Saddam Hussein has been executed. The Butcher of Baghdad is dead.
So what has been accomplished? He became irrelevant when he was captured, he no longer had the means to do harm to anyone. And now he is spared a lifetime of irrelevance, decades perhaps of being just another powerless loser having yet another bologna sandwich for lunch.
Death was too good for him.
It was wrong when Saddam ordered the slaughter of his own people in Dujail. It was wrong when he gassed the Kurds.
And it will be wrong when he is hanged tonight.
Making deviled eggs for the Grazing Table? Here’s how to peel them quickly, easily and without gouging craters into the whites -
First, make sure you’ve boiled them properly. That means, when the boiling time is up, you have to plunge the eggs into a bowl of ice water. This stops the cooking process and also causes the egg inside to contract and pull away from the shell.
Once the eggs have cooled, fill another bowl with warm water. Take each egg and rap it sharply at each end, then roll it on the counter with the palm of your hand just one rotation, to crack the shell all over. Now drop it into the warm water, and do the same with the rest of your eggs.
After a minute or two in the warm water, the shells will easily slip right off the egg, leaving you will perfect smooth whites for those pesky deviled eggs 
On second thought, Butterball will gladly tell you how to cook a turkey. Let’s talk everything else!
My mother-in-law, who passed six months before I met my husband, was Hawaiian of Portuguese descent. Every Christmas morning, DH waxes nostalgic about the traditional Hawaiian breakfast his mother would serve – pan-fried Portuguese sausage, with eggs cooked in all the grease and drippings (be still, my arteries) and served with rice and fresh pineapple on the side.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to find Portuguese sausage around here? But I finally did it, and yesterday I drove SEVENTY MILES to a hole-in-the-wall deli to buy sausage for our Christmas breakfast. If DH didn’t buy the pot rack I want for Christmas, boy, is he going to be humbled or what?
On to lunch …
This past fall, my parents went to Turkey and while Mom brought home the usual touristy stuff for everyone else, she knows my heart and spent a day in the textile and spice markets for me I love you, Mom! She brought me silks and threads and …..
Saffron. Yes, real saffron threads, not powder. The most expensive spice in the world, and it’s mine, mine, MINE!!
So for lunch, we’ll have traditional Spanish almond soup -
50 ml olive oil (use the good stuff)
400 gms. almonds, blanched.
2 cloves of garlic
1/4 tsp. cumin
1/4 tsp. saffron threads
4 slices French bread, diced
10 peppercorns (I like white pepper for this recipe)
1 and a half litres chicken broth
1 tsp. vinegar
Sea salt to taste
Chopped parsley to garnish
Using a mortar and pestle, crush the saffron threads. Warm the oil, and leave the saffron to soak for 10 minutes in the warmed oil. After soaking, heat the oil and toast the almonds, garlic, bread and saffron. When golden brown, set a few of the croutons aside to garnish then blend the rest in a blender along with the peppercorns, cumin and salt. Add a little of the broth and the vinegar to purée. Heat the rest of the broth then stir in the puréed almond mixture and bring to the boil. Simmer gently for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, then serve hot, garnished with the parsley and reserved croutons.
Because I have a Jewish guest this year, I’ll serve buttered latkes with the soup. That’s really the best I can do on such short notice, and I hope it works.
On to the Grazing Table …
The usual pickles, olives, cheeses and crackers, of course. I’ll use a little more of the saffron in the deviled eggs and I’ve also got paprika from “Slovenska Republika” for those. I found some Habernero Cheddar cheese, that should be interesting
Then the traditional turkey and trimmings. As I said, anyone can tell you how to roast a turkey and the usual side dishes are also very easy. What really differs from table to table is the stuffing, and if anyone raves about your holiday dinner, they’re raving about the stuffing. And the gravy 
Here’s what I use in my stuffing. I can’t really tell you quantities and measurements, because I don’t measure and just put in enough to make it “look right”. Don’t you hate it when people say that?
Sourdough bread, spread out on the table and counters overnight to make it stale. I like to make my own bread for this, from real “native yeast” sourdough starter. This way no one can ever make precisely the same sourdough as that which comes from my kitchen What you do is mix up some water, some flour and a bit of sugar in a ceramic bowl, leave it on the counter, stir it every day, and then in about a week the yeast that lives in the air of your kitchen colonizes in the mixture, everything starts to bubble and you’ve got a sourdough starter. Then use it with any traditional sourdough recipe. Yup, too late for that this year, but remember it for 2007
Celery
Onions
Mushrooms (splurge on something flavorful)
REAL butter
Raisins
Dried cranberries
Slivered, toasted almonds
Ground sausage
Granny Smith or any tart apples, peeled and diced
Sage, rosemary, parsley, thyme, marjoram, salt and pepper
Chicken broth
Tear the stale bread into cubes and put in a large bowl. Cook and drain the sausage, set aside. Melt the butter and cook the onions and celery (dice them first) Add the mushrooms, apples, almonds, cranberries, raisins and spices, cook until the mushrooms are soft.
