Wednesday, December 10, 2025

New and Old Objects in My Kitchen

These frying pans that once belonged to my grandmother were in constant use in my mother’s kitchen.
Because I have a smooth-top stove, our only recent use for them has been as a steam source for baking.
The water in them has resulted in rust, as you can see.

Saturday was the December sale of the Ann Arbor Potter’s Guild.

Tuesday, December 09, 2025

The Joys and Sorrows of Household Objects

The essence of this book is in these quotes: “Certain kitchen objects become loaded with meaning in a way that we are not fully in control of.” and “Certain articles of kitchen equipment can also make us feel safe and at home when in reality we are neither.” (pp. 4, 31)

This book is fun to read because it explores the many and varied ways that so many objects acquire meaning in our lives as cooks and as eaters. Some of the stories are personal, involving Bee Wilson and her family. Other stories are taken from friends and even from books, but all concentrate on kitchen gear and how even a large stand mixer can have emotional significance.

A quote I liked, putting the love of crockery into a special perspective with respect to history and also of her friend Paola’s relationship to her pressure cooker (a special thought for me, because my mother had a special relationship to her pressure cooker) —

“It was only with the adoption of cooking pots – which happened as long as 16,000 years ago in East Asia and 12,000, give or take, in North Africa – that what we think of as cooking emerged. For the first time, hunter-gatherers could nourish themselves with grains and a wide variety of plants which needed long cooking in water to make them digestible. For Paola, the pressure cooker has been as transformative as those first cooking pots thousands of years ago. ‘It enabled me to cook certain vegetables that take time’ is how she summarised it when we met. She used this giant hissing pan to boil potatoes, soften cannellini beans, stew peppers to oily sweetness. More than that, it is a tool that has enabled her to eat deliciously and healthily in good times and in bad.” (p. 127)

From an online search: a pressure cooker like the one my mother used
in the 1950s.

Family Objects in My Kitchen Now

Reading The Heart-Shaped Tin made me think about the few remaining things that I still have from the household where I grew up. Many years ago, I had a large number of such family hand-me-downs, but over time they wore out in one way or another and have been replaced (including that for a long time, I used my mother’s pressure cooker and her stand mixer, both now replaced, as well as her heart-shaped cake pan).

Reading Bee Wilson’s stories of kitchen objects that represented family memories made me try to think of the few remaining items that I received from family.

My mother’s rolling pin and a more recent one.

Salt shakers that once belonged to my mother.

My great-grandmother’s platter, used for Thanksgiving Dinner this year.

Sunday, December 07, 2025

Culinary Historians’ Dinner

The Culinary Historians meet for this December’s themed meal:
first each person describes the history and content of the dish they contributed to the feast!

My plate of delicious foods.

The Ann Arbor Culinary Historians was founded around 40 years ago, and has developed its own traditions, including a winter theme meal. The theme for our meeting this evening was “Food from the Gilded Age.” The 18 members and guests who attended made a variety of dishes, using a number of cookbooks published in the late 19th century, and the food was very interesting and also very tasty.

From the Literary Club website.

The group’s themed dinners, which take place twice a year, are held in rented space at the Ladies’ Literary Club in Ypsilanti (founded 1878). The club’s historic building is an enjoyable location for the dinner: it is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is considered to be one of the most important Greek Revival structures in Michigan. It also has a very modern kitchen and beautiful dining room for preparing, serving, and consuming the members’ contributions.

Gilded Age cookbooks on the buffet table.

Desserts

Trifle and chocolate cookies

“Russian Punch Tart” — a delicious layer cake.

Some of the Main Courses and Appetizers

Smoked salmon canapes.

Chicken in mayonnaise, made by hand.

A traditional dish: Kedgeree with cooked eggs. I associate it with breakfast buffets in Agatha Christie mysteries.

Our contribution: tomato and shrimp salad from a recipe in the cookbook La Cuisine Creole by
Lafcadio Hearn, 1885.

Friday, December 05, 2025

Good Food and Maybe A Good Bird

At the Botanical Garden

In the greenhouse at night, the atmosphere is unexpectedly spooky.
We were invited to a reception with refreshments and a tour given by a staff expert.

