Celebrations September 25, 2015 - Finding a Home: Welcome

This is the Celebrating the Small Things blog hop, run by Lexa Cain and her two wonderful co-hosts L.G. Keltner @ Writing Off The Edge and Tonja Drecker @ Kidbits.

I love this hop, though I can't always participate.  It is wonderful to see through others' eyes and understand the various reasons for either outright joy or subtle smiles.

I've been busy with various things, some good, some not so good, but nothing horrible (something to celebrate in and of itself.)


On a message board that I regularly frequent, the talk turned to politics.  This is generally my signal to depart but I stayed where I was and reviewed the messages.  One caught my attention, something about returning immigrants to their countries of origin. 

Now, I don't discuss politics on my blog, my website, any of my social media.  I have opinions, as everyone else does, but I don't choose to proclaim them.  I imagine that if people want a dose of politics they can read The Congressional Record or any one of a good many major newspapers

The comment, however, made me think of my own family, and the voyages of various of my forebears to what we call the United States.

Lafayette, I can't recall the word...

We have a fellow from France, a Protestant who left around 1770 and came to what would become the state of Connecticut.  His name was François, from the part of France that borders what we now call Germany.  He spoke excellent English.  Some years later he served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.  He was tapped to serve as an interpreter to one Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette, known as the Marquis de Lafayette, who came with the French forces to support the American Revolution.  He spoke broken English.  I suspect François made himself useful.

There's another family that left Normandy in the train of a man who was once known as William the Bastard.  They came to England, ended up settling in Ireland around 1100 AD.  They had the surname 'Savage' from 'Sauvage'.  One of their descendants, married to a man from an old Irish family - the Hickeys, from the city of Cork - came to the United States around 1840.

Their daughter married a fellow who came from Alsace (France) in 1848.  This man, Josef Myers, enlisted in the Union Army at the start of the American Civil War, served through the major campaigns, with a stay in the notorious prison of Andersonville, escaped, was sheltered by a family of slaves for a time and finally returned to his unit, serving to the end of the war.  Discharged in New York, he came through Philadelphia and met a young lady of Irish descent.  They homesteaded in North Dakota when veterans were given a grant of land.

All of them newcomers to America, all of them arriving on the shores of North America and registering to become citizens of the United States.

Immigrants.

The discussion took an unpleasant turn on the subject of immigrants.  I didn't participate.  I did, however, remember two quotes: 

Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists. (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressing the Daughters of the American Revolution)

And this, written by Emma Lazarus, inspired by the Statue of Liberty:

"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!"

We all have journeys behind us, journeys from persecution, from poverty, following dreams or necessity.  All of us.  It is, in the final analysis, something to celebrate.  

What are you celebrating?  

Apple Pecan Pancakes Recipe for Autumn

Autumn is prime apple time.  The cooking apples I like  (McIntosh and its derivatives) are in season, it's getting cold, and I dust off the recipe and make apple butter, apple pies and, one of my favorites, apple pecan pancakes.
When I make an apple pie, I generally mix the McIntosh apples with hard green cooking apples, since the Mc's tend to get mushy.  I don't have that problem with these pancakes.

Apple Varieties

The ingredients are simple: oatmeal, butter, chopped ripe apples, pecans...  They are substantial but not heavy, since the oatmeal is counteracted by baking powder, which makes them rise.  I tend to be particular about the type of apples I use for this.  My favorite apple overall, for eating and for cooking, is the McIntosh and its derivatives.  

Here is the recipe:

Preheat your oven to 350

Mix together and let sit:
1 1/2 cups oatmeal
1 1/2 cups boiling water

While letting the oatmeal absorb the water, measure out and thoroughly mix:

photo courtesy of Lyman Orchards

1 cup flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt, or less
1/4 cup sugar

Stir one egg into the oatmeal mixture, which should have cooled slightly.

Then measure out 1 cup of milk.

To the bowl of oatmeal, mix in the flour alternately with the milk, stirring well between.  The mixture will start getting fluffy.

Add
1/4 cup butter, melted, and stir well

Now peel, core and chop three apples.  I prefer any variation on a Macintosh (Paula Reds are the best, but they're early apples and easy to miss)  Granny Smith or any tart green cooking apple works well, too.  Stir them into the batter along with 1/2 cup chopped pecans.
3 apples, peeled and sliced
1/2 cup pecans or walnuts (optional) chopped
2 tablespoons butter

Heat your griddle, put a pat of butter on it, and measure out the pancake dough by 1/2 cups.  Brown well 0n one side, flip and then brown on the other.  (I'd put the heat down to medium and let them cook slowly.)  Put them on a rack in the over while you cook another batch.

Go for the darker syrup

Serve with butter and good maple syrup.  Grade B (the dark stuff the locals use while they sell the tasteless, light Grade A to the tourists) works well. 


These reheat beautifully.  I put mine in the toaster.


Next time I'll take pictures (I was too busy eating mine...)

