Go Greyhound

Today Don's mother arrived from Georgia on the 10 p.m. Greyhound. Well, it was supposed to be the 8:45 Greyhound, but they had to change out the bus in Chicago. For hours before that, lights flashed and warning beepers had squawked as the first bus rolled along the highway. But when the beepers fell silent, the driver decided there was no need to call for service.

Fortunately, if not especially efficiently, the driver decided in Chicago to ask for a new bus in Chicago after all. "I feel stupid enough broken down on the highway in the summer," she told the passengers (who had asked her earlier to have the bus checked out) "I'll feel really stupid broken down on the highway at night in the middle of winter."

Yeah -- the driver feeling stupid was just the thing on everyone's minds, I'm sure.

Kielbasa

This post still needs pics to match the original Blogware post

I don't how long I've been wanting to make sausage. Here it is! I'm doin' it! Homemade kielbasa! Loaded with paprika and spicy goodness. Delicious roasted in a cast iron skillet or boiled in a big pot with a head of cabbage and a load of potatoes and carrots.

Can't go wrong with monkeys

"We'll have storytelling, then we'll watch a movie, and then we'll do a craft," said the woman who was leading the program. She had short gray hair and wore slacks and a long, lightweight jacket that swung down to mid-thigh. I hoped desperately that she would turn out to be cool.

U and I were at preschool story time at the Lakeview branch of the public library, in our neighborhood. It began at 7 p.m., so I scooped him up when I came home from work, pulled some clothes on him, and we went on our way.

The program was held in the magazine reading room, a pleasant carpeted space with cozy leather(ette?) armchairs and a fireplace.

"We'll start with our names. What's your name?" she said, addressing the child farthest to her left.

"Jake," he said.

"What letter does that begin with?"

"J," he answered.

"That's right!" she said. She wrote a big "J" on her chalkboard and she launched briskly into a song that clearly was meant to be adapted, verse by verse, for each little audience member: "J for Jake, my name is Jake, my name is Jake, what's your name?" or similar lines, the idea being that the next kid over says, "Chloe," or whatever, and the storytelling lady says, "What letter does that begin with?"

Midway across the room, a boy of perhaps three, surely not much more than four, kneeled on the floor in front of the chairs where his parents sat. "Ike!" he said, happy that his turn had finally arrived.

"What letter does that begin with?" asked the storyteller.

His little body shot up in its kneeling position, so vigorously that his knees hardly were able to anchor him to the carpet. "K!" he announced. He was eager for this moment.

"'K,'" repeated the woman, slowly. Dubiously. She didn't write it on her chalkboard. "Well, it does have a K in it." She tilted her head to one side. "But does it begin with a K?" She waited for an answer.

The boy looked like he wanted to respond, but no longer knew what to say. Obviously the answer the grown-up wanted was, “No."

"What letter does it begin with?" she persisted. Ike sank back on his heels, without a sound.

"How about I? Does it begin with an I?"

He mumbled assent.

"All right!" said the storyteller, with lavish approval. "I!" She wrote an I on her chalkboard and continued the song. I saw Ike looking out into the center of the room, while the other children turned their gaze to the next child.

I was confused, and angry. What was the big deal? Why did she have to make that kid wrong? In public? In a room full of strangers? Why was it so important to teach the kid about how spelling works -- like he's not going to learn how to spell his own first name, for pete's sake -- that is the first thing a kid learns anyway -- at the expense of his pride and enthusiasm?

Why not sing "K for Ike"? It seems to me that K is the most distinctive sound in "Ike," even if it isn't the first letter. The song didn't say, by the way, "The first letter of my name is __." It just said "C for Cassady," or whatever. Why can't K be for Ike, for a few seconds? How about, "Ike! That has a great big K right in the middle of it!"

She went on to read us some stories from picture-laden books, stories featuring monkeys. By the middle of the second story, the children weren't paying attention much. It was clear to me that the plot was far too complex for them to grasp, and the pictures were not all that engaging. The book was small and fairly far away, too. "Are you listening to the story?" she asked, a little sternly, when the sound of children shifting positions and talking took over. Her admonition didn't make any difference to what was happening in the room. She pressed on through to the end of the book.

Next came an animation based on the picture book, "Goodnight, Gorilla." Lovely pictures, a haunting jazz soundtrack that riffed on Brahms' Lullaby.

Then the lights came back up and it was craft time.

Tables were prepped with craft sets for each tyke. Each place was set with a coloring sheet with an illustration of a monkey, small, colorful feathers, coin-sized leatherette ovals, stars, circles and other shapes. Plastic soup bowls, each containing several glue sticks, were placed in the center of each table.

The idea, we were told, was to make a hat for the monkey out of the leatherette shapes, then decorate it with the feathers.

The parents jumped in with enthusiasm. At my table, a man and woman guided a three(?)-year-old’s hands so that in no time his monkey sported an artful befeathered, multi-leatherette-shape beret.

The boy was delighted with the feathers. “Fe-fah!” he said.

“This is glue,” said the mother, working the glue stick to fix another feather on the monkey’s hat. “Can you say ‘glue’?”

