JoLynne Martinez's Open Salon Blog

Looking For Something to Do During the Day

Sat, 5 Nov 2011 16:11:19 -0400

I do some of my best writing when I walk the dog. She knows the word “walk” and does her doggy dance, toenails clicking on the tile floor in the front hall, as I click the leash on her collar. Sometimes it feels like an interruption of my work to take her out, but as soon as the front door closes behind us and I breathe in the fall air — pungent with the scent of leaves and nuts — I forget that I was ever doing anything besides walking through the neighborhood, looking up at the trees through a steady drifting down of yellow leaves, enjoying the clear blue sky with the sun shining at such an angle that I know winter is coming but is weeks away. It is during these walks that just the right words come to me, forming and reforming in my head in rhythm with the slaps of my shoes on the pavement, and I realize that walking is not an interruption of my work, after all. Later at home, the staccato of my fingers tapping on the keyboard will echo the rhythm of my feet, translating it into these words on the screen.

Lately I have seen another woman walking a dog through our neighborhood. A number of our neighbors are regular dog walkers, but this is someone I haven’t seen before. She is a small woman with dark hair, somewhat older than me, and she walks a little dog of indeterminate breed. We haven’t met yet, but I’ve waved when I’ve been out in the yard, calling my dog to my side: “Girlfriend, come!” The dog is not supposed to leave the yard without permission. Sooner or later, I figured, I would meet the woman while we are out walking. And today is the day.

She is ahead of me, but turns — waiting — when she hears us coming. “My dog is friendly,” I tell her, in the ritual of dog walker meeting dog walker. “Is it okay if she says hello?” The other woman is willing, but warns me that her dog has been a stray, wary, defensive. The greeting may not go well. Sure enough, my dog’s tail-thumping enthusiasm overwhelms the little fellow. He growls. We pull our dogs to our sides, introducing ourselves. We begin to talk.

“It’s okay,” I tell her, gesturing to my dog. “Girly was a stray, too.” She used to cower when I raised a stick — a broom, a rake, a shovel — until she lived with us long enough to realize we weren’t going to hit her.

“What did you say your dog’s name was?” the woman asks.

“Girlfriend.”

The woman is laughing now, saying she had seen me in the yard before, had heard me calling Girlfriend. She had gone home to tell her husband how friendly the new neighbor was. “But then again,” she’d told him, “maybe she was just calling the dog.”

Her little guy is Quincy. Whoever owned him before kicked his back teeth out. No wonder he’s defensive.

Our dogs at our sides, a safe expanse of pavement between them, we learn something about each other. She and her husband recently moved here from south of the river. She had worked as a teacher for 36 years, starting at the district in what had been my hometown and moving to a district in suburban Kansas City. Now she’s retired.

“I didn’t want to work full-time anymore,” she tells me. “I wanted to work part-time, but with my years of experience and all my degrees, they said they couldn’t afford me. Now I’m trying to figure out what to do with myself during the day.”

She had volunteered to tutor at the school up the road but hadn’t heard back from them yet. In the meantime, she is walking her dog.

We will meet again another day, I know. Our dogs are becoming restless, wanting to sniff more of the neighborhood. For now, our paths diverge.

On the way home, the sky that had seemed so brilliantly blue before looks empty. I know it is time to start writing again, writing about education.This is what I do with my day while my daughter is in school. I write and walk the dog. Sitting at my computer again, though, I can’t shake a feeling of unrest. I keep thinking about how much I had loved back-to-school time when I was a child. The words are typing just as they had formed themselves in my head on my way home, but something is missing: an image.

Picking up my camera, I go back outside. Aiming the lens, I focus. With my camera, I take a picture of that brilliant empty blue sky.

And then I published it in the online education policy newspaper I started last summer when I didn't get hired for a teaching job in the fall: http://kceducationenterprise.org/

Child Soldiers

Sat, 14 May 2011 23:05:13 -0400

How old does this boy look? If he were alive today, he would be about the age of my junior high school students.

