Smorgasbord

If we slap a tagline on ourselves, are we helping people understand us or are we limiting what can be understood about us?

Today’s Daily Prompt is called “Tagline.”  The editor asks, “Often, our blogs have taglines. But what if humans did, too? What would your tagline be?”

A tagline is something that gives a viewpoint. Where are you coming from? Where are you looking from? What’s your angle? A tagline is really a label, isn’t it? And a label symbolizes something or someone by imbuing an added significance according to a viewpoint.

We give ourselves and other people taglines all the time.

Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Bride; Village Idiot; Ain’t Nobody’s Fool; Show Me the Money!; Groceries; Know It All; Earth Mama; Your Worst Nightmare; My Precious; Stands With a Fist; Diamond in the Rough; Hellbent for Leather; the Ol’ Ball and Chain; My Better Half; God’s Gift to Women . . .

God's Gift to Women

God’s Gift to Women (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Taglines can be cruel, kind, endearing or damning depending on The Viewpoint. We look down, we look up, we look sideways and cross-ways at people we know or meet. You can go all philosophical  and deep-think with them or just express some momentary whimsy and humor.

Sometimes we ask people to look at us from a certain viewpoint. Like when we put a bumper sticker on the car. I have a neighbor who has a bumper sticker on his car that says, “I poke badgers with spoons.” What is that supposed to make us think? I chuckle at the originality but is he saying he’s extremely brave or that he indulges in animal cruelty? Probably neither. Wry sense of humor, maybe? Pumpernickel? (Work with me here.)

I have no bumper stickers on my car. I resist labeling myself with a tagline. My viewpoint can change in an instant! I can consider in one way and then have another consideration right after that. And so can you, I believe.

That is called “creating your life and being the author of your own truth.” Not indecisive—Flexible. Not fixed—Infinitely Possible. Not living a lie—Honestly Looking. Magic Carpet Ride, perhaps. (See how easy it is to lapse into taglines?)

The tagline for my blog is, “Adventures in Healthy Living.” That is meant to give you a viewpoint that goes along with My Cooking Life. My game is to share my thoughts, ideas and experiences as they relate to my viewpoint about cooking and the adventure of living a great life. And like my blog’s tagline, my personal tagline (if I had one) would also have to be very open-ended Blah, blah, blah..

What good is it, may I ask, to have a tagline if you then have to explain it to people?

So in keeping with the theme of this blog. . . for the moment . . . as anti-climactic as it seems to me now . . .my personal tagline could be

Smorgasbord—Anything and Everything or Nothing At All!

