Carrot Top

I need to know these things, Melissa, just in case I ever get lost in the woods with only my little Swiss Army knife and a lichen pot to cook in. Purple. . .nice. . .the "royal" color, no? Found some more lichen recipes to add to my file: from Bannock Awareness, Printed in Celebration of National Aboriginal Dayand from Healthy IngredientsAlso found lichen in a packet of Indian tikka masala sauce on this site so if I decide to stay in the woods and do a start-up company based on lichen-cious goods, the path has already been paved. Undoubtedly backers would flock in droves to invest in this.

Carrot Top, You gotta let me quote you. This is a great line. I have to add it to my book. David ← Of course you can, David. Take it away with my pleasure and even a kiss or two. (The more important question is, what book are you writing? And does it have Portugese pastries in it? Enquiring minds need to know! )

Ah, oui. Does Alain serve milt sauce with any of his dishes I wonder? ............................................ More importantly, I wonder what it would be like to try to make "truite au bleu" on a spaceship in orbit. P.S. Edit. Reminder. Always view recent photos before requesting special sauces.

We are speaking haute here, so likely the spelling of that would be "Fart Arte", don't you think? Yes, list later on the menu. With specification as to region of origin perhaps? One wonders about corkage fees, too.

Every salt pig in the world comes with its own band of hidden elves. They live under the cover and are invisible, of course, as all good elves are. At night, they come out and slide grains of rice (where do they get the grains of rice? Why they just do a little rice dance, of course, and a little pile appears in the circle before them!) into the salt pig. The pig is happy, for he likes rice. The salt is happy, for it gets to dry out a bit, shedding all that dampness into the rice. The rice is happy because it is all dried out and needs a bit of softening. When morning comes, at the break of dawn, the rice disappears, the elves go back to their hiding places, and the salt is just salt, looking for all the world like a regular thing. I'm surprised nobody else knew this.

Alternately, of course, it might have been a typo, the original being a "Bretonne Farro Tarte."

The recipe I have for a Bretonne Far Tart specifies that first you must have a woman in Bretonne make you a tart. Then you hop onto a spaceship and go into outer space to think about it, about how very far away it is and how you will not be able to have a single bite of it. (Cuisine minceur at its most exteme. Excellent way to save on calorie intake.) There is another, less used recipe. Have the woman make the tart, then go into outer space and think of her instead. She, then, is the Bretonne Far Tart.

You reminded me of something else we used to do. . .Christmas Eve day, we'd watch The Tailor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter from this video set. It is the story of how on Christmas Eve, the animals can talk. . .and the adventures of the tailor's cat. Some lively mice, a rat or two I believe, and a wander through a cobblestoned town at midnight by the cat - and of course, how the mice sew a fancy vest that is due for the Mayor's wedding overnight for the tailor who has become too ill to do so. "Twist! Twist! We haven't any twist!" the tailor cries to his cat and the cat mews back, before the tailor falls into bed ill, for he is poor and has run out of thread. His cat secures him some, and carries it home, placing it under an upturned teacup for him to find in the morning. Oh yes. Quite forgot the food part. There is a large party where the mice eat many good things and the cat tries to eat the mice but fails.

I just ran across a recipe for Icelandic Lichen Bread: Lichen Bread There is also a recipe there for Icelandic Lichen Milk Soup. Anyone out there with more lichen recipes to share?

Two words, put together, that cause a multitude of sadness and problems.

We always make food for Santa's reindeer. Because Santa of course gets cookies and milk everywhere, but his reindeer must be hungry too. Oatmeal, cornmeal, sesame seeds, a bit of brown sugar, and gold glitter so that the reindeer can see it in the dark. Toss all together, put in little bags, and each child tosses their handful onto the ground outside, on Christmas Eve. Strangely enough, usually by morning it is gone. The wind perhaps, a handy broom, or even maybe Santa's reindeer. And the children are happy to see that the reindeer had a good warming snack to keep them strong and proud on their important journey through the night skies.

While I prefer careful and considerate gift-giving in general for all other things in life for weddings I think I prefer the tradition of many large Italian-American families. Large. Bulging. Envelopes. Of Cash. Handed. To The Happy Couple. As The Guests Leave. With A Big Hug And Kiss. Sigh. I am a practical woman.

