Pet Birds and Apple Pie

My mom had parakeets when I was a kid. If my memory isn’t playing tricks on me she had them trained to do amazing things. Well, maybe not amazing but I do know she could make a sound with her tongue and they’d fly across the room to land on her outstretched finger. Mom was a tee drinker and I have a couple of photos of her with a tea cup in her hand and a bird or two perched on the edge of the cup. It’s a wonder she didn’t get sick with salmonella bacteria drinking from a cup that bird feet had been walking around. Maybe she did and it got blamed on handling raw chicken.

Why am I trying so hard to remember Petie the Parakeet and his side-kick whatever her name was? Because it dawned on me that in my Post-Levi-the-Mighty-Schnauzer era I should explore other options for a pet besides dogs. Anything that is living, trainable and depends on me might be enough to make me feel needed, and if some other kind of animal has a shorter life span and a lower price tag than a puppy all the better. I allergic to cats, rabbits and horses so those are out of the running. I’m not fond of Guinea pigs, gerbils or ferrets. Pet rats or snakes would have me boarding up the windows and running away from home. I had tropical fish at one point in my life and all the water bubbling in the tank at my age would have me peeing too often.

Narrowing my search down I landed on Domestic Canaries and Zebra Finches and what it takes to keep them as pets. Both are said to wake you up by singing an ode to the sun and if that got too annoying I could just fry them up for dinner. JUST KIDDING! Canaries have been bred in captivity and caged since the 17th century so if there’s a protest group out there wanting to free all the breeders’ birds they should know that pet store birds are not the same as wild birds and probably couldn’t fend for themselves in the great outdoors. Or am I just buying into the bird breeders’ publicity campaigns? Either way, they have a lot of positives to recommend them for a senior companion. They supposedly are curious about what their humans are doing, smart, will sing back and forth to the birds outside your window, can be left alone for two days if you want a weekend get-away, and they can sit outside with you on your deck during nice weather. “Hi, neighbor! Whatcha got in the cage?” 

Another selling point---at least for me---is that the only vet in town who treats sick birds is located close by where I’ll be moving. Before Levi died I worried about moving so far away from the dog and cat ER here in town. And just to add another point on my list in favor of getting a canary is the fact that my grandfather was a coal miner during an era when they actually used them to test the quality of the air down there. I could give one of their descendants a better life than working in a coal mine. There's that screwball logic of mine again.

Another reason to consider a bird is the canaries only cost $25 to $200. Zebra Finches are $25 to $100. Cages aren’t a huge investment either, but when I looked at used cages on Facebook Market Place---not that I'd buy a used cage and maybe bring a bird virus home along with it---I was shocked at how many were listed. Does that mean I’m not the only one who gets excited by their birds-as-pets research then they lost interest down the road and have used that fry-them-up-for-dinner option? AGAIN, just kidding! Both these species of birds only live five to seven years, sometimes ten. Heck, by then I’d probably forget to feed whatever kind of pet I end up with which makes it too bad these birds can’t "sing" like a tomcat when its hungry or horny. A parrot could be taught to cry like a cat for its food but I’m grossed out every time I see someone walking around with a parrot on their shoulder and bird diarrhea running down the back of their shirt. I see them often in the summer which---come to think about it---makes me wonder if I’m really only seeing one person who happens to travel in the same radius as I do, whose face I couldn’t pick out in a lineup because I’m so focused on that poopy shoulder. And parrots are creepy if you look them in the eye!

Anyway, to wrap this up I invested a whole day studying pet bird care and training and I am/was still open to the idea until I googled how to clean a birdcage and found out the best way is to use bleach on them once a week. Bummer! I'm highly allergic to bleach. When I get my second Covid-19 vaccine, I'll be near a store that sells live birds so I'll stop by, ask a few questions, see if I can smell some of the commercial cage cleaning sprays. Over this past few days I've talked myself into a canary and depending on what I learn at the bird store I may have talk myself back out of the idea. Ya, if you're still reading this post and aren't fed up with my pet dilemma by now you can expect the topic might pop up again as I work through trying to fill the silence Levi's death left behind in the house.

New Topic: I baked my first apple pie since I helped my mom back before my teens. It wasn’t exactly a pie because I donated my pie tins to Goodwill thinking I’d never use them, but if I’m anything I’m good at research so I consulted Mr. Google to learn how to make a pie without a pan. Tip for the day: a cookie sheet and parchment paper. The only reason why I attempted this feat of Womanhood is because last fall a lady who lives down the block and around the corner walked to my house to give me a bag of fresh picked apples. I don’t like raw apples but it seemed rude to turn them down after she’d carried the heavy bag all that way to my house. I’m not replacing things in my pantry when I run out because of my upcoming move so in my pie I substituted almond flavoring for vanilla, and Truvia for real sugar. (I’ll be using that bag of Truvia for the rest of my life but it was the only "sugar" available back when the pandemic started.) My end product looked more like strudel, but it taste great and held together in slices better than a lot of pies at potlucks. I never want to have that many apples in the house again, though. It was too much pressure. I can't throw food away, the waste would make me feel too guilty. But they kept reminding me of how often I had to sit at the dinner table until bedtime when I didn't want to eat what my mom was serving---most notably, liver night once a week. One pie and a batch of apple sauce cured my apple problem. It's spring, they had to go! ©

 

 

 

Male American Singing Canaries are bred for their singing abilities and are happy to live as low maintenance bachelors. You can't put two males together or they fight and if you put a male and female together they make babies easily. Two females will sing but not make up long songs like the males.

