Wednesday, November 22, 2006
LET'S TALK TURKEY
Here's what my family will be eating on Thanksgiving Day. I've cooked my turkey this way for so long I can't quite remember where or when I got the recipe. In any case, it has never failed me. Enjoy, with blessings and wishes for a peaceful and safe Day of Thanksgiving...
Ingredients:
1 whole turkey, deceased and defeathered
2-3 whole apples, peeled and quartered
1-2 onions, cut into 8ths
Whole garlic, peeled and notched
Olive oil
Misc. seasonings to taste - suggested are basil, parsley, sage, season salt, etc.
Whole stems of rosemary
Poultry clamps or toothpics
Roasting pan with lid or aluminum foil
Medium Sherry, any brand
Prep turkey for roasting (remove neck & gizzards, rinse in warm water, pat dry)
Mix together misc. seasonings and olive oil
Coat inside of turkey with olive oil mixture
Stuff inside of turkey with mixture of apples, onions, whole garlic, and pieces of Rosemary until full, clamp ends with poultry clamps or toothpics.
Separate skin from flesh around breast, thigh, leg areas, coat with olive oil seasonings, and insert rosemary sprigs under skin
Coat the entire outside skin area with the remaining olive oil seasoning mixture
Pour sherry into bottom of roast pan, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan but not enough to reach the roaster rack (if there is one)
Place turkey in roast pan, breast side up (legs pointing up)
Cover completely with lid or foil, so no moisture escapes, allowing enough room for air to circulate without the foil touching the turkey if possible
Cook in oven at 350 degrees for 20-30 minutes per pound
It's important to make sure your turkey is covered as tightly as possible in the oven, as the sherry will evaporate inside and help keep the turkey moist while giving it a wonderful flavor. Do NOT remove the foil/lid for any reason, as you will lose all that moisture. There is no need to ever baste the turkey.
Approximately 1 - 1 1/2 hours prior to removing from oven, remove the foil/lid so the turkey will brown. At this time you can also drain the juices from the bottom of the pan if you want to make gravy with it.
After turkey is brown and completely cooked, remove from oven and set out to cool but DO NOT TOUCH FOR AT LEAST 30 MINUTES. Letting the turkey sit out and cool allows the juices to be reabsorbed and will keep the turkey moist.
Carve, serve, and enjoy!
P.S. We don't eat the stuffing from the turkey - we do our dressing separately. The apples and onions etc. are used only to season and cook the bird, but they're not eaten.
Ingredients:
1 whole turkey, deceased and defeathered
2-3 whole apples, peeled and quartered
1-2 onions, cut into 8ths
Whole garlic, peeled and notched
Olive oil
Misc. seasonings to taste - suggested are basil, parsley, sage, season salt, etc.
Whole stems of rosemary
Poultry clamps or toothpics
Roasting pan with lid or aluminum foil
Medium Sherry, any brand
Prep turkey for roasting (remove neck & gizzards, rinse in warm water, pat dry)
Mix together misc. seasonings and olive oil
Coat inside of turkey with olive oil mixture
Stuff inside of turkey with mixture of apples, onions, whole garlic, and pieces of Rosemary until full, clamp ends with poultry clamps or toothpics.
Separate skin from flesh around breast, thigh, leg areas, coat with olive oil seasonings, and insert rosemary sprigs under skin
Coat the entire outside skin area with the remaining olive oil seasoning mixture
Pour sherry into bottom of roast pan, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan but not enough to reach the roaster rack (if there is one)
Place turkey in roast pan, breast side up (legs pointing up)
Cover completely with lid or foil, so no moisture escapes, allowing enough room for air to circulate without the foil touching the turkey if possible
Cook in oven at 350 degrees for 20-30 minutes per pound
It's important to make sure your turkey is covered as tightly as possible in the oven, as the sherry will evaporate inside and help keep the turkey moist while giving it a wonderful flavor. Do NOT remove the foil/lid for any reason, as you will lose all that moisture. There is no need to ever baste the turkey.
Approximately 1 - 1 1/2 hours prior to removing from oven, remove the foil/lid so the turkey will brown. At this time you can also drain the juices from the bottom of the pan if you want to make gravy with it.
After turkey is brown and completely cooked, remove from oven and set out to cool but DO NOT TOUCH FOR AT LEAST 30 MINUTES. Letting the turkey sit out and cool allows the juices to be reabsorbed and will keep the turkey moist.
