Whitticisms

Paula Deen's Diabetes

2012-01-26T11:41:00.001-06:00

http://gma.yahoo.com/paula-deen-caught-eating-cheeseburger-150609231--abc-news.html

Good Morning America, from ABC, gave an update on television cook Paula Deen's diabetes, by "catching" her eating a cheeseburger while on a cruise, at a party she was hosting. It seems that news reporting has become trivial and invasive. While diabetes is a serious condition, and Deen has appeared several times on television to talk about how it is going with her, this hardly is worth reporting on national television.

The amusing part of this version of Deen's ABC appearance is the comments on the Good Morning America website. As of right now, the news story has 2778 comments -- not bad for non-news. The comments are better than the story. They also confirm my view that news about Deen eating a cheeseburger is not news, although it appears that a lot of people find Deen interesting. I give a sample.

Whoever felt the need to "report" this news needs to be chased around the room being slapped on the back of the head with a fried pork chop. Silly article.

Dear GOD!!! The horror of it all!!! Eating a cheeseburger? I am truly appalled!!!

Wars, deaths, economic ruin, and we're hung up on what Paula is eating? Get a grip people!

Seriously? This is news? People with diabetes can eat a cheeseburger. Get back to us when she starts mainlining pure cane sugar.

And on and on. Paula Deen may be shortening her life, but it's her business.

Jack Kennedy -- Book Review

2012-01-07T20:41:00.001-06:00

Jack Kennedy – Book Review

Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero is a fascinating book. Television commentator and author Christ Matthews said his 2011 book addresses the question of what President John F. Kennedy was like. It’s energetic, absorbing, fast moving, and easy to read. The book is 90% Jack Kennedy the politician, and 10% Jack Kennedy living the rest of his life. Just as Kennedy compartmentalized his life (according to Matthews), Matthews compartmentalized the parts of Kennedy in his book. The book reads like Chris Matthews telling about it with his energetic television speaking style.

Most of the book is about Jack Kennedy campaigning, first for congress, then senate, and finally President. Some of it is the life that led up to campaigning, and some of it is the life of the President. Matthews describes Kennedy’s well-known heroic acts, such as saving the men he commanded as a young man in the navy, which is chronicled in Kennedy’s best-selling book PT-109. Matthews points out that Kennedy lived his life with constant pain from his bad back and Addison’s disease. Matthews tells how Kennedy hated war and as President saved us from nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He writes about Kennedy’s thinking that brought about the Peace Corps. He says that Kennedy wanted to be a hero like the men he read about as a child. He wanted to make a difference.

Matthews clearly liked and admired Kennedy. Maybe that’s why so much of the book is about Kennedy the politician while it tells less about Kennedy the person. Kennedy’s early life is there, but it seems to me that Matthews gives little treatment to the legendary Kennedy family. Kennedy’s reputation as a charmer and womanizer is shown almost as an afterthought. Events that led up to his marriage to Jackie Bouvier are almost absent. The births of his children appear almost insignificant, including a stillborn daughter who was born while he was on one of his travels. The death of his son Patrick at two days of age gets more emphasis. The birth of John Jr. is mentioned sometime after the event. Deaths in the family, his older brother Joe Jr. and a sister, clearly had an impact on him, although Matthews says relatively little about them. Brother Bobby was assassinated several years after Jack’s death. The assassination of Jack Kennedy is not there at all, except in comments by Jackie after the fact. I think it was too much for Matthews the Kennedy admirer to contemplate.

Kennedy’s life is shown through many interviews, books and comments from the people around him. These people told of a man who couldn’t stand to be alone, a man who would do almost anything to achieve his political goals, a Catholic who went to confession even while president.

Does all this answer the question of what Jack Kennedy was really like? I find myself asking why he and Jackie stayed married while he was repeatedly unfaithful to her. I find myself asking why Jack needed to carve time out of all his political activity to have sexual encounters with many women. Perhaps that is the elusive part of Jack Kennedy. Maybe that is how national politicians live. Where were the Senate and House of Representatives while Kennedy was making important decisions with the men who were always with him?

I liked the book very much, but questions remain.

Books I have Known

2012-01-02T16:09:00.000-06:00

A difference exists between reading and knowing a book. I read many books, but I know cookbooks. Cookbooks are life’s little instruction books of the culinary type.

Every January my mind fixes itself on food. After indulging in holiday foods during December, I once again focus on everyday kinds of foods. I return to books about cooking.

I enjoy cookbooks, especially old ones. The old ones tell us how to prepare foods. In recent years of cookbookery, some beautiful, pictorial books have arrived, but the old ones are the basic how-to manuals. They don’t specialize like today’s volumes. The pictures are black and white, with some line drawings.

The cookbooks I know best are two: Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, 1953 edition, and The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, 8^th edition, completely revised by Wilma Lord Perkins, 1948. I read others, but I know these.

The BH&G book is my first cookbook. I bought it when I was twelve years old, when my junior high school home economics class did a class purchase. The cover has fallen off. The title page is missing. Many pages are frayed and becoming brown. This book, and Mrs. Robertson, my teacher, taught me how to cook. Here is where I learned to make pie. Here is where I went when I was forgetting Mrs. Robertson’s lessons about making applesauce, biscuits and muffins. Here is where I learned to make pancakes from real ingredients.

The Fannie Farmer book is another treasure. My mother gave it to me in 1962 when I married Rick. My copy is very worn, with the cover detached. It is in better condition than the BH&G book only because it has more traditional binding; the other book is spiral bound. In this book Fannie Farmer taught me how to make bread after my new husband wanted me to make bread like the bread his mother made. Fortunately, I had eaten his mother’s wonderful bread. The book taught me how to make brownies and sugar cookies, which my children and grandchildren still like. The page about sugar cookies is brown and stained with dropped ingredients. The book taught me about soup from bones and vegetables rather than cans.

The worst book in my hall of fame, according to my husband and children, is the book that showed me how to make the all-time worst entrée they ever had to eat. Oats, Tomatoes and Cheese casserole is a legend among them. (I like it.) This little vegetarian cookbook is called Cooking With Conscience: a Book for People Concerned About World Hunger, by Alice Benjamin and Harriett Corrigan (Vineyard Books, 1975). It has some other equally strange concoctions, and overall I would rate it about average. Today the stores have many vegetarian cookbooks that would rate higher. This is a book that I read but don’t know as a friend of my kitchen. However, it is part of my history.

Long live the cookbook.

Cheese, a Wisconsin Love Affair

2011-12-12T15:47:00.000-06:00

Close your eyes and imagine cheese. Cheese on a burger, on pizza, in macaroni and cheese, in sandwiches, on crackers for times when you watch the football game. Cheese is milk gone to heaven. The website for dairy products producer Organic Valley calls it “milk’s attempt at immortality.”

Cheese is ancient and modern. It is made from milk. It lasts a lot longer than milk. Today we can find many kinds of cheeses in our grocery stores, including natural, process, artisanal and artificial cheeses (I think these are called cheese foods). It gives us cheeseheads. It is a large part of Wisconsin’s economy. I have heard that Wisconsin produces more mozzarella than any other state, and that the only, or almost only, producer of limburger is a factory in Monroe, Wisconsin.

I like cheese, but my taste for it is not very broad. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about pizza, but focus primarily on cheddar and Swiss cheese. Writers of cookbooks seem to focus on these, too. Cookbooks for gourmets might be an exception. I use cookbooks for what I call plain cooking.

A plain cook can make many entrees and side dishes with natural cheddar cheese. A good basic cheese sauce will dress up macaroni, potatoes, broccoli, omelets and many other foods. It’s easy to make. Simply direct your browser to cheese.about.com , where there is a video called “How to make cheddar cheese sauce.” That recipe is a bit fussier than mine, but it gives the essentials. That website also gives a lot of interesting information about cheese. Interestingly, while I was watching the video about cheese sauce, a notice appeared at the bottom of the video screen, which said, “Four heart attack signs,” compliments of ads by Google. Wonderful pairing.

Not everyone is in favor of cheese. Some people don’t tolerate milk products, and some are vegans. Some are doctors, like Dr. Neal Barnard, who states in his writings that people should get control of their health, and that means not yielding to the seduction of cheese. Dr. Barnard wrote a book called Breaking the Food Seduction: the Hidden Reasons Behind Food Cravings—and 7 Steps to End Them Naturally (St. Martin’s Press, 2003). He devotes a chapter to cheese, called “Opiates on a Cracker.” Yes, opiates.

Dr. Barnard says that researchers found in cow’s milk traces of morphine, codeine and other opiates. That’s an eye opener. It’s just enough to create desire to go back for more (p.50-51). He suggests that cheese, among other things, is making our nation fat. “…a typical 2-ounce serving has at least 15 grams of fat and about 200 calories—before it even touches your sandwich” (P. 53). “If just one of those pounds of fat lingered on your waistline, adding an extra pound to your weight year after year, you could explain nearly the entire weight problem the country is experiencing—that is, the average American is now gaining about 1.5 pounds per year, and our collective cheese fetish may be a big part of the explanation. If you’re looking for a simple way to trim your waistline, breaking a love affair with cheese can help enormously” (p.53-54).

According to Dr. Barnard, dairy products and cheese seem to be triggers for arthritis and migraines, and avoiding dairy products can reduce the risk of some forms of cancer. Need I say more? That’s the health story. I don’t know if it is true.

Then there is the economic story. Wisconsin is about cheese. Government boards promote cheese. I don’t know if the government pays farmers to bring their milk to the cheese factory, as it pays farmers to grow corn and soybeans without considering health ramifications.

People continue to enjoy cheese. Take a look at the dairy section of your grocery store. It has shredded, grated, sliced, chunk cheese. The freezer section has pizza and cheesecake. Cheese is big business. Cheese is delicious. Thanks, Dr. Barnard. I still respect your ideas. Have another slice of cheese. But don’t overdo it.

Cherries Dolores

2011-12-04T16:36:00.000-06:00

Food and family go together sometimes. It may be true that we are what we eat, but I think it also is true that we eat what we are. Cherries Dolores is a dessert that comes straight from my parents’ lives in Door County while I was growing up.

My parents liked to entertain with fish boils. Real fish boils are done outside over a wood fire. As a person transplanted from the Chicago area, my father experienced local fish boils and quickly learned to produce them himself. We had fish boils at our summer cottage at Clark’s Lake, and after we moved to our home on Bay Shore Drive where we had a large yard on the bay, we had fish boils in our yard. My father was the fish boil chef, and my brothers and I were assistants. My mother made salad and dessert. Both parents prepared the potatoes and onions prior to the cooking event. The fish was lake trout, and after trout became unavailable, whitefish. The guests were friends or business acquaintances. Once we entertained Governor Warren Knowles and people in politics.

I don’t remember a fish boil without cherries Dolores. My mother’s name is Dolores; it is named after her for lack of another name for it. She gave the recipe to the world in her 1989 cookbook, Door County Recipes Old and New : and a Little Local Lore, by Dolores Allen, illustrated by Kathleen Whitt.

This dessert is easy to make. It is good anytime, and when served at a fish boil, it ends a mostly white main course (fish, potatoes and onions topped with lots of melted butter) with a tart, colorful burst of flavor.

Cherries Dolores

Crust:

1 stick soft butter

1 ¼ cups flour

2 tablespoons sugar

Mix well and press firmly in the bottom of a 9-inch square cake pan. Bake 20 minutes at 350 degrees until a delicate golden color. Cool well before adding next layer.

Middle Layer:

1 package vanilla pudding and pie filling mix (not instant).

Prepare according to package directions. Cool well. Spoon onto the cooled crust.

Top Layer:

1-lb. can tart cherries (2 cups)(unsweetened)

2 tablespoons cornstarch

½ to ¾ cup sugar

Combine in a saucepan and cook until thickened and clear. Chill before spooning over the pudding later. (One can of cherry pie filling may be used instead, if you wish.)

Top with 2 cups of whipped cream or whipped topping. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

My comments:

In order for this to work, I think we need to either double the middle and top layer ingredients, or halve the crust and make it in a small baking dish, about 6 x 8 inches or 7 x 7 inches. I say this because when I follow my mother’s recipe, the middle and top layers barely cover the layers below. More dessert is needed to fill the space. If we make half a batch of crust and use the smaller dish, it works quite well, but it serves four to six people rather than a large gathering of people. I loved my mother, but I think she didn’t remember what she had been doing all those years correctly when she put it on paper.

Also, I prefer real food over manufactured mixes, so for many years I have made the middle layer out of vanilla cornstarch pudding rather than packaged pudding mix. I don’t know if packaged pudding mix is still available in the grocery stores. Recipes for vanilla pudding can be found in many cookbooks. Be sure to make it thick enough to hold its shape after chilling or the layers will collapse.

The cookbook is out of print, but it is available at some public libraries in Wisconsin, the Door County Maritime Museum in Sturgeon Bay until they run out, or (used) from Amazon.com. Our family has run out of copies. Needless to say, my opinion is that this is the best cookbook in the world.

Thanksgiving--Our National Holiday

2011-11-23T11:38:00.000-06:00

Thanksgiving is almost here. It is one of our two major national holidays, the other being Independence Day, July 4. We have more, but these seem to be the two primary ones.

I think of Thanksgiving Day as part of an interesting progression of secular to religious holidays in American culture. July 4 is political without religious overtones. Thanksgiving is technically national, with thanks given, to God, for the blessings of being Americans in the most wonderful nation on earth. Christmas is technically a religious holiday, with celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, and much secular activity.

I see something going on here. Our national constitution long ago set the stage for separation of church and state. The first amendment clearly states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Today we have two religious/secular holidays that celebrate the Christianity of our nation, while celebrating secular issues such as turkeys, Santa Claus, home decoration, gift giving and much enhancement of our economic system.

Thanksgiving Day is a big day of patriotism. Schools are closed. People travel to be with their families. Big dinners are prepared and eaten. Sometimes we think about what Thanksgiving is about and why our nation celebrates it. The national mythology tells us that it is about the European settlers sitting down in peace with the Native Americans, to have dinner in friendship. Friendship prevails.

Well, maybe. The Europeans came to our continent with the assumption that they “discovered” it and it was theirs. Yes, but they discovered that people were already here. Here is a quote from a history book by James W. Loewen, in Lies My Teacher Told Me: “Thanksgiving celebrates our ethnocentrism. We have seen, for example, how King James and the early Pilgrim leaders gave thanks for the plague, which proved to them that God was on their side. The archetypes associated with Thanksgiving—God on our side, civilization wrested from wilderness, order from disorder, through hard work and good Pilgrim character traits—continue to radiate from our history textbooks.” (pp. 95-96, paperback edition)

Thanksgiving is about giving thanks. Thanks for making us white, for our land takeover from the original owners (native tribes), for our immense wealth, and for our being the greatest people on earth (empire). It’s about a huge dinner, usually turkey. It’s also about shopping. The day after the holiday is the biggest shopping day of the year, the inauguration of the Christmas shopping season.

I notice that we have a group of candidates who want to be our next President. I see that religious credentials seem necessary for a President, and in particular, “acceptable” Christian credentials. Some people made much over the myth that President Obama might be a Muslim; he isn’t. Some people are worried about Mitt Romney being a Mormon. People like to believe that our founding fathers were all members of established churches. I ask, why is faith being dragged through a country that has separation of church and state? Might some people rather want to see our national leaders acting on Christian principles rather than giving lip service to church membership while advocating violence such as two needless wars? Is this what Thanksgiving is about?

Individually we have much to be thankful for. I am thankful for my family, my deceased parents and husband, and my children and grandchildren. I am thankful that we have enough to eat and a roof under our heads. I am thankful that I have enough money to sustain my life. I am thankful that we live in a society that doesn’t oppress me, although it oppresses some other people. Many Americans are not this well situated.

Bring on our next religious/secular holiday: Christmas.

Frittata For One Or Two

2011-11-12T13:27:00.000-06:00

Frittata for One or Two

I like frittata. Frittata is an Italian omelet, according to Joy of Cooking (1997). I hope it is. I was glad to learn that pizza is an Italian pie, so maybe it is true. I give Joy of Cooking credit for telling me what frittata is. Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook didn’t bother. They just went ahead with telling us how to make it, whether we know what it is or not. What we have here are two ways to deal with life: learn what it is or just go ahead and live it.

Frittata has many good qualities. It is easy to make. It tastes good. It requires no exotic ingredients unless you choose to use some. It is a good way to use up leftover meat and vegetables. Preparation takes little time, although it requires some vegetable chopping and cheese grating. There are two ways to make it: broiling or baking. Frittata is a good example of culinary flexibility. When we are cooking for one or two, we find that we can make a smaller version than the cookbooks offer.

On the other hand, if we don’t have an oven-proof skillet, we won’t be making frittata.

Here is commentary from Joy of Cooking, in its recipe for zucchini frittata, which is not the only frittata in the world. “Frittatas are cooked in a heavy skillet over low heat until they are firm—not runny like a French omelet—and they are left open-faced, not folded….we recommend popping it into the oven or under the broiler to cook the top side. Served in wedges, frittatas are delicious hot, warm, or at room temperature.”

My version of frittata is based on, but not identical to, the one in Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook, 1989 paperback. It requires a medium size oven-proof skillet such as an old fashioned cast iron one.

3 eggs

About 1 cup chopped vegetables (I used celery, green pepper and onion today) (whatever you have in the refrigerator);
Meat (optional); I used one leftover bratwurst, cut in small pieces
1-2 tablespoons fat such as butter or bacon drippings (cholesterol isn’t an issue here)
About 1 cup grated cheddar cheese (I know, more cholesterol)

In an oven-proof skillet, saute the vegetables and meat in the fat over medium heat.

Beat the eggs and pour them into the skillet. Distribute the cheese over the top. Bake at 350 degrees about 15 minutes, or until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean.

That’s the easy way to do it. For cooks who like to do it with other cooking methods, Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook gives directions (paraphrased):

1. After putting the eggs into the skillet, over medium heat, cook it and run a spatula around the edge, lifting the mixture to let uncooked eggs flow underneath. Do this until the mixture is almost set and then put it under the broiler, 4 or 5 inches under the heat. Broil it until the top is just set, about 1 to 2 minutes.

2. You can microwave it. I do not recommend doing this and have not tried it; I prefer real cooking. Cook the veggies in a pie plate in the microwave oven until they are tender. Pour the beaten eggs over the vegetables/meat mixture. Cook on high for 3 to 5 minutes, lifting cooked eggs every minute and letting uncooked portions flow underneath. Let stand for 5 minutes.

Packer Fandom

2011-11-05T11:21:00.003-05:00

It’s football season. Wisconsinites are crazy about the Packers. The Packers are the religion of Wisconsin. I like the Packers, even though I think professional football is ritualized violence. Our Super Bowl champion gladiators are very popular.

Packer fans are loyal. It’s impossible to get a season ticket for home games. Lambeau Field is always filled, and the fans stay until the end even when the team loses. The traffic jams in and on highways leading to Green Bay on game day are enormous, except during the game when no one is to be seen on the roads. I have heard that area churches rent parking spaces to handle the stadium’s overflow crowds. People without tickets sit at home and in the bars, huddled in front of their television sets and radios.

At this time of the year, stores abound with Packer merchandise; a few days ago I had no trouble finding a team keychain. Even the babies are decked out in Packer clothes. People of all ages go about their business wearing shirts with their favorite players’ numbers; quarterback numbers are best sellers. I’m still waiting for merchandisers to bring forth a Packer toilet seat; they haven’t done it yet as far as I know, even or especially during losing seasons. I have seen Packer crying towels.

Broadcasters love the Packers, and I think the Packers love sportscasters. When Rick was in radio broadcasting, the team gave him a free spot in the press box with plenty of food, a seat for me where everyone else sat, a golf outing, other public relations events, and plenty of interviews. Vince Lombardi kicked Rick out of the dressing room, which meant he was one of them. I still have Rick’s press credentials for the Ice Bowl. He went; I didn’t have a seat for that one. I have heard that broadcasters no longer receive free seats for their loved ones, but I am sure that the Packers continue to romance the media. In return, we hear about the Packers 365 days a year in Green Bay, and almost as often in Madison, on our local television stations. (We have the Badgers in Madison to talk about, too.)

Bret Favre took the team to the Super Bowl; everyone loved him until he decided to retire, which became an annual event for him. When he unretired and became a Minnesota Viking, Wisconsin’s ire overflowed. He became another Benedict Arnold. (Read your history book to learn about Benedict Arnold; he wasn’t a football player.) The formerly beloved Favre took some much publicized sexual missteps, and his popularity among fans disappeared. No more annual retirements for him.

How soon we almost forget. Now Aaron Rodgers is the hero, along with the long haired Clay Matthews. News media reported recently that some people want to name a Green Bay street for coach McCarthy.

We’ll have another game in our winning season Sunday. Be sure to tune in.

Autumn Haiku

2011-10-28T17:27:00.000-05:00

Brown red gold gray green;
Ice Age Trail, late autumn day;
Wondrous tapestry.

Happy birthday, Dede

2011-10-03T20:19:00.000-05:00

Forty-seven years ago yesterday, October 2, 1964, my life changed forever. On that day I became a mother for the first time. My beautiful first daughter, Dolores, entered the world. Everyone was happy.

I brought that new life into the house in the woods on Bay Shore Drive on that beautiful fall day, with my mother to help, and I thought, What do I do now? I knew almost nothing about parenting. Rick knew even less. I asked Mother how to change a diaper. She said she didn’t remember. The small amount of teenage babysitting I had done had been with children, not infants. What a beginning.

I had asked my doctor some basic questions, and he had said to ask my mother. Those were the days when new mothers didn’t have books to consult or classes to help prepare. I didn’t have friends nearby to scare me with their new mother advice. I barely knew how to hold a baby. At the hospital the nurses had shown me how to breastfeed. They also had told me that if I ate vegetables in the cabbage family, it would make the milk taste bad. Really super instructions.

Somehow, Dede, (her nickname then), Rick and I made it as a family. Dede had some interesting times in her first year. She got her first tooth at four months. Sometime later she got her head stuck between the slats of her crib, an old crib with widely spaced slats. Rick was at work, so we were home alone. I held her head and wondered if we would have to stay that way for the rest of the day; it was morning. Miraculously, her head slipped back into the baby side of the crib. We replaced that crib with a better one.

Dede was a beautiful, bright child, interested in everything. She walked at one year and never looked back. When she started walking, she kept going. After her brother John was born, she regarded him as a new toy. When Mary came along, she was competition. Dede was more neutral about the arrivals of Libby and Sarah. School came easy, although she never studied and seldom did her assignments. She wrote perfect tests and said she didn’t need to do all that homework; she knew the material. She showed musical talent, singing around the house as a toddler and later playing piano, trumpet (briefly) and French horn. She didn’t date much as a teenager. She dated more as a student at UW-Eau Claire.

