As I surveyed what remained on the shelves at the supermarket I frequent in Rhode Island, I was reminded of the saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

Hurricane or coronavirus pandemic, Rhode Islanders — as befits their mostly Italian heritage and food preference — had cleared the shelves and frozen food cases of pasta (except that made with chickpeas), canned and jarred tomato sauce, and frozen pizza.

Expectedly all the standard frozen and canned foods (except the dreaded whole and sliced beets), milk, butter, eggs, tuna, soup, bread, cookies and snack food had been cleared out, too.

What to buy? I viewed the rejected food not as Italian-American Rhode Islander, but rather as a Virginia transplant to the state. And I found heaps to buy.

Many of the ingredients for classic Southern dishes were still on the shelves and the frozen food cases. Here are some ingredients I saw and some ideas for what to do with them:

— Shrimp and grits: Buy frozen wild or farmed shrimp and grits (look on the bottom shelves in the breakfast cereal aisle). Yo, Italian-Americans up North! If you like polenta, you’ll love grits. “I ga-ron-tee!” as the late Cajun chef and humorist Justin Wilson used to say.

— Okra: If you live in the North, it will be the only vegetable left in your supermarket’s frozen food case. Dip it in buttermilk, dredge it in a seasoned cornmeal-flour mixture and fry it until it reaches that beautiful golden brown. Okra tastes like eggplant: In fact, you can make parmigiana with it.

— Jarred pimentos: When life gives you pimentos, make pimento cheese. Southerners call it “pate du Sud” (Southern pate). It’s a dip, a spread, but mostly it’s chopped pimentos mixed with mayonnaise and cheddar cheese. As Jeremy, the bigger and funnier of the two Jeremys who used to fix things around our house in Virginia, said of pimento cheese, “Put that on top of your head and your tongue would beat your brains out trying to get to it.”

— Stone-ground cornmeal: Cornbread. Nuff said.

— Instant pistachio pudding: You could make Shut the Gate Salad, also known as Watergate Salad. I first ate this salad in college in Washington in the mid-1970s. This salad was never served at the Watergate Hotel, site of the June 17, 1972, break-in of Democratic Party headquarters during the Nixon Administration, and the origin of its name remains obscure.

“But the particular mix of ingredients that became the standard Watergate Salad likely originated with the Jell-O brand, which introduced a line of pistachio pudding mix in 1976. This was two years after President Richard Nixon resigned, and the Watergate scandal was still fresh in Americans’ minds. (A spokesperson for Kraft, which now owns Jell-O, once said pistachio mix was introduced in 1975),” NPR said in a “Weekend Edition Sunday” broadcast.

Salad in the South is often devoid of leafy green vegetables. The green food coloring in the pudding legitimizes eating this pudding, Cool Whip, crushed pineapple, toasted pecan and mini marshmallow concoction as a vegetable serving. (Sound of incredulous gasping in the North.)

The supermarket checkout lines were long, so I only picked a few items off the shelves, including the despised and rejected canned beets and chickpea pasta. And, yes, I was tempted to grab the makings for Watergate Salad: A little Southern comfort food in the time of COVID-19.

My husband says we should try barbecue sauce on the chickpea pasta.

“Thinking well is wise; planning well, wiser; doing well is the wisest and best of all,” says an Iranian proverb. For decades the United States and Iran largely haven’t thought, planned or done well by each other.

One deed in 1953 left a scarring legacy that has brought the two countries to the brink of war today: the coup d’état, orchestrated by U.S. and British intelligence agencies, that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh (also spelled Mosaddeq) and restored power to the shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

The reformist premier had nationalized the British oil industry in Iran, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, created by Winston Churchill to fuel the British fleet when it switched from coal to oil. The shah had tried and failed to dismiss Mosaddegh and, after riots broke out, he fled the country.

The Churchill government enlisted the Eisenhower administration’s support for Mosaddegh’s ouster. Britain was motivated by its desire to regain control over the oil industry in Iran. Arguably, the United States was motivated more by the fear that Mosaddegh wouldn’t be able to stop the spread of communism in Iran than it was by the U.S. share of Iranian oil production after the coup.

