Endless Knots

Harvest Soup inspired by Daniel Bruce

And now, by popular request, this recipe.

First came in contact with the basis for this soup when daughter Miranda (her fine recipes) took a semester away from college to earn her certificate in culinary arts at Boston University, highly recommended 14-week program. Each week, the public was invited to lectures with famous chefs (yes, I sat a few feet from Jacques Pepin, among others) as they cooked. A few times we were invited to actually cook with them. My big catch? Daniel Bruce, chef extraordinaire at the Boston Harbor Hotel, leading to my first and last time cooking fois gras.  Bruce is the generator of the original recipe for the soup below that I’ve altered a bit. Thanks, Daniel, for the now heavily-stained printout of your menu/recipe list, “Autumn in New England: A Festive Dinner with Daniel Bruce, Wednesday, October 15, 1997.”

Harvest Soup (serves 12)

Basic Soup:
4 oz butter
1 large sweet onion (Spanish, vidalia)
3-1/4 c carrots (4 or 5, depending on size)
3-1/4 c rutabaga (large-it’s in the turnip family)
3-1/4 c butternut squash (buy cut up if possible)
4 sprigs fresh thyme
8 c chicken or vegetable stock (I use veg)
4 cloves smashed garlic
4 leaves fresh sage
healthy amount of peppercorns (10-12)
kosher (large grain) salt to your liking

Garnish:
1 c cheddar cheese (grated)
1/3 c toasted walnuts (or butternuts if you can find them)
1/4 c fresh thyme (remove leaves from stems)
3/4 c rutabaga (dice and steam)
3/4 c butternut squash (dice and steam)

1. Cut all veggies for soup into 2 inch chunks.

2. Melt butter in large skillet or soup pan. Add onions, garlic, rutabaga, and carrots and cook over medium heat until onions glisten (about 10 mins). Add squash, stock, thyme and sage (herbs tied for easy removal). Simmer until veggies are soft (20-30 mins, depending on size of your chunks).

3. Remove herbs. Puree in blender until smooth as silk. Return to heat. Stir in half-and-half and season to taste.

4. Put garnish in soup bowl and ladle soup over (or vice-versa). Can add chopped chives.

Can make this ahead and freeze. Also feel free to add parsnips, my fave soup veg, for extra sweetness.

Fahrenheit 451

As a password-carrying member of the blognoscenti, you already know about Kindle, the latest from Amazon (do I have to put in the link?) founder Jeff Bezos, the man who turned writers into statistics-obsessed site-clickers. Even my friend Ellen's hubby (he's on TV, you know his name) checked his Amazon rankings every hour when his first book came out. Me too. My heart still flutters thinking of the day Virtual Teams dropped into three digits.

OK, you didn't see the 1 million blog posts on Monday about the Newsweek cover story, The Future of Reading, by Steven Levy. I was alerted when I clicked into Zoetrope as I do each morning only to find my fellow writers all in a kerfuffle about this new device. In a sentence, Kindle is a wireless device through which you can obtain and read books, 2000 of them at a time, downloadable from, of course, Amazon.

Let me repeat that. A DEVICE where you can READ.

So there's a huge debate going on right now among writers and readers. As a writer who's many times enjoyed the delectable moment when the first copy of your manuscript lands in your hand as something that will take its place on a shelf with its lovely cover and endorsements on the back, well, I just don't think that getting a link to my newest is going to feel the same. As a reader, well, I can take a pill for my nutrients too but...

Yesterday, Steven Levy appeared with my friend (and secondarily, of course, brilliant writer) Sven Birkerts to debate the merits of Kindle on WBUR/NPR's On Point. Last night, I spyed a few moments of Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose. This morning, my friend (and brilliant blogger nee hospital-runner) Paul Levy is conducting a "consumer poll" on Kindle. And, early in, the incomparable Seth Godin states his objection: it oughta come with pre-loaded books.

So I may be eating my words, so to speak, but even though I've been online forever and spend inordinate amounts of time online (just ask my hubby), count me out. It's hard enough packing now to go on a trip, what with my computer and phone and IPod and mascara (ooops, that doesn't need a plug). You know. And what about the sweet scent of musty books and the pleasure of lying on the sofa, feet on your beloved's (or your pet's) lap (or v-v), turning pages? Somehow with a blue glow, it doesn't feel the same.

