Jenyfer Matthews

Saw this sign in a barber shop near where I am staying in Cleveland. I laugh every time I see it. Can’t you just imagine some big, hairy guy going in and requesting their service by name??

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A while back my husband decided to get us a 15″ cast iron skillet because he was suspicious of nonstick coatings – both fumes and also when they start to peel. I admit that I was somewhat reluctant to use the new pan for quite a while. I was used to the pans that I had been using and didn’t think we really needed such a large pan so it sat on a shelf collecting dust.

Since we moved to our new house, I’ve fallen totally in love with the pan. Why? It all started with French toast. I hadn’t had any French toast (eggy bread for my British/Aussie readers) in a very long time, mostly because I didn’t have a pan where it wouldn’t either stick terribly (aluminum skillet) or fail to brown properly (nonstick). The French toast did not stick to the cast iron pan, it browned perfectly, AND it’s large enough that I was able to make three pieces at a time. Hmmm…

Since then I’ve used it to make grilled cheese sandwiches, veggie burgers, quesadillas, fried potatoes, oven-baked sweet potato fries, sautee onions, and pancakes. Yes, it’s large and it’s heavy, but I know it’s not giving off any noxious fumes when I heat it up and you just have to love a pan that you are actively discouraged from washing! I just wipe out whatever bits are left behind, oil it up and it’s ready to go the next time. I’ve been using it so frequently that it now lives on my stovetop.

I used it the morning of my trip to make my new-to-me recipe for March: oat cakes. (Ha! I didn’t have to rely on the brownies after all!) I’ve tried making oat cakes before but they were always denser than I liked. I found this recipe on Mama Pea’s blog and since she used to run a restaurant I figured she ought to know what she’s doing. She does indeed – they were wonderful.

My next adventure with cast iron will involve seasoning the cast iron waffle maker I bought recently. I’ll be able to make waffles on my stovetop OR in the woods! An added bonus is that it is small enough to also serve as a weapon

8:30pm, Saturday March 27th is Earth Hour, sponsored by World Wildlife Fund.

Earth Hour 2010 takes place on Saturday 27 March at 8.30pm (local time) and is a global call to action to every individual, every business and every community throughout the world. It is a call to stand up, to take responsibility, to get involved and lead the way towards a sustainable future. Iconic buildings and landmarks from Europe to Asia to the Americas will stand in darkness. People across the world from all walks of life will turn off their lights and join together in celebration and contemplation of the one thing we all have in common – our planet.

So grab a flashlight or a couple of candles and turn off the lights for one hour. Have a romantic dinner with your honey. Tell your children spooky stories. Or sit and look at the stars. Turning off the lights for an hour isn’t such a hardship, and small actions really do make a difference.

The Bangkok Duty Free and the Orchid Growers of Thailand must be laughing themselves silly over their clever scheme to separate tourists, high on their holidays, from their last few baht.

I had about an hour in the Bangkok airport before my flight and was wandering the shops, as you do, needing to spend what remained of my Thai money. I bought myself an elephant key chain and a few spices for hubby. There were many, many boxes of cut orchids that I admired and passed by. I wasn’t sure how Egyptian customs would deal with me bringing in plant life and didn’t want to risk it. But then I saw the orchids plants, sealed in bottles.

I was feeling overconfident – I have never grown an orchid in my life. I can’t grow picky plants like African violets or cyclamen. I think that seeing orchids growing like weeds all over Thailand (their native environment, duh!) infected my brain though. All I could think at the time was what could be better than cut orchids than an orchid plant? And they came with instructions – how hard could it be?

I ended up getting a package of four small orchids. I gave one to the mother of a friend of mine who loves plants and kept the other three.

First instruction: “Take the orchid plant out from the bottle, when this young plant has filled up the bottle or the nutrient jelly has dried up, approx. 1-3 months spent.”

Hmmm… The inspection stamp on the back of the box was 2009 so surely that was more than a few months? And the plants were in that little airless jar in my custody for weeks and were doing nothing. So I decided to open the jar because maybe they just missed a step in their translation, right?

Wrong. Within days of having opened the jar, the nutrient jelly started to grow mold! Oops.

Okay, on to step two: “Wash the jelly out thoroughly and leave it to dry in basket under shade until new roots have developed, normally consumes 2 weeks.”

I washed the tiny plants off, hoping the Cairo tap water wouldn’t do them in, and put them in liqueur glasses in a dark corner of my kitchen and waited. They looked as if they were molding too – at first. Then I realized that what I took for mold might actually be the roots. Cool!

