The Keeping Room: January 2011

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Love Me Tender with a Birthday Bouquet, Lamb Chops, & a Happy, Happy Day!

This vibrant and redolent bouquet was delivered to my door this morning, signed:

We love you, Robin & Tim! I offer a sincere and warm thank you to

my sister-in-law and her husband in NC.

We had a grand Christmas with them and now THIS! It is beautiful!

News flash: I have had another birthday, and it was a big one!

No, the young cashier did not ask for my ID when I purchased some sherry and tawny port, but on the up side, my students from years past can still recognize me! Of every ten outings I make anywhere near home, I would say nine will surely put me face to face with a person I have had as a student. What a blessing that they always want to stop and visit for a moment!!

I have also had these adorable nesting sheep added to my existing herd of woolly Colin's Creatures. (Click here for his website.) I think this makes seven!

I shall need to round them up and do a head count.
Thank you, Cameron & Little Lisa Lou Who!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No Elvis sightings, but NPR played a lovely instrumental of "Love Me Tender" as one of their transition pieces this morning. And the young lady who gave me a facial (a birthday treat earlier this week) revealed to me that her father was indeed an Elvis Impersonator!
Weehhhhhhll, Thank You Vehhhry Much!

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Here is what I often call Crumbly Gingerbread

I found the recipe on a postcard I sent home to a friend when I visited Grasmere in 1986. This is very close to the gingerbread sold at St. Oswald's church there in Grasmere. This is marvelous with your hot tea. The real secret is adding the sugar at the very last-not blending it with the margerine. I use either a fork or pastry blender to "rub" in the margarine with flour and oats. I have copied it as it appeared on the postcard and added my American interpretation of measurements for certain ingredients.

9 oz brown wheatmeal flour
(1 rounded cup wholewheat flour)
3 oz porridge oats
(1/2 cup Three Minute Quaker oats)
3/4 level tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 1/2 level tsp cream of tartar
3 level teaspoons ground ginger
9 oz hard margarine
(1 to 1 1/2 sticks od Parkay-the less you use, the more crumbly the texture)
9 oz soft brown sugar
(1 rounded cup)

Set oven to 325 degrees or Mark 3. Well grease a shallow tin 14" by 9". Put flour, oats, bicarbonate of soda, cream of tartar, and ginger in a bowl. Add the margarine cut into small pieces. Rub in well with fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in sugar. Put into tin and press down firmly with a floured fork. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes until pale brown. Cut into squares whilst warm and leave in tin until completely cold. Keeps well in airtight tin.

The Secret Heart

Here is my Valentine to every parent who remembers looking on a sleeping child...and lingering in the moment....
Enjoy & linger,
Firelight

by Robert P. Tristram Coffin

Across the years he could recall
His father one way best of all.
In the stillest hour of night
The boy awakened to a light.

Half in dreams, he saw his sire
With his great hands full of fire.
The man had struck a match to see
If his son slept peacefully.

He held his palms each side the spark
His love had kindled in the dark.
His two hands were curved apart
In the semblance of a heart.

He wore, it seemed to his small son,
A bare heart on his hidden one,
A heart that gave out such a glow
No son awake could bear to know.

It showed a look upon a face
Too tender for the day to trace.
One instant, it lit all about,
And then the secret heart went out.

But it shone long enough for one
To know that hands held up the sun.

May 20th is the 400th Anniversary of the Publication of Shakespeare's Sonnets: Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! It is an ever fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
William Shakespeare

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Love Me Tender with a Birthday Bouquet, Lamb Chops, & a Happy, Happy Day!

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