This spring in social studies, our eighth graders were studying the United States Civil War, so the communication arts teachers decided -- in the interest of interdisciplinary studies -- to guide our students through reading Civil War literature.

In prepping for this unit, I stumbled across a book about boy soldiers in the Civil War. Apparently the youngest enlisted was nine years old and the youngest wounded in battle was twelve. At first I -- as a mother -- was shocked at the young ages. As a teacher, I was delighted to find a way to make history relevant to the class. They could look into this boy's face and see someone like themselves. Estimates are that there were 100,000 soldiers in the Union army alone under age 15. The minimum age for enlistment was 18, but children could and did lie about their ages, and parents could and did give their permission for an underage child to join.

As I say, the mother in me was shocked by the young ages of these child soldiers. But then I realized that in my grandparents' and great-grandparents' lifetime, teenagers did not necessarily attend high school. In families that were not financially well off -- which was the majority of families -- children would be on their own at age 14. My great-grandfather Martin Walz emmigrated from Bavaria to St. Louis when he was 14, and he traveled by himself, picking up work as a cook, a saloon keeper, a wine salesman, a candy shop owner. His son and namesake -- my grandfather -- graduated from eighth grade in the same class as my grandmother, and that's all the education they ever had. One of my husband's grandmothers was married at age 14 and bore her first child at age 15.

As I recall from my classwork in the School for Education, it wasn't until the 1930s that teenagers started being required to attend high school, partially so they wouldn't be able to compete with adults for scarce jobs and partially so they could be trained for blue collar work. More and more U.S. citizens were moving from the farms to the cities and needed to learn job skills required in industry, and that is why the nature of secondary education changed from college prep to a two-track system including vocational training.

Students who were going to work in industry needed to learn how to sit quietly, do as they were told and follow a schedule, which is what students are required to do in high school today. However, the nature of work has changed and jobs of the sort high school used to educate students to obtain no longer exist in great numbers. Now we need students to exercise higher order thinking skills, to think creatively and independently. Desperately, educators are trying to instill those skills in a system that was not designed for this type of education.

Next fall my daugher leaves the shelter of elementary school and is supposed to enroll in middle school, the beginning of her secondary school education. She is a talented student, and I was excited for her until we attended a tour of the new school. It was so big. There were so many stairs. Each grade inhabits its own hall so older children will not harrass them. And there is a full-time deputy sheriff on staff who has an office right next to the nurse's office.

My daughter was already upset, because she had to make a choice between taking orchestra or taking visual art classes. Swallowing hard, I started to initiate her into the limitations of adult life. "You have to make choices ... You can't do everything." I felt my heart closing, and I felt awful being the one to limit her like that. Was that my role as her mother? As a teacher? Or should I be expanding her choices?

How do we go from May when she is in the friendly, comfortable elementary school she has attended since kindergarten to August in a school where students are considered to be so dangerous that there is a full-time law enforcement officer on staff? Why are we so afraid of our children? Are they that dangerous?

How old does the young Union soldier look in the photo at the top of this post? Not much older than my daughter.

Democracy in the Twilight Zone

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:02:51 -0500

Imagine if you will, a United States in which John Boehner is just a guy running a plastics company in addition to struggling in an unpaid position as the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Imagine if you will, that Gabrielle Giffords is running the tire warehouse her grandfather founded while commuting back and forth between Washington D.C. and Arizona in order to represent that state's 8th district. Imagine, if you will, that Boehner, Giffords and all other members of Congress are struggling to keep the legislative branch functioning, simply out of a sense of civic duty. Also because not enough people are willing to run for public office.

Perhaps more people would be willing to serve, if there was much awareness of the elections and the importance of the job. However, television and radio reporters don't cover Congress at all. In the newspapers, advertising sales have fallen off so there is only enough money to finance nine or ten column inches of Congressional coverage every few issues. Election coverage is so nominal it consists primarily of candidates' names and the paper's endorsement a few days before the election. Even this information is in fine print buried several layers deep in the online editorial pages, difficult for the prospective voter to find.

