Lasso my Heart & Big Love Cooking

It's what makes the world go round...

Photo by Laura Ockel on Unsplash

Most people would save a post about love for February. But my muse has always done her own thing. So here goes:

Shortly before the holidays, I fell madly in love.

As a writer of love stories, I’m a bit of a romantic. Still, this recent coup de foudre (overwhelming love at first sight), wasn’t at all like me. Especially since I didn’t fall for just one person. I fell for a whole bunch of people. Simultaneously.

Rebecca and Leslie, Roy and Keeley, and Jamie, Nate and Ted. Plus Sam, Issac and the irrepressible Dani “foootball eez life” Rojas. Of course I’m speaking of the TV series Ted Lasso.

Never did I ever imagine Ted Lasso would come out in DVD!

Now, most iconic popular culture stuff pretty much flies right past me. However, the show received so many accolades even I heard about it.

The characters and relationships sounded interesting enough that I figured I’d like the series—even though it’s set in the world of professional European football (or just football, as the rest of the world calls it), and I have zero interest in sports.

Yet never have I ever (yes, this does seem to be my year for “Never Have I Ever’s”) fallen so hopelessly for a TV show. I was enthralled. And each episode pulled me in even deeper.

Most days, as I ride my bike and chop wood and cook dinner, I’m thinking about the characters in the novel I’m writing.

But once my husband John and I began viewing Ted Lasso, my own characters deserted my creative pitch. (Or my playing field, as we say in the U.S.)

Instead, I would wonder about Ted and Rebecca and Sam and all the others throughout the day—considering their triumphs and setbacks, their frequent screw-ups and how they redeemed themselves—living for the moment when John and I would curl up on the couch each night to watch another episode.

What’s so intriguing is that for a sports-themed TV series, the game of football is only a sideline.

This fish-out-of-water and found family tale is actually about friendship and community: people who start out as grudging colleagues, then gradually begin to support, respect, inspire and heal each other.

There’s a romantic thread in the show, but the central focus is on the many ways men form a deep, lasting connection with—and love for—other men. It’s plenty “bromantic,” but not in a hipster kind of way. The connection, like Ted himself, is the genuine article.

Just a head’s up, though: In this show of so many F’s—football, friendship, found family, etc., you should know there’s a whole lot of other F’s in it: F-bombs.

Such a massive number, in fact, that if it was any other show/film/book, I would press “off” or close it without a second’s thought—even if it was about love.

I could never have imagined that a story with so much profanity could have so much heart.

I was resigned to never viewing it, since streaming shows rarely come out in DVD. Then recently, I discovered the powers that be had wised up (i.e., that not everyone has high-speed internet), and I could borrow it from my library!

John and I will assuredly buy our own copy—and I think I’ll make watching the series over the holidays an annual thing. During the season of love, what’s better than lots more of it?

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To paraphrase the legendary footballer Dani Rojas, Food is Love is Cooking is Life

If you’re someone who cooks, did you have a cooking/baking mentor or coach? A Ted Lasso?

Reading an uplifting story about how a professional home chef learned to cook, I was immediately curious about other people. So in a recent post, I posed the question, “How did you learn to cook?”

The question turned me into a bit of a detective, investigating my own cooking past…And now, the second installment of “How Did You Learn to Cook?”

I left off Part 1 with my first true food revelation at 14: my aunt’s lasagne. You may wonder, how did I hit my early teens without tasting anything really extraordinary?

Easy answer: in my family, meals were just so plain and uninspiring.

Despite my dad’s uber-sweet tooth, when it came to savory food, he preferred super- basic. In my childhood, dinners consisted of one piece of meat (ham, plain pork chop, Swiss steak) and one piece only, plus a baked potato and a spoonful of cooked vegetables.

(Side note: It was always red meat because Dad didn’t like chicken. Family legend has it that as a youth, spending his summers helping with the wheat harvest on his grandmother’s farm, Dad had to eat chicken every night. Still, his chicken aversion was so strong I wonder if he was also the designated chicken butcher.)

Anyway. Around the time of my lasagne epiphany, my mom started grad school, and turned dinner-making over to my dad. His meals were every bit as plain as the ones of yore had been: sausages or hamburgers with canned baked beans.

Or his four-ingredient chili: one pound ground beef, one can tomato sauce, one can kidney beans, and one heaping spoon of chili powder.

As you’ve guessed, there wasn’t any family dish or meal that made me want to cook. So I was probably primed to glom on to the first cooking mentor that came along.

