Domestic Left

Travel writing

2011-08-23T23:07:00.005-05:00

I don't fly very often. In fact, in the summer of 2008, after two particularly horrendous flight experiences in a row, I swore never to fly again — and kept that promise for two and a half years. But on Monday I embarked on my fourth airplane trip of this calendar year — and the second to the opposite coast.

I started reading the New Yorker about eight or ten years ago, when I first started taking exercise seriously — a guilty pleasure, a respite from my usual regimen of austere left-wing theory, which I allowed myself as a reward while spending 30 minutes on an exercise bike a couple of times a week. The sense of virtue of working off some of that beer, along with a healthy dose of endorphins, allowed me to take pleasure in the craft of good writing without taking too much offense at the underlying assumptions of most New Yorker articles: a casual condescension toward both the working class and the serious intellectual left.

As the benefit of exercising became its own reward, and as I took up weights and running (at least in the 6 non-winter months we have in Vermont), I've developed a backlog of New Yorkers recently. As this flight was a long one, and I was travelling solo, and as this trip was for work, and as I've been working a lot recently ... I decided to bring nothing but pleasure reading on the plane with me — namely, all those New Yorkers.

* * *

The one issue I read cover to cover on Monday was the April 18th issue, a kind of travel issue, I suppose. There was a long piece by the novelist Jonathan Franzen, recounting a typically New Yorker type quest — the author, seeking to escape a sense of malaise, determines to travel to a remote island and re-read Robinson Crusoe while himself stranded in solitude on an otherwise uninhabited isle. The piece becomes a meditation on the life and suicide of his friend the novelist David Foster Wallace, and on the origins, function and destiny of the novel as an art form.

I've never read anything by either author, and in fact don't read very many novels at all, or fiction of any sort (even the fiction in the New Yorker). I read left theory. I read about what social movements are doing and thinking. And, like so many other people, I read what my friends, family, neighbors and distant acquaintances are doing, thinking, and finding amusing or appalling — on Facebook.

Franzen is his piece admits to having developed the habit of narrating his own life as if it were a novel; I, like so many other people — far more than will ever admit to it to others — often find myself narrating my own life to myself in Facebook status updates, or tweets. But sometimes, especially when I've been reading the New Yorker, I start narrating my inner intellectual life in a more expansive, rich and speculative voice — and, a few times a year, the result makes it onto this blog.

* * *

I started this blog almost seven years ago, prompted by a friend who was at the time, like me, mostly a housewife. She got up early every morning to write — a discipline I always admired but could never emulate. I maintained it in proper blog-like fashion for less than a year, then stopped regular posting, especially after I lost touch with my one regular reader as she went through a divorce and some other life changes. Then for awhile it became a place where I would regularly post recipes, but I've become too busy to even do that anymore.

In recent years, the only serious blogging I have done has been when I travel — which is something I don't do much of. Between the comforts of home — especially the comforts of good food and abundant wine in the evening — the demands of work (paid, house and movement), and the regular exercise that is necessary to maintain my health, I find it hard to find the time to actually write down my thoughts, and difficult to justify writing about whatever catches my intellectual fancy instead of serious writing for the movement. Travel offers not only subjects to write about but the time to do it, and, perhaps more importantly, permission to step outside the boundaries of day-to-day life.

* * *

Travel is, of course, a luxury — and luxury is intimately connected to creative writing. Visual art, music, dance and poetry are all deeply utilitarian — constituting and re-constituting the social rituals that make human society, and thus agriculture, factories, tractors and iPads, possible. They all stretch back beyond written history; they are at the core of what it means to be human.

The novel, however, as Franzen notes, developed with the world-historical emergence of capitalism. The tremendous development of productive forces established for the first time a class — the bourgeoisie — with the leisure time to not only read for pleasure on a grand scale, but also the leisure time to take pen to paper and write — formerly the province of the skilled castes of poets, dramatists and theologians. Novels were the first blogs, the first writing that took the commonplace as a worthy subject for art, and the first art that aimed to become a commonplace — to be read alone, at home, at the end of the day, for pleasure.

Blogging and social media are at the same time a fascinating democratization of intellectual production — we express our leisure now not simply by reading but by creating — and part of modern capitalism's conquest of leisure as a site of accumulation. Every night, after work, millions of us spend our leisure time working for free, creating the content that provides revenue for Adsense and Facebook.

* * *

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts," maintained Mark Twain. Of course, the modern American travel infrastructure has been designed to purge the activity of any such subversive function.

Years ago, as part of a discussion of "socio-economic integration" in the Burlington school district, a well-meaning middle-class liberal expressed pity for the white working-class kids in my neighborhood, who would (according to this person) never leave their community. Yet in Burlington's Old North End, those kids were going to be exposed to, brought into daily intimate contact with, forced by physical proximity and their own powerlessness to reckon with, cultures that were not their own. While that middle-class liberal could easily travel the whole world and never have to leave the worldwide cocoon of privilege and liberal condescension that makes the world safe for white middle-class Americans and their views.

But still, despite all the attempts to sanitize it, travel can still radicalize people. No matter how well-crafted and swaddled in liberalism a study-abroad program is, it always runs the risk of returning a student dedicated to overthrowing imperialism.

Writing, on the other hand, is not fatal to prejudice — in fact, it is fundamental to prejudice, for what is prejudice if not the stories we tell about others whom we do not know. It can seek to disrupt prejudice, but without the disruption caused by contact — physical contact — with others, writing inevitably ends up reinforcing some sort of prejudice, however "inclusive" that prejudice pretends to be.

Which I suppose is why travel writing is, despite my reluctance to do it, important.

Farewell to Winooski

2011-06-01T20:12:00.004-05:00

Tomorrow will be my last day of working in Winooski. While I don't think I'll miss the capitalist time accountancy of working at a for-profit firm, I will kind of miss the long walk into work in the morning. I usually head in between 6 and 7 am, to go to the Winooski YMCA (which I'll also miss; more laid-back and working-class than the downtown Y), so I get to walk down the river valley as the sun rises, ending by crossing the bridge over the Winooski River into the city of Winooski.

* * *

There's been a lot of development in downtown Winooski in the past dozen years. To my understanding, it didn't really displace any neighborhoods (I don't remember there being much but a strip mall and some brush in the area east of downtown where the new building have been built), and lord knows we need more housing in the greater Burlington area.

However, I think the city of Winooski missed a great opportunity by letting the developers build the new buildings in super bland-o-riffic style. I mean, I'm sure it's meant to blend in with the (fairly handsome) old brick mill buildings along the river, but to honest I think with some good, adventurous modernist architecture they could have attracted easily twice as many Burlington hipsters, high-end-localvore restaurants, art galleries, etc. (instead, a lot of the commercial rental space on the sidewalk level is still empty).

Here's the old Champlain Mill building to the right, and the blocks of blah stretching back on the left:

The old mill buildings really do look quite nice, I especially like this entrance to the Woolen Mill:

But I just think they would do better to be paired with new architecture more like these - both in Winooski, neither of them spectacular, but kind of interesting and reasonably handsome:

By the water

2011-04-24T16:58:00.003-05:00

Last Friday was Earth Day, Lenin's 140th birthday, my 38th birthday and, this year, Good Friday. The April 22nd I was actually born on (1973) was Easter Sunday.

Friday morning we were at a small beach town in Delaware, the last stop of a short vacation we took for the kids' spring break, cheap because it was the off season. I got up to run in the morning, it was in the low 40s and the boardwalk was nearly deserted. A sheet cloud covered the Eastern horizon far out over the Atlantic ocean, but as it approached the shore it gave way to small puffy clouds, close together like cobblestones. It was one of those rare moments when you can't see the sun, but its rays are visible shining down through cracks in the clouds, like the illustrations of God's love or holiness in those 14th or 17th century European paintings that so confused me in art museums when I was a little kid, befuddled by why anyone would want to paint so many pictures of a naked guy being tortured.

* * *

We drove back by way of scenic Route 9 along the Delaware coast, the "Coastal Heritage Greenway." The road is at places so close to sea level that there are numerous sign proclaiming that the road ahead is underwater if the lights are flashing, and so forth. Some of the land is farmland, some of it muddy tidal wetlands, a good portion of the latter protected as wildlife refuges.

At one point we drove a couple miles from Route 9 out to the actual shore, and stopped at what I'm guessing was once a fishing village, and is now a tiny pocket of poverty with a few people who try to make a living fishing. It had about two dozen small houses, a parking lot, boat ramp and a small pier which is closed from dawn to dusk unless you're fishing, and this ramshackle and abandoned structure:

Along with island nations and low-lying, densely populated areas like Bangladesh, this area of Delaware is almost certain to be covered by the ocean within a few decades. Unlike Bangladesh, it's not densely populated; the relative handful of I imagine mostly poor folks who eke out a living from the land and sea will be displaced into the rest of what passes for American society.

* * *

At that fishing village, we also got our first glimpse of the Salem Nuclear Power Plant, which sits on an artificial island between Delaware and New Jersey. It dominated our view all the rest of the way along the "Scenic Route," which oddly enough begins at an Air Force base and ends at an oil refinery.

Homemade crackers with the kids

2010-10-10T19:05:00.003-05:00

What with a looming danger of a full-time job in my immediate future, soon enough I probably won't be home in the afternoons with the kids. Not that I'm ever going to be as good a parent as the Sweet Juniper guy — I find it far too easy to ignore them now that they will occupy themselves reading or making WWII diaramas out of Lego or whatever it is they do upstairs — but I've been trying to plan at least one activity to do together with the kids each afternoon.

In practice, this has meant figuring out something to do with the boy, since the girl, now in middle school, has been playing middle-school soccer — meaning most weekdays we don't see her from 7:15 in the morning when she leaves home to catch the bus, until 5:30 at night when she gets home from soccer practice.

The boy really likes crackers, and I really like cooking, so a few weeks ago I enticed him into making crackers with me in part by showing him this video of Mark Bittman talking about and making crackers. So we made the Parmesan Cream Crackers (recipe here) and promptly ate them up. This afternoon, we repeated this with his sister helping out as well.

Here are the crackers after they were made (well, what was left of them after the kids & spouse had afternoon snack...):

Spicy vegan "cream of" broccoli soup

2010-09-02T13:54:00.003-05:00

I made this today to use up some broccoli that needed a home, vaguely inspired (sadly) by a recipe I read earlier in the week in a Hannaford "Fresh" magazine lying around the waiting room of the dentist's office. I wasn't really expecting it to be as delicious as it was. It is also a good way to use broccoli stalks and leaves if the people you cook for will only eat florets (like 2 people in my household).

2 stalks broccoli, chopped
1 onion, chopped
extra virgin olive oil
a couple of pinches red pepper flakes
white wine (I probably used about 1/2 cup)
1 can cannelini beans

1. Heat a little olive oil in a saucepan over medium-high heat and add onions and red pepper flakes. Cook until onions are starting to brown.

2. Add broccoli pieces and cook for a minute or two, until they turn bright green.

3. Add white wine, stir to make sure nothing's sticking to the bottom of the pan, and raise heat to high. Reduce white wine by half.

4. Add beans and just enough water to almost cover (you want to err on the side of less water: you can always thin the soup later with more water; thickening it is much more difficult). Season well with salt.

5. Cover the pan, bring to a simmer, and simmer for 15-20 minutes, until broccoli pieces are thoroughly tender.

6. Whiz up with an immersion blender, adding more water if too thick. Garnish each bowl with a drizzle of olive oil and some freshly ground black pepper.

Serve with toast or croutons.

Polenta-cheese chiles rellenos

2010-08-27T12:37:00.003-05:00

Traveling to the midwest and southwest this summer, we ate at quite a few Mexican restaurants, and I took to ordering not a few chile rellenos, on the theory that when eating in a restaurant, you should order things that you generally don't make at home. A few were amazing — Café Castro in Santa Fe and El Mezcal in Lawrence, Kansas — most were pretty good, and only one was awful, smothered with so much meat sauce (!) and melted cheese that there were pools of saturated fat everywhere on the plate.

Nonetheless, after getting a couple of local poblano peppers at the Intervale Community Farm this week, I decided I'd take a stab at actually making them at home.

I started with Rick Bayless's recipe from Mexico One Plate at a Time. One of the great things about stuffed dishes, of course, is that they lend themselves so well to variation, and especially to meatless variations (not that I'm vegetarian, I just don't cook with meat a lot). Mixing some cooked polenta in with the cheese helped cut the richness of the filling without losing the creaminess, and, because it is zucchini season, I cut one up and added it to the broth for variation.

This recipe has a lot of steps, but there are also a lot of opportunities for doing things ahead — the only thing that really needs to be done at the last minute are reheating the chiles in the oven, reheating the broth on the stove, and sautéing the zucchini.

Measurements for some of the ingredients here are pretty general, because poblanos vary pretty widely in size. I probably used about 1/2 cup each of polenta and cheese, and maybe a few tablespoons of sunflower seeds, to stuff 3 poblanos. Making the batter with 2 eggs gave me more than enough for the 3 poblanos; I could easily have coated a fourth. I used some leftover potato-cooking water for the broth, which was perfectly acceptable, but I'm sure it would taste richer with chicken stock (veggie or beef stock might overpower the tomatoes).

Chiles
Poblano peppers
Lots of oil for frying

Filling
Cooked polenta (either leftover or store-bought), cut into small chunks
Jack cheese, shredded
Sunflower seeds

Tomato broth
Onion, chopped
Tomatoes, chopped or from a can
Cinnamon
Pepper
Water, stock or broth

Batter (for every 2 poblanos)
1 egg
1/8 tsp salt
1 tsp flour

Zucchini garnish
1 or more zucchinis, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
A few pinches of cumin seeds

1. Prepare the chiles by heating 1 inch of oil in a large pan to 350 degrees. I used a 12-inch Calphalon dutch oven, and probably about 1 1/2 quarts of oil. Drop the chiles in and cook for 1-2 minutes, until the skin is blistered all over. Remove, drain on a paper towel, and remove oil from heat.

2. Mix polenta, cheese and sunflower seeds together in a bowl. I used roughly equal amounts polenta and cheese, but proportions could be varied. I prepared the ingredients separately, mixed together as much as I thought I'd use, then when I ran out mixed together a little more. If the polenta is not well-salted (amy homemade polenta always is, but storebought — or yours — might not be), you might want to add a bit of salt here as well.

3. When chiles are cool enough to handle, rub off skins, cut a slit in the side and pull out all the seeds and membranes. Rinse out the insides gently, then stuff with filling. Secure chiles with a toothpick, place on a plate and flatten slightly, and put in freezer for 1-2 hours.

4. Meanwhile, make the broth. Sauté onions in a little oil until just beginning to turn golden, sprinkle with cinnamon and black pepper, and add tomatoes. Cook the tomatoes down for a few minutes, then add liquid and bring to simmer. Puree until smooth with an immersion blender and set aside.

5. Remove chiles from freezer and reheat oil. Separate egg(s) and beat whites with salt until they hold soft peaks but are not at all stiff. Add in yolk(s) and flour, and beat to combine. Once oil has come to 350 degrees, take however many chiles will fit into the oil at one time, dust with flour (shaking to remove excess), drop in batter to coat thoroughly, then lay^* immediately in the hot oil. Rick Bayless says to spoon oil over the top, but I found this had the effect of washing the batter off the chiles, so I stopped doing it.

6. Cook chiles on one side for 3-5 minutes, until nicely browned, then flip over (2 metal spatulas was the easiest way to do it — the batter is so light that it's hard to grab the chiles with tongs without scraping the batter off) and cook on the other side the same amount of time. Remove from oil and drain on paper towels. If you have more chiles than will fit in the oil at once, repeat with remaining chiles.

7. Heat oven to 400 degrees. After all chiles have rested at least 5 minutes out of the oil, put them into the oven for 15 minutes on a baking sheet (lined with foil for easier clean-up if you're neat like that). This will crisp the coating a bit, render some oil, and heat the filling through.

8. While the chiles are in the oven, reheat the broth. Heat some oil in a large frypan over medium-high to high heat, add cumin seeds and cook until fragrant (30-60 seconds), then add zucchini cubes. Make sure each cube has one side flat along the surface of the frypan and then do not disturb for several minutes — you want to get a nice sear on at least one side of each piece of zucchini. Test a couple, and when they're nicely browned, stir the zucchini around a bit and continue cooking until nice and tender. Toss with salt and pepper.

To serve, for each chile place 1/2 cup of broth in a shallow bowl, nestle the chile in the middle, then spoon zucchinis around the chile.

* I almost wrote "lie" here, which would of course have been an instruction to the cook to lie down in the hot oil, rather than to lay the pepper in the oil.

Hotcake crepes

2010-08-22T15:21:00.002-05:00

One of the best food finds during our summer road trip this year was Pamela's Diner in Pittsburgh, which is known for "hotcakes" — large, crepe-like spongy pancakes, served rolled around fruit or other fillings with sour cream and maple syrup. They were amazing, thicker and spongier than traditional crepes — kind of like a sweet white-flour injera. This is my attempt to reverse-engineer them; I'm not sure I got it quite right, but these are still quite good.

I used a 12-inch nonstick skillet to make very large crepes and got 6 out of this recipe, but I imagine you could also use a 10-inch skillet and get more crepes which would still be large enough to roll around a filling. Flipping them is a bit of a trick; I slid the crepe off onto a plate and then flipped them back into the skillet.

2 1/2 tsp yeast
1/2 cup warm water (105-110 degrees)
1 1/2 cups milk
4 TBSP butter
1 1/2 cups flour
4 TBSP sugar
1 tsp salt
2 eggs

1. Mix yeast with warm water in a small bowl. Meanwhile, melt butter in a small saucepan; when melted, add milk and heat until warm (105-110 degrees).

2. Mix flour, sugar and salt together in a large mixing bowl. Add yeast to milk-butter mixture, then add liquid mixture to dry ingredients and mix well.

3. Cover batter tightly with plastic wrap and let stand for one hour, until bubbly and risen. Stir batter down, re-cover, and let stand overnight.

4. Stir down the batter, and beat in the eggs.

5. Heat a 12-inch non-stick pan over medium-high heat. For each hotcake crepe, lift the pan off the heat, add about 2/3 of a cup of batter and swirl around to cover the whole pan. Cook until bubbles appear and the crepe is browned on the bottom, then turn over and cook on the other side (several minutes per side).

6. Serve rolled around berries, jam or other filling, with maple syrup and/or whipped or sour cream.

Garden of Eden

2010-07-19T14:41:00.006-05:00

Yesterday while driving across the high plains, I took the kids to visit the Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas. Built in the early decades of the century by one Samuel P. Dinsmoor, it is quite the bit of folk art and well worth seeing if you're driving across the country on I-70.

On the south end of this tiny town (population about 500) you come across this amazing concrete sculpture garden surrounding a house. Designed by Dinsmoor to be a tourist attraction, the house itself is pretty interesting. It is made out of local limestone (quarried just south of Lucas in Wilson, KS) but, instead of having the limestone broken into blocks as was traditional, Dinsmoor ordered long slabs of limestone and then used them like logs to build what he called his "cabin home."

Dinsmoor was really into concrete (a recent invention at the time) and he made all of the decor on the house (as well as the surrounding statuary) freehand — using his hands and shaping tools, but no molds — which is pretty impressive:

Well, no molds except the occasional beer bottle (this part was made during Prohibition, apparently):

You can go in the house (I'm not sure if that was the case the first time I came here, 20+ years ago), and see the storage/tornado safety cellar:

In addition to the house, he built a mausoleum for himself and his first wife, and had himself mummified (not wrapped up in fabric, but smoked to preserve the body). Per the old man's wishes, apparently, guided tours include a visit to the mausoleum to see his body. Another creepy bit in the mausoleum is a photo he was apparently very proud of: using two exposures, he took a picture of himself looking down on himself in his own casket.

But, of course, the real attraction are all the statues around the outside. Here is (not surprisingly) my favorite, the crucifixion of labor by the Doctor, Lawyer, Preacher and Banker:

And here is the Octopus of Monopoly Capital strangling the world (I'm not sure which bit represents this, but apparently one part of it is the octopus controlling the people by controlling their food supply — a timeless point, I suppose).

In another place, a man and a woman are using the "ballot saw" to regain their rights from the Octopus of Monopoly Capital:

In addition to the political parables, there are (not surprisingly, given the name), Biblical (and pseudo-Biblical) parables. Here, for example, is the all-seeing eye of God, being guarded by an angel with a flaming sword:

And the Devil in the corner, with God's hand reaching out to get him (apparently Dinsmoor thought the Diety could be a little more, ahem, active in trying to, you know, suppress evil and reduce human suffering and so forth)

His first wife apparently got tired of him being outside sculpting all the time, so he built a little face of himself waving into the kitchen window at her (the kitchen was in the basement):

Some more statuary:

When I first came here in the late 80s, it was kind of hard to find (it had just been purchased by a group of "grassroots art" people) but now it has apparently spawned a kind of "grassroots art" renaissance in Lucas, with a Grassroots Arts Center and this big old, I guess, commemorative plate by the highway as you come into town:

Our buried veins

2010-07-16T22:12:00.005-05:00

I went to visit the Ludlow Massacre Monument today, in southeast Colorado. On my way down I-25 on Monday, I must have either missed the signs or been in too much of a hurry to stop.

The Massacre occurred in 1914, and the United Mine Workers of America raised the monument in 1918, but the story is rarely told in standard history books, and when it is, it is usually buried in a sidebar and isolated from its political context.

The miners of southeast Colorado came from Mexico and from all parts of Europe and spoke 24 different languages between them. They suffered injuries and eaths in the mines at a rate ten times that of their contemporaries in the East. As with so many organizing efforts, differences between the workers was the greatest obstacle to getting justice from the boss, but they succeeded, and in September 1913 they all went out on strike, together.

