The building blocks of our kitchen came into play at dinner time Monday. Canned home made vegetable broth, tofu from Iowa City, brown rice flour ramen and white miso paste from China, organic carrots from California, and spring onions, garlic, and pac choi from the garden. This is the American vegetarian kitchen garden at work.
It’s not really local food, is it? The ramen was suitable for vegans, and the flavor of the pac choi really came through. No wheat in this dish, and it is the first time in a while I used tofu for something other than stir fry. It is unlikely 20-year-old me would have prepared something like this.
I reserved some of the pac choi leaves, yet in retrospect should have added them all. The dish didn’t suffer from lack of greens yet there is no sense being frugal about leafy green vegetables. The world is full of them and in general Americans don’t eat enough of them.
There is no recipe for this dish. It was a product of that moment, my experience as a cook, and available ingredients. Mainly, I had to do something with the abundance of pac choi from the garden. We should cook like this more often.
Cooking carrots first in my saucier.
The ramen was satisfying on multiple levels.
This was the first use of my new saucier, and I was happy cooking with it. At three quarts it is of a size to make dinner for four. I hope there will be many more uses of the pan.
It is easy to get behind using leafy green vegetables. The garden produces so many, and certain ones, like pac choi, are best used fresh. One more giant pac choi in the refrigerator then on to the smaller ones.
I’ve written about making vegetable broth before. Baked tofu has become our standard preparation. What set this dish apart was flavoring. Salt and white miso, highlighted the flavor of the pac choi. Likewise, there was enough garlic, but not so much to be overpowering. Making food that tastes good can be done. It is not as simple as it may seem.
Would I make this dish again. Probably something like it in the never ending meal that comes from a kitchen garden.
Instead of getting the garden in by Memorial Day, I moved the date to June 20 when summer begins. I have five plots laid out, plan to skip one this year, and may skip part or all of another. Large amounts of rain kept me out of the spring garden. The shelves in the greenhouse are slowly emptying, and soon initial planting will be finished.
We’ve been cleaning to make room for technicians to repair our washing machine. It generated a code which I couldn’t resolve, so I made an appointment. The service company telephoned and said I should contact Maytag about covering the repair under warranty. I did and they will. The code first appeared at almost exactly at the end of the initial warranty period.
It is surprising how much a modern household depends upon getting laundry done. I can’t imagine what it would be like to return to laundromats. The one in our small city closed years ago, so it would be a big to-do of traveling to the county seat or further to launder clothes. There is only so much time in a life. The less spent on laundry the better.
I opened the covered row and an abundance of pac choi, lettuce, and basil was ready. I brought the haul indoors, cleaned it, and put it away in the refrigerator. I made a sandwich with a generous amount of fresh lettuce for lunch. I don’t often buy lettuce at the grocer, so when I have it in the garden, I make the most of it.
There will be pac choi ramen. In January I bought a 24-pack of Maruchan ramen. When I make it, I throw out the flavor packet that comes with it and make my own broth. This time, I’ll make a vegetable broth using white miso, then saute onions, garlic and pac choi, mix them together, and cook the noodles in the resulting liquid. The abundance of fresh leafy greens is wonderful.
Also in the kitchen garden mix is pasta sauce using last year’s tomato sauce, onions, fresh basil and garlic. This first of the season sauce is also a chance to try out my new saucier. Basil doesn’t keep long, so by the time this posts, I may already have made it.
There is one head of romaine lettuce which I’ll roughly chop for a salad. Not sure what to do for dressing, but it will inevitably use extra virgin olive oil and home made apple cider vinegar. I can’t wait.
While I had to move the goal posts for finishing planting the garden, the harvest already begins. These are the good days for which we live during the long winter. It’s life, as good as it gets.
I managed to get outdoors and garden every day this week. The cruciferous vegetable patch is coming along. One row of cabbage and I’m calling it done. I plan to sprinkle cayenne pepper around the plants to deter animals from nibbling on the tender shoots. That and some Dipel®, which contains a naturally-occurring bacterium found in soil and plants, and I should be good. This is the latest in the season I planted brassicas. Luckily I’ve been cooking with over-wintered collards, this spring’s pac choi and tatsoi, and frozen leafy green vegetables from last year. It has been good to get into the garden.
Writing – Prep for Printing
I created a new file of part one of my autobiography for publication formatting and began work. It takes a lot to make it suitable for printing: font selection, margins, chapter setup, line spacing, ISBN, and maybe a copyright. I researched printing prices for a self-published book and I should be able to get 25 copies for a few hundred dollars. This book was never intended for trade publication.
