Memories are fading for some more than others...

An email arrived yesterday from the daughter asking me to find some particular photos from a past family trip.  I didn't quite go into panic mode but have to confess that there is more than one box of photos that haven't made it into albums... Oh dear. please don't let what she wants be in those!

The request came due to the fact that she is teaching Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" this quarter and thought her students would get a kick out of seeing Hannibal, Missouri when the story took place and where Becky Thatcher and Huck Finn lived in addition to that fence that Huck conned others into helping him paint...

That's my youngest, her brother Boo reenacting the painting up in the left corner and child actors Becky and Huck with Lori on the right...

Well, I can imagine her classes'  delight as I found the desired photos taken in the album from 1992, twenty years ago making their teacher 10 years old. Notice the yellowing of the pages demanding another project of moving these pics onto an archival paper album... Sorry for digressing! Anyhow, I don't know where the time has gone! Do you? They grow up so fast. How did she even remember that I had these pics?

As the Chinese proverb says "Time flies like the arrow." 

Life's a guessing game... so come on guess.

Sometimes it's the unexpected that is so miraculous.

 I discovered this Wednesday about 8:30 am in Rice Lake.

What is it?

Any ideas?

Come on guess... I'll have a follow-up pic later today. 

A lot of great guesses and it almost could be a pic of my dry skin in mid January... but actually there was a cool in my initial comment on Facebook - soooo   cool!

This is how I found my windshield on Wednesday morning after a very hard frost parked by the motel. Thanks goodness for the scraper.  I guess it was a tad chilly for a car that has lived all of its winter nights in a garage.

I told you Mr. Winter was on its way!

Working outside the Valley...

One of my student teachers that I am supervising this quarter teaches a little over 3 hours North from the Valley in a part of the state that I hadn't visited until this placement. When a location is that distance from your home, the University pays for an overnight which I definitely opt to do since I am not a big driver. The town's only listed hotel had poor reviews so I opted to stay in the next closest town that has more than one hotel choice, Rice Lake.

Anyhow, like the name implies this is a Lake region. In 1864 a company Knapp, Stout and Company  built a storage dam on what was an Indian village and rice bed. The first permanent settler to move his family here in 1871 had the first store, hotel and blacksmith shop making this the settlement for the company's northern operations until the area's white pines were exhausted.

Rice Lake has about 8500 inhabitants and at this time of the year  I noticed has increased with all the road construction crews finishing up projects before winter gets here. I also met some Fishermen who are mainly catching Muskies since it's fall.

My visitation actually takes place in the town of Cumberland, within the beautiful northwoods of Northwest Wisconsin.You may have seen some of those 'fall' pics from my last visit but if you didn't here's the link.  http://chaseburg.blogspot.com/2012/10/fall-no-words-needed.html
Unspoiled open spaces, clean lakes and streams, parks and forests abound. It is called the Island City as the central part of the community is located on an island. Dang I missed the Rutabaga Festival.

Upon entering town sits the main industry, a canning factory.  Last visit trucks were dumping green beans onto conveyers. This answered my question of what industry would bring migrant workers to the area besides agricultural work.

This student teacher intern has limited English speakers in the Spanish classes she is teaching. The idea is that this class resolves a placement issue to provide these students a class where they can  work on their English when their classmates are doing their Spanish.
Reality is that many times although the language at home may be Spanish, they may have had limited education in their native countries if at all and still need to learn to read and write their family's native tongue. And yes this does create more work for the teacher but if bilingualism is the end result, this is a necessary part of the educational process.



Cumberland being larger than Chaseburg actually has a  main street  with shops for its inhabitants and tourists from the Cities. Shopping possibilities surprised me as artists have also made this area their homes. I enjoyed perusing a gallery and dress shops during my lunch break last visit and am looking forward to some seasonal sale
possibilities this time.  Inside the world market is a coffee shop amidst the general store and connected gallery.

The library is housed in this terrific building and if it's too cold to  spend free time discovering Main Street finds, I will be housed here inbetween conference times. I don't think I'll have a problem hanging out.

Even though I had to leave the End of the Rainbow Valley for this job, it is reassuring to know that there are like minded people no matter where you go in this state... 

 I just hope that they remember to VOTE. 

Walk, Don't Run

Taking walks didn’t use to be considered an extracurricular activity in my daily life but now that I live in the End of the Rainbow Valley I have a couple of guys who love to take walks with me. Both Natureman and Romeo have always had walks in their daily regimens.

