We have a handsome new ceiling fan in the living room. The five blades are thick, dark-reddish wood, extending out 62 inches from a dark bronze hub, and beautifully concave. Mark, our electrician, installed it this morning then turned it on. Compared to the old fan, the blades’ rotation was lazy.
“Turn it up to high,” Karen said. Mark looked at the remote control. “It is on high,” he said. We checked the remote, and, sure enough it was on high. “It’s moving a lot of air,” Mark said. “If it turned any faster than that,” I said, eying the prodigious blades, “the house would take off.”
It is a vast improvement over the old fan, which had 52-inch blades with the wicker-look inserts, but did not hold its proportional weight in the space, which features a vaulted ceiling and a massive ridgepole beam spanning the width of the room. This new fan reminds me of the noxious commercial where the cool couple sits across the desk from the mega-cool designer, who asks, “And what can I do for you?” And the woman, who was either highly paid or had no idea how idiotic this made her look, sets a faucet fixture on the desk and says, “Design a house around this.”
You could have designed our living room around this new ceiling fan. But we didn’t exactly go looking for it. The old fan would still be with us if I hadn’t single-handedly destroyed it last week. That fan had a pull chain that I had used successfully for years to change its speed. It had three speeds: low, medium, high. It was on medium, and Karen, on a warm evening, asked me to change it to high. “Three clicks,” I said. “Low, off, high.” I reached up and pulled the chain.
I don’t exactly know what happened next. I felt the chain knob slip free of my fingers. That has happened before. The chain, freed, arced upward. That has happened before. Then something happened. The motor housing, above the blades, started turning with the blades. The entire unit was rotating. Karen yelled, “It’s unscrewing at the top!” “What?” I yelled, transfixed by the rotating motor housing. “Unscrewing! At the top!” She yelled something about what I should do, but I yelled back, “Shut up!” I shouldn’t have done that, but I needed time to think. I ran to get a dining chair, climbed on it, and tried to stop the fan turning. I looked up at the beam and saw that the drop rod had become completely unscrewed from the beam housing. The fan had dropped about a foot and was hanging suspended only by its wiring.
I stared at the wiring and wondered if my death would come from electrocution, or fan blade blows, or falling off the chair, or telling Karen to shut up. Then the fan stopped. I let it go. I climbed off the chair. Karen spared me. Probably not 60 seconds had passed. It seemed like an eternity.
In the aftermath, I surmised that the chain must have arced just high enough to be caught by the blade hub, around which it wrapped, jamming into the clearance between the hub and the motor housing. And then the motor housing started to turn. There was no way to intervene. Before I was finished thinking about it, I had developed a bit of pride in myself, in the sense of contributing to a highlight reel. It was like the time I almost drowned when my water ski tips got pointed down, just as the towrope handle got trapped between my legs. That was a long time ago. But you remember.
April 28, 2009
April 27, 2009
Media Literacy: What is News?
What is news? Let's just think about that for a minute.
Every semester, students come into my classroom believing they're going to learn some professional secrets about the media.
They always seem pleased when, on the first day, I ask them: "Who is responsible for deciding what is, and isn't, news?"
The mumbles rise tentatively. "Why . . . the media." The silent ones hear the mumbles, and embrace them, and all the faces acquire a kind of glow, as if they're about to hear an answer to a question they've wondered about all their lives. They think I'm going to tell them how the media does it. And I am. It's not easy, because they've known the answer all along, and an answer in plain sight can be the hardest kind to see, and to understand.
"That's right," I say. "It is the media's job to decide, out of all the things that happen in all the towns and cities and countries in the world, every day, twenty-four hours a day, what is and isn't news. So. How do they decide?"
One answer: "There are big stories, and there are little stories. Anybody can see that."
Anybody can see that. So quickly they get the hint, that they've had the answer all along.
"But what makes one story big, and another story little, and a third story medium-sized?"
"The editors have rules."
"What kind of rules?"
"Rules that tell which stories are big, and which aren't."
