basic braised anything

Well, maybe not anything.  But braising is a great way to cook less expensive cuts of meat and heartier vegetables.  There are a few simple steps to braising:

1) Sprinkle the main item (let’s say chicken thighs) with sea salt and pepper.  Saute it in olive oil until browned on both sides.

2)REmove the main item and put it on a platter.  Adding more oil if needed, saute onions, minced garlic and any vegetables you would like, say carrots or fennel.  ‘They need to be vegetables that will hold up to long cooking, not leafy things like spinach or broccoli. Remove this vegetable mixture from the pan as well.

  3) Deglaze the pan with liquid–generally speaking wine or broth.  Sometimes you can use herbed or fruit vinegars in lieu of wine, or even orange juice.

4) Return the meat and vegetables to the pan.  There should be at least an inch of liquid in the pan–add more if necessary.  Add any spices or herbs you find appropriate.  Bring the dish to a boil and then lower to a simmer.  Cover.  Let the house fill up with yummy smells.  Cook until meat flakes off the bone and veggies have merged into a delicious, caramelized sauce.

5) Garnish with fresh herbs if you like.  That’s it!

who is number one?

I’ve been watching all the old episodes of the 1967 cult classic “The Prisoner”, along with the new three-part “re-imagining of the show”.  Even though I was only 12 when it came out, The Prisoner has had a profound impact on my life.  Because of this show, I’ve had a lifelong block against remembering my social security number.  (to my dismay, I do manage to break through the block when paying taxes and doing other official business)

I am not a number.  I am a free woman.

While the old shows are as engaging as ever, they are clearly based on a Cold War mentality.  Number six is a secret agent.  While we don’t know what side the village is on, and while the show intimates there will come a time when both sides are interchangeable, a dichotomy between good and evil still underlies the action.  Number six always represents the defiant individual.

IN the reimagining, Number six works for a market research company and good and evil are less defined, more diffuse.  The conflict is more psychological than political.  Number six is more a victim than a proactive agent. 

In both series, Number Six deals with Number Two, (in 1967 a constantly changing cast of number twos), never meeting Number One.  INn the original series the question of “Who is Number one?” is never answered.  In the reimagining, we are told that there is no number one.  As an act of humility, we must all accept that even the most powerful among us are only number twos.

I guess the future has arrived, because good and evil are looking awfully diffuse these days.  After defeating Bush/Cheney and avoiding the nightmare of McCain/Palin, we welcomed Barack Obama as our knight in shining armor. I thought he represented intelligence and moderation, and while I tend to agree with Barry Goldwater (“in the face of evil, moderation is no virtue and extremist is no vice”) I know we have a wide range of views in this big country, and believed that moderation would be a big step back from the precipice where we found ourselve.  During the first year of his Presidency, I’ve been fighting the creeping realization that despite all his pretty talk NOTHING HAS CHANGED.  NOthing on climate change, nothing on trade, nothing on human rights, nothing on health care, nothing on Guantanamo, nothing on the Patriot Act.  And now, with his announcement of a major escalation in Afghanistan, I’ve got no choice but to lift the blinders from my eyes and face the despairing fact that Obama’s brand of moderation is a farce. 

What I can’t figure out is what to do.  The political system is obviously so corrupt that it weeds out anyone with the courage and capacity for real change, the Dennis Kucinich’s of the world.  Sixties style protests no longer have the political and social impact they once did.  The whole world is no longer watching.  They’re too busy texting on their cell phones or listening to Rush Limbaugh, viewing everything with an air of detached irony. Plus, as long as the government can find cannon fodder willing to give up their lives for God knows what in Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever hot spot they think of next, why should they care?

More and more, evil rests in the hands of multinational corporations rather than government per se.  Obama is clearly owned by corporate interests.  Yet, who works for these corporate interests? Not some handy cardboard villains we can overthrow.  As much as we might like to think it’s some evil Number two, multinational corporations are composed of thousands of average shlubs going about their daily business .Even the “number twos”, the highly paid executives of Goldman Sachs or Halliburton or Monsanto, are probably all in all decent folks if you knew them personally, who help their kids with their homework and go surfing in Hawaii, and enjoy fine Zinfandels and rationalize how they earn a living.

So I find my own focus getting more interior and more psychological. You’re going to find a lot more recipes, craft ideas, and book reviews in these posts and less political rants.  I’ve been politically oriented practically since birth, and the only lasting change I’ve seen in my life has been cultural.  I get far more of a feeling of accomplishment making changes in my own private life and, hopefully exerting a positive impact on my family and community.  It takes effort not to sell out, not to be overly influenced by the subliminal noise in the prevailing culture, not to be a number.

