White Bean Soup

On the farm the chickens in the coop began to stir at four in the afternoon. The fields had become a checkerboard of sunshine and shaking crops.  Avocados seemed to ripen a golden green as if upon the demand of touch.  Grandfather left the door open so that the sun might gather and enter.  "Cook from morning until night on sunny days," he would say. "Each must be celebrated."  Fortunately the sun shone most of the year around in these great hill valleys.  It was said that this farm was blessed by the memories of Provence.  This day he had set aside a small station next to the stove for me.  Sister Elizabeth would come down later and ask, when the time had past, if she could help.  "Now, to handle a fine Roma, first, you must roll it around in the palm of your hand to feel if it has proper ripeness."

"Don't worry about the chickens, their eggs are most delicious when they stay a bit hungry." He reached over his chef hat, which flopped backwards and sagged like poorly constructed dough.  "De-seeding is nothing if it isn't fun, each a small adventure, you see; take time to cut out each core and then I want you to cut a small X across the end."  He shuffled the handle of the boiling water gently.  The sunshine coming in through the window caught an inner crescent of the pan.

"Dip the tomato into the boiling water with a slotted spoon for the count of 30, then as quickly let it sit in this bowl of ice water.  You will be able to see the sides begin to peel.  Take them off, but save them.  Maybe we will feed them to the chickens later, if they are lucky."  His was an ongoing battle with poultry.  So cute, he would say, and tasty, but a curse upon the farmer, always attracting trouble from the neighborhood. I had been cooking now since I was four and a half years old.  It was said that the wishes of grandmother had fallen on me when I was born.  She did not make the great flight to the states in the early 40's, but remained in her tiny French countryside village outside of Toulouse.  She

swore that she would defend her kitchen garden against the comings and goings of the German army with every spade and hoe she owned.  Grandfather was a wanted man and had to flee the country.  The regime had sited him as an insurrectionist because his cooking had become such an agent of gathering that his skills in the kitchen were mistaken for political.  Grandmother sent with her only daughter, Talese, three heirloom tomato seeds in a small pot covered in cheesecloth with instructions to keep them alive and thereby remember her French origin by tending to the vines as if a family
tree....

November

"Likewise for Tita the joy of living was wrapped up in the delights of food. It wasn't easy for a person whose knowledge of life was based on the kitchen to comprehend the outside world."
         – from Like Water for Chocolate





BLT & Poached Egg Salad

1Tbsp Dijon Mustard
1 tsp minced shallot
1/4 tsp sugar
Salt and freshly ground pepper
4 Tbsp white wine vinegar
3 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
6 slices thick-cut bacon, coarsely chopped
6 heads Little Gem lettuce
2 cups halved cherry tomatoes
4-6 large eggs

Preparation:


The most important thing when poaching eggs is to take care to drop the egg in the boiling pot slowly and be sure to aim for the sides.  Too many eggs boiling in the middle of the pan will begin to join together and before you know it the water is very inedible white foam.  Do not become too attached to the success of any one of these eggs for one will surely disappoint you.  I know this from trying to poach in a previous kitchen in which I was quite certain that one of mine that I dropped in the not hot enough water might hatch to a small chick and fly up across the small herb garden outside the door and disappear in the corn.  Try to remember that the perfect little incandescent bulb of a successfully poached egg will, as soon as you poke it with your fork, turn to soup anyway, a bit like the magical trick of now you have it, now you don't.  Grandfather used to toss his poached eggs in the air to test their 'durability' as he called it.  If they rose two feet in the air, then back into the palm without breaking, he gave a wide grin then curled his lips under his profound mustache and bent over to save them in his secret poaching bowl as if they were found gems.

Grandfather was indeed much a magician in the kitchen as he was not any sort of trained chef.  It was said that Grandpa was born only capable of speaking French language.  He had been raised, it was true, in Soldiers Grove Wisconsin on a small dairy farm but he was born on a warplane in the

Great War years in flight somewhere over the Atlantic between Toulouse France and New York.  It was only at seven years old, the family story goes, that he became bilingual and could say his name in English. Each day he was known for leaving the counter tops and sinks clinking with tipping stacks of uneven dishes, pots and pans two and three thick.  Flour dusted in every corner of countertops, vegetable knives and granules of tossed salt found in the cracks near warped wooden cutting boards.  There were, as we remembered, pockets of extraordinary smells in various parts of his kitchen.  Onion stations merged in with day old broth simmering under the fat hood of the old stove.  He had planted a wood burning stove in the opposite corner where he might be heating black bean and

parsnip stew.  How could one interrupt such necessary concentration?  Grandmother might display dishes on the table or Marie might turn the wooden spoon in the lemonade as if by automatic instruction.  This is how I learned to cook – there were no lists of severe rules. Every item had its life and feel.  It knew, itself, when it was to be done.  It was only in the imagination of the cook that decided to communicate with the components of each dish.

