How I Named My Blog

Being a poet and an occasional pun-ster, the "Not on the Road" title is multi-layered. First, it was a response to old Jack K's "On the Road," since I'm definitely not he. Also, I've moved around a bit throughout my life (like in the last two and a half years!), and I'm sick of being ON the road. And of course, being an animal lover and very active in dog rescue work, I don't like seeing animals, wild or domestic ON the road, dead or alive.

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Thursday, April 16, 2009

Things we find when we are packing to move

I love old cookbooks, even though I'm an ovo-lacto vegetarian and am constantly trying to watch my weight. (Seems like I'm always watching my weight . . . go up!) I've been known to cook meat for the omnivores in my life. As I was packing up cookbooks today, I found the 1969 cookbook put out (mimeographed) by the Women's Association of John Knox Presbyterian Church. This pre-dates the fancy-schmancy "published" club cookbooks of the computer age. Glancing through it, I saw names of women who were my late mother's friends. I also saw some recipes that easily could have been in my cherished edition of White Trash Cooking, a book dedicated to the thrifty and creative cooks of the American South. Yet John Knox Presbyterian Church is in a small township west of Cleveland in northern Ohio. The recipe that called for the cook to slice Spam, but keep the main piece intact by not cutting the whole way through, inserting slices of pineapple between the pieces of Spam and covering the whole shebang with brown sugar left me crosseyed, as did my own mother's entry of cooking a disgusting brown sugar goo and pouring it over saltine crackers in a baking dish, and then baking the mass for 15 minutes. These are not recipes; they are culinary suicide attempts. The only thing worse is the "thing" that shows up at church dinners in Kentucky under the questionable name of "Pretzel Salad."

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