Pasta Sauces – Clam, etc

Pasta and sauce is a good meal. There are many pre-mixed pasta sauces for sale, packaged in jars, cans and pouches – and the sauces aren’t often either bland or overseasoned. They tend to be sweet and heavy on basil and sweet-smelling herbs.

I found a recipe in the Winnipeg Folk Festival Cook book that pointed the way to making a good homemade sauce. It takes a few minutes chopping vegetables and cooking the raw ingredients – but it’s easy and worthwhile

I followed – and played with – Pierre Guerin’s recipe for clam sauce.
It calls for a can of baby clams. I used the 284 ml/10 oz size. It calls for a can of tomato sauce. I used a 398 ml (14 oz) can and a 213 ml (7.5 oz). I think a 14 oz can would be ok, but I was able to simmer this for a while to get a thick sauce. It calls for a medium onion and 2 cloves of garlic. A large onion doesn’t hurt, and 2 cloves of garlic is too bland. Use 4-6. The onions and garlic should be chopped fine, and sautéed in light oil in a large skillet. When the onions are soft, add the clams. Drain the clams first, rinsing them doesn’t hurt. Cook for a few more minutes. Add the tomato sauce. At this point I added a cup of red wine. The recipe called for unstated amounts of oregano, black pepper and parsley. One teaspoon of oregano is good. Parsley is not meant to be eaten, but it seems to be a standard ingredient. I skipped it. I thought a touch of basil wouldn’t hurt – a quarter teaspoon, and a quarter teaspoon of tarragon. I went heavy on the pepper. I use peppercorns in a grater, and I was liberal with both black and mixed peppercorns, perhaps half a teaspoon each – which may be a little intense. Also, a tablespoon or two of grated parmesan. Guerin also suggested a little sugar to cut the acidity of the tomatos. I thought the basil, tarragon and wine did fine. If I hadn’t used the wine, it would have been an idea.

Simmer on low heat, stirring occasionally. Relax. Have a beer. Heat the water for pasta slowly. Clam sauce is good on linguine noodles. Clam sauce is supposed to be eaten fresh, not refrigerated for too long.

Guerin’s notes suggested the recipe works as a Bolognese sauce with 300-500 grams of lean ground beef instead of clams. He suggested adding the beef to the onions as in the clam recipe above. A different idea – if you don’t mind an extra pan to wash – is to brown the beef in a separate skillet, and remove it with a slotted spoon and add it to the onions and garlic. That leaves some fat behind. However, it also makes for a less robust dish. Bolognese is a tomato and meat sauce, good on spaghetti. Choices, choices.

Claire had been making a similiar dish with spicy Italian sausage – a fresh sausage we get at our local supermarket. She starts with onions and garlic and adds sausage chunks. She uses a can of diced tomatos and a small can of tomato sauce. I think she uses some oregano, but she lets the sausage supply the other spices.

I haven’t tried to cost out the ingredients for these sauces against packaged sauces. It’s not expensive – onions, garlic, tomato sauce, and clams/ground beef/sausage/etc. If you have a good chef’s knife and washable cutting board, it’s pretty easy. It cooks in short stages, and there is time to to do other chores or read as it simmers. it’s hard to go wrong, and you can get something you really like instead of someone else’s idea of Italian.
The Folk Festival cookbook is fun. There are a few recipes from the cooks who prepare the meals for the volunteers just for information, like borscht for 1,500. There some interesting regional dishes and some delightful eccentricities. Queen Ida’s Poulet Gumbo (Queen Ida is a Zydeco musician from Louisiana). Stan Roger’s Hot mustard (start with 3 jars of Keens’ and add Tabasco, cayenne, garlic and Madras curry.) Spotted Dick with Hard Sauce? Visions of Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey. The less of two weevils.

Voluntary Simplicity

Voluntary Simplicity, has been around for 25 years, the first edition having been published in 1981. The author, Duane Elgin, describes himself as a former senior social scientist connected with an institution in California, and his biography mentions a business degree and an MA in economic history. He seems to presently support himself as a writer and motivational speaker. There is a political or moral dimension to his work, but his metier is self-improvement and spirituality. For a sample of his recent writing, there is an article at a site called Soulful Living.
I read a copy of the 1993 edition of Voluntary Simplicity which incorporates the findings of his simplicity survey, and has an Introduction by Ram Dass, the former Richard Alpert.

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1000 Kilometers

Mike and I have each managed to ride 1000 k since we started riding in March, up to Monday night, May 30. We added 34 more on May 31. We thought we were riding less this year than last year. I thought we had a lot more rain this year, especially on the weekends when we would ordinarily take half a day for a long ride. We have had several rainy spells, and have lost some weekend rides. when it has been dry we have been riding almost every evening, for 30-35 or even 40 kilometers, for 3 or 4 consecutive nights.

