Herban Sprawl

Today is a day of profound sadness. The death of Senator Ted Kennedy affects me deeply as he was a man committed to the rights of women, minorities and the plain, old, regular American who is struggling to keep a job and make ends meet.

His mark was on everything I hold dear - Title IX opportunities for women, reproductive rights, education, the minimum wage, rights for the disabled, and universal health care. I am sad that he will not be alive to vote into law a bill that will guarantee Americans the right to health care. I am sad that someone who has been vilified by the right wingnuts will not be there to stand alongside the first African-American president of the United States to bring relief to so many Americans. It would definitely have been a moment of triumph for him.

He was the unlikely patriarch figure who grew into himself, as often happens with people for whom there are few expectations. He managed to get more done than either of his deified brothers, and that’s why his life is so significant. He walked the walk, and with far more working against him, he outclassed and outshined those brothers.

I grew to respect Ted Kennedy, which was in direct opposition to a staunchly Republican upbringing. I saw in him a man with flaws and a man with heart. From his hard-partying youth into his hard-partying adulthood, he finally was freed of the yoke of being another Kennedy president, and moved on with his life.

For women of an age, Ted Kennedy stands tall as a champion of our equal rights. His work on behalf of our right to privacy and choice in the matter of reproduction was never an issue in terms of his Catholicism. No bishop or cardinal would dare threaten a Kennedy with excommunication. And he played that card on our behalf.

He had the knack of bringing key moderate Republicans along to his way of thinking. I hated that he supported No Child Left Behind and all the nonsense it would represent. I understood why he did it. He hoped it would funnel money to our schools.

It was a life of privilege, but he used that to help those in need and he championed those without seats at the tables of power. For that, and for the love of his family, he will be remembered as a true mensch.

Rest in peace, Senator. You will be sorely missed.

21 August 2009 (I sure hope my friend appreciates the dates…)

Maffa and I were having a conversation about areas where we want control. By that I don’t mean we, ourselves are in control, but rather that someone is in control.

In thinking about this, I am reminded of times when I pushed the envelope with people who were supposed to be in charge and who were not demonstrating leadership. One man grew so angry that he shouted, “Would you like this job?!” My response was, “No, I don’t want your job. I just want you to DO your job.” The room fell silent because the assumption - and I stress the word assumption because no one ever talked to me about any other possible intention I might have had - was that I was angling for his office in the organization.

On another occasion, one of my superiors said she understood I didn’t want to “come downtown.” I affirmed it. There were a lot of reasons and I wasn’t completely honest with her - just gave her a politically correct answer.

My principal was surprised at a similar response - “You won’t get ahead, you know.” “I don’t want to get ahead. I just want to do what I do.” Silently, I thought, “And I will leave the headaches to you folks who have the stomach for it.”

With that kind of an attitude, why would control be so important? The easy answer is that it means things will move forward.

Maffa and I agree that we are happy to follow a good leader. We like it when someone lays out the plan and puts it in motion. We like knowing what our job is in the grand scheme of things, and we like knowing that we are making a valuable contribution to the effort. If no one is taking charge, we will, but, and we are in complete agreement on this, that is when we both get into trouble. We both acknowledge difficulty with follow-through, because we have moved on to the next problem to solve.

We’re great troubleshooters. We enjoy the challenge of diagnosing the problem, suggesting the remedies, demonstrating the techniques and then leaving it to the other person to follow through - to make it happen. In my case, if it’s my field, I’m happy to be the one to do the actual grunt work myself, but only if that’s what my job is. I am not one to jump unbidden into someone else’s sandbox unless they aren’t doing the part that they need to do so I can do MY part.

I’m at the stage in my life where I have very little patience for people who think they lead when they intimidate. I’ve never liked it, and have always been good for a barrage of sarcastic remarks after a meeting when an administrator didn’t accomplish anything beyond trying to scare the teachers half to death.

To me, leadership is when someone states what the job is, gives an outline of the results they want to see, and then stands back and lets the people work their magic. If they need assistance, they should feel free to ask for it, and the good leader will facilitate the process. A good leader asks, “What materials do you need?” A good leader asks, ” How can I help?” And a good leader knows how to give encouragement, be a good listener, facilitate problem-solving, and most important of all, be positive about any and all progress.

