It's Good For You

     Tam's been fighting a cold and yesterday, it was pretty bad.  So I made chicken soup.

     Thursday is Trash Night, when we change all the litter boxes, gather up all the trash, and get it out to the curb for Friday morning pickup.  We usually order pizza, to avoid time spent cooking and cleaning up the kitchen.  To make matters worse, I worked over.

     But canned chicken soup is--  Well, it's good enough and some brands are better.  Still, for full effect, home made chicken soup is best.

     I compromised.  The neighborhood grocer had diced fresh white onion in deli containers, about a third of a cup, and snack-sized celery right next to it.  A small bag of baby carrots rounded out the vegetables.  They had nice, big chicken drumsticks in the hot deli counter, too, so I got four of them.  Noodles were going to be time-consuming, but Pacific brand chicken soup has lots of nice, broad noodles.  I picked up a 16-ounce can of soup and an eight-ounce container of chicken broth.

     Once home, I didn't want to fiddle around too much.  I heated up about a teaspoon of good olive oil in the medium stock pot, dumped the onion in and gave it a couple of shakes to coat.  The baby carrots were skinny enough to snip with kitchen shears right over the pot (no cutting board!) and once they were in and cooking, I gave the celery the same treatment.  I followed with the chicken.  It's a little tricky, but the meat snips right off, skin and all.  By the time I finished the last one. the onion was translucent and the carrots and celery had brightened up.  I poured the can of soup over, added the broth, put in a shake of Bragg's seasoning mix, gave it a stir, put the lid on and went about setting up for supper.  Ten minutes later, we were enjoying big, hearty bowls of not quite homemade chicken soup, loaded with fresh vegetables and roasted chicken.

     No, it's not as quick as using the phone or computer to summon food.  It's not as quick as opening a can and heating it up.  But it's not that much slower, and it's better for you.  It's a lot faster than doing the whole thing from scratch, and while I didn't simmer the broth down for hours, the profit-minded hippies at the soup company did, or at least used some process with the same end result.  And the deli roasts chicken as well as anyone.  If I'd had more time, I would have thrown the drumsticks in whole for a half hour, then taken the meat off and put the bones back in to simmer with the broth; but sometimes you have to choose your degree of difficulty and the end result was a healing treat on a busy night.

"What's In The Box?"

     The title of this post is a line from Dune.  The young hero (or is he?) Paul is about to undergo a test meant, "To determine if you're human," if he can deal rationally with fear.  What's in the box is pain.

     America's economy -- the global economy -- has been handed a box, too.  We don't know what's in it.  The President and his advisors who devised our new tariffs say it's full of wonders.  Many highly-qualified economists say it's full of pain.  The history of tariffs is, at best, alarming; the Smoot-Hawley tariffs didn't cause the Great Depression, but the general consensus is they made it worse.

     What's in the box?  We'll find out -- and you can bet none of the higher-ups in Washington will feel any pain, including the spineless Congress that has, once again, dodged responsibility by handing the Executive a power, in this case taxation, normally reserved to the Legislative branch.  The power to declare war, they abrogated that long ago; the power to make laws is ebbing, what with Executive Orders now being treated as if they were laws; impoundment of allocated funds and the imposition of "emergency" tariffs cede the power of the purse.

     Anyone with an eye to Classical history can tell you that the Emperor of Rome didn't spring forth full-fledged, but by the gradual accretion of powers and responsibilities once held by the Senate and people of Rome and their various Executives to the office of Emperor.  The framers of the U. S. Constitution were wary of such a thing happening in their new republic, and did their best to hedge against it.  Did they do enough?

     What's in the box?

Quick Dinner

     Last night, I wanted something easy for supper.  I'd had a lousy day and I didn't have much energy.  Our corner grocery often has fresh vegetables and a basic seasoning, bagged up and ready to microwave.  Last night, their "mixed vegetables with Tuscan butter" was front and center, a collection of green and yellow zucchini, pea pods, broccoli, cauliflower, onion, asparagus and shredded carrots with a dollop of seasoned butter.  There's a bit over a pound per bag.

     It's a good assortment and "Tuscan" had me thinking.  I picked up a container of fresh cherry tomatoes, a 16-oounce container of quality red sauce (Michael's of Brooklyn "Homestyle Gravy," which we here in the Midwest know as spaghetti sauce with everything, the full garden of vegetables, cooked down) and a little under a pound of mild Italian sausage.

     This is not the cheapest collection of stuff, but it's still far less than dining out or ordering in.  I browned and drained the sausage with some extra spices, adding a generous double-handful of chopped cherry tomatoes after draining.  I ran the bagged vegetables in the microwave while that cooked, adding the sauce to the meat and tomatoes after a few minutes.  With the pan bubbling, I put in the vegetables (leaving any excess melted seasoned butter in the bag), covered it and let it simmer for a few more minutes -- but not long enough for the vegetables to get mushy.

     The end result has enough sauce to coat everything but not drown the other ingredients.  You could have it over pasta if you wanted to, but we didn't.  Tam even went back for seconds!  Total time was around fifteen minutes and it will easily serve four or five adults.  We had leftovers.

In Which I Address Fools

     An unpublished commenter has chided me. "The right to an education isn't a real right," they claim, leading into a basic explanation of the difference between positive rights (requiring some action on the part of others) and negative rights (requiring only that others refrain from interfering).

     It's all stuff no one who was awake and paying attention over the last 30-odd years could have possibly missed, especially if they inclined to libertarian or even conservative views.  It's also not the point.  Free public schools exist; our taxes fund them.  Speaking as a childless homeowner (Indiana school funding comes from property taxes), I would just as soon live in a world with fewer ignorant children left with plenty of idle time to get up to trouble and I'll pay money to get it.  Like it or not, free universal public education through Grade 12 is how it works.

     If Billy, who was born here but whose parents came from elsewhere and Ramon, who was born here and whose ancestors came here before the Civil War, one of them on the Mayflower, both get a free education, but Billy's big sister Daphne, who was born in the old country before Mumsie and Daddy sneaked across the Canadian frontier, does not, that's pretty plainly bullshit -- especially when Vladimir and Valerie, children of legal immigrants, one born in Undershirtistan and the other here, both attend the same public schools, free for nothing.

     One of the biggest problems with this exclusion is it amounts to punishment of a child for the offenses of their parents -- while Billy and Daphne's parents are presumably still some sort of scofflaws,* little Daphne had no choice in the matter.  In Indiana, this is known as "corruption of the blood," and our state Constitution specifically forbids it.  You can lecture me about it all day, but it's still there, in black and white.  It's got antecedents that go right back to the Old Testament, for that matter.
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* Or possibly not; there are a number of paths, now and in the past, that might let 'em stay here under various sorts of residency.  And just how a law barring children of "illegals" from public education might apply to those situations is unknown and untested.  It's nice that attorneys have a chance to earn a living finding this stuff out, but we don't owe them the opportunity.