Family gathering

Joint effort by Michelle and Russ gave a lovely herbal tasting bird, which was basted every half hour. I wonder if that’s why the white meat was mostly done, but not the dark meat, even though the thermometer reading said it was done. Thank heaven for a microwave to finish the dark meat pieces.

Caroline had a great dressing recipe with leaks and celery…and big chunks of hard bread…it came out great…lots of broth softened it down, and the veggies were reduced to just flavors.

Kate was the Mac and Cheese Mage. 

Audrey was the Green Bean Queen!

We even came up with titles for our contributions!

Dad was already the Fire Maker. 

Michelle was the Turkey Queen

And I was the Gravy Matron. 

My first serving included everything mentioned before with sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, and sweet potato rolls, and cranberry sauce - below.

The pumpkin caramel pie was somewhat sweet and may need some tweaking.

The best part of the day was being with my family!

Physical abilities vs thinking I can do

 Ah the drugs...

Steroids continue for a few more days, which means while I'm resting I think of all the really important things I should do. I'm terribly creative. Not quite to wash the windows...but definitely want to get rid of some of the old furniture which is past it's prime.

However, it's the old bod which limits what I can actually accomplish.

I fixed a real dinner last night (first one since coming home.) It meant washing and cutting up the potatoes and boiling them. Then frying the Gardien vegetarian chicken pieces, and adding a Mandarin sauce (thankfully from a pouch.) I then skipped making the salad or green veggies, because I'd been standing at the stove turning those darn fake chicken pieces for 10 minutes already.

There isn't a clean pot in the house (since some had already been used and not cleaned when I got sick.)

I did one sink-full of dishes before all that. Then had to sit down and watch a Miss Marple movie.

Last morning at hospital I watched this woman (I'm guessing she was female) do some dancing with mowing...perhaps she was talking on her phone, or just having fun. Of course you have to imagine it.

I'm off to fix my apple cinnamon oatmeal now, having my second cuppa coffee completed. Then I can take my meds. And solve all the world problems. NOT. I avoid reading about them, because I know my brain will lap them up like a hungry dog and decide just how everyone should change. 

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Hope is not a wish but an intention.

STEVEN CHARLESTON

Something about cooking

 This week to show you a collection of old photos (and maybe a few that aren't so old) for Sepia Saturday, I'm looking for the food related photos. Mmm, if I can find any.

This little one is getting a drink, then will need changing to dryer clothes...while the wood stove is the heart of the kitchen for his mother. Don't you just know those two buckets have been carried from the source of their water! 

And before women had the gifts of freestanding wood fired stoves, this is the way they cooked. All these little "Dutch Ovens" are covered with live coals below and above, probably to bake some lovely bread. My son Tai and his wife use a Dutch Oven inside their gas oven in the kitchen to rise their sourdough bread... then formed into round loaves.

On a recent visit with them, I asked for blueberry pancakes, and Tai was most obliging.

Another breakfast was steel cut oatmeal with fresh and dried fruit liberally stirred in. I somehow didn't get photos of the wonderful evening meals...which they prepared together. 

I may have mentioned that I'm considering moving to southwest Colorado when an apartment comes available...the dry air is one inviting factor, while being near my son and his wife is also a big one. I'll have to be careful adjusting to the altitude however, which I faced during my short 9 day visit. My pulmonologist said a visit od 6 weeks would show how much I can acclimate to it, but I can't very well do that. So if it happens, we shall see.  Yesterday I was sick with coughing a lot, and even had a fever by late afternoon. Tylenol to the rescue, and today I feel pretty good.

A purchase of my favorite sweetener at the Tailgate Market last year attracted one of the creators of the very same thing.

A mother from Southeast Missouri in 1938. Fannie Lou Hammer's America. Another woman who had the galvanized bucket for water, as well as a wood fired stove.

From internet, "Cooking in 1900."  Some stoves were coal fired as well as wood. This ornate one doesn't have any clear designation, but there appears to be a hot water tank next to it. With all the pipes it's possible she had running water also. (But there's a familiar bucket in the pantry also!)

The crew which helped produce the TV cooking shows for Julia Child. Only thing missing? A bucket!

And to match the theme for Sepia Saturday more exactly, here we see fresh veggies at the Tailgate Market in Black Mountain.