I’m never happier than when I’m working for someone who has a vision and who can see the big picture. I’m good at brainstorming solutions to problems and I like it when those solutions lead to making the vision a reality. What I resent is time wasted in meetings over items that could be covered in a memo.

I want an agenda, I want the agenda to be stuck to, and I don’t want there to be unlimited discussion. A good leader keeps the meeting moving forward and under control. If an issue can’t be resolved, appoint a few people to get together to thrash out a solution, but don’t involve the whole group in something that has no end in sight.

I worked for a guy who had a great vision for the company.  We used to squabble good-naturedly over little things, but the thing is, I respected his leadership because I believed in what he was doing and I believed in his ability to get it done.

We had one employee that was having a great deal of difficulty and we found ourselves making her the goat. It hadn’t been too long since I had been the company goat, so I was starting to feel really bad about the way she was being treated. We had a staff meeting coming up and my plan was to speak with him privately afterward to ask if he would lead us into better behavior toward our colleague. The day of the staff meeting, she was out of the office doing other work, and our boss looked at the others of us and announced that we ALL had been behaving poorly toward her, himself included, and that he felt we all needed to shape up. My after-meeting comment to him was to thank him for saying that, and to say that it had been bothering me a lot and I was just grateful as all get out that he had seen it and was addressing it.

This is the kind of leadership I can respect and that’s the kind of person all of us want to work for. That’s the kind of person who needs to be in charge.

20 August 2009

The recent hullabaloo over Julie Powers’ book about cooking her way through Volume One of Mastering the Art of French Cooking has had me chuckling. I’ve had those books for years and the only thing I got up the nerve to make was French onion soup. It was deelish, naturally, but the rest of those books intimidated me. While I’ve been reading Julia and Julie, however, I blew the dust off Volume I. so I could follow along with what Julie was making. I marveled at her moxie, as well as her haphazard way of attempting some of the recipes.

What I learned, though, was that Julia Child’s masterpiece no longer scared me. Indeed, finding bone marrow is simple. You just have to ask the butcher for soup shanks, and if they aren’t cut up, great. If they are, that’s less work. The marrow doesn’t have to be in one clump to work well. Sometimes it pays to ask your butcher to put them aside for you, too. After all, shanks make the best beef vegetable soup on the planet. Making a sauce for some steaks shouldn’t have been a chapter’s worth of angst.

We’re knee deep in books at the annual AAUW-Roanoke Valley book sale. The books don’t go on sale until September 11th, but I already have the cookbooks organized. I’ve already brought home a boxload of them, on approval. I read them before bed, of course. Last year we had a LOT of cookbooks. This year, not so many. However that didn’t stop me from finding some treasures. Unfortunately, I still don’t have most of last year’s goodies shelved because I am out of cookbook space.

The thing about cookbooks is that all it takes is one really stellar recipe to make the whole book worthwhile. I have given up books like the Vegetarian Epicure, both volumes, because they were written in the days when vegetarians subsisted primarily on mushrooms. I like them, but they don’t pass Big Kitty’s lips. So I saved the vinaigrette recipe and gave the books away. The vinaigrette recipe never fails to get raves.

I was the lucky recipient of some goodies from Anna’s collection before she decamped for Roma. I’ve also collected some of those fundraiser cookbooks that proliferate used book store shelves. I’ve often wondered if I had any sense in keeping some of those, but when I needed a tried and true recipe for stuffed green peppers, that’s where I found reliable material. One fundraiser cookbook has a motherlode of Anna’s personal recipes - ones I’ve eaten and loved - so you can bet it’s one that gets used. Her simple chickpea soup is to die for!

I know people who own maybe two or so cookbooks. They don’t seem to need to follow recipes, I guess. I do, but in all these years, I have kind of graduated to shopping for flavors in my herb garden and then applying basic technique to making some pretty tasty food. Still, recipes are important. They are where I go for ideas. When people marvel over the kinds of things I make, I forget they don’t think about food the way I do. Just follow a recipe to the letter.

