Good Burgers but only for Those Who Wear Spandex

So my eggs fried in bacon grease are okay. But a delicious hamburger sandwich is poison. In fact, it now seems an untimely death lurks in every morsel of red meat.

There are inane warnings on everything, so it’s only proper to warn that my recipe for a righteous burger could be hazardous to your health. So here it is. The Los Angeles Times reported any amount of red meat – that is any amount – increases the chance of early death. (Full Text)

“Any red meat you eat contributes to the risk,” said An Pan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, published online Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

According to the study, one three ounce serving a meat a day resulted in an increased mortality rate of 13% over a twenty year period. The study tracked the meat eating habits of 37,698 men and 83,644 women over a twenty year period.

I have no idea how this cohort was assembled, but it somehow doesn’t seem to represent an accurate cross section of the U.S. adult population. And I’m not sure that it asked all the relevant necessary questions either. Did it ask respondents, for example, how often they wore garish spandex shorts with matching gaudy spandex tee-shirts, or even if they owned spandex shorts? Probably no.

If it had, it would have likely found that spandex short wearers, in general, live longer than most of us regardless of how much red meat they eat. Spandex wearers are almost religious about physical fitness. The shorts have nothing to do with it. Exercise does.

After decades of vilification, lard has become a good food. (Full Text) It used to be I could eat my bacon (in moderation) if I discarded the bacon grease. Now I can cook with the grease (lard) but must throw out the bacon.  

Life insurance actuaries ask how much we weigh & how tall we are, how much we drink, whether we smoke and if we fly airplanes. They do not ask how often we eat burgers. (On issues of longevity, I’ll take the actuaries over Harvard Public Health researchers every time.)

Now after this proper warning on the potential deadly qualities of hamburgers, here’s how to make a good one. For these you will need:

Gaudy spandex shorts with matching tops

1 Pound of Ground Chuck

4 Bakery Hard Rolls sliced in half. (Sheboygan hard rolls are perfect, but alas I believe they are part of Wisconsin’s food culture, so any good hard roll will have to do.)

1 Thinly sliced Tomato

1 Thinly sliced red Onion

4 Slices of sharp cheddar cheese

Salt & Pepper

4 Tablespoons of Butter

Ketchup and Mustard (optional)

Put on spandex shorts (very important). Then, to form the burgers divide the ground beef into four sections and gently form each into a ball. Gentle is the operative word here. If the beef is overworked it will be tough. Between two pieces of waxed paper squash to beef balls into patties. These should be of a slightly larger diameter than the rolls. Salt and pepper both sides of the beef patties.

Preheat and oven to 200⁰ and fire up the grill.

Grill the burgers to medium or for about 3 minutes per side over a medium hot fire. (If necessary squelch any flames with beer – this recipe is from Milwaukee after all.)

Set the burgers off the fire on a warm part of the grill. Then lightly toast hard rolls halves on the grill.

Generously butter the hard rolls. Top the bottoms with a burger and a slice of cheese and place in a warm oven until the cheese begins to melt. Top as desired with ketchup and mustard. Follow with thinly sliced onion and tomato. Top it with the top half of the roll. While still wearing spandex (and be sure to have any dinner guests properly suited up), enjoy a burger the way God meant them to be.

P.S. If you do not have spandex shorts, have a chocolate bar for dessert instead (Full Text).   

For My Russian and Ukrainian Friends

My mother in-law, some years back, began assembling a family tree. Various attempts at it filled four note books. It’s all very curious. For example: her uncle Emil died in 1937; in the margin she wrote “was arrested by the communists and shot;” and as an editorial aside she added “reason unknown – communists did not need a reason.”

This post is for my Russian and Ukrainian friends, who it seems make up more than 30% of the visitors to this blog. Periodically, I’ve touched on Russian and Ukrainian history.

My father-in-law was born in Ukraine in 1909 and remembered the Russian Revolution. That’s interesting. My mother-in-law was born in Ukraine in 1923 and wound up in the U.S. in 1947 as a “war bride,” engaged to be married to a man she had never met. That’s interesting too.

I am completing a book on their story. Bits and pieces show up here. So maybe that’s what draws my Russian and Ukrainian friends.

From time to time and really more often than I would prefer, I’ve expressed my displeasure authoritarian creep of our federal government. U.S. federal administrative agencies are evolving into self-perpetuating extensions of the executive branch whose decisions have the de facto force of law. (They seem intent on serving “pink slime” to our kids for lunch. Some of their other intentions are worse.)

In saying that, I’ve just defined the Soviet Politburo. So I think maybe my Russian and Ukrainian friends follow this blog out of both sympathetic and morbid curiosity.

To those friends, I offer this excerpt from my forthcoming book.

Then came the second wave of Siberian exile. Stalin’s terror and forced collectivization followed with more than 12 million dead from execution, starvation and the depravation of exile to Siberia.

 

In Olga’s family, these are some who were caught in that political pandemic.

In the 1930s, her uncle Arthur, her aunt Amanda and her husband Emil and another Uncle Emil were all sent to labor camps in Siberia. Amanda was the only one to return.

After her uncle Arthur was sent off, his brother, Heinrich, married Arthur’s wife. Her family tree is rife with second marriages, but no divorces.

