This article made me think of Mom

Mom was liberal to the core (in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal sense and also the anti-war sense), although she rarely talked about politics. But despite, or perhaps because of that, she despised the Kennedys. It was Aunt Mary who regularly used the term "whoremasters" in referring to politicians; but the fact is that the Kennedys (Jack, Bobby, Teddy and many of their politically involved children) really were whoremasters, as well as thorough cynics who considered themselves above the laws pertaining to ordinary people even as they loudly trumpeted their supposed love for the little people to attain and hold public offices.

Mom would have loved this article and commented on it. After which Aunt Mary would have delivered her classic line, "They're all whoremasters." Then they would have laughed together at the very best sort of joke, the bitter joke that simply states the real, though crazy, truth of things.

Ravioli and stuffed olives for a bunch of people

I mentioned the other day that Linda found Aunt Mary's recipe for a whole lot of meat ravioli after Angela and I semi-finalized the mad plan for December 19th.

Here it is:

For the Dough:
5 pounds flour
8 extra large eggs
12 oz warm water
Knead approx 20 minutes
Roll out dough into tube and cut into slices
Press slices flat and dust flour on both sides
Run through pasta machine first on 1 and then on second to last slot
Put in meat, fold over and shape

For the meat filling:
8 pounds of cooked chicken and pork total weight
1 cup bread crumbs
1 cup cheese
4 cups chicken broth
4 eggs
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tblsp salt
1 tsp garlic powder
1tsp parsley
Grind pork and chicken mixture together and fill pasta

(The recipes for the dough and filling are next to one another on a card, so I assume the meat mixture is designed to fill the amount of rolled dough that the dough recipe will produce. Assuming it's a recipe for about 200 ravioli that would mean about a half ounce of meat in each ravioli.)

On the back of the same card is a recipe for cheese filling:
1 pound of ricotta
Cheese to taste
1 egg
1/2 tsp parsley
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbl bread crumbs
Mix together and fill pasta

(Clearly the Ricotta recipe is not in proportion to the dough recipe, so my guess is that she wrote that on the back of the card for reference and it isn't meant to be used with the 5 pound dough recipe.

On the other hand Angela remembers the old time dinners consisting of fried meat ravioli, boiled meat ravioli with cheese and cinnamon, and then boiled cheese ravioli with gravy. So perhaps this is a recipe card for those occasions. But even that doesn't explain the problematic proportions since 1 pound of ricotta filling would not have made enough cheese ravioli with the sauce for the dinners for 15 or so that they used to have, even on the assumption that we had already eaten fried and white meat ravioli..

We'll learn the truth on December 19th. I'm figuring we'll do fifteen pounds of flour for dough and then fill with 16 pounds of meat and 8 pounds of cheese so as to end up with about 600 ravioli.

In addition we're going to do six times the following recipe for stuffed olives that Angela sent me so as to end up with about 450 olives:

2 1/2 lbs spanish olives (about 30 olives to the pound)
1 1/2 lbs ground veal and pork
3 eggs
1/8 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp parsley
2 tbsp romano cheese
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp garlic powder
3 tbsp bread crumb

Footballs

Foods you enjoyed as a kid never taste exactly as you remember them; but sometimes you can get pretty close.

Today we made footballs according to the by guess and by gosh method. Using the old hand cranked grinder we ground up about a pound and half of leftover turkey (both white and dark meat) along with about the same amount of cooked Swiss Chard. Then we added about an ounce or so of grated Locatelli, about a teaspoon each of salt and garlic powder, and about a half teaspoon of pepper. I mixed that all up well, Alex and I tasted it for flavor, and then I formed it into footballs about two inches in diameter at the equator. I floured, egged, and breaded those; and then deep fried them.

Excellent! We ate them with mashed potatoes, leftover turkey gravy and swiss chard saute'd with garlic.

Now the question is whether they actually were different from Mom's because she used frozen spinach and we used the last picking of Swiss Chard from the garden (leaves only - the stems are now pithy); or whether 62 year old taste buds don't work exactly the same as 10 year old ones.

Either way they were very fine indeed. A very fine way to dispose of leftover turkey without having to suffer the taste of leftover turkey.

Gnocchi or Cavatelli

I've often wondered why Mom always said she was making "cavadeellie" from leftover mashed potatoes when we were kids, since actually she was making gnocchi. Not that I knew it at the time. I don't think I ever heard the word "gnocchi" until some time in the 1970's or 1980's, when Mom, paradoxically, had started making actual cavatelli, with ricotta instead of potatoes.

Anyway, today I made gnocchi from some leftover mashed potatoes. They went down just like Mom's old cavadeelies, but not so elegantly. Mine were all shapes and sizes. It turns out to be hard to get them nice and uniform. Mom and Aunt Mary no doubt had those little mocking smiles on their faces if they were looking down this afternoon when I was struggling with that dough.

In other news: Sam and Don and I went down to Norfolk last weekend to take a tour of the Enterprise. It was good to see and walk around the old ship again, especially because, just by chance, the Ensign who served as guide for the group we joined is the Assistant First Lieutenant and thus happens to hold the same job title that I had back in the day (after I had spent a year as a Division Officer and more or less knew which end of the ship was the bow and which was the stern).

His job function is hugely different from mine since he got his commission via OCS after rising to First Class Bosun's Mate as an enlisted man, so he actually knows a lot about the management of the anchors, the mooring winches, the ship's boats and such, and he actually functions as the Ship's Chief Bosun. I was more or less the administrative assistant to the First Lieutenant, helping with paperwork that required an officer's signature and overseeing the department watch bill and duty assignments and such so the young department yeoman wouldn't be bullied too much by the petty officers. In port the job took me a couple of hours a day in the office, plus a couple of hour long walking around tours to check the various department spaces and go over stuff with the Division Officers.

Underway I was on a one in three rotation on the bridge; so the department management function was a duck in to the office and do a couple of hours of paperwork every couple of days sort of thing; and I did wandering tours of the department spaces on the way to and from bridge watches.

It was good to stand up there on the bridge and go back mentally to those heady days when the captain left the bridge and trusted me in charge out there, back when Enterprise was still "the largest warship in the history of the world," as he put it to me when he qualified me as Officer of the Deck. Heady days. The 1MC box next to the Captain's chair still connects to all those innumerable watch stations throughout the ship that could call in the middle of the night to report a problem or an emergency.

Mostly, even an actual emergency could wait on a decision for the few moments it took to call and wake up the captain in his sea cabin so you could explain the situation to him and get orders that you would merely pass along for action. But occasionally there would be an emergency that couldn't wait, one that needed orders right now; and you informed the captain after you had actions in train to put things right.

Then to, every so often there would be a merchant ship that was clearly in a privileged situation that suddenly and inexplicably changed course and put you in a situation where you had to maneuver right now to avoid a collision, and inform the captain only after you had given the necessary helm and/or engine orders, while the ship was already in process of making the unexpected change in course or speed. It was very gratifying when he merely gave you a "very well" over the phone after you had reported on what you had done, or when he came out in his bath robe, looked around and listened to what you were up to for a few minutes, or perhaps asked a couple of questions, and then quietly left the bridge to go back to his cabin.

One thing I noticed is that they've cluttered up the windows on the bridge with a whole lot of electronic equipment that was not there in 1971 and 1972. Back in those days we figured the course and speed for flight operations with a circular slide rule, and we kept track of nearby ships and did maneuvering board solutions for collision avoidance by hand on plotting sheets. They have special dedicated computers with touch screens for that stuff now.

Stuffed olives, Rebecca, Pop, the OED and knives.

Don A, the other Don A who is now down in Florida for the winter, sent me a bunch of information about stuffed olives after seeing my little taunt about the very good appetizer Rebecca made for Christmas Eve.

Rebecca said her appetizer was "stuffed olives"; but actually it was little meatballs stuffed with pitted olives. Then she proceeded to argue that her little meatball recipe was the authentic one and that my memory of the olive being on the outside of the meat filling was faulty. This article sent me by Don is one more proof that she was wrong:

http://blogs.denverpost.com/preserved/2009/04/08/ascoli-piceno/

I suppose it's not surprising that Rebecca stubbornly maintained and defended her mistaken view despite the evidence, for Grandpop L used to periodically tell a joke that went like this:

Question - What's worse than having a dead body in the living room?

Answer - Having a stubborn Marche' knocking at the door.

