Down the Bloodline

We finish Bryan Burrough's Big Rich with tales of the great oilmen's posterity. As you might guess, the children of the rich can range anywhere from responsible and handsome fellows who grow the business and get invited to join the best clubs in Dallas, to cocaine-snorting ne'er-do-wells who own great football teams and attend cheerleader tryouts for all the wrong reasons.

My own brush with oil heirs was my first job out of college. Some library I had never heard of offered me a job.  They were attached to Southern Methodist University, but they weren't the main library where students crammed for finals, or where you hunted down a novel, took it home and stayed up all night with it.

No, this was a Special Collections library.  In Special Collections, the books never leave the building.  Professors, writers, researchers come to these temples of knowledge and scribble notes from the books therein, filling up on material for their own books.   Burrough himself probably sat in a few of these research libraries.

"Special" means the library concentrates on a narrow band of knowledge, say Great Lakes history, or history of labor unions.  My library at SMU had its beginnings as the personal collection of Mr.D., an oilman I had never heard of in my life, and his pet subject was Western Americana.

As a side note, all his books about the settling of the West, the water issues of the West, ad infinitum, would not be complete without including some of the big players in the region which means the Mormons. We dusted and tended a good deal of shelf space given over Joseph Smith and everything that came after him.  And deep in the temperature-controlled vault, where they kept the really valuable stuff, we stored original editions of the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants, which we were never to handle without first donning cotton gloves.

Anyway, the original collection was in Mr. D's home.  He willed it to the university upon his death. Perhaps it was was Mr. D's money that built the building, too. Now, my job was just a job, but walking into that building, entering a vast hall of fossilized limestone and walking up the forty or so steps to the hushed confines of library-ness, left me awestruck every day.

Mr. D was such an obscure oilman that I never expected to run across him in Burrough's book.  But there he was on page 152, playing a walk-on role. In the postwar years, Texas was the king of oil the world over. Then rumors popped up about the Mideast and what just might lie under all that desert sand.  A top Roosevelt aide chose Mr. D to cross the world and camp out with the Bedouins. His top-secret mission: investigate the rumors; see if American companies could get a piece of the action.

Evidently, he survived the mission.

But back to his library. Mr. D's son, Mr. D the Second, also added his hobby collection: railroad history.  In addition to books, we kept file drawers of his train pictures.  To my eye, each one was indistinguishable from the next. But train buffs the world over knew that if they wanted really good stuff, we were the library to track down.

Then there was Mr. D the Third.  He was still a young man when I worked there, a student at library school. His contribution was to come in every so often and sort train pictures.  One day, he hinted that when he finished library school, he would no longer be willing to work gratis. I'll never know if Mr. D the Third achieved this professional status. All I know is that he was in his fifth year of study, and library school is only two years long.

So, as far as the D bloodline was concerned, they landed somewhere between solid billionaire status and losing it all to cocaine and cheerleaders.

And we will now celebrate the end of oilman stories with a nice bit of:

PORK & BEEF BARBECUE

Finding the Next Best Thing

I wish I had kept count of the miles I have walked this summer.  We have got to be talking over five hundred.  

And oh, the things I see!  The neighborhoods I want to move into! I used to suffer from house envy, but now I've calmed down to mere neighborhood envy. 

Then again, if I picked up and moved, I would have to give up something I love, something I have never had before and will never find again--the view out my kitchen window:

It is all curved lines, and people-watching.  I can see the main boulevard through the neighborhood.  I can see the walking paths, and everybody strolling, biking or hauling their children in little red wagons.  

Up until Thursday, this wonderful view was marred by a window like this:

That middle bar sat right at eye level.  I either had to stretch or slouch to look out on all the backyard beauty.

But, all fixed now.  New window.  Thank you, Mr. Nesquik.

Of course, if I had a bathtub full of money like the folks Bryan Burrough writes about in Big Rich, I could keep the view from my kitchen window and add, oh, seven more kitchen windows, hopping from one to the other in my fleet of private planes.

In other words, I have advanced from the chapters where the tycoons discover the oil, to the part where they figure how to spend all the moola.

When we lived in Texas, my husband once sat on a plane and listened to a woman from Lubbock, "just flyin' to Dallas to get mah hair done."

With that kind of money, you don't have to choose whether to buy yourself a ranch in Montana or in Mexico.  Just buy both.   

Of course, when you move up into this league, you acquire a whole new set of problems.  One of Burrough's chapters begins with this gem somebody overheard one day in Houston: "It's been a hard day all around.  First, my wife's pet kangaroo has to go and get poisoned, and then somebody stole my midget butler's stepladder."

Back in this heyday, oilmen liked to own a few airplanes but didn't much care about buying yachts.  What cruises they took, they complained about all the wine, preferring, instead, more bourbon, more "barbecue, greens and black-eyed peas." 

Little wonder old money looked on and called these people "Texicanus vulgaris."  But who cared what old money thought?  Texans just went on throwing parties where champagne flowed out of miniature oil derricks.

In my Dallas days, I was the ward organist, just like now, and I had no car.  I had to walk to the church every Saturday, which meant meandering through Highland Park and University Park, two millionaire enclave cities surrounded by Dallas itself.  Oh, the pink marble mansions!  The broad circular driveways!  The magnolia trees and azalea bushes, everything professionally tended!  The gleaming Mercedes, Beemers and Porsches!

