Instead of posting “Cooking” on Thursday this week, I”m putting out this recipe in time for you to get the ingredients together and make this side dish. Besides, you already have my grandma’s chopped apple cake recipe and stovetop dressing in the box takes about 2 minutes to fix, but add some chopped onion to it to bump it up a notch.
Yes, I am goofing off.
I love this dish, because while it can be bought at the store if you’re in a hurry, it is very easy to make from scratch. Fresh cranberries are everywhere now, and if you want to use them to decorate your Christmas/holiday tree, you just string them with a darning needle threaded with heavy duty sewing thread, available at a fabric shop. You can also string popcorn with the cranberries or just put it on its own strings.
When the holidays are over, put the strings of cranberries and popcorn outside for the birds and squirrels, or take the stuff off the strings and put the berries and stale popcorn in spots where you know the critters will pick them up. Make the squirrels happy.
This 2004 version comes from myrecipes.com:
1/2 cup orange marmalade
2 tablespoons grated orange rind (zest is the more up-to-date term)
1 cup fresh orange juice (about 2 oranges)
1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar (to taste)
1 (12-ounce) package fresh cranberries
Combine marmalade and orange zest, and set aside.
Combine juice and sugar in a medium saucepan; bring to a boil. Add cranberries; return to boil. Reduce heat; simmer for 10 minutes or until cranberries pop and sauce begins to thicken. Remove from heat; stir in marmalade mixture.
Cover and chill in front of a TV while watching Macy’s parade or the ‘Frosty the Snowman’ cartoon.
N.B.: Instead of ‘grated orange rind’, the more up to date version is orange zest, which is the color part of orange peel. If you don’t have a microplane to produce orange peel zest, a kitchen grater is fine. Just do not take the grater deep into the white part of the peel. The orange part is where the flavor is, about 1/16 inch thick. If you make orange juice from the oranges, then throw the pulp into this, also.
Please read it carefully, especially Ocasio-Cortez’s plans for seizing the American economy. Her ignorance is at an appallingly high level, yes, but she is a juggernaut on a roller coaster ride to make her place in history, by golly!!! She is annoying the very people who could/might be willing to help her climb to glory.
She has done something that I had not anticipated: Ocasio-Cortez, in her haste to become Numbah One and lead with her ass… er, her lack of information, is running roughshod over senior members of the House and has already created a split in the Democrats over Her Plans. They are quarreling now. If this crack continues to grow and widen, as I hope it will, it weakens them. And if it gets wide enough, it may take a very, very long time to recover.
We now have two in Congress who want to have their own way: ‘Nuke ‘Em’ Swallwell, and this Bronx bimp.
They may seem like threats to the rest of us as a population, and they should, because they think they can do whatever they want to. We know that they can’t just do whatever they like, and that their “powers” are limited by law. But beneath the perceived threat is the wedge they are driving into their own Democratic party.
I had hoped this kind of crack in that party would occur some day. Hoped and wished and dropped coins in a charity wishing well. And it is happening right in front of us. If she continues along this path of running roughshod over senior members of the House, and probably the Senate at some point, a split which has already begun may widen and last for a very long time. Possibly take a century and a half to heal. Let’s hope so.
Personally, I want to see her stir up so much frenzy and quarreling that the Democrats lose sight of their goal to squash the Republicans and especially Trump. I also hope she really annoys a lot of senior Congress critters, but that’s just me.
What?? I can dream, can’t I?
Read the article, read the links to her plan and take in just how much she is stomping on people to have her way. Be grateful for all the resources that give us a chance to find out about these things so quickly.
That small firecracker storm stirred up by yesterday’s posting of an article about a newly-minted Congress critter from California showed that this incipient Congress critter is ignorant of both Federal and state laws about everything.
Here’s my attempt to clear up that ignorance as simply as possible.
First of all, the US Constitution has Amendments that specify such things as what authority is delegated to the Federal government, and what is delegated to the states and to the people of the United States.
