Donna's potato salad (a recipe)

My friend Donna sent me her recipe for potato salad, and it is fabulous. I have a mixed relationship with potato salad, having grown up in a place where potato salad was a staple, and every picnic and church supper included at least two varieties. Mostly I didn't like any of them. I didn't like my mother's version either.

So I usually say I don't like the stuff at all, but once in a while I'll taste something that appeals. This recipe is one of those "once in a while" deals. I love this potato salad, and have already made it twice. And eaten most of it. . .well, Wayne had some too. Here's the recipe:

• 4 medium red potatoes, cut in pieces and boiled until soft
• 3 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
• 1/2 small onion, diced
• 1 tablespoon white vinegar
• 1/2 tablespoon sugar
• Mayonnaise to taste (about 3 tablespoons)
• 1/2 tablespoon brown or Dijon mustard
• Celery salt and black pepper

Let potatoes and eggs cool. Leave skin on potatoes and cut them up in bit size pieces.
Sprinkle the potatoes with vinegar, then sugar. Toss carefully with spoons.
Add chopped eggs.
Add mayonnaise and mustard. Toss carefully to combine.
Sprinkle generously with celery salt and a little pepper.

Mix together, taste for salt, then put in the refrigerator to cool and blend the flavors. Yum!!

The pickle blues

Last weekend was what passes for a Party Weekend these days. We went dancing Friday night and all day Saturday, and then Sunday I cleaned house and put up pickles. And hobbled around a bit while I did that. More rickety than "naughty", drat it all.

Friday was the outdoor FREE concert in Pt. Richmond, which is about 20 minutes from where we live. It's a cute little town right between gritty old Richmond and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Once a month during the summer, they block off a street downtown and have live bands, food from nearby restaurants, wine, and dancing in the street. This Friday we got there in time to catch the last couple of tunes by Irie Fuse (catchy name), a hot reggae band, and then danced our butts off to Andre Thierry and Zydeco Magic, who play (duh) fabulous Louisiana zydeco.

Saturday we drove out to Isleton, a little burg of 923 people about an hour into the Delta, for the Isleton Cajun and Blues Festival. For this weekend Isleton becomes a city of 20,000 people and it was great! What a sweet place! The festival headliner was Elvin Bishop (fabulous!), but we also enjoyed several other groups: Kyle Rowland Blues Band, Magnolia Sisters, Terry Hanck. It was hoppin', and even though my legs were just a tad creaky from all that boogyin' the night before, we still cut a rug. Of course we had to sit down and rest once in a while; guess I'm not the party animal I once was. It sure was fun! I had to pass on the crawfish though...can't do those heads.

When Sunday rolled around and we finally rolled out of bed (before noon, but not much), I started cleaning. Lordy, I dislike cleaning house but I wanted it to be clean so there you have it. Partway through, I took a break and put up six jars of pickles using our cucumbers from the front yard, so prolific they threatened to take over the fridge. Here they are, those bad boys!

Love these party weekends!!!!

Jack London's Wolf House

A couple of weekends ago, we drove up to Glen Ellen, a sweet little town in the wine country between Sonoma and Petaluma. It's about an hour away from Oakland - an easy drive at least partly on country roads. We went to visit Jack London Historic State Park, one of the many precious public landmarks that were saved when local people stepped in to help and more money was miraculously found in California's park budget.

The last time we were here, in January, the park was closed, as at that time it was only open on certain days of the week, and a sign was posted that it would close permanently this summer. Now it's open 7 days a week. Hallelujia!

This park is well worth the drive and the $10 per car it takes to get in. Here's the story about Jack London and his Wolf House, in case you don't know it. Jack London was a well-known figure in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He grew up in and around Oakland and Berkeley, CA, and was a vagabond and explorer. He was also a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, my favorite of which is probably To Build a Fire. Incredible short story.

 Anyway, he made a fortune and eventually married a woman named Charmian. Together they moved to what is now the site of the park, Beauty Ranch, and built a mansion there over a period of several years, called Wolf House. Two weeks before they were to move in, Wolf House burned down. This was in 1913. All that was left were stone walls and the stones of the nine fireplaces in the home.