I could've taken dozens of different routes through this wonderland, and I aimed to try them all, no matter now hot those Texas afternoons got.  I mean, I was already hooked on walking before I arrived, but the Park Cities were like smoking walker crack. 


My walks these days are probably about finding the next best thing to Highland Park.  Pockets of loveliness abound out there.  I see beautifully terraced backyards, perfect for entertaining all one's friends.  And I covet.  I see streets where everybody can walk to the library, the grocery store and the ice cream parlor.  And I covet.  I see houses convened around darling little parks with pretty benches and paths.  And I covet.

But if I traded what I have for what I don't, there goes my perfect kitchen window, with its inimitable view.

So that's where I'll be, inside my kitchen, looking out.

Oh, and cooking things.  This week, we get:

TURKEY 'N SWISS CALZONES

One reviewer said the filling was a little bland, and I agree.  She suggested using a sharper cheese.  I thought about adding more salt to the dough.

Spreading Memories on a Bagel

Finished up Julia Glass' Three Junes tonight, while sitting outside listening to the cicadas.  It was a charming-enough moment, so long as I didn't think about the bedraggled mouse carcass somebody left on the deck. 

Many times, I thought of quitting this book.  In the third June, we meet up with a woman whose list of men is long and sorry and wrong.  While weekending at a Long Island house with one of these men, and pregnant by another, nothing much happens.

Millions of us fight to get our manuscripts onto editors' desks and this one makes it through.

Apparently, it was sandwich week at our house.  After last weekend's turkey/cranberry wonder, we followed up with:

VEGETABLE TURKEY HOAGIES

I was so sad when I took the last bite of this hoagie.  But there's a half tub of leftover garden vegetable cream cheese in the fridge.  Spread on a bagel, it goes a long way toward keeping my fond sandwich memories alive.  And I never had a thing for that cream cheese flavor before.  

Almost Ravinia

Perhaps you've heard of Ravinia, the summer music venue in Chicago's North Shore suburbs.

It consists of four important elements.

1)  Music.  An orchestra plays.  What do they play?  It doesn't matter, especially if you sit in the cheap seats, i.e. the lawn.  To experience it more as background music and less like college-class appreciative listening is OK with me.

2)  The beauty of nature.  That would be the lawn, as I just mentioned, with its surrounding forest.  You could a film a movie of lords and ladies, bows, arrows and chain mail on Ravinia's grounds and probably get away with it.

3) People-watching.  Ok, no bows, arrows or chain mail showed up during my one time there.  But I'm quite sure the people parading past me and my folding chair were the lords of finance and the ladies of sorority life, people that were as accustomed to beauty and culture as I am accustomed to the aisles of Wal-Mart.  Yes, I was a tad bit out of my element.  But I paid the ticket price (the cheap lawn tickets), therefore I belonged.

4) Food.  We did the box dinner.  The sandwich was on thick artisan bread.  The brownie was solid as a brick, yet still chewable.  Stuffed with chocolate chips.  My, oh my, oh, my, what a brownie it was!  It was the kind of brownie that, when I finished, I looked over at my husband and hoped he couldn't finish his.  Too much for you?  Need any help with that?  

Sadly, my summer has not included any Ravinia.

So I did the next best thing, Indy's own Symphony on the Prairie.  This time, I packed the dinner.  I could hardly wait to get settled on the lawn and bite into Rice Krispie treats, watermelon and:

TURKEY SANDWICH WITH CRANBERRY SAUCE

The only spoiler to this sandwich experience was the October-like chill out there on the prairie.  I shivered through the music.  Lots of other music-lovers had the smarts to wear long pants and closed shoes.  I seem to have a problem imagining warm days turning into cool nights.  

Another small problem with this delicious sandwich:  I opened a can of cranberry sauce, used a little bit and wonder what to do with the rest of the stuff.   So I tried:

CRANBERRY SAUCE CHICKEN

Over on the Book Pile, I'm still working through Julia Glass' Three Junes.  I mentioned the Brits on vacation?  Actually, the story focuses on Paul--newspaper publisher, Scottish, widowed.  Switching  between his sight-seeing in Greece and flashbacks of his marriage, we learn that his wife seemed awfully devoted to her collie-breeding business.  Or maybe she was devoted to something or someone else?

Moving on the second June, Paul has now died.  His three sons gather for the memorial service.   We get the story from the oldest son, a gay man who chose America over family closeness.  Again, the story alternates between flashbacks of his life back in New York, where all his friends grow more emaciated with AIDS, and the "now," as the bereaved gather to remember Dad and wonder about Mom.  Then one member of the family asks somebody for a big favor.  And I mean, a BIG favor. 

I haven't gotten to the third June yet.

It's a pleasant but slow-moving story.   It's got some big cow patties, but I could see 'em coming and I flipped the page.  

On Lab Rats

Our lesson this week is:  give the author a chance.

When I opened M. T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing and read the first pages, I wasn't planning to stick with this story of a strangely grown-up-sounding boy surrounded by scholars.  They drill him in Greek and Latin and violin lessons.  They weigh everything he consumes, then weigh again when he excretes.  They exact capricious punishments when he answers a question wrong. 

