I always enjoy reading how others spent their day and what recipes are traditional for them, so I thought I'd post about our day. We had a quiet Thanksgiving, we didn't have family to visit, and our best friends were out of town, so it was just us - which is fine, Mr. B is rarely home, so a day to just be together is always special. He played Scrabble with the boys, we had WDAV playing (classical internet radio), and Miss M made a pest of herself trying to get into everything by pulling up a chair so she could reach the counter while I was trying to work in the kitchen.
In the evening we usually watch a Thanksgiving video - we have a few things we taped off TV years ago - The Mouse on the Mayflower cartoon, a cartoon about William Bradford, a 1950's movie called Plymouth Adventure with Spencer Tracy, and a special from the Discovery channel about wild turkeys. I like to read something like Margaret Pumphrey's Stories of the Pilgrims during the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, but it didn't happen this year.
I did not stay on my raw diet. I planned beforehand to allow myself some turkey (plain, not even salt on it), stuffing-flavored rice (gluten-free), and a plain baked organic sweet potato, and I stuck to my plan.
For the rest of the family, I made everything traditionally. I'm a simple cook, we don't have gourmet tastes, so there's nothing particularly unusual about any of our recipes. Most of them are like what my mother always made. Turkey, simple bread stuffing (from the Better Homes and gardens Cookbook, my mother says), canned sweet potatoes with a little bit of margarine and drizzled with just a little maple syrup, mashed potatoes (dairy-free; I use rice milk), gravy from a jar (almost fat free!) and canned jellied cranberry sauce. There was also apple cider, frozen microwaved corn, baby carrots with margarine and tarragon, frozen green beans which I heated in the microwave and added grilled onions, a dark green salad, bread, and pies for dessert - pumpkin and apple bought frozen and baked the day before, served with Cool Whip (Lite).
I forgot to make biscuits the day before and realized I wouldn't have the oven to bake them on Thanksgiving day, so I went online and found a recipe for a Thanksgiving Bread that goes in the bread machine. My family liked it, so it's going to become our new Thanksgiving tradition. I made a few alterations because I didn't have corn meal, sage or minced dried onions, and I used partly whole wheat flour. Here's the recipe I used with my alterations:
1 cup warm water
1 egg
1 Tablespoon softened margarine
2 Tablespoons brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup cornbread mix
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups unbleached flour
2 teaspoons dried onion powder
1 1/2 teaspoons celery seed
1 teaspoon poultry seasoning
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast
Place everything in the bread machine in the order listed. Use basic white bread setting, 1 1/2 pound loaf size.
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And here's my gluten-free substitute for stuffing. It's the same recipe I've always used for bread stuffing, but with rice instead of bread. Miss M and J love it. They won't even eat bread stuffing any more. Too bad, since I made a huge batch of bread stuffing, and now Tim's the only one who will eat it. I'm making a second batch of rice stuffing today, and doubling the recipe. It won't fit in the rice cooker, so I've got it in the crock pot. I expect it will take 6-8 hours.
Stuffing Rice
Saute:
1 minced onion
1/4 c margarine
Add:
2 teaspoons poultry seasoning
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
Throw in the rice cooker with:
1 1/2 cups brown rice
4 cups vegetable broth
This was done well before the turkey, so it warmed in the rice cooker for about an hour, which might have made it even better. This was the only part of the meal that Miss M went for in a big way. She wouldn't touch the bread stuffing.
This is the same recipe I use for bread stuffing - except that I use a loaf of whole wheat bread, toasted and cut into cubes, instead of rice, and less chicken broth.
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I also found an online site that praised the benefits of roasting a turkey frozen instead of defrosting it first. My turkey was already half thawed, but next year I'm just going to leave it in the freezer. There's no thawing raw juice to leak, and the white meat gets less dry because it's still thawing while the dark meat is baking.
The homeschool movement is growing. A large percentage of homeschoolers aren't teaching evolutionary science. Homeschool graduates are going to college. And not everyone is happy about that. In fact, this article makes it sound like some are alarmed and appalled. What is this world coming to when you can't guarantee 100 percent compliance to the accepted view of mainstream "truth"?
This article made me laugh. I pulled out a few quotes; the way they were arranged in the article really brought home the point that it's all about indoctrination, not education.
For these parents, religious instruction and science are often intertwined. This bothers Brian Alters of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who studies the changing face of science education in the US. He is appalled by some home-schooling textbooks, especially those on biology that claim they have scientific reasons for rejecting evolution. "They have gross scientific inaccuracies in them," he says. "They would not be allowed in any public school in the US, and yet these are the books primarily featured in home-schooling bookstores."
[I agree that some Christian science texts have inaccuracies. But so do public school texts. The texts that homeschoolers use would never be allowed in public schools - but not because they're more inaccurate than public school texts. It's because they don't teach the right dogma.]
"Poll after poll shows that approximately one out of two people in America reject evolution. They think the scientists, teachers and textbooks are wrong," he says. An even higher proportion of home-schooling parents may reject evolution, Alters thinks. "And they're going to be teaching science?"
