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Rick's Second Favorite Food

         The Smashwords Winter/Summer sale continues until July 31. Obtain a free copy of Death of a Foster Child by clicking here

Rick's Second Favorite Food  

          Rick Podowski and The Hefty Trio are four overweight high school English teachers who solve mysteries. Each of the five books in the series contain a mystery and the main characters eat Polish, Irish, Italian and Mexican food paired with botique wines from the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

              Everyone knows that whenever Rick Podowski enters a donut shop, he is overwhelmed by the delicious odors and the sheer varieties of this great food.  However, what is less commonly known is that Rick's second favorite snack originated in Poland.  The origin of the bagel is up for debate, although it seems clear that it first took a foothold in Poland.  Bagels were first mentioned in a list of community regulations published in Krakow, in 1610 that stipulate that bagels are to be given to pregnant women.  Another story says that the bagel originated in 1863 when a baker from Vienna created them, fashioned in the form of a stirrup, as a gift to King Jan Sobieski of Poland to commemorate the King's victory over the Turks that year.  The fact that the bagel is not perfectly circular makes a case for the theory that it's name derives from beugal the word for stirrup in French.

             There are four steps in the process of enjoying a bagel.  First go to your closest bagel shop and immerse yourself in the colors, shapes, and the smells of the bagels.  Next, go over to the glass case at the counter and examine each row of delights.  Bask in the patterns formed by scattered onions.  Admire the coloring of the asiago cheese.  Examine the light yellow tint of the egg bagels and compare their color to the darkness of the pumpernickel, and rye.  Smell the power of the garlic and contrast it with the sweetness of the cinnamon sugar.  Take the time to enjoy the entire ambiance.

               Next, order coffee.  Never use a Styrofoam cup.  Find a bagel shop that has paper cups or bring your own.  Pour the coffee into the cup and add cream.  Under no circumstances should you use a flavored creamer.

               Finally, take care to choose just the right bagel.  Get in touch with your inner self.  Do you feel downtrodden and need a high?  In this case pick cinnamon sugar, raisin or blueberry.  Perhaps you feel the need for some substantial food.  In that case, pick an onion, garlic, pumpernickel, or rye.  If you feel sophisticated, you might try an asiago cheese or another specialty.  After you pick your bagel, have it toasted.

               Step four involves selecting the cream cheese.  Plain old cream cheese allows you to experience the full flavor of the bagel.  However, fruit and nut cream cheeses like blueberry, strawberry, maple raisin walnut or honey almond are acceptable.  Also, acceptable are the more powerful mixtures like garlic, onion, and jalapeno.  In my opinion, smoked salmon constitutes a special treat. 

             

     

               Step five is the culmination of the entire experience.  Sit at a table.  Take a sip of coffee as a prelude to the ultimate experience of actually biting into the bagel and letting it melt in your mouth.  Close your eyes to intensify the experience.  Continue this process until you finish.

                You are now ready to face the world!

Mexican Bread Pudding (Capirotada)

The recipe below can be found in Death in the Science Classroom. 

 
The Smashwords Summer/Winter sale is through July.  Get your free copy of Death of a Foster Child by clicking here.

This book explores a tragedy resulting from a teacher being falsely accused. Rick Podowski, the head grievance representative for the teacher’s union enters the science lab and finds the body of the teacher hanging by a braided rope from the metal frame of the overhead florescent light fixture.

As Rick and his friends investigate, they find Dan Longreen's secret. He has been charged with sexual misconduct concerning three young girls in his Las Vegas classroom. Even though proven innocent, a small group of parents forced his resignation. He accepts a job in San Jose, California, and is creating a new life. Suddenly, he starts to receive threatening emails and there are questions about his death.

Did someone stage the suicide? Was the principal putting extreme pressure on Dan to resign to protect his forthcoming promotion or was the suicide related to Longreen's fiancée?

Capirotada

Capirotada is Mexican bread pudding traditionally served at Lent, but it's delicious at any time during the year.   It can be served with a late harvest Zinfandel. 

Serves 8

10 tablespoons (1-1/4 sticks) unsalted butter

1/4 cup vegetable oil

16 3x2x1/2-inch slices French bread from about three 6 to 7-inch-long French rolls

2 cups (packed) dark brown sugar

1-1/2 cups water

3 cinnamon sticks

1/2 cup raisins

3/4 cup pecans

4 ounces mild cheddar cheese thinly sliced, room temperature

sour cream (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 F. Melt 4 tablespoons butter in small saucepan over medium-low heat. Whisk in corn oil. Brush large rimmed baking sheet with some of butter mixture. Arrange bread slices on sheet. Brush bread generously with remaining butter mixture.