Romeo, our ever companiable 'perro' always  leads the way as he needs to be out in front a couple hundred yards to make him the alpha male. 

 Romeo heads the pack until a squirre/rabbitl crosses his path and then he's off and running.

Even though our driveway is about a mile long we often cut off the road and journey up one of the logging roads. This past weekend we went up to our neighbor's corn field.  He has already hayed and there are still corn stalks awaiting to become silage. The rustling of the stalks is a very distinctive sound and the wind was working a number on them... No telling what's hiding amidst them. Romeo will disappear into them and then all of a sudden reappear out of nowhere. Various animals have been helping themselves to left over cobs and partially eaten cobs are strewn along our path.

If you look northward  you can spy a house at the very tip of the hill on the left hand side. I still don't know how the owners get up there but surely there must be a road. LOL.

On many a walk we have seen various types of critters. The birds are plentiful as they swoop down/ fly overhead  ... hawks, eagles, vultures, owls, geese,  cranes and  ducks besides all the other bird species. We have shared the road with pheasants,  a flock of adult and adolescent turkeys. They really gave Romeo a nice run. And at this time of the year flocks of black birds roost in the trees. Their noise is deafening...

Here's proof of the deer that take refuge in the woods...  besides hiding/ running from hunters. They know it's bow hunting season. I used to say Run, Bambi, Run... but now I realize that they can stay really still laying in the tall grasses for hours. Sometimes Romeo doesn't even bother with them.

Well it was a refreshing weekend walk and probably one of the last really nice light jacket days since 

                              Father Winter is blowing into the End of the Rainbow Valley...

What's In a Name?

I had stopped at a friend's garage sale mainly to visit although I have to admit, I love to peruse for possible new treasures. Actually the only treasure to return to End of the Rainbow Valley wasn't sitting in their garage as our friends had thought of us (actually Natureman since it was his birthday) and had a special gift from Holland. And this is what returned to the Valley:

From my German knowledge and its proximity to Dutch, I could translate the tin's Dutch label Jodenkoechen as "Jewish Cookies." But what in the heck is a Jewish cookie? I was anxious to open the tin and see what they looked like. What I found was a flat 10cm brown sugar cookie.

My curiosity was piqued so of course I 'Asked Jeeves' and 'Googled' Jodenkoecken AND after eating them, not only learned this cookie's history but also was inspired to try making them.

There are actually 4 different stories. The following are all 'lifted' from the internet with some paraphrasing.

Most popular story:

The tin's label actually is factual as the original jodenkoek was made by a baker with the surname Davelaar, in Alkmaar, Netherlands in 1883. Albert Gover began a little bakery in Alkmaar and Dirk Davelaar took over the store in 1924 rebuilding it and placing a lot of ads in the local newspaper. The popularity of his specialty, de jodenkoeken, grew.

(BTW Lotus Bakeries and O'Lacy also use this same name for similar products.
Some producers have changed the name of the product to jodenkoek, after the new orthography of the Netherlands from 1996.)

▪Some say the name has nothing to do with Jews, but that a baker with surname ‘de Joode’ baked the cookies.

▪Jodenkoeken are big but very flat, making it a cheap product to produce. A lot of cheap products got the addition Jewish in former times. A lot of Jews were poor, making it likely that they bought cheaper things because it was necessary. Interesting interpretation. Hmmm.

▪The last story associates the cookie with unleavened bread, Matzoh, baked by the Jews of ancient Egypt at the time of the exodus. The connection is made by the physical properties that both the cookies and unleavened bread have in common: they are both flat, crunchy and have a very low moisture content, resulting in a long shelf-life.

Some thought the name discriminating and the manufacturer thought about changing it but in the end, he didn’t. Jodenkoeken are exported to England and China, but because of the difficulty of the name explanation, the export product is called Dutch Cookies. I loved this tidbit!

At first the cookies were sold in iron tin-plates with a yellow wrapper. Now you can also buy them in plastic tin-plates with a purple wrapper. Because the cookies are in a tin-plate, they are packed air-tight so they remain fresh and crunchy.

So do you want to try making them? The following is a simple recipe and they are great with a nice cup of tea/ coffee and not difficult to make. Natureman said he liked them.