Their unity terrified the bosses, and provoked a barbaric response. Workers and their families were evicted from their homes (which were on company land), not even being allowed to take their possessions with them. The National Guard and state militias funded by the companies were sent in to suppress them, but they held strong. The union leased land and they built tent cities, in Ludlow and elsewhere, in which they braved the bitterest Colorado winter in recent memory.

After seven months on strike, and the day after celebrating Greek Orthodox Easter, the state militia provoked the Massacre — opening fire on strikers and their families, and burning down the tent city in Ludlow. Two women and ten children perished in the blaze, and five men and one more child were killed by gunfire.

They didn't win the strike — or, indeed, win union recognition until 1935 — but the violence did not break the strike in April. They held out until December, when the union ran out of funds and workers decided to return to work.

Though kind of out in the middle of nowhere, and unattended, the monument does have a guest book, kept in a box. The current book was full of names from the past two months, most accompanied by comments, many of them quite moving. This was my favorite:

("God bless the working people of the world, and teach big capital the generosity & compassion that the working class lives & loves by everyday. We are all connected")

* * *

The city of Trinidad was the economic center of the coal mining industry in southeast Colorado. While most of the mines have shut in recent decades, Trinidad seems to be hanging on better than many de-industrialized areas, and it has an attractive downtown with a mix of coffeehouses and art galleries, blue-collar bars and auto-body shops. Most of the buildings, and many of the streets and sidewalks, are made of brick.

It also has two monuments, erected by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Southeast Colorado, both monuments to the dangers of mining. The first honors and memorializes the miners who died in the mines, the second the canaries who served (and often died) as organic carbon monoxide detectors in the days before electronics:

My guess is that the "regular" (i.e., white) Chamber of Commerce would never have honored Max B. Foster and Archie Struthers and Ivan Zorich; it's good that they have the likes of Jose Canuto Barron and Reuben Nunez and Epifanio Martinez to look out for their memory.

* * *

Before World War I, German-Americans were the country's largest ethnic minority — and they were an ethnic minority, with their own churches, bars and restaurants, in which they spoke German, ate foods unfamiliar to most "Americans" and raised the suspicions of many a "patriot" — especially as German-American workers were frequently at the center of labor struggles. They were neither "legal" nor "illegal," documented nor undocumented, because the U.S. had passed no laws whatsoever regulating immigration from Europe (prior to the Immigration Act of 1924, the only immigration regulations were prohibitions on specific nationalities, such as the Chinese Exclusion Law).

The U.S. entry into World War I unleashed an intense wave of suspicion of German-Americans, and an intense campaign to suppress Germanness, especially in the upper midwest where German immigrants were a particularly high percentage of the population. Towns named "Berlin" by German settlers were renamed. German churches which didn't convert to English (most did) were vandalized, their ministers paraded around town by "patriotic" mobs. When this is discussed in history books — if it is at all — it is mostly characterized by the somewhat comical attempts to rename saurkraut "Liberty Cabbage" (the ancestor of this century's "Freedom Fries").

The vast majority of German-Americans responded to this by trying to become good (white) Americans, but it didn't give them all a free pass. When I visited the Los Alamos History Museum yesterday, there was a temporary exhibit about the internment of German-Americans during World War II. Over ten thousand German-American citizens and German residents of the U.S., as well as over four thousand German nationals residing in Latin American and Carribean countries were rounded up by the U.S. government and placed in internment camps, despite no evidence of espionage, much like the more well-known example of internment of Japanese-Americans. Some of them, including some who were Jewish, had fled Germany to escape the Nazis. Some were forced, by the U.S. government, to return to Germany during the war, where they were generally treated as American spies.

I think sometimes we on the Left underestimate the amount of violence and coercion that went into making white people "white" — it wasn't just the carrot of white privilege, there was also the stick of "Americanization." Of course, it pales by comparison to the genocide of native peoples and the enslavement of Africans that are at the heart of white supremacy — I'm not trying to make the kind of "my people suffered too" argument that many of the Right make to obscure the reality of racism. But I think that maintaining the historical memory of things like the forced Americanization of German immigrants helps us grasp that white supremacy is at its heart a system of violence and coercion, not merely prejudice.

* * *

After lunch at the Ludlow Memorial, I drove up Route 12, the "Highway of Legends," a two-lane road that follows the Purgatoire River (or "River of the Souls in Purgatory") up west into the mountains from Trinidad. It was advertised as a "scenic byway," but most of the scenes were of coal and coal extraction.

Just past the Army Corps of Engineers lake at the foot of the mountains lies Cokedale. It's a former mining town (the mine closed in 1947) which still has about a hundred folks living in it, just outside the Romanesque ruins of the old coke furnace.

Across the road from Cokedale is a massive slag heap; it's been there since the 40s (and before). According to the historical marker sign, on hot days the slag heap becomes hot enough to generate steam of its own accord.

Driving up Route 12 is much like driving up any other small road following a river valley up the mountains — except that the exposed layers of rock are clearly rich and black with carbon. Apparently the coal mining industry in the area and revived somewhat in recent years with the use of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" (that's the same process they're using to get oil out of the tar sands in Alberta).

I don't know whether the apparent instability of the rock faces alongside the road (there are almost constant "Falling Rock" signs) is due to the fracking, or the old coal mines, or just the instablility of the rock, but it has apparently inspired some desperate measures. Several miles west of Cokedale, and just past the big operations of "Pioneer Natural Resources," they tried to hold back the rock face with a layer of concrete (which is now cracking) — a sad and failing attempt to paper over the open veins of our energy-hungry society, of the consequences of our past.

Death, destruction, and a lovely hike in the woods

2010-07-16T11:17:00.004-05:00

Sixty-five years ago this morning, General Leslie Groves and Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and other members of the Manhattan Project watched the first atomic bomb detonate in the desert of southern New Mexico. The Trinity test, it was called — so named by the cultured Oppenheimer, inspired by a line in a John Donne poem, "Batter my heart, three person'd God."

I had always assumed, along with probably most folks who know the basic outline of the story of the Manhattan Project, that the Trinity test was a key step on the way to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It turns out that the pieces of the "Little Boy," the bomb that devastated Hiroshima, were already on their way to the Pacific. The scientists were confident enough of the design of the Little Boy (a uranium "gun-type" bomb) that it could be sent off without testing — the Trinity test was a test of a plutonium "implosion-type" bomb, like the "Fat Man" which was dropped on Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima.

I learned this yesterday when I spent much of the day visiting the town of Los Alamos. Los Alamos is a little surreal. As a modern American city, it was pretty much created from scratch during WWII to house the Manhattan Project. Los Alamos County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country — an island of wealthy white people in the midst of a state that is poor and majority people of color. It is where the technicians of the Empire's nuclear death stars keep the arsenal humming, and they are well rewarded for that service.

Nonetheless, it is quite a charming place to visit. Unlike Santa Fe, which is more of a playground for the rich, Los Alamos is just where they live, so they're not looking to make a buck off of visitors. In fact, I suspect much of the tourist infrastructure, such as it is, is designed to entertain the wives and children of visiting scientists and military-nuclear-chemical industrialists (Los Alamos National Labs has partnerships with a variety of capitalist corporations, in which our tax dollars go to subsidize the creation of proprietary technologies, which are then resold to us for a profit). The downtown is compact and walkable, with a couple of free museums, a nice public library, a bustling Farmer's Market on Thursday morning, and a pleasant park with a pond and fountain.

The children of the nuclear elite must be a rambunctious bunch: I think the city has more "no skateboarding" signs per capita than anywhere else I've ever been.

Los Alamos is situated on a plateau right below the Jemez mountains, on the edge of canyons that stretch down into the Rio Grande Valley. Here's a view from the highway driving back down into the canyon:

The canyons divide the town into little fingers of land, and hiking trails are maintained in the canyons in between. The trailheads are right in the town — behind the pool, or the high school, etc. Sadly enough, this was the only hiking I've managed to get in on this trip.

* * *

The official science museum in town, maintained by the Los Alamos National Lab, is (not surprisingly) quite the propaganda piece for nuclear weaponry, technology in general, and nuclear technology in particular. My favorite was a display explaining how radiation is all around us, only a small percentage of the radiation a typical American experiences comes from nuclear fallout (which was actually a bit of a shock — we're all getting a small amount of radiation every day just from all those tests done from the 50s through the 80s), so really, nuclear radiation isn't so bad. Really.

They did, however, let a few things slip, like this wonderful statistic:

Thirty-two accidents have occurred involving U.S. nuclear weapons. Nearly all occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. Although none of these resulted in a nuclear explosion, two accidents — one in Palomares, Spain, and the other at Thule, Greenland — caused widespread radioactive contamination.

The small history wing was much more tolerable. They even gave some coverage to the debate among the Manhattan Project scientists about using the bomb. Most of them had clearly been motivated primarily by fear that the Nazis would develop a bomb before the U.S. did, and by the time they developed a workable bomb, the war in Europe was over. Japan had not yet surrendered, but was clearly losing the war — and one of the stumbling blocks was not so much Japan's unwillingness to surrender as such, but the Allies' demands that they surrender unconditionally.

On July 3, 1945, physicist Leo Szilard drafted a petition to the president, signed by 58 other Manhattan Project participants:

Atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of this development. Thus a national which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.... In view of the foregoing, we, the undersigned, respectfully petition that you exercise your power as Commander-in-Chief to rule that the United States shall not, in the present phase of the war, resort to the use of atomic bombs.

Of course, as Gar Alperovitz has argued, in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb And the Architecture of an American Myth and elsewhere, the decision to use the atomic bomb had much less to do with ending the war or avoiding American casualties in an invasion of Japan, and it had everything to do with establishing the U.S. as the sole world nuclear superpower following the war.

But not to worry, the U.S. is really the best nation to be trusted with that kind of power. As President Truman wrote in his diary July 25:

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. ... He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I'm sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.

The death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is estimated to be at least 200,000 — most of them civilians, including women, children, and the elderly. The deaths were not merely those incinerated at once by the blast, but those who died horribly of burns and radiation poisoning in the following days, weeks, months, years.

* * *

When the federal government decided to establish the town of Los Alamos to house the Manhattan Project, they built almost everything from scratch. There was one institution on the site (forcibly purchased by the feds), a private boys' school. Founded in the early part of the century by a former member of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, the school was devoted to taking the weak, sickly or effeminite sons of the wealthy (Gore Vidal was one of the students) and turning them into hale, heartly, manly "leaders of men" by putting them through a gruelling regimen of physical exercise, sleeping outdoors, horseback riding, and so forth.

A few of the old buildings from the school — which of course became housing and meeting spaces and so forth for the Manhattanites — are still preserved today, and one of them serves as a small but excellent history museum run by the Los Alamos Historical Society.

The volunteer who greeted me when I came in took pains to explain how the history museum differed from the science museum (the one run by LANL) — it wasn't just about the bomb, it also had exhibits about the geological history of the place, and the history and culture of the indigenous people who lived there for thousands of years. There was a room devoted to the history of the boys' school, and the Manhattan Project rooms focused less on the gee-whiz science than on the daily life at Los Alamos in the 40s. These mostly young people (the average age was 24) were charged with a project that was all at once overwhelming, all-consuming, fascinating, compelling and terrifying. They were sequestered from the outside world in a remote location and provided with only primitive facilities (by mid-20th-century standards). They worked hard, partied hard, and clearly let their hormones run wild. A phenomenal number of children were born to Manhattan Project workers during the war years.

* * *

I am become Death, destroyer of worlds
— Krisha, in the Bhagavad Gita, as (mis-)quoted by Robert Oppenheimer upon seeing the Trinity test

The geography around Los Alamos was created by a massive eruption of lava sometime in the distant past, and much of the soil and rock originated as volcanic ash. The Jemez Mountains to the west are not volcanos, but they are bulges pushed up by hot magma around the edges of the crater created by that anicent explosion.

Reading that no volcanic activity had happened in the area for 150,000 years or so, my first reaction (thinking in geological time) was, "wow, that's pretty recent." But of course by human historical standards that is unimaginably long ago. I was reminded of Stephen Jay Gould's point that, whatever dumb-ass things we humans do in terms of pollution and nuclear destruction and climate change, the earth has time to recover and adapt, and almost certainly will — though we, as a species, do not.

Santa Fe: art goes to market

2010-07-14T09:25:00.006-05:00

Visiting a city where you don't actually know folks is always difficult, especially if it's a medium-sized city that is geared towards wealthy tourists. Nonetheless, I spent a day and night in Santa Fe while on the way to Albuquerque, out of a vague sense that it was a cool place that I should see. Maybe this dates back to high school, when I had a friend (now a poet of some renown) who was a little obsessed with St. John's College.

Turns out, downtown Santa Fe is a bit like Taos on steroids: art and wealthy people. The same adobe architecture everywhere — here is a luxury hotel downtown:

Unlike Taos, however, the adobe is also broken up with some fairly attractive Spanish-style architecture: here, the performing arts center:

It was also hot, though the old saying about dry heat being more tolerable than humid heat turns out to be true, and the interior courtyard of the New Mexico Museum of Art was noticeably cooler than outside:

* * *

Downtown Santa Fe is, in many respects, very similar to downtown Burlington: a shopping and dining playground for the wealthy with a slightly bohemiam flair. It has fancy restaurants, aggressive panhandling, mediocre blues/funk bands playing in the park on summer evenings. But in one way it is shockingly different.

Santa Fe is apparently the second-largest art market in the US. The largest of course is New York City, but New York is so large that you can visit it time and time again and rarely (or never) come across an art gallery. Downtown Santa Fe, however, must be 75% art galleries, or expensive handicraft shops, etc.

Obviously, art is going to be commodified in a capitalist society — everything is, more or less. And at some basic level art is also the personal vision of the artist, and that can't be taken away. But in our little backwaters like Burlington, art is also play, it is community, it is something to do with our children. And in museums it is a social good, a collective heritage.

Santa Fe is the dark underbelly of art under capitalism: a reminder that the "art world" can only exist on the foundation of this massive commodity exchange, where the beneficiaries of capitalism's shocking inequalities of wealth stroll through heavily air-conditioned rooms, appraising beauty-objects priced at thousands and thousands of dollars, behind plate glass windows to make their power clear to all in this desert city.

Socialism and love

2010-07-13T11:36:00.007-05:00

In the first union local I was involved in, we used to talk about "surrounding people with love." Not everyone, mind you — we weren't total hippies, just graduate employees. It was just a term we used for how to approach people who basically "got it" on a values level (that we deserved fair treatment and reasonable pay and benefits from the boss) but were confused by some combination of misunderstanding of unions or over-investment in their own (potential) professional status or wack ideas from the dominant culture.

My friend Steve Williams recently wrote a piece over at Organizing Upgrade proposing that we (the Left) "take up the challenge of developing a blueprint of 21st Century Socialism." I've been thinking about this a lot recently — before, during and after the US Social Forum in Detroit, while staring out the window on the car trip or lying awake at night during one of my many bouts of insomnia. Like many people, I feel a sense of urgency about the climate crisis, and — like too few people — I am convinced that the crisis cannot be solved within the capitalist system.

* * *

My in-laws, with whom I spent the bulk of the last week, are all good people, but they have a wide range of political, religious and cultural beliefs. Or, rather, I should say, almost all of them have political, religious and cultural beliefs that are vastly different than mine, and somewhat different from each others'.

If I'm serious about being a socialist, then part of the vision needs to be a vision of how people like my in-laws — including at least one or two who enthusiastically voted for W — are eventually brought to being committed to the project of building a new world based on human needs rather than profit. Not overnight, of course — given the current social, political and economic arrangements in the U.S., a transition to socialism would, in fact, mean that many white middle-class folks would lose a variety of "privileges" (large houses, SUVs, the psychological benefits of white privilege, etc.), so it would not seem to be in their short-term interests.

Still, to build a socialism for the 21st century, we will eventually need the positive commitment from the vast majority of people, including even a big chunk of the white middle class in the U.S. (capitalism, by contrast, can accomplish its main goal — accumulating profit — without anyone being committed to it at all; only problem is it destroys people's lives and ultimately — soon, in fact — will make the planet uninhabitable for humans).

I'm not saying that socialist strategy should be based on reaching the white middle class — we obviously have our work cut out for us in the immediate period just organizing the working class, overcoming white supremacy and patriachy, building internationalist consciousness, etc. We need to be strategic, but at some core place, we also need to have a long-term vision that surrounds everyone with love.

* * *

Growing up as an athiest in the Bible Belt, I've always been extremely touchy about religion — to the point where any real discussion of spirituality is a bit of an emotional trigger for me. If I'd been simply raised in a different faith — Judaism, Islam, Catholicism (not considered fully Christian in some parts of the Bible Belt), etc. — it probably would have been easier. I think most ordinary folks had it sufficiently beaten in to them in the last half of the 20th century that it's not OK to argue with or denigrate or try to convert people of other faiths, but athiests seem to receive less of that respect. Not that I was beaten up or anything, and not that it was particular horrible or had any lasting impact on my life chances — it was just the one axis on which I experienced the "you don't fit societal norms" that people of color, women, queer folks, etc. deal with every day.

But obviously, this is wrapped up in questions of power. And, in fact, I am noticably more touchy about religious talk from white, middle-class folks (and from Protestants) than from people who have less structural power in society.

Which has actually got me thinking — uncharacteristically — about whether separation of church and state might be one of those things that is less of an absolute value than a tactical neccessity for dealing with an unjust society (like affirmative action, for example). When religion is no longer used to prop up and maintain inequities, does it become something (like musical taste for example*) where we can all be comfortable with each other, even in "public" settings?

Concretely, the question I've been thinking about is this: My sister-in-law is a teacher who has given up a huge amount of pay (relative to what she used to make in the public schools) to teach in a Christian school. She seems to have a great philosophy about teaching (explicitly treating children like people), and my gut feeling is that she is probably a much better teacher than some of the folks at my kids' school. Would I be comfortable — again, in a just society — with her teaching in the way she wants to teach, being explicit about her Christian values, in some kind of public school like the one my kids go to (where there might well be more Muslims than Christians, and where Protestants are distinctly in the minority)?

Can we imagine a socialism where that is possible?

*as long as you don't make anyone listen to Phil Collins. That is just not acceptable under any social system.

South through Colorado, then across northwest New Mexico

2010-07-12T18:47:00.006-05:00

Believe it or not, almost all of the driving on this road trip so far has been done by tireless spouse H, except for a 60-mile stretch in Iowa along US 6, during which H (and the kids) slept. This is because H doesn't like being a passenger, and, when not sleeping, conveys this dislike through fairly regular criticism of the driver (usually silent criticism if the driver doesn't happen to be a spouse, whom one can freely criticize...)

But today H flew home on account of having a real job and having to get back to work (3 driving comments during the 30-minute trip to the airport), and we are leaving the kids with H's mom for the week, so I am off to New Mexico, for a little bit of solo travel and a little bit of organizational exchange with the South West Organizing Project in Albuquerque.

After leaving the airport, I drove south on I-25 through the seemingly endless exurbs of Denver, then the suburban-religio-military complex that is Colorado Springs, which was kind of a depressing way to start the day.

South of Colorado Springs on I-25 comes Pueblo, a small industrial city which still has some signs of industry, believe it or not. One of those signs is a bit south of the city, an oil refinery with one, prominent wind turbine displayed out front:

After Pueblo it is pretty empty out there on the plains, and I got pretty bored of driving on the interstate. In part because construction made it difficult to see and access the exit, I failed to stop in Trinidad, which is too bad, because, at least from the interstate, it looked like it had a nice downtown, and I was definitely needing to get out and stretch my legs. Instead, I drove across the Raton Pass into New Mexico, and stopped at the New Mexico Vistor Information Center in Raton, which was kind of out in a strip of Denny's and Sonics and such like, and not such a great place to stop.

On impulse, while looking at the map and thinking about another three hours on the interstate to get to Santa Fe, I decided to cut across on US 64 to Taos instead. The first thirty or so miles were easy driving, a nearly empty two-laner across nearly flat plains:

But then, past Cimarron, the highway started snaking up into the mountains, and I think between all the curves and everything I maybe averaged 30 miles per hour, taking two hours to get up and across and over to Taos. It was beautiful, though. I even stopped at the Palisades Sill, a layer of igneous rock that the Cimarron river has cut into:

* * *

I'm not sure what possessed me to go to Taos, other than perhaps the lyrics of an obscure Jules Shear song:

On his eighteenth birthday, Jimmy Taylor rode to Taos
With his girlfriend Lucy, to rob a bank and buy a house

The ubiquitous adobe architecture in the downtown area makes Taos look a bit like if Stowe had been built by the Barbapapas — or at least by Barbapapas who were primarily interested in selling art and a kind of art/nature lifestyle to rich people rather than creating an eco-anarchist paradise.

Instead of browsing the expensive art, I paid 25 cents for some parking time and wandered around downtown for awhile, then found a grocery store and had a lunch of yogurt, apricots, crackers and lemonade for $5.75. Taos on six dollars a day.

Clearly, rain is not a problem in Taos. Designing your roofs so that rainwater pours out onto your customers' cars would not fly in Vermont:

(incidentally, that Durango from Texas parked next to me was running its engine — someone was napping in the passenger seat — during the more than an hour that I was parked there)

It was interesting, but I wasn't sad to leave. On a final note, even the Walmart in Taos has an adobe look to it:

Western State College, or, the Novosibirsks of American academia could be worse

2010-07-10T20:18:00.006-05:00

Gunnison, Colorado — where I've been staying for the past week — is also home to Western State College, a public 4-year liberal arts college. Wandering around the campus the other day (which runs up against a park the kids & their cousins were playing in), it occurred to me that had I pursued the Ph.D. I supposedly entered graduate school to achieve, I likely would have ended up in a place very much like this.