"Where do they get these rules?"
"Learn them in journalism school."
"Where did the journalism school get the rules?"
"Somebody made them up. Gutenberg, maybe."
Invariably, it comes around, in classrooms, in cocktail chat, and in letters to the editor, that the rules of news are somehow the arbitrary creation of the media. The subject usually comes up in the context of the rules being irresponsible, and requiring change to bring an arrogant media into line. People accuse the media of slanting the rules toward bad, juicy news, because "sensational stories sell."
In my files is a long letter to the editor from a woman who simply listed all the things she was "tired of," 23 items in all, from crooked politicians to crazy people scaling White House fences, and of course including O.J. Simpson, hate mongers, and biased newspapers.
"I'm tired of so many things, and I don't think I'm alone," she concluded.
Her letter inspired other letters, typified by the following, from a man: "People such as (the woman) are in the vast majority, always have been, always will be . . . she is right, she is not alone. Most people are tired of the same things. Just remember, the things she's tired of are flashed constantly in our faces by lazy TV and print reporters, editors and producers because sensational stories sell. And don't forget: It will never be newsworthy that the vast majority of people get up again each morning and make the day go well."
It will never be newsworthy! He's right, he's looking straight at it, but he doesn't realize it. Just like the student in the classroom.
The letter writer is like a person who is looking for his eyeglasses, and can't find them, because they're pushed back on his head. What he must be suggesting is that a vast, untapped market, weary of the everyday news, is waiting for some enterprising, out-of-work newsman (plenty of those around) to start up a paper: The Good News Times. As a newsman myself, I am trying to imagine the page-one headline:
Vast Majority Rises
Does Little Things; Makes Day Go Well
If our letter writer is right, The Good News Times should ride the back of the vast majority to riches surpassing Murdoch. If he is wrong, and the paper folds (once the novelty wears off) and the local bad-news rag keeps selling 400,000 copies a day, he's going to have to go back to these lazy reporters and editors and ask himself: "What do these guys know, that I don't?"
Simply put, they know where the media values come from. It is true that journalists, both print and broadcast, bring to their task many specialized tools – the inverted pyramid, interviewing skills, the ability to write a grabby first paragraph, called a lede – for which the general public has little use.
But when the issue is the definition of news, the media and the public are joined at the hip by that set of values and definitions called the media code. Always have been, always will be. Remember, the code was there before the media. All the media did, starting with Gutenberg, was turn the code into a business. Imagine the media as a sieve, through which the tide of human experience is poured, all of it, every day. The mesh of the sieve is woven from the media code, which won't let news through. Most of human experience – hard to say exactly how much, but let's say the "vast majority" – will pour right on through. Daily – or many times daily now, with the advent of the Internet and the "24-hour deadline" – the sieve will be emptied onto editors' desks, the raw material of, in newspaper publisher Philip Graham's memorable phrase, the first rough draft of history.
A student holds up a hand.
"But if the news is captured by the media code, why do people have such different opinions of what they think the news is?"
Because no two people are alike. Every human being has the ability to create an instant "values profile" for any media image which is also an exact "reaction profile" of who the human being is. Take three random people, show them the same image, or story, and listen to their responses, how individual they are. People responding to media images is like pulling the handle on a slot machine. Imagine a row of windows in your head, like windows across a slot machine, one window for each value and definition in the media code, 14 in all. Every time you look at a news story, you pull the handle on the slot. In the windows, numbers whir, and then stop, each of them somewhere between zero and 10. The number sequence is your reaction profile to that story and an exact reflection of who you are.
The media's role is to democratize the results, assigning values to the story that represent the majority. Yes, emphatically, many people will disagree with the majority, and disagreement is the essence of the democratic process. Imagine, if you can, a nation whose people could read the paper in complete, voluntary agreement every day. Contrast that image with a free nation whose media is the "news Congress" of the people. And it is a Congress free of electioneering, lobbyists and special interests.
