Frittata with Pasta & Morel Mushrooms

 

A Nottage Full of Mice, a Bird Dog Turned Mouser and the Last of the Morels

My daughter, her husband and my grandson were the first visitors to my cabin this season. They had a good time, but the place certainly isn’t child safe, she told us, and it’s become infested with mice.

On the first score the cabin is a cabin in an old school sense of the term – primitive. It’s not a rustic second home, nor a summer cottage.

It’s a nottage, a term coined by an old friend, who had a nice piece property on Lake Michigan not far from Milwaukee. On it rather than building a second home, he built a small cabin with an enclosed sleeping room and a screened in porch. The footprint of this modest building might have been 12’ X 16’. There was an outhouse. He, his wife and two children happily camped there for years on summer weekends.

He called it a nottage as in not a cottage. I took my cabin building from his cue. When I applied for a building permit, I said it would be a shelter for weekend camping.

Not an Entirely Safe Place but One of Enchantment

Mine is a place that is hard to make perfectly safe for children. It’s heated with a woodstove. Lighting is from various kerosene and propane lamps. The sanitary facility is an outhouse. My two-year-old grandson found the little wood splitting hatchet intriguing and began, I’m sure, learning that some things are hot, some things are sharp, and the world is a dangerous place. He was thrilled.

The cabin sits on about 18 acres along the Kickapoo River, half woodland and half flood plain. The Driftless Area hills steeply rise more than 500 feet above the river valley, mountains in a two-year-old’s eyes. And better from a little boy’s eyes, these mountains rise across the road from my cabin. A steep climb from there leads to the Turkey Ridge Orchard above. That orchard is an organic, remnant old “hippy” like commune affair – interesting.

A quarter of a mile both north and south of my cabin, my neighbors keep pastures populated with either horses or cattle. These animals are not children’s book mythical creatures, but are live, huge and up close. The neighs and moos are real and our expression of them is not even a close approximation. They’re loud, much louder than the children’s books let on.

It’s a place of birds, a lot of birds and some of them are huge – turkeys, sandhill cranes and eagles.

From my grandson, Sam’s point of view the cabin is in a land of enchantment.

I told my daughter, “Well yes there are certain child hazards. You just have to keep a diligent eye on him. That’s what parents are for, after all.”

An Invasion of Mice and the Mouse Warden

As for the mice, her assessment of an infestation was something of a hysterical overstatement. Nevertheless, in a country cabin one doesn’t have a mouse. It’s mice in the plural and a tiered abatement strategy is called for.  Tier one turned out to be my bird dog.

She’s twelve, can’t hear and long romps through thick brush in search of upland birds no longer interested her much. But she has found this mousing business is an agreeable part time job for a mostly retired bird dog.

She ferreted out a mouse nest in large container of building fasteners tucked under the cabin’s kitchen counter. Tail wagging and trembling with excitement, she says they’re in here boss. I pulled the tub out, removed the lid and she went to work, nabbing and killing seven of the eight mice hunkered down in there. She is now the cabin and grounds mouse warden.

For years she has had a habit of pouncing on her dog biscuits and throwing them in the air only to pounce on them again. Now I know what that dog behavior is all about -- mousing.

The dog is only part of the solution. Part two is mouse repellent and d-Con. I hope the mice will find being outdoors more attractive than lounging in my cabin. There is nothing in there for them to eat or drink. Finally, I know where they are getting in. Next time when we’re there, and this is tier three, I’ll seal those entry points and then set conventional traps to control any residual problems.

Such are the headaches of even a simple cabin and there are others, but the pleasures far exceed them. One of those is the seasonal varieties of food available in local farmer’s markets and roadside stands, and the outstanding beef and pork for sale at the local butcher shops and meat lockers.

The Season of Mushrooms

The Muscoda (oddly pronounced Muscadee) Morel Mushroom Festival going on when we were their.. We went Sunday afternoon this year, as it was winding down. There were only a few mushroom stands when we arrived. The late and cold spring mostly ruined the three week morel season. The harvest was pitiful. When we were leaving we bought the last half pound bag from the last vendor.

Half of these I used for a morel, butter and garlic sauce for the flank steak we grilled that evening. The balance went into a morel frittata we had the next day. It was delicious.