I try to teach them that if something is "not right" - i.e. the price or packaging or quality seems "off", or if a service is done in a haphazard or inappropriate way - that you really don't have to just walk away feeling bad or feeling as if you "have to put up with it because that's the way it is." Because if one puts up with poor service or poor performance or poor quality in their daily life, that is exactly what they will get more and more and more of - things being the way they are in the struggle for everyone to get through the day, with the usual cast of characters all of whom do not all have love for each other in their hearts. This can translate into: Returning a sandwich if it is made incorrectly (happens as often as it doesn't, at fast-food places) Taking produce that is not fresh yet right there for sale in the nicer grocery stores directly to the produce manager and saying "What's going on here?" (All done with smiles, of course, but definitely without hugs.) Talking to the manager in the meat department if they do not seem to ever have the cut you want to get. Asking if they could carry some different products, and name them specifically, telling all about how wonderful they are. Check the grocery receipts. There was a thead on this one, started by Gifted Gourmet, some time ago. Lots of mistakes often to be found. Find and frequent the places or environments where things *do* work right and give them your business rather than places where there seem to be ongoing problems. Thank people when things do go right and let them know you appreciate the attention they give to making the world (really, through small everyday things) a better place to be in. And if things do *not* go as planned with all this, my kids are used to hearing me say (and by now they join right in with me albeit with rolling eyes and humorous voices added): "If that's the worst thing that happens to you today, consider yourself lucky."

I went to my first "Panera". You know, that chain that advertises such wonderful bread and coffee and on and on. I picked up a "baguette" and thought I was back in olden times where grains were thinned with sawdust and possibly metal shavings. The thing should have been light, but it felt as if it weighed three pounds. Then I got some coffee, and sat down to drink the coffee and have some of the dreaded ancient baguette. They must have put sawdust in the coffee also. Blech. Blech. I tore off a piece of baguette - difficult to do, as it seemed pliable rather than tearable. One bite assured me that indeed, sawdust must have been used in the recipe. My mouth attempted to chew to little avail. Somehow I swallowed it, then stood up and dumped both the entire baguette and coffee in the trash. Stomped out of the place in quite a little mood. How can one ruin simple bread and coffee so completely? I ask you.

I just came across an old (Gourmet) magazine (1969) with an article on Portugese Egg Yolk Sweets. The two most interesting to me were the fios de ovos (thread eggs) where a "tiny hole is pierced in an eggshell half, and egg yolks are strained through the hole in a long thread into a pot of bubbling sugar syrup" and the trouxas de ovos (packs of eggs): "sheets of sweetened eggs yolks rolled into cylindrically shaped "packs" and served in a clear sugar syrup. [. . .] A spoonful of strained egg yolk is dropped into a boiling sugar syrup and cooked until it sheets and sets. The sheet is then rolled up into a little bundle." I also adored the name of yet another pastry - toucinho de cue. "Bacon from Heaven".

There once was a girl from Saigon Who only ate sweets and wontons Boys who ate pickles She thought were quite fickle And immediately sallied "So long!" .................................................. There once was a lawyer from Nimes Who ate ventricles pork fat and spleens Though admired for his head He was terrible in bed And could barely fit into his jeans. .................................................. There once was a lass from Pawtucket Whose attitude hinted she'd suck it But when it was time To pick up that lime In her fingers merely she stuck it. ..................................................... December requires limericks, to my mind.

Lawyers Breath Hot Sauce

That was in the last issue of Alimentum, wasn't it? I lent my issue to a friend, so can not check, but do remember the poem. Fantastic journal for "food lit".

This was probably. . .ouch. . .thirty years ago, Rachel - my first home with my first husband. No, I don't have them any more. I don't tend to save material things or even to take photographs of things, though I admire those that have the ability to do that. They are there firmly, in my memory, though. And that, is good. ....................................... The idea actually could be done in a more professional looking manner with either aprons or linens, old linens, or even old wooden spoons and things, matted and framed.

I echo Anne's sentiments, jgm. If I sounded cranky in my questions before, it was from wanting to be sure that paths were clear enough in all ways so that this *would* work in good ways for you both. Anne's chicken base recipe above might also be used wrapped inside crepes for a lovely and still inexpensive presentation. Instead of broccoli, mushrooms are also a tasty co-lingerer. Chicken crepes sided with a steaming mound of white fluffy rice. . .(!) Yum.

