How to Soup, Part 2: Turkey Noodle with Ginger and Apples

This soup had to be made because that's what you do when you have a Thanksgiving turkey carcass. Turkey or chicken noodle soup is pretty straightforward; I don't stray too much from your standard versions. One variation I love is roasted garlic chicken noodle, where you simply roast a head of garlic, mash the cloves into a paste, and mix it into the soup.

My stuff always has a bite. Occassionally I will make it really spicy, but for this turkey noodle soup, the cayenne and red pepper flakes are perfectly adequate.

I had made so much broth that lifting the pan to pour it through a cheesecloth was too difficult, so I just used a slotted spoon to skim the fat and the old rosemary leaves and tongs to pull out the bones and branches. I ended up simmering the broth for two hours before starting on the soup.

Here are the ingredients, minus the turkey meat.

I had an apple that was going bad and some mushrooms that needed to be used, so into the pot they went. Half an onion, a lot of ginger, another two carrots, about a cup of frozen green peas, a box of rotini, fresh chopped rosemary, garlic powder, cayenne, chili flakes, and salt are the remaining ingredients.

I put the veggies, noodles, and spices in first (minus the rosemary) and let them simmer for an hour. Then I put the turkey meat in and the rosemary, let it cook for 20 minutes, and had my first bowl of it.

It's yum.

How to Soup, Part 1: Broth

I always make soup after Thanksgiving using the turkey carcass. I have a giant soup pot and always make a lot of it, packing my freezer for the winter. I'm hoping to find a few people who are down on their luck to share it with this winter. It's been a tough year for everyone.

This is how I make my broth. Nothing really unique about it except maybe my use of turmeric, which gives it a buttery, earthy flavor.

Step 1: Fill pot halfway with water, add a branch of fresh rosemary and a handfull of fresh thyme sprigs from the garden, turn burner on low.

 Step 2: Chop up some carrots, celery, and half an onion (I use the other half after the broth is finished.) I ate or pickled all the carrots I grew this year, so these are from the farmer's market at Eastern Market, as is the onion. The lovely lemon knife is from Hill's Kitchen.

 Step 3: Add bay leaves from your beautiful bay laurel tree that you keep in your kitchen window for the winter. I suppose store bought leaves will have to do if you don't have a beautiful bay laurel tree in your kitchen.

Step 4: Add dried chiles you grew this summer in your garden.

Step 5: Remove the turkey meat from the carcass and throw the whole carcass in the pot. Put the meat in the fridge to add near the end of the cooking process.

 

  

Step 6: Add enough turmeric to cover the surface of your broth. (This turmeric is from Souk Market on Barracks Row. I refilled an old container.)

 

 

Step 7: Stir, cover, and relax for an hour.

I am writing a cookbook with recipes from ingredients purchased from vendors around Eastern Market, so this and the coming blog posts are practice for that. I haven't entirely decided on the format yet, but I've been writing down my recipes for years.

I am not really sure how to say any of this.

The sky is buzzing, as it has been for the last four days or so. The sirens ring out as they have for the last two months, but for a different reason this week. The helicopters and the drones are like shooting stars from Hell. We are under attack.

I am starting to think covid was a blessing, IF it makes Americans pay attention.

Are you paying attention?

I live in Chocolate City. I have for 17 years now after living in high fructose corn syrup vanilla for my formative years. I think I have taken DC for granted for too long. My neighbors are black, white, latino, gay. It's normal for me now. It wasn't growing up in Southwest Ohio. I live in a kind of anti-bubble, where everyone is so different and coexisting that I forget how most Americans live in bubbles in the rest of the country.

I feel guilty because I am not at the protests and I keep asking myself why? Is it covid? Is it laziness? Is it that the disillusionment that has plagued me so long makes me believe that this won't change anything?

I struggle to find the words because I know that there are no words to say. I've sat here for the past several nights in DC, a city with 700,000 residents and no congressional representation, watching helicopters and surveillance aircraft overhead and hearing the pop pop pop of militias attacking our own citizens.

What is it about white America that makes them fear The Other so much?

Anyway, don't fall for white supremacist shit like All Lives Matter or norse tattoos or thin blue line flags. Think.