Many even within the profession don't understand the elegant, critical simplicity of that role. An admiral was killed in a plane crash, and the paper ran a front-page color photo of the admiral's widow and young son in their eruption of grief. Reaction to the photo was swift and subsequently the subject of a column by the paper's ombudsman. Readers called the photo "disgusting." "An invasion of privacy." "Exploitation at its worst."
The ombudsman referred to the lengthy editorial debate before the decision was made to run the picture, a decision that made nobody inside the paper comfortable. The ombudsman wrote: "At issue here are basic questions about how the newspaper covers stories and the choices it makes."
And then she stopped! Bumped right into the heart of the matter and didn't see it. Turned the discussion in another direction, when the completed paragraph might have – should have – read:
"At issue here are basic questions about how the newspaper covers stories and the choices it makes. It can be a very tough business, but the newspaper is the public's proxy, obligated to respond to the people's media values and democratize them."
Which is of course what happened. In media code, the photo scores 10s for conflict, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest and sensationalism, with proximity (in a Navy town) and human interest reinforcing the others. Once the photo was taken, the paper had no more choice to run it than Barack Obama did to take office when elected. It was simple, democratic mathematics, no matter how distasteful the result to some. (The admiral's widow, incidentally, asked for a copy of the photo to save for her son.)
Those who are discouraged by their media, and by the mathematics that produce media decisions, might want to read the opening paragraphs of "The Moral Sense" (Free Press, 1993), a study of human judgment by the eminent social scientist James Q. Wilson:
"Since daily newspapers were first published, they have been filled with accounts of murder and mayhem, of political terror and human atrocities . . . If people have a common moral sense, there is scarcely any evidence of it in the matters to which journalists – and their readers – pay the greatest attention . . . .But before drawing so bleak a conclusion from his daily newspaper, the reader should ask himself why bloodletting and savagery are news. There are two answers. The first is that they are unusual. If daily life were simply a war of all against all, what would be newsworthy would be the occasional outbreak of compassion and decency, self-restraint and fair dealing . . . Amazed that such things occurred, we would explain them as either rare expressions of a personality quirk or disguised examples of clever self-dealing.
"The second reason that misery is news is because it is shocking. We recoil in horror at pictures of starving children, death camp victims, and greedy looters. Though in the heat of battle or the embrace of ideology many of us will be indifferent to suffering or inured to bloodshed, in our calm and disinterested moments we discover in ourselves an intuitive and powerful aversion to inhumanity."
It is an intuitive and powerful aversion that shows up every day in our national news Congress; the good news that the vast majority craves is always there, glowing between the lines.
Every semester, students come into my classroom believing they're going to learn some professional secrets about the media.
They always seem pleased when, on the first day, I ask them: "Who is responsible for deciding what is, and isn't, news?"
The mumbles rise tentatively. "Why . . . the media." The silent ones hear the mumbles, and embrace them, and all the faces acquire a kind of glow, as if they're about to hear an answer to a question they've wondered about all their lives. They think I'm going to tell them how the media does it. And I am. It's not easy, because they've known the answer all along, and an answer in plain sight can be the hardest kind to see, and to understand.
"That's right," I say. "It is the media's job to decide, out of all the things that happen in all the towns and cities and countries in the world, every day, twenty-four hours a day, what is and isn't news. So. How do they decide?"
One answer: "There are big stories, and there are little stories. Anybody can see that."
Anybody can see that. So quickly they get the hint, that they've had the answer all along.
"But what makes one story big, and another story little, and a third story medium-sized?"
"The editors have rules."
"What kind of rules?"
"Rules that tell which stories are big, and which aren't."
"Where do they get these rules?"
"Learn them in journalism school."
"Where did the journalism school get the rules?"
"Somebody made them up. Gutenberg, maybe."
Invariably, it comes around, in classrooms, in cocktail chat, and in letters to the editor, that the rules of news are somehow the arbitrary creation of the media. The subject usually comes up in the context of the rules being irresponsible, and requiring change to bring an arrogant media into line. People accuse the media of slanting the rules toward bad, juicy news, because "sensational stories sell."