The implication, of course, is that Marche's in general are a stubborn lot, impossible to get rid of. And Rebecca, of course, is three-eighths Marche' by the following calculation.

Grandmom and Grandpop L were both Marche's from Ascoli Piceno, as was Grandpop A. That makes Rebecca's dad three-fourths Marche. Grandmom A was not from Ascoli Piceno - she was born "a Muro Lucano" according to her birth certificate, which is in the L side electronic picture file I sent you a couple of years ago if you had a need for the family pictures.

"A Muro Lucano" means - well perhaps that will be your homework assignment. I figured out what it means many years ago before Al Gore invented this internet thingy, with the help of a librarian, much to Mom's irritation. Find and rattle your family own skeletons if you want to.

Speaking of family skeletons, there is evidence in the family picture album of at least two instances that prove Shakespeare was very right for all the ages when he wrote the best known line in Troilus and Cressida.

Now to other matters:

It's as cold as a brass bra on a witch's tit out there, as Pop and a friend of mine from Missouri named Randy often used to say at this time of year. A very useful quote which will stay useful for a lifetime.

Pop also used to say "another year shot to hell" each year on or after New Year's Day just as he would always say "another summer shot to hell" on or just after Labor Day each year. Not that he brooded on those things. Pop was a very optimistic person, perhaps the most naturally optimistic person I've ever met. Also just after New Year's Day, regarding the cold winter, which he most definitely did not like he always used to say "we're over the hump, it's all downhill from here." Pop managed to see the light at the end of every tunnel of life earlier than anybody else could see it. And he was optimistic about that light even after it became clear that the light might be an approaching train.

Don't go through life brooding about the approaching train that's gonna get you in the end no matter what you do. Most of the time the light is actually the other end of the tunnel, and even when the light is a train you may as well meet that train in a good mood, enjoying life until the moment it gets you.

I generally make my dentist appointments for 8:20 in the morning in part because the dentist usually has on the Philly radio station that has played the Monty Python song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life at about 8:30. Life is too short to go through as a brooding mope.

In other news: Samuel came by last evening Samuel to give me and Linda a presentation on the knives he's selling. A very interesting presentation, and we bought some of his knives to complement the very fine ones Alex and Christina gave us for Christmas. After his presentaion we spent some time over coffee and discussion of David Serdaris's books and of the Oxford English Dictionary, of all things because Samuel said he was interested in books that contain interesting historical information, so I pulled out The Profession and the Madman to give to him.

The madman in the book made the best of his unfortunate situation, being in an insane asylum for life due to an unfortunate crime or two, by making himself the most prolific contributor to the OED. The professor in the book, on the other hand, spent twenty years of his life being grateful for the many contributions being made by mail by a certain fellow and didn't learn that the fellow was in an insane asylum until he decided to visit the recluse and thank him in person.

Here's a piece of advice for you younger married folks. There are a lot of things one must tolerate in life because they're impossible to avoid. And then there are other things one tolerates because of sheer foolishness. We, for instance, have been using a drawer full of annoyingly dull knives all our life because we were too foolish to buy decent knives way back when. This doesn't mean you have to spend a ton of money all at once on good knives. But it does mean you should judiciously accumulate good quality stuff in those areas of life where you can purchase something that will truly last a lifetime.

If anybody is interested in books send me an email detailing the kinds of books you like along with your mailing address. If I have a book or two or a dozen that I think you will like I'll either put it aside for you or mail it to you - media mail is very cheap. My email address is sully(mylastname) at AOL dot com.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

I got five gallons of diesel for the tractor yesterday, so I'm of a mind to wish for snow. This winter has started off well but we need more. We haven't had a really good winter for snow for a few years. Bring it on! I have plenty of wood stored up for the stove.

Now for the subject of Christmas Eve, which Rebecca reminded me of at Sam and Deb's house yesterday before she convinced me that I have to bit the bullet and yank my jammed toe back into proper alignment. . . which I may do once I get up the nerve when Linda isn't around to hear the scream. And then again, I may not. Who declared Rebecca a toe doctor to know whether I should torture myself intensively by yanking at that thing or whether I should simply leave it alone to torture me subtly and naggingly until it gives up?

Enough with the toe. It's mildly throbbing down there; but I have more important things to concern myself with, namely a rant on the general disrespect for tradition among the younger generation.

We deep fry battered vegetables and breaded fish on Christmas Eve because in the proper scheme of things, before the beginning of the decline of Western Civilization, no meat was allowed until midnight. This tradition has, of course, been corrupted for many a year by the introduction of red tomato gravy made with meat, which some barbarians insist on putting on my Spaghetti Aglio e' Olio, thus turning it into a fusion cuisine nightmare.

This practice is by no means new. It started in the 1990's, thankfully after Pop was no longer around to see it. Mom, however, was still around, and we had many a discussion about whether it should be permitted, the uneasy compromise being that we would not make the red gravy but would turn a more or less blind eye to its introduction into the house.

This year, however, Rebecca went further. She suggested that she would bring stuffed olives and I agreed to the suggestion in a moment of weakness. Thus did meat, actual meat, impossible to deny, enter the house on Christmas Eve. I agreed, of course, because stuffed olives are perhaps the finest achievement of Italian cuisine, at least in the appetizer category.

But then, when Rebecca brought what she said were stuffed olives they turned out to be olives in the middle surrounded by little meat balls. She made some claim that her dog had eaten the olives meant for stuffing, so she had to revert to pimento stuffed olives. Then she went further and claimed that putting the meat outside of the olives was actually the original Marche' recipe. Sam's Marche' cook book quickly proved that wrong; but it wasn't necessary.

My memory may have degenerated a bit over the years; but this is something impossible to get wrong. I distinctly remember Mom and Aunt Mary discussing the people who used pitted olives and the people who put the meat on the outside of the olive as they spiral cut the olives away from their pits, a fairly delicate task.

I just finished, by the way, a porchetta sandwich on a Corropolese medium kaiser roll. And I'm fairly confident you didn't. There was quite a bit of porchetta left over on New Year's Eve from that 9 pound roast I cooked; but I somehow neglected to give any of it away to the departing guests. I have five containers of it in the freezer, plus the bowl I've been finishing sandwich by sandwich since New Year's day.

Meanwhile, a large flock of starlings is flying and walking around the lawn out there even as a fifteen or so mile an our wind is whipping the 25 degree air around. It's hard to imagine just how those birds survive in this cold. Why don't they go south? They're clearly finding stuff to eat out there on the frozen ground; but wouldn't they find tastier and warmer stuff in Georgia or South Carolina where they would have warmer feet?

Sam and I talked to Al and Jas down in Florida yesterday and they were whining about the temperatures dipping into the fifties during the day. These starlings should be down in Florida annoying them.

There are, however, some small consolations for living up here in the cold. I have the woodstove roaring away in there. Sitting by it as those damned starlings freeze there little feet off because they're too stupid to fly south is one of those consolations.

In other news: Five scientists, no doubt working very hard down in Australia, where it is summer for those of you who are geographically challenged, have figured out how bees land. I was intrigued by this paragraph:

"First the scientists built a bee landing platform that could be inclined at any angle from horizontal to inverted (like a ceiling), then they trained bees to land on it and began filming."

One has to wonder whether it really took five scientists to do that; or whether a couple of those scientists were looking for an excuse to go to Austrialia and catch some rays.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091223074657.htm

Good for the Queen

This article tickled me because the picture through the train window reminded me how much Mom looked like Queen Elizabeth. There is a picture of her on the golf cart with Pop which can cause you to do a double take.

The article also interested me because of how small an entourage the Queen travels with. Our presidents have gotten to the point where they travel like God Emperors, with a cast of thousands.

A friend once told me he was in Philly when the first President Bush came down Market Street in his motorcade. He said a normal seeming fellow in a business suit spontaneously got up on one of those concrete planters or trash can holders and yelled out, "All hail the king," or something like that.

Just so! Surely it's important for the president to have good security. But is it really necessary for him to travel with the huge entourage that commonly attends him. The president is not a God Emperor. He's a fellow we elect to do a job for us for 4 years. His office and he deserve respect; but really.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1236632/Your-commuter-carriage-awaits-The-Queen-catches-train-journey-Sandringham-Christmas.html

The promised recipe for Pasta e' Fagioli and some other stuff

There is a squirrel with a kinked tail sitting in the pot of the baobab. He's been sitting there grooming that tail, looking around, occasionally licking for salt at the sides of the pot for a good fifteen minutes. When Linda came over and stood by the patio doors he froze up until she moved away. His threat recognition system ignores a giant monster sitting fifteen feet away; but it reacts to one standing ten feet away. The amount of time and careful attention devoted to studying such things by the wildlife biologists and such must be truly stupendous.

