Go over and visit the guy who HAS to be blogdom’s favorite tanker, Lieutenant Prakash. This article narrates his personal activities. Check out the pictures!
Monthly Archives: January 2005
Yet another gumbo recipe
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve talked about gumbo before. Here’s another recipe.
Sunday morning I got up and fed myself and Corey breakfast, put a load of laundry on, and then sat back to catch a little TV with him. He was watching TV and felt the sudden urge for a snack.
“Dad,” he says, “can I have some of those dried shrimp?”
“Sure,” I said. He and I’d been to Wing Tai’s Oriental Grocery a couple of weekends before and I’d bought a relatively large bag of dried shrimp. While the shrimp we bought were for an oriental market, they are also something that is part of Cajun culture.
When I was young, we’d often come into a lot of fresh shrimp. We’d freeze a lot, but we’d also dry some. The technique is simple: Drop whole fresh shrimp into boiling salted water until they turn pink, then spread them out in the sun. Every now and then, when you think about it, turn them over. Take them in at night. Put them back out in the morning. After a few days, the shrimp will be dry and the shells will get very brittle. We’d then put them in an onion sack and shake them vigorously. This would break up the shells and they’d fall through the open mesh of the onion sack. The dried shrimp would keep for a long time, particularly if Mom could keep us kids from snatching handfuls for a snack.
So Corey was snacking on dried shrimp, eating them one at a time, when an idea popped into my head. Here’s the gist of it: Rainy, blustery, cold (for Louisiana) day = Gumbo weather! And Corey was fast eating his way through a key ingredient of the gumbo I had in mind. I stopped him, rescued the remaining shrimp, and headed into the kitchen.
Dried shrimp, sausage and fish gumbo
The Recipe
(note the exotic ingredients)
1/3 cup flour
1/3 cup vegetable oil
one medium yellow onion, about baseball size or so, chopped into ¼” or so chunks
one bunch of green onions (scallions for the pretentious) chopped
one rib of celery (optional. I had some, so I used it) chopped
a cup of dried shrimp, maybe a bit more. Check your local oriental food store.
half pound of white fish filets (I had tilapia. Catfish will work. So will anything else.) Cut these into thumb-sized pieces
half pound of GOOD smoked sausage, cut 3/8″ thick.
A can of chicken stock
Salt
Pepper (both black and red)
For serving:
A pot of cooked rice
Gumbo file’
Hot sauce
The procedure:
Chop everything up beforehand. Set the onion and celery aside in a bowl for ease of access.
Put the dried shrimp in a bowl and cover with boiling water. Set aside.
Make a roux. Using a heavy-bottomed four-quart pot, heat the oil over medium-high heat until almost invisible wisps of smoke appear. Dump in the flour and start stirring. Stir continuously, making sure you don’t miss stuff in the corners of the pot. Your white flour/oil mixture will begin to brown. Keep stirring. Your roux will be done when the color of the mixture is a dark walnut or milk chocolate brown. Honestly, folks, this is the most difficult part of the process. Once you learn to make a roux, you’ve mastered the most difficult task in Cajun cooking. It ain’t hard. And if you’re paranoid, turn the heat down. You’ll still get a marvelous roux, it’ll just take longer to cook. In fact, in the days before vegetable oils were commonly available, the roux used to be made with lard. Lard doesn’t take high heat as well, so roux was cooked over lower heat, and actually took a lot longer.
When your roux is the desired color, dump in the onions and celery. Stir the whole mass. The super-hot roux will almost instantly saute the vegetables. When all the sizzling dies down, dump in a quart of water. Then add the can of chicken stock and the cut up sausage. Dump in the whole container of shrimp and the water they were soaking in.
Handling the fish can be a little tricky. You can dump it right in with the sausage and shrimp, but be aware that some of the fish will disintegrate in cooking. That’s not a bad thing, the flavor’s still there, but if you’re looking for a chunk of fish in your gumbo, you might be hard-put to find it. You could wait until about 15 minutes before serving, and dump the fish into the simmering gumbo to poach it, but that negates the melding of the fish flavors with the gumbo. I think that you get the best of both ideas by dumping half in with the shrimp and sausage, and half in right before serving, for those who want to find chunks of fish.
Once the pot is boiling, add water to make four quarts of gumbo. Add salt and pepper to taste, and let the whole thing simmer for at least an hour.
Prepare a pot of rice. Medium-grain rice is most authentic.
To serve, put a scoop of rice in each bowl, and ladle the gumbo over it, making sure that you share shrimp, sausage and fish with each diner lest they call you bad names. Each diner can add file’ to his bowl as desired, as well as hot sauce.
