Crime Blotter

This Just In!

Burglary: A home on Ninth Avenue NE in Grand Rapids was burglarized. Taken from a refrigerator located on the porch was one 10-pound ham, one 12 pack of black cherry soda, one loaf of wheat bread, one bottle of blueberry pomegranate juice and six Banquet-brand T.V. dinners. No value was given.

NO VALUE GIVEN? That sounds like at least 50 bucks to me. That blueberry pomegranate juice is not cheap.

Some things are sacred

like chicken judging at the Itasca County Fair. Last week was the County Fair here, and Tom and I had the great fortune, for the second year in a row, to see the kids with their chickens.

If nothing else, the sight of farm kids, in white shirts, with good manners, proud to show off their livestock, can melt your heart.

I mean, how great is that?

There are still farm kids out there - kids who do chores before school, kids who decorate their horse stalls for the fair, kids who are proud of their chickens...

lest you think we live in an idyllic small town where all the kids act as if it is 1950...let me remind you of The Midway.

Hallelujah for The Midway of a County Fair. Just like they pump in oxygen at the casinos, they pump in phermones to the Midway. It is primal... the circling of boys and girls, looking but not looking, laughing with their friends, hoping to meet someone who doesn't go to their school that they can talk about when school starts in three weeks... except for the text messaging and the ass cleavage, the Midway too, is as it has always been.

And that's not even mentioning the carnies and the rides and games. Oh man, this too is as it always has been: creepy and rigged.

Speaking of casinos, Tom likes to stand behind the poker players and soak in the game. At the Midway, Tom stood behind a genial fella who was playing Clown Town.

Clown Town is not as bad as it sounds, well, okay, it's bad. At least it's not humans in clown makeup. It is an old shoddy game, with wooden, glass-encased boxes that hold seated clowns with chipped ceramic faces. The clowns are constantly stretching their legs in their little protected houses. The movement of legs moves the shit that surrounds them. Tokens and plastic American flag keychains and ceramic dogs dressed up as sexy waitresses or nurses. I mean really, that's worth a couple of bucks, isn't it? The deal is you drop your token, aim it, and if the clown's feet push just right, you win a prize, or more tokens. Addictive and not as easy as it seems.

I'm proud to say, no crappy knicknacks or keychains left Clown Town with us. Only bellies full of Itasca County corn and the memory of a smile from a llama came home with us that night.

what's cooking

While we were on the North Shore walking on rocks over the weekend, Tom and I came to a decision. 27 by Thanksgiving! Am I right ladies? Okay, so the number and the catch phrase only have meaning to us (and we're going to keep it that way!) But we're going to get healthy by Thanksgiving. And then we'll eat a lot. Better food, more excercise, you know the drill.

Tom's working at the nursing home tonight and I'm making salad and soup for when he gets home. The salad turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself.

GINGER CHICKEN CABBAGE SLAW
1 Tbsp Hay River Pumpkin Seed Oil
4 skinless boneless chicken breasts
2 Tbsp seasoned rice vinegar
1 Tbsp reduced sodium soy sauce
1 Tbsp honey
1 Tbsp Asian dark sesame oil
1 Tbsp grated peeled fresh ginger
bag of broccoli slaw
4 scallions

So here's what I did: grilled the chicken, cut it up and then whisked together all the other ingredients until blended. Then I added the chicken and had my own taste test. I added a little more Pumpkin Seed oil. Chill for 30 minutes.

We'll see what the mayor has to say on this one.

The soup is out of a Cooking Light book I got after interviewing Chef Billy. It's called Thai Shrimp and Chicken Soup. I bought clam juice for the first time for this recipe. We'll see how it goes...

In Minnesota, we call it pop!

My lovely hubby, the mayor of Cobb County, bought me this empty pop shoppe bottle in an antique store in Two Harbors years ago. He could see the nostalgia in my eyes and hear the adoration in my "THE POP SHOPPE" shriek and couldn't help himself from buying me this memento.

