Recipe: Maritime Bean Dip (and bonus Pizza)

Jacob's cattle, soldier and yellow eye are three varieties of bean that are commonly grown in the Maritimes of Canada. If you buy one of these types of beans at the supermarket, it will in all likelihood come with a recipe on the bag, a recipe that never varies. It is Molasses Baked Beans. It is always, always Molasses Baked Beans, as if no Maritimer has ever done anything else with a bean.

That seems a shame to me, not to mention boring, so I have taken it upon myself to provide the bean-buying world with other things to do with a bag of yellow eye or soldier or Jacob's cattle beans, starting with this tasty bean dip that may, if you are so inclined, be made entirely with Maritime-grown ingredients.

The Dip

Ingredients:

• 1 cup yellow eye, soldier or Jacob's cattle beans
• 1 or 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tsp. apple cider vinegar
• 1 tsp. salt
• Ground black pepper, to taste

Soak the beans 4 to 6 hours or overnight in 3 cups of water. If you're not good at advance planning, you can use the quick-soak method: bring water and beans to a boil, cover, turn off heat and let sit for an hour.

Whichever soaking method you use, once the soaking is complete, bring the beans to a boil, reduce heat, cover and let simmer until soft--from 30 minutes to an hour.

Drain beans, place in a bowl and mash. (If you're feeling lazy or have arthritis, use a blender or food processor.) Mince or press garlic and add to mashed beans. (For extra points, use garlic grown in the Maritimes. We have many fine organic farmers ready to supply you. Points will be deducted for garlic that comes from China.) Add cider vinegar, preferably made in the Maritimes. I use Boates vinegar from Nova Scotia. (You can substitute lemon juice, but do note that lemons don't grow this far north. Points will be deducted if your lemons come from Argentina.) Add remaining ingredients. Go to the head of the class if your peppercorns were also grown in the Maritimes. I have yet to come across local pepper, but I know it must exist. I've seen pepper grown in Quebec, and that's the same climate.

Mix well. Taste and adjust seasonings. Yummy, right? And you can't spread molasses baked beans on a cracker.

If you want to get fancy, you can use this bean dip in a pizza. Here goes.

The Pizza

Ingredients:

• Pizza dough, enough for 12-inch pie (to make your own, see recipe below)
• 1 recipe Maritime Bean Dip
• A few handfuls of spinach or other leafy green vegetable (precision is not vital here)
• 1 cup grated cheese

Preheat oven to 450 degrees, 400 if you have a black pizza pan. Oil a 12-inch pan and flatten the pizza dough until it fits the pan; feel free to get fancy and work it between your hands in midair like the pros. It's not that hard, though you toss it into the air at your own risk. Place in pan.

It's not absolutely necessary, but if you want to ensure as crispy a crust as possible, bake the untopped dough for 8 minutes. Spread the bean dip over the dough.

If you are using spinach, wash, spin dry and slice up. You don't need to cook it. If you're using a tougher vegetable like kale or cabbage, you will probably want to sauté it a little first. Sprinkle the vegetable on top of the bean dip.

Top with the grated cheese. As always, extra points for cheese made in the Maritimes; you might want to try some of that asiago that they sell at Aura Foods in Fredericton.

Pop in the oven and bake for 15 to 20 minutes.

Pizza Dough

There are probably a lot of people who have never made their own pizza dough and would be amazed to discover that such an option is open to them. That's a pity, for although it takes time and planning, it's not hard, and kneading the dough is fun and good for stress release.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 tsp. dry yeast
• 3/4 cup warm water
• 1 tsp. salt
• 2 cups flour, preferably whole grain
• 1 tbsp. oil

Dissolve the yeast in 1/4 cup of the water and let sit 10 minutes. Here's a tip: buy yeast by the jar instead of in those silly little packets that come in strips. The packets may be convenient (it's just sooo hard to use a measuring spoon after all) but they're much more expensive, and if you do any amount of baking you're just wasting your money. Plus they constitute wasteful packaging and produce more garbage. Even if you don't do that much baking, jarred yeast will keep a long time if you store it in the fridge.

While the yeast is doing its thing, mix together the flour and salt. When the yeast is done, add the yeast mixture to the flour along with the remaining 1/2 cup of warm water and the oil. (I have a confession to make: I use olive oil. If I knew of any local oil appropriate to the task, I would try it instead. Actually, I'm not aware of any cooking oil being made in the Maritimes.)

Mix, gather into a ball and knead until smooth. If you knead dough frequently, you will get to know the feel of sufficiently-kneaded dough. It is a satisfying moment.

