Ladies who lunch

Lauree has a friend visiting from out of town, and we three went for lunch yesterday at First Watch in Brentwood Square (photo below).  I got a half Monterey club sandwich with their half chicken avocado chop salad.  Of course, I got my usual iced tea, and the whole thing was so delicious!  I came home with enough for another yummy meal.

Beginning ~ of another book by Jimmy Carter

Beginning

"All the elements in this book concerning prejudice, discrimination, war, violence, distorted interpretations of religious texts, physical and mental abuse, poverty, and disease fall disproportionately on women and girls."

A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power ~ by Jimmy Carter, 2014, women's studies, 224 pages

The world’s discrimination and violence against women and girls is the most serious, pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights:  This is President Jimmy Carter’s call to action.

President Carter was encouraged to write this book by a wide coalition of leaders of all faiths.  His urgent report covers a system of discrimination that extends to every nation.  Women are deprived of equal opportunity in wealthier nations and "owned" by men in others, forced to suffer servitude, child marriage, and genital cutting.  The very most vulnerable are women, along with their children, who are trapped in war and violence.

A Call to Action addresses the suffering inflicted upon women by a false interpretation of carefully selected religious texts and a growing tolerance of violence and warfare.  Key verses are often omitted or quoted out of context by male religious leaders to exalt the status of men and exclude women.  And in nations that accept or even glorify violence, this perceived inequality becomes the basis for abuse.  President Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, have visited 145 countries, and The Carter Center has had active projects in more than half of them.  Around the world, they have seen inequality rising rapidly with each passing decade.  This is true in both rich and poor countries.

Carter draws upon his own experiences and the testimony of courageous women from all regions and all major religions to demonstrate that women around the world — more than half of all human beings — are being denied equal rights.  This is an informed and passionate charge about a devastating effect on economic prosperity and unconscionable human suffering.  It affects us all.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts

Book Beginnings on Fridays.

Thursday Thoughts ~ all food related today

I clicked on "America's Favorite Foods" from Reader's Digest, and now I'm hungry!  You'll probably be craving at least one or two of these after you look them over.  Tiramisu (my friend Donna's favorite dessert) is not on the list, but French fries are.  And so are hamburgers, which I thought would be #1.  Nope.

Added around 1:00 p.m.:  I just learned that today is World Chocolate Day!  I had lunch with friends, so I'll go eat the other half of a chocolate bar I already have on hand.

What's your favorite food?  My very favorite is crispy fried okra, the way my mother used to make it — the way my friend Donna learned to make it, even though she thought she hated okra because she had only eaten boiled okra.

Jeff Davis, owner of Shuford's BBQ near Chattanooga, makes perfect fried okra.  I would love to have some right now!  But back to RD's list.  Which of the foods on that list is a favorite of yours?  I couldn't settle on one, so maybe I need to find a Greek-American-Japanese-Mexican-Italian restaurant when I go out to eat.  My mouth is watering as I work on this blog post.  I'm sorry to say that crispy fried okra is not on that list of favorite foods in the United States, but I like lots of other foods, too.

Onion rings come in at #18 on RD's list, but the onion rings pictured here are from Nikki's, one of my favorite restaurants in Chattanooga.  (My top favorite place to eat in Chattanooga, of course, is Shufords see above).  Nikki's has wonderful onion rings!

Oh, no!  As I looked for a photo of Nikki's to use here, I learned the place has been razed and replaced by small condos.  Oh, well, it also says it closed in March 2020, the same month we went into lockdown here because of the pandemic.  I found a good photo and want to save it because I had many wonderful meals there.  Can you read the  signs along the roof that say "SOUTHERN FRIED CHICKEN" and "GULF COAST SHRIMP"?

Aww, shucks! Pumpernickles has closed

I just read in the Jewish Light that Pumpernickles on Olive Blvd. has permanently closed.  It was one of my favorite places to eat.  You know, back in those olden days before the pandemic.  They served kosher food.  Pumpernickles' website, which may not be there much longer, calls it "the place to meet, eat, and kibitz."

