Winston gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two Victory Gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose, only to be absorbed by crumbs from two Rick’s Bakery cookies. A just dessert for submitting to a biometric fingerprint scan, not for national security, but a private employer’s time clock. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

A vuvuzela blast.

While avoiding graven images, there’s no writ against craven puns.

Mosque, ow, on the Hudson? Saying where houses of worship do not belong raises all sorts of red flags, no matter the neighborhood, no matter the religion. How could a house of prayer in the vicinity of New York’s Ground Zero not be a splendid idea? Besides, Moscow on the Hudson is recalled as a delightful movie from 1984; I wonder if it’s dated?

Ground Zero? Ground Zero Mostel!

Now there’s a Jewish radical with humor and chutzpah. I remember Zero Mostel best for appearances with Jim Henson’s Muppets. He is quoted as saying of Henson: “He has the best possible actors. If you have a disagreement with them, you can always use them to wash your car.” Ground Mostel, a real New Yorker.

* * *

Foodie program: Tomatoes no longer are tomatoes. A couple of the major frozen pizza brands, I saw when shopping this week, state in their ingredients list, “tomatoes (water and tomato paste).” In reaction I bought a Wal-Mart Great Value (house brand) pie. Its sauce ingredients start as, “Water, Tomato paste.” As it should be.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Weeks ago I checked ingredients of canned crushed tomatoes for homemade marinara. If you think “crushed tomatoes” implies squished tomatoes, juice, salt and of course some preservatives to make it taste American — well, check the ingredients. Some don’t have “tomatoes” at all, just tomato paste and related materials.

* * *

On Aug. 4, 1998, My Beloved and I began the basic tools of The Artist’s Way. On a free afternoon while running the Beaver Town Inn we saw a flyer at a Eureka Springs bookshop that Lisa Martinovic would be teaching a weekly workshop on the book in Fayetteville. Sounded just what we needed at that point in our lives. It was. We each bought a copy of the Julia Cameron volume, so we could scribble in them with ease. The class created our circle of friends in Fayetteville, partly inspiring our move there. What the book taught has been part of our lives since, especially me. Worth marking it on the calendar ever year. “Morning pages” in longhand are a miracle. No shortcuts.

• • •

Del Monte has a new campaign for its canned fruits and vegetables. The slogan goes, “When fresh fruit spoils, your food dollars disappear.” The rest of the ad’s big print goes, “Pick Del Monte canned fruit instead. Enjoy sunny taste. Without the waste.”

Moldy peaches are no fun, but keeping an eye on them, eating the softest ones first or cooking them in something, will strengthen the world’s supply of tin cans and syrup.

• • •

Kraft is remarketing, repackaging or repurposing its processed American cheese as ideal for microwaved nachos that even children can make. “Kraft Singles Melt Downs — Kids Can Melt Their Own Fun!”

Anyone who can punch 15 seconds (as pictured) on a microwave keypad can use real cheese, with more flavor, calcium and protein, as easily as laying over a handful of chips a slice of Velveeta, in three flavors, Nacho, Pizza and Taco. Take the plastic wrap off first, kids! It takes no more time, and want those flavors? Mom has spices you can sprinkle –chili powder, Italian mix and, uh, chili powder –and you won’t get extra salt and preservatives you didn’t need in the first place.

That was before I checked the related website. A video mini-drama automatically opens of a high school principal having a bad morning with, yes, a meltdown. Apparently, this 2:03 video has been re-edited into 30-second TV spots. Intact, this feels much longer than two minutes. Maybe it’s intended to remind adults if not kids of comedies like Ferris Buehler’s Day Off or Breakfast Club, but soon the overwriting and overacting seem real — even before the 2-second segment with a gun.

• • •

Our friends at Kleenex (Kimberly-Clark has “Personal Care products manufacturing facilities” in Conway and Maumelle, Ark.) have introduced paper hand towels with a pop-up dispenser not unlike their tissues.

