Soup's on: making the most of delicious leftovers

We're very good to make lots of homemade stock at our house. Every bone and uneaten meat scrap that passes through our kitchen goes by way of the stock pot. They all go into the freezer first and when there are enough of them to make it worth-while, they get boiled up.

The stock is strained and put into the fridge where the fat rises to the top and solidifies. We take the fat off, put the stock (if it's rich enough, it will have gelled) into ice cube trays and then transfer the frozen cubes into a zip-lock bag where they're handy for making sauces, gravies, stews.

Every now and then though, soup is the only reasonable end product of the stock-making process.

One of our Easter dishes this year was a delectable bone-in, local, organic, smokey ham. This is how it looked the day we served it:

on the counter

on the table

We've had some good meals with the ham since Easter — with pasta, potato scallop, in sandwiches — but it was time for its final act.

Yesterday, I boiled the ham-bone and all the scraps which had been conscientiously saved. The stock went onto the fridge, the fat was taken off, and it was time to make a traditional split pea soup.

I'm one of the people who got one of Jamie Oliver's utility knives in the recent coupon-collecting promotion. It's the one on the upper right (above) and on the left (below). I really like it but the serrated knife has been a favourite for a long time. I also have a large chef-style chopping knife but the truth is, I find it big and it doesn't suit my hand as well as these smaller ones.

I always forget how long it takes to soften those dried peas and if I had it to do again, I'd start them earlier. In fact, if I had it to do again, I'd soak them overnight and then start them earlier.

Everything worked out though. I used the immersion blender and the soup was smooth but still had some texture.

Before serving, I added some chopped ham that had fallen off the bone after the boiling.

It was hearty and filling and we both enjoyed it. I served it with fresh biscuits. This is not a new photo but the biscuits looked much the same today as they did the day this was taken.

I hope you had something satisfying and tasty today. I had fun, not only cooking but taking most of these photos! (Dan took a few also.) I won't do it every day but it's fun now and then.

Into the light: the post-"asylum" experience — 3

Here are Parts One and Two.

Psychiatry as it was practiced in the cheerful bright wing on the fourth floor of the Montreal General Hospital was, to quote myself, "leaping ahead by a couple of centuries" from our experience at the Verdun Protestant Hospital. I'm pretty sure there's been another great leap ahead since then but at least at the time, we felt we had very much moved into modern day.

My most vivid memories of the fourth floor are not so much the dramatic treatments still in use — electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) and insulin shock therapy — but the relaxed atmosphere and the emphasis on talking. The patients weren't nearly as ill as the patients in the Verdun and individual psycho-therapy and group therapy were widely used. A lot of the therapy was private between the patient and her psychiatrist but we got to sit in on certain group therapy sessions and it was endlessly fascinating.

We were also encouraged to sit and talk with our patients as much as possible and they really meant it in this case. In theory, we were supposed to talk to our patients on our other floors but in practice, we never felt quite comfortable with that. We felt there were more points to be scored by looking busy even if we had to invent extra tasks.

But on the fourth floor, talking — listening really — and taking and recording copious notes, were both expected and evaluated. Many of the patients, suffering from what is now known as bi-polar disorder (known then as manic-depressive disorder), depression and schizophrenia were often pleasant and good conversationalists. Our notes were expected to be detailed, reporting dialogue, facial expressions, hand gestures — we were to paint a word picture so a psychiatrist reading it would feel all aspects of our encounters.

Our patients also were prescribed lots and lots of drugs. Many of the psychiatric drugs were in their infancy so much of our job was also to watch what happened after the drugs were administered — behaviour, thought and speech patterns, side effects.

I have specific memories of only a few patients; the great majority have become anonymous beings that I remember only as treatments or as room locations. One of the patients I do remember was a 17-year-old boy, a very smart boy who was bi-polar and who was barely in control when he was manic but who also spent whole days in bed. It was always very mysterious to see a brain working two very different occupations.

Even though the listening and the talking and the writing are the most memorable, most of our patients also were treated with ECT and insulin and these were major events in our nursing week. Both these treatments were labour-intensive for the nursing staff, in the preparation stage, at the height of the treatment and probably most importantly, bringing our patients back from a sometimes terrifying trip. After ECT particularly, the patient's memory would be mostly gone with even the simplest functions forgotten as the brain waves had been zapped and fragmented with the electric shock. The patients were also usually sore after having had violent seizures. It took days to recover.

Following the insulin, they were often sick and disoriented.

My goodness. What they went through all just to try to feel somewhat normal and to be able to function out in the world.