According to what I've read this little guy is a great starter bird but I don't like the implication of the term 'starter bird.' I've heard of old ladies who keep adding cats to their households. Are there old ladies who keep adding birds to their home? Could I become the Bird Lady in Building One?

Baking Classes and Pink Stoves

I had a whole post prepared for my mid-week commitment to this blog but during the proof-reading stage I got to wondering if I’d written about some of the same stuff in the past. So off I went to my “search this blog” feature and sure enough I’d already told the story about the house my husband bought just before we met that came with a pink kitchen stove and how he promptly hauled it off to the dump after his buddies teased him about having a bachelor pad with a pink stove---it was 1970 and guys didn’t do pink back in those days. I’d only seen that decked out GE one time but it was memorable and worth a second mention. For any new readers, though, I should say that he never replaced that stove the entire time he lived there. If his kitchen didn’t have a coffee pot and a door going out to his garage he wouldn’t have known the house even had a room that was supposedly used to prepare and eat food in. 

I haven’t spent a lot of time in kitchens over my lifetime either and with the “search this blog” feature I discovered that I’ve also written about how when I was a teenager my mom would stress out over my lack of interest in learning to cook. Whenever the subject came up I was like a parrot repeating, “If you can read, you can learn to cook. When I need to learn, I will.” Later on in my twenties when I still wasn’t married with a few kids to feed, I switched to saying, “I’m looking for a man who can cook or has the money to eat out all the time.” I found the latter. 

Our senior hall offers a lot of cooking classes and you’d think they wouldn’t be popular, given the fact that most of my peers have spent a life time cooking for families. I don’t take many of those classes but this week’s class on baking caught my eye. It was taught by a Le Cordon Bleu Paris trained pastry chef and I took it mostly because you get to eat what is demonstrated. The class was billed as one that would teach us how to make easy desserts for our holiday buffets from “rich, melt-in-your-mouth chocolate cakes with dark chocolate ganache to nutritious dried fruit/nut/chocolate clusters.” Heck, I had to ask Alexa what a ganache is; that’s how little I know my way around the world of baking. By the time the registration was closed they had filled up four baking classes of twenty-five each with a waiting list should anyone cancel. The senior hall recently bought a 5 x 12 foot, special overhead mirror for the cooking area so everyone can see inside the pans or bowls so it’s safe to say the cooking classes will remain on the calendar for a long time to come. 

The pastry chef who taught this class had been an emergency room doctor for twenty years before deciding to give it all up and go to Paris, France and Florence, Italy to get a degree in baking. I learned a lot like the fact that my kitchen is woefully understand stocked with gear and gadgets if I truly were interest in doing some baking. I don’t have the silicone tiny molds used for making bite-sized cakes, for example, or the bowl scrappers that she said are her favorite baking tools---she has five. And did you know that those silicone molds need to sit on wire racks placed on top of cookie sheets during the baking? (The wire racks helps to circulate the warm air around the molds for a more even baking.) We also learned tips for piping batter in the molds and why using a water bath is preferable for melting chocolate over doing it in a microwave. I also don’t have a food scale; it seems that professionals all weigh ingredients rather than measure. Good to know. 

I learned that chocolate ganache is to die-for and is made of heavy, boiled cream poured into soften chocolate---in a ratio of one part to one part for a medium weigh ganache. She gave us a chart that I lost on the way out of the building that broke down all the kinds of ganaches you can make by using different types of chocolate and ratios to the cream. But probably the most useful tip I learned is that she always sets her oven timer for half the time called for on a recipe at which point she turns the stuff in the oven---front to back and side to side. And for the remainder of the time she might turn the heat up or down depending on if the tops are browning too slow or fast in relationship to how the insides are baking. Many factors like the humidity in the air or the moisture of ingredients (like in fruits) can factor into baking times so you should expect to tweak the baking time for each batch of anything, even if you’d made it a million times. 

She asked for suggestions for future baking classes we’d like to see and I put in a request for one on scones and biscotti. Before this class I’d already decided I want to teach myself how to make them on days when I get snowed in this winter. My mom would be proud I'm taking an interest, finally, and if my old stove pukes out I might even consider getting a pink one. I hear retro is a hot trend right now. ©