Dover sole,Braised Leeks, and Mashed Potatoes

My plan for Saturday night dinner was Sole Meuniere, a dish that would not only cost me $8.78 a pound , but 20 miles in gasoline. I tried to buy Dover sole at my regular favorite grocery store just up the street, but the fillets looked tired, and when I asked to smell them, they smelled old. I do not live in what one of my old work friends called " the money side of town". My suburb is plain middle-class, and most people here live in apartments. If they buy fish , it will be at Kroger, or Sam's Club, or Walmart, and they will not pay $8.78 a pound.

I had to drive to Whole Foods in Green Hills on a a Saturday night, something no sane person would ever do. My excuse is that a migraine was looming, and it affected my brain.

Green Hills is what this city's boosters would describe as a "premiere shopping destination". Its Mall has a Louis Vuitton, an Abercrombie and Fitch, and a Tiffany's. Up Hillsboro road , and south, is the Hill Center and Whole Foods. I was struggling to describe the Hill Center, getting only as far as "faux". Instead, I will let the people who developed it describe it. They call it a "mixed-use life-style center".

I have been to the Hill Center many times, and I fail to see what uses it has other than eating and shopping. Perhaps the developers meant walking along the narrow sidewalks under the bulbous street lamps. Perhaps they meant the adventures one has finding a parking spot. Or- perhaps "mixed use" is used historically , since General John Bell Hood , and what limbs he had left at the time, used this ground to fight the Battle of Nashville to try to win back a city held by Yankees. That the battlefield is reduced to one marker at the corner of Hobbs and Hillsboro is a tribute to the people of Nashville and their reverence for history.

I found my Dover Sole at Whole Foods. It was fresh, and three fillets cost three dollars. The store was crowded, but there were no lines. People were sitting at the Wi-Fi stations, but they were watching. Everybody was watching everyone else. An unpleasant looking older woman smirked at me. Twice. Perhaps she thought I was there for the promenade, and ought to be disqualified because I was wearing dog hair. I saw then that Whole Foods on Saturday night is Nashville's answer to an Italian piazza. A place to see and be seen. Who does not want the privilege of ignoring the famous actress standing in front of you in the checkout line?

At home and ready to cook , I found that I needed a lemon I did not have. James Peterson's recipe in "Glorious French Food" required it. I took a left turn instead, and went on on my own. What would New Orleans do? I mixed flour with some Creole seasoning and sea salt and dipped the fillets in it. I cooked the fillets in melted butter mixed with the juice of half a blood orange. When the fillets were lightly browned and done I saved them from the pan. I added two tablespoons of dry white wine to the pan juices , and reduced them . Over the warm fillets they went. I must say that the sole was sublime, and it went well with leeks sauteed simply in butter and with mashed potatoes. The meal was worth the money, the gasoline, and the traffic.

Migraine

Saturday, the first day of my four day weekend off, was a day off in name only. After all, I worked Saturday from its birth at midnight until seven a.m. Then I slept until two P.M. My day off was ten hours long. I planned to do all sorts of things Sunday. Walk the dogs at the park. Work on my book. Work on new posts. See a friend in the afternoon-

It was not to be. I woke with one of the worst of time thieves waiting for me. Now, fourteen hours later, the migraine has left and taken my Sunday off with it.

I had my first migraine during my eighth birthday party. I have had them every month since, and sometimes more often. They are the prevailing weather in my life. And anyone who thinks a migraine is merely a headache has never known the moods and miasma that come in the days before and linger into the days after.

Let us not talk about seratonin and migraine personalities and triggers, for what is the point since these headaches are so entrenched. So inevitable and unavoidable. Let me ask a question instead. Do these headaches have a purpose, whether existential or practical?

In her "The White Album", the essayist and novelist Joan Didion writes of her headaches that " The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact". Oliver Sachs , the neurologist, in his "Migraine-Understanding A Common Disorder ", writes of "the major strategic roles that migraine may play in the economy of the individual".

I believe Didion and Sachs are right. I believe that migraines can serve as a time-out for the overtaxed soul. Is a day off a day off when it is stuffed with must-do and need-to-do and want to do ? When it becomes just another work day?