Dede married, gave birth to two wonderful daughters, Katie and Dana, got divorced, and lost daughter Katie to type one diabetes when Katie was sixteen. She gave higher education another try after having given it up sometime before she married Bill. She took up library work.

She still is interested in everything. She has long term friends. She stays connected to her family.

Happy birthday, Dede. I love you.

Bean Soup for One

2011-09-22T20:17:00.001-05:00

I know we can buy bean soup in cans. But I am still championing the old fashioned way to make soup. When I make bean soup, it has no artificial or exotic ingredients. Everything is real, inexpensive and easy to find in the grocery store. It’s perfect for retirees who like to stay home all afternoon. It’s easy to make and it tastes good.

This soup has another characteristic. It’s just enough for one person rather than an army. Your big fat cookbook is likely to start you out with a pound bag of beans and at least six cups of water. It assumes you are feeding a hungry family. It also assumes that you can find your large kettle. My challenge was to create just enough for me and none for my freezer.

I love the way the cookbook authors extol soup making. They paint word pictures about soup. For example, The Blue Plate Diner Cookbook, by Tim Lloyd and James Novak (Prairie Oak Press, 1999), says: “Soup is good food….In the process of making soup, you will fill your home with fantastic aromas. You will be using mostly fresh ingredients, eliminating most chemicals and preservatives.” Monte’s Blue Plate Diner serves good soup, including navy bean soup. Of course, it says to use a six quart pot. Joy of Cooking, revised edition, 1997, talks about soup (without a recipe for bean soup): “If any food seems inherently calming, and even consoling, it is soup. Soup feels good when the weather gets cold. It restores our spirit and our vigor.” Recipes from the Farmer’s Daughters’ Restaurant, located in Door County if it still exists, glows: “Year round, soup is a winner. You will be greatly rewarded if you jump on the soup wagon. It is amazingly uncomplicated and you will be delighted at how quickly a delicious homemade soup can appear on your table and how rapidly it will disappear.” Then, of course, the book continues with the instruction to find a soup kettle that holds ten to twelve quarts. The book’s recipe for navy bean soup starts with six cups of dried navy beans. Ok, it is a restaurant, so it gives restaurant quantities.

When I am cooking for one, I am fending for myself. Even the library isn’t very helpful. I decided to try to make one bowl of soup, and I succeeded. Here it is.

Bean Soup For One

1/3 cup dried beans, such as navy beans or great northern beans

1 ½ cups water.

Place beans and water in a 1 quart saucepan. Bring to a boil, then simmer, covered, for about 2 hours. Add a small amount of water if it cooks dry. Crush beans slightly with a fork or potato masher. Then add:

About 1 cup chopped or finely diced onion, celery, carrot
1/2 tablespoon maple syrup (real, not artificially flavored syrup)
1 slice bacon, cut into small pieces (don't cook it first)(yes, it is fatty)(or use ham)(or whatever)

Salt and pepper to taste.

Cook it for ½ to 1 hour more. Continue to add water as needed.

I ate it with slices of Swiss cheese and celery sticks, and that was a meal.

Note: I don’t soak the dry beans for hours before using them. If you think you should, it’s ok with me.

Apple Crunch Dessert

2011-09-17T19:47:00.001-05:00

It’s apple season again. This morning I went to the west side farmers’ market and brought home some macintosh apples. Many apple varieties are ready for buyers, but I seldom waver from my preference for good sour cooking apples. It didn’t take me long to make the big decision to make one of my favorite desserts, apple crunch. Goodbye diet. Hello good taste. This is even better than potato chips.

The recipe is adapted from my favorite old fashioned cookbook, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer (8^th edition, completely revised by Wilma Lord Perkins), Boston, Little Brown & Co., 1948. I have worn out this book. The front and back covers are detached and tape is holding some pages together. It is my cooking bible. I love everything in it, including the fact that my mother had it first and passed it on to me when I got married. My adaptation is to cut it in half, to suit people like me who live alone and don’t plan to eat the food for a week.

Apple Crunch, or Apple Candy Pie (serves about two)

2 cups sliced tart apples

¼ cup water

½ teaspoon cinnamon

1/3 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

¼ cup butter

Place apples in buttered baking dish, about 7 by 7 inches or so. Yes, that size dish really exists. Pour water over the apples. Blend flour, sugar, cinnamon and butter with fork or knife. Pat over apples or stir into apples. Bake in moderate oven (350 degrees) about 30 minutes, until apples are tender and crust is brown. There isn’t much of a crust if you stir the flour mixture into the apples, which is what I do. Serve warm with whipped cream or ice cream.

For more people, double the recipe. For more information about macintosh apples, click the following link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McIntosh_(apple)

Impermanence

2011-08-29T20:29:00.001-05:00

I have lived through the demise of buildings that were significant in my life. Some burned. Some were demolished. I feel a sense of loss when I think about them. The most recent loss is the home in Green Bay where Rick and I raised our five children for sixteen years. We left it in 1990, but when I heard this year that it had burned, I felt that some part of us had burned with it. I drove past it not long ago. An earth mover was moving dirt around on the houseless lot. I stayed for a few minutes and said goodbye. Goodbye to a house that had lasted a hundred years. Goodbye to all that had happened there.

Here is a list of buildings in my life, that now are gone, plus one I never saw.

1. Central School, Park Ridge IL. After my kindergarten year, the city tore it down. I transferred to Roosevelt School.

2. The Episcopal Church in Sturgeon Bay, where my family went after we moved to Sturgeon Bay when I was ten years old. It was in an old house. A new building was constructed, and still stands. The old house was torn down. No more worship in the living room. (It really was a good idea to replace it.)

3. The house in Milwaukee with our apartment upstairs, where Rick and I began our life together. It was demolished and Riverside Park was expanded into its space. Goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Camarata, our landlords downstairs.

4. Our home in the Preble area of Green Bay. Sometime after we sold it, the city rerouted East Mason Street onto what was Cass Street, and away the house went. The new street was constructed through the lot. The last time I saw that house, it was in a newspaper photograph. Its owner was moving it across the Mason Street bridge to a new location. We lived there with our babies Dede and John.

5. Sturgeon Bay High School. It stood educationless for a number of years before it was demolished to make space for the city’s new city hall/fire department. Needless to say, the education that took place there was relocated. When I arrived in fifth grade, the building housed kindergarten through high school. As time went on the city built new elementary schools, new middle school and new high school. They built the high school on a piece of property that was home to my grade school friend Laurel Paschke. Goodbye to her old home.

6. Our family home in Green Bay on Quincy Street, described in the first paragraph.

7. Barns on the farm of my father-in-law in Arena. While he was alive, the sheep barn burned. He was retired and had not long to live when it happened, so no sheep were in residence. Later, after the farm was sold, the main barn burned. Friends told us.

8. Uncle Otto’s store in Winona MN. I never saw it, but my mother and grandmother lived above it when my mother was a child. Last year my brother and I looked at the spot where it had stood. It now is a parking lot.

Ashes and rubble. Buildings come and go. Impermanence is all around us. The World Trade Center departed. Shopping centers have come and gone. I’m glad I have a brick from my high school.

Natural Bridge State Park

2011-08-07T20:26:00.001-05:00

A couple of days ago I visited the most unassuming state park that I have ever seen, Natural Bridge State Park. Wisconsin State Park System, the state’s brochure, even makes it seem like more than it is. It calls the park’s claim to existence “a breathtaking natural sandstone arch created by the eroding effects of wind and water.”

It’s In Sauk County, somewhere between and west of Sauk City and Baraboo, in the beginning of the Baraboo Hills. It’s small, apparently unstaffed (unless the staff office is in the pit toilet building, which it isn't), and without amenities beyond a parking lot and the aforementioned pit toilet building. Oh, and a small box that invites us to pay money into it. In my opinion, these characteristics are all positives while being a bit surprising to one who is used to the more elaborate state parks in Door County. No park office. No picnic tables. No campground. No recreational water. Yes woods and a few trails. A few small signs.
The park is about a natural formation in a rock outcropping like those at Wisconsin Dells, that is a natural bridge or a big hole in the rock formation, depending on how one thinks about it. It’s beautiful, hidden in the woods so the hiker doesn’t see it until he/she is right in front of it. I stood there looking at it and thinking about what this would be like if it was right in the middle of Wisconsin Dells instead of in the quiet overgrown rural woods. In the Dells, promoters might at least run a little train around it and offer parachute drops off the top, which is thirty-five feet high.
It’s a very good, unusual formation. It’s not surrounded by tourist hype. The park boasts nothing else except a log building in disrepair and a small stone building, both along the road. People who need to have their entertainment provided will be puzzled here and maybe say, “But there’s nothing to do…”
I drove about an hour to find this little park. I thought I was the only person in it until I returned to the parking lot and found a man there using his cell phone. Very undisturbed. I like it.

http://dnr.wi.gov/org/land/parks/specific/naturalbridge/ has more information.

Medical Advice. Huh?

2011-07-31T18:56:00.000-05:00

http://thyroid.about.com/b/
Good Housekeeping Magazine Owes it to Millions of Thyroid Patients to Get the Story Right

Wednesday July 27, 2011.

It appears that Good Housekeeping published a misleading article. Or did it? That's the problem with medical commentary these days. The experts don't always agree. Sometimes they rarely agree. I learned this firsthand in my life. I discovered that I couldn't always believe what I was reading or what a doctor told me.

The topic of the article cited above is hypothyroidism. There is disagreement among medical professionals about treatment and drugs for hypothyroidism and other medical conditions including cancer, heart disease prevention, diabetes and others.

Once upon a time I went to a doctor, who correctly told me that I had (and still have) hypothyroidism. She prescribed a drug, levothyroxine, to treat it. So far so good. At that time I still believed in advice from the conventional medical people.

Some years later, I was advised that my blood sugar was getting high, but not given advice. Later, I was told that my cholesterol was high, but not given advice. So far no advice, no drugs. Later still, a doctor strongly recommended that I take a drug to lower my cholesterol. At that point I started to do research. Yikes and hoity toity, had I ever been fooled. I discovered that conventional doctors' opinions are not the only ones out there. I learned that eating the "healthy" American typical diet is an invitation to disease, especially diabetes. I learned that there is a large group of people who have written intelligently about the dangers of taking drugs to lower cholesterol, and that high cholesterol isn't the cause of heart disease in most cases. I learned that I might have better outcomes if I changed my thyroid medication to bio-identical. Then I discussed these things with my doctor. And my next doctor. And my next doctor. We weren't on the same planet. Then I read about cancer treatment that didn't include chemotherapy. I'm glad I don't have cancer.

The article cited above points to (but doesn't actually say) the need for us to do our own research on conditions we are told we have. We also need to weed out the quackery if we can discover it, or embrace what a conventional doctor might call quackery. The citation above is from a website dedicated to information about thyroid conditions, operated by a woman who is not a doctor, and who did her own research. She has published books.

I'm not taking the drugs the doctors recommended, other than one for hypothyroidism. It took me about ten years and several doctors to finally locate a doctor who would go beyond what she had learned in medical school or from seminars presented by drug companies. I'm a lucky one.

I believe that people should be able to trust the medical advice they are given, and that that advice is likely to improve their health. (I am not optimistic about advice from doctors at this point.) I have several books about statin drugs that are very informative. After reading them and other information, I wouldn't touch a statin drug. I have several books on diabetes, which interest me because I have been trying for several years with success to keep my blood sugar under control without drugs. It amazes me that there are plenty of contradictory books about diabetes, some suggesting low to no carb diets, others recommending low glycemic raw vegetable vegan diets, and one promoting a high carb diet. They all explain the science. Even Dr. Robert Atkins explained the science. The doctors laughted at him too.

I'm glad to get advice from doctors when emergencies come up. They're very good with emergencies. But let's treat chronic conditions with open minds.

Visiting Boston

2011-07-19T09:37:00.000-05:00

I went to Boston last week, on a bus with twenty-five other people. We took in the mythology of the beginning of our nation’s revolution, some Americana and some local culture. Then we came home. My companions on this trip were the other people who took the trip with me. After having taken a few previous trips with Jack, our driver, he was like a familiar friend. He even hugged me and other women goodbye at the end. Jan, our tour guide, was a winner, too.
We spent more time on the road than the three days in Massachusetts. It was worth it for the most part. The scenery in New York State and Massachusetts is beautiful. The mountains and hills are largely wooded. Some panoramic views looked spectacular.
In Boston, I enjoyed our tour of the USS Constitution, the oldest operative US Navy commissioned ship. It was known as Old Ironsides because cannon balls would not penetrate its keel. Next to it in dry dock was a navy destroyer. The old and the new together. The Constitution is in very good shape for its age, which the guide told us and I immediately forgot. She said it held five hundred men in its active days. Pretty crowded, even for small guys who took turns sleeping in hammocks. I was the last person to get back onto the bus because I wanted to stay and look at the boats.
Equally fascinating was our day at Lexington and Concord. A local guide took us to the relevant historical sites where battles too place. She was very good at bringing us into the events that might actually have happened as reported. Mythology here seemed more important than historical accuracy, although she said it all happened. We stood where the shot heard round the world (the expression was coined by Emerson) happened as the alleged beginning of the revolutionary war. She also told of some of the events that led to it. She said that the battle of Lexington and the Battle of Concord each lasted about five minutes. The patriots lost and Lexington and won at Concord.
We visited Paul Revere’s house in Boston, which has been restored. Fireplaces and old furniture. Revere’s midnight ride was recounted. I have read that Longfellow invented many of the details of that ride, although at Lexington our excellent guide pointed out that he was captured before he got to Concord. Longellow left out that part of Revere’s adventure. Related to this, we also visited the Old North Church in Boston, which is an Episcopal Church, where the alleged “one if by land and two if by sea” was said by Paul Revere before he rowed across the river, borrowed a horse and began his famous ride to warn the settlers that the Regulars were coming.
Americana meant stops at the Lucy Desi Center in Jamestown, NY, and the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockwell, MA, both on the way to Boston. Both were interesting in different ways. Lucille Ball’s hometown is Jamestown. The center captures her and Desi Arnaz’s life on television. In Stockwell, Rockwell’s original paintings are exhibited, I ate this up. He captured Americana on covers of the Saturday Evening Post, and the original paintings are in that museum. He was criticized by some for giving us sentimental art, but his art captured mid-century America very well. He was an excellent portrait painter. The museum has a room of his dog paintings. Dogs are present in the paintings but are not the subject of the paintings. There are photos there of Rockwell positioning dogs as models for a photographer, next to the corresponding paintings. Did we think he painted everyone and everything without models?
Local sights and tastes included dinner at Cheers, which was mediocre; the view from the top of the Prudential Building, about 50 stories high; tour of Boston Harbor in a boat; tour of the Charles River on a World War II duck; tour of part of Harvard University; an afternoon walking on the Freedom Trail mixed with time at the Quincy Market; plenty of clam chowder; other undistinguished meals here and there. On my own I located and dined at Legal Sea Food in Boston. I couldn’t forego a good lobster dinner in a city famous for seafood. And wonder of wonders, I had no beans in Beantown.

I had a good time. I took no photos. I am home now.

Speaking Christian -- Book Review

2011-06-19T21:54:00.000-05:00

Here is a book about words. The full title is Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power—and How They Can Be Restored. It is by Marcus J. Borg, well known Bible and Jesus scholar and author of many books.
The book is written in understandable language. It’s interesting and thought provoking. According to Borg, the purpose of the book is to “exposit an alternative understanding, one that draws on the Bible and premodern Christian tradition….it compares and contrasts the contemporary meanings of Christian language with their often very different biblical and traditional meanings.” He points out that Christians often misunderstand the faith as presented in the language of the New Testament, because the words have taken on newer meanings than were intended originally.
Each word or phrase has its own chapter. Borg tells how the word is used today and what it meant in the Bible and the early Christian community. He presents a short essay (two or more pages) about the word or concept, with occasional personal anecdotes. This is not a dictionary, not written in alphabetical or encyclopedia format. It moves from one word to the next, so that one can pick it up and not need to read it in sequence.
Some chapters are Salvation, the Bible, God, God’s Character, Jesus, Mercy, Righteousness, Sin, and Heaven. I was impressed with the chapter about Mercy. He offers official dictionary definitions to show what most people think it is, and then goes into its historic origins, turning it into something like compassion. Of course, he has to explain compassion, too. Mercy in scripture and Hebrew associations is not about a person in power granting clemency to someone with less power. The Mercy chapter is just one example of the way Borg deals with the words of Christianity.
“Heaven and hell” Christianity gets its day, too. Borg doesn’t buy it. He says that that framework emphasizes the afterlife, sin and forgiveness, and is the main reason that many people are Christians. Borg, as a liberal Protestant, explains that the Kingdom of Heaven is here on earth now and not just about going to heaven later. Borg doesn’t agree with a lot of the teachings with which Christians have grown up. He seems lukewarm about the Trinity, the afterlife, and about the divinity of Jesus.
There is a lot in this book. Borg correctly points out, “Christians in this country (and elsewhere) are deeply divided by different understandings of a shared language.” It is available from Amazon.com.

Mowing the Lawn

2011-06-16T16:18:00.000-05:00

I enjoy gardening. Yard maintenance in the woods is a different thing.
I came to the cottage this week for the purpose of mowing the lawn. You might ask why someone would drive more than 200 miles to mow the lawn, even if it was a foot and a half high with tassels on the tops. Even though we were hoping the deer would eat it so it wouldn’t be so tall.
I own this somewhat off-the-grid place on the shore of Lake Michigan with my brother. It has been for sale for six years since our mother died and left it to us. Most of my adult children and my two brothers’ adult children use it like a woodsy timeshare. Once in a while one of them will mow the lawn and cut firewood.
To date this year, however, I am the only person who has been here, although Sarah came with me for the long Memorial Day weekend. So I am responsible for the lawn for now. When Sarah and I were here last, we were unable to start the lawn mower. It’s only about thirty years old and might be the oldest mower on this island. I think my father bought it, and he died in 1992. Maybe he bought it when he bought the cottage in 1970. Is that a reason for it not to start? Apparently yes.
I came here to deal with it. This morning I stuffed the mower into the back of my little Toyota Yaris. Did I mention that it was raining? I took this heavy albatross to Dave’s Garage, without calling him first, of course. Dave and this mower are old friends. My husband took it to him at the start of many growing seasons when it wouldn’t start. Dave had us on file. Dave tuned it up for about $76. While he was doing that, I went to Mann’s Mercantile and looked at new lawn mowers. Just under $200. Hmmm.
Sometime during the morning the rain stopped. It stayed cloudy and wet. By 1:00 the mower was home and it was somewhat dry in the woods. Somewhat. The mower started right away. I mowed for a long time, starting with the driest places, which were the once gravel driveway and the sparsely grassed front yard facing the lake. You might know the expression, the grass is always greener over the septic tank. It’s true. Beginning with the septic tank, it was all downhill, not geographically but humanly. The grass was wetter and thicker. The grass over the plumbing mound was very wet and very thick. Mowing was hard work.
Usually I enjoy mowing the lawn. Not this time. I did it because it had to be done. When the grass is a foot and a half tall, it’s time. It was hard work pushing through grass that preferred to fall down instead of being cut, grass that gave me greenish wet shoes and jeans. I worked up a huge sweat. Finally, the mower stopped. It wasn’t out of gas. It was smoking. It had given up, I think. Most of the mound remained unmowed. The mower and I came to the same conclusion. It was time to stop. I found gobs of wet mulch in the underside, impeding the blade. I put it away.
I don’t think I’ll mow tall wet grass for a while again. The deer can have it.
(I must get back onto the grid to publish this. I’ll join the people on the lawn of the library, where people use its wi-fi when the library is closed. That is, if it isn’t raining again.)

Things That Matter

2011-06-11T11:59:00.000-05:00

I like many things, from avocados to zucchini. Not just food things. While enjoying my morning walk today, I thought about some things that make life worth living for me. I recognize that the things I like best are also good for people as a whole.

Here are the things that matter to me.

1. Faith. It shapes us as we grow throughout life. I believe that we Christians should look to what Jesus did and said as reported in the New Testament. We should not be distracted by Christians who forget that Jesus is the Prince of Peace. Faith means ordering our national behavior to avoid wars. It means loving our neighbors as ourselves, and not using our fellow human beings for our individual or national selfish purposes. I believe that individually, locally and nationally, we should respect the faith of others who practice their faith differently. Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, was reported to have said that he admired Jesus but not the Christians.

2. Relationships. Family matters greatly. Good family relationships strengthen us. They support us in our need. They give us environments in which to nurture each other. I love my five adult children, four grandchildren, brothers and their wives and children and grandchildren. I loved my husband even through stormy years together. A permanent partner is important for health and happiness. Good friends are few but satisfying. Family and friends are not to be manipulated but honored. When we offend our family or friends, it is important to mend the relationships. I have offended my family and friends but not ended the relationships. On the corporate and national scenes, we have seen examples of abuse of relationships throughout history. What must a person do to his or her relationships in order to become President? How many Presidents and politicians and celebrities have dishonored their wives through infidelity? How many worship power?

3. Health. Good health makes life worth living. I order my life around the hope of long life without disability or chronic illness. Our American medical system is a good thing when we have emergencies or life threatening illnesses. It isn’t very good in the way its benefits are distributed. I am thankful for Medicare and hope our politicians do not destroy it. Many opportunities are available to encourage good health. A large amount of material on health is available to us in books and on the internet. I think it is hard to navigate through all the contradictory information. Yet we have opportunities to make decisions about our health. I believe that many Americans live their lives with obesity, degenerative diseases including heart disease and diabetes, buying time with prescription and nonprescription drugs, while losing the health battle. I also believe that these conditions are preventable; my opinion has been voiced by many doctors and other health professionals. I believe that if what I said above about faith is valid, the United States should provide all Americans with a single payer medical care system. I also know that the issue has become one of politics rather than caring for one’s neighbor.

4. Food. Food is related to health. Good food promotes health; bad food promotes illness. I like to cook. I like the taste, color, texture, and smell of food. I like having farmers’ markets in Madison where I can buy fresh vegetables and frozen grass-fed meats. I enjoy eating in good restaurants. And I recognize that there is a big land mine in all this. The joy of variety in supermarkets brings with it the possibility that we will bring home bags of processed and genetically altered “foods” that are likely to bring on poor health. The wide availability of fast food for a stressed and hurried population makes bad food easy to consume. Michelle Obama has given visibility to obesity among children. Who will win, Michelle or our unhealthy economics of food production? Some people find themselves depending on junk food in fast food restaurants and convenience stores. Of course they get sick.