But young Octavian grew on me.  He and his mother were captured in Africa.  She was royalty.  He has no memory of the old continent.  And now they are essentially lab rats at the Novanglian College of Lucidity.  Well, privileged lab rats.  When the college throws a soiree, the mother acts the hostess.  She's royalty, after all, a shimmering beauty with whom every man would like to converse.   

When the benefactor of the institute dies, a rich young lord from England arrives to examine the premises with a mind to sponsoring these scholars.  He strikes up a flirtation with Octavian's mother and makes her an offer--with a boatload of catches. 

This is Boston, just before the American Revolution.  The colonists' rumble with discontent.  Oh, and fear, too.  They suspect the British may foment a slaves' uprising, whence masters' throats will be slit as they sleep soundly in their beds.

So, no more Greek and Latin for Octavian.  He might get too smart.

Then there is the Pox Party.  Whether for the cause of pure science, or to keep war and soldiers at arms' length, the scientists sequester themselves with a few friends (and their slaves), infect them with a "mild" strain of smallpox, promising to nurse them through it with every modern remedy at their disposal.  This, we are told, is far preferable to getting one's smallpox epidemic-style. They can all play whist and stage evening music salons while they break out in pustules together.

I won't give away any more.

Anyway, for a book that held all the promise of a financial statement, the story sure picked up.


Neither did it hurt to read it while I sat on a fine bench in the town square of one of those charming suburbs that I love so much.  The "village" was having sidewalk sales that day and the streets were full of slim ladies in their yoga pants, shopping bags swinging from their arms as they tried on shirts, or strode past the granite walls of the bank building.  Children played in decorative tufts of prairie grass.  Stroller wheels clattered on the sidewalk bricks.  A couple commuter trains clanged by.  And cicadas sang.

Every town should be like this.  We especially need a version where we don't all have to spend a million or so to buy a house there.

Now that I'm back to ordinary life, operating the ByeByeNesquik College of Recipe Experimentation, it's looks like the lab rats are in for a week of sandwiches.  The fanciest one is BROCCOLI HAM RING.

Gettin' All Beachy

Pretend with me now:

You have set aside the laundry and the kitchen and messy garage.  You have left behind the big-box stores and the roundabouts and the doctor appointments.  You have traded it all for a tastefully decorated house, the best part of which is that you didn't have to decide where to put the little pots of decorative beach grass, or the artfully-placed conch shells, or the wall hangings that proclaim "At the Shore."

Hopefully, this house is on a shady street in a sleepy town.  Hopefully, it has a settin' porch and no hurricanes to bother you while you sit out there.

What will you do with yourself?   I don't know.  Can you lift a heavy book?  Might you want to try Diana Gabaldon's Outlander Series?  It starts with The Outlander, wherein a World War II nurse visits Scotland with her husband and finds herself tossed back to 1743.  How will she hide all her 20th-century nursey knowledge?  How will she protect herself, all alone in the middle of a bunch of warrior-clansmen?  And how the heck does she get back to her dear modern-day husband?  How long might it take?  What will he think of her absence?  When she returns, might things get a little complicated?  Especially if she were pregnant?

But wait!  Before you get started, maybe you should make a little something to eat.  LAYERED PICNIC LOAVES won't take very long, and these sandwiches are supposed to sit in the fridge for a hour.  So assemble them, then read awhile, then take them off to a picnic, throw away the paper plates and read some more.  You might be up late tonight.  No, let me rephrase that: you will be up late.  (There's cow patties, but between married people.) 

Awarding Myself the Sceptre

It was almost Christmas time.  We had a little vacation time left for the year, and a little vacation money.

Chicago beckoned.  

We booked one of those little boutique hotels (thanks, Groupon), and found ourselves a short walk away from the marble and brass and holiday windows of the city's best stores. 

I don't know how we decided on lunch on the seventh floor of Macy's (formerly Marshall Fields'),  but there we were, and hungry.  And there it was, the Frango Cafe.

It jumped off the menu right at me, the Cobblestone Sandwich.  When it showed up and I began to eat, I made noises ladies shouldn't make in public.  I vowed to come back and eat it again.

Was it the second trip back, or the third?  Doesn't matter.  I grew covetous and proud as I chewed on that delicious bread.  I grew sure that I could make this sandwich at home. 

I had no idea how many tries it would take.  Mr. Nesquik, licking cinnamon off his lips, said I probably needed another research trip.  I took him up on the idea so fast, the wheels of my suitcase possibly left skid marks across the floor.

Up there on the seventh floor, I asked the waitress, "Do they do this?  Do they do that?"  She didn't know, but she sent the chef out, who explained things nicely.  (She also left out a couple key steps, but I caught on anyway.)

When I finally made the last refinement, the universe twanged.  The sandwich smelled right.  It looked right.  It felt right.  It tasted . . .  uh-oh, here we go again, making noises ladies shouldn't make in public.

May I present:

THE COBBLESTONE SANDWICH

It's a lot like a Monte Cristo. Just in case they copyrighted the name, maybe I should call my version the Monte Kristen, ha!

