Black Eyed Susan's Kitchen

BRUGES

              A few years ago, I saw a PBS travel documentary about the Belgian city, Bruges. It was one of the most romantic places that I had ever laid my eyes on. A medieval city from another era. I wanted to visit this place. My husband has been in Belgium several times in the last few years. He travels a great deal, being in an international business. He was there year before last, and since the meetings would be going through the weekend into the following week, some of the people there planned to visit Bruges. Being the hopeless romantic that I am, and a wife who rarely complains about business trips, this affected me. I asked him if he would mind skipping the trip to Bruges and explained that I really wanted to go there with him. His first reaction was get a flight over and come for the weekend. Mom, being my main job title and wanting to do it well, I could not leave my teenagers at a moments notice, so I declined. (I have always figured that I have gotten this far without being the star of a Jerry Springer show, or an on going article in the local newspaper. I stay close to my kids.) My husband who can also be pretty romantic, got the idea, and went for a run and then shopping instead that weekend. He brought home a box of amazing chocolates and a pretty heart shaped charm for me.
         Last night, we watched a movie, ordered from Netflix. Now, since I have never actually been to Bruges and had built it up in my mind to be the most romantic place on earth, I thought that renting In Bruges would just make my desire to go there all the more. It was a good movie, I will give it that, however, I believe that I will forever have crazy hit men running through this lovely little city etched in my mind for a long time, and the fact that the star of the movie kept referring to the place as f**king Bruges did not help the cause either. So, my husband looked into my eyes when the movie was over, and I looked into his, and we both started to laugh. It wasn't the movie that we expected, but we saw Bruges together.
        Eventually, when time has worn the memory of this movie from my mind, I will hop on that plane (the kids are older now and only one is still in high school), and we will see the real Bruges together.
♥, Susan    

SHE LIVES A CHARMED LIFE

          Life can be so charming at times. I came across this book a few weeks ago at our local Barnes and Noble. Tracey Zabar wrote a book about one of my most favorite collections. For a girl who has always been attracted to charms, this book was drool worthy. Great photos of other womens charm bracelets. My Nana Jean had a charm bracelet. She wore it on special occasions. I can remember sitting next to her and playing with the charms. She had one of those bracelets that had very large heavier charms, one having a large amythyst stone in it. When I was about 10 years old, my parents bought me a bracelet too. The bracelet had a round charm with a kitten on it. Over the years, more charms were added. Several for my sweet sixteen, and other holidays, events and memorable moments. When I moved to the city and started working in Manhattan, a favorite Saturday past time was a visit to Bloomingdales. In the early seventies, Bloomingdales was fabulous...like Disney World to me. Working in the cosmetics department at Bloomingdales was a very tall young woman with blond hair who always wore a black sweater and a gold charm necklace. She became a picture etched in my minds eye. After I was married, many more charms came my way. Trips to foreign lands and more holidays and memorable moments brought so many charms that I had enough to put together a necklace of my own. You can see in the picture the original kitten charm between the bunch of bananas and the witch (more about the witch, later). It is now missing one tiny sapphire eye, but I still love it. In the same, August/September 1998 issue of Home Companion that I had my aluminum article, there was another article about charm bracelets. I am quite sure that the editors of that magazine were kindred spirits. They showed many more charm bracelets and when you read through, you realize how very personal these bracelets are. A lifetime of events.
When our daughters became teenagers, we started them on their own charm bracelets.  Our younger daughters bracelet is full of musical charms, a sweet sixteen, a graduation comemoration, and such. My oldest childs bracelet was more artsy with a painters pallet. They may not find them to be the most stylish jewelry that they own, but they will always remember the reasons for those specific charms. The charming gifts never stopped coming for me, and so, a new bracelet was assembled. I wear the bracelet often. The necklace on rare occasions. The bracelet has charms from the 1964 New York Worlds Fair (living in NY, we went a few times and it is a wonderful memory), a very special trip to Cape May, a star of David, a tree of life, and a fantastic gold turkey, a gift from my brother in law and sister in law because I make Thanksgiving dinner every year. The witch charm was a gift from my husband one year. He has always said that I have witchy ways. A strong intuition and a knack for finding lost items. It was a compliment. An inside look at Tracey Zabars book shows just how personal these bracelets can be. With one in particular that was right up my alley. I have always had a fondness for the peace sign.  Stylish companies like Lucky Brand Jeans and Juicy Couture are producing fun new bracelets, but for me, I love to see a woman wearing a bracelet put together over many years. Mine, is a lifetime on a gold chain, one that my children will one day take apart and claim bits and pieces of for themselves and their children. I do not know what happened to my Nana's charm bracelet, but I  have the strongest memory of it, and a happy memory it is. Are you a charming person too?
♥, Susan       