I think probably anyone who enters graduate school in an academic discipline, with the intention of becoming a professor, at some level at least secretly harbors fantasies of teaching at a prestigious institution — maybe not Harvard or Yale or Princeton, but at least a major research university like the Universities of Wisconsin or Texas or so forth — and doing important research. If you're interested in changing the world and not just studying it, you want to be Robin D.G. Kelley or Peter Rachleff — or at least in a large urban area where there are movement institutions you can be part of, or a celebrity supporter of, etc.

The reality, though, is that most folks are going to end up in out-of-the-way places like Gunnison, political action limited to an Obama bumper sticker and buying organic vegetables at the farmers' market, desperately trying to engage ill-prepared students in the excitement of, say, labor history, knowing full well that even those you reach are going to slip back into the miasma of American anti-intellectualism as soon as they are out of school.

* * *

That said, Western State appears, like Gunnison, quite charming — it could certainly be worse. What I presume are the original buildings have a kind of nice stucco and slightly Spanish architecture to them:

Like most college campuses, there are some unattractive blocks built during the 60s expansion of higher education:

No college is complete without a brand spanking new student center built in 90s bland-o-rific style:

And, most importantly, a billboard advertising new building projects:

Gunnison, Colorado

2010-07-10T19:01:00.003-05:00

We've spent the past week family-reunion-izing with H's family in Gunnison, Colorado — not really H's hometown, so much, but one of the numerous places they lived (and arguably the real hometown for younger siblings), and where the family matriarch currently resides.

Gunnison is in a broad, fairly flat valley just west of the continental divide. The house we stayed at is in an area just outside of town of ranching land being slowly turned into suburban residences:

... and with some nice sunsets.

The town itself is quite charming. The clear absence (or perhaps just weakness or poor taste) of any kind of Design Review Board has led to a kind of anarchic approach to architecture which would never have arisen in the more conservative building approach of New England:

(the second house apparently being designed so that small performances could be given on the stage in front of the house — a disturbing thought, given the loud and apparently drunken debates about the artistic merits of various Lynyrd Skynyrd songs coming from the back of the house at 11am)

The freewheeling architectural style has also apparently given rise to a creative approach to greenbelts, such as this embanked and stone-walled one:

However, the most curious aspect of downtown Gunnison is the fact that, on either side of the north-south streets (though not the east-west ones), run foot-wide irrigation ditches — the maintenance of which is presumably a municipal responsibility. Most of them are simple dirt ditches, but I did find one concrete-lined stretch:

Residents do in fact install pumps to pull water out of these ditches to irrigate their lawns, sometimes covered with little huts:

And, naturally, no 9-year-old boy could resist the temptation of travelling by jumping from one side of the ditch to the other (although I had my camera ready to catch it, he did not in fact fall in):

Denver: architecture and art

2010-07-07T12:17:00.004-05:00

Most of H's family live in the exurban sprawl that joins Denver to other cities along the "front range" of the Rocky Mountains. As a result, I've been to Colorado numerous times over the past decade and a half, but never really gotten a chance to visit Denver as a city. My impression is that Denver is old, and urban, enough to still have some cool neighborhoods, but I've never seen them.

The one small bit of urban culture I've been able to fit in, both two years ago and also on this trip, is a trip to the Denver Art Museum. It is one of the cooler pieces of architecture I've seen in recent years. This time, I didn't take any pictures of the outside because I took a lot during our last visit in 2008 — imagine an angular spaceship with a long prow designed for breaking through space-ice or some such (the Wikipedia link above has a nice picture).

The angular addition is fairly new; I actually happened to read a review in the New Yorker a few months before our 2008 trip, which helped propel me there in the first place. The reviewer really liked the external features of the building, but complained that the odd shapes of the interior did not really lend themselves well to displaying much of the art.

The interior stairway is quite striking:

And many of the rooms actually provide a lot of wall space for hanging paintings — this one was awaiting installation, and gives you a sense of the space:

When I visited in 2008, I had to agree with the New Yorker reviewer. However, since then, I think they've gotten much better about finding art — especially installations — that work exceptionally well with the space. For example, these oversized kitchen knives, descending upon a doorway:

There was also an awesome installation that took up one odd-shaped room on the fourth floor:

The vein-like lines are, upon closer inspection, highways of various widths. They crawl all over the walls and ceiling:

And, my favorite part of the piece, tucked away in a corner that is not at all visible from the entrance to the room, a heart-like metropolis:

Another favorite installation was this red and gray installation of foxes and dinner tables:

Which was below a stairway and which you could walk through:

Finally, here's a couple of other cool buildings right around the museum. This one is, I think, the central Denver public library. It totally looks like it's made out of kids' building blocks:

And this one is, I think, high-end condos, built by the same architect as kind of a companion piece to the museum addition:

Gentrification: the second tier, as farce

2010-07-04T13:02:00.003-05:00

Hipsters frequently play a vanguard role in gentrification. Sure, they seem harmless at first: the spiky-haired performance artist who just wants to deconstruct patriarchal settler colonialism, the quiet, intense bearded fellow who is obsessed with producing the finest artisanal small-batch sugared breakfast cereal, etc. But before you know it, the slightly run-down, funky neighborhood with cheap rents where they can follow their dream is filled up with trendy nightclubs, destination food spots and luxury condominiums.

This is what makes the "Old Market" neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska seem so odd. In the big stretch of land between where we know people we can stay with (roughly, the part of the country east of the Mississippi, with an outposts just west of the river in eastern Iowa) and where H's family lives (the front range in Colorado), we needed to stop for the night in a hotel. We splurged on a semi-fancy hotel near downtown Omaha because, between long rides in the car, we wanted to stay someplace where we could get out and take a nice walk and find some good food, without having to get back in the car. I'm generally against gentrification of urban cores, but if you're travelling through a city where you don't know anyone, it does make for a more pleasant evening than staying in a hotel just off the interstate and driving across the mega-parking-lot to TGI Friday's for dinner.

We did find a decent place to eat — the Upstream Brewing Company, where I had a delicious saison seasoned with black and pink peppercorns, with a hit of ginger. And the food wasn't bad either: H and I split a 10-oz. steak with a perfectly tiny amount of a tasty crème fraîche sauce, and the kids' meals were very reasonably priced — something like five bucks for a burger, fries, juice and root-beer float for dessert.

But the walking-around-the-Old-Market part was just a little bizarre. It was like the city fathers of Omaha had decided to just import New-York- or San-Francisco-style gentrification and plunk it down on a place that was, well, empty. It was a Disneyland theme park version of urban gentrification. I mean, there was still the "Old Mattress Factory Bar and Grill," which was in a building which I have no reason to doubt used to be a mattress factory at one point, but it pretty much looked like it had transitioned directly from one to the other. There was an artists' cooperative gallery, but all the art was mediocre-to-mildly-interesting stuff clearly designed for people looking to decorate their "luxury downtown condominiums" which were, in fact, being advertised as "Downtown Living." There was no trace of hipsterdom, just a strange attempt to seem vaguely like the new face of the Mission district (in fact, I overheard a conversation in which a woman was describing how she had moved to Omaha from San Francisco, though she still "split her time" between the two cities).

There was even less trace of there having ever been any poor or working-class people living in the area. In fact, the powers that be seemed so completely sure of their domination of the place that they had clearly not even invested in the massive police state required for true urban gentrification. When I walked from the hotel to some "Downtown Food Market" in the morning to find something for breakfast, there was a homeless man sleeping in plain view on the side of one of the (otherwise empty) plazas.

Gamelan

2010-07-01T22:41:00.006-05:00

One of the few things I really enjoyed in college was playing in a Javanese gamelan ensemble. One of the colleges I went to, a small college in the Midwest of all places, actually had a full gamelan (made out of metal from a decommissioned ship, no less), and every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon during the two years I was there I crammed into a tiny room in the music building along with a bunch of other hippie-ish students, stepped carefully over the instruments which were packed in about as tightly as possible, and banged on loud pieces of metal for an hour or two (you can actually see a video of us performing with dancers on YouTube — well, you can see the dancers, and hear the gamelan orchestra, in which I would have been playing.

Anyway, since we were driving by, I thought I'd take the kids in to see the instruments, especially as S is now taking drum lessons and in general, likes to bang on things. The college has since built a much larger music building, so the instruments are laid out with much more space — safe to let a couple of kids around:

Midwest retail

2010-07-01T22:29:00.003-05:00

For whatever reason, yesterday as we were driving through Wisconsin and Iowa, a lot of retail signs caught my fancy. Because, I mean, who could turn down eating at "Beef & Etc."?

And, let's just cut to the chase about what brings white people into Mexican restaurants:

The most impressive range of services was available at this laundromat in La Crosse:

And what could improve a meal like "pleasoning"

We went looking for creemees on the road in Iowa, and found their strangely colorful cousin, the "Flavor Burst," in Elkader:

And finally, I just couldn't resist taking a picture of this huge plastic strawberry in Strawberry Point (IA):

Wisconsin

2010-06-29T18:48:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, we left Chicago for a trip through Wisconsin. First, we drove up to Madison, where H had spent several years in the early 90's pursuing an advanced degree in Sociology, otherwise known as "The Painful Elaboration of the Obvious." We visited the UW Sociology building, which had this lovely decor on the walls, "Man: Creator of Order and Disorder":

S practiced his TA section-leading skills:

After spending the bulk of the day in Madison, we drove up to the far north of the state to visit one of our friends, a former union organizer sister who now has a large organic garden and does some other odd jobs. Today, we went out on a canoe:

S found a big stick, and practiced his "Red Guard" stance:

For equity's sake, here's a picture of the older sister:

After an hour or so on the lake, we went hiking/tick gathering, and found this fascinating micro-ecosystem in a truck tire rut:

Brick city

2010-06-29T17:52:00.005-05:00

After leaving Detroit on Saturday, we spent a few hours in Ann Arbor and then drove on to Chicago. And what did we choose to do in that city of big shoulders and fascinating labor history? That's right, we drove out to the suburbs to visit the Legoland Discovery Center in Schaumburg:

There was a Lego Obama:

And a replica of the downtown Chicago skyline (later in the day, we had dinner with a friend and trade union brother who took us on a guided tour of the real skyline)

Of course there was a place to build your own Lego city buildings:

And, what theme park (even one in a suburban mall) would be complete without a ride (the things they are riding in are replicas of a certain Lego vehicle, and they pedal to raise themselves up):

US Social Forum (with kids)

2010-06-29T10:08:00.007-05:00

After a couple of days travelling through Ontario, we spent much of the last week in Detroit for the 2010 US Social Forum.

I helped represent my union at the World Social Forums in 2002 in Porto Alegre, Brazil and 2006 in Caracas, Venezuela, and was part of a delegation of about a dozen folks from the Vermont Workers' Center who attended the first US Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007. So I was not going to miss the 2nd USSF in Detroit.

However, having largely replaced myself in both organizations, I was going in to this one with a lot fewer responsibilities, so rather than go crazy trying to visit all the workshops and be hyper-political all the time, I thought I'd integrate it into a family vacation, bring the kids, hang out, etc. We marched in the opening march (above), window-shopped at all the tables for radical posters and literature and so forth. H took the kids out into Detroit on a "work bridage" to do some work on one of Detroit's many urban gardens:

The kids even went to a couple of workshops that they enjoyed: one on writing run by the folks at Rethinking Schools and an anti-militarism fashion show.

And, of course, a bit of running through fountains:

A visit to Mexican Town

2010-06-24T21:31:00.007-05:00

The last time I visited Detroit, it was with a couple of folks for the Labor Notes conference about four years ago. One of them, when it was time to leave, insisted on going to Mexican Town to buy some tamale-making materials, yet apparently had no idea how to get there. Consequently, we spent several hours randomly driving around Detroit looking for it (this was, of course, in the days before iPhones and such like). Not only did we not find it, we were actually reduced to the point where my friend N insisted that we stop at a Taco Bell to ask the poor African-American teens working there if they knew the way to Mexican Town (they didn't).

Anyway, fortuitously, prior to this visit to Detroit I happened to read a wonderful blog post about Honey Bee Market La Colmena, a family-owned supermarket in Mexican Town. H and the kids went there yesterday for some food shopping while I was stuck in workshops, and decided that tonight, when I was relatively free of movement obligations, we should go and check out one of the many restaurants there.

We had a great dinner, then took a walk across the pedestrian bridge:

Everything was closed (it being after 8pm) but we saw a charming little building that has been turned into a theatre:

And, across the street, a former decorative-iron workshop that has been turned into a gallery:

and on the wall of a tortilla factory, this pretty cool mural (the text on the left reads "In the spirit of the indigenous people who cultivated the land that was once theirs"):

Toronto: Food, Art and Architecture

2010-06-23T06:49:00.005-05:00

Well, we've arrived at the US Social Forum — more about that later. We spent Sunday evening and much of the day Monday in Toronto. As with our last trip to Toronto, we stayed in Chinatown and wandered the shops, ate out, and made one museum visit.

Both kids received an official Adventurous Eating Award for the Toronto stay. Sunday night, inspired by a conversation in the car with the kids about the appropriateness of using your hands to eat, we found an Ethiopian restaurant so the kids could dispense with utensils while eating some spicy lamb, mixed vegetable stew and a kind of thick puree of split garbanzo beans. Then Monday for lunch we found a good cheap place that served dim sum all day; we filled up on dumplings and steamed buns and such.

Last time we were in Toronto we visited the Art Gallery of Ontario, with its new Frank Gehry architectural extension. This time we visited the Royal Ontario Museum, which also has a funky modern architectural extension poking out from a more traditional building:

The spiky triangular bits had a funky staircase inside:

There was an exhibit by some Romanian artist who does installations in which he draws on the walls with markers. A lot of it was, to be honest, a bit much crossed with not really very much, but I guess a few of the drawings had some charm and insight:

There was also a cool exhibit of gems and minerals and such, including this natural sheet of copper:

But I think my favorite was the obelisk in the lobby, inscribed with the names of financial supporters of the museum, which lit up when you touch it, and which provided kids (not just ours) with all kinds of entertainment:

Road Trip Day 2: We beat the G20 to Toronto

2010-06-21T07:32:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, after a leisurely morning in Kingston, we drove to Toronto, arriving five days ahead of the G-20 meeting of the leaders of the world's biggest economies. The G20 meeting is going to so disrupt the daily life of Toronto that they are announcing it on the highway signs:

We also saw this awesome graffiti in Chinatown:

Road Trip Day 1: Kingston, Ontario

2010-06-19T22:19:00.004-05:00

We left Burlington today for the beginning of a 5-6 week road trip across the country. Well, across two countries, technically — the first leg of the trip is a three-day excursion through Ontario en route to the US Social Forum in Detroit next week. If you draw a straight line on a map from northern Vermont to Detroit, it more or less goes through the middle of Lakes Ontario and Erie. The Canadians thoughtfully built a major highway right along the northern edge of those lakes, which makes it much more efficient to drive through Ontario than to zigzag through upstate New York, across the top of Ohio, and then swing back up North.

There are also some cool places to visit — Toronto, of course, but also Kingston, a smallish city at the northeast corner of Lake Ontario. It's about the same size as Burlington's metro area, maybe a little bigger, and has some similarities. Both cities have a downtown shopping district with lots of restaurants and bookshops and funky boutiques near a picturesque waterfront. Both cities were major shipping and transportation hubs back in the 19th century when shipping on the lakes was the best way to move raw materials and manufactured goods, and both have lost lots of manufacturing jobs in the last few decades. But the differences are stark: while Burlington has successfully reinvented itself as a tourist destination and command center for the regional economy (with its attendant cultural institutions, "new economy" jobs in marketing and such, and general veneer of prosperity), Kingston still has the overall feel of a working-class de-industrialized city.

Most observers would say that Burlington is prosperous and Kingston is depressed, but I suspect the actual economic differences aren't as stark as the perceptions. Burlington has a lot of poverty — a full 50 percent of the kids in Burlington's elementary schools qualify for free or reduced lunch. It's just hidden and segregated into the Old North End (a working-class neighborhood just north of the downtown) and pockets of the more suburban New North End — a trailer park and two large affordable-housing developments. Despite merchants' complaints about homeless people panhandling on Church Street (the pedestrian mall downtown), you don't see many working-class folks from the Old North End on Church Street, which is maybe a block away. I suspect this is due to a mixture of economic reasons (most of the restaurants and shops on Church Street run to the expensive side), subtle and internalized social pressures not to appear in the playground of the upper middle classes, and, when necessary, explicit use of police power.

It's actually quite striking as you walk along the four "ped mall" blocks of Church street from south to north — for two and a half blocks the people walking about look healthy and wealthy, they're well-dressed and mostly white, and they're generally on their way somewhere to spend money. Then for the half a block between the Old Navy and the bus stop you'll suddenly notice more people of color, more working-class folks, more cigarette smoking and more "hanging around." Cross Cherry Street, and you're back to the middle class. Needless to say, that one half-block of Church Street has more "No Loitering" signs than anywhere else, and it's quite strictly enforced — I myself was asked to "move along" about a week ago. To be fair, I was leaning up against a column with a "No Loitering" sign talking to some people — but, being pretty middle-class looking, that's never got me in trouble on any other part of Church Street before.

Kingston is a bit like the Old North End had gotten more assertive and grown up over Church Street and the waterfront, as if to say, "you can have your fancy restaurants serving cod in a fennel ragout*, but you're not going to forget the fact that your fancy service economy has been built on a foundation of upwards wealth transfer, you're not going to forget that when we went from working union jobs in your factories to bussing your tables and cleaning your hotel rooms it has meant poverty and suffering and some of us are damn well going to be sitting in your doorsteps begging for change."

*which was delicious, by the way

* * *

Anyway, on account of H now working for an AFL union which pays pretty good, we decided to splurge on a fancy-ish hotel in downtown near the waterfront: the Hotel Belvedere:

It's converted from an old mansion, presumably built with some of that 19th century shipping wealth, and sits on a street of similarly grand buildings, some of which are private clubs, some of which have been converted into quaint museums, and some of which are apparently for sale. When we got into the room, we discovered that it featured a "walk-up" closet:

Part of how we are affording this is staying in a room with one queen bed and making the kids sleep on the floor on camping pads. We thought it would be cute to make the boy sleep in the closet:

* * *

After a nice dinner at Chez Piggy and checking into the hotel, we went for a walk on the waterfront:

There was a pretty spectacular view of thunderclouds over upstate New York. You can't really see them in this picture, but the large island that sits right where Lake Ontario flows into the Saint Lawrence River is now covered with industrial wind turbines, which I actually think are quite beautiful, especially when tinted pink from the setting sun behind us.

Definitely more beautiful than, say, a massive oil spill.

One of the cool things about the Kingston waterfront is that, interspersed with a small public walkway, boat rentals, a "steam-pump ship museum" and lots of tourist hotels, is a working drydock. While I generally prefer the Burlington waterfront, with its massive public space, I'm also a little sad that its history as a working waterfront only lives on in a few bits of ugly, abandoned industrial detritus (out of site of the main tourist sites of course) on the one hand and a handful of historical markers, maybe of interest to visiting yuppies, on the other.

Scallops with tomato-cilantro pozole

2010-06-11T15:15:00.004-05:00

My secret ingredient recently for weekday cooking: canned, fire-roasted tomatoes (I use the ones from an organic tomato company). Here it makes a nice base for scallops.

This recipe (today's lunch) was made with what I had on hand, for two people. I presume it would double easily, and then you wouldn't need to worry about what to do with the other half a can of tomatoes, other half an onion, etc. If you have or can afford more than 3 scallops per person, I would recommend 4 or 5 per person. You could also probably put a chile pepper into the pozole if the people you are feeding it to aren't as spice-averse as my spouse.

Ingredients:
1/2 medium-sized onion, coarsely chopped
a good bunch of cilantro, some leaves reserved for garnish, rest (including stems) coarsely chopped
1/2 can diced fire-roasted tomatoes
1 can golden hominy
1/2 cup chicken stock
6 sea scallops
1 green onion, chopped, for garnish

1. Put the onion, cilantro (except for reserved garnish) and tomatoes in a blender and puree. It doesn't need to be totally smooth (green bits are ok), but shouldn't have any noticeable chunks. Add a couple of pinches of salt.
2. Heat some oil in a heavy saucepan, then add puree and cook until it darkens and thickens a bit.
3. Add chicken stock and hominy, bring to a boil, and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Ladle into two shallow bowls (the scallops cook really quickly)
4. Heat a thin film of oil in a non-stick pan over medium-high heat. When oil is almost smoking, pat your scallops dry with a paper towel, season with salt and pepper, then add to the fry pan.
5. Cook scallops until well-seared, 1 to 2 minutes, then flip over and cook on the other size for a minute or two. Remove from pan and place 3 scallops on each bowl of pozole.
6. Garnish with reserved cilantro and green onion.

Short Article About May Day in VT

2010-05-03T20:47:00.002-05:00

Although I'm credited as the main author of "May Day Protests Gain Urgency as Immigration, Health Care Fights Explode" over at Labor Notes, I really only wrote the last bit about Vermont's May Day Healthcare Is a Human Right rally. Still, I guess it's a publication.

I posted the best of the pictures H and I took on May Day here.

Maple pecan pie

2010-02-28T10:13:00.004-05:00

1 pie crust (I've been using Nothing in the House's recipe, but with all white flour - which makes enough for two one-crust pies; the other half freezes well)
1 1/2 to 2 cups of pecan halves
1 cup maple syrup, preferably grade B
1 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
5 TBSP melted butter
1 TBSP brandy
1/2 tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Roll out the crust, place in a pie pan, make the edges look all nice if so desired.
2. Spread pecans across the bottom of the pie crust (they'll float to the top once you pour in the liquid mixture).
3. Combine all remaining ingredients (if you beat the eggs well first, you might avoid the unsightly eggy bit you see in the photo) and pour into the pie crust.
4. Bake until set, 50-60 minutes.

