Scout Moves

I had such an interesting interview yesterday, for a couple of reasons. A local nurse contacted the newspaper and asked if they'd tell her story of volunteering with the USS Iwo Jima as it sailed around Central and South America on a good-will mission. The ship spent (or is spending) four months setting up temporary medical clinics in impoverished regions and giving equipment and training to local hospitals. She traveled with the ship for one month. So, the editor called me because this kind of story is right up my alley. "Right up my alley" is such a colorful word picture, isn't it? It's in my part of town. It runs right by my house. It's my niche. I digress. Anyway, this nurse doesn't live around here anymore, but she agreed to drive up here and meet me some place. Because she would have her dog with her, she suggested we meet at the park, which was a great idea except we were expecting a crazy storm. The front brought the worst storm that Chicago had s...

It's cooking season, I call it because that's what happens in the fall. I look at the changing colors of the leaves, smell the crisp air, pull on a pair of socks and feel the sudden urge to cook. All day. I was buying groceries over the weekend, and the glorious smell of apples wafted through the produce section, and I knew I had to cook. Fortunately, I have the November issue of Bon Appetit , so I'm set. I'm working through it to create dinners this week and to choose recipes for Thanksgiving. We usually spend the holiday in Illinois with the in-laws, but this year we'll be staying home with our girls and No. 1's boyfriend, a Canadian with no place to go for the American day off from work. He's a professor at Ohio State, which shuts down for a few days so everyone can go home and gorge themselves on sweet potatoes and pie. So, he'll be joining us for my favorite cranberry chutney, sweet potato pudding with pecan and gingersnap topping, green beans with ...

In today's edition of Small Town Newspaper : This month marks the 50th anniversary of an enduring television program, The Andy Griffith Show; and as a child of the first TV generation, I think I speak with some authority in saying it was one of the finest shows ever produced. It ran from 1960 through 1968, and while I was only six when production ended, I grew up watching episodes in syndication. For the handful of people who haven’t seen the show, it focused on everyday life in Mayberry, a small southern town. At the center was Andy Taylor, a widower who lived with his young son, Opie, and a housekeeper, Aunt Bee. Taylor, played by Andy Griffith, was the straight man to his bumbling deputy, Don Knotts’ Barney Fife, a man so inept he was forced to keep his one bullet in his shirt pocket so he wouldn’t shoot himself in the foot. Each episode of the show provided a brief glimpse into the lives of the residents—Floyd the barber, Howard the county clerk, Helen the schoolteacher, Otis t...

In today's edition : I generally try to keep on top of cultural trends even if I don’t adopt them, but there is a growing movement that I have only just discovered. Not long ago, I was walking along in Berkeley, California while visiting my daughter, and I saw a signpost that had been covered with yarn, like someone had sewn a knitted scarf to it. It was colorful and randomly striped, and I pointed it out as if it were the most unusual thing in the world. That’s when my daughter explained the nature of what is known as yarn bombing. It’s when knitters attach something they’ve created to a public object, most often doing their deed stealthily and anonymously. They leave a “bomb,” so to speak, for no other purpose than to brighten up the place and to bring a little cheer to those passing by. Their work has been equated with graffiti, except that the woven yarn is not permanently installed and does no damage to the object it covers. And instead of signifying the territory of a street ...

OK, so I shamed myself the other day by baking bread one could use as a weapon, and I'm still nursing the wound that proves it. But yesterday afternoon, before I threw out the remaining dough in the refrigerator, I decided to give the baking another shot. I used some cool bread baking dishes I bought from a local potter and set the oven to 375˚. 40 minutes later, I had two loaves of really good bread. So, see? I really can bake bread after all. And I thought I was a bread-baking loser.

Have you ever cut your finger on a piece of bread? I have. Here's how— I have a friend who bakes bread, wonderful looking loaves of fresh, natural goodness. I won't mention her name because she pops in here now and then, and I'm a little ashamed of myself. As it is, she's bound to figure this out. Anyway, she has a recipe for bread that I have tried using several times, and each time the stuff comes out of the oven looking like crusty pancakes, so I gave up months ago. Well, she published this same recipe recently, and I decided to give it another shot. I followed the recipe down to the letter, careful with the measurements and the rising and the timing and the storage just as she instructed. Yesterday, I put two hunks of dough on a baking sheet, let them rest, just as she said, and put the pan in the oven as directed. Then I got busy writing a newspaper article about this wonderful couple who is about to celebrate their 70th anniversary—really, they seem happy. During ...

