Happy Friday everyone!
Yesterday I flew to Maui to see my good friend Paula and tomorrow Dana heads off for a week at the beach with her sweet family. We wish you all a happy, peaceful weekend and leave you with some pictures of paradise to get you through.
I have noticed that more home cooking calls for more chicken broth.
Soups, stews, rice, quinoa, roast—I end up using a ton of it, pretty much all year round. And the only way it comes organic at our store is in a 32 oz container. I never use it all at one meal unless it’s the holidays so I end up tossing whatever is left after a week.
More than once I wondered why they don’t sell it in one cup pouches. And then a few months ago, as I cleaned up a carcass after a roast chicken dinner, I wondered something better: “How hard is it to make my own broth?”
At first I wanted to make Rebecca Katz’s “Magic Mineral Broth” from Cancer Fighting Kitchen, but it has chicken, carrots, leaks, onions, celery, potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, garlic, parsley, kombu, peppercorns, allspice and bay.
Yeah, I don’t know what kombu is either.
So I reached for my other cookbook bible, the BHG New Cook Book, circa 1990.
First make this, or buy a roasted chicken at the store.
Keep the carcass in the refrigerator until you’re ready to use it.
Then into a large pot throw:
1 chicken carcass (I leave bits of meat hanging all over mine)
3 celery stalks, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon sage
½ teaspoon pepper
2 bay leaves
6 cups cold water.
Bring it to a boil and simmer for two hours.
Then I strained it and measured it out into one cup portions to freeze. It’s much less salty than the store bought version so the real flavors come through and it’s wonderful to cook with. I use it instead of water for my quinoa and rice, which gives both enough flavor that my kids are not missing those pre-seasoned salt bomb boxed rices.
Our roasted chicken recipe calls for stuffing the chicken with citrus. The first time I made this broth, I took the lemons out of the carcass before starting the broth. An hour later, I was shocked to find a lemon floating in my broth.
“Who put lemon in my broth?” I asked my husband and son, both of whom have official cooking rights in my kitchen. Blank faces. An hour later, Kate came in and asked “Mom, what’s broth?” Turns out she was the lemon bandit. She thought I was making soup and she was pretty sure—from all her cooking show experience—that it needed some acid.
Thanks, Cutthroat Kitchen.
And she was right. So in this picture, you can see I left the lemon and grapefruit in the carcass.
Tasty!
We live in the town over from Murrieta, CA.
Murrieta hit the world news this week due to a group of 100 protesters who stopped a bus full of women and children who crossed the border illegally into Texas. Texas can no longer hold them, so officials are putting them on planes and flying them to Southern California to process them through the local border patrol station.
A small group of Americans met them on the road to the station and physically stopped the busses from going anywhere except back to the border. Busses full of small, scared children and their mothers, who fled here to escape the poverty and violence of their homes.
The protesters were within their legal rights. The right to peaceful assembly is a value upon which this nation was founded.
They weren’t standing on moral ground, though.
Illegal immigration is a problem in this country. It’s a huge strain on the infrastructure. It’s true that taxpayer money goes to support people who have come to this country illegally. On this, we can all agree. There’s a simple solution, which is to make the pathway to citizenship easier and less costly, to reward those who graduate college and serve this country in uniform.
Driven by intense fear, lots of people don’t want this. I don’t understand the fear, because no one is taking food off my table, clothes off my back, or my kids’ place in school.
But it’s a huge national issue and it needs to be handled.
On Tuesday, it was not about the national conversation. It had moved past rhetoric and ideals and projections to a bus full of real live, hurting, hungry people.
In this part of California, we are overwhelmingly Christian, so when a group of people matching word for word the folks in the Beatitudes show up in our community, looking forward to a dinner of frozen burritos and a night sleeping on the bathroom floor, shouldn’t we find compassion in our hearts?
Shouldn’t we walk our Sunday morning talk?
Even if we don’t believe that they belong here, even if we think it’s high time the fools in Washington sorted this out.
When faced with the downtrodden, the humbled, the homeless right in front of us, Jesus commands us to put frustration and fear aside and help.
I’m sad that in a nation founded by immigrants under God, our fear of the “other” overcomes our responsibility to our faith. I’m sad that happened in my own community, where now we have to heal the breach of trust that has opened.
I’m also angry at how quickly we forget our history lessons and since I used to teach this stuff, here’s a refresher:
When John Smith and Company hit the beach in Virginia in 1607, they never intended to settle. They intended to get rich, and kill anyone who stood in their way, which is why we don’t use Jamestown as our shining example of courage and freedom.