The Unfulfilled

Recently I read a book called A Year of Wonders: A Novel about Plague. It is a fictitious story based on real events that happened in Eyam, England in 1666-1667 during which a town decides to quarantine itself to save others from the bubonic plague that came to their village during the Great Plague of London. Two thirds of the village died, but they saved countless lives by sacrificing their own. They would have spread it everywhere had it not been for the rector of their church convincing them that quarantine was the moral thing to do.

The parallels between the book and our time were striking, right down to social distancing, closing the church, the selfishness of the rich family that left the village, the profiteering gravedigger who even buried one guy alive to take his money, people turning to supernatural things like witchcraft and flagellantism (evangelicalism is the modern witchcraft in our case), mobs who blame the liberals (in this case, two unmarried women well-versed in herbal medicine).

Ultimately, what stopped their plague was getting rid of their worldly possessions. Although they did not yet know about germs (they called them plague seeds so they had some idea,) the rector put two and two together and realized that the plague stuck to these things, so he convinced the town to burn everything. It worked.

Bubonic plague is a bacterial infection that we can now treat with antibiotics, but it wiped out entire towns so many times throughout history. The Black Plague of the 14th century wiped out much of Europe's population. Ironically, it may have ended up making Europe better, as labor was in such short supply that those who survived were able to negotiate much better terms with the wealthy overlords, and a merchant class arose that paved the way for democracy in Europe. In death came rebirth.

We face a choice right now. We can use covid as a means to rebirth, creating a fairer system of economics, government, and justice. The protests happening across the country show that there is a will for change. Indeed, if we don't change, we will all suffer for it. Covid isn't the last pandemic. More will come, some that are far deadly than this coronavirus. And germs don't care what race or political party you are.

But we can't change for the better without sacrifice, especially in giving up our consumer habits that are destroying the world.  Covid hasn't stopped climate change, the greatest threat to humanity in all of history. Buying things got us here. Manufacturing. Cars. Pollution. Fossil fuels. Greed. We prop up the wealthy who maintain the system, as the status quo benefits them, because it is too inconvenient for us to change. Part of that system is cheap labor, and cheap labor thrives on racism.

Covid has earned American billionaires $400+ billion more dollars. The rest of us got a pittance or unemployment. They don't pay taxes. We bear that burden, then they take those tax dollars from us in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and police forces. Now they want everything to reopen because they aren't benefiting from our labor. They don't care if you get sick or if you die. You are replaceable. You are mere "human capital stock" as they have stated.

Police forces in this country were formed specifically to protect the property of the wealthy, a group that 99% of us are not a part. Police are the product of the 19th century. They don't exist to protect us. They exist to protect the interest of the wealthy. They, along with most Americans, have been brainwashed to think police exist because the Big Bad Wolf is gonna come and take their junk.

What if the police enforcing the Broken Windows policy in New York, which put patrols in areas where they saw broken windows, instead fixed those windows? What if we used the resources that WE as taxpayers pay for, to improve the infrastructure of poor areas instead of giving it to massive, well-armed police departments? What if a five year old black boy had a bed instead of a dirty mattress on the floor? What if housing projects had parks and spaces for residents to breathe rather than cramming them all together into tiny apartments? What if those women living in poverty had access to contraceptives, childcare, and health information the way their better off counterparts do? What if we actually spent money on comprehensive schooling in the inner cities that included after school child care, arts programs, and whatever else can help steer kids away from a life of violence, a life many of them are currently born into. What if we got rid of the racist credit system and changing banking so black Americans can have the same starting line as white Americans?

We spend billions of dollars on policing in this country, our tax dollars. What if we trained some of those who would be police in trades like carpentry, electric, plumbing, and other jobs that would focus on fixing those broken windows?

What if Americans truly cared about change?

A Reading from the Book of Covidicus

I am an expert in nothing.

The things I am good at - cooking, landscape photography, maybe garden design, packing suitcases, procrastinating - don't pay the bills in our economic system. I am, however, also good at observing, listening, remembering, and reflecting, useful skills that until recently I didn't recognize as skills at all. It seems that most people don't have them, or choose not to use them, that they are wallowing in oblivion, too consumed by the vacuity of their own existence to look around them. All this time I was just paying attention to things around me and didn't even realize that isn't something normal people do.