150 Days Until the Election
We are less than 150 days until the Nov. 5 general election. I offered my political help to my state representative and senate candidates. We’ll see how they take me up on it. Both are first time candidates, so I’m not sure my 60 years experience on political campaigns will be relevant to them. The races will be tough. As long as I can work something out with the campaigns, that is how I’ll spend my political time this cycle.
On the State Park Trail
Six of the last seven days I walked 30 minutes on the state park trail. Everything is greening up. White flowers appeared and can be found everywhere. This transitional time — before everything gets eaten by bugs, or trampled by wildlife — is a favorite. There have been plenty of photo opportunities. The day I did not walk was a long, sweaty one in the garden.
Israel Is Using AI Targeting
An increasing number of news stories assert the Israel Defense Forces have been using artificial intelligence-enabled decision-support systems (AI-DSS) to target and kill Hamas operatives. All is fair in love and war, they say. Or is it? What if I told you AI finds Hamas targets most frequently at home with family. As bombs fly, they take out non-combatant women and children along with Hamas operatives. Shouldn’t that be a war crime?
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts the Lieber Institute. “In today’s complicated battle spaces, the continued effectiveness and enforceability of the law is highly dependent on whether the expressed rules remain definitive, understood, and accepted,” it says on their website. “Yet contentious topics highlight a troubling lack of unanimity in the international community concerning the law.” Since the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel has used unconventional tactics to achieve battlefield superiority. While they have been innovative, any targeting method that indiscriminately includes women and children is morally bankrupt. Let’s hope the peace plan I mentioned last week takes root.
Summer begins in 11 days. Hopefully the main garden planting will be done by then and I can focus on weed maintenance, harvest, and the rest of my household projects.
Early Saturday morning news media reported Bill Anders died at age 90 while a plane he was piloting crashed into the sea off Washington State. He was a pilot at the beginning of his career and that’s how it ended.
Anders was widely known for his unplanned photograph Earthrise. He was a lunar module pilot on the Apollo 8 mission when he took it. Anders later described taking this photograph as his most significant contribution to the space program, according to BBC. “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth,” Anders said.
Earthrise inspired most everyone.
Officials said Anders’ plane crashed Friday at around 11:40 a.m. PDT, according to the BBC. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said he was flying a Beechcraft A A 45 – also known as a T-34. The agency said that the plane crashed about 80 feet from the coast of Jones Island.
Anders’ story has its roots in being a pilot. On Oct. 8, 1997, he told that story as part of the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. Here is his answer to the first interview question by Paul Rollins. Read the entire interview on the NASA website.
[Early in my Air Force career as a fighter pilot] I was trying very hard to get into the Air Force Flight Test School. … I … talked to Chuck Yeager and the people running [the school] and Yeager … said “We’re really looking for people with advanced degrees.” This was in [1959]. So, I signed up for the Air Force Institute of Technology masters [degree] program [where I] graduated with honors. [I went back] to Edwards thinking I was a shoe-in and [was told by Yeager], “Oh, well [that] the criteria [had been changed and that advanced degrees didn’t count as much as flying time.] … I was disappointed but I still kept trying to get in and [applied] for the Flight Test Program [anyway]. [In the meantime,] … I was driving my Volkswagen bus, [one Friday afternoon] going home from work [in] Albuquerque [New Mexico] at the Air Force Special Weapons Center, where I was an engineer and an instructor pilot [when] I heard this announcement [over the car radio] that NASA was looking for another group of astronauts. Now one had to be a test pilot for the first two groups [of astronauts] and it didn’t occur to me that they would change that. But [for] this group [the radio announcer] went down the list of things [NASA required. He said the applicants] had to be a graduate of Test Pilot School or have an advanced degree. I remember pulling over to the side, tuning it up, and then waiting for the next fifteen minute [news cast where the “… or advanced degree” message was repeated. By the time I got home] … I had decided that … I was going to put in an application. … I wrote up a letter [that weekend], … mailed it to [NASA on Sunday]. [W]hen I got to work at the Air Base the next [Monday the pilot officers were] told that if … we were interested, [we should fill out some] forms [and] submit them through the channels. … I went to my boss and said [that I] already sent [NASA] a letter [of application.] … [H]e said, “Well, that’s okay, just go do it again [through channels].” …[T]o my surprise [I] was asked to come down for the various physicals and tests [several weeks later]. And, to my increasing surprise, [I] kept surviving [the cuts]. [On October 17] of 1963 [(my birthday), I] was called by Deke [Donald K.] Slayton and asked if I wanted to [fly with them, I accepted immediately]. Two days later, I [received] a call from Chuck Yeager who said, … he was really sorry [and that] I was really a great candidate but I didn’t make [the USAF Test Pilot School]. I made the mistake, in retrospect, of saying, “Well, Colonel I appreciate [your call] … but I [have] a better offer anyway.” “What was that?” [he asked surprised]. I told him I [had received] a call from Deke Slayton [to come to NASA. Yeager] said that’s not possible because we … screened all the applicants and since you weren’t a member of the test pilot school you didn’t go forward. I said, “Well, sir, I put in [another application directly to NASA].” … [He was upset about that and] actually put some energy into that trying to get me kicked out of the [NASA] program… [Fortunately he was not successful.] (Interview with William A Anders by Paul Rollins for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Oct. 8, 1997).
