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A Hungarian Peasant Dish

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Hungarian Káposztas Tészta, or Cabbage Noodles

Hungarian Káposztas Tészta, or Cabbage Noodles

One of my favorite dishes as a child was Hungarian Káposztas Tészta, or Cabbage Noodles, which was both cheap and good. The recipe below is taken from 2009 posting to Blog.Com describing the way I prepared it for a Hungarian Meet-Up Group potluck:

Take one head of cabbage, grate it as finely as possible. Deposit it into a large mixing bowl and salt liberally. Then cover it with a clean dish towel and come back a half hour later. You will find that the salt draws the water out of the cabbage. Pick up handfuls of the cabbage, squeeze the salt water out of it over the sink, and place in a colander. Then squeeze it hard again.

Now it’s time to get a large saucepan and melt some unsalted butter in it and add an equal amount of olive oil. (The old Hungarians used bacon fat, but butter and vegetable oil is just as good and better for you.) Sauté the cabbage and keep stirring for upwards of an hour, until the cabbage starts to get a little brown around the edges. Don’t leave the cabbage to burn: You have to attend to it fairly closely.

Around this time, start boiling water for egg noodles. My mother used to make her own, cutting them into three-quarter-inch squares that were perfect. But prepackaged noodles are almost as good. Drain the cooked noodles and add to the cabbage. I used my Chinese iron wok to mix the two together. While turning the mix around, I added salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.

Simple and good.

Drifting on the Missouri

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“Fur Traders Descending the Missouri”

“Fur Traders Descending the Missouri”

Although his works were not really discovered until the next century, George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was perhaps one of the two or three greatest American painters of the Nineteenth Century. His most famous work is “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri” (above) with its idyllic boatmen and a bear cub—no, it’s not a cat—perched in the bow of the boat. There is not a breath of wind, and a mist hovers over the river.

Equally famous is his “Boatmen on the Missouri” (below):

“Boatmen on the Missouri”

“Boatmen on the Missouri”

Most of the best known work by Bingham comes from early in his career. After the Civil War, he went into Missouri politics as a member of the Whig party and held several offices.

Politicians are a dime a dozen, but painters like Bingham are rare. When I think of his time and place, I cannot help but see his art.

“The Wood Boat”

“The Wood Boat”

The Loose Juice Caboose

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Why Do We Tend to Go Overboard with Beverages?

Why Do We Tend to Go Overboard with Beverages?

During my lunch hour, I visited the Westwood farmer’s market. What struck me funny was that the vendors of juices outnumbered the vendors of fruit and vegetables. Are so many people convinced that juices are the way to go that they tend to ignore whole fruits and vegetables.

The key word is “whole.” You know, of course, that the “whole” fruit or vegetable is more nutritious than the juice made from it. As a diabetic, I am very conscious that the process of making juice concentrates the sugars and usually leaves out the fiber. According to Harvard’s School of Public Health:

Fiber is a type of carbohydrate that the body can’t digest. Though most carbohydrates are broken down into sugar molecules, fiber cannot be broken down into sugar molecules, and instead it passes through the body undigested. Fiber helps regulate the body’s use of sugars, helping to keep hunger and blood sugar in check.

And since diabetes is probably one of the fastest growing diseases in America, we should re-evaluate our preference for juices. As for myself, I usually go for water, unsweetened iced tea, or mineral water. Tonight, I’m taking home three beautiful white peaches—and no juice.

 

Demoted!

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Carmen de Patagones Seen from Viedma

Carmen de Patagones Seen from Viedma

The two cities sit on opposite banks of the Rio Negro. Carmen de Patagones, on the north bank, is the southernmost city of the State of Buenos Aires; Viedma, occupying he south bank, is the capital of the State of Rio Negro, which extends west as far as the Andes and the Chilean border.

It seems that the current edition of the Lonely Planet Guide to Argentina no longer has chapters for the twin cities on the Rio Negro. I guess they’re not Disneyfied enough to draw all the tour groups. For travelers driving from Buenos Aires to Patagonia, it is at best a stopping place for the night before big chunk of attractions around Puerto Madryn and Trelew.

Viedma also happens to be the terminus of the Tren Patagonico, about which I wrote yesterday. From there, it goes clear across the State of Rio Negro to the Patagonian Lake District around San Carlos de Bariloche. Today, I finally got an e-mail response from the Tren Patagonico people telling me they’ll be ready to take my reservation for November in a week or so.

If my reservation is confirmed, I’ll spend a couple of nights in either Viedma or Carmen de Patagones and wander around both towns seeing the local museums.

In 2001, I remember being the only visitor in a two-hour period to the old fish canning museum in Heimaey in Iceland’s Vestmanneyjar Islands. I loved every minute. The curator gave me a personal tour and explained how Heimaey was the main fishing port in Iceland, a country whose GDP is based on their fish catch. Even though the museum is no more (I looked for it in 2013 but couldn’t find it), I have special memories of my visit. And that is much better than being jostled by huge crowds of tourists who distractedly push their way past all the exhibits on their way to the next destination.

So Viedma and Carmen de Patagones have been demoted! So much more for me to see!

Argentina: One Remaining Question

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An Overnight Train Trip Clear Across Patagonia

An Overnight Train Trip Clear Across Patagonia

Right smack in the middle of my trip, there is a question of how I’m going to get from Buenos Aires to San Carlos de Bariloche. Most people would probably elect to fly, but I want to minimize my exposure to Aerolineas Argentinas, a state-run airline with a laughably intricate labor union structure. There are a dozen or more unions, any of which can decide to call a strike any time. In 2011, they decided to fly us to Ezeiza’s Ministro Pistarini Airport rather than Aeroparque Jorge Newberry, necessitating a fifty dollar cab ride in the middle of the night to our hotel in the Congreso district.

