Well, we have just a few days until spring. It might not look like it when it is snowing outside as it has been recently. But it is just around the corner.
I have noticed shrubs are starting to bloom and bulbs poking up out of the soil. Of course, typical of NW weather we shouldn’t get our shorts and tank tops out quite yet, we can get a variety of weather, from snow to quite warm. To me that is one of the great things about the NW, it isn’t boring weather wise.
Book Club was at Edy’s, we had a nice chat about Pachinko. Edy had maps up on her TV which showed where the cities described in the book were located both in Korea and Japan. It was an interesting book.
Our next Book Club get together will be on March 13th at Venita’s home (307). We will be discussing a book named The Last Green Valley by Mark Sullivan, the same author who wrote Beneath the Scarlet Sky which we have previously read Let Venita know if you plan on joining the group.
Microwave Heating
The microwave built its reputation on speed-heating and cooking, but it gives up a whole lot in the way of results. I’d argue there are much better ways to reheat almost every type of food, be it chicken, pasta, rice, pizza and even fried foods.
See this article for tips as to when and when not to use your microwave.
Restaurant Review
T M Dessert Works
6116 Phinney Ave. N.
Seattle WA
206-789-5765
TM Dessert Works has been in the Phinney neighborhood since 1990.
Kathy Lembo raves about it, says all the deserts are fantastic. Their family has used them for all their birthdays and holiday events.
http://www.tmdessertworks.com/home/
Hours… Thurs-Friday 9:30-4:00 PM
Sat. 9:30-2:00PM
Larry’s Smokehouse
Venita and Chuck have recommended this restaurant.
It is located17416 Wash state highway #9, Snohomish WA.
Hours-Sunday 12-5
Tues 11-6
Wed 11-7
Fri 11-6
Sat. 11-5.
Tel # 425 483 7001
Book a free tasting.
Dine In, Takeout and catering.
Larry’s has been around for 36 years.
Venita says it is the best smoked salmon she has ever had. (She didn’t get a chance to have some of my fathers- it was the best ever!)
A couple of local recommendations
The Little Store and Blackbird Café
Both have been recommended and have been raved about their morning pastries. The Little Store for their scones and Blackbird Café for their cinnamon rolls.
I have been hearing about the Little Store’s Scones for many years. We are yet to try them.
How David Ridge saved the Appolo Space Program
On the morning of Sept. 9, 1965, New Orleans was holding its collective breath. The monster Hurricane Betsy, which had just hammered the Bahamas and south Florida, had entered the Gulf of Mexico. And while it looked for a time like it might be headed for Texas, sparing the Bayou State the worst of the storm, by midday it was clear it was training its sights on the Crescent City. At around 10 p.m. that night, it roared ashore at Grand Isle, just south of New Orleans. It would go down as the most destructive storm in Louisiana history to that point.
Well, I didn’t exactly save the program…But I may have saved some really long delays that could have been critical to Congress, if nothing else. What happened was…..
Hurricane Betsy roared into the Gulf of Mexico in late summer of 1965, as I remember. It wasn’t anticipated to come near New Orleans, and most people, myself included, didn’t worry about it or make any preparations. After all, we had sat out many hurricanes in the area without any problems. I had experience with two others in my time in N.O., and they didn’t bother anything much.
A couple of days passed, and it looked more and more like Betsy was going to hit N.O. directly. On the morning of the hurricane, I went in to work like always and found only about 10% of the crew on hand. Everyone else had stayed home to protect their houses or had taken their family and started driving North!
About 8:00 AM, the loud speaker blared that Betsy was a long ways away, and, if it looked like it was going to hit N.O., they would make an announcement in time for everyone to get home and prepare. As time went on, various people got phone calls from their family, telling them of the storms progress, and I noticed more and more folks headed for the door.
At noon I went to the cafeteria and found a note, “No Service Today.” I fetched up a candy bar and went back to my desk and found that everyone else was gone!
The wind was coming up but wasn’t too bad. I decided to stick around in case there was some emergency…at which time the phone on my bosses desk rang. It was a call from the shop, and they had an emergency!!!
Like all of N.O., the plant was built on low-lying, marshy ground, and the folks in charge in the shop were faced with a dilemma. The first S-1C booster was assembled and laying on it’s side in the shop. It was 33 ft. in diameter, was clear of the floor by 2 ft., and there was a 38 ft. ceiling. Besides the engines, most of the S-1C consisted of two massive fuel tanks…one for kerosene and one for liquid oxygen (LOX). If East New Orleans were to flood and get into the shop, at some point the entire, 138 ft. long booster would start to float due to the big, empty, sealed tanks. If it started bobbing around like a cork, it could damage it beyond repair. The obvious cure would be to break the seals on the tanks and let them fill with flood water. This cure was also a killer, because the liquid oxygen tank had undergone special cleaning processes. No speck of dirt, oil, human fingerprints, metal shavings…nothing…could be allowed because the LOX could explode during loading. LOX cleaning after flooding would be a near impossible task. The shop’s question to me was, “How high will the water have to be to start the booster floating?”