The Puritans who came in 1620—history refers to them as Pilgrims—fled England due to religious persecution. They first lived in Holland, but then obtained a land permit from the London Virginia Company to settle at the mouth of the Hudson River. They hired two merchant ships to bring them across the ocean, one of which had to be abandoned after it was found to be unseaworthy. In desperation, 102 Pilgrims, plus the crew, crowded onto the 100 foot long Mayflower, which departed in July.
They missed the Hudson River, by hundreds of miles. When they finally stepped foot onto modern day Massachusetts, it was December of a horrible winter. By Spring, half of them had died and only four adult women had survived. Four, of seventeen. The ship’s captain was a mercenary and wanted as little loss as possible—he kicked the Puritans off the ship before they had adequate shelter to protect his crew from sickness.
The Natives were wary, since they had some history with Europeans, mostly involving theft, violence and disease. There were tense moments between the Pilgrims and the Natives, but eventually they agreed to a peace treaty and the Natives helped the Pilgrims with their farming and food.
The Pilgrims were a lot like those people on the busses the other day.
They were fleeing violence and persecution, in search of a safer life.
They were brought here by a mercenary who took their money and offered them very little in return, dropping them at the shore hundreds of miles off target in the dead middle of a New England winter.
They were sick and hungry, posing a strong threat to the health of the Natives.
In order to survive, they needed some compassion to get started.
Here’s where the stories divert. In 1620, against their better judgment, the Natives helped the Pilgrims.
And that was such a big freaking deal that we remember it on Thanksgiving.
It’s true that Europeans went on to make the Natives rue the day they didn’t kill the Pilgrims as they came ashore.
It’s also true that those Europeans forged the greatest nation on earth, from blood sweat and tears—sometimes theirs, sometimes those of the “other”. We have a checkered history for sure, but it’s magnificent all the same.
I am proud to be an American on most days.
Just not on days when we forget our own humble beginnings, or days when we forsake the “under God” part of our pledge of allegiance, or days when our fear of what cannot be articulated drives our actions, hypocritical or no.
Days like Tuesday.
Happy Birthday, USA. Here’s to a better tomorrow for the Shining City on the Hill, one that lives up to the lofty and admirable ideals inscribed on our own Statue of Liberty:
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Emma Lazarus, 1883
Dana and I are Feminists from way back. Maybe you’ve noticed.
So we take issue when a group of powerful and important women trash Feminism, which is what happened last week at the Heritage Foundation’s celebration of Women’s History Month, “Evaluating Feminism, Its Failures and Its Future”.
These women have some serious hubris. Do they even know what the word Feminist means?
Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women (dictionary.com)
The Conservative Right would have us believe that Feminism only serves liberals. That’s not true. Sarah Palin is a product of Feminism. Condolezza Rice. Michelle Bachman. Bay Buchanon. Michelle Malkin. Even, and sadly, Ann Coulter. The only reason Karin Agness, Mona Charen and Mollie Hemingway even had a microphone to speak in front of the other day is because of Feminism.
And yet these women blithely turn their backs on the path forged by our grandmothers and great grandmothers, a path that says that every woman born to freedom in this great nation can be anything she chooses to be. Like a presidential candidate, Secretary of State, political pundit or even character assassin in a nodding relationship with the truth.
I am pretty sure that Mona Charen who “called the glass-ceiling a ‘supposed barrier’ and said Feminists and the Obama Administration often use “much debunked statistics” to argue their points” didn’t get where she is by sleeping her way to the top. But 70 years ago, who knows if she would have had the opportunity to run her mouth as a syndicated columnist? Maybe some cigar smoking editor with girlie pictures hanging all over his office would have sent her home to her husband and babies with a smack on her bum, or even invited her to “discuss” her career on his couch.
But that’s not allowed anymore, because of Feminism.
And Mollie Hemingway? It’s odd because I cannot find much specific information on this lady on the internet. Beyond that she’s a highly educated and decorated writer who lives in DC. I know she’s married because she wrote a defense of submissive wives after the whole Michele Bachman thing. But I don’t think she has kids. Which makes this statement all the more puzzling: “ ‘We’re telling women they should delay marriage, ‘lean in’ on career, focus on themselves,” Hemingway said. “And we know these things don’t lead to female happiness.’ “
I have no idea why this submissive wife doesn’t appear to have kids but does have a nationally important voice in the political debate. Or does have kids that are well hidden from an intrusive media, but still travels the country for her day job.
