wendy’s recipe of the day: savory bread pudding

Neither my son Lukas nor I like ends of bread and we are the biggest consumers of loaves of bread in our house.  I can’t bear to throw them away, though, so ends of bread accumulate until they take up half the freezer.  I was excited to find this recipe for savory bread pudding, which claimed to use up 24 slices of bread.  I found the number of slices excessive and the liquid content on the low side; I’ve tried to adjust for that in this recipe but you still may find the result tastes more like a baked breakfast sandwich than a pudding.  No matter, it’s good and my freezer has empty shelves again.

 

SAVORY BREAD PUDDING

enough old bread to fill a 9×13 pan three times over

butter for the bread (I used Earth Balance, a no trans fat vegetarian spread)

one-quarter pound ham

one-half cup olives, pitted and diced

eight ounces garlic and herb flavored goat cheese

8 eggs, lightly beaten

3 cups milk  (at least 2% fat)

salt and pepper to taste

diced fresh herbs if desired (parsley and basil are good)

2 ounces cheddar cheese, grated

1) LIghtly butter pan.  Cover bottom of pan with buttered bread.  Top with half the goat cheese, olives, ham, and any herbs used.  Add another layer of buttered bread and repeat.  Top with a third layer of buttered bread.

2) Whisk eggs together with milk, salt, and pepper.  Pour over bread.  Top with two ounces grated cheddar cheese.  Let sit for an hour or two in the refrigerator, covered with aluminum foil.

3) Place in a larger pan (a roasting pan works well) and fill with boiling water until it reaches halfway up the casserole dish.  Bake for half an hour; then remove the aluminum foil and bake for a half hour longer.  Cut like a lasagne to serve.

the demise of 23rd street books

The other day I was walking down 23rd Street and saw an empty space where 23rd Street Books used to be.  The demise of this 29-year old neighborhood landmark was not a surprise.  Their hours of operation had been shrinking along with their inventory; the owners had laid off most of their staff, including their daughter (who’d gone to work for Powell’s, only to be laid off there).

Still, it hurt.  23rd Street books did not have the broad selection of Powell’s, but the books they did sell were carefully chosen.  If you didn’t know what you were looking for, just wanted something good to read, it was less overwhelming that Powell’s miles of books.  Their children’s book selection was excellent and my youngest son and I spent many happy hours there.  Authors, both local and nationally known, gave readings often.  In the interest of supporting a local merchant, I bought books from 23rd Street even when it involved placing an order, running through almost as many book cards as Torrefazione coffee cards (another long lost tenant of 23rd Ave). I confess that after my daughter Rhianna started working at Powells, getting a fifty percent discount on her books, I stopped buying at 23rd Street as frequently.  But as it was right down the street, right on my walking path, I still stopped at the sales table now and then.  I just bought a calendar last week.  With both the bookstore and Music Millenium gone, I don’t have much reason to go down to 23rd Ave except to go to the bank and every now and then to Lucky Jeans.

The loss of small neighborhood stores hurts the economy, obviously, and frays the threads that hold a community together.  It also damages the texture of life.  We are lucky enough to live near Powells, which is hardly soulless, but its staff of underpaid and overeducated workers does not offer the personalized level of service of a store like 23rd Street Books.  And stores like Barnes and Noble or internet marketers like Amazon?   Impersonal and soulless. A local designer children’s clothing shop, owned by the mother of one of my son’s classmates, recently went out of business also.  I didn’t do my everyday clothing shopping there, but it was a good spot for party clothes and children’s clothing advice.  It put pretty things out there in the world, things that weren’t sewn in a sweatshop in Malawi.  I will miss it.

I’m hoping that these changes are cyclical, rather than an ongoing degradation of the quality of life.  A lot of corporate chains aren’t doing so well either.  Borders may be going the way of 23rd Street books.  Maybe there is a way for these small stores to stay in business if they follow an increasingly successful food model:  buying locally.  How about a store that specializes in local authors, published by local presses, books that you can’t find on Amazon or in Barnes and Noble, and increasingly, not at Powell’s either.  How about clothing stores (there are a few of these) selling clothes sewn by local designers and craftspeople?

