chili and chocolate combo is a great winter tummy warmer

Utah’s done got all cold! I think I heard the weatherman say 16 degrees lower than normal for this time of year. So naturally when I think of supper, I think about chili. Here’s a meatless version with plenty of stick-to-the-ribs goodness to stave off both hunger and chill. It originally came from SIMPLE magazine several years ago. It’s been one of my favorites ever since. Even if you’re cooking for only one or two, it freezes well or tastes even better as a leftover.

VEGETARIAN CHILI MOLÈ

1  tablespoon olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 green bell pepper, cut into ¼-inch dice
2 tomatoes cut into ½-inch dice, or 1 (16 oz) can whole tomatoes, drained and chopped
2 (15-oz) cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 (15-oz) cans kidney beans, drained and rinsed
5 cups vegetable broth
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1  teaspoon salt
1½ ounces bittersweet chocolate

In a stockpot over medium heat, cook the oil, garlic, onion, and green pepper until slightly softened, stirring occasionally, about 5 minutes. Add the tomatoes, chickpeas, kidney beans, vegetable broth, cumin, and salt. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer, stirring occasionally, until thickened, 1 to 1 ½ hours. Just before serving stir the chocolate in until melted.

STORE in the refrigerator up to 3 days, or in the freezer up to 4 months. Freeze individual servings in heavy-duty zipper bags.

Postscript: The first time I made this, I used a German chocolate SIL’s parents brought from Germany for my husband instead of the bittersweet. It was a sugarless chocolate, and I wish I knew what kind of sweetener substitute was used in it, because it was the best batch of this chili I ever made or ate. I can only add that the better the quality of chocolate, the better the taste. For such a weird combination, chocolate and chilis work well together. Enjoy.

a christmas surprise

Last week during one of our frequent forays to the city library downtown, my eye caught a glimpse of a very beautiful and different nativity in one of the shop windows nearby. Naturally I had to check it out more closely. It was a very different nativity scene than the ones we’re accustomed to seeing and I loved it.

Mary and Joseph, the baby Jesus and three wise men, and all the corresponding animals you associate with the manger scene were randomly nestled together in a straw lined wooden dough bowl. The difference was not the dough bowl presentation but that Mary, Joseph, the three wise men and the baby Jesus were South or Central American. They were cast in clay and painted with vivid browns and turquoise and tiny splashes of a contrasting reds. Beautiful. I wondered how much it cost.

No matter how much or how little, however, Hubby and I have resolved not to continue collecting, so the question was moot. It’s time we start downsizing and not collecting more stuff, but my mind and heart began their arguing anyway.

Mind: You already have too much junk. Don’t even think about another collection!

Heart: Oh but wouldn’t this be beautiful next to the one I already have? It could be a special collection. Gee, I wonder how much it is?

I immediately called Hubby back to see them too. He’s always several yards ahead of me when we’re walking along any storefront, because I’m an inveterate window shopper and tag-along-too-lou. He didn’t mind. He thought they were pretty nifty too, and was curious about their cost as well. As it was near the library’s closing time and a Sunday, the store had closed so I still don’t know the price, and it’s probably just as well. I suspect his mind and heart were arguing as well. We both seem to have a soft spot for unusual nativities.

It was the fall 1994 when I was off on a visit to daughter #1 in California for a few days, that  Hubby found himself free to sneak off every day after work plus a couple of lunch hours and join several ladies in artistic pursuits at a ceramic studio in Clinton, Tennessee near Oak Ridge. I knew nothing about this of course; all I knew was he seemed a little too eager to have me disappear for a week, and I had the sense he was glad I was leaving.

A few months later, when we were decorating the house for Christmas, he appeared out of the garage with a mysterious box, set it in front of me, and asked me to open it. It was a little early for a Christmas present, he said, but I would understand after I opened it. This is what I found, each item individually wrapped and carefully packed into the box.

