We're cooking again ...

This isn't turning into a recipe blog, I swear!

However, because of my mother's arthritis in her hand, I am cooking more. I've also started baking, especially cookies (which isn't easy on the diet), since blogging and shooting out résumés doesn't take up my whole day. The next time we go shopping, I'm picking up some yeast for some homemade bread ....

But man does not live on bread alone. So tonight it's a pork roast with a honey-ginger marinade: For a 2 lb. roast, combine 1/4 c. honey, 1/4 c. soy sauce, 2 tbsps. brown sugar, 1 tbsp. ginger, 1 tbsp. ketchup, 1/4 tsp. cinnamon, 1/4 tsp. onion powder, 1/4 tsp. ground red pepper; stir well. Marinate the roast in the refrigerator at least one hour; for best results marinate overnight.

Here's a tip: For roasts, pull the meat out of the oven when the thermometer reads about 3-5º below desired doneness and let it rest without cutting for approximately 5-10 minutes. First, this allows the interior heat to finish cooking the meat to the right temperature so it's not overdone. Second, this allows the meat to reabsorb the juices for the best texture and flavor.

Now, it's too bad I don't have any red potatoes ....

Here's something to scare you for Halloween!

Just two words:

SECOND TERM!

BOO!

 

Filipino comfort food!

When I was five, my father, who was in the US Air Force, was transferred to Clark Air Base near Angeles City, about 40 miles northwest of metro Manila on the big island of Luzon in the Philippines. This was after about a year or so of being stationed at Tachikawa AB near Yokohama, Japan; since both postings were PCSs (permanent changes of station), as Dad's dependents we were "sponsored" to live overseas with him.

What a fascinating time to be a kid!

Like most American families stationed at Clark (and, I imagine, at the naval base at Subic Bay), Mom and Dad hired a local woman, Maria, to cook, clean and watch us kids while they worked for the 13th Air Force. One native dish she introduced us to was chicken adobo. We loved it! And when we came back home, Mom got Maria's recipe from her, so chicken adobo was part of our growing up.

(Aside: One of my fellow Knights of Columbus, Ray Huie, is a Filipino from Chicago. At our council's monthly meetings we have dinner together beforehand, mostly dishes brother Knights have cooked. Ray and I are talking about doing chicken adobo in the near future!)

I bring this up because I've got a pot on right now for tonight's dinner. I hope Fr. Leo Patalinghug has no objections to putting our recipe out there; like most regional and ethnic dishes, the recipe has almost as many variations as cooks.

Chicken Adobo

1. Coat 2 lbs. chicken with a mixture of flour and pepper (about 2 tbsps. pepper to 1 c. flour usually works best) and brown in oil or shortening in a Dutch oven or other large pot. Drain off oil.
2. Add to chicken 2-1/2 c. water, 1 c. soy sauce, 1/2 c. white vinegar, 4 cloves garlic, 1/2 tsp. whole black pepper, 1/4 tsp. ginger and 3-4 bay leaves. Bring to a boil; reduce heat, cover and simmer for 3 hours.
3. When done, chicken should be practically falling off the bone. Serve over steamed white rice.

It's a simple dish, good with salad or any other greens you care to serve. You can skim the fat off the pot liquid (if you don't use boneless, skinless chicken breasts) and pour it over both the meat and rice instead of soy sauce. I recommend Kikkoman for cooking, as it has a more robust flavor than La Choy; plus, you can buy it in quart-sized bottles for ease of pouring.

How did so many kangaroos get into the judicial system?

Recently, Jill Stanek reported that a Kansas disciplinary panel sent a recommendation to the state Supreme Court that former state Attorney General Phill Kline be indefinitely suspended from practicing law due to ethical misconduct in the pursuit of his investigation of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri. Kline responded by accusing the KSSC of using the ethics process to punish political opponents:

The panel did what they were instructed to do. This is the latest chapter of a [former Kansas governor, now US Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen] Sebelius appointed court covering up for a Sebelius political benefactor in order to protect the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars.

The Sebelius court joined Planned Parenthood to file this complaint, appointed the prosecutor, appointed the panel and will make the final decision. Our Constitution was created to end such conduct.

The accusation of cronyism took on added weight and dimension when it was revealed the other day that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment destroyed around 2005 key evidence needed in a trial against PPKMM on 107 criminal charges stemming from Kline's investigation. That's the year 2005, as in "on Gov. Sebelius' watch". Even if the document destruction could be justified as routine or mandated by HIPAA or the Privacy Act, there's no way this can look good; it makes PPKMM's counsel's claim that "there is no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing" look disingenuous to say the least: "Of course there's no evidence. That's what a successful cover-up is supposed to accomplish!"

Be careful what you ask for ....

©2011 Matt Bohrs.

Seriously, I'd rather not speculate on Jobs' eternal fate. After all, God could have seen fit to admit him to Heaven. My task is to try to get there myself. "Yes, there are those now last who will be first, and those now first who will be last" (Lk 13:30).

Ah, if only I could draw!