This particular squirrel has time to waste playing with his tail because the big white oak by the back door has produced a fall of acorns practically beyond all imaginings. Like all the other squirrels, he's probably glutted with acorns and already possessed of enough caches of them to last the winter. Plus he knows he can be blase' about acorns because the black walnut trees have also produced a bumper crop. The walnuts are still in their thick and nasty iodine smelling outer coats on the ground right now; but those coats will rot away and leave just the nuts in their shells, which will lie there contentedly until the squirrels get around to them; because nothing else can eat them. Those nuts are everything but squirrelproof.

But enough of that fat and lazy rodent; who better save his teeth for the walnuts and keep them off the trunk of my baobab tree. I sat down here to complete the recipe for Pasta e' Fagioli that I started a few days ago and then abandoned. I set the beans to simmering on Columbus Day before Jas came to get me for our tour of the new Wegmans and Best Buy, and then I forgot to finish the preparation - at least I forgot to finish the description of the preparation - of the meal. And I just remembered that I promised Linda L a description of the full recipe when we had dinner with her and Mark at the creole restaurant down in Royersford.

Linda L wanted that recipe even though I mentioned that my Pasta Fagiole, which used to be Mom's, and before that her Mom's and Pop's Mom's Pasta Fagiole, has nothing much in common with the recipes the restaurants use and the one that appears on the box of ditalini. Those other recipes are for a watery bean and vegetable country soup which contains some macaroni. My recipe is for a fairly thick bean and macaroni stew flavored with garlic, salt and pepper, and olive oil. Linda L told me that she had tasted my version one time; but for the life of me I can't remember when I ever served such a thing to a crowd.

We ate the finished Pasta Fagiole for dinner on Columbus Day and then again on Wednesday, I think it was Wednesday, of last week. And, of course, I ate some of it for lunch a couple of days last week also, and one time for breakfast even. If you remember, I cooked two pounds of great northern beans pretty much according to the directions on the package, except about four times longer. I did not make Pasta Fagiole out of all of those beans because that would have been enough to feed me and Linda and much of Royersford. Out of the pot that resulted from cooking all those beans I used nine cups for the recipe I made last week. And I also froze three containers, of five cups each.

So, let's get that recipe out of the way before I get off on another digression as I am sometimes wont to do. Cook two pounds of Great Northern Beans on low for several hours, stirring occasionally, until most of them have been reduced to mush. Mom used to like a greater percentage of the beans whole; but then Mom sold out to the point of using canned beans eventually. Pop liked Mom's canned bean ersatz concoction; but he preferred the more mushy bean consistency you can only achieve by simmering those beans to death and beyond. This I know because Pop used to describe how good the bean scrapings from the bottom of the pot tasted when his mother gave them to him. She, Grandmom Filomena, used to cook her beans on the big woodstove that sat in Aunt Carmella's kitchen, and may still sit in that kitchen now, ten years and more after Aunt Carmella passed away.

That stove was huge, and the iron top of it was at least a half inch thick, which I know from playing with the round cover things that were about the size of CDs only much thicker while Mom and Aunt Carmella and Aunt Tavia and sometimes Aunt Mary were having coffee and cookees at the table. You could lift those round things and then let them accidentally clang down very satisfyingly onto the stovetop with that iron tool that slotted into them until you were given another cookie and chased from that kitchen.

You only get the sort of bean curd effect on the bottom of the pot that Pop described if you cook beans until they disintegrate. Which I would remind Mom about whenever I saw her opening bean cans in her later years and I wanted to generate a sharp reaction to liven things up. Despite her immediate reaction, which usually entailed the waving of her big spoon, Mom loved that line of discussion because it inevitably led straight back to feeding families cheaply in the days when she made great pots of beans and macaroni from scratch down on Penn Street. Sometimes it even led all the way back to the story about trapping blackbirds in the back yard of 403 Walnut Street; or the story of Grandmom Angela catching the boarder not shaking the milk and using the cream on top for his morning coffee; or the story of the men sneaking into the rail yard at night to dislodge coal from the cars, so the women could go in the morning to gather it; or the story of Grandmom Angela feeding ten, or was it fifteen, or twenty, with one pound of beef and a whole lot of potatoes and greens - in the era after the blackbirds had learned to avoid her back yard.

But I see that I've done it again, digressed from providing the recipe. Cook two pounds of beans according to the package directions but much longer. About 2/3rds of the way through cooking the beans add two bulbs of garlic, the cloves peeled and more or less finely chopped, of course. Fry the garlic just a bit in about a cup or so of olive oil, to drive the hotness out of it, before adding it and the oil to the bean pot. Also add two or three level teaspoons of salt and half or maybe a whole level teaspoon of pepper. And add a 14 ounce can of tomato sauce for color. If you don't have tomato sauce you can use ketchup or diced tomatoes, but if Mom heard you say you did that the spoon would really have waved. The addition of the oil and garlic will help in keeping the beans from sticking. This is the modern age of dials to control the heat and flat ended stirring spoons with which to scrape the bottom of the pot, not the age of cooking over a wood fired stove and wooden spoons shaped pretty much like blunt sticks. We do not end with bean mush stuck to the bottom of the pot, if we're careful.

From the resulting pot of beans, oil, garlic and tomato sauce for color, remove 9/24ths of the total and mix that with about 2/3rds of a pound of Ditalini cooked to the bare minimum time suggested on the package and then almost completely drained. If the beans are especially thick drain a little less water from the ditalini. If the beans seem a bit thin drain all of the water from the ditalini. That's the recipe I made the other evening. Each of the three containers I have in the freezer contains 5/24ths of that pot. I will probably mix each with about a third of a pound of ditalini, maybe a little more.

Pop used to eat Pasta Fagiole for breakfast whenever there was some of it in the refrigerator. In later years he would sometimes be sitting there in the kitchen window when I went over there for coffee, eating beans and macaroni with that giant flat bowled tablespoon he liked for that specific purpose. We have that spoon, the one with the slightly kinked metal fatigued spot on its handle. We still occasionally use it as a serving spoon for salad, although I prefer a different spoon for that purpose.

Pasta Fagiole is perhaps the ultimate comfort food from the days when people ate cheap and hearty stuff like beans and macaroni for the comfort of a full belly; before some wiseacre thought up the term "comfort food" and thus consigned such foods to mild association with eating to assuage our neuroses.

Update: In other news, scientists have discovered a new species of web spinning spider whose females grow to be bigger than a CD. So far they haven't actually seen a live one, just dead specimens in museums and parts of recently alive ones that have fallen to the ground in the rainforests of Africa. They think the reason they haven't seen a live one in its web is that the females live in the tops of the tall trees where they don't fear most birds and lizards and other such predators on ordinary two or three or four inch in diameter spiders because they look upon them as comfort food.

The scientist who study spiders are apparently short of help. They desperately need a few assistants to climb up those trees, ignoring the trifling snakes and foot long centipedes and other biting stuff, to find those giant spiders and study them, perhaps even capture one to bring down to the ground alive. They assure me that these particular spiders do not jump on things they want to eat but rather wait patiently, camouflaged in their sturdy webs, confident that plenty of food will come to them.

Who says there are no jobs available in this economy?

Update 2: The other night, after I told the story of Lefty and the drapes which Mom always used to tell, Linda told me she had never heard Mom tell her Lefty story, which was a cautionary tale about the taking in of stray troubled souls. Jas and Kathy also seemed to have never heard that story even though Jas remembered that Lefty used to sleep on the pile of burlap bags in the back of Harry's Potato Market until he pulled the knife on Patty. Lefty had a lot, a very lot, of very hard miles on him when we knew him. Mom's story predated that. One of these days I have to tell it here, but not in connection with a food recipe.

Harry took in strays all the time. He took in the quiet and nice black guy from down at the wharf who later stole some money Harry had in the trailor for a trip South to buy watermelons, which caused Harry to buy the pistol about which Patty used to act out a very funny story. And, of course, Harry later took in Eddie Fight, who never stole anything, but who also never did even a lick of work that I ever saw. Eddie had a lot of hard miles on him also, and he could be provoked to crack us up with one of his sayings. "Smarty, eh, smarty had a party." and "Nice man, Harry, very nice man. He'll give you a leaf for a lettuce patch any day."

