Trauma and taxes

But for the massive brain trauma my father suffered due to land mine shrapnel removing a piece of his brain and paralyzing half of his body back in November 1951, he would have been ninety-seven this week. He was barely a statistic, a blip on the documentation of an already-forgotten war, but the injuries he received as a young twenty-four year old who had just graduated from college and was hoping to go to medical school reframed the structure and trajectory of his remaining fifty-four years when, after decades of anti-convulsant drugs and a row of pills he took daily, and a weakened body wracked by atrophy and compensation, he succumbed to sepsis, which quickly moved through his body and ended his remarkable and tragic life, in which he met and married my mom, had their first two boys – honeymoon babies – Francis and Howard, who died after a premature birth, went on to have eight more children, all of whom are alive and well, went to law school and became a lawyer for the marginalized and disenfranchised, all the while living with a debilitating war injury to which many others would have succumbed, either physically or mentally.

And I share this personal information because, as wars rage around the world and our tax dollars support various sides and causes, one of the first things we do is forget that every single person involved in a war, whether on your side or not, carries with them generational trauma that affects an enormous number of people. Here we are, seventy-five years after one land mine exploded and injured my father, and I and my siblings still live with his scarred legacy of volatile mood swings, erratic emotions, and very little mental capacity for reflection and contemplation. And remember, he was just one young officer on patrol in Yanggu Province. What happens to the people of this current war in Gaza whose whole world is destroyed in front of them? When we care about people, empathize as fellow humans who live and grow in a community of friends and family, we remember their smiles, their passions and dreams, the things that make them human. But, when foreign policy decisions and irreparable differences between governments and states turn these people, who probably celebrate their children’s birthdays just as we do, into enemies, none of those human attributes and frailties matter. Instead, filtered through language and images that dehumanize the side that is on the receiving end of America’s bombs and bullets and logistics and supplies, we call an entire people fundamentalists, extremists or terrorists, forgetting that until bombs dropped on them, they were boys and girls who played with imaginary friends and laughed and played together.

Every victim of Hamas’s attacks on Israel last year has been remembered for what they brought to this life – the joy and hope of a generation. They were school kids and grandparents, fathers and university students, young lovers and doctors, and all of them are dead. The loss of each person should be mourned and their lives remembered. But how is it that in these United States it is hard to find a story of a child in Gaza who was killed by a bomb or the weight of a concrete building collapsing on her, and learn of her humanity, her dreams, her hopes? And why is it that if I, as a US taxpayer, disagree with how my government is allocating its resources and which states it supports, I run the risk of being labeled antisemitic? Is it not possible to disagree with a state’s actions and policies and activities and not hate, demonize, or dehumanize the citizens and civilians of that state? Throughout my life I have protested and criticized my government, and still I call myself a deeply patriotic American who loves his country. I should be able to criticize what our government is doing in Israel in the same way – argue about what our tax dollars are supporting, and not be labeled a lover of terrorists, or an anti-Semite. And I am not passing myself off as a Middle East expert, but I have a right and obligation as a concerned US citizen to engage in discussion about what we support with our taxes. And it feels like the lobby that argues on behalf of US support for sending weapons to Israel is as focused as the NRA – it brooks no dissent and has an influence that goes well beyond what it should.

I support Israel’s right to defend itself, and if the US continues to support Israel’s Iron Dome defense network, I will gladly see my tax dollars flowing in that direction. But Israel is no longer merely defending itself, and its continuous bombardment and destruction of Gaza in the past year has now spread to Lebanon and beyond. In one year, Israel has killed nearly fifty thousand Palestinians – which is as many deaths as the US suffered during the entire Vietnam War, and if I raise my voice in opposition to this, someone may very well reduce it to a pat slogan and say that I hate Jews. No, I resist that label because I don’t hate Jews or want to see the destruction of Israel, but I also do not want my tax dollars paying for weapons that kill civilians, and the overwhelming majority of people killed in Palestine are civilians – the very moms and dads and kids and grandparents who are the hope of the next generation. I wrote about my father because I wanted to point out how much trauma one person suffers over the life of an injury. What happens to the Palestinian people, who are facing a relentless orchestrated effort to destroy them? What will happen to their trauma and how will it ever heal?

