The Non-Compliant Twice Baked Potato

I made a delicious anniversary dinner for my wife. The USDA would not have approved, at least judging by the new dietary standards for school lunches. My first sin was the double baked potato. Kids diets they’ve deemed are too potato rich and are making them, and all of us by extension, morbidly obese.

Under the new lunch rules French fries, Tater Tots and chips are frowned upon. The inclusion of these items on school lunch menus is strictly limited. So too with bread and pasta. A couple of servings a week are okay, but only if they are made from whole grain wheat. Worse my double baked potatoes are loaded with fat – bacon fat, sour cream and whole milk.

The next item on my anniversary plate was the lobster tail. The regulators might be okay with lobster of and by itself (though it’s not likely to found in public school cafeteria), but the melted butter in which I generously bathed it would cause them nightmares.

Meanwhile during the day, feet upon their desks, they daydream of dietary reeducation camps.

In principle they would be okay with the salad, but, and in their eyes these things are huge, I didn’t dress it with low-cal, low-fat Ranch dressing. Instead I whipped together a small dressing of mayonnaise, sour cream, olive oil and blue cheese.

It seems that with all the raw vegetables and salads they want served in the schools, the only enhancement to them should be an insipid low-cal, low-fat Ranch dressing. It should also be noted my salad was built around nutritionally vilified Iceberg lettuce. (Iceberg lettuce holds up well in the refrigerator crisper.)

A Regulatory Crusade

The school lunch dietary standards have been a crusade for First Lady Michelle Obama. In defending them she recently told a group of school nutrition officials: “Transforming the health of an entire generation is no small task.  But we have to be willing to fight the hard fight now” [Full Text]

In Milwaukee, the schools will be serving free meals, breakfast and lunch, to all students beginning next year. You have to wonder if brown bag lunches will not be allowed. The picture with the story showed a salad with croutons and a slice or two of hard boiled eggs in in a plasticized box. In the background there was a peach and a carton of 1% milk. Hidden off camera was, I’m sure, a squeeze packet of low-cal, low-fat Ranch dressing. [Full Text] 

So the food guidelines they’ve drawn up are big on fresh fruits and vegetables, short on carbs and dietary fat, and in general force schools to serve lunches that kids would rather pass on. Increasingly elsewhere, school districts and school food service managers are passing on the federal school lunch subsidies rather than follow menu guidelines. They are losing customers and buying expensive food only to throw it away. Their food budgets have been blown to hell. [Full Text]

So maybe it’s a good idea to consider the tomato sauce on slice of pizza as a serving of vegetables again.

In all of this mischief, the underlining assumption is American parents know nothing of wholesomely feeding their children. The way to fix this of course is with federal dietary mandates regarding school lunches and increasingly breakfasts too. Scratching below that assumption is laid a deeper assumption that the institution of family is failed.

Creating the Central Bureau of Group-Think Conformity

That deeper assumption is driving Common Core, nationwide school achievement standards set by the U. S. Department of Education. The national standards are spearheaded by Bill Gates, the association of state departments of education and the Obama administration.

In explaining his support for the standards, Gates told the Washington Post: “The country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get, and that is a huge challenge. ... Education can get better. Some people may not believe that. Education can change. We can do better.” [Full Text]

Critics of the assessment standards claim, for example, it leaves American seventh-graders two years behind the benchmarks set by other countries. Glen Beck believes the policy is nothing short of unbridled evil. [Video] But one thing is clear. While the Gates’ standard might be fine for some schools, through them the U.S. Department of Education is imposing a one size fits all curricula on our nation’s schools when in fact the majority of school districts are doing just fine. Somehow all of that is justified by the economy of scale, I suppose.

The Legacy of Devalued Marriage

But the problem isn’t with failing schools; failing schools are mostly a symptom of broken families.

There is much evidence for failed families. On the whole, culturally we’ve devalued marriage and have tried to bandage the resulting wounds with various social welfare programs. There is as much evidence these bandages haven’t worked too well. Too many federal social welfare programs, agencies and reforms have failed and instead only accelerated the declined. The 1965 Moynihan Report sort of outlined the path we were on and we’ve reached its destination. That story is told by Charles Murray in his study, published this year, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 – 2010. These are the book ends of failed social policy.

