Spring Break and Oxford

I am excited because today is my last day in class before spring break, and I leave this afternoon to start a long weekend in Oxford, Mississippi. I will be writing a travel article about what Oxford has to offer, and I have heard already from one of my travel companions that Oxford offers catfish. Wherever this place is will have to work hard to compete with or beat Fred's Fish House in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, but I am willing to give it a try AND be fair in my assessment.

I am traveling with my "oldest" friend, who has known me from the time we were in diapers, and my "oldest" friend from the newest part of my life - the part in Sedalia. I know the two will get along famously, and that we will have a good time.

At this point, I plan to write about the literary part of Oxford, which includes a very old book store, John Grisham, and most important, William Faulkner; however, I cannot leave food and drink out of the mix. I will be eating three meals a day, which will add inches to my waistline, I am sure, but what the heck? It's all for my fledgling writing career! Inches cannot be a deterrent!

Our plan is to trek down south toward my home town, Thayer, Missouri; then toward Memphis; and then into Oxford. We will be staying at an Oxford institution, and exploring the square. The funny thing about Oxford is that it is about the size of Sedalia - about 20,000 people. The University, I have read, doubles the size of the town to about 38,000. What is most interesting about that factoid is that Oxford has a town square that is vital and booming, whereas Sedalia has to fight to keep people downtown.

I have also read that Oxford has been rated a great place to retire. While I am not ready to retire (am I'm not sure I ever will be), I will be looking around to gauge the general age of the population. I wonder if I will find a pocket of young people (students) and a pocket of people older than I (retirees)? "Let it be a mystery. . ." (Up the Down Staircase).

The South has some fabulous old homes and wonderful gardens, and I hope that this week's warmer temperatures will let us have a beautiful trip as well as a tasty one! I will let you know what I find.

Is it possible? Spring is almost here!

I hate to continue talking about the weather, but this past winter has been extremely, well, extreme. I admit to having enjoyed the snow, especially on the days when Max and I couldn't get out of the house. I felt somewhat like Laura and Mary in the Little House series; when I read those books, especially the ones that dealt with winter, I wondered what it would be like to see nothing but snow for such a long time. This year, I found out!

Then after the snows, I felt as if I would be permanently depressed because of the cold, damp, gray air that pushed through even the warmth of the "growing and framing" fire in the fireplace. I have been looking fervently and with dedication for the signs that erupt to comfort me every year, telling me that the long winter will soon be over: budding grape hyacinths, brilliant yellow forsythia's wildly waving arms, pink spears that push up through the vinca and mulch to become pink and white peonies, tips of pointy green variegated leaves leading the way for the coral tulips to herald Easter's coming yet again. The signs, though, have so far remained hidden.

And then yesterday, when the sun was out and the air was warm and welcoming, I saw one of the signs - not one I was looking for, but one that nevertheless told me that spring was going to be here soon. I saw weeds - flowering weeds. Even that made me happy! And then I looked a little more closely and saw the tulip leaves, and a lump in the ground that portends sweet-smelling hyacinths. The peonies are still underground, but I know they are there. I can wait for a while.

Spring and Easter remind me of each other. They signify resurrection and rebirth after a long and dreary winter, and a resurgence of hope for the sore human heart.

So now, I wait somewhat impatiently for what I know is to come, and hope that I will enjoy every bit of it when it arrives.

The Deaf Man

I am a big fan of Evan Hunter a/k/a Ed McBain, and his 87th Precinct books. Anyone who knows the series knows that Steve Carella's nemesis of sorts is the deaf man. And it appears that I, too, have a deaf man nemesis.

The Deaf Man has a house that is literally falling down around his head. And he is literally deaf. From what I can tell, he has lived in the house all his life. His parents lived there, he grew up there, and he lives there now. I think he may have siblings, but I don't know where they are. He is older than I, I believe, so he probably had little formal education. My friend who is a deaf ed teacher tells me that he probably doesn't have a vocabulary much past third or fourth grade, because "back in the old days," schools didn't provide an education for deaf people.

He is my nemesis because I don't know what to do about him and his house. The law says that he has to bring his house up to code, but the City is now saying that the house is uninhabitable. That means that the house, the one with trees and bushes growing up through the porch roof, the one with holes in the roof, the one with plants climbing up the walls so that the house looks like an apparition in a Disney movie, will be condemned and torn down. And that will leave the deaf man homeless.

Services for senior citizens in the county will provide him with a place to live, but he is not a social being. I don't know if he has ever held a job. He does not drive. He dons heavy down-filled, shearling-lined clothing and goggles and rides a bicycle all over town. I don't know if he has meaningful exchanges with anyone. When we mention finding a new place to live, he becomes not only defensive, but belligerent.

I don't know where he eats. I don't know if his place has running water. All I know is that this is his home, and it is the only place he knows and has ever lived. Senior services cannot take the place of the comfort, safety, and familiarity of home.

And so, he stands in front of me, defiant, angry, and I know, frightened. All he has is endangered. The life he knows teeters on the edge. What next?