For the past year, the US has paid for and provided an endless supply of bombs and bullets being used by Israel to annihilate the Palestinians living in Gaza, and one small thing Americans can do is allow for a space where we can discuss this, and be able to criticize our government – or Israel’s – and not be accused of hating Israelis or Jews. We have a right and obligation to argue about our taxes and foreign policy – it’s about as American as buying a bagel in New York or dipping a warm piece of torn bread into an olive oil-and-garlic-laden hummus. Peace.

My Garden in December

The snow has stopped falling and the brilliant blue sky is washed clean.  Enormous mounds of snow line the streets, proof of our industrious snow-blowing and shoveling.  My garden is buried beneath the snow, the last of the brussels sprouts, beets, and leeks frozen 'til spring.
My wife and I recently spent two weeks in Turkey and Greece, our first vacation in the eastern Mediterranean.  We loved the hamsi in Istanbul, the pomegranate syrup in Sirinci, Turkey, and the kebaps in Athens.  But, what really struck me was a simple breakfast treat at our hotel in Athens, a small, clear glass filled with yogurt, honey, and pistachios. I was reminded that all food, when made with good ingredients, nourishes and sustains.  The quality of the ingredients was outstanding, and the honey especially captured the intensity of the dry, fragrant shrublands known in the Mediterranean as garrigue.  Just as great wine comes from stressed vines, it seems that great honey also comes from the stressed heather, thyme and other plants of the region.  And where do the cows that make such yogurt graze?  The few we saw were wandering  through the same rocky terrain that obviously yielded much (including olive oil) despite its inhospitable appearance. 
Foods that capture and embody the particulars of place leave a lasting memory, and remind us that what we eat is as rich with history and culture as the beautiful sights we travel to see.

Northern cooking

For the past six years we’ve rented a cabin on Burntside Lake in northern Minnesota, just a few miles outside of Ely. The evenings are usually cool and my wife likes to oven roast vegetables to warm up the tiny kitchen and eating area. We brought with us a big bag of garden tomatoes, beets, swiss chard, and lots of herbs. We stopped at the St. Paul farmers market and loaded the car even further with more fresh vegetables.

We start fishing off the small dock as soon as we arrive, and on Monday I made chowder using fresh corn, potatoes, and all the fish we caught on the first two days. I started by making a rich fish stock, the perfect use for all the pan fish that aren’t big enough to filet. Then, in a heavy-bottomed pot I sautéed a few onions, a tomato, a few sprigs of thyme, bay leaf, and a few slices of cut-up bacon (we’ve been eating so much home-cured pancetta this year that I found the bacon too smoky for the chowder.) I started ladling fish stock into the pot, and after a quart or more of stock had boiled down to a few cups I added a several cubed potatoes and let them cook at a gentle simmer. Then I turned the burner off and fished a little more. Before dinner I shucked four or five ears of corn and cut the kernels off the cobs. The corn made the liquid almost disappear, but I poured in a cup of half & half and colored it with a small mound of chopped tarragon. A few stirs later the chowder was ready for the table.

Monday's dinner began with a plate of brussels sprouts sautéed in a little butter and bacon fat. With nothing else except a heavy shake of salt and pepper, the little cabbages – browned on the sides, with a few bits of bacon debris lodged in the outer leaves and still a brilliant, glistening green – looked and tasted beautiful.

My wife’s been slow roasting beets, eggplant, and tomato slices in the oven and reducing to rich caramelized bites the vine-ripened produce of our garden and this season, distilling the abundance of August at 250°F.

Last night's dinner started with big hunks of smallmouth bass filets caught by my son, sautéed in butter after a quick dredging in pepper-rich flour. One plate in the middle of the table for the five of us, forks attacking the tender, flaky flesh. A light Selbach Riesling sparkled in the rays of sunlight pouring through the ragged clouds, and the table danced with its refracted light.

Plates of vegetables came next – the beets dressed in a little rice wine vinegar and paired with a few sweet and tart cherry tomatoes, drained of their water, holding only flavor. More tomatoes, each with a leaf of basil on top, a salute to unadorned food. And hefty slices of eggplant shrunk to not-yet-jerky-like consistency, still meaty enough mash with molars, still carrying traces of bacon grease and olive oil.

And in the evening, when the Milky Way pours out across the sky, we sweat and think and talk quietly in a hot sauna on the edge of a cold deep lake.