Carve, serve, and enjoy!
P.S. We don't eat the stuffing from the turkey - we do our dressing separately. The apples and onions etc. are used only to season and cook the bird, but they're not eaten.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
ARMISTICE DAY
ON THE 11TH DAY OF THE 11TH MONTH AT THE 11TH HOUR IN THE YEAR 1918, AN ARMISTICE WAS SIGNED THAT ENDED THE WAR TO END ALL WARS...
The very first Armistice Day was November 11, 1919 - a year after the end of WWI, known back then as "The Great War" or "The War To End All Wars." After WWII ended in 1945, communities began remembering all military veterans on Armistice Day. In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower officially changed Armistice Day to be known as Veterans Day.
A story broadcast this week on NPR led me to The World War I Living History Project, and from there, to my own front room.
Hanging on my wall are four framed documents, yellowed and creased with time and saved for generations. Years ago, as my beloved paternal grandmother slowly succumbed to Alzheimer's, I found these documents folded in a drawer of her desk. The largest is a page from the November 17, 1918 edition of the New York Tribune showing photographs taken at the Victory Parade on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The other three frames hold the typewritten pages of a letter from a Doughboy at the American Expeditionary Front to his brother, dated November 8th, 1918 - three days before the end of the Great War. Both the author, Harold Weeks, and the recipient, Ben Weeks, were brothers to my grandmother's uncle Charles Roe Weeks.
I will soon post digital images of the actual letter. In the meantime, here is the content of the letter verbatim:
_________________________________________________
My dear Ben:-
I was more than glad to get your letter and the pictures you sent. God knows, I have looked long enough and often enough for some word direct from you. However, I suppose that is one thing we must expect. Always waiting for something we want and hoping that the next mail or car will bring it in. Thank God, you are not over here so far as you are concerned but I sympathize with you and appreciate all that this long year must have meant to you, knowing that the rest of us have come over when you were first into a uniform and into a line. It may not be so bad, their sending you back to the Artillery Corps, because that is, without exception, unless it be the Aviation, THE branch of the Service.
Don't remind me of Delta and Phi and Epsilon and Theta, and wind and windage, and barometer and thermometer and Delta Phi over Delta with big "X" over little "x". They give me the horrors. I think I can see before me now the range of a twelve-inch shell with a powder charge of 270, a barometer of 28 1/2 or 29, a thermometer of 60, with a right angle wind at 20 miles velocity and an elevation of 11 degrees. I also can tell you the pseudo-velocity of the projectile, not to mention its point of impact, its angle of flight, its penetration and I believe we had something else - how many inches of Harveyized steel it would penetrate. After all these years, I think I could take my ballistic table and sextant and fire a big gun with some degree of accuracy. Furthermore, I think I could wheel a battery into line, set my angle points, take my readings and fire my trial shot, and do a little havoc with a battery. Don't be discouraged. This is only the elementary part of artillery. As I sit here writing you I am hearing the actual and practical parts of artillery. Somebody not far from me is doing the mathematics. His results are obvious.
This night would be awful quiet if it were not for your Corps right now. We might hear Jerry like a night owl flopping overhead. We might, incidentally, feel Jerry's pill balls or the results therefrom if your artillery were not taking up so much space in, on and thru the atmosphere and earth. When everything is said and doneI believe I would rather hear the big guns than see the boys marching thru No Man's Land, the horses plodding, weary and tired, loaded heavily with their share of munitions, and fight across No Man's Land or watch the cavalryman in his daily travel. Yes, the big gun takes a rained mine but it offers the advantage of not having to come in contact immediately with the results of your efforts. Out of the air comes the answer and you exist to continue or you are gathered together maybe with a shovel. But the infantry boy or the cavalry boy goes up and over and if he gets across he sees his blade or his gun or his revolver deal its deadly stroke. He fences and parries to protect himself from such a stroke. Maybe he returns intact. More often he is blind or armless or legless or a broken, physical wreck. More often he is two or more of these. The Minnie ball leaves a victim for years to come. The artillery shell mercifully ends all such possibility or at the best minimizes the chances of a mans living to be a burden to himself and his friends.
The aviator has once chance of fatal accident - his machine goes wrong. Other than that he is safe, far safe than either of his brothers-in-arms, on the solid earth or in the water. When he does lose, he never knows it. He goes into a hero'd grave and his friends know where he is, nearly always.