Luckily for them and for the booster, I was the guy with the answers! Other engineers, of which there were none, wouldn’t have had easy access to
the weight, center of gravity, and the tank volumes as I did. I called them back in a half hour and told them the booster would start floating if the water got six foot deep in the plant.
The shop guys then built a six foot high levee of sand bags around the booster, put emergency pumps inside the wall to take care of any leaks, and got some poor soul (Very highly paid, no doubt.) to stay with it to take the caps and seals off the tanks if the water got too high.
They had also built a low sandbag wall (about 2 ft.) all around the plant, as a further protection. As it turned out, East N.O. did flood, but the water at the plant only went up about 1 ft. so it never got inside…..It could have been bad!
As for myself…the loudspeakers never came on again. The guy in charge of telling us that Betsy was going to hit obviously left for Baton Rouge immediately after his 8:00 AM announcement. I stuck around until our regular quitting time of 4:30 PM. The wind was probably 60 mph by that time.
We had double-tall light poles in the parking lot with four big lights drooped off four long arms. They were rotating back and forth about the pole in +/- 30 deg. swings…completely demolished when we came back after the storm. I thought, “I probably should get some batteries, candles, and canned food.” And then I noticed all the stores were boarded up and closed for the duration….my reward for such diligence.
I went to my apartment and lifted everything off the floor as far as possible and then turned on the radio to hear what was going on. The storm was roaring pretty good by that time. The Mayor of New Orleans was answering questions on the radio. Someone asked about their trash cans…whether they should put them out or not since tomorrow was their collection day. The Mayor said, “Keep your can in a safe place”, which I have always thought was good advice.
About midnight, the Mayor came on and said that if you lived East of the Industrial Canal, get yourself West of it, and right now. I lived about 200 yards East of the Canal so, at midnight, with the wind blowing like a banshee and rain leaving bruises on your skin, I climbed into my car and took off for West New Orleans. I had friends in Jefferson Parish where I had lived until a few months before, and I planned to barge in on them. As I drove a mile down to the bridge that would take me over the canal, I ran into a long traffic back-up. Apparently lots of other folks had gotten the message. When I finally got to the corner, I found all of the traffic lights were out. Guiding the traffic and keeping order was a New Orleans policeman with a flashlight in his hand, his feet spread about 6 feet apart, and with trash cans and sheet metal flying past him at 100 mph. I often think about him when I hear how crooked the N.O. police are…
After crossing the canal, I started off across town. There were trees down everywhere and many flooded streets. New Orleans has center boulevards all
over town, and I had to drive right across them on several occasions where downed trees blocked my path. It was a very exciting ride, but I eventually made it to my old apartment building and got hold of someone to give me a place to stay.
Post “Betsy”
I holed-up in Jefferson Parish (West New Orleans) after the hurricane. Electricity was out, the streets were flooded, gas had been turned off, phones
were out, no fans, no air conditioning, no refrigeration, and the water supply was polluted. The TV was dead, but we did get radio. The roads leading out of town were all covered with water, so there was no way in or out. The apartment where I was staying was built around a central courtyard with two big oak trees and a swimming pool. Tree limbs were down everywhere, and the swimming pool was full of debris which was slowly turning into a green ooze.
My friends had thoughtfully drawn lots of water in anticipation of the water supply outage, but food was more of a problem. A community cook-out was
started on the patio so everyone could cook meat from their refrigerators…We ate really good on this first day!
On the second day, with temperatures in the high 90’s and 100% humidity, and with everything beginning to stink from mildew and dampness, the fun ran out. Our token Cajun at the apartments took off for home to check on his parents who lived in La Place, about 30 miles upriver towards Baton Rouge. He had to drive through water much of the way but made it back to the apartments that night with his car stuffed with frozen food. His parents and their house fared well, but, like us, were without electricity. It seems they were hunters and had a freezer packed with duck, goose, venison, and andouille sausage! We ate really good on the second day…
By the third day we were all getting a little edgy, not sure where our next meal would come from and getting more than a little overheated. We heard on the radio that someone had brought in a truckload of ice, and it was located about 10 miles from us. We quickly sent a delegation to find ice. They did, and it was a most wonderful thing. In addition, we felt like we could use a little of our gasoline now and cranked our cars so we could sit in air conditioned pleasure for awhile. Some good soul pulled out their supply of dried goods and made a monster pot of red beans and rice, helped with the last of the andouille sausage, and we ate really good on the third day…
I took off for my apartment in East New Orleans on the fourth day. The water had mostly subsided by then and the streets were relatively clear. I found our apartment building had partly flooded on the ground floor level in the section that was furthest from the road. Luckily, my place was near the road. The water had come within ½” of coming in and had blown under my door a little ways, but basically, my stuff was all clear. The roofing had been torn from the buildings, so the upper floor of this two story structure was uninhabitable. I was able to move back in, but about 2/3 of the renters had to find alternate housing. I was pretty happy until about 6 weeks later, when I found the inside of my closet was wet from water seeping through the interior walls from the roof.
