What I Threw Away Today

A giant jar of Nutella, half-eaten. By me. Straight from the jar with a spoon, mostly, but I did fashion a sandwich at nine PM the other night--Nutella and thin sliced pear on sturdy, quasi healthy country oat bread. Was it a good sandwich? Hard to say, as the probelm with Nutella is that one doesn't truly eat it, one jams it down one's throat, in a fit of primal feeding hysteria.

A jumbo plastic box of mixed baby greens, delivered to a college junior (who like many young people on our college campuses, lives alone) by the local campus grocery shopping service. Measuring sixteen inches by eight inches and approximately eight inches deep, it was enough salad greens for a fairly well-attended wedding reception. After adopting the box of greens from the college junior, we earnestly arranged all other vegetables and fruits around it (it took up major refrigerator crisper space) for a couple of weeks. Then we had a string of meals out or got lots of takeout or were apparently generally unhealthy and forgot about the behemoth residing in the fridge. Until today. The pile of greens remaining in the hinged plastic box (psst--in the packaging industry they call it a "clamshell" ) were wilted and floating around pretty dynamically in a deep pool of their own brown juices. Wow. It was impressive. So impressive, that I almost named some of those repulsive little rotten red oak and romaine babies. (Me, shaking plastic box of decomposed lettuce leaves: Whoa! Look at that one go!)


Also, I just recently dumped my last vestiges of patience and support for the Clinton campaign's down-and-dirty-hey-she's-just-really-a fighter--she's-SO-damn-scrappy-gotta-love-her-for-it-campaign tactics. If Hillary wins the nomination for Democratic presidential candidate I will refrain from voting in the general election. Yes. It's that bad.

A Holiday Apology

Sorry, Easter. Sorry I never managed to come up with a firm, reliable tradition for you. Besides the baskets-full-of-candy-dyed-egg-thing, I mean. And that is almost good enough for the entire day. But we've never quite figured it all out. Is Easter a BIG holiday? Do we invite all the family over for a BIG dinner? We have a few times, either here or at another house (apparently we all all similarly inclined towards confusion about the nature of celebrating Easter...) but the traditon never took hold for any of us. I am thinking a few things here.

1. Easter is just too religious for our family. Christmas is nice as it is at base, simply a celebration of a birth. Easter flat out celebrates one of the miracles of Christianity and none of us are actual believers. So greeting someone with a "Happy Easter!" seems almost hypocritical, particularly if you are not handing them jelly beans or Hershey eggs.

2. The weather is so unreliable here. Today we have light fluffy snow falling. Pretty! It is quite the Currier and Ives scene. And listen! Is that the sound of snowplows grinding down the streets? Pretty far removed from spring grasses and tulips and little girls in pastel-colored dresses collecting flowers from the garden. (Although I do have a memory of lilies of the valley in bloom once during my childhood. Must have been an extremely late Easter that year.) And Easter egg hunts? A foreign concept here due to winter condition prevailing the majority of the time.

3. The date is so terribly changeable. My understanding is that we have t least a four week span here--I decline to go consult a perpetual calendar (though I do love those things)-- but I am certain Easter has been held as late as April 19. And today of course is March 23. This gigantic gap messes with the holiday spirit in a dangerous way for some of us. We need more predictibility!

4. Never figured out what to eat for Easter dinner. There was a long span of vegetarianism around here and the idea of a ham or a lamb roast was just too meaty to contemplate. Turkey (although not a vegetable, yes, I do undestand that) was an alternative but...nah. How about piles of candy instead? Got to get to work on those chocolate rabbits sometime. Make it today, around six PM!

Sorry, Easter. But thanks for all the candy anyway.

AWOL (Where I've been!)

