Chunky Soup Nation

These photos are of that rara avis, the home cooked meal. It is a frittata , an egg dish baked in the oven. An oven omelette, if you will. I stuffed it with plum tomatoes, olives, yellow onions and garlic that had been sauteed in olive oil and flavored with sea salt and Italian seasoning. In her "The Classic Italian Cookbook" Marcella Hazan says the frittata is an Italian staple for a light supper replacing meat or chicken.

We Americans have our replacement for meat and chicken as well. It is the new civilian equivalent of the military's Meals Ready to Eat, the can of Chunky Soup dumped on mashed potatoes or rice- any kind of starch it can ride around the table on.I assume the potatoes and rice are instant as well. People too busy to do more than open a can are not going to hesitate at opening a pouch .

I expect the next Chunky Soup recipes we see will be featured on Super Bowl Sunday commercials, and they will involve pasta. Yet yesterday, on a display table at Publix, I saw cans of Chunky surrounded with something new. Small round loaves of bread that can be hollowed out like a pumpkin and filled with steaming Chunky. For the family hunkered down in the evening in their trench, watching whatever it is that cannot be missed, especially by wasting time in the kitchen.

Perhaps, since I will never win a Pulitzer for my fiction or a MacArthur genius grant for my poetry, I should seek fortune by writing a Chunky cookbook. Tuna A la Chunky-A tuna fish sandwich poached in undiluted Chunky. Rotisserie chicken stewed in a crock pot with Chunky, and served over hamburger rolls-

Alas, I am certain Campbell's has already published the cookbook,(so I still won't be making any money).


Here is the frittata recipe for someone who has an hour to spare in the evening. This makes enough for two.

Saute one diced yellow onion in olive oil until it is soft and golden. Season with salt and Italian seasoning then add 3 chopped fresh plum tomatoes, 3 diced cloves of garlic and a couple teaspoons of chopped green olives. Be sure you are using a saute pan with a metal handle that can go into the oven. Adjust seasoning and saute everything until the tomatoes are soft.

Now beat three eggs well and pour over the saute. Let everything cook a minute on the stove top, then put the pan in a 350 oven for ten minutes or so, until the eggs are set.

Then I suppose, you could dump a can of Chunky over it.

Nashville in the Evening Rush

I spent yesterday afternoon downtown visiting a lawyer. This was arduous, since one spends most of the time in a legal office abandoned in a conference room, eyeing the diet coke the lawyer never offered me, but since he did me good service I will not complain.

I do not enjoy driving downtown. Pedestrians there do not believe in the existence of cars, which puts an unfair onus on the driver- Nor do I like parking downtown, since it costs more than a bag of good frozen shrimp. Yesterday I parked in a garage designed along the lines of a really long drill bit. Ascending was like driving the Autobahn up the Matterhorn. Round and round I went at a creep . Descending was like coming down the luge. Try that in a Toyota Tundra.

I survived only to be dumped onto Charlotte Avenue into a long line of cars and drivers blinded by the sun as she declined to set behind the horizon. Everyone dealt with this by driving faster. This was unfortunate ,for TSU's Avon Williams Campus had just spit out a hundred thousand students. Dear God I prayed do not let me hit any of them and provoke a racial incident and the lead story on Channel Five. "Old white woman mows down a dozen of the black communities' most promising students".

By now my hands were one with the steering wheel and I did not know if they were coming off. Ever. Where was I now I wondered hoping it was not in the lane onto the entrance ramp of the Interstate. Then there she was- on my left- grimy dear old Baptist Hospital, shining like Our Lady of Fatima. At least I knew where I was. Going west . The sun still refused to set and my little orange low gas light came on.

On we sped. Past the Goodwill Store. Past McKay's. Past Nashville West. The sun was giving up. Help was on the way. Gas came next. I was going to live. Then I took the wrong lane and was marooned in the Walmart parking lot.

I saw a Subway. I went in. I had planned to cook, but now the dogs and I were having meatball subs.

Home at last. But no little dogs in the window. Only silence. Which meant I would find the trash strewn all over the floor and dog crap everywhere.

I was right. I told the beagle that I wished I had a gun, but he did not care. He was on his hind legs,looking for the sub.

Three hour later, late, I sped at thirty miles an hour over to The Big House, where I was working overnight in the clinic. I parked, ran in through Checkpoint, not noticing my Tundra's rear was three feet into the driving lane.

In the morning I found a warning on the Tundra's windshield.

"You are in a restricted space". Beneath it, handwritten these words:

"For God's sake, learn how to park".

