Detasseling Corn, a Peasant Revolt and the Return of the Light Bulb

“The first vehicle I learned to drive was an International Harvester tractor. The second was a bulldozer, which was a heck of a lot more fun. The third was my Dad's pickup truck. Later that year, I turned 11." Kevin O’Brien, The Plain Dealer Full Text

When my sons were kids, age nine and eleven as I recall, they worked one summer de-tasseling corn. The de-tasseling season ran three or four weeks. They worked a four hour shift and were paid around $10 an hour. It was hot and nasty work, but it made both of them “rich.”

This is work our US Department of labor will no longer allow children to perform on America’s farms. The agency has proposed child labor regulations that will severely limit what chores farm kids can do. Needless to say American farmers are alarmed and livid over the proposed rule. It would prohibit children under the age of sixteen from operating farm equipment, handling livestock, and even de-tasseling corn.

More than one hundred of Congress and the US Senate have objected to proposed regulations. They’ve asked that the agency withdraw the proposal claiming it will significantly harm agriculture and the nation’s food supply.

O’Brien reported: “a letter signed by 32 senators raises a host of practical objections rooted in the concept and operation of the family farm, including this one: “Until recently, farms jointly owned and operated by multiple family members had discretion over the responsibilities they gave their children on the farm. But the proposed rule change would do away with that freedom. . . . It is common in rural America for siblings to jointly own and operate farms and for extended family and neighbors to participate in agriculture production. With this rule change, the government is proposing to tell farmers and ranchers: We know what's best for your children, and what they should and should not be doing."”

I am counting on this as the beginning of a peasant revolt.

Today, the last day of 2011, I stocked up on 100 watt incandescent light bulbs. I’ve hoarded twenty-four of them which should last well into 2014. By that time public outrage will force the light bulb law to be repealed, and with it any number of other senseless laws and regulations.

Lake Trout, Mercury and a Bold Faced Lie

This is about fish, clean air and bold faced lies. You need to know something about lies first.

President Obama has spent most of the year pushing for higher taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” These of course are individuals with annual incomes greater than $200 thousand and households exceeding $250 thousand.

As I blogged earlier in The American Peasant Tripping Down Stalin’s Path, taxing all household income above $200 thousand a year at a 100% tax rate would net the US Treasury about $2 trillion, just enough to cover current federal budget deficits with a little left over to begin retiring some of our national dept.

Nevertheless, the President has pushed this mantra hard enough and long enough that some 66% of Americans believe the rich are not paying their fair share in income taxes. It’s a bold faced lie.

In the table below, courtesy of the US Internal Revenue Service, those in the top 10% of adjusted gross income tax returns provided the treasury with of over 70% of its income tax receipts. The top 50% of personal income tax filers coughed up 97.75% of all personal income taxes paid.

Tax Year 2009

Percentiles Ranked by AGI	AGI Threshold on Percentiles	Percentage of Federal Personal Income Tax Paid
Top 1%	$343,927	36.73
Top 5%	$154,643	58.66
Top 10%	$112,124	70.47
Top 25%	$66,193	87.30
Top 50%	$32,396	97.75
Bottom 50%	<$32,396	2.25
Note: AGI is Adjusted Gross Income

Now, in politics if you repeat a lie often and with confidence, it becomes a political truth to drive policies that would otherwise be untenable. That is the sad truth infecting not only our legislative bodies, but permeating our regulatory agencies as well. Here is the bold, but veiled face of tyranny. So now for the truth about fish and mercury.

Just before Christmas, the US Environmental Protection Agency published its rules for toxic mercury emissions from coal and oil fired electric power plants. The EPA has full statutory authority to establish emission control standards for toxic air pollutants. But those standards have to reflect human health risks and environmental harm weighted with compliance costs.

Toxic mercury air emissions from coal fired power plant present minimal direct human health risks. Mercury is a bio-accumulating toxin which as it works its way through the aquatic food chain can accumulate to levels of some concern in larger aquatic species if we eat them. Hence, here in Milwaukee for example, we are warned not to eat more than one meal a week of wild caught Lake Michigan lake trout. Pregnant women and nursing mothers are warned not to eat it at all.

EPA’s new regulation was promulgated to address this problem. But here’s how, according to The Politico, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson unveiled the new rule:

““I understand the importance of protection … both my sons struggled with asthma,” Jackson said. “Fifteen years ago, my first son spent his very first Christmas in the hospital,” she said. “I can tell you, I think he was admitted almost 15 years ago to this day.”

EPA says the new standards will prevent 11,000 premature deaths and 4,700 heart attacks a year, along with 130,000 childhood asthma symptoms and 6,300 fewer cases of acute bronchitis in children.”

