Got an actual 6 hours of sleep, and I can breathe most of the time.
We’re gaining on it!
Doing much better today.
by CJ | Mar 21, 2015 | Journal | 27 comments
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glad you’re feeling better !
Now, the objective is for Jane NOT to get it. You don’t need the tag-team action.
You got it!
Better in tandem than simultaneous!
Hope you’re both still feeling better!
Just less than two weeks until Tracker is released, hardbound, ebook, and audiobook. Yippee!
Hmm…. I bought smoked sausage. Somehow did not see “Jalapeño and Cheese” on the label, despite that it’s in the same point size as “Smoked Sausage.” So…I will only use about half in that pot of beans and sausage I was thinking of! (I am not a chili head. We’ll see how spicy it is. Heh.)
Use it for Portuguese Bean Soup. I will post the recipe on demand 😀
I could be dmanding. 😉 Bean soup sounds good. That was where I was heading for anyway. Haven’t made it yet.
Good news: the sausage is not as hot and spicy as I’d thought. (Sampled some. Was expecting to dive for tea. Didn’t have to. This is good. But a pepper fan might like it hotter than I do.) So this will go fine with beans and any veggies added.
I’d be interested in the soup, too.
Portuguese Bean Soup — nice for cool weather, and freezes well too!
The day before: Soak a 12 oz. bag of beans for at least 12 hours in enough water to cover, changing 1-2 times. Small red or pink beans, navy beans, small lima beans, great Northern beans, all work well. I do not recommend pintos.
Broth: Simmer until the meat and skin is falling off the bone a ham bone (with plenty of remaining ham on it), or 2 smoked ham hocks. I usually augment with whatever drippings I have saved from the last time I made ham, the overdone bits, the tough skin… you get the idea. Pull out the bones and any cartilage and skin, but chop up the meat roughly and put it back into the pot. You should have at least a quart, maybe 2 of broth.
Put the soaked and drained beans into the pot and set it to simmer.
Cube and add to the pot (all these measurements are approximations, and may be altered):
3 carrots. about 1 c.
3 stalks of celery, about 1 c.
1 medium onion (CJ, you can omit this and it won’t suffer)
1 medium potato, peeled
1 14 oz. can of diced tomatoes
a 5 oz. smoked sausage. I used andouille sausage on the mainland, when I couldn’t get Portuguese sausage, but any firm sausage in a casing will probably be okay. YMMV.
Seasonings to taste. I add garlic, but again, omit if necessary. I also put in 1 packet (about a tsp.) of the red pepper flakes from Pizza Hut delivery 🙂
Let simmer for a couple of hours until the beans are soft, stirring occasionally, and adding water if needed. Eat with crusty bread, or just slurp it straight. Also very good as a base if you keep a pot of soup going on the back burner or crockpot.
That sounds…mmmm…. — And it has me in the mood for ham, too.
For some reason, I have the urge to add a bell pepper, another carrot, and maybe 1/2 tsp. each curry power, dried basil, and dried parsley to that — or does that sound like it’s straying too far away? (Hmm, I think I’d better do the recipe as given, then experiment on a second run.)
Portuguese sausage: Chorizo? I can get chorizo and andouille here, as well as Texas-made sausage. There are advantages to being near both Louisiana and Mexico!
It looks like a lot of soup for me. I may give some away, freeze it, or halve the recipe.
I need to look in my recipes. I think another fan here on the blog had given a bean soup recipe a while back. I need to wrangle some of these into my recipe files proper.
¡Muchas gracias! (Spanish, because I don’t speak Portuguese.) — Thanks, Chondrite! Good stuff!
I don’t think your spice amendments will change it too far. I would recommend using a sausage that will stay in chunks when you cut it up; chorizo, AFAIK, tends to crumble rather than stay in discrete pieces. It’s also very easy to make a half batch, just use only 1 ham hock and reduce everything else proportionally, the main thing you want is to make the base broth sufficiently rich that it will not wimp out with everything else.
“Obrigado” for a man speaking, “obrigada” for a woman. =[I am] obliged, which is why the suffix reflects the gender of the speaker. And that exhausts my knowledge of Portuguese.
Puxe – pronounced “POOH-shay”, means “pull”. Confused the heck out of me first time I saw it on a door in Rio de Janeiro…..my friend who lives there told me how to pronounce it, but didn’t tell me what it meant…so hearing “push”, I tried… LOL.
