.

I ventured forth to our local Soon To Be Torn Down Because No One Shops There mall--where literally two department stores remain.  Two.  Actually, out of more than 100 possible shops, all are empty except two.

My nostalgic remembrance of the 1960s shopping in Milwaukee or the 1980s shopping in Chicago vanished in a heartbeat as I entered shop Number 1.   I remember the  decorations placed with care.  The high quality boxes that changed each season.  The free gift wrap--they wrapped while one could have lunch in a restaurant next to a big tree and have that Great Pot Pie or Sliced Turkey on Iceburg Lettuce with Thousand Island Dressing.  But I digress.

I entered our local establishement  to be greeted by three Christmas trees that were crooked in their stands and reminded me of toilet bowl brushes.  If I said I saw five other customers in a twenty minute visit, that would be a stretch.  I found two items to purchase.  I finally found a clerk--who was too busy talking to another clerk to greet me.  Our festive exchange went as follows:
Clerk- How will you be paying?
Me:  Cash please.
Clerk:  Do you want to open a Carson's credit card?  (oops, cat is out of the bag!)
Me:  No thank you.
Clerk:  Are you sure?  You get an additional 15% off.
Me:  No thank you.  Cash please.
Clerk: Do you need a gift receipt.
Me: No thank you.
Clerk:  Do you have any coupons?
Me: No.
Clerk:  See--if you opened a charge account, you would get coupons.  Are you sure you do not want to open an account?
Me.  That's ok.  Do you understand I am not interested?  No thank you.
Clerk:  I don't have a box this size.
Me: Fine.
(then after receiving my cash...)
Clerk:  Don't you have exact change?  I will have to go get some if you don't have a smaller bill.
(then--after scraping up some smaller bills from my billfold--I was handed change and my purchase in a plastic bag)
Clerk:  Here you go.
Me:  And Merry Christmas to you too!

That'll Be Four Dollars

"That'll be four dollars,"  said the bartender to Dear One after delivering two gin and tonics to our small piece of real estate at the Mint Bar in Sheridan Wyoming.

Read that again Friends.  Two drinks.  Two bucks apiece.  And that included fresh lime wedges.

We have just returned from a long and much needed road trip to one of our favorite places these days--the American west, namely parts of South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana.  There is no denying the distinct regionalism of the western plains-and the appeal it has for Lady Antique Dealer and Dear One.

Now--don't get me wrong.  I am not going to make the mistake of national politicians and politician hopefuls who gloss over "flyover country" and make sweeping statements about gun ownership and education and sophistication and religious affiliation.

We find genuine folk who have to work hard to make a living and who are very comfortable striking up conversations with people they do not know.  It is not a simple life--but more of a straighforward, cut to the bone life.  Making a living--and sometimes with multiple jobs, what high school is playing who this weekend, when does the book mobile come to our town and what day are they giving free flu shots at the senior center are all concerns to towns with none or maybe only one traffic light.

How can you not love places where there are elk steaks for offer on the same menu as bison burger options, movie theatres are called The Roxy and The Roman, coffee shops offer strong brews called Rattlesnake Blend, jams are made from choke cherries and huckleberries, rangers giving talks on the mating habits of bears and waitresses ask the the sweetest question of all  "Did you leave room for pie?"

Guest Blogger

My writing fountain is running a bit dry this summer and real life has intervened and taken me away from my computer.

So this month--I am passing on a blog about antiques written by Dear One.https://waterlawg.blogspot.com/2017/08/antiques-have-their-privileges.html

He usually writes about nerdy technical stuff.  I am going to talk to him about becoming a regular guest blogger.

Enjoy holding on to summer by your fingertips--the air and light are really starting to change.  Is Halloween junk REALLY in the stores two months early?

Time for Pie

Sometimes when we go to an auction--I will bid on something I should't.  I admit, after all these years of buying--I will bid on something that just grabs me--without a great deal of thought of whether it is too odd to sell.  I will buy something and worry about how to unload it later.

Take pie plates for example.  Lots of pie plates.  Like 100 of them.

This is just a sampling of someone's collection of tin and other metal pie plates that we purchased--most of them with the name of the brand of pie embossed on the piece.

Take this one for example.  Helen Gates it says.  The pie dish has holes in the bottom which help the pie stay nice and  flakey and not get a soggy crust when baked.  My perfunctory research did not turn up a commercial pie operation for Helen Gates pies.

It did turn up a now deceased lady in Indiana--with that name--and her obituary mentioned her percolator was always on and she was known for her cakes and "mile high pies."  This conjures up a picture in my head--of a really tall, really wonderful lemon meringue pie-- With those pretty little peaks of  meringue that looks like ocean waves and disappears like a cloud when you taste it.  (not the sort of tough gummy top with lots of beads of sugar that seem to plague my two forays into lemon meringue pie)

Helen of commercial pie fame will continue to be a mystery.  But I know for certain--I bet our Indiana Helen was a very kind and popular lady--especially at church potlucks.

Poor Salvador

I am startled too, Mr. Dali.  We thought you were Resting in Peace.  But maybe not.

Well, actually, I have no clue if Salvador is resting in peace as I have no clue if he was a Believer.  Actually--that could be a discussion for another blog--and the topic here concerns his remains and how a judge in Spain has just ordered that he be exhumed.

It seems that Mr. D died in 1989.  The surrealist painter was buried in the theatre and museum he designed himself, in his home town of Figueres in the north-eastern Catalonia region.  A woman, born in 1956 has decided to pursue the claim that her mother and Dali had an affair and she is the offspring of that relationship.  There is nothing available from which to take a DNA sample--so they are going to dig the Poor Guy up and take a sample.

This just strikes me a So Wrong.  Where does it end?

Maria Pilar Abel Martinez, a tarot card reader, made the paternity claim in 2015.  Maybe she was flipping through her cards one day and had a favorable reading.  Actually-- many of Dali's paintings sort of look like the images often found on tarot cards.

Or maybe she went to an auction where--more often than not--there are millions and millions and millions of Dali lithographs forever coming up on the auction block.  Dali--or maybe a automatic pen signing machine--have been working for decades making prints that have been sold in shopping mall art shops.

I am not a surrealist fan.  I have never been to a Dali exhibit, let alone his museum.  But to dig the poor dead guy up for an unfounded claim is just WRONG.