Background: Casablanca, WWII


If General Eisenhower or any other American commander would have been asked in the years leading up to the Allied invasion at Normandy where a likely attack might be staged to initiate American involvement in the Great War,  Casablanca, the largest city in Morocco North Africa, would not have

Casablanca, originally called Anfa

been mentioned on the list.  Late to enter WWII, the Americans under President Roosevelt's charge finally offered its true weight, beyond the famous Lend Lease Program, and joined Britain in plans to form an alliance that would attempt a 'Cross Channel' attack against Axis powers.  Many American strategists, new to this war, not yet fatigued as much of the rest of Europe, and still holding onto previous century military philosophy, wanted to move onto western Europe directly.  But looking at the problem from a wiser perspective, Eisenhower and others decided that first there must be a period of time not only to militarily stage what eventually became D-Day on the French beachheads, but to politically stage this first of its kind unified front against the spreading Nazi Regime. The city of Casablanca, primarily known to modern Americans as a classic movie title starring Bogart and

Bergman, happened to be the most critical port in Africa and at the time Vichy France's chief military port outside of Toulouse.  It's important to remember that France at this point had been divided into two regional powers by force: northern France, having been taken and claimed by Germany under an aggressor-style armistice negotiation, and southern Vichy France, which was, in name only, still under control of France, but influenced on all levels by Nazi Germany.  This included all North African colonies under French rule such as Casablanca and Algiers (Recalling the great movie Casablanca, this would be best understood by the complicated political relationships between Rick, the American expatriate 'gun runner' and owner of Cafe Americain, the French military captain Louis, the newly arrived German commander, and the Czech Resistance leader Victor Laszlo.)

The Allies progressed toward Operation Torch, which was to secure critical ports, airfields, resources, and political headquarters in Northern Africa.  What would later be named the North African Campaign, spanning between June 1940 and May of 1943, is not always recognized as significant as later episodes of the War, but it was in these years that the likes of Eisenhower, Churchill, Stalin, DeGaulle, Patton and Montgomery would learn how to lead a world wide force that would not seek to

Churchill and DeGaulle 1944

later take over power of the countries to be liberated, but to give it back.
   

Tao of Food

"Hilly village lanes,
Whitewashed sunlit walls.
Cerulean sea.
The laughter of children."










Barley Vegetable Soup



Food is bound not to be thought of as any one thing for any one person. Meals are always occurring. Tastes change, time is of the essence, trends drag or rise depending on hot new items, diets, or TV shows.  All said, commonly though, we might think of food in our daily lives in certain categories that have to do with things like how sweet it is, convenience, calorie percentages, ingredient grams, allergic tendencies or whether it fills out a plate for a stated price. It takes a bit of a calculated act of imagination to consider food itself as a tangible thread to history.  History itself, often reduced to battle numbers, boundary lines, generals turned politicians and those who counter all of it, can only be fully appreciated through an imaginary reaction to the people or events.  Food is similar.  What did the potato taste like to the ancient farming tribes of Orkney, a set of islands off the coast of Scotland?

Years later, still in Scotland, what did the ritualistic dish of "tatties and neeps" (potatoes and rutabagas), often served with

haggis, taste like?  Certain meals bring alive that associated history to your kitchen.  Smells of roasted carrots must have been similar.  Textures, tastes, and the desire for certain additional spices, if available, would have come to mind to all those before us.  From inside the hut kitchen, looking out the stone framed window, the same sea.  The sound of children laughing. 

This soup makes it easy to imagine the ancient farm table from all around the world.  Barley, one of the oldest known cultivated grains, boiled smooth to tiny pearls, adds a soft and comforting filler.

