So It's Saturday - Sort of a Typical Day

Today is an energetic day, or rather it has been. It's cold and rainy with snow and frost on the way. There were still hundreds of green tomatoes hanging on the tangled vines. So, we decided to harvest everything, all of those lucious heirlooms of a certain size or larger. We worked for about 45 minutes, the result being boxes and baskets of green, even almost white in some cases, of our heirlooms. We had started the day agreeing on tasks for the day, cleaning out and organizing our office space, cooking some, shopping, and dancing. With such a load of green, hard tomatoes spread all over the kitchen counter, the need to cook moved up the priority list. So. heaven bless Google, I began a search for recipes. Three in particular appealed to us; roasted green tomatoes, green tomato and apple chutney, and green tomato salsa.

First to feel the chef's ardor was the roasted green tomato recipes. We prepared two cookie sheets with tin foil, with a layer of a quarter to half inch sliced green tomatoes. Each was sprinkled with salt, pepper, olive oil and cilantro. It took about 25 tomatoes, 45 minutes, 460 degrees, and faith. We had used two varieties of heirlooms, one that ripened green and another that was small fluted, with a thin shell and lots of acidic meat, my favorite of the 9 varieties we grew. After the roasting was finished, all to the tomato disks were soft with roasted crusts on some. I had one on a gardneburger sandwich. It was wonderful. Best of all was simply tossing the smaller, fluted, thin skinned ones into my mouth for a snack. Got any green tomatoes? Try the routine we just described. It produces great things with few calories.

We decided then to hold the rest of the harvest for another day when we could devote time to chutney and salsa, but will probably get to it this week. I then continued with a clean-out-the-refrigerator roast of veggies including carrots, squash cubes from Costco, cauliflower, red onions, potatoes, yams, yellow peppers. Sprayed with olive oil, tinged with sea salt and pepper, the melange was roasted for about 60 minutes. It too was delectable. I managed to run a serrated vegetable peeler down one side of my pointer finger, left hand, and am proving still that the Coumadin is working. The flow has been staunched with a tightly wrapped bandaid. It's not serious, just annoying.

Mom had been saddened today by reading the article in Time this week, which had a huge section devoted to Alzheimer's. The Maria Schriver conference and study came up. More sobering for her and for us were the statistics, the national neglect and obliviousness of the disease and the tsunami of cases and costs on the horizon. The baby boomer generation is now turning retirement age, the age at which onset of the disease begins to double every 5 years after 65. If we don't find solutions to lack of diagnostic tools, medications to attenuate or stop the disease and the effects on caregivers, the cost to the nation will be 20 Trillion dollars over the next few decades. So our generation is not only leaving a nation straggled by debt and animosity, it is leaving the nation a crushing health burden. Add to that the projections about diabetes because of our MacDiets (1 in 3 of us will suffer from it), and you have, need I say it, a sobering situation.

We went dancing last night with the Farnsworths and Spencers. Delightful evening. Learned some new steps. Thursday morning, Rachel, Margaret and I had a daddy daughter breakfast at the park cafe. In laws and sons would have been welcome were any in town. It was hard and funny, all at the same time. I got a view of the advance of the disease from the point of view of Margaret and Rachel. They got a view of the sweet and hard parts of the life of the care partner. We all learned, laughed, and mapped out strategies. Can I just say that it is very hard for DadApaLen to see Mom losing skills and short term memories, particularly when I compare her abilities now with what she used to be able to do. At one point, many years ago, sitting across the picnic table from her at a Lloyd family reunion, I simply marveled at her attractiveness, her zeal, her determination, her goodness, her skills. She still has four of those five attributes. She needs to be mentored through each session on the computer.

Mom so