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.
I doubt you’ll be hearing this on the news. A like-minded and most cherished colleague of mine brought this to my attention. A paper in Vaccines (1) was retracted (2,3) by the Journal today after they’d accepted the June 2nd submission on June 21st. The authors did not agree (4). Three docs from Poland, Germany and the Netherlands had the audacity to crunch numbers on efficacy and side effects of COVID vaccination. They didn’t do any research of their own, relying on numbers from published studies and national databases. They did tip their hand from the beginning, citing the flimsy safety consideration on which these vaccines were launched. So, they stepped up to do a little of their own post-market surveillance. Step one was to see how wide a net we actually needed to cast. A standard vaccinology stat is “number needed to vaccinate” (NNTV) determined from a ratio of bad outcomes in the “treated” (vaccinated) group compared to those not treated (unvaccinated). Numbers exist for all that, particularly from a million strong group in Israel. Determining vaccination effects was challenging, as so few of the control group got infected (<3% after 6 weeks). The NNTV 486 2-3 weeks after the first dose and 117 after the second dose. Death was very uncommon, 0.2% among vaccinated, 0.5% among unvaccinated. The NNTV to prevent one death was calculated as 16,667.
What about the flip side? The authors tapped adverse event reports databases. The chose to focus on the Dutch side effects register. As you can see in the bar graph of individual safety case reports (ISCR) in various European countries, Dutch reports far outstripped the rest of the EU.
The Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Centre Lareb identifies risks associated with the use of medicines in daily practice and is the Knowledge Centre for adverse drugs reactions (ADRs).
Lareb collects 20.000 to 25.000 reports of adverse drug reactions yearly. Analysis of reports lead to signals about adverse drug reactions. These signals are reported to and reviewed by the Dutch Medicines Evaluation Board (MEB). Lareb has been in place for decades, is well known among patients and physicians alike. One commentator on the Vaccines paper chided that an adverse event or death occurring after a vaccination is no proof the vaccination caused the event or death. But wasn’t that just what we the unwashed were saying about all those “COVID deaths” by gunshot, cancer, heart attack, etc.? Regardless, our authors found that there were about 16 cases of adverse reactions after 100,000 vaccinations, with 4 deaths. Now crunch ‘em, Danno. Assuming NNTV of 16,000, vaccinating 100,000 prevents 6 deaths from COVID. However, after 100,000 vaccinations, 4 die, and not from COVID. Which leads to their incendiary conclusion, for very 3 deaths from COVID we prevent by vaccination, we incur 2 deaths as a consequence. They go on to state that with smaller NNTVs, the risk benefit ratio expands to as much as 1:8, although they then say (without cited numbers for backup), that “real life data also support ratios as high as 2:1, i.e., twice as high a risk of death from the vaccination compared to COVID, within 95% confidence limit.
Their discussion includes a paragraph describing several other molecular horror stories from vaccines. An article my missus just found probe this subject in depth (4).
Where’s Nancy Reagan when we need her?
But don’t worry, vaxxers. Meatloaf has a theme song all ready for you.
2. Office, V.E. Expression of Concern: Walach et al. The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations—We Should Rethink the Policy. Vaccines 2021, 9, 693. Vaccines2021, 9, 705. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines9070705
3. Vaccines Editorial Office. Retraction: Walach et al. The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations—We Should Rethink the Policy. Vaccines 2021, 9, 693. Vaccines2021, 9, 729. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines9070729
5. Seneff S, Nigh G. Worse Than the Disease? Reviewing Some Possible Unintended Consequences of the mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19. Vaccine Theory Prac & Res 2021, 2, 38-79. https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/23
A few of what’s left of the 169 who graduated from Vicksburg High June 1970 will gather 3 weeks from tomorrow at Indian Run Golf Club in Scotts for the 50th reunion that COVID robbed us of last year. I’ve asked my class president and reunion committee chairman Forrest to include this song in the festivities. It meant a lot to some of back then. I wanted to include it in an e-mail announcing this month’s Zoom meet up. After all, our time has come. One YouTube containing the long (11:04) version was put together by a Vietnam vet, who provided a pastiche of iconic pictures from the 60s for the song to play over. Anyone feeling a little nostalgic for the 60s should give this a look and listen.
I had the best mother-in-law. Ruth Olsen was an Ann Arbor girl, raised by an old Norwegian guy who talked funny and bound books for all the UofM eggheads needing to publish their theses. She attended Ann Arbor High and graduated with no one famous, although my dear colleague George Thompson may have been close, but didn’t know her. Mother Gladys, from Iowa farm stock and sharing a birthdate with my wife, kept the family of 3 in line. Ruth went to Dental Hygienists school at U of M and there met husky, handsome Clutch Clark from Pittsburgh, destined for great things in Orthopedics. They eloped and went to a Michigan hockey game to celebrate. First son Bob was born at U Hospital but the greener pastures of Akron City Hospital took them to the Buckeye state where they defiantly proclaimed their maize and blue origins for the duration. A boy, Kathy, and another boy added to the domestic bliss on Silver Lake, with the company of one then two St. Bernards and a Siamese named Howard Cosell adding on. Kids excelled at sports, especially the girl. Clutch contracted pancreatic cancer and died tragically young at 48. Kids went away to school as Ruth faced a life alone. A brief stab at real estate didn’t pan out and she finally moved back to Ann Arbor where she could hang with her old school chums. With Kathy close by, they became closer. I got to enjoy exchanging zingers with her. Then an unexplained downturn in her physical capacities plus a little cough triggered an x-ray which found a big goombah. She was dead in 6 months, just as we were reentering our magnificently refurbished house, which her eyes for style would have surely appreciated. Her ashes sit next to Clutch’s on our bedroom bookshelf and I shall always revere them. Thank you Ruth for giving my dear wife life and nurturing her into the beautiful young woman I was so fortunate to snag. The older she gets, the more she looks like you. And that’s not a bad thing.
See Ruth, youngest son Jim, and first grandchild Orion early ’05. She’d be dead before the end of the year. Orion is a sophomore at U.C. Santa Cruz
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