The Big Fish

I know, I know, this is not a photo worthy of a food article. But I just wanted you all to have a small vision of this lovely eleven pound red snapper (snapper Veracruzana) we had for Christmas dinner. What you don't see is the four men it took to hoist this lovely thing from oven to table.
Years ago, I got the idea for this from my Chilean friend, Nidia. She described the green rice that should accompany it, and the dessert flan. I held this idea through those English dinners of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and plum pudding and all kinds of other puddings, most with sauces or gravies. Along the way I had become a 'half' vegetarian and ate no red meat. So, this year we went for the red snapper, the Mexican Christmas dinner. We did not have a platter wide enough for the green rice (made with cilantro, spinach and parsley) so it was served on the side. We also had collards and salad from the garden and the sinful chocolate pecan pie that Anne made. That dinner was just the best. All ten of us helped in some way and we loved the event.
Ten of us sat down for dinner. Our ages were from four to seventy. The four year old, my grandson Quincy, was excused early to watch a new video, and the rest of us truly enjoyed the fish and all the fixings and each other and the ideas swirling around the table. The college student who had just returned from some months in Cuba had stories to tell of his experiences, and the scientists among us talked of turtles and other environmental issues.
After dinner everyone pitched in to clean up the kitchen and get that first load into the dishwasher before going to sit on the screen porch with the armadillos rooting in the ferns and the five dogs alert, and continue the conversation.
I love these gatherings of friends and family. It's a good thing that I do because the next night, we had another and different ten guest dinner. This time it was a lot more ad hoc. I made Hoppin' John with the black eye peas and rice and everyone else brought stuff. Again, we had collards. And again, everyone loved them and they were all eaten.
Here's the recipe. You'll love it!
Take about 15 big collard leaves. Cut out the center ribs and roll up the remaining leaves and slice them thin and then cut those slices into small pieces. Leave those on the side. Now, in a large skillet or dutch oven put a medium sized diced onion and a LOT of minced garlic ( about five cloves) with a couple of spoonfuls of olive oil. Fry these until softened and beginning to brown, about two or three minutes. Add the collards gradually, and then about a cup of broth (chicken, or water or vegetarian). Add a little bit of salt now. Bring to a boil, cover, and stirring occasionally, cook for about 25 minutes on low 'til greens are tender. Remove the lid and turn heat to high and stir occasionally while the collards are cooking down. The pan will be almost dry. Take the collards off the heat and stir in some lemon juice, a little bit of olive oil, salt and pepper to taste. Your guests will rave!
Other than food.. So many wonderful friends have been here for the holidays. We have taken many great walks through the woods and fields. Our local sand hill cranes bugle noisily every morning (louder than parrots!), and we hear the deer barking at the edge of the fields. The cardinals devour the seeds in the feeders each day. We are all enjoying the warm weather after some days of frosts. The vegetable garden has been feeding the multitudes, and the orchids, hardy plants they are, are in great bloom. Even the rye grass we sowed under the clothesline looks perky and green.

Happy Christmas

Though it has been in the eighties today, the landscape is sere and brown from previous frosts and freezes. The vegetable garden is lush with broccoli and greens.
This Christmas Eve of this amazing year is to us quite modest. Tonight we packed the traditional stockings that earlier had been laid out on the hearth by four year old Quincy, now soundly asleep after a hearing of 'The Night Before Christmas'. Sox, toothpaste, wood putty, rubber bands, nail polish, a squeaky toy for the dog. No diamond tennis bracelets, no keys to a sports car.
Christmas pulls me back to my early Christian heritage and I love to hear the Nine Lessons and carols beamed from some cathedral or other.
Sixty years ago when I was a small child with an even smaller soprano voice, the midnight mass was a big deal. Those of us in the church choir gathered in the sacristy proudly wearing our freshly starched collars over our scarlet choir robes. Some of us wore our gold crosses we had earned for perfect attendance at choir practice and church services. We were issued our candles, and reminded again by the choir master to heed the important rest in the cantata. We were ready for the processional around the church behind the cross bearer. This was magic to me. The church was dark except for all the candles on the altar and the ones we carried. As we processed to the strains of 'Oh, Come all Ye Faithful', I was amazed to see the packed church this night. I can still smell the candles and the whiff of snow and cold brought in by the churchgoers.
We processed, finally, up the center aisle, by the creche in front of the altar, and took our places in the choir pews.
The mass seemed to take forever as I recall it now. I was thinking that back at my house we had already hung up the stockings, and was Santa already there? We got through the cantata and no one jumped the rest. By the recessional I was so sleepy and glad to jump into my father's arms and be carried home in the snow and put into bed.
I love this legacy from my parents. I grew up and became an agnostic, unable to give my own children and grandchildren any certainty in religious faith. But at Christmas, I shamelessly have all the trappings, mostly secular. I will not be going to any church, but I look up at the bright stars tonight and hope for humankind that we will prevail and care for each other in these hard times.

