Distracted for good

A meander through learning -- the last paragraph is best. 

Playwright Hanif Kureishi, once at the bottom of his class, worries that education is lock-step, directing some away from their best talents.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/opinion/sunday/the-art-of-distraction.html

Red beans & rice -- then strawberry tart

Strawberry tart cooling

The red beans and rice we had last night for Mardi Gras were delicious -- but dessert makes a prettier picture. A long time ago I wrote "Good" in the cookbook margin above the red beans recipe. That's an  understatement. You can find it on page 3 of The New Orleans Cookbook, which you can buy today in paperback. Here's my version. I used frozen chopped peppers and onions (thawed, with the excess water squeezed out of them), and left out the pickled pork/bacon that's in the original recipe,  which would only make it better.

Red beans and rice

Soak a package of red beans overnight. Drain and rinse them and put in a big pot. Add:
1 large ham bone (Honey Baked sells ham bones. I bought ours at Connie's Hams.)
2 C. chopped onions
1/2 C. thinly sliced green onions
1/2 C. chopped green pepper
1 1/3 T. minced garlic
2 T. chopped fresh parsley
1 lb. baked ham cut in one-inch cubes (You can buy cubes in the grocery.)
1 T. salt
1/2 t. pepper
a shake of cayenne (to taste -- I added this at the very end)
2 crushed bay leaves
1/2 t. dried thyme
a squirt of basil from a tube

Add cold water just to cover. You can leave a bit of the bone above the water. Bring to a boil over high heat, then simmer for 2 1/2 to 3 hours, until beans are very tender. Stir well every half hour and add a little more water if it's getting too thick. Don't let the bottom burn. I had the lid on at first, then took it off to cook it down. When it's done, take out the ham bone and beat the beans a little with the immersion blender (This is what I do -- the original recipe keeps all beans whole). Serve it over rice. I used brown rice, the boil-in-the-bag kind. The original recipe calls for white rice. This is a great soup too, without rice.

For dessert I made strawberry tart, using my raspberry tart recipe and a pie crust I'd had in the freezer from Thanksgiving. To save time I just tossed the berries willy-nilly, rather than arranging them. It took about 30 minutes to bake it so the center was not runny.

Pralines for Mardi Gras

Backyard pecan trees this morning

These are pecan trees. It's where pralines come from.

I made some yesterday -- Mardi Gras was the excuse. Here's the recipe, from The New Orleans Cookbook by Rima and Richard Collin, who wrote it in 1974 and dedicated it "For the city and the people of New Orleans."

The squirrels eat our pecans, so we buy them at the farmers' market. They're harvested in the fall. You can order fresh pecans from many places, such as Sheffield Pecans. You probably won't want grocery store pecans ever again.

I always toast pecans first. Spread them on a cookie sheet and put them in a 350° oven until you get a toasty whiff, between 5 and 10 minutes. Watch carefully, so they don't burn.

Pralines

1 1/2 C brown sugar
1 1/2 C. white sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 C. milk
1/4 tsp. cream of tartar
1/4 C. butter (They call for salted, but I used unsalted and it was fine.)
1 tsp. vanilla
2 21/2 C. pecan halves (toasted)

Combine the sugars, salt, milk, and cream of tartar. Stir over low heat until sugar dissolves, wiping the crystals from the side of the pan with a rubber spatula. Cook to 236°-238° on a candy thermometer, then cool to 220°. Add the butter, vanilla, and pecans and beat until creamy. They say use a wire whisk, but I used my immersion blender. When it began to thicken, I switched to a sturdy wooden spoon (not the long-handled one). Don't beat too long. I've done that before, and you end up with grainy candy. If you're a fudge-maker, don't beat as long as you would for fudge. Stop just before that.

While still soft, drop by spoonfuls onto waxed paper. (They say butter it, but that's not necessary.)  When the pralines cool and firm up, cut the waxed paper between them and wrap each one.

They say leave 4 inches between the candies, but that wasn't enough. I ended up cutting more waxed paper squares,  about 7" squares. Of course, it depends on the size of your candies. I made them two or three bites worth. After I wrapped them I taped them shut because they kept popping open. Clark said he felt guilty eating them after I'd gone to all that trouble.  But he managed.

Heart of Glass

Heart of Glass

No pulse, no

blood, no

hurt. Only

splinters.

