Struggle food

 Most people who are on SNAP already know how to stretch their money, so most of the very basic tips going around on social media aren't that helpful.  However, I mentioned my mother's Depression-era struggle food and a friend said "go ahead"; also it occurs to me that if we all budget a bit more, we could donate the extra $ (such as it may be) to food pantries, so here we are.

I wrote an earlier guide to eating healthy and cheap which also includes a link to Cook For Good which is a much more elaborate guide. 

The recipes I'm about to share aren't especially "healthy" in the sense of long-term cardiovascular considerations. But they are cheap and filling, and life is full of trade-offs. Alive and not enervated from not getting enough to eat is healthy, too.

First of all, go buy some flour, butter, and milk. A five pound bag of flour, a pound of butter, and a gallon of milk will get you pretty far, you will discover.

You are going to make white sauce. Never mind what you are going to make WITH it; we'll talk about that later.  

Here's what you do:

Melt butter in a saucepan on low-ish heat
Add a more or less equivalent amount of flour, a little bit at a time, stirring the whole time. Cook it until it no longer smells like raw flour.  
Then start adding milk, a little at a time, and whisk it in as you go.  It helps if the milk isn't straight out of the refrigerator. Make sure it's simmering but not boiling.
Cook, stirring, until it's the thickness you want. Add pepper and salt at some point.

This isn't a quick process, and the sauce will only keep 4-5 days in the refrigerator (it gets very, very thick when chilled) and it doesn't freeze well. However, you can make the roux part (the butter and flour) in a big batch and freeze it in smaller portions to cut down the time. 

You will notice that there are no measurements here, just vibes. That is because this "recipe" is from my mother and that's how she rolled. However, 4/4/2 works:  4 tbsp butter, 4 tbsp flour, 2 cups of milk.

My advice to you is to start with about half that and practice until you get the hang of it. It's not really that hard as long as you don't get in too big of  a hurry.  It's not NEARLY as persnickety as brown roux, where the line between "adequately cooked" and "fuck I burned it and have to start over" is depressingly small. The worst thing that usually happens to white roux is that you add milk too fast (or it's too cold) and it gets lumpy. It will still be edible though. Just lumpy.

You will want to master the technique though, because white sauce is everything. It's gravy, it's sauce, it's soup base, depending on how much milk (or sometimes stock) you add. It's CHEAP and magical. 

You can make the sauce with other fats than butter, of course. It will work with margarine, and making it with bacon grease or the oil you just fried something else in is how you make cream gravy. 

You can put just about ANYTHING in it once you have it. Put nutmeg in it and it's bechamel sauce. Put cheese in it and it's cheese sauce. Pour that over anything that will be improved by cheese sauce, which is most things. Cheese sauce on pasta is lazy mac n cheese. (If you want the cheesy crust that takes more steps, but you're halfway there).  Use the white sauce or cheese sauce for casseroles of leftover veggies and pot pies if you're ambitious. 

Put boiled eggs in it and spoon over toast, and you've got creamed eggs on toast which is what my mother made for me when I was feeling poorly. 

Thin it out to the consistency of soup with more milk or stock and put canned oysters in it. (Or clams, I suppose). If you want potatoes or carrots in there, add them first and let them cook before you add the oysters.

Bake a whole chicken, eat that for a meal, then strip the meat off and put it aside. Boil the chicken carcass, any giblets, and odds and ends (potato peels, carrot ends, etc) for a couple of hours to make stock. (You can freeze it or make soup the next day).

Make the white roux for a base, then pour the stock in (my mother would also add milk), add the reserved chicken, and heat up. Once it's hot, drop in some dumplings.  (My mother made these from biscuit dough, and would make biscuits to eat with chicken and save some of the dough for next day dumplings). Cook at a simmer until the dumplings are done.

Depending on the size of the chicken and the size of your household, you might be able to also get a chicken salad sandwich out of the meat from the chicken as well.

