Cut all day today, just our combine still. Custom cutters may show up tomorrow or the next day, assuming we don’t get rained out tonight. Cut the fields around the house. This combine was bought used a couple years ago, but is “new” for us. It’s also a Case IH, which is different for us since we used John Deere combines for years. But the new combine is working well, even with the tough straw.
We went with solid stem wheat this year, since it is supposed to be more resistant to sawfly. Hollow stem wheat usually yields better than solid stem (Dad said the plant research guys think that may be due to the genetics of the seed stock, and not because the solid stem is taking so much energy and nutrients to build it might be taking away nutrients and energy from the seed), but that doesn’t make a whole lot of difference if the whole field’s fallen down because of sawfly. Which has happened to a lot of our neighbors who went with hollow stem, even those who went with hollow stem varieties that are supposedly less attractive to sawflies.
Swathers are in short supply, and pick-up headers (which are used to pick up swathed grain and feed into a combine) are supposed to be rare as hen’s teeth.That’s mostly due to sawfly problems.
Still just our crew, fed six-and-one-half people tonight (one half because my sister took some home for her husband too).
Menu:
- Iced Tea & Lemonade
- Green Salad
- Bread&Butter sandwiches
- Delicious Meatloaf (with odd ingredients) (doubled batch, see below for recipe)
- Italian Zucchini Pie (doubled batch, see below for recipe)
- Oatmeal Cake (see below for recipe)
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Recipes, in case anyone is interested, and for my own future reference:
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Delicious Meatloaf Recipe(with some odd ingredients)
Originally posted July 13, 2009
This recipe is a modified version of the “Meat Loaf with Brown Sugar – Ketchup Glaze” that appears on page 451 of The New Best Recipe from the Editors of Cook’s Illustrated, 2nd Edition, ISBN 978-0-936184-74-6 (Amazon.com link) — eagle-eyed observers will notice right away I’ve cut out the glaze. I’ve made other modifications too.
Preheat oven to 350 F. Take a cookie sheet with raised sides and line it with aluminum foil.
Ingredients:
- cooked onions
- 2 tsp vegetable oil
- 1 medium onion, chopped, approx 1 cup
- 3 medium garlic cloves (or more if you like garlic), minced or pressed through a garlic press
- 2/3 cup quick-cooking 1-minute oats
- 1/2 cup minced fresh parsley (can be either flat or curly)
- 2 lbs ground beef
- liquid ingredients and seasonings
- 1/2 cup plain yogurt (or whole milk if you don’t have yogurt, but it tastes better with yogurt)
- 2 large eggs
- 1 tsp dried thyme
- 1/2 tsp ground black pepper
- 1/4 tsp hot pepper sauce
- 1 Tblsp Dijon mustard
- 1 Tblsp Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tsp salt (optional)
- 8 0z bacon (or more) — see notes below about bacon
Put the oil in a skillet and use it to saute the onions until soft, about five minutes. Set aside to cool. If you like, you can saute the garlic with the onions, or add the garlic raw in the next step.
Put the ground beef, oats, parsley, and garlic (if not sauted) in a medium or medium-large mixing bowl.
Put all ingredients listed under liquid ingredients and seasonings (yogurt/whole milk, eggs, thyme, pepper, hot pepper sauce, mustard, Worcestershire, and salt if used) in a small bowl and whisk together.
If the onions have cooled, add them to the bowl with the ground beef. Add in liquid ingredients mixture. Mix all together in bowl until the liquid has been absorbed and the mixture is starting to stick together, about 2-3 minutes if mixing with your hands (which is messy, but not as hard on my hands or as time-consuming as when I’ve tried using a fork to mix everything together).
Pour the meat loaf mixture out on the foil-lined cookie pan. Shape by hand into a loaf shape. There should be at least an inch of space between the loaf and the sides of the cookie sheet. If you have doubled or tripled the recipe it may be necessary to use more than one cookie sheet and cook it in two or more batches.
Place bacon strips across the top of the loaf.
BACON NOTE 1: This part of the recipe does not scale linearly with the rest. So if you double the recipe, you will not necessarily need to use 16 strips of bacon to cover the loaf just because a single recipe used 8 strips.
BACON NOTE 2: You can use uncooked bacon. But I personally prefer the precooked thin-sliced sandwich bacon you can now get in some stores, it’s not as greasy as uncooked bacon and I don’t have to worry about whether it’s fully cooked too when the meat loaf is done.
Put cookie sheet with bacon-covered loaf in oven. Cook until internal temperature reaches at least 160 F, about 1 hour. (Might be more in cases of double or triple recipes, depends on shape of loaf).