Most voters, as a matter of fact, are not aware of when elections are being held. And -- if they are aware, -- can find little information to help decide among candidates. Candidates, themselves, have minimal funds to spend on campaigns and are so busy seeing to their day-to-day business that compaign flyers and websites are slapdash affairs, if they exist at all. Not all candidates even bother to run a campaign.

Over the past decade, political scientists (those who still exist now that universities have been balancing their budgets by doing away with degree programs pursued by only one or two students in an academic year) have been tracking a trend in which voters elect candidates solely on the basis of name recognition. For example, four members of Congress and three Senators named Bush are currently serving, and only one of them is related to former Presidents George H.W., George W., Jeb and Jenna Bush.

Okay, I made all that up. But here's the Twilight Zone twist: Other than the joke about a Bush dynasty, what I have described is actually happening on the local level in our democracy. It's happening here where I live in the North Kansas City School District.

Our board president works for a human resources consulting company. One board member is a personal injury lawyer. Another is retired from our local electrical utility company. Yet another works in marketing and government relations for a commercial and residential real estate company. In addition to being business people, they live in the district and are our neighbors. Can you imagine the immense responsibility the board members serving last year and the year before felt when property values plummeted, and these normal, everyday people were left with the responsibility of educating more than 18,000 children on a budget that had to be reduced by at least nine million dollars? Among other cost-cutting measures, they had to decide which of the people who worked for the district -- which of their neighbors -- were to lose their jobs in these challenging economic times.

Despite the challenges, six candidates stepped forward to run for office last spring. Our local newspaper had interviewed all of them, was preparing to run the interviews in order to inform the electorate ... and then went out of business. There wasn't enough advertising revenue to continue feeding paper to the printing presses. Eventually, the only coverage of the election was buried in the online edition of a larger, regional newspaper. This coverage might have been minimally informative if voters had known to go looking for it. However, when asking people who they were casting their votes for, I found the most common response was: "Oh, is there a school board election coming up?"

One candidate last year was an incumbant with a solid reputation for his service on the board, guaranteed to be re-elected. Three candidates -- an IT guy, a union employee and a stay-at-home mom who had worked as a corporate engineer -- were aggressively campaigning. Another candidate did appear at the county democratic club's school board election forum but didn't bother to mention he had experience in academic administration. The final candidate was not an incumbant, did not run a campaign as far as I could tell, and did not appear at the forum. He won the election.

This candidate had previously run for a seat in the Missouri General Assembly, which he lost. My theory is that -- despite the lack of a campaign for the school board -- he won, because many voters recognized his name and marked the box next to it on the ballot, even though they knew little or nothing else about him. (In all fairness, I have to add that in his campaign for the statewide seat, he did emphasize the importance of education).

April 5 is the date of our next school board election. There are three open seats this year. Two incumbants filed for the first two seats and are running unapposed. This leaves only one seat contested. The stay-at-home mom who is also a corporate engineer was slated to slug it out at the polls with an attorney who is a former school board member. Then the attorney decided she was too busy to run after all, and now the district is trying to determine whether it needs to hold an election at all.

If there are no elections, there will be three people sitting on our school board, administering millions of our taxpayer dollars and overseeing the education of our children, three people who have not been elected by the taxpayers. Not wanting to be too glib here, but that sounds an awful lot like taxation without representation to me.

Citizens, beware. If we don't start taking more responsibility for informing ourselves and for voting in local elections -- even stepping forward to run for office, ourselves -- we just may be entering ... The Twilight Zone.

