writing

I’ve been giving thought to this for some time, both before and since the blogging hiatus I took this winter, and I have determined that I need to hang up my blogging spurs, such as they are.

Basically, I am not cut out to be a blogger.  No matter how I try, or how I try to convince myself that it’ll be different this time if I just do this instead of that, I don’t do short, breezy, and casual very well.  Nor indeed short, hard-hitting, and serious. Mostly I don’t do short very well.  And I don’t do it reflexively at all.  I tend, as anyone who’s read this blog very much already knows, to write essay-length pieces.

A little aside on this, if you’ll indulge me: Most writers I know seem to find over time that they have a “natural length,” an average quantity of verbiage they are wont to spew in the average day’s work.  My “natural length” as a writer, if such a thing can be said to exist, is about 1500 words. As some of you may recall from agonized attempts to pad out college term papers to their requisite length — and I must note that making wordcount on academic papers was never my personal bugbear, but when I taught undergraduates,  many of my freshman comp students seemed to struggle with it a great deal — writing 1500 words takes a lot more time than reading 1500 words.  1500 words — about 6 double-spaced typed pages — is a pretty good writing day for most of the writers I know.  Sometimes I have a really good writing day and I get more than that.  Sometimes I spend all day grinding against something that’s hard to structure or express and I get less.  But that’s about average for me.

And herein lies the basic problem: writing 6 pages takes time and energy and concentration and so on. I only have so many hours in the day, and only so much energy and ability to concentrate.  I can spend it on blogging or I can spend it on writing books, but I can’t really do both.  Not reliably, and not well.  If I’m writing a lot of blog stuff I’m usually not writing a lot of book stuff, and vice versa, and either way the guilt sets in, and either way something isn’t getting done the way I would prefer it to get done, and, well, it’s just not helpful.

If I could easily and reliably write short’n’sweet for the blog, and writing blog entries didn’t suck time and resources away from my work, it might be a different story, but it ain’t.  Turns out that the answer isn’t “take some time away from thinking about the blog and then things will be different,” after all.

Oh, as they say, well.

I plan — as I have time — to finish recording podcasts of The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, to which I will post links in this blog as I can get that done, because I’d like to finish that for those of you who’ve been listening.  And I’ll leave the blog archives where they are.

Thanks for reading, and may all your domestic adventures be delightful.

I am not amused. A few days ago, as far as Amazon.com was concerned, I had written or edited five books that came up when a search on my name was run in the “all departments” search.

As of today? One. Virgin: The Untouched History.

Why? Because Amazon has decided that things with icky GLBT and/or sexually explicit content are icky! And also might make the eyes of helpless children explode! Or turn them queer!  Or make them think about (shudder) their naughty bits.  Or (even worse) someone else’s naughty bits. And as we all know, when that happens, the Ewoks dance terrorists win, thousands more workers in the American automotive industry get laid off, people buy automatic rifles and shoot innocent people, bell bottoms come back in style, and God kills a kitten.

So they had to strip all such items of their Amazon Rank.

Mind you, if I deliberately search only on “Books,” clicking that option in the search box, all of my books appear.  But I have to turn on the “Books” function.  A search on “All Departments” does not, in fact, give the search results from all departments at all: it gives highly censored search results.

You will perhaps comprehend that not all people are likely to specifically click the “Books” option on an Amazon search.  In fact, I confess that mostly, when I have used Amazon.com in the past, have not done so, because I operated under the perfectly reasonable assumption that when the search parameters are set for “All Departments” the search will, in point of fact, search all the available departments.

So the “All Departments” search is not at this point a comprehensive search of all departments.  It is a censored search that disallows certain types of results from appearing at all.  Effectively, Amazon is attempting — by duping the good-faith searcher into thinking that all of Amazon’s for-sale items have been searched — to mislead the user of their website in regard to whether or not Amazon carries or sells certain items.  Given that many users use Amazon not to see whether Amazon carries an item that is already known to them, but to browse for items they may not have encountered previously, this effectively means that Amazon.com is disallowing items with GLBT or sexually explicit content to be encountered.

Think about how you use Amazon.com, or the public library, or indeed a brick and mortar bookstore (if you are lucky enough to still have one of those around, since so many of them have been wiped out of existence by Amazon.com in the past 10 years).  Think about how you most often encounter new-to-you books that look enticing enough that you’ll pick them up and read the jacket copy, or maybe even to buy them and take them home.

By browsing.

Exactly the point.

I will further note that for an author, having only one of their several books easily findable on Amazon.com might, y’know, do some bad things to their sales, and thus to their ability to make a living. Publishers do, you know, consider an author’s prior sales as part of how they decide whether or not to publish new books.  (Prior sales also influence what kinds of print runs a publisher will produce of a new title, and what kinds of promotion those new titles will receive.)

