The NRA would probably be fine with them not shooting guns as long as they still bought them.
They'll claim they were scared of the people escorting them away from the demo and acted in self defence. The thing is, they probably really were scared because the kind of chickenshit who tries to police BLM demos is inevitably a coward who's terrified of black people. Huffpo reports that they may have been wearing body armor, which would make perfect sense.
It is a change around here. In the past, neo-nazis and open white supremacists were usually run off by superior numbers of protesters. As recently as, like, last month, in fact, when they wanted to demonstrate at the capitol.
The more I think about this, the more I suspect that these guys were known to the cops, or were cops, and that they were allowed to "get away" on purpose. It's just weird and out of line with most similar situations I've encountered in other parts of town. (I went to a rally at the 4th precinct last weekend but was not there last night.)
I just can't even imagine what it is like for the people who were there. A lot of them are just kids, for one thing, not that seeing people get shot in front of you gets less traumatizing as the years go by, I guess.
This is all just dreadful, it really is. The whole thing is dreadful, but I really did not expect a bunch of people to come down to the protest ready to kill. It's true that no one was killed, but if you're going to fire on people at close range really suddenly like that, you've got to be going in with the willingness to kill them. And they're all on film - they were ready to do this on film. Either they're really, really stupid - and I wouldn't write that possibility off - or they're super ideologized and don't mind being martyrs, or they know they're protected.
Those people had been coming round the protests for a while. There's a twitter picture that either one of those guys or someone else who was coming around but didn't participate in the shooting posted where he's holding a pistol. They were posting threats on social media. And there was some suspicion going round the BLM-MPLS twitter that this was all being discussed in one of the secure reddit white supremacist threads.
They came with guns and they came ready to shoot. They weren't just coming around to harass and then ended up shooting - not that it would be okay if they were, of course.
Most white people will probably believe that Black Lives Matter protesters are "scary" - or they'll pretend to believe it to play the victim. Black Lives Matter people are just like everyone else - students and kids and artists and some lady who works for the city and some intellectual types and some political militant types and some chronic nonprofit types and some people from the neighborhood and some religious people and so on. Actually, this summer, the Black Lives Matter protests were - in addition to quite good as protests - the source of some of the finest avant-garde/bohemian fashions I have seen here in the Twin Cities metro area. I actually really enjoyed being at those events, because very often people were pretty joyful and in an intensely segregated city like this one, I am not often in majority-POC spaces where there's room for there to be a full flowering of people's humanity.
I've already seen a lot of speculation/people talking about 3.2 as well. The whole thing was pretty sketchy. If nothing else, I wouldn't find it difficult to believe that the police intentionally let them escape the scene without being fully identified/tracked/whatever.
Wait, they got away? Holy shit. I'd just assumed they were subdued, perhaps lethally, by police. Holy shit.
News report say they were subdued by police (with mace)...?
No, it was protesters who were subdued with mace when they gathered around the victims. The suspects got away.
They pretty much just wandered off, yeah, which is impressive given that it happened a block from the police station, during a protest. Also it apparently took something like fifteen minutes for medical personnel to get there, which is... not necessarily a sign of great diligence.
Here is some video of eyewitness testimony. It looks like the white guys were being a lot more than "escorted" away from the demo.
Let's bear in mind that these were guys who had used racial slurs up to and including the n-word and who were known to have threatened protesters over many days, and who were known to have brought a gun. How do you think you're going to get that kind of person to move on?
Of course, the narrative is going to be "yes, these guys were legit threatened, of course they pulled out a gun", when there is NO FUCKING REASON for them to be there in the first place, and no fucking reason for them to bring guns, and no fucking reason for them not to just move along. They brought guns, they threatened people over many days, they escalated and provoked, and they should have been removed by the cops long before if we lived in a society where, like, Black lives actually did matter.
There will always be some reason trotted out for why it's okay for white people to carry guns around black people, and those reasons will never be applied in reverse. If that guy at the Trump rally had shot someone while he was being beaten to the ground? He would get blamed for not taking the beating.