To be a number two is a copout.  To rage against number twos is a copout.  Both imply that we accept the authority that gives number two orders.  Both repeat themselves in unending historical cycles.

In the reimagined Prisoner, the Village is a dream world that only exists through the act of a dreamer creating the illusion of its existence. When the dreamer awakes gaping holes leading to oblivion appear.

Can’t we at least give ourselves the dignity of creating our own dream?  The scary truth is that we are all Number One.

former bookstore owners on the streets

I wrote a post a few months ago lamenting the demise of 23rd Street books, which was evicted from its storefront for nonpayment of rent.  Well, it turns out the owner has been evicted from her apartment too, and is now living on the streets, sitting with one of those “will work for food” signs in front of her (vacant) former store.

There may be more to this story than meets the eye.  As bad as a business bankruptcy is, it seems hard to believe this educated person had no fallback to homelessness–relatives, friends, food stamps, selling her furniture, flipping burgers,whatever.  However, her personal tragedy illustrates what a wrong road we continue to travel as a country and as a culture.

First of all, a neighborhood bookstore should not go out of business.  Sure, we have Powell’s, but a small neighborhood store serves vital purposes, too, as I outlined in my previous blog.  We need more books for sale, not less, especially an outlet for small local presses.  Lots of authors gave readings at the store, and like Music Millenium it served as a community center, a reason for people to walk down to 23rd Ave and maybe go out for a snack afterwards.

Secondly, and more globally, despite our allegedly capitalist economic structure, our society does absolutely nothing to support small business owners and self employed people, be they artists, writers, tradespeople, or anyone else with an entrepreneurial, independent spirit and a skill/product to offer.  Health insurance comes through employers, and the bigger the corporate employer (or labor union) the better the policy.  Self-employed people cannot get unemployment benefits should their business go under.   The tax code is slanted against small business owners and the self employed, who pay a disproportionate amount of workmens comp taxes etc and receive less deductions.

If Portland can even consider spending sixty million dollars to support a millionaire’s dream of major league soccer, can’t they provide microloans for people running their own businesses? Sort of an industrialized world’s version of Heifer International’s buying Third World families a goat?  (come to think of it, they could provide loans for goats, too, and urban farms)?  Couldn’t they provide rent relief for businesses struggling to survive in a recessionary environment?  Big corporations certainly get their tax breaks and TARP funds. Can’t the government provide basic safety net benefits to EVERYONE, regardless of their employer?

Republicans and far too many Democrats protect the interests of big corporations.  Left-leaning Democrats think of the government as big mommy, saving us from our lower impulses, whether it be spending money we don’t have or eating too much fatty food.  Nobody rewards the self-reliant individual, when THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO BUILT THIS COUNTRY and continue to provide most of its energy and creativity.

wendy’s recipe file: wendy’s coleslaw

I wanted to pass on the website for Harriet Fasenfest’s “Preserve”, which I referenced in my post “Urban HOmesteader Before her Time” .  Harriet offers food preservation classes and her website offers a lot of interesting links relating to urban homesteading.

On that theme, I offer this recipe for coleslaw.  An amazing amount of people think coleslaw is a complicated production that must be bought at the deli counter.  Actually, if you’ve got a food processor, you can make it in five minutes for a lot less money, and generally speaking, a better taste.

WENDY’S COLESLAW

1 head green cabbage

3 carrots, peeled

one-half to one cup mayonnaise, to taste

2 T cider vinegar

1 T celery seed

salt and pepper to taste ( I like white pepper for this)

1)  Grate cabbage and carrots with appropriate attachment on the food processor (you can also grate them by hand but it’s a longer process)

2) Combine with mayonnaise, cider vinegar, and celery seed in a large bowl.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

waverly acres

I recently read two interesting articles in the New Yorker, which when merged together would make a great screenplay.  They both took place in Florida, a state that fascinates me in its bizarreness.  There’s at least three cultures merging together in odd ways down there:  the redneck Deep South, Jewish New York, and Latin.  There’s a sense of being permanently stuck in the eighties, music and fashion-wise, and a certain lawlessness.  Don’t forget the obscenely rich snots living in Palm Beach, the drug dealers in their oceanfront villas, and the elderly people snarfing up their all you can eat earlybird buffets.  Add in the hazy humid heat, the wildly colored tropical flowers and thick scratchy grass, and alligators creeping along the canals, and who wouldn’t feel a bit off-kilter?