Trackbacks & Pingbacks

  1. Daily Prompt: Tagline « Mama Bear Musings
  2. Madder than the Hatter | Daily Prompt: Tagline | likereadingontrains
  3. Taglines : Me by them | Geek Ergo Sum
  4. Daily Prompt: Tagline | Mindful Splatter
  5. My Tag Line | Right Down My Alley
  6. Live, laugh, love… | Relax…
  7. Tag, I’m it | Nanuschka’s Blog
  8. Raging Bull [Daily Prompt: Tagline] | unknowinglee
  9. Daily Prompt: Tagline | Books, Music and Movies : my best friends
  10. Phoneography Weekly: The light in dining halls |
  11. Blogging Is Like A Flea Market | The Jittery Goat
  12. Tagging me | 2 times pink
  13. Tagline: It’s All About Me | Mary Angelini Photography
  14. Daily Prompt – “All Humans Need Their Oil Changed” | Create & Motivate!
  15. Tagline: It’s All About Me | Mary Angelini Photography
  16. The Gray Zone | meanderedwanderings
  17. I’ll stick to what I’ve got. For now, thanks. | thoughtsofrkh
  18. The Grown up Kid | Daily Prompt : Tagline | Thoughts
  19. If I Were a Tagline | New Visions
  20. Daily Prompt: Tagline | The Blogging Path
  21. Daily Prompt: Tagline | I Work for a Jerk
  22. Catherine B.’s Blog | My Opinion Not Yours | Daily Prompt: Taglines
  23. Over and over again… | Random, Assorted and Miscellaneous Thoughts
  24. The Tagline I Come With | Things To Rave About
  25. No advertisement please | Spunky Wayfarer
  26. Just Another Bloke | Tony’s Texts
  27. Daily Prompt: Tagline | Musings&Rants
  28. Daily Prompt: Tagline | Lines by Linda
  29. I Am NOT A Bottle of Wine | Spirit Lights The Way
  30. Daily Prompt: Tagline | The Educated Illiterates
  31. the UNCATEGORISED: Daily Prompt | Tagline | the TRASH BASH
  32. How do you tag a person like this guy? | Rob’s Surf Report
  33. I’m alive | Vivir, que no es poco
  34. Think Liquid | Daily Prompt: Tagline | so i wrote
  35. Old Soul… | Haiku By Ku
  36. My Tagline: Daily Prompt | BLUE BEAD PUBLICATIONS
  37. Daily Prompt: Tagline | Chronicles of an Anglo Swiss
  38. Sam McManus: Writer | Sam’s Online Journal
  39. Its all in a tag – describing me. | Random Encounters of an Inquisitive Mind
  40. My Life’s Tagline | Thriving Pessimist…
  41. Love Until Injustice Do Us Part | windandlaughter
  42. A tagline for humans | tornin2′s Blog
  43. A tagline for humans | tornin2′s Blog
  44. Tagline | Going New Places!
  45. Tagline | The self sufficient single mother
  46. Daily Prompt: Tagline — TAG! I’m It! | cinnwriterblog
  47. Daily Prompt : Tagline | The Bluebird of Happiness 幸福
  48. Daily Prompt: Dear Telephone Solicitor | My Daily Prompt Blog
  49. Daily Prompt: Tagline | Borneo Rainbow
  50. Daily Prompt: Tagline | Exploring Utah with MS and Apples
  51. Daily Prompt: Tagline | Under the Monkey Tree
  52. Daily Prompt: Tagline | Morrighan’s Muse
  53. Tagline Me . . . | A Short A Day
  54. Meet the Family… | The Rider
About these ads

Like Fine Wine

What is your favorite staple ingredient?

NAMA SHOYU BOTTLEThis could be difficult for you to choose but for me, the answer is my Nama® Shoyu! I use shoyu in nearly every meal I make. I strive to get full and satisfying flavors out of my meals without using too much salt and Nama® Shoyu is the best by far. ”Nama” means “raw” and “Shoyu” means “soy sauce.”

You will know this is great stuff the moment you break open the seal on the bottle. Remove the lid and savor the deep and complex aroma wafting from the bottle! Opening a new bottle of Nama® Shoyu is one of my favorite pleasure moments in the kitchen! It is like opening a bottle of fine wine.

There are many brands of naturally-brewed soy sauce available in most health food stores but I find none of them come anywhere close to the deep, rich flavors and aroma of Nama® Shoyu. This is hands down the absolute best! With other soy sauces, I find you cannot get all the flavor without using too much of the soy sauce and that makes the food too salty. Not so with Nama® Shoyu—just add a little and you get all the great flavor and your food will not be too salty.

NAMA SHOYU INGREDIENTSNama® Shoyu is made by Ohsawa®—an organic food company well-known for providing the highest possible quality of traditional Japanese condiments.  It is 100% organic, unpasturized soy sauce that is traditionally aged in barrels for two years and retains its live enzymes and friendly bacteria.  This is a truly fermented food that benefits the body and the digestive system in many ways that other more processed soy sauces do not.  In fact, many raw food enthusiasts use this particular soy sauce because of its “aliveness.”

Nama® Shoyu is higher-priced than other brands but you will use less of it and get much greater flavor and health benefits. If you do not see Nama® Shoyu in your natural foods store, you can order it from Gold Mine, the exclusive importer of Ohsawa® products.

Vegan Chilled Cucumber Fennel Soup

Lately, it’s been too darn hot to cook!

Summer has hit very hard around here with temperatures over 100 degrees for the last several days. On top of that we are having the worst drought in history with no prediction of when relief will come.

What’s a cook to do?

One thing I have been doing is getting up early enough to cook something in the morning when the air is . . . well I wouldn’t go so far as to say “cool” . .  but I figure early a.m. is when the temp is as low as it’s going to get for the day. Even so, I do not want to fill our home with heat from my stove and oven!

