Turkey Goodness

Hello everyone.

As we wrap up November 2011, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that this past October marked five years of me doing this blog. Yay!

Of course, I probably should have mentioned that last month when it was actually five years to the day, not today. What's the point in celebrating a five year, one month, and two day anniversary?

But I didn't realize I'd passed the five year milestone until a couple days ago. I have a hard enough time remembering my own birthday, let alone my blog's birthday, so cut me some slack.

I've been teaching myself HTML and CSS lately. I'm also planning on learning Javascript and some other computer languages, programs, and/or software in the near future. I have an idea for a website that I'm going to try to build myself, either from scratch or by customizing a template. I had been thinking about trying to find someone to build the site for me, but then I just thought, "Why can't I build it myself?" I already have some basic HTML experience from this blog, from our photo site, and from other projects, and I'm fairly intelligent, so why not learn how to do it myself?

But I'm quickly discovering that this sort of stuff is incredibly tedious to study. It's not terribly difficult--it's just all right-brain stuff. Or is it left brain? I always confuse the two. What I'm trying to say is that it's all logical stuff. So I find myself walking around with a headache most of the time. Maybe it's just a tumor and completely unrelated to the HTML and CSS language stuff. Or not.

I think it will be much easier once I start playing around with the language instead of just studying it. I'm probably going to fool around with the colors and fonts and formatting right here on this blog. I won't make any big changes (at least not on purpose) because after five years, I'm used to this layout the way it is. But I used the stock Blogger template when I first started this blog, and I'm really bored with it. So I'll probably change the colors at the very least.

The new project won't have much to do with what I do here, so I plan on continuing with this blog. Although, the new project will kinda involve Tucker. Stay tuned.

Thanksgiving News

Well, the turkey we made seemed to be a hit because Cathy and I sure got lots of compliments. I think if we're going to do it again, barbecuing is definitely the way to go. Here's what we did:

We started with an 18 pound turkey. I didn't want one that big, but it was the smallest one we found. Also, full disclosure: I broke one of my rules and didn't get a sustainably-raised turkey, mainly because a sustainably-raise turkey would've cost around $100 and required a drive to Spokane. So we caved and went to the local Safeway instead.

Here's how we prepared it. We thawed it in the beer fridge for a few days prior to Thanksgiving. By Thursday morning it still hadn't thawed all the way, so we soaked it in cold water in the sink for a half hour or so. Meanwhile, we:

• Cored two apples and cut them into chunks
• Peeled two Mandarin oranges and split them into segments
• Diced a couple stalks of celery 
• Diced an onion
• Peeled several (don't remember how many) cloves of garlic and cut them in half.

We mixed all those ingredients with some fresh sage and stuffed it into the cavity.  Then we coated the turkey skin with melted butter.  Finally, we put the stuffed bird in a roasting pan and put the neck, giblets, and extra stuffing in the pan around the turkey, and added a cup or so (didn't measure) of white wine to the pan.

For the barbecue, I started a chimney of "real wood" charcoal (in Eugene I used to get mesquite charcoal, but the closest I can find here is "real wood"--it doesn't say what kind).  When the coals were ready, I dumped them in the barbecue and put the turkey pan on the grill.  It barely fit under my Weber barbecue lid.  I started a second chimney, and when that was ready, I added it to the first, along with some mesquite chips that had been soaking in water.

From then on, we checked the barbecue every once in a while to baste the turkey and see how things were going.  Incidentally, we couldn't find a turkey baster (though I'm sure we have one somewhere in the house), so Cathy went to Safeway to buy one, and of course they were all sold out.  All they had was one meat injector, which she picked up.  It actually worked better than a baster because we could baste with it and inject juice into the turkey.

A couple hours in, I added a third chimney of charcoal, and that was all I needed in total.

About four hours or so after we started, it was done.  Here's what it looked like:

Not bad, eh?