The specific Amendment regarding this comes out of the Articles of Confederation, which was the original document meant to provide for a national and expanding, federal government. When the Articles of Confederation were dumped, the resulting Amendment designating states’ rights was created during the drafting of the US Constitution.
The 10th Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights to create a class of powers, known as reserved powers, exclusive to state governments. The amendment specifically reads as follows: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Now, that’s quite clear language, in my view. It is plain English, unlike some of the bills passed by either or both Houses of Congress, bills in which gobbledygook is meant to cover the cracks in the system that come from quarrelsome parties in Congress. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/amgovernment/chapter/state-power-and-delegation/
I will repeat it. Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The U.S. Constitution is silent on the dispersion of power between states and localities within each state. This means that because local jurisdictions are not mentioned specifically, then local power lies within the purvey of the states themselves.
The other Amendment which is brought up here so frequently is the Second Amendment, which is as follows: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
That’s pretty clear, too. At the federal level, your right to own guns is inviolate. The most recent example of a localized attempt to overstep the US Constitution as well as state law occurred when the Mayor of Deerfield, IL, not only passed an ordinance banning guns in Deerfield, but also included a search-and-seizure procedure with no notice to homeowners, which was tested in court, and was found to not only violate Illinois state laws by not providing due process or warrants, but also violated the US Constitution. She lost, and lost badly.
That was the first test of this kind of thing. I believe more will follow. Prepare yourselves mentally for that, and if necessary, get to be friendss with an attorney who knows both state and US Constitutional laws.
It was this bout of illegal activity by one person that prompted the County of Effingham downstate to offer itself as a sanctuary county for gun owners. That ‘sanctuary county’ program continues in Illinois, as I indicated a few weeks ago, with many counties following suit and more with the sanctuary proposal on their legislative books.
Try to speculate on what will happen if state legislatures decide to go full potato about it, and declare themselves sanctuary states for gun owners.? We’d probably have another test of both state and federal laws. That would be my guess. That’s how you do things in this country. It is “We, the People”, not ‘The Government’.
The newly-elected and very arrogant individual Swallwell from California voiced threats toward anyone who fails to obey a federal gun ban, including dropping a nuke on you. I’d like to see him try that.
He is not only ignorant of the US Constitution, he is also colossally ignorant of laws in general.
The US Constitution’s 2nd Amendment is a federal law, whether he likes it or not. It is backed up by the 10th Amendment. His authority is a lot more limited than he can possibly imagine by the language of the 10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Bear that last phrase in mind: “or to the people”, and review the Deerfield debacle. This Amendment has withstood the test of time and the court system.
The 10th Amencment is quite clear. It is within the rights of each and every state government to create legislation regarding owning guns. It is, in fact, reserved to the states to create such laws as they see fit, which has resulted in the State of Illinois passing rather stringent but valid FOID and CCW laws, both of which meet legal requirements and state laws, and constitutional terms at the federal level. This is what tripped up the Mayor of Deerfield.
I want to remind everybody reading this that Prohibition, a Constitutional amendment passed by Congress and ratified by the states, did not work and was repealed within a few years. Among other things, it provided room for the rise of organized crime, which started with Al Capone.
It is extremely necessary on the part of all of us to be aware of these vultures and give them as much room as possible to expose themselves for what they really are.
Without awareness of them and their agenda, we lose the very things we value most.
USS Ronald Reagan sailor gets two-year sentence after assaulting fellow sailor, strangling civilian
By CAITLIN DOORNBOS | STARS AND STRIPESPublished: November 16, 2018
YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — A USS Ronald Reagan aviation ordnanceman has been sentenced to two years in prison after being accused of sexually assaulting a fellow sailor, lying to Naval Criminal Investigative Services and strangling a civilian woman.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Steven Garcia, 27, pleaded guilty Wednesday to assault consummated by battery, making a false official statement and aggravated assault. He was originally charged with two counts of abusive sexual contact causing bodily harm but pleaded down to the assault charges in a pre-trial agreement with prosecutors.