A day of wonder in second childhood

First off, it's impossible to find time to think undisturbed. It's about 1:00 and I just sat down to write up this day of wonder. And almost immediately that possibly winter damned little woodpecker came back and started tapping at the patio door window and shamelessly displaying to his reflection. Yesterday he woke me up, very thoughfully just before the alarm went off, by tapping on the bedroom window. All the little buddies he was playing around with last week are gone. They may already be headed south. You had better give up with the windows guy, and get your backside south. It's getting cold.

Maybe he listened to me. He's gone now so I can get back to the events so far of the day.

Jas, who is off work because of Columbus Day, called at about 9:30 to ask if I wanted to go out and play. Of course I did; so he came by after stopping at the drugstore. While I was waiting for him I started two pounds of great northern beans on low. The package directions call for simmering them only a couple of hours after soaking them overnight; but I like them mostly disintegrated for Pasta Fagiole, so those beans are still over there slow cooking.

After Jas arrived we went over to the big new playground that just opened and took a couple of hour walk through the Wegman's and then through the Best Buy which are pretty much the only stores open over there at this point. The Wegmans is enormous! And it has friendly people giving out sample snacks here and there, which the little dusty playgrounds of my first childhood did not have. And even if those old time playgrounds had had people giving out snacks they would certainly not have included samples of buttery brie on bread. Very good brie, and the nice lady insisted on giving us some even after we told her we weren't shopping but only walking around.

As we were walking down one of the aisles I heard an old woman exclaiming to her buddy about the price of the gourmet cat food she was looking at. Once we were out of earshot Jas mentioned that she probably drove ten miles to price out the cat food the way Mom and Aunt Mary used to run around to all the stores buying this here and that there. Mom and Aunt Mary never bought catfood though. Cats ate leftover people food back in those days.

Old people sure are funny. They've got all the time in the world to go around doing stuff like strolling around five acre supermarkets eating free samples and checking prices. Which reminds me, I noticed that Wegmans sells the big bottles of soda for 89 cents, which is a lot better price than prevails at Redners where the best you can do, even on sale, is a buck a bottle. Not that I would save any money by going to Wegmans to shop. The place is positively filled with enticing stuff that is not priced at 89 cents and I'm an impulse shopper even when not hungry.

There is, for instance, and olive bar that has selections you don't even see down at the cheese and olive store in the Italian Market down in Philly. I could easily spend twenty bucks at that olive bar after I save 11 cents on a bottle of Diet Mountain Dew.

And Wegmans has five kinds of caviar. Imagine that, caviar for sale right here in Collegeville. And most of that caviar isn't even expensive. Four of the caviar varieties are bargains at only $5.17 an ounce; a pretty darn good price compared to the 28 bucks and change that they want for an ounce of the one expensive variety. Caviar for poor folks. I'm sure only really rich people buy that expensive caviar. Regular guys like me and Jas would never pay that outrageous price. We would stick to the cheaper stuff.

And the produce section! What a thrill that was for two kids who worked at Harry's Potato Market back in our first childhood. That was back when we told people to please don't squeeze the tomatoes displayed under the big cardboard sign that said "FLORDIA TOMATS - 3 lbs FOR 50 (CENTS)".

I put that "CENTS" in parentheses because this darn computer doesn't have a key for the little "cents" symbol. I'll bet Wegmans has computers that have a key for the "cents" symbol; and I'll betcha dollars to donuts they have somebody who knows how to reliably spell "Florida" as well - or maybe they have a spell checker on their computers. Harry apparently didn't have a spell checker on his computer, and he didn't trouble to use me or Jas or Sam or Patty as spell checkers when he made up signs. We laughed about that Flordia sign every year for three or four years when Harry took it out each fall after the last of the local tomatoes were gone.

Harry's computer used to do other funny things. One time, for instance, he priced the figs for individual sale at far less than their bulk cost. Which didn't much matter anyway because there was a lot of shrinkage of those figs. . . a very lot of shrinkage. Harry himself liked them quite a bit, and we did too. Working at Harry's had very few perks; but one of those was eating all of the fruit you could possibly want to eat. It was accepted practice, for instance that the last watermelon off the truck simply had to be dropped, not far enough to make it mushy, but far enough to make it needful of cutting up.

But back to Wegmans. They have fruits and vegetables in their produce section that I haven't seen since I walked through the outdoor markets of Singapore and Hong Kong and Bangkok back when live monkeys were to be had in out of the way places, and not for pets. And, even forgetting about the exotic stuff, there are brussel sprouts still on the stem, about fifteen varieties of lettuce and an aisle of different types of tomatoes that has more shelf space than Harry's whole potato market. The most impressive thing is that they have all of those fruits and vegetables in both normal form for people who eat normal fruits and vegetables, and in super high priced organic form for the kind of people who turn their noses up at cheap caviar and insist on the 28 buck an ounce variety. And the milk! Don't even get me started on the milk except to say that they have at least three big milk sections scattered around that store.

Not that I had a lot of time to pay proper attention to the milk sections. As always Jas was in a hurry, just like he always was back in first childhood. Now, as then, he even wastes time in a hurry. He was always a few steps ahead of me and making me feel guilty for not moving along fast enough. So now I'm going to have to go back to Wegmans one day to see if one of their milk sections is like their produce section. At this point I can only report that it will not surprise me one bit if I find that they have goat and camel and yak milk, all in both normal and organic varieties.

More later. . . I have some stuff to do for tonight's Pasta e' Fagioli. My next post will start "After we left the Wegmans. . ." That next post will include the thrilling tale of our stroll through Best Buy and our brief stop at the big new Wawa, along with the events that led up to our visiting Dave at his little camp in the woods and then coming upon Dan, who was refueling his chainsaw, and getting his opinion of the french fries at the place we were walking to for lunch.

The great circle of life

It's the season of the fawns. Three of the cute little tykes have been gambolling oer the lawn, stretching their little legs, testing the strength of their little haunches. Their mothers move in somewhat more stately fashion.

All very picturesque and life affirming, until one of the mothers ceases to move in stately fashion and comes to just lie there with one unseeing eye staring up at the sky, proclaiming a very inconvenient truth, dead in the middle of the path behind the pond, flies gambolling around that one accusatory eye.

She was still alive the other day, that visible eye occasionally blinking, her breath shallow. She didn't seem to be suffering, unlike that other one with the hurt hoof a few years ago that somehow got himself all tangled up in the wild rose bush where he struggled and struggled. Thankfully this one died on her own, so I was spared the very unpleasant necessity of putting her out of her misery.

But she couldn't stay where she was. So I went out this morning with the tractor and dragged her to a less conspicuous spot. She's pretty well off the path through the old horse pasture, down near where the local kids dragged those rectangular clay drainage pipes and set them up as supports for benches around a firepit a few years ago. Nobody used that firepit this spring; and they certainly won't be using it this fall.

Early on, way back in 1979 or so, Mom got an introduction to the whims of the country just after she and Pop moved into Colwell's old house. Colwell's dog found a deer carcass in the woods and had a grand old time dragging ribs and long bones and big pieces of hide around the lawns. Unlike Pop, Mom was not amused. She wanted me to go down in the marsh and bury the carcass; but by the time the dog got to dragging pieces around there really wasn't much of a carcass to bury.

The good news is that there aren't any big dogs around to tear this new carcass apart and drag pieces of it all over the place; the bad news is that if something doesn't tear it apart it's going to raise quite a stink. I won't be walking the lower loop of the path through the old horse pasture until the cold of winter sets in. Other walkers will just have to take their chances.

I was born under a waning gibbous moon, Pop was at a Phillies game

I was born 22,303 days ago under a waning gibbous moon. Pop was at a Phillies game, watching the Phillies beat the Pirates 2 to 1. Mercury and Uranus were in Taurus, Venus was in Gemini, Mars was in Leo, Jupiter was in Sagittarius, Saturn was in Cancer and Neptune was in Virgo. The Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 190. The Dow has done pretty well since the world was graced with my presence.

Mom always said that Pop was at a Phillies game when I was born, which means I was born in the morning of May 28th since the Phillies played the Pittsburgh Pirates at home on the evening of May 27th. If Pop wasn't available to take her to the hospital she had to have gone there on the 27th. Pop would have been home to take Mom to the hospital on the 28th, because the Phillies were away that day playing the New York Giants.

