Tag: cooking

Recipe: Sweet and Sour Meatballs

On By Tea Sugar SaltIn Cooking, Guest Articles, Recipes2 Comments

Cure Ocha here with a recipe!

So the wonderful co-op had its one year anniversary party with potluck, and I brought a special recipe: sweet and sour meatballs. This recipe has been in my family for half a century and comes out of a 1950s magazine – I love clever 1950s recipes like this.

Sweet and Sour Meatballs for a Party

The meatballs can be whatever meatball recipe you like best, or even storebought, but this is what I used. They’re a little tender and have to be handled gently when made this way, but pretty much anyone who eats meat can eat them safely.

1 cup dry short or medium grain rice
2 cups water
4 lbs ground beef
Italian seasoning (or thyme, oregano, basil and parsley) to taste
Garlic salt (or garlic and salt) to taste

Preheat the oven to 400F. Cook the rice with the water in your usual way. The reason you don’t want long grain rice is because you want the rice to be sticky so that it will bind your meat together. Cool the rice down (I spread it out on a cookie sheet and fanned it with my bamboo spatula) until it’s only warm, then mix it thoroughly with the ground beef and seasonings. Take a small bit and cook it in a pan in order to taste it and make sure the seasonings are right. When it’s yummy, roll the meat mixture into 1 inch balls and place them touching but not smooshed onto a cookie sheet – you should get a little more than sixty from this amount of meat. Bake them in the oven, checking frequently after the first ten minutes, until one from the middle is cooked through when you break it open.

Now that you have meatballs, it’s time for the sauce. Are you ready? This is absurdly easy.

30 oz of cocktail sauce
30 oz of grape jelly

Mix them in a large pot (or crockpot) over low heat. Add the meatballs and stir to coat. Simmer at least 10 minutes and then keep them warm until it’s time to eat.

These travel well in a crockpot and stay safe during potlucks if you just plug the crockpot in and keep it on warm when you get there. If you have a little more or a little less of the sauce it doesn’t matter…it’s a flexible recipe.

Please enjoy!

Where Did the Time Go?

On By Cynthia ThinnesIn Diary

Where did the time go?  I think I say that every day.  I usually say that about 3 or 4 in the afternoon, when I have not gotten to even half of what I had planned for the day.

Grandmother ClockOne may think that one of the authors of a weblog of this nature would have a perfectly clean home, with dinner on the table right on time, and with all my tasks completed at the end of the day.  The expectation may be even greater in that I do not have children, but only three cats.  Surely, I could keep up with everything.

Sadly, that is not the case.  Right now, I am contending with a dish monster because I did not do them last night.  I had to quickly iron a shirt for my spouse, because she needs at least one to wear for work tomorrow.  I had to leave the rest of the shirts for tomorrow.  I did the laundry last Saturday, and it is almost Wednesday, and I am just now getting to the ironing.  Oh yes, some of the shirts are left from last week.  I still have a closet and a back porch filled with boxes of stuff that has not been unpacked since about 2 years ago, when we moved into this house.

Aside from that, I am struggling to make myself finish with the business I am trying to close.  At some point, I do think I need to get serious about getting my astrology practice off of the ground.  Oh dear, I should probably do the charts that I have promised friends and family first.

Oh yes, I did want to learn Japanese.  I started a while back, and I have a book to learn hiragana, but I have not touched it in a couple of months.  I also have Dr. Lee Lehman’s Medical Astrology book I have been working my way though, but I have been working through it for months.  I also want to read Ptolemy and Aristotle.  I am also trying to work my way through Little Women.  Oh yes, as I mentioned in my last post, I want to get started on my holiday gift making.  I have gotten one and a half fingers done since my last post.

There is a quote from the Christian written tradition, “The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”  Sadly, that applies to me right now.

If I were a more practical person, I would probably read books about time management.  I have read those books in the past.  I have also received some wise guidance from a wonderful mentor.  The reality is that I am not a very practical person.  I would love to be, but I really am not.

I might not be all that practical, but I do have some knowledge that can help me.  Given that my trouble seems to be time, I know that time is governed by the Great Angel, Sai Rhavë.  Sai Rhavë’s planet is Saturn.  It just so happened that I just went through a Saturn opposition and Saturn has just crossed my Ascendant, moving from my 12th House to my 1st House.

What all of this means, for those who do not know astrology, who are probably most of the readers of this blog, is that I have been and am still facing the lessons of Sai Rhavë right now.  Astrologers generally consider Saturn a malefic, and so she is, at least on the physical level.   Despite this, I have learned over the years, that while Sai Rhavë can be a rather harsh and severe taskmistress, she can also reward those who learn and practice her lessons.

One of these lessons is that of humility.  I need to accept I can only do so much, and that it may take me time to learn to manage the new routine.  The routine of a housewife is much different than the routine of the workplace.  One generally does not have specific deadlines or anyone giving any guidance as to what should be done when.  Sometimes just making a decision where to start can be a challenge.  I am physically out of shape, and I am not one with a lot of physical energy in general.   My knees can often only handle so much.  I am also not a very organized person in general.  I don’t know how many times I have come up with systems like task lists, only to spend more time on the system than I do on doing the tasks.

