...And The Days Dwindle Donwn To A Precious Few...

...and the English visit draws to a close.

That's the bad news.

The good news is I return just in time for the first presidential debate. While there's no lamenting missing the onslaught of political messages and relentless coverage that has no doubt plagued the news cycle, it has been interesting to experience the Obama/Romney kerfluffle from here -- in addition to getting a big kick out of all news coverage, especially the little bits. We used to call them "filler" in the old days. They were the tiny stories needed to fill space on a page, like the one about the woman in Aberdeen, Scotland who reached into her cutlery drawer and found a black and brown striped snake believed to be an escaped pet. Was it?
No idea. Or the guy in Runnymede who, when cited for drunken driving, cited Magna Carta as grounds for not acceeding to a breathalizer test. The judge disagreed, citing Magna Carta as grounds for finding him guilty and assessing a fine.

Town names here are good for a smile and a giggle, like Cold Ash and Ozleworth, until one considers Texas towns like Cut'n'Shoot, Tow and Dime Box. Better yet are the television shows. Numerous American series have made it across the pond, from oldies like "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman," "Frasier," "Judge Judy","Everybody Loves Raymond," and "Rules of Engagement." There is not much likelihood of reciprocal episodes of "Psychic Sally on the Road," "Hunky Dory Blockbuster (the equivalent of QVC)," or BBC's "Ripoff Britain" in the morning and "Watchdog," in the evening -- both of which cite by name companies caught in the act of defrauding consumers.  In one disquieting episode, an enterprising but ethically challenged entrepreneur was videotape leaving court (after being fined for fraudulent television repairs) and became so angered with the waiting TV crew that he tosses the contents of a bottle over the interviewer's head.  The liquid turns out to  be urine. I'm sure that encouraged the viewing public to do business with him.

And speaking of the public, language on television here would probably come as a big shock --or at least a revelation -- to those unaccustomed to hearing salty dialogue on channels not relegated to cable. I mean, George Carlin would be proud.

Traveling the English countryside has also been a revelation, especially local grocery stores. The two most notable are Waitrose and Tesco -- both comparable in one way or another to Central Market or Whole Foods. Especially impressive are the frozen food offerings which include traditional shepherd's pie, fish & chips, Indian, Chinese, Japanese and -- drum roll, please -- an American Tex-Mex selection of fajitas, chili (spelled 'chilli' here) and barbecued ribs. Particularly impressive are the labels that the food industry is fighting stateside: nutritional information that includes fat content, caloric value, sugar, salt and saturated fat percentages -- on all labels. Equally conspicuous is the absence of additives.  Canned goods do not include salt. High-fructose corn syrup is nowhere to be seen. No MSG, no food coloring, no artificial flavoring (unless clearly stated on the label) and fruit juice from real fruit.

Fish displays are also a pleasant surprise. I encountered a Tesco employee who gave me more time than I deserved  upon being interrogated about where plaice, hake, haddock and mackerel originated. In between serving actual customers he confided that he had only been on the job for three weeks, having walked away from his job as a registered psychiatric nurse -- too few beds, not enough staff to do the job properly. Dover sole, it should be noted, is as pricey here as it is in our neck of the woods.

And speaking of food, as is often the case, English food in 2012 is a far cry from what it once was. There are wonderful meals to be had in towns large and small. I thought about the fox family that used to live at the bottom of the backyard space at Molly's house and was lured to The Snooty Fox in Tetbury, a town in the heart of Gloucestershire's hunt country. The shrimp and haddock fishcake, topped by a perfectly poached egg and finished with a chive butter sauce was outstanding -- as were the steamed mussels in cider cream served with house-made white bread sliced thick.

By the by,  brace for sticker shock. Food, like everything else, is expensive, whether dining out or shopping to eat in.

But some things are worth paying for, like dining out. First, there was the perfect meal at Number Seven Fish Bistro in Torquay. This exquisite family-owned restaurant features fish caught daily, and the flavors --and a packed house on a mid-September Wednesday evening stand in testimony to a sturdy reputation for quality. It worth a trip to Torquay just to eat there. Which is not to say that the menu at Jesse's in the town of Cirencester is anything to be sneezed at. Situated down an otherwise unremarkable alleyway, just behind the butcher shop that share's its name,Jesse's is reason enough to go to Cirencester. The seared sea scallops, the chicken liver pate (with red onion marmalade and toasted granary bread also justifies the trip to Gloucestershire. Other than my friend Cath's cooking (this evening she made and outstanding Beef Stroganoff), these were among the best meals consumed, or, more accurately, devoured, here.

