So I went, on Wednesdays after work in the late fall, adding myself to the ungodly crunch on the westbound orange line in the evenings (I really think if I lived out there myself, I’d spend every single metro ride carefully evaluating whether my apartment/amenities/neighborhood was worth being a sardine. Really.) and it was everything I could have wanted. The teacher, Saphira, was brilliant and able to describe each movement of the muscles we never use in life in at least half a dozen ways, so we could move like she did. The class of about 15 women ranged in age from about 25 to 60 and included women of different colors, backgrounds and ethnicities, all coming together to learn an art form that celebrates what we are already.

Having taken ballroom, a smattering of tap, swing and 10 years of ballet, I know it’s a rare dance indeed that is designed primarily to celebrate your body. Ballet is the biggest offender, but the others all do the same thing. All these western dances are about, fundamentally, using your body to celebrate or convey something else. Your body isn’t supposed to look like your body. (Balanchine apparently told his ballerinas he wanted to “see the bones.”) It’s supposed to be a moving sculpture or a paintbrush or a tree or a swan or something else your body, by its very nature, is not. Ballet tells you that the way you are is something to work against. Bellydance, to the contrary, looks at your body and says, look at all these arms and legs and boobs and butts and hips and bellies we’ve got to work with! Holy crap! Look at all this neat stuff they can do, just by being themselves!

It’s not really articulated in class that way, but it’s how the dance is. The difference in the dances is amazing.

The studio I go to teaches mostly classical Egyptian cabaret style, which I’ve heard involves more shimmying than, say, Turkish. It’s not a codified dance, like ballet is. Things are fuzzy and not particularly dogmatic. I’m also taking American Tribal Style, which is codified by the woman that made it up ~ 20 years ago in San Francisco.

I’m working out what I think about ATS versus Oriental, what they call the Egyptian style. ATS dancers wear long gypsy skirts and zils (finger cymbals), and Oriental dancers wear the hip scarves covered with coins or bells. Both dances are very sensual, as anything celebrating the female body is bound to be, but there’s a sexuality to Oriental that ATS replaces with a kind of Grrl Power. Oriental can be done solo or in a group of any size and lends itself to more audience interaction than ATS does (really, this would make more sense after perusing youtube, but I don’t have any particular favorite clips, so I didn’t bother linking to it). ATS is designed to be done in a troupe, with everyone taking a turn to be the leader. There’s a sense of a community of women to it, which is charming.

The thing is, though, that to say that Oriental dance is sexualized is not to say it’s slutty, cheap or whorish. It’s a powerful sexuality, and what I’m left wondering is whether Oriental is too sexual or ATS loses too much by deemphasizing sex. I suspect the answer is neither, that I like them both and don’t see any reason why not to do both.

I’ve been asked by a few people in the past few months why I’ve taken up bellydancing. “Is it really that good of a workout?” No. I suppose it could be a good workout, if you were good. If you’re learning to play basketball, you don’t get real sweaty right away, you spend a lot of time standing in place, bouncing a ball up and down. I don’t know enough yet for it to be a workout.

It’s an art form. I dance because I love it. Like some people write, paint, sculpt or sing. We don’t do it because it’ll make us thinner. We do it because we like that the world is beautiful and we want to be part of that.

Christmas and New Year’s were pretty good. Have had pleasant month off of blogging. Yes, I know. At this rate, I will never, ever be internet famous like Tila Tequila. I know. Maybe racy pictures would help. Hrm.

For the like, none of you who were on pins and needles about whether the plum pudding was edible, it was. It was actually pretty awesome. Taste and texture were exactly the way they’re supposed to be and it looked pretty great too. A lot better than scooping it out of the stupid plastic tub like you’re having Smart Balance for dessert. All the same, if you want a project next December or you’re sick of pumpkin pie and want to try a very traditional historical Christmas dessert, here’s the plum pudding recipe. This one I’m taking credit for.