It is a terrible aspect to my constitution. I am prone to obsessions, to bouts of egregious consuming. It happens with books, with television shows, with music sometimes. And now with web logs. When I discover a story that I like, in any form, I find it impossible not to read or watch or listen to all of it that I can. Immediately, continually, until it is gone, until I've finished it, used it all up. It is a form of greed, I know. Not an admirable trait, not at all. I used to think everyone was like this but apparently many people are not. They take stories lightly. And why not? It's all relative, I know. People may count themselves an ardent fan of "The West Wing" or "Family Guy". In their world, maybe, but not mine! I am shocked when I find out that they have seen only a few episodes of a show. Here they are, sending me little YouTube snippets of Stewie and Brian, or raving on and on and on about Sam from WW , raving about their love for the characters, the writing, the brilliance of the show. But they haven't bothered to rent all seven season!! They haven't organized their free time around learning all about every tiny aspect of the production. WHAT??? WHY NOT??

Seriously, I am a little disturbed by my own behavior. Because it just happened again. I discovered a blog last week, called "Confessions of a Pioneer Woman". It very recently won a Bloggie, an Internet award for "Best Writing of a Weblog". I found this out at another blog, one of my very favorites-- "Waiter Rant". "Waiter Rant" was also nominated in the "Best Writing" category. The author (Waiter, he calls himself) announced his loss to Pioneer Woman along with a link to her site. I clicked over to visit, tentatively. (I have issues with "confessional" writing.) Hmm. Lots of photos of life on a ranch. Horses. Dogs. Oh, she's got a companion food blog. Cute, very cute. Oh, yeah, she's funny...and look...here's her long, long, romantic but charmingly self-deprecating story of how she met her cowboy husband...hmm...wow, she posts every damn day...oh, here's her archives, going back two years...ha ha...oh, I'll just read a few. Ha ha. Maybe a few more. Oh, hell, just a month or two! And then...holy crap, where did that hour go? Two hours, you say? Oh, my God...

I have been horribly hooked. I've been unable to really do much else on the Internet besides scroll through PW's archive, studying photos of her animals and her family. Reading her recipes and even making my way through initially daunting but really very entertaining photo essay posts about cattle ranching and Photoshop-ing. Phew. I sort of hate myself when I do this, but I once I do consume a narrative this obsessively, it is its own cure. I think the fever has passed. Now that I am all caught up, all current with everything in PW's world, I think I can just be normal. I won't feel like some kind of stalker, vicariously living the life of an redhaired, former dancer now rising at five AM to saddle horses and to take photos of the Oklahoma sunrise and toddlers cramming doughnuts in their mouths, whole. That's really the weird thing about the Internet, isn't it? PW is creating a wonderful story from her life. Her characters are herself, her husband and children, her pretty sister and her mentally retarded brother, her pesky brother-in-law. The dramas that unfold belong to them as much as or (many times) more than to her. As unfailingingly generous and loving as PW is, I still ponder the ethics of this kind of writing. I still wonder--who owns a story? The characters? Or the storyteller?

Slinging Hash

I didn't know hash even existed until I started solving crossword puzzles. "Diner offering" was a surprisingly frequent clue for the NYTimes weekday puzzles. As far as I was concerned, the answer could have been anything, really, but by puzzle serendipity (I mean I knew the answers to the surrounding squares) I discovered that the "diner offering" was HASH. That's a good puzzle answer--those are four (okay three) nice, useful letters. (Well, the "H" is a teeny bit exotic, but not a freakshow like a "J" or a "V". "H" knows how to work with a fair amount of the alphabet.) Diners. Hash. Hmm. I pondered the clue and the answer. I never ate at diners, which seem to be either a big city or a small town phenomenon, not something I'd ever even seen here in our pre-diversified mid-size Midwestern city. Our neighborhood eatery--open only in the summer--was the Tastee Freeze, where you could get chopped! and fried! onions on your well-done hamburger. For dessert there was the far too expensive (meaning usually not ordered) Brownie Sundae (whose amazing idea WAS this you silently wondered as you dug your spoon into the thin slab of warm chocolate cake buried beneath two melting scoops of vanilla ice cream and drenched just DRENCHED in fudge sauce. My god--the inside of my mouth feels coated with sugar and frozen milk crystals just remembering it..) Hmm. There were still a few drugstore lunch counters around when I was a kid--would they have had hash on the menu?