Variations: This is a seafood gumbo. You can add oysters, cleaned crabs, or fresh shrimp as you desire. Leave out the seafood entirely and use chicken. Or a wild goose. or guinea fowl. Or a couple of bunnies. Or ducks. Or half a wombat. Remember, it’s an old Cajun recipe, and the technique lends itself to situations just like my “what do I cook” Sunday.
A disinterested (until she ate a bowl) third party says this is the best gumbo I’ve ever made.
Another Major Dick Culver War Story
Alright Private Figowitz, on your knees !
By Dick Culver
(Blogowner’s note: The following story is NOT suitable for delicate sensibilities. It reflects the way things were in a place and time far, far away. It also contains language which were common in the old military. Us old soldiers, sailors and Marines understand this. Airmen and civilians of kinder persuasions might be offended. there are un-subtle references to explicit sexual activity in this article. You’ve been warned! Swallow all beverages and foodstuffs and proceed at your own risk.)
AN MRE FEAST FIT FOR A KING (OR QUEEN)…
(one of the truly amazing things about the Internet is that you can form some amazing long-distance friendships. I’ve been on Major Dick Culver’s “Gun Talk” board for several years now and we’ve exchanged many e-mails. The good Major is a retired Marine, and he’s spent time with the Civilian Marksmanship Program and the Marine Corps sniper trianing program. Additionally, he spent some time training the forces of our “allies” in the Near East, as well as tours in Viet Nam. He’s quite the writer and story-teller, and this morning he forwarded a couple of stories to me for the blog.)
To anyone who has ever eaten MREs you will appreciate the humor in this more than most.
I had a date the other night at my place. On the phone the day before, the girl asked me to “Cook her something she’s never had before” for dinner.
After many minutes of scratching my head over what to make, I finally settled on something she has DEFINITELY never eaten. I got out my trusty case of MRE’s, Meal, Ready-to-Eat. Field rations that when eaten in their entirety contain 3000+ calories.
Here’s what I made: I took three of the Ham Slices out of their plastic packets, took out three of the Pork Chops, three packets of Chicken-a-la-King, and eight packets of dehydrated butter noodles and some dehydrated/rehydrated rice. I cooked the Ham Slices and Pork Chops in one pan, sautéed in shaved garlic and olive oil. In another pot, I blended the Chicken a-la-king, noodles, and rice together to make a sort of mush that looked suspiciously like succotash. I added some spices, and blended everything together in a glass pan that I then cooked in the oven for about 35 minutes at 450 degrees. When I took it out, it looked like, well, ham slices, pork chops, and a bed of yellow poop. I covered the tops of the meat in the MRE cheese (kinda’ like Velveeta) and added some green sprinkly thingys from one of my spice cans (hey, if it’s got green sprinkly thingys on it, it looks fancy right?)
For dessert, I took four MRE Pound Cakes, mashed ’em up, added five packets of cocoa powder, powdered coffee cream, and some water. I heated it up and stirred it until it looked like a sort of chunky gelatinous organism, and I sprinkled powdered sugar on top of it. Voila–Ranger Pudding. For alcoholic drinks, I took the rest of my bottle of Military Special Vodka (yes, they DO make a type of liquor named “Military Special”–it sells for $4.35 per fifth) and mixed in four packets of “Electrolytes-
1 each – Cherry flavored” (I swear, the packet says that). It looked like an eerie kool-aid with sparkles in it (that was the electrolytes I guess… could’ve been leftover sand from Egypt).
I lit two candles, put a vase of wildflowers in the middle, and set the table with my best set of Ralph Lauren Academy-series China (that shit is f***ing EXPENSIVE… my set of 8 place settings cost me over $600), and put the alcoholic drink in a crystal wine decanter.
She came over, and I had some appetizers already made, of MRE spaghetti-with-meatballs, set in small cups. She saw the dinner, saw the food, and said “This looks INCREDIBLE!!!” We dug in, and she was loving the food. Throughout the meal, she kept asking me how long it took me to make it, and kept remarking that I obviously knew a thing or two about cooking fine meals. She kind of balked at the makeshift “wine” I had set out, but after she tried it I guess she liked it because she drank four glasses during dinner. At the end of the main course, when I served the dessert, she squealed with delight at the “Chocolate mousse” I had made. Huh? Chocolate what? Okay…yeah… it’s Chocolate Moose. Took me HOURS to make… yup.