Oil a bowl, stick the ball of dough into it and turn once to oil the ball on both sides. Cover with a damp cloth and leave to rise for an hour in a warm place. If you're using white flour you can expect the dough to double, but with whole grain flour the rise is slightly less. No worries; it will still be delicious.

The Prorogued Blog

I think I have probably followed the pattern of many a new blogger. When I started out, I tried to put up something new at least a couple of times a week, mostly because the author of Blogging for Dummies said I should. That didn't last long, especially when the posts began to get longer. Multiple postings per week may work well for short posts, but not so much when each post is at least 2,000 words long and takes several hours to research and write.

But I did maintain a steady if plodding pace for a while. However, life has a way of intruding sometimes. In my case, I went into therapy and recovered memories of being molested by my grandfather. That kind of thing can throw you into a tailspin. It's nice to know, finally, why you're plagued with chronic pain and other problems of mysterious origin, but the revelation is a distracting one, to say the least. At times like this, investing a lot of time in a blog that makes you zero money falls to the bottom of your priority list.

Still, even with a good excuse, it was disconcerting to realize I'd let more than a month go by without updating my blog. This happens to many a well-intentioned beginning blogger, and the proof can be found in the apology-ridden blog posts that abound all over the Internet. Apologizing and explaining is an option, but not the most dignified one. Have we done so badly, after all? At least we haven't abandoned our blogs. Abandoned blogs are another thing you can find all over the Internet.

What to do, then? Simply slap up a new post, make no remark about the large gap, and proceed as if nothing happened? That was an option. But then I realized that I could take inspiration from an unexpected source.

Nobody knows the value of not apologizing like Stephen Harper. A demagogue can't apologize--it would be tantamount to admitting imperfection. You can't have that. Such an admission would hamper his ability to bully his lackeys. So when such a demagogue faced with a pesky opposition that won't stop going on about the multiple memos he ignored concerning the torture of Afghan detainees, what does he do? Especially when the knee-jerk counter-attacks are starting to sound tired and contrived?

Why, he prorogues Parliament. He got away with it before, why not a second time? So what if 36 bills, representing incalculable hours of work and therefore tax dollars, get flushed down the toilet? He places much more value than that on his own hothouse-flower ego.

After I got back from the protest rally, I realized this could work for me too. I don't want to apologize either. I don't happen to have a perfectly pliant and obedient governor general to sign all my forms without question, but that's OK because this blog is entirely under my control. I have absolute power over my own blog. I already have the autocracy Harper would like and is working towards.

I therefore announce that I am retroactively proroguing my blog, from the date of my last post (Remembrance Day) to the present. That's right, I even went back in time to prorogue! Eat your heart out, Harper. (Or did you already? Maybe that's where it went.)

There are differences, of course. One might argue that the need to apologize for not updating one's blog is negligible to nonexistent, given that it's not a true responsibility but just for fun, and one's failure to do it hurts nobody. The same cannot be said for letting people get tortured. For that matter, a prorogued blog doesn't have the national impact and expense of a prorogued Parliament. It doesn't cost millions of dollars and waste everyone's time. It's not a show of disrespect towards an entire nation.

I'm glad I don't have that level of responsibility. That would be burdensome indeed. But then, someone who runs for Prime Minister has some idea of what he's getting into. If he should find he doesn't want to do the job he's being paid a great deal to do, he should step down, forthwith, and let someone else, someone more willing and able, take over.

A Remembrance Day call for a change to army culture

Remembrance Day is a day to think about war, and I have been, although not in the way pop culture seems to encourage these days. I do not fetishize war or worship soldiers as heroes. When yet another young man (or woman, but usually man) comes home in a flag-draped casket, it doesn't make my heart swell with patriotic pride. Quite the opposite, if anything.

What I was thinking about was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Soldiers lucky enough to return alive often suffer from it. There is growing recognition of this problem, but the focus tends to be on getting soldiers treatment once they get back home. And that shouldn't surprise anyone. The army is a well-honed system that was created to do one thing only: maximize kills. An important part of this is desensitization. Soldiers are trained to see the enemy, whoever that may be at a given time, as less than human. Disregarding the humanity of the enemy means discarding some of one's own humanity. This is inevitable. One can't become desensitized in one area and remain sensitive in others. Therefore, the army is a culture where nobody is allowed to have feelings.

