Minestrone for Feeding the Soul

Minestrone for Six or Eight

I try to keep my recipes small, serving four to six. This is because I mostly cook for two.

This Italian style vegetable soup is impossible to make small. There is the beauty of it. It is a true peasant soup. It’s hearty, low cost, delicious and can be easily make in a quantity to feed and an army. Two of the ingredients are foods that when cooked blow up. The pasta and beans absorb significant amounts of liquid and prodigiously expand in both bulk and volume.

It’s a true miracle. Because we experience this blossoming on a regular basis we take it for granted. It is a miracle nonetheless. In fact if you examine the list of ingredients everything is mostly water. The vegetables, mostly water. The wine, mostly water.  The cheese starts out as milk. Even the pork sausage is at its source mostly water.

The mysteries of bread, beer and wine are miracles also. Food Inc. tends to blind us of that simple truth. In exchange for a few extra dollars it gives us convenience and in doing so mindlessly robs a small piece of our souls. All of those small chunks of soul taken by the industrial economy add up. It’s all unintentional to be sure. But it’s very real consequences ripple across society.

But I digress, now back to the soup. For it you will need:

Water

2/3 Cup of Dried Kidney Beans (Do not take the shortcut by using canned.)

½ LB of Dried Pasta (I used penne but small pasta shells or even broken spaghetti will work fine)

½ Cup of Red Wine

2 TBS Italian Seasoning

1 TBS Beef Soup Base or 2 Bullion Cubes

1 Pound of Hot Italian Sausage Links, cooked, skinned and cut into bite sized pieces

1 14.5 oz. Can of Diced Salt Free Tomatoes

1 Onion Diced

2 Zucchinis cut into bite sized pieces

1 Rib of Celery diced   

1 10 oz. Package of Frozen Chopped Spinach

1 ½ to 2 Cups of grated Parmesan or Romano Cheese or a combination of both

Double quick soak the beans in 3 cups water with the Italian Seasoning and beef soup base by bringing the water to a boil for about five minutes, cover and then turn off the heat and let sit for an hour. Bring to a boil again for about five minutes and once again let rest covered for about an hour.

The beauty of dried beans is that they take on the flavors of the liquids in which they are boiled while maintaining the own unique subtle flavor. Kidney beans and lima beans are not the same thing. This why, for this recipe and recipes like it, canned beans are not allowed.  The same ability to assume flavor of course is true with rice. With this in mind, the inventor of Minute Rice should be arrested and forever locked in prison for “high crimes” against humanity.  I have wandered off track again but we are, after all, considering the miraculous.

Meanwhile cut the vegetables and cook the sausages by gently boiling for about twenty minutes. Cool then remove the casings and cut into bite sized pieces. Once the beans are ready, almost tender, combine all ingredients except to pasta into a large soup pot. The liquid from soaking the beans and that from the canned tomatoes should cover everything with about two inches to spare. If not add more water.

Bring the soup to a boil then reduce to very slow boil for an hour to cook the vegetables and allow the broth to mature.

Cook the pasta el dente just prior to serving. Start it about twenty minutes before. Then either add it to the soup pot or the individual bowls when serving. Top everything with a generous helping of grated cheese and enjoy. This soup goes will with thick slices of French bread, broiled on both sides until lightly browned and topped with minced garlic and olive oil.

A Peasant Bean Soup for G.K.Chesterton

This is a traditional bean soup – a thick soup of beans, ham and ham stock and vegetables. This is a delicious peasant meal.  It is a peasant soup that G.K. Chesterton would be proud of.

I need to clear up what I mean by peasant because it seems I, like Chesterton, will be championing peasantry and a peasant economy.  Chesterton was a prolific writer in the first part of the twentieth century. In the mid-twenties when economic/social debate focused on socialism vs. capitalism he vigorously argued for a third way – distributism. “Three acres and a cow,” he called it or maybe his critics did. It envisioned an economy where individuals had the individual wealth (read private property) necessary to “make a living.” He viewed “capitalism” and “socialism” as two roads to the same dead end – soft slavery.

“…If capitalism means private property, I am capitalist. If capitalism means capital, everybody is is capitalist. But if capitalism means this particular condition of capital, only paid out to the mass in the form of wages, then it does mean something, even if it ought to mean something else.