Since I mentioned biscuits, they are more versatile than people assume. Biscuit dough can be cobbler or pot pie crust, and leftover biscuits can be toasted the next day or converted to bread crumbs. They aren't especially sturdy for sandwich purposes, but it's absolutely possible to make sandwiches from biscuits or cornbread; people used to do it all the time. Making your own bread is cheaper and better, but yeast bread is a bit of a time commitment. Quick breads are called that because they're quick, and if you pre-mix the dry ingredients including baking soda, they're even quicker.  Use saved bacon grease for your cornbread.

My mother used to eat leftover cornbread crumbled up in buttermilk. That is probably too old school Southern for most people, but it's cheap and nutritious even though buttermilk has gotten more expensive relative to sweet milk than it used to be. 

Salmon patties (or croquettes) are typically made with canned salmon. Remove the bones, mash up with a fork, add an egg and crumbled saltines until you can form them into patties.  Fry in oil until they are brown on both sides (they should form a nice crunchy crust). One 14 oz can will make quite a few...a family meal's worth with some sides...and they are good cold as well.  You can tart them up with paprika or brown mustard or whatever, and people make them with other things to hold the patties together, but the recipe I just gave is the one favored by William Faulkner, so there you are.

Saltines make a good casserole top and the formula for squash casserole (squash + onions boiled until tender, an egg to make it set, pepper, grated cheese, crumbled saltines and more cheese on top, bake at 350 till the cheese melts and browns a little) could be used for most anything you decided you wanted to make a casserole from.

Get cheap cuts of meat. Save drippings and use to cook other things (some fats will go rancid if you don't use them promptly; bacon grease keeps well). Use bits and pieces and leftovers to make other things. Be inventive.

Pasta with butter and garlic isn't something my mother made, but I made it a lot when I was young and broke and make it now because I like it.  You just sautee minced garlic in butter, add some Parmesan, dump it over your pasta, add more Parmesan.  

How much butter? How much garlic?  I dunno, man, just go where the spirit leads you. I am my mother's daughter after all, I guess.

Sara's Survival Guide to What's Heading Our Way

 I'm still processing, but part of how I process is making contingency plans. And stress cleaning, so my house looks better than it has in a while.

I don't have answers to the bigger picture of why our fellow citizens can't see the train bearing down on us all, but I do have some thoughts about how to get out of the way, as best we can. I also have thoughts about exactly why certain choices are being made, but that may need to wait.

Here are a few things that are going to happen:

• Tariffs will raise the price of everything. The more tariffs, the worse it will be.
• Because half of the workforce in agriculture and construction are undocumented workers, food and housing prices are going to skyrocket.
• We are going to get into a war with China...and if we don't, it will be because Trump capitulated control of the South China Sea, which is worse.
• We will continue to have devastating storms and wildfires, but Trump will weaken FEMA and withhold assistance from states he doesn't like. 
• The ACA and CHIP Act are likely to be repealed.
• H1N1 is mutating and could potentially turn into another pandemic, and we already know Trump will fuck that up.

Any one of these things would damage the economy; all of them together is going to crash it. 

It's also possible, if they start revoking the charters of unions (it's in Project 2025) that there will be a general strike. Which I encourage participation in, but that also means you need a way to pay for your expenses.

So here's what you need to do...

• Save your money. Cancel your subscriptions, sell your extra possessions, don't buy anything you don't need.
• On the other hand, if you know you are going to need something that will be affected by tariffs, buy it now.
• Stock up on non-perishable food, and grow your own if you can. Find local sources. Learn how to preserve and store food (so you can buy a sack of potatoes when they are in season from a local farmer, and have potatoes for months). Get chickens. 
• Develop a side hustle and otherwise make your life recession/depression resilient. Make as much money as you can.
• Take a look at your housing situation. It might make sense to buy a house if you're renting if you can and you're pretty sure your income will be stable, or it might make sense to live in an RV. Whatever it is, start planning now.
• Have a disaster plan and assume that FEMA will be non-functional.
• Get your finances in order. Renew your passport.
• If you get your health insurance through the ACA, start figuring out an alternative. Get a checkup and address any health problems now.

I'm sure I haven't thought of everything, or anticipated everything, but hopefully this will get you thinking. Basically, Trump is going to be a literal disaster as well as a moral one. Take care of yourself and each other.

