Recipe: Minestrone Soup

"Minestrone originally was a very humble dish and was intended for everyday consumption, being filling and cheap, and would likely have been the main course of a meal."

Joe's home-made minestrone soup

Yesterday, we lunched at a Japanese restaurant in Plaza Singapura. The set meal each, which cost approx. S$15 each, was value for money. In particular, mine came with two huge bowls of rice - one topped with raw salmon, and the other with egg and unagi (grilled eel), accompanied with soft-shell crab tempura plus the steamed egg and miso soup.

After the heavy lunch, we both wanted something light and simple for dinner. So, we decided on bread and soup. After further discussion, we agreed to make sardine sandwiches and minestrone soup. Below is the recipe for the minestrone soup.

step 1: dicing vegetables.

1. Dice coarsely the vegetables - in our case, we used 5 stalks of celery, 1 huge carrot, 3 tomatoes, 2 small onions, 2 cloves of garlic, 1 corn. Feel free to add different vegetables. Traditionally, the recipe include courgettes and potato.

step 2: cooking and stirring vegetables

2. Heat olive oil in a large saucepan over moderate heat. Add onions and garlic; cook & stir 6-8 minutes until onions are soft. Stir in the carrotrs, celery, and tomatoes and stir 5 minutes. Stir in the corn kernels; and stir for 3 minutes.

step 3. Simmering the soup.

3. Add stock to saucepan. To enhance the flavor, you can add salt, basil, rosemary, pepper and bay leaf. In my case, I added 1/4 cup of red wine and two fresh scallops. Bring to boil over high heat; reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer for 1 1/2 hours.

4. Add pasta to the saucepan (note: the minestrone soup we ate in Italy had cannellini beans, which if you are using, could be added at this point in time). Uncover and cook over moderately low heat for a further 30-40 minutes until soup thickens, stirring occasionally.

5. Serve with parmesan cheese, if using.

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Minestrone is one of the cornerstones of Italian cuisine. It is part of what is known in Italy as cucina povera (literally "poor kitchen") meaning poorer people's cuisine. There is no set recipe for minestrone since it is usually made out of whatever vegetables are in season. Common ingredients include beans, onions, celery, carrots, stock, tomatoes, and often with the addition of pasta or rice (source: wikipedia).

Nuturing Relationships

"I am a big believer that you have to nourish any relationship. I am still very much a part of my friend's lives and they are very much a part of my life." - Nancy Reagan

Into the tapestry of who you are is woven every relationship that touches your life. These relationships are the fibers of your connections to the human network around you...

... Each relationship in your life is an investment of your time, your energy, and you… Relationships can either be problematic or solution based; they can infuse you with energy or drain you; they can either enrich your experience or deplete it. Basically, the manner in which you interact with each person in your life will impact your overall well-being. - Cherie Carter-Scott

Ways to nurture relationships

In her book, "If Success is a Game, These are the Rules", Cherie Carter-Scott argued that human beings are social creatures. She shared 8 important ways we can tend to these relationships:

• Always keep your word – you are only as good as your word.
• Appreciate those around you, and let them know it – do not take anyone for granted.
• Go the extra mile for them – even though it does not benefit you directly or immediately. Doing this will create goodwill.
• Treat others with respect – listen when they speak. Show up on time.
• Forgive when necessary – forgive mistakes, practice empathy and compassion.
• Honor the human in them – show that you care for their well-being. Be interested and involved with their victories and disappointments.
• Pay attention to details – make it easy for people to do business with you. Take the obstacles out of their way. Listen to their needs and wants.
• Communicate clearly – most people are not mind readers. Be clear you’re your intentions, your desires, and your needs. Articulate your expectations. Express your concern when necessary.

The above principles apply also to business relationships.

"A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work, he is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business, he is a part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so." – Mahatma Gandhi.

So, if you want an accounting of your worth, count your friends.

Tulipomania - Dutch Fever!

This is my third and final posting on tulips. I still recall the first bunch of tulips I bought for my then girlfriend, now wife. In 1990, I was on duty travel. A day before I flew back from Amsterdam, I went to the market to buy a fresh bunch of tulips for her. My boss, who joined me on trip, later told her that I guarded the flowers zealously on the flight home.