Drain off the butter over the bread and toss. Reserve a cup or so of this mixture, then add the rest of the ingredients and toss well. Use just enough of the chicken broth to make the bread damp, not wet! Stuff your bird and roast it. Put any remaining stuffing in a baking pan and cover it with foil, keep it in the fridge until the turkey is done, then pop it in the oven for 15-20 minutes to get hot.
Take the cup or so of stuffing that you set aside and use it to thicken your gravy. Pan fry those disgusting looking bits that come in the plastic bag in the turkey and dice them very small. Add them to a pan of chicken broth and bring to a boil. Add the stuffing mixture and stir constantly until the bread dissolves into mush and the gravy is simmering. Probably add a little more salt and pepper, then pour into that odd-shaped serving dish that came with your china (aka the gravy boat) and take to the table.
Pour yourself a generous shot of rum, chug it while no one is looking, add what’s left to the eggnog, and have a lovely dinner!
For my BFF Mary, whose twin boys Eric (USN submariner) and William (US Army medic) are both not only back on US soil, but also home for Christmas! Whahooo!
For Mom and Dad, finally settled in their new home, just in time for a very white Christmas
For George, who really is going to retire to New Zealand and farm abalone. I’d have got him abalone-herding boots and spurs if I could have found some
For my father-in-law, Frank. Yes, I remembered to take poinsettas to Mom’s grave this morning.
For all of our customers and employees, who really make it worth all the blood, sweat and tears.
And for all of the people I interact with online, in blogs, message boards and website forums. Thanks for all the fun, and all the things I’ve learned from you!
I wish you all the best of the season, however you choose to celebrate (or not). Be safe, be well, be happy and may 2007 be the best year ever (until 2008, of course!)
And may we slay Zanthus the Lich. Amen.
xoxo
So yesterday I switched on my monitor to see that Zone Alarm had updated and wanted me to reboot, which I declined to do at the time because I was on my way out the door and only wanted to check some stock quotes and see if Ent. Lawyer had posted up his daily Blind Item yet.
I did notice that my system seemed very, very slow but figured that would correct itself after a reboot, which I did later that day. Well, NO, it did not correct itself and in fact Task Manager was reporting my CPU usage pegged at 100% even with all my resource hogs shut down.
I run the Zone Alarm Security Suite, full version, and saw that a process named “vsmon.exe” was really chewing up the resources. A quick Google told me that process belongs to Zone Alarm. So I went into Zone Alarm to see what had changed.
After mucking about a bit, I realized that the E-mail protection feature, which I do not need, had been turned on. I don’t use a local client like Outlook or Eudora, only web-based mail like Gmail, Yahoo, etc, so I do not need this feature and since it was the only change I could find, I turned it back off and rebooted.
And there’s your fix
Unless you are using local clients that pop your mail to your PC, you don’t need Zone Alarm attempting to monitor incoming email. Web-based services do that work for you, so let them deal with the resource issues
regards
A big shout-out to Snowgoose for super-fast order processing AND a handwritten thank-you note in the package. Their Celtic shuttle is far more delicate than it appears in the picture, I’ll be ordering another one after Christmas and retiring my Boye clunkers forever. They’ve also got size 15 and 16 crochet hooks, which are very hard to find. And they’ve got the Tatsy picot ruler, which I didn’t buy this time, but will after Christmas
Snowgoose could teach Thale Navigation a thing or two. It’s been three months since I bought my Magellan Explorist and I have yet to hear back from either the retail vendor or the company itself about the unreadable bundled software – no wonder you can find pirated copies of their maps and applications all over the Internet.
Thanks, Pete!
So as I said, I am tatting an antimacassar for a lovely 1932 Packard sedan as a gift, which I’ve already begun on my faithful (but simple) Boye shuttles.
But then I came into possession of this:
It’s a complete set of abalone, still attached to the cardboard in the original packaging. Most certainly vintage, possibly antique, and the ends are so tight I would say it’s only been slightly used, if at all.
Now I’m torn. Do I finish up what I’ve already started with the perle cotton and Boye shuttle, or toss that aside and start over with a vintage shuttle and silk thread??
Of course, anyone who knows me, knows exactly what I’m going to end up doing
Here’s the motif I am using for the antimacassar. Yes, those are self-closing mock rings grounding the cloverleaves.
Now that I think about it, I really should be working in beads at the edges. Whoops! Too late to add beads! Better start over!!