If you can get to Bath, and this World Historical Site is just too wonderful for words, have lunch at The Pump Room. On the day we visited the lunch specials featured roasted fennel and butternut squash with a blue cheese dressing; lamb and rosemary cassoulet with roasted garlic and baby green beans; and for dessert,orange marmalade bread and butter pudding.

Yes, we had good food in London, but here in the hinterlands is a happening food scene too.

So as I wind down my escape from 24-hour political stuff (hate that I missed P.M. Cameron on Letterman, but apparently his inability to identify the author of  "God Save the Queen" was disquieting for the local newspapers).  Yes, plural. Newspapers. Five, I think. Even the rail system has free newspapers with synopses of local, national and international info.  Anyway, I will be home in time for the first debate.

Meanwhile, permit me to lord over you that fact that by the time I return I will have seen three episodes of "Downton Abbey" and you, my friends, will have to wait until January for Season Three.

Shall I tell you what happens?

Nah. I was just stirring stuff up.

Greetings from the Cotswolds

I am in such a beautiful place I can't believe it.  I'm visiting a friend who was my neighbor when I lived in England 40 years ago. She lives in the village of Malmesbury in the County of Wiltshire in a stone house built in in the 1820s -- one of the newer houses in this town, where parts of it date to the 13th and 14th centuries. The Avon river courses through her property and today we watched a heron hang out near the water's edge for more than an hour.

The roads are barely wide enough for two tiny cars to pass one another by, and we had a near miss when an oversized lorry  -- sorry -- when a big-assed truck came toward us at a rate of speed sufficiently intimidating to force us to drive off it into a patch of green to let it pass.  There are no overhead lights so roads are eerily dark at night, and the fines for driving under the influence are wicked enough to persuade everyone to either have a designated driver or not drink at all.

As in: at all.

All said, since I'm terrified to drive on the wrong side of the road I'm letting Cath drive, so I'm having the time of my life, and I will share more detail than you probably want to read when I return.

What I really want you to know is that no matter where I go, no matter what the conversation has started out to cover, it invariably turns to the 2012 campaign -- the one i fled the country to avoid hearing or reading about.  Yet here I am, sometime among conservatives, sometime among socialists, sometime among independents, who have all, at one time or another, characterized the Republican side of the campaign as "Mitt the Twit and that other guy."

That's how things are playing out on this side of the pond. I now have way too many clippings from various papers that allow as how well, Obama might not be all we had hoped for, but he is a damned sight better than the alternative.

And, as it should come as a surprise to no one, folks over here know a lot about various candidates.  They've read about Akin's ridiculous "legitimate rape" comments; they hold Elizabeth Warren in high regard; they find it hard to believe anyone would opposed creating health care for all Americans -- just as they are appalled at Rick Perry's efforts to withhold funding for women's health programs. They know about this stuff.

Honest to God, I am not making this up, the Brits are tracking us. They want to know if Jan Brewer is going to be re-elected because they think she is dangerous. The think Eric Cantor is not unlike a nematode and they find unfathonamable the notion that a significant portion of a congressional body can hold a country hostage to its resolve to defeat a sitting president, primarily because they oppose abortion.

And each time someone says to me either by way of a rhetorical question or a direct comment that the brouhaha is directly linked to Obama's skin color, I smile and say "What do YOU think?" The response is invariably "yes."

Having said that, everyone is also stunned by the murder of the envoy and members of his staff (although here they are asking why there were no marine guards to fortify access, given the tenuous relationships throughout the Middle East  Here folks can't believe the US didn't carry the Paralympics, which attracted as many people as the Olympics did. And of course they're all a twitter over photographs of the Cambridges in the buff.

Me, I don't care one way or another. This is England, which is consistently full of surprises.  For instance, next Sunday (Sept 23) the gardens at Malmesbury Abbey --which are stunning beyond description -- will have a "clothing optional" day when naked gardeners will be at work trimming trees, pulling weeds, pruning plants and such like. Visitors can come clothed or stark naked.

I plan to be there.

Until I return, cheerio.