Rutabagas, very rarely found in modern recipes, is a root vegetable that tastes as "of the earth" as anything else grown for as a crop – it tastes like it looks.

Parsnips lend a subtly spicy crispiness that tends to steam and sink into other flavors.  Diced carrots,

a couple of bunches of broccoli, a pinch of oregano and thyme, a couple of clips of onion, simmered in broth, and what you get is a flavor mixture that is a subtle yet brilliantly mild soup that would have tasted like a small treasure chest of nourishment to families for millennia.   

Nature Journal

Oct. 25



The trail rider hangs onto every last open golden day of autumn just like it might be the last.  Although all signs warn of the coming cold – the trees are becoming spinier and leafless, bugs non-existent  – the surge of warmth brings in enough bikers to fill the entire parking lot at Levis.  Out onto Yellow Jacket Trail, a couple of miles inland from the parking lot, out in the vast Clark County Forest, what used to be limited

Julia on Swamp Cut Trail, Levis Mound Trails

close-range viewing as you pass now opens to grander spaces.  Sounds of the forest become crisper as the leaves have coated the trails and every turn of the tire crunches, once in awhile skipping over hidden roots or timber placed to jump. The occasional wooden planks used to cover marshy patches are smooth sailing and fun to try to stay on.

      

Weeknight Cooking

"The Irish prefer them, evidently, to starvation, and the English, too.  And in mid-western Europe, in a part where dumplings grow on every kitchen-range, there are great cannon balls of them, pernicious as any shrapnel to a foreign plate, but swallowed like feathery egg-whites by the natives."
      –M.F.K. Fisher, from "Let the Sky Rain Potatoes"



Potato Pork Chop Casserole

For every golden moment in cooking, for every slight dash of salt that stirs flavor in the right spot at the right time, for every perfect recipe chosen to suit its audience, there is a dud.  The chef, I assume, will assuredly take his or her duds very seriously for there is a waiting, paying mouth at the other end of the fork, but fortunately, for the simple home cook, a dud a week can be handled without any more major repercussion than a snide remark or a boycott by the children (usually quickly followed up by snacks and sweets from the pantry that seem to satisfy every time).

If I remember correctly, an early-week golden moment here at home was a pureed white bean soup with ham and bacon. Later that week, though, the potato pork chop casserole tasted (so I've heard) and felt like the worn rubber toys of a teething puppy dog.

M.F.K. Fisher, the great culinary writer of last century, gives us a good run-down of the potato and helps me, the home cook of a dud, to

understand better why you don't build an entire entree out of a potato.  She comes around to say that when it comes to potatoes, "Although there are few ways of preparing [them] to approach the perfection of a royal plate of fish, and none I know of to make them worth the compliment of a bottle of Chateau Yquuem, they in their own way are superlative compliments." This is her way of saying potatoes make great sides like hash browns, bakers, au gratins, scalloped, mashed, or the most common, fried.  My own recipe called for four tubers sliced thinly and spread out along a baking pan, then covered by onion, a couple of hands full of mushrooms, some milk, sage, then topped by the pork chops, to be placed in the oven uncovered for some 45 minutes.  45 can be a long time to wait in our house once the witching hour of hunger hits.  I sped up the process by trying to broil this pan of duds but what I got, rushed, was a brown crisp edge to the too thick pork chop while the too thickly sliced potatoes below had not received enough slow bake time to soften.  Result?  From another quote from the article, this one by a disappointed potato cooking house wife of yesteryear, "Never have I tasted such a poor, flaccid, grey sad mixture of a mess."  My chops were overcooked and chalky; my potatoes like sharp stones repelling all that attempted flavor piled over it.  And the table of mouths, needless to say, got up at once and rushed to the pantry.

Songs from the Coulee

Neshonoc


1.


When the urge of autumn blossoms,
when the sky fills-in as if by blue paint
when a wintering Jay darts
across the swollen lake,

in the foreground where the water's raised
  over aged dam
and the crickets no longer speak
beholden to the coming cold...
we know our pioneers.

We can see the long treks behind
lumbering oxen from county Dane,
   the bull's heavy breath,
the clippety-clop of slow hooves
over mud caked fields

when the father held his knuckles tight
to lean on leather reins,
and mother to the girls'  low flung dresses,
the hovering of slow bees
beholden to the coming cold...
we know our pioneers.