1. I was remembering today how much I loved the whipped potatoes with hamburger gravy that were often served at hot lunch in School District #391 here in Kellogg. When I was in the lunch line, every time I saw kids coming out of the serving area with these potatoes and gravy, I tried to think of ways I could quickly clean my plate and possibly dash back for seconds. Sometimes, I suppose, it meant drinking my half pint carton of milk really fast because I needed a vessel to cram my peas in: of all the things we were served at hot lunch, peas were the one offering I could not eat. Hiding them in my milk carton made it look like I'd eaten them.
This was on my mind today because ever since last night, I had been thinking about the hamburger stew I was going to make for dinner tonight. Making this stew (or soup) is simple enough. I browned a pound of hamburger. I seasoned it with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. I removed the meat from the skillet, but I don't suppose I had to. In the fat left behind, I sauteed chopped onion, carrots, and celery and sliced mushrooms.
I had been keeping leftover, homemade beef stock in the fridge for just such an occasion as this and I poured the stock, ground beef, and vegetables into the Dutch oven, brought them to a boil, and let them simmer.
I did not add a couple of ingredients common in hamburger soup: potatoes and tomatoes. I didn't add potatoes because I planned on dropping dumplings onto the bubbling surface of this stew.
I didn't add tomatoes because I wanted to serve a meal that might taste close to the hamburger gravy the cooks served over whipped potatoes for hot lunch.
I succeeded. The dumplings thickened the stock and the stock's deep beefiness combined with the hamburger and the vegetables to provide the Deke and me with a substantial meal that gave me the added pleasure of transporting me back to the hot lunch, with especially strong memories of the crowded basement of Sunnyside School, where the teachers on duty hovered over us to make sure we ate our food, making it a great challenge to secretly dispose of those mushy peas. By the way, if Mrs. Ingle spied some one drinking her milk too early in the meal, she sometimes took it away and put it in a window sill and returned it to the offender when he had eaten more of his food. If Mrs. Ingle were on lunch duty, I had to go to Plan B to get rid of my peas: crush them in a napkin and hide them in my lap.
2. Earlier in the day, I had looked to see if a new episode of the podcast, Uncivil, was available. One wasn't. Instead I discovered that the creators of Uncivil posted a guest podcast from The Nod, an enterprise described in a 09-28-2017 New Yorker review, here, as a "playful and serious podcast about blackness". The episode featured in Uncivil was the first of a two-part story about Ever Lee Hairston and her ancestors who had been enslaved on the Cooleemee Plantation in North Carolina for many years, and continued to live and work there on into the 20th century until the plantation owner, Peter Hairston, stopped the practice of sharecropping in 1972. Too much happens in these two episodes to summarize here. You can, however, go to The Nod's website, scroll down the list of podcast episodes, and find the two episodes we listened to, entitled, "Snakes on a Plantation: The Hairstons Part 1" and "Diary of a Mad Cousin: The Hairstons Part 2" by clicking right here.
By the way, if you are a baseball fan, some branch of this Hairston family sent three generations of players to the major leagues: Sam Hairston played in the Negro League and then part of one season with the White Sox; his sons, Jerry and Johnny were both major leaguers, as were Jerry's sons, Jerry, Jr. and Scott Hairston.
3. The Deke and I braved the chilly Silver Valley weather and made a trip to the Wellness Center in Smelterville and each exercised for a solid forty-five minutes, on both cardio machines and on the weight machines.
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