The first article dealt with exotic animals (exotic animal smuggling is big business in Florida) that have escaped into the wild, primarily during hurricanes.  Many of these animals have survived and prospered, in particular iguanas, Nile monitors, and pythons.   As greedy housing developers continued draining swampland building more and more remote subdivisions further inland, they’ve encroached on Python territory.  The pythons have swallowed animals as large as an alligator; who knows what they could eat next? 

The second article dealt with those very subdivisions and how most of them are in foreclosure, disintegrating ghost towns with weeds growing head high in the lawns.  Isolated residents live in the largely abandoned subdivisions, usually renters or people way behind on their mortgage and awaiting eviction.  I wouldn’t be surprised if you found some people just squatting in the homes.  And I’m sure anyone choosing this living situation has an interesting backstory.

So here you have the screenplay.  I am really bad at these high concept pitches, but here goes:  An unscrupulous developer half-builds a fancy subdivision (Waverly Acres–they all have names more suitable to a British shire than Florida swampland) but then goes into foreclosure and abandons the project.  He knows there are pythons in the canals that traverse the subdivision but of course says nothing about it.  Various people move in.  You’ve got our heroine, the wife of a Wall Street banker in New York City, who, after the collapse of his hedge fund, abandons her and her three children with no money.  Familiar with Florida from prior vacations, she snaps up a bargain house–boy, is she in for a surprise.  Then maybe you have some working stiff who actually bought one of the houses at full price but then lost his job.  He is struggling to hang onto the home but his wife has left him with the kids.  Maybe these two will get together.  Then you could have some drug dealer hiding out from the law, or Haitian refugees, or teenage runaways–many possibilities, all with their own backstories.  Put them all together, add in some hungry pythons, and see what happens.

How does this end? I haven’t decided yet, but I’m inclined to leave Waverly Acres to the pythons.

So when I win my Oscar, or at least make multimillions from the licensed plastic snakes with swallowing capability, you heard the idea here first.

wendy’s recipe file: middle eastern bread salad

Come warm weather, I’m a big fan of carb salads–potato salad is delicious, but there are so many more.  This bread salad is a middle eastern take off on the Italian panzanella salad.  While you can toast the pita breads you can also use leftover pitas that are past their prime.  I got this recipe from my friend Jan Heasley.

4 pita breads, torn into two inch pieces

2 cucumbers, peeled and diced

2 tomatoes, diced

two-thirds cup chick peas (canned and drained, or cooked from scratch)

one-half cup fresh lemon juice

one-half cup mint leaves, chopped

one-half cup cilantro, minced

one-half cup dill, minced

one-third cup extra virgin olive oil

one-half cup kalamata olives, pitted and halved

six romaine lettuce leaves, torn in thin shreds

3 scallions, diced

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 tsp salt

two-thirds cup plain yogurt (I reccomend the Greek variety)

1) Preheat oven to 400 F.  Place torn pita bread on baking sheet and bake until lightly toasted, about 5-10 minutes.  Transfer to large bowl and cool.

2) Mix all remaining ingredients together in a bowl then toss with bread.

3) Serve salad with a dollop of yogurt.

Wendy’s medical plan part two–and more

President Obama is having a difficult enough time sticking to his campaign promises without Congress getting in his way.  Yet here you have the odd experience of seeing fellow Democrats block his closing of Guantanamo because (gasp) some of the prisoners might be sent to the US.  We want them sent, apparently, to OTHER COUNTRIES.  I guess the citizens of those other countries aren’t as important as us Americans.

Reality check:  these suspected terrorists aren’t being released into our public parks.  They would be sent to prison,prisons that are strong enough to contain serial murderers and attempted presidential assassins, as well as convicted domestic terrorists like Timothy Mc Veigh.  Then, in a transparent public process, they would undergo a fair trial to determine if they are innocent or guilty of specific crimes.  This is how justice supposedly works in a democracy.

Unlike amorphous problems like the economic crisis and health care, which have many causes and many potential solutions, the closing of Guantanamo is straightforward.  You either believe in constitutional rights and the process of law or you don’t.  One would hope the constitutional law professor we’ve installed as President knows the difference.

