Tuna Salad?? Yup, Tuna Salad Tonight. Aww, Gee.

You've gotta wonder why they always say that.  I like Tuna Salad, even when I get it between two slices of limp white bread.  It's an Old Standby.  It was only one day a few years ago at my sister's house that I learned there were other things to do with canned tuna besides add a chopped onion and a half ton of mayonnaise to it.  Stephanie likes to tune it up with some apple and raisins.  I adopted that for my own plate and kitchen.  (Hey, is that the title of another blog?  Peter's Plate, or simply Plate and Kitchen?)  Then I thought of adding a squeeze or two of lemon juice from time to time, a sprinkling of nuts of one kind or another, and I was off to the races.

Some of the stuff was not fit for the cat...if I had one, but every bit of it was healthy.  But, so is boiled cod and beans healthy.  And, no self respecting "moggie" would lift a paw towards that.  Not even Mikey could be persuaded to eat it.

The other night, though, I prepared something that I thought good enough to serve Mariellen.  It was a tuna and bean salad with some peppers, a bit of lemon and chopped fresh basil.  We just finished our second evening with it, and, by my word, it was as good as if not better than the first night's adventure.  So simple is it and so good I think, that I have decided to be brutally honest and tell you that I got it out of a book, an ad in a book at that.  Here is the recipe:

One 5 ounce can or 3.5 ounce package of tuna (I used the envelope and chunk light, not white tuna)
One 15 ounce can of cannelini beans drained
One Tbsp of lemon juice
2Tbsp of olive oil
One half chopped red onion
One half chopped red pepper
Salt and pepper
Two Tbsp chopped fresh basil
Zest of one half lemon
One clove of garlic mashed

Mash and mix the garlic with lemon juice, lemon zest, salt and pepper.  Whisk oil into it and set aside while you chop and mix the peppers and onion with the beans.  Mix the tuna with the beans and toss the add the dressing and chopped herb.  Toss again to mix the dressing, turn into a serving dish and garnish with fresh picked basil leaves.

I doubled the recipe and it easily will serve six as a main course.  Serve it on a bed of lettuce with some hearty bread and a good dry white for a light summer supper.

By the way, it's quite accommodating.  I had no red pepper, but did have some yellow and orange ones in the fridge.  They went quite well, and added some pleasant color appeal to the whole dish.

It's easy, quick and good.

To Be Entitled Means To be Enslaved

I spent a few moments this morning watching a You Tube video of some fellow on Judge Judy.  He had gotten a couple of dozen thousands of dollars from some government agencies to go to college and become a driveling idiot whose only apology for his life was "I am Me!"  This, I suppose would be what would be praised in the circles which believe in Head Starts for the underclasses...always with the hidden understanding that the real purpose of such things for the "underclasses" is to keep them that way.

I don't really know how that may be proved, since I amn't a scholar.  But, I do see the results of such things as Head Start and free rides of all sorts on the back of tax paying mules.  I know what I see parading before me daily as I hand out pieces of chicken at my very important post-retirement job to wrecks who will have nothing better in their lives than a 60 hour a week minimum wage job behind a counter somewhere, and another one later on in the day behind another counter somewhere, a succession of girl-friends or boyfriends and five, six or seven kids with no idea who is what or who in their lives.  This is the harvest of 50 years of social experimentation in toleration, educational reform, diversity and inclusivity, rights and entitlement...to name but a few things.

I recall the day when CCNY decided not to require any entrance exams for freshman students, and the horrors that resulted from that, because they believed that they should open their doors to students who had not proven capable of passing them through no fault of their own.  NO FAULT!!!  Well, perhaps not.  But they sure as hell didn't do anything to deserve entry and all the remedial BS that necessarily went along with it.  However they were lied to and believed the lie, that they could with no effort at all become the best they could be; that they had a right to a college education and access to all of the things that a college education woudl give them.  They were, in a word, ENTITLED.

A friend of mine who IS a scholar wrote something that made me think some of the thoughts above, not that they hadn't already been bubbling along in my brain for some time.  He wrote in reply to someone who had said that liberal government programs bespoke a certain empathy for the poor which was lacking from the motivational philosophy of conservative politics.  He said this:

"The basic,fundamental distinction in the conflict of visions that we see is, loosely and generally speaking, the tension between liberty and equality.  What we have had, in the last 40 years, in many countries,including our own, is the enlargement of the government sphere with woeful consequences.

And about taking the LEAP OF EMPATHY for the POOR ------- more harm has been visited upon them from ill conceived policies on their behalf than from the indifference of conservatives.  When I read AMERICA and COMMONWEAL, I feel that I am in the company of people who are making hortatory appeals utterly unrelated to social and economic realities.  It takes more than rhetoric to make some accomplishments.  Look around you and behold the squalor and detritus heaved up over the last 40 years.  Why even JOE KLEIN,a standard run of the mill liberal,just wrote a column several months ago, in TIME, on the utter,abject failure of HEAD START.  Yes, that HEAD START!!  I could go on and on.  I will keep it short by conluding with this advice ------- go check out Pat Moynihan who said all this from the mid 60s when he was an LBJ advisor until his last days.  Such is/was the sorry,squalid state of the equalitarian LEFT in the U.S."

I like those terms, squalor and detritus.  Most of the campuses of the country are awash in it.  Most of the schools and most of the legislative chambers.  And, not to put too fine a point on it...most of the boardrooms and trading floors.

That fool on You Tube is not as rare a bird as one might think and more common than cat caca today; so do not laugh at him, the poor victim that he is .

Who is at fault?  You know the answer.