Here's a great website where you can put in your birth date and find out what phase of the moon you were born under. If you put in "planets" and then your birth date it will tell you what signs of the zodiac they were in on that date. Same thing if you put in "Dow Jones Average" and then your birthdate.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

The website will also do all sorts of math stuff. For instance, if you put in "x cubed + y cubed = 17" it will solve the equation for x and y, graph it, and tell you the implicit derivatives, which you may vaguely remember from near the end of the year in algebra class if you weren't daydreaming. More usefully, it will tell you the probability of drawing a full house in a five card poker hand is 1 chance in 693. Or it will tell you that the probability of drawing specifically three jacks and two aces in a five card poker hand is 1 in 108,900, although I can't imagine why you would want to know that.

Talk about neat! It will also translate Roman Numerals into regular numbers, for those pesky situations when you see a long string of Roman Numerals engraved on the cornerstone of a building and can't remember your M's and D's and X's. Additionally, if you should ever be in a position to supply the cornerstone for a building the website will translate the date into Babylonian or Mayan notation so you can carve the date in a way that will really make people nuts.

http://www17.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2021+to+Babylonian

And, talk about something that was invented too late. If you're like me you can remember Mom and Aunt Mary getting into a who's who discussion about relatives. One of them would say something like "She's your second cousin. She's Sia Gigette's sister's granddaughter," and you would be totally clueless. This site will draw you a picture of how you're related to someone if you put in things like "grandfather's sister's second cousin."

http://www17.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=grandmother%27s+brother%27s+second+cousin

Update: Alex called today to wish me a happy father's day, probably because Christina reminded him to do so, since he called on Friday evening and talked to me and Linda. Today he reported that yesterday's Tea Party up in Worcester had some interesting speeches but was a bit of a disappointment because it only drew a crowd of a couple of hundred people.

I find it amazing that there should be two hundred people in the most liberal state in the union, a state nicknamed Taxachussetts, who care about the fact that the federal government is on a spending spree that would make ten thousand drunken sailors blush. George Bush was a big disappointment in the government spending and waste department, just like his father; but Barack Obama is throwing around cash in a way not seen since the last time a ten ship carrier battle group of the Seventh Fleet pulled into Subic Bay after 65 days at sea.

We grew up gourmets and never knew it

The yuppies have discovered weeds as gourmet fare. Nine bucks a pound for dandelion! By that measure there's at least ten thousand bucks worth of valuable gourmet salad out there in the lawn right now.

It's hard to believe the author of this article in The Wall Street Journal missed Chima de Rabe. I remedied that with a comment to the article. As I write this I still have two containers of this Spring's rabes in the freezer. And, I happen to be eating a sandwich of boiled ham, rabes that I thawed the other day and a little mayonnaise on slices of Corropolese split loaf. I generally prefer this particular sandwich on a seeded football roll; but we're out of them right now. It used to make Pop crazy when he would see me putting mayonnaise on a sandwich of rabes and ham; but that's not why I still invariably do it.

Also, she specifies two changes of water for boiling Pokes. I can't imagine that Mom or Aunt Mary R did two changes of water, and I certainly never have; which may explain why there have been incidents of rapid necessary movement to the necessaries room related to the consumption of Poke Salad over the years. It's very difficult to resist the temptation to pick larger and larger and leafier and leafier shoots as one gets tired when picking Polks, which also may explain the incidents.

And, she mentions Burdock but doesn't mention that the leaves are poisonous, or at least that's what Mom believed, although the internet seems not to think so. Mom and Grandmom L only used the thick stems of the leaves which they called Cardunes and prepared by battering and deep frying. Next Spring I'm going to pick Cardunes and try to recreate that recipe. As I recall they had a unique flavor somewhat like, but only somewhat like, the battered and fried celery we do at Christmas.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124338226000356493.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

And, since I'm on the subject of food, I should mention that Linda and I ate our first Swiss Chard from the garden on Tuesday, probably the earliest that it's ever been ready for picking. We've been eating lettuce for a couple of weeks; but slugs are multiplying and ravaging it now, probably due to the very rainy weather we've been having for the past week or so.

Finally, if you are one of the few people who still actually, you know, like, read, like, books, you may find this article by Ann Kirshner in The Chronicle Review interesting. She tried out all the current modes of reading and listening to Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit to see which she liked better. I can only wish she had gone further into the issue of the differences between sight reading and audio since I find them such distinctly different experiences.

Most interesting paragraph - "Readers are passionate and opinionated advocates for their preferred formats. Flip announced that she reads only hardcovers; end of conversation. "I get it," said Bill, watching me read on the iPhone: "You like your books little." Bob is no Luddite, but he insists that Steve Jobs has bribed me, since the Kindle is so obviously superior. Just wait for the Apple tablet," advises techno-sage Joe. And Judith derides my affection for audiobooks as "not really reading.""

For the record I will only read a hardback if I can't get a paperback. Something about a hardback book intimidates me and causes me to treat it too carefully. I can dog-ear the pages to mark my place or break the binding of a paperback by bending it back to hold in one hand; but I can rarely bring myself to treat a hardback book so cavalierly no matter how cheaply I bought it. And, I find listening to an audio book so different from reading the same book that I will often read an especially good novel immediately after listening to it and vice versa. Also, she doesn't mention the obvious next step, which is to combine audio with a video formatted somewhat like the succession of still pictures that Ken Burns used in his Civil War series on PBS. Soon technology should allow relatively easy mating of period pictures with text. So you could see a street scene related to a passage of audio or a picture of an animal mentioned in an audio passage as you listened, for instance.

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39b01601.htm

And, really, really, finally, since I've been on the subjects of yuppies, books, reading and cooking; here's an interesting article by Jennifer Reese on Slate about a book about a whole different way to think about cooking. One suspects that Linda will come home to find something really new and different on the table one of these days; but not 'til after she has endured Lobscouse, which I still haven't gotten around to making even though Alex tried it and praised it pretty highly.

http://www.slate.com/id/2219243/pagenum/all

How come Matty and Sonny never played this sport?

Competitive firefighting. The best event is a combination of drag racing and ladder climbing. A verbal description of it can't be adequately comprehended by anyone who hasn't had at least a few beers. You have to see it done to appreciate it.

This video also has the drag racing, hose laying and hose control event.

You'll have to check out some of the other related videos if you want to see the competitive ladder climbing and bucket brigade event. That's pretty nifty too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0ZSSwTsmrY&feature=related

Incidently, I celebrated Earth Day by picking a couple of plastic supermarket bags of broccoli rabe. I steamed it for three minutes and then mixed it with a bulb of chopped garlic and a bunch of olive oil while it was still hot. I sprinkled on salt several times as I gently mixed it. It took a surprising amount of salt. I was careful with the timing of the blanching and gentle with the mixing because I took a lot of flak from Mom and Aunt Mary one time for turning a batch of rabes too mushy.

I saute'd a nice portion for a few minutes in olive oil to take the heat out of the garlic and we had that with dinner. The rest is in four freezer containers that will provide the makings of a lot of sandwiches. I like it with boiled ham on either a seeded hard football roll (which is the best as long as one has teeth strong enough to handle it) or on sliced seeded split loaf from Corropolese. I also like to put a little mayonnaise on that sandwich, which used to make Pop nuts when he saw me do it. Pop had a very negative opinion of mayonnaise.

Are you adapted to run for your dinner?

Here's an interesting article on the subject of why people can run such long distances. I think I'm going to go out and try to run down a deer one of these days.

http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/the_running_man_revisited/

Speaking of dinner; we had a very nice Easter dinner at Jas and Kathy's house yesterday. All the usual suspects were present and accounted for except for Sam and Deb and Delores W., who presumably went to the wilds of New Jersey to celebrate the holiday with Deb and Delores side relatives. Alex and Christina drove down from Boston for the weekend which made it really great.

Johnny, Jennifer and Kathy put together a combo of lamb, ham, lasagna and cavatelli that was excellent; and of course there were several fine desserts, of which Linda and I contributed Mom and Aunt Mary's rice pie, or at least that's what the 2002 recipe scrawl in Mom's handwriting calls it. It's really more of a solid egg pudding. It came out excellent, at least it did after we baked it for more than twice as long as the one hour that Mom's directions specify.