The Librarian’s Pudding

• 1 cup molasses, dark, light, whatevs.
• 3/4 cup melted butter
• 1/2 cup warm milk
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 cup all-purpose flour, plus additional for tossing fruit
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1 pint dried fruit. (anything will work. raisins, prunes, apples, whatever. i had figs, dates and currants lying around, so i chopped the figs and dates and threw them all in.)
• 1 cup candied fruit. (i’m pretty afraid of the green shit in fruitcake, so i used cherries, because even candied, they kind of look like cherries. and i used candied ginger. not a fruit. also debatably authentic. but i like candied ginger, unlike most other things candied.)
• zest of an orange
• 1/4 c. brandy

Combine the molasses, butter, milk, and eggs in a mixing bowl. Next, sift the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and cloves in a large mixing bowl. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients in 3 additions. Toss candied fruit and raisins lightly with flour to prevent sinking and add to batter. Stir in brandy and orange zest.

Butter and flour a mediumish mixing bowl. You need one big enough to fit your whole pudding but small enough to fit in your big soup/pasta/monkey pot. Get a few feet of tin foil and crumple it into a ring for the mixing bowl to sit on in the pot, so it’s not sitting directly on the bottom. At first I sat it on an upended saucer in the pot, as suggested on Recipezaar, but when the water boils, the saucer will bounce, as the bubbles try to get out. Worrisome, as you don’t want the bowl to spill into the water. Bad scene. So, dump batter into mixing bowl, sit bowl on foil ring in pot, fill pot with water to about halfway up the bowl. Probably a good idea to cover the mixing bowl with some more foil, as loose as you like, just to keep the condensation from the lid from falling into the pudding.

Boil for about 3 hours, until toothpick/skewer/knife inserted into the middle comes out clean. It’s like a big, fatty, spiced muffin. Check on it periodically because the water level might drop. Let the pudding cool for 10-15 minutes, then upend and be duly impressed with your festive, glossy dome of awesome. Now wrap it in, uh, cheesecloth (Yeah, whatever. I used a clean tea towel. Pick something not plushy, that won’t get fuzzies on the food.) and park it in the fridge. Yes, just wrapped in a tea towel. It needs to set up and cure for at least a week. After a few days, open it up and have a look. Give it another shot to 1/4 c of brandy, and let it soak in. Then park it back in the fridge till Christmas. Nuke it before serving and top with hard sauce.

That’s it! The original recipe called for a cup of raisins and a pint of candied fruit, but I don’t really like candied fruit. But it’s kind of necessary, so I reversed the amounts. You could use citron, which is candied citrus peel. I don’t like it, so I just zested an orange. I would not recommend using a whole cup of candied ginger, even if you like it as much as I do. That would be kind of overboard. Of course, prunes would be appropriate in a plum pudding, but the English use of “plum” is like the old use of “pea” or “corn.” It’s kind of a synecdoche and means “stone and/or dried fruit.” So your plum pudding is still a traditional plum pudding if your plums are actually figs and currants and raisins.

My parents live in Tucson, and they have a bunch of citrus trees in their backyard. So my mother brought dozens of oranges and lemons. Obviously, we ate the oranges and not the lemons, so she sent them home with me. Unlike the thick-skinned ones in the grocery store, these guys won’t last forever. So I’ve been making lemon stuff. I’m not a cake person, I’ll always pick pie over cake. But this is no ordinary cake. I totally stole it wholesale from Ina Garten.

HOLY CRAP THIS CAKE IS AWESOME
Ingredients

* 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
* 1 cup plain whole-milk yogurt
* 1 1/3 cups sugar, divided
* 3 extra-large eggs
* 2 teaspoons grated lemon zest (2 lemons)
* 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
* 1/2 cup vegetable oil
* 1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

For the glaze:

* 1 cup confectioners’ sugar
* 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease an 8 1/2 by 4 1/4 by 2 1/2-inch loaf pan. Line the bottom with parchment paper. Grease and flour the pan.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt into 1 bowl. In another bowl, whisk together the yogurt, 1 cup sugar, the eggs, lemon zest, and vanilla. Slowly whisk the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. With a rubber spatula, fold the vegetable oil into the batter, making sure it’s all incorporated. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 50 minutes, or until a cake tester placed in the center of the loaf comes out clean.