Later on, as we were watching a movie, she excused herself to use my restroom. While she was in there, I heard her say softly to herself “uh oh” and a resounding but petite fart punctuated her utterance of dismay. Let the games begin. She sprayed about half a can of air freshener (Air Freshener, 1 each, Orange scent. Yup. The Army even makes smellgood) and returned to the couch, this time with an obvious pained look. After 10 more minutes she excused herself again, and retreated to the bathroom for the second time. I could hear her say “What the hell is WRONG with me???, “…as she again sent flatulent shockwaves into the porcelain bowl. This time, they sounded kinda wet, and I heard the toilet paper roll being employed, and again, LOTS more air freshener.
Back to the couch. She smiles meekly as she decides to sit on the chair instead of next to me. She sits on my chair, knees pulled up to her chest, kind of rocking back and forth slightly. Suddenly, without a word, she ROCKETED up and FLEW to the bathroom, slammed the door, and didn’t come out for 30 minutes. I turned the movie up because I didn’t want her to hear me laughing so hard that tears were streaming down my cheeks. She came out with a slightly gray pallor to her face, and said “I am SOOOOOO sorry. I have NO idea what is wrong with me. I am so embarrassed, I can’t believe I keep running to your bathroom!!” I gave her an Imodium AD, and she finally settled down and relaxed. Later on, she asked me again what I had made for dinner, because she had enjoyed it so much. I calmly took her into the kitchen and showed her all the used MRE bags and packets in the trash can. After explaining to her that she had eaten roughly 9,000 calories of “Army food” she turned stark white, looked at me incredulously, and said “I ate 9,000 calories or dehydrated food that was made 3 years ago?” After I concurred, she grabbed her coat and keys, and took off without a word.
She called me yesterday. Seems she couldn’t $hit for 3 days, and when she finally did, the smell was so bad, her roommate could smell it from down the hall. She also told me she had been working out nonstop to combat the high caloric intake, and that she never wanted me to cook dinner for her again, unless she was PERSONALLY there to inspect the food beforehand. It was a fun date. She laughed about it eventually, and said that that was the first time she’d ever crapped in a guy’s house on a date. She’d been so upset by it she was in tears in the bathroom while I had been in tears on the couch. I know, I’m an a$$hole, but it was still a funny night.
Thoughts on the Iraqi Election
This is just another thing that has gotten so easy – so routine in America that we hardly consider what it means, well, except maybe for the dimmocrats who have to steal one every now and then.
Think about it: In the last few weeks, the jihadi terrorists have done their level best to terrorize the population into staying home. I do not mean to denigrate the upheaval in this country in my youth as blacks gained the exercise of their vote, but folks, there just ain’t a comparison. Even on the worst days, there were not beheadings in the streets of America. Whites weren’t blowing up police stations. The body count was almost nil. All but the most rabid white supremicist knew that blacks should have the right to vote as well as whites. The violence just wasn’t here.
On this day, it’s hard to equate having to stand in line for hours in Ohio with suicide bombers and beheadings. And it’s hard to equate being turned away for not being properly registered to being shot for showing up.
Incredibly brave. That’s what you need to be to cast a vote in Iraq, at least in some places. Freedom. It must be important to them to take the risk. I wonder how important to many of our people it really is…
Hillary: Our clear choice for Presidentess!!!
We ALL may have tagged Hillary wrong. After all, being married to Bill(Boy! This beats the double-wide!) Clinton, she MUST have gone through some drastic changes in personality. ONe newspaper takes a little look into the future in this article, and shows us the Hillary we’ll likely see in the next three years approaching her ONE GREAT SHOT at the Presidency.
An excerpt:
The Times
April 25, 2005Senator Clinton yesterday delighted delegates to the annual convention of the National Rifle Association when she expressed her unstinting opposition to the proposed ban on new classes of lethal assault weapons and dedicated herself to securing the right of every American to own “a fully stocked arsenal� if necessary in defence of his freedoms.
Raising aloft what she described as one of the favourites from her collection of AK47 automatic weapons, Mrs Clinton declared to wild cheers: “If they think some unelected judge in Washington is going to take away my constitutional rights, let them think again! Let them try! Let them come! I’d like to see them. They’ll have to prise this beauty from my cold, dead hands.�
Mrs Clinton has recently been reaching out beyond the Democratic Party’s core supporters on the gun control issue. Last week she was filmed while hunting in upstate New York, and was later seen dragging a dead deer to her new, five-litre Ford Exterminator sports utility vehicle.
Yep! That’s our little girl!