Free-form apple tart with palm sugar

2010-02-22T11:02:00.003-05:00

This is just one-half of Nothing in the House's pie crust (though I didn't have any whole-wheat pastry flour, so I just used 2 cups of all-purpose), rolled out, filled with 3 medium-sized apples, peeled & sliced, and then topped with a sprinkle of ground ginger and a couple of tablespoons of grated palm sugar (H brought home a cake of it from Thai Phat the other day). Bake at 425 for 15 minutes, then 350 for another 20-30 minutes, until nicely browned and crisp.

Potato timbales with garlicky black beans and greens

2010-02-18T20:02:00.004-05:00

My work email has, over the last few months, apparently been subscribed to a wide variety of e-publications vaguely related to my interests (including Guitar Magazine, Keyboard Magazine, even "EQ Magazine," which is, I guess, for folks who are really, really into the proper balance between treble, mid and bass). Generally, these all get deleted, but the week before the Superbowl I glanced at something from a cooking-related site, and jotted down not the recipe but the basic mechanics of something they called "mashed potato timbales."

So, especially what with having a couple of egg whites on hand after using the yolks for Roman Style Baked Semolina Gnocchi earlier in the week, I thought I would take a crack at the recipe. They are light in texture but not in calories or fat, so I paired them with some über-healthy beans & greens.

Potato Timbales
2 1/2 lbs. russet potatoes
1/2 tsp to 1 tsp salt
8 oz. sour cream
8 oz. ricotta cheese
sprinkle of dried oregano (or whatever seasoning you like)
2 egg whites
butter for greasing tins (maybe 1 TBSP altogether)
cornmeal or breadcrumbs for coating (optional)

1. Peel the potatoes, cut into chunks, and cook in boiling water until tender. Mash well.
2. Add the salt, sour cream, cheese and seasoning. Mash until well blended.
3. Grease standard muffin tins (one 12-muffin pan or 2 6-muffin pans) generously with butter, then sprinkle cornmeal or breadcrumbs in if desired.
4. Beat egg whites until soft peaks form, then fold into potato mixture.
5. Spoon potato mixture into muffin tins and bake in 425 degree oven for 27-30 minutes. Let cool in pans for 15 minutes.

The final result:

While timbales are baking, make your beans. I used a lot of garlic, combined from a bunch of cloves of widely varying sizes, amounting in total to about 1/3 of a head:

Garlicky black beans and greens
1/3 of a head of garlic, peeled and minced
about a TBSP of cooking fat (I used rendered bacon drippings, but any oil would probably be OK)
1/2 can or so of tomatoes, with juices
3 cups of recently home-cooked black beans, with cooking liquid, or 2 cans black beans, well-rinsed, plus some water
about 2/3 of a bunch of chard or other greens, stems removed, leaves cut into 1/2" wide ribbons

1. Heat cooking fat over medium heat, add the garlic and cook for for 1-2 minutes, until fragrant.
2. Add tomatoes and season well with salt, stirring to break up tomatoes.
3. Add beans and cooking liquid (or water).
4. Add greens, stir to combine, cover and cook for 5-10 minutes, until greens are well wilted.
5. If mixture is overly liquidly, cook uncovered to reduce. Taste and add salt if necessary.

Plate up a couple of timbales per person, surrounded by beans. And the sauce? I just opened one of these cans because, you know, it's a weeknight:

Sweet potato and black bean empanadas with pumpkin-seed crust

2010-02-17T17:11:00.005-05:00

The vaguely greenish tint to the crust comes from the incorporation of pepitas (raw, shelled pumpkin seeds) into the dough.

Empanada Dough
1/2 c. pepitas (raw, please)
2 c. flour
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 stick butter, cold
1/3 c. ice water, plus more if necessary
1 TBSP vinegar
1 egg

Filling
One medium-sized sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1/2" chunks
A few chard stems, cut into small chunks (optional)
Cumin seeds
Oil
Salt & pepper
1 1/2 c. cooked black beans (or 1 can), well rinsed

First, make the dough:

1. Combine the pepitas with 1/2 c. flour in a food processor and whiz up good until pepitas are ground into breadcrumb consistency. Add the remainder of the flour and the salt and pulse briefly to mix.
2. Add butter, cut into small chunks, and pulse a couple of times to roughly incorporate (you should still have some decent-sized pieces of butter).
3. Combine ice water, vinegar, and egg, and beat with a fork. Turn on processor and pour the water-vinegar-egg mixture in a slow steady stream. Pulse until dough comes together in a ball, adding a few drops more ice water if necessary.
4. Remove dough from processor, press into a disk, wrap in cling wrap and put in refrigerator for at least an hour.

Now, make the topping:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Toss sweet potato chunks, and pieces of chard stem if you're using it, together with enough oil to coat lightly in a baking pan. Sprinkle with cumin seeds, salt and pepper, and stir again.
2. Once oven is heated, place in oven and bake for 30 minutes, stirring once or twice.
3. Remove from oven, toss with black beans, and season to taste with more salt & pepper. Turn down your oven to 375 if your dough is close to being ready.

Here are the sweet potatoes and chard before going into the oven — very festive looking, no?

Once dough has chilled for at least an hour, remove from refrigerator. Divide dough into eight pieces, and, working one at a time (and keeping the rest loosely wrapped in cling wrap and ideally in the fridge), roll out into a circle (or vaguely circular shape), about 8-9" in diameter. Place one-eighth of filling on one side of the dough, fold the other half over to make a half-moon shape, seal edges by crimping with a fork. Repeat for remaining dough.

Bake in a 375 degree oven for 30 minutes, until a little browned and flaky-looking.

Spicy avacado sandwich with kumquats

2010-02-02T15:47:00.002-05:00

Take some thick slices of avacado, and toss with a splash of orange juice, a good shot of hot sauce, and a sprinkle of salt. Layer on toasted whole-wheat bread, then top with thinly sliced kumquats.

Pasta with mushrooms and braised celery in blue-cheese sauce

2010-01-26T14:04:00.003-05:00

This makes about 2 adult servings:

1/2 lb. pasta (I used whole-wheat spaghetti)
good handful of fresh mushrooms, cleaned and quartered (I used cremini)
much smaller handful of dried mushrooms (I used porcini)
about 1 TBSP oil
4-5 celery stalks, coarsely chopped
1-2 TBSP butter
good splash of white wine
2 TBSP a strong blue cheese, crumbled
a good glug of heavy cream (maybe 1/4 cup)
grated parmesan or pecorino cheese

1. About 15-20 minutes before you're going to start cooking, bring about 2/3 cup of water to boil separately (or heat it in microwave) and pour over dried mushrooms in a small heatproof bowl. Go find something else to do for a little while.

2. Back in the kitchen, set pasta water to boil. Heat a little oil (light olive oil or a neutral oil like canola - no reason to use the extra-virgin olive oil here) in a sauté pan — you can either use a small one for the mushrooms and avoid all the cooling-the-pan-down worries in the next step (but have an extra dish to wash), or the large one with a lid you're going to be braising the celery in. Once the oil is very hot, almost smoking, add the mushrooms and cook for a few minutes until nicely colored. Remove mushrooms from pan and reserve.

3. If you're using one pan, you're going to need to cool it down between cooking the mushrooms (which require high heat so they don't release all their juices) and adding the butter (which we don't want to scorch). Hold it off the heat for a minute, and add the celery first (this will cool the pan a bit). Give the celery a good stir, return the pan to the heat, and then add the butter. If you're using two pans, just heat your braising pan over medium heat, melt the butter, and add celery once butter is melted.

4. Cook the celery over medium heat until somewhat browned, stirring occasionally. Turn up the heat a bit, add the white wine, and bring to a boil, scraping up any browned bits on the bottom of the pan.

5. Once wine has almost boiled away, strain the liquid that the dried mushrooms have been soaking in directly into the pan. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for at least 10 minutes, checking periodically to make sure the liquid doesn't evaporate completely (if it does, add a bit of pasta-cooking water). Meanwhile, chop rehydrated mushrooms roughly, and add to reserved cooked mushrooms.

6. At some point the pasta water will come to a boil (if this happens before you've started braising the celery, turn heat off and bring it back to the boil after the celery is braising). Add pasta, cooking according to package directions (though I usually shorten the cooking time by a few minutes).

7. A minute or two before the pasta is done, add both mushrooms and the blue cheese, give a good stir, then add the cream and heat, stirring, until a cohesive sauce forms.

8. Reserve a cup or so of pasta cooking water, then drain pasta. Add pasta to pan and toss, adding a bit of reserved pasta cooking water if necessary to thin sauce.

9. Top with grated cheese, if desired.

Pasta with garlic-braised cabbage and sausage

2010-01-16T19:15:00.002-05:00

Like many of the recipes here at Domestic Left, this is an after-the-fact scribing of something I made a bit on the fly. The ratios I used tonight were:

about half of a small (maybe 6" diameter) green cabbage
3 medium-sized cloves of garlic
1/2 pound pasta (whole-wheat spaghetti in this case)
3 bratwurst (probably should have just used 2)

You'll also need:

olive oil
salt
pepper

1. Cut cabbage into wedges through the center, so that a portion of the core holds each wedge together. Peel the garlic cloves and cut into largish chunks (about 1/4" cubes).

2. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Meanwhile, heat a decent amount of olive oil in a small sauce pan over very low heat.

3. Once water has boiled, add cabbage wedges to water and, at the same time, garlic chunks to oil. Boil cabbage for about 10 minutes, poach garlic in oil over low heat for about the same time.

4. Remove cabbage wedges from water with tongs; return water to boil. Strain garlic-oil into large skillet, reserving garlic chunks. Slice some bratwurst or other sausage into thin slices on a bias.

5. Heat skillet over medium-high heat until oil is hot, then brown sausage slices well on each side (amek sure to cook through if using raw sausage). Remove sausage and reserve, and pour off any excess fat. While sausage is cooking, chop blanched cabbage.

6. Return skillet to heat, add cabbage, and brown well, seasoning with salt and pepper. Return cabbage-blanching water to boil, and, when boiling, add pasta and cook according to package directions (though generally I take a few minutes off the package directions to ensure al-dente-ness).

7. Once cabbage in skillet has browned well, add a bit of pasta-cooking water to deglaze the pan. Add reserved garlic chunks and sausages to the skillet, reduce heat to low and cook through to blend flavors.

8. When pasta is done, reserve a cup or so of cooking liquid then drain the pasta. Add pasta to skillet, add some of the reserved pasta-water if dry, and serve.

My new go-to pizza dough recipe

2010-01-05T19:12:00.003-05:00

Shown here with tonight's offerings — for the kids, ham & mango; for the adults, ham, blue cheese, sautéed shallots and toasted pine nuts.

Recently I've been playing around a lot with the "no-knead bread" that is probably now an overplayed fad. The NY Times version of the recipe does indeed make a loaf with a "crisp crust and large, well-structured crumb," and it's pretty easy, but (a) it requires a Dutch oven, and my dark Calphalon one burns the crust a bit, and (b) it makes a great round loaf, which is great for parties etc. but no so much for the daily requirements of a family (i.e., slicing for sandwiches when the school lunch is deemed disgusting by your 9 and/or 11 year old). And while it makes a nice pizza crust, it's a bit difficult to handle on account of how wet the dough is.

I've had some success with Mark Bittman's faster, whole-wheat version — in fact, I quite like it a lot and my daughter seems to find it perfectly acceptable sandwich bread — but it does make kind of a dense loaf, and the spouse has used the word "veto" recently in reference to it.

I've found that by decreasing the water and increasing the flour slightly, you can get a dough that is just stiff enough to knead and shape, which can be used to make baguettes, bigger loafs or pizza dough. The idea of adding some rye flour to pizza dough came from the first decent baker to open an artisanal bakery in my hometown in the late 80s. Also, if you didn't plan 18 hours in advance, increasing the yeast a bit to compensate is fine for a pizza dough at least. Here's the starting-in-the-morning version I made today:

1. In the morning, before kids leave for school, mix together 3 cups white flour, 1/4 cup rye flour, 1 1/2 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp yeast in a medium-to-large mixing bowl. Mix in 1 1/2 cups water until a rough dough forms, cover with plastic wrap and put in a warmish place to rise (I put in on top of the fridge)

2. If you get the dough made by 8am, it should be ready to roll out by 5pm. Preheat oven to 450 degrees, with a pizza stone in if you have one. Turn out the dough onto a well-floured countertop and knead briefly. Divide in half, and roll out each half into a 15"-diameter round. Place rounds on sheets of parchment paper if using pizza stone or onto baking sheets if not.

3. Put toppings on pizzas, and bake each one for 10-15 minutes, until crust is done and cheese develops brown spots.

Roasted vegetable "poutine" with soy-squash gravy

2010-01-02T14:24:00.003-05:00

At the gym the other day I was reading Calvin Trillin's article on poutine in the New Yorker, and, looking through my pantry and refrigerator for something to make for lunch later in the day, thought I would try my hand at a less-heart-attack-inducing version thereof.

For folks unfamiliar with this Quebecois dish (now, apparently, becoming popular outside la belle province) it is, in its proper form, nothing more than french fries topped with cheddar-cheese curds and then drowned in a thin brown meaty gravy (i.e., carbohydrates topped with fat and drenched in salt). Not something you'd normally make at home, but figuring that oven-roasted root vegetables have lots of the same qualities as french fries, and having on hand lots of potatoes, carrots and Shelburne Farms cheddar (courtesy of a holiday basket delivered to every family at my kids' school), I thought I would give it a shot.

I also had on hand some butternut-squash "stock," a by-product of making a butternut squash soup a week ago. From Cook's Illustrated, one of the best ways of getting a good, pure, squashy soup is to, instead of using either flavorless water or non-squash-flavored stock, reserve the seeds and strings from your squash, sauté them in a little butter for a good several minutes, then add water, simmer for 10-20 minutes, and strain. Even if you don't go to this trouble, it's always worth saving the strings & seeds from a butternut squash to add to onions, etc. when making homemade veggie stock (that is, if you make such).

So, without further ado, the recipe:

1. Cut up some potatoes and carrots - leaving the potato chunks fairly large but cutting the carrots smaller, because they are slower to cook. Also chop up an onion or two. Toss all together with some fat (home-rendered lard, bacon fat or suet is really tasty here if you have it, but olive oil is fine too), a bit of salt and a good amount of black pepper.

2. Put in roasting pan and roast at 425 degrees for about an hour, tossing a couple of times.

3. Meanwhile, cut up some cheddar into chunks if you don't have cheddar curds on hand.

4. Make the gravy: melt about 1 tsp butter in a small saucepan, and add 1-2 tsp flour. Cook over medium heat, stirring to mix thoroughly, until nutty-brown and fragrant.

5. Add 1 cup squash stock (or veggie stock made with squash innards, or just veggie stock, or really any stock you have on hand - just avoid super-salty canned stock or brother). Whisk to incorporate all of the butter-flour mixture, then bring to a simmer, add a good splash of soy sauce and cook for 10-20 minutes until slightly thickened (it should be just a bit thicker than water). Taste and add more soy sauce if necessary.

6. When vegetables are well-roasted, remove to serving dishes and sprinkle cheddar curds or cubes over. Add a splash of sherry to the pan and scrape up the browned bits; add this mixture to the gravy. Heat gravy for another minute or two, then pour over the vegetables and cheese.

Serve with plenty of bread to sop up the tasty gravy.

A winter "pesto"

2009-12-30T19:07:00.002-05:00

This didn't look especially beautiful, so no photo, but it was tasty.

1. Take a couple of handfuls of sunflower seeds (raw, unsalted) and crush them up well with a few pinches of salt and several good grinds of black pepper in a mortar and pestle.

2. Zest one orange with a microplane, add the zest to the mortal and pestle and crush together with the seeds a bit.

3. Add enough heavy cream (the "olive oil of the north") to make a pesto-like consistency.

Toss with hot pasta.

Prehistoric localvorism

2009-11-01T14:45:00.002-05:00

When I worked at a local fast food restaurant (the small Kansas chain Vista) in the early 90's, I had to wear this button on my ugly tan uniform:

Potato and chickpea curry with peanuts and garlic

2009-09-11T14:38:00.002-05:00

This marks my first successful attempt to improvise a dish based on Indian cuisine — I'm pretty comfortable with Mediterranean, Latin American, Chinese and Japanese flavors and ingredients, but until now whenever I've strayed from recipes in making curries and dals and so forth, the results have not been so good. This, however, even my 10-year-old daughter liked.

This is based loosely on this recipe from Raghavan Iyer, but heavily adapted to what I had on hand.

2-3 medium red potatoes
1 to 1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas (or one can, rinsed well)
a good handful of peanuts
2-3 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
1 small chile pepper, minced (remove seeds if you don't like it too spicy)
1/4 tsp turmeric
good handful of cilantro
1 medium onion, chopped
canola or other neutral oil for cooking
salt & pepper to taste

1. Cut potatoes into 1/2" chunks and cook in boiling salted water until just tender (5-10 minutes). Reserve about a cup of the cooking water, then drain.
2. Remove the leaves from the stems of the cilantro; reserve leaves but chop stems roughly.
3. In food processor or mortar and pestle, whiz up or smash the peanuts, garlic, chile pepper, turmeric and cilantro stems with a pinch of salt until a paste forms.
4. Heat a little oil in a large skillet. Add onions and cook until starting to brown. Add peanut-garlic paste and cook, breaking up the paste and stirring contantly, for about a minute or two (you don't want to garlic to burn or it will get bitter)
5. Add the potatoes, chickpeas, and a good bit of the reserved potato cooking water. Reduce heat and cook, covered, for 10-15 minutes to allow flavors to blend, adding more potato water (or tap water if you run out) as necessary to keep it from drying out.
6. Serve over hot rice or with dosas (as shown here; I use this recipe, though I substitute regular green lentils for the urad dal), garnished with the reserved cilantro leaves, roughly chopped.

Deconstructing sausage with sauerkraut

2009-09-07T14:48:00.002-05:00

Last week we had a cookout, and, as is not uncommon, we bought too much food. Extra meats (mostly sausages) and breads (hot dogs buns and those "deli thins" for making sandwiches with grilled eggplant) could easily be frozen, but the sauerkraut, well, it doesn't really freeze well and there was no way we could eat all that sauerkraut with a little bit on each brat. So, taking a page from Mark Bittman's "reverse the ratio of sauce to pasta" approach, I decided to make a leftover dish that features the sauerkraut a little more heavily...

1. For each adult portion (our kids aren't eating sauerkraut yet), I pulled apart a hot dog bun, spread the insides with a flavorful fat (in this case, a garlic-and-thyme-flavored mixture of olive oil and chicken fat that was a byproduct of making chicken confit awhile ago), and put them fat-side down in a hot non-stick skillet.

2. Once the hot dog buns were well toasted, I pulled them out (they became the starchy base for the meal) and put in a little extra fat and a couple of sausages (in this case, those fully-cooked chicken sausages that are called "Italian" and taste good but not really at all like Italian sausages), cut on a bias into 3/4" slices, and browned them on both sides.

3. I removed the sausages and reserved, added a bit more fat and some sliced onions. Once the onions were well browned, I added quite a bit of sauerkraut and the browned sausages, heated through, then served over the hot dog buns.

It was delicious; a more liquidy sauce would have dissolved the super-processed-white-bread hot dog rolls into nothingness, but the sauerkraut was fairly dry so the toasted side of the bread stayed crisp even with all the sauerkraut and onions laid over it. The sweetness of the sausages and hot dog rolls was an excellent complement to the sourness of the kraut and sharpness of the onions. And, we used up a lot of sauerkraut.

Pupusas with roasted garlic mesclun and cherry tomatoes

2009-08-27T07:26:00.003-05:00

Pupusas are, of course, delicious with their traditional topping/side dish, a spicy cabbage-and-carrot slaw called curtido, but they are also wonderfully adaptable to other toppings. To make them into a substantial meal, I generally like to use a cheese filling, spread them with a layer of refried beans, and then add toppings to make a kind of pupusa-tostada fusion.

For 8 pupusas:

2 cups masa harina
1 tsp salt
1 1/3 cup warm water
about 1/2 cup shredded jack cheese
oil for frying
1 cup refried beans (homemade, or from a can)
2 cloves garlic
2 tsp lemon juice
2 TBSP extra-virgin olive oil
salt & pepper
several good handfuls of assorted young greens
a handful of cherry tomatoes

Make the Dressing
1.Roast the garlic cloves in a dry skillet until the skin is fairly blackened. When cool enough to handle, peel and place in mortar. Add the lemon juice and smash garlic and lemon juice into a thickish liquid. Blend in the olive oil and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Prep the Salad Ingredients
2. Wash and dry the mesclun, and place in medium-sized bowl. Cut the tomatoes into quarters and place in another bowl.

Make Pupusas
3. Mix the masa harina and salt well in a mixing bowl, then add the water and mix until the dough holds together. It will be a little on the dry side, but still workable.
4. Divide the dough into 8 equal-sized pieces, and form each piece into a ball. Push down into ball to form a cavity, fill each with about 1 TBSP of the cheese, and fold sides together to enclose cheese. Flatten on counter-top into a disk about 6-8 inches across and about 1/4 inch thick. Repeat with remaining dough.
5. Heat a flat griddle or skillet over medium-high heat. Before starting the pupusas, make sure your refried beans are warm. If you're not going to be serving them right off the stovetop (my family takes each one as soon as it's done), heat the oven to 200 degrees to keep pupusas warm as they're finished.
6. Brush one side of each pupusa with oil, and put oil-side down on hot griddle. Cook until there are some brown spots on the underside, 2-3 minutes. Brush the other side with oil, flip, and cook an additional 1-2 minutes until second side also has some brown spots.
7. Once pupusas are done, spread each one thickly with refried beans. Toss most of the salad dressing with the mesclun, reserving a little to toss with the tomatoes. Top each pupusa with 1/8 of the mesclun, and add a few cherry tomatoes on top.

