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Who’s my Ginger Peachy?
So many times I have often wondered, in print, how one month manages to pass by so quickly. I didn’t feel that way about January 2022. January was just one long string of challenges, one after the other. I’d nicely get over some disaster or upset and another would take its place. I’m not complaining about challenges. I do learn from my disasters. My January fun is nothing compared to what some people have on their plate, every day. I’m just saying, “Whew! Thank goodness January 2022 is over.” The thing is I want to enjoy February. It’s day six and so far it’s been pretty good. The Gym reopened, last week, and I found my favourite winter hat, which had been hiding since New Year’s Eve. I tried a new recipe and I wasn’t disappointed. Heck LOML wasn’t disappointed. When I decided to pull back the front room curtains I was surprised to see the cactus hadn’t died. Also, I was surprised because I’d forgotten we had a cactus but, it didn’t die.
Don’t get me wrong about January 2022, it’s not about the weather or about winter, for that matter. I love all of the seasons. I know I can’t appreciate the heat if I don’t experience the cold and vice versa. Anyway, here we are dipping our toes into February. February, the month of Valentines and love and corny Hallmark™ movies on television. I like February. It’s short, it’s definitely sweet and it feels promising. The local shops are awash with heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and the greeting card racks are filled with saccharine-sweet Valentine wishes. “Who’s Your Ginger Peachy?” LOML and I don’t get too excited about most “holidays” but we do love a bit of mush on Valentine’s Day. On one of our early Valentine’s Days together as a married couple I decided to make a gourmet meal. Back in the olden days, I was not much of a cook. No one swooned over any offering issued from my kitchen. The Valentine’s Day I have in mind was in 1973. We’d been living in the County for about five months and I had a Better Homes Cookbook, you know the one with the red and white checked cover. I hadn’t paid much attention to it but living in the country in the County inspired me to be a domestic goddess. At the time I was a stay-at-home Mom. We lived about five miles from the town of Picton and didn’t own two cars. Whatever I concocted for our Valentine’s feast had to be made from what we had on-hand, there was no dashing into A&P or IGA for ingredients. After spending some quality time thumbing through the book I decided upon a “Fluffy Cheese Omelette” and a “Chocolate Bavarian”. The Chocolate Bavarian was from a Betty Crocker cookbook, if memory serves. Again, at that time, 1973, I wasn’t exactly an accomplished cook. As a matter of fact, I was fairly incompetent with anything but the very, very basics. Once, I even asked LOML how he liked his chicken cooked, you know well-done, medium-rare, rare. But I knew my shortcomings and figured I could cook an egg or two, and who doesn’t like chocolate. What could go wrong and we just happened to have the ingredients needed. It was going to be a romantic surprise for LOML when he got home from a day in the classroom.
It’s probably enough to say I still have the Better Homes Cookbook, while it is well loved and I’ve conquered many of the recipes I have never, again, attempted the Fluffy Cheese Omelette. As it regards the decadent dessert, who knew gelatine would be only part of the dessert nightmare. There wasn’t a warning about getting the gelatinous blob of translucent brown goop out of a mould, which turned out to be the true test of my patience. Timing was another thing. Omelettes don’t need to be started three hours before they will be served, rookie mistake. Bavarians, on the other hand, need more than thirty minutes to “Bavarian-ize” another “rookie mistake” As our son used to say “It was a horrible sight, folks, but it was all part of the food chain.” Yessir, February 14,1973 was the day it occurred to me I needed to work on my kitchen “chops”.
A handwritten note in my Better Homes book reminds me that February, 1973, I baked my first ever apple pie. As I remember the pie smelled divine as it baked. When it came out of the oven it looked as if it could have been on the cover of a cookbook. February 1973 was a month of culinary lessons. After the Omelette and the Bavarian, I learned “do not knead pie dough”. That pastry could have been the hard-cover of a cookbook.
Happy February.
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