Their two weeks were just about up when it was time for me to leave for my trip so I hastily potted them. I used coffee cups because it was all I had handy, and let’s be realistic – how long are these things really going to last anyway, especially now that they’ve been left to the care of my nine year old daughter? Think she’s going to remember to water them twice a day? Fat chance!

Good thing the nursery where I bought the peat moss has some lovely, mature, blooming orchids for sale. I should have just gone there in the first place!

Another thing I would recommend not getting in Thailand is a pedicure. I now have an ugly toenail and a month’s worth of Lamisil to remind me of my holiday treat…

How many pots does it take to make soup for dinner? When you make it like I did the other night, apparently four!

Pot #1 – I started out making spiced dal (Indian lentil stew) – a recipe I’ve made countless times. Only this time – yikes! – I added way too much salt.

Pot #2 – I put more lentils in a second pot to cook without any seasoning, figuring I could add these to the first pot when they were done, with the hope that it would be enough to balance things out.

Pot #3 – Pot #1 was too small to accommodate the lentils from pot #2. Added everything to the pot #3 and find it is still pretty salty. Needs something…

Pot #4 – larger pot still to accommodate lentils, can of diced tomatoes, frozen chopped spinach, and several more cups of water. Voila! Indian lentil soup

(Pots #5 & #6 were for the basmati rice and the side of asparagus)

All in all, way too many pots for what ended up being a fairly simple dinner!! But I was happy to have salvaged the meal – and there’s enough leftover that we can eat it again later in the week. Gotta love a twofer.

Still, I don’t think that such a mad scramble should count as my new-to-me March recipe. I wasn’t going to count the brownie recipe I made at the beginning of the month either, but with March quickly passing and the fact that I’ll be traveling for the last two weeks of the month, brownies it is!

I make cakes from scratch all the time with good results, but hadn’t found a satisfying brownie recipe til now. Normally I rely on a mix, but I had friends coming over and had forgotten to buy a mix and it was raining so I took a chance. I chose this recipe because it didn’t require me to melt any chocolate, instead relying on powdered cocoa – which I happen to have in great supply. The only thing I did differently was add mint chocolate chips as a top crust – in a word, YUM. I may never buy a brownie mix again.

If I make brownies again this week, it can count as my March recipe, right?

I was making an appointment for my next haircut at my last appointment (my hair dresser is that popular and busy!) and it happened that it fell on March 15th, the Ides of March. We both commented on it and she said, “I wonder what that means, though?”

I promptly forgot about the discussion – until I read The Memoirs of Cleopatra and the conversation came back to me. Besides the fact that March 15th is the date Caesar was assassinated, did that date have any special meaning?

Nope, apparently not. According to Infoplease, in the Roman calendar the Ides was just a way of marking the middle of the month. In fact, only three days had names – Kalends, the first day; Nones, the 7th or the 5th depending on the month; and Ides, the 15th or the 13th also depending on the month. All the other days were specified by counting forward or backward from one of those days. (Probably a good thing they weren’t quite as time-bound as we are today because could you imagine trying to set a meeting based on a calendar like that??) The rest of the spooky connotation was gifted to us by Shakespeare in the play Julius Caesar and the now famous soothsayer’s warning to Caesar. Funny how that sort of thing sticks around, isn’t it? (Any author’s dream!)

In short, nothing to see here folks, just another day. Unless you happen to be in Rome where the Hash House Harriers do an annual toga run past the spot where Caesar was killed. Think Caesar would be honored, amused, horrified, or just puzzled?

Last weekend I took a trip to the Wissa Wassef Art Center. I went to the ATM first, knowing that I’d find things that I wanted to buy.

The place was really amazing. It’s basically an art colony started in the 1950s. Everyone works together but they don’t make the artists wait for a piece to sell before they pay them, they pay them all along so that their art doesn’t become commercial and so that the artists only follow their pure creative impulses. They even grow plants to make their own dyes.

If you want to know more about the place, you should go to their website. I was too busy running around taking pictures!

(Click any image to enlarge)

The wool weaving these ladies were doing was amazing – particularly as they were working strictly from a vision in their head — and working vertically!

You can see that the picture is coming out sideways on this one.

They also weave in cotton – the panels are smaller since the thread is so much finer than wool.

I felt my heart rate increase when I walked into this workspace – this man is making a batik panel, and as a quilter I love love love batik. It was a real treat to see how it is done.

I coveted this fabric but could never conceive of cutting it up for quilting!

The detail they manage to weave into these panels is just phenomenal!