The copy reads, “Your hands are only as clean as the towel used to dry them.” The picture shows two bathroom walls side by side, sharing a towel bar. Hanging on the left is a wadded, smudged, formerly white towel. On the right is an upside-down dispenser box of Kleenex Hands Towels with a crisp piece of paper ready to grab. Slogan, “A Clean, Fresh Towel Every Time.” The box, with a wedge-shaped top, is designed to rest on and behind the towel bar, or right-side up next to the sink.

The website includes a song for children to sing as they wash. For convenience, it’s an MP3 audio with a pleasant male voice, under which are printed the lyrics with a bouncing ball hopping happily to each syllable as it goes along. On the same page are two videos. One is an animation with a boy and a dog, an orchestrated version of the singer on the MP3. The one with the real little boy is rap. Hip-hop, get a mop, don’t be a sop, as they say in the ‘hood.

We could expect the sequel videos to explain how to use Cottonelle toilet tissue so let’s check. Nope. It’s a video where a gray-haired serious man in a suit and tie addresses the over and under controversy.

I wanna go baffroom.

• • •

Want the convenience of modern public restrooms in your own bathroom and kitchen? Lysol recommends its No-Touch Hand Soap System. Put this unit by the faucet, and place your palm under the nozzle where an infrared eye will sense that you’re ready for a dollop of hygiene. The price online is about $17.

Slogan: “Never touch a germy soap pump again” and the copy continues, “Helps stop the spread of bacteria … Starter Kit Includes No-Touch Dispenser, Hand Soap Refill and Four AA Batteries.”

The website has a helpful, fear-mongering video and notes the soap — you have to use Lysol’s with a specially shaped bottle — comes in three varieties, Soothing Cucumber Splash, Refreshing Grapefruit Essence, and Cleansing Green Tea & Ginger.

It’s a wonder the soap isn’t canned by Del Monte.

• • •

Speaking of vuvuzela, one rash has come home to roost, on my left forearm. Until the most recent semi-seasonal clean-up the  Shady Hill yard, I have for years assured My Beloved of my immunity to poison ivy. Early last week, two days after battling privet on the perimeter, itchy blisters appears on said limb. Immunity has ended.

In researching valid treatments, I found a great Wall Street Journal article. Along the way to prevention and treatment, it notes that anecdotally there seems to be more, and more toxic, poison ivy this summer. The story cites research blaming global warming. Being the Journal, it does not use the phrase “global warming”:

A study, published in the journal Weed Science in 2007, suggested that poison ivy is getting bigger, spreading faster and producing more urushiol [the itching oil in the sap] as the result of increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

As for prevention, science says soap-and-water works as well as store-bought poison-ivy rinses. My mistake was washing hands but not up the arms. This gardener has briefly suspended his organic principles to buy the smallest bottle of Roundup and spray only the leaves of three. We have lots of other ivies and other nuisance plants, and chemicals cause too many problems for cavalier use. I’ll continue to cut and pull rampant weeds, year after year. But poison ivy? Shrivel and die, you!

Science says over-the-counter cortisone cream reduces the itching. I agree. One tip not found online: Cortisone spells relief, but if you pick up a cat before the ointment soaks in, fur will stick to your arm. That spells itch.

• • •

Maybe my town’s municipal auditorium, the Walton Arts Center, has gotten small for the area. Maybe not. But there’s enough influential people who think the Washington-Benton County area needs either a bigger capacity space or simply a new one that it’s going to get cussed and discussed until the recession eases enough for bids, designs and contracts.

The latest kettle has been tossed in the fire by the original and continuing benefactor, the Walton Family Foundation. It insists that any new facility be 35 miles from my Fayetteville in its hometown Bentonville, or the money will stop for the original one. It does also wisely advise patience — for the economy to speed back up. The letter the fund sent is summarized free in the web journals Fayetteville Flyer and OzarksUnbound.

