All posts by Helen C

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Brushes with Fame

Our culture has become so celebrity-driven. I’ve never been the kind of person to seek autographs or try to mingle with celebrities. There aren’t a lot of people I would cross the street to meet. Come to think of it, the famous people I would most like to meet are dead now. You could say I’m downright unsociable. But I’m still interested to hear how ordinary people’s lives intersect, however tangetially, with the rich and famous.

These are my own brushes with fame. They are pretty meager and mostly dating from the 80s. Apparently moving to Vermont doesn’t get you in the way of celebrities much:

Dr. Ruth attended my sister’s wedding as the guest of someone we actually knew. She was more or less at the peak of her fame at the time. Somehow she got seated at the table with the Christian Scientists. I think they had a good time.

Alan Bond, the owner of the ship that won the America’s Cup in 1983, bought champagne for me and a friend in a bar in Geneva, Switzerland.

I saw the actors Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward on the sidewalk in front of the Flower Clock (also in Geneva). They were hugging so I stepped around them. I figured out a few years later that they must have been there for the filming of the final scene in the movie F/X.

Bob Dole invited me for a ride in his limousine in 1991 after a “meet and greet” event in New Hampshire. I was so taken aback, I said no. I may have visibly blanched.

I was standing on the corner of 5th Avenue across from the Plaza Hotel when I noticed the comedian, Richard Lewis, standing beside me. I was going through a phase of dressing completely in black and so, apparently, was he.

This is a brush with pre-fame. I went to high school with Keith Lockhart, the conductor of the Boston Pops. He directed the pit orchestra of our spring musical, “The Pajama Game”. I played piano. Already a talented musician himself, he didn’t rate my skills very highly. As he signed in my yearbook … “What would I have done in pit orchestra without you? Probably a lot better.”

Adventures in Cooking

A Loaf of Bread

Yesterday I baked bread. It isn’t hard to do. It mostly consists of waiting around between a series of small tasks. Since I work from home, it’s really a matter of setting a kitchen timer and periodically nipping over from the office to the house to attend to the next stage.

I have temporary custody of my mom’s KitchenAid mixer and it makes the whole process incredibly easy — that and a terrific recipe for whole-wheat bread from the March/April issue of Cook’s Illustrated magazine. (Thanks to my brother-in-law for the gift subscription to CI a couple of years ago. It has changed my life.) I used to have a bread machine, which made things even easier, but it didn’t do as good a job of kneading as the KitchenAid.

Funny, although I love baking bread and eating freshly baked homemade bread, I rarely buy or eat it from a store. My ultimate goal with taking up bread baking again now is to re-create the fabulous “Zuricher Loaf” you can get in any Swiss-German bakery. My dad was on a similar quest when I was a kid and frequently served up his latest efforts for Sunday breakfast. He had a knack for breadmaking and the taste of a warm slice of his bread with butter melting on top is a favorite childhood memory. He didn’t write down his recipes, unfortunately.

I’ve searched my collection of Swiss cookbooks and the internet for the exact combination of ingredients in a Zuricher Loaf, but to no avail. My next step is to work my way, one-by-one, through the recipes in a book I have on European breads. It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.

Philosophy, Poems, Quotes, Spring

Spring comes

Spring comes
The grass grows
By itself

When I was growing up, one of my mom’s friends made little notes that were posted inside cabinet doors in our kitchen. The Zen-like poem above was one of them. It was accompanied by a little watercolor sketch of a tuft of grass.

Another of the notes read: “Stop worrying! It’s bad for your blood pressure!” which is just another way of saying the same thing. I don’t remember when these notes first appeared, but they became part of the kitchen landscape, along with the yellowing recipe cards tacked up inside the cabinet door where the baking supplies were stored.

Today spring comes. Nothing we did brought it; nothing we could do could stop it. Outside the scene is much the same as yesterday — a cold wind blowing a few dried leaves across the yard. But I know the warmth is coming.