February 28, 2010

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Working on the March 1 edition of Roofscape. Above is the new cover image. A nice summery photograph to offset winter's gray nadir.


March 2 marks the 55th anniversary of one of the seminal events of the civil rights movement. On this day in 1955 an angry black teenager, Claudette Colvin, refused to surrender her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama and was dragged off to jail shouting, "It's my constitutional right!" This was nine months before Rosa Parks, age 42, secretary of the local NAACP chapter and trained at the Highlander Folk School, took the same stand.

To learn about this major, but not well-known, civil rights figure and get a fresh perspective on the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott, we'd like to recommend an excellent new book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Maine author Phillip Hoose.

Made the Shepherd's Pie, outlined four posts below. Well this isn't it. I was worrying about other stuff, serious stuff, and so not focusing. Made mistakes. Which I knew the minute I did them, if not before. Came out like a soup version of the dish. But it tasted OK. It still might be cool. Maybe it's shepherd's stew pie.

Image (at top) ... Sunbather in a Saltmarsh. Gloucester, Mass.

March Square Foot Gardening Tips | Garden Girl TV

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Patti Moreno, The Garden Girl, and Mel Bartholomew, author of Square Foot Gardening, team up monthly to offer timely garden tips. For March they talk about getting your garden going and compost.

God in Me | Mary Mary | Sunday Gospel Set . 38

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Join us every Sunday to give praise with the Sunday Gospel Set on Radio Roofscape. Our featured video this week is by Mary Mary jammin' God in Me. And here's the complete current set list ...

Oh Happy Day - Whitney Houston & Gospel Choir
Yolanda Adams - Hold On
Disciples of Christ (D.O.C.) - Deeper
Mary Mary - God in Me
Shirley Caeser - He'll Do It Again
Black Jesus - Words of God
Albert Ayler - Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
Hezekiah Walker - You're All I Need
Take 6 - Wade in the Water
Kirk Franklin & Toby Mac - J Train

February 27, 2010

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Two days free with nothing to do but write and prepare the new issue of Roofscape. Snow falling gently. Then next week is a scramble. But we'll leave that 'til then. And cook. A shepherd's pie I think. A recipe I've been working on but haven't yet nailed. Maybe this time. Just put the stock pot on the fire to simmer. And program the Sunday Gospel Set, of course. Rocking it out this week with all urban contemporary - Kirk Franklin, Mary Mary, DOC, etc. Mary Mary's God in Me is the featured video. Their joints continue to blow me away.

Raccoons have been raiding the compost bin for a while now and they're not neat eaters. Stuff strewn all over the yard.

Image ... Painter. Commonwealth Avenue, Boston.

Shepherd's Pie | Cookout . 11

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Men at work, obviously. Work in progress. Don't try this at home just yet! Dinner's tomorrow, Sunday 2/28, at 18:00 hours GMT sharp, if you're hungry, in the neighborhood (Dot) and can bring a bottle of half-decent Chardonay - or whatever.

The Oxford American Dictionary  makes short shrift of shepherd's pie as ... a dish of ground meat under a layer of mashed potato. Wikipedia, which seems to know everything these days, and some of it may even be true, redirects inquiries to the older usage of ...

Cottage pie refers to an English meat pie made with beef mince and with a crust made from mashed potato. A variation on this dish using Lamb mince is known as Shepherd's pie.

The term cottage pie is known to have been in use in 1791,^[1][2] when potato was being introduced as an edible crop affordable for the poor (cf. "cottage" meaning a modest dwelling for rural workers).
In early cookery books, the dish was a means of using leftover roasted meat of any kind, and the pie dish was lined with mashed potato as well as having a mashed potato crust on top.^[3][4]

The term "shepherd's pie" did not appear until the 1870s,^[2] and since then it has been used synonymously with "cottage pie", regardless of whether the principal ingredient was beef or mutton.^{[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]} There is now a popular tendency for "shepherd's pie" to be used when the meat is mutton or lamb,^[9] with the suggested origin being that shepherds are concerned with sheep^[10] and not cattle,^[11][12] however this may be an example of folk etymology.

In the United States a similar dish is called cowboy pie. In New England the most common recipe for shepherd's pie consists of ground beef, canned creamed corn, and mashed potatoes

Now I've heard of cow pies, and stepped in a few, but never cowboy pies. And cottage pie is obviously an English affectation with corrosive class overtones. So Shepherd's Pie it is. We're going to make a vegetarian version of the New England variation, with a few more ingredients to replace what used to be known in this kids' fave as hamburger.


INGREDIENTS

1 head cauliflower, divided into bite-sized florets
peas, frozen and defrosted
corn kernels, frozen and defrosted
onions, chopped
scallions, thinnly sliced
thyme, dried and crumbled
curry powder
butter
flour
vegetable stock
white wine
extra-sharp Cheddar cheese, grated
Parmesan cheese, grated
potatoes
milk
yogurt, low fat
garlic, minced and mashed or pressed


PREPARATION

February 26, 2010

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Worked on Dr. King in Boston. Writing about the Dialectical Society, the informal group of fellow black graduate students interested in philosophy and religion, that ML founded and continued throughout his three years at B.U. Organized the reference books, thanks to a pad of PostIt notes that Charles gave me. Went through the King file, organized and read all new material. Cleaned up MLK notes in laptop notebook (Personal Organizer, a great if rather unlovely app), which I'm going to use for all research now. I feel on top of things now, finally in control of this project. An article which it looks like will turn into a book.

A day of in/out sun and on/off rain. Watering my plants. The office is so dry. Remembering they need to be misted and a fan run part of the day to circulate air around them. Need to find a spray bottle.

The police caught the two hood rats who murdered the convenience store clerk at Hermanos Unidos on Sunday and they were arraigned in Roxbury District Court yesterday. The punks, 16 and 17, live(d) only a few blocks away on Hartford Street. Just what I suspected. I knew they were from the nabe. The DA says he will prosecute them as adults. An anonymous tip, a call from one of their mothers voicing her suspicions and the unusual immediate use of a grand jury broke the case wide open with almost unprecedented speed. Everyone's breathing a big sigh of relief, especially the merchants on Dudley Street, at least according to one shopkeeper I spoke with.

Image ... House Tops. Edward Hopper.

Street Shrines | Dot . 9

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In Dot, Dorchester, and other uptown areas in general, when someone dies in the streets a shrine usually appears on the spot where they were, most often, shot.

Shrines consist of an odd mix of bric-a-brac: candles in tall glasses with pictures of the virgin and various saints stenciled on the sides, empty liquor bottles, teddy bears, greeting cards, bouquets of flowers, toys, statuettes of the virgin, pillows, balloons, beer bottles. Whatever might be of comfort to the fallen as he ascends, perhaps, to heaven.

The police sometimes leave behind a reminder as well, tracing the outline of the vic for evidential purposes.

The shrine above appeared in front of the big warehouse at the corner of Dudley and Humphreys Street last year. It lasted for months, growing ever larger, before it suddenly disappeared one day.

A fatal shooting this past Sunday in the course of a robbery at the corner convenience store, a hundred feet from my front door, inspired the shrine below. The candles continue flickering in the falling rain.