You know what the crowd was saying while they beat and kicked him? "All lives matter". That's America.
You know what the crowd was saying while they beat and kicked him? "All lives matter". That's America -- forever.
I'm going to reserve my outrage for when I have a better understanding of the events leading up to the shooting. One thing is clear: people are making shit up left and right. I'm trying to find accurate information and seeing all sorts of unsubstantiated and contradictory claims. The only information that seems reliable to me so far is the eyewitness testimony I posted up thread.
The bigger group of witness reports is probably a better thing to start from than that excerpt.
What we know, I think, is that the people were there in masks filming the faces of the protesters, they were confronted by a group of them asking them to take their own masks off (which they refused to do), a group of the protesters chased them back around the block a bit (the one witness you linked to says punching, but the other witness reports I've watched seem to disagree), and then one (or more?) of them opened fire on the crowd before getting into a car/van/no-idea and driving away. The police seem to have just ignored this for a while, and when they did do anything it was to drive the protesters away from the injured people (with, people are saying, tear gas or pepper spray or something). The ambulances didn't arrive for quite a while after the shooting.
I vouch for the basic truthfulness of the people at the protest site. I've been sorta-kinda around this group of organizers over the past year, attending marches and following on the Facebook and so on, and their accounts of events I have actually witnessed have been truthful. Sometimes there's some variance in accounts when something has been large, chaotic and unexpected, but in general, I have been struck by how upfront everyone has been, even in situations where BLM activists made less-good decisions in the moment.
But again, I would sure like to know what kind of behavior by a bunch of unarmed BLM activists would even mitigate shooting people. The dude at the Trump demo had reason to fear for his life, and we would not generally approve of him opening fire on his attackers. These people were aggressive, armed and threatening, and they were moved along by a bunch of unarmed people who had plausible fear for their safety. I am not sure how relevant it is to rules-lawyer exactly what happened, except that whenever white people shoot Black people, we as a nation are always sure that there are mitigating circumstances.
The dude at the Trump demo had reason to fear for his life, and we would not generally approve of him opening fire on his attackers.
This is where we differ. If he feared for his life he'd be perfectly justified in pulling a gun and shooting his attackers. I don't buy the notion that killing someone is so horrendous an act one should be willing to die at their hands to avoid it. Some people need to be shot.
The mayor of Dallas agrees with the sentiment of this post.
17 Wow, I'm impressed. A small beacon of light in a howling shitstorm of darkness.
17: Pretty impressive. Can we assume he's not running for reelection? Or maybe Dallas is less wingnutty than I'm assuming it is.
Meanwhile, Ravachol is alive and well and living in Athens.
Well I'll be damned, they arrested someone.
Also, take a look at this about emails between the shooters.
I guess "really stupid" is the answer, which is a kind of relief. But also really gross and insanely racist.
Know, too, that I saw a photo of these dudes on Twitter on Friday showing one of them brandishing a pistol, and it included threats they'd made against BLM protesters and, IIRC, how they were coming to the protest to commit violence. These people were the instigators, they were dangerous and it was absolutely appropriate for someone to try to identify them and drive them away. The fact that the police would not do this says a great deal.
19: Yeah, he's in his second term so he doesn't need to worry about re-election. Also, the city of Dallas is actually pretty progressive. The surrounding suburbs (e.g. Irving, Plano, Flower Mound) are a different story. Also, Fort Worth is very conservative, I hear.
21, 23: There are videos posted by these same guys of their visits to the protests a few days ago. Link to one is below. Be warned: NSFW audio. Unbelievably racist and sexist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj3gc91IpFE
Or let me clarify, I saw on Friday that BLM had identified these guys on Twitter and posted an image (possibly a still?) of them. I assume that the people who were there at the protest recognized the people who had been at the event when they saw the video/social media stuff.
They did just arrest somebody. One of three.
