Victory at the Shrimp Basket
This is a moral victory. AdventureMan and I ate at the Shrimp Basket last week and we DID NOT eat fried food! We tried their non-fried platters, AdventureMan had the grilled fish and shrimp, and I had the blackened fish and shrimps. I took the photo before eating! (another victory, woooo HOOOO!)
Yes, I did dip my shrimp in the melted butter. I could not resist. This is one of the best seafood meals I have had in a long time, it was totally delicious.
On the table was this sign:
The oil has started coming ashore in Louisiana. It is thick and gooey, and it is sticking to the marshlands, clinging to delicate feathers on birds and suffocating wildlife. This is the beginning of a long, long, ugly process of trying to reclaim what nature never intended the oil to touch. It is devastating.
Garden Gate Nurseries
We’re new, but new-with-a-difference, as we have had so many good people to help us with all the decisions that come with settling in. Today, we spent most of our day exploring health care options. We are so lucky to have a military health plan that will cover most of our needs, but it is a bureaucracy, and our daughter-in-law’s step-father helped guide us through the channels, and introduced us to people who could help explain the benefits and rules. Today we searched out doctors who might work with us. At one point, I told AdventureMan, “the problem is, if they are available, I wonder why? Like maybe all the really good ones are taken?”
Our therapy is thinking about gardens, working on our gardens, and exploring ideas for how our yard should look in the future. Again, our daughter-in-law knew just the right person to help us out, and introduced us to Garden Gate Nurseries, a little piece of heaven on earth.
Garden Gate Nurseries specializes in educating clients as to what grows well in the Pensacola / Gulf Coast Climate, how to enrich the soil, which plants are particularly drought resistant, salt resistant, which attract butterflies, or hummingbirds, etc. You don’t just plonk things in the garden, you make a plan, and work little by little to accomplish that plan.
A visit to Garden Gate Nurseries is like a foretaste of Paradise:
They have herbs and vegetables, plants that love the sun and plants that love the shade, and trees, fruit trees, flowering trees, and some wonderful and unique hand crafted gifts and garden-friendly items in their gift shop.
Best of all, they have a landscape designer, Carole Simpson, who loves gardening, gets her thrills from incorporating your dreams into her designs, is thoroughly knowledgeable about growing things in this climate, and on top of all that, is gracious and kind and generous with her time.
Garden Gate Nurseries / Carole Simpson Landscape Design
3268 Fordham Parkway
Gulf Breeze, FL
850-932-9066
Sunset in Panama City Beach
We’ve been putting in so much time around the house that when it came time to go out of town for a family dinner, we went a day early so we would have some goofing off time.
We had a lazy drive down, checked in to our favorite hotel on Panama City Beach, The Sunset Inn, and then I asked AdventureMan “do you want to take me to the quilt shop today or tomorrow?” I have an old friend from quilting days in Germany who owns Quilting-by-the-Bay, one of the most wonderful quilt shops I have ever visited, and if I’m in Panama City, it’s a MUST visit. 🙂
On our way back to the hotel, AdventureMan said “Hey, didn’t you want to do a sunset cruise?” Yes, but I had forgotten, LOL. We drove to the dock, checked on tickets and their was a boat leaving in just a few minutes, so we bought tickets for the Sunset Dolphin Cruise and boarded the ship.
What a lovely way to wind up a day! They played hokey Caribbean music that can’t help but put you in a good mood, and they knew just where to find the dolphins:
They were playing all around the boat! It was delightful!
Back in the car, AdventureMan remembered a great beachy restaurant where all the locals go to celebrate the sunset. As the sun still hadn’t set yet, but was getting ready to, we headed to Schooner’s in Panama City Beach. If you click on the blue type, you can see the restaurant, the menu, AND the live beach cam. 🙂
The parking lot is packed and we think we will go somewhere else, we can see crowds waiting to get in, but just as we are giving up, a car pulls out, it must be a sign we are meant to stay, and we take the spot and walk toward the restaurant.
Special parking for Harleys:
The place is packed on a Friday night, but we get in with only a 15 minute wait. Everyone is visiting, having a little beach drink, and then BOOOOMMMM! I think it is a cannon! There is a countdown, and as the sun sets, the cannon (or something) explodes!
We ordered drinks – iced tea for me, a beer for Adventureman:
And a smoked tuna appetizer – yummmy, especially with the jalepenos:
AdventureMan ordered the Mediterranean Salad and a side of hush puppies:
And I had the Schooner’s Tuna BLT – it had a wasabi sauce and oh, total wow. Who would think a tuna sandwich could have so much taste?