Our free veggies (fruit and bread) from Bounty and Soul, which is brought to different locations on different days in the valley. Those blueberries are organic locally grown, and were frozen immediately...as well as the bread. I'm so fortunate to live where this is available for anyone who wishes to wait in line. At one pick-up place they just give out a box of edibles, but that's wasteful as many things aren't what the person wants, or will eat.

It's always fun to share with other photographers on Sepia Saturday...some of which will be on the suggested meme, and others will be enjoyable as they've gone in another direction!!

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Today's quote:

Sometimes during our spiritual growth, we can feel as if we are going backward — rest assured you are not.

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An old photo from my family files:

My sister Mary Miller fixing something delicious in the 80s.

Moving about over the face of the earth

  I enjoyed seeing the map showing ancient rulers of Europe and the Mediterranean.

The connection is (not about rulers, though that's pretty big in conversations these days) but about how we human move about and deal with changes all around us! Civilizations, cultures, immigrants...it's been happening since the beginning of time.

And another map which shows the peoples who lived in North America before the western Europeans arrived. 

So here's a map showing the routes the various visitors from European counties took into the Americas.

Locations of Stone Circles and Henges in the UK & Ireland - just so you don't think I'm totally 

Ameri-centric. But I'm sorry this was such a pale photo-map...a bit hard to see where what is.

No idea how to pronounce, but it is preferable to Gulf of America (as Trump wants to change it.)

And this is the Dymaxion Map...which shows the land masses in proper sizing...as opposed to the more popular and inaccurate Mercator maps.

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OK, back to real life. Today I'm thankful that the cold front which slammed into our area with heavy winds on Sunday as I was writing this, didn't bring snow as had been forecast. However, you never know, as of then it was due on Wednesday which was yesterday as you read this.

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Sunday I got into a cooking frenzy...I want you to know my usual meals go from refrigerator to microwave...so there I was cleaning some baby bella mushrooms, cutting up some garlic, and sauteing them all in butter. It smelled so good. So how about making it into a soup, I thought. I hunted around in the pantry and found some vegetable stock that expired in 2023. It's going to boil, I thought, so whatever might have happened to it will be ok. Then I thought, cream. Nope, didn't have anything but 2% milk. I put 2 cups in anyway. Thickener? There was this expired container of mashed potatoes. 

DO NOT USE THESE! I was innocent of what would happen. Science came along and smacked me upside the head. The potatoes were runny, so I gently stirred them into the soup mix. No problem. No chunks appeared, so I got bold and poured the rest in. I sure didn't have any other use for them, so thought they might make a nice body for the soup. I sprinkled my favorite spices and some dried onions (since I didn't want to cut a whole one which might be too much for those baby bellas.)

Then there were little blobs that formed throughout the soup. They were like little pieces of tapioca, which for all I knew had been hidden in the potatoes which had stopped having any firmness to them already. But nothing, stir stir stir, would get rid of the little blobs. And they were noticeable when I tasted the soup. Yuk.

OK, maybe I can blenderize them away. So slowly poured hot soup (without mushrooms) into the glass blender, tried low setting, no help. Tried the highest setting. And the blobs were gone. Of course the soup was now aerated with plenty of tiny air bubbles. I poured that first batch into a container which would go in refrigerator. Then did another batch. Let me just say by the time I got to the lase of 6 batches I tried using a colander that had a bigger bottom than the top of the blender...so soup ran down all the outside as well as inside, and the mushrooms I'd been trying to save were covered with little blobs...so that wasn't working.

I just blenderized the mushrooms too. Once I was trying to let some steam escape from the blender, and whirring at the same time...so it splattered mushroom soup all over the place. So that had to be cleaned up. 

I finally had all the soup turned to aerated liquid without any blobs, and I served myself the last cup. Of course lots of the seasoning was in it...whew, lots of flavor. But I ended up with 2 quarts of my own creamed mushroom soup!

Now if only I had someone to do the dishes....

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Today's politics: (yes, I am back thinking, reading, listening, sharing!)

So how do Democrats fight back? If the GOP doesn’t care about the negative impact Trump’s and Musk’s policies and decisions have on ordinary Americans, aren’t Democrats essentially negotiating with political terrorists?

Many demonstrations against Musk and Trump "Not our King" on President's Day, Feb. 17, 2025

 So far we have seen three models of Democratic pushback.

One camp of Democrats appears to think that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the way to go, clinging to norms that have been shattered by the opposition in hopes that a bygone notion of bipartisan consensus about the importance of public service can be preserved. We saw how this worked out for Merrick Garland the last four years. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also appears to be mounting a wait-and-see approach in the face of unprecedented, anti-democratic onslaught.

