Almostgotit.com

January has drizzled and dripped into the Almostgotit home. 

Knoxville’s paper announced today that several hundred more people in our city are about to lose their jobs as more companies go under. 

Tennessee’s economy gets worse and worse, as does the nation’s economy in general, while outside it rains and rains and RAINS.

We were so fortunate to be able to travel West to spend a long holiday with family, though, and have been so blessed to spend many recent evenings in front of the fire here, as well, with good friends. 

I still don’t have a JOB-job, though this month I do have some editing work.  My husband’s job is reasonably secure.  We have enough to eat, and the world’s most wonderful woodstove to keep us warm. 

Plus also a loveable, very naughty dog who WILL not stay off the furniture.

(Many thanks to Kathy for my very favorite Christmas gift.)

(Except for the new TV, I mean.)

Almostgotit isn’t blogging because she’s enjoying lots of family and a Scandanavian-style Christmas (sort of)  in Wyoming, enjoying the brilliant sunshine and snow but thinking it’s good she didn’t move to Utah after all because this stuff out here is COLD. 

Cheers and warm wishes to you and yours!

While trolling for spiral-bound cookbooks in my favorite section of McKay’s Used Books, I found Ernest Mickler’s White Trash Cooking II: Recipes for Gatherins, and had to find Volume I.  Had to order it from Amazon, in fact. 

 It arrived two days ago.  And what a gorgeous thing it is.

So gorgeous that the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, no less,  wrote of it:

I have never seen a sociological document of such beauty — the photographs are shattering.  I shall treasure it always… Now that it’s harder than ever to identify the genuine article on sight — with two generations of prosperity white trash looks like gentry — we’ve long needed something other than the ballot box to remind us of their presence:  White Trash Cooking is a beautiful testament to a stubborn people of proud and poignant heritage. - Harper Lee

It is funny, oh yes: Mock Cooter Stew.  Russian Communist Tea Cakes. Mama Leila’s Hand-Me-Down Oven-Baked Possum.  But the humor is the best kind of all, stemming from a deep and genuine affection — and yes, even respect — for the mamas and aunties who did the best they could, mostly with very little indeed. 

Never in my whole put-together life, writes the author,

Could I write down on paper a hard, fast definition of White Trash… But the first thing you’ve got to understand is that there’s white trash and there’s White Trash. Manners and pride separate the two. Common white trash has very little in the way of pride, and manners to speak of, and hardly any respect for anybody or anything. But where I come from, you never failed to say “yes ma’m” and “no sir,” never sat on a made-up bed (or put your hat on it), never opened someone else’s icebox, never left food on your plate, never left the table without permission, and never forgot to say “thank you” for the teeniest favor. That’s the way the ones before us were raised and that’s the way they raised us in the South.

… But rather than runnin’ around willy-nilly telling stories (which I could do all day long), it might be quicker to get to what I mean by White Trash cooking if, as Betty Sue says, we go straight to the kitchen and “get it did.”

While the Almostgotits aint got much call for fried squirrel in our own Southern household, here’s a coupla good recipes from the book, just in time for the holidays.  If you want more recipes than these, though, you’ll have to order your own copy of White Trash: Amazon sells ‘em used, too!

Plain Ol’ Potato Pone

• 1 cup milk

• 3 medium-size sweet potatoes

• 1 cup of molasses

• 2 teaspoons cinnamon

• 3 eggs

• 1/4 stick of oleo

First bake your sweet potatoes, or use some left from supper. Take off the skins and mash them up.  To the potatoes, add all other ingredients.  Mix well and put in an iron skillet and bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes.  Now this is a real pone.  Dig in and make yourself at home — if you ain’t, you oughta be. This is another one of Betty Sue’s favorites. (from White Trash Cooking)

Fancy Sweet Potato Pone

• 4 cups raw sweet potatoes (grated)

• 1 cup syrup

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 1 cup milk

• 1/2 cup butter

• 1/2 cup chopped nuts

• 1 cup raisins

• 3 eggs, well-beaten

• 1 teaspoon allspice

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

• 1/2 teaspoon cloves

• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Add well beaten eggs, sugar, spices, and nuts to grated sweet potato. 

Melt butter in heavy iron frying pan; add potato mixture; Stir all on top of stove until very hot.  Cook in same pan in moderate oven for 45 minutes, stirring from bottom several times.  Serve with whipped cream.

Raenelle said: ‘This is my recipe but Betty Sue added all the extras, so it’s hard to tell it’s the one I gave her.  She’s always changin’ things.’  (also from White Trash Cooking)

One of the best places in the entire city of Knoxville, Tennessee is McKay’s Used Book Store, and one of the best parts of McKay’s is the “club cookbook” section, an endlessly-entertaining collection of plastic comb bindings.   