How To Be a Southern Lady
You’d think moving back to your own country would be a piece of cake, wouldn’t you? We nomads know better. Young people who travel to other countries to go to school know better. Military people know better. Missionaries know better. Diplomats know better. Anyone who has spent time living abroad know that it works both ways – you have an impact where you are living, and where you are living has an equal impact on you. You may go back, but you are never the same.
With this move, AdventureMan and I have been too busy trying to get settled and to take care of the incredible amount of bureaucratic detail it takes to relocate. Even with AdventureMan ‘retired’, the days are flying by, and we don’t know why we are so busy.
For one thing, I am doing my own housework, and I am finding I am not very good at it. Like I am good at getting laundry done, and even folded, but I haven’t ironed in a long time, and the things that need ironing are stacking up. I have bought a beautiful new ironing board, and a beautiful iron . . . and some starch, the liquid kind I like, not the spray kind. . . but I haven’t set it up, and I haven’t ironed, not a thing. I have discovered that all my packed things looked a lot better after hanging in the closets for a week, most of the wrinkles fell out, lucky me. But . . . the day of reckoning is coming.
The worst part, for me, is cleaning my floors. My floors are supposed to be beautiful; wood and tile floors. They actually ARE beautiful, maybe two days a week, the day I clean them and the next day, but five days a week, they need work. I wish I had asked my cleaning lady in Doha how she got my floors so beautifully clean. I wish I had paid more attention. I keep looking in the store for some miracle, a machine that will clean them in a heartbeat and make them all shiny. . .
The wonderful thing about moving into this culture – and it truly is a different culture from the one in which I was raised – is that we have our wonderful son and his wonderful wife to give us hints on what to do and not to do, and we have his wife’s wonderful family.
Mostly, I try to keep my eyes open. Southern women admire things extravagantly, and after living for so many years in the Middle East and Gulf, learning to admire extravagantly goes against all my instincts.
In the MIddle East, when you admire extravagantly, you can make people nervous. Some people worry about attracting “the evil eye” of jealousy, evil intentions, people who envy you and wish you harm. Some people, if you admire something, will give it to you! It’s true, those stories, it has happened to me. So now I have to un-learn my lessons in retraint and learn to appreciate, if not extravagantly, at least enough to be polite.
One of my wife’s relatives gave us a house-warming gift, an iced-tea maker, with a darling card that states Rule #1 is that every Southern Hostess knows that a pitcher of iced tea is a MUST for all occasions. I like iced tea, but I have never kept it on hand to serve, and I guess I need to start!
Her second rule was one that made me burst out laughing – “A Southern Lady, the most interesting ones anyway, know that rules are made to be broken.”
“Just be prepared for people to leave your home saying “Bless her heart, she must be getting forgetful. There was no iced tea!”
And then rule #3 – “The only correct and acceptable way to criticize anyone is to add ‘bless his/her heart!’ and then, anything goes!”
At a party at her house this weekend, I learned a couple more – the first rule being that when you are invited to a great big family dinner, bring dessert! Thank God, I did take a little guest gift, but now I know – bring dessert! And it had better be sweet!
The next rule is would make any Kuwaiti or Qattari feel right at home – spare nothing in making our guests comfortable. This Southern Hostess had seating areas inside the beautiful air conditioned home, and also seating outside for those who don’t mind a little heat. She had a big basket loaded with all kinds of insect repellents to keep her guests from being bitten. She took time with each guest, and although she was running her little bottom off getting everything organized, she made it all look easy, and as if she was having a good time. I have a sneaking suspicion the truly was enjoying having all the people around and that her great big heart loves taking care of the crowd. She was the essence of gracious hospitality. Did I mention she has also lived in Kuwait?
Dinner was “Perlow” an old Southern tradition, made in a huge old kettle from her husband’s mother, and hung from a tripod over a roaring fire to cook. The actual cooking was the men’s work as they sat outside drinking iced tea:
Home grown peas and beans mix – delicious!
Serving up the perlow:
My Middle East / Gulf friends would be comfortable eating this meal – Perlow is a variation of Pilaf, and very similar to Biryani. No alcohol served. No pork. Lots and lots of fabulous sweet desserts.
It’s funny, I used to tell people in Kuwait and Qatar that it was a lot like Alaska; when the weather got too bad, you just stay inside most of the time. When the weather gets good, you go outside as much as you can. When it’s too hot/cold, you run from your air conditioned/heated car to your air conditioned / heated store or movie theater, or restaurant, and then back to your air conditioned / heated car and back to your air conditioned/ heated house.
