National Pumpkin Day - supping Pumpkin soup and more!

For National Pumpkin Day    QUICK AND HAPPY FOOD FUN:  

instant pumpkin soup and other ideas:

 - preheat oven to 400F.  

• Using any orange pumpkin - large, small, spagetti or classic

• Quarter, seed/clean pumpkin. Save seeds and process as you wish, or discard.

• Bake, inside-down, in a large roaster, with the sections nested to form a sort of tent, if you can with some water in the pan for just a bit of moisture as it bakes. Test with fork after 30 minutes, but may take an hour...will smell right :-) ( option: if you like the spice aroma while it bakes, go ahead and sprinkle some at it - cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, allspice, and a sprikle of salt - nice smells. But plain is fine, too)

• When done, allow to cool, then scoop out the pumpkin and discard the shell, soft or hard. Now the fun begins and is easy:

• Nearly Instant Pumpkin SOUP happens in under 5 minutes:

• Place some of the baked pumpkin in your smoothie maker or processor , with enough water to make it "go" easily - and pulse till smooth.

• Place in dish or soup bowl , add spices and butter to taste and heat till hot. Bubbly can get messy and burn you with splashing, but if it feels witchy-tasty, go ahead.

• THAT'S IT - just plain tasty and wildly nourishing, too!

OPTIONS:  Add a meat stock or hot dogs or sliced carrots or peas or beans, potato...whatever... use your imagination.  BUT TASTE-TEST  IT IN A SMALL AMOUNT OF THE SOUP FIRST, BEFORE ADDING IT TO THE WHOLE AMOUNT, in case your imagination is not quite on the mark and  it fails in flavor.

ORRRR  ...more fun with all that pumpkin:
 - Side dish VEGETABLE - serve in chunks or loosely fork mashed as you would any other squash
- smoothed to thick chunks like apple sauce, sweetened and spiced, even HOTspices,  alongside a thing.
- I have not tried to make pumpkin chips but I'll bet they could be done, with the baking stopped while the pumpkin was still  part-firm, so it could be sliced and quick fried or broiled. Butter and salt if you like.  maybe?

And of course
- PUMPKIN PIE - follow any pumpkin pie recipe  for pies or tarts.

- Cookies and muffins and cupcakes and pumpkin bread or cake - delicious and colorful health.

YES.. especially if you baked a large pumpkin:  use some/ freeze some, by simply putting a few cups into a freezer baggie.  I have no idea how soon to use it because mine has never been there long.  :-D   

Here is a link to the "National Day Calendar" for  a Happy National Pumpkin Day! - and more recipes, too!

Summer Reading

Update from last July - 

This summer sizzles and scintillates and " ... easy, breezy..."  is a keyword for me, so as not to get overheated!  

A huge stall and hiatus in things has passed and progress in business and personal life abound!   A few years ago, they said "wheelchair" and "end of things" and it's been exactly the opposite, with a bit of application. Praise for all who helped and have been patient and fun!

Summer reading this summer?  White papers to support and update the work during the week, and almost-forgotten romances for weekends - especially those that respond to the growing number of later-in-life romances ! 

The largest-growing age group is those over 100 years old !   Creative?   Dreaming of better than ever artwork keeps me in prayerful thank yous at the easel.  And making my own stories of the new options and possibilities is fun for me this summer - making notes . I will be sure to include the biographies of others who are doing neat things for the world and for themselves later in life.  Yes.

At "upper midlife" one gets out early and late and avoids the noonday sun when heat advisories go up , so that leaves time for books and notes and writings WHILE being senior-smart.

What are you reading this summer?   Comment below and be confident that your ideas will be respected.  The feedback is always a vitamin. 

elle

Last year's Summer Reading ( July 13, 2017 )  entry follows here:

July and we may duck indoors to escape heat, it's plenty of outdoors time,  at the pool, lake or beach or breezing about for business or pleasure!  We are happy escapees from winter's confinements in America's Northeast Connecticut - two blizzards this year!  More;  a fix on both feet found me wildly bursting OUT OUT OUT, when the weather and the feets finally allowed.  

Thanks to technology, wait times en route are never boring - audiobook and kindles on my ipad iphone let me engage with my summer reading choices:  Some white papers,  learning and technology for workdays/workhours;  some religious , some women's things, and health and diet things, and stories - fact and fiction, they make the time fly and fill the spirit.

But this is about biographies - a huge thank you!    Since girlhood I seem to reach for biographical reading whenever I am "in a brown study" over things, wanting a job or project, grieving, sluggish for emotional or physical reasons, in flux and lost.  Somehow Biographies do the trick, when I must be still,  my heroes swashbuckle for me - reading of the challenges and triumphs of the subject, I am entertained, informed and almost always inspired before long,...even empowered from within ... to get up and get at it once more, with new insights and inspirations.

As a girl, Lives of Women in Holiness, Red Cross, Nursing, Medicine and Arts of all sorts seemed to find the top of my list. Achievers of either gender in patriotism and science and wonderful inventions and business really lit me up, and still do!