“The truth is that what we call Capitalism ought to be called Proletarianism. The point of it not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital. I have made an heroic effort in my time to walk about the world always saying Proletarianism instead of Capitalism. But my path has been a thorny one of troubles and misunderstandings…”    

Chesterton’s notions on distributism seem to be grounded in Roman Catholic teaching on individual dignity, private property, subsidiarity and solidarity. They seem to point back to a Catholic medieval, an economy of peasantry, monastery and guild. But that’s no so.

I do not use the term peasantry in the sense of an uneducated pre-twentieth country bumpkin. Instead, I am looking toward the agrarian economy of Wendell Berry, or Thomas Jefferson for that matter. This economy can no longer be solely rooted in the agrarian countryside. Still the notion of self sufficient households within the context of community applies equally to our urban industrial commercial environment. And happily, peasantry surrounds us.

Sure it’s the family farm. It’s also the baker, the auto body shop, the plumber, the lawyer, accountant, programmer and the guy with a PHD in Philosophy who bought the dump truck and now collects garbage as an independent contractor. All of the small businessmen and independent contractors are our peasantry. These are the foundation of our true economy. And these are those whom, after the dependent social under class, are most violently laid siege by Chesterton’s proletarianism.

I know. I am a carpenter. I now carry a state issued, EPA federally mandated, picture ID that says I am a “lead safe renovator.” It’s all about proportion. It’s about the Big lording over that which should be local. The EPA lording over carpenters or the the U.S. Department of Education lording over local school boards are examples. Fannie May and Freddie Mac underwrite our mortgages rather than local banks and savings and loans. The list goes on and it’s all wrong. It’s all upside down.

The answer lays in Chesterton’s notion of proportion and the Catholic teaching on “subsidiarity.”

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1883 nonetheless, it goes: “The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “a community of higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of lower order, depriving the latter of its functions…””

The community of the lowest order is of course the household. It’s the realm and kingdom of the peasant. With regard to what we eat the communities of higher order are forever interfering. These are many: the corporate communities; the community of nutritionists and food scientists; the federal and state governments with their overlapping food programs; and finally the many communities of the politically correct who seem to want to set our tables according to own sensibilities and agendas.

To all I offer a simple bean soup – a peasant’s fare – hearty and delicious. For four to six you will need:

1 ½ Cups dried beans

1 ½ Lbs. smoked ham hocks – about three

1 Large onion diced

3 Carrots diced

3 Ribs of celery diced

Ham soup base to taste

Onion powder to taste

Pepper to taste

A bit of thyme

1 ½ Quarts of water

In the water quick soak to beans by bringing to a hard boil for about five minutes then cover and let steep. Meanwhile, bake the ham hocks in a 350⁰ oven for an hour. Deglaze the baking pain with water then add the hocks and pan dripping to the beans. Bring the beans to a slow rolling boil. After about two hours the meat should be falling off the bones and the beans should be tender or nearly tender. Turn off the beans and remove the ham hock and let cool. Trim the meat from the bones. Forty-five minutes before serving bring the beans back to a boil, add the ham and vegetables then slow boil until done. Adjust seasoning and serve with garlic toast.    

We've become a nation of serfs

The reason I’ve been serving up recipes for potatoes, lintels and beans is we’ve become a nation of sharecroppers and serfs. I prefer we become a nation of peasants so I give you recipes for a peasant. A peasant, after all, is a free man.

Let me explain. A sharecropper or serf farms someone else’s land in agreement to turn over a portion of the harvest to the landowner. Before the land is plowed and seeded, the sharecropper is indebted to the landlord who now has a claim on his labor. Often a claim set so high enough that, while ensuring survival, the sharecropper could never create surplus wealth. 

Meanwhile a similar peasant farmer who has title to his land can sell his surplus crops and gradually accumulate wealth, by paying off the mortgage, through saving or both.

Land and labor are the source of wealth for both farmers. Yet one can never generate significant surplus wealth. The sharecropper’s debt is unsecured and places a direct claim on his labor. He faces a life of servitude.

The farmer with the title on his land, while maybe paying off a mortgage, will eventually own both the land and his labor.  His debt is a claim on the land which in time can be fully secured. The landowning peasant is in charge of his economy. The serf is not.

Our unsecured debt, both personal and our collective state and federal debt, has reduced us to nation of serfs, or wage slaves if you will.

Our kids are encouraged to attend college and take on a mountain of federal student loans.