Kamala Harris, coconut trees, burdens, and joy

It has only been two days since Joe Biden stepped aside from the presidential campaign and I have learned a lot more about Charli XCX than I was expecting. Meanwhile, the Democrats have raised $100 million and counting.

A lot of the Republican response has been boringly predictable, and none of it has anything to do with Vice President Kamala Harris as a person or as a politician. They are stuck in a hermetically sealed room with Donald Trump and the smell of their own ideological farts. 

But a couple of the complaints have caught my attention, in that Republicans are saying she doesn't speak well and produces "word salad."  (I bet they've been saving that up since Sarah Palin, you betcha.)  

Even an arguably respectable publication like Newsweek called one of her signature phrases "confusing," and others seem to be mixing up a coconut tree with a turnip truck.*

Let me explain. 

Harris gave a speech in which she quoted her mother as saying, "'I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?'"  Harris went on to say, "You exist in the context of all in which you live, and what came before you." 

That is to say, you didn't come out of nowhere. You have a family and a community and a history and a culture and a world.

The other thing that Harris likes to say is, "I can imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been."

I don't find that statement confusing whatsoever. And coupled with the previous statement, it's a whole philosophy. 

You come from somewhere. You exist in a context that includes culture and history and family and other people and the world at large. Those things inform you...but they need not limit you. The future can be lifted up by the past and present, it doesn't have to be weighted down by them. 

That's a beautiful, hopeful sentiment. I like it.

Assuming that they're telling the truth about what they actually think and not just Gish galloping through life (which is never a good bet, to be honest), the people complaining that she doesn't make sense are either not smart enough to follow the thought or constitutionally incapable of grasping it. 

The same people make fun of her for laughing, as if joy is also something they can't understand. Notably, unintelligent and narcissistic people commonly lack a sense of humor and tend to take themselves very, very seriously.

(There are people who laugh at things I don't think are funny, but that's not actually what they're complaining about. They seem to be upset that she's laughing at all.)

Harris speaks about growing up in a family full of women who laugh big belly laughs. I did too, and it's one of the things that makes me like her.  

Women who laugh loud don't make ourselves small to appease others. We don't suppress our own joy. And we fear no one. 

*The phrase "I didn't just fall off the back of a turnip truck" basically means "I wasn't born yesterday" and while it is a fine turn of phrase, the connotations seem to be different.

What I've been up to...

Mostly, writing for Decaturish. Depending on who you ask, I am doing great work and shining a much-needed light on dark corners of DeKalb County, or I am a yellow journalist who needs to go back to school and learn how to be a professional.

I did go back to school, but it was to teach college English. Jokes on them, I guess. 

I've participated in a couple of Outer Dark events, including Weird Bites last year and Call of the Weird last March. I expect the latter will be up on the podcast eventually.

I hadn't been writing much new fiction or poetry, and not trying very hard to get it published, until fairly recently. I've got an idea for a collection of short stories set in Atlanta in the late 80s and early 90s, mostly (some may reach further back into the past, and others might wander into the future, and at least one starts in Appalachia, as I did myself). They are hard to classify, as they have fantastical elements but are also frequently based on stuff that really happened. Magical realism, perhaps. Confusing people by writing things that seem really vivid like they could have maybe really happened, but couldn't possibly have happened is my favorite honestly.  In any case, I have finished two of those stories and have sent them out to find work, and I have several more in various stages of incompletion. One of them is set in the Hotel Clermont, but as it was in the old days when that whole section of Ponce was sketch as could be. I'm planning to go stay the night and see if I can commune with the spirits of sketch gone by through the boutiqueness of its current incarnation. Wish me luck.

Schrodinger's Bard

 "Shakespeare's words" by Calamity Meg is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

When I was teaching at the University of Georgia, one of my favorite tidbits to drop in the middle of Hamlet or Macbeth was the fact that there is no original Shakespeare. 

Shakespeare himself did not publish his plays, because copyright law as we know it did not approach existence until 1710.  The nineteen plays that were published during his lifetime were most probably not approved or overseen by him. The rest were published seven or more years after his death, and probably not from a written script, but from the memories of his actors.