The deaf man.

White outside

Just when I thought winter was on its last legs toward a slow crawl toward spring - after all, February is only 28 days - we were hit with what is, for me, the storm of my life so far. I believe the ground is covered with at least 18 inches of pure white snow. Our driveway is lost, as is the sidewalk leading to the front door.

I hope that Mr. Bentley, who is a consistent defendant but not a "frequent flier," will show up today to help Max shovel. I have no idea where we will put the snow, but the most difficult and most important place to clear is where the driveway meets the street. The snowplow does its job, but leaves a HUGE pile of snow that no car in this garage can get over. As long as that ridge is there, no one in this house is going anywhere. Period.

This will be my third consecutive day of slugdom. Yesterday, I made cookies and took a short nap and watched the snow pouring down and sat in a leather chair by the fire and watched the fire burn, watched Law and Order - you get the idea. Today will have to be a little more productive so that I can come back to life as life comes back to me. I plan to clean the house a little, make sure that I have all my papers graded, and do some planning for Max's 60th birthday, which arrives one week before Emily's graduation.

I wonder if I will be tired of the solitude and of these four walls by the end of today. Probably not. They are more attractive than the alternative, which is to be out. Yesterday, as I was trying to go to the store early in the morning, I became stuck in the snow on the highway twice. I was pretty terrified, as only a couple of people stopped to help and the tail end of the car kept sweeping over into the next lane, where 18-wheelers were barreling toward me. They, of course, cannot stop quick in an emergency, and I hoped to stay out of their way. It was not such a good thing.

Off to downstairs to build yet another fire with wonderful firewood, and to begin to enjoy another day of doing nothing.

Movie review

"The Visitor" is fabulous. Richard Jenkins was nominated for an Academy Award, and that I can't remember who won that year is testament to this statement: I think he was robbed.

The plot revolves around the visitor, and it is the audience's job to figure out who the visitor is.

Jenkins plays a lifeless college economics professor, whose life stopped when his wife died - maybe before. She was a classical pianist, which we find out only by inference, and his pitiful attempt to learn to play the piano is also his pitiful attempt to continue the life he knew. His life is interrupted when he visits his flat in the Village in New York only to find squatters living there. His integration with their lives and the reawakening of his life is the meat of the story. His and theirs are great stories.

The movie does not have much dialogue, but it doesn't need much. The actors tell their stories without saying too much. They also make great music, which I love.

One sub-plot deals with how illegal immigration is handled by our country. One of the characters, the mother of one of the major characters, says, "This is just like Syria." That should give us all pause. Is there an easy answer to this issue? Probably not. But we all should realize that any story has more than one side.

See it now. Netflix has it. So do I.

Passion for Cooking

Last night was a one-of-a-kind experience. Two trusting souls bought a wine-pairing/tasting dinner at an auction last year. For around $700, they bought 24 bottles of wine, and my love for cooking. Last night, I hope I did them proud.

Mary and I picked a date, and unbeknownst to me, it was the perfect date, because I had nothing to think about for the entire week preceding the dinner other than the dinner itself. I had a list of the wines, and set about looking for perfect pairings; in order to do that, I had to buy some of the wines! Darn! I was already familiar with a couple of them, so had a "leg up" as to what dish to prepare that would be the perfect companion to that wine.

I used my friends as guinea pigs, asking them to taste different dishes and tell me which was better. I tried tuna with two different rubs, a roast boneless leg of lamb, scalloped potatoes to die for (Julia Child calls them "potatoes Dauphinois"), a molten chocolate cake, and even a risotto with butternut squash and mushrooms.

I read lots of issues of "Food and Wine" to try to pick the right flavor for the right grape. I drooled as I thumbed through recipe after recipe, trying to find just the right combination of, well, food and wine. Ultimately, it worked. It worked very well.

Before I brag, however, I need to thank my good friends Kim and Kevin and Wendy and Rob. They were my kitchen help, serving the food when ready, picking up empty plates, and washing the dishes that I had to cart home. The evening was a success because these people, along with my wonderful and accommodating husband Max, worked their tails off to make sure the evening was a success. I would never have been able to carry it off without each and every one of them. On a positive note, we were able to snack and tipple in the kitchen while we were between courses. I think we each at one full meal, even if it was as we were standing around waiting for other people to finish their meals!

I cooked for two days straight before Saturday, figuring that the easiest thing to do would be to have everything ready to assemble on S-Night (Service Night). We carted pans, knives, dishes, glasses, ingredients, Tupperware, and odds and ends to the hosts' house, and we set up shop in their kitchen. We had six courses, six wines, six dishes to serve. Timing would be an issue. How long does it take one person to eat a salad, after all?

We began with a Riesling and a salad. The salad had blue cheese, walnuts, pomegranate seeds (thank you, Costco, for selling the seeds only), and sliced pears. The salad dressing used a reduced Riesling as the base. The salad and the dressing were yummy, even today after each had sat for 12 hours!