“For many Iranians, the coup demonstrated the duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhanded methods to overthrow a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests,” the Agence-France Presse reported.

The United States supported the shah — who many considered to be an imposed ruler — for a quarter of a century then abandoned him. His government was known for its autocracy, its focus on modernization and Westernization, and for its disregard for religious and democratic measures in Iran’s constitution.

On my first trip to Tehran, in December 1976, it was apparent that many Iranians — from liberal students to unskilled laborers — had reached a breaking point with the political corruption and the political oppression by the secret police (SAVAK) — preceded by the shah’s security forces, trained in 1953 by Maj. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., the father of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., who commanded coalition forces during the Gulf War.

The oil boom of the 1970s — from which the shah’s family was the foremost beneficiary — had produced accelerating inflation and an expanding gap between the rich and the poor. The government’s attempts to rein in inflation disproportionately affected the thousands of poor and unskilled men who flocked to Tehran and other cities to work in construction. Culturally and religiously conservative, many went on to form the core of the revolution’s demonstrators and “martyrs.”

In Tehran, on my first trip, I saw a few cars stuck in the open drains along street edges known as jubes. A friend there told me the cars belonged to “foreign workers who are unpopular, and get pushed into the jubes, too.”

Just a year later, Jimmy Carter, who visited Iran on New Year’s Eve, toasted the shah, “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, your Majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.”

Iranians wouldn’t swallow Carter’s toast, which was so out of touch with what was going on in the country. Within days, they began the demonstrations that would end the shah’s rule.

James Schlesinger, who served as energy secretary in the Carter administration, told my husband Llewellyn King and me that he had strongly advised the president to tell the shah that if he wanted to hold on to his country, he should pay his army, not his air force. On Jan. 16, 1979, the shah piloted his “Shah’s Falcon” Boeing 727 jetliner from Tehran to Egypt for an extended “vacation,” setting the stage for his country’s Islamic Revolution a month later.

“When the Shah finally fell in 1979, memories of the U.S. intervention in 1953, which made possible the monarch’s subsequent, and increasingly unpopular, 25-year reign, intensified the anti-American character of the revolution in the minds of many Iranians,” Mark Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne wrote in their authoritative book “Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran.”

The 1953 coup’s legacy bore on later events, including the 1979-81 hostage crisis at the American Embassy in Tehran; the United States designating Iran a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984, unleashing severe sanctions; to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s speech in 2000, acknowledging the U.S. role in the Mosaddegh’s overthrow and “shortsighted” foreign policy in the region; and Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

Whether President Donald Trump knows about the coup or not, it was involved in the airstrike that he ordered in Iraq on Jan. 3, killing Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, a specialized unit in the Revolutionary Guards.

Photo: Tashkent City designs.

Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, is undergoing a transformation at a pace and scale almost comparable to Samarkand in 1370, when the Turco-Mongol ruler Timur, or, Tamerlane, as he is known in the West, made it his capital.

On the one hand, Tamerlane was a brutal conqueror who razed ancient cities to the ground and put entire populations to the sword. The empire he founded in 1370 and ruled until his death in 1405 (probably of a mid-winter cold, caught while on his way to change the Ming regime in China) stretched from Russia to India and from the Mediterranean Sea to Mongolia.

But on the other hand, Tamerlane was a brilliant constructor. One of his signature achievements was Samarkand, which he strove to make the most splendid city in Asia.

“It’s not hard to see why the author of the ‘1001 Nights’ had Scheherazade spin her tales from a palace in Samarkand: the city was on the Silk Road, alive with people from different lands; it was a wonderland of Islamic architecture, and a great center of learning,” Srinath Perur wrote in the Guardian newspaper.

But no place in Samarkand represents all three aspects as well as the Registan, the main square, three sides of which stand a blur-of-blue-tiled madrasas (Islamic colleges). In 1888 George Curzon, world traveler and future viceroy of India, called it “the noblest public square in the world.”