[Scary, isn't it?]
However, not all home-school parents have a religious agenda. "There are probably some wonderful home-school parents, some of whom may be evolutionary biologists themselves. But I have a feeling after talking to a lot of home-schoolers that this is the minority," says Alters. Indeed, evangelical Christians do dominate the home-school movement. "It's disconcerting, to say the least," he says.
[I guess only non-religious evolutionary biologists should be granted the right to teach children.]
By 2004, Patrick Henry College (which caters to graduated homeschoolers) students held seven out of 100 internships in the White House, a number even more striking when one considers that only 240 students were enrolled in the entire college. Last year, two PHC graduates worked in the White House, six worked for members of Congress and eight for federal agencies, including two for the FBI. "Patrick Henry is something to worry about because these kids end up in the administration."
I found this article here by accident while I was cruising new blogs.
Miss M was playing with a stuffed Bambi - a rare treat, since it's usually kept up. They must have been playing house, and Bambi was The Baby. First was a pathetic, pleading whine: "Pleeease, Mama, can I have milk outside? Please?" And then the Mommy, in a very fierce voice: "NO, Bambi! You can't have milk outside! People will be mad!" Followed by whimpering and more pleading from Bambi.
I've been explaining to Miss M that people don't like to see a big girl like her nursing, so we only nurse in private. It's interesting seeing how this concept might look to her three-year-old mind, and from the two different perspectives of the sad, pitiful nursling, and the non-yielding authority who controls the supply.
"But indeed, after the water and the earth, I thought we had already crossed the brook in a sense."
"You will always be thinking that," said the Guide. "We call it Death in the Mountain language. It is too tough a morsel to eat at one bite. You will meet that brook more often than you think: and each time you will suppose that you have done with it for good. But some day you really will."
- The Pilgrim's Regress, Book 9, Chapter 6
And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goees on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
- The Last Battle, Chapter 16: Farewell to Shadowlands
I'm a day late, but I wanted to remember him on the anniversary of his death. I've always liked him, but he became a personal hero after I read his Letters to Children. How can you not love someone who respected and took time for children the way he did?
"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from." from Till We Have Faces
"The essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends..." from A Christian Reply to Professor Price Phoenix Quarterly
Grace is a cosmic fact.
Grace is either a gift from above or a state within, a help of some kind or an experience reverently felt.
Grace is the benign effluence of the Overself, the kindly radiation from it, ever-present in us. The theological use of this term to mean particular help given by God to man to enable him to endure temptation and act rightly is a serious and arbitrary narrowing down of its original meaning. It may mean this sometimes, but it also means the loving mercy God shows to man, which appears variously as enlightenment of the mind or relief of the heart, as change of outward physical conditions or a dynamic revolution-working energy acting on the aspirant or on his life.
The grace is always present since the Infinite Power, from which it originally comes, is always present.
There are little graces, such as those which produce the glimpse; but there is only one great Grace: this produces a lasting transformation, a deep radical healing and permanent enlightenment.
Paul Brunton
Free Online Graph Paper - you tell it how many squares per inch, and it creates a pdf file! Graph paper is one of my favorite things in the whole world. Thank you, Mama Squirrel!
Gifts are as the gold which adorns the temple; grace is like the temple that sanctifies the gold.
William Burkitt
But grace means more than gifts. In grace something is transcended, once and for all overcome. Grace happens in spite of something; it happens in spite of separateness and alienation. Grace means that life is once again united with life, self is reconciled with self. Grace means accepting the abandoned one. Grace transforms fate into a meaningful vocation. It transform guilt to trust and courage. The word grace has something triumphant in it.
Yrj Kallinen, Finnish thinker writing about Paul Tillich's thinking
A string of words is a dangerous thing,
For no man knows where it will stop
Save he take up the strands, and following,
Discover its end, or read till he drop.
Unfurled on the page lay the poem before him,
Inviting him in with its ink-lettered glory,
Calling him sweetly to read of its verses--
(Oh, the innocent lure of those letters!)
So he took it up slowly; and the tugging words caught him
And carried him on, like a stream rolling swiftly
In its widening course, ever deeper and stronger,
O'er difficult passages, from line to line leaping,
Ceaselessly flowing from its source to the sea:
Then he stood at the prow of his vessel of thought
On an ocean of language, and the surging waves
Bore him up higher and higher, till breathless
He clung to a lifeline of thought--and the billows
Upswelled to a toppling summit, and he saw
Through the spindrift a deepening valley--
(And the sea bore him on, while the wind sang past)--
Then he fell from his boat and was tumbled by currents
Under words, over words, eddying round him,
Till they caught him and tossed him and sucked him down under
And he drowned in the plunging word-swell of the sea.
For a string of words is a dangerous thing,
And no man knows where it will stop
Save he take up the strands, and following,
Discover its end, or read till he drop.