Lobster

We eat lobster with unpracticed abandon. During this annual ritual we shed our summer seersucker manners and revel instead in the savagery of mere eating. It’s so easy to do in Maine. A walk to the lobster pound to pick out our dinner; with a long-handled net one of the workers scoops our selection into a brown paper bag and drops that into a plastic one. We hand over our cowry and the trade is completed; out we go and head back home. Into a large pot filled with a few inches of boiling water go the squirming crustaceans, brown, blue, sea-floor camouflage. The lid is closed and in just minutes they boil and steam to perfection. In the time it takes to set the table we stop thinking about them as animals and begin smelling dinner. We lift the lid and retrieve these fiery beacons of summer.
We tear them apart, pulling off legs and pecking at their bellies. Once we’ve sucked the small bits of flesh from the now-hollow legs we move on, hungry for more. The claws are the first fruit that begin to satisfy our craving. These once-wielded weapons are the easiest to break open, and we celebrate these plump nuggets with a mouthful of ale or a gulp of wine. After all the prying and tearing and pulling and biting we eat the tail, breaking it from the top and turning it over to open it. We feast on the tail, savoring and ripping the meat with canines, incisors, and molars. This is how our species evolved, nimble-fingered mammals capable of tearing and chewing other living things. This insect of the sea brings us back to Maine year after year, and whether prices are high or low we feast on them night after night. We eat few other things so completely and in such an unadulterated manner. No separation between us and our prey as we reach for another one-pound soft shell. It’s hard to imagine us ripping apart a chicken or pig and breaking its bones as we tear into its flesh. But on these July nights the smell of pines mingles with the smell of dinner, and we sit with a mound of shells between us – heads, tails, legs – all torn asunder and discarded, and we are satisfied, content animals.

Chicken soup

Rain at the cottage: the kids are in the kitchen playing Monopoly, our youngest nephew is napping, us parents are reading newspapers, magazines, and old books left here from summers past, and the plash of rain through the canopy of towering maples soothes us all as much as the huge pot of chicken soup simmering on the stove. A cut up-chicken, a few extra legs from the icebox, a heap of vegetables - onions, celery, carrots; a few herbs, and salt and pepper.
Here with several of my siblings, all of us remember our mom's cooking and expansive love and generosity. And I think about all the changes in eating habits since we were kids. While processed food was available when we were kids, its widespread presence in today's American diet is something my siblings and I shake our heads at. One of my sisters has food sensitivities and this morning she was saying how hard it is to find half and half that doesn't have preservatives in it. "Why," she asked, "can't I find a product that's just milk and cream? Why does cream need preservatives? People use it quickly, and it doesn't need anything else in it." She spends more time reading labels than she'd like to.
Making food isn't as time consuming as food marketers want us to believe. I can make a tomato sauce in the time it takes the water for pasta to boil, so what time savings is there by opening a can of prepared sauce? The time it takes to make a rich chicken soup is negligible; a few minutes chopping things and then hours of good smells to whet the appetite. A few voices rise to challenge a play on the Monopoly board and threaten the little one's nap, but the slow gurgle of stewing broth percolates through the cottage, filling each room with the fragrant scent of herbs and stock, keeping everything on a pretty even keel.
Taking short cuts seems too prevalent in our society and it's especially apparent in our food choices. The cooking I grew up with wasn't haute cuisine and it didn't require much more than a few minutes thought and a little preparation. Prepared and packaged foods may get us to the dinner table a few minutes quicker, but when we consider the afternoon smells of a long-simmered pot of soup as a mere prelude to the meal itself, I'll take the long road to dinner every time, and spend that time with family and friends.

Northwoods Bouillabaisse

I’ve been making my own northwoods bouillabaisse for a few years now, savoring the fish that Minnesota has in abundance, extracting from these fish, almost all of which are the ones most anglers throw back as too small, a rich and flavorful stew that, while not bouillabaisse, is as rich and satisfying as a trip to Marseilles to indulge in the real thing. That’s an advantage, I guess, of having children for whom the sheer excitement of catching a fish surpasses the need for a mountable trophy – we shamelessly keep the small sunnies, crappies, rock bass and smallmouth bass that look like muskie bait, turning them into the stock that is the foundation for my northwoods bouillabaisse.



Like gardening, part of the pleasure of a good fish stew is catching the fish yourself, and the pleasure is heightened when they’re caught on Burntside Lake in northern Minnesota, a ten thousand acre lake that is cold, clear and deep. We fish off a little point and stand with the water lapping our feet and loons swimming by; fir and pine trees line the shore, islands dot the lake and fade into a grey distance that evokes elemental Milton Avery and Chinese ink drawings.