Eggplant and tomato curry

2009-08-24T13:27:00.006-05:00

At long last, the recipe for which I was preparing my ingredients mise en place last Thursday night. A kind of Thai-Italian fusion; I was originally thinking about making a simple coconut-milk-based curry, but since I had all these tomatoes fresh from the garden, I went with the tomato-based sauce instead.

1 medium-to-large eggplant, cut into 3/4" dice
4 medium-to-large ripe tomatoes, cut into chunks (or I suppose you could use one 15-oz. can)
3 shallots, sliced
about 1/4 c. fish sauce
1/2 tsp red curry paste (more if you & your guests like spicy food)
1 tsp brown sugar
Juice of 1 lime
1-2 large handfuls of fresh herbs (I used regular sweet basil and citrus mint, but any combination of those and/or Thai basil, regular mint, and/or cilantro would be good)
oil (canola or other neutral oil)
1/3 to 1/2 pound of rice vermicelli

1. First, bring a pot of water to boil, add the vermicelli, turn off the heat and let noodles soak in water for 3-4 minutes. Reserve a little of the soaking liquid in a 1-cup measure, then drain and rinse well.
2. Cut everything up, and dissolve the curry paste and brown sugar in the fish sauce.
3. Heat a generous amount of oil in a wok. When hot, add shallots and stir-fry until well browned.
4. Add the eggplant chunks. They will absorb all the oil, so you want to toss them quickly so you don't have a handful of oil-soaked eggplant and the rest unflavored. As soon as wok seems dry and eggplants are browning a little, add the fish sauce mixture.
5. Stir well to distribute the fish sauce mixture, then add the tomatoes, stirring constantly to break them up. Once they start to break down, you can take a break from stirring.
6. Cook for 10-15 minutes over medium heat until eggplant is completely cooked through and sauce has thickened. If pan gets too dry, add some of the reserved noodle-soaking liquid.
7. Squeeze lime juice over curry. Roughly chop herbs and add to curry; stir well and remove from heat. Divide noodles among plates (I made this into about 4 servings), top with curry, and garnish with lime slices and/or reserved herb tops.

Mise en place

2009-08-20T18:53:00.003-05:00

Mise en place is many things: a good idea, a pretentious French phrase, and a religion among many chefs. It is nonetheless something I practice rarely, because I am (1) lazy, and (2) descended from People From the Frozen North Who Like to Cook Their Food Slowly (thus giving us plenty of time to prepare ingredients as we go).

Nonetheless, with the summer and its bounty of produce upon us, I determined that, if I were going to try to make an eggplant-tomato curry tonight (recipe tomorrow, I hope), it would be a good idea to prepare all the ingredients ahead of time:

The star of the show — eggplant from the Intervale Community Farm (our CSA).

Tomatoes, mostly from our thankfully late-blight-free garden, plus one or two from ICF.

Shallots, bought in a bundle from the Vietnamese grocery around the corner, with a lime behind the cutting board.

Rice noodles, from the same (the package bearing the label "Prime Minister's Export Award 1994").

Basil and citrus mint from the garden (being immersion-rinsed using the same pot I cooked the noodles in, to save on dishwashing...)

Fish sauce with a bit of red Thai curry paste and brown sugar dissolving in it.

By the skin of our eggplant

2009-08-11T18:29:00.003-05:00

So today a grilled eggplant salad recipe was the featured recipe on Mark Bittman's blog, and I thought, "hey, I've got some grilled eggplant in the fridge" — but since it's been so hot and humid the past few days, I thought the whole-milk-yogurt dressing might be a bit heavy. Plus, I had some cherry tomatoes that needed a home, and wanted to make it a main dish by adding some garbanzo beans (canned, I'm afraid), so I opted for an olive-oil dressing instead.

I cut off the skins as per the Bittman recipe (it was a large eggplant from the CSA which I had grilled in thick rounds, mostly for sandwiches) and then my New England working-class "waste not, want not" complexes kicked in, and I suddenly couldn't bear to compost the eggplant skin sitting on my cutting board.

My solution? I minced the skins into 1/8" x 1/3" (the thickness of the grilled rounds) pieces, tossed them in a small bowl with plenty of salt, red wine vinegar, and red pepper flakes — making a kind of quick spicy pickle, which worked perfectly as a garnish. The skinless cubed chopped eggplant was meltingly tender, the small bits of briny, spicy skin added piquancy and a kind of olive-like chewiness.

(Seen here with the perfect side vegetable — New England sweet corn, picked that day, cooked in boiling water for exactly 60 seconds. So perfect it needs neither salt nor butter)

The cool delight of soba and silken tofu

2009-07-29T10:32:00.002-05:00

Since summer has finally arrived in Vermont over the last week or so, I've been trying to plan meals that don't involve much application of heat, or at least whose cooked components can be cooked in the relatively cooler morning. Especially I've been enjoying the wonderful versatility of having cold cooked soba (Japanese buckwheat) noodles in the fridge.

Classically, they can just be rinsed off (to remove excess starch) and then served cold with a dipping sauce, which is very good, but they also make a great base for salads. Here, they're tossed with shredded lettuce, sesame seeds and toasted sesame oil, then drizzled with a mixture of 3 parts soy sauce, 1 part mirin (sweet Japanese rice wine) and 1 part rice vinegar.

For the main protein for the meal, I opened up my favorite kind of silken tofu — the Mori-Nu boxes which have a shelf life in the pantry of a couple of months — topped with well-drained tuna packed in water (I discovered a few cans of white albacore in the pantry — from one of the rare shopping trips entrusted to H, no doubt, as I would not myself splurge on such a luxury — but it did taste exceedingly good), drizzled with the soy-mirin-rice vinegar mixture and then garnished with chopped scallions. Not exactly a recipe, but a delicious summer meal.

Waterfront Sculpture

2009-07-07T15:48:00.009-05:00

Intrigued by an article in the paper, the kids and I went down to the waterfront yesterday morning to check out the Andy Goldsworthy-esque sculpture a couple of 19- and 20-year-olds made with rocks. Most of it consisted of piles made of the unusually flat rocks down by the waterfront:

My favorite part was this path into the lake:

S decided to add his own contribution:

In addition to stone, it also incorporated a fair amount of the rusty metal bits that litter Burlington's once-industrial waterfront:

more pictures of the sculpture »

* * *

Burlington's waterfront was not always primarily a tourist destination — in fact, it was fairly industrial up until the seventies. In the 19th century, the waterfront was a huge transportation hub — Burlington was built on a bay which made it ideal for shipping goods on Lake Champlain, either north to Quebec or south to New York, and soon enough the railways came as well — just inland from where this sculpture is there is still a huge switching yard.

Vermont's economy in the 19th century was powered by resource extraction: timber, granite, marble. In the days before refrigeration made commercial dairy farming possible, commercial agriculture meant sheep farming — Vermont is actually more forested now than it was 150 years ago, as land formerly dominated by grazing sheep became reforested. Industrial production meant woolen mills. The built environment of Burlington and neighboring Winooski is dominated by 19th century mill buildings, some turned into condos and offices and boutiques, some converted to heavier industrial use in the twentieth century and now abandoned and toxic.

Like poor rural areas historically, Vermont soon attracted industry as a low-wage, non-union alternative to production in Massachussetts, New York or Connecticut. In the 1940s, organizers for the UE — the CIO union with jurisdiction for machine tool manufacturing — found machine tool factories in Springfield and Windsor where workers were making a fraction of their counterparts elsewhere in the Northeast.

Of course the bosses moved the work to poorer and more rural areas, especially after workers successfully organized. Vermont's industry moved to the US South, to Mexico, to China. And as Vermont de-industrialized, the economy turned to that other mainstay of poor rural areas (at least the picturesque ones), tourism.

By the seventies, it was clear that the potential beauty of Burlington's de-industrializing waterfront could make people wealthy. Whether development of the waterfront would be primarily public or private was one of the key issues in the 1981 mayoral race, in which the then-more-socialist-than-he-is-now Bernie Sanders broke the grip of a corrupt Democratic Party machine on Burlington's city government, running in part in opposition to a plan to develop the waterfront as private condos. As a result, we now have a public bikepath that spans the length of Burlington's waterfront, a public boathouse and large public park at the center of the bay (right by downtown), a science-and-ecology museum, and some other stray amenities such as an off-leash dog park and a skatepark, all with stunning views of the lake and, across the lake in New York, the Adirondacks. All this public land, together with the downtown pedestrian mall (also a product of Sanders' municipal socialism), no doubt create far more economic activity for local businesses than condos for the wealthy would have (there are still condos for the wealthy; they're just set back behind the public parks).

* * *

While the bike path runs along the whole waterfront, not all of it is developed. South of downtown, the bikepath runs for about a mile along the edge of the lake, while just east of the path is an industrial and former-industrial area of railyards, water sewage treatment, trucking terminals and brownfields, and at least one Superfund site. You can't get from the bikepath back to the rest of the city during this mile stretch, and the actual "beach" of small rocks where the water meets the land is filled with rusty metal.

Just south of the water sewage treatment plant (and just north of the temporary sculpture above), there is an odd, and more permanent, piece of public art which commemorates the fact that white marble was found and dug at this spot, and in fact that marble was used — along with other rock — to stabilize and create the Burlington waterfront. Several large pieces of marble are placed along the waterfront, seemingly at random, and some of them carved to look, presumeably, like the detritus of some ancient civilization, both the strange mythical lake creatures that they worshipped:

... and the curious devices that they used for transportation:

Beet and shiitake bing with greens

2009-07-02T09:29:00.003-05:00

I'd never made filled bing before, but everyone in the family is quite fond of green onion pancakes, which are made with the same hot water dough, so when I saw my TV chef idol Ming Tsai's episode featuring several different kinds of bing, I figured I should try it out. Then on Monday we got a nice bunch of beets with greens still attached from the CSA farm, and inspiration struck to serve the bing with greens and a sauce on top (rather than the more traditional dipping sauce).

If you want to be most efficient on time, cook, peel and chop the beets ahead of time, then proceed in this order about 45 minutes to an hour before you want to eat: soak dried shiitake (unless using fresh), make dough, make filling, prep sauce ingredients, make bing, fry bing & make pan sauce.

Hot Water Dough

2 cups flour, plus additional as needed
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup boiling water
1 1/2 TBSP canola oil

Combine water and salt in a mixing bowl, then pour in boiling water and oil and mix with a wooden spoon until the dough comes together. Knead for about five minutes or so, adding flour as necessary to keep dough from sticking to the counter, until smooth (it won't get as smooth and elastic as bread dough). Form into ball and allow to rest for at least 20 minutes.

Filling

4-5 scallions, white and light green parts, chopped
1 tsp minced ginger
1 bunch of beets (4-5 small to medium), greens reserved, roots boiled until tender, peeled, and chopped
8-10 shiitake mushrooms, fresh (or dried and soaked in hot water for 20 minutes), sliced
a little canola oil
dash of soy sauce
freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oil in a small frypan and sauté the scallions and ginger for a minute or two, then add shiitake and cook for a few minutes if dried; until well browned and liquid evaporates from pan if fresh. Add beets, a splash of soy sauce and a good grind of black pepper, mix everything together well, and remove from heat. Let cool.

Forming and Cooking the Bing
1. Divide the dough into 8 balls, and roll each ball out into a 6-8 inch disk, about 1/8" thick in the center and thinner on the edges.
2. Place about 1/2 cup of filling in each disk, then pull up the edges around the filling and twist to seal. If it's sticky, dust top and bottom with a little additional flour.
3. Once bing are formed, heat a generous amount of oil in a heavy skillet (I used cast-iron) with a lid. Put the bing, sealed side down, in the oil, then flip when bottom is crisp and golden-brown.
4. When both sides of the bing are crisp, with lid at the ready, pour 1/3 cup water into the skillet and cover IMMEDIATELY (otherwise you will have splattering all over). Cook until you can hear the water has boiled off, 2-4 minutes.
5. Once the water has boiled off, remove the lid and cook the bing for several minutes on each side, until crisped up again. Remove to a paper-towel-lined plate.
6. Unless you have a really large skillet (or are making a half-recipe), you'll have to do this in two batches, which is OK, because the bings hold their heat quite well.

Greens and Pan Sauce

1 small onion, minced
1 TBSP minced ginger
reserved greens from one bunch of beets, washed and coarsely chopped
zest and juice of 1 orange
splash of white wine or vermouth
salt to taste
1 TBSP cold butter

1. When you're finished cooking the bing, pour off all but a slight film of oil from the skillet. Add the onions and cook, stirring, until starting to brown.
2. Add the ginger and orange zest and cook for 1-2 minutes more.
3. Add the beet greens and a pinch of salt, and cook until the greens are wilted and reduce.
4. Add a splash of white wine or vermouth, and cook until almost all liquid has evaporated.
5. Add the orange juice and reduce by half.
6. Take the pan off the heat, add the cold butter, and swirl to emulsify. Pour sauce over the bings and serve.

The filling:

The bing:

Frying the bing:

Eating the lawn: pasta with white beans and chicory

2009-04-29T12:43:00.003-05:00

It's the season in between when the root veggies from the winter farm share run out and the summer share (or even the Farmer's Market) begins, when there's just not a lot of local produce to be had. However, the lawn is starting to green up, which means dandelions, chicory and my latest discovery, garlic mustard, are there for the picking. The chicory especially calls out, as it is still tender and relatively mild, and has not yet begun to grow its big spiky stems:

So for dinner last night, I cooked it with pasta and white beans, topped with delicious crunchy fried breadcrumbs:

Pasta with White Beans and Chicory

1/2 lb. whole-wheat pasta
1 medium onion, chopped
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
a couple of pinches of red pepper flakes
several bunches of chicory (or other bitter green, chopped if large leaves), washed
1 can cannelini beans, drained and rinsed (or about 1 1/2 cups home cooked)
about 1/4 cup fresh breadcrumbs
extra-virgin olive oil, plus light olive oil for sautéing if desired
salt & pepper

1. Heavily salt some water, and put it on to boil for the pasta.

2. While water is heating, saut&ecaute; the onions in some oil (I generally use light olive oil for sautéing, saving the extra-virgin stuff for finishing and places where you'll really taste it) over medium-high heat until soft.

3. Add the red pepper flakes and the garlic, cook for 20-30 seconds until garlic blooms.

4. Add the chicory leaves, without drying too much so they have some liquid to braise in (since I tend to wash greens, especially from my lawn, by immersing in a bowl of water, I just left them in the water until it was time to add them to the skillet). Turn down the heat a bit.

5. Once the greens have cooked down, add the beans.

6. Add pasta to water once it boils; as pasta is cooking, add small amounts (1/4 c.) of pasta water to sauce and reduce - kind of like making a risotto.

7. Once pasta is cooking, heat several glugs of extra-virgin olive oil in a small skillet and toast the breadcrumbs until they become golden-brown, oil soaked morsels of delicious crunchiness.

8. Drain pasta when al dante, reserving about a cup of the pasta water in case you need to thin out the sauce. Add pasta to skillet with sauce, toss to combine, add a little more pasta water if dry, then drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil.

9. Serve in pasta bowls topped with the breadcrumbs.

In addition to the chicory, I learned this past weekend that one of the invasive species we've had in the backyard for the last few years is in fact garlic mustard, and edible:

Turns out it makes a very tasty pesto, with a kind of lemony-mustardy bite, which is good, because we've got a big field of it surrounding our blueberry bushes in the back corner of the yard and, apparently, releasing a mild herbicide from its root system:

Sauteed pepper salad with hard-boiled eggs and pine nuts

2009-03-14T12:01:00.004-05:00

When the temperature reaches the upper 30s in March in Vermont, and our lawns are down to only a few patches of snow-cover left, our thoughts begin to turn to making salads of things that grow out of our own ground.

Sadly, nothing is available yet (I thought I saw the chives poking up new green shoots yesterday, but I couldn't be sure), and the endless parade of winter squash, cabbage and root vegetables that characterizes our winter farm share is getting a little old. However, my mother's recently acquired Costco membership has seduced me into buying outrageously out-of-season (but cheap and decent quality) vegetables in large quantities, including these sweet mini peppers (size of jalapeños but sweeter than bell peppers).

So for lunch today I sliced up the remaining vast amount of them (I think there were 30 or so — you could probably substitute 3-4 regular bell peppers), sauteed them with some oregano and served as a flat-plate salad, topped with some pine nuts (also purchased in large quantities for cheap at Costco) and sliced hard-boiled eggs, seasoned with the fancy artisanal sherry vinegar that H bought me for Christmas this year.

Ingredients
3-4 bell peppers, or 20-30 sweet mini peppers (mixture of red, orange and yellow), sliced
1/4 c. pine nuts
olive oil for drying
2 hard-boiled eggs
a couple of pinches of dried oregano
a couple of pinches of paprika, preferably Spanish smoked paprika
1 tsp sherry vinegar
salt

1. Toast pine nuts in a large, dry skillet over medium-high heat until fragrant and starting to brown a little. Remove to a small bowl.

2. Add a good glug of olive oil to the skillet, wait a half-minute for the oil to heat through, then add the peppers. Toss the peppers well with the oil, then sprinkle with salt and dried oregano.

3. Fry peppers for 8-10 minutes, stirring frequently, until soft and a little browned around the edges. Take skillet off heat and let pepper cool in skillet for 5 minutes or so. Meanwhile, peel and slice your eggs.

4. Taste peppers for seasoning; add more salt if necessary. Divide among two plates, and sprinkle pine nuts on top. Arrange the egg slices on top of the peppers, drizzle 1/2 tsp sherry vinegar over each plate, and dust egg slices with the paprika.

If only folks had listened to the labor cartoonists back in 1990...

2009-02-14T10:17:00.001-05:00

Whole-wheat calzone, with mushrooms and blue cheese

2009-02-12T19:15:00.004-05:00

For a long time, I was scared of calzone — probably because of my tendency to make the fillings too liquidy (which resulted in a lot of leakage), my tendency to work too much flour into the dough, making it hard to seal (which resulted in even more leakage), and my terrible belief — no doubt due to being brought up in the midwest — that cottage cheese is an acceptable substitute for ricotta (again, resulting in lots of leakage).

Tonight, though, I managed to make decent ones. Since I had actual ricotta, I figured I could make gourmet calzones for the adults and ones just filled with scoops of ricotta for the kids, but this turned out to be overly optimistic — S didn't like the tanginess. Oh, well. As with many last-minute inventions, I didn't measure carefully, so use your judgement if you're going to use this recipe. I used about a quart of mushrooms and half of a largish onion, and it made enough filling for 5 of the 8 calzone (the rest I filled with a couple of scoops each of ricotta). As with any dough, the exact proportions will depend on the humidity, etc., so you might want to start with a little less flour and work it in as needed (though these exact proportions worked perfectly for me tonight). These would probably be more "authentic" with gorgonzola, but I made them with some Irish "ballyblue" I had on hand and they were still tasty.

Calzone dough
2 cups white whole wheat flours
3 cups white flour
1 1/2 TBSP (2 packages) yeast
1 TBSP salt
2 cups lukewarm water (I microwave 2 cups of cold water for 2 minutes)

Whisk together all the ingredients except the water, then pour the water in and stir with a spatula or wooden spoon until it forms a shaggy dough. Turn out onto the counter and knead for 10-12 minutes until smooth and elastic, adding extra flour as necessary to keep from sticking. Grease a bowl lightly with olive oil and put dough in to rise for 1 hour or so.

Meanwhile, make the filling:

Mushrooms (I used crimini, but white button should be fine), cut into 1/4" dice
Onions, minced fairly fine
olive oil
thyme (dried or fresh)
salt & pepper

Heat some olive oil over medium-high heat, add the onions and thyme and sauté until softened but not quite browned. Add the mushrooms, salt & pepper and cook until nicely browned — they will release a bunch of liquid, but cook until it is nearly evaporated. Mushrooms will be a lot smaller than they were originally.

Punch down the dough, knead briefly, and cut into 8 pieces. Roll each piece into an 8-10 inch circle, and place a mound of filling on the lower half of the dough. Top the filling with some crumbled blue cheese. Dip your fingers into some water and wet the outer edge of the dough, then fold over to make a half-moon shape. Pinch the dough together well and cut a slit in the top. Place each on a baking sheet well-dusted with cornmeal.

Let the calzone rise for 30-45 minutes while preheating the oven to 425. Once they are risen, bake for about 20 minutes. Let cool for 5-10 minutes before serving.

Report from 2006 World Social Forum (re-post)

2009-02-04T19:34:00.003-05:00

This was original published (in print only) in the February, 2006 issue of the UE News. I am posting it now because Armando Robles, one of the UE delegation from that WSF trip three years ago, was one of the leaders of the plant occupation at Republic Windows and Doors last December, and just recently visited Vermont as part of the Resistance and Recovery Tour.

In January, three rank and file UE members — myself, Angaza Laughinghouse (Local 150), and Armando Robles (Local 1110) — travelled to Caracas, Venezuela to attend the sixth World Social Forum (WSF). The WSF is an annual gathering of trade unionists, community organizations and other social movements who oppose corporate globalization. The goal of the WSF is to promote a globalization based on solidarity, justice and peace, one that creates jobs rather than destroys them and improves the lives of working people. The UE has been repesented at every WSF since the second one, in 2002. As in previous years, we were part of a broader delegation of U.S. grassroots organizations organized by Grassroots Global Justice.

VENEZUELA

This year, the WSF was hosted by the pro-worker government in Venezuela. While much of the media coverage of Venezuela has focused on President Hugo Chavez, there is in fact a much broader process of social change going on in Venezuela, known variously as "the Bolivarian Revolution," "the Revolution," or simply "the process." Virtually all of the working-class people we met were supporters of the revolution, though a few were critical of Chavez personally.