We also made slow cooker stuffing and garlicky mashed potatoes.  My sister made sweet potatoes, homemade bread, and a couple desserts, while my nephew's wife (my niece-in-law?) made salad and another dessert, and my niece brought drinks and deviled eggs.  Everything was fantastic (except the deviled eggs, which I think are always disgusting, so I didn't have any, though other people said they were good).

In short, it was a success.

It was also lots of fun to hang out with the family.  Even though we live within an hour or two of each of them, we don't get to see them very much, mainly because they live an hour or two away.

Anyway, with an 18 pound turkey, even though we insisted that our family take some with them (they didn't seem to mind too much), we still had lots of leftovers.  Over the weekend I made a batch of my "award-winning" chili, substituting leftover turkey for the beef, but keeping the pork.  It was an all-white-meat chili.  I still plan on posting the chili recipe here at some point, I promise.

Cathy also made a damn good stock out of the turkey carcass plus some onion, celery, and seasonings.  Then she used some of the stock to make turkey noodle soup.  We also had turkey tacos.  And turkey sandwiches.  So many turkey sandwiches.

Fortunately, all the turkey is now either gone or is in soup or chili in the freezer.  I think I've had enough for a while.

And Now, A Musical Interlude

After posting a Tortoise video in my last blog, I realized this is the video I should've posted instead. It's not that the music is any better here than in the live video--it's just that this video is a lot of fun, especially for someone into photography like I am. Here it is:



Reading Materials

This one is going to be a long one.  Cue the obligatory "That's what she said" joke...

• Matt Taibbi talks about the UC Davis pepper spraying
• Naomi Wolf has "the shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy" 
• Joshua Holland says Naomi Wolf is full of shit
• Right-libertarian Ron Paul consultant Lew Rockwell criticizes conservatives who sided with the UC Davis police
• An open email about Occupy Austin by anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber 
• Even Martha Stewart has a sense of humor
• Five ways our generation ruined the OWS generation
• The ten stupidest objections to OWS
• Right-wing website reporters were beaten by NYPD, then helped by Occupy Wall Street protesters
• Occupy Eugene protesters targeted Wal-Mart on Black Friday
• In other Wal-Mart news: an older customer put a video game in his waistband to free up his hands.  In response cops slammed him to the floor, leaving him bloody and unconscious
• And to complete the Wal-Mart trifecta: if the cops don't injure you, your fellow customers will
• South Carolina cops killed a man with a Taser because he wouldn't stop his bicycle when they called to him.  The man was deaf and mentally handicapped.  The cops were there in the first place because someone reported seeing a man fall off his bike.  Standard procedure?
• An Ohio woman was assaulted, and the cops end up taking the victim to jail, forcibly strip searching her (some of the cops were male) while someone videotaped it, and then leaving her nude in her cell for hours.  Standard procedure?
• Miami cops caught on tape laughing about shooting an unarmed protester in the face.  Standard procedure?
• The militarization of the police continues
• Three for the price of one: Teenage high school student said Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback "sucked" on Twitter and was forced by principal to apologize after Brownback's office complained; student rightly refused; then Brownback ended up apologizing for sucking so bad.  See?  Sometimes news stories have a happy ending.
• Thanks to the Bush tax cuts, the average top 1% will get a tax cut that's worth more than the total income of the average bottom 99%
• Speaking of Bush, he cancelled a trip to Switzerland over fears he'd get arrested for engaging in torture.  Now if they'd only apply the same standard to Obama...
• You can't even count on "respectable" publications like Time if you want to be informed
• You can't even count on "respectable" TV networks like The Discovery Channel if you want to be informed
• No, it's not 1950, but sometimes it seems like it is.  A Kentucky church banned interracial couples.
• As if it's not strange enough that an Amish clan goes around cutting the hair and beards of other Amish people, the clan leader's name is "Mullet."  If this were an Onion story proposal, it would be rejected as too far-fetched.
• Tee-hee
• The benefits of being a polar bear zookeeper

In Closing

Do me a favor, drop by check out my friend Erin's new website, Cross Sectional Views. She's a great writer, and her posts are insightful and always worth a read.

