Spaghetti Chili

2 tb oil
3 c chopped onion
2 lbs lean ground beef
1 green pepper, chopped

Scramble-fry till browned. Add to:

28-oz can mashed tomatoes
10-oz can tomato soup
2 x 5-1/2-oz cans tomato paste
4 tb Worcestershire sauce
2 tb sugar
2 tb chili powder
1/4 tsp pepper

Simmer for five minutes.

Cook 1 lb spaghetti in boiling water with 1 tb salt, till tender but firm. Drain, add to meat mixture, and turn into small roaster or extra-large casserole. Cover with 2 c grated cheese and heat in 350F oven for 15 minutes. Cover if heating longer. Serves 12.

- from Company’s Coming ~Pasta cookbook by Jean Paré

This is a great little recipe book if you don’t mind cooking with canned soups. Most are high in sodium and god knows what else is in those things, so should be avoided as a dietary staple.

Lorraine: What do you do with 10 dozen eggs all at once?

Why, I stack ‘em in the fridge!
We often eat eggs for breakfast or lunch and usually when we have this many I make pancakes or cake or something. These eggs are probably as fresh, even by the time we use the last dozen, as the eggs that are purchased from most grocery stores at any given time. At least that's how it looks when you do the comparison test, where you note the shape of an egg after it's out of its shell. Store-bought eggs often flatten out while these remain perky.

Worked this morning, then went to town, cast my ballot in the federal election and went out for a late lunch with my sweetheart. Next on my agenda: try a recipe for “spaghetti chili” to take to the potluck tonight for Scott’s grandma’s 97th birthday. And of course, the neverending dishes must be done. Aside from that, I hope to get out for a walk and haul a few armloads of wood in.

There’s a biting wind outside the yard, beyond the bush. I picked up 10 dozen eggs at the neighbours’ on my way home from town, and thought I’d freeze solid out in their yard, which has fewer trees around it and is open to the north. Yet snow is quite busily melting off our roof at this moment. Peculiar weather.

Sunday 22 Jan 2006
11:26 a.m.

Emil is so proud of himself when he cooks his own breakfast. First he announces "I think I'll make myself some eggs this morning" and then when he's got them onto his plate he'll call to me "Do you want to come and see how beautiful my eggs look?"

Cracks me up.

*yes i know ... the paint job needs to be finished ...

Sent by www.higherawareness.com:

The anxious student asked the Zen master how long to enlightenment. The Zen master answered a long time, at least 10 years. The student said, "Well I will work twice as hard." The Zen master said, "Then it will take 20 years." "No!" said the committed student, "I will work three times as hard." "Well then," said the Zen master, "it will take 30 years."

Do you need to work at being spiritual? No. You already are spiritual. Do you need to work at being human? No. That's just who you are.

The spiritual path doesn't require us to get anything. It's a process of opening to new dimensions of who we already are. It's a process of awakening to our own truth. It's a process of allowing ourselves to be authentic.

"It is not by your actions that you will be saved, but by your being."
-- Meister Eckhart

"People ask what must they become to be loving. The answer is - nothing. It is a process of letting go of what you thought you had become and allowing your true nature to float to the surface naturally."
-- Stephen Levine

8:52 a.m.

It’s still dark when the kids go out to catch the bus at 8 o’clock in the morning on school days. Their shadowy figures are silhouetted at the end of the driveway as the dog jumps up on Everett and he grabs her front paws to dance.

I went to turn off the outside light just after the bus picked them up, and thought this would make a pretty picture if I could catch the colours just right.

Follow this link to see a photo of the dawn, from the other side of the Atlantic, where John Bailey diligently keeps his online journal on a virtually daily basis. I’ve been reading it for years. He has constantly encouraged and appreciated my efforts, both in writing and in life, and has become a dear and valued friend although we have never met and probably never will. I keep saying he and Graham should move to Canada; since they keep moving anyway, why not go for something completely different?

***

Off to Karen's to spend the day pinching perogies with her and a friend. I don't on many occasions find myself in the company of women in the kitchen, so this will be a pleasant way to pass the time. Will stop in at Grandma's this afternoon before coming home.

Everett received a small calendar for Christmas. Each morning when I come to the desk I find, next to the keyboard, the page for the previous day. Perfect to set my coffee mug on!

Now that we've had another foot of snow, this photo is out of date. Hmph. Just last week you could still see the stubble in the field across the road, where our neighbour still hasn't gotten his bales picked up.

When we were in Kelowna and visited our friends Steve and Wendy, Steve remarked that he'd seen photos of the inside of our house and had gathered it is quite small, but "How small is it?" he wondered. Does this help, Steve?

- garden road ~

Mon 16 Jan 2006
12:42 pm

Here are some excerpts, copied into my handwritten journal, from Virginia Woolf’s A Moment’s Liberty, the shorter diary:

“Clive has never forgiven me — for what? His personal remarks always seem to be founded on some reserve of grievance, which he has decided not to state openly.”

“The coarseness of Shakespeare I can see would distress her; she would deal with it intellectually. All her generation use their brains too scrupulously upon books, seeking meaning rather than letting themselves run on for pleasure, which is more or less my way, and thus naturally richest and best.”