When I read about racists shooting at BLM, it takes me a second to remember it isn't about the Bureau of Land Management and the guy who didn't want to pay to graze his cows.
I, too, read BLM as Bureau of Land Management. And I really hope that the Bureau gets angry letters from confused people.
Now two arrests. (I'm watching MSNBC on my mission to the white people.)
Two arrests? I thought these guys were in league with the cops. God, they're terrible at this.
TV sucks, but a Canadian trying to get me to hire his company to dispute my taxes is the worst.
33 - National press coverage and public statements by pretty much every official up the chain of command to the governor of the state does have a remarkable ability to turn an initial response of "oh what first you were made about people being shot by cops and now you're mad about people being shot by white supremacists? make up your mind!" into "Oh yeah we'll get on that right away".
Live stream of Chicago press conference now on the release of a video of the shooting of Laquan McDonald last year.
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Frontier seats are now maybe 2" thick? Wow do they pack people in. I guess I don't fly much anymore. When did I become such a hayseed?
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Honestly, I'm happy and relieved that the shooters weren't cops. But the cops around here are still for the most part actively complicit in racist violence, and fuck a bunch of that. Bob Knoll, the head of the union, is a racist with an ugly history, and there are lots more who've been really aggressive with Black Lives Matter, especially when there aren't too many white allies around.
"Our cops were not actually directly complicit in a racist shooting, even though they do racist things all the time" is a very low bar.
Friendly amendment: Bob Kroll, not Knoll. Barb Johnson and her gang of corrupt thugs are just as bad.
Hey,
I'm interested in buying some advertising space on unfogged.com. I found it while doing some research for sites that would be a good fit for my clients.
If this is a partnership that you'd be interested in, then please let me know and we can take things from there.
Regards,
Dave
At long last, an opportunity to monetize the cock jokes and kale chip recipes.
(Okay, that one's not much of a recipe, but there are others in TFA.)
Unfogged: Where threads about Nazis inevitably become threads about Nazi foods.
I admit I can't think of any emblematically Nazi foods. If someone said "Quick! Write a menu for my Communist-themed dinner party!" that would be fairly straightforward by comparison (and distinguishable from just a list of cheap Russian foods). But what's Nazi food? Ersatz coffee, maybe?
Well, there are those photographs of SS officers' wives on a blueberry-picking expedition on a day out from a concentration camp.
Typing that makes me angry at humanity.
I think part of the Communist menu would also be inexplicable surpluses of one particular sort of food. A family member was working in Minsk back in the seventies and spent three weeks unable to get any sort of vegetable except tomatoes, of which there was an inexhaustible supply. And (IIRC) Leo Szilard's biggest childhood memory of living under the Bela Kun regime was that there were shortages of most staple foods but not of ice cream, which he ate up to three times a day.
Would Nazi foods include Heck cattle steaks?
Maybe just lots of different high-quality European foods and wines, which the host is supposed to have looted.
And morphine between courses.
And beer in enourmous mugs?
ISTR a picture of Goering drinking from one, but I failed at googling.
And lots of organic vegetables, obviously.
An inexhaustible supply of tomatoes for about three weeks sounds familiar to me, due to my parents enthusiasm for gardening. It turns out at least for me when they're real summer tomatoes it's not too bad. Zucchini season was a living hell, though.
For Nazi themed foods though I think you'd just need to go straight to lots of horrible, probably offensive* puns: Luftwaffles; Tortakoff; Arbeit Macht Fries; Schupfstaffel; etc.
*But, well, Nazi themed dinner party, so...
I would think the setting is key. One really needs a renovated castle in the Alps or Sweden or somewhere.
"There were feasts of sublime asparagus - laced with fear."
63.1: We had the same problem. So many tomatoes.
"But, mein Führer, ve cannot serf a dinner mit two carbs! Sink of ze gluten!"
About two years ago my dad decided to write a book of cauliflower recipes, all of which have to be rigorously tested and refined. He is a great cook, but not great enough to make cauliflower interesting that long.