This recipe is from the Vegweb from Quoar who accidentally made these...and realized she had replicated the famous Jodenkoeken, Dutch sugar cookie. It's close.

Preparation Time:
5 to 10 minutes
Cooking time: 15 to 20 minutes

You will need:

1 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 cup water
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
3/4 cup oil
1/4 cup applesauce
Brown sugar for sprinkling

1) Preheat oven to 350 F.
2) Mix dry ingredients , then add wet ingredients until a sticky dough. (It will be very sticky).
3)Scoop dough one tablespoon at a time onto cookie sheet
4) Sprinkle the cookies with brown sugar.

Here they are oven ready. I have no clue how you would do the scalloped edge with the dough so tacky. I will experiment with that next time and there will be a next time.

5) Bake 15 minutes, checking on them every three minutes until dark brown.
6) Take them out of the oven
7) Let harden about 10 minutes.

While the cookies are cooling and hardening. Boil your water for that cup of tea
AND ESS. Eat as my Grandmother used to say...

¿Hablas español?

Last night I attended a panel of area Latinos whose participation was to inform listeners what it was like to be a non- white person in our basically 'monolithic' area.

We all have a story... Today I want to just share a little of Lisa's story. Lisa is 4th generation U.S. citizen, an articulate middle aged woman married to a man who is career military. She has lived in Arizona and Texas and now three years in Wisconsin in a town about 45 minutes from La Crosse.

Lisa and her husband were born with a 'tan' as she called it, a skin color darker than this area's population. Lisa said she has experienced a 50's mentality since she moved here. People ask her all the time where she is from assuming from her skin color that she is an immigrant. Lisa and her husband didn't raise their children with Spanish being spoken in the home but it was assumed that their children spoke Spanish.

Yet there are many Latinos in Lisa's community that are Latino children of agricultural and plant workers who do have limited English abilities so Lisa has become an advocate and volunteer of this minority in a town of 10,000 where almost 7% are Latino.

Can you imagine a school district with such a percentage of limited English speakers did not offer English as a Second Language (ESL) in their summer school program? Due to Lisa's advocacy the Latino Community Center (LUGAR) sponsored by the Episcopalian Diocese of Eau Claire in her town offered ESL last summer with 60 children participating. Half of the students were in k-3. Students continued their English studies through the summer and weren't farther behind when the new school year began. The hopes are to also offer a Spanish class so that Reading and Writing can also be taught ensuring true 'bilingualism.' All the teachers were volunteers.

The school district now 'gets it' and realizes the need to offer ESL in their summer program. It would seem a no brainer. Thank you Lisa for being an advocate.

We as a country need to 'get it.' It doesn't matter who is legal/ illegal. These children are here. Their parents are working here for companies who make lots and lots of money and whose goods we all enjoy. Is it the church's responsibility to take care of them / is it ours?

MIddle Eastern Comes to End of the Rainbow Valley

I just love being able to use up vowels and the letter 'q' using the word 'quinoa 'in playing Scrabble AND I also am thrilled when I find a new recipe to use it in cooking.

One of my favorite bloggers, the Shiksa in the Kitchen is going to be using this dish in her new book and asked her followers to try it out. I think that if you try it, you will agree with us that it is a winner. In addition to great recipes you also get some history and here are Tori's words for this recipe.

"Mujadara is a Middle Eastern dish made with rice and lentils. The first recorded recipe for mujadara appears in Kitab al-Tabikh (Book of Dishes), a cookbook published in Iraq in 1226. It is unclear whether the Persians, who brought rice to western and central Asia from India, created the dish or borrowed it from India. While it is traditionally made with basmati rice and brown lentils, different countries have their own unique versions – for example, Bukharans are known to use mung beans in lieu of lentils and Iraqis like to top theirs with fried eggs. Some regions use chickpeas instead of lentils. Nearly all versions incorporate soft caramelized onions, as their sweet flavor really enhances the dish."

Tori substitutes quinoa for the rice. Try it, you'll like it.

Apparently I cannot print the recipe as it is copyrighted even though I paraphrased it and gave credit. Oh well below is the link...

It takes under an hour to prepare.

QUINOA MUJADARA

http://theshiksa.com/2012/10/18/quinoa-mujadara/

Quinoa added to the cooked lentils before cooking entire mixture

I served topped with caramelized onions, sour cream and chopped cilantro.


YUM...