FLY YOUR FLAG IN MEMORIAL

(row two first image) American War Cemetery (World War II), Florence, Tuscany, Italy — Photo by Bertl123; (row three first image) Belleau, Northern France – MAY 24, 2015: memorial day at American cemetery — Photo by njaj; (row four first image) Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day on May 27, 2013, in Washington, D.C, USA — Photo by dinhhang. The rest of the images need no caption.

 

While most of us will celebrate Memorial Day as a day off work, let’s also use it to remember our fallen and all those who have served so bravely to defend and protect our great nation. At KHT, we honor all those who serve, and have served, and put you in our heartfelt prayers for your tremendous sacrifice. Here’s a little trivia for those of you interested in being the smartest person at the family cookout. Enjoy, and special thanks to Wikipedia and history.com for the additional insights.

  • Memorial Day is an American holiday, observed on the last Monday of May, honoring the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military.
  • Originally known as Decoration Day, it originated in the years following the Civil War and became an official federal holiday in 1971. Many Americans observe Memorial Day by visiting cemeteries or memorials, holding family gatherings and participating in parades.
  • The practice of decorating soldiers’ graves with flowers is an ancient custom. Soldiers’ graves were decorated in the U.S. before and during the American Civil War. Following President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, there were a variety of events of commemoration.
  • The sheer number of soldiers of both sides who died in the Civil War (more than 600,000) meant that burial and memorialization took on new cultural significance. Under the leadership of women during the war, an increasingly formal practice of decorating graves had taken shape. In 1865, the federal government began creating national military cemeteries for the Union war dead. The Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper claimed in 1906 that Warrenton, Virginia, was the location of the first Civil War soldier’s grave ever to be decorated; the date cited was June 3, 1861.
  • By the late 1860s, Americans in various towns and cities had begun holding springtime tributes to the countless fallen soldiers, decorating their graves with flowers and reciting prayers. It is unclear where exactly this tradition originated; numerous different communities may have independently initiated the memorial gatherings. Nevertheless, in 1966 the federal government declared Waterloo, NY as, the official birthplace of Memorial Day, chosen because it hosted an annual, community-wide event, during which businesses closed and residents decorated the graves of soldiers with flowers and flags.
  • Memorial Day did not become the more common name until after World War II, and was not declared the official name by Federal law until 1967. On June 28, 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which moved four holidays, including Memorial Day, from their traditional dates to a specified Monday to create a convenient three-day weekend. The change moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May. The law took effect at the federal level in 1971. After some initial confusion and unwillingness to comply, all 50 states adopted Congress’ change of date within a few years.
  • In 1915, following the Second Battle of Ypres, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a physician with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, wrote the poem, “In Flanders Fields”. Its opening lines refer to the fields of poppies that grew among the soldiers’ graves in Flanders. In 1918, inspired by the poem, YWCA worker Moina Michael attended a YWCA Overseas War Secretaries’ conference wearing a silk poppy pinned to her coat and distributed over two dozen more to others present. In 1920, the National American Legion adopted it as their official symbol of remembrance.
  • On Memorial Day, the flag of the United States is raised briskly to the top of the staff and then solemnly lowered to the half-staff position, where it remains only until noon. It is then raised to full-staff for the remainder of the day. The half-staff position remembers the more than one million men and women who gave their lives in service of their country. At noon, their memory is raised by the living, who resolve not to let their sacrifice be in vain, but to rise-up in their stead and continue the fight for liberty and justice for all.
  • In 2000, Congress passed the National Moment of Remembrance Act, asking people to stop and remember at 3:00 P.M.
  • The National Memorial Day Concert takes place on the west lawn of the United States Capitol. The concert is broadcast on PBS and NPR. Music is performed, and respect is paid to the men and women who gave their lives for their country.
  • For many Americans, the central event is attending one of the thousands of parades held on Memorial Day in large and small cities all over the country. Most of these feature marching bands and an overall military theme with the National Guard and other service personnel participating along with veterans and military vehicles from various wars.
  • One of the longest-standing traditions is the running of the Indianapolis 500, an auto race which has been held in conjunction with Memorial Day since 1911. It runs on the Sunday preceding the Memorial Day holiday. Other weekend events include NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600, held later the same day since 1961, the PGA Memorial Tournament golf event and the final of the NCAA Division I Men’s Lacrosse Championship.
  • On Memorial Day weekend in 1988, 2,500 motorcyclists rode into Washington, D.C. for the first Rolling Thunder rally to draw attention to Vietnam War soldiers still missing in action or prisoners of war. By 2002, the ride had swelled to 300,000 bikers, many of them veterans, and today reaches one million riders. A national veterans rights group, Rolling Thunder takes its name from the B-52 carpet-bombing runs during the war in Vietnam.
  • Now, no holiday can be complete without food! Americans will eat 818 hot dogs per second on Memorial Day. That’s a few wieners short of 71 million in a day. And as for that summer statistical symmetry, Memorial Day leads up to the number one barbecue event, July 4 before coasting down into Labor Day (a close third at 55 percent).
  • The grilling gurus at the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association say the top choices for grilling will be burgers (85%), steak (80%), hot dogs (79%) and chicken (73%), with no sign of tofu turkey anywhere in the ratings. Hickory is the top flavor of barbecue sauce, followed by mesquite, honey, and spicy-hot.

