Category: Ruth Schroader Curtas

Happy Thanksgiving – What a Year It Has Bean

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ELV note: Anyone who knows us, knows that Thanksgiving is our favorite day of the year.  It is a distinctly American holiday that, despite every retail and marketing effort to the contrary, has yet to be  co-opted by capitalism and bad taste. Thanksgiving is all about food, family and friends and that’s it. As much as we love the holiday, though, this year has been a tough one. Illness, death(s) in the family, a busted toe(!), and lots of angst over everything from politics to getting old — a year of false starts.

Still, there is much to be thankful for:

  •  I still have my eyesight.
  • I didn’t get any fatter in the last year, and may actually dropped a few pounds.
  • I’m more regular than a Swiss train.

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  • I took up golf again…and may be progressing past the “old man hacker” level.
  • I walk more in a day than most people do in a week.
  • Those funerals meant spending more time with my family — one of the ironies of growing old.
  • My kids and grand-kids are doing splendidly.
  • Making some new friends and continuing to enjoy many old ones.
  • I’m now drinking even more expensive wine — thanks to Mom and Dad.
  • My wife continues to grow more beautiful.
  • We’re cooking more and restauranting less. (It was time.)
  • Neither The Food Gal® nor I have lost our sense of adventure. We will not go gentle into that good night, and neither should you.
  • And finally, I’m thankful that, for the tenth year in a row, we will NOT be making a turkey. This year’s theme is Britsgiving: featuring a feast inspired by the countries from which the Pilgrims escaped and the foods they were fleeing. Pheasant and beef Wellington will be on the menu, plus Spotted Dick and a Stilton Cheese the size of my head. Turkey is for the birds.

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Regardless of the asperity sprinkled throughout the past months, Thanksgiving is a time to feast and remember all the good things, like “The World’s Greatest String Bean Recipe” — which we now publish for the 19th year in a row.  As usual, we do this by including not one, not two, but THREE recipes (from its origins in the 50s to an updated, more gastronomic version. Make them once, your Thanksgiving table will never again be without these sweet and sour luscious legumes.

And remember: satisfaction guaranteed or your money back!

Before we get to cookin’, you might like to tune in here, where, in 2010, we explore the origins of this essential T-Day feast.

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GRANDMA SCHROADER’S SOUR BEANS (KNPR Version)

1. Fry and crumble a pound of bacon….which is really more than you’ll need, but half of it will miraculously disappear as you complete the recipe.

2. Take one 10 oz. package of frozen, French cut green beans. Microwave them for a few minutes (drain) and put ‘em in a nice serving bowl.

3. Bring to a boil:
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp. of salt
1 chopped up onion

4. Now this is the hard part so pay attention…Pour everything over the beans and garnish with whatever bacon hasn’t miraculously disappeared from your kitchen counter.

5. Serve hot, cold or any temperature in-between.

GRANDMA SCHROADER’S SOUR BEANS  (Authentic, Straight from the 50s Recipe):

2 cans green beans
1/4 lb. Bacon

Fry and crumble bacon

Bring to a boil:
1/4 cup vinegar
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. Salt
chopped onion

pour over green beans
garnish with bacon

 My Slightly More Gastronomic(?) Recipe

Fry and crumble a pound of good pepper-crusted bacon – which is more than you’ll need, but half of it will have miraculously disappeared before you use it as a garnish.

Trim and french-cut 12 oz. of fresh green beans. Cook (steam or par boil without salt) until tender. Drain and  put them in a nice serving bowl.

While the beans are steaming or simmering or microwaving, bring to a boil 1/2 cup red wine vinegar, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon of salt and one medium chopped onion (chopped not too fine).

Now here’s the hard part so pay attention: after the sugar/vinegar/onion mixture has come to a full boil, pour the entire mixture over the cooked green beans and garnish with as much crumbled bacon as your cardiologist allows.

Serve hot, cold or any temperature in between. These beans co-exist wonderfully with any Thanksgiving dinner, and if you serve them once, you’ll serve them every year.

No matter which version you make, it is virtually idiot-proof, and won’t take you more than fifteen minutes. (Frying the bacon takes the longest and you can do that hours, or even days ahead. But good bacon is a must.)

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By now, you are probably besotted and bored by legumes. So we’ll beat it from beauteous beans soon enough pilgrim, but not before we refer you to one last homage to Phaseolus vulgaris– and reveal one final surprise.

As it turns out, neither Grandma Hazel Schroader, nor our mother, nor anyone related to the Schroader or Curtas clans had anything to do with Grandma Schroader’s Sour Beans. Turns out they came from a neighbor lady (Fran Kesler) who clipped out the recipe and gave it to our mother (Ruth Curtas) sometime in the late 50s while we were living on Via Venetia Avenue in Winter Park (Florida, not Colorado).