"Never before or since has a flower taken a star turn on history’s main stage as tulip did in Holland between 1934 and 1937. People at every level of society were sucked into a speculative frenzy."

photo: Keukenhof, Holland (1996)

Today, tulip is commonly associated with Netherlands. Three and a half centuries ago, the tulip, still fairly new to the West, unleashed a brief, collective madness that shook a whole nation and nearly bought its economy to ruin.

When it Started: It was hard to date with precision exactly when the bubble in Holland formed, but the autumn of 1635 marked a turning point. That’s when the trade in actual bulbs gave way to trade in promissory notes: slips of paper listing details of the flowers in question, the dates they would be delivered, and their price.

• Before then, the tulip market followed the rhythm of the season: bulbs could change hands only between the months of June, when they were lifted from the ground, and October, when they had to be planted again. Frenzied as it was, the market before 1635 was still rooted in reality: cash money for actual flowers.
  

Enter the Speculators: Suddenly the tulip trade was a year-round affair, and the connoisseurs and growers who shared a genuine interest in the flowers were joined by legions of newly minted “florists” who couldn’t have cared less. These men were speculators who, only days before, had been carpenters and weavers, woodcutters and glassblowers, smiths, cobblers, coffee grinders, farmers, tradesmen, peddler, clergymen, schoolmasters, lawyers … One burglar in Amsterdam pawned the tools of his trade so that he too could become a speculator in tulips.

The Bubble: Rushing to get in on the sure thing, these people sold their businesses, mortgaged their homes, and invested their life savings in slips of paper representing future flowers. Predictably, the flood of fresh capital into the market drove prices to bracing new heights. In the space of a month the price of a red-and-yellow striped Gheel ende Root van Leyden leapt from 46 guilders to 515. A bulb of Switsers, a yellow tulip feathered with red, soared from 60 to 1,800 guilders!
Semper Augustus (left) was the intricately feathered red-and-white tulip one bulb of which changed hands for 10,000 guilders at the height of the mania, a sum that at the time would have bought one of the grandest canal houses in Amsterdam.

Every bubble sooner or later must burst:… In Holland, the crash came in the winter of 1637, for reasons that remain elusive. But with real tulips about to come out of the ground, paper trades and futures contracts would soon have to be settled – real money would soon have to be exchanged for real bulbs – and the market grew jittery.
On February 2, 1637, the florists of Haarlem gathered as usual to auction bulbs in one of the tavern colleges. A florist sought to begin bidding at 1,250 guilders… Finding no takers, he tried again at 1,100, then 1,000… and all at once every man in the room – men who days before had themselves paid comparable sums for comparable tulips – understood that the weather had changed. Haarlem was the capital of the bulb trade, and the news that there were no buyers to be found there ricocheted across the country. In all of Holland a greater fool was no longer to be found.
The Lesson: In the aftermath, many Dutch blamed the flower for their folly, as if the tulips themselves had, like the sirens, lured otherwise sensible men to their ruin. … It bears remembering that tulipomania was finally a frenzy not of consumption or of pleasure but of financial speculation…

The buble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: “the greater fool theory.”

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Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb, as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world… People blinded by their desire for instant wealth – the truly foolish act would have been to abstain from the tulip trade.

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..All this useless beauty is impossible to justify on cost-benefit grounds.

source: Botany of Desire & http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/aconite/semperaugustus.html

Tulip - The Useless Flower

Among flowers, the tulip is one of the most extravagantly useless.

The tulip was a thing of beauty, no more, no less.

Up until the Renaissance, most of the flowers in cultivation had been useful as well as beautiful; they were source of medicine, perfume, or even food. In the West, flowers have often come under attack from various Puritans, and what has always saved them has been their practical uses. It was utility, not beauty, that earned the rose and lily, the peony and all the rest a spot in the gardens of monks and Shakers and colonial Americans who would otherwise have had nothing to do with them.