NEW YEAR, NEW PRESIDENT, RENEWED HOPE

                Beautiful inauguration! The day was crisp and clear. His words were spirited and moving. The music was the best. Perhaps, this country should consider this a holiday....every four years....a reason to celebrate our freedom to choose. I am feeling very, very hopeful.
             This sign was painted by the artist Mary Hughes. She paints the most beautiful roses and the combination of this very patriotic theme, (and one of my all time favorite songs) with the eagle at the top and the roses is just wonderful.
               Congratulations to President Obama and his family. 

SEEING IT MY WAY

            I see a reason to call a seance and channel Alfred Hitchcock. She sees....lunch!  My husband sees the possibility of an early spring (they are all Robins...big fat Robins).
         I see a big mess on the deck, and an even bigger mess on the table. All because the Robins love the Holly berries. Now, which one of us sees the glass half full?
♥, Susan      

PERIODICAL ATTACHMENTS

               It started in my teenage years with an innocent purchase of an issue of Seventeen magazine. I believe Cybill Shepard was on the cover. There was an article showing white patent leather shoes to be the style worn with chocolatey brown dresses. The combination of white and brown was dazzling to me. Fast forward some forty years, and my life long addiction to the written word with glossy pictures is still a front runner in my life. I can only be grateful that there are others (and you know who you are) who feel the same way I do.
                I heard a rumor, that one of my all time favorite magazines will be published no more. I read that they no longer have a publisher....say it ain't so! This magazine has been a highlight to me for a long time now. The decorating articles have always been up my alley and the articles about artists have also been something to look forward to. I wrote a letter to The Home Companion magazine in the autumn of 1997(in those days before computers and email). I was sitting at my dining room table, looking at my collection of hammered aluminum, and wondering why no one had ever written an article about it. A year later, the wonderful people at this magazine called me about that letter. You can read about the article in the August/September 1998 issue here. They saw the same artful crafting in the aluminum that I saw. I will miss this magazine very much, and I hope that there is a publisher out there, somewhere, who thinks that it is worth saving. In the mean time, it makes me very happy to have saved all of the back issues.
          Some magazines are just impossible to let go of. Others, I can read through and send on. Mostly, I send them to my husbands office, where he leaves them in their lunch room and usually by the end of the day, they have disappeared. Good enough, I know that someone else is enjoying it. I will read through the home dec magazines, and every few months, go through them a second or third time and pull out any important pages that I would like to refer to. These are kept in a binder. Every now and then, I will come across a compatible soul who does not want to send the glossy periodicals on to the recycle bin. This happened a few times this summer at yard sales. One of the sales had these to offer. Ten issues of Threads magazine. Many, many years ago when I sewed my own clothes, and took classes for tailoring, fashion and textiles, I used to love this magazine. Since I have been cleaning out my office, I am finding it necessary to send these periodicals on their way. I thought that I would offer them to you, before I list them on ebay. If you have any desire to purchase the ten issues, please let me know. I would like to get 15.00 for entire group of them, plus the cost of shipping. First comment to request the magazines will get them. If no one is interested, I will list them on ebay next week.
           Another group of magazines that I found at a yard sale last summer was Eating Well. It was a large boxfull. The woman who sold them was at one time quite overweight. She retaught herself to cook healthier meals, lost the weight, and became a chef for one of the prominent upscale markets in the area. Now, I have a whole box of her magazines, including her favorite recipes, as you can see by the tabs that she attached to these vintage periodicals. If you think that you might be interested in some of the Eating Well magazines, please let me know. There are several years worth, going back as far as 1991 and as recent as 2006. Now, some might have just walked by this box of magazines, but I saw a bargains worth of glossy reading material, and had to read through it...maybe you would like to read through it too.
♥, Susan            
             