While most of the edifices seen around the square were built after Tamerlane’s death, they couldn’t have been built without his sacking Islamic brother cities (including Baghdad, Damascus and Khiva) and his sparing their artisans and craftsmen, who he brought back to Samarkand.

In 1399, just a year after reducing Delhi to rubble because he thought the Muslim sultan was too tolerant of his Hindu subjects, Tamerlane was back to building his sumptuous capital. A caravan of 90 captured elephants was employed to carry stones from quarries to erect a great mosque, according to Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, an envoy the Spanish kingdom of Castile dispatched to Samarkand. The Europeans rather liked Tamerlane because roughed up their neighborhood bully, the Ottoman Turks.

Tamerlane returned from his military conquests — estimated to have wiped out five percent of the world’s population — with architectural inspiration and plunder that could finance his appetite for building in Samarkand and other cities.

One of his monuments bears the proverb, “If you want to know about us, examine our cities.”

That proverb could be driving Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who succeeded Islam Karimov as president in 2016. His smart city projects in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara, so it seems, are aimed at rebranding Uzbekistan as a country interested in political reform, economic investment and good relations with the rest of the world.

Javlon Vakhabov, Uzbekistan’s youthful new ambassador in Washington, discussed one smart city project, Tashkent City, in some depth at a summit on smart cities and communities organized by Dentons, the world’s largest law firm.

Construction of Tashkent City, a $1.7-billion international business and financial hub in the heart of the capital, started in 2018. The design includes an industrial park, eight business centers, a shopping mall, restaurants and a cultural center, as well as residential apartments on a 173-acre site.

“The aim of this project,” according to the government, “is to create an architectural complex in the center of Tashkent, implemented by embedding the latest trends in world architecture and the application of environmentally-friendly and energy-saving, smart technologies.”

Vakhabov enthused that Tashkent City projects have already received millions of dollars in loans from the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the World Bank.

But he added, “Uzbekistan is a 3,000-year-old country. We have four UNESCO World Heritage cities. We have 4,000 sites that are highly protected by UNESCO. We need to be sensitive to these historical sites and adapt them to smart cities.”

“A mass movement of people from the countryside to the cities has created stresses on the environment and infrastructure,” he said. Ultimately smart cities can alleviate those stresses, using information and communication technology to improve efficiency, sustainability and citizen welfare.

Meantime, smart city projects have been stressing out people. There have been news reports about protests and court cases in Tashkent over traditional housing demolitions and evictions.

“As for the resettlement of people living in houses built by their forefathers, we need to create more favorable conditions for people persuaded to move to other communities,” Vakhabov said reassuringly.

 

Linda Gasparello is producer and co-host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. Her email is whchronicle@gmail.com.

NUR-SULTAN, Kazakhstan — There is the Grand Canyon in Arizona. But there is also a grand one, the Charyn Canyon, in Kazakhstan, the vast Central Asian country with curious and wondrous sights that await intrepid tourists.

Sayasat Nurbek, who serves as a National Geographic goodwill ambassador in Kazakhstan, lists the Charyn Canyon, which stretches 56 miles along the Charyn River in the mountainous Southeast, as one of the country’s top sights.

Located near Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital, Nurbek describes the canyon as “very futuristic.”

For 12 million years, nature’s sculptors — wind, water and sand — have carved the canyon’s red sandstone to create formations of various shapes and sizes. These have been given names for the fantastic things that they resemble: castles, devils and ghosts.

Nurbek recommends that tourists start their travels in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan with a population of 1.7 million. It is not only the country’s cultural and trading hub, but also the gateway to the region’s natural wonders, including a national park in the Trans-Ile Alatau mountains, which has 300 species of wildlife, including the snow leopard.

Not far from Ile-Alatau National Park, in the Malaya Almatinka Valley, winter tourists can skate on the world’s largest outdoor ice-skating rink, Medeu, and schuss down slopes in Shymbulak, Central Asia’s top skiing resort.

