Minestrone for Feeding the Soul

Minestrone for Six or Eight

I try to keep my recipes small, serving four to six. This is because I mostly cook for two.

This Italian style vegetable soup is impossible to make small. There is the beauty of it. It is a true peasant soup. It’s hearty, low cost, delicious and can be easily make in a quantity to feed and an army. Two of the ingredients are foods that when cooked blow up. The pasta and beans absorb significant amounts of liquid and prodigiously expand in both bulk and volume.

It’s a true miracle. Because we experience this blossoming on a regular basis we take it for granted. It is a miracle nonetheless. In fact if you examine the list of ingredients everything is mostly water. The vegetables, mostly water. The wine, mostly water.  The cheese starts out as milk. Even the pork sausage is at its source mostly water.

The mysteries of bread, beer and wine are miracles also. Food Inc. tends to blind us of that simple truth. In exchange for a few extra dollars it gives us convenience and in doing so mindlessly robs a small piece of our souls. All of those small chunks of soul taken by the industrial economy add up. It’s all unintentional to be sure. But it’s very real consequences ripple across society.

But I digress, now back to the soup. For it you will need:

Water

2/3 Cup of Dried Kidney Beans (Do not take the shortcut by using canned.)

½ LB of Dried Pasta (I used penne but small pasta shells or even broken spaghetti will work fine)

½ Cup of Red Wine

2 TBS Italian Seasoning

1 TBS Beef Soup Base or 2 Bullion Cubes

1 Pound of Hot Italian Sausage Links, cooked, skinned and cut into bite sized pieces

1 14.5 oz. Can of Diced Salt Free Tomatoes

1 Onion Diced

2 Zucchinis cut into bite sized pieces

1 Rib of Celery diced   

1 10 oz. Package of Frozen Chopped Spinach

1 ½ to 2 Cups of grated Parmesan or Romano Cheese or a combination of both

Double quick soak the beans in 3 cups water with the Italian Seasoning and beef soup base by bringing the water to a boil for about five minutes, cover and then turn off the heat and let sit for an hour. Bring to a boil again for about five minutes and once again let rest covered for about an hour.

The beauty of dried beans is that they take on the flavors of the liquids in which they are boiled while maintaining the own unique subtle flavor. Kidney beans and lima beans are not the same thing. This why, for this recipe and recipes like it, canned beans are not allowed.  The same ability to assume flavor of course is true with rice. With this in mind, the inventor of Minute Rice should be arrested and forever locked in prison for “high crimes” against humanity.  I have wandered off track again but we are, after all, considering the miraculous.

Meanwhile cut the vegetables and cook the sausages by gently boiling for about twenty minutes. Cool then remove the casings and cut into bite sized pieces. Once the beans are ready, almost tender, combine all ingredients except to pasta into a large soup pot. The liquid from soaking the beans and that from the canned tomatoes should cover everything with about two inches to spare. If not add more water.

Bring the soup to a boil then reduce to very slow boil for an hour to cook the vegetables and allow the broth to mature.

Cook the pasta el dente just prior to serving. Start it about twenty minutes before. Then either add it to the soup pot or the individual bowls when serving. Top everything with a generous helping of grated cheese and enjoy. This soup goes will with thick slices of French bread, broiled on both sides until lightly browned and topped with minced garlic and olive oil.

A Peasant Bean Soup for G.K.Chesterton

This is a traditional bean soup – a thick soup of beans, ham and ham stock and vegetables. This is a delicious peasant meal.  It is a peasant soup that G.K. Chesterton would be proud of.

I need to clear up what I mean by peasant because it seems I, like Chesterton, will be championing peasantry and a peasant economy.  Chesterton was a prolific writer in the first part of the twentieth century. In the mid-twenties when economic/social debate focused on socialism vs. capitalism he vigorously argued for a third way – distributism. “Three acres and a cow,” he called it or maybe his critics did. It envisioned an economy where individuals had the individual wealth (read private property) necessary to “make a living.” He viewed “capitalism” and “socialism” as two roads to the same dead end – soft slavery.

“…If capitalism means private property, I am capitalist. If capitalism means capital, everybody is is capitalist. But if capitalism means this particular condition of capital, only paid out to the mass in the form of wages, then it does mean something, even if it ought to mean something else.

