Salsa!

I think my salsa is finally ready for prime time:

• 6 cups peeled, fine chopped, & drained paste tomatoes
• 1 1/2 cups fine chopped onions (I used White Sweet Spanish)
• 1 1/4 cup fine chopped peppers (green and red sweet peppers, mostly green)
• 5/8 cup lime juice

• 1 tsp salt
• 46 turns of the pepper mill on a fine grind (yes, I really did count to 46)
• 1 1/2 large cloves garlic, pressed, plus 1 more clove added at the end of cooking (by "large clove" I mean the kind you get with a hardneck garlic such as German White, where there's only five or six cloves per head. The kind you cut in half to fit them into the press.)
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1/2 T whole cumin, fried briefly until aromatic in a miniscule amount of olive oil, then ground in a mortar & pestle. (The added oil may not have been the best idea I've ever had -- it made the grinding tedious -- so I may skip that part next time. My pan was very dry.)
• 2 T jalapeños, very finely chopped (I used Black Hungarians, one red one black, which came out on the mild side of medium)

To prepare the tomatoes: blanch 30-45 seconds in boiling water to loosen the skins. Peel, core and seed, fine chop, and put in a strainer with a bowl underneath. Leave in the fridge overnight to drain out as much liquid as you can. It's easier to get the amount right if you start with more than you need and make the extra into tomato sauce. I used eight or so large Goldman's Italian American tomatoes, which are very dense.

Add the remaining ingredients, reserving a clove of garlic to add at the end. Marinate in the fridge for a few hours.

Simmer, stirring frequently, until you're happy with the texture (between one and two hours.) Add the last clove of garlic when you turn the heat off.

Transfer to wide-mouth cup jars (these are the best size for dipping the chips,) leaving an inch of head room for expansion when it freezes. (I got seven jars plus a half jar for tasting.) Put lids on and label them, then leave in a draft-free place, spaced an inch or so apart, until they cool to room temperature. Store in freezer. Thaw in the fridge a day ahead of when you plan to use them, and stir when you open to make sure it's fully thawed (buzzing briefly in the microwave if necessary.)

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The first time I tried making salsa, back in 2012, it was a demoralizing experience. I had no idea what recipe to use. There was a lot of variation in what I found online, and I didn't have any recipes where I'd actually tasted the result. I didn't realize I needed to drain the tomatoes in the fridge, and the weather was so hot they got moldy and I had to start over. And for that first attempt, I chose a recipe that's acidic enough to can and store at room temperature, and I didn't like the flavor. It was a huge production -- hours of labor -- which ended in disappointment.

The second try, in 2013, was a bit more successful. That time I used a freezer recipe, and the flavor came out better. But I expected to be able to cook it minimally, and that didn't turn out to be the case. As soon as it got hot it turned watery, and I kept simmering and simmering it, wondering what I'd done wrong, until I finally gave up after about an hour and just put it in the jars anyway, even though it was still too thin.

I didn't end up using it much, partly because it was watery and partly because I had to plan a day ahead to thaw it out. Then I found a salsa made by Culinary Kiosk, a local company that I adore, and I decided to just leave the salsa making to the experts.

And that's how things were until about three weeks ago. When I was cleaning out the deep freeze for the move, I found a couple remaining jars of the 2013 salsa, and decided to use them up. The same day, my kid (who now goes by the name Sherlock) decided to open a jar of the Culinary Kiosk salsa. So we ended up with two jars open at once. Time for a taste comparison.

The first thing I noticed was that the Culinary Kiosk salsa was sweeter than mine (and sure enough, there was sugar on the ingredient list.) It was also thicker -- the consistency of a catsup or a thick tomato sauce -- where mine was chunky and (still) watery (after all these years.)

Then Sherlock pushed the Culinary Kiosk jar away when I offered it to them, and said the one from the freezer was better.

Oh. Okay. Thank you.

That, along with a surplus of unusually dense paste tomatoes from my garden, was all the inspiration it took to get me back into salsa-making mode. And I'm finally satisfied with today's version of the recipe. I might have to make another batch.

My Problem with Ayn Rand

I remember reading, and enjoying, Ayn Rand's novels when I was a teenager. As a creative genius myself, it was easy to identify with her creative genius characters. And, like them, I found it hard to fit in to a social environment that prized conformity.

However, some years later, I learned she was an idol of the Libertarians. I was deeply puzzled, since that movement strikes me as hopelessly muddled and unrealistic. Libertarians appear to believe that people, left to their own devices, will act out of enlightened self-interest and shape society into a utopia. And I found it difficult to understand the connection between the works that I had read and this reactionary, just-short-of-anarchist political philosophy.

This past week I was again subjected to a social situation that reminded me strongly of The Fountainhead. A group of community members are looking for a scapegoat, and as the strongest contributor in their domain of dissatisfaction, I'm directly in the cross-hairs. The other obvious scapegoat has departed the scene, leaving behind a vacuum that appears to have sucked me in.