That's why Covid has hit them so hard mentally. Despite the fact that experts have been talking about the coming pandemics for two decades now, Americans ignored it and kept electing idiots to offices that have the power to slow or prevent them. And have Americans learned anything?

Have you seen the covidiots who refuse to wear a mask? Have you noticed we are reopening as cases INCREASE? Did you know the Trump regime fired all the pandemic experts when he took office, the same people who kept ebola, H1N1, and other pandemics out of the US prior to his arrival?

South Korea and the US had their first Covid deaths on the same day. South Korea is playing professional baseball right now because Koreans care about their fellow Koreans and because they have competent leaders who actually care about protecting their citizens. We may not have any baseball season. Americans don't care at all. They are mad that they are inconvenienced by lockdowns while real people die. We are going to reopen anyway, and the virus will spread rampantly, and Americans will continue to elect Republicans who refer to them as "human capital stock" instead of "people," and we will fall into a depression worse than that of the 1930s, and people will lose their loved ones and still not care about others, all so billionaires can get richer. Profits over people. It's unreal that even a pandemic can't make Americans care about others.

Oh sure, there are some who do care. Covid has brought out the best in some people. Others may have realized something about themselves. But my god, has it brought out the absolute worst in far too many people. The selfishness. The arrogance. The entitlement. The utter stupidity.

Thing is, Americans have never experienced any real collective adversity. We haven't had a war on our soil since the Spanish American War in 1898. 9/11 was a shock to most people because they never paid attention to foreign policy or what our government has done to other human beings under the guise of national security. Vietnam wiped out a generation of working class men but it took years for Americans to actually care about that, and even then they only cared because they were losing people close to them. Vietnam the country and the conflict was something abstract and they didn't care about that. Americans don't even acknowledge our endless wars in the Middle East.

When you don't pay attention to things, it is easy to be duped by propaganda. Republicans have been using fear of The Other to their advantage for decades. Russians. Muslims. Immigrants. All people oblivious Americans blame for the miseries in their own lives.  Now they blame China for this pandemic.

They should start blaming themselves.

Oblivious Americans have been brainwashed into thinking government is bad by the very people who benefit from no government regulations. Hatred for government is why this pandemic spread like it did. They cut the pandemic teams. They cut funding for the CDC. They handed responsibility for the response to a bunch of businessmen with no medical background.

Government isn't the problem. Rich assholes are the problem, those who steal our tax dollars to make themselves richer. They need your labor to do so, and they steal that, too, in the form of pittance wages, unpaid sick leave, open floor offices, two meager weeks of vacation (if you get any) that most people can't even take, fire at will, layoffs during economic downturns (executives rarely get laid off), etc. You think a CEO deserves 1000% more pay than someone who does the actual work while he plays golf and calls it a meeting? YOU HAVE BEEN BRAINWASHED.

They've turned science, which is just the reality of the world, into a political ideology so Teh Stoopids among us will spew their propaganda for them while they eliminate regulations and all government oversight so they can get away with their corruption and the theft of taxpayer money. That's our money. So now we have Teh Stoopids running around screaming that wearing a mask to protect our society from the spread of a deadly disease is against Freedom!(TM) and half of Americans say they won't get a covid vaccine when it becomes available because they are selfish trash who don't understand basic science, and they are doing the bidding of the wealthy who right now aren't making any money from their labor. They actively cheer on spreading the virus while their overlords are dismantling the health care system that they are going to need when they get sick from their stupidity.

They tell you the rich provide "jobs." That word means nothing but the theft of your labor, for you are most likely working for an entity that pays you a pittance of its earnings. Or you are a farmer who has no choice but to sell your products to the massive corporate entities that have taken over our food supply. Or you are self-employed and spend half your time fighting to even get the money you are owed by the people who hired you to do a project. Etc. etc. etc. So much of a corporation's profits go to shareholders who don't work for the company and don't earn a damn thing. A company's profits should go to the people who made those profits - the workers.

During the first wave of the Spanish Flu, 60,000 Americans died. Then we opened everything up and the second wave killed 600,000. All for the sake of profit. Now we are doing it again.

Capitalism is the deadliest economic system. It's time to get rid of it. Make people matter again.

Wear a mask, you selfish ass.