Bill Anders died as he lived. May he rest in peace.
At a time when conservative political activists tell us what we can and can’t read and learn in public spaces, summer reading programs at public libraries continue to thrive. In the City of Solon, population 3,018, 261 kids attended the public library’s May 30 Summer Reading Program kick-off event.
Most have heard of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library which mails free books to children from birth to age five. Each month Parton’s organization mails books to one million children around the world with one in seven American children receiving her books. Any parent can sign their child up for the service from Imagination Library.
Young children seem on board with reading. It’s the adults among us that need to do better. According to the website Wordsrated, the average American adult reads five books per year. 51.6 percent of Americans don’t finish a single book in a year. Here are some books where progressives can start improving our book-reading. Call it a progressive summer reading program!
I recommend starting with my March 31 post titled Women to Read and Follow. These authors are essential to understanding the progressive viewpoint in contemporary society. Don’t yap about dark money in politics or Citizen’s United unless you have read Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Following women’s health care rights post-Dobbs? Read Alice Miranda Ollstein’s articles at Politico. Concerned about misinformation and disinformation in the media? You should read Barbara McQuade, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. All eight women I covered are worth reading.
There are some men writing on progressive topics who are also worth reading. I recently reviewed Ari Berman’s latest book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People–and the Fight to Resist It. Berman’s previous book, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America is a must-read. I’ve been following Thom Hartmann’s Hidden History series and any of them is a good starting place. My recent review of The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living is here. Warning! Once you get started with Hartmann you may become addicted. Blog for Iowa weekend editor Dave Bradley wants to read Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry by Austin Frerick.
How do disabled people become political activists? You owe it to yourself to read Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life by Alice Wong who tells her story. What is a main issue? Free and open access to the internet.
Worried about the climate crisis? Hannah Ritchie’s new book Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet offers a fresh and refreshing perspective. Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights is about bird migrations and our interaction with nature, suggesting we should not be using nature as a metaphor at all.
It has been so long since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people tend to forget nuclear weapons should be eliminated and the major powers all agreed to do just that. Annie Jacobsen recently published Nuclear War: A Scenario to remind us. This book deserves distribution beyond folks who work for nuclear abolition.
Who We Are Now: Stories of What Americans Lost & Found during the COVID-19 Pandemic by Michelle Fishburne is a unique story of her 12,000-mile journey with her children in an RV during the pandemic. Her story captures something about the pandemic it is difficult to find elsewhere.
Blog for Iowa editor Trish Nelson passed along some summer reading recommendations. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson is one person’s stories of growing up in Iowa, many places and things we all remember come and gone. A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purcell and Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Spy by Judith L. Pearson are two different books with the same topic: an infamous female spy from America who was a key player in the French resistance during WWII. Trish also recommends Cassidy Hutchinson’s Enough and Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.
A person needs escape through reading from time to time. Novels I recommend are A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar and Whose Names are Unknown by Sanora Babb. It was hard to put each of these books down as the subject was compelling and the story masterfully told.
I turn to poetry when I need a break from prose, reading new and old poetry from my personal library. In the new category, I recommend Plantains and Our Becoming by Melania Luisa Marte, a debut poetry collection about identity, culture, home, and belonging. In the old category, someone on social media convinced me to read the poetry of John Betjeman. His collected poems is on my summer reading list. I am also a fan of Lucia Perillo’s The Oldest Map with the Name America. My recommendation? Go to the nearest public library, find the poetry section, and pick something that interests you.
There you have it: a progressive summer reading list. Happy summer reading!