5. Brains. An educated population can make wise decisions. It doesn’t always do it, but it can do it. An educated population is likely to make informed choices about living. I value my education. It’s not just about finding jobs, although that helps, but it is about being human. A good public school system is important for everyone. A good university should not be out of economic reach for people who want to be educated. The internet provides a great deal of educational material. Good libraries offer reading materials for all kinds of people without discrimination. They need our support. It is no accident that I chose to be a librarian.

6. Mobility. We can travel, move into different homes, enjoy walking in the woods. Our country offers good highways that take people everywhere. Many cities have transit systems. Individually, we have crutches, walkers and wheelchairs. If we have money, we can see the world. If we don’t have money, well, too bad. At least we can walk around the block. Much of our mobility depends of money and government policy regarding how to go from point A to point B. Roads or railroads or airlines? We have come a long way with mobility. I am thankful for mine.

This is dedicated to Andrea, my granddaughter, whose high school graduation ceremony is today. I hope she will care about these things as she begins a new part of her life.

Infidelity

2011-06-09T18:06:00.000-05:00

High profile spousal infidelity has been in the news a lot lately. Right now it centers on New York Rep. Anthony Weiner. A short time ago the focus was former Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger. Before them we heard about others, including Tiger Woods, John Edwards, Virginia former Governor Mark Sanford, Prince Charles, President Bill Clinton, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, President John F. Kennedy (not publicized at the time), President Franklin D. Roosevelt (less publicized and a long time ago), and many more. They all had wives.

Publicly most of the men offered apologies. Privately they had to deal with the damage to their marriages. Their wives responded in a variety of ways. Some stayed married. Some didn't. But does a public apology mend a relationship?

Whenever a famous unfaithful husband is exposed publicly, I feel the pain that I assume their wives feel and felt after being betrayed in their relationships. I feel it because it hits me close to home. It happened to me, too, a long time ago. We are a large sisterhood.

Do those men excuse themselves by saying their sexual activities were their wives' fault, or they did things that technically were not sexual intercourse? Are their public apologies designed as attempts to retain their celebrity or power status? Is it all about narcissism?

Now that we have prostitutes (for Eliot Spitzer), oral sex (for Bill Clinton), subsequent death of spouse (for John Edwards), cybersex (for Rep. Weiner), phone sex (for many others), we are aware of the many ways for vulnerable men in high positions to take risks that can lead to their public destruction and the permanent changes to their most intimate relationships.

One televised image that stays with me is of Hillary Clinton, then First Lady, walking near, not with, her husband after his famous speech in which he acknowledged that he had sinned. Her body language said to me that Bill would have to deal with this episode in their lives himself.

Don't these men think about the pain they cause by thinking with a body part other than their brains? Do they think women are playthings to be used? Does power entitle them? Will they ever "get" it?

Sugar, Fat and Salt

2011-04-19T14:20:00.001-05:00

Incompatible? I think so. Today I’m noticing the pairing of ice cream and obesity. This is a meditation about ice cream and overeating.
While I was on the road to and from Minneapolis last weekend, I listened to the audio version of The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, by Dr. David Kessler. It’s a book about how sugar, fat and salt lead to the obesity epidemic in the US. Today I ate Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream. Most of a pint carton. I had read the book before, so I knew what I was doing.

Phish Food ice cream tastes very good. Ben & Jerry tell us on the label that it is All Natural. I think they have created something delicious and unnatural. In the framework of the book by Kessler, this dessert represents why people get fat. Kessler’s book isn’t about Ben & Jerry’s; it’s about sugar, fat and salt in addicting combinations. It’s also about how corporate food processing companies and fast food and chain restaurants exploit our appetites. It’s about the science behind it. Kessler points out that the processed foods of today are more complex than they were thirty years ago. They contain sugar and fat and salt in several forms, which he calls layering.

Phish Food ice cream is largely a combination of sugar (in various forms) and fat, with some salt. The description says it is “Chocolate Ice Cream with Gooey Marshmallow, caramel Swirls & Fudge Fish.” The carton also says, “…we made the marshmallow nougat chewy and the caramel gooey.” This adds up to an irresistible product that contains five fats and four sweeteners on its ingredients list, with salt listed twice. Do I want to eat liquid sugar, corn syrup, sugar and corn syrup solids, combined with cream, coconut oil, butter, egg yolks and milk fat? Apparently a lot of people do. And it’s called “all natural.”

Kessler points out that it is the way the sugar, fat and salt are combined that makes the difference. Food scientists have experimented a lot to create foods that taste good, look good, and make the consumer want more. They market them in appealing ways. Combined with that, many people eat away from home and snack throughout the day. Successful snacks contain combinations of these ingredients. Of course people are getting fatter after they fill up on them.

In addition to ice cream, I like potato chips. They have less sugar, although the potatoes aren’t innocent. They have plenty of fat and salt. French fries are a lot like the chips. There are other sweets that many people like and I manage not to eat very often, such as cake, pie, cookies, chocolate and cheesecake.

Kessler’s book is about food science. Kessler was commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration under presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He knows his stuff. Ben and Jerry know their stuff, too. They and Kessler are on the American dietary collision course. I have read that two-thirds of Americans now are overweight or obese. We shouldn’t wonder why.

Value of Libraries

2011-04-09T11:32:00.000-05:00

STRONG LIBRARIES NEEDED TO IMPROVE THE STATE’S ECONOMY

Below is a National Library Week editorial by State Superintendent Tony Evers.

Wisconsin’s public, school, academic, and special libraries improve the state’s economy and the quality of life for residents of our state. Libraries have always been a source of community pride, and they are especially valuable in today’s knowledge and information-based world. Strong Wisconsin libraries support a stronger Wisconsin economy.

Our state is struggling with high unemployment and shrinking paychecks. This difficult economy requires smart investments and careful spending. Wisconsin libraries are models of frugality, using technology and working cooperatively to reduce costs and share resources. In fact, Wisconsin is first in the nation in per capita interlibrary loan, which saves taxpayers an estimated $100 million annually by sharing resources rather than purchasing more copies of library materials. The cuts proposed in the 2011-13 budget strike at the heart of library efficiencies. Elimination of the requirement that communities continue to support their local libraries will threaten Wisconsin’s resource-sharing services, creating a system of haves and have-nots.

Libraries are one of the best investments a community can make. Libraries help families cope with tight budgets by providing Internet-connected computers, books and other materials, and professional assistance at no cost to the user. Libraries support a competitive workforce through literacy programs, partnerships with job training programs, and other resources that help children and adults learn to find, evaluate, and use information they need for their education, health, and careers. Studies show that good school libraries effectively improve student performance. And, research has shown that libraries return more than $4 to the economy for each tax dollar invested.

In recognition of the importance of libraries to our economy and the services they provide to their communities, the American Library Association and libraries across the nation are sponsoring National Library Week, April 10 to 16. No matter your interest or need, libraries and library staff members are there to help. In honor of National Library Week, I encourage everyone to visit their local library to take advantage of the wonderful resources that are available, and to thank their librarians and library staff for making information and education accessible to all.

State Superintendent Tony Evers National Library Week proclamation is at: http://dpi.wi.gov/eis/pdf/nlwproc11.pdf.

Who Is Jesus - Book Review

2011-03-13T23:06:00.002-05:00

Who is Jesus?: Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus. By John Dominic Crossan and Richard G. Watts
If you’re looking for a readable book that tells about Jesus with some controversial ideas, this is it. It’s not a biography of Jesus. It’s not strictly traditional, although it covers traditional teachings about Jesus. It focuses on the Jesus of history, the Jesus who was born, taught, healed people and died on the cross. It comments on the Christ we find in Church, known as the Christ of Faith. The Christ of faith is the Christ made known by the people who knew him and lived after him as they tried to make sense of the things Jesus said and did.
The short book is written in a question and answer format with information given in small segments for readability. Chapters present good questions, including: Why Not Just Read the Gospels? Son of God, Son of the Virgin Mary? What Does John the Baptist Have to Do with Jesus? What Did Jesus Teach? Did Jesus Perform Miracles? Did Jesus Intend to Start a New Religion? Who executed Jesus and Why? What Happened on Easter Sunday? How Do you Get From Jesus to Christ?

John Dominic Crossan is a biblical scholar who was on the faculty of DePaul University and member of the Jesus Seminar. He collaborated with Richard Watts to introduce basic questions and conclusions of Jesus research to general readers. While I find that generally Crossan is not easy to read, this format makes his thought quite accessible to ordinary people. In the introduction, Crossan says, “We sent it out in confidence that many will find it helpful, precisely because it has grown out of the struggle of ‘real people’ to reconnect with Jesus by meeting him in the setting of his own first-century world.” Richard Watts was a pastor in a church in Normal. Illinois.

One theme that appears in Crossan's writing is the cross-cultural aspect of events in the stories of Jesus. He refers to the cruel domination of the people by the Roman Empire and the collaboration of the Jewish authorities in the domination. For example, this comes out in his explanation of the events around the cruxifixion at the time of the Passover. He points out that Jesus' "cleansing" of the Temple was a symbolic act. He says, "The Temple was and had to be the seat of collaboration with the Roman occupation authority. The High Priest had to be, whether he liked it or not, the link between his colonized people and their imperial overlords. In such a situation, any Jew...could have performed an action like that of Jesus. It was a symbolic destruction of the Temple as hopelessly and irrevocably contaminated and compromised. Was it the house of prayer and sacrifice or the seat of collaboration and oppression? Was the High Priest legitimate or even valid and what did such invalidity do to the house of God?" (p. 102-3). This act led to his execution by the Roman Empire. Jesus was a political dissident.

While saying the cruxifixion definitely happened, Crossan says that he doesn't think the Resurrection of Jesus is a historical event, although he believes that it exists in that Jesus continued and continues to live in the people. He says, "But maybe resurrection is simply a word-picture of Jesus' continuing presence among his followers....somehow Jesus was still with them [his followers]. So they struggled to find a way to express that powerful and empowering presence of Jesus. That way was the Easter story." Make of this what you will. Crossan is a scholar of the historical Jesus.
The book is now new. It was published in 1996. It is available through Amazon.com.

Wisconsin Politics

2011-02-25T21:26:00.001-06:00

This is unbelievable in the history of Wisconsin. But it happened.

At 1:00 this (Friday) morning, the Wisconsin Assembly abruptly passed a controversial budget repair bill in a 17-second vote. Not everyone had time to vote. It caught many Democrats off guard as it came at the end of sixty hours of debate and ten days of citizen protests inside and outside the Capitol building. The next step is for it to go to a vote in the state Senate.

I am very troubled about this, as are thousands of Wisconsin residents. This will not benefit the people of Wisconsin. It will benefit the rich and powerful. It is no wonder that thousands of people have protested at the Capitol for ten days, including seventy thousand in one day alone, and many have been sleeping at the Capitol in their protests. We aren't even all talking about the same thing. Trust in government and among legislators is gone. Bipartanship doesn't seem to exist.

Several scenarios have been playing here. Governor Scott Walker has repeatedly said publicly that this bill is designed to cut the budget in order to address a significant budget shortfall. Democrats in the legislature have pointed out that the real issue is the governor's desire to get rid of collective bargaining benefits for public workers and break the unions. The public employee unions have agreed to the proposed financial changes but will not concede about collective bargaining. The third scenario appears to be Governor Walker's political goals for himself, independent of any budget situation. This became evident in the broadcast of a prank phone conversation between Walker and an out of state blogger who said he was David Koch, a billionaire supporter of Walker.

In the phone conversation with "Koch", Walker showed that his primary allegiance was to Koch and the agenda of several conservative governors, which is to bust the public employee unions. Walker said he had considered planting troublemakers in the crowds of peaceful protesters but didn't do it because it might damage him politically. Walker and "Koch" agreed that they had a "vested interest" in the pasage of the budget repair bill. You bet they do. As I understand it, the bill gives Walker the right to sell Wisconsin power companies to anyone at any price without having to consult the elected members of the legislature. It seems that Koch is a major player in the power industry. Payback? Hmmm. In addition, Walker revealed his strategy of trying to trick the state senators into being out of the room during a recess and then taking a vote without them present, in the belief that once a quorum was present, business could be conducted even if a quorum was not there. This way the vote would pass. Is this legal? I am not an attorney. Is it ethical? Hardly. Is it like the vote that happened in the Assembly at 1:00 this morning? Yes.

That's not all I'm bothered about. This bill, if passed in the Senate, will give control of Wisconsin's Medicaid and Senior Care programs to Walker and one of his appointees. Here is Wisconsin's own death panel. It is likely that thousands of vulnerable people will lose access to medical services if this happens, in order to save money. That's not all. Public education funding will be greatly reduced and many teachers laid off. Layoff notices have already started to be issued in the state. Wisconsin transit systems will lose their federal aid because in order to get it, they must go through collective bargaining. A Madison bus driver told me that this would mean that several of the state's small transit systems would have to close. Again, this is a blow to vulnerable people who depend on buses.

I don't know when our state government has been this polarized. This dysfunctional group of leaders needs to go to counseling. As events have unfolded, the triple scenario of issues has played out. For ten days, thousands of people have demonstrated at the Capitol, the vast majority in opposition to the bill. Walker supporters have said that these were out of state people who were brought in. Not so. When I was there, most were Wisconsin people in support of teachers, UW employees, nurses, and police and fire department people whom Walker exempted from the collective bargaining prohibition (who supported him in his election campaign), and others with union signs.

In the beginning, Walker did not have a budget crisis. According to reports, when he took office, he put through the Republican controlled legislature provisions that gave a large amount of money to business interests. In this way he created a budget shortfall and then used it to move along his agenda. This happened after he gave back federal funds to run a railroad line through Wisconsin.

After he proclaimed the budget crisis and presented his budget repair bill on a Friday (Fridays are good for not being noticed by people due to the weekend), apparently in hopes of passing it before the public would know what had happened, the State Senate tried to convene and discovered that fourteen state senators were not there, so the Senate could not do any fiscal business. They sent police to find the senators, which seemed heavy handed, and came up empty. We soon learned that the senators left the state in order to slow down the bill and allow discussion. This was a peaceful form of protesting about the way the governor was doing business. They said he would not discuss the bill with them. He was quoted in the media as saying that he would talk to them but would not change his mind. We don't know when they will return. They say they will return when Walker is willing to have real discussion.

As time went on, the Senators stayed in Illinois and were seen on national television. National television came to Madison when John Nichols of the Capital Times and The Nation magazine brought Ed Schultz of MSNBC's The Ed Show here for two days of local coverage. I was there. Other media began to notice.

The Senate was unable to pass the bill due to the absent senators, but the Assembly was in session. A long public hearing occurred, rallies went on inside and outside the Capitol. They debated for about sixty hours, mostly without sleeping. Republicans saw the large number of Democratic amendments as a way to stall and defeated most of them. Then debate was stopped and the vote taken abruptly. It passed. A significant number of representatives did not have time to vote in the seventeen second time period.

Even if the Republicans succeed in passing this legislation in the Senate, and the regular budget bill that will come up in a few days, I think that for the Republicans it will be like winning the battle and losing the war. It will be a sad state of affairs if the moneyed interests pull the strings of government to advance their interests. The middle class is disappearing, and this is one part of the drama. The war could be won when these people try to be re-elected.

Robert Reich, economist and member of Bill Clinton's administration, pointed out on television and elsewhere that the way out of state and national budget woes is not to reduce government services, and not to give tax breaks to the rich and put more tax burdens and deprivations on the middle and lower classes. It is to expect the rich to pay their share and thus put more money into the economy via increased spending by the ordinary people who would be taxed less. If they don't have jobs, they can't contribute to the economy.

Thanks to Rep. Tammy Baldwin and former Sen. Russ Feingold for supporting the people. Thanks to Facebook for being there as a means of communication for many people. I hope Governor Walker has a few sleepless nights over this travesty. Thanks to Ed Schultz of MSNBC and Air America for his ongoing support. Thanks to John Nichols for bringing MSNBC here to tell the world. Not many thanks to Pres. Obama, who has said almost nothing in support of the Wisconsin people. He promised in his 2008 campaign to be with people when their rights could be taken away. He turned out to be a false messiah. I think the native Americans were right. They said that government couldn't be trusted.

February Blizzard and God

2011-02-01T17:01:00.000-06:00

We have had a lot of snow this winter. Today we are having a blizzard. I think it is powerful and beautiful and dangerous for some people. Big snowstorms snarl traffic and sometimes cause people to freeze to death. They also provide lots of snow for winter sports enthusiasts to enjoy after the storm. Who would think that there are several points of view? With this in mind, I decided that it was time for our blogging reporter to interview God, with no irreverence intended.

Since God was very busy dealing with situations in the world, including possibly WikiLeaks, we were able to speak with Reepicheep, a representative of the Kingdom of Heaven.

1. What is God's opinion of the currrent snowstorm?
    God loves its performance, although God is concerned with people caught in it. You probably know that you can talk to God directly at any time, although you might not recognize God's responses.

2. Why is God blanketing the country with all this snow and wind?
    Snow is part of the natural process that God put in place. This is not about punishment for allowing homosexuals to be treated as equals. It is good to remind people that big storms tell us something about God, and that is that God is in charge of the weather.

3. Is God in direct communication with God's prophets, the meteorologists?
    No more than God communicates with anyone else, although God appreciates their gifts in telling people about storms. Meteorologists use science to tell the weather rather than relying on God most of the time.

4. Why did God create snow?
     God prefers not to divulge everything. Come to heaven and find out.

5. What is God doing about people who are in the storm and have accidents or deaths?
    God is concerned about them and is sending them wisdom to do the right things. And as a heavenly mouse, I remind you that the mice are having a hard time in this, too. Some of them are lucky enough to endure the storm in people's houses, or barns, or other shelters, but some of them are not. Mice are God's special creatures. It could be worse for you people. You may remember that for a while in Narnia, where I lived, it was always winter and never Christmas. God gave you Christmas. You people think you are everyone.

Ahem. Yes. Thank you for talking to us today. We'll see God in church.

Big Events of 2010

2011-01-15T21:32:00.000-06:00

Before the new year gets any older, it's time for my comments on the 5 most important events of 2010. Most of them happened in the United States. Some are political; some are natural. Needless to say, other things happened, and not everyone will agree with my choices. Here's the list, not necessarily in order of importance or chronology.
1. Earthquake in Haiti.
2. Oil spill in Gulf of Mexico.
3. "Health Care" law reform.
4. Supreme Court decision giving allowing unlimited corporate spending in federal elections.
5. Recall of a half billion eggs suspected of salmonella contamination.

My list does not include actors who abuse their partners or go to rehab, engagements in royal families, professional sports, Michael Jackson (who seems to continue to live in the news), the ongoing story of the economy, jobs and real estate, and other natural disasters.

The Haiti earthquake stunned many Americans. Maybe it's because Haiti is near the US. An earthquake like that could hit one of our cities. Many people sent money and people to help with the disaster. Unfortunately, the most recent report I heard said that only about a third of Port-au-Prince has been rebuilt, and a huge number of people continue to survive with little help. Where did all the donated money go?

The oil spill severely damaged the gulf. Lots of money and manpower went there to help. The last news I heard was that shoreline habitat is still oil soaked, but some beaches apparently are cleaned up. Where did BP go? We will live with the consequences of this for a long time. Forget about "drill, baby, drill."

The "health care" law, in my opinion, really isn't about health or care. It's about medical services and money. I support it because it offers increased access and provisions about freedom from pre-existing conditions. Like some others, I question the requirement that everyone have "health" (medical) insurance, and I don't know why the people who want to repeal this provision connect it with repeal of pre-existing condition provisions. I don't think this law is socialism any more than universal public education or local police and fire protection are. In any case, this is a major change for Americans.

The Supreme Court decision about funding elections can change the way people are elected. Corporations can pour money in to elect people who support their positions, with little or no concern for the good of the people. I see this as government by corporations and not by the people. We have already seen that legislators will give their support to the causes that help them get re-elected. It's dangerous for democratic processes.

Why do I think the egg recall is big? I didn't list all the automobile recalls. This recall is about people's need for food that won't sicken or kill them. Factory egg production provides eggs and other foods on a huge scale. Since this event, the government has passed new food safety legislation. I also believe that the Food and Drug Administration needs to have enough inspectors to do their jobs related to this.

I hope that 2011 will give us good news.

Winter Squash Soup

2010-12-16T19:18:00.002-06:00

Here it is by special request...from one of my daughters. This soup is adapted (for smaller quantity and added ingredients) from Joy of Cooking, 1997 edition. It will serve one or two, depending on personal enthusiasm for winter squash. This soup is dairy-free.

Winter Squash Soup
serves 1 or 2

1-2 cups (about) cooked pulp from one small winter squash (I use acorn squash)
1 tablespoon butter or coconut oil
about 1/2 cup chopped onion and celery (you decide proportions)
1/4 teaspoon powdered ginger
1 tablespoon maple syrup or sugar
2 cups chicken broth
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
salt if necessary

Saute onion and celery in butter or coconut oil until soft but not brown. Stir in squash, ginger and cinnamon. . Stir in maple syrup and half or more of chicken broth. Puree with blender or immersion blender until it is somewhat smooth. Add remaining chicken broth and salt. Bring to simmer and simmer for 10-15 minutes.

Drugs That Harm

2010-12-11T20:58:00.001-06:00

Wow! Want to get sicker than you already are? Just read this:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/12/09/15-dangerous-drugs-big-pharma-shoves-down-our-throats.aspx

I am a fan of Dr. Joseph Mercola's online articles. Sometimes I think he goes on for too long and buries his main point halfway through. However...this one says it like it is. He published an article from AlterNet that lists drugs that are said to be questionable for health, and points out the side effects. I'm with him all the way.

Then in his comments he points out some other drugs to avoid. He pretty much wipes out a lot of conventional drug therapy recommendations. He says that lifestyle choices can wipe out the need for most of these drugs, particularly choices of diet and exercise. He vilifies high fructose corn syrup, which he associates with many negative health conditions.

Among other things, he has comments about type 2 diabetes. He says that in many cases curing the disease is within the person's own control. I have read another book that says that, called There is a Cure for Diabetes, by Dr. Gabriel Cousens. Cousens says that diabetes will go away if the person goes on a 100% raw food diet. Mercola recommends eating a lot of raw food. Other recommendations for better diet are also in the Mercola comments.

I don't know very many people who are willing to eat 100% raw food. Even I would miss the potato chips.