The nicest kitchen food art I ever had was aprons. Old aprons, from the thrift store, from the 1940's through the 1960's. Some were pink and polka-dotted with prints of poodles smiling with red bows tied on their little heads. Some were white sheer voile, fluffy and ruffly, with big bow pockets. Others were equally individual and equally charming. One year, I took them and stapled them directly onto the kitchen walls, angled here and there as if they were flying through the room with merriment. It was as if the spirits and joys of the cooks that wore them shone from the walls, smiling with pleasure at every good thing that was made there.

Yes, it certainly will be! It's interesting to watch the progression of "styles" both in the ads and in the articles presented. The older magazines seem to have much less of a focus on desserts or pastries than in recent years. I remember reading somewere that the original magazine audience focus was male, during the 1940's post-war period. Kind of a high-life, hunting with the hounds with beef wellington and brandy afterward sort of crowd. "Editor and Publisher: Earle R. MacAusland" - For years those words on the top of the first page enticed me. It always made me think of images of fishing for salmon with a Scottish hat, a walking stick, and a dog by my side, the mansion house in the far distance that I could just barely see where of course the maids were making shortbread and ironing linen sheets. . . .

I love that image of you and the sofa, Zoe (those things were so slippery, weren't they?!) . . .I wonder, too, if your Great Aunt made recipes from those stacks. . .or if she was a "reader" only, which is a fine thing to be. These were actually not the annual "books" I found but individual magazines, which were then carefully placed between the silver holder inside these thick black binders (which one used to be able to buy separately). Like jewels in a quiet black leather case. Yes, it certainly could have been a farm wife that spent her "egg money" on these. I'll always wonder. And here I thought you just sat around eating bon-bons all day, Lori. My image is dashed, dashed. Isn't it amazing that this sense can happen just through anticipation of the good things within the pages? Did it make the potatoes taste better at the time or worse in comparison, I wonder. Sometimes when I read things about fantastic things to eat the very words and images sort of "wear off" onto whatever it is that I am eating, sort of like standing in front of the window of Bendels, the mirror reflection of oneself pictured as being dressed exactly like the mannequins.

