THE $22 CHICKEN

THE  $22. CHICKEN

Not long after I found corn for a dollar an ear and tomatoes for $4.29 a pound, I came across a small organic chicken for $22. at a local farmers' market. When I questioned the price, the farmer explained how the chicken had been fed the purest grain, had ranged freely about the farmyard where it could indulge in assorted grubs and insects and had led a happy, comfortable chickeny life.

I thought of an episode of "Portlandia," the crazy out-there TV series
with Fred Armisen (SNL) and Carrie Brownstein. They're asking a waitress if the chicken on the menu is "local." Every question is answered with more information about the chicken, including its original address. Armisen and Brownstein hop in the car to go check it out. Everything gets loopier, yet you hear echoes of someone with annoying food requirements ordering a Starbucks grande. 

We know food has got a lot more expensive lately and that seems to cut across the board: fruit, vegetables, meat, groceries, everything. Eating away from home has become a rare treat and if you go out, it had better be good. Understanding that a cheeseburger can cost close to $10. maybe the $22. chicken isn't such a bad deal. Think about it like this:

1. Roast the chicken. Deglaze the pan and make gravy. Carve and serve to 4 adults, 2 children.  This uses maybe 2/3 of the bird. 

2. Take the leftover meat off the bones and save it. Throw the bones in
a pot with leftover gravy and cover with water and chicken broth from a can. Simmer for about an hour then remove the bones and throw them away. Refrigerate the broth when it cools. 

3. Make chicken salad or chicken a la king with leftover meat. For salad: 
add celery, apple, walnuts, mayo, lemon juice. This will serve at least four
adults. For a la king: saute sliced mushrooms, celery, shallot and make a cream sauce in the pan before adding the chicken and maybe a little red pemiento. Serve it over toast or rice to at least four adults. 

4. To make soup, remove the congealed fat layer from the chilled broth. Saute onion and celery, mushroom and carrot in canola oil or butter in a large pot. Add the broth and some fresh thyme or a little sage, pepper flakes and salt.  Simmer with the top off until vegetables are tender. You can add tomato.  Add leftover rice or pasta if you have it. Otherwise, serve to four adults with fresh baguette or croutons made with stale bread.

That's it. That's the end of the $22. chicken but look! It has fed a dozen people and all it took was willingness to actually prep and cook plus a commitment to not throwing away perfectly good food. 

                                    * * *
                                            

HOW TO BE AN OLD LADY

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HOW TO BE AN OLD LADY

In a world where a woman becomes invisible when she hits 50 and you are in your late 70s why knock yourself out?  Nobody is watching or keeping score. You might as well relax into granny porn and the free bus ride to Atlantic City for the slots.

You are the last person in America who hangs wash on a line to dry, and  wonder why you bother. You grow your own tomatoes, you have six pairs of shoes none with heels, you don't shop, you car is 10 years old, you can fix things, you know the names of flowers and trees, you understand money. You are an okay but not great writer. You are a maphead with a sense of direction. You have a lot of information. You are an engineer, a wonk, a genius – but WHAT GOOD DOES IT DO?

Your mantra is: “Who are these people? What are they thinking?” and you sound like a crank. Who cares if young people are mindless and the zoning people are zombies and debt is the American Way. You remember when people lived small with no electricity and no central heat and refrigeration was a block of ice. What a Dodo.

Mainly, you read. You read some good stuff mixed in with a lot of junk. You keep a list of what you like but the list disappears from the online shelf you spent a lot of time building. Many of the books you recommend are memoirs: stories about how people change their lives and how women make do. You write a piece about what you don’t read that also makes you seem like a crank: no vampires, no letters, no talking animals, no paranormal, no future, no cozy.

You watch sports on TV and wish you were an Olympic rower. You know there is a Y down the street but have yet to sign up. You got three (pre-Title 9) varsity letters at your Ivy League university but have been going to pot ever since. You think maybe a little roadwork might do it but your feet aren’t good and there is a twinge in your right ankle. You consider getting a small bike but worry about falling so you can't take care of your disabled husband who you've been with for 45 years.

You have regrets but hope for forgiveness. You know there is a limited supply of new chances. You wish you weren’t so resentful and petty and such a stubborn know-it-all. You are pretty sure you are not at all “authentic,” whatever that means. You chuckle at little internal monologues although that often looks nutty. The way to your heart is the prat-fall, the brass band, the trap drum and Hot Club music.