Oh wait, yes I do: Feminism.
And either way, I’m not judging her choices, even if her life seems to give a lie to her words. I don’t judge working moms and stay at home moms and single moms and two moms and dads who are moms and grandmas who are moms again. Because it takes a damn village, and there but for the grace of God go I, and no one should have to feel abandoned and alone before anyone else has walked a mile in their shoes.
You know where I learned all that?
Jesus. And Feminism.
So here’s the thing. If you think your daughter would make a great lawyer, you’re a Feminist. If you think your daughter would make a great wife and mom, you’re a Feminist. If you think your daughter is going to earn a scholarship to play soccer at Stanford or become a Rhodes scholar and get into every single Ivy League school she applies to, you’re a Feminist. If you proudly take her to vote the first time after she turns 18, you’re a Feminist. If you raise your sons to treat the women around them with respect and if you married a man who treats you with respect, you’re a Feminist.
Heck, let’s make this bottom line easy: if you teach your daughter to read and write, you’re a Feminist. And thank God, because in places where they don’t believe in Feminism, girls die on the way to school, shot by men who think they should never leave the house. Their. Entire. Lives.
So come on ladies. Where’s your humility? Maybe you don’t like the tone of womanhood today. I don’t, either. Too much sexuality, too much photoshop, too much divorce, too many babies born out of wedlock, too much abortion. But that’s not Feminism. That’s a crooked culture, and if we could just stop flailing at each other, we could band together like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and put the crooked straight.
(Well, maybe not just like them, because I do enjoy a good vodka tonic)
The point is that history shows us that women’s voices are strong and powerful and sensitive and maternal and compassionate and unyielding when we have something to protect.
You know how I know this?
Feminism.
I’ve heard everything feminists have to say about Disney Princess culture and I get it. I really do. I’ve seen it in my own home. Sometimes Kate puts on that Belle dress and the Beast comes out, all imperial orders and commands.
No one will be shocked to hear that my daughter roars right past princess to Queen.
But the last two Disney princess movies have been different. In Brave, Merida is the tomboy of all tomboys, with her riotous curly hair, and she takes a pretty strong stand against her mom turning her into a proper princess. She has to come of age, because she makes a mess, but then she cleans it up. She fights for her own honor and there is no handsome prince in that movie at all, unless you count the triplets.
When Kate wears her Merida dress, she charges out into the cul-de-sac to ride her bike, her arrows slung over her shoulder, singing “I will rise! I will fly! Chase the wind and touch the sky! I will rise! Chase the wind and touch the skkkkkyyyy!”
Now we have Frozen, with its amazing soundtrack. Most of you know what I’m talking about. But if you’ve been in a hole for two months, go to Youtube and search “Let it go”. See what happens next.
Kate got an Elsa dress for Christmas, of course, because Elsa is the Queen and Anna is just her princess sister. She has memorized the whole soundtrack and for a while, she sang Anna with her purer soprano while I sang Elsa. But then Kate decided that Let It Go was the best thing in the history of ever, and my solo became a duet.
Or she sings it alone. Like the other day, while I was cleaning the kitchen and she was cleaning up her toys in the loft. This is what I heard:
Let it go, let it go!
I will rise like the break of dawn!
Let it go, let it go!
THAT PERFECT GIRL IS GONE!
Here I stand in the light of day!
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway
And I thought Oh yes, my sweet girl. When the world asks you to be perfect, bombards you with false images and makes you feel like you aren’t enough, I pray to the good Lord that you will rise like the break of dawn and make your stand.
Learn from Merida that you can’t selfishly disregard your responsibilities as a member of our family, our community, our world. And learn from Elsa that you should never hide your magic to be what others want you to be.
Sometimes that will be easy. And sometimes you will have to fight against the storm.
In these two movies, there is no happily ever after. There is no guarantee that a few songs and dances have earned Merida and Elsa charmed lives. They only climbed the first mountain, of accepting who they are and what that means. And that’s something we all have to do.
PS: Before anyone says “But the Disney characters bombard little girls with false body images, I saw that article on HuffPo that pointed out that Anna’s arm was thicker than her waist and what is UP with their eyes??” I asked Kate about that. “Does Merida look normal to you?” I asked “With those great big eyes?” She looked at me over the top of her glasses like I was the silliest mama ever. “She’s a cartoon. She’s not supposed to look like a human.” Duh.
Full Of Graces 