(And thanks to this post on CSP’s Political Comments page…)
Just a thought on the Kennedys
Surely it occurred to somebody that John F. Kennedy must have cornered his clan’s ability to perform water rescues. JFK made a name for himself after his PT boat was T-boned by a Jap destroyer, when he swam to a nearby island, helping an injured crewmate.
Then twenty-odd years later, Teddy Kennedy made a name for HIMSELF by swimming away from a sunken car, leaving a young female intern to drown.
If JFK today made the speeches that he made when he was president, he’d make George Bush look liberal, and his brother’d finally have the “big one” that we’re all waiting for…
Lieutenant, there are limits…
During my tour in Germany, I suffered some aggravation to old ankle injuries incurred in a motorcycle accident, and as a result of my maladies, I ended up working the the battalion S-1 (personnel and administrative) section.
Our S-1 officer was a decent first lieutenant who was glad to have me around to supervise his section of “clerks and jerks” and to care for his section’s vehicle, an M-113A1 armored personnel carrier, affectionately known to us tankers as a “Dempster Dumpster” for its general shape and our perceptions of its level of armor protection. But this article isn’t about the M-113.
One day I was sitting near the coffee pot talking with the battalion sergeant major. This is the senior non-commissioned officer in the battalion. Ours was a fine NCO, typical of the rank, and I enjoyed that he’d take time to sit down and chat about things from time to time. There we were, sipping coffee and passing the time.
And up the hall comes the battalion commander with a young second lieutenant right on his heels. The sergeant major and I both stood up when the battalion commander walked up. I noticed that the lieutenant had one hell of a black eye with bruising and contusions on his face.
“Go ahead, lieutenant,” said the battalion commander. “Tell the sergeant major what you just told me.” The colonel turned to me just as I was getting ready to absent myself from the conversation. “You need to hear this. You might need to start the legal paperwork.”
“Sergeant major,” the lieutenant said, “I want Sergeant Smith court-martialed for assaulting a superior officer.”
Well, the sergeant major and I both knew Sergeant Smith. He was a sergeant first class, a pretty decent rank, one stripe above me, and two below the sergeant major, and Sergeant Smith was a a very competent and respected platoon sergeant of a tank platoon. There had to be a back story.
“Okay, sir,” said the sergeant major. He was duty-bound to address the young lieutenant, twenty years his junior in age, as “sir”, since the lieutenant was a commissioned officer and therefore outranked any NCO, although the wise second lieutenant would defer to the greater experience of a good NCO. “What’s the story?”
“He punched me in the face.”
“In front of the troops?”
“No. He called me off behind the building. And then he punched me.”
“Did he say anything to you before he punched you?”
“Yeah. He told me that if I went around his daughter again I wouldn’t get away with getting my face punched in.”
Sergeant Smith had a couple of teenaged daughters. I guess the oldest was seventeen or eighteen. Lived in the local housing area. Went to the American high school. Hung out after school at the youth center. And a lot of young soldiers would hang around the periphery of the youth center just to talk to American sweeties.
Apparently the young lieutenant was making attempts at compromising the virtue of Sergeant Smith’s daughter, and Sergeant Smith was not bent on accepting the idea.
The sergeant major spoke. “I’ve heard about you and Sergeant Smith’s daughter. Lieutenant, you’ve pushed the limits. I’d be likely to offer you the same that you got from Smith. You can’t mess with the man’s daughter and expect to hide behind your rank.” He continued. “Colonel, I don’t think a court-martial is what we want for this incident. I’ll call Sergeant Smith in and talk to him.”
“Sounds okay to me, Sergeant Major,” said the colonel. “Thanks.”
I understand that the colonel had a little talk with the lieutenant.
Comment Spam Update
Well, since I reloaded my comments module last night to get the comments back on line, and then installing Spam Karma, a spam blocker, things seem to have stabilized on the comment spam front.
The blocker has caught and deleted 53 spam comments, and it has caught one of Wayne’s several tries at tripping and spoofing the blocker. That post went to moderation.
I suppose that this thing will work for at least a while.
Here’s the deal: The new blocker evaluates the prospective comment for a lot of different things like use of “spam words”, known bad IP’s and URL’s, a whole bunch of comments all at once, and a lot of other things. It then decides if the comment fits the “spam” profile. If the comment definitely fits, it’s history. If it falls into the “maybe” category, it’ll ask the commenter to do a “CAPTCHA”, reading an image and then typing a response. a real commenter can do this. A spam-bot can’t. The blocker will act accordingly to the response from the CAPTCHA test.