Several tables with food and beverages were set up in the greenhouse.

One caterer offered Kailua pork and pineapple salsa. My favorite!

I enjoyed hearing about the vanilla plant from the tour guide. They are hard to cultivate!
He mentioned that an earlier plant had set one vanilla pod, but it died in a power failure.
Later, a visitor to the garden stole the replacement plant!!

In Our Kitchen

Cheeseburgers!

Len is baking bread again.

Thanksgiving Wrap-up

Curried chicken (from Thanksgiving leftovers).

Maybe a Good Bird?

We saw this snowy owl in 2014 when these beautiful birds spread through Michigan, outside their
usual range. This winter they again seem to be heading further south than usual. We hope they will be here!

Photos © 2025 mae sander.

Shared with Deb at Readerbuzz and Eileen at Viewing Nature.

Thursday, December 04, 2025

Injustice

“There are lots of things we consider public goods and fund accordingly: K-12 education, Social Security, clean water, parks, libraries, roads and highways, and other infrastructure. How have we allowed something as fundamental as shelter to be excluded from this list?” (p. 434)

There is No Place for Us by Brian Goldstone takes very sad look at the life of a forgotten stratum of American life, that is people who are homeless but who have makeshift arrangements for living that result in their exclusion from the homeless statistics. He looks at several families, while providing more general insights about policies and misfortunes that determine their situations.

Here is the author’s description of a street in Atlanta typical of the environment where the muliple histories of homeless workers takes place — “block after block of dialysis clinics, liquor stores, pawnshops, payday lenders, hair-braiding salons, plasma donation centers, twenty-four-hour daycares, storefront churches, and ramshackle motels.” (p 64)

The book takes a close look at the lives of several families in Atlanta, Georgia, over a period of around a decade, and it’s full of really interesting (and very depressing) examples of how they cope with working, taking care of their children, trying to find various types of government or charitable assistance, and many other ways they manage their lives. The bigger picture:

“A more recent analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that between thirty thousand and forty-seven thousand people are now living in metro Atlanta’s budget extended-stay hotels, charged rates that are often double what an apartment downthe street would cost. ‘It’s a reinforcing cycle,’ argues Michelle Dempsky, a Legal Aid attorney who litigates on behalf of extended-stay residents. ‘If you’re in emergency need, you’re paying a premium for necessity, which puts you in more financial distress, which makes you less able to secure housing, which means you’re stuck there.’” (p. 300)

The New York Times review described this book when it was published last spring:

“‘There Is No Place for Us’ is a moving book. It is also appropriately enraging. Incremental remedies, Goldstone argues, have only worsened a problem that stems from the assumption that housing is ultimately a commodity, ‘and that the few who own it will invariably profit at the expense of the many who need it.’”

In The Guardian This Week

A very closely related article about the practices at Dollar General and Family Dollar stores describes another way that similar families (with or without housing) are being taken advantage of. These supposedly lower-priced stores are often the only option for poor families very much llike those I’ve just been reading about. A quote that resonates with the sad histories of the people in the book:

Monday, December 01, 2025

TV and Books

Fun movie to watch — I love all the cameos by famous actors from that era.

Five Found Dead takes place on the Orient Express, and all the passengers are aware of the
Agatha Christie plot. It starts well, but there are too many murders and not enough Christie-type characters.

Post-Thanksgiving

Friday: Chinese Dinner

Miriam in China: Real Chinese Food

Miriam visited China in November, and brought back many food pictures, which she agreed to share here.
These are only a few of her fascinating photos.

Saturday: Post-Thanksgiving Mashed Potatoes

Leftover mashed potatoes were made into potato patties.

Thanksgiving: Once-A-Year Feast

In our family, there is no other meal than Thanksgiving with such a set selection of foods. In my childhood, my mother, father, sister, and brother and I would often have Thanksgiving Dinner with my mother’s sisters and their families, or my mother would invite a friend of the family to our house. Yes, turkey, stuffing, potatoes, and more. My aunts sometimes made the famous (notorious?) casseroles of sweet potatoes garnished with marshmallows or of greenbeans in mushroom soup. Our menu this year was close, but no casseroles.