Soledad, Patron Saint of Oaxaca

This is my favorite patron saint.  It is almost surely because she dresses in black, I admit that, but I do have a fondness for her. The great thing about Oaxaca is that there is a tradition of wood carving that means that these wonderful creches of her are everywhere.

Where did she come from?  There are many legends, but this is the one I prefer.  In 1620 a mule train bound for Guatemala camped outside the city of Oaxaca discovered an extra mule which did not belong to anyone in the group. The mule refused to move and when prodded rolled over and died. When the pack it carried was opened, it was found to contain the statue of the Virgin of Soledad. Taking this as a sign from heaven, the inhabitants built first a shrine, later a church and finally the imposing basilica which stands today on the spot where the statue first appeared.

 She resides in the church dedicated to her, the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad.  Construction began in 1682, it was designed by Father Fernando Méndez, sanctioned by the Viceroy Tomas Aquino Manrique de la Cerda, and consecrated in 1690 by Bishop Isidro Siraña y Cuenca.  This is from another local church that has her dressed much more humbly, which is my preference.

Sweetie Pie's, St. Louis

 Robbie is the woman pictured at right.  She was a back up singer for Ike and Tina Turner, and now she has a soul food restaurant in St. Louis, cooking the food that she grew up with.  I went with a large crowd of people who I am doing a leadership training with, and it was definitely like stepping into Southern Cooking.

The restaurant is a buffet line, where you choose your meat, you choose your side (do not skip the fried chicken and the macaroni and cheese), you decide if you can skip the peach cobbler, and then you go to a table and enjoy it all.

As I was leaving the restaurant I had the best interaction that I had the entire week I was in St. Louis.  The security guard at the door said "you look like you are having a good time.  What's your name?".  "Catherine", I replied.  "Well, Miss Catherine, what do you do?  Are you a teacher?"  "Yes I am a teacher."  "Well you go on enjoying life like you do."  Why thank you sir.  I will try.

DCI Banks (2010)

While it is true that I don't often review BBC crime dramas, I do watch quite a few of them.  It is my go to entertainment when I am walking on a treadmill and I am not up for something more intellectually stimulating.  Unfortunately, I am not a morning person.  Despite that, I try to do at least a small amount of exercise before I go to work, and so my compromise is to watch series like this.

The star of the show is Stephen Tompkinson, best known to me as the upbeat priest in Ballykissangel.  He plays the morose detective from Peter Robinson's murder mystery series, who is preternaturally insightful but somewhat prickly and difficult to get close to.  The cases that he and his team solve are often complicated and the untangling of the clues is what Banks is exceptionally good at.  This is available streaming on Amazon Instant Video, and if you are a fan of this genre, it is excellent.

Rosca de Reyes

The ring-shaped Rosca de Reyes is a sweet round, cake or oval shape Mexican bread, decorated with slices of crystallized or candied fruit colors. The King cake is also called: biscuit, cake or sweet bread to celebrate the three kings.  Yes, it is June and we are well removed from the twelve days after Christmas , but I am remembering this fondly from my January trip to Oaxaca.

The tradition of holding the reunion to celebrate the Day of the Epiphany comes from the middle ages in Europe, mainly from Spain and France. This tradition came to Mexico at the time of the early years of the viceroys.  The rosca de reyes is eaten with family and friends while sipping the famous hot chocolate from the region.  One or sometimes two lucky winners will bite into a small plastic baby, meant to represent the baby Jesus.  Unlike a typical winner, the one who finds the prize in this case has to bear the cost of the party.  So best to eat it one very thin piece at a time.

Misery Loves Co., Winooski, Vermont

 This is a great restaurant, nestled into a small town just outside Burlington.  My spouse read about it on Chowhound and we started off there with a lunch.  The food is incredibly good, each and every dish a taste sensation.  We shared everything and while we were more than full at the end of the meal, we really hadn't had enough.  What to do?  We went back for dinner the next day and it was even better.  One word of warning.  This is the best fried chicken, but when you order it off the dinner menu, you get half the bird.  The neck, the back, the whole thing, piled up on a plate too enormous for one person, and a struggle for two. 

So if you want to give the menu a chance, skip that (or go with more people).  Order  a number of the smaller plates.  The pasta with ramps was phenomenal.  Light pasta, perfectly cooked, spring green in color, just delicious. It had pig cheeks in it and it did not need them (and we are not a couple to turn a good pig cheek down, I am telling you right now).  This is a place to seek out, and to eat at again and again.

Alexander (2004)

I watched this movie with my youngest son after reading a lengthy and somewhat sobering account of Alexander the Great's life. While the Greeks of his day were monogamous, the Macedonians were not, and Alexander's mother was the third wife of Phillip II.  The movie portrays Olympia as a scheming woman who may or may not have had Phillip killed after wife number four had a son.  Phillip II developed and perfected a new form of war fare and Alexander learned it at his side in battle.  He was a master horseman who miraculously had one horse through his many years of war.  Bucephalus was a horse that by all accounts he tamed and who survived with him in bloody wars where they were out manned and out horsed.  Truly a remarkable story, and Alexander's legacy as the greatest field commander who ever lived seems to be richly deserved.