And what is hash, anyway? I wondered. There's corn beef hash, and red flannel hash. Girls like me who read a lot did bump into those references. Images of canned bivouac Army chow came to mind for one, and ignorant, confused ideas of the South for the other. (You know--it's like grits and red-eye gravy. Doesn't really even sound like food.) But that was the extent of my information. It wasn't until I spent weeks and weeks in a cabin in the woods with hardly anything to read that I came across another, more intriguing allusion to hash. I had adopted a paperback I found in the cabin's one tiny bookshelf, a seventies edition of The Joy of Cooking, as my nightime easy reading, sort of a bedtime lullaby all about food. How to Start a Meal. Menus for Special Occasions. Beverages. Canapes and Tea Sandwiches. It was all so soothing. That Irma Rombauer--writing a cookbook to pay the bills after her husband drank up all the finances. And and doing it by stealing recipes from her friends and employees! What a hoot. I especially enjoyed her little stories that preceded or introduced some of the recipes. There was an underlying class consciousness and stiffness to her prose that fascinated me. Still does (except now you have to find those older editions of Joy to get the real flavor of the true Irma). It was another era, of course--St. Louis between the World Wars. But here is Mrs. Rombauer's idea of a charming anecdote, one that she uses in her "About Hash" cookbook entry. "The Irish cook, praised for her hash, declared: "Beef ain't nothing. Onions ain't nothing. Seasonings ain't nothing. But when I throw myself into my hash, that's hash!" (See what I mean? I feel I am not quite getting the full impact of this story--missing for me is the background prejudice about the Irish temperament or irascibility or whatever. Or perhaps the whole point is just how funny it is to have an opinionated immigrant with big ideas about her gifts running your undoubtedly hellishly hot and cramped kitchen?)

But I did became interested in hash. It seemed to be a particularly brilliant way to use up Thanksgiving leftovers--onions, potaotes, turkey and gravy, fried up together. Delicious. Everyone here loves it, although no one takes me up on my offers of to include a couple of gently poached eggs with the meal. It's classic diner fare--Adam and Eve perched not quite on a raft but atop the smoking hot mountain of hash. Ready at the tiniest jab from a fork to bathe the savory potatoes and turkey in a suave burst of rich buttery yolk. But I digress (I am allowed to, though--it's right up there on my masthead). Here is a recipe I made just the other night with leftover fried chicken. I wish I'd had some fresh herbs to shower on top--just a little parsley, even. A burst of green would make spring seem like it really will be here someday, even if hash is simply just the very best (and easiest) winter dinner around.

Chicken Hash with Carrots

four Idaho potatoes, peeled and cut into half-inch cubes
2 or 3 carrots, sliced into half inch coins, each coin cut in half
2 or 3 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 clove of garlic, minced
2 cups cooked chicken or turkey, cut into small pieces
1/2 cream
copious amounts of salt and pepper


Cook potatoes in boiling water for ten minutes--they will still be a bit undercooked. Saute onion and garlic in butter until onion is soft. Drain potatoes and add to onion and garlic in pan. Stir to coat potatoes with butter. Add carrots and cook over medium heat for twenty minutes, stirring just once or twice. Add 1/4 cup of the cream to pan, stir until thickened and glazed. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add the rest of the cream if you prefer your hash creamy, cook to warm it through.

History Lesson

Goodbye, Samantha

You all know what happened today. Brilliant and passionate Samantha Power, foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama, stepped down from her position. Well, shit. She will just have to go back to teaching at Harvard and writing Pulitzer prize winning books. The only tiny good thing about this retarded kerfuffle is that I get to hear dozens of pundits thoughtfully repeating over and over and over, "...Hillary Clinton is a monster!"