He had spent all the free time he could muster the week I was gone laboriously going through the steps of cleaning the green ware, glazing and firing, and painting in suitable colors, then back to the studio for a final glaze at what he described as an old lady’s studio where the only other people were women of various ages each working on individual projects. Of course when they learned what he was doing surreptitiously as a gift for his wife, they were totally charmed. And when I saw this, and thought about how many hours it must have taken, I was a little jealous of that time spent with all those women I didn’t know.

For weeks after I teased him about spending so much time with the old lady who owned the shop, so one day when we  on our way to Oak Ridge he stopped by and introduced me. She really was an older lady who clearly thought he was great. After all there aren’t too many men, that I’ve ever known at least, who would have gone to so much trouble and effort to surprise his wife for Christmas–not by spending a lot of money–but by putting so much of himself into making it as a surprise.

I was showing it to a couple we knew and considered good friends and was somewhat taken aback at their response, and got the distinct impression they were slightly offended that the figures were represented as Indian as they knew neither of us were overtly religious. Perhaps they preferred their Christ only white with blue eyes and white skin and blond angels hovering nearby. I had the feeling they thought we were mocking the Christian representation of the birth of Christ.  Oh what would Jesus think?!

Of course we weren’t, and I’m gratified that these days Christmassy things are looking a lot different. There are variations everywhere on the standard nativity scene. Mary may be clad in a country woman’s shawl with a fedora hat and Joseph may be wearing a poncho. The baby Jesus may be depicted as European with Italian features and the wise men may look like Colombian natives. I even saw a scene with whimsical rubber duckies. Regardless of the ethnicity or depiction of the figures or the religion it represents, nativity scenes re-capture the spirit and beauty of Christ’s lowly birth and remind us what Christmas is all about. And you know what I think Jesus would think? Jesus, at least the Jesus I imagine from the Bible stories I’ve read, would think it’s just fine.

it’s beginning to look a lot like christmas at our house

We’d started dragging the Christmas things from the storage room on Saturday, so the family room was already full of junk and boxes galore. Over the years I’ve collected so much stuff, we’re never able to use it all, but we use as much on the tree as we can, put a few favorite things up and that’s it. Here it is Monday night, and there’s still a little cleanup to be done. I remember the days decorating was only a one-day affair. What happened?

Here’s the tree fresh–not from the farm but from the box–and Hubby’s starting the arduous task of unfolding the limbs. Ummm! Smell that delicious pine scent? (Use a little imagination, please.) I think it’s too close to the curio in the corner, so I think we need to rearrange all the furniture so everything will fit better.

The granddaughter passing by our house with her mom as they walk home from a birthday party wants to stop by for a short visit. The scene looks delightfully messy for a four year old so she asks to stay and help.

Help means keeping the angels and the little stuffed penguin contented until it’s their turn to go on the tree, and who knows what Grandma  will pull out of those boxes next?

This genderless angel (head shrouded in in netting and golden wings hanging from the back of the sleigh) and the penguin sporting the red bowtie are being treated to a sleigh ride. I’m thinking that they’ve been wanting to ride in one of those red buggies a very long time, and wondering why I never thought of it myself.

Meanwhile, the tree’s been fluffed out and moved closer to the television. It’s looking pretty good so far even without stuff on it. It’s an apartment sized tree, 7 feet, but the branches aren’t spread very wide so it doesn’t take up much floor space.

In our Las Vegas house with its 25 foot living room ceiling, we needed a 12-footer that took a terribly long time to fluff and arrange and decorate. I like this one much better.

My mother made these little plastic angels for me only a year or so before she died. So every Christmas we bring them out for their yearly outing. This year one will go on the tree top, and the other will adorn a portion of the living room mantel.

Here it is now–all gussied up and ready to welcome in the holidays in all its glittery glory. The decorations are only about a third of the whole inventory, but every one holds a memory. When we were living in Connecticut we started a tradition of hand making  an ornament each year and for many years we kept it up.