Bake bread slices 10 minutes; turn slices over and bake until golden and crisp, about 5 minutes longer. Cool. Arrange bread in 15x10x2-inch glass baking dish. Maintain oven temperature.

Bring brown sugar, 1-1/2 cups water, cinnamon sticks, and 6 tablespoons butter to boil in medium saucepan, stirring until sugar dissolves. Boil until syrup is reduced to 2 cups, stirring occasionally, about 15 minutes.

Gradually pour warm syrup over bread slices, allowing some of syrup to be absorbed before adding more. Sprinkle raisins and pecans over. Cover dish with foil and bake until bread is slightly softened and syrup is bubbling, about 25 minutes. 

Place 2 bread slices on each plate; spoon some of syrup, raisins, and nuts over. Top each with cheddar cheese. Serve with sour cream if desired.

Summer/Winter Sale at Smashwords

As part of Smashwords Summer/Winter promotion (until July 31, 2014), you can receive a free copy of Death of a Foster Child by clicking here.

Death of a Foster Child explores the guilt felt when the foster placement of a teenage girl in the home of Rick Podowski and his wife failed. To complicate matters, the foster child was brutally murdered and the authorities believe she was selling drugs on the school campus and by implication asserted that the foster parents allowed this behavior. Rick Podowski with the help of Leti Ramos, Erin McGinty and Teresa Spinelli, also know as The Hefty Trio investigate to learn the truth.

In the process of investigating, they discover the world of drug sales on the high school campus, the underlying challenges facing students in a gang infested school, as well as the difficulties faced by special education students. The reader will experience the frustrations of foster parents when faced with a system that is designed to keep the children dependent.

The novel exposes this broken system and after the killer is found, there is a chapter on how we can change the foster care system in this county. That chapter is presented below.

Rick Podowski's thoughts on changing the system.

Changing the Foster Care System

The Dave Thomas Foundation website points out that "nearly 40 percent of American adults, or 81.5 million people, have considered adopting a child. If just one in 500 of these adults adopted, every waiting child in foster care would have a permanent family."

Unfortunately, these children are not adopted and as was stated in the introduction to this book, in 2005, more than 24,000 youth aged out of the foster care system at the age of eighteen without connection to a family. Of this number, one in four would be incarcerated within the first two years after they left the system, over one-fifth would become homeless at some time after age eighteen, and approximately fifty-eight percent would earn a high school diploma at age nineteen, compared to eighty-seven percent of a national comparison group of non-foster youth. Of youth who aged out of foster care and were over the age of twenty-five, fewer than three percent would earn their college degrees, compared with twenty-eight percent of the general population.

Our system produced these unacceptable outcomes.

In order to have a foster child in the home, the interested couples must complete an extensive, complicated process, which many find to be extremely humiliating. Although there have been attempts in recent years to make the rules less oppressive, the California Community Licensing agency (CCL), has made complying with the rules more important than the welfare of the child. Instead of a cooperative effort between CCL and the Foster Family Agency (FFA) there seems to be one of "obey the rules or else" which creates stress for all involved and works to the detriment of the children.

Fear is the overriding factor as social workers and agencies go overboard to keep from losing their licenses or being fined. CCL acts like a fiefdom where inspectors intimidate both foster parents and the adoption/foster care agencies. Child Protective Services (CPS) becomes the enforcer for this system and in many cases unproven allegations can become the basis for removing a child.

One example of the power of Child Protective Services occurred in January of 2001 in Campbell, California. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, after Donna McLean had walked out of a Santa Clara County courtroom with full custody of her sons, Anthony and Mark, then six and eight years old, CPS removed the children from her home without indicating the reason. Three years later, she settled out of federal court. The county agreed to pay her $500,000 and put on record that the removal of Mark and Anthony was "unfounded." But, she still had no clues as to why CPS had, apparently, overstepped its bounds.

The counties want to provide services to help the child, but often their services overlap, and often there is no logical connection between the services being provided.  Death of a Foster Child is based on the experiences of real foster children and one of them had services from a social worker from the county, a social worker from the FFA, a therapist, a team from a different agency consisting of four individuals who would meet to assess the child's progress and drive her to therapy as well as providing a mentor to work with her weekly, a social worker to supervise visits with her birth parents, a driver to take her to the church youth group, a child advocate, an attorney, the attorney's social worker, an independent living team, a psychiatrist, and teen court. This is an incredible waste of resources.

