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Luke-A-Pie
October 31, 2007It's one of those family legends.
No one truly knows when the dessert got its name.
But we all know that German Chocolate Pie isn't the "official" name for that delicious dessert my grandmother used to make.
We simply call it "Luke-A-Pie."
And here the story goes:
Every year for our birthdays, my grandmother, aka Mimi, would cook us each a homemade strawberry cake, which included lots and lots of fresh strawberries.
She'd do this for me and my five little sisters, and our three cousins.
This was the best cake ever. Everyone thought so.
Except for my cousin Luke.
The popularity and deliciousness of strawberry cake was a cruel joke to him since he was allergic to strawberries.
And so to celebrate Luke's birthdays, Mimi would make German Chocolate Pie instead from this recipe on the back of the Cool-Whip container.
One day, Mimi was in the kitchen making a pie for Luke.
My grandfather, aka Dandy, hollered to her from his favorite chair in the den.
"What are you makin'?"
To which Mimi responded, "I'm makin' Luke a pie."
My Dandy, being the jokester he was, needled her.
"Luke-A-Pie? Well, that sure is a funny name for a pie," he chuckled.
And thus, the dessert's name was born.
This was probably 20-25 years ago, and Luke-A-Pie still lives. It's even in the family cookbook, filed under the L's, of course.
I tell this familiar family story because cousin Luke is coming to Wichita Falls on Friday, Nov. 9.
He's the drummer for the Paul Eason Band, and the band is playing at the Crazy Horse Saloon that night.
I'll be there, supporting my cousin.
Maybe, I'll even make him a pie.
***
If you're interested in making Luke-A-Pie, here's the recipe:
1 graham cracker pie crust
1-4 oz. pkg. German chocolate
1/3 c. milk
1/2 c. sugar
3 oz. Cream cheese
8 oz. Cool Whip
Melt chocolate over low heat; add half the milk.
In a small mixing bowl, whip together cream cheese and remaining milk, beating until smooth.
Add sugar gradually, beating smooth again. Slowly pour chocolate mixture into cheese mixture and beat until velvet-smooth.
In larger mixing bowl, put Cool Whip. Slowly stir in chocolate-cheese mixture, folding and stirring until an even chocolate color.
Pour into crumb crust, cover and freeze.
About 20 minutes before serving, take out of freezer and garnish with whipped topping and chocolate curls if desired.
Posted by Lara Richards at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Rufus
October 30, 2007I was watching TV at my parents' house in Clay County when I heard a low, guttural growl come from deep inside our house cat Rasputin, or "Pootie" for short, who was outside prowling.
I was immediately worried and went out to investigate, expecting to find blood and guts and maybe a bobcat around.
Instead, I found a new cat on the roof.
Pootie was up in a tree howling at the cat, and it howled back.
Being the hopeless romantic I am (in the cat world, at least), I thought that Pootie had found himself a girl and was desperately trying to woo her.
It became a regular show.
Every time a storm blew through the area, we'd find the new cat up on the roof, Pootie would start howling, and the new cat would never come down. We'd chunk hot dogs, ham, any kind of throwable leftovers up on the roof for her to eat and we even put a bowl of water up there.
We named her Stormy because of the occasion of her arrivals.
I admired her, really, for sticking to her guns, refusing to come down. She was protecting her virtue from big, bad Rasputin, I thought.
Or at least that's the story I had concocted, which my Pop quickly destroyed with one observance.
Stormy is a boy.
And so there was no wooing, just a jostling for power, with Pootie refusing to let Stormy(?) come down.
Yeah, I realized quickly we needed a new name.
And Rufus (get it -- roof?) was christened. He still shows up every once in a while, on the roof of course, and we throw food up to him.
But the romance has died.
Posted by Lara Richards at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Beauty tip?
October 29, 2007One of the best things about shopping at Wal-Mart is that you never know what's going to happen in the check-out line.
The cashier was scanning my various and mostly unneeded purchases Friday when she came to my 4-in-1 pedicure paddle.
(I had decided, impulsively of course, that I couldn't live without the $3 purchase.)
She looked at me.
"Honey, you know what I use for my heels instead?" An S.O.S. pad."
I guess she has a good point.
I mean if a piece of steel wool can get your caked-on, baked-on, stuck-on food off a skillet, then how could it not be good for your callused heels?