The second course/wine was Sauvignon Blanc. I read somewhere that a natural pairing for that wine is goat cheese, one of my favorites. So I did a bruschetta with goat cheese and sauteed mushrooms. I toasted the bread with olive oil and salt the day before; we spread it with the cheese and topped it with mushrooms right before popping the bruschetta under the broiler for a few minutes.

Third was the risotto. Timing was a complexity, because I had to begin the cooking process while my friends were serving the salad. I had roasted the squash and sauteed the mushrooms the day before, and I measured out all the ingredients to take with me; all I had to do was add the ingredients at the right time and stir. This course deserves a special note. Max and I tried this recipe and decided to buy the Chardonnay with which we were pairing it to make sure that the wine was not too oaky or buttery for the risotto. This pairing was, as far as I am concerned, the highlight of the dinner. It was almost perfect. Somehow, the wine's accents and tastes meshed with the rice, squash, and mushrooms, and the diners were in, as we say in southern Missouri, Hog Heaven. William Hill Chardonnay was the champion here. I will buy that wine specifically to drink with this risotto some time in the future. Amazing!

Next was spicy-sweet tuna. I found some rub recipe and thought it sounded interesting. Brown sugar was the main ingredient, and I believe cumin was also prevalent. I patted tuna steaks with the rub, mixed up a mango and red pepper salsa, and put the tuna in the skillet for a minute or so on each side. It was done very well - seared on the outside, bright pink and warm on the inside. And it went very well with the King Estate Pinot Noir, which is one of our favorite Pinots. I didn't want to mess up that wine, and from the comments, I didn't!

We did a palate cleansing with lemon sorbet, which we served in shot glasses that Max found. The glasses were the perfect size for a little bright citrus. This serving was a surprise, as I didn't tell anyone I was preparing it, but I thought it would be better to have a clear palate for the next fat-infused dish.

We paired Kanoonga Hill Shiraz with a roast boneless leg of lamb and potatoes scalloped with cream and Swiss cheese. The lamb also came with a red wine sauce that used veal demiglace. The demiglace cost more than the leg of lamb. It is SOOOOOO good and rich, though! This was the most disappointing dish to me, because the lamb was too well-done for lamb. It was not dry, nor was it flavorless, but I should have taken it out about 10 minutes before I did. I have heard that good gravy covers a multitude of sins, and in this case, it did. I was very grateful to Williams-Sonoma for selling demiglace.

Finally, the diners drank a white Moscato, and I prepared a sweet red wine ice cream. AFTER I had mixed the ice cream, I thought that it would be even better if I had added ground peppercorns to the custard. We added the pepper as a topping for the ice cream, and we served the dessert with a square of very dark chocolate. I brought along some raspberry sauce, but forgot to put in over the ice cream. It made no difference. The ice cream with pepper and chocolate. but NO raspberry sauce, was gone.

We stayed a little while afterward to relax and converse with the people who had enjoyed the evening, but we had the best time talking to the host, who is a wine lover, and who enjoyed the food - the risotto most of all.

After all the work, I can still say that I had a great time and will probably donate the same dinner to the auction this year. Not that I am complaining or anything, but Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, donated lunch for six to a similar auction for a different organization. HER lunch garnered $100,000. I wonder if it made any difference that she was at lunch, as was Mariska Hargitay and Alec Baldwin? Well, we will start recruiting for next year's event. Who knows? Maybe we can find someone famous to show up - someone like, oh, someone. Maybe you!

SNOW DAY!!!

Last night when I went to bed, the classes I teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays were meeting. "In Session," the posting proclaimed. "In Session." Immediately, I began worrying about how I was going to get to the College by 9:30. Since Emily's car was totaled by a thankfully-insured driver, we have been getting by with one car here and one car there. I don't want to consider getting another car until she graduates and lands somewhere so we know what kind of car she will need. New York, no car. Savannah, small car. Little Rock, mid-size car. You get the picture.

Anyway, Max and I have his car, which is the cutest little sports car, but it is worthless in snow. And the reason I was worrying about how I was going to get to the College was that the snow was, by the time I went to bed, about six inches deep. And the snow was still coming.

When I woke up, however, the snow had stopped, was resting in the cold, and the web site triumphantly exclaimed, "Canceled!" Except I think that the "Canceled" was incorrected spelled "Cancelled." I can't remember because I jumped about 10 feet in the air as I read the heavenly word.

So today will be a snow day for me. Unlike when I was in elementary school, though, when snow days were few and far between, and when ice days required that I unsuccessfully wheedle my father to let me sled down Pentecost Hill with "everybody else," this day will give me one more day to get caught up: to successfully, I hope, wheedle a mortgage company to postpone a foreclosure, to tweak my syllabi, to list my new students on my Outlook Contacts page, to balance my estates' checkbooks, to write seriously overdue thank-you notes, and maybe to take a nap. Oh, and I WILL watch "The Closer," which TNT has most graciously decided to re-run at a time that is not usually available to me - thank you, thank you so much.

Then tomorrow, I will be relaxed and cheerful as I get ready for the wine pairing tasting I am preparing for Saturday night.

These will be two good days.