This Summer?
-  Woman Transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller - do not always approve, but am impressed.  --  Innovators of the new Millennium - just finished one about Elon Musk and was just plain thrilled - did you know you can get a used Tesla for under 50 thousand USD?   wow!  I was hurt in the spine and thought I'd never drive again, so I sold the car to pay the medical bills a bit.....then of all things - I  healed!   instead of a wheelchair, it was the Manchester Road Race / Walkers.  Instead of death, life and plenty of it back at my work including one that went to the White House.
- For the Fourth of July, "John Adams" and his famous lady Abigail

The list goes on  Elizabeth Vigée LeBrun and her important portraiture and much more. Czeslaw Miłosc. the Polish poet, Elie Weisel, and last summer, Edna Gladney.  Somehow reading biography really helps me because it focuses like other media do not and so the results are better.   My Nancy Drew Collection, while not exactly biography to some folk , is very real to me and her immortal fans of her immortal , never changing , ever evolving self. 

What are YOU reading this summer?  I am not being silly, I am interested in your comments about it:  where does summer reading take you??? 

Labor Day 1953

Note: featuring the happy stories about Mother for the next few days - this is her week - she passed in her sleep before Monday morning12/11/17, at just shy of 92....she is free to be our angel always. I love you, Mother!

Life was very very good for the Smith Clan of Fairfield after WWII - all the sons who served, home and decorated for their heroism for Army Engineers in the Battle of the Bulge, Army Communications, Marines, Army Infantry,  Army MPs, and our Dad Pioneer Army Air Corps "Smitty the Flight Mechanic" .  All home and married to their sweethearts who served on the home front and all grateful and joyfully working at grand new jobs and raising families. 

Photoshop needed here - but it's Father's fun with new camera day and all three of us with Mother at one time. Rare to get us all to stand still together that long.

Exuberant Gram and Gramps so proud and nearing their 50th wedding anniversary, and fit for it, joined the annual Labor Day Picnic - a patriotic work song celebration - and this  year it was at Auntie Em's big homestead, to save Gram the work for a change at their "Little White House".

Mother was tall and lovely and expecting her third child very soon and fidgeted that morning, wondering if it was wise to join seven Irish sons and a daughter and their respective families at the blowout event of the year.   She had experienced a false labor, a trip to hospital to deliver, but home again, and NOT deflated enough -  so it could be any time now.  But the All-American Smith Family day found her doing her part with the women, setting up the table and presenting the feast, as the men talked over their game of horseshoes and the children helped with chores and played running and swinging games at the fine large place under the trees and in the field with the sheep and one good donkey.

NOT without caprice, Mother thought it might help things along to overdo the watermelon-eating and did.  Sure enough !     The second trip the hospital soon followed, and blushing, back to face the crowd at the picnic in an hour,  from a second false labor.  Father and the others making jokes about my Mother's desire to "go have this baby" on Labor Day made for a LOT of extra fun that day, for everyone but our Mother and the baby! 

But she was NOT wrong to feel like getting things going - when our sister Lori was born on September 18th, she was not fat, but a very long baby weighing in at 9 pounds 3 ounces!  No wonder she felt it MIGHT be time!  Third millennium medicine would have been able to image it out and let Mother deliver earlier, but back then, no.    And...Since Lori soon developed normally in size, it WAS surely just a long pregnancy resulting in high birth weight.  This one remains a family favorite LORISTORY , all these years later!   Hope you enjoyed it! 

And always a quick prayer and a wish that all who ARE in labor on this American Labor Day, enjoy a celebration of life of it all - today and always! 

My radio show - if I had one - Thanksgiving 2017 musings...

I promised to post this today.   my show.... What would I call it?   The funny name club show?  Sassy seniors with long hair?  Snak-l-frok !

But it is not like that - my name means light and if I had a show it would be to bring light into a dark place - many dark places.  Confront dilemmas and mysteries and get them solved.

My housekeeper said "you really get things done" - and there is that feeling of a doing a thing for the world - but I want to focus on things my Normal Rockwell Childhood brought to table for action - then tabled and never done.   

I think "Occupant Safety & Escape Technology" for planes and tall buildings would lead my campaigns - for years death from their failure has NOT been necessary, but no one is making them do it.  In fact, I'd put it away, then forgot it - parents' orders.  Then on NINELEVEN, I literally had to grab the counter to NOT fall down, when the memory found me and stunned me.   NO ONE needed to die that day.  NO ONE.   If the escape tech had been done on time, two things, in fact would have happened:  if attacked occupants could safely leave the plane or building FAST - super fast.  But with such tech in place, terrorists may  have skipped it for an idea, since there would be so few victims.

On my show, I could invite the dozens of contacts whose job it was to make and use the Technology but who could not or would not.  I would talk with them to see what it would take to win the breakthrough.

This is a priority topic: lives depend on it and I am still a good redcrosslady.   But I do  have a  list of topics I would share from my own experience and observation - I will add them here or linked.

We have so much for which to give Thanks!   BECAUSE we got things done, leaping to meet opportunities and win through obstacles -  and no other reason!