In my files is a long letter to the editor from a woman who simply listed all the things she was "tired of," 23 items in all, from crooked politicians to crazy people scaling White House fences, and of course including O.J. Simpson, hate mongers, and biased newspapers.
"I'm tired of so many things, and I don't think I'm alone," she concluded.
Her letter inspired other letters, typified by the following, from a man: "People such as (the woman) are in the vast majority, always have been, always will be . . . she is right, she is not alone. Most people are tired of the same things. Just remember, the things she's tired of are flashed constantly in our faces by lazy TV and print reporters, editors and producers because sensational stories sell. And don't forget: It will never be newsworthy that the vast majority of people get up again each morning and make the day go well."
It will never be newsworthy! He's right, he's looking straight at it, but he doesn't realize it. Just like the student in the classroom.
The letter writer is like a person who is looking for his eyeglasses, and can't find them, because they're pushed back on his head. What he must be suggesting is that a vast, untapped market, weary of the everyday news, is waiting for some enterprising, out-of-work newsman (plenty of those around) to start up a paper: The Good News Times. As a newsman myself, I am trying to imagine the page-one headline:
Vast Majority Rises
Does Little Things; Makes Day Go Well
If our letter writer is right, The Good News Times should ride the back of the vast majority to riches surpassing Murdoch. If he is wrong, and the paper folds (once the novelty wears off) and the local bad-news rag keeps selling 400,000 copies a day, he's going to have to go back to these lazy reporters and editors and ask himself: "What do these guys know, that I don't?"
Simply put, they know where the media values come from. It is true that journalists, both print and broadcast, bring to their task many specialized tools – the inverted pyramid, interviewing skills, the ability to write a grabby first paragraph, called a lede – for which the general public has little use.
But when the issue is the definition of news, the media and the public are joined at the hip by that set of values and definitions called the media code. Always have been, always will be. Remember, the code was there before the media. All the media did, starting with Gutenberg, was turn the code into a business. Imagine the media as a sieve, through which the tide of human experience is poured, all of it, every day. The mesh of the sieve is woven from the media code, which won't let news through. Most of human experience – hard to say exactly how much, but let's say the "vast majority" – will pour right on through. Daily – or many times daily now, with the advent of the Internet and the "24-hour deadline" – the sieve will be emptied onto editors' desks, the raw material of, in newspaper publisher Philip Graham's memorable phrase, the first rough draft of history.
A student holds up a hand.
"But if the news is captured by the media code, why do people have such different opinions of what they think the news is?"
Because no two people are alike. Every human being has the ability to create an instant "values profile" for any media image which is also an exact "reaction profile" of who the human being is. Take three random people, show them the same image, or story, and listen to their responses, how individual they are. People responding to media images is like pulling the handle on a slot machine. Imagine a row of windows in your head, like windows across a slot machine, one window for each value and definition in the media code, 14 in all. Every time you look at a news story, you pull the handle on the slot. In the windows, numbers whir, and then stop, each of them somewhere between zero and 10. The number sequence is your reaction profile to that story and an exact reflection of who you are.
The media's role is to democratize the results, assigning values to the story that represent the majority. Yes, emphatically, many people will disagree with the majority, and disagreement is the essence of the democratic process. Imagine, if you can, a nation whose people could read the paper in complete, voluntary agreement every day. Contrast that image with a free nation whose media is the "news Congress" of the people. And it is a Congress free of electioneering, lobbyists and special interests.
Many even within the profession don't understand the elegant, critical simplicity of that role. An admiral was killed in a plane crash, and the paper ran a front-page color photo of the admiral's widow and young son in their eruption of grief. Reaction to the photo was swift and subsequently the subject of a column by the paper's ombudsman. Readers called the photo "disgusting." "An invasion of privacy." "Exploitation at its worst."
The ombudsman referred to the lengthy editorial debate before the decision was made to run the picture, a decision that made nobody inside the paper comfortable. The ombudsman wrote: "At issue here are basic questions about how the newspaper covers stories and the choices it makes."
