Kathy and I have decided to celebrate Bastille day by making some genuine French fries, even though we knew they were mainly a Belgian thing, or maybe not https://delishably.com/vegetable-dishes/Is-it-French-Fries-or-Belgian-Frites. We acquired the genuine McDonald’s recipe https://www.food.com/recipe/mc-donalds-classic’french-fries-copycat-433745, and had the necessary beef tallow on hand (secret ingredient) https://wordpress.com/post/theviewfromharbal.com/1384. Prior to 1990, all McDonald’s fries were fried exclusively in beef tallow. If you’ve noticed a drop off in quality since then, there’s your explanation. But in the Harbal kitchen, we know no such boundaries! A couple days back, we bought a couple Russet potatoes, peeled them, and ran them through the mandoline, a French slicing contraption Kathy bought me a couple years ago which is tailor made for this duty. The potatoes had to be brined, then frozen, which prevented us from eating them on “National French Fry Day”, which our WRCJ DJ friend Dave Wagner had proclaimed Tuesday morning. But the waiting was worth it. All my remaining stock of tallow went into the pot, knowing it could be strained and reused up to ten times. Many more fries to come. Then, after my candy thermometer registered 3750 as the recipe specified, we danced in half of the 6 oz of potatoes we had frozen. We eagerly watched them turn brown, removed them to a colander, then did the same with the rest. They didn’t get to cool very long before we began snacking and oh my! These were McDonald’s fries on steroids! Brown, crisp, and absolutely exquisite! This is a dangerous thing we’ve discovered. It is easy to procure and prepare Russets for this fat bath, which we seem to have the capacity to replenish many times. How many more meals will we have when we ask ourselves “do you want fries with that?”?
fries awaiting consumption. The cookie tray was just someplace to rest ,and had nothing to do with their cooking.
Are you spooked by this yet another new strain of COVID? Don’t be. When I first wrote about 2019-nCoVBetaCoV/Wuhan/WIVo4/2019 (Mr. Corona’s full name) back on March 13, 2020, just as things were starting to heat up (1), I mentioned that the little sucker mutates like a mink. The error rate in reading coronavirus RNA is about 1/10,000 nucleotides. With an average 30K nucleotides per viral genome, that translates to 3 mutations per replication. So, every time the virus replicates some progeny are different. Many don’t make it. Some lose Dad’s punch; some do a few things a little better. But there are always going to be new strains. Hopefully, the nasty parts the ChiComs put in will mutate out into something more benign. Chances are they already have, which is why you’re not seeing nearly as many deaths. And if you want to get a feel for the magnitude of the pandemic, check out the Johns Hopkins page (2). I follow those curves like sports scores. Those curves for Michigan are lower than the Tigers’ standing in the AL Central. Don’t worry, Uncle is all over this (3). The delta variant is only a “variant of concern”, meaning “A variant for which there is evidence of an increase in transmissibility, more severe disease (e.g., increased hospitalizations or deaths), significant reduction in neutralization by antibodies generated during previous infection or vaccination, reduced effectiveness of treatments or vaccines, or diagnostic detection failures.” CDC calls the delta strain (as labeled by the WHO) “B.1.617.2 (Pango lineage)”. Not as catchy. But more catching than the original COVID-19 out of Wuhan, maybe by as much as 50%. Its spike protein – the action arm of Mr. Corona – has 15 – count ‘em – 15 mutations from the original Wuhan COVID.So, what does that mean? Seems that symptoms from it are like what most people got with Wuhan COVID – remember fewer than 1% died, and most of those were already sick with something else – cough and loss of smell seem to be less common while headache, sore throat, runny nose, and fever seem to be more common (4). That less cough thing is reassuring, as most of the nasty business from Wuhan COVID was respiratory. Kinda sounds like a cold or flu, just like coronavirus used to do before the boys and girls in the Wuhan lab started tinkering with it. Maybe that’s why we’re not seeing another surge in reported cases. Why see the doc to get a test tube brush stuck up your nose if all you have is a cold? But what else might those changes in spike protein do? To those of you who submitted to the stick: what were those little antifreeze-encapsulated RNAs supposed to do? Make your ribosomes make COVID spike protein so your immune system could react to it! But the spike protein coded for by Mr. Corona’s great great grandson delta doesn’t look exactly like that anymore. Would your charged up immune system even recognize it? If anyone knows, they’ve not written about it yet, except to mention it’s a distinct possibility (3,4).