OK. I give up...

...at least for now.

I'm taking a time out on the heels of the latest loony political pronouncement in a generally lackluster campaign year. This gem comes from whackjob Todd Akin of Missouri, the hands-down winner of the monthly Republican Dumb Comment sweepstakes. It is so dumb it could have come from Texas.

As the whole world knows by now, when asked whether women can become pregnant when they're raped,  Missouri's Republican Senate candidate reportedly said that pregnancy from rape is really rare. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,"  he explained.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the icing on the cake for me.

I have always wanted to leave town when election time rolled around, then get home just in time to vote and be done with it. Maybe I'll tune in here and there while I'm away, but for the most part, electioneering has become so vapid, so devoid of integrity and so intrusive that I'm doing what I've long wanted to do: I'm spending a month abroad to see how we're viewed from someplace far, far away.

To get into the spirit of my trip I booked British Airways to fly me across the Atlantic to England, where I'm reuniting with a former neighbor. Ron and Cathy Young and her husband lived across the street from me when I lived in Leicester, a decent-sized town in the Midlands. We cooked together, argued politics and on more than one occasion she had to step in and mediate when her husband and I got a little to wound up.  It took almost a year for me to realize his greatest pleasure in our discussions was baiting me.

For years I promised to visit. Year after year there was always something: my mother was dying; Molly was dying; I was broke from traveling back and forth to visit the both when I lived in Denver. There was always something. When I retired and move to Austin I got involved in writing the book. Then there was touring with the book. Still, they said, please come to England.

Once again I promised. I'm coming I said.  When they said they'd bought a house in a little town in France, I absolutely promised to visit. We'd hang out a bit in Wiltshire, in the beautiful, historically wonderful Cotswolds, then we'd take the Chunnel to France or fly from Bristol to La Rochelle, then drive to Antezant. This went on for a while and suddenly I heard nothing. Figuring they had tired of me and my empty promises and given up, I wrote a pleading email asking for one more chance.

No answer.

One day I learned why I hadn't heard: Ron had died suddenly and Cathy was alone in their Wiltshire dream house. I bought the ticket I should have bought months before. I called Susan Concordet, Molly's former roommate in Paris and said I would visit her too. Then I called the reporter to had lived with me when she had a fellowship to work a summer at the Dallas Morning News. We'd stayed in touch, but not seen one another in 20 years. I'm taking the Chunnel to visit her, her husband and two sons.

They will all poke fun at our political process and the pathetic performance of Congress over the last four years; they'll laugh and cringe at the presidential race, what with the Romney-Ryan ticket sounding increasingly like a bad parody of a real campaign. They'll ask me why no one is addressing economic issues and I won't even try to make sense of the forthcoming debates.

Just as we wished for a presidential White House like the one portrayed in Alan Sorkin's wonderful "West Wing," I'll tell them how much I wish we could have a political debate like the mock one in HBO's  wonderful series "The Newsroom." I'll listen to them excoriate the idiocy of political candidates like Todd Akin and hope that, if nothing else, Akin's comments will stir women up enough to storm the polls to vote against him and his ilk.

A bientot.

How Much Crazier Can We Get?

 

Let me count the ways in which recent events have turned my brain to mush..

First we have a congressman who thinks it would have helped in that Aurora shooting if more patrons had had guns. Louie Gohmert, the Phi Beta Kappa candidate who thought more guns would be a good idea -- reminds me of a lost gopher, no insult to rodents intended). Then, in a runoff election we Texans got a nobody named Ted Cruz, a Tea Party candidate who will possibly become the other clueless senator from the Loon Star State. He reminds me of a snake -- no insult to reptiles intended. Moreover, if you can believe it,  he's worse than the guy he ran against who was, trust me, bad enough.

I'm drowning in a tidal wave of not-good news. Stop scratching your head over the Romney-Ryan ticket long enough to consider what's going to happen to our food if we are unfortunate enough to get saddled with these two come November. Both are superbig on deregulation.

So consider this, especially if you love corn: you're about meet genetically modified corn in a can. Or frozen. Or on the cob. If it isn't here already, it's en route to a grocery shelf of the nearest Wal-Mart. Sure, some stores have refused to carry this GMO stuff, but if you can't afford to shop at Whole Foods, or there's no Trader Joe's in your neighborhood (although if it helps, General Mills has promised not to incorporate the genetically engineered corn in its products) what do you do? And why should you care?

