My Mother Dolores Allen

This Mothers’ Day I think about my mother, who was different from any other mother I knew. When I was growing up, other mothers spent a lot of time at home as housewives. Not my mother. She filled her life with creativity and activity. She married the right man (my father) and the two shared creativity and innovation for many years. Mother and Father didn’t compete; they collaborated and encouraged each other and their children (us). Yes, they nurtured three children also.

 My father started two radio stations, and my mother helped him. She was a writer of fiction and radio drama, and they acted in her dramas. She created and published a long lasting guidebook for tourists visiting Door County, of which she was the principal owner and which continues today in altered form; he sold advertising for it and distributed it. She created the well-known House and Garden Walk fundraiser for the Hospital Auxiliary in Sturgeon Bay, which still exists as an annual event and for which she was given two life memberships in the auxiliary.  Mother had what was said to be the longest running recipe program in the history of Wisconsin radio, lasting from 1951 until shortly before she died in 2005.  She wrote a cookbook, Door County Recipes and a Little Local Lore, in 1989, which sold well in the Door County area. It contained many recipes that were given on her recipe show on radio. Her interest in local history was in the cookbook in the form of little vignettes about Door County places. Mother also played golf and was in a bridge club for many years. Father was president of the Door County Chamber of Commerce; that was fine with her. He was chairman of the Door County Republican Party; she supported him in that. The Governor of Wisconsin came to dinner; she was there making it happen.

One thing deserves special recognition. It is nothing much in the eyes of the world, but I see it as a sacrifice on her part. Mother had become a successful writer of short stories, and had sold some, when the plan to build a radio station in Door County solidified. She gave up fiction to give her heart and her time to getting that radio station going. She had various office duties, including scheduling and monthly billing, which involved us kids. Our job was to put those bills into envelopes and get them ready for mailing. Father was the manager and the on air person. He also did everything else that no one else there did.

That’s pretty good accomplishment for a child of a single mother who grew up in Minnesota. Mother was born in 1913 and graduated from high school in 1929 at age 16. She was chosen Miss Winona sometime after her graduation. She attended the College of St. Teresa in Winona and received a degree with a double major in English and French. I have no idea how she financed that college education. Her mother worked but never had extra money for education. Mother was a teacher in small town schools and then moved to Chicago and was a model for a while. During that time she wrote stories. She also met my father in Chicago. He was a radio announcer who worked at several stations until landing at the NBC affiliate there, WMAQ. Three children and a bunch of years later, in 1951 we all moved to Sturgeon Bay, where creativity and opportunity joined together as described above.

My brothers and I were part of their ongoing enterprises. Both brothers became radio announcers in Sturgeon Bay as teenagers and it was just something our parents expected of us. I worked in the office during several summers until I got married. I was doing radio commercials in fifth grade for Scofield’s Hardware Store. I illustrated Mother’s tourist guidebook when she wasn’t using clip art.

At home my mother, who was famous for her recipe show, had little time to cook old fashioned meals for us. I have repeatedly said she bought the first of many conveniences that are taken for granted today. She came home with the first convenience food called the TV dinner. She bought the first automatic washer and dryer. She owned a car when many women didn’t drive. She always had a cleaning lady. Father supported these decisions, and said that she was more interesting when she did the things she liked to do. She tried to instill in me an interest in wearing fashionable clothes, but I wasn’t interested, except when prom time came.

I would say that parenting was not Mother’s primary interest. She was a very modern woman and had many interests while loving us. Her attitude that we can succeed as she did was a gift she gave us. She lived ninety-two years and I think she loved most of her time on this earth. Happy Mothers’ Day to my mother, Dolores Allen.

Lefse - Making and Disputing

Everyone in our family likes lefse. We also seem to like to disagree about it. You may ask how anyone can disagree about something so good, bland and Norwegian. The disagreements have been about what to put on it.