The treatment I haven't mentioned, which in fact I only encountered once, was the lobotomy — a procedure almost too painful to think about.

The purpose of the operation was to reduce the symptoms of mental disorder, and it was recognized that this was accomplished at the expense of a person's personality and intellect. . . Following the operation, spontaneity, responsiveness, self-awareness and self-control were reduced. Activity was replaced by inertia, and people were left emotionally blunted and restricted in their intellectual range.

The woman I saw who had had a lobotomy appeared to me to be simply a shell, looking straight ahead out of empty eyes, not reacting to anything around her. No one knew quite what to say.

There was a very dramatic incident during my time on the fourth floor. We had a patient who was suffering severe post-partum depression. She had spoken not a word since the birth of her baby and was non-reactive to everything around her. She was admitted because she was considered a severe danger to herself and was on high suicide alert. This meant that anything that could cause any harm was removed from the room and someone popped into her room every 10 minutes or so.

Shortly after one of the routine checks, there was a mighty crash from her room. Now you have to remember, this was a woman who hadn't spoken or moved or reacted to anything in weeks. This crash was unfathomable.

But apparently, someone had left a heavy glass ashtray in her room.

That is thick glass and it must have taken superhuman strength to hurl it with such force that it broke on the tile floor. But break it did and by the time staff reached her room, she had used a piece of the glass to cut her wrist and was bleeding heavily. Staff sprang into action, got the material needed to stop the bleeding, called emergency and within a very short time a stretcher arrived and she was taken down to the emergency department where she was met by a team to deal with all aspects of the care that was needed.

As far as I know, she survived and I've always hoped that she defeated the post-partum depression and was able to enjoy her family and the new baby.

My "asylum" experience continues: Part 2

Here's Part 1.

I've written only about the women's ward in the psychiatric institution called the Verdun Protestant Hospital but part of our group also worked on the men's ward. I have no real impression of what their work was like. In a way, there was such a feeling of intimacy with some of our patients on the women's ward, I wonder what could possibly duplicate that feeling on the men's ward? We were warned of — and experienced — dangerous situations with the women so I can only imagine what it must have been like working with the men.

I do remember that our whole group — and maybe some other groups — were taken on a chilling tour of the locked ward where the most dangerous patients were kept. These were people who had come through the criminal justice system, who had been charged with serious violent crime and who had been found not guilty by reason of insanity. This was maximum security; we were accompanied by a contingent of security staff and doors were unlocked and re-locked as we approached and passed through.

It was scary and sad and it was also a bit mesmerizing, in the way of a horror movie.

When I was looking up a few facts about the Verdun hospital, I came across a survey that had been done in 1937, detailing the state of the hospital, the staff, the patients, the food, the dress, the recreation, the care. It makes for interesting reading and although I'm sure many of the changes that it recommended had been implemented by the time we came along, there were some descriptions that sounded very familiar.

Without enumerating the details of all the wards, certain general remarks may be made. As has been stated before, there is very serious overcrowding in all of the wards devoted to public patients, and at least one ward now in use, namely "A" and "Observation", which is located in the basement, is not at all suitable for the care of patients.

In spite of that fact, 70 male patients, of various types, are housed there at present. The beds are crowded much more closely together than should be the case, with the result that the ventilation which even under ideal conditions of ward population would not be entirely satisfactory, is decidedly inadequate.

So far as could be observed, the housekeeping was reasonably good. The beds were clean and in spite of the woeful lack of bathing facilities, the patients appeared clean and the wards in general were free of odor. The natural lighting of a number of the wards is poor, and the arrangement is such that adequate supervision of the patients could not be obtained without a large addition to the personnel.

It's so polite and tactful, isn't it?

I think the main impression that comes across in the survey is cheerlessness and that's definitely one of the feelings I was always left with. My memory may not be terribly specific about the conditions in the hospital but my impression is that it was dank and dark and lacking in cheer and colour and hope.

At some point in our training, we were taken on a field trip to another "asylum" — the vast institution in the East End of Montreal called Saint-Jean de Dieu.

We went there on a bus and I remember being taken in by a back entrance to a sitting/waiting room until our guide appeared — a nun in full habit. Saint-Jean de Dieu, run by the Sisters of Charity, at that time housed over 5,000 mentally ill patients. I didn't know it then but I found out later that it was, in fact, an incorporated municipality and the Mother Superior was also the mayor. The hospital/town had its own police force, fire department, post office and its own polling stations during elections.