Well, as reported in a clear and concise article by freelance writer Diane Petryk Bloom, here's why: the corn is from Monsanto seeds, which produce a plant a pesticide that will kill insects that feed on the plant. It's coming to Wal-Mart from farms in the Midwest, Northwest, Southeast and Texas. Bloom is among the most recent writers to cry 'foul' over this fact.

Bloom goes on to say that in addition to the toxin consumed by those who eat this, there are serious farming issues as well. Just ask some of the small farmers who have complained in court when pollen from Monsanto's corn crops have cross-pollinated their heirloom corn. Monsanto has sued for theft, and they such deep corporate profits the little guy doesn't stand a chance. And those

Now that we are released from the 2012 Olympics, let's get to stuff that the right-wing nuts hoped we'd forgotten about in the two weeks since the torch was lit in London: and we fail to notice at our peril. Let's look first a California's Proposition 37 -- which would require all products containing GMOs be labeled as such. We'll know in November if the Golden State will set an important precedent in this country.And guess who doesn't want that to happen?

So you eat crap that has poison designed into its DNA. Sure it kills bugs. How can we know what it will do to humans down the line? A link between sterility in rodents has already been linked to GMOs.  Do you really want to find out what it might do to your children, especially if you want grandchildren? And hey, where is our great protector the FDA in all this? Anybody seen the FDA?

If we can't wait for the weather to cool down before we take to the streets, we can at least write or email our members in Congress. Even if we know the probable response; we can still worry the daylights out of them. We can write letters to editors and company executives. We know they don't read their own mail, but by God, unless their minions are complete cowards, they'll pass it on. They'll know we're out here mad as hell and not willing to take this nonsense anymore.

Oh, and for your information, we watchdogs stateside aren't the only ones who fear genetically engineered stuff -- Japan, Australia, Brazil, Russia. China and the European Union require the labeling California seeks. It's a sad, sad day when China is more concerned about food toxicity than the good old U.S of A. And one more thing: Monsanto isn't the only booger in this. The  creatively titled Council for Biotechnology Information  lists among its members BASF;  DuPont, Switzerland-based Syngenta and Dow AgroSciences (remember Dow, the wonderful people who brought us Agent Orange?).

And yes, as I read each new article and post each new clip on my overburdened Facebook page, I wish anew for the feisty Molly Ivins voice, although I'm inclined to believe that by now she, like so many of us, would be shaking her head in something midway between horror and despair. In one of her last columns she wondered how we became so mean, so senselessly violent, so apathetic,  so unwilling to care about one another, so resistant to hearing any opinion other than our own.

By now she would have to asked how many deaths will be enough for Congress to stand up and face down the insanity that allows automatic weapons into the hands of anyone -- let alone those eligible for white coats and institutionalization; how many travesties will we permit companies like Monsanto, Dow et al to perpetrate upon us?

Finally, because this is too much of a downer to continue much longer, one last thing: Remember when a symbol represented the person formerly known as Prince? Well, according to news out of Ottawa, Canada, via the Huffington Post, Canadian troops and police were trained for two years by the international security contractor formerly known as Blackwater. And in the best Blackwater tradition, it was done without the permission of the U.S. State Department. This revelation appears in U.S. federal court records, unsealed in North Carolina as part of a $7.5 million settlement of criminal charges against the company now called Academi LLC.

Yeah. So lest anyone of us still wonder who's really running the country look no further than Yertle the Turtle; Gohmert the gopher; the NRA; Monsanto, Blackwater/Academi LLC and all those fanatics lacking a sense of irony who call themselves pro-life but support capital punishment.

I'm taking off for a month, but I'll be back in time to vote. And I just might find something cheerier to write about while I'm away.

In my absence I'm counting on you to keep stirring it up.

SRO on The Crazy Train

So far this year, was there even a one-day hiatus from mean-spirited attacks on our president? I mean, we're almost three-quarters through a year marked by one of the most vitriol-filled campaigns leveled against an American head of state in memory. The poor guy doesn't seem to be able to do anything right -- at least according to those paragons of rational thinking whose initials are Boehner, Issa, Cantor, and McConnell.