1 egg 

2 TB milk 

¼ tsp. sugar 

dash of cinnamon

pinch of salt 

2 slices Cobblestone Bread (1 3/4 oz. each) *

1/2 TB lite mayonnaise 

2 thin slices Swiss or provolone cheese 

2-3 oz. deli-sliced turkey 

1½ slice bacon, cooked crisp

Whisk together the egg, milk, sugar, cinnamon and salt.  Set aside.

Spread mayonnaise on one side of one slice of bread. Dip the opposite side in french toast batter.  Place on a lightly buttered griddle.  Top with one slice cheese, half the turkey, the bacon, the remaining turkey, and remaining cheese. 

Dip "outside" of remaining bread slice in batter.  Top sandwich with undipped side of bread.  

Grill on medium heat. Enjoy!  About 730 calories, but so worth it. 

*COBBLESTONE BREAD

2 packages active dry yeast (4 1/2 tsp) 

3/4 cup warm water (105 to 115') 

2 cup lukewarm milk (scalded then cooled) 

3 TB sugar 

3 TB shortening 

1 TB salt 

7 to 8 cups flour 

2 TB water, divided 

2/3 cups packed brown sugar 

2 tsp. cinnamon 

Butter, melted. (1 TB) 

Dissolve yeast in warm water in large bowl. Stir in milk, sugar, shortening, salt and 4 cups of the flour. Beat until smooth. Mix in enough remaining flour to make dough easy to handle. Turn dough onto lightly floured surface; knead until smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. Place in greased bowl; turn greased side up. Cover; let rise in warm place until double, about 1 hour. (Dough is ready if indentation remains when touched.) 

Punch down dough; divide into halves. Roll each half into rectangle, 18x9 inches. Mix brown sugar and cinnamon; set aside. Sprinkle each rectangle with 1 TB of water, then spread half of cinnamon-sugar mixture on each rectangle. Roll up each rectangle into loaf. Pinch edge of dough into roll to seal well. Place loaves seam sides down in 2 greased loaf pans, 9x5x3 inches. Brush lightly with melted butter. Let rise until double, about 1 hour. 

Heat oven to 425'. Place loaves on low rack so that tops of pans are in center of oven. Pans should not touch each other or sides of oven. Bake until loaves are deep golden brown, 25 to 30 minutes. Immediately remove from pans.  Makes 2 loaves, enough to make sandwiches for a crowd, or eat yourself silly.  

Over on the Finished Book Pile, I can now say good-bye to the Patrick Melrose novels, in which unhappiness abounds.   We've already talked about them enough and we're ready for something different. 

And At Do-Re-Mi, We Find . . .

So, I went back to Do-Re-Mi, so to speak, in Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels and found quite a cow-patty-laden beginning.

In the first of this quadrilogy, Never Mind, poor five-year-old Patrick lives under the rule of a father that charms people only to humiliate them later.  Lured in from playtime by his father's piano playing--a tune the Daddy composed especially for Patrick--he stands before the man, ready to please.  "Shall I pick you up by your ears?" the father gently teases.  With the boy sufficiently softened up, the father makes good on his tease/threat and Patrick hangs in the air, convinced that "his ears were going to be torn off, like the gold foil from a pot of cream."  Dad ignores the boy's whimpers, then caps off the experience with fatherly advice:  "Always think for yourself.  Never let other people make important decisions for you." 

And it gets much worse. 

Much of the first novel is a house party, populated by this daddy-of-bad-surprises and his thoroughly demoralized wife.  Guests include a serially-married piece of British gentry who brings along his hippie girlfriend of the moment; plus a philosopher, who also brings his date, an American journalist, a woman with enough detachment to see through Bad Daddy, at least a little. 

The British gentlemen misses women who can give him intelligent conversation, but at a flash of the hippie girlfriend's legs, he forgets all about intelligence.

And they all meet to drink wine and gossip wickedly.  The weed-fortified hippie girl, too dazzled by the glorious south-of-France estate on which they spend a weekend, doesn't quite catch on to how much fun this isn't. 

Why would I read about such cruel, self-absorbed people?   Well, their world is untouched by the fears and frustrations of mine, so I go there for a visit.

The cow patties are truly distasteful.  I'm not recommending, just reporting.

By now, I have moved on to the second installment, Bad News.  Patrick is now twenty-two.  His father has just died.  Patrick flies from London to New York to identify the body.  Naturally, he doesn't mourn.  No, it's more like a celebration, bingeing on heroin.  Then again, this is a pretty sorry way to celebrate, as Patrick spins out of control.  Shall I call my New York dealer?  No, I definitely won't call him.  I'll leave this restaurant and go straight back to the hotel.  Tell you what.  I'll just ring him up and if he doesn't answer, then Fate has spoken.  No dealer tonight.  D---!  Why doesn't he answer. Well, maybe I'll just swing by and pay him a social call.

I recall a story in People Magazine wherein a rock star admitted that, at first, drugs were fun.  Then, they were fun with problems.  In the end, it was just the problems.

We know that Patrick will become the father of little Robert, whom we mentioned last week.  So we await better days for this boy who grew up with such a bad excuse for a father.