When the tulip first arrived in Europe, people set about fashioning some utilitarian purpose for it. The Germans boiled and sugared the bulbs and unconvincingly declared them a delicacy; the English tried serving them up with oil and vinegar. Pharmacists proposed the tulip as a remedy for flatulence. None of these caught on, however. Herbert writes, “The tulip remained itself – the poetry of Nature to which vulgar utilitarianism is foreign.”
Pollan, the author of the bestseller The Botany of Desire think the particular character of the tulip’s beauty made it as good match for the Dutch temperament. Generally, bereft of scent, the tulip is the coolest of floral characters. In fact, the Dutch counted the tulip’s lack of scent as a virtue, a proof of the flower’s chasteness, and moderation. Petals curving inward to hide its sexual organs, the tulip is an introvert among flowers.

It is also somewhat aloof – one bloom per stem, one stem per plant.

The clean, steely stem holds the solitary flower up in the air for our admiration, positing its lucid form over and above the uncertain, shifting earth.

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The tulip's blooms float above nature's turmoil; even when they expire they do so gracefully. Instead of turning to mush, like a spent rose, or to used Kleenex, like peony petals, the six petals on a tulip cleanly, dryly, and often simulatenously, shatter.

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Source: Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

The Pointlessness of Flowers

This would probably be a most unromantic posting for Valentine Day: Flowers - what is the point? "I thought of myself as a young farmer now and had no time for anything so frivolous as a flower." - Pollan (2002).

“Humans, like bees, are drawn instinctively to flowers. It’s obvious what good it does bees to be born liking flowers, but what conceivable benefit could such a predilection offer people?”

It is possible to be indifferent to flowers: Do you know that Africans seldom grow domesticated flowers, and flowers imagery seldom shows up in African art or religion. Apparently when Africans speak or write about flowers, it is usually with an eye to the promise of fruit rather than the thing itself. Jack Goody, an English anthropologist, offers two possible explanations for the absence of flowers in Africa, one economic, the other ecological.
The economic explanation is that people can’t afford to pay attention to flowers until they have enough to eat; a well-developed culture of flowers is a luxury that most African historically has not been able to support. The other explanation is that the ecology of Arica doesn’t offer a lot of flowers, or at least not a lot of the showy ones. Relatively few of the world’s domesticated flowers have come from Africa… what flowers one does encounter on the savanna, for example, tend to bloom briefly and then vanish for the duration of the dry season. However, as Goody points out, Africans quickly adopted a culture of flowers wherever others introduced it.

To judge from my own experience, boys of a certain age couldn’t care less about flowers. For me, fruits and vegetables were the only things to grow, even those vegetables you couldn’t pay me to eat. I approached gardening as a form of alchemy, transforming seeds and soil and water and sunlight into things of value…

To me then (even now), beauty was the breath-catching sight of a glossy bell pepper hanging like a Christmas ornament, or a watermelon nested in a tangle of vines.

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Flowers were all right if you had the space, but what was the point?

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The flowers I welcomed into my garden were precisely the ones that had a point, that foretold the fruit to come: the pretty white-and-yellow button of a strawberry blossom (right photo) that soon would swell and redden, the ungainly yellow trumpet that heralded the zucchini’s coming.

The other kind, flowers for flowers’ sake, seemed to me the flimsiest of things, barely a step up from leaves, which I also deemed of little value; neither achieved the sheer existential heft of a tomato or cucumber. Where do I have the time for anything so frivolous as a flower?

photo: the cool, scentless, and somewhat aloof tulip
The only time I liked tulips was right before they opened, when the flower still formed a closed capsule that resembled some sort of marvelous, weighted fruit. But the day the petals flexed, the mystery drained out of them, leaving behind what to me seemed a weak, papery insubstantiality.

But then, I was ten. What did I know about beauty?

source: Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

The Happiest People

The happiest people are those who have invested their time in others. The unhappiest people are those who wonder how the world is going to make them happy.

Karl Menninger, the great psychiatrist, was asked what a lonely, unhappy person should do. He said, "Lock the door behind you, go across the street, find someone who is hurting, and help them." Forget about yourself to help others. There is no better exercise for strengthening the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.

You wants other to encourage you. Think about it; most of your best friends are those who encouraged you. You don't have many strong relationships with people who put you down. You avoid these people and seek out those who believe in you and lift you up.