At the Altyn-Emel National Park, also near Almaty, tourists can see the Terekty Petroglyphs and listen to the “singing dunes” — a low, vibrating sound made when the wind moves the sand.

“Almaty is a city where in 15 to 20 minutes, you can get to pristine mountains and lakes —- not like the Swiss or French Alps, where you must travel far from the cities to get to them,” says Nurbek, who has a master’s degree in geopolitics from the Sapienza University of Rome.

Shymkent, the third-largest city in Kazakhstan and an important place along the Great Silk Road, is well worth a stopover, Nurbek says.

“It’s a Southern city with a rich cultural and historical heritage. There is great food there, especially kebabs,” he says. You might even wash down your kebabs with kumis — a beverage made with fermented mare’s milk, popular across Central Asia.

In the Kazakh desert, about 93 miles northwest of Shymkent, lies an ancient center of the caravan trade: Turkestan. “It’s a spiritual capital,” says Nurbek.

The city, previously called Yasi, is known for the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, the Sufi philosopher and poet, which was built at the time of Timur (Tamerlane), from 1389 to 1405. The imposing, turquoise-domed mausoleum is partly unfinished, but its Persian master builders experimented with architectural and structural solutions later used in the construction of Samarkand, the capital of the Timurid Empire. UNESCO designated the exquisite mausoleum as a World Heritage Site in 2003.

After touring the South, Nurbek suggests going West to the Caspian, which is the largest lake in the world. Aktau, on the shores of the Caspian, is an inviting beach town.

“There is no other lake in the world that has seals or the strange fish that you will find in the Caspian. You can even collect sharks’ teeth on the beaches because it was once part of a larger sea,” he says.

Nurbek, an avowed “environmental enthusiast,” wants oil and gas exploration in the Caspian to be replaced with “massive caviar production. We would have the same revenues from caviar as from oil.”

There has been an increase in the number of oil fields and, consequently, spills. But, Nurbek says, “they are not catastrophic.” And the Caspian’s prized sturgeon population is growing due to more university-conducted research on the diseases affecting them, he claims.

As for the nascent environmental movement and green party in Kazakhstan, he wishes there were “more people pushing for the environment, more politicians too.”

From the Caspian, Nurbek says tourists should head to the capital city of Nur-Sultan, formerly Astana, in the north-central steppe. The capital was renamed in March to honor President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who abruptly resigned on March 19 after three decades in power.

Nazarbayev moved the capital from Almaty to Astana in 1997. He transformed it from a provincial town to the playground for the world’s leading architects, including Japan’s Kisho Kurokawa, who drew up the master plan for Astana, and Britain’s Norman Foster, who designed the glimmering glass Khan Shatyr shopping mall — the largest tent in the world — which has an indoor beach.

Kazakhstan is the world’s largest landlocked country and its ninth-largest country, about the size of Western Europe. Nurbek recommends that tourists take the country’s trains — a tradition from Soviet times.

“If you are out to experience the vastness of the country — the steppes, the mountains, the lakes — then take the train from Nur-Sultan,” he says, “You can make friends on it, share food, share stories, stop at the stations. You can make memories that will last forever.

Above Photo: The college occupies the 1897 Charleston City Railway Car House.

The American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) in Charleston, S.C. is the seat of a renaissance in education. The college, opened in 2005, is creating “educated artisans” – modern-day Leonardo da Vincis.

“Students complete an integrated liberal arts curriculum, where both academic and artisan courses build upon each other,” a college brochure states.

Already, ACBA students have attracted the attention of master artisans in Europe. The prestigious Fondation de Coubertin in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, France, has awarded two students scholarships to further their artisan and academic training. “It’s the Rhodes scholarship for artisans,” according to President Colby M. Broadwater III, a retired three-star general. Just 30 students a year, from France and foreign countries, are awarded this 11-month scholarship.

Here are some of my pictures of the college and the students’ and professors’ works, which exemplify one of Leonardo’s sayings, “Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.