Stamp of the Day: Baltimore checkerspot

This is an American stamp of the Baltimore Checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton), a butterfly in black, white, and orange. Its caterpillar lives on a plant called White Turtle Head.  Don't you love these common names!?  It has also sometimes switched over to the weedy Lance-leaved Plantain, which came to the US from Europe with the colonialists.

The post office released this stamp for the particular use on large envelopes for greeting cards.  How practical!  I use them for letters to Sweden that need more than the usual postage. More on the stamp, the art, and the orange, black and white here. These were the color of the coat of arms for Lord Baltimore, who not only gave name to the city, but also this butterfly, and the bird called Baltimore Oriole, which we have in our yard.  It hasn't arrived yet this year, but it will, and it builds hanging woven nests in the big silver maples along the road.

This butterfly is relevant to me, because tomorrow I am driving to Baltimore to pick up AREA who has finished her first year in college (yeah! congratulations!!!).  I doubt we will bring back any butterflies or birds in the car, but there will be art, more art, kitchen stuff, a table, microwave, unused foods, and who knows what that will need to be emptied out from her college apartment and stuffed into my car.  Welcome home AREA!

End of high school - yeah! Congratulations AREA!

So, this is it.

No more high school rules about
- how you can dress (= no spaghetti straps, but of course nobody enforced it),
- how to make up gym class (= hand in a media article on health, doesn't matter if you read it),
- no more crazy snow days (they rarely exist in college, you are simply supposed to be in class)
- strict grading (in college the teachers themselves set the policy, ok, it can be even more crazy...)
- no more hall passes or nurse passes (= go to college class unless you are throwing up)
- no more football games or senior prank days (time for more sophistication or real sports...)

This is it.  End of kid years.  Now it is the real thing.  18 and with a driver's license, no money, but a summer job!  Shape your life, get in the wheel barrow (if you like), and do what you think is important, not what some senior speech girl or guy that goes to Princeton think is important.  It is up to you now (with some help from us).  We think you are amazing.

I think you will struggle with keeping things organized, but that is OK.   I think you will make wonderful things that touch people deeply.  I think you will do great, important things that make the world a better place, and I am not talking about money, creating a new Facebook, or being a new Steve Jobs.  Whatever you do, follow the path that keeps you interested and happy with you.  I love that you care about others, especially in this world.  More teenagers should be like you.

Congratulations, 12 years of regular school is over, and now you get to do what you love (well, mostly...).  Actual, unprotected life is scary, amazing, fun, worrisome, and just how life is.  You can handle it, I know it! Du ar underbar.  Love, Mom/Mamma

Swedish food: Blood pudding

black pudding, originally uploaded by lnairks.

Blood pudding actually have pig blood in it. It is not one of those foods that get a name after how it looks only.  If you grow up with it, then it is not too bad tasting, just unusual.

We had this a lot as children, and it was served in school too - at least once a month for 10 years. And school lunches in Sweden when I grew up had only one dish served, there were no options at all. Blood pudding or nothing. Boiled cod or nothing. Liver patties or nothing. Split pea soup or nothing.  Kids today have no clue how lucky they are! :) {At least the American ones that have cafeterias with options, I don't know how it is in Swedish schools anymore.)

You buy it in big chunks, round or half-round cylindershaped pieces encased in plastic. Cut off the plastic, slice it up about 1/4 inches thin (1 cm), and then fry it in a pan with butter. Quick and then it is done. Serve with lingonberry jam, and a glass of milk, and sometimes with sliced raw cabbage too. Black, red and white food.

I don't miss blood pudding, it is not one of those flavors that you think of as something you absolutely need from Sweden. I could still eat it though (unless it is the brand that puts soggy raisins into the pudding). I don't think many kids have salivated over the thought of blood pudding for lunch, quite the opposite. But it was a good way to take care of all parts of the animal in the old times and I bet it is very nutritious.