Scapegoating is an inherently small-minded activity. It's an attempt to solve a problem through destruction, when (pretty much across the board) a constructive solution is what's actually needed. So it's incredibly easy, in this situation, to understand Ayn Rand's frustration with the way small-minded individuals band together to destroy anyone who's competent enough to step into a leadership role.

But I also gained some insight, this time around, into the discrepancy between Ayn Rand's writing and the Libertarian belief system.

In a third person novel, the author invites the reader to step into the shoes of her protagonist and identify with him. So Ayn Rand, in writing The Fountainhead, is inviting everyone who reads her to imagine themselves as a misunderstood and persecuted creative genius. In so doing, readers also imagine that the world would be dramatically improved if they were simply freed from the misguided constraints imposed on them by smaller-minded peers, and allowed to soar.

But there's a problem with that logic. One I hadn't noticed before, even though it's obvious in retrospect. And that problem is that creative geniuses are few and far between. I happen to be one of them in real life: I'm dramatically more competent than the vast majority of my peers at pretty much every intellectual task I tackle. And all my life I've been plagued by people who couldn't stand that fact about me, and who've tried to take me down in any way they could.

But Libertarians imagine that everyone is such a genius, and would rise to that zone of competence if left to their own devices. Which simply isn't true. The majority of humanity is capable of literacy at around an eighth grade level, and more than that is beyond their ability. Readers of Ayn Rand lie on the high side of average intelligence: The Fountainhead is, after all, a tome. But even most of them aren't capable of anything approaching the level of functioning her genius protagonists have mastered.

So what we're left with is a political philosophy that's based on a statistical fallacy. Which is, quite simply, a conflation of the average with the exception case that lies three standard deviations above it.

Humanity, left to its own devices without organizational structures, would not self-organize to a genius level of functioning. It would settle to the mean. And the mean are the exact same small-minded individuals Ayn Rand was warning us about.

Song and Spirit

I drafted this piece last fall, the day after an on-site rehearsal for a concert at Cornell's Africana Center.

It’s hard to sing with conviction when you’re struggling to learn the music. At any moment, the body of sound around you could drop away, and leave your voice standing alone against a sudden background of silence. That happened to me several times last night, on one particular piece. It’s called, “I’ll Stand,” and it’s breathlessly fast: no time to think, so you just have to run with it. In the song the title phrase is repeated in a rapid-fire call and response, and just as we settle into that rhythm it shifts, dropping back a beat and exposing anyone who misses the change.

There’s another new piece, “No Coward Soldier,” that until now I’ve been thinking I just can’t stand. The lyrics are dreadful: exactly the kind of offensive, shaming, guilt-inducing crap that Christians leave the faith to escape.

But Oh My God the music! Last night it just grabbed me and swept me away. We’ve practiced that piece a couple times before, but this is the first time we’ve performed it, and I just couldn’t hold my body still when all those complex rhythms finally came together. If only we could just do the music, the back-and-forth and interplay of voices, and dispense with those awful words.

Much as I love to sing, the music is only one of several reasons I joined this chorus. The group’s focus on “the Negro spiritual” is an opportunity to stretch my musical boundaries, but I also wanted to diversify my social network: the other circles I interact with are almost entirely white. And I have several friends in the group – including a pagan, a Jew, and a couple of Unitarians – so I know I’m not alone in carrying a different faith than the music expresses.

One of the most important reasons, though, is my desire to understand the relationship between music and resilience. The call for auditions emphasized the importance of gospel music in the civil rights movement: the group is named after a local activist, Dorothy Cotton, who worked closely with Dr. King. But how did this musical expression of faith enable the movement to persevere against adversity? To make “a way out of no way,” to borrow a line from Sweet Honey in the Rock? I don’t think it's possible to comprehend something like that intellectually: you have to experience it. So there I was, singing my heart out, in search of a deeper understanding of the connection between Song and Spirit.

 I’ve been imagining myself as an actor when I sing, immersed in playing a role. But at some point last night the reality blurred. My internal observer dropped away -- that part of me that stands apart, observing and evaluating – and I sank into the music, and started to experience it the way a believer might.

It happened on the song, “Anticipation,” a sweet little fairy tale in which we all go to heaven to hob-nob with the saints, and with our loved ones “who’ve gone on before.” I no more believe in that future than I believe in Santa Claus, and I actually appreciate the fact that the song is sung with a sweetness and innocence that resonates with my perception of the lyrics as a child’s fantasy. So it jolted me when I realized I was envisioning Heaven as if it was a real place, where I might someday actually find myself.

I suppose it’s not really that different from suspending my disbelief when I read a novel, and imagining that the people and situations it describes – however fantastic they seem – are real and present around me as I read. But it’s unsettling to know, in a situation like that, that so many of the people around me are absolutely serious about that fantasy. We’re conjuring a world for believers, not just for concert goers in search of an evening’s entertainment. And if our director is right, our ability to conjure that world changes our capabilities in this one.

One of our pieces, "No Ways Tired," is based on a quote from a civil rights activist: "I don't feel no ways tired. Come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. I don't believe He brought me this far to leave me." After singing that song, I can easily see how the music might carry them through.