Now here it is, your moment of Tucker (taken last August):

Rob

The Bacon Explosion: Keeping Cardiac Surgeons Everywhere in Business

Hello everyone!

Two things I appreciate very much are creativity and a sense of adventure. No, this isn't the start of an online dating service ad. I'm talking about food recipes.

As many of you know, I haven't eaten even a titbit of land-based animal flesh in over ten years. That means no beef, pork, chicken, turkey, venison, moose, elk, bear, yak, goose, duck, frog legs, pigeon, or any type of roadkill whatsoever, at least as far as I know, since there is always the possibility that some recipe might have called for some chicken stock or something similar in something I ate at some restaurant at some point. Who knows? The point is that I do everything reasonably possible to avoid eating land-based animal flesh.

I do, however, make an exception for fish and seafood. As Kurt Cobain said, "It's okay to eat fish/cause they don't have any feelings." This would technically make me not a vegetarian, but a "pescatarian," for those keeping score. And no, pescatarians are not people who go to that church near Home Depot, either.

The reasons for my dietary choice are varied and not something I want to get into here because invariably whenever the subject comes up, someone tries to convince me that I should eat this or I should eat that. I've never understood this. What makes people think they should try to seek out and exploit my non-existent dietary allowance loophole?

I understand the idea that if I'm doing something that's not good for me, people who care about me might try to convince me to stop. But in the case of my diet, the opposite seems to happen. When I smoked cigarettes for over 13 years, nobody gave me nearly as much of a hard time over it as people do when they find out I don't eat beef, pork, or fish. In fact, out of people I've discussed the subject with, a much greater percentage of carnivores have given me crap over not eating land animals than true vegetarians or vegans have given me over eating fish and seafood or eggs and dairy. It's the strangest thing.

Anyway, over the past ten years I've noticed that land-based animal flesh, particularly red meat, makes me somewhat nauseous whenever I smell it being cooked. Bacon is not too bad, but that's because the hickory smoke smell overpowers the scorched pork fat smell. The prospect of eating beef, pork, chicken, etc. is a bit revolting to me. I'd happily eat meat if I were starving, but I'm not, so I won't.

It wasn't always that way. Just 12 years ago in my warehouse worker days I regularly had lunch at Burger King, and it usually consisted of a Double Bacon Whopper with Cheese meal, king-sized, of course. Back then, I'd practically eat anything that could reasonably be called food. And I was as carnivorous as one could be.

But there are some food concoctions out there that even me of 12 years ago would've had second thoughts about eating, or even attempting to eat, such as six pound burgers, chicken fried bacon, and many other types of deep-fried food that should never be deep fried.

Then I came across the Bacon Explosion.

I'm speechless. Just click on the above link if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Creative? Absolutely. Adventurous? If Mt. Everest was located on the South Pole, climbing it backwards while blindfolded and then BASE jumping off the peak in the nude while getting a tattoo wouldn't be as adventurous as eating one of these.

I suppose it's not intended for one person to eat the damn thing, but I'd bet my last dollar that someone, somewhere is going to try if he hasn't already. And I know I just did something I'd bust one of my students for doing: using non-gender-neutral language, but I feel confident saying that if someone is going to try to eat four pounds of barbecued pork, that someone is a man, baby.

I have to admit, however, that the creativity and sense of adventure used by the inventor of the Bacon Explosion has gotten some wheels turning in my brain. I showed this to Cathy and asked her if we should try it with Smart Bacon and Tofurkey Italian Sausage. She was up for it, but now that I think about it, it's probably sacrilege to even attempt it.

No, I'll leave the Bacon Explosion to those adventurous carnivores, or to those looking for a clever, tasty way to commit suicide.

Rob