Debi Simons

Author of Intentional Happiness

Some Modern-Day Versions of Ma

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Martha A. Goertzen
Martha Goertzen, my dad’s sister, who lived from 1924-2019. Image retrieved from the website of LaCanne Family Funeral Services, Windom, MN.

Later today or tomorrow I’m planning to put up a brief exercise video, something you can put to use on your living-room floor, and then I’ll be posting much less frequently on this blog as I concentrate on my other site, Behind the Music. That material is much more heavily trafficked, and I have quite a bit of material on sale there, with more being added periodically. If you’re a subscriber to this blog but not to that one, please take a moment to sign up if you have any interest at all in choral music. I write posts about the music we sing in my lovely, lovely choir, The Cherry Creek Chorale, and I also have several books on major choral works. So take a look! All materials except for the books are free, just to be clear.

I did want to finish up a few ideas about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her estimable mother Caroline. As I mentioned in the last post, Laura and her daughter Rose shaped the narrative as they wrote the Little House books. They re-arranged and sometimes left out events, also giving the impression

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More About Ma: Caroline Ingalls and Her History

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Caroline and Charles Ingalls sepia cropped.jpg
Caroline Quiner Ingalls with her husband Charles Phillip Ingalls, image source Wikipedia

I said in an earlier post that I wanted to explore further the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s mother, Caroline, called “Ma” in the books. The more I’ve read about her the more fascinating she’s become. As I’ve re-read some of the Little House books, especially the first one, Little House in the Big Woods, I’ve been more and more impressed with how much sheer practical knowledge about survival both she and Pa had. I had thought originally that Ma had come from a pampered city life because of a passage that shows up in this first book about Ma’s best dress, her “delaine.” Pa has just come home from visiting his father to help with making maple syrup and says that there’s going to be a “sugaring off” party with a dance included.

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How Not to Fall into the “Let’s Make Lots of Cookies During the Lockdown” Trap

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Image by palmettophoto1 from Pixabay

Have you been encountering articles online about how it’s a great idea to get into cooking and baking during the coronavirus shutdown? Make bread! Make cookies with your kids! Etc. And while I’m all for positive family activities to hold everyone together during these long days, I’d sound my usual note of caution about discretionary eating. It’s all too easy to binge/gorge on food as well as Netflix. Neither choice is going to have a good end result.

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A Great, Simplified “Use Up the Veggies” Recipe

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Image by Evita Ochel from Pixabay

I mentioned last week that I had a head of Napa cabbage in the fridge (that’s the stuff in the lower right-hand corner of the picture) and was looking forward to having lots of salads with it, but after a few days it started tasting bitter. I couldn’t force it down. Then I thought, ‘I know! I’ll make that recipe from Smitten Kitchen again!’ But going back and looking at her post reminded me of how ridiculously complicated it is, with totally unnecessary steps. I’m not going to re-write the entire recipe, though.

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Homemade Salad Dressings and Croutons–plus Costco Thoughts

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This image is copyrighted, but hey! I’m pushing people to go there!

Jim and I made our way to Costco yesterday morning, the first big shopping trip since everything started shutting down. It was my first venture out for maybe two weeks. I had made the prediction that either the parking lot would be empty or that there would be a line out the door waiting for this magnificent place to open at 10:00, and, as usual, neither of my predictions was accurate. Instead, the whole experience was perfectly normal, with the exception of limits on certain items, the fact that a smiling woman was handing out packs of toilet paper, and that other items were missing entirely, notably chicken parts and regular pasta. (I was tickled to see quite a bit of gluten-free pasta on the shelves. Since this snarky comment is in parentheses, please feel free to ignore it.) The lines were no longer than usual; everyone was friendly and efficient, and we were in and out in under an hour. They had even opened early. I came home encouraged that the great engine of American capitalism is probably not going to grind to a halt any time soon, even as many are suffering from its slowing. We’re going to get through this, folks!

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How Do You Measure Success These Days?

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Image by Manuel Darío Fuentes Hernández from Pixabay

From Emily Landon, chief infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Chicago:

“It’s really hard to feel like you’re saving the world when you’re watching Netflix from your couch. But if we do this right, nothing happens, A successful shelter in place means you’re going to feel like it was all for nothing, and you’d be right: Because nothing means nothing happened. And that’s what we’re going for here.” (“One doctor’s straight talk about the coronavirus strikes a chord with anxious Americans“)

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Something Funny to Brighten Your Day–and Perhaps Bring a Bit of Balance

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Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

I wrote recently about being “in a slump” and how to get myself out of it. (When I looked at the “related posts” links at the bottom of the page I realized that I’d written almost exactly the same thing two years ago. Hey, at least I’m consistent!)

Anyway, two quick items for today. One’s the funny story mentioned above, but first a practical getting-things-done nudge, from the time management guru Laura Vanderkam (who at this very moment is home with five kids, one a two-month-old baby–follow this link and scroll down to see a priceless picture of her and her new baby in “family jammies.”). She suggested this week in her “Before Breakfast” podcast that we should follow something called “the 10-minute rule.” We’ve all heard of the 5-second rule (now dead as the dinosaurs b/c of the virus) that if you pick something up off the floor it’s still safe to eat if it was there for less than 5 seconds, and the 30-second rule (championed by Gretchen Rubin) that if something takes less than 30 seconds to do, such as hanging up your coat, go ahead and do it right away. The 10-minute rule is a little different: it’s not a time limit but more like a time nudge. Tell yourself, ‘I just need to work on this job for 10 minutes. If I don’t feel like continuing, I don’t have to.’ But most of the time, as the estimable Laura says, we just need to get started, and when the 10 minutes are up we’ll just keep going. And if you do quit, well–at least you’ve worked some. This is a similar idea to that of the “wedge action” that I talked about in that earlier post–anything to get you going.