My nose led me to this discovery, where I found the most amazing two inch long growth of mildew. Mosquitoes took advantage of this period of wet to overwhelm anyone trying to stay outside.
My 1964 Chevrolet Impala had gone through all that Betsy had thrown at it with no problems…or so I thought. I found my muffler had disintegrated one day, from driving through salty water. After a while, I began to imagine other ills from stories I heard of wheel bearings and various other under-carriage parts. When the year turned into 1966, I ordered a new Chevelle, using my Impala as a trade-in. At the same time, having used up all of the fun of New Orleans, I started looking for a new job. I was unable to get released from Boeing in New Orleans to look at other Boeing locations. As it turned out, Lockheed had just won a monster contract to build a monster new Cargo plane, the C-5A, for the Air Force in Smyrna, Georgia. I got a job offer to go there as a contract engineer (a non-Lockheed employee) for a big salary and lots of overtime. In April, I picked up my new Chevelle, hooked up a trailer, loaded up my junk, said goodbye to New Orleans, and took off for new parts….
Traveling Neighbors
- Edy is off to Texas for a couple of days for some work meetings.
- Cheri is going to Calif to visit family and friends.
Recipe Dujour
John’s Biscotti Recipe
2 dozen Biscotti
2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 ¼ cups white sugar
1 pinch of table salt
2 tsp baking powder
½ c almonds, unblanched, sliced in half
Orange zest from on Navel orange
1/3 pennant fruit cake mix (in a small dish with flour to separate pieces)
¼ c Ocean spray craisins
¼ c dried apricots, diced
1/8 c diced dried mango.
1/8 c diced dried pineapple (optional)3 eggs, beaten (extra-large or jumbo)
1 T vegetable oil1
1/4 tsp almond extract
¼ tsp orange extract
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Spray 2 cookie sheets with cooking spray
- In a large bowl, stir together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, almonds, orange zest, and other dried fruits. Make a well in the center and add the eggs, vegetable oil and almond and orange extracts. Stir by hand until the mixture incorporates all the flour and other dry ingredients.
- Place dough on a floured cutting board, a floured pastry cloth, or a floured granite counter which will help you roll the sticky dough. Separate the dough into halves. Wet your hands with cold water before you move the sticky dough to baking sheets. Move each half to a cookie sheet sprayed beforehand with cooking spray. Roll or shape each half into a log about 10 inches long. I’ve discovered that insulated baking sheets ( with only one end raised) are preferred. It is easy to slide the baked loaf off and onto your cutting board for the next step.
- Bake in pre-heated oven for 24 minutes and cool slightly. Using two pancake turners, slide the flattened baked dough onto a cutting board. At this point, I use a small, sharp knife to cut away and dark edges that have over-baked. Use a serrated knife to cut into ¾ slices. Set cookies on their side back onto the cookie sheets and return to oven for 7 minutes. You may need to add cooking spray to the baking sheets before the second short bake. Then remove the cookie sheets from the oven, cool, and turn the cookies over to another side and return the cookie sheets to the oven to bake for 7 minutes. Finished cookies may be moderately hard and chewy or hard and crunchy like traditional biscotti. Experiment with baking times for the finish you desire.
Recipe submitted by John Weschler. See John for any questions.
Ladies’ Lunch
There has been some interest in reinstating the “ladies’ lunch” in the past it has been a well-attended and fun event. Some of you remember the luncheon event. We have had folks bring food items for lunch, it could be anything, casserole, soup or whatever we want. We hold it in the 3rd floor community room.
Let’s try to have it held next month, April. That should give us time to come up with a date and menu. Would someone be interested in taking charge?
We need to narrow down a date, come up with a menu and advise the rest of us. Personally I would love to have the event back in our social calendar.
Daylight Savings Time
Remember we change our clock on March 12. I love it, an hour more of daylight.
And the 1st day of spring is March 20.