Suddenly the rule is no longer about mercury and fish, but is instead about childhood asthma symptoms. It’s bait and switch, the swindle and the big lie. Eating lake trout does not cause childhood asthma or bronchitis.

EPA estimates the rule cost’s to electric utilities and ultimately to consumers will exceed $10 billion. Critics contend the costs could reach $100 billion. According to IHS/Global Insight, the world’s largest economics consulting firm with more than 3800 clients in industry, finance and government worldwide, for every billion dollars spent in complying with the new rule, 16,000 jobs will be lost and the U.S. GDP will be reduced by up to $1.2 billion.  (Full Text – A summary of a cost/benefit white paper by the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council)

In short, if the rule withstands court challenges, what is likely to be one of costliest rules in EPA’s history is justified on a bold faced lie. It will not significantly reduce mercury concentrations in fish. A Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out the total benefits from removing the mercury will amount to less than $8 million. (Full Text)

The questionable health benefits result from the reduction in fine particulates that will also be stripped from the flue gasses in the course of meeting mercury standard. Even those benefits are statistically insignificant.

The AP reported the rule could force the shutdown of between some 30 and 60 coal fired power plants. Other than that, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, on this news the Fourth Estate has remained silent.

On a more positive note, the USEPA has newly launched an internal reform effort. It is trying to reinvent itself as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Environmental Sustainability. (Full Text) It had to reach far back into environmental law to find the statutory authority to do so and could only manage legal justification with a grossly edited and truncated minor paragraph from the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.

Tyranny.

A Cristmas Story and a Book of Memories

I’ve become a writer of books or rather of a book only reluctantly. It’s tough work, with few prospects of financial success. My book is a simple thing. It’s the story of my wife’s parents, Ukrainian peasants both. This book isn’t meant for financial success.  I am writing it for my wife, my children and my nieces and nephews. The title is simple too, Gus – A peasant’s journey through the Twentieth Century. I hope to finish it this spring. I’m self-publishing it.  Here is a draft introduction.

This is the story of my wife’s parents through much of the Twentieth Century. The starting point for both Gus and Olga was Ukraine. Both were peasants. Both wound up in suburban middleclass America. Between those two endpoints were: WWI, the Russian Revolution, Collectivization of Soviet Union agriculture, the Great Depression and WWII on both the German eastern and western fronts. This is not a history of monumental people. Those Twentieth Century histories have long been written. It’s a story of story of peasants finding their way through the monumental times of the Twentieth Century.

Sometimes it takes a while to connect the dots. I must have been married for eight or nine years before it occurred to me that my father-in-law, Gus, not only lived through the Russian revolution but likely was old enough at the time to have recollections of it.

I knew he was born in Ukraine in 1908. I knew ethnically and culturally he was German. I knew he immigrated to Canada in the 1920s and then to the US. I knew I had married into a closely knit extended family and most of my wife’s aunts and uncles came to the US following WWII. I knew my mother-in-law was something of mail order bride. I knew she had fled from Ukraine into Austria with the retreating German army in WWII. I knew Olga and Gus had not met prior to her arrival in America. I knew many things and I knew nothing.

Mostly we live in the present. Our personal histories extend primarily to our memories and those shared with others. What I knew about my in-laws was mostly what I knew of them in the present: they were devout Baptists; their social lives were centered on their extended family and church community; and both groups we’re largely populated by ethnic German immigrants and first generation Americans.

Almost ten years after my wife and I had been married we were celebrating Thanksgiving with her parents. In the course of conversation it finally occurred to me that Gus would have been eight or nine years old at the close of WWI and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. My own memories go back to when I eight and before. So I asked Gus if he remembered the Russian Revolution. He did and vividly. 

Throughout the following winter, I visited often, with a tape recorder, and let him tell his life story. That spring I transcribed those interviews and began writing this book. I knew it would be a mammoth project and I also knew I was not a writer of books.  Good grief, I was an industrial salesman.

After drafting the first few thousand words I thought it was time for a reality check. The story I was writing was a combination of Gus’s narrative, family profile and a more detailed history of times and places Gus had told me about and also about the places Rita’s extended family were at in given times.  As a writer this all this adds up to tough transitions. Though, I didn’t know that.

I attended a writer’s workshop to get feel for if what I was doing was any good and worth the effort. I was told something about tough transitions. In a similar vein, that fall I returned to college and enrolled in class on writing non-fiction for publication – more talk on tough transitions. There was something about climbing up and down the ladder abstraction too. Ladders of abstraction and tough transitions aside, the feedback from the writer’s workshop and non-fiction writing course was positive.