The first assault happened Oct. 22, 2017, during a Ronald Reagan port visit in Busan, South Korea, Garcia admitted in court Wednesday. After a night of drinking with friends, Garcia’s first victim said she lost consciousness and woke up in her hotel room to Garcia forcefully penetrating her with his hand and mouth, causing her pain.
He does not have to register as a sex offender yet, but a BCD is on his plate. He gets to explain to future employers why he spent two years in jail instead of leaving the Navy with a clean plate. I doubt that this is the first or last time he’s done something like this, because he lied to the NCIS people when the assault on the first victim was reported.
From the article: [Each servicemember’s estimated risk of being sexually assaulted during the one-year period of study depended in large part on their assignment to a particular unit, command and installation.
“In one military service, for instance, women could see their risk doubled or halved, depending on the installation or ship to which they are assigned,” the report found.
The study found in the Army, Fort Hood in Texas had the most estimated incidents of sexual assault: 885, with 473 male victims and 412 female victims. Fort Bragg, N.C., had the second-most: 837, with 476 male and 361 female victims.]
What is plain is that more men were on the receiving end of sexual assaults than women. Perhaps the women were more aware and more cautious than the men who were assaulted. It seems to show that things haven’t actually changed in the last 60 years, but have essentially stayed the same. It does not mean that the military employs more sexual predators than civilian companies. It simply means that, because this is a closed environment in all services, the assaults are more likely to be reported than in a civilian environment.
It does not have anything to do with putting women on ships. It has everything to do with people who are predatory in nature looking for victims in a closed environment.
This summary of statistics on sexual violence https://endsexualviolencect.org/resources/get-the-facts/national-stats/ includes an unfortunate and simple fact: Victims of rape and attempted rape who did not report to the police did not report for a number of reasons. 43% of victims did not report because they thought that nothing could be done, 27% thought it was a private matter, 12% were afraid of the police response, and 12% felt it was not important enough to report.
At the same time, 2% of sexual assaults reported to police are false.
Telling people gross jokes and hitting on people at work in the civilian world is something should, and frequently will, get the joker fired. It means that Harvey Weinstein could only get away with being a predator as long as women were willing to put up with his crap.
However, we all have seen people of both genders using sex as a way to get to the top of the ‘look at me’ pile, e.g., Petraeus’s biographer a few years ago.
The loss of good manners and common sense in the general population seems to be on the rise. Bad manners and ‘look at me!’ behavior is taking precedence.
If there is a solution, it’s emphasizing awareness, especially in children, and that should always be ongoing.
The Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft carrying the crew of astronaut Nick Hague of the U.S. and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin of Russia blasts off to the International Space Station (ISS) from the launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan October 11, 2018. REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov
It seems that Vlad Putin is taking a stab at using nuclear-powered rockets to send stuff to Mars.
Now, considering that rocket propulsion systems require a “push” to reach delta V (escape velocity, as shown in the Soyuz MS-10 photo), it is not clear exactly how the Russians intend to produce that effect. It’s not quite the same thing as using nuclear fuel to heat water to produce electricity and drive a big nuke bird farm, or even using Bernoulli’s principle to make a caterpillar drive propel a submarine, like that Big Pig in the “Hunt For Red October”. (One of Sean Connery’s better movies.)
There’s no real explanation on how this nukey spacebird will manage to escape the chains of Earth and touch the Heavens. However, I’ve included a link to the original article at BGR, which tells us that Elon Musk’s reusable rockets will soon be outdated because Russia’s will be one better. https://bgr.com/2018/11/14/russia-nuke-rocket-spacex-rocket/
And apparently, the US is bringing back an old tech program abandoned in the 1970s, which someone brought up in the comments for the article about the Russian announcement at WUWT.
