Pastrami Sandwich Pizza and Blonde

Mari

There is nothing quite like a sandwich pizza! My eyes were big as saucers when I saw the pickles, and since I have a lot of pickles in the fridge and cupboards, it seemed like a good omen. Way back when, I bought and ate a lot of pickles, but now that I have to watch my sodium intake, I rarely eat them. Unfortunately I was still buying them, and you know how that goes, so it’s nice to come across a recipe that everyone will like. Basically, pizza is a form of hot sandwich, and pickles are great with sandwiches, so there goes a small jar. Finally!
I’m all out of things to Stump The Chef with, and I am riding the insomnia bus again, so it’s time to be topical. It’s October, month of stiff breezes, eves crunching underfoot, and Halloween. Halloween means skeletons, witches, ghouls, vampires, and the ever popular ghosts. Scary movies are very rarely scary, but we keep trying because we like to be scared. It’s creepy, it’s fun, a d it gets the adrenaline going. It stops being fun when it really happens. Oddly enough, in reality, it isn’t all that frightening. It was horrible for my kids, but I can only think of one or two or three or fifty times when it was truly terrifying for me. This week’s ghost story isn’t all that scary, but it’s a bit eerie, and it sets the stage for two ther stories closer to Halloween.

Welcome to week one of Scare The Chef. In this anecdote, we had just moved to Minnesota and bought our first house in a suburb of Minneapolis. It was small and cozy and needed some work. When we bought it, the original owner had died and it took them two years to get the house sold. I was in a different state tying op loose ends and told my husband we needed two bathrooms and a big kitchen, and a working fireplace. The house he bought he had a fireplace tht didn’t work, and his idea of a big kitchen was not mine. It was the size of a large closet, and that was it, but it was pretty standard for the 20s, when the house was built. We settled in, and at first, things were quiet, although I laughingly told a. neighbor that the house got mad if I didn’t straighten it every day. She said her former neighbor was a clean freak, “but she was real nice.” Shortly after that the footsteps started. It was an old house, so one could just shrug it off as the house settling. But when the footsteps followed us around, and stopped when we did, it wasn’t the house. My husband liked to sit up late and watch TV. I would climb in bed with a book, and settle in. Within half an hour, the footsteps started and they stopped at the bed. Every night. The mattress went down as if someone were sitting next to me. Then I would feel a hand stroking my head, down to my shoulder. Then it went away. In the morning, I always woke up to a child’s voice tearfully calling for, “Mom! Mom!” That was the extent stent of it until the knocking started. I was always changing rooms and switching things up. At the time, my youngest son was using the upstairs bedrooms. He had a stereo, a guitar and pictures torn from rock magazines and they were taped and/or thumb tacked to the wall. He had complained about knocking noises and my husband dismissed it as being the wind. One day when my older son was home for the weekend. The boys were upstairs hanging out; suddenly there was loud yelling and a sound like a stampede. The boys were shaken. They said that something weird was going on. It was a nice spring day, and there were no fans or air conditioners running, and no furnace. It was just a lovely day and there was no wind. When I got upstairs, all the papers on the wall were flapping as if there were gale force winds, and the photos and articles were ripped off one by one and thrown on the floor. The tape was still stuck to the wall, and the thumb tacks were being thrown on the floor. Their covers and sheets from the beds were thrown on the floor. The beds had been made up when the boys ran downstairs. What would you have done? I always found that in general ghosts were pretty reasonable. I would tell them that it was their room amd we wouldn’t go into it. That actually worked most of the time. Until there was house where they were everywhere. In which case, I picked the room with the most activity, and we stayed clear of that one. If that failed to work, a good yell was fairly efficient at stopping things. At that particular time, I was really angry because I had been cleaning that morning, and that bedroom was immaculate when I finished. The mess and the fact that it went after the kids and was taunting them, really made me mad. You can mess with me, but leave my kids alone. I bellowed something along the lines of, “You bleeping jackass! Knock this crap off and leave my kids alone.” Everything immediately stopped, and nothing ever bothered the kids again. The footsteps and knocking continued off and on, and dwindled to a stop when we were fixing the house. I have heard this both ways over the years. One faction says that renovating a house can stir things up, and the other. Jew is that changing things around, moving furniture, r repainting confuses them and they go away. Next week, the haunted motel room. In the meantime, Happy Friday to the Djalalis, Terry, the puppies, and anyone lurking. ☀️🍁👻👀