If the spammer manages to fool the blocker once or twice or several times, but finally trips the blocker because of the “too many posts, too often” or posting to an article more than a few days old, then the blocker will go back and delete everything from that IP/URL.
Of course, if a comment trips the blocker, the IP and URL are “harvested” and added to the blacklist on THIS blog, and every few days my blacklist is sent to the master list for evaluation and inclusion.
It looks like pretty fine stuff.
The previous blocker, WPBlacklist seems to have gotten into its head that it needed to block ALL comments. It was buggy from the start, but I hadn’t found out about this one yet.
So, folks, until we can actually locate the people who send comment spam and exterminate them with extreme predjudice, we have to depend on these solutions.
As always, if you try to post a comment and it doesn’t show up, let me know…
20 Questions to a Better Personality
So several people have taken this test around blogdom. I figured I’d have to do it…
Here are my honest results:
Wackiness: 18/100
Rationality: 52/100
Constructiveness: 28/100
Leadership: 48/100You are a SEDF–Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you a Evil Genius.
You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.
Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well–even those you have known a long time–because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable.
You are not to be messed with. You may explode.
Of the 83014 people who have taken this quiz since tracking began (8/17/2004), 14.3 % are this type.
Offhand, I’d say it’s a pretty good assessment…
maybe it’s fixed now…
Just hacking (at some very rudimentary level) around trying to get the comments to work again. Replaced a corrupted file. Seems like the comments are working again.
It was so hosed that I couldn’t post comments on my own blog…
To all you kind people who sent me e-mail concerning my problem: Thanks for the help!
UPDATE! I may hate myself later, but I just installed and enabled a spam blocker called Spam Karma. I am not sure how well it is going to work, so again I prevail upon the kindness of you good people. If you try to leave a comment and get bounced, please email me and let me know…
UPDATE #2: Hooray! Thibodeaux from Say Uncle has managed to post a couple of comments. If “Thibodeaux” can get through the spam blocker, the rest of you should do okay. Now all I have to do is wait until it tries to stop some real spam…
What the Founding Fathers didn’t know…
They wrote the second amendment with flintlock muskets and Kentucky rifles in mind. If they’d have forseen the power of modern assault rifles, they wouldn’t have written the Second Amendment like that.
So let me get this straight. They didn’t forsee the advances in arms technology, so they incorrectly wrote the Second Amendment. Does this mean also that they miswrote the First? After all, the “press” they were talking about was a hand-powered, one sheet at a time, hand-set type affair. If they’d envisioned broadcast media like television and radio, printers like the huge building-sized web presses, and the Internet, would they have NOT written in freedom of speech and the press?
Just wondering, you know…
More “what happened … what didn’t happen…
I was unfortunately out of pocket for timing to post on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz near the end of World War II. Aside from the obvious snipe at the anti-war bunch who happily and ignorantly parade around with signs declaring “War Never Solved Anything”, I have another thought or two on the subject.
First, even though the Red Army of the Soviet Union actually liberated Auschwitz as the Eastern Front moved towards Germany and the end of the war, the Western Front’s armies liberated several other camps. There is a difference in thinking involved here. The Soviet system had already systematically killed millions of its own people under the successive reigns of Lenin and Stalin. Though the truth is seldom addressed, the reign of Stalin resulted in far more deaths than Hitler as Stalin purged his own military and systematically reduced targeted groups inside the Soviet Union.
The French, both the occupied area and the area under control of the Vichy collaborationist government helpfully rounded up and shipped off many Jews to their deaths.
It was only natural at the end of WW II for us to recognize the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. It is fitting that we continue to remember this example of institutionalized murder. But it is also incumbent on us to remember the equally dead millions who died at the hands of Communists in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and just about every other place where Communism has reigned.
Mass murder is a symptom of totalitarians and their toadies. The Nazis didn’t have the corner on that market.
Commenting…what’s up?!?!?
Some good folks have e-mailed me to let me know that my comment spam blocker has decided that they’re worthy of blocking.
I have had several run-ins with the Texas Hold-em bunch and several others. In the greater scheme of things, I’d rather not have to spend time sifting through comments and eliminating the garbage, but at the same time, it pains me terribly that the blocker is blocking REAL comments. I don’t get enough comments as it is, so I’m not real picky about who leaves a comment, just so it’s a real person commenting about something mostly related the the article. I just don’t relish the days I open my e-mail and see a long list of comments by some spam-bot.
That being said, I’m trying another tack in the anti-spam protection. I hope it will let you in for a legitimate comment. If it doesn’t, e-mail me and let me know…