The other evening I was through with work and even though it was rather late evening, it was still mucho calor fuera and even though I had not eaten since about 11 a.m. (only breakfast and second breakfast). I still didn’t want to eat anything. Just too hot! But I knew I would eventually get hungry.

(And that’s the thing about summer, don’t eat, don’t eat, too hot to eat, and then Wham! Starving! Eat Everything!. I mean, what’s with ‘second breakfast’ lately? What am I, a Hobbit?  I’ll let you know if I ever get that under control.)

Mucho calor fuera!

Mucho calor fuera!

I thought, “I should eat something at least. What could I possibly make that I might feel like eating?”

There it was! A visionary flash of the ultimate cool-as-a-cucumber but loaded with savory, satisfying flavors.

There it was—a visionary flash of the ultimate cool-as-a-cucumber-but-loaded-with savory-satisfying-flavors summer refreshment idea!

“How about a cold, creamy cucumber soup?”

So I got busy. There was a little cooking involved, but not much.

1. I minced a little red onion—very fine mince—and sauted that with a touch of olive oil until it was sweet and tender.

2. I added some soup stock. I used Imagine Foods Vegetable Soup Stock which is the only ready-made stock I have found that does not have cane sugar in it. (More notes about the soup stock later.)

3. I grated a bulb of fennel and a cucumber—both organic—and added that.  I added salt, white pepper and then a little unsweetened coconut milk and some nutmeg. I adjusted the salt and then chilled the soup. Surely you could play around with the seasonings. A bit of cardamom perhaps? Or go for a hit of hot chili pepper?

Lovely chilled soup in three four easy steps!

4. Use the fluffy end of the fennel as a garnish. (That is, if you can. The fluffy tips of the fennel look lovely when dry and seem like the perfect garnish. But as soon as they get wet they rapidly collapse and resemble a wet Shih Tzu.  So throw on that garnish and serve it fast!)

Now let me talk to you about the color.  If you buy one of these ready-made soup stocks it’s going to be orangey-yellow because they use a lot of carrots or squash. And the flavor of this stock is very nice but definitely affects the outcome of the soup.

If you think creamy cucumber soup should NOT look like pea soup, and you want a more traditional white-looking soup, you should make dashi as your soup stock.  This is not hard to do at all. Then you will have a clear broth to start with. Further, if you really want a whiter soup, you could peel the cucumber before grating it and then you would have much less green color.

I’m sure my photo of this soup would be much more picture perfect had I done that but I was looking for something very fast so used the packaged broth and I prefer to use whole organic foods whenever possible so I generally don’t peel my cucumbers.  There’s lots of good stuff (nutrients) right under that skin!

When the soup was chilled, I served it to my Hubbin’ and myself. I thought probably the soup would be too mild for him and he might not like it. Wrong!! He did like it very much! We both enjoyed the flavors and felt refreshed after eating it.

Another tip about this soup is that you can keep it chilled in a container for work or travel and enjoy it as is! How simple is that?

 

It’s Normal

Today’s Daily Prompt asks:  Is being “normal” — whatever that means to you — a good thing, or a bad thing? Neither?

English: A Butterfly Taken at Tropical Wings i...

(Wikipedia)

There once was a free-thinking man named Norm

Who loved being artistic in every form.

He dreamed and created many beautiful things

Like dresses made from pure butterfly wings.

~

The fluttering dresses so colorful and bright

Stunned the critics and shocked buyers on sight.

“These are ridiculous, they’ll never sell,”

Carped Louie Couture and Daisy La Belle.

~

“Norm’s no designer, he’s just a joke!

Why look at those monarchs stitched to that yoke!

Alert the press! Call CNN!

His career’s over before it begins!”

~

Soon the word spread, Norm’s dresses had failed.

Bronx cheers from Joan Rivers; Jon Stewart railed.

You’d think poor Norm would have changed his style—

“No, I really love this,” he said with a smile.

~

Then one fateful eve at the Grammys, I think

Clad all in butterflies, quite gossamer and pink

A Lady appeared to deliver a song

Wearing one of Norm’s dresses flowing and long.