68 A thought, and indeed utterance, which has occurred to several members of my family on more than one occasion.
He is a devotee of an obscure Himalayan brassica cult, which believes that when every possible cauliflower recipe has been devised and cooked, the world will come to an end.
Overhead, one by one, without any fuss, the choux-fleurs were going out.
Bravo indeed. And I believe my mother would find the end of the world far preferable to another choux-fleur.
I am now stuck on thinking of other ways in which the novel could develop.
a) Mossy Sr is (as is traditional in all the best literary novels) the product of a difficult relationship with his own father, Herbaceous Character, who was of course remote, unemotional and absent. Herbaceous' only expression of emotion was through the medium of cooked cauliflower and Mossy Sr.'s project is a desperate attempt to recapture the remains of his relationship with the now-dead Herb.
b) It's a kind of Lost-Chord thing; Mossy Sr tasted THE PERFECT CAULIFLOWER DISH as a young man and is obsessively trying to recreate it (and recapture his own youth! Symbolism!)
c) It's a cover for his large-scale manufacture of a new sort of amphetamine which happens to smell like cauliflower.
76 A is actually not that far from the truth about Herbaceous (or so I am told - he is indeed deceased). His cooking stretched far beyond the brassicae though.
I've been making a cauliflower dish modeled after something I had in a restaurant. It's really simple but delicious:
-Slice cauliflower so the pieces are ~1/8" thick
-Arrange cauliflower slices (including the parts that crumbled off) on a cookie sheet.
-Shave a fuckton of garlic over cauliflower
-Drizzle with olive oil
-Season with salt and pepper
-Roast at 400° for 15-20 minutes
-Serve with delicious bread to mop up the garlic-cauliflower oil that's leftover at the end
That sounds like our standard roasted cauliflower, but not roasted for long enough. I bet you'd like it even better if you left it in until it was really browned.
I may be shorting the amount of time. It's definitely browned, with some of the pieces crunchy/chewy.
Cauliflower fritters are very good.
81 is like what we do, but thinner, and I don't use actual garlic, but garlic powder, because lazy.
82 sounds interesting.
Cauliflower is magic
Cauliflower is also very good in pakora form.
http://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/gobi-pakora-cauliflower-pakora/
which is a fritter, but using gram flour, and spices.
Gobi Manchurian is the cauliflower dish to beat all cauliflower dishes.
Actually, Mossy, I would be very willing to test any interesting cauliflower recipes of your father's, if you wanted to post or link them. There's pretty much nothing I don't like about cauliflower except raw, and that's okay with enough dip.
Chewing tobacco has never gone very well with cauliflower for me.
I think part of the Communist menu would also be inexplicable surpluses of one particular sort of food. A family member was working in Minsk back in the seventies and spent three weeks unable to get any sort of vegetable except tomatoes, of which there was an inexhaustible supply.
This happened to my dad in the USSR in 1969! there was nothing to eat but tomatoes! Clearly there was some sort of structural oversupply that lasted many years, a Communist version of the 80s European butter mountain.
Does the verb "roast" in 79 mean something different than "put in oven"?
Maybe some kind of triumph of central planning along the lines of Mao deciding to industrialise China using as his only metric of success "tonnage of steel produced". Some mid-level boss was probably basking in glory as he triumphantly announced "This year we have once again outperformed every NATO country in the vital field of tomato production!"
89: You're going to want to turn the oven on.
91: Well, yes, per 79 I knew I had to get the oven to 400 degrees somehow. Turning it on is one obvious way to do that.
Don't limit your options, though. A series of blowtorches could work, as could setting the kitchen on fire.
Okay, I googled. It just means "put in oven". It's confusing that there are so many words for that. Especially since some similar "put in oven" words (eg "broil") actually mean something specific and different.