Frittatas: A Newly Found Culinary Delight

Frittatas are as much about cooking scrambled eggs, a method, as they are about a specific dish. Marcella Hazan devotes nearly ten pages in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking on frittatas with ten recipes. I used a variation on her Frittata with Pasta recipe. Like an omelet, any number of ingredients can go into making it. Unlike an omelet, this can include pasta with a simple parmesan cheese and butter sauce. I found the idea, of fried spaghetti with eggs, intriguing – beyond the bounds of my natural culinary leanings. But, it certainly seemed like ideal platform to highlight my beautiful morel mushrooms.

Frittatas because of endless variation can fit into variety of settings, from breakfast to an appetizer to the centerpiece of a main dinnertime meal. Hazan writes:

“Frittatas taste equally good when hot, warm or at room temperature. They are at their least appealing cold out of the refrigerator. When cut into pie-like wedges, a frittata or an assortment of them will enrich an antipasto platter, make a very nice sandwich, travel beautifully to any picnic, or become a welcome addition to any buffet table.”

A Morel Mushroom Frittata

This frittata is a centerpiece for a simple but delicious main meal, to be served alone for two or with a salad and a little garlic bread for four. I used my morel mushrooms, but shitake mushrooms would work equally well.

For this you will need:

4 eggs

3 strips of bacon diced and fried

3 or 4 tablespoons of butter

½ of large bell pepper diced

¼ pound of sliced mushroom without stems, sliced into strips

¼ pound of raw spaghetti

½ cup grated parmesan cheese

Dice and brown the bacon. While the bacon is browning bring a quart pot of water to a boil, dice the pepper, and slice the mushrooms into strips. Preheat the oven to 350^o.

When the bacon is browned, sauté the mushrooms and diced pepper in one to one and one-half tablespoons of butter. When the water begins to boil add the spaghetti and boil to a firm al dente (it will cook some more with the eggs). Meanwhile beat the eggs.

When the pasta is cooked and drained, while still hot, add a tablespoon of butter and the parmesan cheese. Toss thoroughly then add bacon, mushrooms, peppers and eggs. Again mix thoroughly.

Over medium to medium high heat, melt one to one and one-half tablespoons of butter in a 10” sauté pan until it bubbles. Before it begins to brown add the egg mixture. When it sets, generously grate pepper on it and continue to cook on the stovetop until the bottom begins to brown, then transfer to the oven and bake for about 10 minutes until the top firmly sets.

This recipe might seem like a whirlwind of activity, but it can be pulled off in twenty-five or thirty minutes of only moderate concentration.

Slice into wedges, serve and enjoy.

 

Cordon Bleu, a Slide Rule and the Problem of Common Core.

I cooked up chicken cordon bleu with asparagus. Chicken roulade if you will. I had ham on hand and the asparagus called from the grocer’s case “make something with me.” So I bought the asparagus, some chicken breasts and a few slices of Swiss cheese.

I pounded the breasts into ¼” cutlets, smeared them with mustard, and laid upon them a slice of ham and a slice of Swiss cheese. To that stack I added four or five gently blanched asparagus stalks. I rolled that stack of chicken, ham and cheese around the asparagus, and then secured the rolls with tooth picks. These were then dredged in flour and gently sautéed, in a 50/50 mix of butter and olive oil, until golden. I finished them in a 350⁰ oven for fifteen minutes.

This dish was fast, elegant and delicious. It was of course purely improvised.

The Truth of Generational Knowledge

I cook. My wife cooks. So, not surprisingly my three children cook. They are good at it and sometimes more adventurous than I. Herein lays the truth of generational knowledge. It’s that body of knowledge that’s cultivated by household and extended family. It’s the foundation of a child’s education. But the experts tell us this isn’t so.

Keith Robinson and Angel Harris opined in the New York Times that parental involvement in a child’s education ultimately doesn’t affect school performance and achievement. [Full Text]

They wrote: “In fact, most forms of parental involvement, like observing a child’s class, contacting a school about a child’s behavior, helping to decide a child’s high school courses, or helping a child with homework, do not improve student achievement. In some cases, they actually hinder it …

“After comparing the average achievement of children whose parents regularly engage in each form of parental involvement to that of their counterparts whose parents do not, we found that most forms of parental involvement yielded no benefit to children’s test scores or grades, regardless of racial or ethnic background or socioeconomic standing.”