Pumpkin Soup

2010-12-02T17:13:00.000-06:00

Soup is good on a cold day. Today I made pumpkin soup. It's easy if you have canned pumpkin. It's a bit fussier if you have a real pumpkin on your hands. Here it is...

Pumpkin Soup for 2 or 3

1 small pumpkin, or 1 can pumpkin (about 2 cups cooked)
1 1/2 cups chicken broth or stock
1/3 cup heavy cream
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground sage, or more fresh sage
3/4 teaspoons salt (there is already salt in the broth, so be gentle)
sour cream (optional)

If you need to cook the pumpkin, cut it in half, remove the seeds and roast it, cut side down, until it is soft. Scoop out the pumpkin and discard the shell.

Stir together the pumpkin and chicken broth. Puree this in a blender. Pour it into a saucepan and bring to a simmer on medium heat. Stir in the nutmeg, cinnamon, sage and salt. Mix well. Add the cream. Remove from heat. Serve with sour cream if desired.

Thoughts About Names

2010-11-04T19:52:00.000-05:00

What's in a name? We give and use names. We create nicknames. We continue to have our names reflect patronymics created from naming systems other than American. For instance, we have a lot of Swensons, Petersons, Olsons, names derived from fathers whose names were something like Swen, Peter or Ole.

My grandfather was Edward; my father was Ed; my brother is Eddy; my nephew is Danny; all were named Edward. Nicknames abound. My other brother's teenage nickname was and is Fud; many people call him Dave; his given name is David. (How he became Fud is a different story.) My husband was Rick; his parents named him Richard. My nickname is Kathy; my real name is Kathleen.

This brings me to the point. This is my special ego trip. I became curious about the name Kathleen, and discovered that two nations claim the name. My dictionary (Webster's New World College Dictionary, 4th ed.) says it is Irish. WikiName http://wiki.name.com/en/Kathleen says it is English. I had no idea I was that popular. Both sources give plenty of related names, English, Irish and other national variants: Catharine, Caterina, Ekaterina, Karen, Catalina, Catarina. The dictionary hit for Kathleen refers readers to the listing for Catherine.

Of course, the best part of Kathleen is the company I keep. Who could not love Catherine of Aragon, wife of Henry VIII of England, even though the king did away with her as wife #1. One of John F. Kennedy's sisters was named Kathleen. St. Catherine of Sienna continues to be much loved; I seem to remember that she hardly ever ate. Kathleen Turner is a well known actress. Catherine the Great was Empress of Russia.

How wonderful! Two communities in the United States have my name. They are Kathleen, Georgia, and Kathleen, Florida. I remember the pop song of about fifty years ago, "Kathaleen, oh my lovin' darling Kathaleen..."

Lest you think I stopped with my own name, I didn't. I also researched some very well known names from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Names carried significance. For these people of earlier times, the name of a person, place or thing was in some way connected to the essence or personality of him/her/it. The names of individual persons expressed personality and status or nature. To call a person by name was to engage with that person's inner and outer being. I don't think we can say that about the names we give to people today in the United States.

Here are a few names from the Bible, with no comments on the issue of literal/historical truth of the scriptures.
Adam: human being, translated "man." It is the proper name for the first man, and some suggested that it means "ruddy" or "earth."
Eve: "the mother of all living."
Eden: means "delight," is a garden of God.
Abraham: "father of many," a name ritually changed from Abram.
Jacob: "seizing the heel of." Jacob and his brother were twins, with Jacob being born at the heel of Esau. The name "Israel" was given to him after he wrestled with God; it means "he contended with God."
Jesus. "he will save."
(Thanks to The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan. Oxford University Press, 1993.)

Cholesterol Myth

2010-10-19T16:44:00.000-05:00

Should we worry about high cholesterol? This article says no. Read it to the end. Surprise! We need cholesterol. It's not the enemy unless the total is over 330.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/08/10/making-sense-of-your-cholesterol-numbers.aspx

Dr. Joseph Mercola has given us a very complete rundown on treating high cholesterol. I'm with him all the way. He published the article on his website (http://www.mercola.com/) in August, 2010. The medical advice we get about cholesterol control is controversial. I have had the discussion with several doctors, consecutively, none of whom recommend this point of view.

Dr. Mercola is not alone. There is a body of literature that is consistent with what he says in this article. Most of what I have read is written by doctors and scientists. At the end of the article is his list of references.

Here is the article's table of contents:

THE CHOLESTEROL MYTH THAT IS HARMING YOUR HEALTH
What is cholesterol and why do you need it?
Your total cholesterol is NOT a great indicator of your heart disease risk.
Cholesterol is neither "good" nor "bad."
Cholesterol is your friend, not your enemy.
Vitamin D and your cholesterol.
Cholesterol and inflammation -- what's the connection?
The insanity of lowering cholesterol.
If your cholesterol is too low...
Who decided what cholesterol levels are healthy or harmful?
The dangers of cholesterol-lowering medications.
Are cholesterol drugs even effective?
Zetia and Vytorin: no medical benefits.
How to lower inflammation, and thereby your risk of heart disease, naturally.
How to lower your cholesterol naturally...
References.

Apples and Applesauce

2010-10-01T17:38:00.000-05:00

It's apple season in Wisconsin. I make the world's best applesauce, and I will share the recipe with you. But first I have a few things to say about apples.

1. If you type "apples" into your search engine, you will get a lot of hits, including Apple computers, Apples to Apples game, Wikipedia on apples, and much more. Who would have guessed? Apple computers must be delicious.

2. The apple genome has about 57,000 genes. That's more than in human beings, which have about 30,000 genes. (Wikipedia says.) Does that make apples superior or more complex than humans?

3. China produces the most apples. The US is second. (Wikipedia again.) Wisconsin grows a lot of them. Apparently Washington grows more.

4. The apple is in the rose family. (Wikipedia yet again.) But to make a bouquet, keep them on the branch. Roses work better than apples in vases.

5. Johnny Appleseed was an apple tree salesman. I heard that on television.

Sarah and I went apple gathering on Washington Island during the Labor Day weekend. That is a place where wild apple trees grow along the road. We brought the apples home and I made applesauce for us to share. I make wonderful applesauce due to two things: good sour apples and Mrs. Robertson, my home economics teacher in 7th and 8th grade. This is what she taught us girls so long ago:

Applesauce That is Better Than Canned Applesauce

Apples - sour, such as MacIntosh or Cortland
water
sugar - about 1/4 cup for every 4 apples (you may use white or brown sugar or real maple syrup)
Cinnamon

Quarter, peel and core apples. Put them in a pan. Put a small amount of water into the pan, about 1/2 inch for a small batch. Cover the pan and bring the apples to a boil over high heat. When it starts to boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer until the apples are soft. If you didn't add enough water, add more. Add sugar and sprinkle with cinnamon. If you use a lot of cinnamon, you might overpower the good apple taste, so don't overdo it. Stir the sauce to break up the apple pieces, but don't mash them. Cool the sauce and enjoy the aroma in your home. Eat.

Mrs. Robertson did not tell us to sweeten the sauce with brown sugar or maple syrup. That is something that I figured out myself.

The I Hate to Cook Book

2010-09-25T18:12:00.001-05:00

I read in July that the I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken is fifty years old this year. To honor the half century, the deceased Ms Bracken's daughter has published a revised and updated version of the very funny commentary on cooking for people who don't enjoy cooking. I haven't seen the update, but I still enjoy the original version.

The original does give some good recipes. What makes it extra good is the non-recipe stuff. Yes, the book tells how to cook with the convenience foods of that era, and yes, I still prefer to cook with minimally processed foods, but the commentary is worth keeping. It begins with, "Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them. This book is for those of us who hate to, who have learned, through hard experience, that some activities become no less painful through repetition: childbearing, paying taxes, cooking." (p. ix.)

How about this, from page 113: "Once, in an elevator enroute to my office, I was eating some spice cookies which I had made from a recipe in my big fat cookbook. I gave one to the Elevator Lady, and she tasted it. 'My,' she said reflectively, 'I can sure make a better spice cooky than that.' So she brought me her recipe, and she was quite right. This is a short, rich, ginger-snap sort of a cooky, and the recipe makes plenty." This is much better than the comments in any version of Joy of Cooking. The cookies are good ones.

Bracken also gives her standards for cookies. The cookie dough that now sells in grocery stores probably hadn't been invented when she wrote this. Her standards appear on page 113. I agree with her on them. "When you hate to cook, you ask a lot of a cooky recipe. It must call for no exotic ingredients. It must be easy. It must not, above all, call for any rolling out and cutting. It must produce extremely good cookies. And quite a lot of them."

She comments about cheese: "Now cheese is something of a yes-and-no proposition. It isn't too trustworthy, because you have to concentrate on it; and when you hate to cook, you don't want to. After you've produced a curdled Welsh Rabbit or a Welsh Rabbit that resembles a sullen puddle of rubber cement, the tendency is to leave cheese severely alone." (p. 22)

The wisdom of the kitchen is in this old book. I stand behind some of her recipes. At the end of the book she gives a lot of household hints "or, What to Do When Your Churn Paddle Sticks". She points out that "...I...feel that I speak with a certain modest authority when I say that most household hints are pretty terrible." (p. 140) Her hints are good.

Maybe it will be worth it to buy the new revised version of the book. A review of it appeared in the media last July. http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-07-19-bracken19_ST_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

Ice Age Trail Upgrade

2010-08-27T20:24:00.000-05:00

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/article_2bb503c0-afd4-11df-a805-001cc4c03286.html

The Ice Age Trail has received an upgrade. I took a walk on this new two-mile superhighway for bikes, and here are my observations.

The new path is called the Ice Age Junction Trail, and it goes from Highway PD in Fitchburg to the junction with the Military Ridge State Trail in Verona. It's beautiful new smooth blacktop. It mostly goes around the hills that the walking trail has enjoyed. It's a quick ride for people who want to get from point A to point B.

The walking trail still exists, and it goes to the same place. It's still grass covered, maintained with lawn mowers. It's a bit more strenuous than the bike trail, and a bit longer. It meanders through the prairie flowers and wild berry bushes with no apparent concern for speed of travel. More meditative. Less efficient.

In addition to going through the prairie flowers, the blacktop version of the trail goes through a small woods. I think there is some incongruity in a blacktop path going through a woodsy natural space like woods. I get it that cars go through woods on blacktop, but I think of bikes as being more nature friendly. Blacktop is a manufactured surface made of non-natural stuff. It has little in common with spaces filled with flowers and woods.

The new trail has a stopping off point for those who want to rest. It has more access points for bikers than the former walking-only trail, from area streets. Those are good features. It covers part of the walking trail and crosses it. Both trails go under Verona Avenue through a bridge that has been there for some time, but now the path at that location is easier to traverse due to a small bridge that goes over a watery space. I remember crossing it by climbing on rocks and doing some jumping. This is an improvement for bikers and walkers.

I'll stick to the walking trail with all its beauties and meanderings. The day may come when I try the blacktop trail on my bike. Thanks, Madison, Dane County Parks, and the Community Foundation, for offering a new alternative, even if it is blacktop.

Blackberries Galore

2010-08-06T15:59:00.001-05:00

It's still blackberry picking time in Madison. This morning I found some along the Verona link of the Ice Age Trail, accessible from county road PD. It would have been wonderful if the mosquitoes hadn't emailed all their relatives to say that I would be coming. The only person who wasn't complaining about the bugs was the dog that came along with the other lady who was picking. I finally decided that I could have brought home many more berries, but the mosquitoes became a major obstacle. Alas. It's not easy being part of their food chain.

I really have found enough for one season anyway. I have made a blackberry pie, blackberry ice cream topping, blackberry cobbler, and put some blackberries in the freezer. I regret that our fair city leveled a very promising blackberry patch in Elver Park near my home. It cut my harvest in half. I don't understand why the city fathers didn't wait until after the berries were finished. Fortunately, there are other blackberry patches. And there will be more in a patch at an undisclosed location on Washington Island later in August, when I expect to be there.

The blackberry cobbler that I made is my adaptation from the Cherry Cobbler that I reported on, from the Prairie Farmer WLS Cook Book of 1941. They could have thought of blackberries while they were working on cherries, but they didn't. So here is my version. I like it a lot in spite of the seeds.

Blackberry Cobbler for 2

1 - 1 1/4 cup (approx.) fresh blackberries (Maybe thawed frozen ones will work; I don't know.)
1/2 cup water
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons flour
1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons milk (approx.)

Find a baking dish that is 7x7 inches, or 6x8 inches. Pyrex sells a 6x8 dish. Goodwill occasionally sells old Corningware baking dishes that are about 7x7. The dish should hold about 1 1/2 quarts. The cobbler won't come up to the top of the dish.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Put berries and water in baking dish. Combine sugar and 1 1/2 tablespoons flour, and sprinkle over the top. Put in oven and stir occasionally until the mixture is heated, about as long as it takes to mix the dough that goes on top.

Mix together the 1/2 cup flour, baking powder, sugar and salt. Cut in butter until it resembles pie crust dough. Add milk and stir until soft dough is formed. Stir as little as possible. Roll out dough 1/3 inch thick and place on hot berry mixture. If dough is too wet to roll, add more flour. Place dough on hot berry mixture to cover most of it.

Bake at 425 degrees for 30 minutes. Serve plain or topped with whipped cream or with ice cream.

Berry Picking

2010-07-06T10:40:00.002-05:00

And now, here is Blogspot's Senior Outdoor correspondent.

Good morning, everyone. During our Independence Day weekend, a shocking event has the west side of Madison all abuzz. It seems that two people, identified as Kathy Whitt and Dolores Becker, were spotted picking black raspberries on public land. They appeared to be enjoying it.

On the ground, we interviewed Deary the Deertick, who said, "Bring them on. They're part of my food chain." However, not everyone was pleased. Faline the deer, mother of the famed Bambi, said, "Get them out of here. Those berries are my dinner. Let them go to the farmers' marker if they want berries." Further remarks from Deary the Deertick, were that Friday night's fireworks at Elver Park were "deertick heaven." Thousands of people were there.

Here's a followup to the event. Ms. Whitt and Ms. Becker announced that they planned to maked the black raspberries into a pie. They reported that it was delicious.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blog.

Overused Words and Expressions

2010-06-04T17:06:00.002-05:00

How many have you heard today? They're everywhere: in conversation, on television, in email and postal mail, and maybe in your dreams. Americans are fond of being unoriginal in their ways of speaking. Overused expressions are ubiquitous. Metaphorical speaking is popular.

Don't stop reading now, but stay online. We are the salt of the earth and will leave no stone unturned in our search for the Pandora's box of expressions. Just try to wrap your head around them and and relax. Here are my big five overused expressions for today.

(1) That said. We used to say however or moreover. The first time I remember hearing it was in an Obama speech. Then everyone was saying it.

(2) Wrap my head around. We used to understand something; now we wrap our heads around it. I even heard it in a sermon last Sunday in church.

(3) Green. It seems to be about environmental friendliness. We now have green airplanes (fuel efficient), green architecture (made with environmentally friendly materials), green automobiles (using fewer fossil fuels), green technologies, and more. Today in my mail I received a flyer from a cleaning company that proclaimed, "Green is the new color of clean." Is a quiet home without noise green?

(4) Perfect storm. Once it was a crisis or a disaster. Now it is a perfect storm. The oil gusher in the gulf is today's perfect storm. It certainly is a disaster, and the problems of slowing it down are the perfect storm. I haven't heard tornadoes and hurricanes called perfect storms.

(5) Wake up call. When something blows up in our faces, or we experience sudden important changes of heart, we have wake up calls. They used to be insights for action.

We can describe an event such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with metaphors. Once BP was considered the salt of the earth, maybe even a green corporation, but now its executives are trying to leave no stone unturned in trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They have had their wake up call and are in the midst of the perfect storm. That said, they are trying to wrap their heads around this disaster as they give up their pipe dreams of uneventful, profitable drilling. There is no more pie in the sky for BP as it bites the bullet in its efforts to get back online. John D. Rockefeller will roll over in his grave with today's policy of drill, baby, drill.

Iceland’s Volcanic Ash Causes Fluoride Poisoning

2010-05-11T14:41:00.001-05:00

Iceland’s Volcanic Ash Causes Fluoride Poisoning
This is a long article that isn't really about Iceland. It gives a lot of information about how fluoridation is bad for our health, doesn't really prevent tooth decay, and is responsible for worsening of some diseases.

Drinking Water

2010-04-28T21:06:00.004-05:00

I am thinking about water and the problems connected to drinking municipal tap water. Water is very important for life, especially my life.

Last week's Isthmus has a short article about bottled water. The article tells a partial story about water. It pointed out the advantages of consuming local tap water, along with ways in which bottled water is bad for people and the planet. The occasion was a free screening of the documentary film Tapped, sponsored by the City of Madison. I missed the movie, but am thinking about the water problem.

The article quotes a couple of city people. According to the city recycling "conquistador", municipal water suppliers must meet higher standards than bottled water producers; some bottled water is actually filtered tap water from municipal systems; only a quarter of plastic water bottles are recycled and the others go to the landfills; the bottles are made of "petrol", which I believe is a petroleum product; the bottles must be trucked to stores.

The article points out another issue, the ethical concern that water belongs to all the people, and is being privatized, and in some cases it is being hauled away from populations that need it.

What the article does not point out is the other side of the story. I am not in favor of privatized water, and I do believe that the earth's water belongs to the people. The thing that bothers me is that apparently tap water isn't as innocent as the Isthmus article suggests.

Municipal water is treated with chlorine and fluoride. I can see the need to chlorinate it for health reasons, even though chlorine is a poison. I take issue with fluoridation. It is said that fluoride is good to prevent tooth decay. Okay, I say, so let the kids get their fluoride in their toothpaste and mouthwash rather than in their drinking water. I don't want to see the whole population dosed with fluoride in the water when people can fluoridate themselves with other products.

I say this because I love my thyroid, and fluoride is not good for it. People don't advertise that. I have read about this in several sources, one of which I quote here: "...despite its wide use in preventing tooth decay, [flouride] can act as a metabolic poison and damage your thyroid. Thyroid impairment is a serious problem affecting millions of women. (In Europe, after much research, they removed fluoride from their water supply.)" (Dr. Joseph Mercola, the No-Grain Diet; Penguin Group, 2004, p. 151.) Mercola has a large following on his website Mercola.com, with articles about drinking water and many other health matters. In the portion of the book quoted above, he points out that tap water is toxic because it contains both fluoride and chlorine. He suggested that glass bottled spring water, not drinking water, is a "safe but costly alternative." Mercola is not the only doctor to talk this way.

That leaves people like me with a dilemma. I live in the city with municipal water, not my own well. I can not put a filtration system in my home water supply due to it being a condominium. I can put a carbon filter on my faucet, but carbon filters do not remove fluoride. I can bow to the capitalist system and buy privatized water in plastic bottles that will leach chemicals into the water and fill the landfill unless I recycle them. Fortunately, I have the alternative of cheap reverse osmosis city water at the grocery store, which I put into reusable bottles. It's not ideal, but it provides water with the poisons removed. I would be happier with unfluoridated water from my home faucet. That would help with the ethical problem of privatized water, and it would be very convenient.

I was glad to see that the village of Poynette was not adding fluoride to its water supply, at least for a while. About a year ago the village had a referendum, in which the people there voted overwhelmingly in favor of fluoridating the water. Alas. They did it.

If populations can willingly be fed a poison like fluoride through the drinking water, what will they put into the water supply next?

Dessert Thoughts and Actions

2010-04-25T17:12:00.001-05:00

I spend a bit of time thinking about dessert, especially when I am in the supermarket. The aisles of frozen desserts are awe inspiring as they wait for us to pick up something sweet and feed it to the waiting mouths at home. The shelves of fresh desserts beckon us with aromas and visual appeal. A bakery is another spot to find great quantities of mouth watering goodies for every meal of every day.

Who do these supermarket and bakery people think we are? For one thing, they cater to people who don’t like to cook, don’t have time to cook, or buy on impulse. The marketing people are very good at enticing people to take home extra calories.

In addition to marketing, science has come a long way. Food scientists know how to produce sugar, fat and salt in delicious proportions. I am in the process of reading a fascinating book about this, The End of Overeating, by David A. Kessler. He says that it’s not surprising that we are getting fatter as a nation, because of the ubiquitous availability and ingenious combining of high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt foods and fake foods.

I am in favor of dessert. I know that the food hucksters are trying their best to manipulate my taste buds and pocketbook. However, the dessert that I think is best is the dessert I can make at home. On its downside are: (1) sugar and empty calories are still waiting to fatten me up; (2) it takes some time to make dessert; (3) sometimes the pie gets overdone. On its upside are: (1) I have some control over how much I am poisoning myself with sugar, fat and salt; (2) I like to cook, which is why I would make dessert rather than buy it; (3) I can downsize a dessert recipe to my small household standards; (4) like most people, I feel better when I have dessert that pleases me.

I have some standards for dessert making.
My dessert must be sweet but not oversweet. I like cherry pie that is somewhat tart. Supermarket pies often are sweeter than my exacting standards. They also have lackluster, un-flaky crusts, but that is a different issue. Cheesecake is rich enough in its various incarnations to be indigestible even though it is beautiful to behold.

My dessert must be easy to make and not require any equipment that an old fashioned cook wouldn’t have. Electric mixer, yes. Beyond that, probably no. Spoons are still great tools. A little basic knowledge of cooking can produce adequate pies and pastries, and even home made ice cream. It’s not hard.

My dessert isn’t made of fake ingredients. For instance, there is a recipe for Gumdrop Cereal Bars in my Taste of Home’s 5-Ingredient Cookbook. Three of its five ingredients are manufactured items. They include gumdrops, miniature marshmallows, and Corn Pops cereal. Come on, people. Give me basic ingredients that my grandmother would recognize.

Your reward for reading this far is the recipe for yesterday’s dessert, chocolate soufflé, which I modified by reducing the quantity listed in my big fat cookbook. Before you get excited, you must know that a soufflé is very easy to make. You just have to remember to serve it immediately after it comes out of the oven because its beautiful puffiness will fall very quickly. You can skip the gourmet suggestion of putting a collar around the top of the soufflé dish.

I made this chocolate soufflé after watching a Martha Stewart rerun on television where she and a cook whose name I forgot made one together. As a form of intimidation, they called it soufflé au chocolat, which dressed it up but left it otherwise still easy to make. If you don’t finish it in one sitting, it is good for breakfast the next morning, even if it is cold. That is, if you believe that breakfast food isn’t just eggs, cereal and pancakes.

Chocolate Souffle
(adapted from Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book 12th edition, 2002.)