After a dip into this world, I return to my own, where I cook my Fast Sunday meal:

Broiled Pizza Burgers

Vegetable Trio

Black Forest Parfaits

Somewhere Between King James English and "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen"

"Did you find everything all right today?" said the grocery store cashier.

"Yes, I did, and I was looking for a lot of weird stuff," I told her.

Like spreadable goat cheese.   And pesto.  And roasted red peppers.

We've got a Fast Sunday tradition around here of eating a big meal made made from all new recipes (also known as Dishwasher's Dismay). Currently, we're working our way through a magazine feature on tailgate meals.

You never know with new recipes whether the stuff will actually taste good.  But today was a winner!

Get yourself acquainted with the fancy-cheese section of your grocery and store and make:

Italian-Style Sandwiches

I found the roasted meat in the lunchmeat section, somewhere between plastic-packaged ham steaks and tubs of ready-made mashed potatoes.  The store didn't have ciabatta rolls, but I'm sure you can find something exotic to try.  As for arugula, I couldn't be bothered to hunt very hard.  Good old leaf lettuce did us fine.  Serves 4.  On 4-oz. rolls, our sandwiches came in at 820 calories each.

 Layered Cornbread Salad

We've featured another cornbread salad on Bye-Bye Nesquik before.  It remains our favorite, but today's is still good enough to make it onto the official Bye-Bye Nesquik master list. 

Once we'd had time to digest a little, we ate:

Pineapple Upside-Down Carrot Cake

Let's try the whole meal again sometime, and on an actual tailgate.  Or on a picnic table beside a river bend.  Or on a bench in Central Park.  Doesn't matter; just somewhere out there.  (Can you tell I'm dying for picnic weather?  I'm sure you are, too.)

I'm trying to distract you with a lot of cooking because I have not finished my current book, The Blithedale Romance  by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Hawthorne, as we've mentioned here before, is a tough row to hoe.  His language falls somewhere between King James English and "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen."

But Blithedale is actually rather funny.  The  main character, a stand-in for Hawthorne, plays the smart-mouthed grump in this tale of Boston elites intruding themselves on plain country folk.

Hawthorne based the story on his days at Brook Farm, an experiment in socialist living.  He and his artist friends conceived the idea of living off the land.  They believed they would achieve a form of moral justice, with some time on the side for writing poems and painting landscapes.

After a summer of shoveling a great deal of manure, and no time to write so much as a paragraph, the disillusioned Hawthorne hasted himself back to Boston to take up his former studious life.

I could've told him things would end that way.

You Wouldn't Expect it

They say it'll be sweater weather by the end of the week.  They say these infernal snow walls built up along the street will whittle down.

It's like waking up and trying to remember a former life.  You mean we won't have to cancel every party we plan?  No more wincing against the wind as we walk into the grocery store?  No more driving slow over the ice crust that the plowers haven't bothered to scrape off the streets?  

You mean, I could even dream of taking walks again?  

Well, wouldn't that be nice.  Me and my walking shoes have seen some pretty territory out there, neighborhoods tucked back where you didn't know anything beautiful could be.   What a cute little park, and all the houses facing it just so!   Zounds! A mansion in this part of town?  Oh, my, somebody went overboard with the railroad-themed street names here.  

Until then, we tackle The Leopard, by Giuseppe de Lampedusa, which concerns a Silician prince in 1860, whose fiefdom is on the wane.  His upstart neighbor purchased some land through foreclosures, and now the neighbor is richer than the prince. 

The prince's tenants pay their rent in kind, presenting him with cheeses he doesn’t like, and slaughtered lambs whose falling entrails put him in mind of dead soldier he recently saw rotting beside the road.   

Political matters in Sicily threaten to topple his world.  And the resident priest on his estate reminds  him that he needs to come in to confession because, yes, the prince has been naughty.  He ignores his wife, the mother of his seven children, and slips into town where he knows a certain fetching peasant girl.  No cow patties.

On the page where I left off yesterday, a love triangle was just heating up. 

If you dig in to this story, expect to be confused by the legion of characters, many of whom go by at least three different names.  But sometimes these obscure books by minor authors make for an interesting little side trip, like a walk tucked back in a neighborhood where you didn’t know anything beautiful could be.  

And on that theme of interesting side trips, here’s a dish I doubt I would have thought up myself.  Quite possibly the CEO of Pillsbury wanted a boost in sales.  "Write better copy!" he told the advertisers.  "Invent more crescent roll recipes!" he told the test kitchen cooks.  

Corny Ham Bundles 

A Blizzard Named Franzi and Another One Named Doris

We are supposed to hole up this week around here, to not go outside risking life and limb in the howling arctic winds.  But Bye-Bye Nesquik is running low on wet cat food, not to mention that her  mullet needs a trim, bad.

In fact, the winds just started up.  They make the house crackle and the kitten dash from room to room, her eyes all big and her ears perked up.  

We may be having a winter like the one described in Ashley Shelby's Red River Rising.  In 1996-97, poor old North Dakota got eight blizzards.  They named them, just like hurricanes:  Andy, Betty, Christopher, Doris, Elmo, Franzi, Gust and Hannah.  After days of confinement under roof-high drifts, they dug out and searched for their frozen-solid cattle.  Then they braced for the next one.