Most are from Knoxville churches and garden clubs, but several have travelled long and intriguing journeys from far-off places, like Elvira.  

Many of them are quite old.  A few are even mimeographed. Some have food stains on them.   Many are annotated — “bake longer;” “too much salt, use half;” “goes good with pork.“ 

Men cook, too, of course, but these cookbooks are overwhelmingly about women. 

Women created or preserved the recipes; women solicited and collected them; and women sold and bought the cookbooks, some packing up and moving with them all the way from Elvira. 

Or else mailing them from Elvira to their cousins in Knoxville who don’t cook, but kept them on their shelves for several years any way in case of nosy visitors from Elvira.  Who thankfully died, finally, so the damned cookbooks could be shuffled off to McKay’s. 

It’s interesting to see how recipes have changed over the years.  Who makes potato chip sandwiches these days?  Or casseroles, pretty much in general? 

Or maybe women have changed?  I’m trying to figure too many things out, here.  I read these cook books looking for clues about the women who wrote them, but I’m also looking for clues about myself. 

I’m not working very much.  Should I be cooking a lot, instead? 

And do I channel Martha Stewart and use fresh-shaved  parmesan and parchment paper, or should I return to a thriftier era and make tuna casseroles topped with potato chips, instead?

Listen:  this next thing really is related. 

A friend showed me some hand-made Christmas ornaments the other day, which she’d bought from an older woman who laboriously cuts and contructs the tiny, multi-dimensional things from old Christmas cards.  Dips all the tiny little edges in glitter for a slightly tacky additional touch.

My first reaction:  how pitiful, and also a little strange.  A little embarrassing, even.

I would not spend that much time cutting up and re-assembling old Christmas cards.  I’d buy Certified Craft Materials instead, or just buy some cool ornament that had been hand-crafted by an impoverished woman in Peru, even if it were made out of old Christmas cards.

Aha. 

I wonder if being an American, particularly an American woman, is these days basically an impossible proposition. 

What do you think?

1. Be a rockin’ party host

Because you have time to clean your house!  And time to pull out (and put up) all the Christmas decorations!  And time to look through all those fabulous cookbooks and old magazines you’ve been saving for fabulous party recipes!

2.  Learn how to solder! 

3. Get your volunteer groove on

And feel better about yourself in the process.  You can: help pack Christmas boxes and serve holiday meals to those even less fortunate than you are;  be a temporary “Mobile Meals” volunteer to give some of the regulars time off for their own holidays; help put up decorations at your church, or a nursing home, or at your child’s school; volunteer your time, energy and talent  for those holiday bake and book sales, homeroom parties, church bazaars — it’s all good!

4. Give the best, most creative, most ingenious (plus also cheap) gifts in the whole history of the universe

Make those amazing scrap-quilted placemats you’ve always wanted to give your mom.  Bake gorgeous home-made cookies for all your friends.  Or make them cakes.  Did you know a local caterer here is selling plain old layer cakes for $70.00 each?  Hunt in antique stores (and thrift stores!) for perfectly unique, perfectly personalized special somethings, like the professionally-framed 18th-century French print of a map of Canada that I’ve just scored for my Canadian-born son for ten bucks…  (last year’s prize was the fully-operational Singer sewing machine, mounted in a lovely hard-wood cabinet, that I bought for my daughter… also $10!)

5. Sit in front of the fire and listen to Christmas carols, read a wonderful book, and drink spiced coffee. Right in the middle of the day!

Just because you bloody well can.

I learned how to solder today!  Can welding be far behind?  I’ve always wanted to know how to weld.  

It kind of hurts when the solder gets stuck to your finger though.  At this rate I may eventually weld an iron bar to my own head …

The days are short and dark.  Knoxville is unusually cold and we’ve had days of drizzle, making everything even darker and colder than ever.

It’s like living in Seattle again.  Or England.  This time of year in Oxford, the sun was already low when the kids came home from school at 3:30, and no one turned the heat on, just huddled in wool sweaters looking at their brochures for a Winter Holiday in the Canary Islands. 

Plus also drinking pot after pot of hot tea.  Better than sticking your head in an oven, I guess.

I couldn’t stand to stay at home today, so went out to lunch with friends and then lingered over errands, including a trip to Kroger where, in honor of the day’s drear,  I bought the ingredients for an easy British supper tonight: baked potatoes with tuna and sweetcorn.*

There are several ways to make this, but basically you simply mix a can or so of tuna with another can of corn, add a tiny bit of mayo to moisten plus lots of black pepper, and stuff in a baked potato.  That’s it. 

If you have to go all American or whatever you can add some dill weed, or even some cheese, but isn’t life hard enough? 