Photo: copyright Lars Niklasson on Flickr (he has also many other Swedish things on his Flickr stream)

Ponderings over American school food and eating habits

It is a well-known fact that there are many kids that won't eat anything green, spicy, or 'weird'.  This might be based on their genetics, such as that they have specific alleles for tasting bitterness that some people don't have.  With age, we get used to it and the genes matter less.

However, I think most kids today stick to bland, mass-produced factory food because their parents feed them that kind of food, out of convenience and influenced by advertising.  McDonald's burgers (with no lettuce and tomatoes on the kid burgers, mind you!), french fries, chicken nuggets in a heat up plastic box, poptarts from aluminium foil packets, neon-colored 'cereal' with marshmallows, all soaked and dusted with fat, salt and sugar, oh the compounds we humans love!

And, it certainly doesn't help that most parents eat such food too, so they are not providing a home environment with real cooked food and a variety of ingredients.  Many parents just take the easy way out - why force Bill to eat broccoli and have a scene at the dinner table?  "Frozen pizza is so great, lets have it for dinner", again. 

So, it is absolutely no surprise to me that a big food experiment with school lunches in Los Angeles failed. (read the news story here) They changed the menus to include more vegetables and healthy food, such as new dishes such as veggie curry, jambalaya, and pad thai (Mmm...).  Now, my kids love those three things, but I don't think most kids do. Actually, I know most kids don't.  In the test program, the schools got rid of chicken nuggets, nachos, chocolate milk, and other fast food calorie-bombs.  The kids hated the change, many refused to eat the new food and just threw the food in the garbage.  Undercover food snack deliveries started, and it was just a giant flop.

I am not surprised at all.  First, these kids probably never or rarely had healthy food at home, at school, at restaurants or anywhere else.  They are brought up on the bad stuff, and their parents eat the same thing.  Unless you get the parents with you, and start this early on it will not work.  I guess the only exception are those weight-loss boot camps where there is no alternative, "either you eat this or nothing, and there is just desert around here so you better eat here".

Second, if you are in middle and high school, there is giant psychological tension at all time, and especially in the cafeteria.  Eating something weird, or not eating something, can easily turn into a trend, a thing to be teased over, or just something you don't want to deal with. Cliques of popular kids can very likely influence loads of kids not to eat something strange.

Third, in the schools, why was the left-over food thrown away?  Give it to some pigs if it is leftovers from kids' plates. Keep the pigs outside the cafeteria, and tell the kids where bacon comes from! If there are left-over food from the kitchen, pack it up and give it to soup kitchens, hungry Occupyers, disabled vets, or anybody else that needs some great, fresh food. (This idea came from VFK when we talked about this.) If the food could be thrown away like that, then they also have a bad recycling system at the schools. 

Fourth, if you really want people to change giant habits like this you to have to make it relevant to them.  It has to be personal, not imposed by Big Brother, and it has to feel like an option, not a must and something a teenager has to rebel against.  Use it as a teaching moment, without them realizing it is educational.  Have cooking classes with parents plus kids.  Do survival courses without any cooked food, with foraging from basic ingredients only.  Grow the food on the school yard, plow up all that useless grass. Make the football team dig potatoes by hand for exercise.  Keep bunnies, chickens, and pigs.  Eat weeds.  Cook cultural dishes from around the world, and cook ethnic 'fast-food' like dishes.  Spaghetti with sauce, tacos, hamburgers - these can be great and good!

If I could decide, certain foods would be outlawed, and there would be no food advertising in TV (or anywhere else) for kids under 10. And no fake infomercials either.  Everything would have 50% less sugar in it (if it had any to begin with), and no cereal would have food coloring.  Everybody would have to intern at least 2 months on a farm, in a bakery, slaughterhouse, kitchen, or something like that before they end high school, to understand where food comes from and how it is made. (Actually, interning at a hamburger patty factory might not be bad. Might turn you off hamburgers forever. )  And kids should visit farms all the time, from the time they can put their fingers in their mouths and say gaga over sheep and apples.  Chicken nuggets and other super-processed machine-made food should have giant warning labels on them, saying "NON-FOOD FACTORY PRODUCT".