When the National Weather Service added up all those inches of snow, they warned the people who lived along the Red River of the North:  It's going to be a lot of water this spring.  Buy flood insurance, folks.

Only the middle third of Shelby's book was what I expected.

The first third described an alphabet soup of agencies attempting to guess how much water they might expect.  This part of the story was all about reconnaissance flights gauging the snow-pack, about scientists taking measurements from bridges, and other scientists drawing graphs.  Cities like Grand Forks wanted a number; at how many feet will the Red River crest?

They didn't want the number too low.  The river might rise higher and there they'd be, with water rushing down their streets.

They didn't want the number too high.  The river might not rise that much, even if they'd spent millions of dollars laying down even one extra foot of flood protection all up and down the banks.

I might just mention here that it didn't help that the Red River's mouth is in Winnipeg, Manitoba.  That's northward, folks.  I used to read about a river in Siberia that flowed north into the Arctic Ocean.  The frozen-up waters of its mouth blocked the river's flow, causing it to flood the blighted plain.  Well, thought I, that is why we are the Promised Land and they are not. 

Little did I know we had our own misbegotten river right here. 

But back to our story.

The middle third of the book is the story I expected.  The town filled sandbags.  Pretty soon, the exhausted citizens worked all night, lit by flood lights.  Pretty soon, they ran out of sand and dug up the golf course and a couple parks, all while listening to the eery sound of the river rushing louder, over on the other side of the floodwall.

And, pretty soon, it was time to grab the photo albums and a few clothes, then run, with a last look back at the house.  Because, when they returned, they found the door blocked by the china hutch, the couch upright against a wall, one shoe on a ceiling fan and its mate in the basement.

The last third was the recriminations.  Why didn't the the engineers and the hydrologists predict the right river crest?  How do we start over again?  Why are so many of us taking anti-depressants and attending city council meetings, raising our fists in the air?  

Naturally, people who survived such an apocalypse vowed "Never again!"  But when the engineers showed them the plans for the grand dike that would keep even an 8-blizzard spring run-off out of their streets and second-stories, this master project would swallow up the grandest avenue in town, with its lovely Queen Anne homes.   The flood had already stolen all their frontier-era downtown buildings.  People of more modest means lost their cherished neighborhoods.  Urban planners built new homes for the displaced, far from the river, out by the freeway.  All this loss of what little beauty existed in Grand Forks drove home the truth that their hometown lay on a bleak and lonely plain.

Red River gave a lot of pages over to scientific and political drama, most likely to place the human drama in context. But the explanations of graphs and the many, many names of government officials in the public favor today and out of favor tomorrow tested my patience.  Shelby's account of a city turned upside down was thorough, her elucidations of complicated science illuminating.  But her book is not casual reading. 

And now, as the wind continues shake the rafters, I give you tonight's dinner, perfect for a blizzard-y evening:

Creamy Chicken Rice Soup

Mozzarella Ham Stromboli


We added apple slices and some slightly under-baked chocolate chip cookies to our dinner.   

Those Crazy Dreamers

I used to have a powerful People Magazine habit.  I kicked it, much to the relief of my husband. But I remember what I liked best about it--story after story of people who clung to their crazy dreams.  Much to the consternation of all who knew and loved them, they threw their all into making jewelry, or raising ostriches, or singing in backwater bars in Texas.  And their dreams worked out.

So how about an entire book about somebody's dream?

In Outcasts United  by Warren St. John, Luma Mufleh grows up in a prosperous family in Jordan.  She can expect a good education, a good marriage, a few Mercedes in her driveway. But she just wants to go to the United States.  She's not sure what she wants to do there.  She ends up in an Atlanta suburb, coaching a girls' soccer team.

On a grocery run to a store that carries some of her favorite middle-eastern foods,  she makes a U-turn in an apartment parking lot and finds a group of barefoot boys playing soccer "with the sweaty mixture of passion, joy, and camaraderie" that she remembers from her own country.  As she learns more about these boys, her dream takes shape.

They come from Bosnia, Liberia, Afghanistan, the Sudan and other war-torn countries.  After fleeing murder and plunder, after living in refugee camps and applying for asylum, they find themselves settled in some dilapidated apartments in Clarkston, Georgia.

Clarkston, a peaceful town at the end of the commuter train line, isn't sure what has hit them, but they mostly don't like it.

At any rate, Luma forms a few soccer teams and begins coaching the boys. Clarkston's mayor refuses to let them practice on the greenest fields in town, relegating them a rutted, glass-strewn patch of dirt behind one of the town's worst elementary schools.  And the boys themselves present no small challenge.  "After the trauma of war and relocation, many refugee kids had severe psychological and behavioral problems."

Outcasts is a fascinating look at political asylum, a growing phenomenon in American life.  It is also an account of a woman who gives her all on the soccer field, as well as her car if they need rides, her wallet if they need groceries and her time, if their parents needs help filling out endless forms in a strange language.

I could never be Luma Mufleh.   For one thing, the woman has no time to cook, even something as quick as:  

French Toast Sandwiches 

This is your first installment of french toast sandwiches.  I tasted something similar and quite heavenly at the Frango Cafe in Chicago's downtown Macy's.  I intend to reproduce it at home and share it with you, so wish me luck and keep your griddle ready. 