The Annals of Nursing- Part the Last. Senior Year

This is the last part of the Annals,a history of an education in one of the old three year nursing diploma schools. I graduated from one in May of 1972, and shortly after took and passed my state boards.

It might be natural to think that senior year would be the most grueling. But if you think this you would be wrong.The year was one of the best in my life, full of leisure and happy hours. Foreign film festivals at the Hopkins Center. "The Earrings of Madame D' and the surrealistic original "Beauty and the Beast". Max Orphuls, Truffaut and the other great directors.

And why did we have all this free time?

A half year of a class called "Senior Team Leading". We worked a week, then were off a week. I do not remember my instructors well. I remember no supervision other than the head nurse. We were free help, and the hospital staffed the wards with us on the cheap.There were no CT scans back then. The pulmonary artery catheter was still a gleam in Dr. Swan's eye.There were no beeping IV pumps that I remember. We gave medicines from little white cups lined up on a cart.Primitive indeed by today's standards, but quieter, more hushed. Now nurses look harassed. But 40 years ago they walked slowly down the halls in neat whites.

In our free time we would drive to the Dairy Queen In Lebanon. One of my crowd had a car, but not for long. She went to Afghanistan with the Peace Corp where her most enduring memory was eating vegetables boiled in iodine.

We would go downtown and eat at The Green Lantern, known to all as the "Green Latrine". They doused every thing with MSG. Or if we felt uptown we might go to The Hanover Inn for prime rib and listen to a harpist. I do not ever remember going to Lou's, which I remember as the province of the Dartmouthers and not a place for the town babysitters.

It was a new day in Hanover that year. Women were now admitted to the college. Sleek young black women in long skirts with boots, afros and gold earrings. They made us look dowdy. I remember one admitted to the Infirmary one night with severe asthma. They sent her from there to the ICU over at the main hospital terrified she would die.

Interesting speakers came to town. Shulasmith Firestone. She was a radical feminist who believed babies should grow in tubes and vats and not inside women.She was heavily booed by the gentlemen of Dartmouth.

That winter I took up with a young man from New York. He worked in the People's Lumber Yard, a hippie commune across the river in Vermont.One day he took me to meet a friend and his wife. They lived on a farm and she spent our visit barefoot and drying marijuana on a big cookie sheet in her oven. My boyfriend was a Jew. I had never met one before, nor had I met cannabis. One night we drove to a Canadian nightclub just across the border and I tried it. I didn't like it because I thought everyone had started staring at me.

I was assigned that semester to the Neuro Floor. I would work there after graduation. But behind it on one side was the ICU, and it fascinated me. All those tubes and monitors. I worked there one night as a nurses' aide, and one of the last year's graduates let me do lots of things. This was exciting because I went to irrigate an old man's gastric tube, and bright red blood gushed out. This was better than little white cups. I was hooked. But new graduates were not allowed there. One had to have a year's experience.

After Christmas as the year hurried toward May we left our leisure and did our ICU rotation.I taught myself heart rhythms. I picked the brains of the staff. One of them told my instructor that I was going to be worth my weight in gold. Instead I turned out to be worth 40 years.

Sandra McKay was also teaching an Independent study class. She let us leave and do self study ,
and everyone ran to the roof with towels and suntan lotion.

And the there was Carolyn Sherman's class.She was a dietitian, but she was teaching poetry, to which she said, she wanted us exposed. She was a large woman of outstanding ugliness.She stood there in one of her fleet of purple dresses waving a cigarette and reading Dylan Thomas and Hopkins and Yeats to mostly uninterested girls. I was not one of them. She was the best and most memorable teacher I ever had. She made us buy "The Wasteland", and my world expanded. Now I wanted to be a poet and a writer as well as a nurse.

In May we graduated at a ceremony at Hopkins Center. I remember little of it except the remark of the speaker, a Dartmouth professor, that we were "terminal adolescents". I resented this. Our adolescence was over. Terminated, one might say, by blood and smells and death. He should have saved that line for the Dartmouth boys.


Thus ends the Annals. I am considering writing more memoirs of the next few years ,for I have seen and done much. More than most people could believe.

The Old Doctor- by E Sprague

In the morning when he comes

Through the back doors of the second floor

The clerks and nurses know it's five.

He has been on time for fifty years

With the same gravitas, the nods.

The courtly acknowledgments of the faces he knows.

His patients are along these halls.

Old ladies who put on their lipstick when he comes

Then ask their nurses "" How old do you think he is?'


Older than he was. Much older.

For with every step he shakes.

Hesitates in places where his feet

Should have memories of the mornings he has walked.