In the end, I think this is of course a societal problem, but it really comes down to the parents.  If the parents don't care about food, and the food for their children, then the kids will not care. If parents give in and are laissez-faire parents (=letting any little kid decide for themselves all the time), then you get kids that are whiny, picky, irresponsible, selfish, and won't eat any anything real and interesting.  And who wants to live with such a person when they are adults?

Of course processed fast-food taste good, it is made to make us love it - it is all part of the commercial plans to sell more and to earn more money for the companies.  But you don't have to buy into it.  As a parent, stay strong, and if you slip now and then, that is OK.  I have given my kids Hungry Man TV dinners, mac and cheese from a box, Spaghettios from a can, and so on.  At the time, it was what I could handle, because of other circumstances.  But now they eat nearly everything (well, one is a vegetarian that eats fish, and neither eats beets, which is perfectly fine).

It is never too late to change, to try something new. But to dare to try, I don't think you should be in a giant high school cafeteria and be served lukewarm sticky jambalaya surrounded by other teenagers that tell you it looks like "you-know-what"...  I think this whole food movement would work better if people knew how to cook better, so maybe that is where things should start.  With a knife, a pot and a cutting board.  Maybe we should have survival courses in the kitchen.  "How to cook from scratch during 5 days without electricity and a functioning fridge", hehe... Well, we don't have to be that drastic to begin with.  How about "How to cook from ingredients that come in boxes with less than 3 ingredients listed on each box"?

(And a caveat - there are exceptions of course, but I think everybody can eat better.  Being 3 years old is no excuse to live on only 4 types of food.)

Book reviews: Two books about Chinese places and things

A while ago I was on a roll reading things about China, from Chinese food in the US to Chinese history and culture. Ever since I saw the old Marco Polo TV-series as a young teenager I have been fascinated with this country, and I would love to visit, but now it feels like it might be too late to see the old cultural China and its nature. What we mostly hear about now is about environmental pollution, uncontrolled industrial development, and the lack of human rights and natural conservation. It is sad.

The two books I read a while ago are of very different sorts. The first one, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles - Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee (yes, there is the number 8 in there), is a book of mixed feelings and mixed contents. She sets out to find where the fortune cookies come from, a common dessert addition in American-Chinese restaurants but never seen in China. After she figures that out through interviews and some fact digging in California, she switches subjects to the history of take-away food, Chinese restaurant owners, illegal immigration, the best Chinese restaurant in the world, the true origin of General Tso's chicken, etc. The book is well-written, very well researched with many trips over the world, but I just couldn't find it that interesting because it was so scattered in its topics. It felt like she put everything she could in there, like a quilt with too many colors. based on the reviews on Amazon, most people liked it a lot better than I did. But after reading Fuchsia Dunlop's book on Chinese food and culture, I am spoiled, I know.

And now for something completely different. Peter Hessler has written about his years as an English teacher working for the Peace Corps in the remote Chinese town of Fuling along the Yangtze River in a book called River Town: Two years on the Yangtze. This was before Westerners were common in China, and in fact, he was one of only four Western people in the whole town of a hundreds of thousands of people. He writes about the everyday struggles with the Chinese language and culture, how he teaches his students Shakespeare with a Chinese twist, how Communist party bureaucrazy gets in the way sometimes, and vividsly describes the landscapes, rivers, people, and villages he meets. It is a wonderful book, but slightly too long. The writing is great, it is just the long descriptions some of this thoughts that become a bit too long-winding sometimes. The town of Fuling is half drowned now because of the Seven Gorges Dam. They moved the down up along the hills as part of the flooding of the Yangtze River upstream from the Dam. It is sad to read about how many Chinese leave old history behind and is all for progress, progress, progress (=more money, more things, more production). I think this book was the most detailed and honest book I have read so far about China.

Next up on my Chinese literature track is Marco Polo's stories I think.

Ridiculous Exam Answers

On the website http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-stories-exams.htm#01, a vast list of exam answers for questions by American students can be found. Five such I have chosen to list today:

16. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.

1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.

3. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients.Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.

30. Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. She was a moral woman who practiced virtue. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

28. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened and catapulted into Napoleon. Napoleon wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't have any children.

Math equation: Find x.

Next weekend AREA is taking the PSAT test for the first time, more as a practice test than anything else. Here is a figure to wish her good luck! And yes, I would think the answer is very creative and correct, but I bet the graders disagree. What do you think, AREA?

Old tales (Gamla svansar)

This post is by request from my sister and brother... (and for Sarah too)

When I was in Sweden I found my old writing books from second grade, when I was about 8 years old, and I very much wonder what my teachers really thought about my stories. Talk about lively imagination... Unfortunately they didn't grade each essay. Here is one example:

Originalet på svenska (original in Swedish, med exakt grammatik ur skrivboken):
En aprilmorgon gick Fantomen till livsmedelsaffären för att handla påskmat till sin lata och ilskna lyxhustru, Diana. Hon hade ocksaå bett honom köpa en rulle sytråd för att laga hans strumpbyxor. Med sig hade han Devil, hans gammla sjuka jakthund. Hunden tiggde om leverpastej och nötkakor. Men kakor fick han inte, eftersom han kunde få magplågor då. När Fantomen svängde runt hörnet vid ostdisken halkade han på ett bananskal och slog huvudet i en vetemjölspåse. Han fick en stjärnsmäll. Hans lösgom for ut ur munnen och råkade ge Devil ett bett i vänsterörat. Vid åsynen av blodströmmen från såret kräktes Fantomen upp frukostgröten och svimmade bland toalettpappersrullarna.

Loose translation:
One morning in April the Phantom went to the grocery store to buy Easter food for his lazy and angry luxury wife, Diana. She had also asked him to buy a roll of thread so she could mend his tights. With him he had Devil, his old, sick hunting dog. The dog begged for liverwurst and nut cookies. But he didn't get any cookies, because then he would get stomach pains. When the Phantom turned around a corner by the cheese counter he slipped on a banana peel and hit his head on a wheat flour bag. He saw stars inside his eyes. His loose teeth flew out of his mouth and happened to give Devil a bite in his left ear. When the Phantom saw the blood streaming from the wound, he threw up his breakfast porridge and fainted among the toilet paper rolls.

Notes: The Phantom (Fantomen) is a comic hero, and the stories were translated into Swedish. The nut cookies were probably the ones my grandmother made with hazelnuts, oh, they were delicious. The rest I have no idea where it came from.

We live in strange times, when family time has to be scheduled..

From a recent newsletter from the school district and township we live in:

"What does Night Off mean?
It means a community-wide observance of the importance of family by taking the night off from
regularly scheduled commitments. The schools, township, houses of worship, scouts, and
various community organizations agree to a night without meetings, practices, games,
rehearsals, and homework on March 3rd.

Each family decides how they wish to recognize the importance of family. A family can
participate in a wide range of activities such as eating dinner together, playing board games or musical instruments, going skating or to a movie, or attending a sporting event, just to name a
few.

Why? To encourage and promote quality family time." {My bold italics}

My questions -
For us that have family night most nights of the week, do we get the night off to do something without our families? Can we have a Night On?

They need to schedule a night so families can eat dinner together? Other families must not be like ours. We eat dinner together every night. But I already knew we were the exception, this announcement just puts it on paper so it becomes the truth.

What qualifies as quality family time? Three hours one night out of 365 days? This reeks of Big Brother mentality. "We will schedule your quality time, from 6.05 PM to 8.34 PM on a Tuesday in March." Or do they really think people have to be taught how to get together as families? Probably, yes.

I find the whole thing depressing. Here are some more real things for families to do together, any day of the year: turn off the TV, take a hike, plant some seeds, compost your green stuff, carry firewood, photograph a sunset, draw a faucet, cook a meal, paint a door, make a cookie, build a bird house, chop some rose bushes, build a fire, smoke some bacon, listen to old stories, blog your thoughts, discuss black holes and infinity, pet a cat, donate some books, go to the library, write a letter, design some ear rings,l watch George Carlin on Youtube about cats and dogs.... (note how none of these costs any money and don't involve commercial things you have to travel to like movie theaters, skating rinks, sports events, etc.).