So don't bewail your lot. If you get over and see one week on the borders of No Man's Land, you will have a picture on memory's walls that you would ever wish to turn toward the wall, so horrible would the picture be. There is nothing between you and the front line that is any different from what you are doing there. There is everything between the Front Line and your enemy, that you cannot leave to come in its due course without wishing for that hour to get to you sooner. We have been wishing our lives away doing our bit where we were sent and after one excursion into the battle front believed ourselves bomb-proof but now our men are numbered among those listed as not returning and while the number is few to date, the number will increase each day and as the nunber increases our wish for such a moment ceases to exist. It is not that I would wish you to accept without without any desire to see the front and be in it with your fellow officers because of your danger there, but that I want you to feel and understand that when your turn comes you will be there and if you are among the chosen few who have not had to undergo, without all of the worry and horror, you are among the chosen few lucky men. Whatever way you look at it, there is nothing that will ever recompense the man who has been in France for what he has lost. There is something that has taken away his youth that will never give it back again. Whether he has lost an arm or leg or his sight or whether he has lost the two years out of his life, he has but one one satisfaction and that is the greatest a soldier can feel - that he came over before or when asked, that he did his bit over here where he was put and that he was always ready to do it. Some one had to stay back there and assist in the training and formation of the bodies to come over here. From what I gather from officers who have been with you, your services have been much more valuable there than others who have been sent away. So don't be downhearted. Don't be discouraged but buck up and attack each day's duties with a smile and maybe you will come over later. The war is not over yet and it will be some long months before the troops leave France. War, so far as maiming one another is concerned, may cease to exist any hour now but the work so far as reconstruction and regeneration and refurnishing of France and the Allied countries is concerned, will not be over for some long, long months yet.
Charley is in the Aviation. Somebody said he was on his way over. I understand Harold is over here. Allan is within a few miles of me. And so it goes. They might be all just as far away as yourself so far as my being ale to see any of them or any of them see me because of conditions as they are. I get long a very sweet letters from Bill and Bess. I hear from Mother but none of the rest. I am well, fat and ill-tempered and just as I always was. Got a horse out here I will give you if you will come over here. Will be going away shortly on a different duty and don't know what do do with it. That is all that I can say of myself personally.
I saw Burdon, who is in the south of France, some time ago. He didn't seem like the Harold Burdon who used to live with us. I can't describe the change but I believe he was feeling more natural and trying to readjust himself than he had been for some long time. He drew an unfortunate position and that is an officer in a replacement division. Thank God, you didn't draw that. I don't know of any misery that Uncle Sam can inflict on officers and men quite as keen as placing them in a replacement division. Some of the other officers who were friends of yours at Custer and who spoke very kindly of you and your escapades as a bronco buster, I met in my wanderings. Seems as though you established quite a reputation for yourself as a buster of broncos and handler of men, not to mention considerable of a knight-errant with the ladies. I knew as much long ago. Cut out the ladies. They are nice, awfully nice, but they will make you more discontented and unhappy over your lot than any other mixture of sweets that I know of. Take a page out of my diary and read it over and you will find that I have written several times on the thought, "Cut out the ladies". I have tried to do it always but never succeeded. I have a hope that you will continue in the service after this war is over. But you won't if you mix politics and sweet formulae as done up in petticoat packages.
Give my love to any of the folks you see and write when you get a chance. Don't wait so long next time.
The very first Armistice Day was November 11, 1919 - a year after the end of WWI, known back then as "The Great War" or "The War To End All Wars." After WWII ended in 1945, communities began remembering all military veterans on Armistice Day. In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower officially changed Armistice Day to be known as Veterans Day.
A story broadcast this week on NPR led me to The World War I Living History Project, and from there, to my own front room.
Hanging on my wall are four framed documents, yellowed and creased with time and saved for generations. Years ago, as my beloved paternal grandmother slowly succumbed to Alzheimer's, I found these documents folded in a drawer of her desk. The largest is a page from the November 17, 1918 edition of the New York Tribune showing photographs taken at the Victory Parade on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The other three frames hold the typewritten pages of a letter from a Doughboy at the American Expeditionary Front to his brother, dated November 8th, 1918 - three days before the end of the Great War. Both the author, Harold Weeks, and the recipient, Ben Weeks, were brothers to my grandmother's uncle Charles Roe Weeks.
I will soon post digital images of the actual letter. In the meantime, here is the content of the letter verbatim:
_________________________________________________
American E. F.