Butter
Sugar
1 tablespoon butter
1 ½ tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/3 cup milk
1/3 cup semisweet chocolate pieces
3 beaten egg yolks
3 egg whites
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons sugar

Butter the sides of a 1 ½ quart souffle or baking dish with high sides. Sprinkle the inside of the dish with sugar (bottom and sides). Set the dish aside.

In a small sauce pan melt the 1 tablespoon butter. Stir in flour. Add milk. Cook and stir until thickened and bubbly. Add chocolate. Stir until melted. Remove from heat. Gradually stir chocolate mixture into beaten egg yolks. Set aside.

Beat egg whites and vanilla until soft peaks form. Gradually add the sugar, beating until stiff peaks form. Fold a small amount of beaten egg whites into the chocolate mixture. Fold the chocolate mixture into the remaining beaten whites. Transfer to prepared dish.

Bake in a 350 degree oven for 40 to 45 minutes or until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean. Serve immediately. To serve, insert two forks back to back; gently pull soufflé apart into serving size wedges. Transfer to plates. If desired, top with whipped cream.

Happy Birthday

2010-03-29T08:33:00.002-05:00

Today is my father's 100th birthday. I hope he is enjoying it in heaven.

My father, Ed Allen Jr., was a creative, entrepreneurial person who was interested in everything, although less so when he was old. He's the man who retired and then went to work every day anyway. He died while getting ready to go to work. He was an enormous influence on my life.

We called him Poppy and then Pop. He loved broadcasting. He built a career in radio in Chicago and was proud to have worked for the NBC network. His Early Bird Show on WMAQ had a great following, and listeners sent him quilt squares which my grandmother assembled. I still have the early bird quilt. He started station WDOR in Sturgeon Bay in 1951. It was an adventure that he loved. He started a radio station in Manitowoc with a radio partner, which they sold.

WDOR was a corporation of local people, and it also was our family enterprise. We did commercials. Mother and I worked in the office. My brothers were regulars on the air as soon as their voices changed. David worked hard on the Saturday morning Countdown program of current popular music. Eddy became an excellent sports announcer. An assortment of local programs were tried, including Santa Claus (local doctor), and Mother's recipe program known for most of the years as Five Minutes With Dolores Allen. I think it is the longest runnning program in Wisconsin radio history. Eddy continues to be the manager.

Pop was the religious leader of the family. We all went to the Episcopal Church, whether we wanted to or not. He grew up going to the Moody Sunday School in Chicago, with perfect attendance. We grew up knowing that we should want to be in church. When he didn't like the sermon, he would ostentatiously clean his fingernails to let the priest know that it was pretty dull. Once he asked the priest how long he prepared for his sermon, and was told it was about ten minutes. He then said that it had sounded like it.

When I was a teenager, he let his opinions about my dates be known. He usually wanted to know who the father of each boy was. He usually read the clock wrong when I returned home from dates. He went to bed early. Once I came in at 10:10 p.m, and he sleepily insisted that it was ten minutes to two a.m. If I lingered in the car in the driveway with a boy at the end of a date, Pop would blink the yard light to let us know that the date was finished. I loved him anyway.

I used to go fishing with him, just to be with him. We would go out in his boat, and he would fish and I would draw pictures of the nearby scenery. When he drafted me to work in the radio station office in summer as a teenager, we would go out in his boat and have lunch.

He was Republican chairman of Door County for several years, member of the Door County Chamber of Commerce, Sturgeon Bay Rotary Club, and occasionally played golf. I remember that he would lie down on the green while the other golfers with him did their putts.

He and Uncle Frank Dorn built the family cottage at Clark's Lake. After that he was always doing some construction on it. He moved the kitchen into a former bedroom. I remember when he put electricity into the cottage. Prior to that we had kerosene lamps and a kerosene stove. Later he and Mother sold that cottage and bought an A-frame at Washington Island.

Life with him was always interesting. He was a great person and a great father. Happy birthday.

Medical Insurance Overhaul

2010-03-20T15:24:00.003-05:00

Here is what my congresswoman, Tammy Baldwin, says about the proposed "health care" (i.e. medical insurance) bill. Note that she doesn't say when these things will be in effect, if passed. She also doesn't point out that the clause about pre-existing conditions currently is applicable to children and not adults, as I have heard. However bad the bill is, it has some good parts. I heard one legislator call it a quarter of a loaf. I think she should and will vote yes.

Tammy's thoughts, from her newsletter, start:

After decades of unfulfilled hopes, and a year of intense study and debate, the House plans to vote on a health care reform bill on Sunday.
Health care for all is the issue that brought me into public service. As long as I've been your Member of Congress, I've been working to answer your call to reform our health care system.

What this health debate boils down to is one, simple question: Whose side are you on?
Are we going to improve the lives of Wisconsinites and all Americans; or are we going to improve the bottom line of the insurance industry?

My answer is clear: I stand firmly on your side.

I stand with all of you who have struggled to afford your health care premiums, and copays. I stand with all of you who have been denied insurance coverage, or dropped in your time of need. I stand with all of you who have had to declare personal bankruptcy because of the medical bills from a serious illness, and all of you who face this possibility. The health reform bill that I support addresses all those problems and then some. It’s not perfect, and it's not all I wanted it to be....but it is a good start.

I am eager to pass this measure that will help us move forward and put our families and our economy on safer, healthier ground.

Sincerely,
Tammy BaldwinYour Member of Congress

As we prepare to vote on health care reform, I highlighted specifically how the reform measure will benefit the people I represent in the Second Congressional District (South Central Wisconsin). Under this reform measure:

539,000 people in South Central Wisconsin will see improvements in their current health care coverage;

7,400 with pre-existing conditions will be able to obtain coverage;

Up to 162,000 families will get tax credits and other assistance to help make health insurance more affordable;

Up to 16,800 small businesses will get tax credits and other assistance to help make health insurance more affordable for their employees;

97,000 Medicare beneficiaries will see better care and pay less for prescription drugs because the Medicare Part D donut hole will be closed;

68,000 young adults will be able to stay on their parents’ health insurance policy until their 26th birthday;

13,500 uninsured people will have access to health care coverage;

1,100 families won’t have to file for bankruptcy due to unaffordable health care costs;

6 community health centers in South Central Wisconsin will receive millions of dollars in new funding to care for thousands of new patients.

Under the bill, if you like the insurance you have now, you may keep it and it will improve. The insurance reforms will prohibit annual and lifetime limits, eliminate retroactive cancellation of insurance policies for individuals who become ill while insured, ban coverage denials for pre-existing conditions, and reduce the cost of preventive care.

Equally important, the health care reform bill will cut the nation’s deficit by $138 billion in the first 10 years and $1.2 trillion in the second ten years – the largest deficit reduction measure in 17 years.

Two dietary planets

2010-03-13T11:43:00.002-06:00

I am living on two planets.

One says these things: put fluoride in water systems to benefit children's teeth, with no adverse effects; eating cholesterol is bad and will raise your cholesterol level and raise risk of heart disease; polyunsaturated fats are good for you; it's ok to drink a lot of soda pop; saturated fats are bad for you, including coconut oil; canola oil is good for you; high carb, low fat diets will result in weight loss; the government's food pyramid is a good guide for healthy eating.

The other planet says: don't put fluoride in water systems because it will damage thyroid function; eating cholesterol is not bad because your body produces and uses it apart from dietary intake; polyunsaturated fats are not good for you, olive oil is better; it's not ok to drink a lot of soda pop because high fructose corn syrup gives a major assist to some diseases including diabetes (so why is the government subsidizing corn growers?); saturated fats are not the artery cloggers they are said to be (see cholesterol above), especially coconut oil; low fat/high carb diets are responsible for the obesity epidemic in the US; the government's food pyramid is strongly influenced by food manufacturers and will encourage poor health.

Then we have Michael Pollan, who advocates for eating and enjoying food as food and not as medical delivery systems.

For more than a year I have been reading about what happens to people when they stuff various foods and food-like products into their mouths. The nutrient of this decade seems to be fat. Food science and people don't agree all the time.

It all began with my discovery that coconut oil is a good fat even though it is saturated. The more I read, the more I found. It's a strange world of two planets.

The Politician, by Andrew Young

2010-03-03T16:08:00.003-06:00

The Politician is a fascinating tell-all book that hit the best seller list immediately. Young tells of his strong desire to work with and for John Edwards for about a decade in the hoped-for ascent to the White House. Young was Edwards' most trusted aide and did what was needed for the Edwards campaigns for senate and President. It is a well written story of the seductive side of John Edwards and the enabling character of Andrew Young. It also is about dishonesty by the Edwardses and the pain of disillusionment for Young as he participated in the cover-up of Edwards' adulterous relationship with Rielle Hunter.

Young describes the close relationship he had with John and Elizabeth Edwards in their home and on campaign locations. As Edwards gradually exhibits what Young calls a sense of entitlement, narcissism and self-centeredness, Young shows his poor judgment in crossing employee boundaries to assist the Edwardses in many personal tasks. Young tells most of the story by letting events unfold into a novel-like tale. His commentary about events goes through the book and is more pronounced in later pages of the book as he reflects about the things he and his family lived through in service to Edwards.

John Edwards seems like a tragic character whose flaws overshadow his powerful charisma and talent. Edwards mistress Rielle Hunter is described as self centered and demanding. Elizabeth Edwards is shown first as a loving person who said Andrew was family, and later when the stress of terminal cancer and attempts to believe her husband's lies get the best of her, a nasty shrew.

In this book we see the clandestine romance of John Edwards and Rielle Hunter. We see Rielle Hunter spend the later part of her pregnancy in hiding with the Edwards family. We see Edwards denying the relationship and his child born to Hunter. We see Edwards denying paternity. We see Young's and his wife's difficulties in dealing with Hunter and Mrs. Edwards.

I don't often read tell-all books, but this one is a winner. It is eye opening for people who supported the Edwards campaign promises and then saw his fall. I, too, was excited by his campaign message.

It may be noted that at the end of the book, Young had possession of the Edwards/Rielle sex tape that has made the news, and John Edwards had not yet admitted that he was the father of Rielle's child. I believe that Edwards confessed paternity as the book became available to the public.

Cherry Cobbler

2010-02-07T18:27:00.005-06:00

Now that I live alone, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to prepare food in small quantities, and how to do it with real food and not fake processed food. I love to find simple comfort foods in my collection of old cookbooks. Today I tried cherry cobbler. The young people of today might not have heard about cobblers, since I don't find them in many recently published cookbooks or in restaurants. This cobbler is adapted for my one person household (although it can stretch to serve two), from the original recipe in Prairie Farmer-WLS Cook Book, centennial edition, edited by Gladys Blair (Chicago, the Prairie Press, 1941).

This cobbler is from the era of using less sugar than is used today. With sugar, less is often better than more. I think it is very good.

I must give credit to Mrs. Robertson for the cooking skills that were taught to me long ago in seventh and eighth grades. She gave me a wealth of knowledge about basic food preparation in that home ec class of long ago. I didn't know how valuable her teaching would be for me for the rest of my life. Because of her I know that cobbler dough is biscuit dough and is to be treated as such so it won't be mixed to death. I salute you, Mrs. Robertson, wherever you may be, in Sturgeon Bay or in the great banquet in the sky.

Cherry Cobbler for one or two

1 cup (approx.) canned cherries
1/2 cup cherry juice (from can)
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons flour
1/2 cup sifted flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 tablespoons butter
2 1/2 tablespoons milk (approx.)

I suggest using a baking dish that is like a loaf pan, or one of the old Corningware dishes we all got for our weddings fifty years ago, that is squarish and about 7x7 inches and holds about 1 1/2 quarts. If you lack this dish, go to the Goodwill store and buy one.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Put cherries and cherry juice in baking dish. Combine sugar and 1 1/2 tablespoons flour, and sprinkle over top. Put in oven and stir occasionally until the mixture is heated, about as long as it takes to mix up the dough that goes on top. (This recipe pre-dates microwave ovens, so I don't suggest using one.)

Mix together the 1/2 cup of sifted flour, baking powder, sugar and salt. Cut in butter until it resembles pie crust dough. Add milk gradually until soft dough is formed. Do not stir excessively. Roll out dough 1/3 inch thick and place on hot cherry mixture. If dough is too wet to roll, as happened to me, drop pieces of dough on top of cherry mixture to cover most of it.

Bake at 425 degrees for 30 minutes. Serve plain or topped with whipped cream. (Commercial whipped topping didn't exist in 1941, either.)

Eddy's Birthday

2010-01-16T18:06:00.006-06:00

Today is my brother’s 70th birthday. Happy birthday, Eddy.

What is there to say about my big brother? He helped to make me what I am today. For example, he is the loving brother who, in childhood in the 1940s at the cottage, called in to me while I was in the outhouse (lovingly called the Orchid Room), “There’s a spider in your hair!”

Eddy always cared about David and me. He taught us the meaning of the naughty words we shouldn’t know or say. He also told me not to mention this to our parents. When we were new to Sturgeon Bay, I was in 5th grade and he was in 6th grade. He hit me a lot to show his love. I would have gladly sold him to the first bidder then, but everyone can see that I simply didn’t understand him. By the time I was in 6th grade and he had new boxing gloves, we finally had a match and I beat him. He improved after that. In dear old Sturgeon Bay High School, he made sure to make fun of every boyfriend I acquired. The most memorable was Bill Swan, who he called the Great White Bird. It’s obvious that Eddy really cared. He managed to keep his own love life under wraps.

Somehow we all grew up. Eddy miraculously got a college degree. Then he was an officer in Korea during the Vietnam War, which gave him better survival chances than some who went to Vietnam. He came home and gave his life to our radio station, WDOR, and became manager when our father almost retired. That is, Father retired and continued to go to work every day. Eddy was able to manage family issues then and now. We waited a long time, and he finally got married at age 37 (didn’t rush into it) to Mary Lou, who has been a great spouse for him. He became stepdad to John and Liz, and then Danny came along. No, he’s not the dog, he’s Eddy’s and Mary Lou’s son. After Eddy, David and I inherited the Allen stock in the radio station, Eddy continued to steer that ship as President of the corporation and general manager. During lulls, he goes bowling.

Hail to you, Eddy. I expect some good words on my birthday.

Reasons to Have a Cat

2010-01-14T10:48:00.003-06:00

I brought home a cute, kittenish seven-month-old kitty from the humane society last March. I was feeling somewhat lonely, so I replaced my deceased husband with her. She was very cute, so I named her Sasha after Sasha Obama, who is another cute girl.

Yoicks and hoity toity, did I ever get fooled. Some not-so-cute behavior emerged. Her nickname now is Horrible Hepzibah, after a naughty girl in a kids’ book I used to read to my children. So, to justify my ongoing relationship with this cat, I am presenting my reasons to keep my cat, who still is cute most of the time. She has never been affectionate, but she tolerates me while trying to rule the household.

Reasons to Have a Cat:
1. Sasha is something to love in my one person home. Except when she is biting. I still prefer my children and grandchildren.
2. A cat is a companion. Sasha is very friendly when she wants something, which usually is food or water. See reason number one above. When niceness doesn’t work, biting comes next.
3. A cat can be playful and amusing to watch…except when she is running across me when I am trying to sleep. Usually in the dark the watching is minimal.
4. Cats require less care than dogs. There is no need to walk Sasha or take her outside for bathroom breaks. She is great with the litterbox. She leaves her toys in it and occasionally paves the floor with litter.
5. Cats have few dietary needs. Cat food works quite well. Well, she doesn’t always agree. She jumps up onto the table when I eat. When she puts her nose near my plate, the squirt bottle sends her away. Daily I remove her from the table at mealtime.
6. Cats are quiet most of the time. They don’t bark. On the other hand, Sasha meows loudly when she is attacking her toys. It lets me know that she is still normal.
7. Cats with claws will destroy fabric covered furniture. This isn’t a reason to keep the cat. It’s a reason to clip the claws. It’s good to have old furniture. A scratching post helps, too, but not much.
8. Occasionally a cat will behave as if she loves you, but mostly she loves herself. Sasha can be loveable.

Sasha is my third and most challenging cat. She is the only one who has lived with just one person since I acquired her. All our cats were rescued from other circumstances. The first, Monster, was born with several others immediately after my daughter rescued her mother from a roof outside her apartment many years ago, and we brought her home when she was old enough. Technically she was daughter Mary’s cat until Mary grew up and left home. The second, Elvis, arrived as a young cat in our yard in Seymour and stayed until I invited him into the house. Both of these cats stayed with us for many years.

I have a book that helps with Sasha’s ongoing training. It’s called Good Cats, Bad Habits: the Complete A-to-Z Guide For When Your Cat Misbehaves, by Alice Rhea. It has shown me that undesirable behavior can be changed, and that some cats are a lot worse than my cat.

Christmas Wish List 2009

2009-12-19T10:45:00.003-06:00

This is my Christmas wish list. I mean Christmas, not the euphemistic "holiday" that seem to be in vogue. The Freedom From Religion Foundation may be in Madison, but it isn't in my heart.

I would like to enjoy peace on earth somewhere besides on a greeting card. That means that President Obama should end our two wars and bring home all the people involved in them, including the military, private contractors and Blackwater. It means that the various factions in the world should stop arguing and fighting. I believe that peace is not achieved by war. Peace is a condition in which national and self actualization are possible because people are working freely for the good of all. Cessation of military violence is not the definition of peace. Women and various minorities should be greated with respect.

I would like to see the recession end and world economies flourish. In the US, I would like to see everyone have an adequate income. Corporations should bring manufacturing jobs home, and people in India should not be the people to tell us how to run our home technologies when Americans can do it. Financial institutions should operate in the public interest. I understand that these ideas are not the backbone of capitalism, but I believe that capitalism should not be ruling American decision making.

I would like to see in the US a medical care delivery system that benefits people. It should be available to everyone affordably, and it should deliver quality care to all effectively and efficiently. The system should recognize that Standard of Care might not be the only way to provide the best outcomes. The people in our national government should vote in favor of this, whether it is government or privatly operated.

Related to this, I would like to see our pharmaceutical companies operate in the public interest. It is ok to operate at a profit, but not necessarily for a profit. Drugs that do harm along with good, and drugs that do more harm than good, should be advertised as such, truthfully, if advertised at all. Drugs should be affordable. Doctors should spend enough time with patients to understand their situations and, when possible, give lifestyle advice along with advice on pharmaceutical solutions. We need to have unbiased medical studies. There seems to be a lot of deception in the name of profit.

I would like to see compassion and truth in food systems. Our food producers should provide food that is nutritious and not packed with harmful chemicals. Unhealthful foods abound, and their advertising recommends eating them; this needs to be turned around. News stories repeatedly tell us that junk food makes people fat and sick. It makes sense to be locavores, to eat food that is grown nearby, or at least in the United States. In many stores, people do not know where food comes from because labels do not tell them. Factory farms need to treat animals humanely and fed them their natural diet rather than compensating by filling them with antibiotics after the factory diet makes them sick. Those antibiotics in meat and dairy products are passed on to people.

I would like to see less environmental damage so that our descendants can enjoy our beautiful earth. We can learn to live without oil (with some help from science), and we can reduce pollution. Our standard of living should not destroy the earth.

I would like to see fluoride removed from American water supplies. I have read and believe that fluoride interferes with thyroid function. There is plenty of fluoride in toothpaste and some mouthwashes. We don't need to dose the whole population.

I think that all this is more than Santa Claus can handle.

Poetry Corner

2009-12-08T11:00:00.002-06:00

Here is more about culinary enjoyment, by Kathy Whitt...

Cookies

Mix. Bake. Smell. Eat.

Butter. Sugar. Flour. Sweet.

Stir. Mix. Shape. Smile.

Delicious. Unhealthy. Enjoy for a while.

Nut Tarts

2009-11-29T17:12:00.004-06:00

Now that everyone is anticipating the gustatory delights of the Christmas season, and the resulting corpulence, here is the recipe for my world famous nut tarts. I got it from a spiral bound booklet published without date or copyright in the 1960s, called The Electric Company Christmas Cooky Book. It came from the Wisconsin Electric Power Company in Milwaukee. I picked it up during the year of my residence there. These tarts are very good and easy to make.

Nut Tarts

3 ounces cream cheese
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon melted butter
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/8 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup coarsely chopped pecans

Blend room temperature cheese, butter and flour; chill for 1 hour. Divide into 24 equal parts; shape each part into a small ball. Press onto bottom and 1/2 inch up the side of small buttered (2 inch) muffin cups; chill. Blend remaining ingredients; place one teaspoonful of mixure in each pastry shell. Bake at 325 degrees for 25 minutes. Makes 2 dozen small tarts.

Commentary on News

2009-11-20T11:16:00.005-06:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091120/ap_on_en_tv/us_winfrey_show_ending

Here is the announcement of the end of the Oprah show and the show's history. It's big news on the national reporting scene. While the end of Oprah's program is worth noticing, I question the amount of hype it is getting. We are in an age when entertainment is news.

Oprah, the queen of talk, is very influential, possibly the most influential American woman of our times. She has brought attention to many important issues and causes. She has done it on her program, in contrast to lackluster reporting of similar issues on television newscasts. Maybe talk shows are becoming blurred with newscasts and commentaries. I watch news commentaries on the Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Countdown, the Rachel Maddow Show, Bill Moyers Journal, and others. I do not watch or listen to the Fox network or Rush Limbaugh. These programs are expressions of impacts and editorial conclusions about what is happening. In some cases they are satirical and humorous. In some cases they are the only news programs that some people watch or listen to.

CNN seems to continue to report straight news, along with the nightly newscasts and NPR. This week we are hearing some actual news, such as action on health insurance reform, uproar over recommendations on mammograms, and Obama's deliberation about what to do with our unpopular wars. We heard about a boy who made news by refusing to say the pledge of allegiance in school because he said that homosexuals do not enjoy "liberty and justice for all." Then I heard Stephen Colbert reciting his rewritten pledge of texting to the flag, a satirical twist on human interest stories.

Our nation has ongoing editorializing overtly through the importance given to various events, and we have editorializing by omission. When we spent months seeing and hearing about the death of Michael Jackson, the king of pop, and days enjoying the balloon boy, we undoubtedly missed some other newsworthy issues. As a nation, we love entertainment over content. If that is what we are getting, I am glad to have the intelligent satire of the Daily Show and Stephen Colbert.

The Great Emergence

2009-10-22T14:32:00.004-05:00

The Great Emergence, by Phyllis Tickle

Here is a book written for Christians, mostly North American protestants, that examines history in the churches and the world to explain the big changes that are happening in North American Protestantism. Tickle is a church historian and Episcopalian. She covers the historical causes of the Great Reformation, then what she calls the Great Emergence that is happening now. She says that every 500 years the church has a big rummage sale that cleans it out as part of major change. She gives credit to communications changes for today’s situation, along with Freud, Jung, the automobile, and much more. The book is short but filled with content. She mentions Roman Catholicism and European churches in passing, but does not dwell on them.

