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Sunrise Tuscan Fake Chicken
Abigail C. (original recipe)
Ohio was the first state I remember looking up on a map. It always seemed so far away but
it's not, it's right next door to Pennsylvania. Cleveland is only 300-some miles away, barely
farther than New York City.
We took our band trip one year in high school to Cleveland because our band director wanted
to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I'll never forget an old rocker lady in the museum
store asking why the Van Morrison CDs were filed under "M" but the Led Zeppelin CDs were filed
under "L." In retrospect she had to be joking, but she seemed dead serious. The Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame was fun to visit but I'm glad I went there on a school trip because the whole
concept is obviously a little paradoxical. It would be like having the Uniform Code of Jazz
or a straight-edge reggae festival. (I'm sure they exist, but so does the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame.) If I were in Cleveland, I'd definitely go back just to see how it's changed. Do
they still play the "we pretend that we're dead" song on repeat? Probably not but how would
you know without visiting?
It's really hard to take a tour across America and not think of sports teams. Some people
think "The Guardians" is a bad name but it's grown on me. The explanation is a little stupid,
but remember there is another (Men's) baseball team named after female horses, which strikes
me as a really odd naming choice, yes, it's a pun, but the point is, it doesn't really matter
where team names come from, someone chooses it and then you are obligated to root for them,
go Guardians! and maybe if it's offensive we change it but otherwise you live with it. I
always kind of liked the Cleveland baseball team because you felt like underdogs, the same
reason it's been fun to see the success of the Baltimore baseball team this last season.
Baseball is an amazing sport. I respect every position but the athletic ability of a pitcher
amazes me still even today though I grew up watching the sport.
The problem with sports teams and electoral politics is I will always favor my New York
Yankees over the Cleveland Guardians. The Yankees might have had an uncharacteristically poor
season last year, but I started watching them in the early 90s (the Mets games weren't on TV)
and before The Dynasty they were competing with Detroit to finish better than last. So I've
rooted for bad teams before and hopefully I won't have to this season but I know what it's
like when your pride and joy isn't exactly winning, what it's like to pull for a losing team.
The Supreme Court has ruled that money is free speech, which is of course crazy since that
would mean poor people don't have free speech. But it's what the Supreme Court said and if
anything the Court is going in the wrong direction so we are stuck with it for now. I propose
we address this with a Democracy Surcharge (apparently I am not so creative with policy names).
If we can't cap political spending, then maybe we can determine a reasonable limit for a given
race and we can't stop people from spending more than this but if they do, they will also pay
into a fund that supports the other campaigns.
I realized this is basically the luxury tax in Baseball, and for basically the same reason.
It counterbalances the tendency for the richest teams to win all the time. I suppose I haven't
made the normative argument for why this is a problem in elections, though it feels pretty
intuitive. (You can read a Bernie Sanders book.) Mostly I am suggesting a strategy that is maybe
Constitutional and it has the added bonus that it will be easy for Baseball fans to understand.
I floated it and some are of the opinion the Courts would strike this down too, and maybe
that's true, but I think it is an elegant solution. I was told by a somewhat conservative
professor in college that judges make their decisions first and then look for justification.
Obviously this is a generalization and possibly subjective, but it was nice to hear it
outloud. I like to remind us that we are strange monkey-animals and that civilization, on
some level, is miraculous, but we create it and it is up to us to determine how it works, us
right now, not the dead slave owners of the past.
I'm not saying tear up the Constitution, nor am I completely anti-Originalist, but let's
be leveled headed, the Founders were smart to leave a lot of ambiguity (they couldn't predict
the future and they knew it). Don't let the legal establishment tell us it means exactly this
not that. Good governance reflects the will of the people, so the government including the
Judicial branch should listen to what we want. Amending the Constitution isn't easy, despite
the Founders' intentions. But simple human minds interpret the Law, this is not Divine Law,
it is messy and imperfect and there is a lot of room for agency in how we interpret it.
I don't have a simple solution to the problem of the Supreme Court. They are a thousand
times the scholars I'll ever be, but according to my professor, this just means they are very
good at justifying their bad opinions.
I guess the answer is patience and electing better Presidents. But in the
meanwhile, we must be persistent. We can change minds (we can try) and the legal justifications
will follow. It's stupid to think our Judges are not ideological. Maybe it will take a little
creative thinking, to give them something to work with, but if we expect better of our Judicial
system, these are individual people who don't want to be assholes, mostly they are living up to
our expectations, and if we expect better and empower them with better options, we can change
the way of things.
