Mom's Cheesecake

                                       The piece hubby got to bring home.

It was son-in-law's birthday last weekend and I received a special request...to make him one of his favourites...cheesecake, for the party.  It was one of those typical gatherings that families have.  Everyone pitched in to bring food for appetizers and desserts; daughter provided the main course-lasagna and salads.  The difference for us this year was that along with having a great meal and hearing all the stories and singing happy birthday, we got to take turns holding new grandson.  With two grandmas and an aunt in attendance, let's just say he did not lack for attention.
This is a very old recipe passed on to me from my mother who began using it in the late sixties when cheesecake first became a popular dessert at home.  It makes a 'real' cheesecake; I guess you could say New York style which means the cream cheese has not been mixed with Cool Whip or Dream Whip (which is also very tasty, btw).  The result is a dense cake, very rich in cream cheese flavour and some might say you would only need a sliver to be satisfied.  I like this one because it is not as heavy as other recipes that require five packages of cream cheese and it is not as fancy as some that include different cheeses.  Since son-in-law likes cherry topping, that's what he got.  I have made blueberry and raspberry sauces for this as well; I think blueberry is my favourite.

                Plain Cheesecake

Crust                                                                                Topping
1 cup graham cracker crumbs (or 12 crackers               2 cups sour cream
 crushed)                                                                         2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp sugar                                                                     1 tsp vanilla     
2 tbsp melted butter                                                       
Filling
3 pkg. (8 ounce size) cream cheese
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup sugar
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Make crust.  Combine and mix well all ingredients.
Spread over the bottom of a 9 or 10 inch spring-form pan.  Refrigerate.
Make Filling
In large bowl beat cheese till light.  Add eggs, vanilla, and sugar and continue beating until very creamy.  Pour into crust and bake for about 35 - 40 minutes.
Make Topping
Beat together the sour cream, sugar and vanilla till well mixed.
Remove cheesecake from oven, spread topping evenly over surface and return to oven for about 5 minutes or until set.
Remove from oven and run a knife gently around the edge to prevent the cake from cracking, cool in the pan and then refrigerate - the longer the better; overnight is best. 
Top with your favourite sauce or glaze.

 I've been making this recipe for several decades and always call it Mom's Cheesecake.  I wonder will there be a time when I can just call it mine. 

Constant Craving for Choice

My mother says she can no longer send my father to the grocery store, and not because he is now in his mid-eighties.  It is because of the confounding array of items on the shelves and the way they continue to expand.  Take salt, for example.  I have two kinds right here in my tiny larder- kosher and plain table salt.  Daughter is "into" salts and keeps the little salt pig pictured above beside her stovetop where she stows her latest favourite salt. Our notion of even something as basic as salt is changing.  One time salt was just simply the ordinary Windsor boxed iodized white stuff, now there are salts available from many countries, some prettily coloured in hues of pink or green. 

I'm picking on salt but the same can be said of most things in the grocery store these days and hence my father's confusion ...look for tea, mustard, cereal, yoghurt, tomato soup, etc. and you will be faced with a dizzying array of options.

Perhaps I'm aware of this more so because of where I come from.  It was a place where fish was always cod and only cod.  Cheese was always the hard, orange cheddar cheese.  Tea was Red Rose; mustard would be the bright yellow French's.  This was most practical and trim-lined and grocery stores only needed to be the size of garages, not warehouses like today. You could send a child to do your grocery shopping in those days, if you had a mind to. 

I guess I'm a part of it too; it seems to be that all my folk are craving and demanding more and more choice and merchants are only too eager to satisfy those demands. But where will it end?  Just how big will grocery stores have to become...one wonders. 