You loved your mother and are still  not sure how you feel about your father. You made your sister look bad. You’ve been a disloyal friend and a not very good relative. You are usually honest but not always. You are a tightwad but practice generosity. You’ve been a devoted and useful wife and a loving mother.

Some say you are a co-dependent and enabler. You don’t exactly understand this but it is probably true.  You like to drink but can no longer do much of it. You think you may be disaffected and dissociative. You used to have fun and can’t remember exactly when that ended. Distant is your middle name. You are afraid of being deserted and lately panic overwhelms you. You know you will be left. You’ve already seen it happen.

You dream about people who are dead. You miss your dog. Heartbreaking things – smells, pictures, sounds, vistas – remind you of moments in the past. Your memory is good but not your hearing.

You know you are lucky and that your life is blessed beyond your wildest dreams. You thank your lucky stars for security, for community, for health, for life, for love.

                                    ***

ON INTO JUNE

ON INTO JUNE

...with Cheryl Strayed's "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest
Trail." (Knopf, 2012).

Finished reading, now, and wishing I could make the trek. As I said before, Strayed is a little aggravating (even the fake trail name is annoying -- like all those hippie names: Tinkerbelle, Aurora, Misty)  and, as she points out, unbelievably stupid in her lack of preparation for a 1,200 mile walk.  My usual mantra kicks in: "What was she thinking?"

But she did something not many can (or would) do, a personal challenge
above and beyond. I admire the writing and the unsurpassed descriptions of the wilderness. Thanks to these, I've been  sitting alongside, staring down into the unworldly blue of Crater Lake.

Take this reflection as one of Strayed's many redeeming features:

              "There's no way to know what makes one thing happen
               and not another. What leads to what.  What destroys what. 
               What causes what to flourish or die or take another course."

I'm glad she made it. She expected kindness and generosity along the journey and mostly she found it. I'm happy she finally wrote this book because it did take her 20 years to do it.


                                                 * * *

What I'm Reading Now -- May 2012

 WHAT I'M READING NOW -- MAY, 2012


End of May. Long days and warmer weather here in Vermont means more time outdoors and less time spent reading. Luckily, I can read
books on my i-phone with the type face at the max. Butt on cold metal bleachers at Little League ball games and can read during interminable breaks and long warm-ups.

Finished two by Alison Bechdel: the first, "Fun Home,"  ordered from Amazon (that squid), a graphic narrative that needs to be read in real book form and examined minutely for the ingenious cartoon panels. The second, Bechdel's "Are You My Mother?" was borrowed from the local library. After going through these two memoirs -- the first about her closeted father, the second about her alienated mother, and both about her own search for self, for recognition, and for intimacy.

I can't say I am renewed by this spate of unusually demanding reading. I entered Bechdel's heartbreaking world and wonder how anyone could possibly have emerged from it, so emmeshed, so cruel and cold. These lives --  crypto, covert, internal -- make the usual tales of family dysfunction seem like "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm". The kind of secrets in the Bechdel household appear to me more lethal than the usual substance abuse and battering.

The main thing I take from Bechdel's genius is something I already knew but not deeply, and that is there are all kinds of abandonment. Being left, being lost, being cut off from love and security can take many forms and some of them are worse than others.

Look for Alison Bechdel's blog dykestowatchoutfor.com and the long-running comic strip by the same title. I forgot to say: she is very funny and very smart.

Another memoir I just started is Cheryl Strayed's "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail." The book opens as she looses a hiking boot over a forested ledge, and peers down where it might have landed far below. Then she chucks the other heavy boot after it, saying farewell to the pair that had pinched, caused blisters, blackened toenails that came off and then she was left, in the middle of nowhere, in her stocking feet. What the hell? You might wonder. Obsession. Doggedness. Stubborness in the first degree.

All of the above is what it will take to complete this ordeal of self-discipline and discovery. I will say more as I read on.

                                               * * *

CUTTINGS

CUTTINGS

The comfrey from Martha Dana

Thrives below the back stone wall.

Bees love the modest flowers

And the lavish greenery has

Many healing abilities.

Cousin Tom gave me creeping violet

From his rock garden and now it is

Among the stones, above the comfrey.

