by jphilo | Apr 18, 2012 | Recipes
We celebrated Hiram’s birthday last month with grilled steak (thanks to our unusually warm weather) and strawberry shortcake (thanks to his determination to cut down on sugar due to advancing age). To prove I’m still young, I cut loose. Instead of using the recipe from the old Betty Crocker cookbook, I used my Grandma Josie’s recipe instead. Her recipe was a little sketchy, so below you’ll find her original recipe (submitted to our family cookbook by Cousin Danelle) and then my version of it.
Grandma Josie’s Original Strawberry Shortcake Recipe
1 small cup flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon baking power
1 egg
2 tablespoons butter
Stir in rich milk until semi-stiff. Bake at 350 degrees until golden and toothpick comes out clean. Top with fresh strawberries. Recipe can be doubled to fit in a 10 inch pan.
Grandma Josie’s Strawberry Shortcake
2 cups flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 cup softened butter
2 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup milk
1 quart strawberries, washed, hulled, sliced and mixed with 2 tablespoons sugar
Heat oven to 400 degrees. Mix all dry ingredients in a medium bowl. Cut in butter. Add eggs and milk. Mix with a fork until all ingredients are moistened. Pour into a 9 inch square pan. Bake for 20 minutes until golden brown. Top with fresh strawberries.
by jphilo | Jun 29, 2009 | Reflections on the Past
Recently one of my childhood games, passed on to younger cousins when I outgrew it, was returned to me. The thrill of owning Happy Landings: A Geography Game (Whitman Publishing, 1962) did not overwhelm me when I received the game as a birthday present when I was 9 or 10.
For me, a geographically challenged child from the word go (my best guess is that the game was given after a particularly abysmal score on the social studies portion of ITBS) playing the game was an exercise in failure. The board was a world map marked with red stars. After drawing a card with commands like “Ride over Mackinac Bridge which connects upper and lower Michigan” or “Climb towering Mt. Everest in northern India,” players placed their marker on the corresponding star. I don’t remember ever getting a star in the right place. And since the map, the cards and the markers are in pristine condition, the game didn’t see a whole lot of play at our house or anywhere else.
But as a kid, one thing about the game intrigued me: I could spend hours gazing at the children on the cover. The boy was okay, mostly because he’s holding the pointer which was cool, but the girl was fascinating. She was the epitome of early 1960s perfection. Note the curly hair, the lovely bow in her hair, the unwrinkled shirtwaist dress with it’s own gigantic bow, the lace on collar, cuffs and waistband, and the wonderfully full skirt. And from the look on her face, you can bet she can answer every Happy Landings question without breaking a sweat. She was everything I aspired to be and couldn’t accomplish, no matter how hard I tried. That’s why I spent hours gazing at her picture, trying to imagine what it would be like to have a dress like hers, curls like hers, and smarts like hers.
I’m thrilled to possess the game again because it brings back so many memories: the chalky, booky, dusty smell of the elementary school I attended, girls wearing shorts under our dresses so the boys wouldn’t see our panties on the jungle gym at recess, the joy of discovering Laura Ingalls, the Bobbsey Twins, and Clara Barton inside the covers of library books, and the disappointment of failing another spelling test because I got “b” and “d” mixed up again.
But mostly, I’m thrilled because the game reminds me of how far I’ve moved beyond the child who once owned it and yet how much of her remains. I no longer obsess over lace, bows, ironed dresses, and curly hair. But, I still mix up “b” and “d” when I’m tired, and I still love meeting characters inside a book.
One last thing that hasn’t changed? I still don’t like playing geography games, so please, buy something else for my birthday this year!
by jphilo | May 22, 2009 | Family
For the past six years, from 2003 through 2008, Allen’s birthday was more a day of grief than celebration for me. Every May twenty-third reminded me of the ninety miles we drove to get to the hospital where he was born. The countryside was beautiful but lonely, impressive but stark, inviting but remote.
The land mirrored my relationship with our son during the years when, in a desperate search for peace and safety, he ran to a monastery and began to heal. The first year, I couldn’t hold back the tears when I called to wish him happy birthday. I did better the next year. After that, though the calls were hard, I could see how Allen was maturing and becoming less self-centered and more loving, as he grew into the young man we had always hoped and prayed he would be.
