Monthly Archives: October 2012

CHARITY

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Today, I washed as many dirty dishes at a soup kitchen as Paul Ryan did on Saturday. I don’t think that makes me a saint or anything, but the feeling of accomplishment is very satisfying. What kind of people are we, anyway, if we can’t pretend to help those less fortunate than ourselves?

A LAZY MAN’S POT ROAST: WITH UPDATE

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Cooking in the Crock-Pot is very easy but sometimes I want it shamefully easy. Recently I decided to make a pot roast as simply as humanly possible, modifying a disreputably convenient rule I found online.

I got a three-pound hunk of chuck roast, salted and peppered it and braised it in butter in a large pan. (This was the only remotely difficult part of the procedure.) When the meat was browned on all sides I put it in the slow-cooker, deglazed the pan with red wine and poured the resulting liquor into the pot.  This all took about ten minutes.

I added to the pot a 12-ounce carton of organic condensed cream of mushroom soup and then poured in about 16 ounces of store-bought organic French onion soup, enough to barely cover the meat.

Do you see the beauty of this now?  No chopping!  The only time I even touched a knife was to cut off two ounces of butter for the braising.

I set the Crock-Pot on low, let it do its thing for about 12 hours and then served myself up some delicious pot roast, cackling fiendishly at my slothful but wholly successful enterprise.

Ha ha ha!

UPDATE — this rule works just as well for beef stew, simply substituting two or three pounds of beef chunks for the post roast.

DREAM ON, OBAMA SUPPORTERS

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People think Obama is going to come out swinging in the next debate with Romney and make a bid to turn things around. Don’t count on it. Obama doesn’t care about this country. He doesn’t care about The Constitution. He doesn’t care about democracy. He’s going to be richer than Croesus when he leaves office and cashes in his chips with corporate  America. Does anyone seriously think he cares about being the spokesmodel for the plutocracy for another four years? Why should he? His campaign managers care, because it means jobs for them in a second Obama administration, but Obama doesn’t need a job again as long as he lives. You saw the real man in the first debate — a guy who’s bored to tears with being President, who’s ready to get paid off.

REQUIEM

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. . . by Robert Louis Stevenson, written during a serious illness some years before his death, as his own epitaph:

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

It is indeed ‘graved on his tomb (above) on the Samoan island of Upolu, where Stevenson spent his last years.

This is the view from the tomb:

The bas-relief portrait of Stevenson above is by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.  You can click on the image to enlarge it.