Posted by Lara Richards at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Home
October 28, 2007Home.
I feel sorry for people that don't know what the word means.
Not from a literal standpoint, but rather from the emotional/psychological/spiritual one.
Because if you have a place that you call Home, with a capital H, then everything else just falls into place.
I recently did my master's thesis about Texas-born writer Katherine Anne Porter and stumbled across a poem she wrote in 1940 after a brief visit back home. Porter spent most of her life living anywhere but Texas, and yet she knew that only it was home.
Only it felt like home.
Only it would she ever call home.
I've been working this week from home, and yes, I too, know deeply what the word means.
The poem is called "Anniversary in a Country Cemetery."
This time of year, this year of all years, brought
The homeless one home again;
To the fallen house and the drowsing dust
There to sit at the door,
Welcomed, homeless no more.
Her dust remembers its dust
And calls again
Back to the fallen house this restless dust
This shape of her pain.
This shape of her love
Whose living dust reposes
Beside her dust,
Sweet as the dust of roses.
Posted by Lara Richards at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Blue doors
October 19, 2007I have driven past the old grain elevators in Electra countless times.
Photographer Torin Halsey and I even climbed through and explored as many of the buildings as we safely could several weeks ago before the railroad started tearing the old buildings down Monday.
So many memories floated through the old wooden and brick buildings.
Chairs and benches, old signs, the dusty white shelves in the front of the feed store. They were all left behind, abandoned to time.
My favorite visual memory of the buildings that lined the railroad isn't the tall concrete K&K Grain Elevator, a favorite piece of the skyline for many Electrans.
Instead, I'll always remember the blue doors on the feed store, pounded hard by decades of rain and wind and North Texas heat.
Torin took this picture of the doors several years ago when he was out roaming about the countryside, perfectly capturing their time-worn beauty and elegance.
This Tuesday, Torin and I drove up to the elevators to get pictures and interviews for a story about the demolition project.
And the first thing we both noticed were the blue doors.
The glass was broken. Someone had kicked in the bottom one of them.
They sat open, sadly open, as all of the memories floated out.
Posted by Lara Richards at 8:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Cuss words
October 18, 2007Sports Editor Nick Gholson and I have had a blast today, probably the most co-worker friendly day we've ever spent together.
And maybe that's cuz we've cussed at each other all day long.
I've called him mothertrucker, a son of a biscuit and a piece of shitake mushroom.
He told me to go to hello and kiss his ascot.
(Needless to say, we used the real words, but this is a pseudo family-friendly blog.)
Mine and Nick's newfound cussword frivolity is all thanks to a new study that came out today that said allowing staff to swear at work can benefit them and their employers.
I'm not making this up.
You probably read the story somewhere on the Internet today. Apparently researchers at the University of East Anglia -- apparently a real school in the United Kingdom -- looked at the use of expletives and swearing in the workplace from a management point of view.
According to one published article about the research, "The study found regular use of profanity to express and reinforce solidarity among staff, enabling them to express their feelings, such as frustration, and develop social relationships."
Fudge yeah!
The results of the study are published in the current issue of the Leadership and Organization Development Journal.
Yehuda Baruch, professor of management at the UEA-based Norwich Business School said in one article, "We hope that this study will serve not only to acknowledge the part that swearing plays in our work and our lives but also to indicate that leaders sometimes need to 'think differently' and be open to intriguing ideas."
I don't see our publisher adopting these lax rules anytime soon, though.
Posted by Lara Richards at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Naked sister, Part 2
October 17, 2007So Sister 6 wasn't mad or even ashmaed about the recent "Naked Babies" blog I wrote.
(In fact, she actually posted a comment at the bottom of the blog, just to clear things up about her current lack of nudity.)
Her long-time boyfriend Ben even chimed in, too.
He e-mailed me the following:
If only every reader had the mental pictures while reading this story that I had. After wading through three or so photo albums dedicated to one of each of the sisters, I noticed that Sister 6, like some Superbowl Streaker, had made it, naked of course, into about a tenth of the photos highlighting a certain sister. I'm sure they're all thankful for her artistic input.
Posted by Lara Richards at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Worm meat
October 16, 2007It looked like an ordinary roast.