The subject of presidential trials and tribulations surfaced at a small dinner gathering I had for out-of-town friends a while back. One couple was here from New Orleans, the other from Columbia, Mo. They were in Austin for the annual fancy-schmancy Texas Observer fundraiser that has come to be known as the Molly Dinner. Named for Miz Ivins, the event usually features a bit of entertainment, a decent meal, a prominent speaker (this year it was Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman), an honoree or two, and journalism awards for writers who most reflect Molly's spirit and sense of social justice.

I mention all this because my little cornbread-and-chili supper on the evening preceding "The Molly," as it has come to be called, was almost a repeat of a dinner gathering my living room a few months earlier. As usual, we ended up talking politics during a momentary hiatus from our feeding frenzy. One of my guests was from Scotland, that Anglo-Saxon country we rarely think about unless there's a golfer in the family. Greg the Scotsman said his relatives across the pond couldn't make heads or tails of any reason to vote for any of the goofballs chasing the Republican nomination at the time.

(Remember now, Scotland is also home to a bunch of people named MacDonald. Greg regaled us with his recounting of a Scottish nobleman who rented rooms in his castle and had an in-house restaurant called MacDonald's. Our McDonald's threatened to sue. Their MacDonald threatened to sue our McDonald's -- despite the fact that their MacDonald had been around some 400 years. Check and mate.  Our McDonald's backed down. But I digress)

The free-flowing conversation that evening made me wonder anew how Molly might have responded to our Texas governor who thought Congress should only meet every other year, like the Texas legislature; or to Newt, the semi-aquatic amphibian who characterized President Obama as "the best food-stamp president ever," who probably never in a million years intending any racial innuendo.

And let's not forget Time magazine's Mark Halperin calling the president "a dick" on MSNBC -- not to mention that bizarre episode of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer wagging her bony finger in the president's face as though scolding a recalcitrant child. At least Newt is finally political toast, Halperin got suspended and Perry only emerges periodically from beneath his rock to make some goofy speech or other, as he did on a recent goofball appearance on "Face the Nation." As for Brewer, if there is karmic justice, hers will be ugly.

We lamented the loss of Molly's singular voice, recalling some of her more acerbic observations as aapplicable today as in years past.  "If his IQ dropped any lower we'd have to water him twice a week"; or "It's like, duh. Just when you thought there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties, the Republicans go and prove you're wrong";  One of my personal favorites, and one perfect for our times is, "Any nation that can survive what we have lately in the way of government, is on the high road to permanent glory."

So, in a way, she is still with us. Anyway, halfway through the more recent 5th anniversary of Molly's death, we are once again reminded how few voices like hers remain. I wonder how she would react to the level of meanness to which congressional activity has risen. I suspect she would despair of how few voices fearlessly speak truth to power anymore -- although she owuld be delighted that Bill Moyers is still in fine form on PBS -- which continues to give congressional boos the heebie jeebies.. For the most part, though, reporters who once spoke for the voiceless now parrot a corporate line mandated by media moguls. We're left instead with the stunning new HBO series, "The Newsroom."

Just as the slightly overwrought opening episode addressed newsroom ego clashes, I'm hoping that at some point a story line will deal with the extraordinary bigotry reflected in the behavior of so-called law enforcement officers, especially in the wake of President Obama's executive order allowing children born in the U.S. to remain here with all the rights of other American-born citizens. Specifically in mind is that guy out in Arizona.

Somewhere in that treasure trove of wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-we-still-had-an-Edward R. Murrow-among-us scriptwriting there must be a character based on Joe Arpaio, Arizona's dreadful Maricopa County sheriff. He has got to be the sorriest excuse for a law enforcement officer since Bull Connor. The only satisfaction to be derived from his miserable presence on planet Earth is the knowledge that somewhere down the line karmic justice will bite him on the butt so thoroughly that he'll wish it was a pit bull instead.

Alas, reporters who covered every minute of the Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon Papers trial decades ago are long gone -- mainly because the spirited editors who put themselves out there are also all but gone. Important publications like The Texas Observer, The Nation, The Progressive, The Washington Spectator and Mother Jones struggle to survive. A handful of truly brave web sites track, collate and disseminate accurate information about a crazy Congress, loopy candidates and avaricious corporations, but they too operate on a shoestring. If anybody believes we still have mainstream media that consistently speak truth to power, also believes, like the song says, eggs ain't poultry,  grits ain't grocery, and Mona Lisa was a man.