One thing that does get written about are vaccine complications. A lot of the nasty things happening after COVID infection weren’t from direct effects of virus infection, but from the immune system’s exuberant response to the virus attacking other parts of the body, sorta like some of the things I used to take care of as a rheumatologist: those pesky “autoimmune” diseases. And guess what, some of those same things are happening from immune systems tickled by COVID spike protein made locally: blood clots, myocarditis (heart inflammation), and Guillain-Barré syndrome (immune attack on peripheral nerves aka “French polio”) (5). And of course, a lot of the vaccine recipients’ immune systems really don’t like something in the shot (6). A severe, immediate, and potentially fatal allergic reaction – anaphylaxis – has been reported to occur in 2 to 5 per million vaccine recipients (5). These complications are rare, but a few vaccine recipients have died. The vaccine adverse events reporting system (VAERS) tallied that among the people who received the more than 334 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through July 12, 2021, 6,079 died (0.0018%). The CDC cheated on that last number. Since more people got 2 shots (Moderna, Pfizer) than 1 (J&J), that percentage is actually higher. Still low, but why did the CDC have to cheat like that? At this rate, there will come a day when illness and death from the COVID vaccine will exceed the new cases caused by coronavirus. I wonder if Dr. Fauci will announce that.
So what’s in those books I plugged recently? I thought I might clarify things by posting the forward that’s in each volume.
Musing through a pandemic. A year and a half with Mr. Corona.
How did this all start? There I was, 6 months into a forced retirement and finally shaking the bitterness while beginning to enjoy all the freedoms this new state had to offer. I was nudging my honey to include me in her little “knowledge” business, Docere (“to teach”) L.L.C., which she’d set up after her NASA years to collect speaking gig fees now mainly serving as repository for royalties from her online textbook on Scientific Writing, required for the U of M class she (and others) taught. Mainly, I was looking for an angle for some new business cards, needed as all my U of M ones were obsolete. Once in, I set to work designing and I think they’re pretty cool. That row on the flip side contains logos from all the institutions with which I’ve been affiliated, going back to high school.
The card template had a spot for a URL, which I didn’t have. Looking around, I came across WordPress’ offers for blogs, which were very reasonably priced. I’d been thinking about blogging a little during my idle retired time. I was always boring my e-mail friends with too long treatises on whatever, so why not just shift that into a blog?
The blogsite sat unused for a week or two before I felt compelled to write about the life and death of my dear friend Sam, who’d passed earlier in the month of a liver ailment that could have been successfully treated had it been caught earlier. I’d actually composed the reflections earlier and emailed them out to our mutual friends. Realizing what I had, I posted it on my blog. Then I was off to the races. Anything was fair game for my blog, but what came out seemed to sort into the following areas: coronavirus, friends and family, “my brilliant career”, travel, food, music, sports, and “this life”. I chose to split off the coronavirus musings as a separate book (or books), focusing this particular effort on all those things I thought about “on the sidelines” during that year and a half Mr. Corona was so much with us. Many were prompted by email queries from friends, and I just pasted the response into my blog. I came to see certain people as my muses. After assembling everything else, and seeing how much I had, I decided to split off two more volumes, one devoted to interpersonal relationships and another to the amusements we pursued.
