The massive storm that delayed and than canceled my flight is now passing over. From the looks of it, it’s a deluge—skies blackened and flickering with lightening, waves of rain sweeping the tarmac. I love a good storm, but this one I can neither hear nor feel.

It would be some consolation for the tedium of sitting here at the gate to stand outside and feel the wind and thunder, to hear violence of the downpour. But you’re all locked up at an airport.

Fortunately, I sweet-talked my way onto an earlier flight—the 4:35 back to Chicago, which is predicted to depart at 9:10. Unlikely, since that’s only ten minutes from now and we haven’t even borded. In any case, it hasn’t been canceled yet.

She’s right. Pro-choicers don’t do enough to make their case. But Remy misses the reason why: when it comes right down to it, it’s hard to make a good case for killing unborn babies. That’s why so often pro-choicers prefer to demonize pro-lifers.

That’s exactly what Remy does, and that’s where she links to this blog. She complains about “anti-abortion advocates, who frequently produce far beyond the replacement rate”, and links to my bio page, which mentions my eight children.

To be fair, Remy does try to present the pro-choice case. The problem is she keeps slipping into attacks on pro-lifers. The quote above is from a section on adoption, in which Remy begins by noting the problems of the adoption process (some valid points), then makes the strange claim that not that many people are willing to adopt (false) and finally resorts to criticizing my reproductive choices.

And as if that were not ironic enough from this advocate of “reproductive choice”, it turns out that Remy, too, is guilty of making reproductive decisions without regard to the “replacement rate” (said to be 2.1 children in the industrialized world). She boasts that she and her husband are “child-free”.

What’s more, Remy’s blog is called “writing evolution”, and she has another blog featuring her graphic art (she’s quite good) called “creative evolutions”. But evolution is all about passing on traits to the next generation. Remy is determined not to pass any of her traits on to the next generation, going so far as to declare that should be become pregnant, she would “immediately” seek an abortion.

So it turns out this “child free” couple are effectively being replaced my 2.1 of my kids. And after the 2.1 needed to replace April and me, we’ve still got enough children left to replace another 3.8 pro-choicers. Nice.

But I find that the blog is a convenient place to take notes on a recipe; I want to keep track of recipes anyway, so why not just post them here?

I cooked up this black bean soup yesterday to give my ailing wife (wicked flu) a break. She and the kids loved it, including a couple of them who had declared their hatred for black bean soup an many occasions.

• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 3 medium yellow onions
• 1 green bell pepper
• 1 red bell pepper
• 1 humongous carrot
• 5 cloves garlic
• 2 T chili powder
• 1 t ground cumin
• 2 bay leaves
• 1/4 + 1/2 t sea salt
• 4 cans (15 oz.) black beans
• 1 can (15 oz.) sweet corn
• 20 oz crushed tomatoes
• 3-4 cups vegetable broth

Pour olive oil into a large saucepan or pot over medium heat. Chop up onion and add to saucepan with 1/4 t sea salt. Chop up peppers and add to saucepan. Pare the humongous carrot and then grate; add to saucepan. Press the cloves of garlic into saucepan.

Cook all these vegetables until the onions are clarified and all are soft. Then add some of the seasonings (you’ll add more later to the whole soup, to taste).

Drain and rinse two cans of black beans and place in a blender with 1 cup vegetable broth. Puree and add to saucepan. Add crushed tomatoes too (note: I used an opened 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes; I approximate that 20 oz were left).

Drain and rinse remainings two cans of black beans and can of sweet corn. Add to saucepan. Add remaining vegetable broth (for thick soup, use only 2; for regular soup use 3).

Add the bay leaves and remaining salt and spices. (A note on spices: It’s silly to tell people how to spice their food; tastes vary too much. Moreover, I rarely measure spices like these. So what I’m giving here are just guesses at what I might have put in this soup. In other words: Season to taste.)

The soup turned out great, served with surprisingly delicious vegan cornbread, courtesy of Kosher Blog.

In researching recipes for my first pecan pie a couple of Thanksgivings ago, I was dismayed to find that nearly every recipe calls for corn syrup, a detestable substance, especially in its “high fructose” version, which I find is in nearly everything. What’s more, it appears that the original recipe for pecan pie was inspired by Karo brand corn syrup.

Never mind. I found a recipe calling for maple syrup and used that instead. The pie was quite good, but too mapley to satisfy that specific pecan pie buzz, so for my next Thanksgiving pecan pie and used some stuff called Log Cabin Syrup, which is about 50/50 cane sugar and maple syrup. I had tried to no avail to find “golden syrup”—pure cane syrup.

For this year’s pie, I found another cane/maple blend called Country Forest Gourmet Syrup, which is 82% cane and 18% maple—perfect. I also discovered that I’d left no handy notes from previous pies, so I had to rebuild the recipe from various recipes online, some of which I recognized as having contributed to my past recipes.

My method with such research is to use the “most” of anything that I find in any one recipe, especially when it comes to butter. People are afraid of butter, but the best thing I think you can say about a pie is that it took half a pound of butter to make it.