Memory is a funny thing. There are actually two equally authoritative and mutually incompatible versions of King Lear. No one knows which one is the "real" one. Perhaps they both are; Shakespeare doesn't strike me as someone who would be afraid of a little retconning. Aside from protecting his intellectual property by the only means available, one reason why Shakespeare might not have wanted his plays in print is that then he'd be bound to that version. I'm just speculating, but he loved topical jokes and those often have an expiration date. Of course his other favorite, dick jokes, spring eternal. 

Shakespeare introduced and possibly invented out of his own noggin something like 1700 words, and his turns of phrase are so common as to be found absolutely everywhere, from William Faulkner to Monty Python. He is probably the single most culturally significant writer in the English language. Yet we don't have his original, physical words at all. 

The ambiguity and the lack of actual pages with his writing on them are also why there are so many theories about his work being written by someone else. I think he probably did collaborate on some things and he absolutely, definitely, without a doubt stole whatever wasn't nailed down hard enough. But there's no accepted body of evidence that any other person wrote what is attributed to him, certainly not that any one person did so. However, his looming presence in the culture means that the aura of mystery is attractive to the sort of person who wants to believe that the world as we know it is a tissue of lies and they are on the heels of the real truth. 

Furthermore, Shakespeare has the colossal influence that he does partially because Victorian literary critics decided that he should. They lifted him up as the greatest writer of all time, and he therefore became almost universally read by anyone who could read English, to the point where if you made an allusion to or quoted him you could be sure that the reference would be understood, and then it just snowballed. At this point if you want to understand English literature you have to know Shakespeare. He is absolutely, aside from the merits of his actual writing, a kind of ur-example of hype...a situation he would probably find gratifying and hilarious. No one who loved a pun so much at that man did could fail to be amused by irony.  And no one who could write Hamlet...a play that is very much about layers of perception, deception, delusion, and the possibly empty reality underneath...could fail to apprehend the irony of his own literary ghost. 

Wendell Berry and the Hidden Wound of Racism

I ordered a copy of The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry more or less by accident. I didn't know what it was about, only that Wendell Berry wrote it and I hadn't read it before and that was good enough for me.

It turns out that it's his meditation on racism and the legacy of slavery, from the point of view of a Southern descendant of slave-owners old enough to have heard family stories about it.  Parts of it appear to have been originally written in the 1960s, but it was first published in 1989 (and I wish I'd read it then). However, Berry's observations are so crystalline, so cutting and relentless that they are still far ahead of most, for all that he uses language like "man" for "people" that sounds graceless now.  It's simultaneously a relic of the past (Berry was born in 1932 and grew up, like my father, plowing with a mule) and sharply relevant to today.

A quote on the back cover from Guy Davenport describes it thus: "The brunt of this book is to wake us up, page after page, from stupidity."

Berry speaks scathingly in his firm quiet way of the "romanticizers," whose purpose is "to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism--an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves."  

He's speaking in particular of a memoir of the Civil War published in 1895; but it might just as easily be about the Confederate glorification monuments that scatter the landscape in the South and the apologetics thereof. For all that some of them are coming down, many still remain, and there have even been pushes to put up more...mostly in Appalachia, where support for the Confederacy was low to nonexistent.  Somehow the descendants of people who voted against secession are putting up battle flags in defiance of history and common sense.  We in the South are still preserving our heritage of moral dissonance like a mosquito in amber, having neither learned much nor moved very far on. Not that that distinguishes us from other Americans in any way.

He spends some time attending to the damage done to our religious understanding as well, which explains what drove me out of the Southern Baptist church I was raised in. Berry says, "Far from curing the wound of racism, the white man's Christianity has been its soothing bandage--a bandage masquerading as Sunday clothes, for the wearing of which one expects a certain moral credit."

Indeed, that describes the relationship of white Evangelicals with the Republican Party to a T.

He is unstinting, but allows ample room for humanity, humility, and nuance.  He starts with racism and the legacy of slavery, takes a winding road through his childhood, and ends up at economic justice.  Like you do. 