Talk Like a Pirate Day?

Yar, me hearties, today be Talk Like a Pirate Day!

It's a fun thing, with a website here that has hints for talking like a (Hollywood) pirate, including a Pirate Speak Translator:

The pirate speaks,"greetin's t' all me buckos! Today be t' day! Drink rum, get plastered, fight with cutlass, eat meat and sail into t' sunset in search o' treasure!

It's a lot of fun, with hijinks and silliness , including ringtones for your cellphone, if you are so inclined, and I get a hearty chuckle out of it.  As a student of history, who writes about it, I know a lot about some of the pirates in history, and they are not a comfortable crew to hang with (almost literally, in the end). 

Colin Darch, captured by Somali pirates and held hostage, wrote a book about his experience.  A ladies' club invited him to come speak to them on the subject of pirates, and some of them, not understanding his involvement with pirates, came dressed as pirates.  When they realized the exact nature of Mr. Darch's involvement with pirates, they were red-faced and terribly embarrassed.  
Mr. Darch did not turn a hair, and we now have a photo of him with the ladies..

If you want to read the best pirate adventure (in my opinion), then read Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.  It starts with a bang, goes slowly for a while...until you are on the high seas beside the narrator, Jim Hawkins, and you realize that you are on a ship manned by pirates, the former crew of one of the worst pirate captains in history, and you are hopelessly outnumbered.

AND the very worst of the lot, the calm, pleasant, capable Long John Silver, is running the show.

The pirates are vicious, cunning, amoral and colorful, and very, very dangerous.

The movie with Robert Newton  as Long John Silver is considered the best.  I don't agree.  It's a romp and good fun, but does not catch the ominous nature of the book. 

L to R Billy Bones, Blind Pew and Long John Silver

For my money, Charlton Heston's version, featuring Oliver Reed and a cast of character actors, is the best (though someone really needed to tell Jim Hawkins to spit the wad of mashed potatoes from his mouth and speak clearly).  There's a scene where they are escaping The Hispaniola and the pirates run out a cannon.  One of the crew stands at the rail, watching the rowboat as the heroes try to escape.

"Oh no!" cries one of the heroes.  "Israel Hands was Cap'n Flint's gunner!"  

Hands has not lost his skill, and the heroes end up wading to shore.  


Talk like pirate?  Hm, could be fun.  But I'll stick with the real Navy, thank ye very much!  (Enjoy your weekend!)

9-11 Remembrance

Where was I when the world stopped turning?

I was at my desk, at work.  It was a Tuesday, we had a new employee starting, and I was going to take her around and take her under my wing, tell her how things worked...  I was fairly senior in that department a lifetime ago.

As I took a break, I checked a message board (a cooking board, as it happens), and I read that a plane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers.  I thought it was probably a little private plane, and hoped everyone was OK.  I believe I said a quick prayer.  I was busy.

The magnitude of the event struck me as the day wore on.  One of my dearest friends, best buddies from the age of 14, worked a couple blocks from the WTC.  I knew people who worked there.  I had been there many times, and I knew how many people worked there.  I thought how many would have been killed, and it made me sick.  In fact, the death count was far less than I had expected, but still too high.

Oddly enough, I never saw the footage of the attack, never saw the towers crumble with all the people inside them.  I watched the news unfold, listening to the radio.

Globe from the World Trade Center

Images caught my attention - a river of rescue workers going UP the stairs as the towers were about to crumble...a man, covered with dust, standing on the edge of Ground Zero and shouting to the workers, asking if there was something - anything - he could do to help.

There were all the discussions.  I read a post on the message board from a Canadian who actually said, 'Americans need to think, seriously and without offence, what they have done to provoke this attack.'  And she thought she was being sweetly reasonable.  I replied that it was like telling the family of a murdered jogger that they needed to think, seriously and without offence, what their murdered loved one had done to provoke the attack.  She left the board.

Just this year, 14 years after the attack, I learned that a man I'd worked with and liked a great deal, who had left my company to go to New York - and happy he was to be back in the Big Apple! - had died in the first tower. 

And I never saw the videos.  I work in a business that deals with damage, injury and mayhem.  I have a very strong stomach, and I probably know, better than many, the effect of an injury on a human body, and the progress of disintegration of that body after the human dies.  I decided it was not fitting.  I knew what had happened, I had lived through the trauma of the news, I had followed the rescue efforts, I had wondered and questioned and clenched my fists.  But the footage was never being played when I had my attention on the event.

I suppose I could watch it now.  But I have other images now.  That man, shouting his offer to help.  The survivors reporting the river of rescuers going up the stairs in that doomed building.  People joining together from all over the world to send support of all types.  Images of light.

I had a chance.  In the heat of discussions and arguments and grieving, a friend posted THIS is why I am angry!  And she posted the footage.  I watched the plane come into the screen, watched it circle around, straighten -   And I stopped the video. 

Never forget.  And always remember that even in the darkest times we can find the light.