Meanwhile, cook the 1/3 cup lemon juice and remaining 1/3 cup sugar in a small pan until the sugar dissolves and the mixture is clear. Set aside.

When the cake is done, allow it to cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Carefully place on a baking rack over a sheet pan. While the cake is still warm, pour the lemon-sugar mixture over the cake and allow it to soak in. Cool.

For the glaze, combine the confectioners’ sugar and lemon juice and pour over the cake.

And on Christmas day, we have plum pudding. I don’t know anyone else who eats plum pudding but us. It’s a very old English pudding, more like a fruitcake than an American pudding. My grandfather goes to the grocery store every year and spends about half an hour looking for it and quizzing the staff until he can find one. They’re sold pre-made, in 16-oz tubs like margarine. It’s very dense, so a serving is about a tablespoonful, and you just nuke it in the microwave for 15 seconds and put hard sauce on it. The hard sauce Grandma makes herself. I think it’s butter, sugar and brandy. There may something else in it, but not much.

Last year, I toyed with the idea of making my own plum pudding, but the recipes I found seemed to all say you have to start weeks or months before Christmas and boil the pudding, then pour brandy on it every week till Christmas. Uhm, no. I don’t have that kind of time.

Today I looked again. Basically, I look at the one in the tub every year, and it’s good, and I like it and all, but I’ve never had anything else. Can I do better than that? No one eats English puddings anymore, so I don’t have a frame of reference for the category, just this one Christmas pudding.

I’m going to slap some recipes down here that I’m toying with. Obviously, I’m big on using stuff I can find, stuff I already own, and stuff that’s cheap. So we’re looking at butter rather than suet, not a whole lot of prunes, no mace (spices are expensive and mace isn’t something I use for anything, ever.)

What they all have in common is that there’s flour and butter and a lot of eggs, so it’s kind of like a quickbread but with more fat and protein, but unlike a quickbread, you boil or steam it. For hours. Brits are weird. This project I think is going to go down two Sundays from now. Of course, results to be posted here.

Mom’s suggested recipe:

Boston Cooking-School Cookbook by Fannie Merritt Farmer (1896)

 ENGLISH PLUM PUDDING

1/2 lb. stale bread crumbs.
1 cup scalded milk.
1/4 lb. sugar.
4 eggs.
1/2 lb. raisins, seeded, cut in pieces, and floured.
1/4 lb. currants.
1/4 lb.finely chopped figs.
2 oz. finely cut citron.
1/2 lb. suet.
1/4 cup wine and brandy mixed.
1/2 grated nutmeg.
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon.
1/3 teaspoon clove.
1/3 teaspoon mace.

Soak bread crumbs in milk, let stand until cool, add sugar, beaten yolks of eggs, raisins, currants, figs, and citron; chop suet, and cream by using the hand; combine mixtures, then add wine, brandy, nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, mace, and whites of eggs beaten stiff.  Turn into buttered mould, cover, and steam six hours.

This one from the food network looks simpler.

Ingredients

Directions

1. Grease two large pudding basins.
2. Bring two large saucepans of water to the boil with a trivet or rack in the bottom of each.
3. (I actually use two old pottery saucers in the bottom of mine) Mix all dry ingredients together.
4. Rub butter into dry ingredients with your fingertips, add prepared fruit and grated carrot.
5. Mix egg, milk, stout, brandy and rinds together.
6. Mix the moist and dry ingredients together.
7. (I find this easier to do with my hands).
8. Place mixture in basins, allowing a little room at the top of the basins for the puddings to swell.
9. Cover with greasproof paper, then two thicknesses of aluminum foil.
10. Tie securely with string.
11. Place the puddings into the prepared saucepans– water should reach halfway up them– and boil steadily for 5 hours.
12. As the water boils away replace with more boiling water.
13. On the day the pudding is to be served, boil for 1 hour mmore.
14. Serve with cream, icecream, custard or brandy sauce (or all of these!).

I kind of like this idea, boiled in parchment paper in a saucepan. Will have to come up with a “pudding basin.” No idea what that is. I have a little mixing bowl. Wonder if that’d work…

I also like the grated carrot idea.

