As you may remember, the first woodchuck ate all my sunflowers. The second–still at large–woodchuck ate his way through my cosmos. I had despaired of getting any of those lovely breezy flowers this summer. But, as you can see in the photo above, a few cosmos took their time and emerged to defy the little rodent’s evil intent. Not the full display that we had planted, but enough to make me smile.

My granddaughter seems to have a constant sense that she is late to the party of my life. Whenever I share a story, she says “how come no one ever told me that?” A recent phrase FOMO(fear of missing out) seems, in her case, to operate retroactively. Still, she operates on the theory that I apply to my cosmos, better late than never. She hauls out photo albums and has me identify every person and event pictured therein.

When I sit explaining who is who to her I remember my similar fascination with identifying all the relatives before me. I memorized the names of my grandfather’s siblings in one panoramic photo, even though most of them had already died. That study turned out to be very useful when I inherited all the family photos after my mother died. I have been able to label them, sometimes even posting them on this blog.

But back to the garden. I am grateful that any cosmos appeared and have a chance this September to flutter in the wind until the first killing frost. And glad that my FOMO didn’t apply to my flowers after all.

Along with the double boiler, I inherited a cast iron skillet from my grandmother. Recently I noticed that someone had vigorously cleaned it, thus exposing it to the beginnings of rust. Before we left on vacation, I slathered it with oil and let it season again. Now it has returned to its nonstick surface acquired after years of use.

The pan is rather pedestrian looking, and one day I wandered into a high end kitchen store and saw some lovely enamel clad cast iron frying pans. I eyed them for a while, then asked the salesperson if there was any advantage, besides looks, for the very expensive items. She assured me that the old pans worked just as well, better in my case since mine had been seasoned for three generations. I suspect she won’t last long in sales with this candid offering of advice!

Cast iron cookware suffers in the marketplace from its inexpensive price and its ability to last forever. This makes it an unlikely candidate for our society’s emphatic stance that newer is always better. Just the same, I will continue to stand by my pan, especially now that I have confirmed that the new ones are no better. It has a nonstick surface(unless heartily scrubbed), retains its heat well, and is said to impart a little iron to the food it cooks. And every time I use it I smile remembering its history.

Portland, Maine is noted for its seafood, since it is on a large bay next to the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, on this trip, we stayed in the Old Waterfront neighborhood, now full of  hotels, shops and restaurants. Two years ago, when I was on my halibut search, I had excellent halibut at Scales on the water. This time, however, we had a chance to have an authentic Greek dinner and chose to go to Emilitsa, a much praised place.

When we lived in Portland, Oregon, we had a favorite Greek restaurant, Johnny’s, a no frills, family operation with outstanding food. We ate there for years until the younger members of the family decided to go into other work and the place closed. Since then we had failed to find any offerings that even approached Johnny’s. Although there are many Greeks in the area, they all seem to run pizza parlors. There is a smattering of almost Greek places, but the only authentic food we have found here is at the annual Greek Orthodox festivals. Great food, but sitting outdoors at a long table eating off paper plates doesn’t quite produce the fine dining experience.

Emilitsa had a small focused menu, and I chose grilled lamb chops, something I hadn’t eaten in years. They tasted perfect, and only my residual table manners from my English grandmother prevented me from gnawing on the bones. But I was surely tempted! Dessert was an enormous piece of light lemon cheesecake, half of which we had for lunch the next day.

Portland ranks high as a walkable city, and we were able to park our car and walk everywhere. The streets are usually cobbled, the sidewalks bricks, so I had to watch my footing occasionally, and finally switched to my sneakers. Art abounds, people are friendly, food is excellent, lodging comfortable. I fear for its future. My experience from Portland, Oregon showed me that a place can get loved to death as people flock there, changing its character forever. Signs of new construction abounded, and perhaps it will eventually lose some of its big town/small city feel. Right now, however, it remains a wonderful place to spend a few days.

If you have followed me for any length of time, you know I have been looking for a moose every time we go north to Maine or Canada. You also know I have failed to see one even though I have passed at least 500 MOOSE WARNING signs. Finally we went to the one place we were guaranteed to see a moose, the Maine Wildlife Center outside Portland, Maine. Here injured wildlife of all sorts are brought to this lovely wooded refuge either to recover or to stay, depending on their conditions.

Zoos  often leave me feeling a little melancholy when I think about the animals being uprooted and caged. The center, however, felt tranquil and inviting. Each animal had its own spacious enclosure equipped with appropriate landscape. The foxes could roam through deep grass and hop on rocks to look for mice. The cougars had a cave in the rocks where they retreated. The two moose had a very large enclosure though each one stayed close to the fence, not entirely resigned to their predicament.

Now that I have seen the massive bulk of a moose, I am less inclined to hope to see one on our travels. I would be glad to spot one while hiking, but it would be disastrous for both car and moose to meet on the highway.

Our Maine travel continues for several more days. I hope to post again before we return home.

We’re off in Maine for a few days. I hope to post a couple of times. Until then, take care everyone. Hope to catch up with all the blogs when we return.

When I was a kid, the only biscuits I ever ate came in a tube in the refrigerator. You peeled the cover off the tube, whacked it hard against the edge of the counter, and pulled out eight little round pieces of dough. When baked, these little circles became what passed as biscuits in our house. The first time I ever tasted any semblance of a real biscuit was with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. These were fatter, tastier, and much much greasier.