They and we, literally, have credit cards thrown at us through the mail.

When buying a car or a house, the lenders encourage us to take on as much debt as they believe we can service.

On top of that, our collective debt on the federal level alone, figuring 300 million of us owe $14 trillion, is about $47,000 for every man, woman and child among us. Under that load our options are limited. We have a large nut to cover.

In short, we are at a precipice. We can either turn back toward individual and collective economic sanity. And to be sure it will be very painful. It will require thrift, self sacrifice and willingness embrace self reliance over entitlement.

The other option is to allow ourselves and future generations be bound in totalitarian servitude.

F. A. Hayek observed in The Road to Serfdom: “Although the state controls directly the use of only a large part of the available resources, the effects of its decisions on the remaining part of the economic system become so great that indirectly it controls almost everything. Where, as was, for example, true in Germany as early as 1928, the central and local authorities directly control the use of more than half the national income…they control indirectly almost the whole economic life of the nation. There is, then, scarcely an individual end which is not dependent for its achievement on the action of the state, and the “social scale of values” which guides the state’s action must embrace practically all individual ends.”

The current federal budget is $3.5 billion. That is about 25% of the U.S. gross domestic product. States and local governments command another large chunk. In addition U.S. government indirectly controls the energy industry, agriculture, medical services, education, financial services and others.

When government controls essentially the whole economy there becomes a need for it to articulate an economic plan to produce prosperity and ensure “common welfare.” Hayek argues economic planning on this scale is beyond the reach of democracy. Competing economic interests, reflected in an elected legislative body, result in gridlock where nothing gets done.

At this point Hayek writes: “The cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward planning…

…Hitler did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained the support of many to whom, though they detested Hitler, he yet seemed the only man strong enough to get things done.”

Gnocchi: An Enchanted Potato Dumpling

Enchantment happens.  Serendipity is often part of it – the happy chance discovery.

I woke up one night at my cabin with need to go to the bathroom. My cabin is a simple shelter without electricity or pluming. Upon stepping outside to relieve my self I found the surrounding darkness gently illuminated by hundreds of fireflies. Enchanting.

It’s the magic of place which can be intoxicatingly joyful. I unexpectedly stumbled into an enchanting place while Christmas shopping for my sister, the Wisconsin Cheese Mart. I had in mind a modest selection of award winning Wisconsin cheese that they could share with their Austin, Tex., friends. Hook’s 15 year cheddar was on my list. They had it. I Left with that and three other fine award winning cheeses.

What I expected was a sterile and pricey cheese store. What I wandered into was something else altogether. I found an enchanting Wisconsin cheese bar. These are wonderful combination of cheese store and tavern. These little slices of heaven, plunked down on earth, are sparsely scattered across Wisconsin and far more sparsely scattered elsewhere. My first such encounter with a cheese bar was in tiny Monroe, Wis., at Baumgartner’s. That was just last year. To find a similar place in Milwaukee was a surprise. It has been here forever. I’ve been here forever. How could I’ve not known?  

In Baumgartner’s everyone was happy. Everyone was intoxicated on everyone’s happiness. Such is enchantment and such is heaven. That’s how it was at the Wisconsin Cheese Mart.

Now on to the heavenly gnocchi, I never knew mashed potatoes could be so good. The small reception following my brother’s ordination was enchanting. It was served by Filippo Russo at Da Filippo’s Ristorante in Somerset, NJ. Filippo served seven or eight courses, paired with an appropriate wine, over the course of three or four hours. Magnificent.

One of those courses was gnocchi. Oh my goodness, these were delicately light, flavorful, small pillow shaped potato dumplings. I’ve been trying to duplicate this goodness since. It’s close but not perfect.

Here’s how it goes:    

1 Large Baking Potato, pealed, boiled and riced.

¼ Cup Heavy Cream or Ricotta Cheese

2 Tbs butter

1 Egg

¼ Cup Grated Parmesan Cheese

1 Cup ± Semolina or All Purpose Flour                                                                          

Rice the boiled potato while hot and thoroughly mix in the 2 table spoons of butter. In a separate bowl, lightly beat the egg then add the ricotta cheese or cream. Combine the egg mixture and parmesan cheese with the potatoes and mix thoroughly. Then gradually add the flour until the mix becomes a dough that can be rolled. Roll into ½“ diameter strands, or logs. Cut the logs into one inch segments. Meanwhile bring a pot of water to boil. Boil the raw gnocchi for 10 or 15 minutes. Drain and bake the gnocchi on a non-stick cookie sheet for anther 15 minutes in a 350⁰ oven. Serve with a generous topping of butter sautéed garlic. Serves four.   