(As currently planned, I will use Aerolineas to fly from Puerto Iguazu to Aeroparque, and Santiago, Chile, to Aeroparque. Let’s see how badly they screw me up this time.)

What I would like to do is to take an overnight bus to Viedma on the coast, and the Tren Patagonico from Viedma to Bariloche. Below is a map of the route:

Cutting Across the State of Rio Negro

Cutting Across the State of Rio Negro

Part of this was traveled by Paul Theroux on the trip covered by his book The Old Patagonian Express—except he got off at Ingeniero Jacobacci and transferred to a southbound narrow-gauge train from Jacobacci to Esquel.

The only problem is that I have not so far succeeded in making a reservation for the November 13 train. If they do not respond to my reservation request by October 15, I will take a bus from Buenos Aires to San Martín de los Andes. From there, I will take the scenic Ruta de Siete Lagos (Route of the Seven Lakes) to Bariloche. In either case, I have a reservation for Bariloche beginning November 14.

Either way, I’ll probably have a good time.

 

 

Dreaming of Proust

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Alfred George Stevens’s “Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt” (1885)

Alfred George Stevens’s “Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt” (1885)

When you’re a hopeless intellectual like me, you, too, will have dreams that smack of literary criticism. This one is from last Saturday night. Despite the hot, humid weather we’re having in Los Angeles, I had just begun re-reading the second volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in the David Grieve translation called In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. (That title alone gives rise to dreams of a sort.)

Marcel has finally won the right to go to the theater to see the great actress La Berma (thought to be Sarah Bernhardt) as Racine’s Phèdre, albeit chaperoned by his grandmother. Feeling he is about to be exposed at long last to the holy grail, Marcel awaits the magical moment. It comes, but, alas, the lad is disappointed. Although he claps and cheers madly with the audience, Marcel feels that the actress did not live up to her hype.

That’s where my dream begins. I am thinking: Well, now, the entire heptology is full of disappointments: In the first volume Swann is cruelly deceived by his love, Odette de Crécy … but marries her anyhow. Marcel idealizes the ancient nobility of the Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes, but gives us ample opportunities throughout the series to see how trivial her decorous life has become. As for Palamède, Baron de Charlus, he is given to affairs with lower class young men and, in the final volume, ends up being flagellated by one of them in a male bawdy house. Albertine does wind up in a relationship with Marcel, but he agonizes constantly that she is bi-sexual. Besides, she dies young.

Again and again, it almost seems as if Proust’s grand theme is either “You can’t always get what you want” or “Nothing is as good as it seems at first.”

And that’s where my dream left off. In the end, though, I rejected my dream interpretation. Marcel’s inner life is so vivid and intense that all the disappointments still make it all worthwhile. If that negativity were the only thing I got from reading Proust, why would I be reading the seven volumes for a third time? (Er, aside from THAT, I mean).

Incidentally, the original Stevens portrait of Sarah Bernhardt (above) is at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, near my place of work.

 

Under the Bridges

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James Doolin’s Painting “Bridges”

James Doolin’s Painting “Bridges”

On past visits to the Autry National Center’s exhibit of paintings of the West, I had always admired James Doolin’s “Bridges” (illustrated above). By  now, I have begun to believe that it is one of the most representative landscapes of Los Angeles, simultaneously showing the present web of freeways and, underneath all the concrete, the desert.

I could almost swear the scenes are of the Pasadena Freeway (I-110), which I drove today on the way back from visiting Bill and Kathy Korn in Altadena. It looks like the stretch as you approach downtown L.A. from the north. You can see the 1930s concrete work (in fact the year 1937 appears on the lower left abutment).

 

On the Road to Mordor

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Deserted “Jackrabbit Homestead” in Wonder Valley

Deserted “Jackrabbit Homestead” in Wonder Valley

Today, Martine and I visited the Autry Center, the L.A. museum dedicated to the American West. In addition to an excellent exhibit on the American West in the Civil War, there was an intriguing show featuring the “jackrabbit homesteads” of Wonder Valley.

Martine used to live in this area when she worked at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in the hospital. It was not a happy time for her, and she has retained zero interest in living in the heat of the desert, even at a couple thousand feet altitude.

I remember one time after tax season in 1995, just after the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, I picked Martine up in Twentynine Palms and took the road through Wonder Valley, Amboy, Essex, and various other obscure desert towns on the back roads to Las Vegas.

Deserted Homestead Cabin

Deserted Homestead Cabin

Kim Stringfellow, a resident of the area, has done a brief documentary for KCET-TV about the “jackrabbit homesteads” of wonder valley which can be accessed by clicking here. Originally, the area was settled by First World War veterans whose lungs had been damaged by poison gas. It was thought the desert air would help them. It didn’t.

The next population bump came around the 1940s and 1950s after the Small Tract Act of 1938 was passed. Settlers could lay claim to five acres of high desert for as little as $20 an acre if they put up a shack on the property and lived there. These homesteads are now mostly deserted. What could a settler do with five acres of desert and, for all intents and purposes, no water? There was, however, no shortage of hot and cold weather, scorpions, rattlesnakes, coyotes, and—oh, yes—jackrabbits.