Bean Soup for One

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.