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Showing posts from November, 2018

I'm Finally Ready To Talk About Politics

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.... I'm not normally a superstitious person.  And yet, I've been completely unwilling to write about the political work I've been part of until all the votes were tallied.  I think this is some kind of holdover/hangover from the 2016 presidential election.  I feel that I can't let myself talk about political efforts, until I know how things have turned out. Over the past two years, I have written literally thousands of political postcards.  I've written to politicians.  And I've written to voters, all over the country.  My friends have been collecting vintage postcards for me, which has added to my pleasure in this endeavor. In the weeks before the midterm elections, I travelled up to Nevada with a group of volunteers from Indivisible East Bay  to work with Issue Voters of Northern Nevada .  Nevada is an unusual state, in that the voters are equally divided, with one third being republican, one third being democratic, and one third being reg

Eating Old Food

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.... Because I'm a total weirdo, I've been dragging home vintage cookbooks. Robb is a total champion about this, and gamely cooks the recipes I flag. This morning Robb made Gingerbread Waffles from The Household Searchlight Recipe Book, which dates from 1938.  It's interesting to see what people were cooking in the Great Depression. There are more recipes involving canned pineapple than you could possibly imagine.  Likewise pimentos.  And chopped-up marshmallows. As far as I can tell, these particular ingredients were pantry staples for decades.  The amazingly named  A Thousand Ways To Please A Husband With Bettina's Best Recipes  dates to 1917 and is chock-full of recipes that include marshmallows, pimentos and canned pineapples. (If anyone ever comes across copies of any of the Thousand Ways/Bettina cookbooks, call me immediately and tell me how much they cost.  I've been hoping to buy these books, and can't find them anywhere.)