It also had shops and small businesses along its big main hallway — shoe repair, bakery, sewing and weaving — all operated by the patients. You couldn't help but think of that old observation that "the inmates have taken over the asylum" — but in a good way. I don't know how it looked to the patients and their families but to me it seemed bright and cheerful and hopeful. It was clean and well-lit.

That hospital was so big, it had a tramway inside to transport goods and patients from one place to another. Do you see the rails?

Most people remember — and she was memorable — the patient who believed she was Queen Victoria and dressed and behaved accordingly. She had a regal wave that Queen Elizabeth II would surely envy.

(This is the look she was going for.)

You can only conclude that the difference in the two hospitals was the presence of the nuns. There would have been a good population of nuns in Quebec at that time — this was still pre-Quiet Revolution — and nursing nuns were dedicated to service and to their patients. The survey I mentioned above about the Verdun centred in so many areas on lack of personnel.

I learned a lot from comparing these two settings.

We did eventually get back to the Montreal General and it was like leaping ahead a couple of centuries. I'll come back and tell you about that.

---

Here's Part Three.

Incurably insane to treatable psychotic: my asylum experience

There are times I look back on the psychiatric training we Montreal General students got just after the middle of the last century and wonder if we somehow fell into the Middle Ages. We were right on the cusp of some major changes but we were still in a time when the hospitals were called asylums and some of our mentally ill patients still had the diagnosis "incurably insane" written on their charts.

It was the early 1960s, but a couple of those patients had been admitted to the hospital back in the '30s and I think there was one — her name was "Baby" — who had been there since the '20s. I think she had been admitted as a teenager after being accused of killing someone. (I'm saying "I think" quite a lot here because it was a long time ago and the nature of some of the memories I have are almost dream-like.)

Our hard-core psychiatric work — I'm not sure I can honestly call it "training" — was done at what was then called the Verdun Protestant Hospital. It's now called the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. We referred to it only as "the Verdun" and my memories of it — of the actual hospital — are spotty. I remember the large grounds, with laid out walkways, because we were allowed to take certain patients outside for walks and I remember it being pleasant out there.

If this is how the hospital looked, this would have been much earlier than my time. I can see it being like this however, before those trees matured.

Dr. Heinz Lehmann, who became very well-known for his work in psychiatric drugs, was director of the Verdun and in some of my reading, I see that he described the hospital before some of the big changes that were to come, as a "snake pit." Oh yes.

I worked on the women's ward. Most of the women had been there for years, some for decades. When we had some spare time, we could go into the record room and read some of the charts. There were thousands and thousands of pages written about each patient although we were astonished to discover that some of the charts had ended years before. It was as if there was nothing more to say.

Some of the patients were harmless but we were warned that most had a very dangerous side. A couple of them, we were cautioned, were cleverly manipulative and they would behave almost normally around us, smiling, being helpful and conversational. The more experienced among us watched carefully because those patients regularly attacked young nurses after lulling them into feeling secure. It didn't happen to me but I saw it happen once; it was horrible and involved alarms going off, burly men appearing on the scene, our patient being held down (not easy, even for the burly men) and a vast amount of a tranquilizing injection administered under indescribable duress.

It was scary and I realize, looking back, that there were a lot of things to be scared of there. We had to go through a tunnel to get from our residence to our work. That tunnel was awful and if we ever found ourselves alone down there, it was a nightmare. We did try to stick together.

It was surely a stressful place to work but there were pleasant times too. Some of our patients were adorable, child-like almost (I guess we would be too if we'd been there for so many years, being treated like a child), wanting approval and loving hugs and hand-holding.

There were two patients called Tilly. One was Tilly the White Rabbit who had been walking hurriedly up and down the same small piece of hallway all her waking hours for many years. She had worn a groove in the floor.

Tilly the Police Officer walked purposefully around the ward, not looking as if she were noticing anything but in fact, aware of every little detail of what everyone was doing. If we needed to know something about one of the non-communicative patients, Tilly was our woman.

But we always had to be careful. There was one patient, much much bigger than I, who liked to wrap young nurses in a bear hug. She got me in her grip one day and wouldn't let me go. I quite literally couldn't move and could barely breathe. I tried talking to her calmly, saying everything we'd been taught to say, but I finally had to yell for help. It caused quite a crisis on the ward. She was a difficult patient and she clearly enjoyed having the upper hand. I was never sure after if she remembered having done that. That was scary in itself.

Our patients — as far as I know, looking back — were psychotic and they were being treated with massive doses of anti-psychotic drugs. I think this was a fairly new development and it was probably why the patients were able to function — in their own way.