1 cup rice cooked for 15 minutes and then cooled
3 pounds of ricotta cheese
2 cups of sugar
1 dozen eggs
2 tablespoons of vanilla extract
(Mom's recipe also calls for "1 cup milk?". Fortunately I didn't put that milk in. If I had put it in we would probably still be waiting for it to solidify)

Blend the cooled off cooked rice and the ricotta. Blend the eggs and the vanilla with the sugar. Blend the two mixtures together. Pour into a greased 9x13 inch pan. I used a glass baking dish and I put it on a cookie sheet for fear it would spill over because it was pretty full.

Mom's directions call for baking it for one hour at 350. After one hour the middle was still liquidy. At that point Linda let it continue to bake at 350 for another 20 minutes. I came in and noticed that the middle was still liquidy, but the edges were starting to brown. So I reduced the temp to 325 and let it continue to bake for another 20 minutes. Finally I reduced the temp to 275 and let it bake another 20 minutes, after which I turned off the oven and left it in there for another 30 minutes or so.

People seemed to like it; but only about 40% of it was eaten by the crowd of twenty or so. Marianne and Kathy must have really liked it because they took another 40% off our hands. The remaining 20% has already been cut into by Linda (last night) and me (I'm eating a big chunk right now); but I think I'll cut this recipe in half when I make it again next Easter.

Reflecting back I recall that there was always at least some of this recipe left over even back at the height of holiday gorging when 40 or more would troup through 403 Walnut during the course of Easter Sunday. Back then of course Mom would have brought 4 apple pies or so and Aunt Mary would also have made cream puffs if she didn't make one of those huge four decker six inch high cookie sheet sized rectangular rum and cream cakes. And Aunt Nancy would have brought her nonpareil rice pudding.

And we would have eaten those desserts after a a marathon of ravioli and stuffed olive eating. Sam, Matty and me each at least once managed to down twenty of Mom and Aunt Mary's huge meat raviolis, very easy to take because they came in three distinctly different forms - flat ones fried and then powdered with sugar, curly ones served al dente and white with grated cheese and (can't remember the name of the spice right now - note to self, get gingko biloba before you forget its name, also write your name, phone number and address on a card in your wallet in case they find you wandering around confused one of these days soon), and finally with traditional gravy and meatballs. All washed down with as much soda as you wanted to drink.

It's surprising any of us survived those dinners. Of course, the fact that we did survive is evidence of another survival adaptation. After they ran the antelope to death those long ago ancestors of ours ate the whole thing raw if they could, or at least several pounds of its juicy liver and other innards, before the lions and leopards and hyenas could have a chance to steal the carcass from them.

Two ducks just waddled down from the pond and hopped into the creek near the bridge. And there have been a couple of geese hanging around; but I haven't seen any evidence of a nest yet.

Echoes of Mom

I was just out in the woods wearing one of the two green Farm Credit Bureau knitted pullover caps that Mom got for me at least thirty years ago. Those knitted caps have gotten more and more ratty over the years; but I've found it impossible to replace them. Mom herself made me a new knitted cap in the 90's in an attempt to replace them; but it proved inferior because she made it only single thickness. Those Farm Credit ones are double thickness. There's a small but significant chance that one day Linda will need to send the 911 people to find me in the woods where I'll be lying under a felled tree like Mr. Colwell's dog. If such an event occurs in the winter the ambulance attendants may first spot the bright green of one of those Farm Credit Bureau caps.

On Saturday evening I met a couple, Leon and Betsy, at the Valentine's Day Dance up at the Ballroom on High who live in Silverdale, which was the site of the Farm Credit Office where Mom worked after they closed the Trooper office.

Last Thursday, Jas and Kathy and I played Scrabble using Mom's swivelling deluxe board with the little ridges that prevent the letter tiles from moving around. Naturally we talked about how Mom would give that forceful arm pump of hers when she put down a high scoring word and especially when she won a game.

Mom was very serious about Scrabble, playing it like a contact sport with very definite rules and very definite protocols of courtesy. Her "Gimme the letter bag!" could carry a real edge, especially when she was losing. And there was almost no better way for me to get a rise out of her at a family dinner than by mentioning just loudly enough for her to hear that I first beat her and Pop at the game when I was nine; which was untrue, but too good not to claim occasionally so Mom could exclaim "You did not!"

Then Marianne reminded me of another of Mom's characteristic reactions after dinner last night over at Sam and Deb's. She was talking about impressive Scrabble words. I was too modest to remind her of the time in Stone Harbor when I told her to look up "Galleass" as I started to put down all seven of my letters to connect the top center triple word block with the "s" that Mom had started a word with on the top right triple word block. The best part was that Mom didn't exclaim "Son of a Bitch!" until after Marianne read out the definition. The truth is that I told Marianne to look it up because I wasn't a hundred percent sure of the spelling; but having Mom tacitly admit by her delay in reacting that she didn't know the word made the moment priceless, even before I reached for the bag and realized that the game was over because there were no more letters.

Scrabble and Mom memories don't get much better than that.

On the Ninth Day before Christmas

We all want consistency in our parents; but we treasure and remember the surprises.

Today, for instance I was remembering Pop on a certain Christmas Eve, probably the Christmas Eve of 1954 or so because we were still living down on Penn Street, and I had to be old enough for Doc to have taken it to mind that I was old enough to need a pogo stick. For the record I didn't weigh enough to be able to make that pogo stick work for at least several years after I got it.

Anyway, Pop is hopping on the pogo stick in front of our house on Penn Street sometime after Midnight. It takes him a few tries; but eventually he gets up to being able to maintain a string of about ten pretty good hops. This I know because I was watching from the second floor window.

Mom, meanwhile, is hissing at him from the open door of the house. "Get in here you damned idiot. You're drunk. You're going to fall and break your neck." Mostly she's not happy with the spectacle because Midnight Mass is about to let out down at Holy Saviour Church and the neighborhood will be filled with quiet upstanding neighbors shortly. This I know because it was one of Mom's favorite stories concerning what I'll call the Christmas Eve follies.

We had that pogo stick for a long time because it was practically indestructible. It was made to last of heavy gauge metal; and it had a spring that was so stiff that it took a real jump by someone weighing at least a hundred and forty or so pounds to get it to work at all. When you mounted that thing you either jumped on for real or you wouldn't depress the spring enough to get any kind of a bounce.

To get up to even a few continuous bounces was very hard. I never got beyond six or seven bounces; but then I never tried the thing after a dozen or two shots of Canadian Club, which would have alleviated the concern that I would break my neck and thus made me more daring. The heads of the simpering nannies at the Consumer Product Safety Commission would explode if someone tried to sell a similar toy today.

To imagine Pop healthy enough and athletic enough to get up to ten or so continuous bounces on a pogo stick is probably impossible for those of you who didn't see him do it. But I'm here to tell you that there was a time when he made that thing work for him. I've often wondered how many continuous bounces he would have gotten up to if Mom hadn't coaxed him into the house just after he really started getting the knack of the thing.

Fish stories

Don A down in Florida helpfully provided a list of baccala recipes. The one below looks pretty much like the one Grandmon L and Aunt Mary R used to make on Christmas Eve, and which Angela made more recently, but without the green olives, capers and pignolis which are only appropriate if Don Corleone is coming to visit. There are some other interesting looking baccala recipes on the document Don sent me. If you want the full list send me an email or leave your email address in a comment.

A warning - If you decide to make this or anything else with baccala you need to remember, as I often haven't, that two pounds of dried salted cod is a lot, a very lot. After you soak it, it will swell up like a monster set loose in Phoenixville into something like four or five pounds of fish. I think this recipe must mean two pounds after it's been soaked; so it's a recipe intended for maybe half of one of the hard as wood dried cod fillets that you find being sold right out of the wooden box in a proper market.

One time I showed up at Mom and Pop's house with three dried cod fillets of which I was pretty proud because I had ignored the dirty looks of the clerk and leafed through the fillets in the box just like Mom used to do to get the ones with the thickest thick ends. Pop, who didn't like baccala, took one look at the maybe six pounds of dried cod and said, "What the hell are you gonna do with all of that damned stuff." Mom just laughed. As I recall she kept one of the fillets to use for Christmas Eve and one for later and sent me home with the third along with instructions about how to soak it. So me and Linda had a second Christmas Eve, at least from a baccala standpoint, in late January of that year. Come to think of it I made the red baccala that year myself, so Mom must have said something like, 'soak the fish, fry some garlic in olive oil, put in a can of chopped tomatoes, some potatoes and some raisins and cook it 'til it's done.'