This is not okay.

It’s especially not okay because it constitutes a massive attempt to make information on sexuality — explicit and not-explicit — difficult or impossible to find. Some of my friends’ sex ed titles are effectively erased from general Amazon searches because of this maneuver, including non-explicit titles aimed at responsible and comprehensive sex education for children and young adults.  Other titles that are affected deal with important topics like contraception, sex work, sexual violence, and sexual health.

I don’t think I need to rehearse all the very many reasons this is not okay.

Amazon rank this, Amazon.com: I have deleted all my payment information from my Amazon.com account and I have followed procedure (email their customer service from the e-mail account associated with your Amazon.com account or call 1-866-216-1072 ) to close my Amazon.com account permanently.  Your policy is cowardly, bigoted, homophobic, repressive, oppressive, and thoroughly repugnant, and even if you reverse this policy decision tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. Seattle time, you have lost my business for good.

If you need or want some books, or for that matter CDs or DVDs, find an independent book/media seller near you.  My favorite is Baltimore’s own mighty Atomic Books.  If you stop by, or send in an order (they happily do mail order and special orders — they order things for me all the time!) tell Benn and Rachel (and everyone else) I sent you.

I’m very busy right now with other writing, and hundreds upon hundreds of pages of research reading for the book I’m currently working on.  But I have, it seems, had probably two dozen conversations with friends over the past few weeks about beans.  So it seemed like a timely thing to pull an old essay — not published elsewhere, just not written recently — out of the files and set it forth here.

Someday soon, I hope, I will have time to address the burning topic of What To Do When You Have Just Gotten Another @!$@%*&$!! Cabbage In The CSA Box.  But for today, and also for some other day this week, you get beans.

* * * * *

“Beans, beans, the magical fruit,
The more you eat, the more you toot.
The more you toot, the better you feel,
So eat some beans with every meal!”

At the time that I found myself obliged, for reasons of student poverty, to begin eating beans and plenty of them, this verse was virtually all I knew about things leguminous.  I had not been raised as a bean-eater.  Green beans were one thing, and we had plenty of those, fresh from my grandmother’s garden when we were lucky.  But legumes, the kinds of beans that stand somewhere between vegetable and starch, were not a regular feature on the menus of my childhood.  We sometimes had canned baked beans, which I liked, or kidney beans or chickpeas in a salad now and then.  Upon occasion there would be an exciting visit to a restaurant for what passed, in the 1970s, for “Mexican” food, including a dab of smooth, heavy, often cheese-crusted refried beans.  But aside from these, I managed to reach adulthood knowing, if you will, not a hill of beans about eating beans, and even less about cooking them.

Then I went to college.  As an undergraduate and a music major to boot, I was—as is traditional—basically penniless.  While I lived in the school dormitory this was not such a big deal, cafeteria food being plentiful if not necessarily aesthetic.  But then I moved out of the dorms.  Squeezed by Boston rents on the one side, and a despondency brought on by too many meals consisting primarily of Top Ramen or peanut butter on the other, I realized I was going to have to find some ways to broaden my culinary repertoire without adding to the grocery bill.

I also wanted, and needed, to get some more protein into my diet.  Somehow, I had the innate suspicion that eating meals consisting of prepackaged fried noodles swimming in a broth of MSG might not be providing adequately for all my nutritional needs. But meat was too expensive.  It would be years before I would be able to actually confront the question of cooking cuts of meat in my own kitchen.  At the time, all I could afford was the occasional fish, bought whole from the stalls in the Haymarket or the tanks in Chinatown.  I had learned to clean and dress fish on fishing trips with my father as a teenager, so I would take them at home and, to the horror of my housemates, scale and butcher them in the kitchen sink so that I could keep all the edible scraps.   After I dressed them out I would make stock with the scraps, heads, tails, and fins, while I cooked the filets or steaks.  I’d eat the meat on the first day and possibly the second, make hash with the leftovers on the third, and when the hash was gone, take the stock out of the battered Chinese takeout container I’d frozen it in and add celery, onion, and rice to make soup.

Fish, along with eggs and cheese, were my primary sources of protein… and I couldn’t always afford them.  I had not yet had my Tofu Awakening, and the myriad soy-protein goodies now available had not yet come onto the market. Soy protein remained a murky mystery lurking in the bottoms of big white plastic buckets in the reach-in coolers in the baffling, tempting markets in Chinatown. In those days of fifteen-dollar-a-week grocery budgets, I was not keen on experiments that might prove inedible.

Finally I turned to my 1975 Joy of Cooking, purchased on a remainder table in Harvard Square for $1 because some browsing oaf had broken the binding.  Right there in the first chapter, “The Foods We Eat,” was my answer: beans.  They were cheap, they were easy to get, they had lots of protein, and best of all, the wonderful Rombauers had provided oodles of recipes.

