Things Southern Girls Say
LOL, I hear these every day! It’s really true!
By Secret Ballot
I hear people talking back and forth; feeling one another out. Most assume their friends will vote Republican; it’s Republican country up here in the westernmost part of Florida. Yards are littered with Romney – Ryan signs, with a few timid Obama signs here and here in a yard or on a car fender.
My Dad taught us, when we were very young, that the only appropriate answer when asked how one would vote is “I am voting by secret ballot.” He taught us how precious the right is to cast your vote and to know that no one can intimidate you into voting for someone else, because we vote by secret ballot. No husband can command his wife, no father can command his family, no minister can command his church. We each vote our individual conscience.
So we have the luxury of worrying whether we will vote the right candidates into office. We can only do the best we can with the information we have. I don’t want opinions, I want to see where a candidate stands on the issues that are important to me. And, in the end, I trust in the Lord:
Psalm 20
Now this I know:
The Lord gives victory to his anointed.
He answers him from his heavenly sanctuary
with the victorious power of his right hand.
7 Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.
8 They are brought to their knees and fall,
but we rise up and stand firm.
9 Lord, give victory to the king!
Answer us when we call!
When I hear people moaning in the locker room, or jeering in the parking lot, I walk right by. It’s not my problem. I vote my conscience, and I leave the outcome in the Lord’s hands.
Not the Day I Expected
Last night just before we went to bed, I reminded AdventureMan to set his alarm clock back for the end of daylight savings time. It was so much fun, having an extra hour to do things, to read. It was so relaxing, waking up and knowing we had plenty of time to get to church. I got up, fixed my coffee and changed all the clocks downstairs.
As we drove to church, I noticed all the outdoor clocks along the way, still on the same old time. I was feeling very smug.
When we drove into the parking lot, it was full, which was odd, because it was early, even for the early service. When we saw people leaving, as we were driving in, I had the “aha” moment.
Oh wait. This isn’t the first week-end in November . . . 😦 I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I got the fruitcakes all done and I was ready for November, so ready that somehow, I thought it was a week later . . .
We missed the early service, LOL. We always think of the early service as Episcopal Lite; the express version. Instead, we attended the 10:30 service, and had a great treat at the end, Ken Keradin playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, you might know it as background music for other creepy movies.
You know how once a day gets started the wrong way, the rest of the day just seems weird? It is a gorgeous, chilly day, bright sunlight, and I can’t get started on any of my projects. I feel jangled, turned a little upside down. Now I have to go through all the clock changes again next week-end!
Fruitcakes and the Sun is Not Over the Yardarm
It is a nice, cool, wonderful day in late October, and today I am going to make the annual fruitcakes with my Mom’s old recipe. I always set a target date of 31 October, and try to make them somewhere in that week so they will have time to mellow in the refrigerator.
The recipe is my Mother’s, although she says she barely recognizes the result. I can remember as a little girl in Alaska sitting at the kitchen table and cutting dates with scissors, taking the seeds out and cutting the rest into pieces, and then the prunes. For a long time I was not fond of dates or prunes, LOL! They were STICKY!
Now, dates and prunes come in packets already pitted, and you can even buy date pieces (I don’t) so you don’t have to cut them up. The Cuisinart does a great job, makes all that cutting into small pieces a 10 second task. It takes longer to load and clean the Cuisinart than it takes to chop the dates and prunes.
I watch the stores for the candied cherries and citron, and use a lot. After all, it’s supposed to be a FRUITcake, isn’t it? The first one is ready by Thanksgiving. I make a few larger ones to use during the holidays, and several smaller ones to give as gifts, but only to people who really like fruitcake and won’t use it as a doorstop. They are dense, and heavy as bricks, LOL.
Yesterday, AdventureMan brought home a couple of his friends from the garden club. Wouldn’t you know, I had just poured a bottle of brandy over the raisins and microwaved them to soak overnight, so the raisins in the fruit cake would be plump and tasty. As they all walked in, the house reeked of brandy. I could imagine them wondering if Adventureman’s wife was hitting the bottle that early in the day. Not only was the sun not over the yardarm, but wasn’t even near.
I hope to have them all baked and wrapped and stored by tonight.
UPDATE: Mission accomplished 🙂
Foods a la Louisiane: Jambalaya
Did I tell you I collect cookbooks? One of the guidelines I use is that the cookbook have the name of a person attached to each recipe; if your name is on a recipe going into a book, you know you are going to be very careful that this recipe is really, really good.