And then she stopped! Bumped right into the heart of the matter and didn't see it. Turned the discussion in another direction, when the completed paragraph might have – should have – read:
"At issue here are basic questions about how the newspaper covers stories and the choices it makes. It can be a very tough business, but the newspaper is the public's proxy, obligated to respond to the people's media values and democratize them."
Which is of course what happened. In media code, the photo scores 10s for conflict, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest and sensationalism, with proximity (in a Navy town) and human interest reinforcing the others. Once the photo was taken, the paper had no more choice to run it than Barack Obama did to take office when elected. It was simple, democratic mathematics, no matter how distasteful the result to some. (The admiral's widow, incidentally, asked for a copy of the photo to save for her son.)
Those who are discouraged by their media, and by the mathematics that produce media decisions, might want to read the opening paragraphs of "The Moral Sense" (Free Press, 1993), a study of human judgment by the eminent social scientist James Q. Wilson:
"Since daily newspapers were first published, they have been filled with accounts of murder and mayhem, of political terror and human atrocities . . . If people have a common moral sense, there is scarcely any evidence of it in the matters to which journalists – and their readers – pay the greatest attention . . . .But before drawing so bleak a conclusion from his daily newspaper, the reader should ask himself why bloodletting and savagery are news. There are two answers. The first is that they are unusual. If daily life were simply a war of all against all, what would be newsworthy would be the occasional outbreak of compassion and decency, self-restraint and fair dealing . . . Amazed that such things occurred, we would explain them as either rare expressions of a personality quirk or disguised examples of clever self-dealing.
"The second reason that misery is news is because it is shocking. We recoil in horror at pictures of starving children, death camp victims, and greedy looters. Though in the heat of battle or the embrace of ideology many of us will be indifferent to suffering or inured to bloodshed, in our calm and disinterested moments we discover in ourselves an intuitive and powerful aversion to inhumanity."
It is an intuitive and powerful aversion that shows up every day in our national news Congress; the good news that the vast majority craves is always there, glowing between the lines.
April 24, 2009
Archives: Flying Sideways, January 1991
Until this afternoon in January, 1991, I had been studying the concept of "taking back power" for three years, but still only understood it academically. Then the 727, taking off, put it on the ground for me.
A cold front had just passed through Dallas, bringing the usual winds howling from the north. The overcast was giving way to blue sky as our flight taxied from the Delta terminal over to the west runways.
Ahead of us was a Delta 727, hurrying along, probably late, like we were. Without pause he took the runway and began his takeoff roll. I lost sight of him as we maneuvered on the taxiway, but when we turned to enter the runway, I saw him again.
He had just lifted off, climbing sharply through 200 feet, presenting to us a topmost profile of white fuselage and silver wings.
He was flying sideways; that is, the fuselage was skewed two or three ticks to the right of its direction of travel. It is not unusual for airplanes, particularly small ones, to fly sideways. They call it “crabbing,” when a pilot, to fly straight, has to steer right or left into the wind.
But this was different, this glimpse of a 727, 200 feet off the ground, flying sideways at takeoff. Here was a three-engine aircraft, 100 feet long, weighing 115,000 pounds, driven forward by 45,000 pounds of thrust, and the wind had blown it sideways the instant its wheels left the ground. The pilot had to steer left to fly straight. It showed how strong the wind was, and how effective the countering design, a design that joined flexibility with control. It was a triumph of equilibrium.
Then we turned onto the runway, and the 727 was gone, but its image remained. It occurred to me, at that moment, that the ability to fly sideways is the central theme in human happiness.
Those who live in happiness will tell you that it feels a lot like freedom. Personal freedom, like political freedom, consists of the power to make choices. That is, of course, a great power. People who come to experience happiness are amazed when one of its features turns out to be a feeling of great power.
