Friday Five

From Julie D. at Happy Catholic: the Friday Five. This week it's five foods that remind you of home or childhood.

1. Turkey and Stuffing. Daddy always made these on Thanksgiving and Christmas. He rarely (okay, never) cooked the rest of the year, but we were a big family and it took a strong man to lift the bird into the oven. He made it simply: the stuffing was just the dried cornbread stuff with butter, salt and pepper, but the aroma of it roasting through the morning and early afternoon was amazing. I'll never forget it, even though I don't make it the same way.


2. Chili My mother made chili in the crock-pot, and it was one of the few dishes she could make with any sort of success. She had gotten the recipe out of the crock-pot instruction book. I always remember having it with crackers, with a little cheddar cheese on top.


3. Pinto Beans. Mother usually made them the slow way -- soak them overnight, then pick out the dirt, bugs and sticks that had found their way into the bag. We ate them in a soupy preparation, with diced onion on top. I can't eat the frijoles at the Mexican place without thinking of it, because the salsa they use has onion in it too.


4. Cheeseburgers. This one isn't terribly pleasant, I suppose. My dad was military; most of my life I knew him as retired military. My mother still shopped at the commissary on base, and they sold the hamburger in large, rectangular bricks, about 5" by 9" in size. Mother always cut one these bricks into four pieces and just fried them in the pan.
   One Saturday night I had just come home with Mother from somewhere and a pan of those cheeseburgers was sizzling away on the stove when the phone rang: Daddy was in the hospital. He had had a massive heart attack and wasn't expected to live through the night.
   I will never forget rushing out of the house, just turning off the burgers and leaving them there, nor will I forget coming home to them a day and a half later, stuck in the solidified tallow at the bottom of the pan. They became a sort of symbol for the rest of my teenaged life: stuck, waiting, unproductive.
   My dad lived through that night and went on to live a debilitated life for another eleven years.


5. Biscuits. Could I be more southern?
   My Aunt Thelma, may she rest in peace, made biscuits nearly every day for most of her 89 years. Hers were the best. After many attempts, I finally persuaded her when I was an adult to show me how to make them, but it was totally wasted: she didn't measure anything. She just tossed the flour through the sifter, worked the lard in with her fingers, mixed in the buttermilk, and five minutes later, bam! It's biscuits.
   I later learned to make them, but to my chagrin I have to measure every single ingredient except the salt, and it takes me half an hour to make the darned things. They taste good, but they'll never be as good as Aunt Thelma's.

I had to end with a happy one! The cheeseburgers are too much for most people, probably, but it's a powerful food memory. I can't make them myself without thinking of that awful night. But my spaghetti sauce, barbecue sauce, chinese food, and various other things are to die for, and they don't have any teenaged baggage!

Frankly I think it's an advantage that my mother was such a disaster in the kitchen: it made me want to learn to cook because I knew it could be better!

Observations . . .

. . . about this article.

First, they don't seem to be able to bring themselves to write the words "pro-life."

Second, the fact that the abortionists and their legal representatives can behave so shamefully with their "bare faces hanging out," as my dad used to say. Here's a key quote:

"Antiabortion zealots, Catholic or otherwise, have shown that they will stop at nothing to inflict guilt and to compound the grief, sadness and sense of loss that these women experience," he said.

No mention of the good deed the parishioners are doing in giving a decent burial to the "tissue" that the abortionists have slain. No, they can't do that, because that makes it seem almost as if the "tissue" might have been a human being to start with. Note this (indirect) quote from a clinic worker:

"The clinic said it was just tissue, but when he opened it up he and his staff were traumatized," she said. "He asked the church what he should do, and our priest offered to bury it."

And fortunately the diocesan spokesman doesn't use any weasel-words in answering the reporter's questions:

"This parish and other parishes have done this for years," Sergio Gutierrez, the diocese spokesman, said Friday. "This discussion clarifies the distinction between people who believe in the sanctity of life and those who don't. What is their view? To discard unborn children and then worry where they end up."

Well, it's a sad day indeed, this anniversary; I hope that one day it will be remembered like Yom Hashoah as a date of infamy, of a terrible mistake that all mankind will one day regret; I hope it lives forever as a gall to those who hold today's culture up as a shining example of democracy and perfection.

We all know better; and those poor unborn, never allowed to breathe the air or see the light of day . . . they know better too.

That really hard quiz

This quiz is quite difficult. (Hat tip to Julie D. at Happy Catholic.) Not to do my superior dance or anything, but I scored 17 out of twenty. Mr. Keating writes in the grading section:

Seventeen to nineteen answers correct. Wonderful. You have every reason to be satisfied with yourself.

But wouldn't that be prideful?

Author List

Julie D at Happy Catholic has posted a list of authors that she got from someone else. The idea, she says, is to take off the authors you don't have in your own library and replace them in bold with ones you do have. So here goes mine:

1. Margaret Mitchell (doesn't every Southerner have this one?)


2. Richard Nixon


3. Nigella Lawson


4. Jane Austen


5. CS Lewis


6. JRR Tolkien


7. William F. Buckley, Jr.


8. Florence King (autographed 1st Edition of Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, no less)


9. Reid Buckley


10. William Shakespeare

Is that fairly eclectic? Okay, no, I guess not. It seems unfair that it's limited to only ten authors!