This produces an efficient army, an array of killing machines. It also produces an environment where PTSD becomes entrenched. After all, a soldier who has suffered through a traumatic experience is not free to talk it over and have a good cry. He has to pretend to be strong, "masculine" and unaffected. The feelings that cannot be expressed have but one place to go: into the body, where they manifest as physical problems, behaviour disorders, flashbacks and nightmares.

Rather than concentrating entirely on dealing with the damage once the soldier has come home and the disorder has had time to become well-established, wouldn't it be nice if some measures were taken to prevent PTSD while the soldiers are still in the field?

Of course, when you're at war, there's no way to prevent traumatic events from occurring. What could be prevented is the blocking of expression. If, following a traumatic event, soldiers were free to express themselves as needed--not only with therapists but with each other--there might be less occurrence or severity of PTSD.

Clearly, this would take a major change to army culture, if not to our culture as a whole. I say it's high time for such a change. We haven't had an appreciable and permanent change in our cultural attitudes towards war since the days of the Roman empire. All we've done is come up with better chemicals and machinery for wreaking mayhem. Not much of an accomplishment.

So I say, let's start changing culture, including army culture. The time is late and the need is desperate. And if it leads to a loss of killing efficiency, so be it. There's something worse than not being stronger than everybody else, and that's being stronger than everybody else, at such a cost. Death may well be preferable.

Links of Interest

Broken Heroes

This documentary by the CBC News show The Fifth Estate looks at three soldiers recently returned from Afghanistan and suffering from PTSD. You can watch the entire documentary online, see clips of each soldier's interview, or read transcripts of all three interviews.

Operational Stress Injury Social Support (OSISS)

A support network founded by Lt.-Col. Stéphane Grenier, one of the soldiers interviewed in Broken Heroes.

Dr. Horrible Wins Hugo

Back in February, I complained that the brilliant short musical comedy Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was shut out of the Oscars. So I am very pleased to report that the film has at last gotten the recognition it deserved. It won a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation - Short Form.

The Hugos are presented yearly at Worldcom, an enormous SF convention that takes place at a different location each year. This year, it was in Montreal, Quebec. According to Locus Magazine, Colin Harris accepted the award on behalf of Joss Whedon and the other creators.

But who is Colin Harris? He does not appear to be any relation to Neil Patrick Harris, who played the title role. Airlock Alpha describes Colin Harris as a "prominent fan." On the other hand, a commenter to Whedonesque.com says he's a past WorldCon co-chair.

Hmm, I guess Joss Whedon and the gang were pretty convinced they wouldn't win. The only person they sent to pick up the award was someone who had nothing to do with the actual making of the film.

This unfortunate lack of self-confidence was also displayed in the acceptance speech that Harris read. "Hugo, you need to get your act together, man.... You must have too many categories if we win one of them" (Source: Locus, Sept. 2009).

Enough of this modesty, false or otherwise! At a time when most movies are soulless reworkings of last year's movie, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was a lone gem shining out of a pile of Hollywood garbage. Yes, it deserved that award. It wouldn't have beaten out two Dr. Who episodes otherwise. (In case you're wondering, not only doctors were nominated, although they did top the heap. Other nominees were Battlestar Galactica and Lost episodes.)

Take heart, Dr. Horrible. At least Hugo respects you.

Scoop! The True Nature of Fredericton Bus Station's "Shuttle Service"

As this is not a news blog and I am not a reporter, I never expected that I'd ever be able to scoop the local papers. But the improbable has happened, and quite by accident. All I did was make a phone call. Amazingly, I've even scooped Charles LeBlanc.

It's big news in Fredericton that the bus terminal has been forced to move from its handy downtown location to some awkward spot in an industrial park. Indeed, there has been widespread anger and protesting. It's no secret that this has happened because Irving owns the land that the bus terminal was on, just as Irving owns a frightening percentage of New Brunswick soil, and they booted Acadian Bus off the spot so that they can build a parking garage. But this post is not about the ugliness of replacing a bus station with a parking garage at a time when everyone is supposed to be so keenly aware of the need to slow climate change. It's not about the weakness of every level of government in this province and how they let the Irvings do whatever they want and never lift a finger to stop them. Believe me, I could do a long and heated rant about that if I wanted to. But that's not what this post is about.

It's about the alleged shuttle service. Both the CBC and The Daily Gleaner reported that for the first two weeks of the move, there would be a shuttle service to take passengers to the new location. Sounds good, but nobody reporting the story gave any details about this shuttle service and when it would run.

So I phoned the bus terminal and asked, "When does the shuttle bus run?"