The about.com website on fostering children asked for people to complete the statement: "If I could change the system...." Eight-six people responded and some of the major points were as follows:

1. The most important thing is to listen to the children. Teach them that decisions impact their lives.

2. Emancipating is the hardest time for most foster youth. There just aren't enough programs for them to be prepared for the real world, which is a big reason why so many of them end up homeless, pregnant, addicted to drugs, and in jails/prisons.

3. There must be more emphasis on the child's well being and safety and less on reunification/parent's rights. The system is in too big a hurry to put kids back in unhealthy environments simply to save money or appease parents or for lack of foster homes.

4. We throw money at the DCFS, kids and the parents, but money can't fix everything. There are Foster Family Agencies that make thousands of dollars per child and don't provide meaningful services that help these children.

5. Simplify the process of becoming a foster parent.

Taking all the above into account, as well as my experiences with children in foster care and my review of the research, I feel that the system needs to change in the following ways.

Currently, the training for foster parents emphasizes that everyone should work as a team, but the reality is quite different. The private agencies live in fear of the Community Care Licensing Agency, and meeting its requirements is much more important than dealing with the needs of the foster families. A true team approach must be implemented.

The emphasis is on placing foster children with relatives. Often grandparents who raised dysfunctional children end up raising their grandchildren. Searches are done to find distant blood relatives who have never had contact with the child, in the hope that, acting out of shame or guilt they will take the child. There are cases in which the child who is functioning perfectly well in a foster home is taken away to live with strangers whose only claim to the child is a blood connection. This model must be examined, and the placement must be made in the best interest of the child. In addition, it is the duty of the social worker and the courts to develop a plan in which the birth family remains an integral part of the foster child's life.

There is a dual structure when a private agency is involved with the child. The private agency social worker meets with the child, and this is often followed by another meeting with the county social worker, thus creating an unnecessary duplication of efforts. The county should turn all supervision over to the private agency.

Instead of CCL investigations designed solely to establish blame, they should instead focus on why the placement failed and provide an analysis of how the situation could have been handled differently. By adding this information to a database, training programs could then be improved and the number of failed placements would decrease.

We need a model that focuses on preparing the children to take their place in the community and become productive citizens, and this is, perhaps the most important change that should be made in the foster system.

One program that seems to be working is the Ontario Looking After Children (ONLAC) project, a program that focuses on the Forty Developmental Assets developed by the Search Institute. There are twenty external assets, divided into the four categories of support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations and constructive use of time, as well as twenty internal assets, also divided into four categories including commitment to learning, positive values, social competencies, and positive identity.

The external assets, working together with internal assets, promote protection and resilience of the children in care. When children and youth enter the child welfare system, they often come from situations of extreme poverty, parental substance abuse, emotional and/or physical abuse, and sometimes sexual abuse. By focusing on the developmental assets, the children in foster care will develop better resistance skills to cope with the negative aspects of their lives.

In the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies Journal (summer 2008, vol. 5, no 2), Cynthia Vincent, Shaye Moffat, Marie-Pierre Paquet, Dr. Robert Flynn, and Robyn Marquis reported on "Developmental Assets and Resilient Outcomes: Findings from the Ontario Looking After Children (OnLAC) Project." They hypothesized that there would be a positive relationship between the number of developmental assets that the young person had and his or her level of pro social behavior, academic performance, and mental health.

The study was based on 713 teenagers from ten to seventeen years old of which 56% were male and 44% were female, 85% were in foster care and 15% were in-group homes.

Data had been collected on all of the 713 participants which included: a summary profile of the forty assets rated by the child welfare worker, a questionnaire yielding pro social and total difficulties scores, and ratings of academic performance. Lastly, the young person provided self-esteem and placement satisfaction data.

The measure of developmental assets was calculated as follows. The child welfare worker was asked to rate the young person's possession of the asset in terms of three response options: "yes," "uncertain" or "no." A total score was computed for the young person by summing up all the "yes" responses. Thirty-one assets are considered optimum for an adolescent. The mean asset for the total sample (N = 713) was twenty-seven. Females had a greater number of assets, with an average of twenty-nine while males rated twenty-six.