Enjoy your family and friends and please remember to say a prayer for our fallen.

.

.

.

.


 

Some Like It Hot

(top left) Red hot chili peppers… Hey, that’d be a great name for a band! (top right group: rows one, two & three, l to r) Anaheim peppers, Banana peppers, Bell peppers, Cayenne peppers, Cherry peppers, Jalapeno peppers, Pimiento peppers and a garden full of Ornamental Peppers; (bottom group) Hey, a guy’s gotta’ eat: Peppers are GREAT on pizza and a MUST in fajitas and burritos!

With Memorial Day weekend coming up, it’s time for me to plan and plant my veggie garden. Working with Jackie and the girls, we’ll plan our garden like most people, prep the soil, and head off to the garden center – where I then focus on my favorite area – you guessed it – my peppers. Being a guy who gets a bit excited about heat, I get fired-up (get it) every year trying to figure out the best balance of taste, sweetness, texture and kick. Couple this with my organization and processing brain, my peppers garden becomes my own little PIA (Pain In The @#$) Job. I get to apply my love of problem solving, trial and error, care and nurturing, and with good sun and the right amount of water, success later in the season. THEN… I wake up and realize that unfortunately I do not have a “green” thumb and can’t grow a thing! If I want some of my favorite peppers I have to go buy them! So, for my post this week, I thought I’d pass along some general info on pepper types, and a little info on the famous Scoville scale. Many thanks to garden.org and theguardian.com.