“The truth is that what we call Capitalism ought to be called Proletarianism. The point of it not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital. I have made an heroic effort in my time to walk about the world always saying Proletarianism instead of Capitalism. But my path has been a thorny one of troubles and misunderstandings…”    

Chesterton’s notions on distributism seem to be grounded in Roman Catholic teaching on individual dignity, private property, subsidiarity and solidarity. They seem to point back to a Catholic medieval, an economy of peasantry, monastery and guild. But that’s no so.

I do not use the term peasantry in the sense of an uneducated pre-twentieth country bumpkin. Instead, I am looking toward the agrarian economy of Wendell Berry, or Thomas Jefferson for that matter. This economy can no longer be solely rooted in the agrarian countryside. Still the notion of self sufficient households within the context of community applies equally to our urban industrial commercial environment. And happily, peasantry surrounds us.

Sure it’s the family farm. It’s also the baker, the auto body shop, the plumber, the lawyer, accountant, programmer and the guy with a PHD in Philosophy who bought the dump truck and now collects garbage as an independent contractor. All of the small businessmen and independent contractors are our peasantry. These are the foundation of our true economy. And these are those whom, after the dependent social under class, are most violently laid siege by Chesterton’s proletarianism.

I know. I am a carpenter. I now carry a state issued, EPA federally mandated, picture ID that says I am a “lead safe renovator.” It’s all about proportion. It’s about the Big lording over that which should be local. The EPA lording over carpenters or the the U.S. Department of Education lording over local school boards are examples. Fannie May and Freddie Mac underwrite our mortgages rather than local banks and savings and loans. The list goes on and it’s all wrong. It’s all upside down.

The answer lays in Chesterton’s notion of proportion and the Catholic teaching on “subsidiarity.”

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1883 nonetheless, it goes: “The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “a community of higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of lower order, depriving the latter of its functions…””

The community of the lowest order is of course the household. It’s the realm and kingdom of the peasant. With regard to what we eat the communities of higher order are forever interfering. These are many: the corporate communities; the community of nutritionists and food scientists; the federal and state governments with their overlapping food programs; and finally the many communities of the politically correct who seem to want to set our tables according to own sensibilities and agendas.

To all I offer a simple bean soup – a peasant’s fare – hearty and delicious. For four to six you will need:

1 ½ Cups dried beans

1 ½ Lbs. smoked ham hocks – about three

1 Large onion diced

3 Carrots diced

3 Ribs of celery diced

Ham soup base to taste

Onion powder to taste

Pepper to taste

A bit of thyme

1 ½ Quarts of water

In the water quick soak to beans by bringing to a hard boil for about five minutes then cover and let steep. Meanwhile, bake the ham hocks in a 350⁰ oven for an hour. Deglaze the baking pain with water then add the hocks and pan dripping to the beans. Bring the beans to a slow rolling boil. After about two hours the meat should be falling off the bones and the beans should be tender or nearly tender. Turn off the beans and remove the ham hock and let cool. Trim the meat from the bones. Forty-five minutes before serving bring the beans back to a boil, add the ham and vegetables then slow boil until done. Adjust seasoning and serve with garlic toast.    

We've become a nation of serfs

The reason I’ve been serving up recipes for potatoes, lintels and beans is we’ve become a nation of sharecroppers and serfs. I prefer we become a nation of peasants so I give you recipes for a peasant. A peasant, after all, is a free man.

Let me explain. A sharecropper or serf farms someone else’s land in agreement to turn over a portion of the harvest to the landowner. Before the land is plowed and seeded, the sharecropper is indebted to the landlord who now has a claim on his labor. Often a claim set so high enough that, while ensuring survival, the sharecropper could never create surplus wealth. 

Meanwhile a similar peasant farmer who has title to his land can sell his surplus crops and gradually accumulate wealth, by paying off the mortgage, through saving or both.

Land and labor are the source of wealth for both farmers. Yet one can never generate significant surplus wealth. The sharecropper’s debt is unsecured and places a direct claim on his labor. He faces a life of servitude.

The farmer with the title on his land, while maybe paying off a mortgage, will eventually own both the land and his labor.  His debt is a claim on the land which in time can be fully secured. The landowning peasant is in charge of his economy. The serf is not.

Our unsecured debt, both personal and our collective state and federal debt, has reduced us to nation of serfs, or wage slaves if you will.

Our kids are encouraged to attend college and take on a mountain of federal student loans.

They and we, literally, have credit cards thrown at us through the mail.

When buying a car or a house, the lenders encourage us to take on as much debt as they believe we can service.

