Happy St. Joseph's Day! Hickey's Kapusta Soup

I love Polish food.  Hell, I love food.  One of my favorite dishes at every Hickey gathering was my Aunt Aurelia's Kapusta. My Uncle Sylvester Hickey had the good sense to marry a Polish girl from over by St. Michael the Archangel on South Shore Drive.

Kapusta is a stew of bacon, Polish Sausage, onion, garlic, apples and sauerkraut.

I have been making a soup using the basic ingredients.

Here 'Tis,

1 1/2 lb Pork Shoulder (Mariano's)
1 lb. jar of excellent Polish Cracovia Sauerkraut ( Mariano's)
1 lb of Bobak's Polish Smoked Sausage (Mariano's) cut into thick chunks

1 large carrot diced small
1 medium onion diced small
2 stalks of cellery diced small

I thumb sized cut of brown sugar

1 500 ML Box of Bandit Pinot Grigiot ( Mariano's) :

Radiant and fresh, Bandit Pinot Grigio charms the senses with aromas of citrus, peach and pear followed by flavors of lemon and green apple. A splash of sweet is tempered by a tiny bit of tart, resulting in a vivacious wine that pairs perfectly with everything from delicate dishes to fiery fare.

Well, I dump over the meat and vegetables

1/3rd cup of brown apple cider vinegar

2 tablespoons of Smoked Paprika

1 tablespoon of dried ground sage

6-8 black peppercorns

I tablespoon of Kerry Gold butter - ( anywhere but Wisconsin)

Using the wonderful Hamilton Beach 5 quart slow cooking set on low - LOW

Place pork shoulder covered with mierpoix ( onion, carrots, celery), ground sage, the peppercorns, the thumb of brown sugar and pour the box of wine over all. Cook on low for ten hours. then shred the pork, removing anything feeling like a chunk of bone.

You can place the mixture in the icebox over night.

After a nice cool marinade in the ice box, set on High and return the vessel to the heating element.

Now, add the Cracovia Sauerkraut, the smoked paprika, as much crushed garlic as you like, the apple cider vinegar. Cook on high for two hours and then set to Low.  Add the butter and Bobak's Polish Sausage chunks and cook on low until you can no longer resist great aroma emanating from the bubbling cauldron - about an hour and a half.

Soups on!~

Serve with good Polish Rye bread.  Ten irlandzki bum umie gotować!

St. Joseph would elbow the balance of the Holy Family out of way to get at this, as nice a guy as he is.

The GOP Blows Off Its Own Toes . . .Yet, Again!

“The hedge fund guys are getting away with murder… The middle class are getting absolutely destroyed. This country won’t have a middle class soon.” — Donald Trump

"We've had people we've known our whole lives decide we're racist and white supremacist," said Suzanne Monk.

Resistance to President Donald Trump is cropping up in the most unlikeliest of places: the House GOP caucus.
At least four Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives, some of whom have been questioned, booed and heckled at recent town halls by their constituents, publicly called for Trump to release his tax returns in order to review for any potential conflicts of interest that pose a national security risk or violate the Constitution. Salon

The tassled-loafer wing-tip of the American Political Elite ( global statists, bent upon aiding in the creation of the American Banana Republic) is worn by the folks who helped create ObamaCare - the GOP ( 'go-along' and all Oligarchs profit).

• The likes of former U.S. Senator Marque Kirque of Illinois, who remained in U.S. Senator Dick Durbin's back pocket, in sickness and in health, for his entire senatorial tenure, comes to mind.

• Then there are Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham, the Uncle Cyp and Aunt Sap, of Nation-building Endless Warfare.

• The Womens Media Team of Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins always ready to hot-foot the end of Roe v. Wade.

If they are talking on CNN and MSNBC, it means that they are on the job for the elites.

Let us not forget that the GOP was always friendly to abortion, prior to Nixon.

From Nixon using abortion legislation to strategically woo Catholics to lobbyists deliberately linking family planning to abortion in the '90s, the Republican long game to court a new voter base was nothing if not effective. Today, it's almost impossible to be a pro-choice Republican running for any major political office. And across the country, state-level efforts to restrict abortion access are powering forward: in Texas, the number of abortion providers dropped from 40 to eight in a little over a year.
Though reproductive rights seem to be disappearing before our eyes, the secret Republican history of Planned Parenthood tells a different story—namely that it doesn't have to be this way, because it hasn't always been.