Jaws and fish for dinner

Alligator skulls
Cedar Key Museum State Park

 St. Clair Whitman collected these alligator skulls. Alligators like grouper. Here's a recipe:

Grouper with tomatoes

2 pieces of grouper, each about 5 oz. (or some other fish)
salt
pepper
olive oil
1 small to medium onion, chopped
1 fat clove garlic, minced
2 tomatoes, diced
5 large green olives, stuffed, sliced
1 T. capers, rinsed
1 little can of chopped chilis
fresh lemon or lime juice

Saute the fish until it is cooked through (rule of thumb is 10 min. per inch thick).  Put it on a warm plate in a warm oven.
Make the rest of the ingredients into a sauce:
Fry the onions until soft and starting to caramelize. Add garlic and cook another minute, stirring. Add the tomatoes, olives, capers and chilis. Cook, stirring occasionally, until you like the sauce -- 10-20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and lemon or lime juice. Spoon the sauce over the fish. We had this with noodles and broccoli, and it was good.

This my adaptation of this slightly more complicated recipe from Weeknight Kitchen. I also make a similar dish, in which you put all the ingredients in foil packets and bake it for about 40 minutes at 350°. That recipe calls for basil and leaves out the onion and garlic.

My favorite poet & a meatloaf sandwich

In the awful moving of a shelf of books I came across poems of someone I love -- me!

Certain men won't cry
until they learn
a beloved dog
is going to die.

For lunch we had meatloaf sandwiches: buns, tomato slices, some shredded Napa cabbage and horseradish sauce. The meatloaf was good the first day too, with baked potatoes and broccoli, It  suited the gloomy day.

For a guide, I use Sarah Leah Chase's recipe from Nantucket Open-House Cookbook. She calls for flattening out the meat mixture and spiraling it around provolone and prosciutto, which I skip. I used grocery store meatloaf combo of chuck and pork, and I did not exactly measure the other ingredients. I didn't have tomato juice, so used broth and squeezed in a little tomato paste from a tube. Here's the basic recipe:

Sicilian Meatloaf

Mix (I used my hands.)
1 1/2 lb. ground sirloin
1 lb. ground veal
1 medium onion, chopped
4 coves garlic, minced
2 T. dried Italian herb blend
1/2 C. chopped parsley
2 1/2 C. fresh bread crumbs

Add
2 eggs
1 C. tomato juice
1 T. salt
2 tsp. or less pepper

Form into a loaf shape on a baking sheet or shallow casserole dish.
Bake at 350° for an hour, or until the center is not pink.

Where ideas live

One of my tutoring students wants to write good essays. It's fun to work with such a motivated person. It made me want to write an essay.  I wrote it for her.

Where Ideas Live

An essay is like a snug cottage. It is a small and comfortable dwelling for your thoughts. Like any home, the essay is an expression of the one who lives there. It is full of things that the author cares about. The writer chooses words like furniture. She wants each piece to be authentic and placed where it will look best. The essay, like a private home, may reveal secrets. It may hint or tell you outright something fresh that you never before suspected.

The essay’s introduction is its front porch. It welcomes the reader and gives a hint of what may be found inside. It makes the reader want to open the door and read more.

The paragraphs are rooms. Each one has a special purpose, or topic. It is important to place furniture in the appropriate room. The stove does not belong in the living room! In the same way, sentences and details ought to fit right in the paragraph. Sometimes you will have to do some moving around. For instance,  I had the second sentence (“It is a small and comfortable …  thoughts.”) in the ending paragraph. As I worked on this essay, the sentence seemed to fit much better where it is now.

The essay, like a little home, must have clarity and order or it will be a mess. You must sweep out unnecessary words. They are useless and confusing, like too much furniture.  For example, at first I began this essay with, “An essay is a lot like a snug little cottage.” When I read it over, I saw I could shorten the sentence without changing its meaning. It is also important that you can move easily from one paragraph to the next. The more you write, the tidier your essays will be.

The back door is the essay’s conclusion. Before you leave, you glance back quickly, reviewing all the rooms you just explored. You breathe in the atmosphere of this cottage – the colors and scents of the word that make up its particular style. One day you may come back again, but as you open the door you get the feeling you have had a satisfying visit. When you hear the click of the back-door latch behind you, you know you are finished.

There are many larger and more imposing structures in the great city called literature -– palaces that are books, and skyscrapers full of short stories. But if you look closely, chances are good that you will find the heart of each structure is a related collection of rooms, or topics, each explored in a paragraph -- an essay.