And like any ordinary roast, Mom had thrown a bunch of carrots, potatoes and sliced onions all around it.
After church that particular Sunday, we came home, each served ourselves a plate of roast and fixings and dug in.
All except Sister 2. That day, she claimed she was a vegetarian.
All of a sudden.
Everything was fine until someone decided to get seconds, and they served up a foot-long curly tape worm, which had been masquerading as an onion.
(I swear to this day that it had fangs.)
Sister 2 laughed. She had seen the worm on the first go-round.
"Ha, ha. Y'all just ate worm meat!!!" she cackled, her tastebuds untainted by worm meat.
We threw the meat outside to the dogs and put the worm in a jar.
Pop tried to allay any of our fears of poisoning or contamination. The worm was probably in the cow when it was slaughtered and then was released by the heat from the oven.
It had been long dead before it made it to our house, Pop told us. He told us we wouldn't get sick. That we'd be fine.
But five of us sisters had eaten worm meat, and Sister 2 wouldn't let us forget it, even to this day, decades later.
We made Pop take the worm up to the grocery store and demanded that he come back with some kind of restitution.
He came home with another roast.
We ate grilled cheese for a month.
Posted by Lara Richards at 5:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Naked babies
October 15, 2007One of the greatest things about growing up in the country is that you get to stay naked for a really long time.
I really don't think I owned clothes -- and certainly not shoes -- until I started kindergarten.
Naked babies and toddlers are as common as tumbleweeds and mesquite trees across the countryside.
Which brings me to my favorite story about Sister 6.
Since she was 12 1/2 years younger than me, most of my early memories of her involve her being a baby and a toddler, and thus, being naked.
When she was 2, which would make me 15, sisters 3 and 4 always stripped her down to nothing and had her run through the house, belting out, "Lara's got a boyfriend" anytime a guy came to the house.
I don't know if because she was the sixth kid that we had run out of clothes or money or, that by that time, my parents simply didn't care, but she was naked a lot.
And to us, it was simply the norm.
To the rest of the world, though, it would always come as a shock.
One particular afternoon, this cowboy that worked for my dad knocked at the front door. I was sitting at the kitchen table and could hear the conversation clearly.
My dad answered the door and the cowboy had a puzzled look on his face.
"Mr. Richards," he said with his slow, deliberate drawl. "You've got a naked baby on your trampoline."
And my dad looked out the front door and I looked out the window, and there was Sister 6, jumping up and down on the trampoline buck naked spraying a water hose around.
The sound of the pickup barreling up the driveway. The cowboy standing on our porch, where she could clearly see him.
Nothing made Sister 6 stop bouncing or search for clothes.
My dad looked back at the cowboy.
"Well, I guess I do," Paw said.
My baby sister is now 21.
And fully clothed, for the record.
Posted by Lara Richards at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Oven Fried Buffalo Chicken
October 12, 2007One of my good friends told me -- more like dared me -- to try Internet dating, not for the "find-your-true-love" aspect of it but more just because it’' something to pass the time when you're sitting at home. Alone. With nothing to do. Every weekend.
But my friend said I had to come up with a cool user name. That's what really lures them in, she said.
I thought long and hard, drank a few beers, flipped through a few magazines, and came up with what I thought was a hum-dinger.
Ovenfriedbuffalochicken.
Because, I thought to myself, what man doesn't love oven fried buffalo chicken?
My brief brush with Internet dating didn't work out, needless to say. My friend said that's because I tried it half-heartedly.
First of all, I didn't put my picture up on the site. I told her that's because I didn't want people to know what I looked like. (Ditto for my blog, incidentally).
And she said my user name wasn't exactly, well, enticing.
Apparently, no man wanted to date overfriedbuffalochicken.
Posted by Lara Richards at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Church signs
October 11, 2007I fell in love with church signs at a young age.
The First Christian Church in Paducah had one that stayed up for decades.
"If you are too busy to go to church, you are TOO busy," it read.
It still makes me chuckle.
I love finding and reading church signs out in the region, like this one from the First Baptist Church in Lakeside City.
The Lakeside City church sign inspired me. It got me thinking about what my own marquee would look like, if I hung one up.
Something like this, I presume:
Pardon the mess
But I'm trying to get my
H S T I in order.