Oliver Stone's retelling of his life does not gloss over the low points in Alexander's life.  Olympia (well played by Angelina Jolie, a woman who was not afraid to play the role of mother to a grown man) is paranoid, smothering, and a little creepy.  Alexander (played by Colin Farrell) aptly says of her that she sought a high price for the nine months he spent in her body.  Alexander has a close and loyal childhood friend, Hephaestion (played by the very beautiful Jared Leto) who is his right hand man on the battle field and probably has shared his bed on more than one occasion.  All of this is probably a true depiction, as is the single mindedness that Alexander took to conquering much of the known world without any sense of how to rule it all.  He wore his troops out, and left a kingdom that no one man could ever rule again.  The story is told through the eyes of Ptolemy (played by Anthony Hopkins), who went directly to Egypt upon Alexander's death, eliminated all the local contenders for the governorship, and built a dynasty that lasted until Cleopatra rattled the cage of Rome and the Ptolemy's were wiped out.

Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, St. Louis

  had never been to a national cemetery even though I have worked at a VA hospital in some capacity since 1983.  Before I visited the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery last month, I thought that Arlington was a national cemetery, but it is not part of the system.  I also would have thought that Gettysburg had some connection, but again have been wrong.  So my visit to St. Louis was eye opening.  Jefferson Barracks is named for Thomas Jefferson, who died on July 4, 1826.  The facility was commissioned in 1827, soon after his death, and it was made part of the fourteen national cemeteries that Abraham Lincoln created in 1862. 
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ISo a part of the cemetery pre-dates the Civil and it is an obviously different part of the cemetery.    Days family could erect their own monuments, so it is a mish mash.  The Confederate soldiers wanted pointed gravestones so that Union soldiers could not sit on them.  Some grave markers are smalls, some are large, and some are not white.  In the beginning, the cemetery was largely populated by children who had died.

The more modern part of the cemetery, meaning World War I onward, has the grave markers all the same size and shape and color.  They are set at exactly the same height and they are roughly the same color of marble.  The cemetery orders from only three quarries.  There is a standard that 90% of them need to be in line, and it is impressive to look over hill after hill and see that uniformity.  The other thing that I did not know is that spouses can be buried with the veteran.  They stack them.  First in goes 7 feet deep, next one 5 feet down.  The veteran’s name is on the front of the marker and the spouse on the back.

Finally, the group graves are interesting.  A common grave is used when the remains are comingled and cannot be identified or separated.  The common situation is a plane crash or a fire, but the other situation is cremated prisoners of war who were found in Japanese POW camps.  That is why there are group graves with the remains of international soldiers.  A very cool experience, and since there are 130+ national cemeteries nationwide and some overseas are well worth seeking out.

Panic in a Suitcase by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

This is the dark comedy of immigrant stories.  The Nasmertovs, the family at the center of the book, have been in Brooklyn for 715 days--they were still counting the days, literally, as the novel opens.  When the parents, Esther and Robert, immigrate in 1991 with their grown daughter Marina, her husband Levik, and their 7-year-old granddaughter Frida, they leave behind their son Pasha, a socially phobic,up-and-coming poet who avoids all discussions of what he will do with his life and who is part black sheep, part source of irritation and fascination.  He takes to his bed often, and is the kind of guy who can suck the life out of a room.

This is a book you read for its vivid characters and language more than plot. Panic abounds in biting cultural and visual observations, as when Pasha, debating whether to cede to his family's pressures to relocate to Brooklyn, reflects, "His fellow countrymen hadn't ventured bravely into a new land, they'd borrowed a tiny nook at the very rear of someone else's crumbling estate to make a tidy replication of the messy, imperfect original they'd gone through so many hurdles to escape, imprisoning themselves in their own lack of imagination." He notes that even the food is uncannily similar, "the only divergence being in abundance." It is both wonderful and manageable.  Not too Slavic in it's length but just as sharp in it's wit.

Mockingjay Part 1 (2014)

I admit that the third Hunger Game book devolved to a very dark level, but this movie has sucked the life out of a very talented actress in Jennifer Lawrence.  I can see that she has to see the series through, and anyone who read the books would know what they were in for when they signed up for the series, but it is not a pretty sight.

Katniss wakes up after the shocking end to the tournament of winners to find herself in a bunker deep below the earth in District 13.  Her home has been decimated by the government, thousands of people burned to death in the streets, with Gabe and her family amongst the survivors.  Peeta has been captured and is being brain washed.  The tow of them share a connection that is born of killing and surviving, and there is no saving either of them really.  A part of them has died. 

The story progresses to the rebels having someone who they can rally around, and the symbol of the revolution being torn apart by it all.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman is still a player in this, and Julianne Moore plays the president--but again there is very little room for good acting to be found.  I regret that they divided the movie in two, because I won't be able to not watch it, but don't hold out high hopes.

Steamed Kohlrabi and Celery

Kohlrabi season is just around the corner and I found several recipes for it in my new vegetable cookbook, The Broad Fork (which I will review once I have the chance to make a few more things out of it.  This recipe is very simple, and not very photogenic, but good in the way that vegetables that taste like themselves are.  Nothing fancy.

2 bulbs of kohrabi, peeled and cubed
1-2 Tbs. butter
1 shallot, thinly sliced in rings (can substitute onion with some garlic minced)
1/2 c. thinly sliced celery with leaves
1 tsp. thyme
salt
1 Tbs. toasted sesame seeds

In sauce pan brown the butter.  Add the shallot, celery, and kohlrabi and saute briefly.  Reduce heat, add 1/4 c. water and thyme, then cover the pan.  Cook for about 5 minutes until kohlrabi is tender and water evaporated.  Season with salt and top with sesame seeds.