This toxic love affair between WASP delicacy where unwelcomed babies made manicured finger-tips touch shamed pink cheeks, so too the blush of profitable partnership with the radical Progressives (ACLU) and Neo-Cons:

Yet the triumph of neoconservatism was hardly permanent or complete. The administration so far has not adopted neocon arguments to push for regime change in North Korea and Iran. Bush has cooled on the "axis of evil" talk and has launched negotiations with the regime in North Korea. The president has also established friendlier relations with Communist China than many neocons would like, and he launched a high-profile effort to promote a "road map" for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that most neocons (correctly) predicted would lead nowhere.
"Neocons Are Liberals Who Have Been Mugged by Reality"
No longer true. Original neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol, who memorably defined neocons as liberals who'd been "mugged by reality," were (and still are) in favor of welfare benefits, racial equality, and many other liberal tenets. But they were driven rightward by the excesses of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when crime was increasing in the United States, the Soviet Union was gaining ground in the Cold War, and the dominant wing of the Democratic Party was unwilling to get tough on either problem.
A few neocons, like philosopher Sidney Hook or Kristol himself, had once been Marxists or Trotskyites. Most, like former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, simply had been hawkish Democrats who became disenchanted with their party as it drifted further left in the 1970s. Many neocons, such as Richard Perle, originally rallied around Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democratic senator who led the opposition to the Nixon-Ford policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Following the 1980 election, U.S. President Ronald Reagan became the new standard bearer of the neoconservative cause.

Abortion, Civil Liberties When Acceptable to the Elite, and Nation Building are the global initiatives are meat and global warming, gay triumphalism, class and race warfare the gravy of the elitism defeated by Middle America in November 2017.

The GOP and Progressive Democrats hate Trump with equally bilious malice.


Here in Illinois, the radical Progressive Democrat Party runs everything with the help of Illionois GOP.   Had they not, Dan Proft might be our Governor.  Make no mistake. A Governor Rauner is the the twin of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.  Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin dip from the same dish.

President Trump was not my first, or my fifth choice for President, but I have come to appreciate his genuine concern for Helot America.

The GOP is the Party that blows off its own toes, when the elites are threatened. They are threatened.

President Trump looks better to me every news cast and with each fold of the page.

South Side St. Paddy Parade is Looming and a Pot of Slumgullion is Just the Thing

slum·gul·lion(ˌsləmˈɡəlyən)
noun: USinformal
noun: slumgullion
cheap or insubstantial stew.

Insubstantial?  My broad manly rump, Hombre!  Who is writing these WEB definitions?

Before I bolt the hood, exchanging the shouting and bag piping of the annual South Side St. Paddy's Day Parade, for lowing of black and white dairy cattle in Dodgeville, Wisconsin ( home to best Cornish pasties that side of Bridgeport) and the expected dusting of March snow, I shall pot up a mess of slumgullion.

Slumgullion is the food of the working people who built America!  Not Howard Zinn activists and trust funded hair-shirts of the 21st Century American History textbooks, but the real people, former slaves, black, white, brown, yellow and tawny.  They are Edna Ferber's Midwestern Jews, Bohemian, Alsatian immigrants; they are John Dos Passos' Portuguese, Irish, WASP, and Begian adventurers; They are Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas and James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan.  They are slumgullion eaters.

Slumgullion is a varietal staple that can include Chinese five spices, Mexican cumino, Japanese ginger, Hungarian smoked paprika, or just salt and black paper.

You need a cauldron, Dutch oven, iron pot or slow cooker of some volume.

Beef and Pork are the usual cuts of meat, but chicken, squirrel, turtle, or fish will work as well.

Root vegetables, or macaroni, pasta, rice or noodles will add substance to savories.

Here is my offering today.