Will "teams of practice" catch on?

And while we're extolling Bill Ives's blog, Portals and KM, here comes the self-referential rant: Bill has a post today, Introducing Teams of Practice (and then he includes Jeff's and my names) about mine below called Teams of practice, wherein I throw out the idea that we're moving beyond vague communities of like-minded practitioners to teams acquiring and sharing their knowledge. Heresy? Who knows...but I sure have gotten a lot of hits on that post. Thanks, Bill, a prodigious and generous blogger.

Latkes and the web

Now there's a combo you wouldn't normally think of - the delectable Chanukah treat (it's just around the corner) *and* the deep history of the web. But Bill Ives, Internet Sleuth, has discovered one of the oldest, if not the oldest, recipes on the web, Andy Carvin's Grandpa's Latke Recipe. Andy's been posting since Oct 1994. Check out Andy Carven's Waste of Bandwidth, (hardly), his blog, which in the olden days, was achieved by reposting his website in toto. Yay, Andy.

Dorothy, it's knowledgement management

The Leavenworth (Kansas and, yes, I wore my red shoes) Times carried Conference focuses on knowledge management last Friday, an article on the event where we spoke in early November:

Speakers included the husband and wife team of Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps, co-founders of a company called NetAge.

Part of their presentation focused on virtual teams, which Lipnack said are small groups of people working independently across boundaries.

Stamps and Lipnack provided tips for operating what they called “far-flung teams” or groups with people working at different locations.

Thanks to writer John Richmeier for including us in the piece. You can see our full presentation to the conference by clicking here: The Transformational Power of Networks, Teamnets and Virtual Teams.

"Let them be sea captains"

Other than her infamous pronouncement, "I accept the Universe," there is perhaps no more quoted line from the great Margaret Fuller (whom I posted about below in The Most Famous Woman in America) than this phrase from her best-known work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Note to publishers: This book deserves a new, more distinguished edition):

But if you ask me what offices they may fill; I reply--any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will.

Such then is the title of my friend Megan Marshall's excellent piece in the November 15, 2007, issue of The London Review of Books. Megan is the Pulitzer finalist for her biography, The Peabody Sisters, which captures the spirit of three remarkable and under-written-about-until-Megan's-work siblings, contemporaries and friends of Margaret Fuller. Meticulously researched and elegantly written. Five stars from me.

Megan's LRB piece is ostensibly a review of the second volume of Charles Capper's exhaustive biography of Fuller: Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Volume II: The Public Years. But she does a lot more with the piece, capturing the grand themes of Margaret's life and placing them in context. Only a writer familiar with the world of Margaret's contemporaries could have conveyed so much about her in such a relatively short piece.

I met Megan at a reading she was giving for The Peabody Sisters at the Concord Bookshop, the very same small town where Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne (who married Sophia Peabody), and Margaret's sister, Ellen, lived, and where Margaret visited frequently. Megan's reading was impressive, so much so that, a few weeks later, when I was in the nut aisle of Whole Foods in our mutual hometown of Newton, Mass, I recognized her. Lacking proper restraint, I went up to her, somewhere near the walnut bin; we struck up a conversation; and exchanged emails. Barely a week later, we bumped into each once more, again in the nut aisle. And, though it's hard to type this, a few weeks later, yet again. Needless to say, we've taken something from the symbolism and become friends.

Congrats, Megan, on this excellent piece and may you do much more writing about our mutual friend, Margaret.

Thanksgiving menu Chez Lipnack-Stamps 2007 (redux)

Due to a rash of family-wide busy-ness and travel, we are repeating our 2005 Thanksgiving menu (small modifications) this coming Thursday. Principal substitution is in the soup department, where we will enjoy "Harvest Soup" (with butternut squash, rutabagas, and carrots, among other fall veggies) in place of the Curried Pumpkin Soup  here. We're also adding a requested second salad: Boston lettuce with peas and mint (really easy and delish).

If you'd like the recipes and/or the shopping list (which makes for an easy time at the grocery store), post a comment or send me an email: jessicadotlipnackatnetagedotcom.

