Weekend

 Plants from the Botanical Garden Sale

On our deck: Len has potted the herbs that we bought from the Botanical Garden sale.

At the sale: the plants were displayed in the greenhouse.

Good Eating

Lamb chops and buttered potatoes with herbs.

A somewhat exotic sandwich spread called Amba. It’s an Israeli specialty that originated with Iraqui Jews in Israel. It’s a key ingredient in an Israeli street-food sandwich called the Sabich.
We had sandwiches with Amba and vegetables; the classic Israeli Sabich includes eggplant and hard-boiled eggs.

Another Return of Sherlock Holmes

Reading Anthony Horowitz’s 2011 sequel to the Sherlock Holmes stories really makes me appreciate the skill of Arthur Conan Doyle — both in terms of plot and in terms of character development.. The House of Silk is very long-winded, while Doyle’s original stories don’t include surplus details or descriptions. The House of Silk has numerous characters and subplots, while Doyle was very focused. I did read Horowitz’s entire book, but it made me kind of impatient. Over the years I’ve reread the original stories a few times, but I wouldn’t want to reread the imitation. 

Slow Service, Good Burgers

 

Uncertainty

 

How to Not Know

This book — just published today — offers a combination of interesting insights (from time to time) with a lot of conventional and somewhat banal or predictable advice. Like the advice you find in newspaper columns. Not terrible, but I guess on the whole I found it somewhat a waste of time. I kind of speed read it. I’d say: don’t bother.

Never doubt the polio vaccine

1950s: A child in an Iron Lung, a device to save the lives of those whose lungs were paralyzed by polio.
His face is reflected in a mirror to enable him to interact with people around him. (source)

“For polio specifically, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported steep declines in case counts and deaths since the first vaccine was licensed in 1955. Around 1952, about 16,000 cases and 1,879 deaths were reported each year. That fell to fewer than 1,000 cases by 1962 and then lower, to 100 cases per year, according to the C.D.C. report.” (source)

I was in elementary school when the first polio vaccine was released. We viewed it as a miracle of medical science, and were in awe of Salk and Sabin and their colleagues who had created the vaccine. (See my previous post on this here: https://maefood.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-polio-vacccine.html)

Before that, the children with whom I went to school and all of our parents were in terror of polio. Each morning in class we would hear announcements first from the Principal and then from a child representative of each class. One news item from each class might be the name of a classmate who was absent because he or she had contracted polio. The designated announcer would express the hope from the class that the victim would recover. Some did recover. Some came back with a crippled arm or leg which over time would not grow, so that the victim would have a severe limp or inability to play ball or other disabilities. Some never came back and we never were specifically told why.

Don’t ever let anyone convince you that the polio vaccine is worse than the disease. Not for society. Not for individuals. You never want to get polio. You never want your child to get polio. Forgetting (or encouraging people to forget) the horrors of the disease seems to me to be a crime. I’m looking at Robert Kennedy.

News this week of the death of one of the last survivors who used an iron lung reminded me of these long-ago experiences. Simultaneously there is front-page news of the current administration’s war on vaccines. See https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/health/kennedy-vaccine-safety.html  and also this article from the NY Times: 

Lawyer, Author and TikTok Star Spent 72 Years in an Iron Lung

Paul Alexander, who died at 78, was paralyzed with polio at age 6 and relied on the machine to breathe.

Good to Eat, Pretty to See

 In the Garden

On the Table

Alice brought us Satchel’s Ribs for dinner. Mac and cheese, coleslaw, potato salad, and cornbread too.

The ribs were Evelyn’s treat (via Alice). We are really home now!

Photos ©2026 mae sander

Netflix of the Day

“Anyone can cook aloo gobi, but who can bend a ball like Beckham”

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM
An old but very amusing film.

“Bend it like Beckham" is to curve a soccer ball around defenders during a free kick, a technique mastered by the famous soccer player David Beckham. The film of this title is about an Indian-British family who live near Heathrow airport. The teenage daughter is a keen and skilled soccer player, to the dismay of her family — who want her to be a proper Indian daughter and either go to school and become a lawyer or get married to someone they choose. Her mother especially wants her to learn to cook aloo-gobi, the traditional British-Indian dish. She’d rather bend it like Beckham.

Her fellow team-mate is played by Kiera Knightly. We saw the movie close to the time it came out (2002) and just watched it again. We expected it to seem out-of-date, but in fact, it’s held up very nicely over the decades! It inspired me to try recipes for aloo gobi, the cauliflower and potato dish that’s in the title. Maybe I’ll make it again soon.

Aloo Gobi that I cooked in 2009.

Anyone can turn blue…

Three Avatar movies from the past and present.

Happy Mother’s Day

Pancake Breakfast

 

Blueberry Pancakes with powdered sugar and (later) maple syrup.

Photos © 2026 mae sander

Outdoor Art from our Trip to England

Photos © 2026 mae sander.

Crathes Castle Garden and Sea Birds

This was the final tour on our cruise in the British Isles.

Birds Seen from the Ship

Thus begins the challenge of catching up with all the photos I took during the voyage while I had inadequate internet access to upload them and little time to create blog posts! This is shared with several weekend blogger collections.

Photos © 2026 mae sander

Kitchen Scenes

Here, in no particular order, are some of the photos I took when touring two Great Houses along our route in the British Isles last week. The families who own these houses, which also have beautiful formal and less formal gardens, lived there until fairly recently, so the kitchens combine historic display items with slightly older equipment for preparing grand dinners and family meals. Some of these photos were in a post I did last week, but I wanted to include them again.

I’m writing this while watching a version of a Jane Austen novel on TV — I suspect that these kitchens would have been quite similar to the ones in the houses she wrote about, though the characters in the novels weren’t generally in any kitchens. They are definitely similar to the ones in many TV series about the British upper classes and their servants!

This meat grinder, which has a clamp for attaching to a table, is very much like the one I had until recently.

Photos © 2926 mae sander