The ruin of Wolf House is still in the park, and you can wander around the walls and go up onto a second floor ledge overlooking what was the pool and the courtyard in the center. It's in a beautiful sunken glen among the trees a half mile or so from the entrance. You do wonder whether it would have been prone to flooding in the rainy season.

 

Jack and Charmian determined to rebuild, but Jack died in 1916 before much progress was made. He was only 40. Charmian continued to live on the ranch and eventually built The House of Happy Walls, which today serves as a museum housing all kinds of interesting stuff from their worldwide travels and adventures.  It's a lovely home, but not grand in the way Wolf House promised to be.

 

The House of Happy Walls

 It's easy to feel a sense of melancholy and nostalgia here in this park. The beauty and the ruins. The House of Happy Walls, where there must also have been a fair amount of loneliness and isolation. The simple picket-fence-surrounded grave on a nearby hill, where both Jack and Charmian are buried (she died in 1955), marked with a large stone from the ruins of their dream.

On the brighter side, the park is filled with walking trails and lovely views, and it makes a very interesting day trip from the Bay Area.

Cleaning vinyl albums

Dear readers, not long ago I told you about the new 1970s stereo system that Wayne put together for us. The thing I didn't mention was the cleaning. Between us we have about 400 old-school record albums. Some of them we kept from the old days, some of them we bought at garage sales and thrift stores. Most haven't been played for 20 or 30 years, and when they were played, they were played a lot. We didn't know much about taking care of things in the old party days - drinks got spilled, records covers doubled as tables, records got left on the turntable for weeks, people smoked like chimneys and flicked ashes all over everything. It was a chaotic time, full of fun and bad habits!

Bottom line is the records are dirty. In truth they are worse than dirty. They are filthy, and filthy records not only don't play well, they can ruin a brand-new old-school needle quicker than anything. They have to be cleaned before they can be played. Drat.

We started out cleaning one or two with water, and then with alcohol, but they didn't get clean. So we went to the internet and, voila!, there was the solution - a Spin-Clean Record Washer. We ordered it from Amazon for $80. Cute as can be, here it is:
 
It's a plastic reservoir with two removable brushes. You fill it with distilled water and add three capfuls of a cleaning fluid that comes with it. Then you rotate the records three times in each direction through the brushes, let the water drip off, and dry them with anti-static cloths. Suddenly the records are like new - no clicks, superficial scratches gone, sound as clean and full as it was when they were right off the shelf. They sound great!

One reservoir-filling will clean 50 records before it gets too dirty to use. So far we've had three 50-record-cleaning sessions. The first time, we had no idea how long it would take and we started too late in the evening. At 3 a.m., we were just finishing (major yawn), because of course we had to play all the records as they got clean. It was a disaster trying to function the next day.

Now we start earlier, and finish before midnight. It's great fun, and more and more of our records are ready to play. What a pleasure!!

Here's Wayne cleaning a record, equipped with his trusty headlamp. Many more records to go, and we're still accumulating . . .

New York virgin. . .(sort of)

My friend Donna and I spent last weekend in New York City. I had never spent much time
there before and she had, so I asked her to show me around. It was a beautiful weekend.

Lady Liberty is doing just fine, thank you. She had a little issue after Hurricane Sandy and had to have her pedestal cleaned up, if you know what I mean. But she'll be open again soon. We took the FREE (!) Staten Island Ferry around her, got off in Staten Island, and got back on the next ferry returning to Manhattan. It's a great way to pay your respects.

Here are some highlights, and a few favorite experiences:

* Jazz Standard for Fred Hersch on piano and Esperanza Spalding on bass and vocals. Rockin'! We decided to concentrate on jazz clubs and local restaurants, because you just can't do everything. Another time for the shows and museums.

* Vin sur Vingt for wine and croque monsieur before music at The Village Vanguard. Perfect little French bistro.

* Having Sarah Jessica Parker and children brush by me while standing in line at The Village Vanguard.

* Being at The Village Vanguard.