_____________________

Photo credit: royalty-free image purchased from Dreamstime.com

Wine or Lemon Pudding: A 19th-Century Receipt

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 03:02:23 -0500

Although my husband's surname is Martinez, his mother is German, and the first years of his life he spent with his mother's family in Germany. My husband has an Uncle Volker who lives in Stuttgart, and I started learning about German food in order to please him. Volker enjoys traveling. He has visited us here in Missouri. However, he does not enjoy American cooking.

I am also interested in German food, because my father's grandfather was born in Bavaria. When he was only 14 years old, Martin Luther Walz left home and ended up here in Kansas City, Mo., where he started working as a cook and eventually became a saloon owner in the waning days of the Old West.

Because of my dual interest in family history and feeding Uncle Volker, I was intrigued when I stumbled across a book published in 1897, Henriette Davidis' Practical Cook Book Compiled for the United States From the Thirty-Fifth German Edition. Apparently this was a book widely used by German immigrants in the United States. Perhaps my great-grandparents owned a copy.

Perusing the table of contents, I was intrigued by all the recipes with wine in them: Wine Soups (including a Wine Soup for Invalids), Sourkrout With Oysters and Rhinewine, Wine Jelly With Eggs, Wine or Lemon Pudding. All these wine recipes reminded me of driving with Volker through Stuttgart and out into the countryside. Vinyards were everywhere there was a scrap of land large enough to squeeze in a few grapevines.

Interested in attempting some of these antique recipes -- or "receipts," as they were called in 1897 -- I decided I simply had to start with one of the wine recipes. In particular, I decided to attempt the Wine or Lemon Pudding. The title of the receipt intrigued me. Why wasn't it "Wine and Lemon Pudding"? Couldn't the author make up her mind?

Here are the instructions Ms. Davidis provided in her Practical Cook Book:

Wine or Lemon Pudding. 1 tablespoonful of gelatine is dissolved as described in Division M, No. 1. Then take the yolks of 12 eggs with 3 glassfuls of white wine and 5 tablespoonfuls of sugar, a little salt, put on the stove over a slow fire and whip until it is smooth (it must not boil), then take it from the fire, constantly whipping it. After it has cooled, stir into it with a spoon the juice of 2 lemons and a little grated lemon peel, the dissolved gelatine and then slowly add the beaten whites of 12 eggs. The pudding can be put into a glass pudding dish to cool.

The words were in English, but I wasn't sure that was much help.

Paging back to Division M, No. 1, I skimmed over instructions for making jellies with isinglass and calves hooves to the section on gelatine. Apparently I was to cut the gelatine with scissors. Tearing open the packet I had purchased at the grocery store, I shook the powder out into my cupped hand. Gelatine in the 19th century must have been sold in a different form, because I wasn't going to be cutting this powder with scissors anytime soon.

In addition, Ms. Davidis directed me to dissolve the stuff for half an hour or an hour on a wood stove, and there were varying instructions for preparation in the Summer and in the Winter.

Because of modern climate control, I decided I could disregard the seasonal instructions, and I found information online about how to dissolve gelatine and nuke it in a microwave.

That's done. Okay, what's next?

Then take the yolks of 12 eggs ...

Easy enough. I can separate eggs.

... with 3 glassfuls of white wine ...

I had a bottle of sweet white German dessert wine uncorked, but how much should I pour? My glasses are all different shapes and sizes. Maybe three cups would work, 24 fluid ounces? Perfect. That left one glass for the cook to sip while figuring out the rest of the recipe.

... and 5 tablespoonfuls of sugar, a little salt ...

A little salt must be a pinch.

... put on the stove over a slow fire ...

My stove is electric. I turned the burner to medium. Maybe that would work.

... and whip until it is smooth (it must not boil) ...

Smooth? What did she mean by "smooth"? Setting aside my whisk and praying the concoction wouldn't boil while neglected, I pulled my food-stained copy of The Joy of Cooking down from the shelf by the stove to locate pudding recipes. The consistency of thick cream was mentioned. That was my goal, then: thick cream. So I returned to whipping the egg mixture.