A second camp, represented by a younger cohort of Democrats, wants to counter the GOP blow for blow, trolling back hard in the hopes it will bring press attention to the unfolding national crisis. For example, Rep. David Garcia recently presented a photo of Elon Musk on the House floor as a “dick pic.” And Rep. Jasmine Crockett famously fired back at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene during a hearing, calling her a “bleach blond butch bad built body.” These are admittedly headline-grabbing moves, which in this attention economy has some real value. They also demonstrate to Democratic voters that someone is fighting back, an important reassurance at this time. But while these counterpunches may feel good in the moment, there is little evidence they actually do anything to make MAGA stop behaving so terribly. If anything, they encourage more bad behavior in an endless cycle. If the other side is behaving like spoiled children, and our side does it, too, the fear is we will be locked forever in a schoolyard fight.

Perhaps there’s a third way, best represented by Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s style of discourse. He combines a willingness to engage and actually listen to the other side with a sturdy defense of Democratic values. Buttigieg is not afraid to go on Fox News and other outlets where Republicans are tuned in. He looks past the bad behavior and taunts of the MAGA right and tries instead to get at the heart of why they feel aggrieved, even when that grievance is tainted with racism and misogyny. He then seeks to find common ground, at least on some level. He always presents a path forward, even if it is an aspirational one, where the two sides can treat each other as people caught in the same dysfunctional system, yet all with a shared need for security, health, and community.

It may be too lofty for these rough and tumble times. And there are few in the Democratic Party who can actually step into this role with the skill of Buttigieg and consistently resist the urge to condemn the other side as irredeemable monsters. Few leaders will bother to try and unpack whatever it is that drives the dangerous nihilism at the core of the MAGA right.

But considering the incredibly high stakes, more Buttigieges may be sorely needed if we are ever to escape the downward pull of Trumpian nihilism.

SOURCE: The Big Picture newsletter  Feb. 19, 2025

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Sharing with Thankful Thursday

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Today's quote: 

Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle but I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.”

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Today's art:

Art by Sophie Blackall from If You Come to Earth.1

Plastic recycling and women cooking...

Today I want to veer towards the future, and change the subject from cooking to plastics. Fear not, I have a link to a previous post about how women have cooked...

This article says a lot to us in 2020.  /how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.

The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.

Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.

 The rest of this article has interviews with more people, including 

Chevron Phillips Chemical's $6 billion (new plant in Texas)...their investment in new plastic..."We see a very bright future for our products," says Jim Becker, the vice president of sustainability for Chevron Phillips, inside a pristine new warehouse next to the plant...(a new petrolium/plastic plant.)

And here's my organic greens package, which says it's a recycled plastic container, which can be recycled again. I'll sure try to recycle it again. But according to the article above, it's not likely to happen.

Just thought since I'm thinking about how to use less plastic, I'd share it with my SS friends.

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But more in line with Sepia Saturday's prompt...

Have I ever cooked over an open fire? Yes, with a grate in a camping area...so the pans had something to sit upon. And I usually was using wood rather than charcoal.

The way I cooked when camping (1969-1998)

These Australian women are cooking over an open fire...as Sepia Saturday shared this week.

in 1915, while wearing their hats!

And allowing a photographer to capture their efforts.

I feel sorry for the one in a white skirt. She is probably sitting on a camp stool (hidden by her skirts) If not, then she is a master of a squat - the exercise I can't hold for even 1 second!

So I went trolling (that's somewhat educated searching) through my old photo collection and found these other women (yes, it was always women!) cooking on wood stoves, or earlier at fireplaces.

Sepia Saturday has me beat...no billy cooking. I had to look up what a billy was...since I'd only heard of it in a song...Waltzing Matilda.

The term billy or billycan is particularly associated with Australian usage, but is also used in New Zealand, Britain and Ireland.

It is widely accepted that the term "billycan" is derived from the large cans used for transporting bouilli or bully beef on Australia-bound ships or during exploration of the outback, which after use were modified for boiling water over a fire; however there is a suggestion that the word may be associated with the Aboriginal billa(meaning water; cf. Billabong). SOURCE: Wikipedia

I have formerly posted a Sepia Saturday post about women cooking in fireplaces (for how many years?) and then cooking on wood-burning stoves, HERE.

Today's quote:
Input from experts is valuable but our own sense of the truth is ultimately the most important.
Daily Om