  

Standing on Top of Mt. Tolstoy

THE BOOK

THE BOOKMARK (that thin thing near the back cover).

Abbey says this is a mouthful.  

'Nuff said.

Now, let's wrap it up with  Gourmet Deli Turkey Wraps.

 Maybe you to leave out the bleu cheese.  I left out the walnuts.  No harm either way.  

Yer Doin' It Wrong

Alas, the poor we have with us always.

I think we all know it's not a good idea to hand them money in perpetuity.  And surely we've figured out that warehousing them in urban high-rise projects isn't working well at all.

But what to do, what to do?  

If only we had some data to help us figure out what might work better.

Oh, well, look at that.  We do!  Marvin Olasky wrote The Tragedy of American Compassion, back in the '90s, or maybe earlier.

Olasky documents charity in early America.  Churches, civic associations, immigrant societies all reached out to help the destitute in their communities, offering sleeping rooms, jobs, coal, food, God.  They took the view that mankind could be sorely tempted to live off the labor of others; that people down on their luck needed a "hand up" more than a handout.  Some people couldn't help the troubles that befell them, but some could and they should be expected to overcome the habits that kept them down.

Olasky also tells the story of an opposing point of view:  mankind is inherently benevolent and the reason that poor can't stop being poor is because they have never been placed in a situation where they can thrive.  Therefore, we need to provide them housing and a guaranteed income.  To  my surprise, this idea has been around quite a bit longer than Roosevelt's New Deal.  Olasky traces it back to 1840. 


His many facts and figures demonstrate that charity worked well in early America because giver and receiver knew each other.  Giver could better discern the needs of someone in his community, someone with who he had a relationship.  I was amazed--no, fatigued--by accounts of busy volunteers offering rooms in their homes to the destitute, delivering coal, gathering up clothes, patiently preaching a better way to the alcoholic and the fallen woman.  They stayed close enough to the poor to smell them.  They spent their time much more than they spent their money. 

Who knows if they got a little judgmental as they made the call between who deserved help and who didn't.  Maybe they didn't understand mental illness or alcoholism.  But they did an awful lot of good. 

It sounds like all of early America was one big Relief Society.

Heavy on statistics, Tragedy is no beach read.  Would the people I know enjoy this book? I ask myself.  Likely not.  It's more for the specialist, the academic, the politician.  None of you are secretly a United States Senator, are you?  I didn't think so.

So, it's out there if you want it.  I downed it as a big serving of literary vegetables, and I'm none the worse for it, just eager for a big helping of fiction now.

As for vegetables, here is a tolerable way to sneak them into your diet:

SAUSAGE AND VEGETABLE HERO SANDWICH

1 lb. sweet Italian sausage links
1/2 cup water
2 medium onions, quartered and sliced
2 medium green bell pepper, cut into thin strips
1 medium red bell pepper, cut into thin strips
2 medium zucchini, choppped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 tsp. basil
1/2 tsp. oregano
1/2 cup chicken broth
6 hoagie buns, split (toasted maybe?)

1. Place sausage links in a 10-inch skillet.  Add water and cook, uncovered, over medium-high heat, turning occasionally, until water evaporates, about 10 minutes.  Reduce heat to low and continue cooking, turning occasionally, until sausages are lightly browned, about 5 minutes.

2. Remove sausages to a cutting board; cut diagonally into 1/4-inch slices.  Return to skillet and cook, over medium heat, stirring, 8 to 10 minutes, or until well browned.  Remove to a dish.

3. In same skillet, cook onions over medium heat, stirring occasionally, 4 to 5 minutes, or until limp.  Add red and green peppers and zucchini and cook, stirring occasionally, until zucchini is tender, about 10 minutes.

4. Add browned sausages, garlic, basil, oregano, and broth.  Heat to boiling, reduce heat to low, and simmer 10 minutes.  Serve on buns.  Probably works better open-faced.  Serves 6 @ 355 calories, assuming an 180-calorie bun.

This is what we shared with the missionaries this week.  I deliver our Friday-night leftovers to them for their Saturday meal.  I never know if they like it, if they throw it out, or if they eat the dessert on Friday at midnight and let the rest rot in the fridge.

If they didn't like this one, I wish they would've sent it back.  I fondly remember the zucchini.  That stuff is pretty good, browned in sausage juices and steeped in a tasty broth. 

From 365 Easy One-Dish Meals by Natalie Haughton.

No Manageable Bites Here

I'm reaching into my past reading conquests for today's Finished Book Pile.

I don't know how I had time to read the book I'm about to recommend.  I was playing for a high school  production of Damn Yankees at the time.  Piano parts for musicals, at least during the Rogers & Hammerstein era, were actually "reduced orchestrations," every note for every instrument crushed together on two piano staves.  In other words, not humanly playable.

I was out of my depth.  On the bright side, the pit band made so much racket, I couldn't hear my sour notes.  (Which doesn't mean the audience couldn't.)

James Alexander Thom's Follow the River must have been a comforting distraction during this frazzled time.  But it's not a book a reader can consume in manageable bites, then put down and run off to rehearsals that run late into the night.  I really don't know when I fit it in. 

 In fact, I recommend you raise your children old enough to feed themselves cereal before you pick up Thom's story. Buy several kinds, because they'll be eating it all three meals for several days.