Masters of the Universe

This morning I drove up to attend the monthly community action committee meeting at Lacoochee School. (Oh, horrors! Community organizing!). As I went along Cummer Road towards the school I noticed the many Christmas creches in front of the houses. I slowed down right after the railroad tracks to look at a peeling vivid green block house surrounded with tan beaten earth. A dirt colored pit bull was chained out front, out of range of the creche that was carefully arranged in front and surrounded with hay. Somehow, this Christmas presentation, so tasteful even on the bare ground, so brave and affirmative, brought tears to my eyes.
The meeting of folks dedicated to helping this small rural community and school reported on their progress in establishing a boy scout troop, a football program, how the Girls and Boys club had a Christmas party the night before. The food pantry needs, needs, needs. A group of volunteers opens a daily office to help people get their food stamps and sign up for unemployment.
The school principal, a woman whose real talent is community organizing, affirmed all the participants. A tour de force, she has her heart and mind firmly set on what will be best for those 600 kids in her Title One school where over 95% of them are on free lunch and breakfast.
We volunters do what we can, and it is never enough. Here are kids who have never even been to Tampa! Some of them are always hungry and they don't even have the basic necessities. On the principal's wish list are sweat suits from Walmart so the kids can be warm!
After the meeting we were served a fine lunch with many many pecan pies. I took my plate and sat down with "Miss Lily", a huge black grandmother. She's huge in the community and is the mother, grandmother and foster mother of many. She's a person one listens to. I just loved her stories and I hated to leave.
Back home, I stretched out on the porch couch with the dog to read the New York Times. On the front page was an article by Louise Story about the compensation of the Wall Street wizards, the masters of the universe. We have known about these excesses for a few weeks but in today's story it was so detailed and spread out in front of me I leapt up in outrage!
I want to know a few things about this greed. Did these people grow up with no values, i.e. knowing right from wrong? Were these people so entitled from day one they didn't have to think about anyone but themselves? Did they go to Brearley or Choate or any of the other super expensive schools and then to an Ivy college and think they could just continue being oblivious to general human kindness and consideration? Did they think that having corporate jets and personal yachts and multiple homes and expensive cosmetic surgery and Patek watches was o.k.? Did they ever think of the concerns of such places as Lacoochee? ( One tennis bracelet would fund a field trip for ninety kids) No, they were concerned with the silliness of having the correct $500 stroller for their child, and to make a small bow to the vast unwashed, they spent a few of their many millions at charity balls.
There are a few vastly rich people who have made incredible difference in our society. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet come to mind, and there are others. But still, one wonders how many hundreds of thousands of others were the backs on which these titans walked.
I think it is going to take a long time for our society to correct itself. I still do see many Americans, like the folks in Lacoochee, who truly do know how to do the right thing. Maybe our models will have to come from the bottom up. Certainly, our models have not come from the financiers. We will all have to speak out when we see that the emporer has no clothes. We really knew that many people could not afford those mini mansions and we really knew that those New York people were fakes. But we chose not to see.
I remember one time that my husband's boss said in an economics discussion, "Everyone wants to be comfortble." Yes, sure. The thing is, though, we have to make a society where everyone can be comfortable, have a home, food, work.
I'd like to have these masters of the universe, those failed Wall Street financiers, these cynical multimillionaires have to spend some time living among the homeless under the bridges of America.
We are all responsible and we can't escape that. We can blame it on Bush, but we let this disaster happen because we were all too comfortable. I can't wait for Obama!

