frybread, with swedish lemonade
One of relatively few TV shows I make a special effort to see is CBS Sunday Morning, which has a lot of interesting segments but mostly avoids the obnoxious "happy talk" that is a key ingredient of most morning shows. (Although there's a pattern in tone some reporters take that I find a little annoying.) Somehow, even topics that I would think are of no interest to me are covered in an appealing manner.
This morning they had a segment about Kit Carson and his involvement with various travesties perpetrated on American Indians in the century before last, including the Long Walk of the Navajos to what amounted to a concentration camp. In the piece someone talked about frybread, described as the most popular food among Indians. (BTW, I've read that they prefer to be called American Indians rather than Native Americans, a term which is considered to be the product of liberal guilt.)
I don't believe I've never had frybread, but the first thing I always think of when I hear about it is that sweet guy, a character in the film Smoke Signals, talking about how much he loved his mother's frybread (or was it his grandmother's).
The person who mentioned frybread described its origin, which was the Indians' concocting it from their meager allotment of foodstuffs, which included flour and salt. This combination was fried in what she referred to as "animal fat". The salt made me think of those fresh-baked pretzels you can buy in malls. (On the Wikipedia site, they mention flour and lard, but not salt.)
What got me was how something that was created by oppressed people with minimal resources under dire circumstances became an enduring favorite of those people. They took what was given to them and they made it their own. As in, when God gives you a lemon, make lemonade. (But here, they didn't just make lemonade, they invented it.)
I always appreciate being reminded that a bad thing sometimes leads to or turns into a good thing. And I lived it yet again on a small scale this afternoon.
On one of my little mental breaks at work last week, I took a look at the Reckless Records website. Noticing a search feature, I plugged in the name Kjellvander. Christian Kjellvander is a Swedish singer-songwriter a friend recently turned me on to. He's at the folk side of the rock spectrum, with a major twang. (He's so great that I'd put Sweden at the top of my travel list if I could be assured I could get to a show of his there. But I think I'm more likely to see him here in Chicago.)
To my surprise, the Reckless search resulted in a hit: one of his albums was available at both Reckless locations - Songs From a Two-Room Chapel - an import, and for the amazing price of $4.99! I checked again on Friday, and they were both still there.
I wanted to go pick it up during the week, but somehow the time and the energy never converged, so I looked forward to stopping at one of the branches on the way home from my father's this afternoon. I went to the one in Bucktown, as the clerks are nicer there, and dove straight through the Rock "Ke-Ko" bin. It wasn't there!!!
I went to the counter, and a clerk looked it up and told me: (a) they had sold their copy earlier today (wow!), (b) the Lakeview store still had one (great!), and (c) it was in the soul section (yikes!). He called the other store and asked them to hold it for me. I had a bad feeling as I drove over there. It's a tough neighborhood to park in, and actually getting the CD seemed too good to be true.
I got to the second store (having parked my car without damaging its newly rehabilitated spendor), stepped up the counter, and they didn't know what I was talking about. (Is that the power of negative thinking?) So I headed over to the soul section, and, eureka, one of the last covers in the bin was what I wanted. I browsed around the store some more, finding quite a few of the things I wanted, for good used prices. (For once I had a list, which I had made the night before while browsing around some online best-of-2006 lists.) And I picked a couple of new things I wanted to hear enough to pay a few bucks extra for.
While I was looking around, I heard a clerk tell someone he had $135 worth of stuff and did he know that there was 10% off once you hit $150. I didn't even try to reach that amount. I'm trying not to buy stuff that's not really special to me, or that is readily downloadable, and by then I was in the mood to get out of there anyway.
I did a rough total before I went to pay, and it was around $75.00. It took the guy about five minutes to get the discs from the shelves behind the counter, and then he said he had to go to the back. While I waited, I noticed that they had the John Cassavetes 8-DVD box - which I've been wanting for quite a while - for the pretty fair price of $79.99. Hey, that'd get me over $150!
When the clerk returned, he said there was one disc he couldn't find. And he held up the cover of the Christian Kjellvander disc I'd come for. What kind of god allows something like this to happen? I felt like walking out immediately. I told him that that was the only thing I really wanted in the whole pile. That wasn't exactly true, but I hoped that a bit of drama would motivate him to keep looking.
I mentioned how the other store had called and asked them to hold the disc for me. He looked and looked and looked (there's a lot of counter space in the store). I asked him to show the cover to the other clerks and see if anyone remembered getting a call about it. Someone did. And there it was! Whew!!!
Walking out of the store, thrilled to have gotten the Cassavetes box for the net price of $64.00 (mentally applying the entire 10% discount to that item), I thought about how, if the first store had had the record I came for, I wouldn't have found all the other stuff I got at this one. I'm sure I would have found something interesting at the first store, but I can't believe I would have done as well there.
And I'm very happy for Christian Kjellvander that he has at least one other fan in Chicago. (Or was someone just taking a chance on some unknown blue-eyed soul?) (BTW, the disc I got came with a second disc - a single that I played a couple of times in the car on the way home. Did the other guy get two discs, too?)