So, is this an issue in Sweden? Do people have to be taught how to have quality family time over there?

Life in New Jersey in 5 images

Sunset towards Sourland mountain, a rare moment captured forever. This photo reminds me of summer nights in Sweden when the sun sets at 11 PM and gets up at 2 AM.
An old motorcycle was parked outside a restaurant (this one is for you AREA). Might have been one like this, I don't remember.
Tools and signs at the Sergeantsville butcher shop. On the sign - Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing, It Wastes Your Time and Annoys the Pig.
Midsummer here still means potatoes cooked with dill, herring, sour creme, and chives, just like at Barking Dog Plaza where I grew up. And after the sill.... I think we had quail ('vaktel'), locally farmed. Next year we are planning on rabbit, groundhog, and raccoon for the midsummer night grilling. (Yes, a stupid raccoon woke us up by sitting on the bird feeder at 4 AM and trying repeatedly to get in to the precious bird food. And today a squirrel tried to chew his way through the steel of the bird feeder. I think these deserve to be midsummer food...)

School graduation, about two weeks later than in Sweden. Here the 8-graders get ready to get their diplomas and to have two months of school vacation. And yes, all the 400+ students looked the same in their rented green gowns.

Not much avanti at Avanti restaurant, Pennington, NJ

After a long frustrated discussion of where to go for dinner to celebrate AREA's participation in a Teen Arts show, we decided on an Italian restaurant we had never been to before. It all sounded good and it got good reviews. When I called an made a reservation I got a tiny but hesitant though, because the person answering the phone could not tell us if there was a table available or not until she has asked someone else, and what should have been an easy phone call and question turned into a complicated one. But we got a reservation and we were off.

The Avanti restaurant is in Pennington, a cute little New Jersey town, in a separate building on a back lot. It is small, very small in fact, and the kitchen is even more miniscule. The menu was great, lots of Italian dishes (but no pizza for kids). We ordered fried calamari (squid) and mozzarella sticks for appetizers, and all main courses came with salad. Now the problems started. The salads came out quickly, but there was a mixup with AREA's salad, and no bread arrived until we asked for it (much later). There was nothing remarkable about the salads, good, but nothing special. Oh, there was another problem with providing oil and vinegar for the salads too.

From where I sat I could see the waiters trying to get in and out of the narrow door to the kitchen, and the crowded areas inside. Very crowded... Appetizers arrived, and they were OK but not great. The mozzarella sticks were laying in a pool of tomato sauce which made them soggy. The calamari wasn't crisp, and the tomato sauce was just regular tomato sauce. I think it was missing seasonings, like herbs and pepper, but then I am used to food that has fresh pepper and fresh herbs in it all the time. But considering that this is a fancy Italian place, I expected much better.

Then the waiting started. And continued. Finally our entrees arrived - veal for PP, baked ravioli for AREA, linguine with meat sauce for LA, and fresh pasta with mushrooms for me. It was all good, but still, not exceptional. Our waiter disappeared for a while, and then showed up with a large band aid around her whole lower arm. "What happened", we asked. "Oh, just a burn ", she said. Well, half her arm was covered up, so it didn't look like 'just a burn'. Before this we had seen two waiters crash in the flip-flip door, causing a plate with tomato sauce get all over the kitchen door.

In the beginning our water glasses were refilled quickly, but then it was like they forgot about us. We asked for more bread to soak up the good sauce, but never got any. The pasta dishes were good, but nothing like the ones at La Casa Bianca, another Italian restaurant in the area. Once again I thought that my dish was unseasoned. It was good, but not fantastic. It needed pepper and herbs, again. And dried parmesan on the table is not the same thing as fresh cut parmesan.

Time to pay. Oops, they only take cash or American Express, no VISA or Mastercard, which I think was very unusual. Even more unusual is that this was not stated anywhere on the menu. We were lucky to have enough cash with us, usually we don't.