My collection could be catalogued by a librarian with time on her hands. Italian, herb, Louisiana, tea, baking, vegetarian, French, Mexican and the collections. The collections are books like The New York Times Cookbook, the McCall’s Cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, The Gourmet Cookbook, and the like. Then there are the ethnic books covering everything from Scandinavian to Indian, and all points in between. As it stands, I have 18 feet of these things, and could use another two feet for the overflow and another two feet for those yet to come.

Why? Because I love to try new things and we both love to eat. Big Kitty has made the transition from “I don’t care what it is as long as it doesn’t have mushrooms and there is a lot of it” to “This is good but it needs something. What would happen if you added…” He eats whatever I put in front of him, which is far cry from the culinary experiences of my poor, sainted, late mother.

Growing up, I experienced great cooking from my grandmas and my aunts. My mother muddled through, making bland, boring food that only Dad liked. When Grandma Kate would call saying, “I got hungry for gnokes. Come pick me,” I got excited. Gnokes was Grandma-speak for gnocchi. The other valued treat were her “arkichokes” - breadcrumb and garlic stuffed artichokes. Mom and I would blast off for Grandma’s and return with her and a huge roasting pan jammed with artichokes. The aroma was heavenly to us and poison to Dad who would shriek and complain about the stink of the garlic.

When Grandma was relegated to a nursing home after having suffered a stroke, I brought her to our house and had her make artichokes. Before she tossed in a pinch of this or a dab of that, I would have her dump the ingredient into a bowl, measure out what she had in there and dutifully write it down. She showed me how to mash the artichoke upside down and then run cold water through it. After that, she trimmed the spikes with a paring knife against her thumb. I use kitchen shears, which I find easier. I also use a helluva lot more garlic than she did.

I still don’t have a cookbook with a recipe that comes close to hers, although they were described to a tee in Gumbo Tales.  And that brings me to my main criticism of Julie Powell’s cooking style. I know she had to have had a ball making those recipes and blogging about them. But the fact is, I don’t see a whole lot of organization or common sense in her approach. The more I read about food and the more I cook my way through various books, the more I have come to realize you have to read the recipe in advance. You have to picture it in your mind. If you lack a tool, you have to think about what you have that would work, or how to compensate.

Case in point: bone marrow. Most of grocery stores sell beef shanks for soup. If there is a butcher available - and I mean the kind that gets in sides of beef or whole pigs and cuts up the critter into recognizable hunks - you just TELL him what you want, and he’ll make it up for you. If he can’t, all you have to do is ask for a reasonable substitute. The butcher will tell you what else would work. It means you have to plan ahead.

My kitchen is jammed with gadgets. Wayne goes crazy over all my gadgets, but they sure do make my life easier. Wanna add bing cherries to a fruit salad? Pits? No biggie. Put on a really heavy apron and use the little pitter. Plan on having stained fingers until after you wash a lot of pots and pans in hot water.

Want jam filled crepes for dessert? No problemo. Got a nifty electric crepe maker that turns ‘em out slick as can be.  Want scalloped potatoes? What size gratin do we need to use? Want an apple pancake like at Walker’s on Green Bay Road? Reach up there and hand me the pan. Need to run the French onion soup under the broiler? Divide it into these Le Creuset flameproof mini casseroles first.

The right tool makes life easier. I found out that my stubborn adherence to the good old American made Chicago Cutlery knives wasn’t making my life easier. I found it out by accident in the Sur la Table store in Chicago, where a Globe santoku knife forever changed my cooking. I don’t need the food processor nearly as much. To be sure, I don’t have a kitchen like Julia Child, with the outlines of my batterie de cuisine arranged around the room like the feet taped to the floor for ballroom dancing. Mine is small but very functional.

And everything I do, I owe to having read a lot of cookbooks, cooking magazines, and watching my sister, who took lessons and is utterly fearless in the kitchen. (She wasn’t taking any chances on eating like Dad for the rest of her life!) So, yeah. I do need another two to four feet of cookbook space and all I get from Big Kitty is a grin. He was such a skinny kid when we got married….

And he didn’t think much of the veal chops I made last night following Julia’s recipe. Might need to check for a better one in Giada or Craig Claiborne.