“The cold bites through. These last days have been like frozen water, ruffled by the wind into atoms of ice against the cheek; then, in the shelter, forming round you in a still pool.”

“...everything as bright as fire in the mist...”

“Oh detestable time, that thus eats out the heart and lets the body go on.”

“A very fine skyblue day, my windows completely filled with blue.”

“I have made a very clever arrangement on the new board that L gave me for Christmas: ink, pen tray, etc. I never cease to get pleasure from these clever arrangements. So death will be very dull.”

“As for the beauty, as I always say when I walk the terrace after breakfast, too much for one pair of eyes.”

“Maynard not well; cramp in the muscle of the heart. His toes curl up.”

“No statement today. Cabinet meeting. Just as in violent personal anxiety, the public lapses into complete indifference. One can feel no more at the moment.” (talking about peace talks with Hitler before WWII)

“Then over all a feeling of the senselessness, futility, so that there was a dilution of emotion.” (I related this to why people get frustrated but don’t act when it comes to social justice and other issues)

***

School buses didn't run today as there was no guarantee the grid roads would be ploughed early enough. I left Everett at Grandma's overnight again and will pick him up this afternoon. Spent this morning working and must now go outdoors and dig my van out of the snow.

Sunday 15 Jan 2006
12 noon

No sooner did I say we’ve hardly had winter, than we get a big dump of snow. A foot of the fluffy stuff has come down since last night and there is no sign of it letting up. Reports on the radio yesterday predicted stormy weather for southern and central (where we live, the “parkland”) Saskatchewan; looks like they were right.

I would be completely at peace with it if I didn’t have to drive to Grandma’s, 20 minutes down the highway, to pick Everett up.

It’s still only 5C below; can’t complain about that. But am not sure whether I should brave the road just yet or not.

If I recall correctly, I was in Grade 1 during the blizzard of 1965, or was it 1966? We were driving on the highway —- Mom and Dad, me and Karen — was baby Cameron with us? I don’t recall — on our way from the little town where we lived, to our home town. This would have been a frequent weekend trip, as it was considerably less than an hour’s drive away and both sets of my grandparents lived there.

Somewhere along the way, the snow had picked up so suddenly and so intensely that before we knew it we had to pull over and stop, and were soon in a line of cars stuck in the drifts along the side of the road. We sat in our car for about six hours, I’m told, until we were rescued by men on ski-doos. I remember Dad and I, passengers on one, he facing forward and I facing backward. My biggest worry was that he might fall off, and I held tightly onto him just in case.

A number of families, including ours, were taken to a farm home in the area (one of many that took in stranded travellers that weekend), where we were “snowed in” for several days. The lady of the house served wonderful meals, Mom told me last year. She was still amazed that there was enough food in the house to feed that many people so well for so long.

My memory of the stay in that house is of playing bingo with two little girls who were a year or two older than me. I could never figure out how they found the numbers so fast, as I didn’t know you looked under the letter that was called before each number. Neither of them told me, either. It probably never occurred to them that I was that dense.

After this conversation with Mom, I realized that one of the tellers at my local credit union was the little girl whose home we stayed in. She’s the little girl we played bingo with, fancy that. I made sure to remind her and to pass along what Mom had said about admiring her mother.

The following information comes from this website.

“Blizzards are a notorious feature of winters on the Prairies. They are characterized by intense windchills (above 1600 W/m2), strong winds (speeds of 40 km/h or more), and a fine, blinding snow which reduces visibility to 1 km or less. To qualify as a Saskatchewan blizzard, these conditions must last for 4 hours or more. The amount of new snow may be negligible, but the winds whirl the falling and drifting snow so fiercely that people and animals easily lose their sense of direction and become lost. Freezing temperatures, intensified by the wind, have been known to freeze whole livestock herds at a corner of a field or in snow-filled barns, and even in modern days, people have lost their way home and been frozen to death.

Snowstorms and blizzards are easily the most feared and perilous of all winter storms. January is the month when these storms are most likely to occur and they happen most frequently in southwestern Saskatchewan. Swift Current and Regina average 30 blizzard hours a year and five full-fledged blizzards (4 hours or more) in every two years. Northward the frequency of blizzards is much less. At Saskatoon, blizzard hours average 6 a year, but only once in two years does a full-fledged four-hour winter blow occur. Most blizzards in the south last an average of 12 hours, although 48-hour blizzards have been recorded.

The most memorable blizzard in Saskatchewan's history occurred in February 1947. For 10 days all highways into Regina were blocked. Railway officials declared conditions the worst in Canadian rail history. One train was buried in a snowdrift 1 km long and 8 m deep. Another paralysing blizzard lasted 4 days in February 1978. Snowdrifts reached Regina roof-tops, yet only a trace of new snow fell at the airport.

Prairie Blows

Saskatchewan is not the windiest region in Canada; that distinction is shared by the coasts. However, open as it is to the free sweep of winds from any direction, the province does experience strong average wind speeds. Because the terrain is relatively flat and the land is largely cropped or in pasture, obstacles that impede the wind are lacking. For this reason, winds are generally lighter in the more northerly treed parkland than in the open prairie.”