I think every ethnic group has its breads. The Norwegian Americans have lefse. It’s a soft flat bread made from mashed potatoes and flour. In my experience, which is limited to Wisconsin, people spread butter on it, or butter and sugar, and roll it up. I have been told that people fill it with other things, especially in a legendary restaurant in Osseo, Wisconsin. I also learned that commercially produced lefse has been marketed as something to eat like a tortilla. Well, other than its shape, it’s nothing like a tortilla. I have never seen tortillas marketed as lefse.

The argument started right after our wedding. I had always eaten lefse with butter spread on it and rolled up. Rick was amazed that anyone would eat it that way. He insisted that it had to have sugar sprinkled over the butter. That’s the way his mother served it. And so the argument began and remained in the family for about half a century. As life went on, Rick was louder than I was, so the kids voted for sugar along with him.  And I continued to protest that butter without sugar was best. It remained a friendly argument.

Sometime early in the marriage, I learned to make lefse. It was one of those foods that one didn’t find in most grocery stores, so if we wanted to eat it, I had to make it. Cookbooks don’t often dwell on it, although some country church cookbooks tell how to make it. I didn’t have country cookbooks then. So I decided that lefse would be easy to make.

To begin with, I didn’t have the equipment, namely a lefse rolling pin, which is die cut and a requirement. I substituted a quart fruit jar. Big mistake. Instead of lefse, I had created crackers. As it happens, the first try at lefse making is likely to make crackers even with the correct rolling pin. Lefse is all about technique. In my favor, I had a ten-inch cast iron frying pan, and it worked. Originally, I was told, the cook needed the top of an old fashioned wood stove. My mother-in-law used her wood stove. It made big pieces of lefse that would not begin to fit into my frying pan.

I bought the first lefse rolling pin that I could find, and the rest is history. With a few modifications, including size of the pieces, I learned to make tolerable lefse. It seemed to please the family and gave us all something to argue about. Eventually two of my daughters tried to make lefse when they were teenagers, and they had the same crackers result that I had had. They hid the disaster and didn’t tell me about it until much later.  Then when Rick’s aunt died, I inherited her electric lefse griddle. I didn’t know they existed, and I still prefer the frying pan. Now my daughters help me and sometimes we make it together when they visit me.

Recipes for lefse are hard to find because the manufacture of it is hard to describe. Exact measurements don’t seem to work well. Some people, including commercial lefse makers, make it with dehydrated potatoes. I think lefse tastes much better and less like cardboard when we make it with natural unprocessed potatoes. I also think that it is easier to make a batch with about two potatoes in order to figure out the technique.

One of my recipes from a church cookbook says to begin with forty pounds of potatoes and twenty pounds of flour. That would make a lot of lefse for a smorgasbord, but would send me right out of the kitchen promising never to try to make lefse again. Another book says to use six cups of mashed potatoes and two cups of flour. The proportions of potatoes and flour seem to be the same. It’s all a question of how much of the stuff you want to make. Flexibility is needed.

Here is a general idea for how to make lefse for a few people. You will need a lefse rolling pin, a cast iron pan or griddle, and a spatula to turn the pieces.

Lefse

Cook a few potatoes and mash them as you would for dinner, with milk, butter and salt. Go easy with the butter and the shaker because lefse is not supposed to taste salty. Like much Norwegian food, it is bland. Mash them or use the electric mixer to get out the lumps.

Mix the potatoes with all-purpose flour, about half as much as potato. You will need enough to make the resulting dough not sticky, but holding together. Use as little flour as possible, and handle the dough quickly and lightly. Shape the dough into little balls, and then roll them into flat circles with a lefse rolling pin. The circles must be as thin as possible, and more flour may be needed for rolling. The size of the circles will be determined by the pan you use. My ten-inch cast iron pan holds circles of dough that are six to eight inches in diameter. My (unused) lefse griddle makes circles that are twice that size.  An old fashioned wood stove top makes even bigger ones.

Heat the pan or griddle until it is hot. The temperature should be about hot enough to cook pancakes. You may need to adjust the heat as you go along, if the pieces burn quickly or take too long to cook. This is the intuitive part. This is where you will end with lefse or crackers. Do not grease the pan; the pieces are baking, not frying. Place circles of dough on the griddle, one at a time. Turn them with your spatula when they barely begin to brown, a couple of minutes into the process, and cook on the other side a short time until the dough is cooked but not crisp. My mother-in-law used a long thin stick from a window shade as a turning spatula, as did Rick’s aunt. I use long pancake turners.