After nearly a year and a half of doing this, I decided to edit, organize, and annotate my writings into this little book(s). I hope you have as much fun reading them as I did writing them. The “year-and-a-half” demarcation seems pretty natural. I started the blog just as Mr. Corona was beginning to creep over here from Yuhan and many moves announcing lifting of restrictions as of July 1st make it feel like this thing might actually be coming to an end. My own COVID impact has been quite minor, mainly one of annoyance at the arbitrary and often baseless restrictions, the shutdowns, and the accusatory stares from the COVID woke commenting on behavior I was not properly exhibiting. I’ve been blessed with a good mate, good food, ample things to keep my mind occupied (including the blog), and plenty of exercise to keep my mood up and waistline down. For sure, as Mr. Prine would sing, it could have been worse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMPXUnAfv70
If you’re reading this on a Kindle or in an Amazon paperback and want to print out or save something full size, like a 3X5 recipe card, you can access all of these essays and stories on my blog www.theviewfromharbal.com. Links might work better from there than from a Kindle, also.
Last month, I finally got around to reviewing and organizing the 170 odd posts I’d put up since starting this blog in January 2020. I thought that they might make up a book, strung around the theme of living through this pandemic. When I started, Mr. Corona was just making his way over from Wuhan and by this June it really felt like things were winding down, with so many restrictions set to be lifted July 1st and the Hopkins curves flattening out. Musing through a Pandemic. My Year-and-half with Mr. Corona turned into three books, volume I mainly about the virus and its effects on us (not all from the virus), volume II about the inter-personal relationships I turned to to get through, and volume III about the various indulgences we pursued to make life more bearable (there were many). I list below the brief descriptions of each book Amazon had me write.
Vol I. My year and a half with Mr. Corona. About Mr. Corona. A La-Z-Boy, a laptop, and a plague that keeps me there more than I’d like. Musings arise, and thanks to WordPress, they get recorded and distributed. With the worst of the pandemic seemingly passed, a considerable pile of said musings have accumulated. In volume I, they all concern the coronavirus one way or another. After all, it’s all we’ve been obsessing about. Reading though the various entries, you can get a pretty good idea of what just hit us, and not all the hits were from Mr. Corona.
Vol II. On the sidelines. Interpersonal relationships. Here’s to all those people I had the privilege to bump into, especially during plague times. You’ve made my life ever richer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhp7mz3Q7NQ.
Vol III. On the sidelines. Indulgences. The COVID pandemic has limited us from doing much of what we used to take for granted. However, pursuit of happiness is a strong force – yea, a God-given right – and we all managed to find ways to do just that despite the lockdowns, restrictions, and social pressures. In this volume, I recount some such forays. Some are just reminiscences of past good times, but those can be a source of happiness, too. Many recountings contain blueprints for more good times. Let ’em roll!
The books were each fat enough for Mr. Bezos to make up paperback versions. Of course, these cost more than the $3 Kindle versions, which have the advantage of working links. All the covers look alike, but the paperbacks are different from the Kindles.
You can access the books through my Amazon author’s page https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B095CPDZGP?ref_=pe_1724030_132998070 or by typing “Robert Ike” into the Amazon search bar. Be sure to use the quotation marks or you’ll get a bunch of books about Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I made a shameless plug a month ago for my second book https://wordpress.com/post/theviewfromharbal.com/1606, this one about the funnest band ever- Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen – and all the good times they and their alumni have provided me over the past 50 plus years. It was too slim a volume for Mr. Bezos to make me a paperback on Amazon, so it’s only been available as a Kindle. I decided to ask Staples to make me up some hard copies. One defect of an actual book is you can’t access the links, and this book is full of them, mainly to music but some to key articles and 2 to full movies and one to a whole radio show. My solution is to post all the links here, then include the URL for this post in the book face page.
As a refresher, here’s the cover
And here’s the links. Lotta great music there. If you start clicking, be careful not to have Too Much Fun!
Lost in the Ozone … Again. Links
Here are the links in the book you can access now only by writing them down and pasting them in. So much easier with a Kindle, but you can’t hold it in your hand.