I’m really more interested in how a nuclear-powered engine can get something that big off the ground, never mind into Space. I understand how reactors work (at the basic level). I’m just curious as to what they intend to use for the propulsion system to create the liftoff. I’m guessing, however, that they’d use conventional fuels to get liftoff and reach escape velocity, and then switch over to the nuclear engine to keep propulsion stable and control spin/yaw/wobble/whatever floats your boat.
I’m leaving this for you nukey birds to discuss at length and confuse us mere mortals, and have some fun on a snowy Saturday.
Airman First Class William “Pits” Pitsenbarger was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously after he sacrificed himself to save numerous wounded soldiers. (Air Force)
You may remember one alleged LTC by the name of Margaret deSanti, whose claims of this and that seemed out of bounds to reasonable people, and decidedly far-fetched to others of us.
You can revive your memories of deSanti at the link below to her 2014 claims that she was a nurse on medevac helos in the Nam, and “repelled” out of helicopters, when there is zero record of her service. https://www.azuse.cloud/?p=57300
That was put up on TAH in 2014. There is no record of her service, period. There is, as noted in the original article, only one person received the Silver Star since WWII, and that was Leigh Ann Hester. It is easy enough to check on such things. Yet, Ms. deSanti claims that she received that award.
Ms. deSanti, who cannot even produce a correct salute, has literally spit in the faces of the women who did serve before she tried to add herself to their honored group.
I’ve gathered together a bit of information about various things that happened during World War II, such as women who were in nursing schools being recruited to serve in the US Cadet Nurse Corps, to replace nurses who joined the Army and were deployed to the various theaters. You can find that history at the site below in some of the stories that these ladies left behind.
This year is the 75th Anniversary of the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps. Some of them did go on to serve in the Army Nurse Corps once they finished their nursing degrees. Their stories are at this link: https://uscadetnurse.org/weremember
Some of them are rather poignant, as they were written by children and/or grandchildren after the Nurse Corps member passed on.
The U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps’ 75th Anniversary is going on now, in 2018.
“They saved lives at home, so others could save lives abroad.”
The website is a compilation of information about the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps—the nation’s first integrated uniformed U.S. service corps—which fulfilled an urgent need for nurses during World War II. At that time many nurses were called overseas to military service, and other women were attracted to the defense industry, while understaffed civilian hospitals in the United States were on the verge of collapse.
Nursing and Medicine During World War II
There are many links at the ceufast.com page, including links to WWI history of nursing.
The following article includes references to the struggles of black women to be accepted as nurses during WWII. Some 500 black women served in various theaters during that War.
Let’s lift a glass to all of these women who filled in for their departing counterparts and served at home, and for the those who joined the Navy and Army Nurse Corps and were sent overseas, some of whom did not make it back home, and for all those who followed in their footsteps in Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, OIF/OEF, and whatever has followed since then.
The subject is soup. Soup – the stuff that Immortals dream of.
Well, they just wish they could cook as well as mortals, which is why the Immortals always show up with an empty bowl and a spoon and that sad look in their eyes.
Soup of any kind is good. Onion, beef-based veggie, chicken noodles w/veggies (and I do mean noodles!), cream of potato, cream of mushroom.
So here’s a good and simple recipe for onion soup:
One onion per person – Spanish/yellow onions hold up well in this
Beef broth
Salt and pepper to taste, thyme and oregano, plus a bay leaf or two
Red or white wine is optional, but you want to make soup, not get stewed.
Kleenex
Croutons, sliced baguette and cheese (Swiss, gouda, mozzarella – it’s all good!)
Peel the onion the easy way: cut it in half, pull off the skin and outer layer. Slice each half on the mandolin if you have one; if not, then just do a coarse chop. One onion should serve one to two people.
Put the sliced onion into a pot, add the beef broth to cover. How much beef broth? How hungry are you? One 28 ounce box of broth should suffice for a couple of servings because it will cook down a little. If you want a lot of onion soup (yes, please!!!), add more as you go. The broth and sliced or diced onion cook together, so that the onion can weep tears into the broth to season it, and the broth can throw thyme and oregano at the onion to comfort it. Salt and pepper are to taste, always, and you can throw in a bay leaf or two if you like. The wine addition is optional. I don’t find it necessary, but it’s good with a hot bowl of onion soup with all that melty cheese on top.
