8 DEC More odds and ends from the
Earth Fare coffee shop:
It is December,
thus the annual hunt for the annual rib roast.
2012 will be upon us sooner than seems possible. To properly acknowledge the event we’ve acquired
two splits of Veuve Clicot Ponsardin champagne to toast the visible movement of
a clock hand and one excellent two-bone standing rib roast to convince our
palates that the event merits celebration.
Gloria is
in class at 1500 and I’m in the coffee shop at Earth Fare waiting her summons
or 1600, which ever arrives first.
Earth Fare
is a truly dangerous place for a foody.
They sell hard to find and truly
delectable foods. I could happily spend
a day in their cheese shop armed with a knife and a loaf of sourdough and a
baguette or two. They have seafood
too! To truly understand the
significance of that sentence you must have grown up where I did and then live
for some time on the coast prior to moving back inland. I grew up in Missouri, a state with no
natural lakes and few cold-water fisheries not secondary to flood control dams.
Seafood, when I was young was breaded, then frozen, shrimp. It usually arrived fried to the consistency
and flavor of cardboard. The other option
was also served fried. Catfish was found
in the streams and ponds. Its abundance
was made less welcome by the tendency of the fish to uptake the flavor
characteristics of the water it live in.
Think muddy, algae-ridden, as the base flavors and you’ll be close.
When I moved east to marry Gloria I
was exposed to an abundance of fresh seafood including blue crabs. Little of it was served fried. Our stay in Florida brought more options to
our menu. I’ve had the chance to enjoy
fish and seafood I’ve only read about until my middle age.
Now we live in North Eastern
Tennessee. With modern processing and
transport methods good seafood is available even here. However, we have made it
our practice to take notice of consumer information and avoid any seafood
touched in any manner by China.
It would be lovely to have a bushel
or so of blue crabs to steam. They could
be safely trucked in on ice. But there
is no apparent market for crabs here.
There is simply no market for any fresh seafood from outside the region
among much of the populace. Gloria
believes a road-side truck sale would be met with open arms and wallets. I contend that the traditional foods and the
fried food from fish and chip fast-food shops are the only marketable item for
95% of the populace we see daily. Tradition
drives diet here just as strongly as it does any other ethnic group. We’ll be making latkes this year even though
we are far from any bastion of Red Sea Pedestrians.
9 December 2011 follow-on
I should mention that I had a great
phone call yesterday from my sister Suzanne.
She’s getting close to having her new kitchen completed. She’s had a rough year, including the death
of her husband, Ernie. Between work and repairs,
she’s finding her way back to the life she deserves.
I left Earth Fare yesterday with a
pretty little 2 rib roast that was on sale.
By using a coupon randomly assigned last week, I wound up paying only
$6.00 for it. Two other coupons gained
us 2 1-lb packages of fresh ground chuck.
Sometimes it is worth the danger to gain the prize.
I’m troubled greatly by the loss of
our recon platform to Iran. I haven’t
seen any images that indicate it was shot down.
Somehow, it lost control lock and auto landed or was taken over by some
opposing nation’s agents and landed. Either
option is “double plus ungood.” I have
no trouble believing that China was somehow involved in any successful control
takeover. There is most likely a team of
Chinese engineers and programmers waiting to disassemble the drone and then
reverse engineer their way to a copy that China can fly and market to our
enemies less technologically advanced.
For further consideration:
Iran
responsible for 1998 U.S.
“It went virtually unnoticed (and unreported by this newspaper),
but last week a federal court found the government of Iran liable for the 1998 bombings of
the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.”
In a very real manner of speaking, we are already at war
with Iran.
While we need to contain
Iran, it should be a United Nations effort.
Nuclear weapons in the hands of religious fundamentalists with martyrdom
recruits standing by is not good for any nation. Yet we lack the troop strength and the
financial capability to fight another Christian crusader-driven war for
oil.
Ideas anyone?
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