Lulu: Food and Einstein

Crock-pot Rigatoni

Makes 10 servings

28-oz. jar spaghetti sauce

12-oz. rigatoni, cooked

1-1 ½ lbs. ground beef, browned

3 C shredded mozzarella cheese

½ lb. pepperoni slices

sliced mushrooms, optional

sliced onions, optional

1. In 4-quart slow cooker, layer half of each ingredient in order listed. Repeat.
2. Cover. Cook on Low 4 to 5 hours.

Variation: Use 1-lb. ground beef and 1-lb. sausage.

Beans & Rice

Makes 8-10 servings

1-lb. pkg. dried red beans

water

salt pork, ham hocks, or sausage, cut into small chunks

2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. pepper

3-4 C water

6-oz. can tomato paste

8-oz. can tomato sauce

4 garlic cloves, minced

1. Soak beans for 8 hours. Drain. Discard soaking water.
2. Mix together all ingredients in slow cooker.
3. Cover. Cook on Low 10-12 hours, or until beans are soft. Serve over rice.

Variation: Use canned red kidney beans. Cook 1 hour on High, then 3 hours on Low.

Note: These beans freeze well.

Dorothea’s Slow-Cooker Chili

Serves 6-8

1-lb. ground beef

1-lb. bulk pork sausage

1 large onion, chopped

1 large green pepper, chopped

2-3 ribs celery, chopped

2 15 ½-oz. cans kidney beans

29-oz. can tomato puree

6-oz. can tomato paste

2 Tbsp. chili powder

2 tsp. salt

1. Brown ground beef and sausage in skillet. Drain.
2. Combine all ingredients in slow cooker.
3. Cover. Cook on Low 8-10 hours.

Variations: For extra flavor, add 1 tsp. cayenne pepper.

For more zest, use mild or hot Italian sausage instead of regular pork sausage. Top individual servings with shredded sharp cheddar cheese.

These are the recipes I was going to try from the crock-pot cookbook. I think the Dorothea one is hilariously named. I only wanted to try it because of the name and its few ingredients. I only tried the Rigatoni (which was REALLY good!!) , because Phill's mom came to visit (from England, no less) and made meals every day! In fact, we had so much left over each time that we were able to freeze NINE meals for this week. Absolutely perfect for our moving week.

On another non-food-related (however, book-related) note, I'm reading a book I picked up in the book section at Wal-Mart. I just thought it looked really big and great, but I read the first few sentences and then decided I definitely wanted to read it. It's called Einstein: His Life and Universe (by Walter Isaacson). Hasn't someone mentioned this author? Or this book, even? Anyway, I'm really enjoying it. I'm reading it kind of slowly, but the writing is beautiful and I'm pretty intrigued by Einstein. There are a few things from it that I had to share, because they were just so beautifully worded, not to mention that the ideas expressed are beautiful, too.

"His success came from questioning conventional wisdom, challenging authority, and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals. Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society. 'It is important to foster individuality,' he said, 'for only the individual can produce the new ideas.' This outlook made Einstein a rebel with a reverence for the harmony of nature, one who had just the right blend of imagination and wisdom to transform our understanding of the universe. These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the twentieth century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age."

And I found this particularly adorable and interesting. He had a hard time with early language development, and the author says "Whenever had had something to say, he would try it out on himself, whispering it softly until it sounded good enough to pronounce aloud." I find that so interesting because it kind of is a pre-cursor to how he later came up with his theories. He used "thought experiments", which essentially means he thought things out, as opposed to real experiments. But he learned through this method. He learned using his imagination. He thought things out until they were right in his head, and then he verbalized. In the beginning, different characters are described, different characters in his life, and it becomes evident that many of these colleagues could have also come up with the theory of relativity that was so defining to Einstein's life. But the more I read about what kind of person he was, the more I'm convinced that he was meant to be the one who brought about that theory (and other earth-shaking ones). In fact, this sums it up really well:

" 'When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstances,' Einstein once explained. 'The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have.' " I just don't think that was happenstance, coincidence, luck...it's very much on purpose, this life, these people who shape our history and cause us to think in ways we aren't accustomed to.