November 8,1918.
My dear Ben:-
I was more than glad to get your letter and the pictures you sent. God knows, I have looked long enough and often enough for some word direct from you. However, I suppose that is one thing we must expect. Always waiting for something we want and hoping that the next mail or car will bring it in. Thank God, you are not over here so far as you are concerned but I sympathize with you and appreciate all that this long year must have meant to you, knowing that the rest of us have come over when you were first into a uniform and into a line. It may not be so bad, their sending you back to the Artillery Corps, because that is, without exception, unless it be the Aviation, THE branch of the Service.
Don't remind me of Delta and Phi and Epsilon and Theta, and wind and windage, and barometer and thermometer and Delta Phi over Delta with big "X" over little "x". They give me the horrors. I think I can see before me now the range of a twelve-inch shell with a powder charge of 270, a barometer of 28 1/2 or 29, a thermometer of 60, with a right angle wind at 20 miles velocity and an elevation of 11 degrees. I also can tell you the pseudo-velocity of the projectile, not to mention its point of impact, its angle of flight, its penetration and I believe we had something else - how many inches of Harveyized steel it would penetrate. After all these years, I think I could take my ballistic table and sextant and fire a big gun with some degree of accuracy. Furthermore, I think I could wheel a battery into line, set my angle points, take my readings and fire my trial shot, and do a little havoc with a battery. Don't be discouraged. This is only the elementary part of artillery. As I sit here writing you I am hearing the actual and practical parts of artillery. Somebody not far from me is doing the mathematics. His results are obvious.
This night would be awful quiet if it were not for your Corps right now. We might hear Jerry like a night owl flopping overhead. We might, incidentally, feel Jerry's pill balls or the results therefrom if your artillery were not taking up so much space in, on and thru the atmosphere and earth. When everything is said and doneI believe I would rather hear the big guns than see the boys marching thru No Man's Land, the horses plodding, weary and tired, loaded heavily with their share of munitions, and fight across No Man's Land or watch the cavalryman in his daily travel. Yes, the big gun takes a rained mine but it offers the advantage of not having to come in contact immediately with the results of your efforts. Out of the air comes the answer and you exist to continue or you are gathered together maybe with a shovel. But the infantry boy or the cavalry boy goes up and over and if he gets across he sees his blade or his gun or his revolver deal its deadly stroke. He fences and parries to protect himself from such a stroke. Maybe he returns intact. More often he is blind or armless or legless or a broken, physical wreck. More often he is two or more of these. The Minnie ball leaves a victim for years to come. The artillery shell mercifully ends all such possibility or at the best minimizes the chances of a mans living to be a burden to himself and his friends.
The aviator has once chance of fatal accident - his machine goes wrong. Other than that he is safe, far safe than either of his brothers-in-arms, on the solid earth or in the water. When he does lose, he never knows it. He goes into a hero'd grave and his friends know where he is, nearly always.
So don't bewail your lot. If you get over and see one week on the borders of No Man's Land, you will have a picture on memory's walls that you would ever wish to turn toward the wall, so horrible would the picture be. There is nothing between you and the front line that is any different from what you are doing there. There is everything between the Front Line and your enemy, that you cannot leave to come in its due course without wishing for that hour to get to you sooner. We have been wishing our lives away doing our bit where we were sent and after one excursion into the battle front believed ourselves bomb-proof but now our men are numbered among those listed as not returning and while the number is few to date, the number will increase each day and as the nunber increases our wish for such a moment ceases to exist. It is not that I would wish you to accept without without any desire to see the front and be in it with your fellow officers because of your danger there, but that I want you to feel and understand that when your turn comes you will be there and if you are among the chosen few who have not had to undergo, without all of the worry and horror, you are among the chosen few lucky men. Whatever way you look at it, there is nothing that will ever recompense the man who has been in France for what he has lost. There is something that has taken away his youth that will never give it back again. Whether he has lost an arm or leg or his sight or whether he has lost the two years out of his life, he has but one one satisfaction and that is the greatest a soldier can feel - that he came over before or when asked, that he did his bit over here where he was put and that he was always ready to do it. Some one had to stay back there and assist in the training and formation of the bodies to come over here. From what I gather from officers who have been with you, your services have been much more valuable there than others who have been sent away. So don't be downhearted. Don't be discouraged but buck up and attack each day's duties with a smile and maybe you will come over later. The war is not over yet and it will be some long months before the troops leave France. War, so far as maiming one another is concerned, may cease to exist any hour now but the work so far as reconstruction and regeneration and refurnishing of France and the Allied countries is concerned, will not be over for some long, long months yet.