So here we are, rocketing toward a national election with standing room only on the crazy train.

Rage, Race and White Trash Cooking

My friend Bonnie and I are so much on the same wavelength much of the time it gets scary. Our biggest point of departure is the fact that she is not only a voracious reader who retains roughly 95 per cent of what she reads, but she formulates ways in which she can translate her information into action rather than rage.

When she does get exercised, it's because of this country's continued use of torture, the lies that are spread in defense of it, the people who perpetuate it and those who practice it. I'm angry about just about everything, from official abuse of authority, to pollution, to political lies to Texas heat, so I sign petitions, send certified letters and emails couched in the most temperate language I can summon to corporate bullies who are unworthy of temperate criticism.

When we get together over lunch or dinner, Bonnie and I come to earth long enough to talk about Molly and/or food. And so it came to pass that in a conversation more than a year ago we decided to have a party that would celebrate the culinary traditions of a group of people who have been long lost to our social consciousness.

The idea came about, as near as I can recall, because we were sitting in some fabulous Mexican dive of a restaurant that served the most exquisite ceviche and tacos, tamales and empanadas. Hardly anyone spoke English, and you waited while your food was prepared because everything was made to order. Nothing fancy, just good solid food as good for the soul as it was for the body.

Somehow, we detoured into favorite foods growing up and I told her about the onion sandwiches my father and I used to make -- a slice of Bermuda onion and a slice of Beefsteak tomato between two slices of Wonder bread slathered with Miracle Whip and finished with a generous sprinkling of black pepper. No, not mayonnaise. I mentioned that I had been surprised the find a recipe for the same sandwich in a 1986, spiral-bound volume of "White Trash Cooking." Turns out Bonnie had the same Ernest Matthew Mickler book (Ten Speed Press has since published a 25th anniversary edition). The Mickler family had the good sense to know their foodways were to be treasured, not ridiculed.

We then got into a conversation about how white trash cooking is not much different from what has come to be known as "soul food." Which then made us wonder why one iteration of the same foods should have one name and the other a different name. But before we could get too existential about it, our Mexican food came and we had decided to do what we often do when we eat: have a party.

An homage to white trash cooking.

It took a year to convert conversation to action. We scoured recipes from White Trash volumes I and II. We came up with far too many components, winnowed them down and sent invitations. As expected, some recipients were, at best, ambivalent; at worst, horrified. We decided that those who didn't get it, oh well. Others began to reminisce about their own roots in Texas, or Kentucky or West Virginia or Maryland or Missouri. They told of Jell-o molds with bananas and canned fruit cocktail and lime Jell-o with cottage cheese. Greens cooked with fatback. Okra and tomatoes. Black-eyed peas, pickled okra,  peas and smoked ham hocks. Buttermilk cornbread. Red soda. RC Cola and Moon Pies. Macaroni and cheese made with Velveeta. Fried chicken. Biscuits. Potato salad. Cole slaw. Corn Pudding. Hamburger Gravy.

OK, so even though we found a place to buy dressed possum, squirrel, alligator and raccoon, we bypassed the opportunity in deference to our budget and the fact that nobody would eat raccoon stew even if we did make it with locally sourced, organically grown herbs and vegetables. Willie's Swamp Cabbage Stew didn't make the cut, nor did Jail-House Chili, Esther's Five-Can Casserole, Lady Divine's Chicken-Asparagus Pie, or Mama Leila's Hand-Me-Down Oven-Baked Possum.. It might be The People's Republic of Austin, but, well...

Anyway, this dinner party would be a tribute to the resilience of a group of people who had to make do all their lives with foods that generate upturned noses among the well-heeled, especially those lacking the empathy gene. Again, we figured folks would either get it or they wouldn't. As it turned out, about 60 people did get it. They realized you didn't have to be from Hot Coffee, Mississippi or Dime Box Texas to relate. They came, they ate, they talked politics they talked food. They were young, old, Democrats, Republicans, black, white and Asian. Some allowed as how they also came with Tums and Alla-Selzter. Eri Weinstein made peach cobbler in a cast-iron skillet with peaches picked from the tree where he is co-owner of a massage therapy school and spa.

Yes, there were Moon Pies and fruit pie and red velvet cake.

