In my enthusiasm yesterday to tell you about the wonder of alliums at the Ann Arbor farmers’ market and the great soup I’d just made with them (1), I omitted an important ingredient from the recipe! Without the juice of those three lemons right at the end, you don’t cut the pungency of the alliums or the heaviness of the cream, and the soup turns out totally different, not nearly as good. I’ve gone and corrected it in the post. If you don’t want to live in the past, here’s that recipe right here:
The good Lord is really beginning to show his bounty in these parts. Trips to our farmers’ markets no longer target just one or two acts, punctuated by some hydroponic greens. Those treasured early seasons – rhubarb, asparagus, strawberries – have come and gone but now we get a real show. There are those precious, and pricey, little raspberries, and blueberries, and sweet corn (yay!). The greens are local now, and luscious. But one of the biggest explosions has been on the allium front. I just wrote about the monster shallots I encountered (1). But the whole family’s like that. Heads of garlic you could chuck like a weapon, green onions that look like leeks, leeks like oh well, and onions of every stripe. Though those grapefruit size numbers are nice, the little purple bulbs that still have their shoots are awfully appealing. I realized that whenever I’d made my 5-lily soup in the past, I’ve relied on grocery store ingredients, as those items tend to be available year ‘round. But fresh, local, dontcha know! Can’t beat that! As I surveyed the bounty I hauled home, I realized it wasn’t going to fit into my old recipe. Adjustments were in order, and they were made!
First, see here what I had to work with:
Starting at the bottom and going clockwise, there’s the garlics. That’s a real baseball, just for comparison. It did not go into the soup. Green onions next, shallots in the middle, then onions of several sorts. Smaller purple bulbs at top, then large red and large white. Leeks to the side. They’re often bigger in the grocery store off-season but these were fine and still slightly bigger than the green onions.
You roast the garlic, then choppy, choppy everything else. Looks mighty nice in the pot.
After simmering in stock, it has to cool to room temperature so you can buzz it smooth in the Cuisinart, blend in the cream, heat and eat!
So, here’s the recipe. Realize how much garlic is in this, so respect social considerations.
Dr. West’s Medicine Show and Jug Band had their biggest hit with 1967’s “The Eggplant that Ate Chicago”, describing a mutated alien vegetable that put civilization at risk (1). Norman Greenbaum, who wrote and sang the song, would later do the 1970 classic, “Spirit in the Sky”, a staple of boomer funerals everywhere (2). When I spotted some monster alliums at the farmer’s market this morning, I wondered if Mr. Greenbaum’s eggplant had come back as a different species. As I am very fond of shallots, I bought a couple bunches and took them home. So far, they’ve sit quietly on the kitchen counter, and I intend to have the upper hand with them later.
I’m a latecomer to the love of shallots, but my has that romance been soaring. I’ve always been fond of onions and garlic, of course, especially the latter. The guys with their green shoots still on – scallions (green onions) and leeks – I’d use now and then, leeks being especially nice in soups and stews. But I’ll take that little shallot bulb over everyone else in the lilly (allium) family. In imbibes anything it’s in with a delicate but rich flavor that’s reminiscent of onion but without the pungency and a little sweet. And unlike onion and garlic, it’s polite. You don’t cry when you peel them or reek when you eat them.
These days, whenever a recipe calls for onion, I’ll substitute a little diced shallot. A decent sized shallot (not like the ones at the farmers’ market!) will make about a quarter cup. With small onion = 1C, medium onion = 2C, and large onion=3C, a couple shallots will supplant half a small onion. I only have one recipe here featuring shallots, which I’ll leave you in the end. Kim has some dandies (3).
My favorite restaurant in Ann Arbor, the much-missed Lord Fox, where Henry Ford and his henchman Harry Bennett used to ride their horses for Sunday supper, once had a special soup on the menu “Five Lilly Soup” (4). Betty, the proprietress, told us a little about it, including the close relationship of the five main ingredients – onion, garlic, scallions, leeks, and shallots – all in the lilly (allium) family. Garlic (allium sativa), had the most notorious non-lilly relative, that ever popular five-leaved fellow with the same last name. Besides the fact they both stink, the two plants have quite a few chemicals in common (5). I worked to make my own recipe, and think I ended up with something pretty close.
It’s entirely possible that some of the monsters I brought home will end up in a new pot of this soon. While you can get all 5 lillies in the grocery store all year round, they’re all available fresh, grown locally, right now. No better time to make that soup. And the stuff in it is so good for you, it might as well be medicine (6).