I would love to have enough drawing skill to be a cartoonist. But, alas! I don't. So here I am, trying to work this exchange into a passable joke without drawing skills:

Person #1: "I'm from the US Government, and I'm here to help you."

Person #2: "WOULD YOU MAKE UP YOUR MIND!?"

That's all.

Shocking news: Bishop's faith not shaken after attack!

A year ago, Bp. David Monroe of Kamloops, BC was assaulted with a blunt object when he answered his door. He spent 55 days in the hospital; his attacker, John Bandura, is currently being held at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital in Port Coquitlam.

So it was nice for The Canadian Press to follow up on the story a year later.  What I don't get is the lede: "A Catholic bishop from Kamloops, B.C. says his faith in God was not shaken, even as he struggled to breathe following an attack at his home one year ago."

Is there a particular reason why his faith should have been shaken by the attack? Should Bp. Monroe have expected God to come swooping in on his attacker like Spider-Man or Batman to foil Bandura and save the day? 

It's not that the question is "stupid", but rather that the answer is so shocking that it deserves the lede. It would be more newsworthy if Bp. Monroe's faith had been shaken by the attack, if he were reconsidering his vocation in light of it.

After all, Catholicism isn't into the whole "prosperity gospel" thing; to us, faith in God isn't a lucky rabbit's foot to grant us perpetual health and wealth or to protect us from all harm or inconvenience. S*** still happens; you just deal with it differently.

So anyway, here's to Bp. Monroe: may the rest of his life be healthy and just eventful enough to be interesting.

Lo, how the mighty hath fallen!

One day, maybe in a month or two, the OWS protesters will realize that people don't take them seriously anymore.

Well ... yeah. But then, very few people, if you walk up to them and accuse them of being evil and greedy, will say, "Yeah, I know. Ain't it cool?"

 

Just to show you that elitism isn't dead in America ....

Actually, this was shown later to be an astroturf movement started by Vilya, the Ring of Fire, and Nenya, the Ring of Adamant.

And the most annoying thing is, he doesn't really eat them. [Actually, I'm a Distributist. I don't mind if someone has more cookies than I do, so long as everyone has enough ovens and ingredients.

Now they tell me ....

Hugging the cactus—UPDATED

©2011 Getty Images.

In quick succession, we've seen Hollywood figures at their most generous and at their most infantile.

On Saturday, Robert Downey, Jr. delivered a speech in acceptance of the 25th annual American Cinematheque Award, an award which pays tribute to an actor "fully engaged in his or her work and ... committed to making a significant contribution to the art of the motion pictures." Certainly Downey throws himself completely into every role he plays, and is very knowledgeable in films and the art of story-telling, so I can think of few people as deserving of the award.

Except for the actor who presented him the award — Mel Gibson. And Downey paid him tribute both for his craft and his friendship by demanding that Hollywood forgive Gibson for his indiscretions of the last few years. Here's the part of the speech, as presented in Forbes:

When I couldn’t get sober, he told me not to give up hope and encouraged me to find my faith. It didn’t have to be his or anyone else’s as long as it was rooted in forgiveness. And I couldn’t get hired, so he cast me in the lead of a movie that was actually developed for him. He kept a roof over my head and food on the table and most importantly he said if I accepted responsibility for my wrongdoing and embraced that part of my soul that was ugly – hugging the cactus he calls it — he said that if I hugged the cactus long enough, I’d become a man. ... I did and it worked. 

All he asked in return was that someday I help the next guy in some small way. It’s reasonable to assume at the time he didn’t imagine the next guy would be him or that someday was tonight. So anyway on this special occasion and in light of the recent holidays including Columbus Day, I would ask that you join me, unless you are completely without sin in which case you picked the wrong f—ing industry, in forgiving my friend his trespasses and offering him the same clean slate you have me, allowing him to continue his great and ongoing contribution to our collective art without shame. He’s hugged the cactus long enough.

A Canticle for Liebowitz: Plus ça change, plus ça même chose

I've had A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (New York: Bantam Books, 1959), in my book collection for some time. In fact, judging from the state of the cover, it must be one of the last books I bought from a second-hand book store I lived near in Omaha over five years ago. But while I started it a couple of times, in both cases something else called me away from finishing it.

So I read Dr. Peter Kreeft's laud of Liebowitz in Dappled Things, and realized with some guilt that I still had it but had never read it completely through. So taking the command "Tolle, lege" literally (while still appreciating the reference to St. Augustine's Confessions 8:12:29), yesterday I took up and read the sucker straight through. And I will say something that will strike the sci-fi purist as sheer blasphemy: Miller did in one book what Isaac Asimov could not do in all his Foundation series. 

Liebowitz reminds me very much of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (especially in the last section, where Miller's overview of the second technological age is reminiscent of Chief Bromden's mental fugue after he and Murphy go through electro-shock therapy). But where Heller's novel is an absurdist shot at war, and Kesey's is full of the post-Sixties distrust for "the system", Miller's work indicts the modern hermeneutic of "the eternal conflict between faith and reason", which treats the two principles as if they were divorced and not inextricably entwined.