That summer, a friend of mine started a legal publishing business and needed writers. Suddenly I found I was a legal journalist reporting on environmental legislation, litigation and regulation. The family history project was placed on a back burner and ultimately tucked away in a closet to be returned to at some later date. Big projects tucked away in closets are things thought of with dread – hard work and foreboding with fears of inadequacy. They are thought of it’s there and ought to be worked on. And at the same time, the dreadful conclusion is I really don’t want to go there.

That later date turned out to be twenty years into the future and some four or five operating systems later. Thank God I had the wisdom to save my work in an ASCII text format.

About Christmas time last year, Rita asked, when are you going to finish my father’s history? By next Christmas, I told her. “It will be a Christmas present.”

That wasn’t going to happen. But it was a deadline. Some deadlines are set in stone. Some are meant to be broken – in place only to keep a project moving forward. Mine was one of the latter.  Now there was much work to do – history to brush up on: the great depression, WWII and the like. Some of the history I needed to know was only just being written. The history of Stalin’s collectivization program only started to come to light in the early 1990s.

 A formal history of European displaced persons at the end of WWII was first published in 2011, as I write now. It’s a huge story. But it was overshadowed by so many other huge stories of WWII it’s almost forgotten. Other stories, such as the Battle of Los Angles are found in old newspaper accounts and in more recent but obscure military histories.

The twenty year lag time was both a blessing and a curse. If I had known then, what I know now, I would have been more able to question Gus and Olga for details and could have presented their narrative fully. But I cannot go back. Both are dead. I am sorry I can’t say to them “tell me more.”

I am sorry too that I can’t go back to both of my parents and say tell me more of your lives, of the times before I was born and of the times neither my sisters nor our brothers can remember. We live in the present after all. Our histories mostly consist of our shared memories and shards and bits of memories from what we know from parents from those times before we were born. There is always the courtship story, after all.

These things become like the frozen and dissolving pixels on our digital TVs when the signal goes bad. Lost. For our roots we try to piecemeal them back together through genealogy and elaborate family trees.

I had the luck once to connect the dots – to ask a question and to say tell me more.

In the end, that simple question resulted in this story. This story is a very simple gift of love, first to my wife and my children. After that it’s a gift wife’s brothers and cousins and their children. And finally, this is a gift to the many people who share a similar history. And in retrospect it is a gift to Gus and Olga. It says I remember.

Rouladen & Other Happy Meals

Rouladen is one of my happy meals. It’s a simple thing too. It’s a thin slice of round or sirloin steak, layered with two strips of bacon then wrapped around a generous dill pickle spear, a rib of celery cut somewhat wider than the slice of steak and a carrot stick of equal proportions.

This beef roll is secured with a couple of toothpicks, seasoned with salt pepper and paprika and baked uncovered with beef stock at 350^o for forty-five or fifty minutes until browned. Add additional stock as necessary for gravy, cover and bake at 275^o for about another hour, until the steak is fork tender.

Thicken the pan drippings with a white wash and season to taste with parsley, garlic and onion powder. Serve up with homemade spätzle and my Bavarian red cabbage and oh my, you have created a Milwaukee, German-American feast fit for royalty. Easy.

McDonald’s also serves up happy meals, but not so much to my liking. Children seem to love them because they include some sort of toy. Now when my own kid were toddlers and preschoolers, my wife took them to McDonald’s one night for supper. They were thrilled. Up until that point in their little lives they had never been to McDonald’s. We were a young, struggling couple with three kids. McDonald’s was simply a too pricey meal for our family of five at the time.

I was off fishing. Rita had been busy putting in a garden and didn’t much want to cook. We’ll go to McDonald’s she told the kids. They squealed in anticipation and joy – a special dinner out and ooh at McDonald’s. Aside from burgers, shakes and fries, McDonald’s servers up a ton of advertising, as in “oh I’m love’n it.”

Little kids buy into that, adults do too. On that day my kid’s expectations met up with reality. The much anticipated McDonald’s happy meal, even with the toy, wasn’t much too their liking. The burgers at home were better. At home they were made better beef, served on a better bun, seared to a juicy perfection and cost a great deal less. At home these burgers were not served with fries, but with a salad.

As for the rouladen, tell me what could delight a child more than a slice of tender beef wrapped around the colorful and tasty splendor of the pickle, carrot and celery stick. I recall taking my two young sons to the mall at Christmas time one night after supper. They were maybe four and five years old. It was mostly to get them out of the house for a while to burn off a bit of steam. We went to the local mall, played hide and seek in the Victoria’s Secret’s store and such. We returned home an hour and a half or two hours later.