Thanks, Walt. Why didn’t I think of “Obrigado”? I know I’ve heard that before, and it’s cognate to obligado (Spanish) and obligato (Italian). Hmm, participial and adjectival / adverbial form agreeing with the speaker’s / subject’s gender, that makes sense in Latinate languages. (The full sentence would be (In Spanish), «(Estoy) (mucho) obligado.» = I am + much/very + obliged (masculine). Muy (very) would also be correct there, substituted for mucho. (One is technically more an adjective, the other an adverb, but they have shades of meaning too.)
French does something odd with its past participle agreement, which I see I need to review. There’s a situation when one uses the form of être, to be, plus the past participle of the verb, when it must agree with the direct object, if my memory is correct. French has some verbs with avoir, to have, and some verbs with être, to be, in its passé composé (compound past, finite/perfect). The forms with avoir have the past participle agree with the subject, which is normal. The forms with être, if I remember right, have the past participle agree with the direct object. Either way, they have to agree in number and grammatical gender (not natural gender). If that sounds very fussy, just be glad we don’t still do it in English, which used to do so.
—–
Puxe, eh? — To further confuse things, in French, “pousser” is also to push, and sounds like “pooh-SAY”. And yes, there’s usually schoolkids laughing about certain verb forms in French and Spanish. :: rolls eyes :: Poder, for instance.
Older Spanish used to have X as a sh sound, and some words still use that. (So does Basque.)
“Puxe” would have probably had me “Push” the door instead of Pull it. … Nuts, now I need to look up French for “to pull.” It’s not poulet, which is a chicken (think of a pullet, which is what it became in English, from the Norman French period). Pouler? Pouloir? Ce n’est pas le mot juste. Il faut les recherches. Ne pas «jeter», that’s to throw. Hmm.
To pull –> tirer, a plain old French verb I should’ve thought of. So my French is still rusty in places and shiny in others. Tirer has other connotations, of course. It’s seldom a one-on-one correspondence.
I wish there was another language as close to English as Portuguese is to Spanish, which seem to be mutually intelligible in face-to-face conversation where gaps can be negotiated on the fly. From what can judge, comprehension is pretty good up to a point, when it … isn’t.
I was once at an international conference, which offered simultaneous translation in English, French and Spanish. Most of us dutifully wore our little headsets and spoke one of the ‘official’ languages, but the delegates from Portugal, Brazil and the former Portuguese colonies in Africa either spoke Portuguese or got excited, lost their Spanish and reverted to Portuguese.
The translators tried, bless them, and generally did pretty well. But every so often there would be a gap during a joke or colloquialism when the poor person would confess, “I’m sorry, this is too Portuguese”
The Dutch dialect that is supposed to be English’s closest relative is nowhere near that close.
Interesting. I’d never heard that English and Dutch were closely related – from the Dutch perspective it’s German that’s closest, IIRC specifically the ‘Low German’ dialect, which is logical as it’s geographically the nearest. The relationship between Dutch and German is probably similar to that between Spanish and Portuguese; if you know one you can guess quite a lot of the other – and make really foolish mistakes too, when similar-sounding words have a very different meaning! I don’t know this about Spanish and Portuguese as I have no more than a few words of Spanish, but Dutch and German equivalences contain quite a few very egregious traps for the unwary.
I’ve been (almost) bilingual since I was eight, so it’s hard for me to guess the difficulty for someone who knows only one of these languages, Dutch or English, to comprehend the other, but I don’t think it would be very easy. Knowing both English and French would make it a bit easier to guess some of the other language’s words (in both directions), and knowing German would make it a lot easier.
Hmm, I wonder why these two pairs of closely-related languages are so much more closely related than other European languages? Did they split off more recently, or was there much more contact between them than is the case with other languages? Were the Iberian languages a bit more isolated from the rest of Europe, what with the Pyrenees, and stuck together? Was all the trade between Holland and Germany (the Hanseatic League etc.) keeping the languages closer and preventing them drifting apart?
Well, when I took Comparative Linguistics, we talked a lot about Old High Norse, which I think they have renamed and subdivided. Northern German came from one group—Dutch seems closer to old Frankish, from around Cologne westward into France and Belgium…They’ve worked out a lot more than we were able to back several decades ago. Here’s a neat chart explaining what was where. I love Old Gutnish. I’d never heard of that one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_language
I remember a documentary Robert MacNeil, from the Newshour, himself Nova Scotian ISTR, did on the English language that said it was closest to the Frisian dialect. It still has a basically Germanic grammar with some Norman French vocabulary gloss.
