Olga's Ukrainian Borsch: Foresight & Whatever

Olga taught me how to make borsch. I figured she’d know. Ukrainian mother-in-laws should know such things.

It’s bean soup, she said, with beets and cabbage or sauerkraut. If you make it with cabbage add a little vinegar.

What about the stock I asked.

That doesn’t matter, she said, chicken, ham – whatever.

                                                                                                                                                                          

Olga always reduced things to their most basic elements. That borsch was basically bean soup with beets and cabbage is nevertheless enlightening. As is the “and whatever.”

The Joy of Cooking’s take on it goes like this: “There are probably as many versions of borsch as there are Russians.” It opens a wide door for the “and whatever.” Their recipe calls for beef or other stock. It says nothing about beans. And it’s silent on potatoes as well. Some makers of “orthodox” borsch insist on potatoes. (In that regard Rita has “orthodox” leanings that I refuse to give into. Potato soup is something altogether different and I certainly wouldn’t make it with cabbage, unless of course I had leftover corn beef on hand). Borsch is a state mind involving cabbage and beets. It’s not one recipe, but many.

A little foresight mixed with whatever, that’s all of it. That is the joy of cooking reduced to its most basic elements. The recipes here are from notes on dinners I’ve cooked or dishes regularly cooked that result  from a little foresight and whatever. 

All of the almost “meals ready to eat” that have expanded our grocery stores to foot field proportions wage their provocative and relentless war against foresight and whatever.

What’s certain about it though, this soup and all homemade are soup born from a time when one’s super market and the backyard garden were one and the same. Cabbage and beets were crops that stored well – always on hand. After that the other ingredients are “whatever.” The peasant tending his or her garden isn’t thinking about what’s for supper tonight. Their mind is more clearly focused on what shall I eat next winter. And the “whatever” might be a ham shank, a beef shank, or the legs from a tough old stewing chicken. Whatever.

Foresight is the key to a fine pot of borsch. And “whatever” is key to peasant cooking. You will not need to plant a garden for this soup, but you will need to think ahead. The soup is made with things that are always around and are cheap: dried beans, beets, cabbage, an onion, carrots, possibly potatoes and whatever. It’s ever so satisfying and delicious. And with a little foresight it’s quick.

It takes a while to cook up the beans, but how long does it take to cook up vegetables – a half hour maybe.  So it’s the beans that take foresight and planning. A good stock is that way too. It takes a while but is quite manageable if you think about it ahead of time, as in “I think I’ll cook some beans and stock tonight so that I can make some borsch tomorrow.” In that one sweet decision, you will have vanquished the kingdom of food “products,” and will have embarked on the delightful adventures of simple living.

That’s it. The only thing keeping you from a fine pot of borsch is the adult realization that tomorrow evening once again it will be supper time. While tonight’s miserable frozen pizza bakes in the oven, put some dried beans and ham shank to boil for tomorrow.   

You see, the tiny bit of foresight necessary to precook some beans needn’t be an insurmountable roadblock toward making this fine pot of soup.  

For Borsch you will need:

1 cup of dried white beans (Great Northern beans cook faster than navy beans).

1 ham shank about 2 pounds will do.

3 baseball sized beets.

1 large onion.

1/3 head of cabbage shredded.

4 carrots peeled and cut into bite sized pieces.

2 ribs of celery cut into a small dice.

Water about 2 pints.

Allspice and ground cloves to taste (about ¼ teaspoon of each).

1 Bay leaf.

1 teaspoon caraway.

Ham soup base to taste.

Sour Cream for garnish but very important.

While the frozen pizza (or whatever meal “ready to eat”) is in the oven for dinner tonight, add the dried beans, caraway seeds, bay leaf and ham shank to a large pot. Cover generously with water, bring to a hard boil then reduce heat to an ever so slowly rolling boil. Cook for 1 ½ to 2 hours until the ham starts falling from the shank. If the beans have softened in this time it’s okay. If not, don’t worry. In a separate pot, boil the beets for about twenty minutes, drain and reserve in the refrigerator. (Note: They can be peeled and diced into bite sized pieces at this time too.)