Posted by Lara Richards at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Presents from Red
October 10, 2007The new farm pup, Red, brought me some presents last weekend.
I opened the front door to find three gifts on the front porch that he'd rustled up.
A thoroughly gnawed-on stick, slobber still present.
The brushy endpiece to the Shop Vac from the garage.
A coyote's jawbone.
And he just smiled and smiled and smiled at me.
I guess it IS the thought that counts, after all.
Posted by Lara Richards at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Question of the day
October 9, 2007Is it butt naked or buck naked?
Because, sadly, that question comes up more frequently in my life that I care to admit.
Posted by Lara Richards at 8:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Blog hits
October 8, 2007Fellow Times Record News blogger Jason Palmer posted the number of hits on TRN blogs from September on his blog. And then Clayton Hein commented on the results on his blog.
Quite frankly, I was horrified.
Not at either Jason or Clayton but the fact that my blog was viewed 1,597 times in September.
That's just scary.
Because, with my luck, that's not 1,597 separate individuals reading my blog.
Or 100 people looking at my blog 15 or so times.
In my universe, it's two backwoods twin brothers -- Earl and Meryl -- with 13 teeth between them, who have a year's supply of chaw and a subscription to "Guns & Buns" magazine who've taken a liking to me.
And my blog.
And they checked my blog 1,597 times last month just hoping that one day I'd post a picture of myself or my itinerary for that day so we could "accidentally" meet up.
And by "meet up" I mean meeting up with a roll of duct tape and the bed of their pick up.
Yeah, I'm not paranoid at all.
Posted by Lara Richards at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Chicken spaghetti
October 2, 2007Please don't read this blog if you are, say, eating lunch right now.
Especially chicken spaghetti.
I saw a flyer the Wichita Falls Drove 154 of the Benevolent Patriotic Order of Does USA sent us this week about its upcoming chicken spaghetti fundraiser. Immediately, fond thoughts of this ewwy-gooey Southern staple filled my mind.
But then I thought about my third sister.
She says she can't ever eat chicken spaghetti again because of a horrid dream she had when she was little.
Apparently, in the dream, Sis walked into the kitchen one day and my mom was stirring a big pot on the stove.
Sis asked what was in the pot and mom replied, "Chicken spaghetti. Wanna see?"
So Sis leaned over the pot and in the midst of all the chicken and spaghetti and cream of soup and chopped onions and bell peppers were tiny, bloody puppy heads.
My sister said the dream was so vivid that, to this day, she can't eat chicken spaghetti.
I guess I see her point.
Sis told me this story a few years ago, and it took me a little while to make a very startling and horrific Big Sis realization.
I don't think it was a dream.
I'm not saying my mom was cooking chicken/puppy head spaghetti, but I think my sister melded two events together in her young mind.
I remember the days leading up to it distinctly. Our collie had given birth to a litter of puppies, 5 or 6 of them, and they were only a week or so old.
About that same time, an old, grey starving female greyhound had wandered up to our house.
She wouldn't let any of us get near her, but I had spent about a week getting her to trust me. She had started eating a little, and we hoped to nurse her back to health.
I was in my early teens, I think, 13 or 14ish, which means little sis was around 7.
I came home from school that fateful afternoon, and the puppies were gone. So was the greyhound.
I went into the kitchen, and if I remember correctly, mom was, in fact, making chicken spaghetti. She was stirring it furiously, clanging the sides of the pot.
I asked her where the puppies were and she said she and pop had given the puppies away and taken the greyhound to the pound.
But I could tell something was wrong. Really, really horribly wrong.
Later that evening, when the rest of my little sisters were asleep, she told me the truth.
She had been in the kitchen cooking that afternoon when she looked out the window and saw the greyhound eating the puppies. She sprinted outside and they were all dead, nothing but blood and heads left behind.
Without thinking, instinct taking over, she buried the puppy heads before any of us kids got home and hosed off the blood.
And then she went back to cooking, which has always been her emotional outlet.
She said it's probably the worst thing she's ever seen or had to do.
Mom made me promise not to tell the other girls what had happened, but maybe somehow, Sister #3 heard us talking that night.
And in her young mind, chicken spaghetti and puppy heads were forever linked.
(I don't think is what the Does had in mind when they sent us information for publicity about their upcoming fundraiser.)
Posted by Lara Richards at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