You need to start forty eight hours before you plan to cook the fish by putting the dried fillet in a big pot of cold water. Bend it or cut it in half if need be so it's fully submerged and put the pot in the refrigerator. Change the cold water at least twice and finally change it again before boiling the now swelled up and soft fish. The fact that the whole house will smell like a Portuguese fishing boat for a day or so after you boil it is part of the fun, it adds atmosphere. The fish ends up looking pure and white, surprisingly like fresh fish, given that it starts out yellow and fibrous; but it has more body, more texture and bite, than fresh fish.

I'm always amazed that only me and Sam and Angela really look forward to the red bacalla on Christmas Eve. The rest of the family at best tolerates it and at worst takes Pop's attitude. Pop never met a fish he really liked even though he liked to fish when he was younger.

PESCESTOCCO ALLA MESSINESE
This classic bacalla dish includes potatoes and green olives, found in many sicilian dishes
2 lbs of bacalla (soaked, cleaned & deboned)
1 cup of olive oil
2 med onions - sliced
2 celery stalks - sliced
4 tomatoes - peeled, seeded and chopped
1 lb potatoes - peeled
10 green olives - pitted
2 tbls capers
2 tbls pignoli nuts
4 tbls raisins
Heat the oil in a deep skillet or sauce pan/saute the onions & celery and cook till softened/add the tomatoes and 1/2 cup of warm water/bring to a slow simmer/cut the bacalla into fairly large uniform pieces/cut potatoes into quarters/add the bacalla, potatoes, and the rest of the ingredients to the pot & simmer for 30-40 minutes

Mr. Tad's Thanksgiving; and some sappy stuff

We just returned home from Thanksgiving dinner. Quite a gathering, perhaps the last of an era because Jas and Kathy have been talking of spending a lot of time in Florida after they retire next August. The Thanksgiving gathering has been at their house for about the last ten years, so we may be getting toward one of those unpleasant junctions in life when old and familiar things change.

Today's gathering included Jas, Kathy, Johnny, Angela, Jenny, Doug, me, Linda, Alex, Christina, Sam, Debra, Samuel, Don, Delores, Marianne, Dave, Liana, Catherine, Mark, Linda and Mark. Dave A had to work, so he missed dinner, although he was around earlier in the day.

Twenty-two of us sharing the most precious thing of all to be thankful for.

Not the food, although the food, prepared mostly by Kathy and Jenny, was excellent - traditional turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, brussel sprouts, peas, a tart cranberry relish, a sweet cranberry mold and, of course, multiple desserts. The food was great, but Thanksgiving gatherings have boasted similar food for all of my sixty years.

And not the scintillating conversation, even though it was wide ranging. And even though Linda remembered that my frog once had a proper name, Mr. Tad. In observance of Thanksgiving I gave Mr. Tad a special treat today, a little pinch of bloodworms from the quarter of an ounce container out of which he has gotten an occasional pinch for about fifteen years. He likes bloodworms, a lot; and even frogs should have reason to be thankful.

And not the memories evoked as we older folks remembered the days of The Three Stooges and bemoaned the fact that the youngsters have no respect for the great old black and white movies. All leading, as such remembrance conversations sometimes do, to marvelling about how Aunt Mary R became fascinated with the story of Lorena Bobbitt, holding her up as an example to all womankind after the first little snippet about her appeared in The Times Herald, long before the story went national in a big way. "Good for her. . .That's what all you men deserve," was her greatest quote. A complex and interesting woman, Aunt Mary R, harboring some deep currents under the image of the dutiful Italian housewife.

But I was talking about being thankful. The most important thing we all have to be thankful for is the fact that Mom and Pop succeeded in raising the four of us in such a way that we have remained compatible one with the other, and as a family, for all of the past forty nine years since Marianne appeared. Even more miraculously, the four of us have all been fortunate enough to make good and lasting marriages to spouses who are also compatible.

For more than fifty years that I can attest to we've been gathering for dinners on Thanksgiving. And that's besides the gatherings for dinner on Christmas, New Year's Day and Easter, and for picnics, cookouts, on Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day. We've been a close family even putting aside the run of the mill Sunday dinners and desserts, the Saturday morning coffee klatches, the weekday evening visits, the weeklong vacations together in Stone Harbor, then Chincoteague, then Corolla Light and finally The Villages, plus a couple of road trips out west.

Early on in that period we Augustines clustered with the hordes of ravenous Raimos and Luzis and Capones and Romanos and Piermarinis and DiAngelis's at 403 Walnut Street in Norristown. Grandmom L and Aunt Mary R did the honors for dinners that included thirty or forty, not counting those who stopped by after dinner to pay their respects to Grandmom and Grandpop L, and maybe stay for coffee and "just a little dessert."

At the very peak of decadence back then I remember Thanksgiving dinners that included turkey and all the trimmings as above, plus a ham, plus lasagna and meatballs, all topped off with one of Aunt Mary's signature four layer twenty pound rum cream cakes, several of Mom's apple pies, a couple of pumpkin pies and Aunt Nancy's nonpareil rice pudding which could not be resisted even if one was near to bursting. It's fortunate there were no seat belts in those days, because it would surely have been painful to put them on for the ride back home. Looking back from the perspective of this cholesterol aware age, it's amazing anyone emerged alive from those dinners.

After the gatherings switched to 2808 Second Avenue in Trooper the menu tailed off to turkey and the trimmings, most memorably topped off with one of Mom's cookie sheet apple pies during the period in which she decided that one huge rectangular pie was more efficient to produce than several smaller round ones. Has anyone ever made better apple pie than mom, with that flaky crust that can only be achieve with lard or crisco. There were, of course, always a couple of pumpkin pies that one had to at least sample as well; and sometimes lasagna sneaked onto the menu; but I don't think Mom ever added a ham to the mix.

After dinner and dessert in Trooper, of course, we had to go down to Norristown to visit Grandmom and Grandpop. And it was impossible, once there, to avoid having a couple pieces of rum cream cake and maybe another piece of pie. It would then have been impolite not to at least stop in and say hi to Aunt Carmella, and doubly impolite to turn down her offer of coffee and maybe some cookies to force down while Russos, Jackinskis, Prostocks and DiPrinzios ebbed and flowed around.

Gatherings for Thanksgiving at Mom and Pop's Hopwood Road house in Collegeville, are the most memorable, of course. For what previous occurrences could have competed with the joy at the successive arrival of the various cute little rugrats - John, Rebecca, Jennifer, David, Alex, Samuel, Donald, Catherine and Liana - who first crawled and then ran around in their diapers, and occasionally broke loose and ran around without their diapers, their fathers oblivious and their mothers in hot pursuit.

If each member of that new generation is one tenth as lucky in their relationships as Linda and I have been in the steady closeness we've enjoyed with their parents they will be lucky indeed in life.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Update 11/29: Marianne, my annoyingly watchful sister, reminded me last evening that Thanksgiving dinners after 1990 had come full circle and were down at 403 Walnut because Mom was then living with Aunt Mary R. The dinners moved up to Canci Court when Mom moved in with Jas and Kathy after Aunt Mary died. Thus Catherine and Liana celebrated their first Thanksgivings with the family at 403 Walnut.

Veterans Day, Armistice Day and horsemeat

It's Veterans Day and also Armistice Day; so naturally my thoughts are on the time Linda and I went to Europe after I finished my four years in the Navy and I ordered a Hamburger Aux Cheval in a Paris restaurant. I had learned enough in two years of French classes during high school to think the name denoted a hamburger riding on a bun. Only when I noticed it tasted just a little funny did I realize that the perfidious French were feeding me horsemeat.

Not that I was breaking new ground in the family by eating horsemeat for Grandpop L had eaten quite a lot of it when he was a young man. That came about because Grandpop L was clever enough to make his way to an American army recruiter in 1917 before he could be drafted into the Italian army. Not a trivial decision; because as a result he became a U.S. citizen and Grandmon L became a citizen in turn when he married her.

One of Mom's favorite stories was of the time she embarrassed an arrogant high school teacher who singled her out in class as a naturalized citizen. "No," Mom said, she wasn't a naturalized citizen. Yes she was, the teacher insisted. And Mom repeated that, no, she wasn't. But you were born in Italy, the teacher said. "Yes," Mom agreed, she was born in Italy. "So, I'm right," the teacher triumphantly announced, you can't be a citizen by birth. At which point Mom informed the teacher that she was indeed born abroad; but she was also a citizen by birth because her parents were American citizens living abroad when she was born. Mom loved that story.