The fund obviously wants a geographic balance. That’s lovely, and it may be the right thing to do for some reasons. The Walton family’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now under construction in Bentonville, thus would have a neighbor facility as companionship for all those lonely days when everyone’s gone to the game or Beaver Lake.

Theatrically, Northwest Arkansas is big enough to support an arts district, the one it already has, the “high street“ stretch of Dickson Street in Fayetteville. The Walton Arts Center, on Dickson at West, has a primary auditorium, a modest gallery, classrooms, studios and two small stages. This area may never be big enough to support two districts. We finally are ready for a real museum, and I can’t wait; the permanent collection is top shelf.

An already established arts district can successfully reside 35 miles from world class visual art. A district provides a central nightlife region that includes a wide variety of restaurants as well as bars and clubs. Bentonville ain’t never gonna have anything close to a Dickson Street. Visitors can roam Crystal Bridges halls and grounds by day and hit the WAC at night, having dined anywhere in between, and afterward stay in any hotel along the region’s sole interstate.

Role models are numerous – Lincoln Center in New York, with 26 performance areas, or Center Theatre Group in LA, with three stages. Such districts have sufficient centralized parking, restaurants within walking distance and, most of all, a tradition for so being in the middle of life so that stage and music lovers from everywhere already know it’s there waiting for them.

That’s if you get past the idea of how many nights a really big theater gets rented. The modest Walton Arts Center is booked most nights of the week 12 months a year. This was considered in the last third of a Brick from this spring. Theaters — and “arts center” here means performing not visual arts — in America only rarely are profitable. Communities support them for all the other reasons. But arts facilities badly planned can be money sieves, and that’s unnecessary. Evidently, the Walton Family Foundation has no theater management specialist to advise them on show business. Their gig is home-grown philanthropy, God love ‘em. We need ‘em.

Ratatouille is a southern European, mid-summer, vegetarian casserole, ideal for when you return from the farmers market with way too much. The chickpeas make this a one-pot meal; bread crumbs are to thicken the broth. (Neither are part of a traditional ratatouille, and I haven’t yet found a recipe to mention stirring before serving, either. Layers are pretty, but so are mosaics.) Because the produce all is fresh, measurements cannot be precise. Here’s a ratio, though: Cut up, there should be about a quart each of eggplant, zucchini and tomatoes, and a pint each of onions and peppers. Count on 45 minutes to prep and 1.5 hours to bake. Adapted mainly from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

• 1.5 to 2 pounds eggplant (about 6 Oriental or 2 globe)
• 1/4 cup olive oil, divided use
• 2 large onions, peeled and sliced
• 2 or 3 bell peppers, red, yellow or green, cored and seeded, cut in half-inch pieces
• 1 to 1.5 pounds zucchini or other summer squash, cut in half-inch slices
• 4-6 tomatoes, cut in half-inch cubes
• 1 14-15 oz. can chickpeas, drained
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
• 3 teaspoons dried herbs (thyme, oregano, tarragon, marjoram etc.) OR 1/4 cup fresh herbs, chopped roughly
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon hot sauce
• 1/4 cup dry bread crumbs or matzo meal
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley or fresh basil
• Parmesan cheese

Peel the eggplant and cut into half-inch cubes if globe style, or half-inch slices if slender Oriental style. Place pieces in bowl, sprinkle 2 teaspoons salt and mix thoroughly. Place salted eggplant in colander placed in a bowl to catch the bitter liquid. Let sit no less than 30 minutes, while preparing the rest.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread 1 Tablespoon olive oil in medium (5-6 quart) casserole or Dutch oven, over the bottom and up the sides.

Rinse well the eggplant pieces in running water and drain. Fill the casserole in layers. While the order doesn’t matter, I like the onions and peppers on the bottom. Then the eggplant, squash, tomatoes, garlic and chickpeas. Mix the hot sauce with the remaining 3 Tablespoons olive oil and drizzle over the top. The pot will be nearly full.

Bake one hour covered. Once or twice during the hour press on the mixture with a spatula. Sprinkle bread crumbs or matzo meal over the mixture and bake another 15 minutes with no lid.