There were statistically significant positive correlations between the young person's number of assets and his or her pro social behavior, self-esteem, relationship with the female caregiver, placement satisfaction, and academic performance. That is, the more developmental assets the young person possessed, the more positive were his or her outcomes. The study also found a statistically significant negative correlation between developmental assets and psychological difficulties, in that young people with a greater number of developmental assets had fewer psychological difficulties. Overall, the results suggested that, as in the general population, the possession of a larger number of developmental assets were beneficial for young people in care.

In Shasta County, California the Foster Outreach Strengthened through Empowerment and Resources (FOSTER) program is designed for youth ages eleven through eighteen developed to address at-risk youth in the foster care system. The focus of the FOSTER program is to improve services to foster youth by linking them with county wide activities, both public and private that will increase their resilience using the Search Institute's 40 Developmental Assets Model. The goals are to reduce risky behaviors, reduce or prevent alcohol and substance abuse, and promote positive change.

The current model clearly isn't working, and I believe that a revamping of the entire system is necessary in order to achieve one primary goal, which is to provide the resources so that our foster youth become productive adults. I believe that models incorporating the developmental assets have the best chance of being successful. Also, the oversight agencies (CPS, FFA, County Social Services, and CCL) need to take more of a support role and work to improve placements.

40 Developmental Assets for Adolescents

 (ages 12-18)

External Assets

Support

1. Family support—Family life provides high levels of love and support.

2. Positive family communication—Young person and her or his parent(s) communicate positively, and young person is willing to seek advice and counsel from parents.

3. Other adult relationships—Young person receives support from three or more nonparent adults.

4. Caring neighborhood—Young person experiences caring neighbors.

5. Caring school climate—School provides a caring, encouraging environment.

6. Parent involvement in schooling—Parent(s) are actively involved in helping young person succeed in school.

Empowerment

7. Community values youth—Young person perceives that adults in the community value youth.

8. Youth as resources—Young people are given useful roles in the community.

9. Service to others—Young person serves in the community one hour or more per week.

10. Safety—Young person feels safe at home, school, and in the neighborhood.

Boundaries & Expectations

11. Family boundaries—Family has clear rules and consequences and monitors the young person's whereabouts.

12. School Boundaries—School provides clear rules and consequences.

13. Neighborhood boundaries—Neighbors take responsibility for monitoring young people's behavior.

14. Adult role models—Parent(s) and other adults model positive, responsible behavior.

15. Positive peer influence—Young person's best friends model responsible behavior.

16. High expectations—Both parent(s) and teachers encourage the young person to do well.

Constructive Use of Time

17. Creative activities—Young person spends three or more hours per week in lessons or practice in music, theater, or other arts.

18. Youth programs—Young person spends three or more hours per week in sports, clubs, or organizations at school and/or in the community.

19. Religious community—Young person spends one or more hours per week in activities in a religious institution.

20. Time at home—Young person is out with friends "with nothing special to do" two or fewer nights per week.

Internal Assets

Commitment to Learning

21. Achievement Motivation—Young person is motivated to do well in school.

22. School Engagement—Young person is actively engaged in learning.

23. Homework—Young person reports doing at least one hour of homework every school day.

24. Bonding to school—Young person cares about her or his school.

25. Reading for Pleasure—Young person reads for pleasure three or more hours per week.

Positive Values

26. Caring—Young person places high value on helping other people.

27. Equality and social justice—Young person places high value on promoting equality and reducing hunger and poverty.

28. Integrity—Young person acts on convictions and stands up for her or his beliefs.

29. Honesty—Young person "tells the truth even when it is not easy."

30. Responsibility—Young person accepts and takes personal responsibility.

31. Restraint—Young person believes it is important not to be sexually active or to use alcohol or other drugs.

Social Competencies

32. Planning and decision making—Young person knows how to plan ahead and make choices.

33. Interpersonal Competence—Young person has empathy, sensitivity, and friendship skills.

34. Cultural Competence—Young person has knowledge of and comfort with people of different cultural/racial/ethnic backgrounds.

35. Resistance skills—Young person can resist negative peer pressure and dangerous situations.

36. Peaceful conflict resolution—Young person seeks to resolve conflict nonviolently.

Positive Identity

37. Personal power—Young person feels he or she has control over "things that happen to me."

38. Self-esteem—Young person reports having a high self-esteem.

39. Sense of purpose—Young person reports that "my life has a purpose."

40. Positive view of personal future—Young person is optimistic about her or his personal future.

The 40 Developmental Assets are used with permission from Search Institute, Minneapolis, MN. More information is available at www.searach-institute.org.