"When special people touch our lives then suddenly we see how beautiful and wonderful our world can really be. They show us that our special hopes and dreams can take us far by helping us look inward and believe in who we are. They bless us with their love and joy through everything they give. When special people touch our lives they teach us how to live." - J.C. Maxwell (1993)

What do you get out of encouraging others? One author wrote, "there is no way to decribe the joy of having a young person touch your arm and smile because you have taught him new values and touched his heart and his mind."

Just as you need it, people need to be encouraged.

Prayer: Father, we all need some encouragement in our lives. Teach me how to be kind and thoughtful and how to elevate someone’s self-esteem. Gentleness, kindness, and encouragement are indicators of a special strength. Instill that strength within me.

Love Chemistry

Yesterday, we attended our niece's solemnisation. This was the second niece, on my wife's side of the family, to get married within the last six months. In view of this as well as the coming Valentine Day, it is timely for me to post this poem, which I first came across when I was in my secondary school. You need to know chemistry to appreciate it.

I am attracted to you
Like an electron to a proton Together we form an ionic bond
Though we are oppositely charged ions
I am drawn toward you

Falling in love with you is a chemical reaction
I have been transformed
When I first met you there was a chain reaction
Which caused my love for you to grow

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As my love for you increases
My energy level rises
I am in an excited state
Increasing the tendency to form a chemical bond

Ours is an exorthemic love

Each giving off love not just absorbing it

Sometimes you do something especially nice

Which speeds up the chemical process

Like a catalyst in my increasing love for you

I realize that we have our inhibition periods
and sometimes I am selfish enough
To be an endothermic reaction
Only absorbing your love
When you are gone I am a noble gas
An inert substance
When I am without you
The world seems still

The feeling I have for you is so intense
It cannot be measured in kilocalories

Often I have to make a qualitative elemental analysis
To understand and love you more
But I don't expext to know your empirical formula
You are too complex a person for that

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Our love is unique as an orbital
For only two electrons can fill this space. I was an element
It took you to make me a compound substance

Who is Worse?

Photos: Sante Fe, New Mexico (2005)

In my devotion this morning, I came across the following story in Luke 13:1-5: "When Jesus was informed that some Jews from Galilee had been butchered as they were sacrificing at the Temple in Jerusalem, he asked:

“Do you think they were worse sinners than other men from Galilee? Is that why they suffered?... And what about the 18 men who died when the Tower of Siloam fell on them? Were they the worst sinners in Jerusalem?

The dialogue refers to two instances of people being taken away by sudden death! Or rather, two tragedies – death that came at unexpected time and places. The irony being towers, which are built for safety, in this instance, proved to be the 18’s men destruction. Similarly, the altar and temple, which used to be a sanctuary and place of shelter, became a snare and a trap, a place of danger and slaughter.

Lesson 1: Neither the holiness of the place nor the work would be a protection to them from the fury of an unjust judge, who neither feared God nor regarded man. In other words, priests (or good people) can still die in the course of doing God (good) works.

Jesus answered his own question with an affirmative, “Not at all!" (Luke 13:2, 5). Here, Jesus cautioned his hearer not to make ill use of these and similar events; nor take occasion to censure great sufferers, as if they were therefore be accounted as great sinners. We must not be harsh in our censures of those that are afflicted more than their neighbors, lest we add sorrow to the sorrowful.

Lesson 2: Whether a person is killed in a tragic accident or miraculously survived is not a measure of righteousness. We must abide by this rule: that we cannot judge of men’s sins by their sufferings in this world; for many are thrown into the furnace as gold to be purified.
In his reply, Jesus also said: “And you, too will perish unless you repent.” (Luke 13:2, 5). Here, Jesus intimates that we all deserve to perish as much as those who died, and had we been “dealt with” according to our sins, like the Jews who was butchered in the temple, our blood would have long mingled with our sacrifices by the justice of God… “we are as great sinners as they, have as much sin to repent, to be sorry for what we’ve done amiss, and to do so no more."

Lesson 3: Everyone has to die; that’s part of being human. But not everyone needs to stay dead. Jesus promises eternal life

“For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

So, instead of blaming or judging others, everyone should look to his or her own day of judgment!

Source: LAB