Next time I’ll show you a special Christmas item from 1995 and tell you how I came to acquire it. For now, however, since it’s almost 9 p.m.,  it’s time to get out the Christmas CDs and play the sounds to match the look. It certainly is beginning to look, sound, and feel a lot like Christmas in our house.

This is it! Day 30 of the challenge to publish a post each day of November. Surprisingly I had a lot of fun and got into the swing of things, learned a few things too. I began to relax and let the post flow for itself without worrying if it was too stupid or not. My regular readers have been gracious and supportive, and I can’t imagine quitting now. But it won’t be daily. Hubby is so relieved to know that! Maybe our schedule and dinner times will be less scattered. But I hope to regularly post several times a week come hell or high water. It feels good that I did it, and that’s all I have to say for now. But I’ll be back soon, whether you consider that a threat or a promise.

if it hurts enough you tend to remember it

I’m pretty sure this picture was taken in the spring, and my guess is it was taken shortly before my birth in 1942. The glee on my sister’s face was shortlived, because up to that time she had been the only girl in my father’s  side of our family. Then Great-Grandma Fannie died in March of 1942, just in time for my parents and siblings to move into her old house where I was born in May. And my sister never fully recovered after that upset.

There I am in the front yard (yes, that step needs to be repaired!) at about six months of age. I make these assumptions based on the tiny dog between my oldest brother’s knees, that–up to this day–I had never noticed! It appears the puppy is several months older., plus the three siblings were sitting at a site I know to be where the tiny little house they  lived at the time was located, way back in the corner of one of the fields on Grandpa’s farm.

A few years later my brothers would complain that I ruined every hunting dog they brought  home because the dogs were given too much love and everybody knew you had to keep a hunting dog lean and mean or they turn into pets no good for hunting.

This house was much larger, and the boys would share a bedroom while my sister had a room of her own. We must have left there about two 0r three years later, but I have very vivid memories–though fleeting ones–of things that happened when we were living there. A tree that can’t be seen grew on the other side of where my dirty foot lies–one with Spanish moss hanging down in long strands (notice the Spanish moss hanging in the background).

When I between two- and three-years-old, I pretended the moss strands were fish. I found a cane fishing pole and stood on the front porch “fishing” until I managed to hook some moss. I reached out to catch hold of my “fish” with my right hand to draw it near me–just as I’d seen the grownups do–and the hook dug into the fleshy part of my middle finger.

My big brothers struggled to carry me down the road to Grandma & Grandpa’s house. I don’t know if my mother was there or not because this is where the memory becomes fuzzy. I always thought my grandfather removed the hook. The actual removal is vivid, but according to my mother when I talked to her about it several years prior to her death, it was the doctor who clipped off the hook at the base where the fishing line was attached. I thought he would have to slit my finger to get it out so I was bawling the whole time. I do remember the crying and the great relief I felt when the hook was finally out. The scar is very faint now, but if you know where to look it can still be seen.

And that’s my Sunday snapshot memory on this 19th day of the November daily posting. One more day!

finding the proper title goes a long way

Both Hubby and SIL backed up the recent advice of a reader to add an external hard drive to my constipated PC to better store my photos and music files, rather than trusting them to CDs. I’m grateful for good advice, so I’ve begun the tedious process of transferring the files one by one. But this time I’m taking the time to better organize them so I’ll have less problems losing things. I’ve been looking for a certain photographs for months now with absolutely no luck.

So that explains how I found a peculiar folder hiding in some obscure file and I couldn’t explain in a month of Sundays how they found their way there at all. I had taken the time to title each one, however, and that in itself is a little out of the ordinary for me. Most of my pictures have titles like Image050 or Image050 (2) and the like. It’s understandable, therefore, that it takes a mite longer for me to sort and find the pictures I want to put into a post.

To add to all the other problems, last week I found several old pictures from 2004 that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out. I saw a bunch of little squares with different colored squiggles instead of the familiar little thumb sized pictures that usually identify a picture. Even if I weren’t looking for a particular photo I was so deeply intrigued by the titles on some these pictures that I could hardly wait to open them and find out what treasures I’d hidden away with titles like “sewers” and “undressed ladies.”