Here’s the recipe:

Pie crust

• 1 C unbleached flour
• 8 T butter (1 stick)
• ½ t salt
• 1 T suger
• Approx. ¼ C ice water

I’m not going to tell you how to make pie crust. It’s too much of an art. Ask your mother or grandmother to show you, but ignore what they say about lard and use butter instead. They say that lard makes a flakier crust, but butter makes a butterier crust, and that’s what we want. Don’t use shortening—for this or anything else, except maybe greasing an axle in an emergency.

I learned to make pie crust from my wife, April. I make pie rarely enough that I have to call her into the kitchen every time for a refresher course and careful monitoring of the process.

Pie filling

• 3 eggs
• 1 c cane and maple syrup
• 1 c brown sugar
• 1 T flower
• 4 T butter, melted
• 1 t vanilla
• ¼ t salt
• 2 c roasted pecans
• 9″ pie crust (see above)

To roast the pecans, place them on a shallow baking sheet and in a 250° oven for 1 hour. Reserve eight nicely formed pecan halves for the top, and crush the rest of them moderately by hand. This is important; your hands need to be thoroughly lubricated with pecan oil for the remaining steps to be properly fulfilled.

Now mix everything except the roasted pecans (and pie crust, silly) in a big bowl. My byword is that you can’t have too large a bowl for mixing. Whip it all up, and then pour into the pie crust shell. If you’re making more than one pie (as I always do), be careful to whip everything up as you’re distributing the filling, since the it tends to separate if left sitting for more than a few seconds—you don’t want all the eggs and butter in one pie and all the sugary stuff in the other.

Put the crushed pecans into the bottom of the pie shell, evenly distributed, and pour the filling over them. Or, if you get these two steps reversed (as I did this time), use a spatula to pat the pecans down into the filling. Some people let the pecans sort of float on the filling, for some reason. That sounds like madness to me.

Place the eight Platonic pecan halves at eight points on the compass around your pie. If you’ve got some leftover crust batter, you can make a little maple leaf like I did, or other delightful decoration. Artistic types might attempt a flowing cornucopia. The less skilled might settle for an apple, though this would be an odd choice for a pecan pie.

Bake at 350° for 60-70 minutes, and let cool overnight.

It remains to be seen if I can meet my deadlines and actually see the new design published, but meanwhile I want to share a discovery.

For the TMS homepage I wanted to use a Wall Street Journal style “hedcut” of Tom Brejcha, the lead attorney at TMS—and the guy I’ve got on speed dial when I have to deal with police out on the street protesting abortion.

I couldn’t find any quick instructions on how to do this (the hedcuts made famous by the WSJ are hand drawn—good for them!). So I threw something together myself using Corel PhotoPaint. Should be easy to do with PhotoShop too.

I started with a color photograph, converted to grayscale (I also sharpened the image). First I cropped the background out of the original photograph (I used a feather mask to avoid jagged edges), and created an object out of the remaining head and shoulders. I resampled this to the size I wanted.

Next I used a transparency effect to fade out the bottom of the image. On reflection, I should have skipped this step; I don’t think it was really necessary.

I copied the object and saved the copy in another file so I could bring it back in when I wanted it, then converted the object I’d been working on to black-and-white using the Floyd-Steinberg conversion at 50% intensity. This gave me the stipple-effect characteristic of the WSJ hedcut—but rather raw.

Now I pulled in the copy I’d made before converting to black-and-white as another object and placed it over the black-and-white version. I set this object at 60% opacity.

The last step was to combine the two objects with the white background and export at a GIF. You see the results above.

This is just a first shot, and I’ve already tinkered with other approaches—putting the “stipple” object on top at 50% opacity, for example, with the grayscale object at 100% opacity. I don’t have time to play with it more, but I’m pleased enough with the results for now.

But first, an explanation. Last week I took vacation time to build a large playhouse/fort in the backyard. I’ll post an article about that soon, once all the loose ends are tied up. But it was pretty hot last week, and it’s been hot all month. We finally got sick of making five and six pitcher of iced tea a day and decided to make a whole lot all at once.

First of course you’ll need a five gallon cooler. Plus a box of Lipton Cold Brew “Pitcher Size” iced tea bags, and a large bottle of lemon juice, and a colander the right size to place in the top of the cooler without it dropping all the way down.

Open up the iced tea bags and place them in the colander, on the counter. You don’t want any tea bags steeping too much or too little, so wait until you’ve unpacked them all—22 total—before dropping the colander into the water.

Why the colander? This way you keep all the tea bags together, and there’s much less chance that you’ll leave one behind and wind up busting it open when you’re mixing in the sugar and lemon juice. That’s a real drag. Pretty much ruins the lot.

As for the water, I usually use filtered water for anything I’m going to drink, but it would take about a day to get five gallons out of our RO system, so tap water it is. If you’ve got a team working, one man can fill the cooler while the others are unwrapping the tea bags.

Submerge the tea bags in the water and let them steep for about four minutes. The usual time is three, but it seems like this volume needs an extra minute.