I don’t remember buying this cookbook, but it is a gem. On the other hand, there have been some surprises . . . there is a recipe for making boudin, that ubiquitous Cajun sausage, and it starts off with “1 large hoghead.” The directions state that you boil the hog’s head until tender, let it cool, remove meat from bones, then grind hoghead meat with heart, kidney, onions, parsley, etc. in a meat grinder.
Thank goodness boudin is not a favorite of mine. Andouille, a spicier sausage, IS a favorite of mine and if I see a recipe for andouille, I am NOT going to look at it.
I love making jambalaya – and here is a genuine Louisiana recipe:
JAMBALAYA
1/2 cup vegetable oil or drippings
2 medium onions, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 cup fresh parsley, chopped
1 medium green pepper, seeded and chopped
1/2 cup chopped green onion tops
Water
2 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
Red Pepper to taste
Pepper to taste
Browning agent or 2 teaspoons Kitchen Bouquet
2 lbs peeled raw shrimp
4 cups long grain rice
Heat oil over low heat in a heavy 6 quart Dutch oven until warmed. Add vegetables; saute until lightly browned. Add enough water to cover vegetables; add seasoning and browning agent. Bring to a boil; add shrimp. Cook over medium heat for 10 minutes. Stir in rice; cook 10 minutes. Cover and cook until rice is tender, stirring occasionally. Yield 10 – 12 servings.
I do jambalaya all the time (DISCLAIMER: I am neither a Louisiana native nor of Cajun descent, so what I do cannot be taken as authentic, even if it is tasty 🙂 ) and I use more spices, chopped tomatoes and I don’t add the shrimp until the rice is cooked; I add it at the end and give it five minutes for the heat of the rice and cooked ingredients to cook the shrimp. We also use andouille sausage (or a turkey sausage if we are entertaining Moslem friends) and some cut artichoke hearts, maybe a small jar of pimentos, maybe some leftover peas. Sort of like a jambalaya/paella 🙂
“That’s Just Not Right”
We are talking about taking in the new “ferociously exciting” movie Argo today, and having a bite to eat afterwards at Mellow Mushroom. AdventureMan likes their pizzas (you can watch them toss the dough in the air for the crusts) and I like their Portobello Reuben sandwich or sometimes their spinach salad.
“Law and Order Man always has pineapple on his pizza” AdventureMan said, “and every time he does, he says ‘I know there are people who think pineapple doesn’t go on pizza, but I like it.'”
We laugh. We know who he is talking about. It’s us. We have our ideas of what pizza is supposed to be based on our pizza experiences in Germany and Italy and France. Not a lot of sauce, not a lot of cheese, and a sprinkling of toppings – our very favorite being a seafood pizza we ate in Dinard, France, where they threw and handful of tiny still-in-the-shell creatures on and put it in the big, hot wood-burning oven and minutes later we had this thin crust pizza saturated with briny tiny sea creatures, cooked exactly right.
Pineapple on pizza – it just doesn’t seem right to us. I’m glad our son has the gumption to stick to his guns and have pineapple on his pizza if that is what he likes, but . . . not me. Never!
So we were laughing about our preferences this morning and AdventureMan says “that would be like putting pineapple on a peanut-butter sandwich” at which point . . . I stopped agreeing with him.
“That sounds sort of good!” I said thoughtfully.
“No! That’s just not right!” he almost stomped his foot. He will mix peanut butter with jellies, but for some reason, the thought of pineapple in his peanut butter is unthinkable.
I’ve heard of a sandwich Elvis loved, something like peanut butter and banana and bacon, all grilled together between two slices of bread . . . that doesn’t sound good to me, but then again, I haven’t had the courage to try one. I guess it might be the calorie count that also holds me back – fat on fat on fat, LOL.
Do you have any irrational food preferences? Or combinations that, in your perspective, are just not right?
The War We are Losing: Assault of American Servicewomen
Shocking, and sad. What can be worse than serving your country and to be assaulted by a member of your own team? To double that shock and betrayal, to have the team captains bury your injury for the sake of the team?? I thank God for the gals that are taking their cases to civil court and making a stink. Sometimes, that is what it takes to make people pay attention.
I have a friend, a friend in her sixties. She has served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a civilian, and she has had senior officers stalk and attack her. She is disgusted that senior leaders could feel so entitled, and so free from constraints.
I can’t print this whole article here, but it is fascinating. You can read the entire article from Huffpost: HERE.
