Music for Thanksgiving

Jammin' down on the farm: Sweet Georgia Brown and Bye Bye Blues with Tractor Accompaniment.

Old-time Fiddling with tractor accompaniment.

And Tractor Square dancing.

When your tired of thinking about farmwork, musical dreams for engineers and mechanics.

Thanksgiving recipes

One thing I always do at Thanksgiving now is to make a batch of cranberry sauce from scratch, from the Ocean Spray Cranberry package. Sort through the berries while washing (they float) and follow the recipe exactly, breaking berries which don't burst. It's so easy, and much better than canned whole-berry sauce. Wonderful if you're transporting food to someone else's house, as it doesn't need to be refrigerated and is best made ahead. For a different flavor, less assertive, add 1/4 teaspoon salt. You can also use part orange juice in place of water and a little orange zest. But I've been going the purist route in recent years, leaving the oranges for raw cranberry relish. For kids, have some mild, jellied Cranberry/Raspberry sauce on hand.

One year here in our garden, we had fresh shelly beans in the garden at Thanksgiving, several varieties, and I combined them with corn, a little caramelized onion and a touch of heavy cream for a "more traditional" succotash. I got the idea from the Joy of Cooking. No cup of butter in the succotash for me. Though tomatoes in succotash are another way to go. Keira's mom used to cook dried corn and add a little cream for fall sometimes to remind everyone how things used to be.

I cooked some of the shellies (fresh seeds from over-grown, but not dried, green beans) separately for myself, since I can't eat corn. Black Valentine and Coco Rose de Prague are good varieties for variable fall weather, and make good shellies as well as green beans. Supplement with frozen lima or green beans if you are short of "shellies".

The Amazon cooking blog has a recipe for roasting a small turkey in 45 minutes. Might need to try it this year for our second shift dinner. Though if I'm going to the trouble of removing the backbone, I'm also going to separate the breast from the dark meat, so I can cook the dark meat a little longer, like they do in restaurants. The Sweet Potato Pie and the dressings for the Romaine salad sound good, too. There are general tips for whole turkey (brine the bird, chill the breast) and for making gravy.

Keira's mom used to partially roast the turkey in a big roasting pan, then remove it, pour off the pan juices for gravy and pile a lot of bread and rice dressing into the pan before placing the bird on top to finish roasting. A good way to prepare enough dressing for everybody and for leftovers, plus gravy. I still follow Grandma Smith's practice of putting the simmered giblets in the dressing. Fresh sage makes a difference, though the bread and rice dressing was good with extra celery, thyme, etc. to make up for a sage allergy.

Don't think I'll be doing deep-fried turkey or crockpot turkey breast. My rolls will be from frozen dough, not "scratch".

Butternut squash and apple cider soup and diabetic apple and pineapple pie sound good. We still have Red Fuji and Pink Lady apples on the trees. We tried several varieties of winter squash this year, but the Butternut family of squash is still best for our hot valley, unless you're exporting Kabocha squash to Japan in June. Francisco grew a Mexican variety that's shaped sort of like a pumpkin, but with some green netting in the skin. He gave a bunch of them away to friends. We grew Argonaut, a giant hybrid butternut. Ours didn't get anywhere near 100 pounds. Next year, maybe we'll go back to Tahitian. Maybe with Rainbow Butternut or Greek Red Butternut.

Hoping that everyone has a wonderful day tomorrow.

Thanksgiving Proclamations and thoughts

As we prepare to host two separate Thanksgiving dinners:

Remembering the Pilgrims.

The first national Thanksgiving day was a day of fasting and prayer.

Thanksgiving proclamations by Washington, Lincoln, Adams, Madison and other presidents (on subsequent pages). Dennis Prager usually reads one of the proclamations on his radio show on Thanksgiving, at the perfect time to listen while cooking.

I like to pick one to read before the prayer on Thanksgiving. Shortened, if necessary, when children might get restless. Unfortunately, I don't have a Spanish translation of any of them, and some of the language is quite unfamiliar to us today. Guess we'll muddle through.

An interesting historical note: a speech given on the day Lincoln issued his famous proclamation - scroll down.

Our friend Brandy reminded us not too long ago that the ancient Feast of the Tabernacles was the antecedent to our Thanksgiving celebrations. Here's a Jewish perspective on Thanksgiving: "Our gratitude to God must express itself in the actions of our daily life. Giving back the "first of our fruit," the choicest share of the crop, is the only appropriate way to thank God for giving us all our fruit."

Have a happy Thanksgiving.

Happy V.I. Day

Happy Victory in Iraq day.

We won. There were good arguments for not going into Iraq, but once we were there, it was important to the world that extremists not be allowed to prevail over the US and coalition forces. And it's been astonishing to watch the world press virtually ignore the remarkable progress in Iraq. So bloggers just declared a day of victory.