It’s an oratorio, which I hadn’t really known. An oratorio is a sort of cheap, quick and dirty opera. You get the singing and the music and the plot, sort of, without the pretense of acting, costumes or sets. So they just sing the story at you. It comes in parts, with a soprano, alto, tenor and baritone, and there’s a chorus, obviously, singing the chorus bits you’d have an ensemble singing in a play/opera/musical. Like an opera, the solo bits come in arias, which are soaring and more musical and you probably can’t figure out what the words are, and recitatives, where the singing is a vehicle for them telling you words and moving the story along. The music and lyrics take reverse roles in aria v. recitative. (It’s Italian, in case you’re curious- “ray-chee-tah-TEEVE.”) And it’s kind of the story of Christ, from Isaiah (“Wonderful Counselor, Almighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,” etc) clear through Easter and the Pentecost.

Now, the interesting bits are really the historical aspects of it. 1) While it seems terribly appropriate to sing the Messiah in a baroque cathedral, as it happens, that never occurred in the time of Handel. when he wrote it, opera was the, ah, soap opera, we would say, of the day. It was no-account, lowlife trash. Handel was consider an even more cheap and dirty composer for writing oratorios, which were even cheaper and trashier than operas. So, taking the life of Christ and turning it into an oratorio was considered pretty gross. Maybe like this.

It was originally performed someplace in the west of England or maybe Dublin, I forgot, but he had a hell of a time getting a theater in London to do it and it didn’t become famous or acclaimed or not creepy until after he died. He wrote the music in like 3 wks, which is still unbelievable, and I’m sure some would say divinely inspired, which is pretty hilarious considering the time period. Someone else wrote the words. You didn’t have the librettist and the composer being the same dude very much. The words came first.

2) The words are pretty great. It’s interesting from a linguistic and musical perspective which words in the libretto he chooses to linger on and emphasize with repetition or bells and whistles. And the distinctions between the focus of church then and church now are really neat. You can tell because he uses words you never hear in church now. He talks about the actual consumption of the dead flesh of Christ, worm-infested and everything. There are snakes and blood and gore and fire and purification and darkness and shadows of death and tongues and spitting and body parts. That’s not how church is now. We don’t talk about body parts or the creepiness of communion or forgiveness-as-violence or death or shadows or anything. It’s not visceral anymore. It’s all huggy and lovey and forgivey.

The free underpants aren’t all of them. You can’t get the lacy, pink leopard boyshorts-hip huggy whatevers. Only a few more boring kinds, and only in light pink, white, beige or black. But, well, they’re underpants you didn’t have before. And they’re free.

Normally I don’t spring for the bra. Just the underpants, ma’am, like the model on the card. (Why isn’t she wearing a bra? If I have these specific free underpants, I won’t need one? Like the Matrix?) But yesterday, I had a few minutes, so I looked around.

They hide the comfortable ones. They always do. Because they’re unsexy, I suppose. Also, sort of cheaper. There’s a body by Vicky full coverage microfiber one that’s regularly $36 and the same thing in cotton for $22. I like both of these quite a bit, and $10 off of $22 is about what I’m willing to pay for a garment no one ever sees, practically speaking. Yesterday, however, I had a hard time finding the ones I wanted, hidden in a drawer in the back. I got distracted by the ipex ones prominently displayed in the front. “On Sale! $19! From, like, France!!” “Okay, fine. For $19 I’ll try it on and see.” So I did. I do this periodically at Vicky’s and the experience never fails to make me feel inadequate and unfeminine.

Problems Inherent in Vicky’s Stores.

1) Nearly all your bras are lined or padded. In addition to being uncomfortable for any length of time (Boys, imagine keeping your junk in a styrofoam cup all day. It’s not particularly awful, but you never forget that your junk is sitting in a styrofoam cup. Also, when you, say, turn to the right, the cup stays and the junk moves. You can either be more uncomfortable and perhaps obviously misaligned or you can awkwardly and probably publicly reinsert yourself into your storage device. No good.) the bras also are displayed nested- boob cup in a boob cup in a boob cup. You cannot look at the tags to see what size they are without messing up the entire table. Vicky, no one wants this. Not me, not you, not the poor girls you pay minimum wage to realign the preformed bras.