I have a confession. I used to be in love with a magazine. Gourmet Magazine, to be exact. It was a love affair that lasted some years. Today, I don't feel exactly the same about the magazine, but it could be that I am jaded. It is still a consequential magazine, to be sure. I'd like to share my story about this love affair, in hopes that my confession will lead you to confess in turn your own secret feelings about this magazine, both then and now. They say that confession is good for the soul, and certainly thinking of love is! The Gourmet Under the Table .................................................... The bright red, black and white roosters twitched their waddles, nodded and danced in the blaring sun that drove down upon the cages stacked in neat rows. There was nothing at all on the horizon but this small white house. You might really call it a shack. Its hand-lettered sign dangling from the grimy front window announced in broad yawning handpainted letters : “Beer. . . Cigarettes. . . Soda. . . Milk. . .” Nothing on the horizon but cornfields, wide hazy blue skies above, nothing but fine smooth black tar roads quartered together in insistent silence but for the rare bark of a dog in the distance, nothing but heat in the air and whatever was in that store. What was in that store was a man, always a man. Women did not come to this store, ever. Men came here, once in a blue moon. Sometimes they brought boys, boys that seemed even at tender ages of eight or ten to be younger versions of grown men, all of them quiet, watchful, all of them moving carefully out of their pickups into the store. The men chewed tobacco, the boys chewed gum alongtimes, in rhythm with their fathers. The roosters in their cages became anxious as I approached. I lived down the road a bit, in this rural paradise, and was curious about what this corner store could be. I’d never lived in this particular part of the agricultural South before, and was naïve about many things. We’d explored the fields around our house together, my children and I – the grounds so solidly damp from the humid air, the frogs of all varieties honking and hooting and crying each night from the small stream that trickled along next to the tobacco field that aligned itself to our back yard. The smell the tobacco gave off after baking in the sun all day, when the blue dusk fell, was mesmerizing and delicious. I walked out through the door of the sun room each evening and looked into the distance that held only the moon and dim tops of tobacco plants, and breathed deeply, as deeply as I could. I wondered how on earth this sweet fragrant enticing aroma could actually become a cigarette, with an aroma so different. Feathers fluffed and rose, shrieks and raucous cackles came from the cages. A man came out from the store. He didn’t say a word. Just looked at me. No expression crossed his face – the stubble of his beard looked like a gravestone. “Lookin’ for somethin’, ma’am?” he finally asked. I was trying to decide whether to smile or to run. The yankee lady (that was me) smiled. “Nice roosters,” came from her mouth, with what might have been a slight squawk herself. “Cocks,” he said. “Fighting cocks. I sell ‘em to folks round here.” …………………………………………………………………………… That was life in this small town. Sharecropping tobacco, growing field corn, maybe a factory job an hour down the road if you were real lucky, going to church (Baptist, please – move into town if you cared to be Methodist or Episcopalian) each and every Sunday with the family dressed up Sunday best, the preacher coming to do home visits of his parishioners once in a while, accepting a glass of spirits and a bit of cake (which might be home-made or might not) betting on cock-fights and dog-fights to make ends meet, deer hunting from the side of the long straight roads in fall, standing beside your pickup truck and watching the fields closely with binoculars – (lots of beer in battered coolers set inside the truck cabs) - just about the time the cornfields were burned to the ground to prepare for next season’s crop. Bear-baiting was a haute sport, not done by all but by the “best”, with huntin’ dogs, some cherished and sold at high prices, others dumped down by where the creek rose under the bridge at the edge of town, if they didn’t do as well as one might hope. A dog’s life was dependent on his performance, and sometimes, so were his master’s fortunes. Life had a hard edge in this small town in the South. “Gourmet” was not a word one would expect to hear here. There were two small restaurants in town itself, a Cracker Barrel up near the highway half an hour out in the always-stretching distance up the black tar roads, and a barbecue shack that served just barbecue, on the edge of town. Straight up. Pork barbecue. Vinegar-y sauce on the table. Buns that seemed as densely humid as the air, though sweet and soft, too. A side of long-cooked bacon-dubbed green beans or coleslaw, thick heavy hushpuppies with soda (“pop” in the vernacular) to drink with it all, or sweet tea. No, you would not expect to hear “gourmet” round these parts. ……………………………………………………………………… One day there was a book sale at the old dark-red brick library set to the center of town. The library was always rather strangely lit and often deserted. But a library book sale is a library book sale, so off we went to see what we could see, myself with a toddler on each outstretched arm. Long tables of dusty books. Many titles that one would never think to call one’s own, sad books that had hoped for better. The children found something each, of course – there is never a time when a child can not find some sort of book, a momentary treasure found to clasp to themselves with hopeful ardor of discovering a new world within. My hand ran drearily along the dusty hopeless spines of lines and piles of books that I sadly had no heart for. Then, from below the table, a gleam of gold lettering caught my eye. On black leatherette. A collection. A collection of old Gourmet