Category: food

Coping

jono55

Some good things that come from the cold weather are the coping strategies that we use. A steaming bowl of steel cut oats is a warm and chewy way to start a morning. Aromatic soups both mundane and exotic are just the right thing for supper, and their preparation warms and perfumes the rooms.

Sharing a small blanket with a friend while watching television harkens back to the bundling practices of colonial America. And if you and your friend are of like mind, there are delightful liberties that can be taken under that covering.

Those puffy down jackets and coats are amazing armor against arctic weather. Even my 35 year-old Loden parka, heavy wool that it is, is a barrier no icy blast can penetrate.

And when your bathroom feels like the crisper drawer in a refrigerator as you strip down to take a shower, a small portable heater can create a micro-climate just for you.

I think that our cats feel much the same way. Without the need to constantly patrol the back yard against marauders of various species, they can remain indoors and devote themselves full-time to their true love … napping.

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Father’s Son, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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We still don’t have much snow here in Paradise, and the nearby ski areas are starting to complain that they would like quite a bit more, if you please. Ski resorts here in the mountains so frequently grumble about how much snow they’ve received that in this they are much like the farmers of the prairie states who absolutely never get the amount of sunshine or rainfall that they want.

In general talking to those farmers during the growing season is tiresome. They will rail against the weather of the present, and when they are done with that they will begin bringing up the meteorological misdeeds of the past several decades.

These orations are so similar to one another that farmers could really save themselves time and energy by transcribing one of them and then printing it as a handout to be passed around in place of conversation.

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I can’t recall if I’ve brought this up before, but my approach to cooking is to learn how to do everyday dishes well, and leave the more exotic and the gourmet to others.

So it’s a tasty roast chicken that might come from my stove, but probably not coq au vin. I don’t worry about the intricacies of working with phyllo dough because I skip over any recipe that contains it.

From time to time a new recipe will work out so well that I take one bite and my jaw drops and my pupils dilate. Although this is not a culinary blog, I am going to start sharing with you those times when something turns out that good that I can’t shut up about it. My first such share is for a chicken noodle soup that rocks, and is in a total ‘nother country.

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Cuckoo, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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Readers of this blog over time have learned that I attend AA meetings pretty regularly. Even though I haven’t used alcohol for a very long time now, there are at least two reasons that I still go to those meetings.

  • First, one is never “cured” of whatever being an addict is, and so far there has been nothing found that works better than the comradeship and support of people in the same pickle that you are in in maintaining abstinence.
  • Second, if you have found a small boat to have been a lifesaving tool for you, gratitude leads you to personally want to make sure that such a useful watercraft is tied up to the dock and available for the next person who needs it. An AA meeting can be that boat.

Robin and I are watching the British television series Call the Midwife, and in one of its story threads it has subtly laid out the progression that many people who now suffer from alcohol addiction have followed in their lives. A main character in the show first enjoys the camaraderie and sophistication that she feels when having a dram on special occasions. Then it is on non-special occasions. Then nightly. Daily.

Because the series was so successful and lasted so long, this progression took place slowly over several years, as it often does in real life.

Eventually there come the attempts at self-control and their subsequent failures with accompanying guilt and dishonesty. The lucky ones eventually find their way to a therapeutic community, with AA being one example.

All of this has been laid out quite believably in the series. There are no big dramas, no surgeons passing out and pitching forward into the abdominal cavity (oh, the stories we accumulate), but only a good woman doing what other good women were doing but finding that somehow … inexplicably … she developed a problem while they did not.

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[Sometimes it helps to turn to poets to see through the smoke, at those times when life becomes a dance of perplexity and anguish. A friend of mine long gone used to say “Poets are the last truth-tellers.” Of course, he said a lot of things … some of them were true.]

Exquisite Politics

by Denise Duhamel

The perfect voter has a smile but no eyes,

maybe not even a nose or hair on his or her toes,

maybe not even a single sperm cell, ovum, little paramecium.

Politics is a slug copulating in a Poughkeepsie garden.

Politics is a grain of rice stuck in the mouth

of a king. I voted for a clump of cells,

anything to believe in, true as rain, sure as red wheat.

I carried my ballots around like smokes, pondered big questions,

resources and need, stars and planets, prehistoric

languages. I sat on Alice’s mushroom in Central Park,

smoked longingly in the direction of the mayor’s mansion.

Someday I won’t politic anymore, my big heart will stop

loving America and I’ll leave her as easy as a marriage,

splitting our assets, hoping to get the advantage

before the other side yells: Wow! America,

Vespucci’s first name and home of free and brave, Te amo.

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I’m A Song, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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Music Hath Charms …

jono55

Students … STUDENTS! Take your seats, please. I am about to expostulate right in front of everyone (an act that is a misdemeanor in at least four of the red states , and a felony in two).

My statement for the morning is this. There are rock songs that are as worth studying as some pieces of classical music are, for they are every bit as intricate and complex.

