Texas Bar-B-Que and Bavarian Red Cabbage

They serve up sausage at the Salt Lick Bar-B-Que in Driftwood, TX. The Salt Lick is a place Austin locals take visitors to for a taste of authentic Texas Bar-B-Que. I had a sample on a recent visit with my sister and her husband who retired to Georgetown, TX.

The Salt Lick was packed on the Saturday night when we were there. By the size of their parking lot and by the presence of the Local Sheriff directing traffic into it, packed seems to be the norm rather than the exception. The night we were there, the wait to be seated was more than an hour.

No big deal, the Salt Lick is an event as much as a restaurant. Bring a cooler of beer and wine and enjoy the wait on the large patio outside. During that time, a waitress brought a large platter of Salt Lick sausage for the waiting patrons to sample.

That which in Texas is simply sausage, in Wisconsin has a name – Smoked Polish Kielbasa. At home, I like Bavarian red cabbage, or sauerkraut with my Kielbasa. In an epiphany I saw my Bavarian cabbage beautifully wed on a plate to bar-b-que ribs or brisket.

The bar-b-qued ribs and brisket at the Salt Lick were excellent, better than I can make at home. They were served with a disappointing run of the mill coleslaw and a mindless potato salad. Had they been served with my Bavarian red cabbage the meal would have been raised to very lofty heights.

Whether this recipe truly Bavarian or not, I don’t know. It’s inspired by the fine German restaurants in the Milwaukee area, of which once there were many but now are only a few. In those restaurants this mildly sweet-sour cabbage was served with roast duck, sauerbraten and the like. When serving duck or sauerbraten at home, I always serve red cabbage with it.

But my Bavarian red cabbage, at heart, is a comfort food. It’s the main dish to be served with a few thick slices of Kielbasa or corn beef, some slices of hearty rye bread such as pumpernickel and a good dark beer. With duck this recipe will serve four, with a few thick slices of Kielbasa it serves two.   

The most important ingredient in this recipe is not explicitly listed. It’s the bacon fat. It’s used to thicken the liquid the cabbage is boiled in into a velvety sauce. While the food Nazi’s would have us believe bacon fat is poison. In moderation all things are good. And bacon fat is one of the many edible oils our peasant grandparents and great-grandparents took full advantage of. Goose grease, tallow and lard are all in their place proper, good and necessary.  

A gingersnap made with goose grease or duck fat is out of this world delicious. I know because that’s how mom made them. If make with bacon fat on the other hand, they would be kind of funky. I know this from mistaking the liquid smoke for vanilla in whipping up a batch of chocolate chip cookies once. But I digress.

Bavarian Red Cabbage:

½ Head Red Cabbage Coarsely Chopped (1 inch x 1 Inch)

1 Apple Cored, Pealed and Chopped

1 Onion Coarsely Chopped

3 Slices of Bacon ½ Inch Dice

Balsamic Vinegar

Water

2 TBS Flower

1 tsp Caraway Seed

Combine the red cabbage, onion, apple and caraway seed in a pot and cover with a ½ and ½ mix of water and vinegar. Fry the bacon and when crisp add it to the pot with a slotted spoon to drain excess fat back into the fry pan. Deglaze the fry pan with vinegar and water then whisk in flour to make roux.

Bring the cabbage to a boil, adding water or vinegar as needed and to adjust the taste. When the apples have softened almost to mush drain of any excess liquid (it should not quite cover the cabbage), return to a boil and slowly add the bacon fat roux to thicken the remaining liquid into a sauce.  

Then, and this is important, eat hearty and enjoy.

Wisconsin's Family Fight

The Duluth News Tribune reported, March 13: “Wisconsin’s protracted family fight over the budget and public employee unions moved to this Bayfield County town Saturday evening, as embattled Gov. Scott Walker spoke at an invitation-only event and was greeted by at least 2,000 angry protesters outside.”

One of the protest organizers, Scott Griffiths, told the Tribune: “The thing that really got me here is the disparity of wealth that has grown way too out of hand. This is not a Wisconsin thing. This is a global pandemic of wealth buying power.”

On Thursday Walker signed his budget repair bill. The bill applies directly only to state employees. It limits their collective bargaining “rights” to salaries only. Until now benefits, work rules and sick time was all on the table. It also required that state workers contribute 5% of their pay to their pension plan, and increased the contribution from 6% to 12.5% of the cost of their health insurance.