The new solution is a de facto centralized ministry of group-think conformity.

To criticize that is hopelessly politically incorrect, racist and to be silenced. Instead, we are asked to quietly accept federally mandated dietary standards and Common Core, standards that are necessarily set to a lowest common denominator. It is a low bar set for public schools that increasingly serve as proxy parents, but impose a very high price of regulatory compliance both on our school districts and the individual families they serve.

A Twice Baked Potato

Having said that, here’s how to make a USDA disapproved double baked potato. Should you serve this up with a lobster tail for your wife in celebration of a thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, she will probably not kick you out of the house for a while – maybe not for another year. She said we haven’t had lobster for quite some time. Not since our last anniversary I replied.

For this non-compliant double baked potato you will need:

3 medium russet potatoes

3 slices of bacon diced

½ medium onion diced

2 Tbsp. sour cream

1 tsp dried chives

Seasoning salt to taste

1 splash of milk

2 Tbsp. grated parmesan cheese

2 sprinklings of paprika  

 

Bake the potatoes in a 350^o for an hour and 15 minutes. While these bake brown the bacon and when it begins to crisp add the unions. Continue to sauté the onions for about two minutes until they soften then remove from the burner. Prepare the lobster tails for baking by cutting the membrane and fins from the underside of the tail then wrap in foil. Toss the salad of your choice.

When the cooked and while still hot, cut off the tops of the potatoes, scoop out shells, and mash with bacon, onions, sour cream, milk and chives. Stuff the potato skin shells, mounding above the shells. Top the stuffed potatoes first with parmesan cheese and then sprinkle with paprika. Bake with the lobster in a 350^o oven for thirty minutes and then serve.  

 

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.

 

 

 

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas -- Remembering December, 1944

When Gus was transferred to a search light battery in San Diego in February 1942, the United States, and really the rest of the world were braced for a long war and were gearing up to fight it.

When he enlisted, the term of service was one year. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, on December 19, the term of service was indefinitely extended to the duration of the war plus six months. All men between the age of 18 and 64 were required to register. At the time the U.S. Army wasn’t much. When Germany invaded Poland, the U.S. Army had 170,000 soldiers, and another 200,000 served in the National Guard.

When the U.S. entered the war, it would take a while before the U.S. could mobilize the sort of armed force necessary to engage in a sustained offensive war. For most enlisted men already in the army, and those being inducted, their immediate prospects were for a long and indefinite period of training and waiting – mostly waiting.

“In the middle of February, [1942], I was sent to San Diego. I was assigned to the coast artillery battery. We were quite fortified there. We had as much as 16 inch guns up there. Point Loma was tunneled. They had the machine gun nests up there and then they had the 16 inch guns on railroad tracks. They could hide them in the tunnels. I worked in the plotting room where they tracked the target . . .” Gus recalled.

It seems the army was in certain state of confusion and flux. When a country begins mobilizing there is no choice other than to begin with what you have. Point Loma is a sand stone peninsula on the ocean side of the San Diego Bay. Its cliffs rise more than 400 feet above sea level and offer an unobstructed view along the far southern U.S. coast to Mexico. Fort Rosecrans, on the south side of the peninsula, was a natural home U.S. Army’s Coast Artillery Corps in both World War One and Two.

Gus never said anything about it, but a nearly two year billet there couldn’t have been an altogether bad thing.  It was southern California – a pleasant climate after all. He had long established California connections. There were not too many targets to track.

In entering the war, Fort Rosecrans was an asset the small military had at hand. It was one of a handful of starting points.

In early 1942, military assignments for enlisted men were unavoidably haphazard. Point Loma was one of those places to begin building a military force from a few hundred thousand into what numbered over 12 million by the war’s end in 1945. Of those 8,300,000 were in the Army.

No one had written a field manual on doing that.