I’ve always thought Churchill’s rail a good example of that. I believe it was on the floor of Commons when he was admonished for ending a sentence with a preposition, he said, “That is the sort of nonsense up with which I shall not put!” Good enough Germanic sentence structure. 😉
Hmmmmm, I was late this month. Guess I’ll get a jump on next month…
English, Frisian (Friesian), Dutch, and German are all from “Western Germanic,” which split off from “Common Germanic”.
English and Friesian are nominally closest, and both are very close to Dutch, then next-closest to German, and then to the other Germanic languages. The Scandinavian languages (Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish) are related to Old Norse, the Vikings and the various Danish groups mentioned in Beowulf. The Vikings and Danes raided and colonized enough in Saxon and later Norman England to leave important traces in English vocabulary and a few in grammar, being distant cousins.
Dutch and German stayed close to each other, so there was contact back and forth, again between language cousins. Dutch also took in a good bit of French from close contact, but in a very different way than did English.
English got very hybridized, a fusion, a pidgin or lingua franca between the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman French, and then layered educated Latin from both sides. English (and Gothic in the east) were two of the earliest Germanic languages to gain the Latin and Greek alphabets, from Roman trade and military and later Christian missionary contacts.
So there are similarities in the written and spoken forms, but because of historical movements of populations, conquests, and so on, things get jumbled instead of being straightforward. There’s the isolation of the English Channel as a barrier to keeping close contact between the languages, and the heavy blending from an already changing Old English with the Norman invaders’ brand of French, before settlement and politics and marriages meant that the Norman Conquerors … became assimilated by the people they’d conquered, as much as the other way around. An oddity in how those things work. (Though I guess what happend with the Gauls and Latins mixing, then mixing again with Franks, to created what became the French provinces (and more than one language) would be similar to what happened with English.)
So there are things that would sound or read very, very similar to me, between my native American English and Dutch and German, but many others that either are false cognates, traps in words whose meanings have changed more, or things that simply disappeared on one side or another, so that we wouldn’t guess what they were, without knowing the languages or past history.
Dutch spellling: It looks odd to me, but it has its patterns, and would become familiar. Between English and French and a little bit of German, I can make out a little of Dutch. I’m not sure how much spoken Dutch I could get, without a long time immersed in it.
I speak Spanish, not as well as French and non-natively. I can look at written Portuguese and hear spoken Portuguese, and between Spanish and French, I can make out some of Portuguese, but to me, it is harder to guess at either the spoken or written forms than it s to guess at spoken or written Italian. That seems strange to me, but it’s how I perceive it. Spanish and Portuguese, and Catalunyan and a few other languages around southern France and Switzerland, all had varying amounts of neighboring contact, political ties in history, and so on. So they had a little overlap. But they were also often fiercely independent. so it gets “Complicated.”
Contrast Europe’s many, many languages with the United States, nearly entirely a single language because of colonization and conquest, and the American hubris about not studying other languages, and you get a very different situation. Even though I’ve studied languages and love it, I haven’t been to Europe, and I am sure I’d be amazed by the multiple languages. … And it’s common for Europeans to be more fluent in more languages than I am, as an American who’s studied. — The closest here would be in immigrant or ethnic neighborhoods in big trade cities like mine, I guess, where there’s more of a mix of languages from all over. … And yet that pales in comparison to the language mix in India. Wow!
I’ve heard varying answers from Spanish speakers and Brazilian Portuguese speakers about how well they can understand each other.
But I would think that English and Dutch, say, despite being linguistic first cousins, are slightly more difficult for mutual intelligibility than are Spanish and Portuguese. Still, I can make out a few things from Dutch text or speech, and if I’d study it, or get immersed, I’d pick up more on the similarities. You begin to pick up the patterns and what’s more versus less alike, as you go.
— But I wonder how long it would take, if I were plunked down in China, since I don’t know the language at all, or Japan, where I barely know anything from a little looking at study materials. Or Cherokee, for instance. It would take quite a while to build up from the most basic bits, and it would depend on access to bilingual study materials or tutors.
I did not really pick up much of any Russian, when I was looking into the accent for my audio voice role. But I picked up clues. I still intend to try it so I can pick up a little, especially if I ever have to say anything for any future roles. Besides, it’s just good to know these things. Never know when it’ll come in handy. And it’s fascinating, besides.