6. Wan Q, Li N, Du L, Zhao R, Yi M, Xu Q, Zhou Y. Allium vegetable consumption and health: An umbrella review of meta-analyses of multiple health outcomes. Food Sci Nutr. 2019 Jul 10;7(8):2451-2470. doi: 10.1002/fsn3.1117. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6694434/
Happy Birthday, George Frayne IV (Commander Cody)!
Olivia van Goor is an up-and-coming jazz singer we’ve been pleased to see around these parts. A Hudson Ohio girl (home of Western Reserve Academy where my wife Kathy went to high school), her family moved to southeast Michigan in 2017 and she plunged into all things Dee-troit. She loves the Great American Songbook and does it justice. Her new album – “Don’t be mad at me” – will be officially released Friday August 4th. Not a shy girl, her first cut on it is “Over the Rainbow”. Take that Judy Garland! Underneath those pipes is an impish sense of humor, which makes her performances especially delightful. She knows how a chanteuse should look, and if that sexy dress over her womanly body doesn’t get you, she’ll seduce you with her voice. She appears all over the place in this area, and her web site will tell you all about it (1). Today she was outdoors at the Saline Jazz Fest, where she agreed to a pic with an elderly admirer.
As of Friday after next, she’ll have 2 CDs, the first with only 4 tracks, but a novel Velcro closing mechanism.
But she has an ample recorded output to sample. Here’s a half hour or so of her performing at the Blue Llama (3), and at a full show at Moriariy’s in Dee-troit (4). Quite a bit of her repertoire is on YouTube and you can sample it here (5-32). Yes, there are some Christmas numbers (33-37), and even an entire Christmas show (38), but who wouldn’t want Olivia in your lap, hopefully with some mistletoe nearby? But that’s many months away.
79 years ago today, George W. Frayne IV was born in Boise, son of 2 artists headed to New York. He earned a B.F.A and M.F.A. from U of M, getting tangled up in some frat bands that evolved to become the Lost Planet Airmen. You may know him better as Commander Cody.
I celebrate this day every year, more so since his passing September before last. I likewise recognize anniversaries of the fateful day in April 1971 when I saw the band for the first time (1). How does one celebrate such occasions? Pretty easy: mind-altering substances, music, and food. What food? The Commander, with the help of sidekick Kirchen, put it in their Emmy-winning, Museum of Modern Art Video (2). While the Commander insists the song was about some greasy spoon in Oakland, he had to have had some inspiration from Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burger in Ann Arbor (3). That’s where I went to get my 2 triple cheese side order of fries, and oh was it good. I ate ‘em to the accompaniment of the Ann Arbor Civic Band, who did not play any Cody numbers. Home now, I have my library to dive into. I think I’m going to restrict myself to vinyl. Too Much Fun awaits.
PS. Visit the Commander in his prime with the boys playing their hit (4).
4. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. Hot Rod Lincoln. (from Ten for Two, premiered 4/1/72. Produced by John Lennon and Yoko Ono). Posted to YouTube by RW Ike 3/19/21. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8TeHA4UL_8
A week and a day ago, I posted a blog about the late U of M Dental School Professor Albert G. Richards and his unusual hobby of x-raying flowers (1). I was finally getting around to hanging the three radiographs we’d bought from him back in the early 90s and was so taken by his unique and unusual works I felt compelled to share his story. While I told how he did it, I didn’t do a very good job of showing what he did. While abundant examples could be had on the end of several links, I thought the post itself should carry some, and have added three. So, if you’re curious, go back and take a look.
In our continuing frenzy to hang stuff on our walls, we decided those flower x-rays sitting in our storage room needed to see the light of day. There was a big expanse of white in our bedroom over the door to the deck just begging for art. We’d bought the pictures from the artist in 1990, whom we went to visit in his Ann Arbor Hills home. Retired from the dental school, he was a radiologist and avid gardener who had the notion the flowers he was growing might show us something new if he x-rayed them. Indeed they did.
As with many curiosities in this town, it was a piece in the University Record that got me to seek him out. I won’t say he was old, but my late mother-in-law Ruth, who graduated U of M as a dental hygienist in 1953, had him as a professor. He was a kindly host, appreciating the attention, telling us how he developed his technique, still marvelling over what he’d found, enthusiastic as when he made his discovery. He’d just published a book of his radiographs, which may be what prompted the Record piece that led me to him. That book is still in print, available on Amazon (1). It’s nice sized 12 X 9 ½ coffee table book.