Standing on the precipice of what I was afraid would be the most flatulent summer on record, I went to the store and spent five dollars on dried beans.  (Five dollars, for the record, still buys a simply enormous quantity of dried beans.)  Then I began working my way through the dried bean recipes in the Joy.  Over the next months I made sixteen out of seventeen.  The process filled me with glee. Cooking dried beans, you see, was a fantastic magic trick.  With only water and heat and maybe a few vegetables or seasonings, a thirty-cent plastic bag of tiny rocklike objects turned into a pot full of food.  The only reason I did not try the Joy’s seventeenth recipe, “Campfire Beans,” was that a campfire on my fire escape seemed likely to draw unwanted attention from the fire department, or at least the landlord.

In the process of eating up all those beans I learned many things.  One was that you could cook beans without salt pork or bacon or any meat whatever and have them turn out just fine.  Another was that the Joy was awfully skimpy on the garlic and spices, whereas I liked bolder tastes.  Perhaps not so bold as to become a devotee of the Rombauer’s lentils with prunes, which was so contrary to my tastes that I actually decided I could afford to waste the money I’d spent on the ingredients and consigned a good two-thirds of it to the trash.  But garlic and onions at least were cheap and easily doubled.
I also learned that I truly did like beans.  Beans, I decided, had acquired a reputation far worse than they deserved.  They failed utterly to transform me into a giant fiber-fueled Hindenberg nightmare, a fact I didn’t even really notice until a summer job co-worker eyed my luncheon Tupperware of kidney beans, tomatoes, chiles, and rice and promptly began urging a “magical fruit” sing-along.  I rolled my eyes.  I’d been eating beans for a month, and I remained both unbloated and socially acceptable.

Truth is, the body becomes accustomed to the fiber and complex starches of large quantities of vegetables and legumes, just as it does to the less challenging diets most people seem to consume on a regular basis (diets which, it must be said, have their own gastrointestinal pitfalls).  Perhaps it is markedly different for some folks with less robust digestive tracts or ones dependent on a more highly processed diet, but I’ve simply never had a big problem with beans, and in the years that have elapsed since my first foray into the world of cooking and eating dried beans and peas and such, I’ve noticed that in cultures where beans play a large role in everyday eating, cultures as different as Japan and Honduras, they don’t have the same tee-hee factor attached that they do in North America.

I suspect that for most Americans at least, the fear of doing what Dante so picturesquely described as “making a trumpet of one’s ass” is a mask for a colder, deeper fear:  the fear of poverty. Beans generally and dried beans particularly are often viewed as penitential to prepare, unpleasant to eat, and resolutely lower class.  Few people, unless they were reared in a food tradition where legumes were a staple—say that of the working-class rural South, where stewed pinto beans are a universal favorite from east coast to west—grow up thinking of beans as something they would eat or serve by preference.

Even when grappling, as I did for a while, with the kind of poverty that all but mandates a beans-and-rice-centered cuisine, many people simply won’t go that route.  To continue to spend the money on higher-status foods is to continue to assert a certain claim to belonging to a higher socioeconomic stratum.  There’s a reason that “bean-eater” and “beaner” have been mainstays of name-calling in a number of places around the world: it means you’re a poor schmuck who can’t do any better, that you come from a whole class of poor schmucks who can’t do any better, and probably you’re ignorant, gauche, illiterate, and graceless too.  We see it even in Annibale Carracci’s famous painting of a sixteenth-century bean-eater at his rustic table, spoon poised, eager to gulp down the kind of humble food—beans, bread, onions, rough red wine—to which the painter’s patrons would almost certainly have taken affront had it showed up on their own tables.

Annibale Carracci, "The Bean Eater" (circa 1580-1590)

This is largely still true today.  For middle- and upper-class foodies and health-food fans, home preparation and unprocessed ingredients have become the seal of gastronomic authenticity as well as the hallmark of good nutrition, and some beans, particularly those with gourmet cachet—flageolets, favas, various heirloom varieties prized for their rarity—are considered fashionable and desirable.  But most beans, for most people, are just things that take a long time to cook and which must be substantially processed at home are just an inconvenient pain, something you don’t do if you can afford not to.
Being an enthusiastic and unrepentant bean-eater thus can require a bit of fortitude, if only because other people cannot be trusted to treat your leguminivorous ways as anything other than raw material for fart jokes.

Personally, I find that the best defense is an irresistible offense.  If the beans are tasty enough, they become the most reasonable and defensible thing in the world.