Alas! It was not to be a mystery quickly solved, as my photo program didn’t seem to want to open any of those puzzling files. My eyes scrolled quickly to the last photo in the file and I read “dressed up ladies afterward,” making me all the more curious. I tried all the picture software on my PC; there are many. When my Image Express flat out refused to open it, I was beginning to wonder if my PC knew something I didn’t. Like maybe somebody had somehow managed to slip a file of, you know, sizzling pictures into my family oriented stuff.

This morning, determined to filter out whatever evil fiend has gotten hold of my PC, I decided to try once again every photo processing programs I’m privy to. Just for more aggravation, I suppose, I decided to try one more time. I practically fell out of my chair when the picture I’d clicked on opened almost immediately. Finally the mystery was solved with the revelation of this first picture of the sewers:

See? When you half have your mind in the gutter already, and you see a file like sewers, you might think toilets and latrines and the like. But in this case you’d be wrong.

These are the sewers. As in seamstresses. (Click on each picture for a larger view.)

These are some of the ladies who were participating in a pioneer program at the Spring Mountain Ranch State Park just outside Las Vegas near Blue Diamond, Nevada that year–2004. I’ll bet you can hardly wait to see the naked ladies, now, huh?

The pioneer program takes place once a year at the ranch, in the fall, and the docents there take the opportunity to do a little fund raising for a few extras for the cash-strapped state-run park. It’s a good place for the kiddies to learn what it was like living way out in the desert when the west was still being settled, maybe assist in washing a few clothes in a washtub or making lye soap, or talking to a slew of mountain men demonstrate black powder rifle shooing. The dolls are part of the fund raising.

When I saw them lined up on a couch back at the ranch house while seamstresses worked furiously to make more clothes, I couldn’t resist taking a picture. Apparently it takes a little less time to sew the dolls than it does to make the clothes. You know how ladies are, wanting things to match and all.

These five lucky ladies are already dressed up prim and proper and ready to go out to the cabin store.

My title on the photograph naked ladies worked rather well in enticing me to open it so I could see what I had. Now I need to work on those photo files I’m transferring to the external HD and give them all equally intriguing titles, so I’ll be able to find exactly what I’m looking for in those 11,209,487 pictures waiting for my attention.

Just one more note. We’re at day 28 of our month long daily posting adventure. Only two days to do. Maybe my last post for November will be about the number of cialis and viagra spammers were caught by wordpress’s anti-spam program. That might make an interesting post, huh? With any luck I’ll be finished in about 19 years.

welcoming mountain woman to the blogging world

Today it’s my pleasure to introduce my art loving readers to a new multi-talented blogger on the block, MountainWoman Silver. I’ve known Silver since around 1994 when this attractive, silver haired woman walked up to me at a writer’s conference in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and asked if we’d met someplace before? As far as I knew, we hadn’t, yet she did have an air of familiarity about her. The next two years we spent a good deal of time exploring the Tennessee hills and valleys together as we discovered we had quite a great deal in common besides our love of writing. As we became better acquainted, I would learn of many other talents of hers that included all the arts I admired–photography, sculpture, painting in oils and acryllics, and fabric arts to name a few. She’s good at them all.

When we were in Tennessee for that short period of about two years, she was heavily involved in exploring the fabric arts. We went to quilt shows together, and she produced some traditional as well as art quilts during that period. She even convinced me I could do something like that. I really can’t, but she encouraged me to practice it for my own enjoyment. Here’s a couple of examples of her work that I especially enjoy. “Grandma in Her Garden” up there has become one of my favorite for obvious reasons.

Here’s a detail of a commissioned art she did for a woman who had lost her young son in a tragic accident and wanted a quilt for her wall designed especially as a memorial tribute to him. The finished project is stunning, although out of respect for the owner (whom I could not contact for permission) I will not post the entire quilt. It’s possible you could see a photograph on the art web site where Silver’s art, fabric as well as painted canvas and other media, is listed. All these pictures will enlarge so you can see more detail, by the way, if you click on them. To go to the Art Site, click here.