Stir well then garnish with parsley or basil. Serve with Parmesan cheese at the table. Makes 6-8 servings.

The leftovers are wonderful. Reheat as is. Or mix a couple of cups of cooled ratatouille with 4-6 cups cooked short pasta for a pasta salad, perhaps adding a little lemon juice.

Note: Other vegetables can be baked in the mix as well, if you’re clearing out the fridge and pantry or feeding a potluck. For example, 1-2 cups of sliced fresh mushrooms, green beans or cubed potatoes, along with the zucchini and tomatoes etc.

This was reported in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which for a half-decade has kept a special projects team just for hard-hitting reporting on scientists confirming the bird once considered extinct. (Proving that reports of newspapers going extinct need to be verified by science as well.) The article in Friday — the three paragraphs you can read without a subscription are sufficient because, well, you have me — would go on to note how this began in 2004 with a valid sighting.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is ending its funding of the project, $14 million so far. The administration of George W. Bush authorized the expenditure so it was a conservative use of tax money.

What Fish, Wildlife and Cornell forget is the intelligence of animals. This woodpecker species may not be rare, they’re just cleverer than we assume. Consider how often your pets outsmart you. We think of creatures as guided by instincts of food, mating and migration. While those are necessary — they’ve certainly stood me in good stead — ivory-bills successfully have avoided poachers, habitat developers and other idiots since the 19th century. After the turn of this century, maybe they got a little careless.

Scientists saw an ivory-bill some six times in 2004-05, but not since. Before disappearing, ivory-bill woodpeckers apparently wanted the last “Ha-ha-ha-HAA-ha.” A series of police reports in 2006 documents their path of mischief: Brick’s Birdberg Blotter.

I found these 14 news items from newspapers in towns so small they don’t have Wal-Marts, much less cell towers and the Internet. The 14 blotter briefs make slightly more sense when read from earliest up, Feb. 12 up to Feb. 25.

In 1982, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder recorded “Ebony and Ivory.” On muggy nights in the swamps of southern Arkansas, you can hear among the “kent-like” calls of either ivory-bills or bluejays a twee version of the hit pop song: “Japery and Ivory live together with some tension / Like keys dropped in bogs, here and there, don’t give it a mention.”

National Novel Writing Month

Want an excuse? How about National Novel Writing Month. It’s 50,000 words to create a first draft of a novel (around a 200-page book) in 30 days. November is the one. My third try, and I went past 50,000 by midnight Nov. 30. It contains parts that might work as a beginning, climaxes and conclusions for the end, and scene upon scene to fill the middle. It will take another year or three to revise it to where I could show a savvy friend. The surprise for me is that I thought I’d be creating characters from people I know, but the cast is amazingly fictional.

So that explains November. What about only 10 postings in six months? There’s explanations and excuses. But why not look forward? Besides, my self-editing prevented real junk from littering the shoulder of the Information Highway. Even if that never bothers other people.

Isn’t that always the case on the road?

I make gazpacho just once every summer. It’s not that the prep is complicated, kind of long but not bad, but … I don’t know. But I just changed one thing, and now have made it twice in three weeks. It was inspired by a couple of tangential remarks in food blogs about hot soup made with water instead of stock, occasionally, for a fresher taste. Hmm. The base of seemingly every gazpacho recipe is supermarket tomato juice, sometimes V8. If the point of summer soup is to use garden-fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers, why cloud it?

A 46-ounce can or jar of low-salt tomato or V8 juice can replace the water here, and it will intensify the flavor and provide that gazpacho mouth-feel. But if there is nothing like home-grown tomatoes, try this way. Then it’s more Summer Soup than Gazpacho.

To make a whole-meal soup, add 2 cups of garbanzo or cannellini (white kidney) beans with the diced veggies at the end. That’s a 14-ounce can; rinse and drain the beans first.