Tickle demonstrates that changes in religion are part of changes in the world. She points out that the question of where authority lies is at the heart of the Reformation and today’s church issues. It’s not hard to read and will help us to understand what’s going on.

Library Editorial

2009-10-20T14:44:00.001-05:00

Rob Rogers - Yahoo! News

This editorial cartoon is a commentary about libraries and the economy. The Edgerton Public Library, where I last worked, has reduced its hours while having a beautiful new building. I hope the library board will reconsider and restore the service time. But then I don't expect pigs to fly soon either.

Politics of Medical Care

2009-10-15T15:21:00.003-05:00

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/editorial/article_e3c4aa9f-0976-524e-b0c9-4676f0630094.html

The senate has a long way to go to get a reasonable "health" care bill. Feingold is right. This isn't about health, and sort of is about medical care, and mostly is about profits continuing for the insurance companies.

Scat, by Carl Hiaasen

2009-09-30T16:08:00.003-05:00

Scat, by Carl Hiaasen

Here is a book for everyone. Carl Hiaasen has given the world another funny but serious story about crazy people and respect for the environment. It’s a great story. This one is for teenagers, so it is minus the vulgarity of his books for adults, and it is just as good. You will like this book if you are an adult. Like Hiaasen’s other books, this one has an easy-to-digest message about protecting Florida’s natural environment.

Nick and Marta are the two students who are concerned about their very unpopular biology teacher, who doesn’t return from the school’s field trip to the nearby swamp after the swamp is set afire. They set out to do detective work to get to the real truth about their teacher. They find her doing an environmentally good thing, they save the boy who is being framed for setting the fire, they get involved with typical Hiaasen crazy guys (substitute teacher, student’s father, and the swamp man), the oil speculators get caught setting up an illegal drilling operation in the swamp, and everything ends up ok. Oh, and there are a couple of panthers. That’s how scat enters the story.

Hiaasen’s characters are well developed. Even the crazies are believable. The reader cares about the good people and cringes at the actions of the bad people.

Scat received a starred review from School Library Journal. That review and one from Booklist are on the Amazon.com website.

CBS News Poll Comments

2009-09-28T13:24:00.003-05:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090928/ap_on_re_us/us_tv60_minutes_vanity_fair_poll_2
CBS News recently conducted a 60 Minutes-Vanity Fair Poll. How could they have forgotten to ask me what I think? Here is my commentary.

It shouldn’t surprise me that Walmart is the institution that best symbolizes America today. It won over Google, Microsoft, the NFL and banking. I am wondering if there were some other choices, even though everyone seems to crowd into the nearest Walmart store except my son who takes Walmart’s ethics very seriously. I am wondering how many people voted for the Christian churches, or McDonald’s. The answer to this survey question says a lot about American economic thinking on the local level.

Should the US tax the richest Americans by at least fifty percent? Only fifty percent of the respondents said yes. What’s wrong with us? If I remember my American history correctly, when the income tax was put into place, the idea was to have it graduated according to ability to pay. The people with the money are running the government, so they make it sound as if taxing them without regard for their financial largesse is a burden on them. This question applies to taxing people for their purchases, too, I think. Of course there should be a large sales tax on their yachts and Porsches. It’s not that I want these things. It is that they are examples of American greed.

The luxury people hate to sacrifice in tough economic times turns out to be dining out, according to the poll. Television talking heads say that many people eat most or all their meals in various eating places. If people can’t afford to eat in restaurants, they will have to learn to cook and maybe find the grocery stores that no longer are near their homes. Construction workers would go back to work designing functional kitchens for the homes of people who suddenly need to use them. It could be good for the stomach and the economy. The losers here would be the people in urban areas who can not get to stores other than convenience stores.

Fighting obesity among users of fast food chains is interesting. The paragraph above might be one solution. Dining out seems to be a luxury. The biggest (pun intended) response was to put scales in the eateries. I suspect that the people who eat there would be the last ones to get onto the scales. I suggest that one way to lessen obesity is to avoid the fast food chains.

People said it is much worse for politicians to take bribes than to have extramarital affairs. I agree. The sins of the spirit (i.e., ethics, etc.) are worse than the sins of the flesh. However, I sympathize with the plight of Elizabeth Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Jenny Sanford and Eleanor Roosevelt.

When will Obama bring the troops out of Afghanistan? Probably in time for the next presidential campaign, but maybe in time for the mid-term elections. I believe the people are becoming cynical. It’s likely to be that way. Where is change we can believe in? This is a war we can’t believe in.

Here comes pop culture. Who is the man with whom to trade places for a week? I think I could trade places with George W. Bush for a week and enjoy life on the ranch in Texas, doing nothing except visiting with Laura, Mom and Poppy.
The top responses were Barack Obama, Tom Brady and Bruce Springsteen. Obama has the hardest job in the world and lives with constant barbs against him for his race and his actions. Tom Brady is a professional football player. Who would want to be pounded physically into a life of disability at a young age, even for a week? (He's not Brett Favre, after all.) Bruce Springsteen is a more reasonable choice, but not for me. My father and my husband were celebrities, although on a small scale. Forget it.

Top responses for the women with whom to trade places were Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Angelina Jolie, and Beyonce. What? Not Sarah Palin? Not Oprah? Certainly not Lynn Cheney. I could try Barbara Walters or Rachel Maddow.

Maybe all this explains why CBS news didn’t call me to ask these questions.

George McGovern on health care reform

2009-09-25T19:45:00.003-05:00

This newspaper article by former Sen. George McGovern is very good. Needless to say, I agree with it. McGovern favors Medicare for all. He points out that the idea is having trouble with congress because the powerful insurance lobby is "too powerful to resist."
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/guest/article_255d23c6-a2f2-11de-bcb1-001cc4c03286.html

In my opinion, as long as insurance companies call the shots, universal access to medical care is not likely to happen.

Meditation on Aging Plants and People

2009-09-23T15:59:00.001-05:00

It’s time to watch the seasons change along the Ice Age Trail and other places. Today the formerly green grasses are yellow and brown, and most of the flowers have faded. Some yellow goldenrod persists, along with different varieties of daisy-like flowers and some purple asters. The berry bush leaves are becoming red. The berries are long gone. Good bye to the riots of July colors.

Today I walked from county PD to the soccer park in Verona, the part of the Ice Age Trail nearest my home. I have enjoyed watching the spring turn to summer, and now the summer turning to fall. The panoramic view shows it off well.

It’s cool and humid after yesterday’s three-plus inch rainfall. Today we have clouds but no rain.

There is a parallel of this with my class reunion last weekend. We graduated fifty years ago. The beauties and studs were there, and some were long past their prime. Others persisted in health and vigor. When asked how they were, some of them counted off their diseases. One said she is dating and having a great time. She said the same thing fifty years ago. We have more widows now, and more replaced knees. I was glad to see them all, just as I was glad to walk among fading plantlife on the prairie.

Cat update

2009-09-01T16:25:00.003-05:00

It's a great day for my cat Sasha. Not only did she have her first birthday in August, but also today she overcame her jumping disability and jumped up onto the kitchen counter in one direct leap. Then after I congratulated her, she did it again. I understand that most cats jump onto many surfaces, but before today Sasha only got to counter level by first jumping onto a stool or something else halfway up.

It's not that I want her on my kitchen counter. It's just that I have wondered what was wrong. Daughter Mary suggested that she has a problem with depth perception, and that might be it. She had no trouble making the jump today. Maybe she spent the last six months calculating it.

Julie and Julia

2009-08-25T21:13:00.001-05:00

Today I saw the movie Julia and Julia. I rarely go to movies, so it wasn’t just something to do. I liked the movie. No sex and violence. Positive messages of achievement delivered by people who actually love each other. That must make it a chick movie. The draw for me was that it is about Julia Child.

The short Isthmus review gives a taste of what the movie is like: “Julie (Amy Adams) cooks her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, while, in a parallel story, Child herself (Meryl Streep) finds her vocation as a chef. Adams is an irritant, but Streep’s half is irresistible.” I didn’t find Adams irritating, and I found Streep very like Julia Child as I remembered her. The movie is based on two related true stories.

The matinee show was sparsely attended by women and one man.

Health Care

2009-08-17T14:39:00.003-05:00

It isn't health care any more. It's medical insurance.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090817/pl_nm/us_usa_healthcare.

I agree with a quote from this story: "Leaving private insurance companies the job of controlling the costs of healthcare is like making a pyromaniac the fire chief." --Rep. Anthony Weiner, Democrat, New York.

This isn't change we can believe in.

Blackberries Again

2009-08-08T16:20:00.002-05:00

The wild blackberry season continues. With rain yesterday and this morning, plenty of newly ripe berries are on the bushes. That’s right. I was out there picking again. Since the blackberry pie is gone, I looked for another interesting way to eat blackberries.

Yesterday’s batch of berries went into a dessert I found in a cookbook and modified due to quantity, substitute thickener due to not stocking arrowroot, and my jellybag being jettisoned about twenty years ago. I discovered this new way to use blackberries in Rodale’s Basic Natural Foods Cookbook, edited by Charles Gerras (New York, MJF Books, 1984). I made it yesterday while it was raining. When it rains for a long time in summer, it’s time to cook.

I found the dessert as presented not sweet enough even for my not so sweet standards, so when eating it, I stirred a small amount of additional sugar into it. That made it quite palatable. This morning I tried a new way to improve it. I stirred what was left first and then folded some Cool Whip topping into it, which made it very good. I don’t know about its keeping qualities, since I ate it on the spot. I noticed that a small amount was enough to satisfy me. I don't stand behind Cook Whip as a nutritious product, but used it anyway.

Don’t get excited about the jellybag part. A satisfactory result comes with straining the cooked berries with a colander, and then sending the resulting juice through a finer strainer to get rid of the seeds that made it through the colander. If you want pure, uncloudy juice, find your jellybag. It’s not difficult to make this, especially if you have time on your hands.

Crimson Classic
(including my revisions)

2 cups fresh red fruit (I used blackberries)
1 ¾ cups water
1/3 cup honey
2 ½ tablespoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Combine fruit and water in a stainless steel or enameled 2 or 3 quart saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 20 minutes. Strain juice through a muslin cloth or bag, or use a colander and strainer. Combine honey and cornstarch with a small amount of cooled berry juice. Gradually add juice, stirring to combine. Cook over low heat until thickened and clear, stirring almost constantly. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Pour into a bowl and chill. Serve with whipped cream or whipped topping.

Tomorrow I’ll think of another way to eat blackberries. I’m not ready to make jelly yet.

Blackberries

2009-08-06T21:43:00.002-05:00

It’s wild blackberry season. Not everywhere, but where I walk. Every day I see hundreds of them. I can’t pick them all. Fortunately, other people have been picking them, too. So much abundance! I have been picking blackberries for several days. Today I shared some with my neighbor Liz.

There’s nothing quite like the sweet shot of berry flavor in my mouth when I toss a half dozen in. The walk stops and the picking begins. The sun warms the berries and they are delicious. Front teeth chewing only, please, or the seeds will occupy all the barely accessible spaces throughout the back teeth.

Daughters Dori and Mary were here for the weekend, so Dori and I went berry picking Sunday morning. We came back with enough to make a pie, plus plenty more. She makes wonderful pies. She used the standard piecrust instructions from Better Homes and Gardens, along with the recipe for blueberry pie on the Kraft Minute Tapioca box. As she said, blueberry is close enough. And it was.

Blueberry Pie Using Blackberries

4 cups fruit
¼ cup Minute tapioca
1 cup sugar

Mix fruit, tapioca, and sugar in bowl. Let stand 15 minutes. Line a 9-inch pie plate with pie crust. Fill with fruit mixture. Dot with 1 tablespoon butter. Cover with top crust. Seal and flute edge. Cut several slits in crust. Bake in preheated 400 degree oven 45 to 50 minutes or until juices form bubbles that burst slowly. Cool.

Thanks to Minute Tapioca for printing the recipe on the box.

A Walk on the Hills

2009-08-04T10:40:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I had a breezy enjoyable walk along the Military Ridge State Trail, starting in Verona. It’s a good flat former rail bed, so one can walk for a long time without a lot of exertion. Today it was the hilly walk from home to and through the Prairie Ridge Conservation Area. Yesterday the constant breeze modified the effects of the humidity. Today there was no noticeable wind. I thought I had started out early enough to avoid the perspiratory (I think I just invented a word!) (sweaty?) effects of the humidity. No such luck. It was an enjoyable walk anyway.

The way to it goes up the hill on Raymond Road, past the Channel 3 property, left on Muirfield Road and into the little park on the hill. The grass trail behind it then goes through the hilly terrain. The illegal burn there in the spring probably helped the prairie flowers and grasses. They look and smell wonderful.

Walking outside the urban buildup is restorative to the soul. Remember the 23rd Psalm, “He restoreth my soul.” The colorful, abundantly alive country spaces remind us that we don’t own ourselves or the environments we inhabit. When we use them, we can enjoy a little bit of heaven while God restores us.

Wisconsin Library Censorship Issue on CNN

2009-07-22T13:12:00.004-05:00

It's big time for censorship issues at the West Bend Public Library. When CNN reports on it, it has to be big.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/22/wisconsin.book.row/index.html

Libraries are responsive and responsible to their publics, and it is not unusual for people to push strongly for the kind of materials to which they think their children should not be exposed. These people often believe that their opinions are shared by everyone. As this situation shows, it isn't so. Solutions that appear reasonable to some seem like censorship to others.

As a former library director, I saw parents with varying points of view on what is acceptable for children of any age. Libraries usually do their best to present balanced views. With fiction for teens, often demand drives collection development, as it does with television viewing or Internet usage. There's a lot more sexual content and pornography available to everyone on the Internet than one will find in the library.

My sympathy goes to Michael Tyree, Director of the library at West Bend, and the library board there. It's not fun when the library is attacked.

Walter Cronkite

2009-07-21T14:48:00.003-05:00

Walter Cronkite died a few days ago. He was a great broadcast journalist. Michael Jackson died almost a month ago. He was a great entertainer. Cronkite got some well deserved publicity, but not nearly as much as Jackson. It continues to puzzle me that people prefer entertainers to great people, especially entertainers who seem bizarre.

The Capital Times has this commentary on Cronkite.
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/458999

Cronkite was called the most trusted man in America. "Journalism is what we need to make democracy work," he was quoted in the article.

Maria Shriver Answers Questions.

2009-07-20T16:59:00.001-05:00

Many of us know about Maria Shriver as first lady of California, respected former television journalist and member of the very political Kennedy family. She also is a sensitive author of books for children. Some of us push aside books by celebrities as likely to be of poor quality, published only because the author is famous. Other adults have no interest in reading books for children. I suggest that people take a look at these. They are good.

What’s Heaven? (1999) And What’s Happening to Grandpa? (2004). Here are two books by Maria Shriver for children that are totally about family love. They were born from Shriver’s family experiences of death and Alzheimer’s disease. Most of us know the stories of her family’s deaths and illnesses. Here we see these universal experiences explained simply and lovingly, with softly focused pastel illustrations by Sandra Speidel.

Shriver said in an interview recently that she was concerned that as a child she had questions, and children today have questions, so she wrote books that address them at the level of young children. As a Catholic, she stays non-denominational and focuses on uncomplicated concepts of heaven in one book, and dementia in the other.

It’s ok for adults to read kids’ books, for themselves, or to their children or grandchildren. These get to the point, are strong statements of love in families, and they are short. They are in print, available in online bookstores and area libraries.

Potato Chips

2009-07-15T14:29:00.001-05:00

Crunch!: a History of the Great American Potato Chip, by Dick Burhans. Terrace Books, a trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.

Before I started this book, I hadn’t eaten many potato chips and thought they were pretty much alike. I learned otherwise as I read this book. The potato chip origin, mythology and business are all in it. It starts and ends with kettle chips, and spends time on the potato chip wars, where Frito-Lay emerged victorious over the national market. I thought the first half of the book could have been done in ten pages, but didn’t see the second half that way. Who would have known there was so much in making and processing potato chips? Fat is explored here, too, with different fats producing different chip tastes and textures. If you want saturated fat (lard), or trans fats, or vegetable oils, they are available, but not all in the same chip.

A small amount of space is devoted to potato chip nutrition, but potato chip devotees are quoted as saying that if people want nutritious snacks, they aren’t likely to eat potato chips anyway. The small localized chip companies apparently are having some success with chips that aren’t uniform like the national brands, and flavors abound. It’s not your grandmother’s potato chip any more, even if it’s made in a kettle again.

Now I am eating potato chips again and having some appreciation for the uniqueness of the different brands. They’re not all alike.

Food and Memories

2009-07-05T19:52:00.000-05:00

Food connects us with memories of people. When I think of some people, I think of the foods they brought into the lives of my brothers and me. Here are some memorable foods and their people in my life.

Cambric tea. What? That was the name of the sugar-water I often sipped with my childhood neighbor, Roberta Brown, on her back porch in Park Ridge. Her mother warmed it up and called it cambric tea. We were pretty young. She was afraid to come to our house because she was afraid of Omar, our St. Bernard. We played dolls and colored in our coloring books for several years.

Chocolate chip cookies and date bread. Who could forget Sweetie Pie’s cookies that awaited us whenever we visited her or she visited us? Sweetie Pie was my maternal grandmother. Her cookies were very good, and the memory probably makes them better. Once when we were older children, she tried store cookie dough on us, but we caught her forging her stellar product. She went back to the originals. She also was famous for date bread. Where would we have been without it?

Pinwheel cookies and chocolate pudding. Delicious. These were Grandma Allen’s specialties. Who could not love them and her? She baked a lot of other things for us, too. When we spent weekends with her in Oak Park, she told us we ate like birds, meaning we didn’t eat enough to satisfy her. She gave us old fashioned cooking. Aunt Lina lived with her after Grandpa died, and I remember Aunt Lina chasing brother Eddy around the house trying to kiss him.

The food memories abound with Father. When he liked a food, he loved it and proclaimed how good it was. He praised cauliflower until I decided it must be good even though I didn’t like it. Father also was fond of beef brains There was no mad cow disease then. He would bring them home from Fritz Ripp’s meat market and fry them immediately with enthusiasm, regardless of what really was on the menu. He brought home a jar of dried grasshoppers once.

At Christmastime we were required to eat lutfisk, which Father cooked; he carried on this tradition for many years. He is the only person I know who liked it. I had to make the horseradish sauce. It was a kind of bonding with him. He also made glogg for three days on the back of the stove during the Christmas season. He was even enthusiastic about dog food, although he didn’t eat it; he simply thought our dogs were lucky to have such good food.

Father’s big claim to fame was the Door County fish boil. He embraced this Door County tradition whole heartedly. When the parents entertained, it often meant having a fish boil outside. My brothers and I were his assistants, so we know how to do it, too. He entertained Governor Warren Knowles with a fish boil in our yard along the bay.

Mother had the good sense to let him do his thing with food. She was the person who cooked normal food for us. She was famous for her recipe program on WDOR, which is probably the longest running radio program in Wisconsin history. It went from 1951, when the station went on the air, to mid 2005, shortly before her death. She was the convenience food queen. She told other people how to cook.

White sauce and muffins. Accolades for these go to Mrs. Robertson, my home economics teacher in 7th and 8th grade. Without her I never would have learned to cook or sew. I think white sauce is the one thing everyone should know how to make. It is flexible enough to work in sauces of all kinds. With cheese melted into it, we had a lot of macaroni and cheese after I was a mother. Mrs. Robertson’s muffin recipe was very good, too. It wasn’t sweet cake like muffins of today.

amazing church news

2009-07-04T10:11:00.002-05:00

It must be a new era if the Vatican actually praises John Calvin.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090703/lf_afp/vaticanreligionprotestantcalvin

It's true that Calvin had a powerful influence on Christianity, especially in the United States. The pilgrims were Calvinists, if I remember history correctly. And I like to quote Fr. Samter, who used to say that Plymouth Rock should have landed on the pilgrims instead of the other way around.

A Walk in the Prairie

2009-07-03T17:46:00.001-05:00

It’s July on the prairie. It’s beautiful. At Governor Nelson State Park the blanket of white, yellow and purple flowers among the green grasses is beautiful. A walk through it is like a walk through heaven. The work of prairie restoration looks like a great success.

It was a great day in the state park. I had the unusual opportunity of observing a pair of sandhill cranes among the grasses from about forty feet away. They didn’t fly away. One sat down among the grasses and became invisible to me. The other ignored me. I loved it.

The beach on Lake Mendota was populated by plenty of children with their accompanying adults. The lake draws kids. A few people were working on their tans.

The weather was perfect, somewhere near eighty degrees. It was mostly cloudy. The humidity was just high enough to bring up the scents of the grasses and flowers. The wild black raspberries were just ripening. I ate a few, without pondering the question of legality of picking anything in a state park. That’s the only time the mosquitoes appeared. Were they guarding the raspberries, or just lurking there in the shade?

With 4th of July fireworks expected tonight, I prefer the prairie.

Hugs and Quiches

2009-06-30T14:56:00.002-05:00

Quiche is good on a summer day. It’s a choice for ladies’ day out at the local eatery. I enjoyed a very good quiche at the bookstore in Milton about a year ago. (Yes, bookstores and quiche are good combinations.) Quiche is easy to make at home.

What is a quiche? Here it is from the Wiktionary. For anyone who is confused, the Wiktionary is a companion to the Wikipedia. Did you think it might be a dictionary?
"quiche (plural quiches)
A pie made primarily of eggs and cream in a pastry crust. Other ingredients such as chopped meat or vegetables are often added to the eggs before the quiche is baked. "

So much more is left to be said. Quiche is very wonderful. It can almost melt in one’s mouth. It is a pie, a custard, and a way to use eggs creatively. As a pie or custard it isn’t sweet. As a way to use eggs, it is delicious, and after the egg nutrition controversy of a few years ago, probably nutritious. Yes, it’s full of cholesterol, but steak is too. For more on the cholesterol controversy, and it is a controversy, go to the Internet.

I really like the following quiche. I prefer to omit the crust due to my bias against white flour, and sometimes I reduce it to two-thirds of the recipe. Here I present it as Better Homes and Gardens gives it. Please note that it requires no exotic ingredients, just ingredients most of us already have at home.