The population of the city near where I live was 3,018 during the 2020 U.S. Census. It is growing yet much remains the same about small city life.
The grocery store will give you cash back, that is, unless it is early in the morning and they have not received any $20 bills in the till.
The clerk at the hardware store was reading the Cedar Rapids Gazette. I entered through the back entrance because the sidewalk in front is closed for repairs from high winds in 2023. They had what I needed.
The fire station is locked up tight as an all-volunteer force is working other jobs during the day.
A large tent was erected on the south edge of town where fireworks will be sold ahead of Independence Day.
The convenience stores are hopping with customers who service their addictions. They are the busiest places in the city most mornings.
What to make of this? It just is. The unseen parts of the city are more interesting.
A majority of residents commute to a job somewhere else.
Most everyone has high speed internet and everything that means.
Shopping with Amazon is so convenient it hits sales from Main Street stores like a bludgeon.
When we do need to buy something, the prices are much higher than in nearby larger cities.
Within city limits, housing stock turns over as quickly as a realtor hangs a sign.
It’s like one desultory stream of features that mean nothing unless one knows the people who live here. Maybe that’s the point. To know the city, know the people.
Made In three-quart, stainless steel saucier. Photo credit – Made In website.
I came into some extra money from my writing and ordered a Made In, five-ply stainless steel clad, three quart saucier. I saw the device on Olivia Tiedemann’s Instagram channel where she recommended it for sauces, grain cooking, one-pot dishes, and more. It is her go-to pan, she said. Tiedemann is a private chef with more than 4 million Instagram followers. She makes short cooking videos, curses a lot, and flips the bird at the camera at least once during each episode. The saucier sold out on the Made In website shortly after I ordered mine.
I am very excited to be receiving this saucier, tracking the shipment a couple times a day. As I type, it is at a warehouse in Iowa City awaiting delivery, presumably today.
Buying a saucier is a poor man’s extravagance. Did I need a special pan to make sauces? I was getting along just fine. Do I want to be like Tiedemann? Maybe, except she is definitely oriented toward using all the meat and dairy products, unlike what goes on in our household. Once one eliminates meat, fish, dairy, butter, eggs and the like from meal preparation, cooking becomes something else. I’m hoping the saucier will help me down a path of developing sauces and dishes for our hybrid vegetarian-vegan cuisine. If I had real money, I’d dine at a favorite restaurant multiple times a week. I don’t, therefore, saucier.
Will the saucier change my life? I hope so. I hope to be a better cook in my kitchen garden. Imagination and a special pan may be the way to distinguish what I do here. The anticipatory excitement is well worth the money spent on the saucier.
Sign at Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Solon on June 4, 2024.
The Democratic ballot was simple this election. Vote for all the Democrats, except pick three of five candidates in the supervisor race. The primary winners for supervisor were Rod Sullivan, Lisa Green-Douglass, and Mandi Remington. No surprises there.
On the Republican side, there were two races of interest. Incumbent Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks defeated prayer breakfast organizer David Pautsch with 55.9 percent of the vote. In House District 91, Oxford attorney Judd Lawler defeated second-time candidate and Williamsburg Mayor Adam Grier with 78.9 percent of the vote. Lawler trounced Grier in Johnson County where he got 502 of 554 votes cast.
The common theme for these elections is voter turnout was pathetic.
Miller-Meeks’ 16,446 vote win was a comment on the state of the Republican Party in the First District. Division within the party runs deep is how I read it. It was surprisingly low for someone who first ran for this seat in 2008, and won her last election by seven points. Such division will keep her tilting toward the extremist wing of her party. In the general election this represents no change in her match-up with Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan.
In an election night email, winning supervisor candidate Rod Sullivan summarized the situation like this: “I sincerely hope Democrats are ready to work this fall, because Dems did not turn out Tuesday! Hopefully they care more about Congress than local races.” We shall see.
This chart says a lot about the history of newspapers in the 21st Century. As the number of employees in the business declined by 75 percent, private equity extracted financial resources from these businesses through mergers and acquisitions, leaving a much diminished infrastructure to provide news and information. There are fewer daily newspapers in 2024 compared to 2000.
As newsroom employees are purged, and substacks, blogs, podcasts, and the like proliferate, we are left with fragmented news sourcing around specific reporters’ individual interests. There is a role for that, but obtaining reliable news about things that matter is increasing difficult, both from the news consumer’s perspective and from the newspaper perspective of doing more and more with fewer resources.