A fair amount of liquid will come out of the loaf while cooking, this is normal. When done cooking, this liquid and the foil lining for the cookie sheet can be thrown away.
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Italian Zucchini Pie
One of Mom’s favorite recipes. A single batch can be made in a 10″ pie pan; a double batch fits well in a 9″x13″ pan.
Preheat oven to 375 F.
- 4 c thinly sliced zucchini
- 1 c chopped onion
- 1/2 c butter (preferably unsalted)
- 2 Tblsp parsley flakes, or 6 Tblsp (or more) chopped fresh parsley
- 1 Tbslp garlic powder
- 1 Tblsp dried basil
- 1 Tblsp dried oregano
- 2 tsp yellow mustard powder
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 2 c or 8 oz low-moisture mozzarella cheese, shredded
- crust for 10″ pie or (1) 8 oz can crescent rolls
Melt butter in large pan. Once melted and bubbling, add zucchini and onions. Cook, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes or until vegetables are cooked and have lost some of their moisture.
Add parsley, garlic powder, basil, and oregano to vegetable mixture. Mix thoroughly and continue to cook for another few minutes. Turn off heat.
If you have not already done so, line an ungreased pan with the uncooked crust or the uncooked crescent roll dough, whichever you are using. Sprinkle with mustard powder.
Mix cheese and eggs together.
Mix cheese mixture with vegetable mixture. Pour into crust and place in oven. It is done when the middle looks set and knife inserted and withdrawn from the middle comes out clean. For a single batch this can take 20-30 minutes. For a double batch in a 9×13 pan, plan for 40 minutes or more.
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Oatmeal Cake
Probably more properly called an oatmeal spice cake, but around here whenever someone refers to “oatmeal cake” this is the cake they are talking about.
I have made this cake numerous times for visiting friends, taking to potlucks, meals at home, etc. and I’ve never had a single complaint about the way it tasted. There were a couple times I knew people with nut allergies, but the solution to that is to replace the nuts in the topping with an equivalent amount of dried coconut.
Cake:
Heat oven to 350 F.
- 1 c quick 1-minute oatmeal
- 1-1/2 c boiling water
- 1/4 c vegetable oil
- 1 c brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp nutmeg
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1-1/2 c flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
Mix the oatmeal, boiling water, and oil together in a medium or medium-large bowl. Mix thoroughly, then let sit until warm or cool (but no longer hot).
Add brown sugar and eggs. Mix. Add nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla. Mix.
Mix together flour and soda, then add to oatmeal mixture. Mix thoroughly, then pour into a greased 8×10, 9×9, or 9×13 pan. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.
Take cake out of oven, but leave in the pan. Turn oven off. Put topping on cake while cake is still hot.
Topping:
- 1-1/3 c chopped nuts
- 1-1/3 c dried shredded sweetened coconut
- 2/3 c brown sugar
- 8 Tblsp or 1/2 c melted butter, unsalted
- 1/2 c canned milk (if you are using a 5 oz can of canned milk, you can use the entire can for this recipe)
- 1 tsp vanilla
Mix ingredients together in order given. Put on cake while cake is still warm from baking. Spread evenly over cake.
Broil with oven door open 2-5 minutes, until bubbling and brown. Time for this step will depend on a lot of different factors, such as how close the cake is to the broiler, how hot the cake and topping were to start with, etc., so this step has to be checked often and can’t be timed. WATCH THIS STEP VERY CAREFULLY, AS THE TOPPING CAN GO FROM BUBBLING-BUT-STILL-PALE TO BURNT IN LESS THAN A MINUTE.
Once topping is browned, remove cake from oven and let cool.
Article — Secondhand Blues (from Psychology Today)
Fri, Sep 11, 2009 by cgoodsthings
Argh!!! Only a synopsis is online (unless you subscribe). *sigh* The article discusses how depression is contagious. Simply put, depressed people are often self-centered, tend to overreact, and are overly anxious and pessimistic. Being around that will in turn drain you of energy and make you depressed. Supportive social contacts are the most effective way to counter that.
“Secondhand Blues” by Michael Yapko and Hara Estroff Marano, from the September 2009 issue of Psychology Today.
I’m not going to quote from the article, but I will summarize a lot of the general ideas.
Depression is socially contagious, both from friends and family. Especially from family.