When we got home, my youngest son Ed had some sort of wad in his cheek, like a jawbreaker or a slug of chewing tobacco. Neither jawbreakers nor chewing tobacco were part of our evening excursion. It turned out the mysterious wad was in fact a brussels spout that he had squirreled away in is cheek. He was quite literally savoring it all that while.  Brussels sprouts, like rouladen are part of my food culture.

But so is an occasional Big Mac. And I’ve found that their sausage McMuffin with eggs sandwich has medicinal properties for curing hang overs.

Now back to the McDonald’s Happy Meal. San Francisco tried to discourage happy meal sales by focusing on the happy meal toy.

The city enacted an ordinance that prohibited restaurants from including a toy with meals that do meet city generated nutritional standards. The measure was a thinly veiled shot at McDonald’s. In some circles McDonald’s is an evil corporate force largely responsible of “childhood obesity epidemic.” San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar evidently runs in one of those. (view video – it’s a hoot)      

And his ordinance reeks of hypocrisy. San Francisco school lunches don’t meet the city’s nutrition standards either. (Full Text) You would think a city with the audacity to draw up municipal nutrition guidelines would apply them to their school lunch programs first. But no and in the broader scheme of things, what’s up with city nutrition guidelines anyway?

McDonald’s of course took counter measures to get around the silly ordinance. Now in San Francisco you can only get a toy when you order a happy meal. It’s an option. They charge an extra ten cents for it. The extra ten cents goes to Ronald McDonald charities At McDonald’s stores elsewhere the toys can be purchased for separately $2.18, so a health consciences parent could have their child wash down a salad with a cup 2% milk and still thrill them with a toy.

But it’s no longer that way in San Francisco – to get the kid the toy, you have to buy the happy meal. It seems the McDonald’s corporate lawyers have beautifully ironic sense of humor.      

Eric Mar you’ve been outbid, out trumped and checkmated. I suspect you’re ‘not loving it.’

Spätzle: A Slacker’s Noodle and a Lesson on Energy and Work

I dearly love homemade noodles in my soup. But I’m lazy, so I make spätzle instead. It’s a German egg dumpling and a close cousin to both a traditional egg noodle and reebles.

Homemade noodles are time consuming and create something of a mess that needs to be cleaned up. In short they are a lot of work. Even though I have a pasta machine, I seldom make them anymore. Maybe President Obama is right. We’ve become a nation of lazy slackers and that’s why our current recession is so persistent.

Jonah Goldberg observes, in the National Review Online, that the president has been obsessing on this notion for any number of months. (Full Text)

But maybe the president has never had a basic physics course and does not comprehend the relationship between energy and work. It could be this lack of knowledge has put a stranglehold on our economy. I must note that people who aspire to become community organizers in college generally shy away from courses in physics.

With regard to the relation between energy and work, in Europe electric motors are sized according to the energy they use, expressed in kilowatts. Something the president wants us to use less of. In the U.S. electric motors are sized according to work, in horse power. Something the president wants us to do more of.

There is a contradiction here. Energy and work are the same thing. One horse power is equivalent to 0.77 kilowatts of electricity.

My home on average uses about 23 kilowatt hours of electricity or about the equivalent of a horse toiling away twenty-four hours a day to keep my lights on, to run my refrigerator and freezer, to braise my veal chops and such. All of that is “work.” That’s it. The calculus is simple.

Because I am lazy, I really do not want to scrub my wash with a washboard. It’s nasty work. But the Department of Energy efficiency standards for household appliances have created machines that work so poorly that if I want clean clothes the washboard maybe my only option.

Now the president is pushing “alternative” energy. (There is no such thing. Energy is Energy.) And he envisions a future of Chevy Volts powered by wind turbine generated electricity. It will take quite a few of those turbines to power a nation-wide fleet of electric cars. The usable power in the Chevy Volt’s battery is 16 kilowatt hours. By comparison the energy stored in a gallon of gasoline is about 36 kilowatt hours.

On average the Volt will travel about 35 miles on electricity alone – not too far. There are plenty of conventional cars that get around 35 miles to the gallon. So in electric mode it is somewhat more than twice efficient than a conventional automobile. But here’s the kicker. Electricity costs me 11 cents a kilowatt hour. The relative price of electric energy compared to gasoline is $3.69 a gallon. If you were add in average state and federal transportation fuel taxes that price would climb to about $4.20 a gallon. That’s about a $1 a gallon more than I’m paying for gas right now. The Volt’s increased efficiency is diminished by relative energy costs.   