I must say, the pics look amazing on our wall. This shot doesn’t do justice to the detail those x-rays show. It’s probably a loss they’re so high, as you really need to get your nose into the image to appreciate fully all the detail.
Professor Richards died in 2008. Born in 1917, he was a year older than my dad. There are some marvelous tributes to him and his work on the web (2,3,4) . A number of his radiographs were in 3-D (4), or even “colorized”. The technique for the latter was so painstaking, he made only a few, and refused to part with one despite Kathy’s imploring. There’s a named award in his honor, the Albert G. Richards Graduate Student Research Grant is designed to assist postgraduate students in conducting applied research in Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology, conferred by AAOMR, the American Academy of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology (5). U of M published a nice historical vignette (6). His works are displayed in the Getty Museum (7). You can buy his works on Pinterest (8).
Prints of A.G. Edwards’ x-rays are still pretty reasonable on Pinterest. So I’m not going to cash in by owning the works of a deceased artist, it seems. Heck, I don’t even remember how much I paid him for what I’ve got. But the joy Kathy and I will feel as we arise each morning and see those flowers is priceless, and we’ll be forever thanking Professor Richards for that.
Addendum. When I posted this blog a week and a day ago, I told you about Professor Richards and his technique, but did not do a very good job of showing the results of that work. The pic on the cover of his book (1) and the shot of my own three treasures of his hanging on my bedroom wall hint at the wonder of his works, but hardly capture that wonder. Several of the references have well-detailed, if small, representations (2,3,4,8). Scans from his book aren’t optimal either, but that’s what I did. Here, then, are the first 3 of the 100 radiographs in his book, which appear in alphabetical order, from amaryllis to zinnia. The 9 ½ X 12 book doesn’t quite fit on my 8 ½ X 11 7/8 scanner, and all radiographs are full page, but each has a small border, so my scans did capture each whole picture.
First, an amaryllis (Hippeaeastrum puniceum)
Next, an apple blossom (Malus pumila)
Finally, a blossom from a mountain ash tree (Sorbus aucuparia)
The flower on the cover of The Secret Garden is a lily while mine are 2 roses either side of an iris. Professor Edwards is holding 2 blossoms of a fuschia.
I’ve given you plenty of references to explore about Professor Richards and his work, should you be interested in seeing more or maybe even having your own copy of The Secret Garden for your coffee table. It’ll be like nothing else that rests there.
I dearly loved my dad, but I idolized my Uncle Bob. Yes, his Dutch name at birth was Bowenus, named for his uncle in Milwaukee who facilitated Grandpa’s passage from the old country and marriage to his love Dena, a first cousin whose romance was frowned upon back home. The other Ike boys got Dutch names, but Gerritt, Bowenus, and Dirk quickly became Gary, Bub, and Dick as the Ikes sought to assimilate in their new country.
Gerritt (Gary), the oldest, took to women and business, succeeding at both, but dying young, barely 50. Uncle Bob was a man of early middle age when I first met him as a tyke in the 50s. But I was quickly smitten by this big barrel-chested man from whom greetings tinged with hints of his beloved cigars coupled with that Cadillac grille smile just melted this little boy. I didn’t have to hear of his youthful exploits to make him any more a hero in my mind. But my dad filled me in. He, too, adored and admired his big brother. Uncle Bob was a big-time jock. He was a 3-sport star at Grand Rapids Christian: fullback, pitcher, and pole-vaulter. He’d play semi-pro baseball for several years after high school as an ace starter. Whether the bigs ever came calling is a lost detail. He took up boxing and won the Michigan Gold Gloves novice division as a heavyweight in 1933. Some jock.
The war came and extracted exploits I’d never heard about until I read them in the archives of the Grand Rapid Press recently. Uncle Bob was not one to go on about his past accomplishments. Basic training in Missouri led to some observations of talent the Army Air Force wanted honed in airline mechanics school at Mineola, New York. He graduated with high honors and a merit citation to be posted to New Castle Army Air Base at Wilmington ,Delaware, where he was installed as crew chief of a B-24 Liberator. Uncle Bob’s B-24 bomber was a beast.
