Valentines Day Candy

This year for a Valentines Day present I asked our daughter K to go and buy a box of candy for me to give my wife P as my Valentines Day present to her.  P said that she really liked the candies and as she had to go to work, placed the 1 pound box of candy on the dinning room table.

Valentines Day was the day to change my ventilator circuit (the tubing from the vent to my throat).  After I had lunch and after the lunch lady cleaned my trach's inner cannula she and I started replacing the old circuit with the new clean one.  Changing out the vent circuit is something that take all of our concentration, however just as I switched onto the new bedside circuit, it dawned on me that I hadn't heard our dog Tippy lately.

The lunch lady went looking and found Tippy between the dinning room table and the wall eating the Valentines Day candy just as fast as he could swallow.   Somehow he had managed to get the candy off the table without us seeing him.  Even as she started to pick up the mess of candy and little candy cup papers, Tippy continued  wolfing down more candies just as fast as he could.  What a mess.  What an expensive meal for Tippy. 

I quickly sent P an email asking her to call the vet asking what we should do to Tippy because I’ve heard that dogs weren’t to have chocolates.  She called me back and said that we need to get Tippy to swallow 2 Tbs of Hydrogen Peroxide which should get him to throw up all the candy.

The lunch lady poured 2 Tbs of Hydrogen Peroxide into an orange juice glass and while I held a funnel down Tippy's throat, she poured the Hydrogen Peroxide down the funnel.  What a job because as you might imagine, Tippy wanted nothing to do with a funnel being stuck and held down his throat.  But persistence paid off and we got the 2 Tbs of Hydrogen Peroxide down Tippy’s throat.  Once we were finished, out the back door went Tippy.  I leave you to figure out the rest.

Once Tippy was finished getting rid of all the candy he ate, we let him back in and put him in his kennel.

I hope your Valentines Day was better then mine was.

Grandma's Old Recipe

This started out as a comment to a Blog Britt-Arnhild’s House in the Woods.  Only as I continues writing my comment on her Blog I noticed that the comment was growing bigger and bigger.  So I changed it into an email and now an entry in my Blog.  I am beginning to have trouble with my memory so my siblings and any cousins may remember this a little different but I think I have the meaning  of this correct.  I hope I haven’t offended anyone if there are errors in my memory.

When my father died and we were breaking up his house my youngest sister asked if she could have an old dresser that Dad and Mom had in their kitchen.  When she got that old dresser home and started to go through it's drawers she found out that she had a "GOLD MINE" of valuable items.  In those drawers were letters Mom and her mother had exchanged over the years.  And if that wasn't enough there were recipes that Mom had asked for and Grandma had written down and sent to Mom.

My sister sent me a couple of those old recipes of Grandma and I just love the way they were written.  You must understand that Grandma lived on a farm that Grandpa's family had purchased from the American Indians back in the mid 1800.  So of course there was no nice gas stove and oven they had a wood burning stove and oven.  I have always assumed that was why the recipes were written with very few if any baking instructions.  Here is one of the cookie recipes:

PEANUT COOKIES – Grandma

½ cup sugar, white
½ cup sugar, brown
½ cup fat
1 egg
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon soda
1 cup flour
½ cup oatmeal
½ cup corn flakes
½ cup salted peanuts

This is the entire recipe.  I especially like the entry stating “½ cup fat” nothing is mentioned about what type fat.  In today’s recipe that entry might be “½ cup Crisco” or “½ cup vegetable oil”.  I guess that if you were a cook you would know what type of “fat” was to be used.  Also in most of today’s recipes there would be instructions about mixing together or “creaming” the eggs and sugar.  Then the most important item that we would find missing is there are no baking instructions.  Once again I guess that if  you were a cook you would just know what temperature you needed to use to bake these cookies.

There were many many other recipes written in the margins of a letter, or written on a loose piece of paper.  My sister did find one of Grandma’s recipe books which like the one in the photo had many hand written recipe on the edge of the pages.  Also there were many recipes just written on any piece of paper.

Your Blog entry today also brought back to my memory of jumping out of the car and running up to Grandma’s Kitchen door and seeing Grandma sitting on a chair with a hand operated coffee grinder grinding up the coffee beans so the adults could have a cup of coffee while they visited.  Now every so often when someone grinds coffee I am transported back in time to my Grandma’s kitchen smelling fresh ground coffee beans and the smell of a wood smoke.