Sprung At Last

It’s A Long Story: Show And Tell

03.17.2014 by J. Doe // 1 Comment

I started kindergarten, and it was mostly fun, though parts of it made me nervous. Sometimes the teacher would show our work to the class and we’d talk about ways it could be better; I felt like I had done something wrong when she showed my not-quite-egg-shaped Easter Egg, and hoped I wasn’t in trouble as she trimmed the rough edges.

Once we had a pottery lesson. After we shaped our bowls, we were told which tables had which colors of glaze on them and then asked to say which table we wanted to move to for glazing. I couldn’t remember which tables had which colors, even though everyone else seemed to know where they wanted to go, so I said I wanted to stay at the table I was already at, and hoped I had chosen red. I was disappointed to receive a green bowl when the firing was finished.

Show and tell was once a week, and it had a theme to it: bring something green, or maybe square. On the day we were supposed to bring something orange, my mother gave me an orange kitchen sponge. I didn’t want to bring it.

She said, It’s orange. That’s your show and tell.

I cried. She shouted. The neighbor girl who walked me to school waited outside the screen door.

Finally, she demanded, Well, what orange thing do you want to bring?

I don’t know.

I tripped on the way to school and scraped my knee so that it bled on the sponge. The teacher tried to comfort me, but I still had to stand up in front of the class for show and tell. I didn’t talk for long – there isn’t much to say about a sponge, especially when you have a skinned knee and one of the other girls just showed her orange See and Say.

Tangelo Sorbet

03.13.2014 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

The Red Dog starts to settle in, and becomes very attached to me very quickly: I cannot leave his sight, even for a moment. He follows me from room to room, watches me in the kitchen, whines when I go into the garage and leave him on the other side of the door. I go on a one-day business trip, and get a message from the dog walker, he would not leave the house, so I walked him in circles in the yard.

It’s all very endearing, until I discover the extent of the panic he experiences whenever I leave, on the leg of my grandmother’s antique dining table.

Separation anxiety, says the vet.

I order baby gates to contain him, and while I wait for them to be delivered, take him with me everywhere.

In the midst of this puppy love, I decide it’s time to lose some weight. My father bought me a juicer a year ago, and I stashed it on top of the refrigerator, where I could mostly ignore it, feeling guilty only when it happened to catch my eye, which happened only when the cat would climb up alongside it and knock some part down with a loud clatter. I find a juice diet online, and go to the store and load up on veggies and fruits and follow the plan exactly. I lose six pounds in five days and although some will hurry to point out that It’s Just Water Weight, I have to say, it’s very motivating water weight.

I’m eating my vegetables, just like grandma always told me to. Everyone’s happy.

So pleased am I by this turn of events that I decide to indulge myself in a gift: An ice-cream maker. I know an ice cream maker seems to have no place on a diet, but this is a juice diet, and of course you can make other things in an ice-cream maker. Sorbet, as luck would have it, turns out to be made entirely out of juice.

The ice cream maker arrives and I decide I want to make something with blood oranges, which were abundant in the fruit section less than a week before – but now, they’re gone, replaced by tangelos, something I was told I would like when I was six or seven and haven’t eaten since. I must not have liked them when I was six or seven, but that was a while ago, so it’s probably time for me to reconsider the tangelo. I have a recipe for tangerine sorbet from David Lebovitz’s newsletter, which seems like it should work for tangelos too, so I buy a dozen of them figuring that should yield the required three cups of juice, which it does, plus five leftover tangelos.

Which is not a problem, because I learned two important things: 1) Tangelos are delicious, and 2) tangelo sorbet is even more delicious.

The sorbet is also absurdly easy to make, and requires just two ingredients, or three if you’re feeling posh and want to add the optional cup of champagne. I loved the crisp citrus flavor, so light, and just lightly sweet. It would be the perfect finish to any meal, especially where you didn’t want something heavy. Just a little goes a long way, although The Child was so entranced with this that it didn’t last very long at all.

Tangelo Sorbet

Once frozen, the sorbet will get a bit hard in the freezer, so let it sit for 5-10 minutes before scooping.

Author: slightly adapted from David Lebovitz, My Paris Kitchen

Serves: 4

Ingredients

3 cups freshly squeezed tangelo juice
⅔ cup sugar
Optional: 1 cup Champagne

Instructions

Warm 1 cup of the tangelo juice in a small saucepan with the sugar, stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved.
Stir the mixture back into the tangelo juice and chill thoroughly.
Freeze the mixture in your ice cream maker, according to the manufacturer's instructions. (If you want to add Champagne, mix it in right before churning.) Makes about a quart.

Notes

Lebovitz uses tangerine juice in his recipe, for which I substituted tangelos.

Wordpress Recipe Plugin by EasyRecipe

It’s A Long Story: A Quiet Place

03.11.2014 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

The first time I saw a movie in a theater, I was terrified. I wailed loudly, so my mother left the theater with me halfway through the film. All I remember about Pinocchio is standing on a small-town sidewalk while my mother shouted that movies cost money to see, and were nothing to be afraid of.

Shouting fills the spaces of those years at my grandparents’ house, and also my aunt’s house, where we lived for a short time. I ran a staple through a four-year-old finger, and there was shouting because I wasn’t supposed to be using the stapler. We headed out for a walk downtown, and I fussed about the long walk and wanted my stroller, and there was shouting about being too big for it, though I had just been walked in it a few days before and wasn’t too big then. When I could not ride my bike without training wheels, I stood in my aunt’s gravel driveway, blinking at my mother as she shouted from beneath the weeping willow I had helped her plant there.

My grandmother and my mother shouted at each other. Mostly, I stayed out of that, although once I heard my mother shouting, Oh, Mother! at my grandmother, and that was wrong, because she was Grandma, not Mother. I interrupted and was told to shut up, but I didn’t. One of them was Mother and that was my mother, not Grandma, who was my grandma. That one time, I shouted too, until they finally gave up whatever that day’s argument was about.

There were quiet places, too: my Grandfather knew where they were. The park near our house was quiet, and he and I would walk there together with the Schnauzer. His bedroom, separate from my grandmother’s, was quiet, and private, and sparse, housing only what mattered to him. He had a reel-to-reel tape player, and in the evenings, he would play The Carpenters and I was allowed to listen, too. The living room was often noisy, but quiet when Lawrence Welk was on, and my Grandfather would sit with me on the gold velvet davenport while I watched the ladies singing with bubbles floating around them and wished I could be one of them someday.

Once, we sat in his room, and he showed me how to pare an apple with his sharp pocketknife. He let me touch the knife so I could feel how sharp it was, and then explained how to cut away the seeds and core, so that I would know what to do someday when I was old enough to pare an apple, too.

It’s A Long Story: Show And Tell

Tangelo Sorbet

It’s A Long Story: A Quiet Place

About Me

Legalese