"Enough!", cries the over-burdened body and spirit, "If you refuse to rest, if you will not slow down- I will recruit a migraine to make you do it".

And now the headache is gone. I feel new. Energy is seeping back. I walk out to see a full moon. I think of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said " If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well".

Elderberry Syrup on French Toast

When I started this blog in January I promised to write about making elderberry syrup. But a recipe would be pointless now and better suited to late summer. If I can find elderberry bushes then that the Highway department has not bush-hogged to stumps. Last summer I had my eye on a large, resplendent elderberry bush at the corner of Old Harding Pike and Bellevue Road. It was across the street from a gas station and only feet away from the railroad tracks. Slash we must, declared the Highway department and there were no berries. I found another bush a couple hundred feet down the line and picked enough berries to make half a pint of syrup. Why the bush-hoggers spared it I do not know.

Elderberry syrup is the color of cassis, or Kir- a liqueur made from black currants, and that is what its taste reminds me of. I have heard of elderberry wine, though I do not know how anyone would ferment it. I tried several times to make elderberry jelly, but no matter how much pectin I added the syrup would never be still. It will give up and turn to purple sugar crystals instead.

Making this syrup is like walking back in time- perhaps to the kitchen of the Smith family in Vincent Minnelli's "Meet Me in St. Louis". It harks back to berry-picking days- blackberries, wild strawberries. To the black cap raspberries I found as a child in New Hampshire; they always grew around the charred timbers and cellar holes of forgotten farms that had burned to the ground. Here in Tennessee, where wild strawberries grow where I cannot find them , we pick blackberries from the field edges, and come home covered with ticks and chiggers.If we are lucky we may find Paw-Paws fallen beside the Warner Park auto roads. But in 30 years I have found only three. Wild persimmons are more reliable. Foxes, deer, coyotes, and possums love them. Beagles will eat them too. It is a myth that persimmons are not edible till after frost. Their orange pulp makes a fine pudding. So much for my little treatise on foraging. I am taking arms against the recession and spending some gas driving over to Whole Foods to find a sole fillet. Good evening.

Time For some comedy

To cheer myself up I have decided to post another fictional snippet. There are three characters in it who I need to introduce to you, though their parts in this little comedy are bit. Renee Lyman is the wife of St. Sanctimonia Hospital CEO Will Lyman, who you met in "A Meeting of the Board". Miranda Olsen is an Intensive Care nurse new to the Hospital. Timmy Profitt is CEO of Criterion Medical Corporation, a hospital company founded by his father W.E. Profitt


We Tube - by E.Sprague



Miranda's patient wanted to watch the ten o'clock news.

"How do I work this?". He handed Miranda the TV remote. Nine hours after bypass surgery, he was still shaky. But he knew what he wanted. " Could you put it on Channel 9?".

"Next- On Fox News Live at Ten", announced Calliope Acidophilus, the news reader, "A Southbelt neighborhood is up in arms tonight about a local man's plans to build a 50 foot tower of empty dog food cans in his front yard. A Belltown woman finds a squirrel in her dryer, and scenes from a local hospital end up on the Internet, and some people are not happy about it'.

"I wonder what hospital they're talking about," said the patient. Five minutes later he put on his call light. " I just saw you on TV," he said to Miranda.

Randy Snaggs and his friend Jimmy Burkle called the video they put on We-Tube "My Gran is a patient at the world famous St. Sanctimonia Hospital". They filmed Miranda through the window of Mrs. Snaggs' room.

"She's hot!", the boys agreed. Randy had hidden the camcorder in his backpack.

"Put it back," said Mrs. Snaggs, who saw Miranda coming toward the room.

Wasn't that just like Gran! The boys loved her. Who else would drive them ten miles out of a dry county to buy beer at a mini-mart? Who else would sit with them in their driveway, giggling and drinking?

The hot nurse left. Randy pulled a bottle of beer out of his back pack. He filmed Gran pretending to open it with her teeth.

Mrs Snagg's room was next to the fire door and the back stairwell. After the boys took some good shots of the bedside commode that the day nurse had forgotten to flush, they decided to explore.

The dust on the first landing was so thick that the boys scooped it into balls and threw it at each other. On the second landing they found a live cockroach and a dead wasp. They filmed a mock battle between the quick and the deceased. There was no excitement on the third and last landing. Until they found a bottle of vodka in a paper bag tucked under the stairs. The boys pretended to drink it.