2) Lace? Really? For all the cash you spend on your kind of pretty, kind of hot, kind of creepy, but deeply fetishistic and weird fashion show every year, why have you not come up with lace that does not itch? Why would you ever, ever, make a garment that goes against the skin out of itchy lace? Should I get one to wear under my burlap sack I layer over a hair shirt???

3) Some of these ipex things close in the back like a bikini top. A pokey thing goes into a loopy thing. No hooks, like a regular bra. Unlike a bikini, however, these were utterly impossible for me to do behind my own back. Getting it off was worse. Were these invented by a man who hates women? A woman who, Neolike, has transcended the need for bras and feels no compunction to make them do what they’re supposed to do?

4) Apart from the on sale ones, your bras retail for $30-$45, more or less. The vast majority of them are impossible to wear comfortably for more than 15 minutes. I’m willing to acknowledge that underthings, and, uh, shoes, meant to be taken off with alacrity have a place in the retail world and many closets. So why do they cost so much?

I can’t even express how angry I am about this injustice. I can only hope Congress does its homework and passes a law to keep private health insurers from discriminating on the basis of sex, because that’s all we can do.

I have to date kept my mouth the hell shut about how postfeminism is horseshit because feminism isn’t over. This is exactly the concrete example that shows that we haven’t won yet. This country does not treat women equally to men. We only won the easy battles. The hard ones we haven’t touched yet. I think it speaks to a complacency, and I don’t know on whose part, that just now??? In the past few months??? someone has done the homework to find out that we are getting systematically fucked by health insurance companies. 

The worst thing about it is that it’s just another story in a litany of stories (here I’m thinking about John McCain’s air quotes around women’s health) that make me wonder if I’ve been lied to my entire life about how I could be successful, do whatever I set my mind to, or even be taken seriously. My health is of so much less importance than that of John McCain and his friends that it doesn’t even merit serious discussion. And, because I could bear children, and have a physiology made more complicated by that simple fact, I would have to pay 30-50% more for my individual health insurance than would a man.

I think it’s fascinating because it’s not just about pigs turning around in circles, is it? if the animals get more space, you can’t have as many in each building. So you’d need more buildings. Or just raise fewer animals. Fewer animals means less waste. Per building, anyway. This could be good, since one of the most serious problems with industrialized agriculture is that it produces a lot of shit. Big ag states like California have laws in place about how to deal with all the shit, reservoirs and setbacks and vegetative barriers and things, but sometimes rivers still get contaminated, and the nitrogen in the chickenshit (chickenshit is the worst, pigshit and cowshit have lower concentrations of nitrogen, but still, there’s a reason you don’t put cow pies in your fish tanks) kills the fish. Animal waste and nitrogen-derived fertilizers are causing a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico already. Clearly, this is runoff from big ag states around the MIssissippi River, not California, but I can see why California doesn’t want to do the same thing in the Pacific.

Anyway, apart from environmental concerns, Prop 2 has made allies out of vegans and animal rights people of varying stripes in the name of poor helpless animals. Down with animal cruelty, etc. I’m not in love with CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations- the factory farms where the animals are in tiny boxes and can’t turn around) myself, but my problems are environmental. I want to see American farming break free of petrochemical fertilizers. I agree with most of Michael Pollan’s ideas about farms raising crops and livestock and using the chickenshit and cow pies to fertilize the grains, rather than fertilizing the grains with fertilizers derived by Monsanto from Middle Eastern oil. This farming model would also stop the contamination of rivers and the Gulf of Mexico, because the plants would be absorbing the nitrogen from the poop. Also, with this farming model, the cows would get to eat grass, not grain, which is what cows are supposed to eat. Cows didn’t evolve eating corn or wheat. They graze. On grass. This grass would be fertilized by cow poop, not petrochemical fertilizer. (Is the pattern beginning to emerge?) So then, we could use the corn and wheat we can grow to feed the starving people of the world, who are suffering from a global food shortage made even worse by the tanking world economy.