“When I got to San Diego, they didn’t need bakers or cooks. So I was assigned to a gun crew. First I was a gun commander on a 10 inch gun. I had a sergeant’s rank.

“I was in “F” battery and we got orders to go to Alaska. Since I had just come back from Alaska I was transferred into ‘K’ battery. When I was transferred to ‘K’ battery, I was moved to the plotting room. I was shipped to Europe in December 1944.”

Gus’s war began with a long wait. In early 1942 it was apparent it would not only be a long war, but it would be brutal too. The Allied forces had been evacuated from Dunkirk in May 1940. In 1941 Hitler marched almost at will across Eastern Europe to the suburbs of Moscow. From December of 1941 through May of 1942, Filipino and U.S. forces were engaged with the Japanese in the Philippines. By the time battle concluded with the infamous Bataan Death March, of the 150,000 Filipino and American combatants 25,000 were killed, 21,000 were wounded and 100,000 were captured.  

About the only bright spots were the defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy, in June, at Midway, and a victory at Guadalcanal, following a hard battle that raged on from June 1942 until February 1943. The nature of the war ahead was clear. There were 60,000 U.S. ground forces at Guadalcanal. Overall the battle left 7,100 dead.

On all fronts and among all belligerents, including the U.S., they were more than willing to wage a war of attrition. The war on the Eastern Front, between the Soviet Red Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht, kind of set the tone for things to come.

Winston Churchill met with Stalin in the middle of August 1942, to lay out Brittan’s overall near term war plans which focused on a large attack in North Africa hitting Rommel from the east. Stalin wanted a second front in France and he wanted it now.

Churchill recounted the meeting in his history The Second World War, volume IV. This is how it went:

“I told Stalin that I was well aware that this plan offered no help to Russia in 1942, but thought it possible that when the 1943 plan was ready it might well be that the Germans would have a stronger army in the west. I then said I had good reason against an attack on the French coast in 1942. We had only enough landing-craft for an assault landing on a fortified coast – enough to throw ashore about six divisions and maintain them...

“Stalin who had begun to look very glum, seemed unconvinced by my argument, and asked if it was impossible to attack any part of the French coast. I showed a map which indicated difficulties of making an air umbrella anywhere except actually across the Straits…

“Stalin, whose glumness had by now much increased, said that, as he understood it, we were unable to create a second front with any large force and unwilling even to land six divisions. I said that this was so…

“Stalin, who had become restless, said that his view about war was different. A man who was not prepared to take risks could not win a war. Why were we so afraid of the Germans? He could not understand. His experience showed that troops must be bloodied in battle. If you did not blood your troops you had no idea what their value was…”

Importantly, Stalin’s view about war was different. A soldier either fought to the last bullet or was a traitor. 

Up to that point in the war, the Soviet dead and missing in action numbered nearly six million, according to G. I. Krivosheev, in Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses. Of those nearly five million had been taken as prisons of war. The Red Army had been all but crushed in 1941, but held a line and turned the German Army from the outskirts of Moscow in the winter of 1941-42.

It’s understandable why Stalin was so insistent on an immediate second front in France, but ultimately saw the logic of Churchill’s near term focus on North Africa. Churchill continued later in that passage:

“At this point Stalin seemed suddenly to grasp the strategic advantages of “Torch.” He recounted four main reasons for it: first, it would hit Rommel in the back; second, it would overawe Spain; third, it would produce fighting between Germans and Frenchmen in France; and fourth, it would expose Italy to the whole brunt of the war.”

U.S. ground forces didn’t engage the German land force until the end of 1942 with Operation Torch in North Africa. This was followed by the Invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and Italy with American forces landing on Italian peninsula in September. Rome fell to the Allies in June 1944. Operation Overlord, the invasion of France in Normandy, was launched on June 6, 1944. American forces were fully mobilized.   

So things went. While Gus was stationed in San Diego, waiting, by 1944 the mood of the nation was dark. The uncertainty of those serving in the armed forces, and by extension that of their families, loved ones, and friends, was overwhelmingly breathtaking. That is, as in literally breathless, as if having had the wind knocked out of you.