He drops his head to hear-

Can't remember what he has said.

Orders things that we cannot

In good faith subject his patients to.

We wait instead the extra hour.

Until his younger partners come behind.

Scan his orders and rescind

The antique drugs and surveys he has planned.

"He's got to be eighty, if he's a day",

Our nursing supervisor says.


And youth is all around him as he walks-

Young nurses with their diamonds.

Interns who don't know his name or care.

He greets them anyway, as if they ought to know

From the lecture halls and buildings named for him.

"He should take the hint and go ", I've heard whispered.

"That's what they mean when they give the bricks your name".

"He'll die if he retires",

Our nursing supervisor says.


And when I see him now I wonder

If he would be grateful to die at his desk.

Or never to awaken

On that morning when it comes

To the whispers of his colleagues.

To the ominous phones.















Our nursing supervisor says

What is a Horned Pout?

Out on the Prairie has asked me what a horned pout is. It is a delicious little catfish that lives in the rivers of New Hampshire and Vermont. It has very sweet pink flesh. In the spring people line up along the rivers at night to catch them. Or at least they did 30 years ago.I remember dozens of people sitting on the river banks with pails and lanterns in the cool evenings.And oh how good they tasted though it was hard to skin them.They had wicked face spines too, and could give quite a sting. And yes I am returning to New Hampshire for good.

New Year's in Nashville

These are scenes of sunset, New Year's Day 2012. I had the day off, if one can call a day off a day spent working from midnight to 7 am. And that is how a day off is defined in Hospital Land.

I, along with fifty percent of the bedside nurses in this country, worked New Year's Eve. The other fifty percent worked New Year's Day. And at midnight December 31st, I looked out a fifth floor window and saw the fireworks display from downtown. This was a truncated, blink or you'll miss it affair that did not last more than 10 seconds. Perhaps the city came up short after paying for the fleet of shuttles and buses that ferried the drunks home safely after the music note dropped from the stage top at midnight ,and after Lynard Skynard stopped singing "Sweet Home Alabama" to a crowd on Lower Broad.

After that it was all epilogue as taxis by the dozen went up and downtown. The "Jack in the Box" on Broadway- Nashville's equivalent to Delmonico's or Maxim's- opened at midnight for cabs, and people fleeing on foot, and stretch limousines. The line at the takeout window went all the way back out to the road. All this I could see from the window of the break room where one of the respiratory therapists was live streaming her pastor's sermon from Old Hickory over her Smart phone. The pastor, and his gospel choir and the thousand in attendance, had more stamina than the fireworks display did. The minister preached from seven till midnight about Destiny in 2012. The therapist told me her pastor wanted to offer people something other than" going out to the clubs". "He doesn't even care if you're white", she said, "He wants everyone to come to his church".

And the night became an ordinary night. And the morning an ordinary Sunday with more street people than cars. An elderly woman with a walker, an old man with a cane. What they owned- carried in plastic bags as they crossed the street near the Holiday Inn Vanderbilt. The runners were out. They always are. Wearing shorts and joyless expressions. They did not look as though they expected 2012 to be any be any better than 2011.

Professional Finesse in Cooking

Hulu.com is a trove for people who want to see experts cook. One can find episodes from Jose Andres's "Made In Spain" and "Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home". No gleaming teeth, no cleavage- just masterful technique.Watch Jacques Pepin do the simplest thing. Watch him cut open an avocado and cut it up for a tomato and red onion salad. He does not butcher the avocado, digging out the pit and the pulp with a spoon as I do. He pulls the pit out by impaling it on a small cleaver, then he cuts the pulp back to front, side to side into rectangles.

I watched Julia and Jacques last night. Jacques was cooking a pot roast braised in wine and beef stock. I had a chuck roast bought as a Kroger Manager's Special for $6.00. I followed Pepin's instructions, and here is my New Year's Day dinner.

The carrots were cooked in the wine braise in the last 40 minutes of the roast. Then I took them out of the wine with a spider, put them in a bowl and buttered them. The potato souffle was also a Pepin production. Two eggs beaten into three cups of mashed potatoes, then spooned into a buttered souffle dish and sprinkled with a little cheese (I used Pecorino). I baked it at 400 degrees for thirty minutes.

I sifted a few teaspoons of flour into the left-over braise to thicken it into a gravy. And when I sat down to dine, I could not have eaten better at a restaurant.

Jacques Pepin showed me how to brown the roast, how to season it, how to present it. And he did it for free, unless you count a few 15 second car commercials.

The Internet can be a wonderful thing.