Active-duty female personnel make up roughly 14.5 percent — or 207,308 members — of the more than 1.4 million Armed Forces, according to the Department of Defense.
One in three military women has been sexually assaulted, compared to one in six civilian women, according to Defense. According to calculations by The Huffington Post, a servicewoman was nearly 180 times more likely to have become a victim of military sexual assault (MSA) in the past year than to have died while deployed during the last 11 years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to the most recent report by the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, 3,192 sexual assaults were reported out of an estimated 19,000 — roughly 52 a day — between Oct. 1, 2010, to Sept. 31, 2011. The department estimates that only roughly 14 percent of the assaults were reported. The majority of sexual assaults each year are committed against service members by service members, SAPRO reports. While MSA does not affect only women, the office characterizes the “vast majority” of victims as female junior enlists under the age of 25, and the “vast majority” of perpetrators as male, older (under the age of 35) and generally higher-ranking.
Last Tuesday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered a sweeping review of all initial military training across the services: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. The move resulted in part from mounting pressure at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, where at least 43 women have recently come forward as victims of sexual assault. Every aspect of training, from the selection of instructors who directly supervise trainees to the number of female instructors, is under consideration. And a day after Panetta issued the directives, Defense officials revealed that Jeffrey A. Sinclair — a brigadier general with five combat tours behind him — is facing possible courts martial on charges ranging from inappropriate relationships with female subordinates to forcible sodomy.
On Friday, Panetta called the military’s record on prosecuting MSA an “outrage.”
Panetta’s refrain for years has been heartening: “One sexual assault is too many.”
To which Havrilla responds, “This whole concept of ‘zero tolerance,’ it’s just words and no action.”
“You can’t leave. You can’t quit. You can’t walk away.”
We were in the military when the first women were sent to serve with formerly all-male battalions. There was a lot of controversy, and a lot of chagrin among the men. I think those first women were some of the bravest women ever. Almost forty years later, the battle is still being fought. Militaries attract the guys with high testosterone, the guys who don’t think the rules, laws and boundaries apply to them – and slowly, slowly, they have to be brought to understand that yes, the rules apply to them, and that forcible sex with another woman – or man – is OFF LIMITS. Bravo to those brave women who go public and create awareness and disgust for this problem. Evil whens men get away with this despicable crime.
Mediterranean Plus Doors Closed and Driving and Texting
Sigh. We went for lunch at our favorite local ‘Mediterranean’ food restaurant, the Mediterranean Plus, only to see a big “This Space For Rent” sign on the door. So sad. The last time we were there, we talked with the owner, who said that Chow Time (a Chinese Food Buffet), which had opened near by, was killing him. It is just so sad. We are hoping he is only looking for a more propitious location. We’d love for him to find another location closer to downtown.
On our way to church last night, we looked over at the guy in the blue pick-up next to us, who was texting. He was only going about 20 mph, but when the car three cars up slowed to make a right turn, he didn’t notice, and crashed right into the much bigger pick-up in front of him. CRASH! It made a horrible crunching sound, and his hood got all crinkled up.
Even if Florida doesn’t have any laws against texting, his entire front-end is all smashed to pieces, glass and plastic everywhere, sharp shards. Having to pay for all that damage will be a big penalty. I wonder if it will make any difference in his behavior?
Wil Saudi Arabia Curb the Morals Police?
This is a tiny little article in the Qatar Gulf Times:
New curbs on Saudi moral police: reports
AFP/Riyadh
Saudi Arabia will curb the powers of its religious police, a newspaper report said yesterday.
“The new system will set a mechanism for the field work of the committee’s men which hands over some of their specialisations to other state bodies, such as arrests and interrogations,” Al Hayat daily quoted religious police chief Sheikh Abdullatiff Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh as saying.
Agents of the body known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice will also be banned from carrying out “searches without prior approval from the governor”, he said.
Okaz daily also reported that the religious police agents will be prohibited from “standing at the entrances of shopping malls to prevent the entry of any person”, referring to attempts by agents to ban women who do not comply with the Islamic dress code and unmarried couples from entering malls.
Sheikh was appointed in January as the new chief of the religious police. Two weeks into his post, he banned volunteers from serving in the commission which enforces the kingdom’s Islamic rules.
In April he went further, prohibiting the religious police from “harassing people” and threatening “decisive measures against violators”.
In June, Sheikh came out strongly against one of his men who ordered a woman to leave a mall because she was wearing nail polish.
The woman had defied the orders as she filmed her argument with the policeman and posted it on YouTube.
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