If you think change is impossible, contemplate that when my dad was in college and called the
UConn men's championship basketball game at Madison Square Garden, there was not yet a Three
Point Line. I'm maybe not completely sold on the Pitch Clock in baseball but I understand the
argument and I don't think it ruined the game even if it seems really out of place in baseball.
Sports are not afraid of change, while at the same time, they are steeped in nostalgia and
reverence for their own histories. Americans (everyone) are obsessed with sports, so why not
learn from the examples of Sport (good and bad). Sometimes we need to look at the rulebook with
fresh eyes and remember what is important in our short times here.
Ingredients
- 1 Chicken substitute fillet
- 1/2 cube No-chicken bouillon
- 1/2 cu. Cherry tomatoes, halved
- 1/3 cu. frozen Spinach, thawed
Sunrise
Preparation
Prepare pasta and fillet according to the instructions on the packages.
Heat oil in a medium-small pot. Saute garlic for approximately 1 minute. Then add water
and bouillon and stir to dissolve. Add cherry tomatoes, lemon, spinach, and almonds. Bring to a
boil and simmer 5 minutes. Add nutritional yeast and basil and simmer 2 minutes longer.
Serve over pasta and fillet.
For the sunrise: Peel a tangerine, slice it in half and place half in the center of a plate.
Then place strawberry slices around it in a circle.
Discussion
This preparation had a couple of strikes against it. First, I once again used a non-vegan
chicken substitute. I had an open box that I grabbed at the store for convenience but when it's gone I'll
be brave and try a vegan product. I had one bad experience which is why I am a little fearful, and
it's hard to find a plain fillet-style product which is why I am prone to grabbing what is familiar
when I'm in a hurry. But I'd rather not have to publicly apologize to murdered baby chickens so
I think it's worth the extra effort.
Incidentally, I've thought a fair amount about cruelty-free dairy
products, and it seems to me eggs are probably the easiest to get there. It will never happen
commercially in the
current ways of the world since it would involve caring for non-egg producing hens for decades and
the industry frankly doesn't want to take good care of egg-producing hens; I'm not sure decades
of life under those conditions would really be doing a lot to reduce cruelty. So commercially
it is a challenge (there is simply no way around the efficiency of culling non-productive animals)
but for small family farms, your chickens can lay for a time and then become pets. So the last
challenge is culling male birds and that is where I figure we could develop the technology to sex eggs.
Obviously it isn't necessary when you are going to eat the eggs (and eggs would be pretty valuable,
you don't want to waste them!), only when you need to maintain or increase the flock size, and
then you could bring your eggs to a local extension office or whatever to get them tested, probably
they'd mark the eggs with a little male or female symbol, and you'd let the hens hatch and
eat the rooster eggs unless you happen to need a rooster for breeding purposes.
Fun fact, XX birds are male and XY birds are female.
I guess if we bred self-sufficient chickens we could retire them to semi-wild chicken retirement
communities in the Great Plains. I've thought about this with cows, and it's probably a lot more manly
to wrangle cattle than chickens, but since we are positing a new way of thinking about it, why not
let our imaginations range free.
Strike two was that I forgot to add the basil. It was good but obviously including basil would have been
better.
The sauce was basically a fancy gravy which reminded me of Thanksgiving leftovers when I used to
eat gravy over pasta and turkey. I don't observe holidays right now but whenever Thanksgiving rolls
around I succumb to temptation and eat the traditional foods, ideally not on Thanksgiving itself but
whenever makes sense. When I did celebrate it, I'd even eat a tiny piece of turkey once each year,
because it is an important holiday and the best reason to eat meat in my mind is ritual. For this reason
I did not call myself a vegetarian. I prefer to label cuisine rather than people, but if the label fits
it's obviously convenient. Today I do call myself a vegetarian and though I have weakness for cheese,
I don't really miss meat.
I said a couple of strikes because I didn't want to strike out, so maybe this last point is
more of a foul ball, but I didn't serve the pasta and sunrise in the same meal, call it what you like.
I doubt they'd be
terrible together but I knew I would take separate photos anyway so I took it as an opportunity to
simplify the execution by making the sunrise later. It wasn't particularly difficult to make, but I
forgot the basil so obviously I didn't need unnecessary complications.
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Louisiana