People who are depressed tend to make others around them depressed. This happens a couple of ways. First off, depressed people are very anxious and pessimistic. So whenever a new idea is suggested, the depressed person will often react by list all the things they think will likely go wrong. If a problem is encountered, it is immediately deemed insurmountable, or conquerable only with a vast amount of effort. Secondly, depression, social isolation, and overreaction make a self-destructive spiral for the depressed person. They are depressed, so they start thinking their friends don’t want to hear from them, people don’t like them, there’s no point in asking for help, etc. As the person withdraws from social life, they lose perspective and their world shrinks down. When a new problem or idea is suggested, the reaction is overly emotional and overly negative because the depressed person has been thinking about how hard their life is and how they can’t cope. This in turn intensifies the depression and they withdraw further from their friends and family, ad infinitum.
So, if you’re dealing with someone who’s depressed, it is extremely draining for you even if you are not depressed yourself. It will be an uphill battle getting the depressed person to consider possible solutions or alternative actions — they’ll argue there’s no point, nothing will work.
The depressed person will tend to emotionally overreact to new problems or any perceived criticism, which is wearing for people trying to talk to them. And yes, pointing out how life is not that bad and could be much worse and their reactions are a bit out of proportion will often be perceived as criticism. So the person trying to draw the depressed person out of their depression will get tired of dealing with the overblown emotions and stop trying. Which leads to further isolation, further narrowing of the worldview, further overreaction, further depression, etc.
In such cases, it’s understandable why even someone who wasn’t depressed would start to agree there was no point in trying, things are awful and all problems are insurmountable.
When it’s a child dealing with a depressed parent, the transmission of depression is very easy. The article spent quite a lot of time discussing this, and with good reason. Children are full of questions — a “why?” from a child is not just asking why something is happening, but how should the child deal with it right now with their actions, how should they feel about it emotionally, should they expect similar events in the future, and how does the event in question fit into the overall grand scheme of things. If a depressed parent responds by telling the child not to ask why, or that’s just the way things are and there’s nothing to be done about the world being a horrible place, the child eventually learns to stop asking “why?”. If every new idea and new endeavor of the child’s is met with criticisms and a litany of all the reasons it won’t work or will be a waste of time or might get the child hurt, the child eventually stops taking chances and becomes isolated.
Which, you might notice, describes a lot of very overprotective parents who fly into a tizzy whenever their child wants to walk across the street, ride their bike, go play with friends, or do any of the thousand things most kids do (and most survive unhurt).
The most effective counter for both depressed people and someone dealing with a depressed person is a network of good social contacts. People who are upbeat, outgoing, and put things in perspective so even though there are problems, let’s figure out a way to deal with the problems and move on. But this is counter to prevailing trends of people spending more and more time sedentary and alone in front of the computer or the television.
And, while the article did not say this, this is my own experience talking — keeping good social contacts takes a lot more work than most people are willing to do. Talking through differences, being willing to compromise. Not reacting to every little annoyance. Biting down on the first cries of offense and instead working through the emotions before deciding if the issue is important enough to bring up. Manners. Knowing how to carry on a conversation. Reciprocity. Making the effort to stay in touch and understanding it takes to two to keep in touch, not just one person deciding if and when they’ll respond to the others repeated overtures. Risking rejection. Trust and the attendant emotional vulnerability. All of these take work. They take forethought. And since everyone screws up on these from time to time, they also require humility, the willingness to sincerely apologize, and the grace to politely accept an apology while still allowing the other person to maintain their own dignity. And I personally see a lot of people who would rather be isolated and depressed that expend the personal effort and self-discipline it takes to build and maintain a solid friendship or family relationship.
What does not fix depression, and both the article and I agree on this, is medication. It will numb depression, or hide it for a while. But unless the person also works on learning coping strategies and social skills, the depression will come back if the medication is stopped or if the person develops a tolerance for the medication — and it will be just as destructive to the person and contagious to others as it was before.
But medication is by far the most often recommended treatment for depression, and behavioral therapy is mentioned hardly at all.
The article presented some scary statistics about how depression has been increasing in the population during the last couple generations, and not just because it’s being diagnosed more but because it’s a social disease.
Finally, the article mentioned that while depression typically shows up in the 20s and 30s, it is usually preceded by anxiety problems when the person is still a child. If you are dealing with a child who seems to be overly anxious, it will do them a world of good to help them develop coping strategies now. Help them put things in perspective and think of solutions they can carry out themselves. Even if they have problems with anxiety their whole life, the coping strategies will help them deal with the anxiety and stop it from turning into depression.
I really wish the entire article was online (for people other than subscribers, I mean). If your local library carries a copy of Psychology Today and you have or have had problems with depression or are dealing with someone who is currently depressed, I would really recommend the article. I need to doublecheck, but I think one of the article authors has written a book about the same topic. If so, I will probably read the book sometime in the future.
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