Now I'm going to check my cookbooks for a lardless frybread recipe.
-- 1360
This morning they had a segment about Kit Carson and his involvement with various travesties perpetrated on American Indians in the century before last, including the Long Walk of the Navajos to what amounted to a concentration camp. In the piece someone talked about frybread, described as the most popular food among Indians. (BTW, I've read that they prefer to be called American Indians rather than Native Americans, a term which is considered to be the product of liberal guilt.)
I don't believe I've never had frybread, but the first thing I always think of when I hear about it is that sweet guy, a character in the film Smoke Signals, talking about how much he loved his mother's frybread (or was it his grandmother's).
The person who mentioned frybread described its origin, which was the Indians' concocting it from their meager allotment of foodstuffs, which included flour and salt. This combination was fried in what she referred to as "animal fat". The salt made me think of those fresh-baked pretzels you can buy in malls. (On the Wikipedia site, they mention flour and lard, but not salt.)
What got me was how something that was created by oppressed people with minimal resources under dire circumstances became an enduring favorite of those people. They took what was given to them and they made it their own. As in, when God gives you a lemon, make lemonade. (But here, they didn't just make lemonade, they invented it.)
I always appreciate being reminded that a bad thing sometimes leads to or turns into a good thing. And I lived it yet again on a small scale this afternoon.
On one of my little mental breaks at work last week, I took a look at the Reckless Records website. Noticing a search feature, I plugged in the name Kjellvander. Christian Kjellvander is a Swedish singer-songwriter a friend recently turned me on to. He's at the folk side of the rock spectrum, with a major twang. (He's so great that I'd put Sweden at the top of my travel list if I could be assured I could get to a show of his there. But I think I'm more likely to see him here in Chicago.)
To my surprise, the Reckless search resulted in a hit: one of his albums was available at both Reckless locations - Songs From a Two-Room Chapel - an import, and for the amazing price of $4.99! I checked again on Friday, and they were both still there.
I wanted to go pick it up during the week, but somehow the time and the energy never converged, so I looked forward to stopping at one of the branches on the way home from my father's this afternoon. I went to the one in Bucktown, as the clerks are nicer there, and dove straight through the Rock "Ke-Ko" bin. It wasn't there!!!
I went to the counter, and a clerk looked it up and told me: (a) they had sold their copy earlier today (wow!), (b) the Lakeview store still had one (great!), and (c) it was in the soul section (yikes!). He called the other store and asked them to hold it for me. I had a bad feeling as I drove over there. It's a tough neighborhood to park in, and actually getting the CD seemed too good to be true.
I got to the second store (having parked my car without damaging its newly rehabilitated spendor), stepped up the counter, and they didn't know what I was talking about. (Is that the power of negative thinking?) So I headed over to the soul section, and, eureka, one of the last covers in the bin was what I wanted. I browsed around the store some more, finding quite a few of the things I wanted, for good used prices. (For once I had a list, which I had made the night before while browsing around some online best-of-2006 lists.) And I picked a couple of new things I wanted to hear enough to pay a few bucks extra for.
While I was looking around, I heard a clerk tell someone he had $135 worth of stuff and did he know that there was 10% off once you hit $150. I didn't even try to reach that amount. I'm trying not to buy stuff that's not really special to me, or that is readily downloadable, and by then I was in the mood to get out of there anyway.
I did a rough total before I went to pay, and it was around $75.00. It took the guy about five minutes to get the discs from the shelves behind the counter, and then he said he had to go to the back. While I waited, I noticed that they had the John Cassavetes 8-DVD box - which I've been wanting for quite a while - for the pretty fair price of $79.99. Hey, that'd get me over $150!
When the clerk returned, he said there was one disc he couldn't find. And he held up the cover of the Christian Kjellvander disc I'd come for. What kind of god allows something like this to happen? I felt like walking out immediately. I told him that that was the only thing I really wanted in the whole pile. That wasn't exactly true, but I hoped that a bit of drama would motivate him to keep looking.
I mentioned how the other store had called and asked them to hold the disc for me. He looked and looked and looked (there's a lot of counter space in the store). I asked him to show the cover to the other clerks and see if anyone remembered getting a call about it. Someone did. And there it was! Whew!!!
Walking out of the store, thrilled to have gotten the Cassavetes box for the net price of $64.00 (mentally applying the entire 10% discount to that item), I thought about how, if the first store had had the record I came for, I wouldn't have found all the other stuff I got at this one. I'm sure I would have found something interesting at the first store, but I can't believe I would have done as well there.
And I'm very happy for Christian Kjellvander that he has at least one other fan in Chicago. (Or was someone just taking a chance on some unknown blue-eyed soul?) (BTW, the disc I got came with a second disc - a single that I played a couple of times in the car on the way home. Did the other guy get two discs, too?)
Now I'm going to check my cookbooks for a lardless frybread recipe.
-- 1360
posted by lsg at 1/07/2007 06:09:00 PM
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