We Can Save a Forest

Can you remember the last time you actually used a paper phone book? Serving as an impromptu booster seat or doorstop doesn't count. If I need to look up a person or business, I'll go to yellow pages.com or some such web site. If I need a contractor for a household job, I'll ask friends for references or call Lou Manfredini at WGN.

If you can't live without your phone book, you may want to stop reading this now. That's how I feel about a real newspaper. I like the feel of it in my hands and can't quite get satisfaction from on-line news. So I sympathize with you.

On the other hand, consider this. In my building alone - 29 floors with 6 units per floor, we are regularly treated to a pile of at least 12 phone books arriving silently in each of our stair landings next to the trash chute. They sit there for weeks, many times without the shrink wrap being removed by even a single resident. Eventually the maintenance men remove them - hopefully, to the recycle bins in the basement and not down the trash chutes.

I'm sure our building is not alone. According to real estate board statistics, there are no fewer than 626,000 housing units in the city of Chicago. I'm no math genius, but if my building alone is not using 348 of these 3 1/2 inch, 2000 page, 5 lb. monsters. Think how many others are sitting idle in highrises and two flats all over the city.

I know they're free, and the folks who publish them get lots of advertising dollars, but sometimes it has to be about more than money. I hope the P.I. attorneys who paid to have their ad affixed to the cover of each book dont mind that their smiling faces are on their way back to be recycled.

I care much less about them and the companies who are selling the ads, than the fact that my great grandchildren may have to go to history books to see what a real forest looks like.

Kielbasi Quest Revisited

Anyone who knew my mother knows that she would travel on the bus from Chatham, New Jersey to Newark everyday to her job as the payroll person at Woolworth's. The traits I wish I had inherited from her were her work ethic, her stylishness (Newark was the capitol of fashion for us - think Orbachs, Kleins and Lord and Taylor), her devotion to her parents and siblings and her ability to add long columns of numbers without using a calculator or her fingers.

Instead, I seem to have inherited the transporting of kielbasi trait. She would visit the section of Newark that sold the best kielbasi and bread (I later found out it was Jewish Rye bread) to bring home to the suburbs for the entire family. When she visited our Aunt Caro in Arizona, the plane would be doused with the smell of the precious sausage that she carried in a shopping bag on board.

When we moved to Chicago, she'd bring the stash to our house, along with the best horseradish available. I can imagine the snarky remarks of the American Airlines stewardesses ( no flight attendant PC titles back then.)

Today I traveled by CTA to our tax guy (if you need a good one, call me)and made it there in record time on the Blue Line and the #80 bus. Thinking that Easter is coming up and I had time to spare, I took the #54 south to Belmont and the #77 west to Lockwood and visited my favorite polshki place, Gene's Sausage. I was restrained by the fact that I didn't have a car trunk to fill, but managed Kielbasi, farmers cheese, cold cuts, pork chops, Kosciusko mustard,a loaf of caraway rye bread, a gigantic pickle, a slice of headcheese for Joe, and two boxes of sinful cookies. Armed with my shopping bags I took the #77 back to the Blue Line and at Washington emerged in Daley Plaza for the #157 which stops in front of my building. On all these trips, I looked around as though, I too, was wondering about the smells, as I looked up from my book. Surely, I didn't look like the kielbasi culprit to my fellow travelers.

When I got home and thought about it - this is my third trip to Gene's on the CTA since we got rid of our car- and includes the trip last November when I loaded up on the mother lode of kielbasi for Aunt Caro and her family in Arizona (vacuum packed to avoid flight attendant remarks) I came to the realization that what the joke cards say about growing old are true.

I HAVE BECOME MY MOTHER.

More Buried Treasure

I had some aging mushrooms that needed to be used soon. I was looking for a good appetizer with mushrooms and recalled a recipe given to me by a River Forest neighbor in the 1970s. I went to the bookcase cabinet where I keep the friends and family recipe scrapbooks - which I haven't looked at in years. After considerable browsing I found the recipe and decided to see if it was still a winner. I can't divulge who gave it to me as I won't use real people in this blog without their permission, and we've lost touch. For my kids, suffice it to say Bridget and Eddie and Cupcake Park. Here's the recipe:

Set: the oven at 375 degrees
Soften: 1 8 oz package of cream cheese with 2 tsp. milk
Beat:2 egg yolks and mix well with the cream cheese
Sprinkle: a shake or two of garlic powder and mix
Add:1 TBS minced scallions and 1/3 cup of finely chopped mushrooms
Toast: small rounds or triangles of bread of your choice - I do mine in the oven for 7 minutes and use multi-grain baguette rounds
Spread: The cheese mixture on the bread generously and bake in 375 degree oven for 5 minutes and broil on high for a few minutes until lightly browned and puffed up.
Serve immediately with something cold to drink and some red and green pepper strips as a contrast.
It will make 24 - 36 depending on the size of the bread.

This tasted as good tonight as it did all those many years ago.

As for the buried treasure. Also in that cabinet was bag, full of handwritten recipes of my mother's and mother-in-law's along with others from my daughters, sisters, nieces and friends. My mother lived through the depression and would never think of buying a recipe card - she used the backs of envelopes, scraps of paper and whatever. In this picture is an envelope from Jersey Central Power and a voting receipt. Also the badly stained recipe offered in this post and one from our neice Barbara with her grandmother Crawford's nut bread recipe. I feel a family cookbook coming on.


ZOOM IN TO SEE THE RECIPES.

How Do I Love Thee?

What looks like an ordinary spagetti scoop has also been used in our house......

....As a back scratcher

.....To reach items on high shelves

.......To pull the speed change chain on the ceiling fan

..........To drag a shoe out from under the bed

.............To scoop out laundry from the bottom of a deep washing machine

................To open a cabinet when my hands are sticky

And of course to pull pasta from the boiling water.

I'll bet you can think of other uses. I can't live without mine. How about you?