Back to the amorphous problem of health care.  I see the health care industry is now pledging to save tons of money.  They could start by cutting down on all the ridiculous paperwork.  Going to the doctor now requires several pieces of paper before you even get in the examining room.  You need to sign the same privacy form you’ve signed zillions of times before (couldn’t they keep ONE in your record).  They need a copy of your insurance card (again, couldn’t a copy be kept on file?) Then the constant updates of information, when you could easily supply this type of info (change of address, new medical problem) yourself when applicable. AFter your doctor’s visit, more paper arrives.  There’s the statement that is “not a bill”.  So what is it?  something to clog up your desk?  There’s the bill from the doctor sent before they hear from the insurance company.  There’s the statement from the insurance company when they finally process your bill.  If you have any kind of lab tests, they are billed separately.  My son had a vision test as part of his pediatric checkup–by the same nurse, right there in the same office.  It was billed separately.

Then consider that the bills themselves are incomprehensible.  There is an amount billed.  Then there is an allowed amount.  When you get, say, your car serviced it costs a fixed amount.  There’s not one amount the shop charges you and a smaller “allowed amount” determined by some bureaucrat.  Doctors should charge a fixed amount that is covered at the fixed percentage allowed by your insurance plan.  Let’s say the doctor charges $100 for an office visit and your insurance covers 80%. Your bill is $20, plain and simple.  And why issue these statements ever single time you see a doctor? Why not send quarterly statements, detailing your expenses, the amount covered, and the amount owed?  Obviously to the insurance companies, complication and confusion operates to their advantage–I’m sure a lot of inaccurate charges slip by because people do not understand statements that look like a tax return (another exercise in obfuscation).

Lastly (for today) , let medical personnel determine how often a procedure needs to be done.  They are far from perfect in their judgement, but at least they have the expertise.  For instance, my dental insurance covers a replacement crown for a tooth every five years.  What if your crown doesn’t last five years?  Are you supposed to suffer, maybe develop a tooth abscess requiring more expensive care?   My vision coverage covers one checkup every two years despite the fact that my opthamologist specifically requests that I have a yearly checkup due to my cataracts.

I could go on all day, but  I have other things to do, so stay tuned for my next post on this subject.

friends in strange places

Usually oped columns are as formulaic as a Hollywood blockbuster.  Either the writer agrees with my predetermined opinions or they do not.  If they agree with me then I can bask in their pleasant reassurances of my worldview.  If they disagree then I can count on them to raise my blood pressure and fill me up with righteous indignant energy.

That’s why David Brooks stands out.  While theoretically a “conservative” columnist, I can never predict what he might say on a given subject and how I might respond.  He’s actually thought-provoking.

Probably the main reason for this is that he covers topics generally ignored by a reactive and lazy press.  In the past month, he’s noted that Obama’s economic stimulus package does little to promote “new urbanism”–urban infill, multiuse buildings, proximity of workplace to home, etc. While I generally associate these concerns with the liberal end of the spectrum, most liberals have been jumping out of their skins with joy at the thought of some New Deal style government work program putting people to work building new bridges and superhighways.  Never mind that all the interstate highways and dams built in the last century, while they may have provided employment and fueled economic growth, have led to environmental disaster and social disruption.

Brooks also wrote a column where he discussed a study indicating that hard work usually trumps genius.   A person of average musical ability who practices piano diligently will probably play better than an unusually talented person who goofs off.  A person of decent verbal ability and good imagination who decides she wants to be a writer and writes every day and keeps sending off her articles or stories to magazines, will one day be a published writer.  Nothing magical about it.  As a person of average musical ability who practices piano diligently and a person of above average verbal ability and imagination who keeps sending off my creations to the larger universe, I take heart in this.

Today Brooks wrote about happiness, how as we all know, money or talent or looks doesn’t buy happiness and we don’t know exactly what does.  He acknowledges that there are mysteries of the human soul we still know nothing about.

These topics might support some traditionally liberal programs–universal music education or bike paths.  They also advocate individual responsibility, which somehow has become (at least theoretically) a cornerstone of conservatism. But Brooks does not propose or denigrate any specific policy initiatives in these columns.  He simply throws the issues out there, suggesting one can deal with them in a multitude of ways and still not fully  understand them.

Finding what works—isn’t that what the Obama administration is supposed to be about?

wendy’s recipe file: little league chicken zucchini bulgur casserole

I whipped up this casserole this afternoon while waiting to see if this afternoon’s Little League game would be cancelled (it wasn’t).  By the time we get home from games it’s 7:30 in the evening and the whole family is hungry, especially the Little League player. This took a half hour to make at most, was very healthy, and pleased everyone.  My older son popped it in the oven about fifteen minutes before we got home.  This can be a one-dish meal but goes nicely with a side dish of sliced cucumbers mixed with Greek yogurt, 1 T dill and a dash of sea salt.