Fortunately this is simple.  For all their humbleness, beans, with their seductively comforting combination of starch and substance, are intrinsically delicious.  Beans are easy to cook, requiring only soaking and simmering to be edible.  They will accept virtually any seasoning with grace.  They can form the backbone of savory dishes or sweet ones.  Beans can take nearly any role in any meal, literally from soup to nuts.  But it is also true that not all bean recipes are created equal.

… to be continued

Upon discovering my dairy allergy, one of the categories of things that immediately vanished from my food options was the category of the creamy dip or dressing. Mayonnaise, of course, was still an option, as were creamy-textured dips and dressings that had a mayonnaise base, since mayonnaise is an egg emulsion and not made with dairy products. But since it is frequently impossible to tell visually whether a dressing or dip that one is served at a restaurant or party is exclusively mayonnaise-based or whether it is dairy-based or as is often the case, made of some combination of dairy and mayonnaise, I quickly learned to just avoid anything that looked creamy.

This wasn’t a huge problem. I’d never been devoted to creamy dressings and dips. Then again I certainly had been known to enjoy roquefort or ranch salad dressings now and then, and once or twice a year would get a horrifyingly intense jones for the Lipton onion soup sour-cream-and-onion chip dip and would eat a whole pint of it over the course of a couple of days. It didn’t seem like so much to give up. Still, not having the creamy-dip/dressing option got annoying after a while, particularly after I started to realize just how many vinaigrette-style prepared salad dressings also contained ingredients I couldn’t eat, most commonly in the form of small amounts of cheese.

Oh, I know from vinaigrettes and egg-based dressings, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been making my own salad dressings on a fairly regular basis for years. I can coddle an egg or two for a Caesar salad with the best of them (I just leave out the parmesan, and add extra anchovies). But… well… sometimes you want something with a nice creamy mouthfeel. And you don’t necessarily feel like being bothered to coddle eggs to get it.

Enter Hollyhock Dressing. The recipe was given to me by my wonderful friend and darned good cook, Liza, who warned me, not a bit hyperbolically as it turns out, that the stuff is addictive. It really is. Hollyhock dressing is fantastic stuff. It’s garlicky. It’s savory. It’s vegan. It keeps well. It’s easy to make, providing you’ve got a blender. And it’s creamy.

Seriously, this stuff is so good that I rarely make less than a double batch at a time. Often, I make a triple batch.

The ingredients are simple and few.

For a single batch, you will require:

• 1/3 cup water
• 1/3 cup tamari (you can use soy sauce but the flavor isn’t as good)
• 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar (you can use red wine vinegar or cider vinegar or whatever vinegar you like, but the flavor will be accordingly different, and balsamic is so yummy I rarely mess with anything else)
• 1 cup olive oil
• approximately 1 bulb worth of peeled raw garlic cloves (I usually just use 15 cloves because I peel large quantities of garlic ahead of time)
• 1 cup nutritional yeast

The method, likewise, is a complete and utter cakewalk:

Whiz the liquid ingredients together in your blender with the garlic until the mixture is as smooth as you can get it. Add the nutritional yeast in thirds, whizzing it together in the blender each time, and scraping down the walls of the blender jar after each blending. At the end, blend the mixture for an additional minute or so, just to make sure everything is completely combined and completely smooth.

Note: if you make a double or triple batch, make each batch separately in the blender, to avoid overloading your blender jar. Pour them out into a large bowl and stir them together as you finish blending the batches, to ensure a uniform consistency and taste.

Store, refrigerated and covered, for 3-4 hours before serving, or preferably overnight. Let come back up to room temperature before you serve it, as the olive oil will thicken quite a bit when it’s cold.

One of the best things about Hollyhock Dressing is how versatile it is. It’s great on salad, of course, and brilliant as a dip for crudites. But it’s also a wonderful dip for hard-boiled eggs, and anything you might be prone to dip into aioli or anchoiade you can certainly dip into this, a list which very much includes good crusty bread. Additionally, Hollyhock Dressing has an amazing affinity for potatoes. Pour it over your baked potatoes, or, if you want your mouth to think it died and went to heaven, use it instead of butter/margarine/milk/faux-milk in your mashed potatoes.

Try it. You can thank me later. Or better yet, thank Liza, who gave me the recipe and thus brought great joy into my culinary life… and made it commonplace for my Belovedary, not normally much given to salad-eating, to request a big plate of salad with his supper.

I told you it was good.

(Full disclosure: This photo is of the salad I had for lunch… mixed greens (several lettuces, rocket, parsley, a couple kinds of basil) plus Corno di Toro pepper and two sliced Brandywine tomatoes. My Belovedary, poor thing, is allergic to raw tomatoes, so this is categorically Not His Salad.)

P’an Ku’s Companions,
Or,
Where You Come From

By Hanne Blank, based on Taoist creation myths

Posted in cats, short stories, writing No Comments »