* Seeing the newly-raised spire on the Freedom Tower at the site of the World Trade Center.

* Meeting Donna's niece Tracy and boyfriend for Saturday brunch in Brooklyn. Loved Brooklyn, very neighborhood-y.

* All the cab rides - great way to see a lot when it's too far to walk.



* Harlem on Sunday for Marjorie Elliot's parlor jazz and lunch at The Red Rooster. Harlem is so cool.

* The well-dressed couple outside Marjorie Elliot's who helped us decide to eat at Red Rooster.

*The young man on the Harlem street corner who helped us flag down a cab and negotiated the price we wanted. People were so helpful all over Manhattan.

* The memorial concert for jazz great Dave Brubeck at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. This was free, and featured Dave Brubeck's musical sons as well as Chick Corea, Tony Bennett, Roy Hargrove and other musical legends. It was fabulous and touching.

It was an amazing trip! My first time in New York.

Sew-very-British!

I've gotten very excited about a BBC reality show called The Great British Sewing Bee. Those who know me know I don't even have a functional TV - I mean, I have a TV but I don't have cable so I can't get any channels. I hate TV really and only use it to stream movies from the computer or to watch DVDs. Anyway, you can watch The Great British Sewing Bee on YouTube. Episode 1 is here, and there are 4 episodes total. They're all available on YouTube and, believe me, they are addicting. Begin watching at your own peril!

After watching the first two, I was so inspired I went immediately to my sewing stash and pulled out a skirt I started working on a year or so ago. I had been gifted with the fabric, a beautiful soft wool plaid, and I actually drafted the pattern for the skirt myself. It's not complicated, but I decided to put a ruffle of sorts on the bottom of it, and at that point I got stuck and put it away.

These British ladies and gents, who were pulled from the general public in London with varying degrees of expertise with sewing, really cranked me up along the lines of, "I know how to do that - I can sew that well. I'll bet I could do that even better." Well, you can see I got mildly insufferable, but the end product was good. It got me excited about sewing for myself again.

So here's the skirt with its ruffle - not finished, but all that's left is to attach the lining and hem it. Piece of cake, love, as the Brits say!

The Steamer

True confession: I have fallen in love with a home cleaning device. You won't hear me say that often - I personally detest cleaning the house. Unfortunately I like living in a clean house, so I have had only two options . . . get over my aversion to housework, or hire someone else to do it.

When I was working fulltime, I hired someone else to do it. The appointed person usually did a good job for the first few months, then started to slack off as time went on. About the time I noticed waxed-over dirt on the dining room floor, and cobwebs in most of the high corners of the house, I'd let that person go and try it myself for a month or two before hiring someone else. Et cetera, et cetera.

When I retired from my fulltime job, I couldn't justify hiring a cleaning service anymore. I mean, I was theoretically home much of the time, so why did I need someone to come in and clean my house? Drat. The house hasn't been so clean lately, although in reality it's probably as clean as it was when I was having someone else do it. The problem is it's not clean the way I want it to be, and I have no one to blame.

We were visiting our friends in Denver and getting their home ready for 31 people for sit-down Hanukkah dinner, when Yasmin, one of the daughters, pulled out this machine and started running it over the hardwood floors. Everywhere she went, she sprayed a cleaner on the floor, not even bothering to bend down, and then ran the machine over it. Steam came up, and the floor behind the machine was clean, shiny, and beautiful. It didn't even look wet. "What the heck is that?" I asked.

It was a steam cleaner, and I bought one immediately after I got home. Here's the link on Amazon. You sweep or vacuum the floor first, and then you spray with a good cleaning product, like Method, and run the steamer over the floor to wash and deep-clean it. The linoleum in my kitchen, which is seriously trashed and really needs to be replaced, hasn't been so clean since it was new 20 years ago. I mean the corners and edges too. The hardwood in the dining room, the victim of the wax-over-dirt disaster, is starting to look great. A few more passes with the steamer and I should have most of the old wax, as well as the dirt under it, up and out. Couldn't be easier.

Forget mops. Forget getting down on your knees and scubbing. I'm sold on my new love!