In the same way, I am beginning to wonder if the South and the Middle East know how much they have in common? In Pensacola, on Saturdays, we have the religious people on the corners shouting at passing cars, not a whole lot different from the volunteer morality police in Saudi Arabia. In the South, as in the Middle East, ‘family’ isn’t just blood, it’s also who you’re married into, and there is a lot of emphasis on family getting together and spending time together. In the South, as in the Middle East, men tend to gather in one area, women in another.
In the South, they drink iced tea; in the Middle East, it’s hot tea. Both have passionate patriots, fundamental believers and a tradition of gracious hospitality. Both have a passion for hunting and fishing. Nobody much likes obeying the rules in either culture. Maybe I’m still in the MIddle East?
AdventureMan Cooks a Florida Bouillabaisse
One of AdventureMan’s retirement dreams was to have time to cook. There have been two times in our lives together when he has had the time – one, when our son was born and he learned Chinese cooking so he could stir-fry while I held the squalling baby (he had colic, and squalled from about four in the afternoon to eleven at night. Do you know how long every single minute is when you are holding an inconsolable baby?)
The second time was when he retired from the military, and spent several months at home, keeping house, taking our son to visit colleges, and serving up some of the most fantastic meals we have ever eaten. (I was working; it was a total role reversal. Kind of fun to shake things up, do things differently in a relationship now and then. 🙂 )
So when he started thumbing through cook books, I started grinning to myself. This man is very talented, and while I am very good at ‘survival cooking’, i.e. getting a meal on the table that will nourish and quell hunger pains, AdventureMan takes cooking to an art form.
First we had to make a trip to the grocery store for some basics. When you set up housekeeping after a (yet another) move, you are missing some of the most basic things – like cayenne pepper, or garlic.
Then – oh heaven! – we visited Maria’s Fresh Seafood Market, heaven on earth for this little old Alaska girl.
Fresh, fresh seafood, and people who know how to cut it. The prices are good. As we entered, a drama began, a woman buying a lot of (something) picked a fight, first with the man serving her and then with the cashier. We were there about half an hour, and during this time, she complained, loudly and vigorously, to anyone who would listen. I think she wanted her purchase comped.
AdventureMan bought what he needed, got it cut mostly how he needed it, and also got a fish head and tail for making stock – a great big grouper! He said as he cooked it up, the head and mouth were sticking out of the pot like “Help me! Help me!” but I wouldn’t know because I was upstairs minding my own business while he worked his magic on the Florida fish bouillabaisse. 🙂
Soon, tantalizing odors drifted upstairs, rich, complex odors, with a hint of sherry . . . it was divine. I had to pop down to let him know how much I was appreciating his efforts.
“Do you think it’s a little too thick?” he asked.
“I think it’s like a fish stew; I think thick is OK. You can add a little more liquid if it seems to need it,” I added, but actually, he is doing just fine without any input from me.
Finally, it was time to eat. AdventureMan dished the concoction into some shellfish soup bowls I found many years ago at that exotic resource store, TJ Maxx (LOL) and dinner was served.
Total YUMMMMMM. Bravo, AdventureMan, Bravo! I am having a lot of fun with your retirement! 🙂
What Matters?
For twelve years, most of my life prior to 1998 was in storage. When we first headed to Saudi Arabia together, then back to Germany for several years, then to the Gulf for several more, we had thought it would be just a few years . . . actually, we didn’t think of any time, we just never expected to pack almost everything we owned for that long.
As we were awaiting our shipment from storage, AdventureMan asked me what mattered most. In the greater scheme of things, what matters most isn’t coming out of storage. What matters most is the lives who have connected with mine over the many years.
But there are a couple things I wanted to see again.
First, when we married, we started saving for our first trip to Africa. We didn’t eat meat. We didn’t go to movies. We saved, and a little after we had been married for a year, we went to Kenya and Tanzania for a month, three weeks on safari and then a week on the beach at a marine reserve, where we could snorkle. During that time, we saved every penny, but out of his lunch money, AdventureMan saved enough to buy me this little candleabra, which I cherish. He bicycled to the shop to pay the $25 per month until it was paid for. It was a total surprise, one of the best surprises I have ever had in my life. I wanted to see it again:
Also during that first year, we were looking for wedding china. We had met and married. We hadn’t gone through a long process, just made a decision and followed through. It seemed so sensible to us at the time. Then we had lots of time to search for just the right china.