I've got a song in my head

Woke up this morning with kind of a rappy drumbeat going in my head, (da-da-da-dum bum, da-da-da-dum bum) which turned into the following spoken word poetry piece:

Used to be an apple, now it's a seed.
Used to be a seed, now it's a sapling.
Used to be a sapling, now it's a tree.
Used to be a tree, now it's firewood.

Used to be firewood, now it's a fire.
Used to be a fire, now it's ash.
Used to be ash, now it's fertilizer.
Used to be fertilizer, now it's corn.

The cycle is turning,
The cycle is turning,
Life is returning, 'cause
The cycle is turning,

The cycle is turning,
The cycle is turning,
We gotta let the wheels go round.

Used to be corn, now it's food scraps.
Used to be food scraps, now it's a chicken.
Used to be a chicken, now it's soup.
Used to be soup, and now it's poop.

Used to be poop, now it's sewage.
Used to be sewage, now it's sludge.
Used to be sludge, and now it's . . . landfill waste.

Used to be sludge, and now it's. . .landfill waste.

Something is broken,
The cycle is broken,
Something is broken,
The cycle is broken,

The cycle is broken,
We gotta repair it,
We gotta make the wheels go round.

Used to be an acorn, now it's an oak.
Used to be an oak, now it's lumber.
Used to be lumber, now it's a floor.
Used to be a floor, now it's. . .landfill waste.

Used to be a sofa, now it's. . .landfill waste.

Used to be diapers, now it's. . .landfill waste.

Used to be a high rise, now it's. . .landfill waste.

Used to be a skyscraper, now it's. . .landfill waste.

Something is broken,
The cycle is broken,
Something is broken,
The cycle is broken,

The cycle is broken,
We gotta repair it,
We gotta make the wheels go round.

Used to be an ocean, now it's a cloud.
Used to be a cloud, now it's rain.
Used to be rain, now it's a stream.
Used to be a stream, and now it's a lake.

Used to be a lake, now it's a river.
Used to be a river, now it's. . .fracking fluid.
Used to be fracking fluid, now it's. . .toxic waste.

Used to be a river, now it's. . .toxic waste.

Something is broken,
The cycle is broken,
Something is broken,
The cycle is broken,
The cycle is broken,
We gotta repair it,
We gotta make the wheels go round.

Used to be an ocean, now it's a cloud.

Used to be a cloud, now it's rain.

Used to be rain, now it's sap.

Used to be sap, now it's a fruit.

Used to be a fruit, now it's a salad.

Used to be a salad, now it's you.

Used to be a salad, now it's you.

Now it's you.

Now it's you.

You're part of the cycle,

You're part of the cycle,

You gotta repair it,

You're part of the cycle,

You're part of the cycle,

You gotta repair it,

You gotta make the wheels go round.

You gotta make the wheels go round.

(copyright me, 2015)

Being a Non-Conformist

Some time ago, when Facebook came out with its "Custom" gender category, some friends of mine were rallying us all to change our genders from Male or Female to one of the custom types, as a way of showing solidarity with people who can't easily assign themselves to a binary gender category. For example, the custom genders which apply to people who fit well into the traditional categories are "Cis Male" and "Cis Female."

So I went into the list to look for an appropriate gender. And found myself stymied. When the choice is binary, it's obvious which side of the boundary I fall on. I have never questioned the gender I was assigned at birth. But when gender is portrayed as a spectrum, I simply can't bring myself to identify as "Cis Female." There are far too many aspects of that gender role that just don't fit.

In the past I've simply copped an attitude about it: This is what a woman looks like. Get used to it. But now I've been presented with an actual choice. Eventually I changed my gender from "Female" to "Gender Non-Conforming," and called it done.

This morning I was editing my profile, and noticed it had reverted back to "Female" again, so I went back in and reinstated the new designation. And that got me thinking about it again.

What does it mean to be "Gender Non-Conforming"? To quote a smattering of online sources, gender non-conformity is "behaving or appearing in ways that are considered atypical for one's gender." A gender non-conformist's "behavior or gender expression. . .does not match cultural expectations about the gender roles typically associated with their sex assignment," and they "do not adhere to society's rules about dress and activities for people that are based on their sex."

That would be me, all right. I was a tomboy as a child. I hated playing with dolls. I am a scientist and an engineer. I have always been fiercely independent, and I desire an egalitarian relationship with my partner. I detest housework; I love to build things. And as for heels and makeup? wtf? It's true that I'm primarily attracted to men, but the men I'm attracted to are similarly outside the traditional norm. Big hunky guys are anathema to me: I prefer a mate who is thin, with delicate features and artistic sensibilities. And when I dance, I enjoy flirting with women as much as with men.

As a young adult I attended a pro-choice rally in NYC, and while I was there I bought a T-shirt. It was different from most of the pro-choice merchandise: rather than a specific reference to a woman's right to choose an abortion, it was emblazoned with the single word CHOICE.

Yep, I thought. That about sums it up.