Heh.

Sad or Funny?

You Decide!

Crossing the River

When the 35W bridge collapsed so terribly into the Mississippi River August 2, I heard from more than one or two people who confided to me a shocking truth: They weren't actually aware that the stretch of freeway encompassing the disaster was a structure spanning water. Interstate 35 is so wide right there--four lanes in each direction-- and the view of the river is so obscured that it is, apparently, possible to zip right over the Mississippi at 65 miles an hour and never know it. An overpass is an overpass, you know? Shocking but it's true.

I thought about that as I drove over the Mississippi the other day. It was Saturday morning and instead of taking the freeway to a fencing meet at a school over in St. Paul, I was taking the scenic route. Strangely, although it takes ten minutes longer it is actually a more direct route, door to door. But it is mellow and pleasant in a way the freeway really never is. The road I took winds along the creek and several parks and then crosses the river. The Ford Parkway Bridge is two lanes in each direction and there is no way drivers can be oblivious to the famous waters stretching to the north and south. The banks are covered in snow and the river is frozen in great uneven chuncks and the trees and bushes that line the shores were coated in frost. Plus the bridge itself is quite lovely. There's a walkway/bikeway and black wrought iron rails on both sides. Making this drive, I just can't help being conscious of this town's history, imagining this scene through the eyes of all of us who have gotten to know the Mississippi--natives, early settlers, the proud progressives who built this bridge, all the generations of children staring out the rear windows of cars, holding their breath until the car reaches the other bank, safe and sound.

After crossing the river, I ended up in a great neighborhood not far from my destination. Passed by neighborhood coffee shops bringing in all the custom, right across the street from empty-parking lot Starbucks (St. Paul is great that way.). Natural food stores and old-fashioned pizza joints that will share the shade of giant oak trees once summer comes. And although it was lunch time by the time I got there, I had breakfast at the Bakery Cafe (honestly, that is what it is named). The Bakery Cafe is, quite fantastically, trying to cater to every need a customer could possibly have. Breakfast All Day. We Make Wedding Cakes. Open 'Til Eleven PM. Our Spaghetti Is The Best In Town. Try Our Chef's Specials--He Is From NEPAL!! (And to prove it, that chef comes out and waves once in awhile.) "His Tarkari is really good" says our waitress. "Oh, and his Momos are out of this world!" chirps her grandma, who is constantly on the prowl, handing out those thermos coffee carafes and who is, I think, maybe the owner of the place. Our waitress purses her lips, shakes her head and does a pinky point at the Lunch Specialty insert. "Yeah, but if you want vegetarian, you should try the Sag or Chatamari."

Sorry to disappoint, guys but I went with Eggs Benedict. I was pleased to note they were called such on the just a little bit crusty plastic menu. Here comes a Peevish Edict: Don't make me talk baby talk when ordering! As in, "I'll have the Eggs Benedict. Waitress "You mean the Bennies?" Grr. (Here's where I quickly look down to shield innocent working girl from daggers of hatred shooting from eyes. Obviously I have a problem with menu-forced chuminess.) The Bakery Cafe's English muffins were big and golden and perfectly chewy, the ham was cut in gently salty, slightly ragged slices from a real ham out in the kitchen and the Hollandaise was as nice as it comes. Lemony, buttery, almost pourable. (Apparently I also have issues with congealed egg-thickened sauces. But that's understandable, right?)

And that's what you get when you take the scenic route.