20% heavier on the ground than a B-17 Flying Fortress, with a longer range, the debate as to which was a better bomber continues (1). Workers at Willow Run – about 15 miles from me – built a staggering 8,685 B-24 bombers – 6,792 complete planes and 1,893 knock down kits – by the time the last one was finished on June 28, 1945 (VE day was May 8, VJ day August 14). No one had ever manufactured airplanes on such a scale before. The RAF (Brits) actually gave up on the B-17, despite its ability to withstand attacks. The B-24 was manned by a crew of ten men — pilot, copilot, navigator, bombardier, and six gunners — the aircraft was capable of a maximum speed of 290 miles per hour, a service ceiling of 28,000 feet, and a maximum range of 2,100 miles. See here how the responsibilities were distributed. I suspect Uncle Bob’s “crew chief” would be “flight engineer”.
He’d end up flying out of Calcutta and logging over 300 hours over the Burma Road (“the hump”), which involved flying over the Himalayan Mountains to China to resupply the Chinese war effort of Chiang Kai-shek and the units of the United States Army Air Forces based in China. He’d be awarded 2 air medals and the Distinguished Flying Cross. Somehow, he routed himself home via Austria, where in Vienna he snagged championship skier Anna. He married her there and whisked her home to Michigan.
Michigan quickly turned to Colorado Springs, as the Air Force came calling offering Uncle Bob a chance to apply another of his talents, that of an artist, where the Force would appreciate his skill at accurate representation of their sensitive objects. He’d serve happily as a commercial artist, finding time to draw and paint on the side. How I wish I could find some of those works!
He found a modest brick bungalow on 2105 Eagle View, its big picture window looking smack at Pike’s Peak. He’d put his wife to work at the tony Broadmoor resort, where Aunt Anne did the heads of the rich and snooty. They all loved her, finding her accent exotic. Visits to Colorado Springs were a joy, if infrequent. They had a son, Dickie, who came along a year before me. We were good playmates of sorts, if tending our diversions to the crude side.
Uncle Bob died in July of 1987, at 72, two years older than I am right now. He came home to Grand Rapids for his funeral. Five years later, I was taken how all the Ike guys looked alike laid out in a casket, seeing then my grandpa in a similar position. He’d made 104. Kathy was stopped long before she entered the room. There at the entry was a placard “funeral of Robert Ike”. She’d never met Uncle Bob but was happy it wasn’t me in that casket.
I’d hoped to snag some pictures of my heroic Uncle Bob in his glory, resplendent in his uniform, etc. Such were not arising from the Ike archives. So, this picture in closing will have to do, Uncle Bob as I knew him as a grown up, leaning back on my dad’s Cadillac with his dad aside. Two Hollanders I loved dearly.
Goodbye, Uncle Bob. I’ll never forget you. Grandpa either.
Is there anything prettier than a flat of fresh Fragaria ananassa, right from the market?
Our farmer informs us that this is probably it, as the berries remaining in his field are getting too ripe to pick, so Saturday is iffy. This is our third flat of the season, so we’ve had our share. In these parts, strawberry season starts up around Memorial Day, as asparagus season is waning. Here at the summer solstice, it’s about finished. Pretty glorious 3 ½ weeks. Helps that it coincides with the best weather of the year.
But what to do with all those beauties? Ya gotta hull ‘em*, as that green stem piece adds no flavor to the experience. Then, ya just pop ‘em in your mouth! I know, you can only eat so many strawberries at a setting, but it’s a great challenge! But with a little preparation, some wonderful taste treats are at hand.
Of course, the classic early summer delight is strawberry shortcake: fresh berries in their juice over a warm biscuit with some whipped cream on top. You can’t get this at Baskin-Robbins. My wife and I have tinkered with the standard berry prep, which is to douse them with sugar till they give up some juice. She doesn’t like really sweet things (except me), so we’re always working to reduce sugar. She came across how you could substitute balsalmic vinegar, no less, and still get the juice extraction. And, no, you don’t taste the vinegar at all. This berry prep is useful in other recipes, and freezes well.
Good shortcake is key, and warm fresh out of the oven is even better. The recipe we use is pretty simple.
If you can’t get your hands on Bisquick, here’s how you can make it.
The coached nutrition program Kathy’s followed since February, which has her slimmed down to the girl I married, avoids high glycemic foods, and flour’s a real bad actor there. Cauliflower rice, something you make by buzzing florets in the Cuisinart, can substitute – well – for many of those starchy treats (1). Turns out you can even make biscuits with it.
Can you ever get tired of strawberry shortcake? Well, if you’re looking for a little variety on the dessert front during strawberry season, there are options. Both involve bringing in that misunderstood first-of-the-season vegetable, Mr. rhubarb. Its striking color blends well with the berries, as does its bitter taste. Not one for the kiddos.
For the lazy cook, there’s this one. A little ice cream on top can help it along.