19 August 2009
In today’s Times, they ran an editorial cartoon that really hit home for me. Signe Wilkinson of The Philadelphia Daily News depicted a balding, fat old duffer signing up to send a petition to President Obama. The caption was “No Insurance Coverage for Abortions!” In the duffer’s back pocket is a big bottle of Viagra.

I went over the edge at the annual insurance meeting for my husband’s company. They are covering prescriptions of Viagra - only 4 tablets per month. However, they are NOT covering birth control.

It’s discrimination no matter how the religious wrong or anyone else wants to paint it. The message is clear: men can screw all they want and the insurance industry will cover the cost of a questionably safe drug to make sure they can. However, they won’t voluntarily cover birth control for the likely side effect suffered by the partners of those poor hard up men.

What angers me is that my husband’s company also employs a number of younger men. The assumption is that their wives don’t need birth control, or that they are working and get insurance coverage at their own places of employment. This is not necessarily the case. There are also younger women at the company who are of child-bearing age. What about them? The older men get a benefit they are denied: sexual freedom.

In all this shrieking about the government interfering with the insurance companies’ ability to continue to gouge the public, we hear a lot about abortion, but nothing about birth control. Reproductive rights are still a matter of suspicion among the religious wrong. Women need to be kept at a disadvantage, after all. Lord knows, if we weren’t, we’d be sexual jezebels, now wouldn’t we?

I’m irritated because I see the Democrats starting to back down. Millions of Americans need this and they are getting chicken. It’s deja vu all over again. They missed their big chance when Bill Clinton tried to fix the problem, and now they’re going to blink and be voted out with nothing to show for it.

Yes, our taxes will rise to cover this. But anything worth having is worth paying for. And in the end, you really do get what you pay for.

12 August 2009

Capt’N Paul has passed away. I read his obituary in yesterday’s paper, and today the Times had a large article, complete with a picture of him as I will always remember him. Paul was my fishmonger. It was a title he relished and a role he played to the hilt. We never had such good fish in the Star City, and we flocked to his store at Towers like moths to the flame.

I walked in with my recipes and my list for my Mardi Gras dinner party, and the guys studied it and made recommendations for substitutions. Paul got me the finest and the freshest of whatever I ever needed. The guys in his store were utterly wonderful.

Paul was one of these larger than life types with the kind of buoyant energy that made his customers look forward to making a trip to his store. He was unfailingly polite. His generosity extended to recipes, jokes and general bon homme. When he was in the store, the place reverberated with his energy. It was a fun place to go and he even had a way with the pickiest of customers.

When the lease negotiations at Towers Mall stalemated, he threw in with the Heavenly Ham people and moved up the street. In terms of location, it was a disaster because it was so hard to get in and out of. I know he had to have lost a lot of the less stalwart of drivers. Nevertheless, I went in a few days after I had spoken in favor of a school board candidate at a city council meeting, and he saw it on the public access channel. I was greeted with his explosive, “Here she is! She’s a t.v. star!” Paul never failed to tease me about being on television after that and would regale other customers with the story of how he’d been relaxing with his cat and saw me on the television.

That was the other thing about Paul Corne. The man had rescued a cat and that cat was his soulmate. We had a lot of good cat tales between us and shared them with the resigned humor of all people who are owned by cats.

I went in one day and he refused to let me pay for my crab cakes. There are no crab cakes to equal his and I’d do anything to have his recipe. “You’ve been with me since I opened and I just want to say thanks,” he said. It was the only time I ever saw him serious. I had a feeling something was up.

Not long after, he closed. I was distraught. Where else could I get fish as fresh and where else could I get the advice on how to make really good suppers from that fish?

There were rumors that indicated the good Capt’N had some substance issues. I remembered a suspicious joke or two about the ever-present Solo cup in the old days, but I always figured it was just part of his persona. His family declined to give the reason for his untimely demise, and those who knew him well can probably put two and two together. I can’t, and I don’t want to. I just know that in spite of all his issues, he was a truly great purveyor and his customers loved him.

So, the Jolly Roger flies at half mast for Capt’N Paul Corne and the world has lost a good guy. Rest in peace, Paul. Make me some of your signature crab cakes when I get there?