The door outside was next. They opened it and surprised two rats eating chicken tenders someone had dropped on the sidewalk. Commentary from Jimmy- "World class St. Sanctimonia Hospital employees hard at work". The rats ran.

The security guard outside the Family Waiting Room entrance never saw the boys. He was smoking and facing the other way. The boys walked up the service road. At the loading dock, behind a dumpster, they saw two Enviornmental Services employees sharing a joint. "Got it," said Jimmy.

Their last coup was a long tracking shot right up to the doors of the Emergency Room. "Life and Death in the big city hospital," said Randy. A pizza car sped up, and the driver jumped out to deliver four pizzas to a waiting nurse. Behind him came another car which dropped off two bags of Chinese from the Jade Dragon Garden.

One of Timmy Profitt's sons saw the video on the news, and called his father.

Timmy Profitt called Will Lyman. " I can see you're making a big difference over there". Timmy was laughing.

"We Tube," Will said to Renee, "This must be it. 'My Gran is a Patient at the World Famous St. Sanctimonia Hospital' ".

"What are you going to do?", Renee asked after they watched the video. Why was Will so incapable of getting control of his hospital?

Will Lyman knew what he needed to do.

"Let's go up to the farm for the week of Thanksgiving ," he said.


( The preceding is a work of fiction, and part of a novel in progress- the Author.)

R.I.P- The Airpark Inn at Reelfoot Lake

These photos are from the Dyersburg Star Gazette. I found them tonight. The Airpark Inn is a casualty of State budget shortfalls. After neglect weakened it, and a fire destroyed some rooms, the State of Tennessee has decided to demolish it. I hope the state leaves the road to the Inn and to the campgrounds open. There is no better place to stand on a January evening to watch numberless skeins of wild geese flying to their roosts. I was going to post My Snake Adventures Part 2 tonight, but am now too dispirited to do so.

Cheap Soup and Hard Times

I am no Panglossian. I do not think that this is "the best of all possible worlds", though I think it unlikely any of us will get a chance at living in another one. We must do what we can. I realize this is an odd prelude to a recipe for Bean Soup , but these are hard, hard times.

Reduced by circumstances a week or two ago, I sold some books at McKay. As I walked in dragging two heavy sacks I overheard two young people talking. It appeared they had not seen each other for a while. The young man was gentle-eyed and bearded- just the sort of young man I would have admired 40 years ago.

"Yeah," I heard him say to his friend," They just called us all into a room and let us go. They're closing down".

I could not stay to eavesdrop more, but why would I have needed to? And this week,visiting a work friend in another part of the building I talked with her and with another woman working there. This woman was a dignified sole bread winner and the mother of several.

"I don't understand it. We work. We have jobs. Why don't we have money?", this woman asked.

During the first Great Depression people went to the movies to see the sleek Myrna Loy and the debonair William Powell with his ever-present martini. Glamour, sophistication, elegance in a theatre helped people forget what awaited them outside. No soup, or if they were fortunate- cheap soup. Thank God for Cannellini beans. (The Tuscans do.)

Cannellini bean soup.


2 16oz cans of cannellini beans

2 16 oz cans of chicken broth

2 to 4 cloves of garlic, or even more, if you can stand it.

3 three inch rounds of pancetta, or three strips of crispy bacon.

4 or 5 sage leaves , minced.

sea salt to taste

1 or 2 teaspoons of Italian seasoning

1 or 2 tablespoons of olive oil wouldn't hurt either.

1 tablespoon of tomato paste. ( For aesthetic reasons- it improves the soup's color.)


I hope anyone reading this is not such a novice as to need to be told to open the cans, but if you are- go and grab your can opener. Put the beans and broth in a biggish sauce pan. In goes the salt next. Then the garlic,sent through the garlic press. Italian seasoning, olive oil, diced pancetta, and minced sage next. Lastly add the tomato paste. Heat on medium heat covered until it just boils, then cover and simmer on low. I think a half hour to an hour of simmering is just right. This should serve 4, if the people you live with don't make pigs of themselves. I like a toasted slice of Italian bread with this.

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