1 lb. ground chicken (ground turkey would work too)

1 cup bulgur

6 small zucchini, sliced fairly thinly

one-half large onion or one small, diced

1 small jar marinated sun dried tomatoes

1 small jar artichoke hearts, drained

2 T olive oil

1 tsp marjoram

1 tsp dried basil or 3 T fresh, minced

1 tsp dried oregano

sea salt and black pepper to taste

1) Cook the bulgur in two and a half cups boiling water.  The bulgur will absorb all the water surprisingly fast; keep an eye on it.

2) Put olive oil in a large saucepan.  Saute onion until transparent.  Add ground chicken and zucchini; saute until meat is cooked through and zucchini is crisp tender.  Add spices, sun dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts.  Remove from heat and mix in bulgur.

3) Bake at 350 until heated through, approximately 15 minutes.

urban homesteader before her time

My apologies for having been away from my blog–life intervenes, and like going to the gym, once you get out of a habit it takes energy to overcome inertia and get back in the habit.  So, time to get back in the habit of blogging.

For the past month, I’ve had an article sitting on my desk about a woman named Harriet Fasenfest, who owns a business called Preserve in her Northeast Portland home, teaching classes in such topics as garden planning, canning, pickling, cheese making, and “ordering meat directly from farmers”. The recession has made all these old fashioned skills trendy. 

I’ve always been interested in these things.  I remember skipping down the halls of my junior high because my twelve week session of home ec class was about to begin, a rare pleasure point in a dismal day.  At the age of 11 we were expected to master such tasks as making a basic white sauce and sewing a machine-smocked apron.  When I got to high school, I asked my counselor about continuing in the advanced home ec program, which included such classes as gourmet cooking.  “Oh, no, that’s not for students like you!” she exclaimed (ie smart, college-bound). Home ec classes would soon disappear, a casualty first of the feminist movement and then of budget cuts.

When I met my future husband (at age 17) I told him about my very untrendy dream of having six children, cooking all the family’s food from scratch and sewing everyone’s clothes.  We’ve had four children and I do cook all our food from scratch; fortunately for them I do not sew their clothes(though I do knit and sew the occasional household item). Until now all this has earned in the outside world is curiosity.  What earns money and prestige (especially if you’re smart and college bound) is trafficking in abstractions.  A successful woman works ten hour days at her law firm so she can rush by the yuppie deli and buy dinner prepared by more lowly folks.  If I write about the vitamin A content of leafy greens–now that’s work–if I grow my own leafy greens and make them into a salad with homemade dressing–that’s an affectation to pursue in my leisure time.

I even found that stay-at-home moms got caught up in the same mentality, rushing about and processing their children through countless scheduled activities as if they headed up a family corporation, rather than staying at home and , God forbid, “homemaking”.  To chauffeur your child to cookie-baking class is a a valuable use of your time; to stay at home with that same child baking cookies is mindless drudgery.  When I lived on Long Island, I had to drive a half hour (to a less affluent area) to buy so much as a spool of thread.  When I mowed our postage stamp lawn with a power mower, people came up to me asking a) what it was and b) had my husband lost his job because we obviously couldn’t afford to hire a gardener.  Sometimes I entertained a fantasy:  if some apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization happened, what would all these ladies with mile long nails, and their husbands, also with manicured hands, do?  When we moved to Portland we met far more like-minded people, but generally speaking, the culture of frenzy still prevailed.

No wonder our society completely lost touch with where their food and other goods (clothes, furniture, toys) come from as all these necessities of life appeared magically on a store shelf.  As I noted in a previous post, even the “resource economy” was dismissed as a thing of the past.  Now progressive people lived in the age of the “information economy”.  They went to college so they would never get their hands dirty.  Trouble is, we don’t eat computer chips. Plus all this abstracted frenzy rarely leads to the same primal satisfaction one gets from creating something tangible that is clearly linked to meeting basic needs.

 

Now a whole generation (or two) are going to learn this lesson the hard way and pickling home grown cucumbers is suddenly chic. Fasenfest makes a very incisive comment when she notes that we should think of ourselves not so much as consumers, but as producers.  I’ve always hated the word consumer, the way it reduces human beings to a greedy carnivorous maw, the way it defines us only by what we buy, what we use up and throw away. Sure, we all consume things, but all of us should produce things too.  The economic exchange should be one based on trade.

I still like making things. I still feel startlingly ignorant of most of the substances and devices I rely on each day.  I’d like to learn how to make more things, or at least understand how they work.  I must say, though, that if I wanted to order meat from a farmer I’d simply call up and do so, and I wish I trafficked enough in abstractions to be the first one to think that people would actually want to take a class about it.