The Pop Shoppe was in the back of a gas station across from Hardees in Brainerd when I was growing up. Not a convenience store gas station like we have today, but the kind with a few mismatched candy bars under glass and car parts. In the back of the station were hundreds of bottles of Pop Shoppe Pop. A man would fill up the gas tank and my brother and I would run in and pick from the delightful array of flavors. Sarsparilla, Cream Soda, Black Cherry, Grape, Orange, Pineapple, Strawberry, Cola, Root Beer, Lime Ricky....it's not hard to see why, with all these flavors, the Pop Shoppe was more exciting than our usual Tab or Fresca. The ability to mix and match, the bottles in the cool red plastic carrying case and the smells of oil and gas, oh man, I'm light headed thinking of it now. (P.S., I'm a fainter, so punch in a 9 and a 1 and hold your finger above the last 1, just in case.)

But just like when my dad brought home the egg fluff donuts, the Pop Shoppe Pop lasted only a few days in our house.
Now that I am rummaging around in the archives, pop has always been part of my life. One of my first jobs at Holtan's Resort was running our pop machine. It was an old Pepsi bottle machine that we filled up with RC Cola products. The money part of the machine didn't work anymore, so people in need of pop had to knock on our metal screen door and ask for me.

I would then emerge with my cigar box of money and THE CRANK.

That is, if I could find the crank. (It really was a crank by the way.) I'd put the crank in the hole, crank and crank some more and hand the customer their beverage of choice. Then I'd collect the money, put it in my cigar box, and thank them for their patronage.

You may not know this about me, but I'm not really cut out for the world of business. A) I frequently lost the crank and B) I drank all the profits. These things didn't stop me from leaving my brother Keith threatening notes on his pillow that looked something like this:

To: Keith
From: Heidi

You owe me $3.50 for pop. Please pay by Friday. Or ELSE!!!

When I reflect on these formative years in the business world (I was 9), I really believe that being a pop entrepreneur and being my own bill collecter made me the woman I am today.

oh summer, I hardly knew thee

I've always loved berries, and since I've moved to this part of the world I've started marking my summer by the berry picking.

June...I remember it like it was yesterday...driving out to Luneyberries, my gas tank on E, a whistle on my lips, a zip in my step and pants that weren't appropriate for dirt and broken berries. I spent a hot, steamy morning lying down in rows and picking strawberries, interrupted only briefly by an older man who surprised me a bit and turned out to be lying in a row right next to me. Inches from my face really.

"Good berries this year!" he said.

Then there were the raspberries up in the garden, mid-summer. Every year Tom and Bob the Gardener have been adding more raspberries. It's a little fishy where these raspberry bushes actually come from as neither of them will give me a straight answer about it.

"Bob knows a guy over across the causeway, blah, blah, mumble, mumble mumble"

It's probably better I don't know the source of their raspberry harvesting.

Just this week Tom and Bob and I went over to Lavalier's for their final blueberry day. We got there at 7:30 in the morning, and already people were packed into the rows. Bob and I sat together on our big white buckets, me grabbing the berries he couldn't see because of the macular degeneration, and him chatting up the ladies near us. It went something like this:

"I usually wash 'em, clean em, and freeze them on cookie sheets."

"That's what I do!" one answered, the other said, "Oh I just throw them in old milk jugs and wash 'em when I take them out of the freezer!"

For some reason Bob then went on to discuss the state of our hospital in town. "They brought that staff infection from the old place with them! Even the employees don't go there!"

It was a great morning and the blueberries were huge and ripe. We froze a lot of them and last night I tried my hand at making blueberry syrup.

And finally, there's my favorite. The second cousin once removed of the berry world. The blackberries. Our woods are lousy with these berries, and I mean that in the best possible way. Everywhere you go, thorny, scratchy blackberry bushes... bushes filled with berries that taste wonderful, if you catch them just right, even though they leave a seed in your dental work. Berries so strong, so hearty, and so painful if you reach for the really good ones, they could take over the world, or at the very least, Cohasset.

With blackberries, it's not even about the berries for me. It's that there are so many that I wind up socializing more. Last weekend Cristin and Jon were here and we picked. The other day Raina stopped by and we picked some for her company that's coming to town for the Farm & Antique Tractor Threshing Show in Blackberry, and this weekend, Lee and Kim and the kids are coming to pick some more. I'm thinking of inviting some work friends next week to pick even more.

So I'll pick blackberries while they are there, and try not to think about that they also signify the ending of summer.

How's your summer going?