~

She won the award and after the show

She stood for photos and looked all aglow.

“My dear, what do you call that smashing formal?”

She looked to the camera and said, “It’s Normal.”

~

Butterfly wings were soon on most dresses

And hats and shoes and even in tresses.

Soon there were knock-offs at Harrods and Macy’s

Butterfly frocks on each Sue, Jane and Stacy

~

“Normal” was normal, that’s all there was to it.

Except for Miss Patty who did cleverly ‘tuit

That changing whims and currents of fashion;

Were not where she placed her heart and her passion.

~

“I have my own thoughts and I’m going to write

What’s important to me, what brightens my light.

No matter if this is not mainstream and hip,

I write from my heart and I steer my own ship.”

~~~~~

  1. Everybody laugh, everybody cry | From Five to Fifty
  2. the everyday.. | bodhisattvaintraining
  3. 50 Words: Normality | Scant Words
  4. Daily Prompt: The Normal « Mama Bear Musings
  5. Why so happy? |
  6. Daily Prompt: The Normal | a Portia Adams adventure
  7. Just a Moment | charlottesville winter
  8. Aint Nothing Wrong With Being Average Joe | The Adventures of Rain Dance Megan
  9. I have never been normal and never will | Now Have At It!
  10. Normal Just Is | Daily Prompt: The Normal | likereadingontrains
  11. Daily Prompt: The Normal | Stevie’s Words
  12. Nature or nurture????? | My life! My Way!
  13. Baa-rmy Army | The Daily Dilly Dally
  14. What is Normal? | Stuphblog
  15. Be Yourself ~ It’s the New Normal! | Misifusa’s Blog
  16. An Ode To Not Being Normal
  17. It’s a wonderful F’N life
  18. AB-Normal | Nanuschka’s Blog
  19. BiPOLAR COASTER | It’s a wonderful F’N life
  20. Normal | Matthew Vett’s Development Blog
  21. Daily Prompt: The Normal Everyday // 365 Day 135 | AmiLoo’s Photography
  22. Believe It Or Not There Is A Normal And An Abnormal | The Jittery Goat
  23. As He is, so we are | A Teacher’s Blog
  24. Normal According to Whom? | das Nicht-zuhause-sein
  25. The New “Normal” | A Good One
  26. Sgt. Pepper et al | Relax…
  27. Daily Prompt: The Normal | Books, Music and Movies : my best friends
  28. Daily Prompt: Give Me Abnormal or Give Me DEATH! | Iam Who Iam
  29. Daily Prompt: The Normal | Chronicles of an Anglo Swiss
  30. Daily Prompt: Normal Is Abnormal | Creative Mysteries
  31. Be you… | Haiku By Ku
  32. Daily Prompt: Who wants to be normal? | Jane’s Journal
  33. The normalcy of being a Geek | Geek Ergo Sum
  34. This face is… | Sad Magic
  35. Daily Prompt : Forever Normal | The Bluebird of Happiness 幸福
  36. What is normal? | AnxiousElephant
  37. Daily Prompt: The Normal | The Educated Illiterates
  38. Normal is GOOD | Going New Places!
  39. How did I miss THIS one? | Eyes Through The Glass – A Blog About Asperger’s
  40. Normal equals boring. « kiyudesu
  41. Normal | Cytherean Dreams
  42. The worst day of my life, nothing will be normal again | Lewis Cave
  43. Normality is just an illusion | Spunky Wayfarer
  44. Daily Prompt: The Normal – Like Any Other | SERENDIPITY
  45. The Daily Prompt: The Normal – Pack Response | Required Writing
  46. Daily Prompt: The Normal « samidare reprise
  47. The Pain of the Entrepreneur | Sandra Harriette’s Blog
  48. Akin to killing? | MindBlur
  49. Strangely Strange But Oddly Normal | Clive’s Blog
  50. Normality Will Resume Shortly | Tony’s Texts
  51. We need to be abnormal to find normal in life… (Daily Prompt) | The Rider
  52. Daily Prompt: The Normal | My Endless Rants & Ramblings
  53. You are the Chosen One | Start My Quest
  54. What Is Normal? | Fish Of Gold
  55. Same Me – Same Normal Daily Prompt: The Normal | New Lease–Same Hope
  56. Normality Snormality | Fish Of Gold
  57. reading backwards | The paradox of a zedonk
  58. Daily Prompt: The Normal | Left to Write
  59. Without Fail | It’s a wonderful F’N life
  60. The Normal: | Khana’s Web
  61. The Normal: Mr. & Mrs. Normal | Khana’s Web
  62. Effortless, The Pictures They Paint | Here’s My Heart & Here’s My Mouth
  63. Daily Prompt: The Normal | The corner of my imagination
  64. Daily Prompt: The Normal | The Tarot Alchemist
  65. Daily Prompt: Normal/Staying in Focus | Staying in Focus
  66. The formality of reality is never normality… | EW Brown
  67. Departure From The Norm | Daily Prompt: The Normal | Words From The Desk Of An Insomniac
  68. We Have Normality! | Sincerely, Ms. Roberts