Charley is in the Aviation. Somebody said he was on his way over. I understand Harold is over here. Allan is within a few miles of me. And so it goes. They might be all just as far away as yourself so far as my being ale to see any of them or any of them see me because of conditions as they are. I get long a very sweet letters from Bill and Bess. I hear from Mother but none of the rest. I am well, fat and ill-tempered and just as I always was. Got a horse out here I will give you if you will come over here. Will be going away shortly on a different duty and don't know what do do with it. That is all that I can say of myself personally.
I saw Burdon, who is in the south of France, some time ago. He didn't seem like the Harold Burdon who used to live with us. I can't describe the change but I believe he was feeling more natural and trying to readjust himself than he had been for some long time. He drew an unfortunate position and that is an officer in a replacement division. Thank God, you didn't draw that. I don't know of any misery that Uncle Sam can inflict on officers and men quite as keen as placing them in a replacement division. Some of the other officers who were friends of yours at Custer and who spoke very kindly of you and your escapades as a bronco buster, I met in my wanderings. Seems as though you established quite a reputation for yourself as a buster of broncos and handler of men, not to mention considerable of a knight-errant with the ladies. I knew as much long ago. Cut out the ladies. They are nice, awfully nice, but they will make you more discontented and unhappy over your lot than any other mixture of sweets that I know of. Take a page out of my diary and read it over and you will find that I have written several times on the thought, "Cut out the ladies". I have tried to do it always but never succeeded. I have a hope that you will continue in the service after this war is over. But you won't if you mix politics and sweet formulae as done up in petticoat packages.
Give my love to any of the folks you see and write when you get a chance. Don't wait so long next time.
Always your loving brother,
HRW
_________________________________________________
Friday, November 10, 2006
THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN AMERICA
SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (I-CT)
This man could name his price. Anything he wants, it's his. "Which chairmanship would you like, Senator? How MANY chairmanships do you want, Senator? Does Connecticut need any federal dollars for pet projects and improvements, Senator?"
GOP to Lieberman: Your party dumped you, they don't love you anymore, come over to us, and we will once again control the kingdom that is the U.S. Senate and you will be our Crown Prince.
Dems to Lieberman: We really do love you, man! It was those leftie nuts in your home state who dumped you, and, well, Hillary and everyone else are all about the Party so they HAD to endorse Lamont in the General Election, you know how it is, PLEASE don't leave us!
The balance of power in the U.S. Senate rests on the shoulders of Senator Lieberman. You know THIS man's phone is buzzing...
LEFT AND RIGHT, WE ALL AGREE ON ONE THING - C-SPAN ROCKS!
I DON'T KNOW THAT I'VE EVER AGREED WITH THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF THE WASHINGTON TIMES - UNTIL NOW. ON THIS SUBJECT, I COULDN'T HAVE SAID IT BETTER.
Kudos to the Washington Times for their thoughtful and appreciative editorial on all that is C-SPAN. In my opinion - and obviously I'm not the only one - C-SPAN has literally made our federal government relevant and accessible to everyone. And we are a better country for it. You can read the full text of the WashTimes editorial here.
Kudos to the Washington Times for their thoughtful and appreciative editorial on all that is C-SPAN. In my opinion - and obviously I'm not the only one - C-SPAN has literally made our federal government relevant and accessible to everyone. And we are a better country for it. You can read the full text of the WashTimes editorial here.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
I'M BACK, AND I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE...
No particular reason why I've been gone, I just got out of the habit of posting. I will try to rectify that.
First thing is the most important thing. Yesterday's election, and the results. The Democrats are back. We won not just the House, but the Senate too.
Unlike most of my Democratic counterparts, I don't feel elation. I never viewed this election - or any other election - as a competition, a popularity contest. I take it much too seriously for that. For me, these elections have always been the answer to the question "who do we trust to make decisions that will profoundly affect us and future generations in countless aspects of our lives?"
Today, as a Democrat, one of the things that I feel is a tremendous sense of responsibility. We Democrats have been entrusted with the future of our entire country. It is now up to us to lead. It is both an honor and a challenge that we cannot take lightly.
But mostly what I feel today is a sense of relief.
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