People without choice-making power live in fear. Personally and politically, the remedy is to take back power. It requires courage, but people make that decision all the time, because otherwise life is miserable. They start to take back power that most of them lost, or gave away, as children. It is a wonderful moment in their lives.
What they are gathering is the power to take off. In aviation, the point on the runway where the airplane reaches takeoff power is called “rotation.” The pilot can lift, or rotate, the nose, and the airplane will fly.
Both airplanes and human spirits are safest on the ground, but on the ground, both are out of their element. People have associated flight with spirit since the first recorded human thought. Daedalus invented wings on which Icarus, his son, soared free of the Labyrinth. Daedalus was a prophet of happiness. Unfortunately, Icarus in his exhilaration flew too near the sun, which melted the wax that held his wings, and he fell to his death in the sea.
People reach rotation at their own speed and usually not without professional guidance. It may take years. One day they realize the power is there, and it is as if there is no alternative but to lift the nose and take off. Some people call it commitment, but it also feels very much like surrender. They surrender safety, surrender the ground. It is a feeling of liberation they have known only in their dreams.
The spirit, entering its element, instantly feels equilibrium take hold, and that is the moment at which people understand how great the power of happiness is. The wind will still blow you sideways sometimes, but steering into it, you can fly straight. It is as exhilarating as life should be, as long as you don’t fly too near the sun.
A cold front had just passed through Dallas, bringing the usual winds howling from the north. The overcast was giving way to blue sky as our flight taxied from the Delta terminal over to the west runways.
Ahead of us was a Delta 727, hurrying along, probably late, like we were. Without pause he took the runway and began his takeoff roll. I lost sight of him as we maneuvered on the taxiway, but when we turned to enter the runway, I saw him again.
He had just lifted off, climbing sharply through 200 feet, presenting to us a topmost profile of white fuselage and silver wings.
He was flying sideways; that is, the fuselage was skewed two or three ticks to the right of its direction of travel. It is not unusual for airplanes, particularly small ones, to fly sideways. They call it “crabbing,” when a pilot, to fly straight, has to steer right or left into the wind.
But this was different, this glimpse of a 727, 200 feet off the ground, flying sideways at takeoff. Here was a three-engine aircraft, 100 feet long, weighing 115,000 pounds, driven forward by 45,000 pounds of thrust, and the wind had blown it sideways the instant its wheels left the ground. The pilot had to steer left to fly straight. It showed how strong the wind was, and how effective the countering design, a design that joined flexibility with control. It was a triumph of equilibrium.
Then we turned onto the runway, and the 727 was gone, but its image remained. It occurred to me, at that moment, that the ability to fly sideways is the central theme in human happiness.
Those who live in happiness will tell you that it feels a lot like freedom. Personal freedom, like political freedom, consists of the power to make choices. That is, of course, a great power. People who come to experience happiness are amazed when one of its features turns out to be a feeling of great power.
People without choice-making power live in fear. Personally and politically, the remedy is to take back power. It requires courage, but people make that decision all the time, because otherwise life is miserable. They start to take back power that most of them lost, or gave away, as children. It is a wonderful moment in their lives.
What they are gathering is the power to take off. In aviation, the point on the runway where the airplane reaches takeoff power is called “rotation.” The pilot can lift, or rotate, the nose, and the airplane will fly.
Both airplanes and human spirits are safest on the ground, but on the ground, both are out of their element. People have associated flight with spirit since the first recorded human thought. Daedalus invented wings on which Icarus, his son, soared free of the Labyrinth. Daedalus was a prophet of happiness. Unfortunately, Icarus in his exhilaration flew too near the sun, which melted the wax that held his wings, and he fell to his death in the sea.
People reach rotation at their own speed and usually not without professional guidance. It may take years. One day they realize the power is there, and it is as if there is no alternative but to lift the nose and take off. Some people call it commitment, but it also feels very much like surrender. They surrender safety, surrender the ground. It is a feeling of liberation they have known only in their dreams.
