FOOD

“Think how the other person must feel.”

/ janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments

My mother said those words to me hundreds or thousands, or perhaps only a few dozen times. They were the words that stuck, the instruction that carried over into my dreams where I routinely switch characters. I might be me for a while, but then the other person. I consider how the other person feels. This hasn’t always meant I was as kind or considerate as my mother intended. It did mean that I sometimes see another’s side so clearly that I feel what they feel. That is what I like to think she hoped for.

Oystercatchers make a sound like a squeaky toy. We know this pair at Hug Point very well, and have watched them successfully raise their babies. The black oystercatcher (Haematopus bachmani) doesn’t eat oysters in our area because we have none locally. According to Wikipedia, “It forages in the intertidal zone, feeding on marine invertebrates, particularly molluscs such as mussels, limpets and chitons, but also on crabs, isopods and barnacles.” You can see barnacles and mussels in the photo. What you can’t see in this photo, taken predawn, is the oystercatchers’ red beaks, reddish legs, and bright eyes in dark gold and red-rimmed like enamel on copper.
Continue reading →

EASTER, a billion dollars

/ janpriddyoregon / 6 Comments

It was still dark the second time I woke this morning, and I remembered the screaming man. We’d walked to Portland State University to the Saturday Farmers Market. I was hoping to find organic rhubarb, which would go fast. We arrived just before it opened and walked all the way around, but only one booth had rhubarb and it wasn’t organic, so we went back to the south end to buy our favorite breakfast. Nathan smiled and asked, “Two?” because we always order the artichoke and cotilla cheese tamales with everything but the hottest sauce.

Here is the sky from the other morning, but we’re in Portland this morning. Gary checked in with Mary who, we learned, was home after ten days in the hospital. I baked cranberry bread from berries in the freezer here and Gary took some to a neighbor. Our family is busy with work and school so we won’t likely see anyone but our immediate neighbors here in Portland I am scheduled to run, once the sun is up. Today is supposed to be warm, in the 70s, but we’ll be back at the beach by then.
Continue reading →

YOU’RE SWEET ENOUGH

/ janpriddyoregon / 6 Comments

I enjoy reels of people on their weight-loss journeys. I read one yesterday morning: “Eat less sugar, you’re already sweet enough.”

The best part of this organic gluten-free, nut-free vegan chocolate cake was baking it for someone I love. It tasted great—don’t get me wrong—but making it was the greater fun for me. (It’s only 6 inches across with vegan “buttercream,” fresh blackberries, and sliced figs for decoration with blackberry jam between the layers.) I do love chocolate, but my mom always made me a lemon meringue pie for my birthday because I like pie better than cake. I often do that even now, though lately I make myself a lemon angel pie—whipped Chantilly cream over lemon curd, in a meringue shell. It’s worth the trouble.

Fat doesn’t need much in the way of calories to sustain itself—it’s a storehouse, not active tissue. Muscle, organs, and fluids in your body do need energy to survive. A person fifty pounds overweight can eat exactly what another person with the same body but fifty pounds lighter eats and neither will drop an ounce. They are both eating for the same core. It’s why an overweight person can eat a perfectly reasonable diet but not lose a pound.

Taking that weight off is really, really hard for most people. There’s a good reason for that.

Continue reading →

ANTHROPOMORPHICATION

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

Years ago, a visitor in our home was sitting in the purple chair, petting our cat. Zora. The cat lashed her tail. I had to caution our friend that a cat lashed her tail when she was irritated, not like a dog would because she was happy.

The brown pelicans are still offshore, the nearest black oystercatcher pair had one baby this year, and there seem to be fewer juvenile seagulls this year. I admire them on the shore.

Every time I see someone on Facebook coo over a baby animal, “Oh I want one of those!” I cringe. We are a peculiar species, it’s true, fawning over the babies of other species and then eating them.

Continue reading →

LOW TIDE

/ janpriddyoregon / 11 Comments

Decades ago now, a friend visiting with us became impatient with talk of high tide and low tide. “What does that even mean?” She was genuinely irritated, as if I’d made it up talk of tides to annoy her.

So I took her to a window and pointed at the Cape: “See where the waves are hitting the headland? Remember that.” And then I literally waited six hours before taking her back to the same window and pointing again at the Cape. “See how the surf is barely breaking on the seastack second out from the headland? What you saw before was high tide; this is low.”

The Cape and the first two seastacks during low tide, but not very low. There are at least two more revealed during a minus tide.
Continue reading →

2025 new year

/ janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments
This is one of my favorite photos. It’s my desktop image just now.

Gary caught me working on this and when I told him it was a new blog post, he said, “Finally!” I had “resolutions” for 2024. Some of those plans fell apart and some went better than I dared hope and shifted my goals. Toward the end of the year I began making plans for 2025. Those have shifted too.

Continue reading →

MARRIAGE

/ janpriddyoregon / 16 Comments

When we’d been together a few years, people frequently asked us how we’d managed to stick together. It seemed odd at the time. Three or four years is not long enough to prove permanence, it seemed to me. It feels odder now that no one asks us how we managed to stay together—we were only asked that back in the early 1970s.

Here we are at our wedding fifty years ago today. Gary is feeding me cake I baked from the Fanny Farmer Cook Book. I am wearing a Bedouin wedding dress I bought while I worked at La Tienda on the Ave. It was not new even then, and the embroidery included birds. Gary is wearing a Guatemalan shirt from the same shop and a vest I made for him.
Continue reading →

EXPERIENCE

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

First, I concede that I possess the arrogance of a person with experience. This is tempered by the many things I don’t know or how to do—many more unknowns than knowns. Even so, there are things I have been doing regularly for decades. I may not be the best or perfect at doing all those things, but I do know what I’m doing.

.

I will use the example of Paul Hollywood, a professional baker who has written books about baking, and has been the host of The Great British Bake-Off (known as The Great British Baking Show in the U.S.) since it began. I willingly concede he knows more than I do about baking. He achieves perfectly even bakes and has experience with more products than I ever will. He is a professional.

Continue reading →

SWEDISH DEATH CLEANSING

/ janpriddyoregon / 12 Comments

In a two-year-old article, Ann Patchett explains that as a teenager she did not consider cream soup spoons essential when she bought sterling flatware as a 14-year old. I do. I will say that I already gave away all the family silver and have bought only odd pieces which I intend to use daily in the new year—using her sterling was something my grandfather’s third wife, Genevieve, did too. Patchett wonders what to do with her dozen champagne flutes that will never find a dozen people wanting champagne, but we have kept fourteen flutes purchased over the years on anniversaries. Though we have no better idea when or if they might be used, they line a high shelf and give me pleasure every time I take down a plain water glass. Throw them on a beach after I die.

Fabrics sorted for a quilt I made for our oldest grandchild a couple of years ago.
Continue reading →

PARTY

/ janpriddyoregon / 15 Comments
No chimney in the condo, but pieced stockings hung from the bookcase! I made the green one for Gary years ago, but the red and pink one on the right is brand new and for me. Both are lined in velvet and pieced with cotton, silk, and scraps of a red gilt and silk damask I bought in San Francisco for Ian’s madrigal costume twenty-five years ago.

We invited people in the building for a visit and had a lovely time. It gave me an excuse to bake cakes and shortbread, but talk was the major event. It was so good to sit down and have a conversation with our interesting and talented neighbors.

Continue reading →