Last May, we began a new tradition and spent the week before Allen’s birthday with him at the monastery. Though it wasn’t quite like a birthday party at home, it was more family time than we expected when he left us. His delight in our presence was more than we had dreamed of or hoped for, and I only cried once all week. We hatched a plan to visit the monastery every May, to celebrate with our son and the monks who had helped him heal.
Then last November 30, God put into motion a series of events that still take my breath away. Two weeks later, Allen completed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and left the monastery for our home where we celebrated Christmas as a family. By the end of January, he was living with my sister in the Twin Cities. By March he began his dream job at an organic farm. In April he spent the weekend here helping fix our driveway, and he asked, “Would you come up to the Twin Cities to celebrate my birthday?”
“Yes,” I said as I fought back tears. “Yes.” So tomorrow morning, Hiram and I are heading north, with Mom and Anne in tow, the trunk jammed with suitcases and a cooler containing a German chocolate birthday cake, ten pounds of baby back pork ribs and fresh asparagus. And tomorrow night, we will celebrate more than just a birthday with our son. We will celebrate the outpouring of grace in the presence of a God who has worked exceedingly abundantly beyond what we could imagine or conceive: the emotional healing of our son and the restoration of our family.
This May twenty-third, I will cry on my son’s birthday once again. This year, my tears will spring from streams in the desert, like violets blooming tenaciously after a long, hard winter. They will be tears of incredulous, undeniable, and wholly unexpected joy.
by jphilo | Mar 13, 2009 | Family
Hiram, my husband, had a birthday last Sunday. He’s fifty-three, as I will be in a few months. We’ve reached that age where people look at our wedding pictures and say things like, “Wow, Hiram, you had a lot of hair!” or “Jolene, you were so…young,” or some other exclamation that requires the speaker remove a foot from the mouth.
Our trip to California was his birthday present and he says it was a great one. We’ve been married for thirty-one years, so I could have predicted the reasons he enjoyed himself: jogging on the beach every morning, listening to the stories the elderly relative on my side of the family told, fixing a kitchen drawer for the same relative, and the engrossing tour of the Midway, a retired aircraft carrier. In fact when I couldn’t find him on the carrier, I knew right where to look. He was front and center at the “Ejection Seat Theater,” captivated by both the movie and his ejection seat.
In all the important ways, Hiram hasn’t changed at all. And when I look at his college pictures – with all his sun-blond hair and without glasses – I see him as he was then and as he is now. I have no words to explain how the passage of time has changed him (and me) without changing us at all. But one of my favorite authors, Marilynne Robinson, says it perfectly in her new novel, Home.
The main character, Glory, describes her elderly father and his lifelong friend as they tell old stories and play checkers. “The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utter changed.”
Robinson’s words describe Hiram, a man of few words, so beautifully. “…the same day after day and…somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed.” I can’t wait to finish her book or to watch my husband’s unchanging transformation during the rest of our lives together. Between the two of them, there will be words enough to keep me happy for a long time.
by jphilo | Sep 3, 2008 | Daily Life
Right now my technological skills are as fuzzy as the cute little caterpillar I photographed a few days ago while possessed by a “seize the day” fury. I’m not moving any faster than the caterpillar as I crawl along, trying to figure out why some of you can post comments and view them on the internet while others (including me) can’t. I can see your comments when I get into my web folder, and I can delete nasty ones (something I’ve never had to do) but I can’t add my own comments.
Today, spurred on by my eighty-year-old aunt who has the mistaken impression that I know something about computers, I checked iWeb’s help pages. Then, I followed the instructions they said would fix the problem. This required a lot of calming, cleansing breaths as I tried to remember where I had stored the needed passwords and customer numbers. But I got it done, which is a miracle because I usually forget or lose the passwords and this time I didn’t.
So far, the problem is not fixed on this end, but the instructions said it could take 24 – 48 hours. I’m trying to be patient while I wait. For now, here is my reply to Janet and Mary: I will pass on your birthday greetings to Mom. She’ll be thrilled that you remember her. And Harriet, here’s a reply to the comment you tried to make: My knowledge of computers and Alaskan politics is pretty fuzzy. Don’t look for me to morph into a butterfly any time soon.