We were hanging this evening listening to Spotify Louis Prima channel, a pretty fun and lively place. A song came up, say that’s my theme song! At least for my kitchen. You denizens of this blog will notice that I like to punctuate my posts with a tune. None of my kitchen and food posts lately have had that feature. But here it is now, straight from the Cotton Club https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvkCEEj4I2s. But all this food obsession has to have to have some balance, and here it is from the snarkmeister, the late much missed Mr. Hicks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CNIWuQU74. Yep, he wrote that though others have claimed it and its been passed as some sort of 30s jazz standard. But a standard it is, with a timeless message for us all.
Growing up, I don’t recall paying much attention to the fleshy, edible stalks (petioles) of species and hybrids (culinary rhubarb) of Rheum in the family Polygonaceae, which are cooked and used for food. I recall my older relatives swooning over rhubarb pie once it came in season, but I don’t recall them offering me a taste. Maybe they figured I wouldn’t like it. Rhubarbs were what umpires and disgruntled managers engaged in.
My wife’s recent turn away from things sweet got me thinking about rhubarb. Maybe she’d like a confection made with this tart concoction. This past week I splurged and bought $4 worth of a rhubarb bundle. It was about to rot when I stumbled on my impetus. Seeking to sort out the collection of cookbooks in my basement kitchen, I came across 3 manila folders chock full of recipes. One was full of things I’d collected back in med school. I don’t recall that I was that much into cooking then. Maybe it was a fantasy that I could be someday. I had a lot of clippings from Mike McGrady “My turn to cook”, a column which ran in the Tribune. He pointed out full dinners guys could cook. More fantasy, I guess. One happened to include rhubarb pie, which seemed pretty simple. He pointed out the hard part was the crust, and proposed a ready made product. But elsewhere in that same folder was a 4X6 card handwritten in a style I didn’t recognize “fool proof pie crust”. That was enough for me. I already had the new cast iron pie plate, lard, the tallow I’d rendered up https://wordpress.com/post/theviewfromharbal.com/1384, and bacon grease. I’d end up using all 3.
The pie recipe itself was pretty simple
But the key is the crust, and here’s that recipe
Thank God for my pastry cutter. Kathy, who is more savvy about dough than I, thought it was pretty soupy. She lined the bacon greased iron pie plate with lumps of dough she spread by hand. As she worked more with the dough, it became more malleable. We had some left over with which she made tarts from yesterday’s berry sauce https://wordpress.com/post/theviewfromharbal.com/1763.
The pie baked up into something beauteous
And I can attest, it is absolutely delicious, with an exquisite crust. I understand now what my old relatives were raving about. I suppose mincemeat pie is next.
The dessert was prepared to follow a simple dinner, prepared also from a recipe retrieved from my Chicago file
Hard to lose with a $50 winner! We cut up 2 C of duck breast from our 4th of July feast, giving our salad a little protein. We had a nice French pinot to wash it all down. It was spectacular.
So I’ll go and post this now, then go to have another piece of that pie. Life is good.
When I posted this yesterday, I forgot something important: a closing song! Fortunately, Roy Blount Jr. has written the perfect one. Unfortunately, it’s not on YouTube. So I’ll just reproduce it here. It’s the last one in his book*.
SONG TO PIE
Pie. Oh my.
Nothing tastes sweet,
Wet, salty and dry.
All at once so well as pie.
Apple and pumpkin and mince and black bottom.
I’ll come to your place every day if you’ve got ’em.
Pie.
*Blount Jr R. Save room for pie. Food songs and chewy ruminations. New York: Sarah Crichton Books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Julia Child has a wonderful simple sauce recipe for any kind of berries. But a key ingredient is sugar, which the missus abhors since going on keto. We’ve adapted our strawberry shortcake recipe, so we decided to do the same with the current crop of berries. We had some fading strawberries plus some prime new blueberries, first of the season from the cute little girls in their plain clothes at the market. Into the pot they went (berries not the girls), with pretty spectacular results. So good I had Kathy whip up some shortcakes.
