Catwalks

So I was thinking about the Evansville stockyards on my drive into work this morning.

When I was a kid, sometimes Grampa would take us with him when he took hogs into town to the stockyards.  These trips are among my earliest memories; we were still living in the trailer, and we moved out of the trailer when I was three.  I'm realizing that most of my earliest memories are tied to one geographic location, which is more or less where the trailer stood.

Anyway, the stockyards.  I don't remember the stockyards themselves, rather than just Grampa's old red truck with the high-sided back that he used for hauling hogs into town, until I'm maybe six or so.  The stockyards had loading docks for trucks to back up to, then a series of interconnected holding pens to move the hogs up to the scales as they became available, as well as some walkways.  Over the pens, up in the rafters, there were catwalks.

We (us kids) didn't always go up in the catwalks.  I think it depended how long Grampa had to wait for the hogs to get to the scales and get paid.  I don't even remember how us going up in the catwalks got started, but we weren't sneaking around, just keeping busy.  You could wander over most of the stockyards via the catwalks, which I think were accessed by stairs from the scales office.  It was a bit of a maze, and we got kind of lost over the cattle half of the stockyards once, prior to which it hadn't occurred to me that the stockyards were for more than hogs.  Sometimes to keep going you had to jump a gap of a few feet, which seemed quite far when you're six or eight.

A lot of random memories are tied into the stockyard trips.  The vending machine at one of the feed stores that had grape soda of a brand no one else carried.  Stopping at a gas station (now closed) for candy based partly on how much Grampa had gotten for the hogs.  Spilling a whole package of Sixlets in the truck.

The stockyards closed sometime in the 1990s, a victim of the city having grown up around it, the declining local livestock economy, and probably other factors that I wasn't aware of at the time.  Grampa died in 1998, about five months before I met my now-husband and graduated from high school.  Experiences like this probably fed into various parts of my personality, but at this point in time what I'm wondering most is, who's going to take my niece exploring, and where?

Old Family Recipes

This is what it looks like outside today:

That's the fish pond over there on the left, with the bubblers to keep it oxygenated.  So I figured today would be the day to make the nut roll.

Okay, it's six nut rolls, but still.

This recipe comes from my mom's grandmother Aunt Jo and is Croatian in origin.  The theme:  I need bigger bowls:

Proof three packets of yeast, you say?  The bowl was full-full by the time I was ready to add it to the mixture, and I put the plate under it just in case it spilled over in the meantime.

So yeah, you start with proofing three packets of yeast with a teaspoon of sugar and half a cup of warm water.  But really you start with putting two pounds of pecans (or walnuts, but pecans are better) in the food processor, one pound at a time if your food processor is small like mine.  You run them through that till they're finely ground, then put them in a bowl with a cup of sugar and a cup of brown sugar.  I had to up-size that bowl, too.  They can sit like that while you get the rest of the stuff ready, but you're eventually going to add a stick of melted better and half a can of evaporated milk or so.

Back to the dough.

So you put eight cups of flour in a big bowl. I used the biggest bowl I've got, a giant Pyrex mixing bowl, and I really wanted a bigger one.  Add to that a cup of sugar and a half a teaspoon of salt, and then cut in a pound of butter.

Yes, I've already mentioned five sticks of butter at this point.  Apologies to everyone I know who's trying to lose (or keep off) weight.

Once you've got the flour mixture crumbly, add the yeast mixture, a can of evaporated milk (12 oz.), and six egg yolks.  At this point it's really easier to mix with your hands, and you're going to knead it all together until the dough comes off both your hands and the bowl.  You may need to add a bit more flour.  The recipe says you can refrigerate the dough overnight if needed, but I've never seen anyone not just roll it out straight away.

Now you're going to go back and finish mixing the nut mixture; add the melted stick of butter and half a can of evaporated milk, and then add as much more of the milk as you need to get the mixture spreadable.

Divide the dough into six parts.  Roll one part out into about a nine by twelve inch rectangle and spread with a sixth of the nut mixture.

Roll it up long-ways and put it on a greased (or lined) cookie sheet.  Mom fits three on a pan somehow, but I went with two.

These are going to bake at 350F for thirty to thirty-five minutes; ten minutes before they're done, you brush them with an egg glaze (one egg plus two tablespoons of water) and then bake until they're golden.  Accept that they're going to split; I don't know yet how to prevent this, but I suspect it has to do with the yeast, so different a rolling tightness or possibly even just cookie sheets without sides might make a difference.

The nice thing about pan lining paper is you can just kinda slide it off the pan onto the counter once they've cooled a bit.

If you're going to eat it right away, dust the top with powdered sugar.  Otherwise you can wrap them in plastic wrap, then foil, then put them in freezer bags to freeze.

