I grew up in Iowa, and they are the pork capital of the country. That’s what they do with all that corn – feed it to the hogs. My father is German, and the Germans must eat a lot of pork, too, because my father loves it. Pickled pig’s feet were always a favorite. All kinds of sausage, pork chops, ham and bacon showed up on the menu at home.

I bought fresh green beans at the farmer’s market yesterday and the first thing I thought of doing with them was to make my father’s green beans and bacon.

Dad started with about a half pound of bacon ends. (These are the scraps left over after they put the neat little slices into the Oscar Mayer package.)(I was married before I knew bacon came in slices.) My Dad cooked the bacon in a big skillet until not quite crisp, and poured off some of the fat into the jar on the stove. (This jar of pork fat was kept and used to season other vegetables and to fry eggs.) A chopped onion or two was thrown into the hot bacon/fat mixture in the skillet, followed by a bunch of cooked green beans, a little salt and a lot of black pepper. The whole mess was cooked down until the onions were browned and the green beans were almost falling apart. I’ll tell you, that is some good eating. Now we all know that pork fat is not a health food, but don’t tell that to my 96 year old Dad.

I decided to modify my Dad’s recipe a little to make it a tad healthier for me. I cooked two slices of all natural, no nitrates, no antibiotics, smoked bacon. Once the bacon was crisp, I poured out the fat and cleaned the pan. I used a tablespoon of olive oil to cook down an onion and a red bell pepper. The bell pepper is my own addition. I like them and they’re colorful. While they were cooking slowly, I cut my green beans into a pot of boiling water and after 20 minutes used a skimmer to add the green beans to the onion & pepper. I tossed in some minced garlic, too, just because, and ground in a lot of black pepper. I can’t remember whether my Dad put garlic in his beans or not, but I don’t think he’d mind. At this point I added back a tablespoon of the bacon fat and the bacon, chopped up small. Then I cooked and stirred until the beans were totally soft and coated with the bacon fat. You can’t rush these green beans. Just be sure to keep the flame low under the pan so they don’t burn. I’m not going to pretend this is diet food, but I did the recipe calculator and for ½ a cup it’s only 112 calories and 7 grams of fat.

My husband won’t eat them. He doesn’t like green beans. I had to put the leftovers in the refrigerator as soon as I’d measured out my serving so I didn’t eat the whole pan full myself. I can enjoy them all week.

Here is a poem about husbands and food. It’s by Leo Dangel.

After Forty Years of Marriage, She Tries
a New Recipe for Hamburger Hot Dish


“How did you like it?” she asked.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“This is the third time I cooked
it this way. Why can’t you
ever say if you like something?”

“Well if I didn’t like it. I
wouldn’t eat it,” he said.

“You never can say anything
I cook tastes good.”

“I don’t know why all the time
you think I have to say it’s good.
I eat it, don’t I?”

“I don’t think you have to say
all the time it’s good, but once
in a while you could say
you like it.”

“It’s all right,” he said.

For more poems by Leo Dangel, check out the Writer's Almanac, one of my favorite sources for poetry.

writersalmanac.publicrad
io.org/author.php?auth_id=
1577

There's No Crying in Baseball

One of my favorite movies is a film called “A League of Their Own”. Madonna was in it, and Rosie O’Donnell. Tom Hanks played the alcoholic coach of a girl’s baseball team. The most famous line in the movie is “There’s no crying in baseball” but I liked another line better.

One of Hanks’ best players is quitting the team. She tells him, “It just got too hard”, and he tells her off, saying something like, “Of course it’s hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it. That’s why it’s good. It’s the hard that makes it good.”

It’s the hard that makes it good.

Many of the best things in life require effort – graduating from school, having a baby, even, sometimes, staying married – but the coach said more than that. He didn’t just say good things take effort, he said, “It’s the hard that makes it good.”

Among the best experiences in my life was learning to scuba dive when we lived in Bermuda.

I’m a good swimmer, but the dive course was hard. As part of the final test we each had to go to the bottom in about 15 feet of water, take off all our scuba gear – mask, fins, tank, weight belt – go to the surface, take a couple of deep breaths, then go back down to the bottom and put all the gear on again.

Getting the gear off is fairly easy. The first challenge for me was getting back down to the bottom. The laws of physics say that fat floats, and I am a champion floater. I normally wore 10 pounds of lead weight around my waist just to get my butt under water. Without the weight belt, I really had to struggle to get to the bottom.

The next challenge was getting my mask on again. When you breathe air through a regulator under water you are normally wearing a mask over your eyes and nose. This creates a little pocket of air over your face that makes it a whole lot more comfortable to breathe. When I got back to my gear, I grabbed my weight belt, and reached for my regulator to get more air. At this point my lungs were screaming “breathe” but my brain was screaming “don’t breathe you fool, you’re under water, you’ll suck water up your nose”. I had to pinch my nose shut in order to breathe through my mouth. This left me only one hand to put my mask on. Once the mask was on, I had to clear the water out of it by pressing it against my forehead and exhaling through my nose until the air replaced the water.

I passed the test on the first try, thank goodness. It was hard, but it was good. I got my license to scuba dive and I spent many enjoyable hours exploring the reefs and ship wrecks around Bermuda. The best part of every dive was getting back in the boat with a deep feeling of accomplishment. I was a diver – and I lived to tell about it.

Losing weight isn’t easy either. It’s not easy to come home from a long day at work and get on the treadmill for 40 minutes, but walking off the stresses of the day is good. It’s not easy to watch other people in a restaurant order anything they want while I’m mentally counting calories and portion sizes, but it’s good to leave the restaurant feeling satisfied, but not stuffed, and it’s good to have a bag of leftovers to make a lunch for the next day, instead of having heartburn.

So next time you tell yourself you’re going to quit because it’s “just too hard” to lose weight, or get strong, or stay healthy, I want you to hear Tom Hanks telling you “It’s the hard that makes it good” and I want you to stay on the team.

I always end with a poem, but it’s going to be a short one today because the blog was so long.

By Edna St Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.