• Summer Cooking: Old Recipe Compilation

    Over the years I posted some easy recipes and now, when the City Market is brimming with fresh produce, is a good time to revisit a few of them. Some of the posts may look miss-formatted and Flickr stopped showing some of the photos when they took away their free photo hosting that used to come with the my internet service. If something is missing please let me know.

    Zucchini Caviar:

    Pickled Watermelon:

    Stuffed Bell Peppers:

    Eggplant Dip:

    Red Borscht:

    Green Borscht:

    Red and Green borscht recipes are vegetarian, and can be eaten refreshingly cold on a hot and sweaty day.

    Dill Pickles ( I have a fresh batch on my kitchen counter as I type this):

    Pickled Tomatoes:

    Roasted Bell Peppers with Garlic:

    Kompot (fruit drink):

    Eggplant salsa – caviar:

    Garlicky Eggplant Tomato Sandwiches:

    Marinated Leaf Lettuce:

    Pickled Jalapeños (new crop is coming in right now):

    And Honey-Marinated Bell Peppers :

    As always, these recipes may or may not be authentic, but that’s how I cook them so deal with it. I know of at least one person who tried a few of these and survived, and hope so will you.

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  • It’s that time of a month…

    … when I am eating red borscht again. Since my daughter is unlikely to inherit any money, this recipe is probably all she is going to get, so she can cook it for some unlucky schmuck who will get me for a father-in-law.

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  • Old Photos: Kansas City Gambling

    In 1939 Life Magazine published an article “America Gambling: Half of the nation made bets in 1938“. Kansas city was prominently featured as one of the most notorious gambling towns.

    Thousands play bingo at church-sponsored game at Jersey City Armory. By poll, more Americans risk money in church lotteries than any other form of gambling.
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  • Old Photos: Retouching The History

    The extent of the falsification of the official Soviet history is still mind-boggling many years after the USSR went extinct. “The Commissar Vanishes” by David King provides a small glimpse into the Soviet photo manipulation at the time when a Photoshop was an actual photo shop. In the years after the Revolution as the result of the Red Terror and later the Great Purge, the official history had to be corrected to reflect the destruction of millions of the “enemies of the people”. Many of them were prominent revolutionaries, frequently appearing next to Lenin and Stalin in the photographs. It was easier to get rid of a person than completely wipe out the record of their existence, but the Soviet people were persistent and came close to erasing all traces of the entire lives from the record. Some of the materials shown in the book survived only abroad. Even owning a photo could trigger a new way of arrests and murders.

    I copied a few photos from the book (I am pretty sure illegally) but it is available from the library so if the subject interests you, go ahead and rent it. I am not even going to list the people on the photos (I am sure you’ll recognize Stalin); what’s important is that each airbrushing or a crop represents death, labor camps, murder, lies and in many cases disappearance of the whole families, their friends, co-workers and sometimes neighbors.




    Here is another set:




    Do we engage in cleaning up history? The answer is: every day. Sometimes it’s innocent like omitting a distinguished employment at Domino’s, sometimes it’s more serious like erasing some unpleasant facts from a politician’s biography. Hopefully it will never come to this again:

    UPDATE: Emaw unleashed his Googling skills to find my own long-lost and retouched photo.

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  • Old Newspapers: Random Old Stuff

    I went to the library today with an idea to look up some articles about the streetcar battles of the olden days, and even though the article was there, the quality of the scan, or most likely the paper itself was not that great and I couldn’t easily make a readable copy. So I gave up on that idea, but the time was already wasted invested and I continued to ogle women scan the old papers.

    *all images should be more or less readable when clicked.

    Few clips are from 1882 and the rest of them are from the Kansas City papers from exactly 55 years ago, April 2, 1957.

    This ad shows some effort – both sides of the column spell the name of the subdivision.

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