My cat says I need to pay attention to him, not the web. Guess I should listen! 😀
@BCS: Regarding Frisian: its spelling is quite different, often making it harder to guess. For instance, the Dutch name for the language is Fries, but in the language itself it becomes Frysk (all with the same i-sound as in Frisian) , and the Frisian landscape = het Friese landschap = it Fryske gea.
As it was mostly a spoken language for a long time, I think they’re honestly trying to write the vowels the way people say them, instead of following a historically-derived convention. This leads to a lot of diphtongs and some consonant-combinations (like Lj) which look strange to Dutch eyes. I don’t live in the province, nor do I speak the language, so that’s all I know about it.
I hate dipthongs in English! One never knows quite how to pronounce them. It’s pretty easy in German, just pronounce the second. Of course, here in the PNW we have a forest products company, Weyerhaeuser, that nobody pronounces correctly (more like -hoyser).
Here’s an interesting thought. I had a prof once that claimed that part of the reason that English spelling is so strange [besides the issue of us inheriting the pronunciation from one of the four major dialects in English during Tudor times but the spelling from another of the dialects], was that our orthography was influenced by people who didn’t actually speak the language. The story was that since printing in England was heavily taxed and censored, (the Tudor’s had a pretty effective police state going on) much early English printing was done, for financial or political reasons in Belgium / the Netherlands. Since orthography only starts to settle down when people begin to read print sources, not manuscript, printers who couldn’t really proof their work supposedly had an impact.
I only heard this tale in a lecture and haven’t run across verification in any other source, but it’s a neat idea.
He may have had a leg to stand on. The first printed Bibles in English translation, John Wycliffe. William Tyndale, et al., were printed on the continent and smuggled in.
I shared a tour bus with a Dutch family for about four days and I could occasionally understand just some of what they were saying, but I think it would be hard to learn to pronounce: at least a long and careful study. My family is strongly Dutch, but I think the last Dutch speaker would have been about in the 1700’s. They were Vandeventers (originally van de Venter) all the way to my grandfather, but they had begun to name kids according to the English pattern by the 1700’s. They weren’t the only Dutch family that had settled in south central Oklahoma, though. My Vandeventers used to complain about the two sisters on the telephone party line who would start their conversations in English and whenever they got to the good part of the gossip, would switch into Dutch, frustrating everybody else on the party line. 😉 I remember them from my childhood.
The main source of English spelling oddities is that the Norman French tried to spell Saxon English words the way they sounded to Norman ears at the time. What eventually developed was a mutt, a hybrid. Then English vowels and a few consonants underwent a seismic shift around Shakespeare’s and King James’ time, which further changed things. Even though spelling wouldn’t be standardized until the very late and early 19th century, it stayed more or less as it was in the 1600’s.
I can partially believe the claim about Dutch printers, except — The English traded with the Dutch and imported Dutch typefaces / fonts and printing presses, besides the English built their own during the period. The English also had contacts with German and Italian printers early on. (Alcuin was actually Alcwinne, an Englishman.) Some early English printers and typecutters had studied from the Dutch. There was important international and sea trade between the two countries.
So several of England’s early printers were strongly influenced by Dutch types (fonts). Some English type was imported from Dutch type foundries. But England quickly had people creating their own English types, albeit often modeled on Dutch types, and both tried to outdo each other for quality, and still traded back and forth.
Even into the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, William Caslon’s type and John Baskerville’s type, both very English, were still influenced by Dutch models and somewhat less by Italian models. For that matter, even the London Times newspaper’s Times Roman was influenced by Dutch historical models in the early/mid 1900’s.
Er, and that leaves out the great influence of Claude Garamond’s French type and several Italian types that came from their first printers, modeled after Italian Renaissance calligraphy.
But those are the major ancestors of all the “Roman” and “Italic” types we have today. I hadn’t really considered, but the Dutch influence on English typography was considerable, even though the English began innovating too, as soon as they got their hands on the technology. English pritners made important refinements to printing technology. (John Baskerville particularly. He got very picky about it and refined everything about the printing process and technologies of the time, not just the typeface that bears his name, but paper, ink, engraving and lithography refinements.) Not that he was the only one, and not that England was the only country doing that. — I don’t know enough about the German and Swiss contributions, but they were important, and the Americans got into the act in a big way, all three countries, throughout the 20th century.
Oops, talking shop, type history buff here.