There is no doubt that this process is benefiting the working people of Venezuela. While many speak of the process as being a "revolution," it is peaceful and democratic. There is no political repression — indeed, the opposition flourishes in wealthier areas, owns all of the private press and media, and in fact organized a large (and extremely well-dressed) anti-WSF march at the beginning of our time there. The "process" seems to primarily consist of using government resources to assist communities and workplaces with self-organization, whether it is around jobs, health care, education, public safety or other concerns. As a result, the access to health care, quality of education, level of public safety and so forth seem to be improving throughout Venezuela, in marked contrast to the U.S. where we are constantly fighting defensive battles. Furthermore, what we in the UE would call "rank and file control" is a central principle of this process; a common slogan was "the revolution is giving power to the people." The new provision of services in neighborhoods is directed by neighborhood committees, and, most inspiringly, factories and other workplaces closed by their owners are being re-opened by the workers (see below).

VENEZUELAN LABOR

For many decades, workers in Venezuela have been represented almost exclusively by a labor federation known as CTV (Venezuelan Confederation of Labor), which was and is corrupt, undemocratic and tightly connected to both employers and the old political parties (before Chavez was elected, politics in Venezuela were controlled by a two-party system very much like our own, with both parties representing bosses' interests). The CTV is extremely hostile to Chavez, and was involved in both the Bush-instigated coup against Chavez in April of 2002 and the "general strike" (really a general lockout called by employers) which attempted to force Chavez from power later that year. It is one of the few labor federations in the world enthusiastically supported by the Bush Administration.

In the last five years or so, rank and file workers have created a new labor federation, the UNT (National Union of Workers), which has become the dominant federation in the private sector and has also recently gained the affiliation of the key construction unions. In contract to the CTV, debate and discussion flourish inside the UNT; while the UNT membership is overwhelming in favor of "the process," there is a vigorous debate over whether the labor movement should be close to Chavez or strive for political independence.

Another issue of great discussion and debate in the UNT is "co-management," the process by which many closed factories and other workplaces in Venezuela are being re-opened under worker control. We met an electrical utility worker from the UNT who could barely contain his pride that he and his co-workers were now running the shop without bosses. "We run it now," he said.

EXPOSING U.S. GOVERNMENT HYPOCRISY

At a workshop co-organized by UE and the Southwest Workers' Union (SWU), which represents school support staff workers in southern Texas, WSF delegates from Venezuela, Colombia, Europe and the U.S. heard Local 150 Executive Board member Angaza Laughinghouse describe the struggle of public sector workers in the U.S. South for collective bargaining rights through the International Worker Justice Campaign. At another workshop organized by SWU on the general issue of workers' rights in the U.S., Armando Robles (Local 1110) also described the struggle of workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago for a democratic union.

Participants from other countries, who often hear the U.S. government defend its military adventures or interventions against pro-worker governments like Venezuela's with rhetoric about "democracy" and "rights" were shocked and appalled to hear how the U.S. denies the basic democratic right of collective bargaining to millions of workers. All three of us were also interviewed by a radio journalist from Quebec, who broadcast a story about the U.S. denial of collective bargaining rights over the WSF's own radio station while we were there and also recorded a program to be played on Montreal radio when she returned.

IMPORTANCE OF SOLIDARITY

We all returned inspired by how workers in Venezuela, and throughout Latin America, are organizing and making improvements in their living and working standards. We were also impressed at how clearly they saw that American workers were not their enemies, but their brothers and sisters in a struggle to improve the lives of all workers, even though our government has been working to undermine their achievements. We returned committed to telling the truth about how Chavez's democratic revolution is benefitting the workers of Venezuela, and to prevent Bush from intervening in Venezuela.

Roasted salsify soup with black bean-garlic oil

2009-02-03T14:16:00.004-05:00

I had some salsify on hand from the winter farm share, and was trying to think of something interesting to do with them. Since its taste is vaguely reminiscent of oysters, I started thinking along the lines of great seafood dishes, and eventually hit on Chinese clams with black bean sauce.

This soup had a great mouthfeel — the creamy richness of pureed root-vegetable soup, broken up by the varied textures in the garnish: crispy salsify-ends, spongy black beans, and, well, mushroom-y shiitake mushrooms, all bathed in a rich garlicy olive oil.

I started basically with Oven Roasted Salsify Soup. If you've got salsify that are quite large at one end but taper at the other end, then roasting them whole presents a bit of a problem — after 30 minutes the tapered ends were charring but the large ends haven't cooked through. Not a big deal; just chop them up and finish cooking in the soup water (takes longer, of course). I found that the roasted salsify, combined with the garnish, was flavorful enough to be able to use water rather than stock in making the soup.

The amounts are pretty inexact. I used two hulking salsify (the biggest ones I've ever seen in fact), each the size of a large juice carrot, supplemented by one medium-sized potato, and it made two servings each of which was a light lunch.

Ingredients
A good amount of salsify roots, or mixture of salsify and potatoes
a few dried shiitake mushrooms (1 for every two servings)
about 1 clove of garlic per serving, minced
about 1 TBSP of fermented black beans per serving, chopped but not too finely
plenty of olive oil
salt & pepper to taste

1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Peel salsify (and potatoes, if using), toss with olive oil, salt and pepper and place in small baking pan. Bake for 25-30 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, cover the shiitake mushroom with hot water and let soak.

3. Mince the garlic and chop the black beans a bit, but not too much. Combine with plenty of extra-virgin olive oil (remember, you're making a flavored oil, not sautéing something) in a small saucepan. About 10 minutes before the salsify come out of the oven, place saucepan on lowest possible heat.

4. Remove salsify from the oven and chop. Tapered small ends will be crispy; chop these fairly small and reserve for garnish. Chop remainder of salsify into 1" pieces and put in pan with water to cover; bring to a boil.

5. Drain and mince shiitakes, reserving the soaking liquid. Add the minced shiitakes to the black bean-garlic oil; strain the soaking liquid through a coffee filter and add to soup.

6. If the salsify were cooked through in the oven, you can puree the soup as soon as it comes to a boil. Otherwise cover and simmer until salsify pieces are completely tender.

7. Puree the soup in a blender (or use an immersion blender, which is way easier). Season to taste with salt and pepper. Ladle into serving bowls.

8. Add reserved salsify bits to black bean-garlic oil, stir to combine, then scoop out some solids from the oil to make a mound in the center of each bowl. Drizzle remaining oil over soup.

After a nor'easter, we are visited by aliens

2009-01-29T12:11:00.001-05:00

Our Weber grill always becomes a perfect spaceship after a big snow.

"Our ability to see each other is the greatest threat to the status quo"

2009-01-28T19:57:00.002-05:00

At the time, I was a little too stressed out about logistics and workshop facilitation and so forth to fully appreciate how excellent this event was. The workshops were, for the most part, even better than the speeches, but the speeches were pretty good:

Butternut squash napoleon with red beans

2009-01-27T19:39:00.003-05:00

Me: Mmmm, vegetable-based dinner

H: yeah, with lots of butter

I was trying to think of something to make tonight with the massive amount of cooked butternut squash I have on hand. I had a build-up of two large squash from the winter farm share sitting on the counter, so over the weekend I cooked them — cut in half, cut-side down on a baking sheet with a rim and about 1/4" of water, covered tightly with foil, at 375 degrees for an hour and a half until completely tender. Scoop the flesh out of the skins, line a colander with a clean dish cloth, and drain with a weighted plate on top for a couple of hours to get rid of excess liquid.

I thought about experimenting with empanadas, but making and rolling out pastry dough seemed a little much for a weeknight, so instead I eventually hit upon the idea of making a napoleon with biscuit dough.

For biscuits
1 1/2 c. white flour
1/2 c. wheat flour
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. salt
5 TBSP butter, cold
3/4 c. milk

Preheat oven to 450.

Whisk the flours, baking powder and salt together. Cut butter into small pieces, then cut into flour with two knives or a pastry blender until it resembles coarse meal, with pea-sized chunks of butter. Add milk and press together into a rough dough.

Because I wanted to split these for serving, I rolled them out twice the size I wanted (about 6" x 12") and then folded in half, then cut into four large (3" x 3") biscuits.

Place biscuits on an ungreased baking sheet and cook for 12 minutes.

Filling
1-2 cups cooked butternut squash
1 small onion, chopped fairly small
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
olive oil
red pepper flakes
salt
pepper

Heat olive oil in saucepan, add onion and cook until just browned, seasoning as it cooks with red pepper, salt and pepper. Add garlic and cook for 20-30 seconds, then add squash puree. Turn heat to lowest setting and cook until heated through, seasoning to taste with salt and a generous amount of black pepper.

For serving
1 cup red beans (roughly)
salsa

Once biscuits are nicely browned, remove from oven and split in half. On the bottom half, layer a good spoonful of butternut squash filling, top with red beans and salsa, then with the top of the biscuit.

Luscious garlic tofu with pork and walnuts

2009-01-22T19:19:00.003-05:00

This was inspired by and roughly based on "Tofu with luscious chili oil" from Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet — a recipe from the Yunnan province of China. I made it less hot and used more Italian flavors, and served it over barley, though I imagine it would be good with pasta or rice or on its own with good, crusty bread. It is, as Naomi and Jeff say of the original, a good mid-winter meal, when quality seasonal vegetables are in short supply (or when you're a little tired of all your quality seasonal vegetables being root vegetables and winter squash...)

1. Make your garlic oil — put several tablespoons (or what Jamie Oliver would call "a couple of good glugs") of extra-virgin olive oil in the smallest saucepan you have, add 2-3 peeled cloves of garlic, and cook over the lowest possible heat for 8-10 minutes, until garlic is just slightly golden on the outside. Remove garlic and some of the oil to a mortar and pestle, smash well, and season with salt, pepper, and a few pinches of red pepper flakes.

2. Put a small handful of walnut pieces in a dry wok, and toast over medium-high heat until it smells of, well, toasted walnuts. Remove the walnuts and return wok to the heat.

3. Add 1/4 c. ground pork and stir-fry, breaking into small pieces, until completely browned (ground pork should have plenty of fat in it, so no need to add any oil first).

4. Push pork to the sides and add about 8 oz. of tofu, cut into largish (3/4" to 1") cubes. We're not trying to make the tofu brown and chewy here, so no need to press it beforehand. Add the walnuts and a small handful of kalamata olives, chopped. Toss all this together for 30-60 seconds, to heat through.

5. Remove wok from the heat, add the garlic-oil mixture and some or all of the garlic-flavored oil from the saucepan (leave it out if you're looking to be more low-fat, add it all if you're looking to be more luscious). Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Local/not so local

2009-01-18T10:46:00.007-05:00

My friend Dan, who grew up working-class in Burlington, used to catch smelts in Lake Champlain when he was a kid and sell them to Ray's Seafood to supplement the family income. I don't know whether the smelts that usually show up in the grocery stores in winter are locally ice-fished or not, but they are cheap ($4.29/lb yesterday) and tasty, especially when fried:

I don't cook them too much because H is not too keen on the small bones (which are totally edible, and good for you to boot) and the kids are squeamish about eating fish that, well, looks like a fish. To spruce up the rest of the meal, and try to pretend it isn't winter, I went in a tropical-fruit direction — serving the fish with a little leftover Cranberry-Mango Vinaigrette I had in the fridge:

... a brown rice salad with pomegranate seeds and pineapple:

... and the cabbage salad with golden raisins and almonds — dressed only with extra-virgin olive oil, salt & pepper (no vinegar) — which is the best nutrition-into-kids delivery mechanism in our house (here made with napa cabbage):

Soup and salad

2009-01-06T19:17:00.003-05:00

Beautiful, isn't it? An easy weeknight meal only because I had many of the ingredients prepared and sitting in the fridge (squash was roasted, pomegranate seeds prepared, etc.)

The soup is a butternut squash soup, not unlike this one, garnished with sliced onions fried until nicely browned in olive oil and generously salted, and a few drops of the artisanal balsamic vinegar H got me for xmas this year.

The salad is baby spinach, dressed with a wee amount of some no-fat raspberry dressing I found in the fridge left from a mother-in-law visit some time ago — augmented with a couple of good grinds of black pepper, then topped with smoked salmon and pomegranate seeds, and, to finish it off, a drizzle of toasted sesame oil.

Broiled sichuan-pepper tofu with greens and lemon

2009-01-05T13:56:00.003-05:00

Take two with the sichuan pepper, and this time much more successful.

1 TBSP kosher salt
1 tsp sichuan peppercorns
silken tofu, about 3 oz. per person (I used the Mori-Nu that comes in a box and keeps well in the pantry)
1-2 heads baby bok choy per person, or equivalent amount of other greens
1 TBSP fresh ginger per person
vegetable oil
lemon juice
cooked brown rice, for serving

1. Start your rice (if you're using white rice, you might want to make the pepper-salt first).

2. Make the Chinese pepper-salt: toast kosher salt and sichuan peppercorns together in a small, dry skillet until the kitchen is fully aromatic. Then grind together in a mortal and pestle. This will make more than you will likely need, unless you are making of lot of this.

3. Preheat the broiler. Brush the broiler pan, or a baking pan (lined with foil if you like) with a good amount of oil. Slice the tofu into thick slices, place on pan, and sprinkle each slice with a goodly amount of the pepper-salt. Put the pan under the broiler. I used my toaster-oven:

4. Bring a pot full of well-salted water to the boil. Wash the greens well. If you're using greens that have thick stems (bok choy, chard), separate them so you can blanch the stems for a bit longer. When water comes to the boil, add stems (if necessary) to cook for a minute or two, then leaves for 15-20 seconds. Remove to a cutting board with tongs and cut into manageable pieces. Drain.

5. Heat a little oil over medium-high heat in a wok. Add ginger and stir-fry for 30 seconds or so; then add greens and stir-fry until they start to develop brown spots. Meanwhile, the tofu should be getting slightly golden on top and well heated through. Remove from broiler after about 10 minutes.

6. Plate up with a generous portion of rice, topped with the greens, topped with a couple of tofu slices. Squeeze a little lemon juice over all.

My new favorite band

2009-01-04T18:58:00.002-05:00

I was going to blog about either a) the incredibly depressing thoughts I had during another attack of insomnia last night, or b) how much (and why) I hate Borders, but I'll spare the internet my angst and spite for today and instead give props to my new favorite band, Firewater (whose latest CD I purchased at the aforementioned corporate media chain today):

(I was originally entranced by them when stumbling upon a couple of videos of them playing live at KEXP in Seattle, while browsing the "giveaways" section of the Bloodshot Records website)

Ice sculpture and anolini update

2009-01-03T18:15:00.003-05:00

These of course melted last weekend (when it was in the 50s, for cryin' out loud! in Vermont!), but we were downloading the Christmas photos off the camera and thought we'd share these with the internet. Made from the 30-50 pound blocks of ice that slide off our roof and our neighbors' roof on occasion:

The butternut squash anolini that I made yesterday with the kids (see previous post) were quite delicious, mostly because, hey, anytime you make something out of your own homemade pasta it's probably going to be delicious. Yeah, it might have been a little better if I'd made a fancy filling like this one, but I just mixed together some cooked butternut squash, some leftover canned pumpkin that was needing a home with some softened butter, seasoned with salt, pepper, and a couple of pinches of nutmeg. The pastas were very good, topped with some brown butter with dried rubbed sage. However, I learned two things, more by error than by trial:

1. If you're going to mash up softened butter with something straight out of the fridge, let the something come to warm temperature first, or microwave a bit to warm it up — otherwise, it will re-harden the butter into chunks as you try to mush it all together. In fact, if you keep your house at 62 in the winter like we do, it's not a bad idea to microwave it to a bit over "room temperature," since butter isn't as softened at 62 as it is at the temperature of warmer rooms.

2. My various cookbooks were a little vague on how to store filled pastas for a couple of hours between when you make them and when you cook them. So I, um, guessed, and kept them on plates on the counter, covered by saran wrap. This was fine for the anolini that the kids made for themselves, filled with small chunks of pepperoni and mozzarella, but the moister squash filling made my pasta all soggy. They tasted fine once cooked, but getting them off the plate and into the water was a bit of a challenge — I ended up having to kind of scrunch them off with a spatula, which made them all crinkly and brain-looking. Next time, we'll try drying them on a rack or something.

Starting to get the hang of this pasta making thing

2009-01-02T16:37:00.004-05:00

I made fresh pasta and homemade ravioli on Christmas eve, and ever since S has been begging to make them again. This afternoon, we did. He helped not only with rolling out the dough and assembling the ravioli this time, but also helped make the dough (the big where you stir up the eggs in the well of flour with a fork, slowly incorporating the flour into the eggs — he wasn't quite up for the kneading bit).

Anyway, rather than irregular and large rectangles, we actually used a biscuit cutter. If these were smaller, I think they'd be anolini ("small coins") instead of ravioli. I don't know what they are if they're 2 1/2 inches across uncooked, maybe anoloni? (since "tortelloni" are bigger than "tortellini"?)

Haven't eaten them yet; I'll post a recipe for the filling if it's good.

One of the by-products of cutting rounds of pasta out of the big sheets was some pretty funky-looking farfalle, with crinkly edges and most of them wider on the top:

This one was my favorite:

I have some nice shots of the kids helping (E actually did most of the squash-stuffed ones for the adults); maybe we'll post them on H's facebook page (for folks who know us) later today.

Note to self: do not open a restaurant

2008-12-31T10:54:00.002-05:00

Michael Yates just posted an excellent piece on the political economy of restaurant work in a capitalist society at Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate. It reminded me, no matter how much H and I occasionally fantasize about turning my modest skills as a chef into some kind of food-based independent business, that the main reason I devote so much time and energy to cooking (both cooking itself and research — reading cookbooks, watching cooking shows) is that it gives me the opportunity to engage in some unalienated labor.

I was also excited to read that Yates, one of my radical idols, also likes to watch cooking shows on TV — though, I have to admit, the competitive aspect of shows like Top Chef have always turned me off.

Also yesterday I was reminded of the modestness of my cooking skills. I wasn't planning to do anything particularly inventive for dinner — fish and chips, in fact: pan-fried tilapia, oven fries (I use the Cook's Illustrated recipe from volume 66, which is a bit complicated but worth it), and our staple winter salad of shredded cabbage, golden raisins and almond slivers, dressed with olive oil and a little salt and pepper. But I had also checked Hot Sour Salty Sweet out of the library and was reading about the cuisine of the Mekong, and had recently, on a whim, purchased some sichuan pepper. I decided to make some Chinese pepper salt (pan-roasting the sichuan pepper with flake salt, then grinding it together) — the aroma in the kitchen was enticing, and I started thinking about using it to flavor the fish (well, for the adults).

Tasting the pepper salt, I thought it probably needed something to complement it, like a dipping sauce. I didn't think a fish sauce base would work very well, and I didn't have any limes, so I ended up using equal parts clementine juice and soy sauce, adding a few drops of sesame oil and some chopped scallion. This was the successful part of the meal.

My great mistake was using corn starch to coat the fish (another experiment). Well, it wasn't that great of a mistake — the kids definitely liked the crisp crust on their non-sichuan-pepper-flavored fish. But, of course (and I should have thought this through), you can't mix a seasoning like crushed sichuan pepper into a corn starch coating the way you can into a flour coating. The cornstarch is too thin; it adheres to the fish but brings precious little pepper (or salt) along with it.

A decent meal, all and all, but needs some work before I can really publish a recipe, and, of course, I'll need to stop making these kinds of mistakes before I open that restaurant...

Individual tuna pies

2008-12-28T19:40:00.003-05:00

A great way to dress up cheap tuna packed in water. This is loosely based on a recipe from Penzey's Spices. It makes two servings (in this case, for the adults — the kids got chicken strips from the freezer tonight) and could be doubled and all made in a 10-inch pie pan (kind of like how the original recipe is made). If you don't have creme fraîche on hand, sour cream, or a mixture of sour cream and mayonnaise (again, like the original) would probably work. I'm guessing a bit on the filling ingredient amounts, since I used the leftovers of a sauce from the Christmas salmon — the key thing is you want the filling to be a bit more creamy and liquid-y than your average tuna salad; it will firm up in the oven.

1 can tuna in water, drained
1/2 cup flour
1/3 cup shredded cheddar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp paprika
2 TBSP butter, cold
about 1/4 cup creme fraîche
about 1/4 tsp dill, dried (or 3/4 tsp fresh)
about 1/2 tsp capers, chopped up fine.
butter, for greasing pans

1. Preheat oven to 400. Butter two 4-inch ramekins.

2. Mix together flour, cheddar, salt and paprika in a mixing bowl. Cut butter into small pieces, add to the flour mixture, and cut together with two knives until it resembles coarse meal with a few pea-sized chunks.

3. Meanwhile, drain tuna and flake with a fork. Mix tuna together with creme fraîche, dill and capers.

4. Put about one quarter of the flour mixture in the bottom of each ramekin. Tilt the pans so the sides get at least a minimal coating of crust, then press the crust left in the bottom down slightly.

5. Spoon half of the tuna mixture into each ramekin, then top with remaining flour mixture.

6. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until topping is golden. Remove from oven and let cool for 10-15 minutes before serving.

Turning your leftover roast beast into a tasty pasta sauce

2008-12-27T19:19:00.006-05:00

So this Christmas, we reverted to the traditions of my mother's New England family, and had roast beef for Christmas dinner. Since my sister has been not eating red meat for a few years, it's been awhile. (In addition to the roast beef, we had a filet of salmon, which worked out nicely — the resting time for the roast was just enough time to crank the oven heat up and roast the salmon).

However, on account of having two main dishes (our kids were also preferring the salmon), the limited selection at the grocery store we patronized last Saturday, and the general state of the economy, I ended up buying a small top round roast rather than the more extravagant standing rib roast that I've cooked in the past:

... and, between the top round's high proportion of connective tissue and my chronic tendency to undercook things, there was a lot of, well, quite rare and chewy meat which didn't get eaten Christmas day.