  69. One Million Billionth Of A Millisecond On A Sunday Morning | a former clarity
  70. Daily Prompt – The Normal | bambangpriantono

Chilled Soba Salad

Cold soba salad served with a couple slices of barbecued tofu.

Cold soba salad served with a couple slices of barbecued tofu.

So quick and easy!

  • Thin soba noodles cooked al dente
  • 1 bunch of raw, washed watercress, cut in half
  • sliced white onions
  • roasted red pepper
  • dressing of choice

The roasted pepper is easy squeasy. Turn on your burner if you have a gas stove and put a whole cleaned red pepper over a low flame. Turn the pepper occasionally to get all sides blackened. Put your roasted pepper in a paper bag and let it sweat. Then peel and slice—mmm good! No gas stove? Try the broiler.

I made my dressing with juice of two lemons, some umeboshi vinegar (a salty and sour vinegar made from a pickled plum—typically a Japanese condiment), some toasted sesame oil, some mirin and some garlic.

Toss it all together and chill. Takes about 10 mins.

Don’t have or don’t like these ingredients? No worries! Substitute with whatever sounds good to you and enjoy.

Can We Effectively ‘Vote with Our Dollars?’

I’m not one to be super critical of products and companies on this blog and I’m going to put as positive a spin on it as I possibly can. But I ran into something recently that was quite a wake-up call for me and I’m going to share this with you.

It used to be that if you were vegetarian or macrobiotic or into eating whole grains, rice cakes were the standby snack food. Plain, slathered with peanut butter or apple butter, or perhaps with hummus, rice cakes made an extremely innocent little snack that didn’t harm anything or anybody.

Claude loves rice cakes with toasted sesame tahini and sauerkraut. Moi aussi, Claude, me too!

Claude loves rice cakes with toasted sesame tahini and sauerkraut. Moi aussi, Claude, me too!

Today there are many brands of rice cakes. Most notably in my supermarket I see Quaker brand. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Aren’t they the oatmeal people? Rice cakes have been a natural expansion of their product line for years.

Fine. They are an industrial food manufacturer, very mainstream and it is not surprising to find that several of their rice cakes have sugar and a bunch of other stuff that I wouldn’t feed to a dog. No surprise there.

What about a well-respected organic food company that has been farming high-quality organic brown rice for us since 1937? This is a company I have relied on for the mainstay of my diet for decades. I’m talking about Lundberg Farms. When my kids were young and I had a house full of students and recipients of my homecooked meals, I bought Lundberg Organic Short Grain Brown Rice by the 50-pound bag—just about every other week! (Yes, I did a ridiculous amount of cooking back then and I loved it.)

I also bought their rice cakes. My favorite is the Mochi Sweet Rice but I also like several of the others. These make very substantial snacks. In fact, the bags are surprisingly heavy because, as the company brags, they are made with twice as much rice as other brands. And sure, I know that “caramel” and “cinnamon toast” rice cakes and some others are likely to have sugar in them and I never bought those.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is, I used to be able to pick my flavor of rice cake and just toss it into my cart. I didn’t have to give it a second thought. These were Lundberg’s after all. I could count on them to be high quality, fine products.

A couple of weeks ago I was shopping and I saw two flavors of Lundberg Rice Cakes that were new to me: Organic Hemp-a-licious and Organic koku seaweed. I picked the sea weed one because I have been conscienciously adding more sea vegetables to my diet lately.

The Lundberg line-up including Hemp-a-licious, which I thought I might try.

The Lundberg line-up at Whole Foods Market.

“Hmm.” I thought, “these are pretty sweet. How come?”

How come. HOW COME? Hello! . . .  Because they have cane sugar in them!

If this doesn’t shock you, believe me I understand. The quality of food in our so-called healthy foods stores is rapidly spiralling in the wrong direction. I read food labels no matter where I’m shopping. I just didn’t think I had to read this one on the Lundberg Rice Cakes.