If you are a white Southerner, you must read this book, which is short but concentrated. Other people will benefit from reading it as well; but Berry is speaking our language here, and depicting the culture we grew up in with compassion and humanity but also unflinching clarity for its particular flaws.  Never mind the lies of America in general; we've been fed on particular poisoned lies for particular reasons, and Berry offers an antidote.  Read it and be healed.

Why "But the Irish Were Slaves!" is both wrong and racist

Since people have been posting about this...

First of all, the Irish were not slaves. There were quite a few Irish and Scottish (and English for that matter) indentured servants, and indenture was exploitive and frequently brutal, but indenture was not the same as chattel slavery.  The most significant difference is that indenture is a legal contract that a person enters into, which has a theoretical end.  That end was often not respected but the indenture remained a legal human being. Enslaved people on the other hand were not seen as legal persons at any point. Slavery was carefully built both legally and culturally to be seen as innate, the "natural" relationship between white people and black people because of the latter's supposed inferiority.  There were reams and reams of writings justifying that world view, a sure sign of propaganda at work.  Another word for this ideology and its long-term effects is "racism."

There was indeed slavery in Africa, as in Europe, Asia and basically everywhere in the world, but there were avenues for someone to gain their freedom AND it didn't create a skin color based caste system like it did here. The evolution of slavery in the Americas, because it involved the displacement of literally millions of people, is unique.

There were some indentured servants in the colonies who were African in origin, as well as chattel slaves. We know this mainly because they frequently had to argue in court for their status as indentured servants whose terms were up. Those who did so successfully were generally Christian and literate. Later laws against teaching enslaved people to read and write should be viewed with that in mind. The codification of chattel slavery into law was a process, one that made it harder and harder for anyone of African descent to extricate themselves from any form of servitude, and created a situation where a person of color was assumed to be enslaved until proven otherwise (and said proof was frequently not accepted). That process was largely complete by 1700.

Indentured servants were on the same general social level as enslaved people. There were intermarriages. This partially explains why certain Irish and Scottish customs, such as jumping the broom and "first footing," have become African American customs. HOWEVER...and this is a big however....a white indentured servant who completed their term of service became a free person and could completely blend in to the rest of the population.

This made an incredible difference in outcomes, both for individuals and collectively. As a white person, some of my ancestors may well have been indentured servants. I don't know...and neither do you. Because you can't tell by looking at me, and more importantly, it has had no discernible effect on me or my more recent ancestors who have been a bunch of middle class or wealthier farmers, business people, preachers, and educators for generations.

The same can't be said for African Americans...even if their ancestors were in fact indentured and not enslaved, or were freed at some point before 1863, or indeed even if they arrived long after it was all over, because the state of slavery or its existence at a given point in time is not the sole determining factor here.  Escape from slavery, whether as individuals or collectively, did not and has not granted escape from racism.  Partially because racism, while woven into the establishment and justification of the system of chattel slavery and exploitation, was also very much tied up with the origins of capitalism.  That is to say, while racism is certainly the legacy of slavery, it's still very much alive and well because it serves other purposes.  In any case, racism has a measurable effect on black people's educational and employment opportunities, their ability to acquire and maintain wealth, their health outcomes, how frequently and harshly they suffer punishment from the justice system, and (as we should all be aware by now) how likely they are to die violently at the hands of police.

And that brings us back to "But the Irish were slaves too!"  Aside from the fact that it's factually wrong, the only reason to bring that up right now is to somehow deflect from the argument that racism in the US is the legacy of slavery.  I hope I have explained clearly enough what is wrong with that idea.  But let's back up even further and ask a more pertinent question...

Why the hell would you want to do that?  What do you, O fellow white person, get out of trying to undermine the idea that racism is a real thing that happens to real people and sometimes gets them killed?  Why, when millions of people are marching in the streets in the hope of justice, do you think it's a great moment to waltz in with what would be a desperately irrelevant bit of historical geekery even if it were true?  What reason could there be, except that you recognize that the status quo benefits you and you are choosing in this moment to defend it?

What the hell is wrong with you?