Now I can already see a few haughty noses being raised in the back row there, those of you of privileged breeding who regard such suggestions as being quite preposterous. Must I remind you of the quotation from the philosopher Herbert Spencer:

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which can not fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

There. I’ve had my say. And now a musical example is provided by Jason Isbell and his band The 400 Unit. To begin with it’s an interesting ballad, but listen carefully to the long break after the second verse. Themes rise and fall, guitars move in and out, percussion waxes and wanes. What is this if not the rock and roll equivalent of chamber music?

Dreamsicle, by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

There will be a quiz on Friday next. Bring your Air-Pods.

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From The New Yorker

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If you accept ovo-lacto-vegetarianism as a thing, I have slowly moved to where I am about 95% vegetarian. Reasons? Health concerns, curiosity, economy … all of these have played their part. But the final straw (or straws) has been the cumulative addition of one horror story after another about how that piece of beef or pork or chicken made its way to my plate. The awfulness of that industry … if you would ask me why it took me so long to get to this point, my answer would probably be twofold, sloth and unwillingness to change.

I have no excuse. I read The Jungle as a teenager. During the ensuing decades since that eye-opener I’ve seen one documentary after another on the meat industry and felt shame each time when I was done viewing.

All of my life I have been picking up bits of knowledge about what it means to be a sentient being, and what our duties and responsibilities toward the rest of the animal kingdom might be. But my eating patterns remained largely unchanged.

So about that remaining 5%? Well, that’s my personal hypocrisy score, I guess. It’s a better number than it was a decade ago, and I confess there are many other areas of my existence where that score would be higher. Slow learner, moi.

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From The New Yorker

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I’ll Fly Away, by Ian Siegal

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Less than two weeks now until we celebrate the national holiday in support of obesity. The only one of the bunch where eating large quantities of food is the whole point. Oh, there are brief mentions here and there about being grateful and giving thanks and all that, but otherwise the articles dealing with Thanksgiving are mostly about recipes.

If I were to decide that each day for the rest of my life I would eat nothing but turkey stuffing, I am almost certain that I would not run out of instructions for preparing variations of these dishes until I was over the age of 125.

And by that time my bloodstream would be 50% creamery butter, I would likely weigh over 600 pounds and when I died I would have to be cremated with a flamethrower. If you Google overeating on turkey day, you will be inundated with suggestions as to how to avoid things like food coma, GI reflux emergencies, and trips to the emergency room for tryptophan overdose.

So you can see how far we’ve come from the first Thanksgiving where the Pilgrims sat down to platefuls of succotash and were grateful for not being dead of starvation, exposure, and disease.

I have my own gratitude list that I compiled some time ago, and keep amending from time to time. It is much like the Pilgrim’s might have been. Grateful for the roof over my head, clothing enough to keep me warm this winter, and food enough for the day. Grateful for the friends that I have now and have had over a considerable lifetime.

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Observations on what has transpired since the recent election. I have my own conspiracy theory which is no more crackpot than many others that are circulating. I think that it is possible that the leaders of North Korea, China, and Russia got together and decided that instead of continuing to amass nuclear arsenals and build up armies against the USA they would do what they could to get Donald Cluck elected to office. It was a far cheaper and more effective approach, knowing that he would appoint one incompetent after another, deliberately sow chaos and disunion in his own government, and undermine agencies, institutions, and programs that had been effective in promoting safety and stability for generations.

It was a genius idea, and we are seeing it play out daily in the media. Half of the country is still gloating in his re-election even as he is busily sawing a leg from the very stool they are standing on.

I would find it hard to feel sorry for them if they ever realize their error and the great national harm of which they have been a part. In fact, I will probably haul out my trusty “I TOLD YOU SO!” and use it as a club to lay about me at will.

I am nothing if not petty.

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Here is where I would like to spend eternity. At the World Cheese Awards. This year there were 4786 entries from 47 countries at the event. It was held in Portugal and the winner was a Portuguese cheese described thusly:

Made with vegetarian rennet created from thistles, the winner is described as a gooey, glossy, buttery cheese with a herby bitterness that’s typically served by slicing off the top and spooning out the center.

CNN Online, November 16

“Slicing off the top and spooning out the center” … have you ever read a more beautiful line in your life?

The photograph below was taken of the judging floor, and ( I am choking up just thinking about it ) those tables are filled with the best cheeses in the entire (bleeping) world. I mean, really, what wouldn’t I have done to get there? To get a chance to wear one of those tan coveralls I might not have killed, but I would certainly have bruised.

The Director of the Guild of Fine Food, which puts on the show, described the atmosphere:

Gathering thousands of cheeses at room temperature under one roof inevitably produces an intense aroma. “It’s very punchy,” is how John Farrand, managing director of The Guild of Fine Food, the contest’s UK-based organizer, described the atmosphere at the event.

CNN Online

So probably not for everyone. I have known people who swooned from the aroma of a single well-aged chunk of Roquefort unveiled at a party.

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That Smell, by Lynyrd Skynyrd

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