This is International Women’s Day but the most interesting story I have to tell is of men. My student called yesterday after getting out of parish prison, to explain that having been there for 24 hours was the reason he had missed class.
He was in parish prison for 24 hours because he jumped his supervisor at work. He jumped his supervisor at work because the supervisor hit him. “You can tell he wants to hit everyone, but being white, he only dares hit another white guy. I thought about it for a minute and realized that if I didn’t react now I’d be victimized from here on out.”
He didn’t know I already knew the story from my neighbor, the Marine (retired), who also works at that place and was thrilled that somebody finally took this supervisor down a notch. My student is suspended from his job for a week but no charges have been filed. The Marine has arranged an interim job for him with another company, so he will still get a check.
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Meanwhile, my activities for International Women’s Day seem to identify me as an Xtreme homemaker. I have already been down to the studio to check the glaze fire, and I will go again in a few hours – it is a reduction fire, and it needs watching. I have planted two trees.
I made a stellar tuna salad with mayonnaise, a lot of grated carrot, minced celery and scallions. I put it in a pita bread with large amounts of variegated lettuce, and wolfed it down. Now I am straining yogurt to make fresh cheese, and I have prepared a chicken to roast.
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Roasting chicken: I do not have a roasting rack, but I use a cast iron grill pan and it seems to work just as well. I brush it with olive oil, and rub the chicken with salt, pepper, and lime juice inside and out. I stuff it with sliced onions and limes cut in half. I stud it from the outside with slivers of garlic, inserted into small slits. I drizzle the top with olive oil and more lime juice, and I roast it slowly.
Stuffing fowl: I never make dressing, as I dislike it intensely, even if it has chestnuts or oysters in it. However roasting is the best way to cook birds, and they must be stuffed to roast well. I stuff chickens with garlic, lemons, and limes, turkeys with onions, grapes, and raisins, and ducks and geese with leeks, carrots, apples and prunes. Turning birds as they roast has always worked very well for me, when I have actually gone so far as to do it.
Ducks I like to roast on end, with the feet sticking up. That way you can fit several to a pan. I like French ducks far better than American ones, because they are so much less fatty. I do not like wild ducks, as they are gamey and tough (and may contain buckshot).
Fowl, in my opinion, should be served with red cabbage. For chicken or turkey you can make a red cabbage coleslaw, but with vinaigrette, not mayonnaise. Ducks and geese require Scandinavian style braised red cabbage.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Roast duck with duck gravy, red cabbage and a potato dumpling!! But I do not care for caraway in my red cabbage.
Should I be domiciled with an oven again, I will try stuffing a chicken with oranges and garlic–that sounds delightful.
Nesting today, are you?
Perhaps, but also celebrating my student-in-jail event, it happens every year for one reason or another. And yet I do house and yard work a lot, and yet not nearly as much as many of the neighbors do.
Their trees have more fruit, their houses are more renovated, and they catch more fish and shoot more ducks.
I am also contemplating the fact that we now have a new worst type of student. It used to be the children of the Honduran contras … they were the least intelligent. Now they have grown up and we have some new winners: Venezuelan oil princesses. Some are actual Venezuelans and some are Americans raised on Venezuelan oil rigs. All of them are d.u.m.b., I am sorry to say. Only the girls take my classes, I am not sure where the boys are.
Yes I realize I am stereotyping people by the nationalities and jobs of their parents, and the location of their oil rigs. Nothing would delight me more than to find evidence that proves me wrong.
Cabbage – there are more than one recipe linked here. The Danish one has no caraway:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Danish-Christmas-Red-Cabbage/Detail.aspx
Danish food is infinitely superior to Swedish food in my opinion.
Amazing the things globalization brings us. The last few years I have had almost an annual “my mother/father was deported, what do I do now” conference.
Of Venezuelans and their oil rigs I know not even enough to be able to mobilize stereotypes!
Now, if you had told me Swedish food was better than Danish, I would have suspected lingering, deep-seated resentments from the Union of Kalmar.
We used to squabble over who would get the skin of the roast chicken, which we called “the rags.”
Rags, that’s pretty good.
As an honorary Dane I am a colonizer from way back, even before the advent of America! 😉
My latest immigration drama was can I take the final early, I have to go to Laredo this weekend and wait, my brother left Havana with a coyote last night and if I don’t meet them at Laredo with $10K in cash, the coyote will leave him in a Mexican jail!
Oh yes – and the upshot of the Laredo trip was, it was a bust, the coyote boat got intercepted while still in Cuban waters and the brother ended up in a Havana jail! (An aunt bailed him out, though.)
Perhaps you can serve these delicious meals on your Royal Copenhagen porcelain, while wearing your Eileen Fisher ensemble. Doesn’t every Dane or would-be Dane have a set? (grin) Doesn’t red cabbage clash with Talavera?
I am not enough of a scholar to know whether there is any estimate of where all this money goes exchanged in all of these illegal transactions. I assume a good chunk of it comes from illegal work in the U.S., but even so. Hard to believe it couldn’t somehow be put to better use. In the incidents I’ve been involved in, I’ve been listening to students who are legal but whose parents aren’t–and then they have to come up with a retainer for an attorney who mostly can’t help them all that much. I assume this is because students who are themselves illegal can’t reveal themselves when their parents are captured for fear of a similar fate. Of course, now that some states are making it illegal to study at a university for in-state tuition if you can’t prove legal residency, this complex of problems may be abated. (shakes head)
I should have Royal Copenhagen but the pattern I like is Blue Denmark and I only have a couple of pieces of it, from the thrift store. The Talavera is the goal, clashing or not. I now have 6 Talavera plates, plus the plates I make (that’s another example of Xtreme housewifery, making your own plates).
The money – from illegal and legal work in the U.S., yes. The whole thing is so Baroque and convoluted, we might as well do something like … open the border and make all the salaries the same? What would that cause, I wonder?
It’s hard to say. In Europe there has always been this huge frenzy before a border opens, and then when it happens, well, nothing happens. The Schengen Zone has finally been widened to include the easternmost EU countries, and the wave of crime and pillaging that was predicted has not materialized. Presumably every border has its own dynamic, though. I think we would see significant migration in the short run and wage drops. The question is how long they would last.
Ah yes, wage drops. And of course the real solution is to create policy such that people do not need to migrate so much.