The thing that got me thinking about all this was reading lately something that referred in passing to electro-convulsive therapy — which we were ordered to say — also known as "electric shock treatment" which we were ordered never to say.

Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) and deep insulin coma therapy were both used at the Verdun but not so much on our ward. I think they must have been used in areas where the patients had a better prognosis. I only remember seeing the treatment once or twice but I do remember this: the shock was administered with no general anaesthetic and the thought of that is another kind of shock. (I assisted with ECT many times in the psychiatric unit back at the Montreal General where the second part of our affiliation took place and there, we did use general anaesthetic. It was still shocking — sorry, it just seems to fit — but a little easier to take.)

I was still a few years away from being able to look at the incarceration and treatment of the women at the Verdun with a feminist analysis. For Her Own Good hadn't even been written yet. That will be a subject for another time.

But I obviously have more to say about life in the asylum and being a nurse to the mentally ill so I'll be back with Part Two.

---

Here are Parts Two and Three.

From bruschetta to gelato — a Mediterranean feel to Easter

Back in the early '80s, I was driving in my car in Fredericton, NB, when a commercial came on the radio. (My car didn't have an FM band so I couldn't listen to CBC.) The commercial said, "Only two days left to do your Easter shopping!"

I said, "Huh? How long can it take to buy a chocolate bunny and a bag of Cadbury's eggs?"

I did a commentary for CBC about the very odd concept of "Easter shopping." It was the first time I had ever heard of such a thing and judging by the reaction of my radio listeners, it was an unknown idea to them too.

Today, in 2016, I saw someone on Twitter say he'd been looking at friends' photos on Facebook and he was amazed at how much kids get for Easter. He said it looked like another Christmas.

It's not only Easter. All the "holidays" have become much more elaborate and complicated than they used to be and it's all centred on one thing: buying more stuff.

Valentine's Day, Canada Day, Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving — all now involve extravagant decorations, a special menu, lots and lots of advertising to get you out to the stores.

Easter remains a religious observance for us and a time to have friends over for a somewhat traditional dinner. But I admit, we've fallen into the new trend a bit also.

We don't decorate as sumptuously as we do at Christmas but truth is, I don't remember that we ever did decorations for Easter when I was a child. I think we coloured eggs but they were probably hard-boiled and we'd eat them later. We always got a small wicker basket from the Easter Bunny and maybe a small gift. I remember one year getting a pair of red sandals. I remember them so clearly that they must have been an unusual and unexpected gift.

The other vivid memory I have of Easter is going to church on Easter Sunday morning, always with a new outfit, little white gloves, maybe a new hat and tiny purse — and possibly, brand new red sandals.

Easter 2016

Dan was — as always — in charge of decorating. He's the best at it. Over a week ago, he cut a few branches of forsythia in the back yard. By Saturday, the flowers had burst open and although they looked nice as they were, a few eggs just added to their charm. (I remind you every so often to click on the pictures to get the full effect.)

He took this one with a flash because of the bright window behind. It made a rather beautiful effect:

Dan also took care of the table:

He coloured some new eggs this year. The ones I had done several years ago were getting a little tired, as I wrote about here.

I took care of the food. Eggs are, of course, an Easter staple and I always make devilled eggs. Which I did again. I also made a garlicky, basil, tomato bruschetta:

When we gathered at the table we had a traditional leg of lamb, rubbed with garlic, lemon, rosemary and a fig mustard:

Because we can never decide whether to have lamb or ham, we decided to have both.

The best thing about our meat dishes is that they come from our farmer, Cheryl Williams, at Shani's Farm. The meat is organic, free-range, local — and we buy it from Cheryl in a face-to-face transaction. As an extra added bonus, the meat is really really good.

The accompaniments were a Caesar salad (with bacon bits also from Cheryl's farm) and a mélange of roasted veg: red and purple fingerling potatoes, carrots, parsnips, Brussels sprouts, onions and broccoli, all tossed in a sauce based on grainy mustard, olive oil, garlic, lemon zest and oregano. (I steamed the broccoli florets and put them in just before serving to make a nice bright green addition.)

It seems like a lot of food but interestingly enough, it was a satisfying dinner but no one felt stuffed. For dessert, we had a few treats and then, because there was a little Mediterranean feel about it all, we had a limoncello gelato.

The very best thing about our Easter dinner was that we three were joined by our dear friends, Lynn, Ann and Claude. And we didn't take any photos of them! They probably would have objected anyway.

Next time, I promise.

Liven up your toast with whiskey and ginger marmalade!

We bought a fairly good supply of Seville oranges and I made one batch of marmalade which I told you about here. Dan took over for the second batch.

