Sunday Sundry 9-25-16

It's been awhile since the last Sunday Sundry installment, a space for everything (but not everything in this space).  Let the randomness begin!

(Hunter's Star quilt finish, below)

Food, Glorious Food
As I write this, I'm eating some of last night's dessert, Paleo Rice Pudding.  So good!  Don't let the paleo tag put you off.  I look for paleo recipes because it usually means it's real food and the recipe is likely to be gluten-free and dairy-free and use a minimal amount of natural sweetener.

I've been on a winning streak with the recipes I'm finding on Pinterest and elsewhere lately.  As a side with dinner last night, I made Cumin Cooked Cabbage, and that was terrific as well.

This is not your mother's cooked cabbage.  Not my mother's, at any rate.

Funny how a person's tastes change through the years.  I have liked most every kind of food as far back as I can remember, with the exception of a handful of things, like salmon, cilantro, cooked cabbage, and German chocolate cake (the goopy frosting, specifically). 

(image source)

On about my sixth birthday, a sweltering August day in the '60s, I asked my mother what we were having for dinner that evening.  Cooked cabbage and German chocolate cake, was the answer (presumably among other things).  To which news I threw a small tantrum, pleading her to change menu plans.  "I HATE cooked cabbage and I HATE German chocolate cake!"  It was my birthday, after all, and I felt I deserved some say in the matter.

"I CAN'T eat BOTH of those things, they make me GAG!"  But Mom was not one to be swayed by the emotions of a kindergartner, and she brushed my petitions aside like so many pesky houseflies, shooing me back outside to play, or sulk, in the process.

Fast forward six hours and I am, in fact, bowing to the porcelain throne, my mother standing by with a cool washcloth.  "I TOLD you it'd make me sick," I moaned with beads of sweat on my forehead.  "You just caught a bug," she soothed.  I was not convinced.

As I got older and tried (and tried, and tried again) those "icky" things, I eventually came to love them all.  It was the way it was prepared, in the case of salmon, that I disliked.  That was in the form of salmon loaf, from canned salmon, that the school lunch served once a month or so.  Blarg!  I'd eat it, at least a couple repulsive bites—back then it was that or go hungry—but I detested it.

Then in my mid-20s, with my sister's endorsement, I tried a slab of fresh, wild-caught salmon—and really didn't mind it.  I was wary, so I can't say I liked it right off, but it was definitely tastier and better than the stuff I remembered from the cafeteria days.  So I tried it again...and again...and then I really liked it.  Now I could (and sometimes do) eat salmon twice a week.

Cooked cabbage?  Well, my mother cooked the daylights out of it, usually with a big ole ham hock, and by the time supper rolled around, it was gray, slimy, and bitter.  Cabbage doesn't need to boil for hours, it turns out.  A quick saute or steam is all it needs.  

Now cilantro is a different story, and that chapter wasn't rewritten until about five years ago.  That's when I noticed it was hiding in my "organic mixed greens" and consequently making the whole salad taste like soap.  But being the frugal person I am, I couldn't bring myself to dump a pricey bin of greens, and the stuff was too elusive to pick out of the mix, so I just put on my big girl bib and dug in.  By the next shopping trip, I'd forgotten about the sneaky cilantro and bought another big container of the mixed greens—and again chomped my way through it.  But you know what?  By the third time I made that mistake, I wasn't minding the cilantro.  In fact, my palate kind of looked forward to that zing of weirdness among otherwise snooze-worthy greens.  Soon, I was buying the stuff in bunches and adding it to recipes—somewhat to the chagrin of my husband, who is not yet a convert.

So taste buds (and minds) can change with exposure and openness to experience, I believe.  That said, I'm not going to be rustling up any Rocky Mountain oysters anytime soon.

Getting High (perspectively speaking)
The hubs and I went for a hike last weekend in a new-to-us state park.  I once again demonstrated how to get lost despite marked trails and a map in my back pocket.

The upside:  (1)  We found the observation tower, (2) It was a gorgeous day, and (3) Hiking in circles gets you twice (okay, maybe three times) as much exercise!

A Quilt Finish
I finished the Hunter's Star quilt this week.  It ended up about 56 inches square, a nice lap quilt size.

That funky backing makes me smile, and hopefully it will someone else too.

Got it all nicely packaged and donated.  

It will be among a number of other prizes raffled in an upcoming local event, where combat wounded veterans gather and go duck hunting together and enjoy a weekend of comradery.