The lyrics of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas expressed the dark limbo in which enlistees and civilians alike drifted.

The song was written by Hugh Martin for the 1944 movie Meet Me in Saint Louis. Here’s what he wrote:

“Have yourself a merry little Christmas
It may be your last
Next year we may all be living in the past
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Pop that champagne cork
Next year we may all be living in New York
No good times like the olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who were dear to us
Will be near to us no more
But at least we all will be together
If the Lord allows
From now on, we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

The business of “It may be your last” and “Next year we may all be living in the past” were too dark for Judy Garland, who had those lines rewritten to “Let your heart be light” and “Next year all our troubles well be out of sight.” A recording of the song, released at the same time as the movie, became hugely popular with U.S. troops.

Gus shipped to Europe in December 1944, at the age of thirty-five, as a sergeant and presumably an infantryman. . .

Before Apple Pancakes Refinishing the Floor

The third rule of refinishing a floor is not to step in the Varathane while laying it down. The contingency plan to mitigate this possible eventuality is to lay it down in stocking feet and to carry a fresh pair of stockings in one’s back-pocket. When changing stockings be sure not to sit in wet Varathane. This will only make matters worse.

The floor came out reasonably well. I’m happy with it, but there was a steep learning curve along the way. Stepping in it is no good.

The first rule is that you cannot sand enough and never be stingy with tack cloth. Go over it twice. The corners can be cleaned with a sharp chisel. By the time you have finished rough sanding, you will have taken off 1/16 of an inch wood. You can shave that with a sharp chisel. But here’s the thing about chisels. Most come from China and even brand new, they are not sharp. Hone the chisel on a diamond stone some before going at the corners. From there take everything down to 320 or 400 grit sand paper with an orbital sander.

The second rule is not to trust the manufacturer’s instructions for laying down Varathane. They are sketchy at best and almost misleading to the point of fooling you into believing the job will be a piece of cake. But they do warn you not drink the stuff, to be careful with fumes and to evacuate the area should you get lightheaded and dizzy. You probably don’t want to get the stuff in your eyes either.

They say on the can you can lay down a second coat after 5 or 6 hours without sanding. This is a hopeful lie. After five or six hours the stuff doesn’t flow smoothly. It pools unevenly.

Lay down a coat. Let it dry and harden for 12 hours. Sand it out and tack cloth and repeat three or four times. (It should be noted the Rust-Oleum people who make Varathane offer no suggestions on their WEB site as to how best apply it. The instructions are a scant three tiny sentences in the smallest of type on the back of the can. (Even with my “readers” on, it was hopeless. I needed a magnifying glass.)  

The final and forth rule for refinishing a floor – do it in good light. It’s impossible to evenly coat a surface if you can’t see how the finish is laying down.

Once again a life’s lesson is relearned. There are no shortcuts. The same thing is true with apple pancakes. (Next post. And oh, such more tasty.)

Idaho Style Cream of Potato Soup: If the Shoe Fits Wear It

My vision of cream of potato soup was informed by the classic version – Vichyssoise. It didn’t appeal to me. Think of it, warm or cold, watery mashed potatoes with leeks just doesn’t conjure up a vision of culinary delight. My pantry would have to be pretty bare before I’d make something like that.

The restaurant in the Boise airport changed my mind on the subject. Understand, the default motto on Idaho’s license plates is “Great Potatoes.” My first impression of the city set a number of years ago, after disembarking from the plane the first marvel that greeted me was a vending machine that cooked up hot French fries. How could you not plug a couple of quarters into a machine like that? 
Once again, upon leaving Boise while in the airport, another potato dish bid me farewell. Cream of potato soup was menu item at airport’s restaurant. Setting aside any Vichyssoise prejudice, I ordered a bowl of it. If anywhere there was a perfect bowl of cream of potato soup I reasoned it would be in Idaho, in the Boise airport. It was very good, a kind of Rocky Mountain ham chowder.
 