Word of the Day #1

kib·itz /ˈkibits / verb

speak informally; chat.  This word came into English from Yiddish.  Example:  "Sarah loves to kibitz with her friends."

Word of the Day #2

ko·sher /ˈkōSHər / adjective 

1. said of food, or premises in which food is sold, cooked, or eaten; satisfying the requirements of Jewish law.  Example:  "She keeps a kosher kitchen."
2. informal = genuine and legitimate.  Example:  "He consulted lawyers to make sure everything was kosher."

Today's suggestion for being happy

This is from the Action for Happiness calendar I publish at the beginning of each month.

Two books by Russell Baker on TWOsday

Growing Up ~ by Russell Baker, 1982, memoir, 278 pages

Russell Baker traces his youth from the backwoods mountains of Virginia to a New Jersey commuter town to the Depression era in Baltimore.  We meet the people who influenced his early life:  his strong mother, his little sister Doris, the awesome matriarch Ida Rebecca and her twelve sons.  He writes about schoolyard bullies, great teachers, and the everyday heroes and heroines of the Depression who faced disaster with good cheer as they tried to muddle through.

The Good Times ~ by Russell Baker, 1989, memoir, 351 pages

Picking up where Growing Up left off, Baker recounts his odyssey from writing police reports in Baltimore to penning news stories about the Queen of England and offering his wisdom on the grownup world.

Aging, words, and the food I eat

The Virtues of Aging ~ by Jimmy Carter, 1998, memoir, 160 pages

Former president Jimmy Carter reflects on aging, blending memoir, anecdote, political savvy, and practical advice, to truly illuminate the rich promises of growing older.  In this book he shares the knowledge and pleasures that age have brought him.  "As we've grown older, the results have been surprisingly good," he says of the new experiences that come to us with age.  He delves into the issues of planning for retirement, undertaking new diet and exercise regimens, coping with age prejudice, and (on a more intimate level) he paints a glowing portrait of his happy marriage to Rosalynn.  The book celebrates both the blessings that come to us as we grow older and the blessings older people can bestow upon others.

A day or two ago, I happened to notice this book on one of my bookshelves.  Actually, what I noticed was the word "aging."  I'm 82 and feeling my age these days, so I put this on top of my latest pile of books that I'm either reading or about to read.  My post-it note inside the cover says I got this book seven years ago.  Jimmy Carter spoke to one of my classes at Emory University in the mid-1980s.  I still remember the Secret Service guys rushing in and sizing us up, and how much shorter Carter was than I expected.  Anyway, I plan to read this book next.

I ran across the word liminal (p. 168 in Happy Now by Courtney Ellis), and I smiled.  Like proclivity, the word liminality is one of my favorites.  It isn't a word we see often, so there's the definition, if you need it.  I also found this Wikipedia quote for us:  "In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete."  I think of it as being on the threshold of something (see #2 above).

A decade ago, I wrote about salad days, saying:

"I don't usually get excited about food preparation, maybe because it too often seems like a lot of work to make a meal for one.  I do, however, like to experiment with salads.  My process is to toss in whatever I have on hand that sounds good to me at the moment.  It could be leftovers, like this one.  On Thursday, I had a hard-boiled egg from breakfast, a tomato, and some leftover asparagus from a recent meal.  So I cut up those together in a bowl.  After taking this photo, I added Roasted Onion Parmesan Dressing and called it a salad."

Yesterday, I had another salad . . . well, I had tuna salad.  I did my usual thing by combining the foods I had on hand.  What I came up with isn't particularly photogenic, and I'd already eaten it when it occurred to me to write about it.  What was it, you ask?  A tuna salad sandwich with artichoke hearts on it.  Yes, that may seem like an odd combination, but I had tuna salad and bread and artichokes.  Why not?  I tried it, and artichoke hearts taste very good on a tuna salad sandwich.