In the real world the Volt doesn’t save much over other fuel stingy vehicles. According to Edmunds, the automotive publishing house, in a fuel cost comparison under typical driving conditions the Volt averaged 41 mpg, with total fuel costs of $88.55. A relatively conventional Volkswagen Jetta TDI averaged 37.2 mpg with total fuel costs of $90.88. (Full Text)

Even if you typically drive less than 40 miles a day, you might save $2 a day. Well, for someone who can afford a $40,000+ car, $2 a day isn’t a big deal. People who can afford a $40,000+ car want something that is a pleasure to drive. In short the Volt is a car without a market. On the other hand, Chevy’s more pricy and less fuel efficient Corvette is. So is the far less costly and almost fuel efficient Fiat 500.

Besides, if every American drove a Volt we would need a nation forested with windmills and in the end have virtually nothing to show for it. For this American tax payers are giving those who buy a Volt a $7,500 tax credit. As for the windmills, it seems they are being abandoned when their useful life and energy subsidies come to an end – some 14,000 in the U.S. have met this fate – and stand like giant parched corn stalks bracing the wind. For nothing. (Full Text)

President Obama is pursuing policies that will necessarily increase our electric rates, inhibit domestic hydrocarbon energy production and is raising CAFÉ fuel efficiency standards that will necessarily cause the price of automobiles to skyrocket. In short he is making “work” more and more costly and wonders why the economy remains in the doldrums. The American economy crumbles for a want of a course in introductory physics. Energy is work.

Now on to a slacker’s delight -- spätzle. For these you will need an egg or two, flour, baking powder and salt. Parsley, chives other optional ingredients can be added depending upon the circumstances of the spätzle’s final destination on the plate or in the bowl. This recipe is from Joy of Cooking. I like to use a 50/50 mix of all-purpose flour and semolina flour. And if I boil them in a bullion-cube broth I cut down the salt in mix.

Spätzle        Serves Four

2 eggs

1 ½ Cups Four

½ Cup Water

½ Teaspoon Salt

¼ Teaspoon Baking Powder  

2 Tablespoons of butter (Optional)

A dusting of Paprika and Parsley for a Garnish                         

In a generous mixing bowl combine water, salt and baking powder. Beat in the eggs then gradually add the flour until the mixture is smooth and has the consistency of a heavy paste. In batches, drop the batter in slowly boiling water or stock drop ¼ teaspoon at a time. Gently boil for about 5 minutes until the dumpling float to the surface. Transfer the dumplings to a casserole pan.  Add the butter and sprinkle with parsley and paprika and serve.

Cheese Bintzes and the Food Stamp Challenge

I made cheese blintzes. It was something of an adventure because I hadn’t made them before. And while Rita regularly had them at home while growing up, she wasn’t much help in guiding the way. And so it went with my participation in the Food Stamp Challenge. The blintzes were crucial to my effort.

The non-profit group Fighting Poverty With Faith issued the Food Stamp Challenge in a lobby effort to protect the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from budget cuts. It requires participants to limit their food budget to $1.50 meal, the average per meal amount food stamp recipients receive. According to The Hill at least nine Democratic congressmen took up the challenge. (Full Text)

When Rita read about this in the newspaper she said I should take the challenge.

“Is there some sort of prize,” I asked.

“No,” she said, “but we don’t spend much more than that on groceries, as it is.”

I took the challenge. Here’s how it went:

Sunday – roast chicken with mashed potatoes, gravy, onions and carrots. I bought the largest roasting chicken I could find. It was about 4.5 lbs. and would be good for at least another six meals: two beautiful chicken sandwiches with lettuce and mayo and a pot of hearty chicken noodle soup to amply feed four. It cost $8.50.

Monday – beef roulade with potato dumpling, gravy and sugar snap peas. The roulade is a thinly sliced round steak, layered with two strips of bacon and then wrapped around a large carrot stick, a rib of celery and a dill pickle spear. Delicious – I make these regularly. The cost driver in this meal is the steak and bacon and is less than $1.10 a serving.  The potato dumplings were made from the left over mashed potatoes, an egg and enough flour to stiffen the mix for rolling into balls. The yield on this was four servings. Rita snacked on the left overs for breakfast.

Tuesday – lamb ragout. This might have been a deal breaker, but it was oh so good. It was made from a 0.43 lb. lamb shoulder chop costing about $8 a pound. I cut this beauty into stew meat and brazed in a combination of equal parts of chicken stock, beef stock and red wine. The stew was finished with two peeled, seeded and diced fresh Roma tomatoes, an onion, ½ of a bell pepper and sliced green olives. It was thickened with tomato paste and simply seasoned with garlic, basil and oregano. Finally it was tossed with cooked rotini pasta. I think this dish might have cost $2.60 a plate.