God's Potato Garden

Idaho’s identification with a lowly russet potato is an instance where general rule of “if the shoe fit’s wear it” has been followed. God, it seems, intended southern Idaho to become his potato patch. The climate and rich volcanic soil in southern Idaho are perfect for growing potatoes. While the climate is semiarid, Rocky mountain snowpack acts as a huge fresh water reservoir. Water from that reservoir is distributed across southern Idaho via the Snake River and its tributaries.

In the early 1920s, irrigation and agricultural mechanization gave birth to industrial agriculture in southern Idaho. Idaho is now the overwhelming to potato producing state in the U.S. In 2009 roughly 350 thousand acres were planted. Potatoes are a $2.5 billion industry.

 J.R. Simplot caught the crest of that gathering wave. He founded the J.R. Simplot Company in 1929 to process potatoes and other vegetables.

According to Wikipedia, he made one fortune during WWII supplying the armed forces with dehydrated potatoes and onions, and another after that following the invention of the frozen French fry by one of his food scientists. By the early 1970s, Simplot was a primary supplier of frozen French fries to McDonald’s.

The J.R. Simplot Company is headquartered in Boise, as was Ore-Ida until 1999. Ore-Ida invented the tater tot. It also invented the French fry vending machine. It had 50 hand built prototype machines made in 1991, for test marketing [Full Text]. More than likely I encountered one of these original magnificent machines in the Boise airport.

Potatoes, a “new world” food, are cropped all over the world. I once had the good pleasure of having a couple of Indian students prepare a traditional Indian meal at my home. The menu included curried potatoes. The Germans plant more acres of potatoes than Idaho does. It is the home of German potato salad, potato dumplings and potato pancakes. Despite this, Germany does not claim to be the potato nation.

Against this backdrop, Idaho proudly makes claim to the state of “great potatoes.” Well if the shoe fits, even in ordinary things like potatoes, wear it. Increasingly, in ordinary things we are forced into shoes that don’t fit and are painfully troublesome. Increasingly, even in ordinary things, we are painfully shoehorned by politically correct think.

Groupthink Ill-fitting Shoes

In a recent essay, Victor Davis Hanson wrote about the troublesome fit imposed upon us by groupthink in regard to the Boston Marathon bombing. In the name of politically correct thought which he linked to the Star Trek era Cyber Borgs, we’ve have decided to ignore radical Islamist thought is the primary source of global terror. [Full Text]

“The result has been that ever since 2009, various members of the administration collective have sought, each according to his station, to bring us into the network of not associating Islamism with terror. And the Borg have certainly been diverse, as all sorts of political appointees, opportunists, and career officers plugged themselves into the hive. Obama may have killed ten times as many suspected Muslim terrorists by drone as did Bush, but we were to assume that the fact that there were no Christian, Jewish, or Buddhist victims of Hellfire missiles was irrelevant.

”Shortly after assuming office as the head of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano associated the prior “war on terror” with a “politics of fear”: “In my speech, although I did not use the word ‘terrorism,’ I referred to ‘man-caused’ disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.” Again, one wishes to ask her how many Christians have been targeted by Obama-administration Predator drones.”

He went on to observe:  

“After the Fort Hood shootings, the Defense Department characterized the murders as “workplace violence,” despite the known fact that Major Hasan had been interviewed by the FBI because of his correspondence with the radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki, and even though he yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as he killed twelve soldiers and one civilian and wounded more than 30 others. The military was absorbed into the non-Islamic groupthink to such a degree that Army Chief of Staff George Casey editorialized of the mass murder of his soldiers: “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” Dismantling the “diversity program” would be worse than the slaughter at Fort Hood? These days our martyrs are to die not on the altar of freedom, but on the altar of diversity?”$

He then concluded:

What will break up the Borg? Tragically, it may take another Boston-style bombing to send enough rogue voltage through the system to explode the circuitry and free the drones from the hive.

It should be remembered, following the bombing, all of Boston was “locked down” in informal martial law while government authorities conducted a massive search for the remaining suspect fugitive. The shoe didn’t fit. Communities are relatively self-policing. The bomber wasn’t found until after the lockdown was a lifted and a local homeowner saw something amiss with his boat in his back yard.