It is very okay to cook the onions before you put them into the pot. That’s a personal choice. But it’s also okay to just cook them slowly in the beef broth without sautéing them first.
If you want this for lunch, start after breakfast. If you want it for dinner, start after lunch. Very slow simmer, lowest temp or flame on the burner; put a lid on the pot to keep the broth in the pot. Yes, you are allowed to peek, and test the flavor levels. You can also put this in a slow cooker or Crockpot for 5 to 6 hours on High, or if on Low then 8 to 10 hours.
The croutons you can buy already toasted and ready to use. The baguette slices go on the top of the onion soup, with the cheese (sliced or shredded, your choice) on top of the baguette. To get the nice browning, 1 to 2 minutes in the broiler at 375F to 400F with the door open, or bake it at 375F for 3 to 5 minutes in the oven, on a tray. It’s cheese. It gets gooey and melty. It’s good!
The Kleenex is for when you peel the onions the hard way instead of ripping the outermost layer and skin off the bulb, or for when you’re trying to slice them across the bulb by hand.
This is in regard to finding a new place closer to the Chicago area than the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery at Elwood, IL, which is south of Joliet. That cemetery includes places for cremains, and has room for 400,000 burials. The Fort Sheridan Post Cemetery is limited to those who made a career in the military, and those spaces are dwindling. Part of Fort Sheridan’s acreage is also part of the Lake County Forest Preserve district, with regular guided tours for people who want to come and see the wildlife (mostly hawks) and the habitat. (Sorry, I don’t have a photo of the Lincoln Cemetery entrance.)
What the VA wants to do, according to the article, is build a columbarium on a 15-acre site at Freeman and Mundhank roads, five miles east of the Arboretum (shopping center) of South Barringon, just off Interstate 90. It would offer room for 5,000 containers for cremains, along with a memorial marker, gravesite locator and parking.
However, the potential neighbors of this proposal were adamantly against the idea, even though it will be near Paul Douglas Forest Preserve, named for the Senator from Illinois who was one of the oldest Marine seeing combat in World War II in the Pacific Theater. Mr. Douglas also helped to preserve the Indiana Dunes National Lake Shore.
There are apparently all kinds of excuses: kids scared by the sound of blanks being fired from rifles, the sound of “Taps” depressing everyone, etc. but the NIMBY attitude is the real reason.
As Mr. Selle, the author of the article, tells us, it is less about finding a final resting place for veterans. It’s about property values and that old bugbear NIMBY (not in my back yard!)
From Zillow: The median home value in South Barrington is $759,700. South Barrington home values have gone up 2.0% over the past year and Zillow predicts they will fall -0.9% within the next year. The median list price per square foot in South Barrington is $210, which is higher than the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin Metro average of $166. The median price of homes currently listed in South Barrington is $865,000.
I looked up current sales prices on homes in South Barrington. They’ve gone up quite a bit since 1972, when I had a horse at a stable over in that area, something on the order of 1000% higher than back then. https://www.zillow.com/south-barrington-il/
While I can understand the desire to have a place closer to Chicago than the rather long distance down to Elwood, there are other places that might welcome the plan and provide acreage suitable for a columbarian.
One of those is land near the Illinois-Wisconsin state line, already purchased by the Lake County Forest Preserve District, and currently used as crop production until further notice. If the VA is paying for the development of this facility, then why not use land already in the FPD, with plenty of parking and access already in place?
The VA is taking public comment on the cemetery through Nov. 26, with a final environmental assessment due next month. However, as Mr. Selle indicates in his article, the VA can build the columbarium without village approval.
I could not find any VA contact info specific to this, but you could call their general number and ask about how to provide your input on it, if you like.