magazines, hiding in the even deeper dust under the table. One set, two. Another? Yes, and another. All in all, six bound annual volumes of Gourmet. The years ranged from 1969 to 1975, with 1970 missing, oddly. Where did it go? Did the person who donated these keep the 1970 volume because that had been a particularly good year for them? And who was this mysterious person, living here in the midst of cornfields and tobacco farms, Baptist casseroles and fighting cocks, flat black tar roads that led only to more flat black tar roads – who read Gourmet magazine religiously enough in those years past to have gathered and carefully bound this collection of gastronomic ephemera? The volumes sit before me now. They’ve traveled with me through three different states, and yet more homes. The two little toddlers that held my hands have both grown now, each to be taller than me, yet these slightly faded volumes remain the same as the day I pulled them out choked with dust from under the table, a needle in a haystack, already aged volumes, out in a place where life does not resemble in any aspects easily discerned by the general observer, the smiling glossy ads for the “high life” pictured in the photographs on these pages. In Gourmet magazine, the year 1969 has no hint at all in it of muddy hay-strewn pickup trucks toting beer, guns, and deer meat. Opening to a page, Paris a Table appears, written by Naomi Barry. She tells of Dr. Johnson in his chophouse; Proust; Alexander Woollcott; and the Algonquin’s famous Round Table. It is a review of Drouant , the restaurant where the Academie Goncourt gathers to meet. The pages delight with the tastes of gigot de sept heures; chicken wrapped in pie crust; duck with peaches; the civet of baby boar with chestnut puree; a pate of woodcock en croute. The smells and colors fill the imagination, and we learn also that the bookshelf set in the far corner of the restaurant contains not only copies of all the Goncourt winners (since 1905) but also the works of Colette, a former president of the Goncourt Society. The evening quiet rises to fill my mind, the quiet perhaps that engulfed whomever it was first read this review in 1969, as they sat with the rich smell of fresh tobacco leaf right outside their backdoor, sitting in a comfortable chair right next to the yellow-orange beam of the reading lamp, their eyes and thoughts focused intently on images of Parisian night life of not only that singular year, but also of many sparkling years of the past, all spread deliciously out on the pages. Having to miss out on 1970 saddens me, but there is 1971 to discover. The page opens this time to “Fritters”. Fritters. They will tell us how to make fritters, and oh what fritters. Hushpuppies are fritters too, a familiar thing where the crows dive onto the bared cornfields. But the recipes in Gourmet do a wild dance indeed, through so many forms, with ingredients perhaps rare to behold at the local Piggly-Wiggly market: fritters of whitebait (would catfish work?); stuffed lobster; almond sole; fritto misto (daring to include both calves brains and sweetbreads in the mix); hard-boiled egg; shrimp and vegetable; sweet potato (wonder if that might be good with barbecue!); onion; cheese; savory cocktail fritters (maybe good for the town meeting next week. . .); Indonesian peanut; apple; flower fritters (goodness gracious is there anything these folk don’t try to eat?!); apricot salpicon; souffled fritters (daresay Mawmaw might take to that!); pineapple with frangipane custard; calas; and even oliebollen. Like marching soldiers or angels on wing, they follow along one right after the other, these recipes, leading one to line dance right along with them in time and place. The preacher might be knocking at the door unexpectedly as our imaginary reader‘s eye first traveled over the issues of 1972. A quick leafing leads to “Cooking with James Beard” where the master tells us about kebobs with his usual leisurely, informative style. The pages are dotted with bits of history dropped in a by-and-by manner (“Mrs. Ruffald, in the 1799 edition of The English Housekeeper, included a recipe for mutton kebobs. . .”) then we’re off for a whirlwind world tour as he instructs us all on how to make Turkish kebobs; souvlakia; Iranian kebobs; kofta; Moroccan kebobs; shashlik; shami kebobs; Moglai kebobs; venison kebobs (“serve the kebobs with a puree of chestnuts and drink a Burgundy” he advises); brochette Villeneuve; lamb chops en brochette; anticuchos; chicken hearts and livers en brochette; duck kebobs; Malaysian sates of pork and of chicken; sosaties; kabayaki; fruits de mer en brochette and brochettes Saint-Jacques. “Mornin’, Preacher,” says our reader from so long ago, opening the front door with a flourish, humidity rushing into the room with the usual glimpse of the endless black tar road outside. “Would you like some anticuchos?” The land is dark and blank, vistas edged by scrub, the closest neighbors’ Christmas tree lights barely visible a mile down the road as our reader tears December 1973 from its thick brown paper wrapper, fresh from the mailbox, cold fingers eagerly slipping round it, hurrying to get back into the warmth of the solitary house. And once torn eagerly open, there within is Lillian Langseth-Christiansen to entertain and entice on the subject of “Swedish Yuletide Baking”. Lillian informs us that “Sweden’s baking reflects her history and rejects her geography, and it combines flavors that come from the east with the light touch of France.” The beautiful story of the Feast of Santa Lucia is told, the recipes to make a candle-lit Swedish Christmas are amply provided – pastries rich with the scent of cardamom, colored like the sunshine with saffron, all rich with good butter and endowed with good names like drommar (dream cookies). The final page of December 1973 has “The Last Touch”, which this month comprises “Game Sauces”. Oh, just a few of those. Sauces made from chestnuts, their richly colored shells reminding