I whipped it.

And whipped it.

About 15 minutes later, I decided it was looking creamy enough and turned the heat off. What next?

… then take it from the fire, constantly whipping it.

What did “constantly” mean? Was I supposed to keep whipping while removing the saucepan from the stove? For 15 more minutes? Until the stuff cooled? How long would that be? Half-heartedly, I whipped it a couple more times, then stopped. That was enough.

After it has cooled, stir into it with a spoon the juice of 2 lemons and a little grated lemon peel …

How much is “a little”? Looking for recipes using zest instead of lemon extract, I found an icing recipe that called for a tablespoonful, so that’s how much I decided to add.

… the dissolved gelatine …

Sigh. While I was whipping and adding and trying to figure out what glassfuls of this and a little of that were, the gelatine had completely gelled. Luckily, there were a couple more packets in the box I’d purchased.

… and then slowly add the beaten whites of 12 eggs.

For some reason, beating eggs makes me think of Simon de Beauvoir. She didn’t learn to cook until World War II. Until then, apparently she and Sartre ate out in cafes all the time. De Beauvoir wrote that she learned to enjoy cooking, because of the chemistry involved. It is the chemistry that I enjoy, as well, beating all those egg white molecules, forcing them to unravel into that froth that can be turned into meringue or – in this case – Wine or Lemon Pudding.

The pudding can be put into a glass pudding dish to cool.

I don’t own any glass pudding dishes, but wine glasses will do. How long to cool them, though, and where? When I was a kid, my Mom always set the Jello in the refrigerator, but Ms. Davidis didn’t have a fridge in 1897. Did she have an ice box? I suppose that in Germany in the Winter, she could have simply set the stuff outdoors.

Impatiently, I started my pudding in the freezer, later transferring it to the refrigerator.

When I checked an hour and a half later, it had gelled in two layers: a base that looked like yellow custard topped by stiff white foam. The glasses looked especially lovely after I had garnished them with lemon slices and tucked a chocolate hazelnut cookie stick into each. I figured that if the pudding didn’t turn out, at least we’d have the cookies for dessert.

“Have you tried it yet?” my husband asked when I handed him a spoon and a glass.

“Not yet.”

We took our first bites together.

“I can taste the lemon and the wine,” he said. He tried another spoonful. “You know what I like about this? It’s not too sweet.”

My impression was that it tasted equally of white wine and of lemon. But it’s not so lemony that it makes you pucker up, and it’s not so alcoholic that it gives you a buzz. You might call it Wine Pudding. Or you might call it Lemon Pudding. Either way, it’s light and refreshing.

And – if I may – I’d like to raise my glassful of Wine or Lemon Pudding in a toast. Here’s to Henriette Davidis and her Practical Cook Book. Here's to my great-grandparents, Martin Luther and Bertha Brownsberger Walz. And here’s to Uncle Volker. Prost!

Mansef: A Middle Eastern Recipe for Lamb in Yogurt Sauce

Sun, 6 Feb 2011 22:02:03 -0500

In the early years of my marriage, I had a lot of romantic ideas. One of them was about how we would frequently dine al fresco. With that ideal in mind, I purchased a magazine filled with photographs and recipes for the romantic picnicker. I only ever made one of the recipes, and it wasn't for a picnic. We ate at home in the dining room. Turns out my then-new husband had severe grass allergies.

Among my other romantic ideas were Orientalist dreams about the Middle East. As one of the recipes was a Middle Eastern dish called Mansef with an "e," it was the one I most wanted to try. Actually, I think most recipes you'll find online these days are for Mansaf with an "a," but seeing as how the name was transliterated from the Arabic, and dialects vary regarding the pronunciation of vowels, the slight difference between an "e" and an "a" is understandable. Of course, when I cooked this recipe, the Internet hadn't been invented yet. Even today, with the Internet being largely English-oriented, recipes for Mansef or Mansaf -- or whatever the name is -- are still uncommon, despite the fact that this is said to be a common Middle Eastern dish served at large family gatherings and to honored guests. It is a lamb dish in a yogurt sauce. At the time, I thought it was an authentic ethnic dish, although I know now the version I stumbled across was highly Americanized.