  • Chile, Chili, Cayenne, Jalapeno – By Any Name, It’s Hot! Names for hot peppers can get confusing. Some people call them chili peppers, cayennes or jalapenos, and others just call them hot peppers. What are they really called? Is each of these names a separate category?
  • The confusion started in Mexico. Chile is the Spanish word for pepper. To specify which type of pepper, Mexicans would add the word for the particular type of pepper after the name chile. Therefore, chile dulce would be sweet pepper, chile jalapeno would be the Jalapeno pepper, and so on. When chile found its way into this country, different meanings were given to it in various parts of the country, and it even acquired a new spelling. In the Southwest and West, chile is used to refer to the Anaheim pepper. In other parts of the South and the Southeast, and still other sections of the country, chile refers to any type of hot pepper. Some folks refer to all hot peppers as cayennes or jalapenos. And all over the country we have different chile con carnes, which are pepper based.
  • Chile and chili are not varieties of peppers, but only words used to describe that the pepper is hot. So whether you say chile or chili, cayenne or jalapeno, and whether the word describes just an Anaheim pepper or all hot peppers, watch out! That pepper is hot!
  • Seed companies break the peppers we grow down into two categories: hot and sweet. The hot types include Cayenne, Jalapeno and Anaheim. Examples of sweet peppers are Bell and Pimiento. Banana and Cherry peppers come both sweet and hot.
  • When people talk about flavor, they usually focus on taste and smell. But there’s a third major flavor sense, as well, one that’s often overlooked: the physical sensations of touch, temperature and pain. The burn of chilli peppers is the most familiar example here, but there are others. Wine mavens speak of a wine’s “mouthfeel”, a concept that includes the puckery astringency of tannins – something tea drinkers also notice – and the fullness of texture that gives body to a wine. Gum chewers and peppermint fans recognize the feeling of minty coolness they get from their confections. And everyone knows the fizzy bite of carbonated drinks.
  • None of these sensations is a matter of smell or taste. In fact, our third primary flavor sense flies so far under our radar that even flavor wonks haven’t agreed on a single name for it. Sensory scientists are apt to refer to it as “chemesthesis”, “somatosensation”, or “trigeminal sense”, each of which covers a slightly different subset of the sense, and none of which mean much at all to the rest of the world.
  • Chilli aficionados get pretty passionate about their pods, choosing just the right kind of chilli for each application from the dozens available. The difference among chilli varieties is partly a matter of smell and taste: some are sweeter, some are fruitier, some have a dusky depth to their flavour. But there are differences in the way they feel in your mouth, too.
  • One difference is obvious: heat level. Chilli experts measure a chilli’s level of burn in Scoville heat units, a scale first derived by Wilbur Scoville, a pharmacist and pharmaceutical researcher, in 1912. Working in Detroit, Scoville had the bright idea that he could measure a pepper’s hotness by diluting its extract until tasters could no longer detect the burn. The hotter the pepper was originally, the more you’d have to dilute it to wash out the burn. Pepper extract that had to be diluted just tenfold to quench the heat scores 10 Scoville heat units; a much hotter one that has to be diluted one hundred thousandfold scores 100,000 Scovilles.
  • However you measure it, chillies differ widely in their heat level. Anaheims and poblanos are quite mild, tipping the scale at about 500 and 1,000 Scovilles, respectively. Jalapeños come in around 5,000, serranos about 15,000, cayennes about 40,000, Thai bird’s eye chillies near 100,000, and the habanero on my table somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Scovilles. From there, intrepid souls can venture into the truly hot, topping out with the Carolina Reaper at a staggering 2.2 million Scovilles, which approaches the potency of police-grade pepper spray.
  • Paul Bosland, the director of the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University, a plant breeder by trade, has a keen professional interest in all the tiny details of how chilli heat differs from one pod to the next. Bosland says he and his colleagues distinguish four other components to chilli heat in addition to heat level. The first is how fast the heat starts. “Most people, when they bite the habanero, it maybe takes 20 to 30 seconds before they feel the heat, whereas an Asian chilli is immediate,” he says. Chillies also differ in how long the burn lasts. Some, like jalapeños and many of the Asian varieties, fade relatively quickly; others, like habaneros, may linger for hours. Where the chilli hits you also varies. “Usually, with a jalapeño, it’s the tip of your tongue and lips, with New Mexico pod types it’s in the middle of the mouth, and with a habanero it’s at the back,” says Bosland. And fourth, Bosland and his crew distinguish between “sharp” and “flat” qualities of burn. “Sharp is like pins sticking in your mouth, while flat is like a paintbrush,” he says. New Mexico chillies tend to be flat while Asian ones tend to be sharp.

Have fun planning your garden. I’ll swing by this subject later in the season, discuss our collective horticultural successes and share some great salsa and peppers recipes.
.
.
.
.
.
.


 

Happy Mother’s Day!

 

Here’s wishing all Moms a special day
That’s filled with every pleasure,
Your love, care and tenderness
Is what we really treasure!

Happy Mother’s Day!

.

.

.

.

the above are copyright © by their respective owners.

 

The 5th of May

(top row l to r) In the early 1860’s, Napoleon, III thought it’d be a good idea to own Mexico; The battle of Puebla; President Benito Juárez said to Napoleon, III “not on my watch, dude” or something like that. (middle row) Two depictions of the revered Benito Juárez leading his people through troubled times. His birthday, March 21, is a national holiday. (bottom row l to r) Dancers at the annual Cinco de Mayo Festival in Washington, D.C.; Who doesn’t love some chips and salsa? We have a great recipe below. What can I say, I express my feelings through food. 

 

My Spanish vocabulary is limited to “taco” and “cerveza,” so I took this Cinco de Mayo as an opportunity to learn more about the significance of this holiday. A relatively minor holiday in most of Mexico, in the United States Cinco de Mayo has evolved into a celebration of Mexican culture and heritage, particularly in areas with large Mexican-American populations.  For me, it’s a chance to share a little heritage with my neighbors, enjoy some great food and beverages with my staff and friends, and officially commemorate the date of the Mexican army’s 1862 victory over France at the Battle of Puebla during the Franco-Mexican War (1861-1867). Here is a little history you can use to impress your friends while passing the salsa…(try mine below).  And thanks to history.com for the info.