"We won't know what's in the bill until after we pass the bill."

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quipped “we won’t know what’s in the bill until after we pass the bill,” she laid bare the full truth of tyranny by administrative law. She made this remark prior to the enactment of what is now known  as “Obamacare.” Yet, it applies to virtually all major federal legislation enacted into law.

Consider, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration released a draft regulation that would require backup cameras on all new vehicles in 2014 to prevent drivers from backing into pedestrians.  The rule would cost as much as $2.7 billion a year and add as much as about $200 to the cost of a new car. The final rule is due out in February.

The agency said on average, 292 people are killed each year by drivers when backing up. Another roughly 3000 are seriously injured in back-over accidents. In round numbers, the cost of preventing those deaths and serious injuries is $1 million each.

Now, I am a careful driver and I do not want to spend extra $80 to $200 for a back-up camera when I buy my next car, but I won’t have that option. I will have to spend that money because of the mishaps of 3000 careless drivers each year.

Earlier this year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published its Repair, Renovation, and Paint rule. It specifies the work procedures carpenters and painters have to follow when working on homes built before 1978. It’s onerous and very costly to homeowners contracting major home maintenance projects. The rule is intended to protect children under the age of six from lead poisoning by insuring they will not be exposed to lead contaminated dust and paint chips when painted surfaces are disturbed in the course of the work.

Adults and children over the age of six are not risk. In fact the draft rule had an opt-out provision if there no children under the age of six in the home. That opt-out was stricken from the final rule.

We are micro managed by vast federal regulatory agencies with extraordinary and often arbitrary authority over our lives. That we won’t know what’s in the law until we pass the law is chillingly correct. We are subject to virtual strip searches and or groping in our airports. We wonder where did that come from.

So what does this have to do with the soup? Everything.

S.510, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act passed in the Senate this past November and could be signed into law before the end of the year if the House moves on it. If it is not passed in this congressional session, it will likely resurface in the next. It essentially gives the FDA absolute control over food production, processing and distribution.

I wonder if in five or ten years we will find ourselves sneaking off to food “speakeasies” to feast on oysters on the half shell, beef tartar, cheeses made from raw milk and deliciously medium rare New York strip steaks. For sure, my dreams of an artisan baked bean boutique seem dashed – no artisan pork and beans, no cassoulet with lamb, no heritage chili beans, and no Mediterranean beans with fennel and lamb, all smartly packed in quart jars and all smartly priced. All gone.

The “from the farm” links on this page are web pages of small food producers and processors in Wisconsin that I patronize. This list is by no means comprehensive, most are too small to bother with a web presence. This small list links does however shine light on Wisconsin’s unique food culture. It is that regional culture that is most threatened by placing absolute regulatory authority for food production and processing in one massive bureaucracy.  Bureaucracies manage that which is large and uniform and set impossibly high hurdles for all the rest.

What would the FDA make of Ma Baench, a small Milwaukee company that packs raw marinated herring tidbits to be served upon crackers. I cannot see the FDA ever approving of raw fish or meat to sold as a ready to eat finished food product. I can see them banning it.

Or how about Hook’s Cheese, a creamery that produces a magnificent 15 year cave aged cheddar?  I mean how is some bureaucratic stuffed suit obsessed with food safety going to take to perishable food served up after a fifteen year stint in a cave.

Karl’s County Market is small supermarket with a large butcher shop. It sells restaurant quality meets and produces absolutely wonderful sausages, some of the best in Wisconsin. That says a lot. Wisconsin is home to many fine sausage makers, large and small. Here’s the rub. In 2007, USA Today reported, cured and smoked meats and meat products are strongly associated with some types of cancer. No amount is safe according to the American Cancer Research Institute. They also caution eating more than 18 oz. of cooked red meat a week.

That “no amount is safe” assessment will surely draw attention of agency has complete authority over our foods and is mandated to insure food safety. Are the days of Wisconsin’s beloved bratwurst limited? That seems to be low hanging regulatory fruit.