It took us forever. We would ‘kind of’ like one or two, but not enough to buy it. Then, one day at the Heidelberg Officer’s Club, we found it. We visited it again three months later, and found we liked it just as much, even more. We also had an income tax refund, so we made our first major purchase together, and, after all these years, we still love it:
It is simple, white, with a little encrustation, and – to us – still as beautiful as the day we bought it. It is made by Reynaud, an old porcelain manufacturer in Limoges, but they were bought out several years ago by Cerelene, and now this pattern, Cheverny, is no longer made. I am registered on several replacement sites, but not a single piece has appeared in all the years I have been registered. One year in Germany, just before we left, we bought four more plates and coffee cups, but the replacements are not the same. The china was thicker, not so refined as the original. And then they stopped making it altogether.
Every piece arrived intact. We have a couple chips – we’ve had the china around 36 years, so a broken piece here and there, a chip from time to time – it’s hard to avoid.
We also have an Ethiopian cross, and some very old cookbooks and etiquette books I have collected – I was happy to see them again, along with some French hunting ducks I found once in the Metz flea market. 🙂 Old friends. By the grace of God, we have come through these 12 long years with only a few chips ourselves, nothing broken, and nothing of great importance missing.
AdventureMan Loves Magnolia
I was oblivious. I didn’t even know what a magnolia tree looked like. But AdventureMan grew up in the South, and he has been pointing them out ever since we got here. We watched them as they formed their buds. And now – magnolias are blooming all over Pensacola!
Grafitti Bridge
Grafitti Bridge turned purple last week. The Run for Life (Cancer Survivors) had painted it purple and then had to put guards on it because the Oil Spill protesters wanted to paint it black.
You know how there are the rules, and then there are the way rules are enforced – or not? Grafitti is discouraged in Pensacola, but Grafitti bridge – a train bridge – is kind of exempt. The informal rule is that as long as the police don’t actually SEE you painting on the bridge, they won’t bother tracking you down. So the adventure is to do it in the middle of the night, with someone keeping watch so you don’t get caught in the act.
The Mediterranean Plus In Pensacola
Woooo HOOOOOO on YOU, AdventureMan, you were RIGHT! (He always looks for his name, so might as well put it right up front for him 😉 )
We had visited an international grocery store to look for some particular spices, and AdventureMan spotted the Mediterranean Plus just around the corner. We thought they might be related . . . both have felafel and other “Mediterranean” specialties we have come to associate with the Middle East – hummus, tabouli, baba ghannoush, fattoush . . .
As we walked in, we knew we had come to the right place:
The menu was to die for – almost all the things we love. The owner is Jordanian, and, while there is no fattah for my early breakfast 🙂 he has a lot of other wonderful dishes to satisfy our ‘Mediterranean’ cravings. Once again, I apologize. Sometimes when the food shows up, I forget about photos until it is too late. I wish you could have seen this plate when it was prepared, it was beautiful. Even better, the baba ghannoush is lush and smokey, as good as any I have ever had in Kuwait and Qatar. The tabouli was just exactly right, the right blend of parsley and bulgar, exactly the right amount of lemon. Mumtaz.
I have been on a mission. I have a good friend who is down to the last of some Kuwait biriyani spices I had brought back as a guest gift a while back, and I was hoping to find more. I found biriyani spice AND I found Lebanese olive oil. I laughed when I saw Vimto:
As AdventureMan talked with the owner, he discovered we actually had been in the restaurant before, in its previous location on Cervantes. This location has a lot more space for diners and for parking. We are thrilled to find it – the food is GOOD!
Mediterranean Plus
6895 N 9th Ave
Pensacola
850 469 9225
My Newest Friends
Welcome! Welcome!
We ordered the washer and dryer almost a month ago, but because of a huge energy star promotion, there was a backlog, and it took forever to get them.
In the meantime, our household goods from storage – 12 years of storage – arrived, and almost everything we are keeping needs to be cleaned.
We had two old featherbeds from the former East Germany that had a little mildew on them. I almost threw them away, but I thought since I am going to throw them away, I might as well see if they could be saved. I put them in (one at a time; they are each too big to be put in together) on a cycle called “sanitize” and then dried them on high and . . . they came out perfect! Wooo HOOOO!
As you can see, even though I have done many loads, I still have a ways to go:
No, not the brass pot; it is not going in the washer. It needs to have a handle put back on, so it is waiting there with other low-priority projects for me to get around to it. 🙂 Isn’t this a great laundry room?
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