This gigantic piece is actually three panels made over the course of three years.

This is some detail from the above panel. Amazing!

All of the above pieces were in the art center’s museum. I didn’t look very closely at the items for sale because they were too expensive for me to even consider. They started at $500 and went up from there. Worth every penny, but I wasn’t so sure my husband would agree with me!

I also resisted most of the pottery. It was pretty, but I have a habit of falling in love with teapots and then not using them.

I loved these little teapots but in an awesome display of willpower, I decided only to take pictures of them

I got this picture while we were waiting for our bus to pick us up. The whole trip was worth this picture – I see this all the time but almost never have my camera with me, or a zoom lens powerful enough to take a picture like this from so far away.

All in all, quite a satisfying way to spend a Saturday morning in Cairo.

You know you are getting up there in age when many of your stories include phrases like when I was a child or I remember when. Since it seems like a lot of my stories start that way recently so you can draw your own conclusions!

Though I was never a girl scout myself, I have a long history with girl scout cookies. A friend of mine down the street who was a little younger than me was a girl scout and I used to help her sell them. It was kind of a treat for me because my school was always asking us to sell hard things like magazine subscriptions. Girl scout cookies were a breeze – they practically sell themselves!

But it was difficult for even a young child to resist the allure of all those cookies. I used to buy boxes of thin mints with my allowance and stash them in my bedroom. No worries of attracting insects because they never lasted very long! The serving size in the nutritional information really should just say “2″ – I can easily eat an entire tube at one sitting and I’d like to think that everyone else is doing exactly the same thing. I’d like to know what they put in Thin Mints because I can resist all other varieties of Girl Scout cookies but those. The only way for me to resist them is not to buy them at all.

(And incidentally – that Thin Mint Blizzard that Dairy Queen was hyping last summer was a big disappointment. It was Oreos and mint sauce in ice cream. Not a bad Blizzard but NOT Thin Mints)

I’ll be making a quick trip back to the US soon and a friend asked me would I like any girl scout cookies. Does anyone ever say no to girl scout cookies?? Even the cat in the picture is even sitting on a box of my favorite variety! I think my only hope is to avoid eye contact if I see any Girl Scouts or I may have to pay for excess baggage on the return flight!

But you can’t take competition out of the children.

I subbed last week for a librarian at the local American school and instead of working in the library that day, I did what she was scheduled to do that day and worked at their annual sports day. Only they don’t call it “sports day”, they call it “kids day” – and rightfully so because there was nothing sports-like about it.

When I was a child we called it “field day” and there were actual competitive sporting events. We had things like sprints, long jump, relays. There were also slightly borderline events like three-legged race and wheelbarrow race, but all the events had one thing in common: they were all competitive and they all had a declared winner. Someone kept a tally, and at the end of the day the person who won the most events was declared the overall winner and on the next regular school day the first, second, third and fourth winners were recognized with ribbons. It was meant to be a mini-Olympic type day and anyone who cared competed fiercely for those ribbons. I can still remember that I won first place for the girls when I was in sixth grade.

Back to the present and last week’s kids day. It was a day of fun, a day of games, but not a day of competition. At least not officially. Some of the games had ways to measure wins and losses, but they were all team events and so far as I could tell, no one was keeping track of it in any official way. As the officials running the various game stations, we assigned points for how well the children listened to the instructions, how much positive team spirit they displayed, and how many children were wearing hats. If there were a way to swab for sunscreen and what SPF they were wearing, I’m sure that would have been on the sheet as well. But nowhere was there a spot for recording winners and all the activities were team activities. No individual events. It was all for fun.

In spite of all this carefully orchestrated non-competitive fun, I still heard kids cheering for their teammates to hurry up, accusing others of cheating, and declaring themselves the winners of an event. They were clearly enjoying themselves, but they were also very intent on winning and were disappointed when they didn’t do as well as they would have liked.

So why is it that we can still celebrate the victory of our Olympic athletes, but we want to erase any sign of competition when it comes to our children? Where do people think that Olympians come from anyway? Or any successful people in any field for that matter? Different people are good at different things. No one will excel at everything, and yes, when you are young and still figuring all that out, it’s not always a happy or comfortable process. But parents and teachers aren’t doing anyone any favors by trying to shield children from that knowledge. And from what I’ve seen over the years on soccer fields, tennis courts, and schools, parents and teachers would be much better off accepting that competition is a part of human nature and instead of trying to expunge it from the curriculum, teaching children sportsmanship – how to be good winners and good losers.