When my mother-in-law died, we inherited the wooden biscuit bowl pictured above. She grew up in rural Texas and her mother had left this bowl to her. It must be, therefore, at least 100 years old, probably more. I have loved it as an art object, but really didn’t understand its use until I prepared this post. Sadly I never had the opportunity to ask my mother-in-law how she remembered it being used.

I loved reading how women simply poured a large amount of flour into the bowl, made a well for the lard, buttermilk and baking powder and began mixing. By sight and feel, the baker would mix the dough until it was just right for biscuits. Bread was also made in these bowls, and the wood held the heat for the required rise.

My husband’s grandmother had five children, a husband with tuberculosis, and very little money. I am quite sure she constantly made biscuits and bread to fill every stomach. She definitely used the flour sack cloth for sewing. Her frugality was passed down to her daughter and now onto her grandson, my husband. His salvaging of bricks and collecting of seeds shows he learned to “make do” as surely as his grandmother with her wooden biscuit bowl.

We have become used to technology becoming obsolete, but the other day I saw my double boiler sitting on a shelf and realized it too had stopped being useful. My double boiler was first used by my grandmother who gave it to my mother who gave it to me. Like many things from years ago, it was built to last and it has.

My mother used it to melt butter which became the base for the white sauce that she used for tuna and chipped beef. She believed knowing how to make white sauce was a prerequisite for marriage, and she taught me how to make it using this pot. The simmering water in the bottom pan heated the content of the upper pan without burning it. She also melted chocolate in the double boiler using it to make our once in a blue moon hot fudge sauce over vanilla ice cream. Chocolate, like butter, burned easily in a single pan, so the double boiler was essential.

Staring at the pot, I realized that my microwave oven had replaced the double boiler for melting butter and chocolate. I never make white sauce any more, so I don’t need to stir the flour into the melted butter at the bottom of the pan. Chipped beef is too salty and tuna in white sauce no longer appeals to me. So the double boiler has become an artifact, perhaps one day to sit on a museum shelf with children wondering about how on earth they used it “back in the old days.”

I remember being taught to play the piano and being supplied with two mnemonic devices. The lines on the staff for the right hand could be remembered by Every Good Boy Does Fine(e,g,b,d,f). The white spaces spelled out FACE(f,a,c,e). I still call that tip to mind when I look at a new hymn on Sunday. Mnemonics exist to help our struggling memories over commonly forgotten facts.

A couple of tips in school have stayed with me for sixty years. The difference between principle and principal is that the principal can be your PAL. Desert and dessert have different numbers of the letter “s” because you only want to cross a desert once but you will always want two desserts. Most repeated, despite the handy feature of spell check, is “i before e except after c or sounded like a in neighbor or weigh.”

Theoretically names can be brought to mind more easily by inventing a personalized mnemonic. The idea is to take a person’s characteristic and link it to the person’s name. This has never worked for me, probably because I start laughing thinking up the trick. Let’s see: “he is a real pill and his name is Bill.” Not a good plan. However I am able to remember a man’s name I see every Sunday although I always start down the wrong path with it. His name is Angelo, but I keep thinking it is Anthony. A nearby restaurant is called Angelo’s, and now I struggle to think of the name of the place and then can think of his. Not a very quick trick for sure.

I would love to know any other mnemonics that my readers learned or still use. Until then, “a pint’s a pound the whole world round.”

As you can see in this photo of me in 1949, I have always loved raspberries. We have a thicket of raspberry plants next to the garage, and the photo on the right shows the most recent picking of ripe berries. Our vines produce two crops each summer, and the crops are bigger every other year. This year is a bountiful one. The early summer taste good, these late ones taste even better.

Raspberries don’t ship very well. They are fragile, spoil quickly, and yield their juice at the slightest pressure. The ones sold in grocery stores must be a special variety, bred for their ability to stand travel, so they are firmer and much less sweet. Even ours will begin to go bad by the next day, providing an ready excuse to devour them quickly. They are excellent stirred into a batch of Greek yogurt with a little granola thrown in if desired.

I have written before about how lovely it was to walk around my old neighborhood in what had been an Italian part of Portland, Oregon. My daughter and I would pick figs, pears, apples, plums and blackberries which were abundant in the area. I haven’t seen any local figs here, so they probably need a warmer climate. As you can tell from my posts, I am loving the height of summer and the abundance of fruit. Soon apples will fill the farm stands, a clear sign that autumn has begun in New England.

Well equipped to protect himself from the skunk, my husband crept up on the trap, threw a sheet over it, and opened the latch. Then he waited. And waited. And waited. Tired of waiting, he propped open the trap door with several (salvaged) bricks and called it a night. Apparently the skunk had become used to his new quarters and was in no hurry to leave.

By the next morning the skunk had wandered off, having determined that no more broccoli was going to magically appear in the strange wire home he had so recently discovered. And so another wildlife saga comes to a denouement on Broad Street. Guess my husband will get to return to one of his favorite August pastimes–eating the peach crisp I just made him.

Speaking of peach crisps, I recently spent some time with my New England baking cookbook and found that in addition to peach crisp I could also make peach buckle, peach slump, peach cobbler and peach grunt. Apparently those cooks had to keep coming up with various ways to deal with the surplus of peaches that arrive at the end of summer. But I am sticking with the famous peach blueberry pie I mentioned earlier and the very simple peach crisp currently sitting on the kitchen counter.

I hope the woodchuck relocates himself. I hesitate to find out “what evil lurks in the heart” of my back yard waiting to walk into that trap.