Clearly it was the name that first caught my attention. The name? “OWYN.” Remember our new little Cardigan Welsh Corgi is named Wynn. And we say, “Oh, Wynn!” a lot around here. Now maybe we’ll shorten it to OWyn. But is she – or this drink – “Only What You Need?” I doubt it.
Whether we need a Welsh Corgi is beside the point. We have her and we adore her.
Wynn – at 7 months – and Oakley – at 11 years
Whether we need to be drinking OWYN is another question.
I was curious what this OWYN drink was and why 5,827 Amazon members had given it an almost perfect 5 star rating. Here’s the company’s ad:
I won’t argue that this list of benefits and nutrition makes OWYN sound great; but I would argue that a fortified drink isn’t “Only What You Need.” I like to think we get our nutrition – our EAAs (essential amino acids) and protein and superfoods and Omega 3’s – from food that does more than just help us survive another day. I’d like to think that both preparing and consuming food can and should be a pleasurable experience.
Instead of mindlessly inhaling that supermarket/Amazon drink, how about making a quick and easy pasta dish – with sustainable tuna, organic spinach, and walnuts – and even anchovies, if you’d like. A few of you may say “YUCK” to the anchovies. You’ll want to check out more about “YUCK” in today’s Andy’s Corner.
As shown in the chart below, tuna, anchovies, spinach, and walnuts are great sources for Omega-3 Fatty Acids. And note: Omega-3’s have been shown to fight anxiety and depression. Sounds perfect for this Covid era!
If we weren’t such fans of cooking, we’d probably just squirt some of Wynn & Oakley’s fish oil supplement onto a store-bought salad to quickly and easily get our Omega-3’s (just kiddin’!).
As for picking a good sustainable tuna brand, here are two that are recommended by Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.
For today’s healthy, yummy WYNN-R (What You Need Now – Really) winner recipe, we’re pleased that its source is San Francisco’s legendary Judy Rodgers and her The Zuni Cafe Cookbook.
Descended from members of the original Donner Party
Used a line from a Yeats’ poem as the title for one of her books
Received her degree in English from Cal (otherwise known as Berkeley for those of us who didn’t grow up in Northern California)
Was a Barry Goldwater supporter
With her husband, wrote the screenplay for 1976’s A Star is Born, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson (I LOVE Kris Kristofferson!)
Wrote “You were meant, if you were a Californian, to know how to lash together a corral with bark, you were meant to show spirit, kill the rattlesnake, keep moving.”
Confessed to having a coke every morning before she started writing
Did you get it? If not, keep reading and I’ll divulge the name at the end of this blog :). If you didn’t get it, you’ve missed out on knowing about and enjoying the works of a really fascinating and complex writer.
Yeats’ poem is also worth highlighting, especially given the fact that he wrote it in 1919 – in the midst of the Spanish flu pandemic. Probably the most disturbing lines for us living through the last few years are these:
Yeats and Falcon
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…
My mystery author refers to this Yeats poem as she begins her famous essay:
The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.
It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the year 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco.
Upon re-reading those lines, I actually found them to be comforting. It’s easy to forget that we’ve had really hard times in the world before this Covid pandemic laid siege. And it’s an eye-opener that the author is describing the year Andy and I married – 1967 (not incidentally, that’s also the year Andy got drafted, as the Vietnam War got going). And just so you know – in today’s Andy’s Corner, we learn of Andy’s “connections” to the two main characters in one of this author’s most famous essays.
San Francisco – 1967
But on to less disturbing thoughts and more about California and rattlesnakes. We hadn’t lived in Glen Ellen, California very long before one of my new clients from my days as a gardener (remember MiniBlooms?) told me how years ago she had shot and killed a rattlesnake that had bitten her young son. I guess we native-born Coloradans aren’t nearly as tough as the best of these Californianos. The first and only time I confronted a rattlesnake, I screamed for Andy to come do something (Andy, of course, is a native-born Californian, so that explains his killer instincts when confronted with a snake).
And leaving rattlesnakes behind (thankfully), we can next consider the author’s suggestion that real Californians know they must keep moving. Hopefully, that won’t entail moving out of California (which is a headline practically every other day), but will entail moving forward, not stagnating, not letting pandemic morose overwhelm us.
My soon-to-be-named author used Coca Cola to get moving in the morning, so we’ve got a Coke recipe for you to try. Andy and I gave up drinking Coke years ago – and only buy it now when a certain family member arrives for a visit and requests it – though we adamantly and self-righteously refuse to buy Diet Coke or cans of Coke – and will only consider a bottle of Mexican Coke. But that doesn’t keep us from LOVING this cake. Crazy what a little Coke can do! (note: I said A LITTLE. I just read that Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) routinely drinks 10-12 bottles of Diet Coke…a day – and she’s in the news not only for her junk food addiction and her overuse of Ibuprofen but because she just had emergency surgery for ulcers).
So here’s a final hint for my mystery author quiz: she made a big deal about NOT drinking Diet Coke – yet she was incredibly – almost abnormally – thin.
And (I’m sure y’all already know) – The quote is from the essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” and my mystery author is Joan Didion. RIP
And just like that – 2021 is coming to an end. Whew. And Sex and the City has returned – rebooted and renamed And Just Like That.
I won’t be snarky and give you my assessment of this new versionof Sex and the City, but I am enjoying revisiting and falling in love again with the gorgeous song that concluded the 2008 movie of Sex and the City.
It’s New Year’s Eve and Carrie Bradshaw is dashing through the snow and cold (in her fancy fur coat and Chanel boots) to Miranda’s house so that neither will be alone at the strike of midnight – and we see all of the other SATC characters celebrating the approach of the New Year in their own special ways.
The scenes are fascinating – but it’s the music that makes it. Mairi Campbell, a Scottish singer, sings a version of “Auld Lang Syne” that is breathtakingly beautiful…so much lovelier than our standard version of the song.
This is Mairi Campbell singing her beautiful Auld Lang Syne – the same version as heard in the movie. Be sure to watch the video until the end. It’s so so sweet when the children join in.
Of course, hearing that song makes me think of old acquaintances (and in Andy’s Corner, Andy, upon hearing that song, has questions about it). Speaking of old (auld?) acquaintances, Janet, a special friend from college and my roomie during our 1st year out of college when we lived in Upland, California, just sent me a recipe from her Aunt Mable, whom I was lucky enough to meet when she visited us in Colorado Springs in 1966.
HBR stands for Hot-Buttered Rum! La duh. 🙂
When I asked Janet why her aunt had put (“Sh!”) beside the “HBR”, she asked Mable’s daughter, Ann, who recalled that their home state of Oklahoma had not ended prohibition until 1959, even though the U.S. had ended it in 1933! Ann wrote, “Mab certainly wouldn’t have wanted people to think she was pushing booze since it wasn’t legal in Oklahoma, so she put her finger to her lips and said, ‘shhhh.'”
And Ann continues, “I just finished using the recipe to ward off the chill of a dark and dreary early evening at my good house!“
So – just like that – we’re ready to toast to a new (and surely better) year – with Aunt Mable’s Hot Buttered Rum. It’s legal now…even in Oklahoma.
Here’s to old and new acquaintances – and to 2022!
