Available exclusively at the Silver Lake Café, Silver Lake, Minnesota
Volume I, Issue 1
***** Silver Lake Gazette Contributors
Helen Yost -- my wife, owner of the Silver Lake Café Pat McMahon -- co-proprietor of Jill and Jack’s Quilting and Music Fritz Urke -- semi-retired plumber, regular customer at the Café (Fritz prefers to sit at a middle table, where he can talk to everyone.) Dr. Amy Wells -- retired general practitioner and 43-year resident of Silver Lake Larry Yost -- Editor
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***** Welcome to the Silver Lake Cafe
When the last of our kids went off to college three years ago, my wife Helen insisted that we move back here to her native town of Silver Lake, Minnesota. I held back the tide for a year and a half and we stayed in our home in Ocean Beach, California until then. At that point, she got a twenty-six foot U-Haul truck and started loading her stuff. "What are you doing?" I asked her. "I'm going to Silver Lake," she said. "I don't really care what you do." "I guess I'll come with you then," I said. We got to Silver Lake in the springtime. The prairie was bursting with wildflowers, meadowlarks were singing, the townsfolk were whistling. Cosmic vibrations were signaling our welcome. We stopped in to see Helen's mom Lillian right away. Her dad died a couple years back, but Lillian still lives in the same square two-story house that Helen and her three sisters grew up in. The house looked great. "I had it painted last summer," Lillian explained. “Henry was too cheap to pay anyone else to paint and too old to do it by himself, so it looked pretty bad when you came back for the funeral. I think the light blue looks nice with the dark blue shutters, don’t you?” That very evening, Helen and I walked three blocks from Lillian’s house to downtown Silver Lake. The two- block stretch that used to bustle with the activity of fifteen hundred Silver Lakers and perhaps another five hundred souls from the surrounding countryside was virtually a ghost town. There were three open businesses including the gas station mini mart and the municipal liquor store. Among the closed storefronts were a furniture store, two grocery stores, a shoe store, a hardware store, and what used to be called a department store. Besides the Muni and the mini mart, the only other operating business was Jill and Jack’s Quilting and Music. Two doors down was the old café. After peering in the windows Helen announced, “This is it.” “This is what?” “This is where I’m going to open my café. It looks like there’s probably apartments on the second floor. We can live up there.” “What are you talking about?” She ignored my question. Now it’s over a year and a half later and I’ve come to know and love Silver Lake. Helen opened the Silver Lake Café last year about this time after a summer of hard work. I was her sole employee all last winter, with jobs varying from bus-boy to dishwasher to waiter to short-order cook. Since Ellen started working here in June, I finally have some time to myself. So, I’ve set up a little office in our apartment and here I am producing the Silver Lake Gazette for your reading enjoyment. Thanks for stopping at the Silver Lake Café. --Larry Yost
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***** Tomato-Basil Soup
Ingredients: 2 potatoes, 3 leeks, 1 onion - chopped, 1/8 cup butter, 1 large bunch of fresh basil - chopped, 4 cloves fresh garlic - chopped, 1 cup wine, 12 oz. stewed tomatoes, 12 oz. tomato sauce, ½ cup celery - chopped, 1 pound button mushrooms - sliced, 2 bay leaves, 1 tsp oregano, 6 peppercorns, 2 tbsp brown sugar
In a large pot boil potatoes, leeks, peppercorns and bay leaves until potatoes turn to mush. Remove bay leaves and peppercorns. Separately sauté onion, celery, mushrooms. Add basil and cook one minute. Add oregano, wine, brown sugar, and garlic. Mix well and cook 5 minutes. Add contents of sauté pan to pot along with stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce. Keep over low heat. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Great with pork chops. --Helen Yost
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***** The Way I See It
The news isn’t good. New Orleans is flooded. Gas is three bucks a gallon. The few labor unions that are left are getting busted up. The country is in debt up to its neck. Plus there’s another damn war going on in Iraq. I’ll tell you, some days it’s tough to be my usual cheerful self. You know the saying about the straw that broke the camel’s back, where the camel already has a million straws on its back and then the one final tiny straw is added and the cumulative weight of all the tiny straws is finally too much for the camel? Yesterday I was starting to feel like that camel after I read a story about the decline of the world’s largest group of hippopotamuses. There used to be tens of thousands of these hippos in some remote region of the Congo. Now there are only a few hundred left. The rest have been killed by poachers for their meat and ivory teeth. Since the Congo has been in civil war for years, no authority exists to stop the poachers. The situation is like going ninety miles an hour down a dead-end street. Just thinking about it made me so mad that I had to walk down to Lakeside Park in order to clear my head. It’s only ten minutes from my house, but by the time I got down there my worries were gone. Sitting alone by the water’s edge is good for the soul. The lapping of waves against the shore, the cool breeze, and the sounds and sights of wildlife are things that everyone needs but not everyone gets. It’s clear to me that the rest of the world should be more like Silver Lake, and not the other way around. We’re not New York, Tokyo or London. We don’t set the trends, but maybe we should. If everyone had a lake to walk to and time to sit and reflect, we’d all be better off. -- Fritz Urke
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***** Choice Quotation
We must cultivate our gardens. --Voltaire
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***** Ask Doctor Amy
Winter’s not here yet, but it’s not too early to start thinking about frostbite protection. Like all things medical, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Wear warm gloves and boots and don’t stay out in the cold too long. If your fingers and toes start to feel numb, go inside right away. If you are unlucky enough to have them go numb, heat them up slowly. Don’t put them in warm water or too close to a fire, or tissue damage may result. Instead, warm them gradually by gentle rubbing and blowing on them. (Note: if you are physically unable to do it, you may omit blowing on your toes.) Another method is to put the frigid digits in a container of cool water. Then warm water is gradually added until full circulation is restored.
--Dr. Amy Wells
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***** Old Vinyl
I started buying records back in the early 1970’s. For the first time I could control the music. Instead of having to wait for my favorite song to come on the radio, I could play it whenever I wanted just by setting the needle on the turntable to the right track. I’ve been collecting music ever since, mostly the blues and rock-n- roll, but I like all styles. As my records became dinged up from frequent use, I came to associate pops and scratches with the songs. This never bothered me unless the scratch caused a skip. Instead I loved the songs even more. Now that everything is on CDs, people are missing out on the beauty of vinyl records. That’s part of the reason why I run a used music store - to keep those old records in circulation and introduce them to a new generation of music lovers. Another reason why I love vinyl records is because a lot of great music has never been re-released on CD’s or tapes. For example, James Cotton’s 100% Cotton was released by Buddah Records in 1974. I had a copy way back when and then I lost it. For many years afterwards I wanted to hear it, but I couldn’t because the record wasn’t available anymore. Last week I found a copy at an estate sale. I paid twenty-five cents for it, brought it home, and cranked up Boogie Thing. Here are some great deals on great music. Come on down to the store and check it out.
Led Zeppelin IV (six copies, from $2 to $10) Rolling Stones Beggar’s Banquet (white vinyl, $20) Queen A Night at the Opera (four copies $3-10) Graham Parker Squeezing Out Sparks ($16) Miles Davis Birth of the Cool ($12) Lamont Cranston Band Specials Lit ($8) Neil Young Decade (3 disc set, $25) George Harrison Concert for Bangladesh (3 disc set, $25) Blue Oyster Cult On Your Feet or On Your Knees (2 disc set, $11)