His method was different from mine. I took all the coloured peel off using a vegetable peeler and made sure I didn't get any of the white pith. The pith, along with the seeds, went into a cheesecloth bag and was suspended into the juice and peel.

The combination of peel, pith and seeds was supposed to provide enough natural pectin to thicken my marmalade. You may remember that I had to add some Cert-o to get it to thicken up.

Dan's recipe didn't divide the orange up in the same way. He squeezed out the juice, removed some of the thicker membrane and chopped the peel, pith and all.

That's a bottle of Jameson's Irish whiskey. He wasn't drinking it. It was waiting to be part of the recipe — whiskey and candied ginger.

His required quite a lengthy period of boiling. It was different from mine, even at this stage.

As I had, he cooked and cooked, stirred and stirred, tested and tested. He used the small-cold-plate-in-the-freezer method as well but the marmalade still wasn't thickening. We even found a candy thermometer that we hadn't seen for years in the bottom of the "miscellaneous drawer" and he used that to cook to what should have been the right temperature for it to thicken. No luck though.

In the end, he resorted to the same solution I had: hello, Cert-o. He stirred in a bit and presto — a lovely thick preserve. He added the whiskey and the ginger and pretty soon, it was ready for the bottles.

His recipe made a little more than mine and there was a bit left over to use as a tester. It's very delicious. Marmalade, by its very nature and by definition, is tart and bitter but this one is even moreso. The oranges make it tart; the whiskey and the ginger make it sharp and bitter.

It sure can liven up a piece of toast.

When years of carnage turn into decades

When we heard the news from Brussels, our first thoughts were for Dan's brother John and our beloved sister-in-law, Ilse. Ilse grew up in a small town near Antwerp and she and John now live in Antwerp. Belgium is a small country though and Brussels is less than an hour from their Antwerp home.

John and his business partner travel a lot and the Brussels airport is a regular part of their working life. Thankfully, our family and friends in Belgium are safe.

This brings the Brussels tragedy close to home for us. Paris too — not because we have family there but we do know people who live there and we've been there not that long ago ourselves. It hits us a little harder because we know the streets and the landscapes and the people's routines.

We need to be reminded though that tragedies like these play out every day in places that don't get the same attention as Paris and Brussels. The big headlines are saved for our big familiar cities and somewhere on page seven, we see the news from more distant lands.

After the attack on Brussels, someone somewhere made this little meme which turned up on Facebook from several different sources. If I knew who made it, I'd be haapy to give credit but I don't. One person who shared it noted that Baghdad was spelled wrong and that San Diego was used instead of San Bernardino. With those two corrections in mind, the information here is worth considering:

Thinking about this took me back to September 11, 2001. As many people do, I remember where I was and what I was doing when the airplanes hit the twin towers in New York. I saw the second one hit the building live on television. I spent the next several days watching TV, listening to radio, reading newspapers soaking up every detail of an attack that was closer to home than we were used to.

A few days after the attack, I managed to find one of the last copies of the black-covered New Yorker on local newsstands.

I read almost everything in that issue but I was particularly struck by the Talk of the Town near the front of the magazine — a series of short essays by writers who had been in New York on that fateful Tuesday. There were contributions from John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Roger Angell, Aharon Appelfeld, Rebecca Mead, Susan Sontag, Amitav Ghosh, and Donald Antrim.

They're all worth reading but after all these years, there's one paragraph that has stayed with me and that I've quoted several times, often on the anniversary of September 11. It's from the essay by Denis Johnson, a writer who in the years preceding 2001 had reported from Somalia, Afghanistan, the southern Philippines, Liberia — among other so-called "hot spots" around the world. He writes that he wondered what it would be like if he had to do such reporting in his own land, how he would feel and react. And here he was, after seeing and hearing and writing about so much horror in other parts of the world, experiencing the violence and suffering and carnage here at home.

It was his last paragraph that has haunted me all these years:

On Thursday, as I write in New York City, which I happened to be visiting at the time of the attack, the wind has shifted, and a sour electrical smoke travels up the canyons between the tall buildings. I have now seen two days of war in the biggest city in America. But imagine a succession of such days stretching into years — years in which explosions bring down all the great buildings, until the last one goes, or until bothering to bring the last one down is just a waste of ammunition. Imagine the people who have already seen years like these turn into decades — imagine their brief lifetimes made up only of days like these we’ve just seen in New York.

The very thought of it breaks my heart. "Imagine a succession of such days stretching into years . . ."

If you want to read the whole Talk of the Town, you can find it here.