Remove the colander and place it in a bowl where you can safely squeeze the bags out without worrying about breaking one of them. Pour the salvaged tea goodness from the bowl in to the cooler.

I like my tea moderately sweet and very lemony. So I use 6 fluid ounces of lemon juice and 2.25 cups of sugar for a five-gallon batch.

Now you’ve got to refrigerate the tea. Fortunately I have a fridge dedicated to beer brewing, where there’s usually room for a five gallon cooler, especially in summer when I rarely brew, it being too hot to ferment wort at the low temperatures I consider ideal for a good ale.

I would love to know if anyone tries this recipe. It’s no stroke of genius or anything, but it might be nice to know what kind of volume of lemon juice and sugar you need for such a large batch—and about the tea bag bursting problem; I’d have appreciated the information. But having discovered it myself, I am sharing it with the world.

Enjoy.

Unfortunately, I could not get a photo of the “vandalized note” in question to come out. But I do have a picture of me with “Baby William” which will give you an idea of what kind of state I was in after three days pacing around hospital rooms. William was fashioned from a blown-up surgical glove, onto which I drew a face: the thumb became William’s nose; the fingers his Mohawk.

William was “born” when my seven other children were visiting us the evening after Sarah was born. For some reason they let the whole crew in there at once, and Daddy got rather silly. Another silliness was my “vandalism” of the note that had been taped onto Sarah’s bassinet.

The back story is this: we had refused to allow the nursery crew to give Sarah a bath. Why? Because bathing a newborn baby is insane, that’s why. A baby at the moment of birth is the cleanest thing in the hospital. Moreover, bathing the baby brings down her body temperature, and then she has to be warmed up under a heat lamp. Madness.

There’s more to tell about our battle over such needless and even outrageous interventions, but let me not digress. When Sarah was finally returned to us in the postpartum wing, there was a note taped to her bassinet reading:

Please use gloves when handling this baby. She was not given a bath due to parents request.

Now, first of all, astute grammarians will immediately recognize the need for an apostrophe in the word “parents.” I duly added it (after the S, of course). That’s not vandalism, it’s editing.

However, I could see that further revision was called for. And so I amended the note as follows:

Please use gloves AND HAZMAT SUIT when handling this baby. She was not given a bath due to WACKO parents request.

Yes, I was feeling giddy. The kids got a huge kick out of all of this. Daddy was showing off.

The next morning, the note was gone, replaced by one which simply read, “Please use gloves.” Soon we were visited by a pediatrician—the same one with whom I had argued about the interventions already alluded to. She was there to badger us into consenting to a hearing test for Sarah, at which she finally succeeded by threatening that our refusal would significantly delay our discharge from the hospital, on account of the need to consult with hospital lawyers.

I promise to rant and rave about this “state mandated hearing test” on another occasion, but for now let me continue with this particular thread of the story. The pediatrician—who, by the way, could not have been a day over 17—was not content with her victory on the hearing test controversy. No.

“And also,” she declared, “I just want to say that I have the deepest respect for the nursing staff at this hospital. Your additions to that note were very disrespectful and inappropriate.”

Wow! Talk about can’t take a joke! I hardly knew how to respond. Should I point out that my note was not directed at the nurses at all, but at the hospital’s crazy protocols? Or perhaps directed at her, the great champion of those protocols? That it was a nothing but an innocent joke brought on by extreme exhaustion and the glee of sharing my new daughter with her brothers and sisters?

No. No point. I just said, “Okay—noted,” and left it at that.

After she left—and once the shock had worn off—I did amend the other note as well: “Please use gloves. BY ORDER OF DARTH VADER.” But April talked me into removing that note from the bassinet. Shortly thereafter we were released.

God is good! Praised be His Holy Name forever! In his mercy he has blessed me to be the father of six girls—no fewer than six! Nor has he forgotten to give me sons, two of them, older brothers to help me nurture protect these precious sisters and daughters.

I invite you to share my joy by meeting this newest Scheidler daughter.

Reservoir Dogs is one of those movies that I can watch over and over and over again—one of the “rewatchables.”

These aren’t necessarily the movies I consider better than any others. some great movies just don’t lend themselves to repeated viewing. Sure, any great movie can be watched a couple times; but only a handful never get old. Here of some of mine:

• Spinal Tap—”This one goes to eleven” kills me every time.
• The Blues Brothers—Maybe you had to grow up in Chicago to find this movie endlessly entertaining; I did and I do.
• It’s a Wonderful Life—Actually, I took a break of about ten years from this movie. But watching it with the kids for the first time was great last year.
• Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang—My daughters Lucy and Ada watch this maybe once a week.
• Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—Not to be confused with the ooky Johnny Depp remake.
• The Princess Bride—”Have fun storming the castle!”
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail—”Let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who!”
• Blue Velvet—Saw this for the first time in London; felt sick to my stomach. Got over that in subsequent viewings.
• Citizen Kane—Enjoyed my first viewing in high school despite an obnoxious classmate’s Rosebud spoiler.

What are your favorite “rewatchables”? Matt? Erin? Renee? James? John?