Gee, whiz? I avoid pureed soups at restaurants; I want to see what I’m eating. But it’s needed here. Reserve some of the veggies, blend the rest and return the chopped to the bowl so diners can appreciate what they’re eating.

Bitter cukes? One day too long in the fridge, and cucumbers get nasty. Sometimes they just come that way from the store or farmer’s market. Don’t ruin your soup, taste each cuke as you start to cut it and toss it in the compost if it doesn’t pass muster. Seeding sometimes can rescue an in-between cuke. It’s worth running back to the grocery for better ones.

Make the soup at least four hours ahead. Cover and refrigerate to marry flavors. Serving either at room temperature or icy is great. The soup will start to turn after four or five days, so eat up!

Gazpacho Summer Soup

• 1 pound cucumbers (3-4 small-medium), peeled
• 2 pounds tomatoes, cored
• 2 bell peppers, cored and seeded, red or green
• 1 large onion, peeled
• 1/4 cup black, green or cured olives, (about 12), pitted and chopped, optional
• 2-3 cloves garlic, peeled and rough-cut
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1/4 teaspoon, scant, cayenne pepper flakes
• 1/2 teaspoon whole cumin seed
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
• 2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 Tablespoons Balsamic vinegar or 1 Tablespoon red wine vinegar
• 2 Tablespoons lemon or lime juice
• Up to 6 cups water

Make garnish first: Peel and seed (scoop with a spoon) 1 cucumber, reserve seeds, and dice the meat. Cut the prettiest tomato in half and squeeze out the pulp and seeds, reserving those, and dice the meat. Dice the best pepper. Dice half the onion. Put a heaping half cup of each of these into a small bowl, add the optional olives, and set aside. Put the remaining dice (and cucumber and tomato seeds) into a 3- or 4-quart, wide-mouth refrigerator jar (a large mixing bowl will work, too).

Rough-chop remaining pepper, cucumber, onion, tomato into 2-inch chunks and add to the big container, along with the garlic. Grind spices, salt and pepper together in a coffee grinder, and add the mix to the container, along with the oil, vinegar and lemon juice.

Add about half of the water to the container and puree with a stick (immersion) blender. Or whiz in batches with a jar blender or food processor. Add to the soup the reserved diced vegetables and enough of the remaining water for your preference of consistency (though it’s better soupy than stewy.) Cover and refrigerate. Before serving, taste and perhaps add a squirt more lemon juice or a quarter-teaspoon of salt and/or ground black pepper. Makes at least eight servings.

Postscript

Here is the recipe from which the above evolved: Isabel Marks’ Summer Soup: 1 Tablespoon distilled vinegar; 1 teaspoon salt; 2 Tablespoons olive oil; 2 Tablespoons Worcestershire sauce; 6 drops Tabasco sauce; 1 large can tomato juice; 1 small jar pimento, undrained; 1 small can mushroom pieces and stems, drained; 1 large onion, peeled and chopped; 1 large cucumber, chopped; 4 tomatoes, peeled and chopped. Combine all ingredients and chill a day before serving. May need more salt. Makes 2 1/2 – 3 quarts. (The original called for a tablespoon of salt — maybe canned tomato juice was less salty back then.)

Any kind of eggplant works; the common jumbo globe has the least seeds, according to Cooks Illustrated. Toasting then grinding sesame seeds tastes better than store-bought tahini (sesame butter).

• Around 2 pounds eggplant
• 2-4 cloves garlic
• 1/4 cup sesame seeds OR tahini
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne red pepper flakes
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 2 Tablespoons olive oil, plus extra for serving

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease a cookie sheet. Heat 8- to 10-inch skillet on medium for 4 minutes.

Wash eggplant, trim off stems and slice in half, pole to pole. (Leave small or long eggplants whole.) Place on cookie sheet, cut side down, and bake 45 minutes. Or the eggplant can be grilled, skin side down, watching carefully, in less time (the smoky flavor is great but it’s more trouble). Garlic, unpeeled, can be roasted on the cookie sheet for the last 20 minutes, then pulp squeezed out. Or peel raw garlic and reserve.

