Nostalgia comes in many forms. We enjoy movies set in the era when we were young. We browse through old photo albums and floods of memories come back. We go to reunions or meet up with old friends from school on Facebook.
I have food nostalgia. There are certain things my mother used to bake or cook or even buy that are inextricably linked to childhood. Some of them I never expect to experience again. One example: mom used to make the greatest jelly roll. It started with a light, yellowish, spongy thin cake that she would wrap in a wet towel and roll after spreading jelly on it. The jelly roll itself was great, but for me the real treat was the edges of the cake. She would trim these off before making the roll—they were dark and crispy and crunchy, and no one, not even my older sister, quite knows how she made them. Geez, I can taste them right now simply writing about them!
Alpha-Bits was one of the cereals I often had as a kid, along with Honey Comb and Shreddies. The latter two I can still get (though I have to import Shreddies from Canada), but Alpha-Bits went “out of print” a couple of years ago. Then I saw a box on Covert Affairs a couple of weeks ago and, after a little research, found out I could buy them from Amazon so yesterday morning I had Alpha-Bits for breakfast again. Heavenly.
My mother made the best boiled icing. She made it look easy. No candy thermometers were involved—she knew it was ready by the way a drop trailed a thread behind it when released from a spoon. I really wish I’d paid more attention back then. I attempted boiled icing yesterday and it was a catastrophic failure. It looked like it was going all right. I had a thermometer and I heated the boiling sugar water to 240° and blended it in with the beaten egg whites. But it never set, and I ended up with a bowl full of liquid froth that would have run off and puddled onto the floor if I’d tried to ice the cake with it. I was very disappointed. I was so looking forward to recapturing that taste from my youth again. Had to settle for a can of store-bought. Bummer.
I finished and posted my review of Three Stations by Martin Cruz Smith. Not the absolute best Renko novel, but any MC Smith novel is guaranteed to be at least very good.
I was a little surprised by Annie’s actions in Covert Affairs this week. She hasn’t been on the job long enough to go off the grid the way she did. I also don’t understand exactly why Joan didn’t put her through the wringer. I know she’s their best link to Ben Mercer, but still. And who are we really meant to trust? Joan and Arthur or Mercer? It was inevitable that she should run into the FBI guy that she encountered on her first job, when she pretended to be a prostitute to get the data from a smartphone at a crime scene.
And I’m still not sure who’s zooming who on Rubicon. Ingram seems to be guiding Will along gently in a certain direction, but to what end? And poor Maggie—she and Will always seem to have the absolute worst timing.
Big Brother is getting down to brass tacks. Only five people left, and only two people will vote tonight, unless there’s a tie. If I were Enzo and Britney, I might collude to make a tie and force Lane to cast the deciding vote. That would put him in the cross hairs by whoever he sent to the jury house.
I’m going “off the grid” for the long weekend. Have to get away from phones and internet every now and then. Time to recharge the batteries and relax. Cook some good meals, play cards, make jigsaw puzzles and just hang out.