I discovered my own Ted Lasso, not on the pitch of big love football, but in the kitchen of my first mother-in-law. She brought me into the world of big love cooking.

When I began dating the boy I later married, his mother was feeding a husband and four teenagers on a limited budget. They all had big appetites—honest to God, I had never seen people eat so much—and she cooked everything from scratch.

When my own family was becoming pretty fractured, she took me under her wing. While my boyfriend, and later husband, was in the Navy, I took on the role of sous-chef, working alongside her, peeling carrots and potatoes, and chopping onions.

I’ve always thought of her as a real power home cook. After a long day at work, she’d whip up navy bean or split pea soup with a ham hock, fried chicken or beef stew, both accompanied with homemade biscuits made with Crisco. She could transform a package of hamburger into spaghetti with meat sauce or cabbage rolls.

Then there was her “American lasagne.” It was basically beef-a-roni, hamburger cooked with tomatoes and macaroni, and of course it didn’t hold a candle to my aunt’s traditional lasagne. Yet like all her dishes, it was flavorful, and there was always enough for seconds and even thirds.

Despite her very small kitchen, she made three-tiered wedding cakes from scratch for every cousin and grandchild, all held together with lots of luck, and frosting that, like her biscuits, was mostly Crisco.

One blistering Fourth of July, she decided to put on a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. And she wasn’t going to let any 100 degree weather mess with her plan. While I helped, wilting from the heat, she got that turkey roasted, potatoes mashed, green beans casseroled, and biscuits and pies baked.

Even if she didn’t formally teach me to cook, through the years working by her side, I learned all about creating fairly nourishing meals on a budget. While my daughters were growing up, I came up with a similar repertoire of hearty, low-cost meals cooked from scratch.

Of course, everyone’s food preferences and cooking styles evolve over time, and I’m no exception. Such as a zero-tolerance policy for Crisco, and John and I buy almost all organic food.

True, I've pretty much abandoned her cooking style. Still, like Ted Lasso dispensing non-football wisdom, she provided positive life lessons for me, like being thrifty and making the best of things. And staying strong despite setbacks.

Big Red

Besides my dear MIL, I’ve had one other baking muse in my adult life: the big red Betty Crocker cookbook.

Although I saved a couple of my favorite pages, the cookbook itself disappeared during one of my many moves.

All that remains of my Betty Crocker cookbook

Still, one of Betty’s recipes lives on.

Her shortbread.

This simple combo of flour, butter and sugar is mouth-wateringly delicious. Betty Crocker baked goods are, if memory serves, about 75% sugar. Yet surprisingly, the shortbread recipe has the lowest amount of sugar of any I’ve come across.

What’s more, this cookie has stood the test of time. For decades, I’ve made at least one batch of Betty’s shortbread over the holidays. Given all the butter in it, this shortbread is my ultimate treat for myself—although I always bake enough to give away as gifts.

And like Ted Lasso’s shortbread love offering to his boss Rebecca, I give my shortbread only to the people I love most.

How did you learn to cook? I’d love to hear about it!

For the Love of Bee Balm…and Bees

It’s been a strange winter.

As of mid-January, we haven’t yet had a killing frost. With the soil still workable, I’ve embarked on a rather ambitious garden project: digging up a bed of invasive Black-eyed Susan.

I’ve been putting off this chore for years—years!—but it just floated up to priority status. We need to bury the cable for our upgraded internet satellite dish.

A future bed of bee balm

The easy way kill off this obnoxious perennial would be to simply cover the area with cardboard and leaves, and let the mulch do its thing. But hold your horses!

There’s still remnants of a once-thriving bed of bee balm in there—which used to be a hummingbird magnet.

So I’m excavating big clods of the Black-eyed Susan, then tearing it apart to look for the tender strands of fuchsia-pink bee balm roots.

So far, I’ve mined and repotted about 15 bee balm rootlets and/or tiny clumps. As delicate as the roots are, the plant is plenty winter-hardy, and I anticipate a once-again thriving bed of their red blossoms.

Here’s hoping our wild bees will enjoy it as much as I do!

If you’re a gardener, are you making progress on any winter projects?

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Thank you so much for reading, and a special thanks to my new subscribers! I appreciate all of you spending time at my Little Farm. If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll press the handy ❤️ button! Sending all my best to you for the New Year—

Warmly,

~Susan, from the Foothills