Stack the pieces on a plate to cool. Large pieces are cut into quarters. My smaller ones are eaten without being cut. When you are ready to eat, spread the pieces with butter. If you are so inclined, sprinkle them with sugar. Then roll them up. As I said above, I am in the no-sugar faction.

I have tried commercially made lefse and think it is inferior to the home made kind. One brand was critiqued by my daughter Mary several years ago, when she changed (in her mind) the brand name from Aunt Julia’s to Aunt Julio’s. It isn’t very good. I found another brand, called something like Jolly Troll that rises a little above mediocrity. It really is worth it to make lefse yourself.

Easter and Faith Stories

Once again, the season of Lent is with us. It is about to culminate in Good Friday and Easter. It’s the faith story of Jesus, the big foundational faith story for Christianity. Are we thinking about it as a people?  When many of us think about Jesus, we think about him being born, dying and rising. Some of us think about the life he lived between birth and death, as recorded in the New Testament. A lot of other people don’t think much about him at all. I suggest that his faith story might remind us of our own faith stories.

Last week at a gathering at church, I was assigned to tell my faith story. I thought about it a lot and concluded that it is easier to tell someone else’s faith story than my own. My father’s story is much more interesting than mine, as is my brother David’s. I am proud of both of them.  They both taught me that a faith story is not just that person’s story, but rather the story of their communities of faith. They both wrestled with God a bit. My father joined the Episcopal Church in suburban Chicago and then moved to Sturgeon Bay, where he found a more high church manifestation. He complained about it and took the Bishop to lunch to try to resolve the dilemma of how to make the church match his image of it. My brother left the Episcopal Church when he disagreed with it, and he became a pastor in the Assemblies of God. Both were and are faithful people of God, in death and life. Things fall apart and come together, all in the tent of God.

My story was hard to tell, partly because it involved unhappiness and partly because it was hard to tell without telling the story of us, Rick and me. My story is our story. My father’s story involved my mother, and my brother’s story involved his wife. My story was about realizing in the middle of the night that God was real, my husband and I could straighten out the mess we had created, and our stories were intertwined. We don’t live faith alone. In all three stories in my family, the church has been there to support, assist and shape us. The church has its own sinful story, but it still shows us the God who holds us in his hands.

We all live with the challenges of the world around us. We come together at Easter with many faith stories, some happy and some not so happy. Stories of lost or no faith come, too. Easter has a big umbrella. It’s an umbrella that covers us and still lets the sun shine in.

Some people prefer an Easter that is about a rabbit that gives away colored eggs. That’s a different story.

Bread Making

I raised my family on home made bread. It all started when Rick said to me shortly after our wedding, “Will you make bread like my mother’s bread?” Fortunately, I had enjoyed his mother’s bread several times on visits to the Whitt farm before she died in 1962, and it was outstanding. In a world of Wonder Bread, her bread was firm with just a bit more salt than commercial breads of the day. As the kids were growing up we referred to commercial breads as phony plastic bread.

I had never made breads other than biscuits and muffins, and those accomplishments were due to my home economics teacher when I was in junior high school. Thanks again, Mrs. Robertson. My mother wasn’t a bread maker and I don’t think my grandmothers were, either. So I did the next best thing. I opened the tried and true cookbook given to me by my mother, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, 8^th ed., 1948.

I had no photos like the ones in today’s cookbooks, no DVD, no internet baking experts, no real knowledge about bread making. After all, it was the 1960s. What I had were the texture and the taste in my memory as a guide. I had tried to make rye bread once before with disastrous results due to not understanding that yeast requires warmth to do its magic. So I tossed out that failure and started anew.

My bread was a success because my cookbook was a success (also, I could read). The bread chapter presented a tutorial on flours and leavening, liquids and flavors. The recipe for white bread went on for a page and a half. How could I fail? Best of all, it looked and tasted a lot like my mother-in-law’s bread.