  • In 1861, Benito Juárez, a lawyer and member of the indigenous Zapotec tribe, was elected president of Mexico. At the time, the country was in financial ruin after years of internal strife, and the new president was forced to default on debt payments to European governments.
  • In response, France, Britain and Spain sent naval forces to Veracruz, Mexico, demanding repayment. Britain and Spain negotiated with Mexico and withdrew their forces. France, however, ruled by Napoleon III, decided to use the opportunity to carve an empire out of Mexican territory.
  • Late in 1861, a well-armed French fleet stormed Veracruz, landing a large force of troops and driving President Juárez and his government into retreat. Certain that success would come swiftly, 6,000 French troops under General Charles Latrille de Lorencez set out to attack Puebla de Los Angeles, a small town in east-central Mexico.
  • From his new headquarters in the north, Juárez rounded up a ragtag force of 2,000 loyal men—many of them either indigenous Mexicans or of mixed ancestry—and sent them to Puebla.
  • The vastly outnumbered and poorly supplied Mexicans, led by Texas-born General Ignacio Zaragoza, fortified the town and prepared for the French assault. On May 5, 1862, Lorencez gathered his army—supported by heavy artillery—before the city of Puebla and led an assault.
  • The battle lasted from daybreak to early evening, and when the French finally retreated, they had lost nearly 500 soldiers. Fewer than 100 Mexicans had been killed in the clash.
  • Although not a major strategic win in the overall war against the French, Zaragoza’s success at Puebla on May 5 represented a great symbolic victory for the Mexican government and bolstered the resistance movement.
  • In 1867—thanks in part to military support and political pressure from the United States, which was finally in a position to aid its besieged neighbor after the end of the American Civil War—France finally withdrew.
  • The same year, Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, who had been installed as emperor of Mexico in 1864 by Napoleon, was captured and executed by Juárez’s forces. Puebla de Los Angeles was renamed for General Zaragoza, who died of typhoid fever months after his historic triumph there.
  • Within Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is primarily observed in the state of Puebla, where Zaragoza’s unlikely victory occurred, although other parts of the country also take part in the celebration. Traditions include military parades, recreations of the Battle of Puebla and other festive events. For many Mexicans, however, May 5 is a day like any other: It is not a federal holiday, so offices, banks and stores remain open.
  • In the United States, Cinco de Mayo is widely interpreted as a celebration of Mexican culture and heritage, particularly in areas with substantial Mexican-American populations.
  • In the 1960’s, Chicano activists raised awareness of the holiday in part because they identified with the victory of indigenous Mexicans, such as Juárez.
  • Today, revelers mark the occasion with parades, parties, mariachi music, Mexican folk dancing and traditional foods such as tacos and mole poblano. Some of the largest festivals are held in Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.

Hot + Spicy “Can’t Stop Dippin” Salsa Recipe

  • 2 10 oz. cans diced tomatoes and green chilies
  • 1 12 oz. can whole tomatoes (with Mexican flavors ok)
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1 chopped onion
  • 1 or 2 whole jalapeno, quartered & sliced thin with seeds/membrane
  • ¼ teaspoon ground cumin
  • ¼ teaspoon kosher or sea salt
  • ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
  • ¼ teaspoon sugar
  • 1 fresh lime – squeeze out all the juice you can
  • for fun, add one can of black beans and cup of frozen corn

FOOD PROCESSOR: Combine the diced tomatoes, whole tomatoes, cilantro, onions, garlic, jalapeno, cumin, salt, sugar and lime juice in a blender or food processor. (This is a very large batch. I recommend using a 12-cup food processor, or you can process the ingredients in batches and then mix everything together in a large mixing bowl.) Pulse until you get the salsa to the consistency you’d like. I do about 10 to 15 pulses. Test seasonings with a tortilla chip and adjust as needed.

HAND METHOD: Pour whole tomatoes and juice into bowl and slice up into small bite sized pieces. Chop cilantro, garlic and onion into small pieces and add with rest of ingredients. Hand mix and set texture to your preference.
Refrigerate the salsa for at least an hour before serving. Check amount of liquid and drain as needed. Serve with medley of white and black chips.
.
.
.
.