But I sure should have. I threw the seaweed rice cakes out. Actually, seaweed can help your body get rid of things like excess dairy and can help you re-balance your body when you have been eating sugar. BUT NOT IF THERE IS SUGAR RIGHT THERE IN IT!

Cane sugar in seaweed rice cakes!  Are you kidding me?  Eldon and Harlan Lundberg must be rolling in their graves!

I checked out some other flavors in the Lundberg lineup to see if they had sugar, too. Several did—such as the Organic Hemp-A-Licious. Guess I won’t be trying that one after all, boys. Organic Sesame Tamari? It has sugar and it didn’t used to. Organic Sweet Chile Rice Cakes? Yup, it has sugar and brown rice syrup. (What is the point of that? Can someone please explain?)

There are also some flavors that still do not have any cane syrup in them, but they are in the minority these days down on ol’ Lundberg Farms.

I’m disappointed in the Lundbergs, no doubt about it. But I am also going to continue to buy their excellent products that I consider worth eating like their organic rice, their organic brown rice syrup and their rice cakes that don’t have sugar in them. Ultimately, I can do without the rice cake and stick with the whole grain brown rice.

After all, Lundberg Farms has played a very big role in promoting organic, sustainable farming and they still do. They have done as much for the expansion of the natural food industry as most any other company. They take a stand against GMO’s and I applaud them for that. Perhaps they figure a little sugar in some of the rice cakes to keep the bottom line from crashing is a price worth paying in order to continue holding the line against powerful enemies like Monsanto.

Well I don’t agree. Tell the Lundberg boys they are sliding down a slippery slope—the slope that places profit over quality. But actually, WHO is sliding down that slope?

Is it Lundberg Farms? Or is it us? Would it be a good idea to boycott this company for putting cane syrup in their rice cakes? Or would it be better to not buy those particular products and continue buying their fine, organic, sugarless, rice products? Should we “pick our battles” as they say? Or have we underestimated the hold the sugar industry has on us and our economy?

You tell me. I, for one, will continue to vote with my dollars. But it is a tricky business. I go in my Whole Foods store and week after week they have discontinued items I bought regularly and they have filled the shelf space with new products, many of which I will never buy because of what’s in them. They do this because these products are “what sell,” explains the Customer Service representative. I get it. There’s only so much space on the shelf and they have got to move their inventory and make a profit.

I wouldn’t want a company like Lundberg Farms or Whole Foods to go out of business. Then where would we be? I have been putting in more time to shop at the smaller health food chains and a local co-op that often have some of those hard-to-find products and I try to find time to go to local grower’s markets when they’re open. My voting dollar has a little more power in these smaller arenas, I feel.

But I do have the ability to do more than vote with my dollar and so do you! I also “vote” with my voice, my blog and any other appropriate communication channel. I talk to someone at Whole Foods customer service frequently. I tell them what the problem is and sometimes they bring something back onto the shelf that is of far better quality than what they had. Sometimes I talk to other shoppers. Most of them are in there because they do want to eat healthier food and they simply don’t know their way around yet.  I’ve helped a few and have learned a lot myself from doing that.

At the end of the day, I don’t know how much difference my actions will make. But that doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying. Been doing this since my childhood days as a member of the United Farm Workers Union.

I am putting my shoulders to the wheel with a lot of other individuals who have already made a big difference and we are going to just keep going! The question I first asked was, Can We Effectively ‘Vote with Our Dollars?’  Yes, if enough of us get busy telling the story so we have lots of votes.

And, I am going to write a letter to those wayward Lundberg brothers.

Lars prefers yummy jam on his rice cakes. Mmm, Cherry jam is a good choice, Lars!