I'D RATHER BE DECORATING

              Still coughing, and finally on those antibiotics. I should be feeling my old self in an hour or two (if only they worked that fast!). I've been very busy trying to fill ebay up with lots of new auctions. Vintage cookbooks are a good seller, and pretty darn collectible. These are not cookbooks from my own collection, although I will purge a few at some point, these are from people who continued to seek me out, even after I closed my store. They would bring boxes and boxes to sell me. I always had trouble saying no. Some of these books are so interesting. Some are signed by the author or restauranteur. Some tell entire stories about families and some just give you the recipes.
        I thought that this book was pretty interesting. It tells about all of these obscure contests that you can enter if you have a good recipe, and know how to cook. There was a National pineapple cooking classic sponsored by the pineapple growers association of Hawaii that doled (pun intended) out thousands of dollars for winning recipes such as "luau ham salad pie" and "gingered pineapple coffee cake". Here in lies the problem I am currently facing. Everytime I pick up a book to list, I have to look through to describe it. Some of these books are fascinating...some are just pretty to look at. This picture came from an old McCall's cookbook. It is a covered bridge gingerbread style house with sleigh. I won't even go into how long it took me to finally list the Cooking With Mickey cookbook. It lists all of the recipe favorites from Disney world and Disneyland. Then there are the books that I have all good intentions of listing and once I start reading through, I realize that I need to try a recipe or two from the book first. That happened with a spiral clad book called The Underwater Gourmet. This book is all about seafood recipes from Florida restaurants. It is from 1983, and contains 5 different recipes for shrimp scampi alone. Altogether there are several dozen shrimp recipes. Conch, clams, lobster, paella, fish...you get the picture. 300 pages of something new to try out....I may have to keep this one.
        My whole point of getting these books out of the office and listed on ebay was to free up room on the table. This table belonged to my husbands great gradmother. It was given to us about 30 years ago. I refinished the top and used it in the kitchen for a while. Then it was sent down to the laundry room where I folded clothes on it. Now it is in the office and I can't barely see it anymore. I'm thinking that now I might just like to put it back in the kitchen. There is something very comforting about sitting at this table and sipping a cuppa. Yes, I need to get back to work, so that I can free this old table and put it back in the kitchen...and maybe rearrange some of the other furniture in the house too...and maybe, finally get those office walls painted. The redecorating movement has begun...I can feel it. Things are going to change around here. I just love redecorating..don't you?
♥, Susan  

INSPIRATION EVERYWHERE

              New Years resolutions come and go every year. Some actually stick...most do not. When I was twenty two years old, I made a resolution to stop smoking cigarettes. I was working in Manhattan at the now defunct Merrill Lynch, and had to choose between a pack of cigarettes or money for lunch. My stomach won out, and I haven't smoked in more than thirty years.
               What I have learned about resolutions is that the more necessary they are, the easier they are to keep. This year, I resolve to read more blogs, and in the process, open myself up to the inspiration they offer. I have spent almost two years, sitting on the sidelines, reading great idea after great idea, and then forgetting all about them. This year, I intend to act on as many good ideas as will be possible. I started on the first, reading a very simple recipe for scones from Tara at "days missed on a hammock". She has a fabulous blog, and this recipe was too good to ignore.  All of the ingredients that I needed to make the scones was in the fridge or the pantry, so I gave it a try and voila! This was the last one, and I had to take a picture. Everyone in this house was crazy about the scones. The recipe also lends itself to make a good biscuit. I switched the 6 tablespoons of sugar for one tablespoon of sugar, and added a cup of grated cheddar instead of the raisins. We had a baked ham on New Years day, and the biscuits went perfectly with it. Two new recipes...I feel like I am on a roll.

         I am also excited to read many new blogs and it so happens that my friend Jenny has started a blog of her own. "Supplies Overflowing" is where you can find her. She is a very creative and artistic woman who has been raising a houseful of kids and will undoubtedly come up with some good reading and inspiring ideas. I am so lucky to have so many creative friends!!

         My last two resolutions, are to be more proactive in our recycling. Last January, I started the recycling of cardboard and anything food wrapping related. We would wind up with stacks of cereal boxes and pasta boxes and other paper packaging. We had been recycling newspapers from the beginning. The town that we live in has special trash and recycling  bins for us to use. When they dropped  the bins off at our house, I went to the borough hall and asked for a second recycle bin. It cost me all of $38.00 and was well worth it. We use one for paper, one for cans and plastic, and of course the trash bin. We only get to send out the recycled trash every other week, and it has really helped to cut down on clutter to have these bins in the garage. So, in addition to recycling the paper, this year I am hoping to do away with plastic bags completely.

           My last resolution is to make every attempt to write on this blog more often. The ideas are always there, but it isn't always easy to make the time. In my prioritizing, blogging will be high on the list. Leaving comments on your blogs, instead of just passing through will also be a priority.

♥, Susan