We’re not going to get help from the top, no, not even from Superobama’s stimulus package.  Maybe it’s time to concentrate more on the grass roots.

wendy’s recipe of the day: roasted chicken with olives

ROASTED CHICKEN WITH OLIVES

2 lbs boneless skinless chicken thighs

3 cloves garlic, minced

4 T olive oil

juice of one lemon

3/4 cup dried Moroccan olives, pitted

2 sprigs fresh rosemary, coarsely chopped

one-third cup sun dried tomatoes, coarsely chopped

4 oz pancetta (I like the prepped kind from Trader Joe’s)

dash white wine

grated parmesan cheese

1) Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

2) Array chicken thighs in glass baking casserole and top with all ingredients except cheese.

3) Bake in oven until cooked and lightly browned on both sides, turning once.  Top with cheese; turn oven up to 400 and bake five more minutes or until melted.

The delicious sauce this dish effortlessly produces tastes great over tagliatelle noodles.  Serve with sauteed broccoli or spinach.

plumbing the shallows

A week before he gets flushed down the toilet of history, almost ex-President Bush gave an exit interview, reminding us why he’s destined for the sewer.  In charitable moments, I’ve wondered whether Bush’s inarticulateness obscures any deep thinking on his part.  But,no, this press conference makes clear how his mangling of the English language merely magnifies his incredible shallowness.

I’ve never seen a president so blithely unaware of the gravity of his office.  President Johnson’s eyes were filled with tears the day he resigned.  That doesn’t obviate his role in escalating the Vietnam War and needlessly killing thousands of people, but at least he acknowledged responsibility.  Even President Nixon felt the need to constantly reassure the American people that he “was not a crook”. Reagan initiated the era of President Lite, but even he projected an air of fatherly maturity.

But Bush?  He termed Abu Ghraib a “disappointment”.  A “disappointment” is when your team doesn’t win the Superbowl.  You don’t use that word to describe your reaction to horrific acts of torture.  Repulsed, maybe?  Sickened?  He termed the failure to find WMD in Iraq “disappointing” as well. Please, it was his rationale for a war that has killed tens of thousands of people  and maimed and ruined the lives of thousands more!  And he refers about it like it was a rainstorm interrupting his tropical vacation.

“I don’t know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but they were-things that didn’t go according to plan” he adds.  Well, George, I would call them mistakes.  Big ones.  And since when do Presidents expect “plans” to flow flawlessly in a diverse and complex world?  Heads of state implement policy.  They don’t “make plans”.

When reality didn’t line up with his perception, Bush, as is his wont, simply lied.  The federal government “plucked thirty thousand people off their roofs” during Hurricane Katrina?  Funny, I don’t remember Federal troops showing up for days.  Bush conveniently dismisses the fact that New Orleans has yet to remotely recover from Katrina.  The world still admires America?  Funny that, when both polls and world leaders say otherwise.

Bush blithely disregards the destruction–physical, economic, moral–that he leaves in his wake.  He says “burdens of the office” are overstated.  He cracks his old stupid jokes like he was a car salesman.  I think I regarded my tenure as PTA President with more seriousness. I can’t decide whether Bush’s bland indifference to the suffering he causes is worse than honest intentional evil.

So let’s hurry up and flush that toilet.  Too bad the American people are left swabbing the bowl.

wendy’s recipe of the day–moroccan glazed carrots

Maybe its ancestral bodily memory, but I’ve got a weakness for anything Moroccan.  On Jewish holidays, rather than relying on Eastern European staples (which I’ve never been too fond of) I prefer to explore the more richly spiced and vegetable oriented Sephardic cuisine.  These carrots go well with most meats and fish.  The sweet and sour flavor is typical of that part of the world and is also delicious with zucchini.   This recipe serves four but can readily be doubled or tripled.