Pundit Fatigue

We saw the movie "Australia" today. The first two thirds of it was a predictable and lovely western and the last third was suddenly about WW Two. Such handsome actors, and you never thought for a minute that everything would not turn out o.k., and as a bonus you laughed and cried and loved the scenery and that wonderful kid. We were there for three hours and out of our normal time. As we drove home we said to each other that we needed more time away from these everyday concerns. We should take a vacation where there were no newspapers or NPR or TV. We need a rest from the news articles, and especially we need a break from the pundits who constantly explain and opine. But we are addicted.
There is a full moon tonight and as the moon was rising huge and yellow, four deer were cavorting on the edge of the woods. I think anxiously about the state of our American society. Are we heading toward the bottom of everything? Who are you out there on Face Book? I know you do not even know what an incredible mind Thomas Friedman has, or track any of the other commentators who think seriously about the American predicament. You only look at short comments on the "wall", or communicate in short text and twitter messages.
Be aware. The world is changing. It will not go back to the old times when it was necessary or automatic to be frugal. And this recession will change us.
You young people have an interesting time ahead of you. Materialism seems to be doomed for now and it won't come back as we have known it for a long time. Talk to each other, slide ideas past each other and don't be afraid to take the high road of doing the right thing, whatever it seems to be at the time. Be not afraid to think seriously about our hard problems. I am not so sure that our economic crisis will have the happy ending that "Australia" did. We could all be shot in the back. We've got to be serious, and serious does not come in tiny Face Book wall items and Fox News bites.

Christmas House Tour

My new friend, Chris, invited me to accompany her on a tour of houses decorated for Christmas in her upscale gated community near here. I leaped at the chance, being the nosy person I am. I have driven by this development thousands of times as I make the commute from our ranch into St. Petersburg. It's a golfing community but I never breached the gates since I do not golf.
I met Chris in a quilting class in our little town. She was clearly the most accomplished quilter and artist in our midst. One day we decided to have lunch together in a little shop next door. She was an Obama supporter, a rare bird in this place. She's lovely, thoughtful, community minded.
So I was glad to be invited on the Christmas house tour.
I arrived at the Club House, after signing myself in at the entrance to be official. Chris was waiting and we began the tour. We were to go to six places and it seemed they were identical. There were several models of houses (the Tradewinds, the Naples, etc.) While we are tooling from place to place I am trying to figure out who Chris is! Clearly, she's not a person who decorates her house with plastic accessories in every nook and cranny. Her house was not on the tour but we went by it (fast).
After seeing these houses I was left with a feeling of sad creepiness. Who are these people who have such perfect homes, recently purchased, that not a stray pubic hair could be found in the entire place? They obviously must ingest food, yet there was not a hint of anything edible or tracks of food on anything.
A theme of the tour was that every couple seemed to have some collection. In one house there were tiny lit up ceramic houses, salt and pepper shakers in another, really dreadful fashion sculptures in another. My favorite was the golf balls with applied glitter, or maybe it was the Christmas tree decorations made from shells with applied stickers. I loved this! I loved talking to these devoted couples who wore complimentary outfits. They were all recent occupants of these amazing houses. They had been police chiefs in Long Island towns, military men (I thought I would have to restrain Chris when she wanted to go on about her brothers in Iraq), CPA's, and whatever. But, now they were proud to live in this incredibly sterile and squeaky clean place, now decorated in overwrought Christmas.
There were some great surprises. One couple had some really nice paintings. Another couple had a really old mother carefully placed on a couch. I talked to her as the tour was taking a spin in yet another opulent bathroom. She looked stunned to be here and told me about her origins in Ireland.
In some strange way, I really connected with these people who are proud of where they have landed. They speak of how much they love their new community and their neighbors. To be retired is scrappy. You've got to figure out what to do with all these empty days. You can play golf. It looked to me like the women had a better grip on their lives. After all they had quickly decorated their homes for the Tour. The men had "offices" in their opulent homes that were maybe reminiscent of the offices they left when they retired. Everything now paper and dust free, maybe purpose-free as well. There were no books anywhere to be found but huge t.v.'s everywhere.
The bathrooms! All the couples were so proud of these,( we dutifully inspected them all), large enough for a square dance, and enough of them to service a posse of women with bladder disfunction.
Who are these people, my fellow Americans? Where are their compost piles?
Anyway, I loved doing this. Fodder for the mind. My new friend, Chris, has a lot of moxie to invite such an eccentric as me to go with her.
My grandson, Diego, has a lovely on line art exhibit. Go to tampabay.com/nie and click next to the XpressPluggedIn logo.
The photo above is my house, no connection to the Christmas house tour. We actually have a Christmas tree, in a pot, so we can plant it later. Not fake, and it has decorations made by a four year old.
I am so blessed, though idiosyncratic and certainly peculiar!