My personal favorite cauliflower dish right now is cauliflower rice - grate a lot of cauliflower, cook using a fat in a wide, heavy pan until done, add stuff. Sometimes I cook it in coconut or peanut oil and add curry paste and fried cashews; sometimes I add sour cream and hot sauce; sometimes I add a melty cheese like raclette plus a lot of pepper; sometimes I have it with fried eggs on top. I have experimented with adding this fierce szechuan pepper sauce but have not got it right yet.
Rumor has it that cooking grated cauliflower in bacon grease is very tasty, but I would not know. I imagine that a dish of bacon crumbles, brussels sprouts cooked in bacon fat and sauted grated cauliflower would be generally pleasing to people who eat that sort of thing.
I thought that "broil" was just direct heat and "roast" was indirect. And "bake" is the same as "roast" but just tends to get used for carbs, not meat and veg.
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Moby, did you see a guy died in the Mirror Lake jump last night?
|>
I didn't know that was ever allowed. When I went there, the told us all a guy died jumping in and that nobody was allowed to do that. That was 1993.
95: So, how deep is the grated cauliflower piled in the pan? A thin layer, or more like an inch deep?
I admit I can't think of any emblematically Nazi foods. If someone said "Quick! Write a menu for my Communist-themed dinner party!" that would be fairly straightforward by comparison (and distinguishable from just a list of cheap Russian foods). But what's Nazi food? Ersatz coffee, maybe?
Some of my friends came up with a menu for a dictator themed cafe. Nazi Goering, Pol Pot Hot Pot, Idi Aminestrone Soup etc.
97: I did. My wife was talking about it last night -- wondering which of her student workers would be jumping.
99: You're not actually looking to crisp up or brown the cauliflower, so it doesn't really matter how deep it is - I've cooked a huge panful where it was probably at least two inches deep.
If you were looking to crisp it up, I would suggest maybe a 2/3" layer.
In either case, you need to stir regularly. If your pan builds up too much heat, some of the bits in a big pan can brown (which isn't really the end of the world if they don't burn) and if you were frying them in enough oil to deeply brown them, you'd want to stir a lot to keep from burning the whole thing.
I usually use a scant T. of fat for a big pan, since the cauliflower partly steams.
The goal is a nutty taste rather than a pan-fried taste.
If you're using curry paste, I've found that diluting it with a little water so that it's just pourable is helpful - otherwise you end up having trouble distributing it evenly amongst the cauliflower bits. Because I am not a true gourmet and am not very good at seasoning my own curries (all my home-made curries taste the same, basically, no matter how they are supposed to end up) I just use Kitchens of India.
94: I don't know if this will make you feel better, but I've been confused by this too.
Does the verb "roast" in 79 mean something different than "put in oven"?
Yes, it means put in oven at a specified temperature and leave there until cooked, usually turned in a little oil or melted butter.
96 is basically right, although these days people tend to use "roast" for cooking vegetable matter at high temps in order to get browning without overcooking. Like, 50 years ago you'd have baked a green bean casserole, but nowadays you roast green beans that have been tossed in oil.
I can't believe there are this many comments and no one has mentioned Fanta, an actual Nazi food. Also, someone should have by now reminded us that Hitler was a vegetarian.*
56
Erdos also lived off of vanilla ice cream in Hungary, if my memory of his biography serves me correctly.
*I've heard that the main reason for souring relations between Denmark and Germany in 43 was that Danes had much better access to dairy than Germans did, and it was an issue for German morale that members of an occupied country were eating better than they were. This caused the Germans to start taking more Danish dairy products, which led to more Danish resistance, which caused the Germans to meddle more, and started off the whole cycle.
102: The 'not trying to brown it' clarifies it completely.
Oh, and in SE Asia there was Hitler Fried Chicken, although I think the owner was sued by KFC and had to change its name.
but nowadays you roast green beans that have been tossed in oil.
Hell yes I do.
108: That's fucking incredible. Have you been there and, if so, how was the chicken?