————

* ”Corn” is a generic word for grain in British English, so “sweetcorn” (or maize) is what they call the yellow stuff we sometimes eat off the cobb. 

Ever feel like this guy?

I am tired. Tired of my life and tired of my mind. I am an intelligent guy; I have a degree and should be making more of life. But, to be honest, I don’t have a clue what I want. In fact, I almost feel like I don’t want anything.

Last month, some of my friends participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) — including Korrektiv’s Rufus McCain, who recently quoted one of the little “pep-talk emails [he] received from famous writers encouraging [him] to finish [his] novel, which is stuck on page 2.”

The letter Rufus reprinted in his Nov 20th post is from Janet Fitch, who wrote about hitting a creative wall while writing White Oleander.

Luckily I was seeing an amazing therapist at the time. I explained I was afraid that if I chose route 6, then I would be eliminating all the other possible routes. What if route 15 was better? Or 3 1/2 ? So I hedged. I couldn’t commit. I was stuck. And she gave me the piece of advice which has saved my writing life over and over again, and I will give it to you, absolutely free of charge. She said, ‘I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.‘

Ah yes, the Amazing Therapist.  The butt-kicking amazing therapist, who saves people’s lives even, by giving the same sensible advice that Every Wise Person you ever met also gives you, advice which you know perfectly well already but which, sadly, hasn’t helped you at all.

Because you’ve made a lot of decisions already, and too many of them have been wrong.

Enter Cary Tennis, who addresses our Poor Tired Guy quite differently:

To me you simply sound like the philosophical rebel — what we term these days a slacker.

Ah now.  Here it comes –  more butt-kicking.  Right?  But no…

Do you not realize that you are a member of the cultural opposition? … Perhaps that makes you the true misfit — one who does not even recognize it and would disavow it if asked.

… You are the solitary man without a country, without a home, wondering what’s wrong with you — because your protest is yet an inchoate thing, innate and unfocused. Your plight is thickened because your context is so thin — today you’re a rebel without a context! Is there still a Greenwich Village to flee to? Is there still a San Francisco where one can rent a cheap room above a bookstore without becoming a real estate agent or a software change agent or an FBI agent?

This is entirely wrong, Mr. Tennis.  Celebrating the Slacker?  What kind of crazy American work ethic is this?!? 

What should be you doing if you are not on the job and have nowhere to be? Should you pick your toenails or eat some lasagna? Should you read an edifying book or stroll through the park? What should you do? …  You live within this matrix [of who works, who doesn’t, who gets paid a lot, who doesn’t] and may wish for it to mean something, and indeed rules can be deduced …but at times, to the individual man caught in the tornado, the only thing it seems to be is random and insane.

That is why the philosophical rebel is so dear to us — because he alone has the courage to say, “I have no clue what this shit is.”

Good heavens.  Is that courage or laziness?  What possible value to society is such a stance?

Of what value to society is such a stance? … Most important, he is anathema to hoo-ha — he does not swallow the Kool-Aid or follow the company line; he does not jump when the Man says jump — he scarcely moves; he hardly hears the Man; he can hardly even see him; he has to squint. It’s his constitution to be cautious and to ask the relevant question Why? Which in our current situation we could use more of — if we in the West had been more skeptical, if there were among us more bantams in pine woods, we might not be so deep in shit as we are. …

Could it be that the voice of what you want is God’s voice? Could it be that what you want is what God wants? Could it be that you are eating and sleeping and fucking for God?

Erm, beg pardon… eating and WHAT?

Give yourself a break, my man. If you are depressed and have a drug problem or have a metabolic imbalance, then that’s some serious stuff and you need medical care. But if you simply lack ambition, I take my hat off to you. The world is way too full already of overly ambitious fucks elbowing us out of the way on the streetcar.

Oops! Let me just get something to clean up the milk coming out of my nose. 

Almostgotit honestly doesn’t know what to make of this, and can’t say she’s quite as lacking in ambition as all of that.  But she loves a good iconoclast and wonders if Cary Tennis might be on to something.  What do you think, readers?

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I’m Scattered and Have No Ambition By Cary Tennis (Salon.com)

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Sorry, too enthralled feeding the fire, eating leftovers, and fiddling with Facebook to do any actual blogging. 

The only problem with vacations is that you have to come back from them.  Behind-er than ever.

Feeling so very, very whiny, besides.

I hate it when seasons end, even if another one is starting.  (Plus also, so totally not fair that only a 12 year old can be 5′6″ and a size 2 at the same time)

Though our little part of Knoxville is not without its seasonal charms.  What the heck are boiled peanuts (or fried pork rinds, or moon pies, or okra generally) you might ask?  Take my advice: Remain In Ignorance on These Things, Grasshopper.