Now for the finished soup: Remove the ham shank from the beans, trim off the meat and cut into bite size pieces. If the beans need to cook awhile longer get them going now, bring to a hard boil then reduce the heat to a slow rolling simmer. Once the beans have softened add the diced ham and vegetables, allspice and cloves. Continue to cook for about ½ hour until the vegetables are done. Adjust the seasoning to taste and served garnished with a generous tablespoon to sour cream on top.

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

Divine Proportion Part 1: Braised Beef Shanks

Leonardo De Vinci is most closely associated with that which is known as Divine Proportion and the Golden Ratio, but not rightly so.

It has captured Western imaginations for over 2400 years from Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece to present day mathematicians and physicists. (Wikipedia full text and a must read even if you don’t have time.) Some say it is the Signature of God writ here there and there across the universe. Musicians and artists, biologists and astronomers can all come under the sway of its sublime appeal. In marketing, for the ad men and their graphic designers it’s a useful tool. Cigarette packs are divinely proportioned.

In cooking it is that “sweet chord,” that just right combination that makes a dish simply oh so good, and its presentation a matter of no small consequence. Though in cooking, it’s hard to make a mathematical case for it. I am convinced it is key. It’s the right combination of ingredients, of method, of complementary dishes and presentation that rises cooking to culinary art. A boiled egg is a boiled egg. A deviled egg can be a magnificently different thing altogether. It is the divine ratio, without which the deviled egg is nothing but a boiled egg with college education.

So I’ve got a pot of beef shanks on the stove. The initial divine proportion here is enough water to cover. That’s just the beginning. From that there will emerge a fine plate of braised beef and spätzle lusciously glazed in sauce of reduced stock and caramelized onions, and a generous pot of beef barley soup will follow.

This was to have been a recipe for braised oxtails. But they’ve become costly, $4.50 a pound at my market.

It seems that trendy and pricey pricy restaurants across the U.S. have added either braised tails or braised beef short ribs to the peasant side of their gourmet menus. (Beef short ribs have become pricy too, as have chicken wings. My god, what’s poor boy to eat?)

I’ve returned to the food stamp challenge. This time it’s not out of curiosity, but necessity. I’m laid off – got bit in the butt by Obamanomics, that’s what. It’s not an altogether bad thing, but it’s something that is certainly tightening the belt on my household budget. So instead of the oxtails, I’ve braised up some shanks and will get the bonus of a pot of soup.

Under these circumstances, shanks of all sorts have become wonderfully attractive. There are beef shanks, turkey shanks, chicken shanks and pork shanks. They are a good buy and can be cooked up into delightfully tasty dishes provided one brings divine proportions into play. (Lamb shanks are costly too. I think the peasant side of the gourmet menu enters into that equation as well.)        

For the braised shanks and soup stock you will need:

2 pounds of beef shanks

1 quart of low sodium beef broth (not condensed)

1.5 quarts of water.

Oven brown the shanks in a 350^o oven for about an hour, then transfer to the soup pot. Cover generously with the beef broth and water and bring to a very slow rolling boil for two to two and one half hours until the meat separates from the bones. Add more water as needed to maintain the original volume. Remove the shanks from the stock and trim the meat from the bones. Return the bones, the fat and gristle to the stock pot. There is still flavor in them after all and more importantly we are trying to extract and breakdown as much of the naturally occurring gelatins as possible.

Short ribs, oxtail, beef shanks and veal neck bones are all cuts of meat rich in gelatin. This is why they are so wonderful for braising and why they render such delicious stock. I’ve used the beef broth here to enhance the flavor because I am not boiling the shanks into tasteless mush. Beef has become too dear for that luxury.

In removing the meat from the bone it becomes obvious that the shank is comprised of a series of muscles. Divide the meat according to individual sections of muscle. On the cutting board there will be eight or ten small to medium sized medallions. These are for the final braising and will make braised beef shanks for two.  Also remove the marrow from the bones. This too is for sauce.

There will also be four or five larger muscle cross sections. These are for the soup.