The spirit, entering its element, instantly feels equilibrium take hold, and that is the moment at which people understand how great the power of happiness is. The wind will still blow you sideways sometimes, but steering into it, you can fly straight. It is as exhilarating as life should be, as long as you don’t fly too near the sun.
April 23, 2009
Stretch Cooking: Smothered Steak
When you take a piece of seasoned round steak, dredge it in flour, brown it nicely on both sides, then simmer it in its own gravy, you wind up with Smothered Steak, a staple in the Stretch Cooking repertoire.
The stretch elements here are the round steak, which is one of the cheaper cuts, and gravy, which makes all kinds of meat dishes go farther, and of course bread, to go with the gravy. The gravy can be made with water, or milk, or half of each. The gravy will have intense flavor, from being simmered with the steak, and the steak, in turn, will be remarkably tender. It is a nice partnership.
A pound and a half of round steak, an inch thick or less, and trimmed of its rim of fat, is fine. You don’t have to pound it, or tenderize it, unless you want to. Cut it into three or four pieces. Slice through any connective film around the edge of the steak, so it won’t curl in the skillet. Season the steak on both sides with salt, pepper and garlic powder. Dredge the steak in flour – a pie pan works nicely for this – and let the steak sit on a rack for five minutes.
Render the steak fat trimmings in a large, heavy skillet – I like cast iron – and add oil as needed to a depth of one-quarter inch. Bring the fat up to a temperature higher than medium, but not medium-high: 6, on a knob scale of 10. Give the steak a good browning on both sides. Place it back on the rack.
Pour off most of the fat, into a used coffee can, until the bottom of the skillet is three-quarters covered with fat – about three tablespoons. Be careful not to lose any of the browned bits in the bottom of the skillet.
Return to medium-high heat. Stir in three level tablespoons of flour, and stir constantly until the flour is browned and loses its raw flour scent. Add two cups in all of liquid – water, or water and milk, and a little cold coffee if you have it – and stir until the gravy starts to thicken. Salt and pepper the gravy. Place the steak in the skillet, turning it to coat both sides with gravy. Cover and simmer on very low heat for an hour and a half. Flip the steak a couple of times during this time.
Traditional with Smothered Steak are rice, turnip greens (or spinach), sliced tomatoes and plain white bread. Or choose your own sides.
The stretch elements here are the round steak, which is one of the cheaper cuts, and gravy, which makes all kinds of meat dishes go farther, and of course bread, to go with the gravy. The gravy can be made with water, or milk, or half of each. The gravy will have intense flavor, from being simmered with the steak, and the steak, in turn, will be remarkably tender. It is a nice partnership.
A pound and a half of round steak, an inch thick or less, and trimmed of its rim of fat, is fine. You don’t have to pound it, or tenderize it, unless you want to. Cut it into three or four pieces. Slice through any connective film around the edge of the steak, so it won’t curl in the skillet. Season the steak on both sides with salt, pepper and garlic powder. Dredge the steak in flour – a pie pan works nicely for this – and let the steak sit on a rack for five minutes.
Render the steak fat trimmings in a large, heavy skillet – I like cast iron – and add oil as needed to a depth of one-quarter inch. Bring the fat up to a temperature higher than medium, but not medium-high: 6, on a knob scale of 10. Give the steak a good browning on both sides. Place it back on the rack.
Pour off most of the fat, into a used coffee can, until the bottom of the skillet is three-quarters covered with fat – about three tablespoons. Be careful not to lose any of the browned bits in the bottom of the skillet.
Return to medium-high heat. Stir in three level tablespoons of flour, and stir constantly until the flour is browned and loses its raw flour scent. Add two cups in all of liquid – water, or water and milk, and a little cold coffee if you have it – and stir until the gravy starts to thicken. Salt and pepper the gravy. Place the steak in the skillet, turning it to coat both sides with gravy. Cover and simmer on very low heat for an hour and a half. Flip the steak a couple of times during this time.
Traditional with Smothered Steak are rice, turnip greens (or spinach), sliced tomatoes and plain white bread. Or choose your own sides.