My other beef (lol. I know. I’m hilarious.) with industrialized agriculture is that we’re breeding super strains of bacteria. When we keep so many animals in such close quarters, to keep them from getting sick and/or getting us sick, we have to shoot them up with a lot of pretty hardcore antibiotics. As we know from our annoying doctors who refuse to give us penicillin whenever we want it, overuse of antibiotics just kills nearly all the bacteria, leaving the several very strong ones alive to breed. So we need stronger and stronger antibiotics, both for us and for animals. This is not a great cycle to get into. These are my problems with industrialized agriculture. Organic farming is not a whole hell of a lot better. Because they can’t give the animals antibiotics, organic farmers have to wear space suits in the barns to prevent infection. They have to be very, very vigilant. The cows still poop the same, and they can still be kept in the same little pens, and they still get fed grain. The grain just must not have been fertilized with petrochemical fertilizers. My problem with organic people is that I don’t think organic farming is enough of an improvement over the regular kind to justify the level of pretension and self-righteousness I see in people who only eat organic food.

Animal rights weirdos never talk about what I consider the actual problems with factory farms. They just point to the animals and say, OH LOOK HOW SAD THEY ARE. THEY CAN’T SIT DOWN. A friend of mine articulated the fallacy at play here very well- these people are making the assumption that animals are like people. They’re not. Cows are more content at lower temperatures than people are- like 20 and 30 degrees Farenheit. Why are we imposing our own views on animals that we have no reason to think would agree with us about what they want? I think the animal rights weirdos have the right idea here, but as usual, I disagree with their reasoning.

The farming industry, of course, opposes Prop 2. It would cut into their bottom lines. Their arguments aren’t half bad. One is that Prop 2 would drive the entire California livestock industry into Nevada, where there’s no such law. While I have my doubts that this one provision would bring on the demise of all animal husbandry in California, I see how it could take a sizeable chunk out of the industry. That would not solve any of the animal rights activists’ problems, since the animals would still be mistreated and the environmental problems would still be present, they would just be present somewhere else. Not good.  On the oher hand, I’ve heard that many? most? California factory farms have big enough pens to conform to this law already, and it would just force the others into the 21st century. (Thank you, Gypsy.) Maybe that’s true.

From what I can tell, Prop 2 opponents’ other argument, aside from the economic hit argument, also hinges on the idea that California would lose its livestock operations to Nevada and Mexico. The idea is that California already has pretty strict laws about food safety. Stricter than those in surrounding areas. So the egg industry, especially, would go to a more loosely-regulated area and Californians would be more likely to see eggs and meats in the market that might be contaminated with salmonella. Maybe they’re also worried that more chickens cooped (lol again. I kill myself.) up in Mexico might bring on the next big catastrophic bird flu. I agree, opponents. I am scared to death of the bird flu as well.

All the more reason to do one’s homework, I suppose. The ballot language doesn’t come close to fleshing out the issue. If I were voting in California, and I know by now I sound like I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, but I would do more homework. I would want to know whether Gypsy is right. Are most of the farms conforming already? If so, the state doesn’t stand to lose much of the industry, and the opposing arguments I’ve dredged up seem kind of moot. If, however, it looks pretty likely that a lot of the farms would just be displaced to more loosely-regulated states and Mexico, I might vote against it. There would be the same numbers of confined animals and all the same problems, with even fewer laws to protect them and us. Worrisome.

The other ballot initiative I don’t get to vote on but think is interesting is the Maryland slot machine clusterfuck. May post about that in the next few days.

The version I’m slapping below is essentially the same, but there isn’t a scale in the produce section at the market around the block, so I’m giving the veggies by number, not weight. Also, I used sour cream rather than cream. I looked at the label and learned today that sour cream is not made of cream. It’s skim milk, some cream and active cultures. The light one subs in a modified cornstarch (do not want) for the cream. You’re trading fat calories for carb calories. I’ll take the regular, thx.