Wednesday and Saturday -- chicken soup with buttered toast triangles for dunking.

Thursday – meatloaf from 1 lb. ground chuck, an egg, two table spoons of chili sauce, onion soup mix and a cup of bread crumbs. I had this with Betty Crocker scalloped potatoes and an iceberg lettuce salad. The leftover meatloaf was good for another three sandwiches.

And now we come to the adventure. Friday – cheese blintzes. A blintz is simply a thin pancake. In France they are called crêpes and in Italy, crespelle.  In Eastern Europe, Russia and Ukraine they are called blintzes.

Like hearty soup with bread, they are part of peasant cuisine.  I knew that if I were to meet the Food Stamp Challenge I would need to cook like a peasant. After all, Rita had them regularly while growing up and both of her parents were honest to god German-Ukrainian peasants. So I placed the here-to-for unknown to me, cheese blintz on my menu.

While blintzes can be filled with any number things, Rita’s mom made cheese blintzes filled with either cottage or farmer’s cheese and topped with cherry pie filling. Rita did not want that. She rejected the cottage cheese, and suggested Ricotta instead. Nor would she have anything to do with cherry pie filling. Beyond that advice I was on my own. The result was magnificent and a recipe will follow.

Now I don’t really know if $1.50 per meal is miserly or overly generous food assistance for the poor. But I do know that the SNAP program is supposedly a supplemental program and for $2 a plate one can eat very well indeed, provided there is a little peasantry in one’s food culture. And to a significant degree, that’s what the best cookbooks are all about. Think of the Joy of Cooking, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking or Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.  

I normally spend between $70 and $85 a week on groceries. Rita packs a lunch every day. I normally pack a lunch two or three days a week. On the days when I buy a lunch the cost is normally under $5.

My local newspaper columnist James E. Causey also accepted to food stamp challenge. His account of his experience presents joyless and unhappy week of eating, anchored by skinless, boneless chicken breasts, turkey burgers, canned soup and peanut butter sandwiches. (Full Text) And after enduring this purgatory like menu he oddly concludes:

“The experiment reinforced my belief that there should be restrictions on what can be purchased with food stamps. Food stamps are meant to be a supplement, and with the nation facing an obesity epidemic, restrictions should be placed on sugary snacks, chips and sodas, cookies and cakes.

These restrictions actually would help those who use food stamps to make healthier food choices by eliminating the least healthy options. It would curb impulse buys, such as candy bars or bags of chips while waiting in line.

When I was at Aldi, a family ahead of me at the checkout was overdrawn on their food stamps and had to put back some food. What they put back were several Arizona Ice Teas, Popsicles, ice cream and bags of chips.

In that family of five, four of the people were overweight. With more than 40 million people currently using food stamps, don't we want to make sure people are making the healthiest food choices?“

But enough of that, it speaks for itself. Instead let me offer you a recipe for delicious cheese blintzes.

Cheese Blintzes with Caramelized Apple Slices

For the Blintz (makes six):

½ cup of half and half

1/3 cup of flour

¼ teaspoon salt

1 egg

Slowly wisk the flour into the half and half making sure to beat out all the lumps. Wisk in the egg and salt to complete the batter.

Fry these in a lightly buttered 10” sauté pan on medium heat.  About three tablespoons of batter will do for each blintz. The batter swirled to coat the bottom of the pan to make a very thin 8” pancake.

For the cheese filling:

6 oz. Ricotta Cheese

2 oz. Cream Cheese softened at room temperature

2 heaping tablespoon crumbled blue chees      

For the sauce

1 Apple pealed cored and thinly sliced

2 oz. Apple cider

2 oz. Maple Syrup

1/8 teaspoon ea. Allspice, ground cloves, ground cinimon.

Saute the apple slice in butter until browned and limp. Add cider to cover then add the spices and maple syrup. Bring mix to a slow boil then simmer to keep it warm.

To assemble

Fill the blintzes by centering an oblong mound cheese filling on each pancake, fold the sides over the filling then roll the blintz up to fully enclose the filling. Place the filled blintzes seam side down on a non-stick sheet pan and bake at 350⁰ for 15 minutes. Then serve topped the caramelized apple sauce.  

Black Applesauce and Pork

Alexis de Tocqueville, 175 years ago, warned a democratic republic could degenerate into tyranny more intolerable than any of the Europe’s monarchies. As power and wealth became centralized and concentrated he prophetically observed:

“…the sovereign extends it arms over society as a whole. It covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; …it rarely forces one to act, but constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”

In an August Rasmussen poll, a shocking 69 percent of likely voters no longer believe the federal government governs with the consent of the people. I copped the above quotation from a short article by Jeffry H. Anderson, writing on the topic in the Weekly Standard. (Full text here) In a similar vein Myron Magnet, writing in the City Journal, thoughtfully outlines how we’ve reached this point. (Full text here)

I bring this up because I fear that with my regular rants on the mindless, numbing tyranny of the federal government that I may be becoming something of a crackpot. And while this may true, I take comfort in knowing that at least I am not alone. I am proudly one of the 69 percenters.