April 22, 2009
A first-rate mockingbird
Every morning, for the last several mornings, on a telephone pole down the hill from us, sits a mockingbird I wish Atticus Finch could see.
Atticus is, of course, the memorable lead character, memorably played by Gregory Peck, in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” A scene comes where Atticus is explaining to his children, Jem and Scout, his way with guns. He says: “I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted - if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
“Why?” says Jem.
“Well,” Atticus says, “I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.”
This singer down on the telephone pole, he is pure mockingbird. He chirps, tweets, trills, imitates motors, makes a noise like a cane stick dragged across a washboard. Singing his heart out. When it gets too much for him, which is about once a minute, he leaps into the air, rising several feet on a fluttering of his wings with their distinctive white chevron markings and then settles back to his perch, never missing a beat.
Some Texan from the past had the good sense to claim the mockingbird as the State Bird of Texas. Things have felt very much like Texas around our house the past few days, with the breeze already warm even before sunup, the Texas privet in bloom, and the mockingbird partying down on the telephone pole. He seems to like it there. Lots of bird types perch on that pole – hawks, crows, sparrows, finches. But they come and go. Our mockingbird has occupied the pole exclusively since last weekend. Once a couple of sparrows approached, landing on braces below the beam where the mockingbird was singing away. I got the impression that the sparrows wanted him to shut up, and were going to team up on him. They advanced upward, but the mockingbird turned to meet them, and away they flew, either intimidated or unable to stand the decibel level.
Of course at night, the mockingbird becomes a party animal. Sometimes a mockingbird will take a midnight shine to the bottlebrush tree at the corner of the house and sing the night away. A person trying to sleep can become sparrowish toward such behavior. This has not happened since Karen and I have been married, but she recalls times when she would go outside at 2 a.m. and heave rocks into trees toward the music. I don’t object to this – I don’t think Gregory Peck could kill a mockingbird with a rock in the middle of the night – but it’s not something I would do. I hold a fondness for a bird that would stay up and sing all night. It wouldn’t be a sin, but maybe, for me, a transgression, to diss a mockingbird.
Atticus is, of course, the memorable lead character, memorably played by Gregory Peck, in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” A scene comes where Atticus is explaining to his children, Jem and Scout, his way with guns. He says: “I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted - if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
“Why?” says Jem.
“Well,” Atticus says, “I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.”
This singer down on the telephone pole, he is pure mockingbird. He chirps, tweets, trills, imitates motors, makes a noise like a cane stick dragged across a washboard. Singing his heart out. When it gets too much for him, which is about once a minute, he leaps into the air, rising several feet on a fluttering of his wings with their distinctive white chevron markings and then settles back to his perch, never missing a beat.
Some Texan from the past had the good sense to claim the mockingbird as the State Bird of Texas. Things have felt very much like Texas around our house the past few days, with the breeze already warm even before sunup, the Texas privet in bloom, and the mockingbird partying down on the telephone pole. He seems to like it there. Lots of bird types perch on that pole – hawks, crows, sparrows, finches. But they come and go. Our mockingbird has occupied the pole exclusively since last weekend. Once a couple of sparrows approached, landing on braces below the beam where the mockingbird was singing away. I got the impression that the sparrows wanted him to shut up, and were going to team up on him. They advanced upward, but the mockingbird turned to meet them, and away they flew, either intimidated or unable to stand the decibel level.
Of course at night, the mockingbird becomes a party animal. Sometimes a mockingbird will take a midnight shine to the bottlebrush tree at the corner of the house and sing the night away. A person trying to sleep can become sparrowish toward such behavior. This has not happened since Karen and I have been married, but she recalls times when she would go outside at 2 a.m. and heave rocks into trees toward the music. I don’t object to this – I don’t think Gregory Peck could kill a mockingbird with a rock in the middle of the night – but it’s not something I would do. I hold a fondness for a bird that would stay up and sing all night. It wouldn’t be a sin, but maybe, for me, a transgression, to diss a mockingbird.
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