This brings us to John and Dorothy Priske. They raise grass feed, corn finished, Highland beef on their Fountain Prairie farm. The beef is aged for six weeks after its slaughtered. Years ago this was standard practice. Ageing improves both flavor and tenderness of the beef. It’s also costly from a producers point of view. Is that a practice the FDA will view kindly?

Lastly, I give you the Kickapoo Orchard. Over forty varieties of apples are grown there. The harvest begins in mid-August and goes on until the end of October. All of the apples are sold directly to the public from orchard’s large store. The orchard in a way is both a large producer and a small producer at the same time. Is this producer/retailer going to be caught in the crossfire of crippling and unnecessary regulation?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. I do know industrial agriculture, Congress and the regulatory agencies too often intertwine in that unholy thing we call corporate cronyism. It systematically robs us of our dollars, our choices and our opportunities. My baked bean boutique seems out. The backing-up camera for my car seems in.

Grumpy Potato Chowdah

A grumpy leftover baked potato is a very good thing and tasty too. With several on hand you have the makings for many quick meals. I use them for fried potatoes, corn beef hash, fish cakes, potato salads and in soups. They are a householder’s trick for quick, cheap but wonderful meals.

The potato is a beautiful creature. She is a new world delight who has endeared herself to food cultures throughout the world. Sadly I fear, most potatoes consumed in America are either as chips or fries. It's tragic

This is a Mid-western take on Manhattan clam chowder. It’s a quick soup. With already baked potatoes on hand, start to finish this soup can be made in about a half hour. And it’s delicious. As a child, I loved Campbell’s condensed Manhattan clam chowder, but I knew I could do better. It is the first soup ever I made. This is an almost gourmet version with fancy imported Pomi and would be fully gourmet if had been able to buy a pint of frozen chopped clams. None were to be had. I settled on two cans of baby clams instead.

24 oz. box of Pomi diced tomatoes

8 oz. bottle of clam juice

4 medium baked potatoes pealed and diced     

4 sliced of bacon diced, fried and drained

1 medium onion diced

1 rib of celery diced

1 level Tbs. minced garlic

Pepper to taste.

Drain liquids from the clams and tomatoes into the soup pot. Add the clam juice, celery, onion and garlic. Bring to a boil then cook gently until the celery and onions are soft. Add the clams, tomatoes and potatoes, and return to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes then serve. Serves four to six.

You can substitute a 14 oz. can of salt free diced tomatoes and another 8 oz. bottle of clam juice for the fancy imported Italian tomatoes. It will be a different soup, but nevertheless a very good one.



Razor Sharp

I do believe in every household kitchen that I have ever encountered there is a drawer of kitchen knives. With a few exceptions in all of those drawers all of those many, many knives are dull and nasty. Some of those knives have saw- like serrated edges to awkwardly and laboriously hack through an onion rather than elegantly and cleanly slice it.

The truth is: this past Thanksgiving millions of American men hacked through their Thanksgiving turkey with an electric “carving” knife. A Milwaukee Tool Sawzall would have been more manly, more elegant, and with the right blade would have done a better job.

In all the drawers of all the dull knives only four items are needed to make everything right: a six or seven in boning knife, an eight or ten in French chefs knife, a stone and a steel. Also needed is an accurate judgment of 22^o.  22^o is the dynamic angle that one draws the knife blade over the stone and steel to maintain an edge. The steel straightens the edge. The stone sharpens it. Diamond stones do quick work.

This maintenance isn’t time consuming. A short visit with the steal once or twice a week usually does it. And ten minutes with the stone two or three times a year will keep household knives razor sharp.  

This brings me to the topic of razors and shaving. While this has nothing directly related to cooking, it has all to do with the household economy. For over 30 years, I have been had by Gillett. They have moved me from the injector razor, to the costly twin edge cartridge razor and are now trying to seduce me into buying cartridge razors with edges stacked four or five, one upon the other. They promise a smoother, closer shave. They gain a $150 a year razor cartridge customer. It’s a scam.

My son gave me an old fashion single blade safety razor on Thanksgiving. He said they give a better shave and the blades cost about a buck apiece and last for a month. I somewhat nervously tried it out the next day. With the exception of a few nicks, he was right. After two mornings I had it mastered.

Sunday he stopped by for dinner. I told him the razor worked well and found I had been scammed again.

Then I think I’ll get one, he said. I thought I’d use your face for my testing ground.