Her uncle Paul Kamenz was arrested by the communists but was pardoned after six years. A more distant uncle Ortlieb was arrested and was never heard from. Her cousin Harry is listed as missing at that time. Her uncles Heinrich and Ruben Kamenz were listed as missing since WWII in Russia. Her great uncle Heinrich’s second wife, Berta Herman, apparently went missing in 1943.

Her uncle Emil Kamenz, she writes, “was arrested by the communists and shot,” in 1937. As an editorial aside she notes “reason unknown – communists did not need a reason.”

It is so telling, the weariness of it. It must have been like a deadly plague settled across the land, arbitrarily claiming lives here and there with numbing regularity. Olga’s extended family was large; nevertheless its ranks were slowly decimated. That same plague afflicted one’s friends, neighbors and acquaintances with regularity. How many dinner conversations began with a hushed “did you hear they . . .?” Insert your chosen verb: came for; arrested; shot; sent; and . . .

Yet when Olga drew a biographical sketch for her grandchildren, the recollection of those conversations was absent. The childhood she outlined was ordinary and regular. From it one might reasonably gather that she grew up in Topeka, Kansas.

Her parents were married in 1920 and they worked on Julius’ father’s farm until 1923, when he rented his own farm. In 1929 they moved to Zhytomyr where her father built a house and worked a variety of different jobs. (Elsewhere in her family tree she writes, the land was taken in1929 for collective farming) For the most part he was a carpenter and did some earth drilling, but he also worked in a slaughter house, and in a bread factory as a furnace man. They kept a large garden with fruit trees. They had chickens, a cow and would fatten a pig from time to time. Among Olga’s favorite memories was taking the cow “on the pasture.”

She began school when she was eight.

She tells her grandchildren: “like all schools we had to do homework. We were not bussed to school. We had to walk. I had to walk about a mile rain or shine. We had no cars either and no bicycles. Where ever we went we had to walk.”

“I spent my summers on the farm at my grandmother’s, Emily Rode, with my aunts and my cousins in the village of Horodysche. I remember as a teenager, 12 or 13, a stray bullet went through my right knee – nothing special. I finished school in 1939 and started working when I was 16.”

Her best friends she says were her cousins Ljuba, and Kheika. (These cousins are not found in the family tree.)

Regarding romance as a young woman she wrote:

“I really didn’t date. As young people from church we were always together as a group. There were friends that came to the house often. I had a letter from a fellow that I didn’t know but had only met twice. Apparently he wanted to marry me. I heard from another. When that letter came I stood outside by the fire and threw it in without reading it. It was a heavy letter. My mom and a friend stood there and did not say anything.

“I had two other proposals but the time was not right for me to get married. It was during the war and my father had an accident and cut off three fingers. And then while chopping wood he cut his big toe in half. So I had to be the breadwinner. I told the young man I couldn’t get married until I was 25 years old. By then my sister could take over.

“All of my proposals were by mail.”

It must have been like that for the young women in Topeka during the war too -- getting letters, from old high school sweethearts and church friends, now off to the army, proposing marriage to the girls back home.

During WWII Zhytomyr was nothing like Topeka.

Unlike Topeka, the young men in Ukraine didn’t rush to patriotically enlist in the Russian army. If they enlisted they did so, much like Gus’s brother Sam, to avoid Siberian exile or worse. It’s more likely that the young men writing letters proposing to Olga were conscripted by the German army for forced labor and were writing from German factories and farms.

Writing somewhat more candidly in one of her family tree notebooks, in an understatement she says, “World War II brought some changes.”   

I remind my other readers that federal government, in the name of “combating terrorism,” has assumed the authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens and to assassinate U.S. citizens abroad. Maybe we're all in Topeka with our heads buried in the sand. 

I Seem to be a Verb Making Dymaxion Borsch

“If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,” Fuller once wrote. “But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.”

Read more //www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/09/080609fa_fact_kolbert#ixzz1o4jkh3qZ

De Vinci’s man inscribed by a circle and a pentangle always reminds me of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Man. However, it seems my memory is faulty. Fuller wrote no such book. Nor did he coin the word. Nevertheless he did adopt Dymaxion as sort of a trade name for his line of thinking on how things should to go together. Dymaxion was an adman’s word to describe the three wheeled automobile he displayed at the 1934 world fair in Chicago. It’s combination of dynamic and maximum.

Fuller sought the greatest economy for the task at hand. His geodesic domes, for example, enclosed the most space with in the least material.

So it should be in search of divine ratios. In that quest the first rule is to best use what is a hand. My improvised borsch began with a ham dinner. The ham was further whittled down for ham sandwiches. The final heal end was cut up for lintel soup.

I also had left over Bavarian cabbage I had made nestle next to a delicious stuffed pork roast. In all, the two Tupperware containers of leftovers contained a very generous bowl soup and a healthy serving of sweet sour cabbage. Combined, these created a delicious dymaxion borsch –a soup with an earthy lintel/ham foundation over which, in an almost angelic fashion, floated a harmonious and the delightful sweet-sour tang of the cabbage.

I had a magnificent meal for two created from two and three generations of leftovers. Life in the kitchen cannot be sweeter. I do believe it’s high time for a Bucky Fuller revival. And on that note I will close this riff with another quote.

“I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category.  I am not a thing — a noun.  I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of Universe.”  - R. Buckminster Fuller