My bread was simple, in contrast to the excellent bread that my daughter, Mary, makes and has described in her culinary blog, Mary’s Food Journal. Mary uses more ingredients including powdered buttermilk, which I think had not yet been invented when my cookbook entered the world. Mary’s rising process (the bread rising, not Mary rising) requires a lot of time. She is truly a woman for today. I noticed on her blog that the hands of the person pictured kneading that bread are those of her husband and not Mary, so it is a team effort. Our bread making experiences say a lot about the way we approach food. Our daily bread is our daily life.

Bread making is about process. People who want results without process can buy bread.  My daughter-in-law Sherry uses a bread machine, and that's okay. Results can come in various ways. I think that there is something like this in the Bible. Remember Moses? When the Hebrews were out in the wilderness on their forty year journey away from Egypt, they ate manna, a food that came to them from heaven. Was it bread? Maybe. It was about results, not the process of making the food. And did they complain about it? Did they want pizza? Moses was the complaint department, I think. It’s no wonder he retreated up onto a mountain, where he got the Ten Commandments.  So if we complain about our results-driven diet today, we can think about those Hebrews who were lost in the wilderness and benefiting from the celestial supermarket product of manna.

Here is the wonderful process-driven bread that I made for a lot of years, shortened from the aforementioned page and a half. Today I rarely eat bread, but it is part of the family story. The nutrition part of bread is not part of this essay. You can read about that somewhere else.

White Bread

1 cup scalded milk                              2 tablespoons sugar

1 cup hot water                                   1 package dry yeast

2 tablespoons butter and/or oil              ¼ cup lukewarm water

2 ½ teaspoons salt                              6 cups all purpose flour (approx.)

Mix together milk, hot water, sugar, butter and salt. Cool to lukewarm. Dissolve yeast in lukewarm water and add to liquid mixture. Stir in 3 cups flour and mix thoroughly. Add remaining flour gradually, using just enough to prevent stickiness. Knead it on a floured surface until it is smooth and elastic, about ten minutes. Put the dough into a lightly greased bowl and cover it with a dish towel or some other loose cover. Set it in a warm place to rise until it is double in bulk, about an hour. When it is doubled, punch it down, turning it over and over. Don’t skimp on this or you might cause a yeasty or sour taste.

Divide the dough into parts to equal two or more loaves, depending on desired size. For me this makes two standard size loaves. Knead the pieces and shape them into loaves. I flatten the dough a bit, roll it up and tuck the ends under so that the seams don’t show. Place them into two greased loaf pans (about 9x5 inches). If you are making round or oblong loaves, place them on a greased cookie sheet. Cover them with a dish towel and let them rise again until double in bulk, about an hour. Bake the loaves at 375 degrees 40 to 60 minutes until they are brown and make a thumping noise when you rap on them. Turn them out of the pans immediately.

That’s my bread, without the dissertation about what happens if the dough rises too long or not long enough, the rising temperature is too high or too low, or the oven is too hot. Bread making is an experiment.

Praying Our Way Through Stress - book review

I wrote this book review for my friend June Paul, a Godly woman and friend who has much to share.

June Paul has given us a short book that is filled with Christian wisdom from Scripture. It is designed to bring people through their stress into happier lives with God.  She combines knowledge of various types of stress with stories and verses from the Bible. Her book is the outgrowth of her workshops, where she says people encouraged her to make her information available to a wider audience.  She says, “Part of the good news about the gospel of Jesus Christ is that God wants to help us handle stress and that prayer does work.”  The early part of the book contains short chapters about different stressors, and the later part has some helpful meditations based on the sermon on the mount and the Lord’s prayer.  June Paul gives us a glimpse of people with pain from financial stress, that is based on her work with people.  In addition, the book has useful prayers, poems and songs, some by Ms Paul, and reading resources for continuing assistance. This book is valuable for people living with stress and others who can read it as part of their spiritual journeys.

Long Cold Winter?