Skim the fat off of the stock. This will yield a generous cup of fat that our grandparents would have put to good use. (That fat is in my refrigerator. I’m eyeing it up for homemade French fries. That will be a deferent adventure.)

To finish, this is where divine proportion comes in, you will need:

Beef shank medallions

Bone marrow finely chopped

2 cups of stock

¼ cup dry sherry

1 bay leave

1 medium onion thinly sliced

1 teaspoon butter

1/8 teaspoon Sweet paprika

Salt & Pepper to taste

In a sauce pan combine the stock, bone marrow, sherry, bay leave and paprika. Bring to a boil and reduce by half. Meanwhile in a sauté pan caramelize the onions. When the stock is reduced, lower to simmer and add the beef shank medallions and caramelized onions. Allow to simmer for fifteen minutes then add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve over spätzle, noodles or buttered toast triangles, with either green beans or oven browned root vegetables (a mix of carrots, parsnips and rutabaga). There you have it, divine proportion guiding a peasant feast. We can only hope the beef shanks don’t find their way to the peasant side of trendy gourmet menu.      

One final note: I’ve added a recipe gadget to this page. It’s not bad at all. You can use it a resource or simple reality check against the recipes I outline on these pages.

The Federal Register's Orwellian Happy Face

The unleashed regulatory beast is sporting an Orwellian happy face. On December 26, I blogged the USEPA is reinventing itself as the “U.S. Bureau of Environmental Sustainability,” (with a link to a Fox News article on the topic.)

Well this demanded more investigation. The first time in more than a dozen years I dove into the Federal Register to see what was going on. And indeed, on January 19, 2012, it announced it would hold meetings on February 13^th and 14^th to begin developing this “meta regulation.” (Federal Register Full Text.)

“Meta regulations” define the Executive branch’s overriding regulatory policy. It’s generally spelled out through policy directives, executive orders, and sometimes cut from whole cloth like the EPA newly found authority to regulate “greenhouse gas emissions.” Other times the regulatory authority comes from seemingly ubiquitous riders attached to must pass spending bills.

Among the meta-regulations currently driving environmental policy are environmental justice, climate change, and sustainability. These are all nebulous concepts that fully unleash new regulatory hounds. The progress of these meta-regulations are dutifully reported in the Federal Register, but are buried in mind numbing verbiage.

It should be noted that some administrations attempt to reign in the regulatory hounds. The Obama Administration, on the other hand, has been prodigiously releasing them.

Now here’s the thing. The Federal Register is essentially the federal record of public notice. It’s hundreds of pages of legalese every day. It’s the daily great grey book of regulatory verbiage. While I wasn’t watching, it took on an Orwellian happy face.  

In tracking down the EPA commissioned study “Sustainability and the U.S. EPA,” I opened the online version of the Federal Register on January 20 and was greeted with a smiley faced announcement saying:

“We, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service), along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, Department of Commerce) and other Federal, State, and tribal partners, announce that we are seeking public comments and input regarding the draft National Fish, Wildlife, and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy (Strategy). The purpose of the Strategy will be to inspire and enable natural resource professionals and other decision makers to take action to conserve the nation's fish, wildlife, plants, and ecosystem functions, as well as the human uses and values these natural systems provide, in a changing climate. In addition to this request for written comments, several public workshops will be conducted in order to provide additional opportunities for public involvement and discussion of the draft. The draft Strategy is available at the following link: http://www.wildlifeadaptationstrategy.gov/public-review-draft.php”

The portal for the Federal Register has become something of a daily news magazine telling of all the wonderful things the Federal Government is doing to improve our lives. (Take a look) The daily grey regulatory.pdf files behind these upbeat stories, in a Paul Harvey like way, tell the rest of the story. (Full Text) In all of that, here are the hounds lurking behind that smiley faced good news.

“We initially requested public

comments and input on the

development of the Strategy in a May

24, 2011, notice of intent in the Federal

Register (76 FR 30193). After we

incorporated initial input, in November

2011 we requested comments on a

preliminary draft of the Strategy from

selected Federal, State, and Tribal

agencies.

We now open the public comment

period (see DATES). After considering

and incorporating comments from the

public, we anticipate releasing a

revised, final Strategy by early summer

2012.