Here’s a quilt in progress. You can see the blocks have not yet been attached but the layout gives you an idea how the quilt came together in the traditional box layout. I have Silver to thank for getting me to think a little outside the box to try and encourage my own creativity. Sometimes things that aren’t perfectly matched or leaving a frayed edge makes a piece of fabric art much more appealing. I must tell you, it takes a certain “eye” that isn’t nearly as developed in me.

I doubt you’d be surprised at all to know that Silver’s won awards and accolades for not only her fabric art, but some of the paintings she’s devoted her time to the past several years have been accepted into juried shows around the country and she’s now an award winning painter as well as fabric artist.

Last but not least,  “That Quiet Miss Emma” is one of her earlier collages I’ve always admired. I feel it represents all those other quiet little women who sit on the sideline and are easily dismissed into one stereotype or another because of how they look, their educational status, or myriad things that don’t truly define them. All the things that went into making Miss Emma don’t show on the outside except for those the artist chose to bring to our attention. If we take the time to know them, we’ll learn there’s a lot more to all the Miss Emmas of the world.

Just before she moved away from Tennessee to a new state in the southwest, Silver was struggling with decisions to be made about how to dispose of a lot of things that seemed too burdensome to keep moving from place to place. So that quiet Miss Emma lives with me now.

I know this is a busy busy time of year when there’s just not enough time to do all the things we need or would like to get done. But I do hope you’ll take a few minutes to stop by Silver’s new blog, Mountain Woman Silver Speaks, where you can see more of her painting and quilt art. And while you’re there, I hope you’ll leave a little welcoming message. Oh and one thing she probably would NOT want you to mention . . . is how much I loved it when she used to sing the Milk Cow Blues to me, and how I was always begging her to sing it. So don’t mention that, okay?

alice’s restaurant is closed today

Day 26, November daily post challenge.

It was hard to decide what to say today since it is a national holiday here in the U.S., and a favorite one for a lot of people. I won’t try to say all that meaningful stuff, because most everyone else is far better than I at that style of writing. So here goes with stuff you probably never needed or wanted to know.

According to Thanksgiving facts gleaned from an internet sweep,  over 535 million pounds of turkey will be consumed today, those apparently coming from 45 million brave turkeys who had no other choice but volunteer for the occasion because that’s how things are. And because of lots of other things that will appear alongside whatever the cook has planned for your dinner table today, the average American will probably have consumed 4,500 calories by the end of the day. It might be good to be thinking about a long walk after dinner or tomorrow first thing.

Now these facts could be easily disputed; it depends on the source you go to, but one of my favorite sources is the funny paper. They have about the same shot at accuracy as anybody else in my book, so I thought it might be fun to throw one more fact at you, this coming from Grand Avenue (Steve Breen & Mike Thompson). It’s estimated that Americans will consume ten million pounds of turkey today . . . and due to turkey’s high sulfur content, Americans will also produce enough gas to fly a fleet of  75 Hindenburgs from Los Angeles to New York in 24 hours.

While I was contemplating these fun facts, Hubby played a Youtube video of Arlo Guthrie singing Alice’s Restaurant. Apparently it has become a tradition for radio stations to play this every Thanksgiving at exactly 12 noon. It also seems to be catching on in blogs, and even the ABC network today will be featuring it.

The original Arlo Guthrie video that started all this runs 18½ minutes and the sound quality isn’t that good on the ones I saw, so I shopped around and found this one instead. It only runs a little over a minute so if you have time to read this, you could probably spare another minute or two to enjoy this guy. He’s a real treasure I’m glad I’ve discovered, another thing to be thankful for.