This winter has been long, cold and snowy. More snow is expected tonight and tomorrow. Everywhere I have heard people complain about how bad it is. But is it really? I suggest that we are fortunate to live through the winter with the amenities that technology has given us. We have electricity for light in the long cold nights, various types of fuel to heat our homes against the harsh cold, indoor plumbing for necessary bodily functions, cars to drive through the well plowed roads to our chosen destinations.

Many of us can recall some depictions of winter in other times when people lived without the comforts we have. We read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, The Long Winter, about the Ingalls family barely surviving in the Dakota Territory in the 1800s. They stayed in their rural home in bitter cold with little food for the long winter. And they survived to live on in better days. The book, Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, told of harsh winters in Moscow and the Urals in the early days of the Russian revolution. I read the book and remember the movie, in which the wolves howled outside near Zhivago and Tonia while they nestled under blankets for warmth, and Zhivago and Lara while they huddled close to the heating stove where they wouldn’t freeze. That was winter! The movie industry showed it well.

Winter is described with great intensity in the well known poem, Snowbound, by John Greenleaf Whittier (http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/whitt02.html). In our family, when our kids were young, Rick quoted it every time we had a snowstorm:

“The sun that brief December day

Rose cheerless over hills of gray.

And, darkly circled, gave at noon

A sadder light than waning moon.”

That wasn’t all. Rick would call up the stairs to John and the girls, again quoting Whittier’s poem:

 “A prompt, decisive man, no breath

Our father wasted: ‘Boys, a path!”

It was time to shovel the driveway and sidewalk.

As far as I know, this winter, while long and cold, has not been memorialized in literature, although it has dominated television news. The Ingalls family, Zhivago, and Whittier did not have television to show us what winter is like at its worst. They told us what it was like to live with it. We are living with it in greater comfort. We can stop complaining now.

Bread Pudding - Delicious But is it Good for You?

Bread pudding is delicious, but should we eat it? Here are some reasons for and against consuming bread. Then I’ll tell you how to make a little bread pudding so you can decide or just want to eat it anyway.

For bread consumption:

1.      It tastes good.

2.      It is filling.

3.      It helps the grain producing industry (if you favor that).

Against bread consumption (backed up by Grain Brain, a book by David Perlmutter):

1.      If you have celiac disease (gluten intolerance), you might be at risk for developing mental delay, learning difficulties, tic disorders and ADHD.

2.      If you have gluten sensitivity, you might have severe depression and anxiety.

3.      White bread is a simple carb, so your body treats it like sugar. On the way to diabetes, or worsening it if you already have it.

4.      You are likely to gain weight if you eat bread regularly, assuming you eat the standard American diet.

5.      Modern grains, including refined white flour, “arguably our our beloved dietary staple, [are] a terrorist group that bullies our most precious organ, the brain…but also will accelerate your body’s aging process from the inside out. This isn’t science fiction; it’s now documented fact.” (Dr. David Perlmutter, Grain Brain, p. 5.)

Have you heard enough? Bread pudding is a terrorist?

I seldom eat bread, but when I do, one of my favorites is bread pudding. Ok, I know it will do me no good, but like many people, I sometimes deviate from my usual meal plan. If I haven’t talked you out of health ruination, which is a real threat to well being, read on to learn how easy this is to make. To help you avoid too much temptation or weight gain, this recipe makes only a little bit of the stuff. You can bake the dish in your toaster oven.

Bread Pudding for One or Two

2 slices bread (stale is good)

Butter

1 egg

1 ¼ cups milk (I use whole milk)

¼ cup sugar

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

¼ cup raisins

Nutmeg

Butter a baking dish that will hold a quart or less. I use a standard Pyrex loaf dish. Spread butter on the bread and cut it into dice size cubes. Place them in the baking dish. In a bowl, beat the egg. Add milk, sugar and vanilla and mix well. Pour the mixture over the bread and let it stand until the bread is soaked, about 5 minutes. Add the raisins.  Sprinkle nutmeg over the top. Bake at 350 degrees about 45 minutes until it is firm and browned slightly. Eat it warm or cold.