Happy Holidays!

I read an article in the NYT Food section last night about all these people celebrating Kwanza and it sounded better than Christmas--more genuine somehow. A recipe for coffee rubbed grilled fish with lots of other spices and all the recipes reflecting the history of Black America and the brilliance of making something out of nothing, or anything, that would be delicious and always remind of home and roots. And lots of Tofu recipes for some reason---have to find out what that's about. A big two page spread of all these happy families sharing their recipes and what they do for the seven days. None of the showy razzle dazzle or desperately traipsing around a mall with a list. Very simple and reminded me of some famous pianist that said, "The quieter you play the better they hear you." Gratitude is always soft spoken.

Then the rest of the Food section was on making tamales. People I work with gave me some home made ones today--two red, two green. So excited and some others I don't know what they are. The Nicaraguan ones are my favorites in the banana leaves with an olive tucked in. How lucky am I to have that for tomorrow?

The paper had already done Jewish food and normal White Christmas food the weeks before. No Asian lately for some reason although they do get a turn now and then . They are still the invisible I am afraid.


Have a Happy Holiday everyone--- EVEN if that happens to be the very Christmas for you and you desperately traipsed around the mall with a long list.

Love,

D&D

Dudely Dude, which honorific shares initials with your name, I made Chicken Tamale Casserole.

I'm afraid none is left to share. But hot damn, it was good! I trust you'll take my word for it.

You're welcome!

Love ya!!

And that's all the time, not just seasonally.

When I was younger I always made what I called fiesta tamales for christmas. It was traditional for us. They were huge and filled with beef, pork, chicken, jalapenos, anaheims and other stuff.
Some of my fondest memories.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/24/2020 09:54PM by thedesertrat1.

OK EOD, kick down the recipe! I don't have a chance in hell of making real ones but maybe I could make your Chicken Tamale Casserole? I am also in need of a good, not too spicy enchilada recipe that would be in my limited skill set. Hubby was not impressed with my last attempt.

Happy Holidays to you too D&D! Hubby is jealous about those tamales. Typical white people dinner for us. I did make one error. I ordered the ham. I didn't quite understand how big a 23 pound bone in ham was. I hope it fits in the pan, this will be interesting.

Kiss your baby for me :)

Susan I/S Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> OK EOD, kick down the recipe! I don't have a
> chance in hell of making real ones but maybe I
> could make your Chicken Tamale Casserole? I am
> also in need of a good, not too spicy enchilada
> recipe that would be in my limited skill set.
> Hubby was not impressed with my last attempt.


https://www.the-girl-who-ate-everything.com/chicken-tamale-casserole/


This Chicken Tamale Casserole has a sweet cornbread crust topped with enchilada sauce and chicken. This Mexican dinner is a crowd pleaser!


INGREDIENTS:

1 (14 3/4-oz) can creamed corn
1 (8.5-oz) box corn muffin mix
1 (4.5-oz) can Old El Paso chopped green chiles
1/4 cup sour cream
1 egg
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 1/2 cups shredded Mexican blend cheese, divided
2 cups shredded cooked chicken (rotisserie chicken works well here) [I, EOD, bought a one-pound chicken breast and cooked it in the microwave, then sliced it thin, seared it a bit in a pan and then shredded it.]
1 (10-oz) can Old El Paso red enchilada sauce
Toppings: sour cream, diced avocado, diced tomatoes, cilantro


INSTRUCTIONS
Preheat oven to 400 ° F and spray a 9x13 baking dish with cooking spray.

In a large bowl, combine the creamed corn, muffin mix, chiles, sour cream, egg, cumin, and 1/2 cup of the shredded cheese.
Bake for 20-25 minutes or until edges are golden brown and the middle is set.

Use the back of a wooden spoon (or any other utensil) to make dents in the top of the surface.

In a medium bowl, combine the chicken and the enchilada sauce and pour over the top of the baked corn mixture. Sprinkle with the remaining 1-1/2 cups of the shredded cheese.

Bake for 5-10 minutes or until cheese is melted.

Remove from oven and let cool slightly. Slice into squares and top with sour cream, diced avocado, diced tomatoes, and cilantro if desired.



If I can do it, anyone can, even a woman!

Who says EOD has no marketable skills?!

Only da peeples who know me say dat!!

;-)

I sit here eating some smoked venison sausage and some Elk pepperoni. A good hunting season this year. Over 500 pounds of meat in the freezer and we didn't have to drive more than 20 miles total for the hunt.
A good benefit of living in 'very' rural areas.
Not to mention the pheasant, duck and geese we took along with the fishing year round. Just waiting another week for ice to get thicker so we can spend time trying for winter walleye.

You make me miss my Dad. He always hunted. He liked it, but we were dirt poor and he had to. We lived up in the Mountains of Norther Utah. If he didn't get a deer for the winter then we didn't have much meat when I was a kid. The deer often didn't taste that good, but it was food. One year he got a a record buck that made the papers. He was so proud. We rented a freezer at the general store up in town.

On the other hand, the pheasants, ducks, and quail were absolutely a treat. Skinning the pheasants was a big treat for me as an artist. Had some pheasant last year from a gourmet place but it wasn't the same as Mom made and then we all had to be careful of the ammo bits. Was that buckshot? Been a long time now.