Now I shall turn my attention to more pleasant things – black applesauce and pork.

Black apple sauce is a good thing, but you must rethink apple sauce. This isn’t anything like the ready to eat apple sauce that comes in a jar. In Tocqueville’s words that processed applesauce on the grocer’s shelf has been hindered, compromised, enervated, extinguished, and dazed into an insipid mush that only vaguely suggests its beginnings were in something as glorious as an apple.

Instead my applesauce is apples, cider and in this case some balsamic vinegar with a hint of Chinese Five Spices. It’s an autumn celebration – good harvest from the land. It is an ad-lib concoction I made to lather on breaded pork cutlets. And oh my, the balsamic vinegar was a happy stroke of blind genius.

An important note here – balsamic vinegar is a product of Italy and somewhere the label should read Aceto Balsamico di Modena. It should be added just prior to serving so that its aroma carries through to the finished sauce.

For reasons unknown to me, pork and apples marry so well. Sweet/Sour and pork can be perfect. And it’s all so easy.

2 baseball sized apples – pealed, cored and diced into pea sized pieces

¼ cup of apple cider (from the orchard and not reconstituted apple juice from the supermarket}

¼ cup Balsamic Vinegar

½ teaspoon Chinese Five Spices

Pork cutlets, thinly sliced, breaded and sautéed in butter.

For the sauce: cover the chopped apples with a 50/50 mix of cider and cider vinegar, season to taste with the five spices. Bring to a slow boil and allow the apple to cook and soften for about thirty minutes. Add liquid as necessary balancing sweet and sour to taste. Just prior to serving add the Balsamic vinegar.

Serve hot over the pork schnitzel.

Occupy Wall Street: Misunderstanding the Native Wealth of Place

“Accursed be the soil because of you! Painfully will you get your food from it, as long as you live. It will yield brambles and thistles, as you eat the produce of the land. By the sweat of your face will you earn your food…” Gen 3; 17-19

A road trip and the native wealth of place

There was a wedding to attend, so we set out from Milwaukee to Knoxville by way of New Orleans – a road trip.  As we went, the changing agrarian landscape unfolded before us.

Wisconsin is a state of forest, cattle and diverse crops. We are big in cranberries, tart cherries, apples, potatoes, table vegetables, maple syrup, mint, oh yes and cheese. There is forestry and mining in the state. And to help harvest this “produce of the land” there is manufacturing.

In Illinois the landscape changes to mono-crop fields of corn and soy. In Kentucky forestry returns and slowly cotton enters the picture. Travelling further south, along the west bank of the Mississippi river, in Louisiana cotton is still king and then there are oil pumps.

Indeed our wealth is from the land. Yet unseen in the countryside, the agent harvesting this wealth is commerce.

Our first stop on our way to New Orleans was Chicago, to leave our dog in the care of our son Nathan. He lives in Chicago’s Logan square neighborhood. It’s about four or five miles northwest of the Loop – an international hub of commerce.

Along the way we visited other but now faded hubs of commerce: Shiloh, the site of a battle fought over a railroad hub in nearby Corinth; Vicksburg, a town perched high above the banks of the Mississippi and in the 1860s controlling steamboat traffic on the waters below; and Natchez, whose antebellum mansions mark a bygone era of concentrated wealth and a starting point for an even earlier trade route – the Natchez Trace.

Our road trip and odd route to a wedding in Knoxville, TN via New Orleans was set by two circumstances. First, our daughter Hanna recently moved there and second, neither my wife nor I had ever visited that charmed city.    

In thinking of native wealth we naturally think of climate and soil, we think of minerals, of forests and fisheries. But commerce too is part of the native wealth of place. In some places that wealth is so compelling that those places evolve and change but the nevertheless endure. New Orleans is one of those places, as are Chicago and New York, New York.

I mention these only because they are the places my children have chosen to labor in and seek their fortunes. Their harvest is not directly from the soil, but is more closely tied to commerce and to the wealth of cities. Nevertheless, going back to Genesis, they too will earn their bread by the sweat on their faces. There are no free lunches.

This brings me to the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd who seem to believe the economic role of government is to distribute wealth when to the contrary it is to facilitate commerce for the creation of wealth.

