Happy Memorial Day everyone!
I'm sorry I've not been posting in a while. Things have been crazy busy! I do have a couple of things to talk about. One is directly involving Memorial Day.
So I wonder. In most American's minds is Memorial Day only about the Vietnam War? At least that's the impression I get from the media. Rarely do they talk at all about World War I or II or any of the others, Korean etc. Hell, doesn't it even include Civil, Revolutionary, 1812? Americans died there too. But all we get now is Vietnam.
I was reading that Memorial Day was established in 1868. It has a long history coming from widows laying flowers on graves at a particular time of year.
My second topic is even more of a rant, actually, So I was watching the Today show today and they had some chef on making some kind of party dips. This is the guy from Take Home Chef on Discovery Channel (Or TLC, I never can tell the difference.) Anyway, he's that Aussie Chef, Curtis. Anyway, he made crab salad dip. Had lovely jumbo lump blue crab. Mixed it with some things and then came out the evil evil Lemon! *queue dramatic music*. Immediately my head exploded. Ok, so maybe this guy doesn't know because he's Australian and doesn't know the nuances of Blue Crab, but you NEVER NEVER use lemon on blue crab. NEVER! This has been a pet peeve of mine since I was about 18 years old and read an article in the newspaper by a Marylander. In it he explained that lemon will kill the delicate taste of the crab.
Really, you are paying something like 20 dollars a pound for premium lump crab meat, and. you. put. lemon. on. it. What's the point? Get imitation and pretend if you have to have lemon on your crab. Save yourself some money.
Come to think of it, I'm not a fan of lemon on any fish. Lemon will mask any flavors of the fish, presumably if the fish isn't all that fresh the lemon will cover up that fish age. If you have fresh from the sea fish, there's no reason to slap that lemon on it, don't you want the nuances to come through.
Anyway, happy Memorial Day everyone! And drop those lemons!
Happy Memorial Day to you!
ReplyDeleteI didn't know that about lemon being used on fish that is starting to turn. Thanks for the info!
I haven't really noticed a Vietnam bias. Last time I went to the Portsmouth Memorial Day parade most of the wars were represented in one form or another.
ReplyDeleteI'm more concerned about the way the holiday is often presented as a festival of mindless patriotism and hamburgers. As part of my observance, I listened to Bob Edwards's Weekend radio programme. He aired a documentary about a reunion of medical personnel from the Vietnam war. The programme was excellent but you couldn't listen to it without breaking into tears. And Bill Moyers on his Journal programme did a great editorial where he argued that the prisoners held in Gitmo, the Iraqis who have died, and the soldier who had a mental break down last week and killed five of his fellow soldiers, for example, should also be included in our Memorial Day narrative.
Veterans Day is huge in England and the imagery associated with the event is primarily from WWI. Everyone (me included) wears an artifical poppy on their lapel for days before and after the holiday. Even Ramin when coming out for his curtain call in Phantom wore a poppy. The flowers are sold for charity.
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