So last night I made the leftovers into a rich pasta sauce:

1. Cut leftovers into 1" chunks and brown them well in a little fat (I used bacon fat, because I had some on hand and was feeling decadent, but olive oil would work too). Make sure you don't crowd the meat; I did this in about three batches.

2. Remove meat from the pan, add a little more fat if there's not some left in the pan, and then add 1 cinnamon stick and 1 bay leaf; toss in the fat for 20-30 seconds.

3. Add about 1/2 cup each of finely diced onion, carrot and celery. Cook for 5-7 minutes, until well browned. Add some chopped fresh rosemary and 1 clove garlic, minced. Sauté for 15-30 seconds.

4. Deglaze the pan with a good splash of white wine, scraping the bottom to incorporate all the browned bits into the sauce. Add any meat juices from the contained you stored the leftovers in, and enough stock to make a saucelike consistency (beef would probably be best, I used turkey because that's what I had, chicken or veggie stock would probably be ok. I've also used leftover soaking liquid from reconstituting dried mushrooms with great success). Return meat (with any accumulated juices) to the pan.

5. Cover and cook over low heat for a couple of hours, adding stock and/or water as necessary to keep it from drying out:

6. After you've basically cooked the meat into submission, remove the chunks of meat to a cutting board. Remove and discard the cinnamon stick and bay leaf. Now is a good time to start boiling the water for your pasta. Chop the meat up fine, then return to the pan:

7. Keep the meat mixture simmering until pasta is cooked. I used homemade papardelle (really wide noodles). If you're using storebought and can't find papardelle (I can't find storebought papardelle around here), use the widest noodles you can find — fettucine, farfalle, or wide egg noodles:

Vermont/Chinese turnip cake

2008-12-10T20:30:00.002-05:00

I'm preparing to make this tomorrow (all up until the frying step) for a party on Friday, so I thought I would copy the recipe over from my old MySpace blog...

This is an adaptation of a variety of recipes for "Chinese turnip cake" which I found on the web. According to the Chinese food section of "about.com," these savory cakes (which are steamed and then cut into slices and fried) are traditionally served during the Chinese New Year.

What makes it "Vermont?" First, it's made with good sturdy New England turnips, not the Chinese radish (related to daikon) which the real thing is made with and which is customarily mistranslated as "turnip." It's also vegetarian (vegan, actually, if you're keeping score at home). I've substituted salted carmelized onions for the dried shrimp and Cantonese sausage/Chinese bacon called for in other recipes.

Ingredients
Turnips (I used 3 softball-sized, about 2 lbs total)
Dried shiitake mushrooms (a good handful)
One large yellow or white onion
Two green onions
Bunch cilantro
sherry
2 c. rice flour
2 tsp salt plus extra for onions
1 tsp sugar
oil for frying

1. Soak the mushrooms in water just to cover for 30 minutes. Drain, reserving the liquid and straining it through cheesecloth if it's got lumps of dirt.

2. Peel turnips and grate coarsely. Put in saucepan with water just to cover, bring to a boil and simmer 30 minutes. Drain, reserving the liquid.

3. Chop yellow/white onion, and fry in a decent amount of oil in a wok or saucepan over medium-high heat until nicely browned and crispy. This will take about 10 minutes. Sprinkle generously with salt, then remove from pan, draining excess oil.

4. Once mushrooms are rehydrated, remove stems and chop caps finely. In a separate pile, chop green onions and cilantro together. Heat small amount of oil in wok or saucepan over medium-high heat and stir-fry the mushrooms for a few minutes. Add the green onions and cilantro, stir-fry an additional 20-30 seconds, then add a splash of sherry, stir together for a few seconds, and remove from heat.

5. In a large bowl, whisk together the rice flour, salt and sugar.

6. Add enough of the turnip broth to the mushroom-soaking liquid to make 2 cups. Add to the flour and stir to make a smooth batter. Add the cooked turnip shreds, the onions, and the mushroom mixture to the batter.

7. Turn into a cake pan (I used a 8 1/2" springform). You'll need for the cake pan to be able to fit inside a larger pot (I used a 12" calphalon dutch oven) so that it doesn't touch the sides and can be suspended above simmering water. I placed two metal jar lids in the bottom of the pan. If the pot's lid is flat, wrap it with a towel to absorb moisture so it doesn't condense and drip down on the top of the cake.

8. Simmer for one hour, approximately, until cake is firm. Check periodically to make sure that the water doesn't all evaporate.

9. Remove cake from pan if it's easy (i.e, with a springform), let cake cool, and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours.

10. When ready to serve, cut 1/2" to 1" thick slices off the cake and fry in oil over medium-high heat until nicely browned on both sides. Garnish slices if desired with chopped green onions, cilantro, or napa cabbage.

My UE peeps in Chicago make some history

2008-12-08T17:48:00.002-05:00

In January 2006, I got to spend a week in Caracas, Venezuela, as part of a UE delegation, along with Armando Robles, now president of UE Local 1110.

The best description of deer hunting, ever

2008-12-03T19:05:00.001-05:00

The usual procedure, as I understand it, is for them to hide in small structures called deer blinds. They throw corn around in front of the deer blind. They swig bourbon from hip flasks and suppress homosexual yearnings until some hapless ungulate wanders by and starts eating the corn. Then they blow its fucking brains out.

From my new favorite blog, I blame the patriarchy (and who wouldn't?)

Pretty pictures

2008-12-01T10:13:00.000-05:00

My first attempt at paella — and damn it was tasty. A quick weeknight version, made with a couple of Italian sausages and a handful of shrimp, frozen peas, canned artichoke hearts and roasted red peppers from a jar.

This is a flatbread with delicata, kale, cheddar and Italian sausage. I sliced the delicata into very thin rings and sautéed in olive oil.

Turkey egg roll "tostadas" with cranberries and hoisin

2008-11-30T17:49:00.003-05:00

Inspired by my favorite TV chef, Ming Tsai. I made these with Thanksgiving leftovers, but one could probably make something similar substituting oil or butter for the turkey fat, white wine for the stock, and ground turkey (or beef or pork) for the leftover turkey. In that case, brown the meat with the onions rather than adding at the end. You could also cut the egg-roll wrappers or use won-ton wrappers to make smaller versions for appetizers.

Serves 4 as appetizer, 2 as main course

1 small onion, diced
1 TBSP minced fresh ginger
1/2 c. cranberries
1/2 c. hoisin sauce
4 egg roll wrappers
canola or other vegetable oil
homemade turkey stock, fat from the top removed and reserved
2 c. leftover turkey, diced
1 green onion, sliced thin

1. Preheat oven to 350

2. Heat a little of the reserved turkey fat in a small-to-medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Once reasonably hot, add onion and ginger and sauté for several minutes.

3. Deglaze with a bit of stock, then add cranberries and hoisin sauce. Reduce heat to medium-low and cover pan.

4. Once oven preheats, brush each side of the egg roll wrappers with vegetable oil, lay flat on a baking sheet and put in oven.

5. After 5 minutes, check egg roll wrappers; they probably won't be browned & crispy quite yet, but remove them if they are. Add turkey to saucepan and re-cover. Check wrappers every 1-2 minutes; remove once they are brown and crispy.

6. Spoon 1/4 of the turkey mixture onto each wrapper and garnish with green onions.

Chocolate pancakes with olive oil

2008-11-30T09:17:00.002-05:00

A Sunday morning favorite in our house. Pretty much adopted from Jose Made In Spain. The olive oil (both in the batter and on the skillet) gives them a slightly crisp surface and a bit of a change in flavor from the usual butter pancakes. Everyone else eats them with maple syrup but I prefer strawberry preserves.

1 1/2 c. white flour
2 TBSP sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 c. buttermilk OR 1 TBSP cider vinegar mixed into enough milk to make 1 1/2 cups total
1 egg
olive oil
about 1 oz. chocolate, chopped up into fairly small pieces

1. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl, creating a slight depression in the center.

2. Pour the buttermilk or soured milk into the depression, crack the egg in, then pour in some extra-virgin olive oil (I probably use about 2 TBSP, but I've never measured it). Start whisking the liquid ingredients together, slowly incorporating the dry. Mix until just combined.

3. Fold in the chopped-up chocolate.

4. Heat your pancake griddle. Once it's hot, drizzle a little olive oil over the surface and ladle the pancake batter on by scant 1/4 cups. Cook as usual for pancakes, repeating the drizzle of olive oil for each batch.

Penne with chestnuts, apples and cream

2008-11-28T18:36:00.003-05:00

A week or two ago, while dragging the younger kid on a grocery shopping trip, he found a bucket of chestnuts, became fascinated, and insisted that we buy some. Since the first rule of Getting Kids to Try New Foods is to purchase anything they show even remote interest in in the grocery store, I did. Last Sunday I roasted them (in the oven — no open fires in Vermont this time of year), and everyone ate a few as appetizers, but we ended up with some leftovers.

This dish could also be made with chestnuts from a jar — in fact, I recommend it. Cooking chestnuts yourself is kind of a pain in the ass unless you have children and/or a non-cooking spouse who you can put to work doing the peeling (they need to be peeled while still hot).

The recipe (serves 2)

1/2 lb penne
1 TBSP butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium apple, cut into smallish chunks
1-2 tsp dried rubbed sage (or 1-2 TBSP fresh, minced)
pinch of cloves
1/2 cup cooked chestnuts, cut or broken into smallish pieces
splash of white wine or vermouth
good glug of cream (I think I used about 1/4 c.)
salt to taste

1. Put some heavily salted water on the boil for the pasta. Meanwhile, dice or chop all the other ingredients.

2. When the water is looking like it might boil fairly soon (small bubbles), melt the butter in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat.

3. Once butter is melted, add onions, stir to coat, and cook for several minutes.

4. While onions are cooking, your water should boil. Add the pasta.

5. A few minutes after the pasta has been cooking, add the apples, sage and cloves. Cook for several minutes.

6. Add the chestnuts, cook for another minute or two.

7. Add the white wine, scrape up any browned bits if you're using a non-non-stick pan, boil until wine is almost gone. Add a bit of the pasta water and the cream to make a saucy consistency, not too thick.

8. Drain the pasta, reserving some of the pasta cooking water. Add pasta to pan with sauce and toss to coat. Add a little of reserved pasta water if sauce is too thick.

* * *

Meanwhile, the kids (since they wouldn't come anywhere near anything with sage and onions) were assigned to make their own leftover plates. The younger one found some leftover plain penne in the fridge, and somewhat over-microwaved it, creating an edible fused pasta hanging sculpture:

My political compass

2008-11-16T20:55:00.004-05:00

I was perusing PunkAssBlog, and came across the political compass test. Here are my results:

To be honest, I scored a little more libertarian than I expected to.

Studs Terkel and the old, old left

2008-11-01T08:55:00.003-05:00

Studs Terkel died last night. Here's an obituary. A master of "the rich art of taking the vernacular, and making it eternal."

I (sort of) met Studs Terkel once. He was speaking at a university where I worked, and where my co-workers and I were trying to organize a union. During the question and answer period, in a shameless ploy to advertise our efforts at this (hopefully sympathetic) gathering, I essentially asked him what he thought about this. He didn't hear very well, he didn't catch any of the particulars, but he waved his arms about a bit and lectured the crowd on the great benefits of the labor movement, and made a great show of signing the authorization card I handed him and putting on one of our buttons.

* * *

My high school friend P was from England — he moved to the heart of the "red states" in junior high. The Labor Party was still marginally socialist in those days before the famous TONY BLAIR, MP = I'M TORY PLAN B anagram. The guy probably never read a word of Marx in his life, but he came with this basic, English working-class understanding — predating even the "old left" of the Communist Party and the Russian revolution — that capitalism benefits the rich, socialism benefits the workers.

For Halloween: Pumpkin gnocchi with ginger cream sauce and shiitake mushrooms

2008-10-31T17:10:00.003-05:00

Kind of a last-minute improvisation.

For the gnocchi:

1 c. cooked, pureed pumpkin
1 c. flour, plus more as needed
1 egg
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg

Mix all ingredients together in a bowl until mixed evenly into a dough. It won't ever become smooth enough to knead, just mix until it comes together into a ball.

Dust the counter liberally with flour, divide the dough into pieces and roll/shape each piece into a 1/2" thick rope (I kept the dough fairly wet, which made it difficult to roll but fairly easy to shape).

Using dough scraper or knife, cut each rope into 1" chunks, turn each chunk a half turn (they will have been flattened by the cutting), and slightly flatten (in the other direction) with tines of a fork. Put all on a baking sheet, and place in freezer.

(I was only making dinner for three tonight, so I only ended up using a little over half of the gnocchi, and saving the rest in a bag once frozen)

For the ginger cream sauce with shiitake mushrooms

1 TBSP butter
1-2" piece of fresh ginger, peeled and minced
6-8 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in boiling water for 30 minutes then drained and chopped
good pour of cream (maybe 1/4 cup?)

Once the gnocchi are in the freezer, soak the shiitake in boiling water for 30 minutes (you can also probably use fresh shiitakes, they'll just take a little more time in the fry-pan). Drain, pouring the soaking water through a coffee filter and reserving for another use. Mince up the ginger.

Bring a large pot of heavily salted water to boil.

When water is approaching boiling, heat butter in large fry-pan over medium-low heat. Once butter is melted, add ginger and stir to coat.

Once water is boiling, add gnocchi (from freezer) to boiling water.

Add mushrooms to fry-pan, cook for a few minutes over medium-low heat.

Add cream to fry-pan and heat until bubbly. If sauce gets too thick, add spoonfuls of pasta-cooking water.

As gnocchi begin to float to the top of the pot, remove with slotted spoon and place directly in cream sauce and toss to coat. Continue until all gnocchi have come to top of water. If sauce in fry-pan is too thick, thin with a little pasta-cooking water.

Salt to taste.

Fruits of autumn

2008-10-20T18:59:00.003-05:00

This weekend, our neighbors gave us a big bag of pears from their tree, in various states of ripeness, so I spent a portion of Sunday afternoon coring and peeling the most almost-ripe of them to make pear-apple-sauce:

6 small-to-mediumish pears
4 small apples (I used granny smith)
1/2 cup sugar
1 cinnamon stick
2 cloves

Peel and core the fruits, chop into smallish pieces. Combine with other ingredients in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, cook, covered, over medium-low heat for 10-15 minutes, then mash with a potato masher. If overly watery, turn up the heat a bit and cook uncovered until reduced to applesauce-ish consistency. Remove cinnamon stick and cloves.

* * *

I was in a crepe-y mood on Sunday, I guess — I made regular, sweet crepes for breakfast and then savory buckwheat crepes for dinner (using the recipes in my prized 1997 edition Joy of Cooking). For the kids, I made "crepesadillas" — crepes folded in half and filled with cheddar cheese, baked in a griddle until the cheese melted.

Also over the weekend, I decided to go through the freezer and pull out everything I'd frozen from the, ahem, 2007 growing season (some vegetable soups, frozen pumpkin puree, etc.). I also found a couple of chicken livers, tossed in the freezer when I'd roasted a whole chicken but not had time or inclination to cook the livers. Not enough to justify making paté — so to fill the crepes (for the adults) I kind of deconstructed my paté recipe:

Chicken Liver and Apple Filling for Buckwheat Crepes

1 apple
2-3 chicken livers
several fresh sage leaves
butter (about 2 TBSP)
flour, salt and pepper for dredging
splash of brandy
cream (I think I used about 1/4 cup)

Chop chicken livers into smallish pieces and dredge in combination of flour, salt and pepper.

Heat about 1 TBSP butter in small sauté pan and cook apples until soft. Remove to a bowl.

Add a little more butter to the pan, then sauté chicken livers and sage leaves (choppped) for 1-2 minutes, until browned on all sides.

Deglaze pan with a little brandy, then add cream. Cook for 30-60 seconds, remove livers to bowl with apples, and reduce cream to sauce-like consistency (another 1-2 minutes)

Add a little of the sauce to the apples and livers, toss well, and fill 4 crepes with the mixture. Drizzle remaining sauce over crepes.

* * *

For desert, I reheated about half of the pear-apple-sauce in a small saucepan with a splash of vanilla extract and a generous chunk of butter; when warm and the butter melted, I served plain to the kids and with a dollop of whole-milk yogurt and garnished with 1 raspberry apiece (the last from our garden this season) for the adults.

Buildings and people

2008-10-09T13:21:00.003-05:00

I'm not actually surprised that this Bill Ayers stuff is getting play, but, I mean, come on. The guy is a professor of education for cryin' out loud. Sure, he blew up a few statues and stuff in the 60s*, but at least he wasn't dropping napalm on children...

*(the Weather Underground explicitly avoided any bombings that might hurt people, though being bumbling confused middle-class kids they managed to kill a few of themselves by accident)

Always pleasant when someone does something competent

2008-10-07T08:38:00.002-05:00

I have infinite faith in the ability of the Democratic Party to lose, and am highly skeptical about many things about Obama (including the competency — let alone vision — of his campaign), so it's nice to see that they've actually put together a nice documentary piece about McCain's involvement in the Savings & Loan debacle of the 80's. You can see it here on Shirin and Sameer's blog, or you could probably find it on the Obama website if you're willing to brave that level of electioneering.

The grassroots left on the crisis

2008-10-02T15:21:00.000-05:00

"Now is the time to develop a promote a vision of an economic system that does not exploit and does not lead to these global crises. This is what our communities deserve."

http://www.ggjalliance.org/node/11

The truly amazing thing

2008-10-02T08:35:00.003-05:00

Last night I dreamt that I was travelling with a friend and we were staying with a rich, older woman in my home town. She owned an imposing, three-story Victorian home that looked out over the park with the old locomotive in it, a park in between the only two one-way streets in town which often in my dreamscapes turns into a grand mall. She believed approvingly that my home town was "socialist" — a belief that only rich liberals could persist in.

I was woken up in the middle of the night and looked out the third-story window to see my friend getting into the car and I thought maybe driving off, but really just bringing in some forgotten items. I got up and helped out and with my trained parent's eye for small things left behind helped make sure it all got safely into the house.

* * *

In real life I woke up after that dream and had a bit of insomnia and thought about the connection between authenticity and colonialism, the powerful searching for "authentic" experiences in the lives of the less powerful.

* * *

The truly amazing thing about us is that we can heal. I suppose we wouldn't have gotten through evolution without the ability to make new skin cells and other cells and other repairs, but still. Every scar is an act of creativity.

Word of the day: expropriation

2008-09-29T13:25:00.004-05:00

We don't watch much television, and even less so commercial television with the kids, but the last two weekends we've started watching the new Doctor Who on CBC and of course we watched the Simpsons season premiere last night. So the kids have periodically caught "coming up on the news at 10" references to the BAILOUT. (which are pretty amusing in their Canadian flavor — "Tonight, on The National, the world's biggest promoter of free markets proposes the largest government bail-out in history")

Poor kids — they've already suffered through hearing "you kids are going to paying for this stupid war, so you'd best help us stop it" probably more times than is good for developing minds; now they get near-daily lectures about how they have to learn about expropriation if they're ever going to enjoy a decent standard of living.

Low-quality copies of high-quality music

2008-09-28T18:01:00.004-05:00

Kids, before there was napster and illegal mp3 downloads, there was the cassette tape. This weekend, we finally installed the ultimate in home decoration, a hang-on-your-wall cassette display rack, recently acquired at a neighborhood "free sale" and apparently home-made. This prompted us to finally, after 11 years of living together, go through our 400+ cassette tapes (which for most of the last 11 years have lived in boxes in the basement). And lo and behold, we discovered numerous duplicate, and in a few cases, triplicate, copies of various albums.

Well, internet people, our dupes are your gain. These albums, having been selected for at least dubbing, if not purchase of a factory-made tape, by both of us, are clearly of the highest musical quality. If you're interested in any of these copies, give us a call or email if you know us, or if you don't, leave a comment below. If you're not in Burlington, we'll ship stuff gratis to friends; people we don't know, we'll probably want you to cover the shipping costs through paypal.

Factory Made Tapes
Red Hot Chili Peppers: The Uplift Mofo Party Plan
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Mother's Milk
Edie Brickell and New Bohemians: Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars
REM: Automatic for the People
U2: Achtung Baby
Lone Justice: Shelter
Adrian Belew: Mr. Music Head
Paul Simon: Graceland
Sting: Nothing Like the Sun
10,000 Maniacs: In My Tribe
Pixies: Come on Pilgrim
Cowboy Junkies: The Trinity Sessions
Pink Floyd: The Wall
Talking Heads: Naked
Cowboy Junkies: Whites Off Earth Now
They Might Be Giants: Flood
REM: Life's Rich Pageant
B-52's: Cosmic Thing
Bruce Springsteen: The Ghost of Tom Joad

Home Made Tapes
Kate Jacobs: The Calm Comes After/Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers Greatest Hits
Jefferson Airplane: After Bathing at Baxters/Fairport Convention: Leige and Lief
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man/U2: Zooropa
Brahms: 21 Ungarische Tanze/Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 New World
Cassandra Wilson: Blue Light Til Dawn
Gabriel Faure: Requiem/Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
Dire Straits: Making Movies/Billy Bragg: Workers' Playtime
24-7 Spyz: Harder Than You
Lou Reed: New York plus some greatest hits
Mortal Micronotz tribute/Replacements: Tim
Lyle Lovett: Joshua Judges Ruth
Laurie Anderson: Bright Red
Son Volt: Trace/Uncle Tupelo: March 16-20, 1992
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Blood Sugar Sex Magic
Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus plus Kronos Quartet
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: The Day, The Night, The Dawn, The Dusk
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Devotional and Love Songs and Party
Kim Forehand: Going Home/Kate Jacobs: (What About Regret)
Lucious Jackson: Natural Ingredients/Poster Children: Just Like You/Bottle Rockets: The Brooklyn Side
Blue Mountain: Dog Days/Bottlerockets: The Brooklyn Side
Spearhead: Home b/w selections from Stolen Moments: Red, Hot and Cool
10,000 Maniacs: In My Tribe b/w selections from Hope Chest and The Wishing Chair
Billy Bragg: Don't Try This at Home/George Clinton: Hey Man ... Smell My Finger
Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense
The Hooters: Nervous Night/Talking Heads: Little Creatures
Volcano Lover read by Susan Sontag
Uncle Tupelo: March 16-20, 1992, Anodyne
Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks and Greatest Hits
Pink Floyd: The Wall
Paul Simon: Rhythm of the Saints b/w a Lady Smith Black Mambazo album
Luka Bloom: Riverside, the Acoustic Motorbike
Townes Van Zandt: Rain on a Conga Drum
Bruce Springsteen: The Ghost of Tom Joad
Peter Gabriel: "Melting Face", Security

Secret ingredients

2008-09-27T18:12:00.004-05:00

I made pasta with lentils for dinner tonight — cheap and nutritious, and easy to make two meals (plain pasta and plain lentils for the children, the combined dish for the parents). My basic recipe is this:

Lentils
Pick over and rinse ~1 cup of lentils. Put in saucepan with a bay leaf or two and cold water to cover by 1-2 inches. Bring to a boil, then simmer 20-30 minutes, until tender.