The recipe as I've got it from Mom:

Croation Nut Roll from Millie Krilich (note: I don't actually know who Millie Krilich is, since that wasn't my Mom's grandma Mom said Millie was the friend Aunt Jo got the recipe from - she tried a bunch of them, and this was the one she liked best)

First - mix 3 pkgs. dry yeast in 1/2 cup warm water in a small warm bowl & add 1 tsp. sugar & set this aside while you're mixing the items below:
Use large mixing bowl - cut together

• 8 cups flour
• 1 lb. butter or margarine
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp. salt

When you've got the mixture above crumbly, add:

• 1 can Milnot (evaporated milk)
• 6 egg yolks
• & the yeast mixture

Knead to a nice smooth dough.  Add more flour if necessary.  You can knead right in the bowl till it leaves fingers and bowl.  Or knead on floured place on table.

Cover bowl & refrigerate over night or you can roll out immediately.

Divide into 6 balls.  Roll out to about a 9 x 12 inch size (approximately).  Spread filling (ingredients below) on rolled out dough.  Roll with finger tips to make a tight, small roll.  Bake on greased cookie sheet at 350 degrees (usually can fit three to a sheet) for about 35 minutes.  10 minutes before they are done, brush with the following glaze: 1 egg beaten with 2 T water.  Put back in oven till light browned.

Mix:

• 2 lbs walnuts or pecans (ground fine)
• 1 c. white sugar
• 1 c. brown sugar

Add 1 stick of melted margarine or butter.  Mix in 1/2 can Milnot and stir.  Add more Milnot until mixture spreads easily.

Generational

I don't like to admit it, but technically, I'm a millennial. Generation Y, if you will. The early end of it, but still, by most accounts, in the range.

I think the biggest reason I have trouble associating myself with the generation I was born during is because I didn't have helicopter parents. I was allowed to become my own person, and although I grew up close to my family, I talk to my mom maybe once a week. I'm sure if we lived closer, we'd spend more time together - I have fun parents and siblings - but given the distance and my problems with telephones (one of those random phobias), we don't talk daily. (Unless we're logged into World of Warcraft at the same time. Yeah, everyone but my dad plays.)

I got married when I was 20. I moved out of state - not away to college, but away - when I was 19. I'm not sure I ever actually told my parents that I was transferring colleges and moving in with my then-fiance (now husband); I just kind of... did. Once I met him and fell in love, all my future planning became "us" and not in the context of my up-to-then nuclear family. Looking back it was a huge shift in how I thought, but at the time I didn't even realize it had happened.

I'm not a group-work person. I work okay in a group, but I don't naturally gravitate to them. (This is to me somewhat ironic - I am a solo-player by nature, perfectly content to do my own thing and observe the world around me, and then my husband gets me into a guild in WoW and, four years later, I'm running it.) It does make mingling kind of difficult - I'm a listener and observer by nature. Small talk (and eye contact) don't come naturally to me. (And no, Mom, I don't think I have Asperger's, I'm just one of those introverts who spends more time analyzing than experimenting in the social realm.)

Multi-tasking - oh, yeah. I have nine windows and/or tabs open right now. Normally there would be more, but I'm not on my own computer. But I'm very easily distracted by loud noises or flashing colors, and I can't write a paper with music playing. I turn off all the screen-edge flash kind of visual warnings in WoW, because they distract me. Busy webpages bother me. I have six icons on my desktop at home (and the background picture is, as it has been for about ten years, the front cover of Dark Side of the Moon).

Web 2.0 stuff I'm kind of hit or miss on - I'm on Facebook, I have a couple Twitter accounts (it seems like the WoW-related one is the one I'm most likely to use), I sporadically blog. But being an introvert, the whole social part of social networking doesn't quite click for me. I sign up, and then... I mostly read what other people post. Web 1.0 I got into more - a couple web pages, way too many Gmail accounts. Oh, yeah... and then there's WoW.

But the younger people in this millennial generation - the ones who don't understand the original Star Wars, who don't get the references from Wrath of Khan, who just don't know about the pop culture I know best... (Yeah, so, I was born in 1980, and somehow missed out on most of Michael Jackson's post-"Jackson 5" music - still haven't figured out how I managed that.) Since my parents were in high school and college in the 70s, that's the era's music that I grew up with... sort of. When I was in 6th grade I got my first radio. I listened to two stations - the oldies staion (50s/60s/70s rock) and the classical station (classical & NPR). Yeah. I didn't really discover 80s rock until I was 19 or so. (Like... U2. How did I not know U2?)

The long and short of it is that despite being born in the bounds of the millennial generation, I don't feel like I fit into all these stereotypes I see pushed as a librarian on a college campus. "Millennials learn like this, socialize like this, etc." None of them ever seem to apply to me. The technology stuff, sure, but between the learning types (face it, lecture with note-taking works for me) and the pop culture differences, I just feel out of place.

Woot!

My brother (well, one of the two) is officially engaged!

Yay!

Happy 30th, Mom & Dad!

Genealogy

So the BBC had an article - War records reveal America's past - about Ancestry.com uploading a bunch of old U.S. military records, and that access was going to be free for a couple months.  So I punched in the somewhat uncommon last name in its old spelling and came up with a Civil War entry.  I'd heard rumors of that, but I'm not sure whether it's the right one or not - there were a couple Jacobs with that last name in the area, apparently.  The National Parks service maintains the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System, which has the information, too.