On top of that, our collective debt on the federal level alone, figuring 300 million of us owe $14 trillion, is about $47,000 for every man, woman and child among us. Under that load our options are limited. We have a large nut to cover.

In short, we are at a precipice. We can either turn back toward individual and collective economic sanity. And to be sure it will be very painful. It will require thrift, self sacrifice and willingness embrace self reliance over entitlement.

The other option is to allow ourselves and future generations be bound in totalitarian servitude.

F. A. Hayek observed in The Road to Serfdom: “Although the state controls directly the use of only a large part of the available resources, the effects of its decisions on the remaining part of the economic system become so great that indirectly it controls almost everything. Where, as was, for example, true in Germany as early as 1928, the central and local authorities directly control the use of more than half the national income…they control indirectly almost the whole economic life of the nation. There is, then, scarcely an individual end which is not dependent for its achievement on the action of the state, and the “social scale of values” which guides the state’s action must embrace practically all individual ends.”

The current federal budget is $3.5 billion. That is about 25% of the U.S. gross domestic product. States and local governments command another large chunk. In addition U.S. government indirectly controls the energy industry, agriculture, medical services, education, financial services and others.

When government controls essentially the whole economy there becomes a need for it to articulate an economic plan to produce prosperity and ensure “common welfare.” Hayek argues economic planning on this scale is beyond the reach of democracy. Competing economic interests, reflected in an elected legislative body, result in gridlock where nothing gets done.

At this point Hayek writes: “The cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward planning…

…Hitler did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained the support of many to whom, though they detested Hitler, he yet seemed the only man strong enough to get things done.”

Gnocchi: An Enchanted Potato Dumpling

Enchantment happens.  Serendipity is often part of it – the happy chance discovery.

I woke up one night at my cabin with need to go to the bathroom. My cabin is a simple shelter without electricity or pluming. Upon stepping outside to relieve my self I found the surrounding darkness gently illuminated by hundreds of fireflies. Enchanting.

It’s the magic of place which can be intoxicatingly joyful. I unexpectedly stumbled into an enchanting place while Christmas shopping for my sister, the Wisconsin Cheese Mart. I had in mind a modest selection of award winning Wisconsin cheese that they could share with their Austin, Tex., friends. Hook’s 15 year cheddar was on my list. They had it. I Left with that and three other fine award winning cheeses.

What I expected was a sterile and pricey cheese store. What I wandered into was something else altogether. I found an enchanting Wisconsin cheese bar. These are wonderful combination of cheese store and tavern. These little slices of heaven, plunked down on earth, are sparsely scattered across Wisconsin and far more sparsely scattered elsewhere. My first such encounter with a cheese bar was in tiny Monroe, Wis., at Baumgartner’s. That was just last year. To find a similar place in Milwaukee was a surprise. It has been here forever. I’ve been here forever. How could I’ve not known?  

In Baumgartner’s everyone was happy. Everyone was intoxicated on everyone’s happiness. Such is enchantment and such is heaven. That’s how it was at the Wisconsin Cheese Mart.

Now on to the heavenly gnocchi, I never knew mashed potatoes could be so good. The small reception following my brother’s ordination was enchanting. It was served by Filippo Russo at Da Filippo’s Ristorante in Somerset, NJ. Filippo served seven or eight courses, paired with an appropriate wine, over the course of three or four hours. Magnificent.

One of those courses was gnocchi. Oh my goodness, these were delicately light, flavorful, small pillow shaped potato dumplings. I’ve been trying to duplicate this goodness since. It’s close but not perfect.

Here’s how it goes:    

1 Large Baking Potato, pealed, boiled and riced.

¼ Cup Heavy Cream or Ricotta Cheese

2 Tbs butter

1 Egg

¼ Cup Grated Parmesan Cheese

1 Cup ± Semolina or All Purpose Flour                                                                          

Rice the boiled potato while hot and thoroughly mix in the 2 table spoons of butter. In a separate bowl, lightly beat the egg then add the ricotta cheese or cream. Combine the egg mixture and parmesan cheese with the potatoes and mix thoroughly. Then gradually add the flour until the mix becomes a dough that can be rolled. Roll into ½“ diameter strands, or logs. Cut the logs into one inch segments. Meanwhile bring a pot of water to boil. Boil the raw gnocchi for 10 or 15 minutes. Drain and bake the gnocchi on a non-stick cookie sheet for anther 15 minutes in a 350⁰ oven. Serve with a generous topping of butter sautéed garlic. Serves four.