Throughout, we need enough rogue voltage to explode the circuitry that binds us in so many ill fitting shoes. The guy eyeing his boat was a spark of rogue voltage. We need the courage to say something’s amiss.

Affordable Health Care that is Anything But

The newly minted Affordable Health Care Act, is another type of ill-fitting shoe we’re forced to buy and wear. It is the exact opposite of what its title implies. It’s an ill-fitting shoe that will increase the cost of health services for most of us, and in to many cases dramatically so. Never the less, the president boldly announced at a recent press conference, "A huge chunk of it's already been implemented…and it’s working fine."

Investor’s Business Daily took exception to that [Full Text]:

“Democrats put off the bulk of the law — the massive market regulations, the government-run exchanges, mandates to buy coverage, and various taxes and fees—until 2014, both to hide its true costs and to avoid any unpleasantness before the 2012 elections.
 

"For the 85% to 90% of Americans who already have health insurance ... they don't have to worry about anything else."

Really? The Congressional Budget Office expects 7 million workers — and possibly as many as 20 million — will lose their employer coverage because of ObamaCare. That's plenty to worry about.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said millions of seniors will get dumped from their private Medicare Advantage plans by 2017 thanks to sharp payment cuts required by the law.

And small businesses now providing coverage face huge rate hikes thanks to ObamaCare's many market regulations and benefit mandates. Maryland's biggest insurer, nonprofit CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, said ObamaCare will force rates up by 15% next year.

"The other stuff's been implemented and it's working fine."

That's only true if you ignore the fact that ObamaCare's high-risk pools have been a disaster, attracting a third as many people as predicted while costing far more than the administration budgeted.

Or the fact that Obama had to issue more than 1,200 waivers to companies who said the law's initial insurance market rules would have forced them to cancel coverage for millions of workers.

The overly complicated small-business tax credit has also been a bust, with only about 5% of eligible firms taking advantage of it. And so on.

"We're going to be able to drive down costs ... and that will save the country money as a whole over the long term."

Except, Obama's own health care number crunchers say ObamaCare will force national health spending up 7.4% in 2014, and add billions in costs over the next decade. The Congressional Budget Office says it will add massively to federal health spending.

And the architects of Obama's reform wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine about how, despite ObamaCare, "health costs remain a major challenge."

It all leads one to wonder: Is Obama just dangerously misinformed about ObamaCare? Or is he willfully misleading the country?”

Misinformed and misleading are two sides of the same coin. The operating word in the Investor’s Business Daily’s editorial is “willfully.” The president, government bureaucracies on all levels, academia and the press have “willfully” adopted a point of view that a vast centralized government can solve all of our problems. One size fits all. It drives Hanson’s Borg like group think. 

It's as if the only cream of potato soup we should be allowed to make or order is a cold, watery mashed potato soup with leeks.

With that, here is a proper cream of potato soup as if made in the Boise Airport restaurant. This will amply serve four, or six if served as a first course of a larger meal.

2 Ham shanks 1 pound each

3 or 4 Medium russet potatoes baked, peeled and cut into    bite sized pieces.

2 Ribs of celery cut to a small dice

1 Medium onion cut to a small dice
1 Large carrot cut to a small dice

4 Table spoons butter

4 Table spoons flour

½ Pint heavy cream

2 Pints of water

Ham soup base

Pepper, Onion powder and ground celery seed to taste. 

In a gallon soup pot cover the ham shanks with two pints of water, bring to a slow boil and cook for about two hours until the ham begins falling from the bone. Add additional water as needed. Remove the ham shanks and cut the ham from the bone and into bite sized pieces.

Melt the butter in a sauté pan and whisk in flour to make a roux. Adjust the ham stock for flavor with ham soup base if needed. Bring the stock to a boil gradually add roux to thicken. Add celery and onion cook until al dente. Add the diced ham, potatoes and cream. Season to taste with pepper, onion powder and ground celery seed. Serve when ham and potatoes are warmed.