Over this past weekend, I was organizing a menu for this week. I do that on Saturdays—pick a cookbook from the collection, choose a week's worth of recipes from it, make a grocery list based on the recipes and do the shopping. It may seem tedious for a Saturday morning, but if I do that all at once, I don't have to worry about dinner through the week. I just look at the menu and get to work. I know the ingredients will be in the kitchen, so no worries. For this week, I chose Ina Garten's Back to Basics book. It's filled with great recipes using basic ingredients. I chose five recipes and then found myself in the dessert section where I stopped at Pumpkin Roulade with Ginger Cream. Anyone else would call it Pumpkin Cake of Pumpkin Roll, but I guess my culinary hero Ina wanted it to sound a little more highfalutin (did you know that's how this word is spelled, for real?). Given my previous failure with a pumpkin cake, I had to make this one as a form of redemption. P...

In today's edition of Small Town Newspaper : It’s been said that bullying is nothing more than smoke, a screen with no substance, but it can be so much more than mere smoke and so often signifies actual fire. It’s these serious life-and-death consequences of bullying that have brought on a new anti-bullying campaign led by Cartoon Network and CNN’s Anderson Cooper. The multi-faceted program is titled “Stop Bullying: Speak Up,” and it is designed to reach the 75 percent of students who witness bullying in its various forms. If allowed to torment people unchecked, bullies are more likely to be convicted of crimes as adults and to continue their pattern of aggression in the workplace, if they manage to hold down a job at all. Often being from harsh homes, they tend to carry their domineering tendencies into their own homes and to perpetuate the cycle through their own children. Without adult intervention, their victims are more likely to skip school or to become physicall...

OK, so the pumpkin dump cake from the other day was a failure and a waste of ingredients, but not being one to give up too quickly, I decided to try another cake, a Romanian apple cake. I found a recipe at allrecipes.com that claimed the cake was traditionally Romanian, and I can only take their word for it. I never once had homemade cake while in Romania this past summer. At the orphanage where I volunteered in July, most of the cooking was done in an open kitchen, the one in the photo above where everything was cooked over open flames in big iron pots made by local Roma. Not once did these women provide dessert. It was all they could do to provide basic meals for 100 people using only donated ingredients, so you couldn't really expect them to also give us cake; but I bet anything if they had the time and the wherewithall, they would have made something wonderful. In the compound, one of the houses full of children was run differently from the others. Instead of eating in the dini...

Sunday was one of those long, quiet rainy days, the kind that make you think you should take a nap or have a second cup of coffee and then maybe a third while watching your DVD of The Philadelphia Story because James Stewart is so darned adorable. On that quiet day, my friend Kyle mentioned the phrase "Pumpkin dump cake" on Facebook . That simple three-word phrase embedded in my brain, and I knew I had to make the thing. I don't make dump cakes, partially because I don't make cakes in general, and more specifically because dump cakes are usually made with cake mixes. As a rule, I am opposed to mixes. I hold that cooking with a mix is morally, ethically, socially, intellectually, grammatically offensive; but with the pumpkin cake in my head, I gave in to my objection and went to the grocery store for canned pumpkin and a yellow cake mix. My convictions only go so far. There's a shortage of canned pumpkin, they say, and I discovered the shelf marked "Libby Pum...

In today's edition of Small Town Newspaper: It’s Positive Attitude month, the perfect opportunity to take stock of my tendency to grouse and to look for ways to be more positive. I suspect you could do with some introspection as well, because, really, grumbling seems to be a favorite pastime for far too many these days. I’d like to think of myself as relatively optimistic, going out of my way to look for the positive elements of even the bleakest circumstances. But honestly, I confess I can whine about irksome things with the best of them. I have been heard complaining about everything from people who pop their chewing gum in public to parents who talk out loud in the audience of a school band concert to drivers who slow down as they approach an exit ramp, as if the exit ramp itself were not long enough for that purpose. Recently, I was exposed to true masters at complaining, and their ability to completely suck the joy out of the room made me stop and consider my own approach to m...

I've been feeling under the weather for a couple of days, although I'm not sure of the nature of that phrase. I know it means I don't feel 100 percent, but I don't know why it means that. I can usually feel this coming on a day in advance—my head hurts, my throat is scratchy, I'm exhausted and my skin is sensitive. I let myself fall into bed the other night with the last ounce of energy I could muster, and I said, "Tomorrow I'm going to have bronchitis," because that's how it works. But the next day I didn't have bronchitis. I just had more of the same, only I felt even more tired, and I could tell my kick-ass immune system was doing its job. I had a slight fever, which I fought like a champion, but none of the other symptoms got any worse. After a brief whine on Facebook, a bunch of people suggested I try a neti pot. It cleans the sinus cavities without medication and makes life grand, so they suggested. I have to say I've never heard of ...