I am interested in the issue of blogs as news sources. Like it or not, Bleeding Heartland, Blog for Iowa, and Iowa Starting Line are no news substitute for the vacuum being created by private equity shedding newspaper employees and mining news assets. Iowa Starting Line is part of Courier Newsroom, funded by reader contributions, sponsors, and philanthropic and corporate underwriting, according to their website. Both Blog for Iowa and Bleeding Heartland have been privately funded, although that model is changing at Bleeding Heartland. Funding is addressed on the Bleeding Heartland website: “Readers can support independent journalism and help cover reporting costs, such as public records requests, by contributing here.” This type of funding provides freedom to do what editors think is best. While a lot of solid journalism is accomplished on blogs like these, they are not a replacement for news.
Some journalists found a way to make a living outside the world of newspapers. It is increasingly clear that with the rise of potentially profitable podcasts, substacks, YouTube channels, and the like, there is more money to be made in these new entities than in writing for a newspaper. There are important essays to read in this fragmented news media, yet our formal news environment is the worse for these one-off entrepreneurial enterprises.
While individual reporters venture into single-source, news-like publications, other things are filling the vacuum left by the demise of newspapers.
Political operatives are filling the news void with coordinated, partisan messaging. When Republicans like Kim Reynolds, Joni Ernst, Ashley Hinson, and Mariannette Miller-Meeks all refer to the New York trial of former president Trump as a “sham,” it is not by accident. They have the resources to develop consistent messaging to an increasingly poorly educated populace where they sow the seeds of their right-wingery. Furthering such messaging is important to Republicans maintaining a majority of elected offices in Iowa. The decline of newspapers created this opportunity for them.
At the same time, the rise in misinformation and disinformation in social media is rampant. First, social media is not a public forum as long as a user name and password is required to gain access. Second, a person can say almost anything, subject to after the fact censoring. Most importantly, troll farms can flood the social media space with posts aligned toward a specific perspective. Whether we like it or not, there is a propaganda war going on in social media, and I don’t mean cats are taking over the world. The degree to which Chinese and Russian troll farms work to infiltrate American social media is a substantial political issue.
For all the hobbles attached to news organizations in the current environment, subscribing to a major newspaper provides more value than harm. It is not enough. We must seek out news writers offering distinct, less biased messaging, and follow them where they are. I’m thinking of Heather Cox Richardson, but there are many others. By all means subscribe to a newspaper. Also take the next step to find writers whose work is valuable and follow them where they publish. This means some work we didn’t previously have to perform, yet the rewards will help us cope with a changing news media infrastructure.
Garden work made me tired this week. It took multiple days to prepare and plant the tomato plot, and it is not finished. Other plots are prepared for specialty crops like fennel, okra, peppers, kale and the like, but I can’t get around to putting them in the ground. So it goes with a septuagenarian gardener. Things are slowing.
Election Interference Trial
The biggest news this week, upon which I will spend the least time, is the New York trial of former president Donald J. Trump. I tend to agree with actor Robert DeNiro, who said, “I don’t want to be talking, but I am so upset by it. I have to say something. This is my country. This guy wants to destroy it. Period. He’s crazy.” Read “Keep Hope Alive” for my longer take.
Writing
It seems clear once I finish the current read-through and editing, the next step for my autobiography is preparation to print it for private distribution. That means making about ten or twelve copies as a first run so I can call it done. Font type, page layout, line spacing, long quotation formatting, grammar and punctuation consistency, and more need to be addressed. I should have a professional read it and provide advice, yet I don’t have funds to do that presently. The goal is to have the finished book in front of me later this year.
Part two has more words than part one already, yet most of it is in very rough form. When I’m ready to start, the outline needs completely re-done. This would be followed by a serious write-through. Part of the reason I stalled on part two is the amount of background documentation is tremendous. Journals, notes, files, recordings, and more are stuffed in boxes waiting for me. That’s not to mention more than 5,000 blog posts. I don’t expect to turn every page, yet I must turn a lot of them. The main initiative to do a write-through will be during the hot days of summer and the coming fall and winter.
First things first. I need the first book in hand as soon as is practicable.
Israel-Hamas War
There has been devastating loss of life in Palestine. U.S. policy enables it. Here’s hoping the president addresses this in a meaningful way. He encouraged Hamas to accept the following proposal. Let’s hope all parties can soon agree to a way out of the violence.
“It’s time for this war to end, and the ‘day after’ to begin,” Biden said in remarks at the White House May 31.
Journey Home 
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