MOROCCAN GLAZED CARROTS

2 pounds carrots, peeled and cut into lengthwise strips 3-4 inches long

4 T extra virgin olive oil

2  T sugar

1 large freshly squeezed lemon

2 T cilantro, minced

one-half tsp paprika

dash red pepper

sea salt to taste

1) Cook carrots in boiling salted water until just tender.  (I find a steamer basket works well for this purpose)

2) Combine other ingredients in a small bowl.

3) Drain carrots.  Toss in a bowl with dressing ingredients.  This dish may be served hot or at room temperature.

 

he’s not there

In Todd Hayne’s movie “I’m not there”,  Bob Dylan tries various identities on for size, physically manifested by different actors, including a black child and a woman (superbly played by Cate Blanchett) and musically and lyrically manifested by his incredible songs.  One is left wondering if there is at the core, any one true Dylan, or if he is nothing but a soulless chameleon.  It’s an abstract, chilly movie, but I think it accurately captures the abstract, chilly character of Dylan, who has never been comfortable with his celebrity and especially his pigeonholing as a spokesman for his generation.

What a lot of people don’t realize about Dylan–and I can’t fault them, because it’s a disheartening realization–is that he is not a passionate, sensitive creature baring his soul.  What he is is a consummate craftsman.  Look at all the songs he has churned out over the years, with remarkable facility–love songs, ballads, protest songs, some works of astounding genius, others quite ordinary, but all of them decent and singable.  He could write commercial jingles.  He could write for Broadway shows.  Because of his ability to channel diffuse and inchoate emotions into music and lyrics, the natural tendency is to impute those emotions to him.  But that isn’t necessarily the case.  A lot of the time I think he’s simply reporting on what he sees.  Or else he’s playing with technique, which is why he has that irritating tendency of changing around his songs every time he performs them.

What Dylan doesn’t seem to understand and appreciate is that his songs, once he creates them and sends them out into the world, take on a life of their own apart from his personal and limited artistic intent.   They mean whatever his audience takes them to mean and become larger and more significant when reflected in their consciousness. When I first heard the song Mr. Tambourine Man (a few years after he actually wrote it) I was blown away by the way this human being could distill all my longings into four verses of a song.  This epiphany about the power and words of music has stuck with me.  I listened to to that song every night of high school, down in my basement room on my plastic record player, and that feeling of transcendence and escape has stuck with me too.  When I read, a couple years ago that the TAMBOURINE Dylan based his song on was on display at Paul Allens rock and roll museum, I was stunned.  He was actually writing a song about a man who played a tambourine??  That was what the song was about?? Maybe to Dylan, but fortunately not to me.

So now I’m going to bring the conversation around to Barack Obama, because I think I see some parallels here.  Obama also has the power to channel words–if not music–that move people, and people see in him a reflection of what they want to see.  They see a charismatic leader, a rescuer, another voice of a generation, when what he actually is is a consummate politician.  Which leads me to wonder what is at the core of his protean character, if there is any there there.  But I also wonder:  how much does it really matter?

Changing the course of our sick society is a job too big for any one person.  Our country is huge and diverse; our needs complex; our agendas differing and conflicting.  Change is as much cultural as political.  If Obama can help us harness the best in ourselves–and I think as a nation we’re ripe to be harnessed–and we all work hard to make positive change in our particular areas of expertise and passion–does it really matter that he’s more a facilitator than a visionary?  Visionaries get frustrated by their inability to translate dreams into reality.  They don’t know how to smile and shake hands and remember names.  They don’t get elected President.  Sometimes they can accomplish wonderful things, but all too often they burn out and fade away.   Maybe a facilitator is the change we need.

I can’t tell you how many times during the eight long years of the Bush Administration that I found myself humming Masters of War, or A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, or other songs Dylan wrote forty-some years ago.  He might not have written them from the heart, but I hear them from the heart, and that matters a whole lot more.   

b