“Fe-fah.” said the boy, passing a feather between his fingers.

“Glue,” she insisted, waving the glue stick toward him. "Glue."

Meantime, Ulysses scraped at the tip of the glue stick with a fingernail. A blob of purple glue stuck to it. He shook his finger, then rubbed it against the paper. He explored the blob’s texture with his finger. I stuck a feather into it to demonstrate that it would stick to the paper. But he was already playing with his leatherettes, pouring them from one palm to the other. He saw the leatherettes at the empty place settings at our table, and went round to collect those, as well. He took a bunch of feathers and placed them on the concave seat of his molded plastic chair. He examined them with his eyes and fingers, then went back to examining the leatherettes.

I marvelled at what I saw in the room: a lot of adults working very hard to make a group activity happen against considerable odds. The children were clearly – to me – continuously and spontaneously becoming immersed in their own deep worlds of experience and exploration. But their grown-ups consistently, automatically, pulled them out. They were committed, it seemed, to compelling the children to attend only to a specific set of pre-selected, narrowly defined, details and procedures.

What kind of learning was supposed to be going on?: How to use a glue stick? How to follow instructions? How to complete someone else’s pre-prepped creative vision? How to pick up an object and fasten it where it was supposed to go? Or maybe it was the very concept of “supposed to” that was being taught.

As far as I could tell, U was the only kid learning anything about leatherettes, shapes, colors and feathers. Or at least the only kid not being so strictly channeled.

By now the craft time was over. Families were leaving, and the activity leader was giving each child a box of conversation hearts -- Valentine's Day was near -- on his or her way out the door.

I heard a man say to his child, “Look, Michael! You get candy for doing the project!”

U and I lingered longest. He continued to play with the shapes and feathers, and I gathered up materials and straightened up, as the room emptied. The woman asked if I wanted some candies for him. I thanked her, but said that since he hadn’t noticed them, we might as well not point them out. I asked if we might keep a few leatherette shapes. She hesitated, then said, “Sure, why not?”

The hesitation was interesting, I thought, for a couple of reasons. First, we had already declined the candy. Hospitality would seem to demand that a host would be glad to have discovered an alternate gift.

Second, suppose we had glued those same leatherette shapes to our coloring sheet. I wouldn't even have thought to ask about taking them with us. All the other kids and parents had taken theirs along. I thought of Locke's theory of the origin of property rights. You mix your labor with a natural resource that belongs to noone -- for instance, you chop and saw a log and make a trunk from it -- and it thereby becomes your property. Ulysses hadn't made the monkey hat with his leatherettes. Not only that, his parent hadn't done her share, either. Hadn't kept her child in his seat while she hovered and got the monkey cap made, one way or another. We didn't "do the project."

Perhaps offering the candy was an attempt at a good deed on the part of the storyteller -- a charitable gesture. But when I asked for the craft supplies -- without putting any work into them -- I had gone too far. Plus, unlike the candies, the shapes hadn't been offered; I had cast myself as a supplicant.

I heard some folks thank her for the session, saying that the theme was a good one.

She laughed. “You can’t go wrong with monkeys!”

Vanilice: Serbian holiday cookies

[Note: I found out later that my memory was off. The "family friend" was actually a relation. She was my aunt's mother. That is to say, my cousins' grandmother. Specifically, she was the mother-in-law of the brother of my mother. I also found out that the cookies she made are called "vanil grancle" (pronounced VAH-neel GRAHNT-sle). There is such a cookie as a vanilica, but I had confounded the names. Use the search tool at top of page to find other posts I've written about this topic, including the real vanil grancle family recipe. – This note added 12/21/2008, VK]

Today I brought a platter of these cookies to the James Reeb Unitatian Universalist Congregation's Holiday Bake Sale. I wrote up the recipe, and the story of how I came to the recipe, and took it along. I sold the cookies for 50 cents -- 3 for a dollar -- and the recipes for a buck!

The cookies sold out. Selling the recipes made it so I could raise more $$ for the church than with just the cookies alone!

One parishoner is part Croatian. She remembered vanilice as her favorite cookies, that her grandmother used to make. She said she had tried to document her grandmother's cooking, but everything was done by feel and experience. All the amounts, she said, were either "Some" or "A little bit." She told me about how, many years after her grandmother had died, she visited an aunt who made her a whole batch of vanilice, knowing they were Mary's favorite, and gave them to her. Mary said it brought tears to her eyes.

Below is the text that I charged people a dollar for. Now you can read it for free.

Vanilice
(Pronounced va-NEE-leet-seh)

These festive, delicate cookies are a Serbian favorite around the winter holiday season, which, for Serbs in America, can stretch from the buildup to “American Christmas” on December 25 through Eastern Orthodox Christmas on January 7 and even Serbian New Year's on January 14! I remember a friend of our family who would make several hundred of these every year, freezing them in batches weeks in advance.

The finished cookie is a circular, powdered-sugar covered, jam sandwich of sorts. The top layer of the sandwich features a “window,” a round hole through which the jam can be seen. Very pretty.