There's progress in Iraqi politics. And booming investment in infrastructure.

One newspaper made the announcement three months ago. Thanks are due to our troops, coalition troops and the Iraqi security forces.

I'm going to keep praying for the Iraqis and their fledgling state, as well as for our country and other countries still trying to make progress in a complicated, dangerous world.

What might have been.

Update: George W. Bush'sgifts to President-Elect Obama.

Lessons from the Big 3 auto industry crisis

Real-time confirmation of basic principles from Barbarians to Bureaucrats - a book which helped me understand how organizations work:

1. Unions are organized because management is not paying attention to workers. Unions and corporations often become so rigid in their interactions that they become involved in death-spirals. Everyone wants security, but when everyone starts to feel too secure, things fall apart.

2. Boards of Directors who pay massive salaries and bonuses to executives are often not acting in the interests of the stockholders. This distorts the ethical system upon which the corporation should be built. When leaders of corporations are out of touch with their customers, stockholders and employees, they enter a state of aristocratic decline, much like the decline of an entire civilization. These leaders start to exhibit signs of madness. Sort of like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

Question from the Right Coast: Is it too late to institute a French-style socialist solution? I don't see any handy, efficient "barbarians" around to reform the Big 3 without getting us into deeper trouble. Nimble Japanese car companies are doing a good job of rolling over the Big 3, another function of "barbarians".

Update: Revisiting Michael Moore's first big success. And, why couldn't GM adjust fast enough to world changes? And, why aren't our aristocratic members of Congress held responsible for their part in the disaster? Especially their failure to give assurances to the auto makers that future legislation would not destroy the value of investments the automakers were ready to make to meet the contemporaneous demands of Congress?

Cub Scout Jokes

Shaun: What do you do with a blue elephant?
Pedro: Tell me.
Shaun: Cheer it up.

Shaun: What do you call Australian boxer shorts?
Peter: I haven't a clue.
Shaun: Down-underwear

Shaun Wolf, Rockford, MI

My favorite:

If at first you don't succeed,
Skydiving is not for you.

Gabriel Laska, Marshall, Ill.

Living Life Every Day

Blogger Dean Barnett has died of Cystic Fibrosis. He was one of those people who made the most of life even in the face of tremendous challenges. He wasn't shy about taking on an intellectual argument. But he also wrote a tribute to a Lefty blogger with whom he deeply disagreed when the latter died last year, also at the age of 41. Dean Barnett looked at his challenges head-on and moved forward in a realistic way, appreciating both the big and the little things which came his way each day.

I've met two other people recently who strike me in the same way. David and I talked recently with a local pastor who had a near-death experience in a diving accident which made him a paraplegic and an instant Christian. He is currently running for City Council, with considerable help from his brother, other relatives and friends.

I also met one of the Hoggard's neighbors, a woman who has severe arthritis of a rare form which is fusing her spine and deforming her body. Her hips were both replaced when she was relatively young. She and her husband adopted a little girl from overseas a few years ago. The girl, now 8, is the focus of a lot of love. Her mom also keeps busy volunteering for the Catholic church. She speaks with great enthusiasm about her life, even expressing gratitude for her disability.

A former neighbor of ours, Mrs. Rambo the "garden lady", similarly made me feel good just being around her. She also had debilitating pain in her spine. She and her husband had lost their only daughter when she was just a girl. I lost track of her when she went into a nursing home near an "adopted" - unrelated - niece in Tulare. She fought the move as long as she could. Her little house is just not the same without all the exuberant flowers she tended there. She made a difference in my life. She radiated both gratitude and a kind of determination to live a fulfilling life. She "thrilled" at the sound of a rooster crowing, as it reminded her of ranch life. She took joy in every flower in her garden and every person she knew.

Dennis Prager interviewed his mother for the first time on his Happiness Hour last Friday. It was her birthday. She and her husband look forward to each day, ignoring the aches and pains of age. She provided some fascinating insights into life in the past as an Orthodox Jew in New York City. Things have really changed. She thinks she was "born happy", though she has had several challenges - a deaf mother and the murder of a grandfather, for example.

Dennis' old friend Father Gregory called to speak with her. His call reminded me of the old days when Dennis moderated the "Religion on the Line" radio program in Los Angeles. The clergy got along with each other remarkably well, laughed together and supported each other despite their theological differences. There was a core set of values which they shared and which they helped each other express to listeners. They also seemed to be a notably grateful group of people.

Wretchard put a note of gratitude and comfort into his post on Dean Barnett's death. It could apply to many other people we cherish and are grateful for, and probably even to to my difficulty in throwing away old things which have meaning to me:

"Sometimes relatives put off cleaning out the room or packing up the effects of the deceased because it almost seems as if they’ll come back. Just you wait.

The time to clean up comes when we realize that even memory is not necessary for love. Nothing is futile. Just you wait."