Key milestones are shown below:

• Outreach and Engagement Sessions—

2009/2010

• Steering Committee Formed—

December 2010

• Technical Teams Established—

February 2011

• Agency Review Draft Circulated—

November 2011

• Public Review Draft Announced—

January 2012

• Release Final Strategy—May/June

2012

Ultimately, the Strategy will be a

blueprint for common action that

outlines needed scientific support,

policy, and legal frameworks;

recommended management practices;

processes for integration and

communication; and a framework for

implementing these approaches. It will

enable national and international

conservation communities to harness

collective expertise, authority, and skills

in order to define and prioritize a shared

set of conservation goals and objectives

.We initially requested public

comments and input on the

development of the Strategy in a May

24, 2011, notice of intent in the Federal

Register (76 FR 30193). After we

incorporated initial input, in November

2011 we requested comments on a

preliminary draft of the Strategy from

selected Federal, State, and Tribal

agencies.

We now open the public comment

period (see DATES). After considering

and incorporating comments from the

public, we anticipate releasing a

revised, final Strategy by early summer

2012.

Key milestones are shown below:

• Outreach and Engagement Sessions—

2009/2010

• Steering Committee Formed—

December 2010

• Technical Teams Established—

February 2011

• Agency Review Draft Circulated—

November 2011

• Public Review Draft Announced—

January 2012

• Release Final Strategy—May/June

2012

Ultimately, the Strategy will be a

blueprint for common action that

outlines needed scientific support,

policy, and legal frameworks;

recommended management practices;

processes for integration and

communication; and a framework for

implementing these approaches. It will

enable national and international

conservation communities to harness

collective expertise, authority, and skills

in order to define and prioritize a shared

set of conservation goals and objectives.”

In short the hounds are on the prowl. Unfortunately, traditional news outlets will report on none of this until after the hounds have cornered their prey.   

Oyster Stew: A Festive New Year Eve Soup and the Clenched Fist of Tyranny

The soft hand of Federal tyranny balled up into a clenched fist New Year’s Eve when President Obama signed into law, a military funding bill, that allow the US military to apprehend, interrogate, and indefinitely detain suspected terrorists caught in the US. There is no exclusion for US citizens from this Authoritarian law. (Analysis)

Keep in mind, “suspected terrorist” casts a very wide net.

After all, last summer according to Politico, “Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room.”

Normally, following a turn of events such as the wholesale suspension of US civil rights I would not be much in mind to write on a festive soup. But I am forever hopeful and this hopefulness is not without foundation.

My son’s Facebook page was plastered with alarming reports on this news. You have to understand the social network with which he connects. He is a Yoga instructor, who aside from teaching Yoga classes assists individuals in managing chronic pain though a combination of Yoga and therapeutic message. He blogs on spiritual health and is a member of a Chicago avant-gard band, The I Ching Quartet. He does not exactly run with the “black helicopter” crowd. (See Potted Plant Wellness)  

He is not a tea party Republican. He might have some Libertarian leanings, but he is not a tea party Republican. Now here is the big thing and my son is mildly concerned. One of his good friends is constantly traveling between America’s big cities: Chicago, LA, New York, San Francisco and such. He is a contract employee for a number of video production companies.  He travels on one way air fares like a “suspect terrorist.”

More and more, young Americans are recognizing and turning away from what Malcolm Muggeridge called “The Great Liberal Death Wish.” (Full Text) In that there is ample cause for celebration and a festive soup.

Oyster stew is not, like most of my soups, the main entre’ of a simple peasant meal. It is an opening course, like an appetizer for multi-course feast. And it is elegant in its simplicity. For it you will need:

1 to 1 ½  pints of shucked oysters with liquor

2 Tablespoons Butter

1 ½ to 2 Cups Milk

½ cream

Salt

Oyster Crackers for Garnish

Over medium heat melt the butter and gently saute the oysters until they puff up slightly, a minute or so. Add the milk and cream. Stir gently until the stew is hot but not boiling. Season  the stew to taste with salt and serve with oyster crackers.