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A Book to Make You Think, “Hey, It Ain’t So Bad!”

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I was irresistibly reminded of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter as the cascading news reports have been coming about the coronavirus. It’s so interesting to see the different sources that people are drawn to in responding to bad news. Some want to distance themselves, reading, watching and listening to material as far removed as possible from the real world.

And then there are people like me, who always find it consoling to say, “Well, other people have had it worse.” For some reason, I’m especially drawn to the last days of the Roman Empire. Hey, the Goths haven’t poured into the city, looting and burning! So we don’t have anything to complain about!! And, in concert with about 95 million other people, Jim and I re-watched the movie Contagion this past weekend. I must say, I have some serious issues about the plot, especially on a third watching. Society almost immediately descends into chaos and looting, but then, suddenly, as soon as there’s a vaccine, everyone is lining up perfectly to snort the stuff. (I have no plans to watch it a fourth time; that honor is reserved for Inception.)

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Food Thoughts . . .

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Image source: Pixabay

during this time. I have no great insights, and there are tons of food blogs out there. Just a few things that have occurred to me:

  1. Don’t waste food. I have a container of ricotta cheese that I bought for something–can’t quite remember what–and didn’t use up completely. Friday morning I decided to make Jim and me a ricotta, pesto and Parmesan omelet with tomato sauce, with the ricotta dolloped over the top. I opened the container. It looked a little pink, which is how such items start looking before they get actually, like, moldy. But the stuff underneath the top layer was perfectly fine. (Note that if it had actually been green I would have thrown it out. As I’ve said to Jim on any number of occasions, “It isn’t worth getting sick just to use up a dollar’s worth of food.” So I am pretty cautious. But in this case it seemed fine, and it was going to be heated.) There was some left after the omelet and I was tempted just to toss the container, but then I thought, ‘No, wait–I can make those ricotta-black pepper rolls with this.” Which I will probably do for this evening. They’ll be baked in a 350-degree+ oven, so any microbes will meet their deaths. It’s a small issue, as it’s a small amount of food, but it doesn’t hurt to have a frugal mindset even in the most robust of times.
  2. Take an inventory. Probably everyone reading this has already taken stock, but I haven’t as yet. Especially if you have one of those pantries with deep shelves, or a backup pantry somewhere, it’s all too easy to lose sight of what’s in there. In our old house I had two pantries for our little three-person household, one in the kitchen and one in the laundry room. I was always saying that I ought to have some kind of running list on the doors so I could cross items off as I used them and add what I bought. But I need to pull everything out and just see what’s there.
  3. Buy wisely. Don’t get items with short shelf life. So I bought Napa cabbage this past weekend but not lettuce. We can have some nice fresh greens that won’t have quite the tendency to wilt away. The freezer is stuffed. I have lots of packages of pasta and dried beans as well as cans of beans and coconut milk. I have somewhere around ten pounds of unbleached all-purpose flour, plus maybe 25 pounds of wheat that I can grind in my grain mill. There’s a full, unopened bag of yeast in the pantry. Did you know that, at least according to Michael Pollan, a person can indeed “live on bread alone”? (Humanly, practically speaking, that is.) If you give someone a bag of flour and some water, and that’s all he has to eat, he’ll die of malnutrition. But if that person makes bread out of the flour and water, which wouldn’t require buying yeast but just leaving the flour-and-water mixture sitting out long enough to ferment and then baking it, he/she could live perfectly well. So interesting! (I’ve felt at times that I had too much flour/wheat on hand, but now I’m glad to have it. I can’t claim any particular wisdom in buying these items in bulk–it just sort of happened that way. I even bought a big mega-pack of toilet paper at Costco last Wednesday, not because I thought there would be a shortage but because we were out. If I’d waited one more day to go shopping . . . well, I wouldn’t be feeling so safe and secure in that department as I sit here.)

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How to Handle Slumps

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Here’s my problem: I need to be BOTH people in this image.
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

As I’ve said lo these many times on this blog (both before and after re-naming it to reflect my major new emphasis on food), I’m a personality type called an Obliger, part of a four-part personality framework that Gretchen Rubin created. (Take the quiz here to find out your type.) It’s a framework that’s very helpful—I think, anyway—because it doesn’t try to explain everything about a person. Instead, it focuses on one narrow part of personality: how you respond to expectations, either inner or outer. Obligers, who make up the largest group (about 40%, according to a study that Gretchen commissioned), respond very readily to outer expectations—that is, what others expect of them—but don’t do well with the expectations they have for themselves. In other words, they don’t tend to be great self-starters. I had always recognized this lack in myself but thought of it as a character flaw. I was lazy. I was unmotivated. I was a procrastinator. Then I realized that this was simply the way I am, and that I needed to deal with my personality type in a productive and positive way. There was no sense in berating myself, but neither was there any sense in just excusing myself. ‘Oh well, that’s just me,’ wasn’t going to cut it.

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