Thom based River on the true story of a frontier West Virginia woman kidnapped by Indians.  Mary Ingles was pregnant at the time, giving birth on the trail as the Shawnees carried her to their Ohio settlement.  Biding her time among them, she finally broke away, following the river trail from whence she came. In other words, Mary Ingles went on the ultimate camping trip. She just forgot to stop at Cabela's first.

Do you think my Damn Yankees troubles were so bad that it was restful to escape into Mary Ingles' world?  Nah. An orchestra pit might be a confining place, but nothing like a cage in an Indian encampment where she kept a wary eye on her captors.  And I might have lost a blouse from sweating through the four performances, but she lost forty pounds from hiking through the woods, living on nuts and berries and . . .  oops, better not give away too much now.  And the pit band didn't turn on me like the Dutch woman, Mary's traveling companion turned on her.     

It was one of those stay-up-late books that caught me mercilessly somewhere before the middle and I either had to stay up and finish, or lay awake fighting off the urge.  Will she survive the night, sleeping inside the rotted log?  Now is that Dutch woman friend or foe?    I'm getting worried by the look in her eye.  

If you feel too bad about making the kids eat Cocoa Krispies and Grape Nuts for three days, you could make up a double batch of these to tide them over.  Unless you want to eat them all yourself:  

Pigs in a Blanket 

Placenta Lady

Childbirth was not such a bad thing. It was dramatic enough that I was the center of attention for a few hours. Then when things got really bad, events sped along and finished up, and somebody offered me a hearty breakfast afterward.

I understand, of course, that your mileage may vary.

It gets even better on the spectator end, because your party troops along to the hospital knowing something exciting is going to happen that day (or the next). You get to cheer the mother on, and shout out when you see the baby's head. You get to run out of the room after the baby's born and call everybody you know, then run back in and watch the little guy look around the room, taking it all in. You get to watch big brother and little infant face off for the first time.

So I can imagine why Peggy Vincent fell in love with delivering babies. In her memoir, Baby Catcher, she takes us along as she runs out of the house, sometimes in her flannel nighty, sometimes deep in Bay Area fog, and attends to her patients right in their homes. Vincent's births are scenes of siblings with their elbows on the bed, watching raptly, of women swaying, moaning or singing away the pain (whatever works), and of kittens playing with her shoelaces while she waits out a particularly long labor. Sometimes she takes a tea break. Sometimes she calls an ambulance, riding along as she holds the emerging baby's head in just a little longer.

This being Berkeley, she considers buying some Birkenstocks, just to fit in with the other midwives. But Vincent's face is as round and wholesome as the 4-H fair's prize squash judge.

Her husband accommodated her crazy schedule. Her children took it in stride when she came to school and showed placentas to the middle-school sex ed class. And Vincent herself rode the waves of a career she was passionate about, logging each of the 2,000+ births in her little book and flooding with memories every time she read her patients' names.

If it were me doing all that midwifing, I would would want somebody to whip up some Bacon 'n Egg Wraps  as soon as the baby lay safely in the mother's arms. I guess everybody's hungry when all the drama concludes.

Great Undertakings

Sometimes, if you think you're not due to die soon, and you can summon the energy and concentration, you embark upon a Great Undertaking.

Great Undertakings are projects that you can't conquer in a day. Or a week. It could be raising a child from diapers to driver's license. It could be shepherding a constitutional amendment through ratification. It could be cutting out a valley with only a glacier for a tool.

Or it could be reading Alice Schroeder's The Snowball, all 800-something pages of it.

Schroeder's biography of financier Warren Buffett portrays his precocious childhood wherein he often sat on his front porch, writing down license plate numbers of cars turning at a nearby corner. Should a crime ever be committed down that street, Warren believed he could hand over numbers and help the police solve the case.

Warren exhibited the same ambition when he landed in the hospital with appendicitis. His doting aunt gave the bored boy a fingerprinting kit and he went about fingerprinting all the nuns in the hospital, just in case they, too, slipped off the straight and narrow way.

Warren's quirky hobbies taught him the art of handicapping, of reading probabilities. This came in quite handy when he grew up, for Warren decided to make a million dollars by age 35. Since he didn't care much for manual labor, he invested in the stock market. Warren met his goal and, like a movie buff who can't stop reaching into the popcorn bucket, just kept on going. The man simply can't help himself. The money keeps rolling in, somewhere in the hundreds of billions by now.

I patiently waded through a few too many pages of financial arcana in hopes of getting the scoop on Warren's personal life. Let's just say that, were he your neighbor, his marital status would have you gossiping over the fence. How in the world did all the parties agree to the arrangement? What made each of them say, "Yep, I'm OK with that"?

After such marathon reading, I rewarded myself with Diana Lopez' Confetti Girl. It's a middle schooler story with a Latino flavor. It's quick, it's lightweight, it's got a likable heroine and her crazy socks.

As for your recipe, we glorified our hot dogs this week with a tasty  Coney Island Sauce.

This recipe celebrates my recent week in Detroit where, every suburb I drove through had a "koney island"-type restaurant, leading me to believe that a lot of Michigan people landed there from the East Coast and they miss the old neighborhoods.