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Six Great Ideas

Once again, a note about a philosophy primer by Mortimer J. Adler. He wrote Six Great Ideas in 1981. He divides the ideas into two groups. Truth, goodness and beauty are ideas we judge by, and liberty, equality and justice are ideas that we act on. His discussion of each idea is broken down into 3 or 4 short chapters. The book is around 250 pages long, divided into 28 short chapters.

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Seances, Carlos Castaneda etc

Following the links from an essay, featured at AL Daily, published in the San Franciso Journal called “Leaving the Left“, I reached the web site of Keith Thompson, a writer in California. His site includes some of his freelance articles and essays including his interview of the writer and fakir Carlos Castaneda, and a magazine piece about a seance.

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Nature-Worship or Science?

There is a review of Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive” in the London Review of Books. The reviewer, Partha Dasgupta, is an economist. The review is titled “Bottlenecks”. It’s a long review, with an overview of the book. The book has been praised in reviews and on the web by deep ecologists, Greens, Gaians, and the other usual suspects. Professor Dasgupta isn’t singing in that chorus. He is impressed with Diamond’s research and the analysis, up to a point.

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Spamfighting

I got an email from Garth advising me that he had been blocked from commenting on my blog. It turns out that he had used the word socialist, which was blocked by the text string “cialis” in the Blacklist. Cialis is some kind of drug or herbal – I don’t know what it is but it has been promoted through blog spam. I have been using a combination of MT-Blacklist, SpamLookup and MT-Keystrokes. I have cut out a lot of stale URL’s from MTB, but I still run it to screen for proven text strings found in spam relating to gambling, porn, drugs. SpamLookup and Keystrokes have been pretty effective. I think they basically take care of everything, but there is some question about server load running SpamLookup under a moderate spam attack. MTB intercepts incoming comments first.

Orthodoxy

On Saturday May 14, 2005, about 100 people arrived outside Calvary Temple, an independent pentecostal church in downtown Winnipeg, to protest against a conference being held held in the church – about 400 people were expected – led by representatives of Focus on the Family. The newspaper story wasn’t clear on it, but it was a “Love Won Out” seminar. The conference animator was quoted as saying that Focus on the Family does not believe in trying to convert gays, accepts gays, but opposes gay marriage and wants to help gay people who want to walk away from the gay lifestyle. Which is not quite a denial of promoting the useless de-gay “therapies” that gay people have identified as harmful and repressive. The protesters wanted to expose what they see as the homophobic agenda of the socially conservative Christian churches, but they said they were defending freedom.

The protest was visible but peaceful, and the conference was private and peaceful. The protesters were against “homophobia” and in favour of same-sex marriage. The picture with the story showed a few of the protesters and heir hand-lettered signs, attacking Christianity (and Islam) for being repressive of sexual freedom in general and the sexual freedom of homosexuals. Staging protests outside churches and challenging right wing Christians to accept the rights of gays and lesbians is probably not useful way of changing right wing Christians. The protest was intended to shock – as the French saying has it, to épater le bourgeios. The act of shocking conventional values implies that the shocker is not only alienated from those values, but has superior values which must be taught by confrontation. The protesters were signalling that they have superior values.

There is an anti-religious sense to the idea of sexual liberation. The advocates of sexual liberation accuse Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and other practitioners of traditional religion of being intolerant and repressive. What is true is that some people disagree with other people’s moral, social, political and religious values. The rhetoric of modern liberalism is that liberal values are more enlightened, progressive, highly evolved. The modern radical is comfortably smug in accusing other people with different values of being comfortable, smug and conventional, which motivates the radical to challenge those values. The intellectual and emotional core of this kind of protest is the Romantic belief that religious beliefs repress people from finding their true sexually liberated selves while they are under the influence of a church. This protest was an act of aggression against Christians, to silence their dissenting views when they disagree with an ideology of secular liberation.

A United Church of Canada Minister (evidently a liberal member of a liberal protestant denomination) who was among the protesters – was quoted as saying “People have a right to their values and their viewpoints but when those values and viewpoints hurt other people, they need to be challenged.” She calls on a principle of social behaviour – no one can talk about other people’s social behaviour if the discussion hurts their feelings. That reasoning inverts the logic of pluralism. She is not claiming tolerance or freedom from discrimination for homosexuals. She is claiming the right to confront Christians in their churches and to challenge their morality. The more specific argument is that the gay rights community says that disagreeing with it about its ideas about gender and sexual orientation is “homophobia”, which is as bad as positive discrimination against their rights.

The protesters implied that homophobia is a psychological problem. The gay rights community is mobilized around the idea of fighting homophobia, and its members are easily motivated to get out and protest or march on that issue. It gives their community direction and cohesion. It gives them a chance to reinforce their beliefs collectively and to talk to the public about their beliefs through the media. The gay rights community has good reasons to view itself as embattled and threatened, to work to entrench its legal rights and to try to secure a less fragile standing in society than uneasy or contemptuous tolerance. Calling Christians repressed or accusing them of trying to harm gays and lesbians is conducive to respecful engagement.