Choose-a-Flavor Quiche (serves 6)

Pastry for single-crust pie
3 beaten eggs
1 ½ cups milk
¼ cup sliced green onions
¼ teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
Dash ground nutmeg
¾ cup chopped cooked chicken, crabmeat or ham
1 ½ cups shredded Swiss, cheddar, Monterey Jack or Havarti cheese (6 ounces)
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

Oven 450 degrees.

Prepare pastry for single-crust pie. [or buy one]
Line the unpricked pastry shell with a double thickness of heavy-duty foil. Bake in a 450 degree oven for 5 minutes. Remove foil. Bake for 5 to 7 minutes more or till pastry is nearly done. Remove from the oven. Reduce oven temperature to 325 degrees.

Meanwhile, in a bowl stir together eggs, milk, onion, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Stir in chicken, crabmeat or ham. Toss together shredded cheese and flour. Add to egg mixture. Mix well.

Pour egg mixture into hot pastry shell. Bake in the 325 degree oven for 35 to 40 minutes or till a knife inserted near the center comes out clean. If necessary, cover edge of crust with foil to prevent over-browning. Let stand for 10 minutes.

From Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. Des Moines, IA, Meredith Corporation, 1989.

I omitted the Quiche Lorraine variation and the Individual Quiche Casseroles at the end of the original recipe. The library has the book. Go and read it.

Political Feeding Frenzy

2009-06-25T09:52:00.002-05:00

The most amazing but not surprising feeding frenzy is now going on about Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina. He disappeared to Argentina to continue an affair with a woman there who is not his wife. The media people appear to be thrilled and can’t stop talking about it.

Harry Smith commented this morning on television, “Ho hum.” I agree with him.

I make two points here: (1) The ongoing news reporting about some very personal aspects of his indiscretion is being overdone, possibly at the expense of some other important news; (2) politicians have personal lives in addition to political lives, and in the US they seem to get intertwined, but I say let’s let them get on with their political lives.

I never heard of Sanford before yesterday, and I don’t care if he is a Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian. I have some sympathy for his wife after seeing the text of his romantic emails to the other woman. Maybe he should have remembered that email can be read by the world. Unfortunately, last night Keith Olbermann on MSNBC appeared to thoroughly enjoy showing this email peep show to the world. That was bad taste.

An interesting interpretation of the news about Sanford and others is in this morning’s Yahoo News. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_philandering_politicians_analysis

Here is what the article pointed out after naming plenty of political names (quoted from the article):

"There's also a clue in the kind of people drawn to politics.
These are men who love themselves deeply, need to be recognized and relish approval. These are men who adore getting praise and who often are surrounded by swarms of sycophants. These are men who, in some cases, need to exercise power and sometimes can become drunk from it. These are men who think the rules don't apply to them and who think they're untouchable.
As leaders, these are also the type of men who are likely to break promises, manipulate and cut corners. They probably are big risk-takers. And they're prone to thinking of themselves first."

So what else is news in the world of politics besides sex? Let’s get on with it.

anniversary

2009-06-23T19:07:00.002-05:00

Today is Rick's and my 47th wedding anniversary. It feels kind of strange and not celebratable with him gone. We never celebrated it much even when he was alive. Oh, well...

Island Report

2009-06-22T13:27:00.008-05:00

I am vacationing at Washington Island. It’s great to be able to stay as long as I want to. The weather has been warm with occasional clouds. Somewhat like life. The lake water is several inches higher than it has been for several years, almost up to the shore. Some of us remember where the shore ought to be. Thanks to Gordon’s North Star Realty for the photo of the cottage.

I arrived Friday in time to take myself out for fish at Karly’s. I greeted Tim on behalf of Eddy. I visited with Ray and Barbara Hansen after finishing my dinner, and met one of their sons. Until now I had met only Dan. One thing about Washington Island is that everyone knows everyone.

Saturday I mowed the lawn. The grass was a foot high over the plumbing mound. I wished that Danny had mowed it last weekend when he was here. The old push power mower isn’t very efficient in high grass. It also gives new meaning to the words Heavy Metal. I’m not very efficient in tall grass, either. I am thinking that I should get a weed whacker for some not very level areas.

Sunday I went to the Lutheran Church and then had lunch with Phyllis Ellefson and Peg Sullivan at K.K. Fiske. Phyllis and Peg eat lunch every Sunday and invited me to come with them. The sermon was a Powerpoint report on the parish’s trip to New Orleans, where the attendees helped build houses with Habitat for Humanity. Those people who sweat here when it gets up to eighty degrees were very hot there where it was in the nineties and very humid.

Sunday afternoon I visited the Art and Nature Center, viewed the annual art exhibit, and visited with Laura Waldron, who told me about her daughter’s eating disorder. Their list of programs for kids isn’t created yet.

Of course I have been walking. The daisies, columbine, orange and yellow hawkweed and buttercups are blooming. A few wild strawberries are ready to eat, but most aren’t ripe yet. Spring came late this year. I found two stalks of wild asparagus. That seems to be late also. The poison ivy is doing well. The insects are thriving, also, especially the mosquitoes. Four deer were observed today.

Tonight Bread and Water, the restaurant across the road from Mann’s Store, is having a Thai dinner, and I plan to take part. They had one last Monday and ran out of food, so their suggestion is to get there early.

That’s Washington Island, a very enjoyable and talkative place. I have decided to return home Wednesday instead of Tuesday. Sometime soon I will report on my six day bus trip to South Dakota, which was earlier in June.

More About Hormones

2009-06-18T18:55:00.001-05:00

The medical community has been trashing Oprah Winfrey and Suzanne Somers for their support of bio-identical hormones for menopause. See a previous post on my blog for some information. Now Dr. Mercola gives it his opinion, which gives some facts to counter the opinions in the article in Newsweek.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/06/18/Media-Blast-Oprah-for-Supporting-Alternative-Medicine.aspx

It is a rather long piece but I think it is worth reading. It appears that the conventional medical people are pretty unhappy with the Oprah programs about alternative medicine. I’m with Oprah and Suzanne.

I wish they had also talked about bio-identical hormones for hypothyroidism.

Oprah, Suzanne Somers and Hormones

2009-06-06T18:00:00.003-05:00

There has been a brouhaha lately about a recent program on the Oprah Show, in which actress Suzanne Somers talked about how wonderful she feels after taking bio-identical hormones for post-menopause symptoms. This week’s Newsweek has an article that slams the show and the Somers point of view.

Now here is another commentary from Dr. Mercola’s blog. It points out that one of the writers of the anti-Somers, anti-Oprah article has authored a book on hormones (presumably not bio-identical), and Newsweek has drug companies as advertisers. It’s hard to be objective with these other interests, in my opinion.

The blog posting is here, along with a link to the Newsweek article.
http://blogs.mercola.com/sites/vitalvotes/archive/2009/06/03/Media-Blast-Oprah-for-Supporting-Alternative-Medicine.aspx

I watched the Oprah Show that is discussed in the article and blog posting, and I found it interesting. I think the Newsweek article doesn’t do justice to it; to me it had an angry tone. I need to remind myself that Newsweek and other news magazines do a lot of interpretation and commentary, and less news reporting than they once did. Suzanne Somers might even be right. In any case, she started the therapy because she felt very unwell (she documents this in her books), and now she says she feels great.

I feel fine without bio-identical menopause hormones, but I don’t condemn others for making choices that make them feel better, if they are safe.

Another Walk in the Park

2009-06-04T15:38:00.001-05:00

Yesterday the Ice Age Trail. Today Elver Park. It’s a great time to be walking, with seventy-degree temperatures.

Elver Park has beautiful blossoms at this time of year. The flowering crabs are finished, as are the invasive garlic mustard blossoms that promise many more in the future. The black raspberry blossoms are turning into baby berries. Other blossoms have taken their turn.

Today Elver Park has two floral experiences. The park has two hills of woods separated by a lower grassy area that contains recreational spaces. At this time of year the interesting parts of the park are in the woods. Each side is different. As I walked through the woods at the north end, I found more wild geraniums than one could ever hope to see scattered through the shady pathway. It was very beautiful.

Coming out onto the grass, I looked across at the south hillside and saw a spectacular white or off-white expanse of flowering locust trees, all facing north. Lots of tall mature locust trees, going up the hillside. This hillside provides wonderful views of fall color later in the year for people who drive by on McKenna Boulevard. Today they can see the flowers.

The irony is that when I was walking up the trail on that hill, I couldn’t see any of the locust blossoms. They were all high above my head in the ceiling of greenery that is the woods.

There is plenty to enjoy on the ground, too. The bursting of green life that is everywhere except under the shady tall pines is reassuring that our planet is still regenerating itself even in our parks, with some help from the Almighty.

Orange Sauce

2009-06-01T19:56:00.001-05:00

Orange Sauce

Here is the orange sauce mentioned in the previous post…

Melt:
3 tablespoons butter.
Stir in until browned:
4 tablespoons flour
Stir in slowly:
1 1/3 cups stock (I used chicken broth)
Season with:
Salt and paprika.
Keep the sauce hot over hot water.
Shortly before serving add:
1 tablespoon grated orange rind
2/3 cup hot orange juice
2 tablespoons sherry.

The cookbook calls this orange sauce for game, but I found it very good with grilled chicken. Due to not having all ingredients on hand, I substituted the red wine in my cupboard for the sherry, and I omitted the orange rind. I also deviated by adding a few squirts of Tabasco.

The sauce is not strongly orange flavored, but has a good fruity influence.

From: Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, The Joy of Cooking (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1952). The Foreword gives background for this edition: “The first ‘Joy,’ a modest volume, was published privately in 1931….In 1936 the Bobbs-Merrill Company brought out an enlarged and revised edition of my timidly launched maiden effort and this was followed by a second enlarged and revised edition in 1943. A new edition is now before you.”

On the Patio Slab

2009-06-01T16:48:00.004-05:00

Now that it is June, we are finally having weather that sends us outside. Yesterday I walked six miles on the Military Ridge State Trail. This afternoon I spent an hour sitting on the slab that the condo builders decreed was sufficient as an outdoor space. No humidity-induced discomfort, few insects, a bit of breeze. A cloudy day provided little sunshine. Very good.

I watched the gophers and chipmunks scampering among the boulders of their in-ground condo that hold up the terrain between our condo buildings. A few gopher holes are near my patio, so we are providing underground housing for the new generation. Rabbits live in our yard, as do birds.

While I was enjoying the local wildlife, I was looking through one of my four editions of The Joy of Cooking. Today’s selection, a revision of the 1931 edition, was published in 1952. In 1952 people cooked with real food. The real food included a section about many kinds of sauces made with real ingredients, and a small selection of sauces made from canned ingredients. I decided to try an orange sauce on the chicken I planned to have tonight. This part of the chapter went on to present recipes for fruits with meats. I must admit that I haven’t spent my life trying apples stuffed with sauerkraut, baked cranberries made with fresh cranberries, fried bananas, or boiled kumquats.

Then I looked at salads. It began with a commentary about a scene in a medieval play, and a quote from Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop, both about salad, but more about salad culture than about how to make salad. Author Rombauer lamented the acceptance of “ready-made salad dressing.” After a page and a half of commentary, she got to the business of making salad. Some of us remember commercial salad dressings even in 1952.

There is a lot more in The Joy of Cooking, and it has changed over the years. I still love the old cookbooks. Somehow the activity of small rodents and the fun of reading an old cookbook went together on the patio. Rachael Ray, eat your heart out.

Memorial Day and Others

2009-05-26T11:15:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was Memorial Day. The national holiday exists as a way to formally remember dead members of the American armed forces of all wars. The New York Times Almanac says that it honors soldiers fallen in battle, dating from the civil war. In real life it honors dead people even if they survived the wars.

This holiday has become a time to wave flags, have parades, decorate graves, and, yes, honor our military dead, whether dead from battle or other causes. I am glad that the city of Madison honored Rick as a veteran of the Korean war, along with others who served in the military, although I did not go to the ceremony. I did stop to visit the graves of my parents and grandmother in Sturgeon Bay.

Since I was on the road yesterday with the radio tuned to my favorite radio station (WDOR), I listened to a program that gave rise to the thought that maybe some of us are mixing the national holiday with religious sentiment. The program, Heroes, was a well performed musical and spoken tribute to some people who did good things in their lives and were, therefore, heroes. Most of the program was music from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Not surprisingly, the program was produced in Salt Lake City.

I enjoyed the music but was a bit troubled about the question of blurring separation of church and state in honor of this holiday. They sang America the Beautiful and Amazing Grace, along with some others. One of the Heroes was someone who became a pastor or minister.

It’s interesting to me that Memorial Day, in some places, has religious overtones while being a national, not religious, holiday. And vice versa. So much for separation of church and state.

We blur the line for other national holidays, most notably Thanksgiving Day, when we give thanks for plenty of food and other things. Some churches have Thanksgiving Day services, even though it is a national holiday that remembers the early settlers surviving their colonization and bringing in their first harvest. The mythology brings in some happy Indians who help celebrate. This day is a day of prayer and feasting in celebration mostly about how wonderful our early settlers were to give us this bountiful nation. The native Americans may have a different view of this day.

I think the most pointless of our national days is St. Patrick’s Day. It is religious, political and social all in one. St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland. Somehow the entire United States has adopted St. Patrick, with Irish stew, green clothes, green beer, green rivers, and parades. To me it makes little sense except in church. The second most pointless day is Groundhog Day. Who really cares about the myth about the weather? It's all fun. Fun is ok, but should we have a holiday for it?

Some holidays are Christian but have secular expressions. Christmas and Easter are both religious and secular. Just think about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Do rabbits lay colored eggs? Even the President does Easter with an egg hunt annually on the White House lawn.

A little more than a week ago we had Armed Forces Day, the third Saturday of May. I didn’t notice anyone celebrating that. And National Maritime Day was May 22. Missed that one, too. National Teacher Day was the Tuesday of the first full week in May, May 12. We could honor teachers by giving better funding to education for all ages. Of course we all celebrated Mother’s Day May 10, a day that Rick called a Hallmark holiday because it increased greeting card business.

There are others. The mythology just hasn’t caught up with me yet.

Trouble in the Neighborhood

2009-05-20T13:26:00.001-05:00

Here’s news about my neighborhood, or areas near my address: http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=25931&sid=904d8a1d00ebaaf0294d1461ac1c21e2.

I have seen the kids, but not heard the shots. I volunteer at the Meadowridge library but wasn’t there for the shooting. I have seen the police standing around the shopping center regularly after school. That’s near my neighborhood. At the other end of my neighborhood, off McKenna Blvd., I haven’t seen or heard much, but my bike was stolen from our locked condo garage in one of two breakins last year. I got the bike back, thanks to reporting it stolen and the police following up. They said it probably was kids from nearby, but they hadn’t been able to catch them. There had been other breakins.

Is this part of Madison any more or less safe than other parts of the city, or other communities? I also saw stuff like this while at at my library job in Edgerton. There seems to be widespread parental/babysitter disregard for what some kids are doing. I think the new neighborhood center at the Meadowood shopping center is a step in the right direction. I love the kids but not what they are doing.

Reasonable Medical Care For All?

2009-05-14T22:46:00.003-05:00

http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/451131

The Capitol Times and YouTube comment: the hearings on medical care for Americans have excluded people who want single payer care while welcoming the for profit medical industry. Is this Change We Can Believe In?

Read on....

http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/letters/450710

Here is another example of how the American system of “health” insurance fails people. If they can't afford the insurance, they can have dire consequences.

Branding

2009-05-01T15:29:00.003-05:00

These are logos. How many can you identify?

Branding is everywhere in the business and nonprofit world. In addition to visual logos, branding has long included catchy slogans to remind everyone that businesses are here to serve you, er, make money by helping you remember them.

Below is today’s quiz. How many of these slogans can you identify with the correct businesses?

1. I’m lovin’ it.

2. Always low prices. Save money, live better.

3. I’m thinkin’ Arby’s.

4. Eat fresh.

5. My life, my style, my store.

6. What can brown do for you?

7. Save big money at Menard’s.

8. Finger lickin’ good.

9. Live like you mean it.

10. Shop the pig.

Answers: (1) McDonald’s. (2) Walmart, 2 slogans. (3) Arby’s. duh. (4)Subway. (5) Shopko. (6) UPS United Parcel Service. (7) Menard’s. duh again. (8) KFC Kentucky Fried Chicken. (9) Wisconsin Tourism. (10) Piggly Wiggly.

These slogans are effective. Sometimes we remember these little phrases for many years. I remember from the past, “There’s a Ford in your future”, “The gift that keeps on giving” (was it Westinghouse?), “It cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth” (toothpaste), “You deserve a break today” (McDonald’s), “For those who think young”(Pepsi), and many more.

Some slogans tell us something about the product, such as “Save big money” and “Always low prices.” They suggest that the products are affordable. Others appeal to the emotions, such as “Finger lickin’ good” and “I’m lovin’ it.” Still others tell you something about the business, such as “Eat fresh,” and “My life, my style, my store.” Then there are some odd ones that must work but I don’t think they tell us much. What do we get from “What can brown do for you” other than that they use the brown color as part of branding? “Live like you mean it” is the new Wisconsin tourism slogan, and I think they could have said something better, like “Escape to Wisconsin,” the old slogan.

Our family radio station, WDOR in Sturgeon Bay (www.wdor.com), has had its slogans over the years. It was “the voice of cherryland”, and “the big sound”. Now it is “The heart of the Door Peninsula.”

It’s time for a new look and sound statement for the station. The sailboat has been around for a long time. The station specializes in local information and sports. In our changing world, slogans come and go. Ours will, too. “Don’t you love radio? Don’t you wish everybody did?” That sounds a lot like Dial soap.

My cat

2009-04-25T14:07:00.005-05:00

This is my cat Sasha. She is named after Sasha Obama, who is a cute kid, too. Sasha Obama also is dark colored like my cat but doesn't have stripes.

Reading for Fun

2009-04-20T12:14:00.001-05:00

Why is it a sin to read for fun?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/193475

This unbelievable title goes with an article in the April 20 Newsweek. It is unbelievable because as a librarian I know that millions of people read for fun, and it’s ok.

The article is about reading for pleasure as seen through various quoted people, most notably Jodi Picoult and her followers. Picoult has had sixteen books published, and she has a substantial fan base. The article says that fiction reading is increasing among young adults, the 18 to 24 crowd, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. The article goes on to say, “…the news was reported by literary blogs and arts journals with throat-clearing about what kinds of books these young adults are reading.”

The article says the judgment is, “All books are good for you…some are just better than others.” It calls this the ‘gateway drug’ theory of literature, that people will naturally want to read harder, deeper texts after starting with enjoyable fiction. It further points out that Picoult knows she won’t win a Pulitzer Prize because her writing is popular.

Are we a nation of puritanical readers? When did pleasure reading become something to be ashamed about? Novels have become mainstream. Many are actually about something. This literary form has been around for a long time. Jane Austen fans will remember her book from a couple of hundred years ago, Northanger Abbey, which is in part a commentary on the gothic novels that were popular among young women of her day.

Gateway drug? Really, it’s time to put aside the negative judgments about today’s novels. It’s ok to read Jodi Picoult, Danielle Steel and vampire novels. I’m not so sure about hard core porn fiction. One decade’s bad taste can become respected literature later. I have trouble believing that Harry Potter will lead to the reading of pornography.

Vanilla Ice Cream

2009-04-07T15:41:00.001-05:00

Here is another goodie from a cookbook written in a different era. The ice cream tastes good, although you need to beat it a lot. It doesn’t require the ice cream freezer that most ice cream recipes of today require.

My comments about it: Hardly anyone knows about top milk any more because it is what you get at the top of the bottle of unhomogenized whole milk. If you buy unhomogenized milk, do what I did: shake it up in the bottle and then measure it. When it says use a refrigerator dessert tray, no one knows what these are, either, because they pre-date the freezers that everyone now has; I used a small 7x9 inch baking pan. Where it says freeze with control dial set at coldest, just put it into your freezer. I think 20-25 minutes is not long enough to freeze the ice cream at the end. I let it freeze overnight.

Unfortunately, the white corn syrup that we buy now contains some high fructose corn syrup in addition to the original corn syrup. I used it anyway. The recipe has a variant spelling for syrup, which is why I typed it sirup.

Economy Ice Cream

2 eggs
6 tablespoons sugar
4 tablespoons white corn sirup
1 cup top milk -- I used whole milk
1 cup light cream -- I used heavy (whipping) cream
1 teaspoon vanilla

Beat egg yolks, sugar and corn sirup until thick and lemon colored. Add milk, cream, flavoring. Pour into refrigerator dessert tray. Freeze until firm with control dial set at coldest. Remove to chilled bowl, add unbeaten egg whites, and beat until fluffy. Return to freeze chest for 20 to 25 minutes or until frozen.

This recipe has variations for chocolate, maplenut, peanut brittle, peach and strawberry.

From The Betty Furness Westinghouse Cook Book, prepared under the direction of Julia Kiene (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954). Betty Furness was an actress and consumer advocate a long time ago. I remember seeing Betty Furness regularly on the Today Show many years ago. According to the preface in this very good book, she wasn’t much of a cook, so she teamed up with Julia Kiene of Westinghouse, who could cook.

Things My Father Taught Me -- the Top Ten

2009-03-30T15:44:00.004-05:00

Yesterday was my father’s birthday. He would be 99 years old. When we were kids, we called him Poppy (not to be confused with Poppy Bush). He was extremely influential in my life and one of my heroes. So in honor of his birthday, here’s to Ed Allen, Jr., who showed that the American dream can really happen. Well, maybe not any more, but in the last century. He taught me:

1. Enjoy the outdoors. He showed us how to love ice skating in winter, being in the woods in summer, and outdoor cooking before charcoal and gas grills were commonplace. He loved our cottage properties first at Clark’s Lake and later at Washington Island. He had a series of boats over the years. He and I used to eat our lunch on the water during the summer when I was a teenager working at WDOR.

2. Be good to animals. He loved Omar the St. Bernard and Clancy the springer spaniel. He buried them with their rugs on the WDOR property, where trees are growing over them. He also kept some pheasants in a cage in the attic above our garage on the bay shore. He had ongoing wars with squirrels that tried to help themselves to the goodies in his bird feeders, but he didn’t hurt them. He just tried to thwart them.

3. All the interesting reading is found outside school. He raised me on cartoons in The New Yorker and stories by Damon Runyon. Dick, Jane and Baby Sally couldn’t compete with that. Neither could anything else we had to read in school until I discovered at the University that there was a lot of good stuff out there. Quite possibly this is a commentary on the teaching we received in school.

4. Save some of your money. He gave us Savings Bonds before we knew what they were. He encouraged us to contribute to our savings accounts. He was a product of the Great Depression, so he didn’t waste much.