In conclusion, the service was poor, but I don't blame our waitress for most of this. It appeared that they had too many tables for such a small kitchen, or that their routines weren't good and this has more to do with management than a single waitress. The food was OK, but not worth the money. I can make better pasta at home. If you want to eat for about the same price around here in central NJ, go to these places instead: Za, Brothers Moon, The Blue Bottle, Sergeantsville Inn, Origin, Makeda, etc. Maybe the restaurant had a bad evening, but it wasn't even full. I wonder how it is on a night when all the tables are occupied. Are people waiting 2 hours for their main dish then? Maybe I am too critical, or maybe I am just comparing this restaurant to the amazing places we have found. In any case, I don't think I want to go back here when there are so many places that are so much more appetizing around here. (NY Times review of Avanti, this is the only link that works on their website to supposedly 5 reviews.)

PS. The photo is of the Studebaker Avanti, PP's Dad's favorite car.

Guess what I saw today? (Stamp of the Day)

I saw one of these, swimming, splashing and then diving. I think it is the first beaver I have seen in New Jersey. I also saw a white-tailed fawn with its deer mom, and two wild turkeys. The only missing was black bears, but they were in Millburn instead. I am in northern New Jersey, close to the border with New York State, in the bear-heaviest part of NJ. It is a nice area, hilly and forested and it turns into a ski resort in the winter. We are staying at the Appalachian, where each room has a fireplace. Unfortunately it is just a gas fireplace, not the real thing, but still, it is a wonderful place.

Book review: Three cups of tea

My friend SS lent me this book, Three Cups of Tea, and I have to admit that it probably wouldn't have been a book I picked up in the store based on the cover. But after I started reading it, I was hooked. It is a fantastic book, and a true story.

Greg Mortenson is an American mountain climber that fails to climb K2 and then spends some time recuperating from his failure in a small village in northern Pakistan, high up in the mountains. After a month he asked if he could see their school, and the elder chief brings him to an open field where the children are sitting outside in the cold wind without any books or desks and just with a teacher in front of them. Greg decides to build them a school as a thank-you gift for their hospitality, so he goes back to the US, tries to raise money for the school and finally finds a donor.

He comes back to Pakistan, builds the school, and realizes that there are many more villages that need schools. So he continues to build schools together with the local people, raise money, and the focus is especially to educate girls in this Muslim society of many different tribes and cultures. He co-founds the Central Asia Institute, which is now involved in many efforts to help the people in this part of the world.

The language is so vivid, the characters so well-explained with so much humanity, and you get a very good understanding of this part of the world nested in between India, Afghanistan, and China. At the same time this is happening you have the raise of the Islamic fundamentalists in northern Pakistan, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and 9-11 happens. Throughout the whole book there is a streak of hope and persistent, despite setbacks and difficult circumstances. In the end of the book he describes Afghanistan after the war between the Taliban regime and the US, and how so much money dedicated to rebuilding the country never showed up. It is sad and it also makes me angry. First the US bombs and destroys, then the promised money to rebuild schools and hospitals never show up. Kids are having lessons in bombed out tanks because their school has no roof, they have no books, and no pencils.

Now 60 schools have been built and over 25,000 students have been educated, all due to one man's inspiration and dedication. It is an amazing, lovely, and important story.

Better food in my kids' school!

Great news!
Acting Governor Richard J. Codey today announced that, by September 1, 2007, New Jersey school districts will be required to adopt a comprehensive statewide policy that will ban soda and junk foods, and teach better eating habits. (link)
Kids (AREA and LA), are you ready for no fries, no soda, no candy? I want you to report back next week what is different from last year. Is the school's lowfat pizza good? Let us know.
Some of the new rules:
The following may not be served, sold or given out free as promotion anywhere on school policy at any time before the end of the school day: Foods of minimal nutritional value, as defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This includes a ban on soda. Items listing sugar in any form as the first ingredient. All forms of candy.
Finally some progress in the mainstream food culture in USA.