Menu credit: Miranda Stamps

Thanksgiving Menu
November 24, 2005

Hors d’oeuvres
Brie in Puff Pastry with French baguette
Stuffed mushrooms
Warm Spiced pecans with rum glaze

First Course
Curried Pumpkin Soup

Salad
Autumn Beet Salad With Spiced Pecans, Pears And Fourme D’ambert

Main Meal
Roasted Turkey
Three Mushroom Stuffing with Chestnuts
Cranberry Sauce (two kinds, fresh and Ocean Spray canned for the traditionalists)
Gravy (turkey and vegetarian)
Mashed Potatoes and Turnips with Pear Puree
Yams with Spiced Sorghum Butter
Green Beans with Shallots and Vermouth

Dinner Rolls

Dessert
Warm Apple Pie with French vanilla ice cream
Pumpkin Pie with fresh whipped cream

Spiced Pecans

It's that time of year here in the ole US of A where it's impossible to find a parking space at the grocery store and what you don't want is fully stocked and what you do want...

Thus begins a series of posts (I'm so optimistic about my intentions) containing family-favorite recipes.

Today, Spiced Pecans, first introduced to our family by virtue of Jay's (son-in-law) noble roots in Birmingham, Alabama, and posted, along with a number of her other excellent recipes, at daughter Miranda's (and Jay's) website. Served these at a book party for Wangchuk Meston's remarkable memoir, Comes the Peace and got so many requests for the recipe that I sent it out to everyone who came.

You probably weren't there (ok, I know a few of you were) so here it is again on the jump page.

And, oh, they're quick and easy. Shopping the ingredients is only time-consuming part.

The Capitol at night

Thanks to the Brookings Institution, I was part of a private tour of the US Capitol today, led by former US Congressman Jim Moody, who represented Wisconsin's 5th district for a decade. I don't know how the average person could arrange to have Rep. Moody provide a tour but, if you can figure it out (naturally, you're not average because none of my readers are), try to make it happen. I took the obligatory seventh grade tour of Washington as part of my junior high marching band (little known fact: I played the French horn) but I never before today had visited The Capitol.

Rep. Moody loves the building and the institution and I love enthusiastic people so, all in all, a wonderful tour. He advised us to keep our eyes on the ceilings, the mouldings, and the floors as the architecture and the decor change throughout the mammoth structure, built in stages beginning in 1793.

He pointed out statues--including those of Jeannette Rankin (the first woman to serve in Congress--she was from Montana, a Republican and a pacifist), Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, among many, many others. He took us into the chamber of the House of Representatives where we sat in the gallery watching about two dozen lonely congresspeople discussing something indistinct while checking their Blackberries. I only heard one representative speak: "My four-year-old goes online..." she said before mentioning something about predators. I guess they were debating some kind of legislation protecting kids...but what did she say? FOUR YEAR OLDS ONLINE????????

From there we walked and walked, admiring murals, listening to extraordinary acoustics, catching glimpses through the window of the Washington Monument as the sun was setting, into the Rotunda, into the Republican Leader's Suite, where a wood fire was burning in one of the Capitol's six working fireplaces, past Rep. Dennis Hastert who was walking, head down, with some aides, past Senator Dorgan from North Dakota, then down some stairs, and suddenly we were in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Room, standing behind chairs set at brass nameplates: Mr. Obama, Mrs. Boxer, Mr. Biden...the place where this Senate committee sits and discusses matters of life and death. It all felt so very close, so very immediate and I wished they were there in their seats so I could ask a few questions.

It was dark when we left the building, The Capitol lit, glowing against the black sky. For a moment, despite all the terrors and uncertainties and mess that is politics, it felt as if there was something solid and lasting.

December '07 book club: A Thousand Splendid Suns

The Fiction Book Club ends the year reading Khaled Hosseini's newest work, A Thousand Splendid Suns. And, websters, you'll be pleased to know that Hosseini has his own website.

Sad to say that due to travel I'm missing tonight's book club discussion of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. But I'll be there for the next one as it takes place at our house.

Feel free to comment on this book or any other under the Fiction Book Club category.