The trend in education is to remove parents from the equation of educating children. It seeks a level “playing field” where all children can be tested and deemed proficient. It’s Common Core, the federal national education standards, and an implicitly necessary, nationally standardized curriculum to achieve them.

Yet a child’s education is wrapped up in discovery and solving small mysteries. It’s the stuff of fantasy and imagination and even for a very small child , a two year old say, it’s the pleasure of a thing done well. In these things family and household lay a foundation for a child’s education.

Common Core & Light Sabers of Generational Knowledge

The light saber was the weapon of the Jedi knights, who in Stars Wars mythology maintained just social order prior to the tyranny of the “Empire.”  As I recall, in the first movie “Old Ben Kenoby,” an old reclusive Jedi knight, taught the young Luke Skywalker how to operate a light saber.

I bought my grandson a slide rule. He’s not two yet and won’t have any use for it for a while. But the day will come when he is in either the seventh or eighth grade, and has mastered the fundamentals of arithmetic, when the slide rule might become a light saber of math, and fascinating. It will be both a calculator and pathway into a deeper understanding of mathematics.

 My generation was the last when slide rules were part of a grade school math curriculum. They are mechanical analog calculators, good for multiplication, division, trigonometric functions, square and cube roots, and based on natural logarithms. Until the early to mid-1970s these analog computers were carried, saber like, in leather holsters fastened to the belts of students studying math, science and engineering on our college campuses. They of course gave way to less intellectually demanding, but faster and more accurate, digital scientific calculators.

Meanwhile it seems our kids no longer need to know the mechanics of addition or subtraction, memorize multiplication tables or geometric proofs. It’s all key punching now.

My sister who taught college math owns no fewer than three slide rules. She approved of my purchase. At one time she had four slide rules, but gave one to her grandson. With regard to digital calculators, she complains if you don’t know the math the only thing they do is get you to the wrong answer faster.

 So it goes with generational knowledge.

It is knowledge passed down from a mother and a father, and knowledge passed down from a grandfather and grandmother to a child. Slide rules might or might not be part of it, but on the whole, a mostly intact family is the foundation of a child’s education.

Common Core seems to be placed in a position of severing that tie.

A Universal Cure for the Shortcomings of Family

Apparently, current thought in education has dismissed family as the structural cornerstone of a child’s education. It’s too often broken and worse. Intact it is too often pathologically destructive. This line of thinking that leads to the conclusion that the trouble with our schools is the false assumption that parents play a vital role in their child’s education.

The solution of course is to remove parents from the equation and instead set some sort of national standard and benchmark for schools, one that overcomes the shortfalls of family and the socially inequitable transmission of generational knowledge.

Somehow, a federal thing once called the No Child Left-Behind Act morphed into another federal creature named Common Core. One size fits all. In it there is room for tablet computing and texting. There is room for hand held calculators and Google searches. Yet, none of that is really the stuff of education.  

Common Core ultimately envisions an industrial like, optimized process for educating kids, complete with measured inputs and tangible but limited measured results. In this model the teacher’s role is nothing more a technician managing a process. 

In all of that, lost is the intrigue, beauty and mystery of the slide rule.

Wisconsin is among the majority of states that have “bought” into Common Core. Though, bribed into it is more correct. Federal grants to states that adopt the standards are the deliciously dangled carrot hoisted above the horse. That is precisely all that’s wrong with Common Core. It’s a standard by which neither family nor community play a role. It sets standards for schools where the family and community are mostly erased. It’s where large and powerful special interest groups, possibly called “big education,” call the shots and federal largess is the motivator. Horribly as it’s shaping up, it is where the lines of “correct” social thought and education intersect.

The lobby is made up of schools of education, educational publishing houses, teachers’ unions and bureaucracies of state and federal departments of education. They drive the carriage and collectively through the federal Department of Education they dangle the carrot.

Do it this way, they say, and federal dollars will fall like manna from heaven.

These are the groups that write the laws and craft the regulatory code implementing them. Meanwhile and some years later, moms and dads discover their children are being taught lines of social thought absolutely counter their own. The arithmetic and math they work with daily is incomprehensibly presented in their child’s lesson book. Mouths agape they wonder, where did this come from?