A year or so ago, when Bonnie and Gary, my brother Fred, his wife Denise and I were in New Orleans with a group of friends, we sprung our white-trash dinner plan. Bonnie asked Fred and Denise, "Will you come?" To which they replied, "Sure; we'll come as friends of white trash." They too grasped the concept.

In the best white trash/soul food tradition, we had too much food. We still have leftover Orange and Grape Crush. Some guests entered so thoroughly into the spirit of the occasion that they brought not Cotes du Rhone and Pinot Grigio, but cheap beer and Boone's Farm Strawberry wine. The first guests arrived right at 6, and the last left at about 11. By then we had already decided to do it again next year. We haven't exactly decided on a theme, but two of the guests, a couple displaced by Katrina, brought shrimp and white beans. It set us to thinking...other than Native Americans and Afro-Americans, what group's culinary traditions survived to become among the trendiest of recent food trends?

Stay tuned. We'll be stirring it up.

You CAN Go Home Again

I should know. I never miss a chance to go back to my home city, the place I couldn't wait to leave, to see people I've missed ever since departing.  This time I came to St. Louis to the home of my almost-sister, Rose. She and I go back so far in food years it isn't even funny. And here we were again,  stirring it up. Only this time it revolved around what we've come to call "The Book."

She actually flew me into town to prepare a meal based exclusively on recipes in The Book: carrot soup, Caesar salad, Cajun meal loaf, green beans and, of course, butter-laden garlic mashed potatoes with sour cream (which should have been in The Book but wasn't) and Ina Garten's sinfully splendid brownies.  The occasion was her turn to host the book club she joined four years ago. They've been going strong -- with the occasional dropout and replacement.  Appropriately called "The Laughing Ladies," we gathered around Rose's eight-seater of a mahogany dining table, amply fortified by red and white wine.

As guests arrived they immediately gravitated toward the kitchen --- as seems to be the case at any get-together.

Sara, whom I hadn't seen in years, promptly assigned herself to adding butter and sour cream to the mashed potatoes as I mash-squish-mash-squished the addition of heavy cream and more butter.

Robin set about mixing the salad and topping it off with freshly grated Parmesan.

Rose assumed her natural role as gracious hostess while I tried not to sweat over the meatloaf as I removed it from the oven and transferred pan juices into the skillet that would soon be filled with the Cajun sauce (we call it gravy in Texas) loaded with the trinity of chopped onions, celery and bell pepper. Garlic is a given.

Soup was actually served in soup bowls, part of a set Rose brought from her visit to the Czech Republic. We decided to dispense with salad bowls and assign lettuce to plate, alongside the meal's main components. Our sole concession to calorie counters, bless their hearts, was an absence of bread.  That was more than compensated for by brownies and French vanilla ice cream. Of course there was fresh fruit -- raspberries, strawberries and grapes -- which I interpreted as being part of the brownie-ice-cream configuration, not an alternative.

Oops. When you're a charter member of the Too Much Is Never Enough Society,  well, too much really is never enough.

Now it should be noted here that this was a celebratory meal. Few of us would recommend so much butter, cream, butter, sour cream, butter, and more butter in one sitting, but there are times when, in preparing a meal from a book, caution gets thumped sideways: a little fruit of the vine and a lot of  fruit of the cow makes for delicious merriment.

It was the kind of evening I enjoy most; friends sitting around talking asking questions, discussing ideas, reminiscing about favorite meals and talking about Molly.  "Wonder what Molly would have to say about (fill in the blank; the options are endless)"; "What did you leave out?" (personal stuff from conversations she never meant to be public and that had nothing to do with cooking together);  and the most frequently asked -- "What was she really like?" (Private, surprisingly shy and very funny even when she wasn't 'on'.

Finally, as the evening wound down conversation inevitably veered toward politics. How could it be a dinner devoted to Molly and not head in that direction, for cryin' out loud. This much I know for sure: she would have loved the idea of some knucklehead arranging to have Rush Limbaugh enshrined in the rotunda of the Missouri state capitol, if for no reason other than the fact that it would have given her ample material for one of her eviscerating columns dedicated the addlepated troll of the airwaves.

From there we zig-zagged to more politics, international travel, fun vacation spots, and finally wound down to who would host the next book club gathering -- a sure sign that the two and -one-half hour meal was coming to a close.

So see, Tom Wolfe, you can go home again.