Mil gracias for this one, EOD! It sounds fabulous, and easy enough even for me, the kitchen klutz. Though I will skip the cilantro. Stuff makes me gag.

Feliz Navidad a ti y a tu familia!

Gracias mi muy estimada Catnip! Cuídate en esta época tan peligrosa! Hay que seguir la batalla durante el año que viene.

Ya tiene razon

And next week, a bowl of Hoppin' John. Start 2021 off right.

Today marks the start of Kwanzaa

It's a seven-day non-religious holiday observed in the US, meant to honor African Americans' ancestral roots. The celebration lasts until January 1.

The name comes from the Swahili phrase "matunda ya kwanza," which means "first fruits."

Created in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, a black nationalist and professor of Pan-African studies at California State University at Long Beach, Kwanzaa became popular in the 1980s and 1990s in tandem with the black power movement -- making up the trio of winter holidays along with Hanukkah and Christmas. It's not as widely celebrated now as it was then, or it is, depending on where you are and how you celebrate.

The holiday is defined by Nguzo Saba, or the seven principles. Each day is dedicated to a specific principle, marked by lighting a new candle on the kinara, a seven-branched candelabra.

The 7 principles of Kwanzaa:

(1) Umoja - unity in Swahili
("To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race")

(2) Kujichagulia - self-determination (defining, naming, creating, speaking for oneself)

(2) Ujima - collective work and responsibility (uplifting your community)

(4) Ujamaa - cooperative economics (uplifting your community economically; to build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together)

(5) Nia - purpose ("To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness")

(6) Kuumba - creativity ("To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it")

(7) Imani - faith ("To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle")

"(7) Imani - faith ("To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle")


Now that is my kind of FAITH!

Thanks moremany. I meant to look up the seven days after I read the article. Such nice thoughts to focus on and such a contrast as the rest of the world is busy returning billions of dollars of materialistic gifts that were the focus of their holiday.

Today for me is going to be about Kuumba. Yah!

D&D said: "...reminded me of some famous pianist that said, "The quieter you play the better they hear you." Gratitude is always soft spoken."

That is lovely. Thank you.


So I looked it up.

Rumi: 13th century Persian poet (born 1207): “The quieter you become the more you are able to hear”. (Nice, and often true, but I like your version better, D&D).


That led me to this:

"When my master and I were walking in the rain, he would say, "Do not walk so fast, the rain is everywhere."

 — Shunryu Suzuki (Suzuki Roshu) (1904-1971) – Zen monk.

Also: “Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.”

All so thought-provoking.


Poetry before lunch. Now back to the housework. Sublime to mundane. A description of everyday life in general.

After a Christmas to (try and) forget, I started today off getting stopped by a cute cop who (regretfully but firmly) walloped me with a $600.00 ticket - my car insurance had lapsed yesterday and in all the mess and flurry of this year and this season and etc I had overlooked this must-do of insurance renewal every December. ($600 for one-day of oversight - admittedly a huge overlook, but wah).

So yeah, I needed a moment of silence and reflection before I knuckle down to a lot of overdue housework and other everyday hassley stuff. I **cannot wait** to say so long and don't come back to 2020, a year of great heartache, severe challenges and etc for all too many folks. I try not to complain, as it is so much worse for so many, but it's hard to squelch it sometimes.

A moment of poetry has lifted my spirits. So thanks for that.

I heard a poet being interviewed on the radio this morning. Among his other gems he said "To love someone means saying I'm prepared to be devastated by you" (unconditional love, he went on to explain). Touched my heart.

Meanwhile, bring on 2021 I say. And yet I was so disproportionately thrilled when 2020 rolled around. I love round numbers. I thought it presaged a stellar year to come. I was wrong about that.

Bigly.

> Poetry before lunch. Now back to the housework.
> Sublime to mundane.

That is the definition of "bathos," a word that is more useful than it is known. Of course the Chan/Zen Buddhist would say that we should find the sublime in the mundane, but for the rest of us bathos makes more sense.

Bathos. Not the prettiest of words. Matches its meaning though, in that case.

Definitely sums up my current mood. Discouraged. Disillusioned. Fed up.

Feeling sorry for myself - someone's gotta do it!

To summarize: I am feeling bathotic! There. That makes me feel better.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/28/2020 03:16PM by Nightingale.

There was a book of Japanese poetry that came out a few decades ago; I wish I could remember the name or the author. But she wrote Haiku and Tanka about household things like washing dishes or doing laundry or walking the kid to school, and the poetic forms revealed the numinous element of mundane activity. It was mopping as meditation.

I try to bear that message in mind--as I clean up Christmas messes. . .

I could be Portho to your Bathos! We could ride around in your Dodge Dartinium!

> I was so
> disproportionately thrilled when 2020 rolled
> around. I love round numbers. I thought it
> presaged a stellar year to come. I was wrong about
> that.
>
> Bigly.

Brilliantly put.

:)

Thank you for the expansion, Nightingale. The rain one brings back memories somehow. Good ones.

Another beautiful line from a book the other day:

"Love is a sore loser."


As for finding poetry in the mundane---I'm skipping that one. That enlightened am not.