Squash Soup.

• 3 small unpeeled butternut squashes, halved and seeded
• 3 smallish unpeeled onions
• 1 small head of garlic
• olive oil for slathering
• dried thyme to taste
• 2 14 1/2 ounce cans chicken broth
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• pepper

1. Cut 1/4 inch off the tops of the onions and garlic bulb. Cut a little off the bottom of the onions so they sit up and don’t roll around.
2. Slather some olive oil on the cut side of the squashes, sprinkle with salt. Line a cookie sheet with tin foil and place the squashes, onions and garlic on it.
3. Roast the veggies on 350 for 1 1/2- 2 hrs, until tender.
4. Uncover and let stand until room temperature.
5. Scoop the squash out, unwrap the onions and garlic cloves.
6. Buzz the veggies in the blender in two batches, one with each can of chicken broth, and the sour cream.
7. Add salt, pepper, thyme to taste, heat in pot until it’s hot like soup.

I like this kind of stuff because it’s cheap, first of all. The squash was 89¢ a pound. Also, look at it. It’s orange. It’s orange because it’s full of carotenoids and phytohealthies. Also, it’s in season. This is good because a)it probably didn’t have to travel all the way across the country to get to your store, which is better for the earth, b)the less the food travels, the longer it can ripen before it’s picked, which gives it more time to make phytohealthies for you, and c)stuff that is in season is more plentiful and consequently cheaper. Everybody wins!

A friend of mine asked about wealth redistribution. Obama and Biden have been talking about it and they’re wigging a lot of people out. Largely because most people have no idea what they mean by this. People who talk about wealth redistribution always bring up the estate tax. It’s a nice, tangible thing to talk about that actually exists and isn’t some nebulous plan than makes us all worry about Bolsheviks taking over. So, would Obama’s estate tax proposal actually redistribute wealth? Yes, in the sense that any tax redistributes wealth, but the tax rate he proposes is 10% LOWER than the rate that had been in place for over a decade before Congress in 2001 passed a sunset law forcing itself to do something about the tax in the next 10 years.

Also, the old tax gave everyone $1 million tax-free. So if you kicked it in 1999 and between your money, house, car, stocks, furniture, vintage Barbies and Star Wars lunchbox, you possessed $1,100,000 worth of stuff, the federal government would only tax you on $100,000. Not the whole thing. The exemption under the 2001 law (EGTRRA) has been rising each year. Its highest level will be $3.5 million in 2009. This is the number Obama proposes for the estate tax exemption to be permanently. (I did as well. In May. ::flips hair::)

The tax rate pre-2001 was also 55%. So, on your $100,000 that’s taxable if you died in 1999 with $1,100,000, you’d owe $55,000 in tax. This is what they mean when they say “wealth redistribution.” People who die loaded and don’t plan well would get taxed at a crazy high rate and lose over half their wealth, so their kids and grandkids, ad infinitum, would not be idly rich. When the tax was invented, that was a large part of the ploy- to prevent a class of idle rich in America like there was (is?) in England. I don’t have an opinion on how well this worked, because we can’t know if, in an alternate universe where there was never an estate tax here, there would have been more idle rich people. I think it’s a nonsensical inquiry. Obama’s proposed tax rate is 45%, which, while less than half, is still pretty punishing.

The salient point is, though, that virtually no one pays this tax. No one. Next to no one dies with that much money. And the ones that do hired a lawyer and had them write a will and come up with a plan. You can give everyone you want $12,000 every year as long as you want. Tax-free. This is one of the most obvious ways to get money out of your estate, which is the name of the game. If there’s not enough in your estate when you die, you don’t get taxed. So really, the only people who have to pay estate taxes are both rich and stupid. This is not a particularly sympathetic bunch. Of course, estate tax opponents like to trot out their small businesspeople and say, holy crap! Joe the Plumber’s kids will have to liquidate the business to pay the taxes and won’t be able to carry on the family business! Again, these people are wrong. Small businesspeople who don’t have lawyers to organize their businesses, write their wills and help them with business planning are idiots. The way to avoid the tax, which everyone with any sense does, is to transfer shares of the business to the next generation over time, so then they gradually get control and no one dies owning the whole show.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that the tax encourages charitable giving. Anything you bequeath to charity on your death will be untaxed.