Lady's mantle swapped with Charlotte

for Hosta Elegans  fights for space

With silvery artemesia

From Stella, a constant gardener,

And the mother of my husband.

Years ago, walking with Virginia,

Before she lost her mind,

I pulled up some nice ivy

From a vacant lot

And trained it to climb.

Yellow iris from Susie's place in Fly Summit

Has survived, unhappy where it is.

Bishop's Weed from Loomis Street

Has taken over by the shed.

I've carried a shovel in the trunk of my car

And dug daylilies and asters from ditches.

Betty Ann and Helen poached

My white jonquils by moonlight

From somebody's front yard.

Rhubarb from Julia French is going crazy

Out on the compost

And Julia herself, well over 90,

Is in a nursing home over near Corning.

I treasure all these cuttings.

And watch for them each Spring,

Knowing exactly where each originated

And when it was planted.

When I'm gone, there'll be no remembering.

The next people

Will never understand rhubarb.

And the comfrey will be

Just another weed.

Elinore Standard

From Uptown Dogtown

WHAT I'M READING NOW -- APRIL, 2012

What I'm Reading Now -- April 2012

I forget how I got to Alex Dryden's "Red to Black" (Harper 2009) but I downloaded it from Amazon, that squid, and just finished reading it on various electronic devices.

This is what I suppose you'd call a novel of intrigue and it spans about 10 years in the lives of Finn, a British former MI6 spy, and Anna, a colonel in the FSB. The action moves from Moscow to Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, France and then on to the shores of the Black Sea in Moldova.

"Follow the Money," the saying goes, and this is Finn's quest, his compulsion. The hidden trillions of oil money, drug money, mount up in secret Swiss accounts, too much money coming in even for them. Putin and the mafia and the oligarchs control it all and what it might ultimately be used for is what this book is about. Who knows if such a gigantic conspiracy is real, but it sounds as if it is. Dryden is a pseudonym for a journalist who watched the Wall come down in 1989 and has, as a blurb says, "charted the false dawn of democracy," in Russia.

Who can believe anything? The characters have plenty of trouble with this and the reader is not exempt. It all sounds so real and so frighteningly unrelentingly cruel. You want it to be made up, but you suspect it is true.

Just so you know, this lead by Joe Nocera appeared in his April 16 NYT Editorial page column:


Who knew that what corrupt Russian officials care about, more than just about anything, is getting their assets — and themselves — out of their own country? They own homes in St. Tropez, fly to Miami for vacation and set up bank accounts in Switzerland. They understand the importance of stashing their money someplace where the rule of law matters, which is most certainly not Russia. Besides, getting out of Russia is one of the pleasures of being a corrupt Russian official. 

Two more novels featuring Anna follow this first, and they are even better because they carry forward the conspiracies of Putin and his circle and their machinations over Ukraine -- "Ukraine is not even a state," (Putin to George Bush, 2008) : "Moscow Sting" (2010), and "The Blind Spy," (2010).


                                         * * *

"An American Spy," by Olen Steinhauer (Macmillan, 2012) unlike Steinhauer's other intrigue novels, is not set in middle Europe or in the Balkans. This one begins in China and I found it less appealing than the previous stories. "Spy" got excellent reviews (NYT) but don't ask me why.

Milo Weaver, a character from two previous novels who reappears here, can't seem to figure out what's going on, either, and ultimately the reader doesn't care. Although the Dryden book is complex, it is never confusing -- unlike this. Sorry, Olen, but I didn't much like your latest.

SKULL  by Jim Harrison from "Songs of Unreason" (Copper Canyon Press) sent to me by Laura Furman who calls it "a rugged poem."


You can't write the clear biography
of the aches and pains inside your skull.
Will I outlive my passport expiration?
Will the knots of the past beat me to death
like limber clubs, the Gordian knots
that never will be untied big as bowling balls?
Maybe not. Each time I row the river
for six hours or so the innards of my skull
slightly change shape. Left alone knots
can unravel in the turbulence of water.
It isn't for me to understand why loved ones
died. My skull can't withstand
the Tao of the mighty river carrying me along
as if I were still and the mountains capped by clouds were rushing past.
After we submerge do we rise again in another form?
Meanwhile I speculate on the seven pills
I must take each day to stay alive.
I ask each one, "Are we doing your job?"
The only answer I've found is the moving
water whose music is without a single lyric.