5. You can do anything if you aspire to it, and you should excel in what you do. He started with just desire and made it big in Chicago broadcasting, then left NBC in 1951 to start his own radio station and other allied businesses. He started radio stations in Sturgeon Bay and Manitowoc, both still in existence, and with Mother started a very successful Door County guidebook that still is published under other ownership. He started the Cherry Train, a tour train that still operates on Washington Island after more than thirty years. He tried other entrepreneurial enterprises. He knew what he wanted to do and how to get there. He told us that we could do it, too. He encouraged me to draw and paint and praised my artwork to others. He wanted me to be the best artist in Door County. I didn’t accomplish that.

6. Develop and use your talent. He raised us on the parable of the talents, and he meant it. He never understood people who had little motivation. He used his speaking talent to rise in NBC radio and then operate his own radio business.

7. Don’t compromise your integrity. He was honest with his family, friends, business acquaintances and employees. He expected integrity from them, too. I never asked him how he came to grips with the Watergate affair and President Nixon’s resignation, since he had great respect for Nixon. It had to be difficult. The picture of the two of them shaking hands didn’t stay on the wall.

8. Family matters. Honor your family and care for them when they need it. We moved in with Grandma Allen in Oak Park for a few months when we were between houses and Grandpa had died. Father and Mother brought both their mothers to live in Sturgeon Bay as they aged, so we would all be near each other as needed. We all drove Grandma Allen and Aunt Lina to church on Sundays for quite a few years, although we went to a different church. He also loved Mother and they had a very good marriage.

9. Have a relationship with God and mean it. He was strong on attitude about going to church. He had difficulty with our little Episcopal Church in Sturgeon Bay after we moved there, and he took us to several other churches in hope of finding a good match with his belief system. In the end he stayed with the Episcopal Church. He wasn’t about to put up with a faith that he didn’t believe. He criticized some people for going to church for business reasons.

10. Influence the political process. Being in the radio business was a help, because he scheduled ongoing political events and discussions for broadcast. One of my early memories of WDOR was the broadcast of the Army-McCarthy hearings with Senator Joe McCarthy. Regular reports from Senator Proxmire were broadcast for years. Other broadcasts gave people the opportunity to follow politics. He served as Door County Republican Chairman for several years. While I am not a Republican, he taught me that the political process is important.

Chocolate Chip Bars

2009-03-28T14:19:00.002-05:00

My tasting panel in my test kitchen, Laura and Ian, said they did not like these bars with nuts in them. I think the nuts make them really good. You don’t have to use nuts. The recipe may be doubled.

Chocolate Chip Bars

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

¾ cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1/3 cup butter
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 egg, slightly beaten
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup chopped nuts
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Stir flour, baking powder and salt together. Melt butter. Add brown sugar, egg and vanilla, then dry ingredients. Mix until combined. Last add nuts and chocolate chips. Put in greased 8 inch square baking pan. Bake about 25 minutes. Cut when cool.

Age Quiz Benefits Drug Companies

2009-03-26T10:25:00.001-05:00

Today’s New York Times has a story about an age quiz. The link to the story is http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/technology/internet/26privacy.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=online%20age%20quiz&st=cse. The article begins: “Americans yearn to be young. So it is little wonder that RealAge, which promises to help shave years off your age, has become one of the most popular tests on the Internet. “

What will we fall for next? This is a brilliant marketing scheme that benefits the drug companies. People like us unwittingly take the age quiz without knowing that our answers are being used. The drug companies look at people’s answers and market drugs to the people, based on their answers.

By doing promotions like this, I believe that the drug companies spread anxiety about real or imagined medical conditions. People are interested in how long they will live. According to the article, Dr. Mehmet Oz, featured regularly on the Oprah Show, is on the payroll of RealAge, so people are likely to think the quiz must be okay.

Do I think this is good for people? No. I think this is another way for the drug companies to make money. I believe that we already are bombarded with advertising from drug companies without this, too, especially since it appears that the people who take the age test do not know that their answers will be used by the drug companies. It looks like deception to me.

I believe that we are being overdosed and overprescribed now. I say beware.

Fluoridation News and Opinion

2009-03-23T12:41:00.005-05:00

Fluoridation in municipal water supplies is in the news. Why do I care? It affects me. I do not support dosing the entire population with a substance that is available elsewhere than in the water supply for people who want it. And I question whether government should be putting anything in the water supply that could have a negative effect on the entire population.

The community of Poynette made the news in the last few days because of its controversial decision to stop fluoridating its municipal water last summer. Some people object to that decision. An article by Bill Lueders in the March 20, 2009, Isthmus, points out that over time people have contacted the city of Madison questioning its fluoridation. According to the article, Madison did a study in January, and concluded that fluoridation is good and “there is no harm in fluoridating our water supply.” The article quotes Tom Heikkinen, Water Utility general manager on this, who says, “This is a public policy decision that should be made by elected officials.” The study’s conclusion is that the practice is safe. I believe they are referring to fluoride’s safety in its role in slowing down tooth decay. Heikkinen doesn’t say what he means by “safe” in the article.

Reports say that fluoride taken in excess is poison. Fluoride intake can be excessive due to being ingested in various ways, such as city water, toothpaste, soda made with fluoridated water, and swimming in pools filled with fluoridated water. Fluoride has been reported to cause hip fractures. My concern is the mostly unreported reports about fluoride and impairment of thyroid functioning. They don’t seem to be talking about that.

An authority on the subject of fluoride and thyroid function is Mary Shomon, author of the website http://thyroid.about.com/ , and author of Living Well With Hypothyroidism: What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You...That You Need to Know (HarperResource, 2005), and other books. In the section of the Living Well book, she says, “Fluoride, a common additive to water supplies, a frequent ingredient in toothpaste, and a common treatment given by dentists, is likely one of the reasons behind increased rates of hypothyroidism—and other health concerns—in the United States." (p. 271). She also says, “Some experts and researchers believe that fluoride is in part the reason for near-epidemic levels of hypothyroidism in the United States. Fluoride has been used for decades as an effective anti-thyroid medication to treat hyperthyroidism, and was frequently an effective treatment at levels below the current 'optimal' intake of 1 mg/day. This is due to the ability of fluoride to mimic the action of thyroid-stimulating hormone. The more fluoride circulating, the more the body thinks there is TSH circulating, which shuts down the thyroid, making it less active." (p. 273).

Enter the blogosphere. The Daily Page, the online presence of Isthmus, has an ongoing conversation that I find very interesting, with various points of view from intelligent to absurd. It is at http://www.thedailypage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=45560. The discussion points to some sources that apparently the Madison Water Utility people did not consider. I offer them as informational, not necessarily the last word on the issue. Try http://www.fluoridenews.blogspot.com/, called Fluoride News Tracker; or http://www.fluorideaction.net/.

Flouridation may be legal, and safety is a big question. Another question is whether government should be permitting water to be adulterated with fluoride, or, as has been proposed elsewhere, statin drugs to control cholesterol whether needed or not. What is to stop us from putting other substances into the water, such as drugs to pacify us into not acting on civic issues, or anything else that might control society by chemical means?

food production news

2009-03-19T13:57:00.002-05:00

Here is a news story about inspections of food production plants. It appears that it is remotely possible that we may have some improvement. Can we hope?
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2009-03-18-kellogg-food-safety-reform_N.htm

Things My Mother Taught Me -- the Top Ten

2009-03-18T14:19:00.004-05:00

This list begins with early childhood and progresses with my age. In some cases I didn’t follow her advice very well if at all.

1. Don’t push your little brother down the stairs.
My mother stopped me just in time.

2. Don’t go out in the street alone.
Again, this is about my little brother. He was hit by a car when he was very small. He lived. We were glad.

3. Be polite.
My mother required me to recite a special saying when she thought I was being loud, rude and obnoxious. I recited it obnoxiously. It was not effective. I give her credit. She tried.

4. Take care of your own pets.
Mother thought pets were ok, but she made it clear that she would not take care of them. My turtles died rather quickly, and my goldfish lasted quite a while. I remember our tadpole cemetery next to the back porch on Iowa Street. I didn’t have to take care of the dogs because they belonged to everyone in the family.

5. Do well in school.
School was easy for me so this was no problem, but it was important. As I remember it, my mother bribed my brother to get good grades, but I had no such incentive. Was that fair? Later in my life at the University, getting good grades became a problem because I discovered a really great social life.

6. Cook with convenience foods.
Mother was the convenience food queen. She brought home the first boxed dehydrated mashed potatoes to ever come off the assembly line. She fed us canned beef stew and even canned chicken pies before frozen chicken pot pies were available. She fed us frozen vegetables before the neighbors knew they existed. Mother had a double identity. At work she was broadcasting a cooking show, and at home she was giving us early forms of junk food. Needless to say, she lived to be 92.

7. Use labor saving devices as soon as they are on the market.
Mother was not fond of household chores, so she was ahead of everyone else in dealing with them. She had early models of the automatic washer, dryer, chest freezer, electric broiler, steam iron, microwave oven, and more. Her chest freezer dated back to the 1940s. Look at item number 8 to see who used all these things.

8. Have someone clean your house so you will have time to do more interesting things.
The cleaning lady came along with all those labor saving devices. We didn’t have enough money to pay for the twelve-cent movie matinee, but Mother had the cleaning lady. In those days most moms stayed at home and did their own cleaning, so having the cleaning lady was a good idea. Our mother went to work every day and stayed there a long time. She had some inconsistencies. I remember that Mother decided that I needed to learn to iron my clothes when I was in fifth grade. That was not a pleasant day. I agree with her that many activities are more interesting and fulfilling than cleaning house.

9. Honor and stay connected to your family.
I am very glad that we all love each other. As long as we had parents, we gathered with them as often as we could, and everyone came home to them for Christmas. What a crowd.

10. Follow your dreams.
Mother was a teacher, model, writer, radio personality, community supporter, wife and mother. Teaching and modeling didn’t last long, and she cut short her fiction writing career to jump into the radio business. She wrote radio scripts in the days of radio drama. She had what was probably the longest running radio program in Wisconsin history, a five minute recipe program, five days a week from 1951 to 2005. She created and published a Door County guidebook for many years. She invented the House and Garden Walk in Sturgeon Bay, to benefit the Hospital Auxiliary. The auxiliary gave her two life memberships. How long did they expect her to live? She was a leader among women without being a feminist. She didn’t try to make her children into something we were not. She taught us by example that we can live the lives we choose.

Medical Care Delivery

2009-03-13T17:22:00.001-05:00

Is it all in our heads? Are our assumptions about sickness and going to the doctor based on sound science, or something else? Maybe not all of them, but maybe some of them are. What is good health?

Here’s a book that offers something more than the usual approach to the current health care delivery system. Dr. Nortin Hadler expresses little patience with many of the sacred cows of traditional and nontraditional medicine, and offers plenty of evidence for his view that Americans are being overtested and overtreated. It’s called Worried Sick: a Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

Hadler is a rheumatologist whose field is musculo-skeletal medicine. He is concerned with what he calls overmedicalization, which is policy based on common assumptions perpetrated by doctors and the popular press. Hadler shows that many treatment assumptions result in unneeded interventions and drugs that offer little improvement in patient conditions. He calls it Type II Medical Malpractice – “doctors doing the unnecessary, albeit very well.” This compares with Type I Medical Malpractice, “which is doctors doing the necessary unacceptably poorly.”

Hadler offers a social construction for illness, based on his research into socio-economic status of peoples, not just individuals. And his evidence points to causes of illness in many people due to their situations in society, their families and workplaces. He differentiates illness from disease. He carefully presents his view that people go to the doctor with pains or conditions that would be tolerable if they were in different socio-economic positions. He says in his introduction, and spends the next hundred pages explaining, “Once I educate you, you will be able to go before your physician with such complaints as ‘Doc, I feel awful. Could it be in my mind?’ or ‘Doc, my back is killing me. I can’t figure out why I can’t cope with this episode.’”

His point is to teach well people how to navigate the health delivery system critically. He understands that there are circumstances that require one to go directly to the doctor in order to survive, but that is not the focus of this book. He deals with doctoring for heart disease, stroke, blood pressure and blood sugar issues, cholesterol screening and treatment, aging, metabolic syndrome and more. For example, about metabolic syndrome, he says, “Do you really think that 43 percent of Americans age sixty to sixty-nine should be medicalized as having the Metabolic Syndrome? Could it be that this definition [reported in the book] is nonsense?” Hadler offers a list of treatments for various conditions that he says do not qualify as effective because their benefits are barely measurable.

He gives his solution to the problem. He advocates overcoming “misdistribution and the inconsistencies in the quality of care,” to prevent sickness and heal when prevention fails. He says that first medical treatment must be effective, then of quality, since quality treatment is good only when it helps someone. He wants “rational, not rationed, health care.” He has a plan to finance and carry out his proposition in the United States. It sounds different from what others are saying.

This book is extensively documented and based on much research. Hadler is professor of medicine and microbiology/immunology, and has written other books, including The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System, which is on the same subject.

Cat

2009-03-11T15:56:00.000-05:00

Life is better with a pet. With all the hype these days about Barbie’s 50th anniversary, I think a furry cat is much better than a plastic doll. Is there a humane society for Barbie dolls?

Oprah featured her new, very cute shelter cocker spaniel a few days ago. This week’s Newsweek magazine features a story about a shelter dog bringing love into a family. Animals get a chance at life thanks to the humane society.

I have a young shelter cat. She came home with me yesterday. The Dane County Humane Society (www.giveshelter.org) had her until yesterday. They call her a brown/orange tabby mix. I think God designed her coat to look like a Monet painting, with a hint of stripes. She is somewhere between kitten and cat.

There is some mystery about a pet one finds at a shelter. A shelter cat is a different kind of orphan. The mystery is the emotional baggage that comes with the cat once it goes into a home. I know some things about my new cat because she lived with a local vet for quite a while after being hit by a car. I don’t know if she has residual damage from the altercation that isn’t evident.

The Madison area has several places to find shelter animals. Some pet stores feature shelter animals from time to time. I discovered Friends of Ferals and Happy Cat in addition to the humane society. Probably there are other organizations. It all makes getting a great pet an easy event.

Move over, Barbie. Make way for a living companion.

Chocolate Musings

2009-02-26T20:59:00.002-06:00

Many people like chocolate. It is sold in many shapes and in many places. It can be dark brown, medium brown, or white. It seems to be used mostly for desserts and snacks. Sales of chocolate products have increased greatly in the last hundred years.

I regret to report that chocolate seems to have been ignored in the President’s stimulus plans for the United States. It also is un-American in that it grows in an unprocessed state on plants in other countries. There are no Hershey Bar trees even in Pennsylvania. American companies like Hershey, Mars and Ghirardelli are likely to get their cocoa beans from somewhere else. Some chocolate farms provide a living for their farmers; some don’t. So chocolate has politics.

Today it became obvious to me that my sweet tooth is not as strong as that of many people. Maybe that’s why I am still alive. I love chocolate, but not extremely sweet chocolate. My interest in broadening my taste for chocolate took me to the library, where I checked out a not-very-new book called Taste of Home’s Chocolate Lover’s Cookbook, dated 2003. After reading it and enjoying the photographs, I concluded that this book is aimed at big time sugar consumers. For example, I couldn’t imagine eating Nutty Chocolate Marshmallow Puffs,Four-Chip Fudge, S’mores Crumb Bars, or Really Rocky Road Brownies. I was surprised to learn that there are many ways to make brownies. Brownies can contain coconut, peanut butter, apricots, cherries, caramel and polka dots.

My favorite chocolate recipes are not very elaborate. They do not mainline sugar into my veins, although they are somewhat sweetened. I like dark chocolate bars with 70 percent cacao. Give me my old fashioned brownies from the 1940s, without the frosting, or a good chocolate chiffon pie from my 1953 Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. I will yield to a newer cookbook for a delicious, sweet and easy-to-make French Silk Pie. It is in the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook of 1989. Chocolate contains multitudes.

Here is the sentiment of Taste of Home’s book, which looks like a really good book to read if not actually use. At the beginning, it says, “Well, are you hungry yet? Do you feel a chocolate craving coming on? Then go ahead and get going.” If chocolate is that addictive, Mr. Obama should have addressed it in his stimulus program. It obviously is a stimulant. An alternative is to just go to the store and buy some.

A Walk in the Snow

2009-02-25T15:36:00.002-06:00

Blue sky and forty degrees today. That meant go out into the snow. The Ice Age Trail is beautiful in winter, beautiful in summer, and slushily beautiful when weather is above freezing in February. I am fortunate to have a segment of the trail on county highway PD near my home.

I was prepared for several scenarios. I took snowshoes, two pairs of boots, and one pair of walking shoes. Also one jacket that proved to be too warm. One look at the parking lot and the trail suggested that I leave the snowshoes in the car. Not enough snow. Too much snow to go without boots.

Trudging up and down hills in slush is work. It also is invigorating. Right away I saw a beautiful springer spaniel walking a man. Then, when farther uphill, I looked over the panorama of city development that is very near the trail, but far away enough to not interfere with the rural character. A small woods provided some variety. Since I didn’t want to slide downhill at the far end of the woods, I turned around and reversed my direction. I walked until the winter coat seemed superfluous. As I said, walking in slush is work.

The high grasses on the fields manifest a great number of colors; some are golden, some are more brown or more gray. It’s winter beauty that often goes unseen. Who cares about grass, especially when it is three feet tall? Apparently I do. The snow is heavy and white, with gray slush. In some places the ground is evident. That’s winter in all its variety and wonderfulness.

You don’t know what the Ice Age Trail is? Go to your favorite search engine and type Ice Age Trail and Wisconsin. Or try this: dnr.wi.gov/org/land/parks/specific/iceagetrail/. The trail is part of a national trail system, with many segments in Wisconsin.

Peanuts Recall

2009-02-20T21:01:00.002-06:00

I am thinking about peanuts. It appears that the current recall is growing day by day, to include products made with peanuts, peanut butter, and peanut paste coming from the Peanut Corporation of America. The Food and Drug Administration has issued a very long list of affected products. The number of hits in a Yahoo search is very long. Just type in Peanuts Recall.

Recalls due to food borne “bugs” like salmonella and e coli are happening often enough to cause me and others to take notice. We remember the nationwide spinach and hamburger recalls that made the news not long ago. I have read in the news sources that conventional food production by big business isn’t being inspected very often by the FDA because the FDA is underfunded and understaffed. I read that the companies that make the food products are funding the FDA at levels at least as high as or higher than the government funds it. That’s called the fox guarding the henhouse.

Where are this country’s priorities? There are now many ways to make people sick as long as people continue to eat. Once upon a time people could trust the country’s food supply and the agency that oversees it.

I know that some peanutty foods are not contaminated. I can go to the store and buy some peanut butter that is ok if I choose. Not so the nursing home residents and others in institutions. They deserve food that they can trust.

It’s not just peanuts, spinach and hamburger. I read a book some time ago, called Death by Supermarket: the Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America, by Nancy Deville. Part I is called How Factory Food Changed the Way We Lived…and Die. It was published in 2007. Mostly it is about factory, or manufactured, foods that are responsible for the high rate of American obesity, but it also points out causes of food contamination. In the context of factory farming of animals, she says, “According to CDC, each year food-borne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5000 deaths in the United States” (p. 140).

Enjoy your peanut butter.

Main Dish Hall of Fame Entree

2009-02-17T19:16:00.003-06:00

Our family voted me off the island for this dish, which they unanimously proclaimed the worst main dish they ever ate. This was when we had all five children in residence, before they grew up and never tried it again. My husband voted with them. It’s a vegetarian dish that I like. Maybe I’m the only one in the world.

This dish is a legend for unpalatability, in the opinion of my family. It’s worth immortalizing in this blog because of its bad reputation. It’s right up there with powdered milk as something worth drinking. Remember the Alka-Seltzer commercial that said, “Try it, you’ll like it. So I tried it. Thought I was gonna die.”

As I said, I actually like this. Here it is.

Oats, Tomatoes and Cheese

2 cups rolled oats
1 cup grated cheese (I use cheddar)
1 16-oz. can tomatoes
1 egg
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon marjoram

Save some cheese for the top. Mix all other ingredients in a greased casserole. Sprinkle with cheese and bake for 1 hour at 325 degrees.

Serves 3 or 4.

From Benjamin, Alice, and Corrigan, Harriett, Cooking with Conscience: a Book for People Concerned About World Hunger. Noroton, Connecticut, Vineyard Books, 1975.

Grandparents

2009-02-02T18:58:00.000-06:00

This is a shameless reminiscence.

We had three grandparents. The fourth, our maternal grandfather, died before we were born. Grandparents are valuable parts of family life. They have extra clout with Santa Claus, and they offer special relationships to their grandchildren.

Grandpa Allen drove streetcars in Chicago. He saved streetcar pins that we called buttons and gave them to us. He took us for rides in his Reo car. He told me that if he drove slowly enough, the red light at the corner would change to green. I remember him sitting in a chair asleep while being our baby sitter. He had a Swedish accent that made it hard to say my name correctly. After he retired, he got sick and died after about a year. I was eight years old.

The real star of the grandparents was Grandma Allen. She was all love, no matter what we did. Santa Claus brought gifts to her house for us even when he also came to our house. Her chocolate pudding and pinwheel cookies were the best. When we stayed overnight with her, she took us to her church and let us sit in the balcony instead of downstairs. She taught me to crochet three times, and I made a long crochet chain but that’s as far as it went. She had a cocker spaniel named Blondie, who drank coffee with her every morning, using her water dish.

Our family moved in with Grandma Allen in Oak Park after Grandpa died, and we stayed with her for several months until we moved into the duplex in Lincolnwood. After we moved to Sturgeon Bay, we moved her and Aunt Lina, her sister, to Sturgeon Bay. She was thrilled to live long enough to see her first great-grandchild, our first daughter. Grandma was a real saint. She said that dying was going to Glory.

The grandmother on the maternal side was Sweetie Pie. Apparently she preferred to be called something other than Grandma. She was pretty glamorous for her day, with various shades of red hair and stylish dresses. She gave us silver dollars when we visited her. I remember seeing her try to catch a mouse in her apartment in Rochester, MN, and catching it. Later she moved to Chicago to be near us. She worked in music stores. She then lived in Milwaukee for a while, while I was a student at UWM. Later still when she was old we moved her to Sturgeon Bay to be closer to us again.

Holidays with both grandmothers were interesting. Sweetie Pie enjoyed alcohol with my parents, while Grandma Allen was a teetotaler. Those who wanted a drink would sneak one while Grandma Allen wasn’t looking. The two grandmothers were never friends.