So, should we redistribute wealth? Noting that the tax doesn’t really do that very well and the Obama tax would do it even less?

I think so. DP argues that if he earns millions of dollars fair and square, he should get to keep them. I told him he’d be dead. You can’t own stuff when you’re dead. It’s not possible. It’s a neat feature of old English property law that we’re allowed to distribute our stuff largely as we choose when we die. Not an innate feature of the stuff we own. It’s a societal construct.

My father was skeptical about this whole idea, but was convinced by Bill Gates, who admits that it’s the American system that allowed him to make the money he’s made. Without the business opportunities, tax structure, venture capital and other features of American capitalism, Bill wouldn’t be where he is. It’s a system that enables some and doesn’t do favors for some others. He seems to think maybe he owes some of his success to the country he succeeded in, and didn’t do it all completely on his own. My father thinks this makes a lot of sense, and I have to agree.

1) Black Bean S00p.

-3 cans of black beans.

-6 cups of broth. Chicken, beef, veggie, whatever.

-1 can of tomatoes.

-4 strips of bacon

-1 onion

-2 celery stalks

-1 carrot

-2 jalapenos

-5-6 cloves of garlic

-1 T chili powder

-1 T cumin

-bay leaf

-however much black pepper you feel is appropriate.

* Throw bacon into soup pot, cook till crispy, remove and eat!

* Dice onion, carrot, celery and throw in. Then garlic and jalapenos (I use 2 b/c I like it spicy), since they cook quicker.

*Let it rip for like 10 minutes, till the vegibles are tender, then throw in spices and stir around for a minute so it smells cuminy, then throw in beans, tomatoes and broth, stir and simmer for like half an hour.

::EDIT:: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, TAKE OUT THE BAY LEAF. IT’S NOT FOOD. DON’T EAT IT.

Slaw I Made Up.

So I went to Giant and got a head of red cabbage. I brought it home and chopped it up so it looked kind of like slaw shapes, and there wasn’t any more space in the bowl, so I didn’t use carrots or anything else like I was originally thinking. The dressing I made in a separate bowl. I used a ginger nubbin about the size of my big toe, as many cashews as I could grab out of the container, soy sauce, rice vinegar and two bloops of canola oil (you know it makes that noise when it comes out and you measure it that way too) and like a tablespoon of honey? The soy sauce and the vinegar I kind of poured, stirred, tasted and fiddled with. Chop the nuts, peel the ginger and mince it as small as you can reasonably manage. Throw in, stir, dump on cabbage and mix with your hands.

From what I can tell, no white people north of Winston-Salem ever make collard greens except for me and my bff. (We have other things in common. We’ve been friends since before we both started cooking greens at home.) This is silly. Collards are tasty. They just look daunting when you see a bunch of giant plasticky leaves in the produce section. But people, they’re cheap. And they’re healthy. And they’re easy. So grab a bunch, pay your dollar and take a chance.

Boardwalk Fries Collard Greens.

Deep breath. They’re just leaves. They can’t hurt you. Get a big knife and a cutting board and prepare for the amputation. First, rinse your leaves well. Then take them one at a time and cut along either side of the big stem in the middle, so you’ve got two big leaf halves and a sad leafless stem. The stem is not food. Throw it away. Keep the leaves. Repeat the the rest. Slice the leaves into like inch-wide strips or so. Whatever. You can cut them in hearts if you like, I don’t care.

Now, the pot. Again, four strips of bacon go in first. Cut them with kitchen scissors into little pieces and brown them. Then add 2-4 cups of broth, any kind. Be careful not to start a grease fire with hot grease and cold broth. Throw in greens. Bring to a boil, then simmer for like 20 minutes. They’ll cook down. You don’t need oodles of liquid. When they’re tender, take them out and serve with loads of malt vinegar and some more salt. Like boardwalk fries. It’s nice when food gets better the more malt vinegar you put on it.