When the fish are biting we put a nightcrawler on a hook and let it fly, a ¼ oz sinker dragging it to the bottom where rocks abound. If we avoid the numerous snags it’s not long before there’s a gentle tug, that thrilling feeling of an imminent strike. And sometimes a good sized bass will inhale the hook and a jolting yank on the line immediately awakens the senses for the beginning of a chance to land a big one.

My stew is a simple one, and I change it as new herbs or ingredients seem good to add. I start by scaling and gutting all the fish. If any of the fish are large enough I also cut out the fillets and put them aside. Usually I have only a few meaty fillets, but when I fry these in butter and bacon fat they add a lot of richness and flavor to the stew.



Cover the fish in water and bring to a boil, skimming off all the scum that surfaces. Usually when I’m up north I have limited ingredients, so I usually add only an onion, carrot, and maybe a bay leaf to the stock. Cook for thirty minutes to an hour and strain. If any obvious chunks of fish are visible and easy to get at, I usually use a fork to pry them from rib cages and other bony areas. In a wide sauté pan, I like the 3 qt size because of the wide surface area for evaporation, I add garlic and onion to olive oil, butter, bacon fat or a combination of those delicious cooking fats. For this stew I almost always sauté the onions over a high flame, usually because I’m hungry and don’t want to wait for lunch. Next, I add a tomato, usually just one to begin with, and I crush it and let it be absorbed into the onions. Keeping the pan really hot I slowly add a few more tomatoes by ones and twos, breaking them apart with my wooden spoon (is there any kitchen tool as wonderful as a wooden spoon? It is primitive and prehistoric and essential) and watching them sizzle, adding another when the now-emerging sauce is reduced to almost no liquid. While I’m sautéing the onions I add basil, thyme, parsley and a few pinches of sea salt, and then I add anise seed and saffron, keeping some semblance of a traditional bouillabaisse. I let this get really thick and fragrant and then I start adding ladlefuls of fish stock, one at a time, keeping the flame hot and adding the next ladleful only when the previous one is almost completely evaporated. The longer I’m willing to cook it the richer it is – on the first night it’s always the thinnest, but as I save some for each subsequent night the resulting stock, when chilled, becomes thick like rubber.



Because I always eat lunch with my wife, I add stock and continue to reduce it until there’s enough for two bowls. As I near the end of the reduction, I sauté the fish fillets in butter over high heat, browning and crisping them with a bit of salt and pepper. A little leftover penne is another good addition at this time, and so are chunks of potato. Pour into a big bowl, place the fried fillets on top, and enjoy.

Rodger and me (Bordeaux and ribeye)

Rodger introduced me to my wife and we were in other's wedding. We met several decades ago and have enjoyed eating and drinking wine the whole time. We shared a house until it burned down, and he visited me in Thailand when I was a Peace Corps volunteer.

I'm visiting our cottage in Ontario now, and yesterday Rodger drove up from Buffalo, bringing his two daughters, a 2000 Haut Bailly from the Pessac-Leognan appellation of Bordeaux, and the best looking ribeyes I've ever seen -- Buffalo, for all its economic woes, has beautiful meat markets. We swam in the beautiful water of Bay Beach and my parents-in-law drove down from Toronto to stay the night with us, too. When we visit our cottage, siblings, friends, and in-laws come and we visit, swim, eat and drink. Mẹ (my mother-in-law) brought a case of mangoes, too.

The 2000 Haut Bailly had a beautiful pencil-lead nose, and was a dark, broody wine with leather and some dark black fruit. The full tannins were soft and there were hints, along with that pencil lead, of other wood underneath. An elegant, earthbound wine. Cooked over very hot charcoal, the beef, simply grilled with salt and pepper, was dazzling with the wine. Tender tender red meat with little chars of fat and browned surfaces. A salad, caramel custard for dessert, an old friend, my in-laws, a long walk on the beach talking with Mẹ about family, tiny shells (not zebra mussels, which seem to have decreased significantly in the past two years) in the sand right at the water’s edge, wispy clouds in blue sky as the sun set, all the memories of summers on this beach and the Milton Avery-like simplicity of water, sky, earth. Along the lake bottom the waves make ridges in the sand, a beautiful symmetrical pattern, and Henry and I looked at them as we waded through ankle deep water. Reading at night while the kids sleep on the porch, a whole novel in two days!