Of course, we had to wait a bit for our feast to settle: St Louis ribs https://pitbarrelcooker.com/blogs/food/award-winning-pork-ribs-1, avocado, tomato and corn salad/salsa https://www.food.com/recipe/avocado-tomato-corn-salad -salsa-161980, tater tots and, of course, a nice pinot (Obsidian The Bench 2019). We’ve been provided a marvelous soundtrack by Spotify. Seeking patriotic songs earlier, and being rewarded by a channel that gave us military bands playing rousing patriotic songs, which unfortunately ran out, we skipped forward to “USA Patriotic Hits”, which has doled out endless tunes in our roundhouse. Is this a great country or what? And you can dance to it. So while that plays, we’ll tend to our berries and shortcake, putting away the few leftover ribs for another day.
The sauce recipe is incredibly simple
Berry season is just beginning, so take advantage!
I hope you all had a great 4th. Today is the official “Independence Day holiday”, so we can do it all over again! Be sure to fly your flag. And remember you don’t have to wait for a holiday to do that. Show your neighbors whose side you’re on.
As I was cleaning up my kitchen from yesterday’s blowout (duck hung in my Pit Barrell cooker https://pitbarrelcooker.com/blogs/food/whole-duck, creamed fresh peas and pearl onions https://spicysouthernkitchen.com/creamed-peas-and-pearl-onions/, tater tots, and a nice pinot, not to mention all the beer required during the lead up; hey, it was hot out there!), I found myself in the corner by the ovens. That’s right by that bookshelf with 44 cookbooks, 4 binders of recipes, and the two black “lab books” into which I scribble my new concoctions, all nestled between my 2 big blue Chantal pots. There I realized there were a couple of other things I should have included, in my last post about my kitchen https://wordpress.com/post/theviewfromharbal.com/1682. I hope to remedy that omission with this post.
First, how about a picture of that bookshelf? It would take more than a thousand words to describe to you all the wonderfulness those books have helped me create. So here ‘tis.
Those aren’t my only references. Upstairs, I have 6 boxes of 3X5 recipe cards, one from my dear departed Aunt Dorie. In the downstairs kitchen, I have 36 more cookbooks and 3 more recipe boxes: one 4X6 double-wide of Aunt Dorie’s, a red metal box with my mom’s favorites, and a dark wooden one of mine with two things in it, a newspaper clipped recipe for shredded wheat bread and a 1994 receipt from Boersma travel for a trip to Seattle on which I seem to have written a bread recipe. And there’s more: 3 manila folders of loose clipped recipes and a 3-ring binder of mine in which I had pasted clipped recipes in the late 70s and early 80s. But my favorite find was a slim spiral notebook in which I’d recorded some of my homebrewing activities ’99-’01. I haven’t brewed anything since ’09 but might take a stab at mead again later this year, having obtained 12# of raw wildflower honey from my friend and Vicksburg classmate Dennis, fire chief turned apiarist. But back to the notebook, it wasn’t what was on the pages, but what fell out: a whole bunch of the labels I used to use for my beer. I’d lost the file I created to print them and feared that design was lost forever. But here it is!
Each batch would have a clear stick on with the beer’s name, O.G., F.G. (with these two data points you can calculate alcohol content), hops used, and date of bottling. That would all fit in that banner.
So, you see I believe in having references. Earlier this year I stumbled on some references I’ve found immensely helpful in my cooking. Eleven tables of different ingredient conversions, stuff you usually need to know in the middle of a recipe with the stove on. I keep them in a page protector stuck in the back of my Julia Child. You can find them on https://www.reluctantgourmet.com/cooking-ingredients-substitutions/
– a site with megatons of other good cooking info – and I’ve pasted them in below.
I practiced medicine for 40 years. I don’t know if I ever got it right. Upon retirement I happily shed the responsibilities of medical practice and haven’t looked back. My recent dive into my storage room looking for pictures for my 50th plus one high school reunion has found some additionals. In the early 80s, when I was still a young buck on faculty, my dear Aunt Dorie brought me a friend of hers with some kind of problem she thought I could sort out. She brought her camera and took pictures! So here’s a bit of what she saw, clearly persuasive, but I think I was much better once I went gray. The t-shirt I’m wearing was made up by a grateful patient. I saved him my usual grammar nazi chops.