This Close To a Bear

April, almost a week done and spring is taking its own sweet time to arrive; it is creeping in which reminds me of the Carl Sandburg poem about fog moving in on cat's feet.  That poem, Fog, only had twenty-one words in it but remains a favourite for many and may be the piece Sandburg is most famous for (which is a little remarkable considering he won no less than three Pulitzer Prizes so has quite a body of writing).  Anyway, spring is certainly approaching with great care and trepidation just as the Farmer's Almanac predicted by the way.  
The land now has a typical March look to it ...you know that time when the ground can't decide if it is mostly snow or mostly mud.  It rained yesterday so the mud was winning for awhile and then it snowed so now we have slightly more snow again.
This reminds me of last year in March when I found the bear's den.  It was a warmish day that enticed me out for a tramp through the woods to the side  of the house.  I remember I was hoping for a sighting of a pileated woodpecker that favours those  trees.  I noticed one of the outcrops of rock a little low to the ground (we are on the edge of the Canadian Shield so have a fair share of rock on the property).  This rocky hole caught my attention because it was larger than usual and the few bushes in front looked trampled.  I had walked by this many times and wondered how had I not noticed such a hole before.  Perhaps the bushes had been fully grown then; perhaps the grass had sprouted enough to cover and obscure the opening.  I could see right away it would make a great den for some animal.  I glanced about and saw in the old snow nearby where it looked like something large had rolled around or lain down then several paw prints leading further into the woods.  I stood up as it hit me I was looking at bear prints; I glanced towards the house and realized I could see clearly into the den window from there.  To think that if I had been looking out at the same time as Mrs. Bear was looking my way, we could have seen each other.  I tried to get hubby to come out and look at my discovery but he really didn't want to think of a bear within sight of the house, even though we have never actually seen a bear here.
I'm thinking this outcrop is probably the one I stood on when I was on my turkey chase trying to get a photo of those surprisingly swift moving  gobblers.     

Well-Timed, Always

"Better three hours too soon than a minute too late."

                                          Shakespeare


Being raised by a man who was an army veteran meant being on time was always fifteen minutes early.  I have never needed an alarm clock to wake me and always wear a watch that tells time that is  five minutes ahead.  I think it could be said that I am pathologically punctual.  I do feel body reactions akin to anxiety and nervousness if I think I'm going to be late.  My father is exactly the same; he has always been so punctual the one time he was late, everyone panicked thinking he'd had an accident. 
My mother tells the story of having to wake me only once during all of my school years. That particular morning I was terrified I was late for school, and try as she might, I would not calm down.  She kept telling me I was just late getting up, not late for school.  I still remember the song that was playing on the radio as I flew out of the  house that day; it was Marty Robbins singing El Paso. 
It is fitting that during my younger years hurrying to get somewhere and worry about being late figured often in my bad dreams.  Other people dreamt of failing tests, I always dreamed about the panic of getting to them. 
It's a little ironic that much later in my life I lived in the far north where the people had a very different view of time and timeliness.  Time took on a whole new meaning in a place where there was no where to go- no bus, taxi,or train to meet; no rush hour traffic to beat.  Counting time would have been a waste of time.  Meetings could start and end without the pressure of how long they were taking.  At once freeing, it could also feel annoying sometimes.  Tardiness could never be taken personally in a setting like that.  It was good for me to live there and learn to adapt to life lived without the sense of the clock perpetually ticking.  It was just one of the many, many things I learned there.

My Evening With Oprah

 Last May for my Mother's Day gift my daughter and son-in-law bought me a ticket to An Evening With Oprah.  Ms Winfrey included Ottawa on a tour around North America she was conducting at the time.  After giving up her daytime talk show, that was still the top rated show after 24 years, Oprah was feeling the need to reconnect with her fans.  I joined 20,000 of her closest friends, as she put it, at ScotiaBank Place for an evening of chit chat.  I loved every minute of it.  After watching Oprah for so many years on t.v., I did feel like I knew her.  She did not disappoint.  She began with a slide show showing photos of her rise to success from the humblest of beginnings with the message that if I can do all this so can you. She talked about children and the importance of protecting them; she talked about women and our need to be strong and maintain our support of each other.  She talked about books and the joy of reading.  She sang a song for us; her  singing voice surprisingly strong and enjoyable. She had the most inspiring wonderful quotes projected around the arena.  At one point she declared that her very expensive shoes were killing her feet, so she took them off and promptly gave them away to a young woman in the audience.  Her assistant rushed slippers on stage for her and she finished the rest of the evening in them. Leaving the building amid all those women of all ages, I must admit I did feel empowered; Oprah was right...what a force in the world women are.
I am a reluctant fan of most things and certainly not celebrities.  I'm not the jump up and down, hoot and holler, type of person.  But yet I have always admired Oprah and mainly for two reasons.  For her early years, she often did shows dealing with the rights and needs of children; she tackled many issues of child abuse head on and included experts in the field on her show at a time when this was not really being done. She continued to do these shows even when ratings were indicating they were not her most popular.  How could I, an educator and mother, not love that?  
The second reason is how she managed to boost the idea of reading nation wide.  By talking to authors and starting her book club, she gave reading an importance no one before or since has been able to do.  Many people who had never read a book began reading because of her influence.  As an educator and avid reader myself, how could I not love that? 
So there I was that night amid joyful fans, cheering and clapping too with a big smile on my face.  I dressed in pink with a purple scarf....Oprah's favourite colours. ( Actually I wore a pink boiled wool jacket with a pin in the lapel and with my silk scarf, I told everyone I was channeling Jackie Florrick, joke).
I would never have gone on my own, but I'm ever so glad I did.
  