It also: allowed public employee the option to not join the union; ended the deduction of union dues from pay check and; required an annual recertification of the union.

The governor has made it clear the he intends to close $3.5 billion projected state deficit by reducing state aid to schools, counties and municipalities. His budget repair bill offers those the public employers to adopt the same measure with their public employee unions. He says these are the “tools” they need to balance their budgets. 

    

Since he signed the bill, 16 lawmakers are facing recall campaigns. The secretary of state is postponing publishing the law for ten days, the full amount of time allowed. New laws are normally published within 24 hours after they are signed and take effect after publication. Many believe the walkout by all fourteen Democratic senators and now the delayed publication of the law is a stalling tactic to allow public unions time to extend existing contracts.

Finally, a number of lawsuits have been filed challenging the constitutionality of bill.

Wisconsin is locked in a battle between public employee unions and its taxpayers.  Therein lays the irony of Mr. Griffiths’ statement to the Tribune. The median household income in the state is just over $50 thousand. The average Milwaukee Public School teacher’s annual compensation is just shy of $100 thousand and upon retiring enjoys guaranteed pension benefits with lump sum values in excess of $1 million (based on retiring at age 62 with a $40 thousand per year pension).

The rich in Wisconsin are the State’s public employees who buy political power through their unions. This battle isn’t about collective bargaining. It isn’t about contributions to benefits. It’s entirely about political power.

Weirdness in Madison

In spite of all the political weirdness in Madison, I will offer you a bowl of sanity with a fine cream of chicken, wild rice and shitake mushroom soup.

For this you will need:

2 qts. Full Bodied Chicken Broth

4 oz Wild Rice

1 Large Onion finely diced

3 cup Diced Chicken

½ cup Cream

4 oz Fresh Shitake Mushroom sliced (8 oz would be better)

½ tsp Paprika

¼ tsp Thyme

2 Tbs Butter

2 Tbs Flour

This recipe begins with a full bodied chicken broth. I was fortunate to have the left over carcass from a roasted pasture raised chicken on hand. I simmered this in one quart of water and one quart of low sodium canned chicken broth for two hours until the meat was falling from the bones, but had not been rendered into tasteless mush.

I picked the bones clean and returned them to the pot and let the broth simmer for another hour. The meat from the carcass, wings and neck amounted to three cups.  There are other roads to two quarts of rich chicken broth and three cups of meat. My pasture raised chicken was a four dollar a pound gift. I did not want any of it to go to waste. In the end this chicken was a roast chicken diner for four, soup for six and three sandwiches.

In any case, with two quarts of rich broth at hand, add the wild rice, shitake mushrooms, diced onion, thyme and paprika. Bring to a hard boil, cover, reduce heat to low and simmer, about and hour, until the rice softens and expands. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a sauce pan over a medium burner then mix in the flour and allow it to brown slightly into a blond roux.

When the rice has cooked bring the soup to a boil, add the roux and cream to thicken it, then add the chicken to finish. Adjust seasoning and serve.  The result is a very rich and savory soup. In that there is sanity.

As for the madness in Madison, at issue is a projected $3.5 billion shortfall in the next biennial budget or just over 5% of the roughly $60 billion the government is on track to spend over the next two years. It’s not a big deal, except it is a structural deficit that the state has encountered every budget session for the past ten years or so. In the past it had been closed though a combination of tax increases, borrowing and wonderfully creative accounting.

The current governor campaigned on specifically on eliminating this structural deficit without new taxes or more debt. In the 2010 election the governorship and both houses of the legislature went from Democratic to Republican control. Much of the weirdness in Madison over the past two weeks has been the result of an insane denial of the new political reality and is a temper tantrum if you will.

But there is deeper insanity. That is the economic reality that few of us will acknowledge. In this blog I’ve tended to view things from the perspective of households. I believe households are foundation upon which so much rests.

There are roughly 2 million households in Wisconsin. At $30 billion a year, the state is spending roughly $15 thousand dollars per household. Add to that local property taxes and that number begins to approach 20 thousand. Given that there are just under 115 million households in the US. At $4.5 trillion a year, the federal government is spending another $34 thousand per household per year. 11 thousand of that is barrowed on our behalf.

The median household income in the US is around $50 thousand per year. Given that reality, temper tantrums simply will not do.