Ah the 50s….when cryptic recipes were clipped and shared across the back fence, to the sounds of kids getting dirty outdoors and moms mixing the martinis.

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No matter who invented them, Grandma Schroader’s Sour Beans is a recipe destined for your Thanksgiving table. They won’t taste the same this year without my mother telling me how I’ve done them wrong, but I’ll be serving them in her honor, nonetheless.

Happy Thanksgiving….and remember:

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments. – Samuel Johnson
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10 Years Ago

Image(June 27, 2012)

My little toe hurts. Really hurts. As in, when you put any pressure on the top of it (right behind the teensy tiny little toenail) it feels like an electric shock is shooting through my foot.

I don’t call it a “pinkie toe” because I’ve always hated the term — too infantile for something on a grown man’s body, no matter how negligible that body part may be.

I probably cracked a bone or pinched a nerve or bruised a muscle in this goddamn tiny appendage when I walked three miles in a new, too-tight pair of shoes six weeks ago. Been f**king me up ever since — forcing me to wear the loosest pair of shoes I own. Every day. Sooner or later I’ll see a doctor and they’ll tell me what’s wrong and I’ll get it fixed and I will no longer spend my waking/walking hours obsessing about my least significant appendage.

Three weeks ago, my mother died. Somewhat unexpectedly, it seems. If the label “dying unexpectedly” can be applied to a woman who was 97 years and 10 months old, you could pin in on the demise of Ruth Schroader Curtas. She was driving herself to her nail appointment and working in her garden the day before she tripped on a rug in her living room (she still lived alone) and fell, causing a hairline crack in her femur which had to be repaired. We all knew the surgery would be rough on her, but she came through it like a champ, and was sitting up in bed talking to my sisters the morning after. But she hated hospitals, and the stress got to her, and after eating lunch in her hospital bed she said she had to go to the bathroom, so as the nurses were helping her out of bed she fainted and that was that. No pain, no suffering, no extended misery for her or her family. At that point in her life she was like a fine antique of the most delicate spun glass — frail, tenuous, but holding fast — even as we knew her structural integrity could be threatened by the slightest breach. I hate thinking about her being in pain from a crack on her hip, but pain management is one thing modern doctors are good at, and she wasn’t in pain when she passed.

No pain, no prolonged hospital stay (she hated them), no death watch — the only better way would’ve been in her sleep at home, or if we had found her slumped in her beloved garden, trowel in hand, on a rainy day.

Six months ago, my mother-in-law died after a long, degenerative illness. Two years prior, my father-in-law passed away after a five year (losing) battle with Alzheimer’s. Neither one lived to see their 73rd birthday. Needless to say, the first six months of 2022 are ones The Food Gal® and I would like to forget.

My wife and I are all for supporting the guilt-assuaging functions on the neuro-muscular charity ball circuit, but from our first-person perch, the American medical establishment can give very little succor (much less answers) once the human body decides to decompose itself from the inside out. “We’re good at trauma,” a neurologist once told me, “after that we’re pretty much flying blind and guessing at what will work.” Yep…and making money off of other’s suffering.

Ten years ago, all of these lovely, caring people were alive and I was on top of the world. For a few years, it was my oyster. Literally. All of Las Vegas (and a good many great restaurants from Los Angeles to Paris) lay before me to be slurped and savored like a boundless orgy of great eating. After fifteen years devoted to writing about the Las Vegas food/restaurant scene, my phone was ringing, producers were calling, gigs were everywhere, and red carpets were being rolled out left and right. A front page article in the food section of the New York Times will do that for you (see above).

Even then though, I knew it wouldn’t last. Even then you could feel the internet tsunami about to dilute genuine human contact by exalting the superficial over the spiritual, Ten years ago we began glamorizing our internet representations of ourselves over the messy, complex reality of what it means to be alive.

But my in-laws, and even my mother, 25 years their senior, didn’t care about such things. They were old school, and even though all of them bought into the computer age (my mom actually used Google and e-mail quite a bit) they never let it define themselves and how they saw the world or the people they loved.

Thinking about them, I realize they may be the last of those who naturally and casually disregarded how this form of digital communication has cheapened our lives. They relied on good old analog phone calls, and person-to-person communication and the human touch to convey feelings. “I love my photo albums,” my mom told me a few weeks before she died. “I can’t imagine anyone getting the same warm feelings from looking a pictures on a computer screen that I get from going through their pages.”

Ten years ago, I remember looking through some of those albums with her. She was holding my hand while we turned the pages together. I’m not sure anyone holds their mother’s hand anymore while they swipe through pictures on a smartphone.

A decade ago, I knew none of this would last forever. But I thought/hoped we would be with each other, happy and healthy in our non-computerized worlds, for a little longer than our time turned out to be.

Ten years ago, a little part of me thought I was invincible and my toe didn’t hurt. I think it’s going to hurt for a long time now, no matter what the doctor does.

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