Sauce
If you've got a few slices of bacon on hand, chop fairly small and brown slowly in a fry-pan. Once nicely crisp, scoop the bacon out with a slotted spoon, and pour off all but 1-2 TBSP of fat. If you don't have bacon, heat 1-2 TBSP of olive oil in a fry-pan.
Add 1 medium onion, 1 medium carrot, and 1 stalk celery, all chopped fairly small. Cook over medium heat until well-browned.
Add 1-2 TBSP chopped fresh rosemary and 1-2 cloves garlic, minced, cook for 20-30 seconds, then deglaze the pan with a slosh of white wine.
If you have a little (homemade or low-sodium) chicken or beef stock on hand, add now and reduce while waiting for everything else to be done. Otherwise turn off the heat and wait to reheat until pasta and lentils are done.

Pasta
I usually make this with whole wheat spaghetti, though broader pasta (like farfalle) is more traditional. Cook in well-salted water, and reserve 1/2 cup of the cooking water just before draining the pasta.

Finish by adding a cup or two of the cooked lentils (removing the bay leaf) and the pasta to the sauce. Add enough of the reserved pasta-cooking water to make a nice, moist sauce and heat through 1-2 minutes. Serve with parmesan or pecorino if desired.

I didn't have either bacon or stock on hand tonight, but as I was rummaging around the refrigerator looking for a veggie I noticed something I had saved from a night or two ago — the water I had soaked dried shiitake mushrooms in. I chucked it into the sauce at step four, and also added a bit of soy sauce, and ended up with one of the meatiest-tasting vegan meals I've made in awhile.

Gingerbread economy

2008-09-19T13:51:00.003-05:00

Sad as it is, the price of maple syrup has become so high, even in Vermont, that we no longer feel like we can eat it on our pancakes and waffles every morning. Lately we've even begun to rely on the old southern/midwestern standby, homemade brown sugar syrup. As a New Englander of many generations, I find this a bit depressing.

Here was an attempt to come up with a pancake recipe that actually goes fairly well with the thin, caramelly non-maple-tasting brown sugar syrup:

Gingerbread Pancakes

1 c white flour
1/2 c whole wheat flour
3 TBSP sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves

1 TBSP cider vinegar
1 1/2 c (less 1 TBSP) milk
1/2 tsp vanilla

3 TBSP butter
3 eggs

1. Combine all the dry ingredients.
2. Combine cider vinegar and enough milk to make 1 1/2 cups (or, if you like, use 1 1/2 c buttermilk and omit the vinegar), then add 1/2 tsp vanilla
3. Melt butter, add milk and then eggs, one at a time, combining well
4. Add butter-milk-eggs mixture to dry ingredients
5. Ladle by 1/4 cups onto hot griddle

Steps 1 and 2 can be done the night before (leave milk in fridge overnight), making pancakes on school mornings much easier.

Makes about 16

Voice

2008-09-17T10:12:00.004-05:00

The performing arts theatre where I work (as a low-wage box office peon) is calling part of its season this year "Giving Voice" — theatre pieces about food insecurity, class and culture in New England, and post-Katrina America.

But I can't stand the phrase "giving voice." In my experience, the problem isn't that (powerless) people don't have a voice, it's that no one listens to them. Nothing against the artists — they seem like good and interesting pieces, I may even try to go see some of the shows — but "giving voice" seems to me to be a marketing tool to get the theatre audience (which will be overwhelmingly white and middle-class) to buy tickets to these performances so they can feel good about themselves for having participated in "giving voice" to working-class folks, for having participated in an "initiative for diversity" (one of the institutional sponsors of one of the shows).

When, of course, the most useful thing white middle-class people can do is to shut up and get some humility and find ways to listen directly to voices from the grassroots.

* * *

I loved music as a youngster, learned the guitar and piano starting in junior high, wrote songs, played in bands, picked up other instruments, spent endless hours making home recordings on a 4-track tape recorder. But I never could sing; I'd always have to find singers and teach them the songs I wrote (which often had interesting lyrics, chord changes and rhythms, but were kinda weak on melody).

In my early 20s I finally taught myself to sing a little — I figured out I could pick out (simple) vocal melodies on the guitar or piano, then play the melodies back and sing along and slowly learn how to match the pitch with my voice. I started playing solo acoustic shows, with a repertoire of songs whose vocal melodies didn't go below C or above G. In general only close friends, and a few people who really liked the songs, were willing to endure my more or less on-key but not particularly musical singing.

Over the years I expanded my range a bit, even found a few singers with whom I could successfully harmonize, but it wasn't until I had kids and had to sing lullabyes a capella (and, incidentally, no longer had time to play the guitar) that I finally learned to sing consistently on-key. Instead of using my ears to match the pitch of my voice to the pitches of instruments I heard around me, I learned to find the pitch in the vibration of my own body.

Red tomatoes, white privilege

2008-09-15T11:35:00.002-05:00

For lunch today: a fresh garden tomato, stuffed with lentils and bulghur. With a centerpiece of various squashes and gourds grown in our garden.

Recipe:
one large tomato, fresh from the garden
some cooked lentils (boil for 20-25 minutes in water with a bay leaf or two)
some cooked bulghur (bring 1 1/2 c water to boil, add 1 c bulghur, reduce heat to lowest possible setting, cover and cook for 15 minutes)
an onion, sliced fairly thinly and then fried over fairly high heat in olive oil until nice, brown and crispy

Scoop out center of tomato to make a shell. Mix together tomato innards (chopped or smashed small), lentils, bulghur, onions, with salt and pepper to taste and a little extra-virgin olive oil. Stuff tomato with this mixture.

Then, after enjoying a good lunch, a good and important read: Understanding McCain-Palin: It's About White Privilege (written by Tim Wise, cross-posted by my friend Sameer).

What I learned in college

2008-09-10T11:21:00.004-05:00

One of my forays into the world of higher education was at a small liberal-arts college located in a small town in the Midwest. I was there for two years.

The town had a little under ten thousand residents (I never knew whether this number including the 1200 students or not), was even more overwhelmingly white than the college (which was, um, pretty white), and was noticably divided by Sixth Street, which ran just along the south edge of campus and along the north edge of downtown. North of Sixth Street was the college campus, surrounded by leafy neighborhoods filled with the spacious victorian houses that most of the professors lived in. South of Sixth Street were smaller houses, a trailer park, the county fairgrounds, feed stores and Wal-Mart, and the five or so factories that provided what employment was to be had there in the 90s.

At one point while there, I was part of a multiracial group of students who decided to facilitate a workshop/exercise on racism and discrimination called Archie Bunker's Neighborhood. You can find a more in-depth description of the exercise here, but the basic gist is dividing the participants up into different "communities," each of which has to navigate a system of bureaucracy and law enforcement in order to build their community, and — as with real life bureaucracy and law enforcement — the facilitators playing the sherriff, mayor, permitting office etc. treat the white group more favorably and leniently. Then everyone breaks into small groups, blah blah blah.

In addition to doing this on campus, we also did it at the town's high school. I don't remember whether I got to be the sherriff, etc., but I did have to facilitate a small group discussion — not something I had a lot of practice with when I was twenty.

The small-group discussion with my small group of all-white high school students went about as one would expect — the liberal, middle-class children of the college professors and other professionals in town knew the right lines to say, summed up appropriate moral outrage, while the working-class kids kind of stumbled over themselves, kept their mouths shut, or said mildly inappropriate things ... until the subject of Rodney King and the LA riots — which had just happened a year or two previously — came up.

All of a sudden the entire group changed. The middle-class students' moral outrage was directed at the rioters (why couldn't they just be nice non-violent Negroes like Martin Luther King?) and the working-class students began telling stories of being followed and harassed by cops whenever they went north of Sixth Street, or just for being out in a group together. "I guess I kind of felt like I knew why those people rioted in LA."

* * *

One of my best friends at this college was T, from a lower-middle-class family in rural Wisconsin. She, like me, felt a little out of place there — the vast majority of students were from the suburbs of Chicago and other large Midwestern cities. One summer she stayed in town and supported herself by lying about not being a college student and getting a job at one of the factories in town, sewing sportswear in a poorly-ventilated metal box on the south side. She was an avid gardener — I still have photos from that summer of us balancing produce on our heads for laughs.

One day in the spring she was walking with another friend — J, a counterculturalist from the suburban tracts of Ohio — by the feed store. They had extensive and well-groomed flower beds out front. T noticed one extremely tall flower in a bed where the owners were clearly aiming for a uniform height. Almost absent-mindedly, from the know-it-in-your-bones-and-muscles that comes from true craft, T reached out and pruned the errant flower.

J — against all conformism and hierarchy — was appalled.

Creamy chard-stem soup

2008-09-03T16:06:00.003-05:00

I've decided to return to posting recipes on this blog, since maintaining two blogs seems a bit too much work for me, and I'm getting too old for MySpace.

Chard has become one of my favorite vegetables this summer, mostly because one of my favorite Joy of Cooking recipes, the chard tart, has become a favorite of the kids' as well. But this recipe, like so many chard recipes, calls for removing the stems, which seems a bit of a waste. What to do with the stems alone? I've chucked them into stir-fries and curries, but — at least for the red-hued chard — they sometimes bring a neon-pinkish color which is not always appetizing. In Spain, the stems are breaded and deep-fried as tapas, but deep-fat-frying is not something one should be doing that regularly.

I instead started making a creamy soup with them, which has worked out well — the kids even love it. It can be served hot or cold, and like almost all pureed soups, loves homemade croutons. I've never measured the amounts, just pretty much used what I've had of each, and eyeballed the milk/cream at the end:

1. Melt some butter in a saucepan over medium-low heat. Add chopped onions and cook slowly and gently until translucent. The smell of onions cooking slowly in butter is one of the great kitchen smells of all time. If you're really ambitious (and want an even better smell), substitute a leek for the onion.

2. Add a good chunk of chard stems, chopped. Last night I used the stems from 1 1/2 lbs. of chard. Stir and cook for a few minutes.

3. Add some starchy (yellow or white) potatoes, chopped into 1/2" cubes, and water to cover. Last night I used 3 egg-sized potatoes, skin and all. Bring to a boil, then simmer, covered, until potatoes can be broken up with a wooden spoon, 20 minutes or so. It would probably be a nice touch to add some fresh basil to the soup right at this point, but I've never done it.

4. The best Christmas gift ever — I got one from my mother-in-law a year or two back — is the handheld stick blender that you can stick into a pot to blend up hot liquids (which otherwise have a tendency to misbehave and splatter all over the kitchen in standing blenders). If you've gotten to this point in cooking and don't have one and have $60 to spare, turn off the stove, go out and buy one, come home, and whiz up the soup into a nice puree. If that's not an option, let the soup cool, blend it in a blender, then reheat and proceed with the recipe.

5. Add enough cream or half-and-half to lighten the soup a few shades. If it's too thick for your liking, thin the soup with milk. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Camp Dad and Google Reader

2008-06-14T23:39:00.004-05:00

Well, I lied about posting more. But I did discover that Google Reader has a cool function where you can share stuff you've read recently on the web (see the right-hand column).

In other news, the school year ended yesterday in Burlington, and today I finished my last meeting on the coordinating committee of Grassoots Global Justice, so this summer will be "camp dad," hanging out with the kids. All the movement work has been a little overwhelming in the last few years, and the kids are growing up, and I figure this may be one of the last summers I get to really hang out with them before they get too cool and teenagerish to hang with their folks.

And maybe — just maybe — I'll be posting more frequently on this blog.

Resolutions and high-profile friends

2008-01-11T09:31:00.000-05:00

I kinda sorta made a new year's resolution to "blog more." I'm not sure why, exactly, but it may lead to more writing on here, has already inspired a new design, and will probably mean a new direction and some attempt to attract readers.

If you just stumbled upon this, the best writing is not really what's below (which is, of course, hardly writing), but rather the writing from 2005.

Meanwhile, looks like my old Iowa friend Jamie Schweser is going to be in the New York Times Style section this Sunday. Check out his website.

The wrong side of the Atlantic

2007-11-22T23:32:00.000-05:00

We need trade unions who are prepared to unite to defend their members, not to look over their shoulder about whether they're embarassing their friends in goverment.

— Mark Serwotka, general secretary of Britain's Public and Commercial Services Union

This week in France...

2007-11-15T08:46:00.000-05:00

We believe in the power of the street. In France, all our social battles were won on the street. It's always been like that and it always will be. This is about the kind of society we want. Do we want liberalism to reign, or do we want a society of social support and equality?

—Adrien Bouzard, 22, second-year anthropology student at Nanterre university

Guardian

Shell beans

2007-10-19T18:22:00.000-05:00

Like sentences, shell beans are a great deal more trouble to produce than anyone who isn't producing them knows. You have to shell the beans, slipping open the pods with your thumbnail and then tugging the beautiful little prismatic buttons from their moorings — a process that, like writing, always takes much longer than you think it will. And then even the best shell beans, cleaned and simmered, are like sentences in that nobody actually appreciates them as much as they deserve to be appreciated. Shell beans are several steps more delicious, lighter and finer, than dried beans, much less canned beans; but the sad truth is that nobody really cares beans about beans, and not many eaters can tell the fresh kind from the dried, or even the canned.

—Adam Gopnik

Revery alone

2007-03-25T15:11:00.001-05:00

Like many people who cook a lot, I have a vast number of recipes that are not in cookbooks — they were clipped out of newspapers or magazines, jotted down on scrap paper while paging through cookbooks at someone else's house, came with the package of won-ton wrappers, and so forth. I often clip, copy or save them because they look interesting, they go into an accordion file and are promptly forgotten, because unlike untried recipes in cookbooks, which you see every time you page by them en route to your favorite recipe, they just sit there, alphabetized by their title (which may reflect their main ingredient, their ethnic origin, or the first name of someone else's grandmother) in the dark in the accordion file.

For the last year or so I have put newly-clipped recipes into a separate folder of "untried recipes," figuring that I am more likely to actually try them if I have a folder I can flip through when looking for inspiration, and more likely to realize that some things (like a "Tex-Mex appetizer" made with Pillsbury pie crust) were not, in fact, worth clipping. Finally this weekend I went through the accordion file itself to pull out any untried recipes.

I found all sorts of interesting things, including a set of handwritten recipes on index cards sent to me by an English major I used to date — if I recall correctly, the recipes were sent during an uncertain point in the relationship, when graduation had made for a long-distance toss-up as to our future (it ended badly, as you might imagine). Among the recipes was this:

Quartet for Four Beer-drinkers

From your pint glass
take a swig of beer
whenever you feel like it

When you are not actually drinking
strike your glass
with an implement

sometimes quietly
sometimes loudly

Let there be silences between your attacks

Continue
until all four glasses are empty

— Wendy Cope

* * *

The snow cover is finally starting to melt off in Vermont. Wide swaths of green (and brown, there's more mud than grass in much of my neighborhood) are becoming visible among the greyish frozen slushiness of urban snow cover. A few bulbs are starting to poke out of the ground, our ground phlox in the front is beginning to green, the few bushes we have seem to have been spared by the sidewalk ploughs this winter. I am eagerly anticipating the first meal I can garnish with fresh chives gathering from along the side of the house.

We've had a winter share from a local CSA this winter, which has meant a lot of root vegetables. Root vegetables are great, comforting and filling and warming in their long cooking times in the oven in the winter, but they do, generally speaking, require a lot of cooking work — peeling to remove their thick coats and spicing to prod their heavy slothfulness and greasing with rich fats to lubricate their dryness and long simmering, baking or roasting to bring them to the fullest flavor (RECIPES at blog.myspace.com/domesticleft).

Nonetheless, I'm ready for the vegetables of spring, perfect with a quick slicing and a light dressing and a sense of wonder before them.

* * *

On Saturday we went to a decent-sized antiwar rally and march downtown. Because the nationwide anniversary-of-the-war actions last weekend coincided with the University of Vermont's spring break, the students had decided to organize something for the 24th, and were also joined by a respectable contingent of labor folks (the crowd we were among) and the "usual suspects" of middle-class liberaldom.

The speeches started off painful, as they so often are at local peace rallies, at least around here. Because, much as I've always believed that social change comes about when people assemble and listen to lengthy speeches from well-meaning students and socialist professors and passionate liberals that detail their own intricate grasp of statistics and history, well ... OK, so I've never believed that.

Then the veterans spoke.

Not the old "Veterans for Peace" folks, who are great but mostly give long-winded speeches that detail their own intricate grasp of statistics and history. The veterans from Iraq. There's probably a more powerful critique of the war than a Marine describing the safest drive he ever took in Iraq (he wasn't shot at once. Because he was driving over the dead bodies of Iraqi men, donkeys, women, camels, children slaughtered by his battalion the night before). But not for me right now.

* * *

Also from my recipe folder (same source):

Emily Dickenson's All-Natural Outdoor Recipe

To make a prairie it takes a clover
and one bee —
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

Compartmentalization

2006-12-12T11:05:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot recently about the latest blog post from yes! this is Nick Robinson about traffic:

There is a real horror in being forced to use deadly, destructive machines to get to work and back. After all, almost 43,000 people died in 2003 in accidents ... without reason, except for the routinization and acceptance of terror on our commute to work and leisure.

and how our automobile culture is related to the social division of labor — he quotes Andre Gorz:

it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community.

* * *

Last week I read "Abandon the Old in Tokyo" by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a series of short comic stories. In the interview at the end of the book, Tatsumi describes the era he was writing in, and about:

Japan was destitute after World War II, but by the late-'60s, it entered its period of high-growth economics. Economic development was considered more important than the way people actually lived their lives.

In the title story, a man lives with his aging and infirm mother in an apartment building where everyone still does their laundry (including his mothers' frequently peed-upon bedclothes) in a shared washtub. Meanwhile, the man works as a garbage collector, one of his coworkers finding a washing machine that just needs a simple repair. "Doesn't matter how handy it is. People get rid of anything old."

* * *

For the first time this year, there are actually more poor people living in America's suburbs than there are living in its cities (in absolute numbers; the percentage of people in poverty in urban areas is still higher).

Vocabulary

2006-12-08T12:20:00.000-05:00

The other night, I took E to see the modern dance company Pilobolus. She is very much into dance (ballet especially, of course, but with a healthy appreciation for other forms of dance as well).

I enjoy dance, but I can't say that I have ever before been completely entranced by an entire dance performance. The program talked about how Pilobolus uses collective improvisation to create a new "vocabulary" for dance — different than the "vocabularies" of ballet, or modern dance, or hip-hop — and the results are in fact strikingly original. "Memento Mori" wasn't so much dancers dancing the parts of a marriage, but dancers who had so closely observed the physical vocabulary of a marriage — the grimaces, grins, preening and poking, exasperations and expectations that our bodies develop for each other during long companionship — and used them to create a piece of art that was very classically structured (unlike most marriages).

* * *

I've started a new job, and a new blog. The new blog is at MySpace, and it's just about food. What I've cooked and how to cook it. I've moved a post or two over there from here, posts that were, for the most part, just recipes. I also deleted a few posts from this blog which were just notes about news or such — I'm trying to keep this to be just, ahem, writerly things.

My new job is primarily writing. My official title (officially conferred upon me on Wednesday) is "Assistant to the Director of International Affairs," but basically I am a grant-writer. Clear narrative, careful attention to crafting our proposals within the shade of political language preferred by each grantmaker in turn, and most importantly: meeting deadlines. I like being clear, ferreting out shades of politics and I'm pretty good at making deadlines.

But I do have issues about writing as work. Flipping burgers is work, running machines in a factory is work, serving customers is work, teaching is work. And really, writing is work, too, but it has been so tied up in my mind with privilege that, before starting a writing job, I've always tried to write (both the blog and writing leaflets, etc. for the movement) in the corners of my time — during down time at work at my customer-service job (I'm fine with using the boss's time), or if I wake up early because of my occasional insomnia, or on the weekends when the laundry is all done and the house is fairly clean and H has taken the kids off somewhere.

* * *

I first read blogs about two and a half years ago, mostly mommy blogs, primarily the excellent though long-defunct days of the week, but also dooce and fussy and some others (until they all blogged about proudly crossing picket lines at a mommy-blogger-convention in SF — I haven't looked at them since). Now that the kids are older, more person-like at 6 and 8, I suppose I don't feel like I need even the minimal validation of reading blogs about other parents who are also driven crazy by the mysteries of small-child-behavior, who form the online bad, but not so bad, parents club.

I never felt much kinship with other "stay-at-home dads," probably because most of them were still men, and they either retained too much manliness and wanted to talk about sports, or were too into renouncing their manliness and wanted to talk about feelings. I liked the mommy-blogs because they spoke the vocabulary of the Small and Daily and Material, not the Big and Important.