Toast sesame seeds in skillet for 2-4 minutes, until about half of the seeds have darkened to light to medium brown; do not burn. Remove to a bowl and cool 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to hasten cooling. Grind seeds with the dry spices in a coffee grinder — the size of the grinder bowl will dictate if that’s to be done in batches.

Take eggplant from oven. Let eggplant cool enough to where it can be touched. Peel the halves, scraping out any meat sticking to the skin with a spoon. Cut the meat into around 2-inch chunks. If the eggplant is still tough, place in microwave-safe bowl, add 2-4 Tablespoons water, cover loosely and zap on high in 2-minute increments until tender, no need to drain water.

Combine all ingredients and puree. I use a stick blender, but a jar blender or food processor work fine, in batches as needed, then stirring all back together in large container.

Baba ganouj should be served at room temperature or a little cooler than that. Serves at least 8. Just before serving, taste test as it might need another 1/4 teaspoon salt or a spritz more lemon juice. Drizzle olive oil over top.

This is a no-fat, fairly low-sugar granola. Store-bought granolas, including restaurant granolas, are whole grain, but if you’re wanting healthy, realize they’re loaded with oil and sweeteners. Keep a tub of this granola in your fridge, and, at about 1 teaspoon of sugar a serving, granola can be a daily cereal not an occasional “morning dessert.” Making it in a large skillet adds to the convenience; takes less than a half-hour.

• 6 cups rolled grains, mostly or all oats
• 2 cups raw nuts and seeds, variety, with large ones roughly chopped
• 1 cup shredded, raw coconut, preferably unsweetened (optional)
• 1 cup dried fruit, if not raisins then chopped to raisin size (optional)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 4 Tablespoons carob powder OR cocoa powder (optional)

Place heavy, 12-inch frypan on stove on medium heat. After 3-4 minutes to preheat, pour in the grains. Toast for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add nuts and toast for 8 minutes, stirring occasionally. While granola is cooking, in a medium bowl mix sugar, salt and spices, breaking up clumps. Add coconut to pan, and toast for 2 minutes, stirring more frequently.

Turn off heat but leave pan on burner. Pour sugar mixture evenly over surface of granola then mix in, stirring constantly for 2-3 minutes. The sugar somewhat melts into the other ingredients, but you don’t want it to stick to the pan bottom and burn.

Place pan on cake rack to cool, about an hour. Add dried fruit, stir well. The 10 cups will fit into a 2-quart plus 1 pint container. Store in refrigerator. Makes about 20 half-cup servings, with milk or yogurt. Or sprinkle over fruit; you know the routine.

Notes

Granolas are made for variations. Virtually any kind of nut is fine. Often, I mix in hulled, raw sunflower seeds with slivered or sliced almonds. Peanuts don’t seem right but might be perfect for others. Sesame seeds taste great here, but being so small they’re not ideal to mix. I think chopped dates are wonderful, but raisins sure are easy to find. Natural food stores with bulk-food aisles are great for granola ingredients.

Rolled grains. Rolled oats should make the majority, but a cup or so of rolled rye and of rolled barley add variety in color and somewhat in taste. I don’t use rolled wheat because I eat so much wheat elsewhere in the day; a half-cup of wheat bran or wheat germ is nice, though (part of the total 6 cups grain). Don’t use instant or quick oats etc. because they’ll turn to powder. No steel-cut or stone-ground, Irish or Scottish, oats. Go for old-fashioned, five-minute oats.

Carob powder? It’s no more a chocolate substitute than tofu is a meat replacement. Carob is mellower and muskier than cocoa. Buy in the bulk aisle so you’re not stuck with a pound of it. The granola will be fine without it, too. A half-cup either of honey or maple syrup can replace the brown sugar; in that case mix the spices first into the pan.

Credit: Still Life with Menu, Mollie Katzen, 1988; How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman, 2007.