This is one of the few traditional Serbian cookies that is like the kind of cookie we are accustomed to in the U.S.: an individually shaped and baked sweet biscuit made from a fairly stiff dough. Most bite-sized sweet treats in the Serbian tradition are bars cut from pans of baked batters, often topped with meringues and sprinkled with nuts, or sometimes phyllo leaf layerings.

To my surprise, I couldn’t find a recipe for these in my Serb-American cookbook, a classic published by the Serbian church in Milwaukee in the 1970s. On the Internet, all the recipes but one were in Serbian or Croatian, with the measures in metric, and it was slow going for me with my faltering way with the written language to decipher that they weren’t what I was looking for. The one recipe in English was also not the variation that I was familiar with. It didn’t even contain vanilla – and that’s what the cookie is named for! So I tinkered with recipes and came up with my own recipe that yields an authentic rendition of this classic holiday treat.

Hardware note: You will need two sizes of cookie cutters to make the rounds and the windows in half of the rounds. Scrounge about the house for bottle tops that will yield pleasing results, as I did for years – or do yourself a favor and invest a few dollars in a set of round pastry cutters at a kitchen supply store or Web site, or a restaurant supply store. These will serve you well for the rest of your life!

Production:
1 1/2 stick butter, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups all-purpose flour

Finishing:
Powdered sugar
Apricot jam or other kind of jam

Cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Work in the flour. The result will be a dough about the stiffness of pie crust.

Roll out to about 1/8" thickness. Use plenty of flour on the board, and sprinkle flour atop the dough so that the pin doesn’t stick. Cut the dough into rounds about 1 3/4" in diameter. Into half of the rounds, cut a hole of about 7/8 " in diameter. These will be the cookie tops. Keep re-rolling until all the dough is used.

Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet at 300° F for 10 minutes. They do not need to brown at all. Do not overbake. Let cool before handling. They are crumbly and fragile while still hot.

Spread about 1/4- to 1/2 tsp of jam on the rounds. Atop each round, place one of the rounds with a hole cut into it.

Dust each cookie with powdered sugar. To accomplish this, put about a three-inch deep layer of powdered sugar into a bowl or deep dish. Lightly drop each cookie into the sugar, first bottom down, then top down. Gently knock off any extra clumps of sugar.

Arrange on a platter. These are better at least a day later, when their flavor has had time to develop. Yield: about 3 dozen cookies.

Badnje Vece: Serbian Christmas Eve

It was Serbian Christmas Eve in 2002 when we first decided, "We should have a baby. Why not?" Two years later, we got to spend a Serbian Christmas Eve with our little one for the first time.

The Serbian Orthodox holy days calendar is calculated according to the Julian calendar The Gregorian calendar used on the West came later, with Pope Gregory. It is more accurate, astronomically. Orthodox = no pope, so no calendar change.

As the centuries passed, the calendars drifted apart. By the early 20th century, Julian Dec. 25 fell on Gregorian Jan. 6. Today it falls on Gregorian Jan. 7.

This all has nothing directly to do with Epiphany or the three kings, although you will read explanations that say it does, some quite. authoritative-looking. The Epiphany thing is a coincidence, in the strict sense of the word.

Serb Xmas entails a fasting, or "posno" menu. No meat, poultry, eggs, dairy. Don and I call it "The Dinner of the Little Dishes," because (at least the way we have it) everything is served on little plates or little bowls. It's an incredibly filling meal. Fish is de riguer. This year, we had shrimp with avocado oil, garlic, mushrooms.

Rezantsi c makom: A little bowl of ground poppy seed heaped over noodles, then drizzled with honey.

Chorba od patligian, or tomato soup. This year, for the first time, I made it from scratch. Used a recipe from the Joy of Cooking. "Quick Tomato Soup." The meaning of quick has shifted over the years, apparently. The soup is well beyond what today's typical American would consider quick, I think. Really delicious. It involves a butter roux. I used it by accident -- forgot to substitute olive oil because of the posno thing. Oops. It sure was delicious.

Kidney bean salad. My mother's recipe. One can light red in their juice, 2 T olive oil, 1/2 T vinegar, 1/2 T lemon juice, 1/8 t salt, grindngs of pepper.Chill at least 3 hours before serving. Wonderful.

Suvo voce. Dried fruit. Stew prunes, raisins, and what have you for at least 45 min. in water or juice. You never knew sweet could be this sweet. The single most filling item of the meal, per cubic inch. Over the years I've learned to scale the serving size way back. Just three or four prunes and maybe 10 raisins a person is plenty. It's easy to eat more, because it's so sweet and good. But eat more and you can't finish the rest of the meal.

Once, back in my Baltimore days, I ate a lot of dried fruit right out of the bag on an empty stomach. How much? My fill, I guess. Maybe 1/2 cup or 3/4 cup. Then the fruit filled with liquid inside me. I thought I might die.

Posno pogacha, or lenten flatbread. A yeast-raised quickbread. Heavenly dipped in tomato soup.

This pic is the most Serbian-looking I've ever seen Ulysses.