To be sure, the “occupy” protesters are voicing the legitimate concerns shared by a majority of Americans: a nearly 20% unemployment rate when the under employed and those who have quit looking for work are factored in; a decline in real wages; lost wealth in retirement accounts and home values; and college graduates facing tough job prospects and loads education dept.

There is much anger and resentment in America today.

Yet focusing the blame on “millionaires, billionaires” and big financial institutions is misguided.    

Of all that our federal government does four things are primary: national defense, securing our borders, ensuring our civil rights, and enabling commerce. All else is tertiary.

In terms of enabling commerce its job is to: maintain a stable currency; provide infrastructure necessary for commerce; and to respect the “rule of law.” Instead we have a government of “quantitative easing” and economic engineering.

Regulatory compliance costs consume 15% of the private sector economy. Federal spending is about 26% of gross domestic product and state and local spending consumes another 20%. Compliance with our byzantine tax code, as well as forcing employers and shop keeper into being tax collectors takes another 5%.  (See attached)

From this, it’s easy to point out that in our economic calculus government directly or indirectly controls or consumes almost two thirds of our economy. Yet the “occupy” crowd direct their rage at the “millionaires and billionaires,” the one percenters who still have enough of a grip on the private economy to create wealth and jobs and who in fact foot the greater portion of our taxes.

It’s a straw man diverting our attention from the degradation of the “rule of law,” and the heavy chains cast by that degradation have imposed on commerce. Through executive order, the promulgation and enforcement of administrative rule, “law” has become arbitrary and capricious – a tool to advance political agendas and to garner political gain and economic advantage.  

In what should be a free economy, the government is picking winners and losers. On the win side: labor with the bailout of GM and Chrysler; green energy with the loan guarantees to the like of Solyndra and sweetheart tax deals to the likes of General Electric.      

And there are legions of losers. There are now more than 4000 ways to run afoul of federal statutory criminal law. The regulatory code implementing those laws vastly multiplies our exposure to potential criminal prosecution. The case of the Gibson Guitar Co. is telling. (Full Text) The hand of soft tyranny has a stranglehold on commerce.  

Finding Romance in a Cup of Corn Chowder

Columnist Mark Steyn recently lamented the cultural decline of romance in the US. In a recent National Review Online article he observed:

“Yet one of the curious features of a hypersexualized society is that it becomes paradoxically sexless and joyless. Guys who confidently bellow along with Enrique’s “F**king You” no longer quite know how to ask a girl for a chocolate malt at the soda fountain. It’s hardly surprising that, as Miss Ingraham reports, the formerly fringe activity of computer dating has now gone mainstream on an industrial scale. And, even then, as a couple of young ladies happened to mention to me after various recent encounters through Match.com and the like, an alarming number of chaps would rather see you naked on their iPhones Anthony Weiner–style than actually get you naked in their bachelor pads. I was reminded of The Children Of Men, set in an infertile world, in which P.D. James’s characters, liberated from procreation, increasingly find sex too much trouble.” (Full Text Here)

As a counter measure to all of the above a warm bowl of corn chowder is one of many perfect dishes to initiate a romance. It seems acquaintance, friendship evolve into a romantic relation through the first intimate meal. Whatever is served it must be satiating – think of Steyn’s chocolate malt at the soda fountain. As for Enrique’s ballad “F**king You,” I offer “Some Enchanted Evening” in its place. (Listen Here)  

This is soup for late summer and early fall when the corn is in harvest. Ideally it should come from farmer’s roadside stand.

So here is Corn Chowder – a luxurious, satiating soup for romance. For it you will need:

Three ears of cooked corn on the cob

Three medium sized cooked baked potatoes

One baseball sized union diced

8 Slices of Bacon diced.

3 heaping tablespoons of flour

3 Heaping Tablespoons of diced roasted red pepper from a jar

1 Pint Half&Half

1 Pint water

¼ Teaspoon of onion powder

¼ Teaspoon of garlic powder

Salt and Pepper to Taste.

Cut the corn kernels from the cob. Cut the cobs into chunks. In a small sauce pan cover the corn cob chunks with the pint of water, bring to a slow boil for ½ hour to make a corn broth.

Meanwhile, sauté the bacon. When nearly crisp add the diced onion and sweat it in the bacon fat for a minute or so, then mix in the flour. Peel and dice the baked potatoes into bite sized pieces.

Strain the corn broth into a two quart pot. Bring to a boil then add the bacon, onion and flour mix.

Once the broth has thickened add the Half & Half and remaining ingredients. If the soup it too thick, thin with more water or milk. Let the soup slowly simmer for another fifteen minutes so the flavors meld. Then serve with good bread and cheese.