 

Alice’s Restaurant, the one Arlo Gurthrie wrote the song for, was located down an alley behind a grocery store at 40 Main Street in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It was roughly six miles from the church, and true to the song’s lyrics, just half a mile from the railroad track. It ran the length of the building from front to back along a side alley. It was only owned by Alice for a year and then she and her husband Ray divorced. Since Arlo’s song became so popular, Alice’s Restaurants have sprung up all over the country, and I’m sure you can find one today if you know where to look. Also, I hear the original Alice is still out there somewhere too.

One further note, I can’t accurately count the number of strings on his guitar, but it sounds much too good to be the standard number of strings (six?). I think it might be twelve, which leads me to mention a post I have planned for tomorrow–to introduce a new blogger to my blogging world. She’s MountainWoman Silver, an artist and woman of many talents–one of which is playing the 12-string guitar–but that’s tomorrow. I hope you’ll come back for that.

As for today, I hope you all have a wonderful holiday, because if you’re able to or just plain have time to read this, then that means you have access to a PC so that means you have a lot to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

tell me more, tell me more . . .

Day 25, November daily post challenge: This is to be one of the busiest days of the season! So what am I doing here pecking this keyboard!

Surprise! Surprise! Yesterday’s post looking for recognition of the word chivaree was sure to be a bust, I thought. No one outside the south had probably ever heard of it. Naturally I was very pleasantly surprised to hear from a few people.

Catch Her-In-The-Wry had heard of it, saying it was quite common in the area of the south she lived in for awhile (she now lives in Ohio). That didn’t surprise me too much. What did is that apparently by the way she phrased her comment it may still be going on.

Gary from Holler Notes noted the chivaree is very similar to a practice mentioned in a Thomas Hardy novel, i.e., as a way to shame or demean an  unmarried couple living together without the bonds on matrimony. I remember reading similar notes in my admittedly short research.

MountainWoman Silver who grew up in Mississippi and Louisiana remembers hearing her parents speak of the practice though no one in the family that she knew of ever participated as she suspects they were too straight-laced.

Mage who writes her Postcards from out of San Diego lived for a short time in Virginia. She remembers having heard about them, and no doubt it while she was living in the south. She never heard of anything like that in SD. No surprises there.

GrannyMar in Ireland says she has never heard of it, which surprised me very much. So much of the southern speech patterns of the U.S. sound very much like the English spoken by people in parts of Ireland. And we know that the southern states of this country were settled by large numbers Irish-Scots who immigrated in the 17th and 18th centuries, so I guess I just assumed the practice very possibly originated there. I had hoped she might verify my hunch.

Then Meanderings author Colleen showed up to remind me chivaree had been worked into a storyline on the Waltons tv drama in the early 1970’s. Call me a silly sentimentalist, but I still like that show. It takes me to a simpler time in this country, not that life really was easier then but as a child I didn’t have any responsibilities and nothing was my doing. That’s why every generation suffers from nostalgia at some point in their lives I suppose.

One comment especially caught my eye, that of Rebecca’s Daughter, and it made me think that there’s a lot more exploring I’d like to do about old traditions and their meanings. She reminded me of the old tradition in Scotland and other areas of the British Isles where the reigning lord had a turn with new brides BEFORE their new husbands did. Can you even imagine such a horrid practice? But yes, I do remember reading about that somewhere, and it seems to me it was portrayed in a movie I saw once. Can’t rightly remember the title, but it was certainly set in Scotland. RD wonders if chivaree might have grown out of it.

I decided to write about the custom because, just as I wrote in the post, I wondered why there was no mention in the book which I thought would have been the correct time period for such practices. My thoughts were something on the order that “no one will read it anyway and it’ll be an easy post” which hasn’t been the case for many days of this month long ritual (daily posting).

What did not surprise me was that all the commentators mention the practice in the southern part of the U.S.The biggest surprise was that so many of the comments evoked a lot more curiosity on my end for all kinds of rituals, some still practiced–some no longer practiced or remembered, but all quaint enough to warrant more research. What I thought of and wrote as a throwaway post leaves me wanting more.

A big thank you to all who responded.