It came from a “public” interest lobby, whose seeds were sown ten, fifteen or more than twenty years ago. Today, it is within this cohort precisely where the lines of contemporary social thought intersect in a politically correct, national k12 curriculum. And to be sure, he who writes the test also authors the books and outlines how teachers should go about their business.

At this intersection generational knowledge is erased from k12 education. The underlying assumption is for too many kids, the warehouse of intergenerational knowledge is empty.

Mitigating the Matthew Effect

Every child enters school with a foundation of knowledge gained from their household environment. A child growing up in a leaning rich environment, with educated parents who fill his or her early years with reading, travel, museum visits and such, enters school with huge advantage over children who don’t.

In education it’s called the “Matthew Effect,” coined by sociologist Keith Stanovich after a passage in the Gospel of Matthew: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and shall have in abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away everything that which he hath.”

In short, children entering the first grade who come from language rich homes thrive in reading and comprehension, while those from language impoverished homes fall further behind.

To address the problem we have Head Start, a federal preschool program for economically disadvantaged children. Yet by objective measures it hasn’t worked and nevertheless the president wants universal preschool. And we now have Common Core.

A hopeful and optimistic read on Common Core is that it fills the gaps in necessary prior knowledge needed for academic success. Let’s set a baseline for student achievement. For some schools it might work, but the trouble is the baseline. It is a low bar which is foisted onto all schools and all school districts. It locks families and community out of the equation. And for many their expectations are much higher. From a kid’s point of view it’s punishingly grey and void of joy, much like the new school lunches being served up.

The Fundamental Nature of Light sabers

Now here’s the real deal. In the seventh and eight grade I began learning how to operate slide rules. It was 1966 and these were the scientific calculators at the time, but to use them you needed to have a grounded fundamental understanding of basic arithmetic and an introduction into somewhat higher orders of mathematics. Natural logarithms and such. Neither scientific calculators nor Google searches are a decent substitute for an education built on a foundation fundamental knowledge. [Full Text] 

A child might learn such things as how to cook, fix power equipment and build and grow things from their household environment. And other things too, like how to put up a can of tomatoes or beans. Maybe something about slide rules, literature, history, or polite and civil manners. And maybe not. A good school fills the gaps.

The truth is Common Core assumes not only that most households have abdicated their role in educating children, but the majority of our schools are not up to the task either. Both assumptions are horribly false. First off, most parents do a decent job of laying down a firm foundation for their children’s education. And second, most schools to a decent job of educating kids. 

In every school district there are children who are disadvantaged because the “library” of “prior knowledge” is deficient. Too often in economically disadvantaged urban schools the “wellspring of prior knowledge” is abysmally dry. 

Nevertheless, even within the Milwaukee Public School District which has been berated for years, if not decades, for its overall poor performance there are outstanding schools. Four if its high schools ranked in the top 20 of Wisconsin public high schools by US News and World Report, and overall metropolitan area high schools took eight of the top slots for Wisconsin’s best. [Full Text] Not included on the list were Milwaukee schools like Messmer, a school choice high school. Additionally, the Milwaukee metropolitan area has an open enrollment policy whereby Milwaukee parents can enroll their children in suburban schools, like Shorewood High and Wauwatosa East both on the US New top twenty list. Similarly, suburban parents can enroll their kids in MPS specialty schools.

On the whole, schools in the greater metropolitan Milwaukee area are doing a good job. Public school teachers who teach in them are doing a good job. In the City of Milwaukee things are not so rosy. The high school graduation rate hovers miserably around sixty-percent, and math and reading proficiency below that, and it’s somehow the fault of the school district. That’s not so. The fault is in crumbled families and households. We are to believe the fix somehow lies in the hands of the U.S. Department of Education. Maybe, but probably not. 

Meanwhile, well, you do what you can. 

I bought my grandson a slide rule and one day I, or his father, shall teach him how to use it. For now telling him stories and reading to him is good enough. In the near term he shall help me in baking chocolate chip cookies, and in the more distant future I shall teach him how to take a safe and proper cut with a circle saw and speed square.  

Between now and then, trout fishing, bird hunting and motorcycle rallies might figure in. He will find his grandpa keeps a modest library and an eclectic collection of vinyl phonograph albums. Such is the “well spring of knowledge.” 

These things reflect the fundamental nature of light sabers after all.