You will note in the recipe the large number of spices, and if you will use your imagination while reading, you will only begin to realize how delicious Mansef is.

After dinner, my husband knelt down at my feet. Seriously. Not only did he kowtow before me, but he kissed my feet.

Despite the utter joy of that moment in our young marriage, it has been years -- perhaps more than a decade -- since I have made Mansef. We're still married, still in love (although our understanding of "in love" has inevitably changed over the years). I still enjoy cooking for him. But ... remember that severe grass allergy of his? The one that kept us from picnicking? Those allegies led to asthma so severe that he was puffing on inhalers multiple times a day. His medical doctor and an allergy specialist could do nothing more for him. In desperation, he scheduled an appointment with a doctor of Chinese medicine. (I'm not saying one must be desperate to turn to Chinese medicine. I'm just saying my husband was desperate.)

The Chinese medicine doctor prescribed accupuncture, herbs and dietary changes ... including no more dairy. Which means no more yogurt.

Now my husband can breathe. And we can picnic. Not that we have, lately, but we can if we want to. He just can't eat Mansef, despite all its warm, delicious spicy yogurty goodness.

What I have listed below isn't the original recipe in my picnic magazine. I can't find that publication now. Probably I discarded it during a move from one apartment to another, or the apartment to the house, or from house to house. But this recipe that I found online looks pretty close to what I recall of that recipe that made my husband kneel down before me to kiss my feet all those years ago:

Mansef

Ingredients:

• about two pounds raw lamb, cut into 1- or 2-inch chunks
• beef or chicken broth
• about 3/4 tsp ground cardamom
• 3 cinnamon sticks
• 10 or 12 cloves
• salt and pepper
• a little olive oil
• juice of a lemon
• 2 containers or more of plain yogurt (about 4 cups; Greek-style is recommended)
• rice
• pine nuts
• a little chopped parsley
• pita bread

Season the meat with salt and pepper. Skim the bottom of a large frying pan and brown the the lamb pieces nicely on all sides. Then place the browned meat in a large crock pot.

Sprinkle cardamom and cloves over the top of the meat, and tuck the cinnamon sticks in around the meat. Cover with beef or chicken broth. If there’s not enough liquid, add some water to cover. Squeeze the juice of a lemon into the pot with the liquids.

Place the lid on the crock pot, turn the pot to “low,” and let the meat cook until tender, about four to six hours.

At dinner time:

Prepare some rice—for a large group, you might want to cook up two or three cups of dry rice, which will make quite a lot of cooked rice. Judge the amount of rice you’d like by the amount of meat you’re cooking. While the rice is steaming, gently brown a handful of pine nuts in some olive oil or butter. Watch: don’t let them scorch.

Remove the meat from the crock pot and set aside. Place a cup or so of the juices in a blender, and add about a cup of yogurt. Cover the top and place a towel over the top to protect your hands, in case the hot liquid tries to escape. Blend the ingredients well. Repeat to incorporate all the yogurt into the juices.

If any juices remain in the pan, pour the yogurt mix back into them and stir well to mix. Taste. Add salt and pepper to taste. If desired, add more yogurt, using the same mixing technique. But don’t turn the heat on under the pan with this yogurt-meat sauce, lest it curdle.

Pile the rice in a big bowl. Toss the meat and toasted pine nuts into it. Then pour the sauce over the rice and meat mixture. Garnish with chopped parsley sprinkled over the top.

Serve this with some warm pita. Diners place a bit of mansef into the center of a piece of flat bread, wrap the bread around the meat mixture, and eat.

http://funny-about-money.com/2009/10/27/mansef-a-middle-eastern-feast-dish/