There was silence. I elaborated on the fact that there was supposed to be (as I'd understood it) a shuttle bus to take people from the old location to the new.

"There's no shuttle bus," said the man on the phone.

"Oh, because they said on the news that there was--"

"What there is," he explained, "is two guys with a van, and they're there for people who show up downtown and didn't know we'd moved."

In other words, there isn't a shuttle service. If you're aware that the station moved--which you will be if you heard about the "shuttle service" in the first place--that van's not for you. Oh, maybe they'll be nice and give you a ride anyway. After all, New Brunswickers are nice people, and besides, it's got to be boring sitting there in a van all day. They'll want something to do. But it's not for you. No, it's for the probably-nonexistent person who lives under a rock and never gets news or talks to anybody and consequently heard nothing about the move.

You heard it here first. Great reportage, CBC and Gleaner!

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If you enjoyed this bit of mockery aimed at our fine institutions of journalism, you may also appreciate my short post on a CBC host's musical difficulties.

Recipe: Vivian's Spinach Dip From Scratch

This recipe came about because I wanted to make spinach dip for a barbecue. Spinach dip is usually made with dried soup, but after I bought a packet, I read the ingredients, which I've gotten into the habit of doing these days, and was put off by the presence of monosodium glutamate, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate and sulfites. (For more information on some of these chemicals, see my earlier blog entry on food additives.)

I decided it would be an interesting challenge to create my own, soup-mix-free dip. And here it is. You can replace the goat yoghurt with standard cow yoghurt or the more traditional sour cream, but I find that the goat yoghurt imparts an unusual and delicious flavour to the dip. It is also easier to digest (for humans, that is) than cow dairy and lower in fat than sour cream.

• 1 1/4 cup goat yoghurt (or 1 cup thick sour cream)
• 10 oz spinach
• 1 cup mayonnaise
• 1 clove garlic, minced or put through press
• 1/4 cup onion, finely chopped
• 1 cup red bell pepper, chopped
• 4 oz water chestnuts, chopped (optional)
• 1/4 tsp salt, or to taste
• Freshly-ground pepper to taste
• 1 large round bread (optional)

Line a colander with cheese cloth and put the yoghurt into it. Place the colander in the sink or a bowl and leave for an hour to strain. If you are using thick sour cream, skip this step.

If you are using fresh spinach, tear off stems (unless it's baby spinach, in which case you can get away with leaving the stems on). Wash and leave some of the water on. Cook until wilted--a couple of minutes on the stove top, or ten to fifteen minutes in a preheated solar oven*. If you're using frozen spinach, thaw. Either way, squeeze out excess water and chop.

Mix the sour cream and mayonnaise together in a bowl. Add garlic, onion, red pepper, water chestnuts, salt and pepper and mix well. Blend spinach into mixture. Chill for a couple of hours.

If you are using a bread bowl, prepare it just before serving so the bread won't get soggy. Slice the top off and cut or scoop out the inside, leaving walls of reasonable thickness, at least an inch I'd say. Spoon dip into hollowed-out bread. Cut up the leftover bread (from the top and inside) to use for dipping.

If you're not using a bread bowl, serve the dip in an ordinary bowl with tortilla chips, crackers, pita chips, toast points or... anything you want, really.

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If you try this recipe, please let me know what you think by posting a comment. If you think the version with dried soup in it is better, feel free to let me know that too.

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*We bought a solar oven this summer. I am thoroughly enamoured of it and yes, I used it to cook the spinach for this dip. The brand we bought is Sun Oven, but as that's the only type of solar oven I've ever used, I'm not going to advocate it over other brands. The Sport Solar Oven looks good too. It is more basic as well as cheaper, and the reflector is sold separately. If you want to make your own solar oven, you can find oodles of directions on the Internet.

A message from prot?

Here's a curious piece of synchronicity. While we were in Grand Manan, we paid a visit to the local library and James found a copy of K-PAX. Remember the K-PAX movie, about a guy in a mental hospital who calls himself "prot" and insists he's an alien from the planet K-PAX? Well, it was a novel first. In New Brunswick we have this nifty system where all the libraries are on one network, and we can use our cards anywhere in the province, so James checked the book out of the library.

In the movie, prot says he's returning to K-PAX on July 27. In the original book, the date is August 17. It's repeated several times: pyschiatrist Gene Brewer (who just happens to have the same name as the author) has very little time because of this cut-off date, August 17. Well, take a look at this slip, from the library book, and see what the return date was.

Coincidence? What are the odds? No my friends, this is a message. Prot lives! See you on K-PAX.