February Metapost

age ago alice almost annoying around attention attic author away barack being bit books boxes bring called canoe caucus chard coffee cold completely cook cream cut dozen enough evening ever everyone eyes fage family fdr featured five flavor fresh friend getting greek green ha hair hear heat hour house immediately jalapeno kennedy kittens knew leaves life links love metapost minnesota minutes needed obama oh overheard parents party people pepper pieces politics poodles post president pretty quite really red remember result room roz ruth sauteed school six slices soup super tablespoon talk things think tiny top vote wear years yes yogurt

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The Pure Love of Clara and Robert

It was the Composers Fair yesterday and oh, how the teenagers (and their mothers) were dreading it! Research a composer, the group of young musicians was instructed. Be creative--do a skit or record yourself performing music written by your composer. Or draw a portrait! Don't just cut and paste information from the Internet, either. Go to the library! For godsakes, snarled the teenagers. How old am I? Nine? Six? The resentful adolescents had a point, we all agreed. Some of the more experienced parents who had been through a Composers Fair held years earlier foretold of a dreary afternoon spent in the church's Commons, milling about that big chilly room, dutifully perusing dozens of projects--every single one consisting of a giant piece of posterboard covered with a stiffly written biography which, sadly would neither move nor truly inform onlookers. A bore, a waste of time, the jaded parents whispered. (Whispered because no one wanted the music program's director to overhear such divisive remarks. We're all a little afraid of the director, and this is a good thing, in its way. It gives the program a strength when we are all just foot soldiers in One Woman's Army. So we pressed on with our committment to the Composers Fair and regularly annoyed our teenagers by inquiring every few days about exactly what kind of progress they'd made on their research. )

And in many ways the Composers Fair was all that we all had feared it would be. Chilly with lots of posterboard. Except... it was such a joy to see those six-year-olds and those nine-year-olds. Their hearts couldn't help but be in this little affair. All of it, even the first event, the most unexpected "Presentation on the Staircase." This was sort of like the Miss America Pageant, we all agreed. The music students were all hustled up the to the second floor of the church, while the parents were all herded into a U-shaped cluster at foot of the staircase. One by one, in no particular order, the students walked down the stairs and when they arrived on the last step they announced their name and then told us the name of the composer they had so very recently become so very expert upon. "Hi, I'm Kelsey and the name of my composer is Shostokovich!" "My name is Amy and my composer is Antonio Hector Fiocco!" Was it cheesy? Nah. Not with contestents, I mean participants like the three nine-year-olds girls who descended together, dressed in eighteenth-century mob caps and ankle-length skirts, tiny shawls around their shoulders and tiny voices announcing, "We're Sophia and Laura and Adeline and our composer is The Schumanns." And, yes, yes, of course, the teenagers mostly slithered down the stairs in embarrassment. But truly, I think they were bolstered by the hilarity of finding themselves in this quasi infantile environment together. (Oh, and the parents all applauded after the students said their names --biggest round went to a tiny boy dressed in gray slacks, suit vest and fedora--"my composer is Frank Sinatra!"* I, however, clapped hardest, even hooted a little bit, for a stout lad wearing canary yellow breeches and matching tunic, a gray wig covering his dark curls, who stalked down the steps, gave us an encompassing beatific glance, uttered the single word, "Telemann", and exited stage left...)


I've really been a big fan of my children growing up--I love the increase each year in communication. It's great to be, literally, eye to eye with my offspring and it's just generally more relaxing now that they are able to take care of the majority of their own needs and some of ours--driving places, grocery shopping here and there, doing laundry and dishes and ordering takeout some nights. But yesterday afternoon when I stopped by the Schumann's booth I was kind of overwhlemed at the glorious innocence of its three creators. The display was thoughtful and intricate--a triptych to beautiful Clara, "the most gifted pianist of the century" and her extremely romantic husband, Romantic composer Robert. Here the girls had glued a half-open envelope with a copy of a love letter written to Clara peeking out. "Take it out--you can read it" urged Sophia. Here was a bunch of dried roses just like the ones they had read she kept from Robert, forever. And look at this--a copy of the hearing from the trial Clara endured when her father ("he thought he OWNED her!" exclaimed Adeline) brought a lawsuit against the lovers. And the music, yes, all the compositions were carefully copied down in the girls' very best, their fanciest handwriting. They had soaked the paper in tea, the girls told me. To make it look old.

*No, Frank Sinatra was not a composer.