If you want to get fancy and make an actual crust, there’s nothing like a strawberry-rhubarb pie.
And how about a salad? The late Stuart McLean, CBC raconteur, blessed us with this recipe, something we look forward to making this time of year every year. Who wouldn’t want some sweet nuts with their spinach, especially of there were some strawberries on top?
If you tire of chewing your strawberries, there are a couple ways (that I know) of drinking them.
Frozen daiquiris are always a crowd pleaser. Wait till you see what you’ve got when you make them with strawberries! For a dinner party last month, I poured out the whole batch straight from my blender into a glass half-gallon milk bottle, doling the magic red sluice to each guest’s empty glass. Let us say the crowd was pleased.
Helps if you freeze down the berries first.
The last one requires a little patience, as to make the required strawberry-infused vodka you need to watch it sit there on the shelf for 5 days. After that, it’s easy peasey. And the infused vodka is a tasty drink in its own right. One of the ways we’ll be “preserving” our latest flat of berries.
Well worth the wait.
The alcohol content of the final drink is about 42 proof, about the same as cosmopolitan. Drink up!
When I was writing this yesterday, I totally forgot a great way to “preserve” those berries for a time when you want to taste a little summer but it’s bleak outside. My Grandma Slater, just like Greg Brown’s, put it all in jars (2). I love my grandma’s strawberry jam. I still have some jars of it in my freezer, and Grandma died 35 years ago. Of course, she taught her daughters the recipe, and it was my Aunt Dorie who made the batch I’ve got. She’s only been gone 20 years. With my wife’s absent sweet tooth, we rarely have occasion to spread the stuff we’ve got, let along make more. When I decided to add jam to the list of strawberry destinations, I went looking for the recipe. Not in Mom’s box or the oilcloth bond cookbook she put together for the Hamilton Circle of the Grandville Methodist Church in 1960. Neither of my Aunt Dorie’s crammed boxes contained a jam recipe. I remember those Slater women kept some of their best recipes in their heads. Summer after my freshman year, I used to stay with Grandma when I went up to visit my girlfriend Rosie in Grand Rapids. I got Grandma to tell me how she made it. It was so simple I had to go and tell Rosie. As we sat in Grandma’s living room, I told her: ”berries, mash ‘em, add some sugar and voilá”. Grandma overhead us and shouted from the kitchen “don’t forget the Sure-Jel” (pectin). Rosie loved the jam, too, but never tried to make me any.
Looking for the recipe, I had to check Joy of Cooking, where a lot of the simpler recipes are very similar to the ones the Slater ladies cooked. But the jam recipe there was much more complicated than what I remember. But Dr. Google came through with something that looks mighty close, and here it is:
Technical notes.
Handling the bounty. Faced with a fine full flat of berries, that challenge becomes what to do with them all. A flat holds 8 quarts. That’s a lotta berries. Fresh berries will last about a week, even if kept cool. Kept in sealed containers in the ‘fridge, you might get an extra week. A tragedy when the little wonders go mushy. So the estimate is how many we’re gonna eat now and how to protect the rest. Fortunately, the only thing the berry loses in the freezer it its plump resilience. Flavor and color survive. My vacu-sealer does not squoosh the berries when I pack them. So you can pack them whole or sliced, looking to use them like regular berries when you thaw them later. We pack a lot of them up as if for strawberry shortcake. That same prep works for drinks. As I type this, my wife is out buying a large bottle of vodka so we can infuse some more with our berries. We bought two flats today and they’ll be safely packed away (or eaten) before sundown.
*Hulling. The only non-joy in acquiring a bunch of fresh strawberries in the need to hull the little bastards. This pain-in-the-ass step is necessary to remove the dried-up green remnants of the flower that produced the fruit. For you botanists out there, there are several names for the structures you’re removing (see figures(3)). When you’re swearing, it always helps to name names. You can pinch ‘em off, but that’s messy and your fingers quickly attain a lovely red hue. A paring knife can do it, but you lose a bit of that precious berry flesh with each circumcision. Kathy and I stumbled on a tool made just for this task, and it does a bang-up job: picks the hull off the berry slicker than snot off a doorknob, as Kathy likes to say. Six bucks on Amazon, and well worth it (4).
Here’s my Grandpa Slater standing out front of Engine House#10 on Division, sometime in February 1929. He’s the tall handsome guy to the left of the fire truck. How about those bow ties! He’d retire in 1959. He almost died in the line of fire once. That’s what I’m writing about. Tentative title “Grandpa’s close call”.
Bob Ike's blog 