Gillian FLynn's Gone Girl

What Was On My Night Table

It is not often that I choose a book from the library's Express Read offerings because it means you have to read it in seven days.  If a book is at all literary I like to reread parts and linger over certain sections and generally take time to reflect on meaning and any bits and pieces of wisdom I can glean to apply to my own meagre life.  Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is definitely not in that category.  That being said it was a good book for the express reading part of it, reminiscent of what would have been called a beach book in the old days. 
The book opens with the scenario of a young man returning home on the day of his fifth anniversary and finding his wife missing.  As time passes and she does not show up everyone realizes the girl is truly gone and suspicions fall on the husband.  The first third to half of the book was hard for me to read.  I did not like the language or hip kind of way it was written; this seemed to settle down as the novel progressed or perhaps I grew more accustomed.  The structure of this book is what keeps people reading, I think.  It has twists and turns, some obvious, others not, that make you want to know what is really going on or going to happen, undeniably a good feature for a mystery book.  There are surprises so I'm going to say the novel is entertaining.
I did not care at all about the couple.  Narcissistic and sociopathic behaviour seem to be seen a lot these days in book, t.v. and movie characters. I guess it is disturbing that these qualities seem to be taken more and more for granted  but I think they should at least be portrayed in an interesting way; I'm reminded of American Psycho which I found intriguing and layered in many ways  because of what it was saying about modern day society.  The couple in Gone Girl reminded me of the young man and woman in the movie Open Water; remember them?  They were a similarly self-absorbed young couple who, in their case, get left behind by their scuba diving boat tour; they spend most of the movie floating in the ocean attempting to fend off sharks.  The movie failed I think because viewers could not muster enough empathy for the people involved.  I guess characters who are competitive, strident, and snarky with each other and overall the b word applies to just don't elicit sympathy.
 However after all that, if you want an easy read that is entertaining,  maybe something to take on holiday (to the beach) with you, then Gone Girl fits the bill.

Sharing the Road

The pavement on the roads is staying mostly dry these days.  A definite sign of spring.  Along with the dry pavement out come another sign of spring... the cyclists.  The road to our house is a winding two lane that flows through farmland and trees.  It is considered a 'pretty' drive and this has made it a favourite with the people who enjoy cycling.  Most of them look professional, all decked out with the proper suits, helmets and I'm sure the best of bikes.  They are Tour de France wannabees I'm thinking each time I see them.  As much as I admire their obvious fitness levels and devotion, sometimes their presence makes me uncomfortable.  I'm a little concerned trying to get around them and having to share the road with them.
 One evening I was driving home about dusk and encountered a long line of cars all moving like a caravan.  At the start were two cyclists riding side by side, seemingly oblivious to the line of cars now snaking behind them.  In the near dark and on two lanes with oncoming traffic, each car was having to use a very small window of opportunity to pull out and pass them. It seemed so dangerous to me; an accident waiting to happen was all I could think  and I was simply grateful that they had turned down a side road by the time it was turn to try to get by. 
There have been a number of tragic accidents here in Ottawa involving cyclists.  Meanwhile, there is a strong movement to share the main roads with bikes even in the downtown area which is very tight space-wise and often traffic congested.  As much as I want to support such a movement...so much good in it, I am so afraid for the bikers themselves.  It seems to be dangerous and I know I'm not the only driver who gets nervous sharing the road with cyclists.