                                               Pat Hickey Slumgullion

two lbs - of chuck cut like Fajitas dredged in three good tablespoon of flour, smoked paprika and cilantro

One 1/2 cup of Mire Poix( celery,onion and carrots)

Five medium potatoes peeled - I use three Golden Yellow and two Russets

Five sprigs of Rosemary and five sprigs of thyme

One 16 oz. Can of Crushed Tomatoes and one small can of tomato paste

Two long dashes of Worcestershire sauce

A pinch of crushed Red pepper flakes

One five quart Hamilton Beach slow cooker

One skillet with three tablespoons of Olive Oil

Methode: À la manière de Hickey

In a large plastic bag add flour, smoked paprika and cilantro; Mix well and add the beef and roll it , bounce and knead the hell out of it  and let sit for about ten minutes.

Add beef to the skillet and brown it.  When good and brown make room for the mire poix and saute and them blend all together, Cook until all vegetables are tender-ish

Peel and coarsely cut five potatoes and place them in the bottom of the slow cooker.

Pour meat and mire poix mixture over the spuds.

Add 16 oz. can of crushed tomatoes and then the tomato paste and mix them together over the meat and spud.

Squirt five dashes of Worchester and sprinkle crushed red peppers over the tomatoes

Layer rosemary and thyme sprigs and mushrooms on top.

Cook on low for twelve to 24 hours. This will be ready to put in the ice box when I return from Wisconsin Sunday night and then Hold the Phone all week!

Serve with Pat Hickey Cornbread - Preheat oven to 425 degrees

2 cups of Aunt Jemima Corn Meal
one Jumbo egg
one can of creamed corn
2/3 cup of milk
two tablespoons of sugar
one tablespoon of good vanilla extra

Mix it all with a fork

Pour contents into a pie tin or cast iron skillet and drizzle honey over the mixture

Bake for 25-28 minutes.


This is perfect for the snowy weather expected next week.  I'll be eating it up to Friday next.  Then eggs, mushrooms, spinach, peppers and Giardinara.

The Problem of the Chicago Voter Outside of the Ensorcelled Circle

Imagine if a Mayor of Chicago, had at one time been a civil engineer and actually read Mary Wisniewski's fine piece of reporting in the editorially awful Chicago Tribune - all crap that Rahm approves.  Too bad a Mayor is not a civil engineer by trade . . . Oh, that's right . . .one (Ed Kelly) was but that was long before Ms.Wiszniewski wrote about crumbling bridges.

Instead, we live in a politics and policy driven Progressive, global, Banana Republic. This is a malicious make-believe palace, a fairy tale world where magical things can happen for an Oh, so very few, including an eight year stay in the White House for a very special lad, or where a little guy can sit on another little guy's lap and tell him that he too dreams of being Mayor.

It is a place where big dreams count as nothing and fortunes trump virtue.

It is a tight ensorcelled circle that welcomes only the approved - the businesses, the banks, the law firms, the real estate wizards, the University and 501(c)3 public policy tax vacuums and the very few people enchanted for windfalls.

Outside of the ensorcelled circle only those with an immediate connection to the source of gold some few benefit with multiple pensions, Shakman exempt appointments, or sinecures beyond  of the vision of  everyone else.

That leaves out millions of Chicagoans and many more Cook County residents.

Outside of the ensorcelled circle people make due, beef about water bills, tax increases, burgeoning crimes against person and property, horrific public schools and worse public servants.

Yet, these same put-upon people vote the ticket every election and every time.

Gun Violence and Police Misconduct keep every eye on flaccid media writers like Eric Zorn, Neil Steinberg, Stephen Chapman and Mary Schmich, or smarmy echo-chamber Orwellians on WBEZ, or WTTW.

Chicagoans nod, sigh and wait for the Cubbies. Sadly band wagon south siders feel a tingle in the thighs over the baby bear and forget 2005 as a time past. Same goes with political villainy.  Chicagoans are too nice by half.

They scratch their heads about

• Forrest Claypool's latest six figure job and pension package
• Suzanne Mendoza's leap from Herbie Pulgar to the Comptoller's chair
• Pat Quinn
• Proco Joe
• Toni Preckwinkle
• Mike Quigley
• Jan Schakowsky

And think nothing about putting an " I'm With Rahm" sign on the their lawns

Chicagoans will always do a neighbor a solid; even if the neighbor works against every fundmental core value you have, makes a ton of money and pension for following orders.

The only thing necessary for the perpetuation of evil in Cook County is for good people to do a solid for Frannie, Billy, Tommy, or any other knucklehead with a government gig.

It is one thing to break wind in the bath tub; it is another thing altogether to bite the bubbles.