Another lesson is that of patience.  Things are going to take as long as they take.  When I started this, I had illusions that in the first month I would have the house completely organized, have my old business finished, and have my new business at least off of the ground.  I guess that was a bit unrealistic.  Sometimes, I feel like I am not making any progress at all.  I think one of the tricks to patience is to be happy with small victories.  One of the small victories I am having is learning to cook.  I am slowly adding new things to my repertoire.  My latest is meatloaf.  I was rather proud of myself yesterday when I managed to have the meatloaf and all of the sides ready at about the same time, and I managed to get everything on the table without a major panic.  It is a small victory, but one must take the victories she can get.  I have also managed to write fairly regularly for this blog and the others I write for.  I think I can take that as another victory.

One of the most important lesson of Sai Rhavë, though, is the lesson of persistence.  I need to just keep going, a little at a time, without giving up or getting discouraged.  That can be the hardest lesson of all.  I am fortunate in that my spouse has been mostly patient with me as I am fumbling through the changes.  She tells me dinner is good, and she is generally supportive of my efforts.  Money is a bit of a worry, but I think that money is always a worry.   I just need to keep plugging away a little at a time and trust and have faith.  I have to do my best, and hope that my best is enough.

Thank you for reading through my worries and woes.   I hope you are all not completely disillusioned by these confessions.

Baby Steps – The Dinner Table

On By Cynthia ThinnesIn Diary4 Comments

I have a confession to make.  I am only beginning on my journey of reclaiming my home as a true Hestia and of reclaiming a civilized femininity.   It is a slow process, and there is a wide gap from where I have come from to where I am trying to go.  Change is hard, and I believe that it takes time to make lasting changes.  I have a spouse, who takes time to adjust to change.  Furthermore, I will freely admit that I am much, much better at talking about the philosophy of the Hestia than I am on the practical application of this philosophy.

One of the changes that I am trying to make is to cook dinner and to eat dinner with my spouse at the dinner table on a regular, if not a daily, basis.  There was a time in my life when I ate two to three meals in the car in between work, school, and home.  There were other times in my life where I ate out, mostly fast food, several times a week.  The nights I did not eat, I ordered pizza.  Even when my spouse or I cooked a meal, we often ate it in front of the television.  Eating dinner at the table was a rare occasion and a special treat.  We do not have children.  If we did have children, I would like to think that we would have done a better job in this respect, but I am not so sure about that. Nowadays, children are as busy as their parents, with extracurricular activities and such, so I do not know whether we really would do any better.

It is amazing what a difference it makes to eat at the dinner table.  Yesterday, my spouse came home from work stressed and tense.  Usually, when this happens, she really wants to eat at the television, but I had already had dinner prepared and the table set.  As dinner went on, she started to calm down and relax.  It was rather amazing.

After dinner, we had dessert, a jello pie that my spouse made the day before.  I served the pie with tea, served with our nice teacups, which were passed down from my grandmother.  When my spouse saw the pie and the tea in the nice cups, she smiled more broadly than she had all evening.

Yesterday, my spouse said that she wanted pizza today.  Generally that means ordering pizza, usually from Domino’s and eating in front of the television.  Today, I decided to try something different.  I decided to make a pizza and not a frozen one.  I had already intended on grocery shopping.  I bought a fresh multi-grain flatbread crust, pizza sauce, a four cheese Italian shredded cheese mix, and some pepperoni.  I also found some tasty looking little French bread rolls to make garlic bread and salad in a bag.  Just to make things seem a little nicer, I also bought some sparkling grape juice.

SAMSUNGI also have the good fortune of a grandmother living upstairs, who is an amazing gardener.  She has a little herb garden, where she grows basil, oregano, and parsley (among other herbs).  I picked some of these fresh herbs to doctor up the pizza sauce and to add to the garlic bread.  I also set the table, and we ate at the dinner table.  It is amazing how much more civilized this felt than ordering Domino’s and eating it at the television.

Previously, I had made some other changes in my kitchen and dining room.  My grandmother gave me a lovely china set passed down from my SAMSUNGgreat grandmother.  My grandmother wanted me to use them every day.  I did use them for regular dinners for a while, but I found that they became a little less special that way.

Our everyday dishes were an old scatched-up set that was passed down to us from my mother-in-law, so we had a little extra money one month, and we decided to get some new dishes.  I found a very nice set at Walmart of all places.  The set does have mugs rather than cups with saucers; however, this is still a step up from the mugs with silly writing and pictures that we previously had.

Oh yes, one last thing.  During the month that we had a little extra money, we purchased a new coffee maker.  Our old coffee maker was on its last legs.  Look at the lovely coffee maker we found.  My spouse grumbled a little about the pink coffee maker, but I think she really likes it.