The View From Mrs. Sundberg's Window

Winter's at the Door

November 11, 2008

Listened to the show Saturday and it was not bad. I listened from the kitchen this time around, where I turned out two rounds of fresh whole wheat bread, a batch of snickerdoodles, and a double batch of red pepper sauce to freeze for evening meals these next few months. Winter's at the door and with the kids having been sick and all I've spending a bit of extra time in the kitchen. Mornings, too. A bowl of cold cereal might fill your belly, but when you've been sick, you need some hot food to get your energy going. So it's been pancakes and sausage, or eggs with bacon, or cheesy hash browns and Spam the last few days.

Though I don't know why I even bother with the toast. Seems the kids always leave their toast untouched. You really ought to eat your toast, I told them. I mentioned that somewhere in Florida recently a bodybuilder named Troy ordered French toast at a café and the last piece had an image of Jesus on it. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it? I asked them. "So what are you saying?" they asked. "If we don't eat our toast, Jesus is going to show up?" No, I said. The toast just reminded me of that story, and I thought you might enjoy hearing about it. Makes a person wonder how much of what we see is what we want to see.

"Well, there's a dragon in the floor of the bathroom at school, if you look at it right," one of them said. "Our Phy. Ed. teacher, Ms. Nelson, has a birthmark shaped like a dolphin on her right arm." The third one added, "When you lay on my bed you can see a horse galloping on the ceiling over by the window. Looks just like it."

They left for school talking about how the cracks in the attic wall spell "Rog" and who "Rog" might be, and there lay a pile of uneaten toast. What's a person to do? As I cleaned up the kitchen, I got to thinking about the image in the shower, the one eleventh tile up from the bottom on your left as you enter. It's only the man's face you can see, and the tile is slate, so you have to really look, and tilt your head a bit to the left, but he's there. He's wearing a white hat, and a moustache, and I'm thinking he's Italian. Or French, perhaps. But not Norwegian. I've yet to see a Norwegian man holding a rose with his teeth.

Red Pepper Sauce for Chicken or Pasta
This one's on the spicy side, a nice change of pace from the traditional white sauce.

1 cup heavy cream

1 cup roasted red pepper puree (see below)

1/2 to 2 tsp dried red pepper flakes

1/2 tsp salt

Simmer all ingredients for five minutes.

Pour over pasta or cooked chicken.

Serve bread with meal to soak up remaining sauce.

For red pepper puree: roast red pepper in a 450 degree

oven until burned and blistered, about 40 minutes. Wrap

in a clean kitchen towel and let steam until cool. Peel

off blistered skin; don't worry if some is left on. Puree in