Lars prefers yummy jam on his rice cakes. Mmm, Cherry jam is a good choice, Lars!

Where I Live

New Mexico resonates with me. I happily dance along its many harmonics as if it is an old familiar place filled with people I’ve known for a very long time.

I’ve lived in New Mexico for three years.

1940NewMexico

I was reading a friend’s blog—she is very funny—about being accused of being a hipster. One comment there inspired my comment which got a couple of replies all of which has nothing to do with anything except I was considering another reply/comment of my own having to do with being understandably confused since I live along the famous-and-we-aren’t-going-to-let-you-forget-it-EVER Route 66.

I was only trying to be clever and had no actual point to make about it so I didn’t post that comment. But I started thinking about Route 66 and living in an area where hundreds of small businesses play on that theme. Neon signs. Malt shops. Classic cars. You name it, if it’s “’50′s” many Albuquerquian business folks love to decorate with it, neon-ize it, or hang it up next to a poster of Elvis. I’m sure Route 66 is dotted all across the country with this kind of thing.

Neon Business Sign

Neon Business Sign

Don’t get me wrong. I happen to like ’50′s nostalgia especially when it comes to kitchens. I might love having a beautifully restored, bright “neon red” Wedgewood with four burners. a griddle, two ovens and storage drawers! (This, my friends, is the mycookinglife connection in this post.)

Oooooh Baby! This is a red Wedgewood.

Oooooh Baby! This is a red Wedgewood.

Here in New Mexico we have quite a dichotomy going. On the one hand we have a fascinating rich and varied culture of Native American tribes, cities twice as old as the country itself, and a tradition brought here by Spanish and Mexican peoples who traveled the Camino Royale—Royal Road—bringing arts, culture, gold, education and livingness. The spirituality in this state, present in so many different forms, is so rich you can scoop it up with your hands and cleanse yourself with it.

In contrast this state is ground zero for all things nuclear. Los Alamos. Atom bombs. White Sands Missle Range. Carved out mountains holding nuclear armament. This is the very invention that can wipe all of us and all our culture, art and spirituality right out.

What do you do with a situation like that? There are many answers apparently. Spirituality, art, culture and living traditions abound over here. They loom very large and make a powerful stand to not only survive, but thrive! I camp out here. I help this survive and expand.

Very soon we can, if “we” can afford it, get outta town—way, way outta town—and get a fresh perspective on things. We’ve got the Spaceport Authority of New Mexico to thank for that. Spaceport America is located in the Jornada del Muerto desert basin in Southern New Mexico. Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is not alone at the spaceport. There’s SpaceX, UP Aerospace (Is United Parcel planning uber-fast package delivery I wondered? No, that would be “UPS”) and Armadillo Aerospace. Commercial space travel is the coming thing. That is pretty creative!

Even the Spaceport has a little neon touch. The first flight is scheduled for Christmas Day. I wonder if it's booked?

Even this conceptual image of the Spaceport has a little neon touch. The first flight is scheduled for Christmas Day. I wonder if it’s booked?

We can try to live a normal, standard American life and ignore the rest. But thank goodness the city of Albuquerque is one of the few places I’ve seen where the unique characteristics of the region haven’t been totally overwhelmed into oblivion by a blanket of fast food and retail chains that homogenize an area to look like any other area of the country. There are still a lot of independent businesses here and a lot of local traditions present and visible.

And, we can be Route 66 people and put neon signs up.

You can get your kicks at Route 66 Casino & Hotel

You can get your kicks at Route 66 Casino & Hotel

Welcome to Albuquerque!

Neon doesn’t have to be ’50′s nostagia. It can be aesthetic, modern, even futuristic. Welcome to Albuquerque!

New Mexico is called the "Land of Enchantment." Can you see why? The best kind of neon is natural neon!

New Mexico is called the “Land of Enchantment.” Can you see why? The best kind of neon is natural neon!