Another benefit of Grandpop L joining the American army is that he thereby probably increased his odds of surviving the war by at least tenfold. The losses suffered in World War I by the Italian army are nearly inconceivable to us at ninety years remove. In that war the U.S. lost 116,708 men killed out of a population of 92 million. Italy, by contrast, lost 651,010 men killed out of a population of 35 million. Italy also suffered 589,000 civilian deaths, while the U.S. suffered 757. Think that through. More than one out of every thirty Italians alive in 1914 died in that war; and, additionally, one out of every thirty people left alive in the country in 1918 was a wounded soldier. Grandpop L made a very good decision indeed when he travelled over to present himself to the Americans who were recruiting Italian peasants for service in artillery units.

If you a want a relatively painless take on that war, in which Italy fought on the side of France, Britain, Russia and the U.S. against Germany and Austria-Hungary, there is an excellent novel by Mark Helprin titled A Soldier of the Great War. Helprin's presentation of Orfeo Quatta, the typewriter hating dwarf who starts the book as a servant to the family of the book's protagonist and ends it as a war department bureaucrat, is one of the greatest comic riffs in literature.

But this was to have been a post about Veterans Day, and I still have to get to horsemeat. Pop never ate horsemeat; and he always said that we, the U.S., had no business getting involved in World War I. To him it was a European business. But he didn't feel that way about World War II even though it cost him his health. It could well have cost him more; because as soon as he was old enough he and a buddy went down to Main Street in Norristown to join up with the Marines. But, as it turned out, the Marine recruiting office was closed when they arrived. So they walked next door and got into a conversation with a Navy recruiter, and the next thing they knew they were on the way to training and then to the South Pacific as Seabees.

Instead of storming ashore with the first wave, or the second wave, of Marines, Pop and the other Seabees went ashore on island after island to build roads and airfields and barracks and hangars after the Japanese were pretty much beaten. From some of his stories about Japanese bodies still littering the beaches and the fields, and about needing to watch where you walked because of occasional sniper fire and artillery it's apparent that sometimes the Japanese hadn't been fully informed that they had been beaten.

Pop survived the war fine, but the trip home on a slow freighter nearly killed him. By the time he got to San Francisco he was coughing pretty good; and then by the time he got home by train he was on his way to pneumonia which lead to tuberculosis, or perhaps it was vice versa. So he was in and out of Veterans hospitals and sanitariums for the next couple of years; and as part of his treatment they collapsed and then removed most of one of his lungs. The blessing in it all was it made him as calm and optimistic a man as you will ever meet. He was told by a Navy doctor in 1946 that he should put his affairs in order because he would probably not survive long. As it turned out he outlived that doctor by about twenty-five years; and he lived virtually every one of the days of those years suprised and glad he had wakened up alive, and intensely interested and involved in the world. He took life as it came and he definitely did not sweat the small stuff.

But I have to cut this off, and I still haven't gotten to the horsemeat. Well, the reason the American army was in Italy recruiting all those Italian peasants like Grandpop L was that artillery units in those days had a lot of horses to pull the cannons and the hundreds of wagons that carried the shells and the powder charges and the other equipment. And some bureaucrat like Orfeo Quatta in the U.S. War Department came up with the idea that Italian peasants would be good to have because they would know how to handle horses. An interesting idea, but sorely wrong, as it turns out, because Italian peasants rarely used horses since fields in Italy were mostly small and broken up, making it more efficient to do most of the farming work by hand.

Grandpop, of course, was smart enough to tell the recruiters what they wanted to hear when they asked about his knowledge of horses; and he was also smart enough to learn what he needed to learn to handle the horses just fine. He and his compatriots in the artillery unit were also smart enough to forget to put a gas mask on one of the weaker horses during a gas attack whenever their diet lacked in meat. And, finally, they were also smart enough to share the resulting bounty with their sargeants and their officer. Grandpop often said that he had never imagined eating as much meat as he ate when he was in the army.

Update: 80 89 89 80 80 87 79 ;<)

Quit the whining

Lately it seems everybody I talk with wants to whine about higher food prices. And they're right; in the past few years it's been getting outrageously expensive to go to the market and buy ripe mangos air freighted from Brazil and fresh lettuce from Mexico and hot chutney from East Africa which sometimes I can't even get; so I have to be satisfied with the inferior stuff from India.

And don't even get me started on how expensive it's getting to top off the shopping cart with those little frozen creampuffs and cashew nuts and seedless cucumbers from England and that breakfast cereal with the crunchy freeze dried strawberry slices that are so delicious they're probably harvested exclusively by virgins working under the light of the new moon.

Then there are the Costa Rican plutocrats who must think their Hearts of Palm are made of solid silver. Madonna! I just want the things to fancy up a salad, for God's sake. And the Sicilians - just how much more do they think I'm going to pay for their fattening damn Caponata in the little cans. The Chinese are a bit more reasonable with their Mandarin Orange segments; but even they're getting greedy.

So this week Linda and I stepped back into the past. We stepped back to simple, healthful, slow food, you might say. Slow, economical food, if I may say so myself.

Early in the afternoon on Sunday I started a pot of Goya Great Northern Beans. Ignoring the ridiculous recipe on the label, I rapid boiled a pound of beans in eight cups of water. Mexicans have a lot of guts even proposing a recipe for Pasta e' Fagioli, if you ask me, even if Mexicans are a tiny bit Italian, being diluted Spaniards who are basicly diluted Romans.

After about an hour, I drained and rinsed the beans with cold water so I could rough them up a bit by rubbing them between my hands to loosen the skins and float them away. Then I put the beans on the stove again with eight cups of water, a couple of teaspoons of salt and about half a cup of olive oil to slow simmer for a few hours until they pretty much disintegrated. That's the way Pop liked them, the way his mom made them, more like bean sauce with little broken up soft chunks than like intact beans in liquid.

A couple of hours before I shut off the heat under the pot I broke up a bulb of garlic and peeled and sliced the cloves. Like Mom and Aunt Mary R, I carefully sliced the first few cloves nice and thin; and then the slices might have gotten a bit thicker and less regular as I got tired of the task. I threw the garlic into the pot to simmer with the beans and then turned off the pot at about ten to cool down a bit so I could put it into the refrigerator at about midnight.

It was then a simple matter to come home on Monday at about 5:15, start a pot of water with a half a handful of salt in it for the Ditalini, dip about a third of the bean sauce into a saucepan to heat up, dump in a box of ditalini once the salted water was boiling, let the Ditalini boil for precisely the eight minute minimum for al dente specified on the package, poured off as much of the cooking water as I could without letting any of the Ditalini escape from the pot, poured in the now just boiling bean sauce to join the remaining water in with the Ditalini, and ladled the completed Pasta e' Fagioli into shallow bowls by 5:35.

Between us, Linda and I ate about one-third of the Pasta e' Fagioli for dinner, so the pot contained about six meals. There were also two more potfuls worth of bean sauce that I froze later. Figure two bucks for the beans and two bucks each for three boxes of Ditalini. Add in about three bucks for a cup and a half of olive oil and a buck for three bulbs of garlic. Total cost of eighteen meals? About twelve smackeroos. Sixty-six cents per meal.

And. . . I defy anyone to make a better meal, both from the perspective of health and from the perspective of taste, if taken with fresh Corropolese bread and a nice salad dressed with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Plus the garlic will keep away vampires and other pests.

So quit your whining about the cost of food.

Food is costing us more because we're eating like decadent Roman aristocrats. No, that's not right. We're eating far better than pampered Roman aristocrats because we also get to enjoy Hearts of Palm from Costa Rica which add a nice crunch and flavor to our salads. And we have Cheetos and Mountain Dew, which are lots better tasting than flamingo tongues and sour wine.

Lucullus would have swooned with pleasure if given access to the foods we consider common; but they wouldn't have made him any happier.

I'll let Epicurus explain; "If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires."

Update: I forgot to say that I added a can of diced tomatoes to the pot early on in the process. I did that because I didn't have a little can of tomato paste or a medium can of tomato sauce. It's mostly for color anyway. Without something to make it a little bit red this soup looks pretty sickly. I'm too lazy to update the cost information above but a can of something tomato-ey costs about 60 or 80 cents, trivial.

Update 2: 80 86 64 88 :<(