one of that bay mare down the road a piece; a sour cream and mustard sauce; piquant sauce; lingonberry (wonder if those mulberries set down would do? Maybe add some crabapples, maybe. . .) sauce; fruited curry sauce with pine nuts; chasseur sauce; red-wine sauce. Game sauces might be not only useful but a way to bring variation in the days of these cold months when life reduces itself to labors done indoors - no tobacco to cut, no hay to bale, no land to till, even the woodpile cut and placidly waiting. Sophistication and elegance mark the June 1974 centerfold “Bachelor Dinners” in June 1974. It might have been a tough choice for our reader between the weeding that needed doing quick before it took right over the garden or between this suave entry. The bachelors that peopled Gourmet back then were advised in no uncertain terms to prepare dinners such as the following: Mackerel in white wine to start, double lamb chops with mustard butter accompanied by potatoes Savonnette as entree, chicory salad to cleanse the palate after, then a fine wedge of Brie as finish. Served with a Chateau Talbot ’64, of course. Guess those guys didn’t remain bachelors for long. Or maybe they did, cooking elegant dinners for themselves and their bachelorette companions, as they years rolled merrily on, well served by good food and even better wine. Could our reader have been this sort of man, ensconsed in a rural life, hearing the cocks crow at dawn as he diced rich ingredients for a Cognac-soused pate, knowing without even a hint of wonder that those same birds, this afternoon would fight to the death as bettor’s device? There were many other writers I knew in these pages - these people were the ones that taught me to cook, in times close to “way back then”. Married to a man who loved food, I adored and consumed the ways of cookery like potato chips, never being able to “eat just one”! Gourmet Magazine was the light of sustenance. In years to come, when I became a chef, there were other writings, other books, heavy tomes, that became my food for thought – but these words and stories written in Gourmet were the ones that first set my soul alight in ways that cooking, finally, as a professional, never really could touch in the same ways. The question still hums through my mind though: How did one get from “here”, this tiny quiet southern farming town where the soil was always present and palpable, the sun something that one relied upon to grow age-old traditional crops, to “there”, the pages of Gourmet that lauded the haute society and the histories of every civilized land and then some? Who had owned these volumes, who had read them and dreamed of foreign lands and worlds that held astonishments and treasures of food and culture? I don’t know. Serendipity left its touch when these volumes were so quietly given to that dank somewhat crumbling red brick library, in a town where (as a foreigner myself) never did I expect to find such a thing, never did I think to know someone was there, up the black tar road, maybe round the corner near where the dogs were dumped in late Fall, someone that loved these volumes and the worlds they essayed with as much intent and ardor as I did. The last image, the last year of volumes. 1975. Elizabeth Andoh relates with vibrancy her knowledge of the ways of the “The Seasonal Japanese Kitchen –Picnic Lunches”. I like to think of my imagined friend turning the magazine pages slowly, in the kitchen, the warm breeze moving slowly through the window, the frogs humming their seasonal melodies while the tobacco plants push up from the sienna soil, corn shoots nearby starting their even lines upward. He ponders at length the very serious question of where to find the dried hijiki and abura age needed to make a fine Hijiki no Nimono. Lifting the telephone receiver, he dials the number of the one person in the entire world he knows he can count on to hop in the car with him at a moment’s notice, crank up the AM radio, and make that long drive down the black tar roads to the far distant city, where he might find some of these ingredients that just don’t make their way out here. “Yep, sure – I’ll be right over. Let me just get someone to watch over these birds for me,” the man at the corner store smiles as he answers his brother. “It’ll be fun.”

My thought was that it is very possible that whomever this is that wants to learn to cook, does know the basics of nutrition, but simply does not know how to manage home cooking within the budget that is available. The category of population that one might define as being "fall through the crack" sort, who have *not* had the opportunity to learn even the basics of nutrition, generally *would* be able to being able to qualify for foodstamps, usually (or at least, from what I've seen, but of course I have not seen everything in the world). And the WIC programs are as "teaching-nutrition" focused as they are anything else. What I have noticed as a growing population is young married couples who *do* own homes and car(s) and nice clothes and who have had access to good educations who simply do not know how to manage money in our credit-focused society. This group can get into trouble in most basic ways - such as having so many bills to pay each month that when it comes to putting food on the table in a basic sort of manner (which they do not lack the education about as many have college-level educations) they simply have never had to do it, so they flounder. My reason for thinking that jgm's student did have enough basic education to know basic nutrition (which is so prevalently taught in most of of our "middle-class" society) is the fact that food stamps were not an option in this situation. But nothing was really specified about the exact situation beyond this, so it was just a guess on my part. I do admit to being curious, though. .................................................. Edited to correct spelling of the word "month" which somehow I must have gotten snotty and spelled "monthe".