To return to an earlier point in the thread - they've identified the shooters from the MPLS protest, and it turns out that one of them is from Lakeville, which is this nouveau riche suburb about 30 minutes away and the other two are from Pine City and Hermantown, one and two hours away respectively. These guys drove for hours to get here to shoot up the protest. Also, they are not from the city and they come from places with virtually no Black residents. In a way it's exactly what you'd expect, ignorant and spoiled young white men from outstate whose racism was never challenged at all by the actual presence of people of color, poisoned and motivated by gross MRA/4***n/reddit internet culture. I was initially thinking how dumb they must be to film themselves and put it on the internet, but then it occurred to me that the whole point of the thing was to put it on the internet, so that their little forum buddies would know what badasses they were.
In the past, I haven't been too scared of this type of person, because they respond to normal motivations - they want to bully without being caught, basically, so they try to keep things low key and they're scared off if they're identified. So a big demonstration is pretty safe, and so is a big group. These young internet forum racists, though, their whole thing is to be famous to a group of their horrible little peers, which means that ordinary methods of dissuading them don't work.
Was this not linked here?:
http://www.vice.com/read/nazis-chic-is-asias-offensive-fashion-craze-456
Domenica in NOLA has an excellent cauliflower dish , which is basically a whole roasted cauliflower served with a whipped goat cheese sauce. The cauliflower is poached first; I suppose the head wouldn't cook all the way through otherwise.
I'm tired. I read the essential part of that recipe as a well whipped goat.
That's tragically capricious!
Since this is the food thread, I'll point out that my dad will buy fruit cake for himself. And eat it. I had wondered who was doing that.
Many men, perhaps particularly older men, want fruitcake but don't get it, and have to endure the opprobrium so easily attached to it. Your dad has decided to stop waiting and end his disappointment.
My mother makes fruitcake every christmas and it is magnificent. I look forward to it.
Perhaps fruitcake is due for a revival/rehabilitation. Like Brussels sprouts.
You make it be taking cake stuffed with dried fruit and christmas spices* and then soak it all in brandy for like four to eight weeks! How that even became something people looked down on I'll never know.
*Or, fine, "pumpkin spice" or whatever. It's just basic fall/winter desert spices.
You can buy them at the IGA, but you need to soak them yourself.
Well done, 118.
120 reads exactly like Emerson.
Doesn't LB make fruitcake?
The thing about fruitcake is that, even at its best*, it's very unlike what Americans want from their desserts. The vast majority of popular desserts are (relatively) light in texture/crumb (from mousse to sponge cake to American-style chocolate cake, from angel food cake to lemon meringue pie). Fudge brownies are the clearest exception I can think of, but that's a pretty pure chocolate delivery device, which is to say that it's playing on a different field.
Probably worth noting that people still eat rum cake (although I'm pretty sure its popularity is low as well), which is basically a much less dense version of fruitcake, without the fruit. The fact that fruitcake includes really weird fruit surely doesn't help. I think green cherries and vibrantly colored cubes of... pineapple?... don't scan as anything that one would eat in the last 40 years.
*from what I gather
There are now two pieces of evidence that Frank Gifford had brain damage.
My thing with the cauliflower dishes is that they are good in inverse proportion to how much they actually taste of cauliflower - see "fuckton of garlic" "well-whipped goat" etc. The best cauliflower dish I ever had, at an Indian place, was cauliflower pieces encrusted with garlic and spices. The cauliflower was literally just scaffolding for garlic.
118 is a masterpiece.
LB, I understand the book of cauliflower is nearing completion. I'll post a link when it's done.
There were truly delicious babas au rhum at the ital ciné fest do earlier this year ... mmmmm ... light and buttery rum delivery devices ... if I didn't have briefing deadlines stacked up from here to eternity I'd be plotting to spend the weekend making some. Also I'm coming down with a cold.
Sorry to hear you've been poorly, idp, hope you are feeling better. If you're bed or sofa bound, you might enjoy the hilariously over the top Zola adaptation on bbc radio 4 these days.
The thing about fruitcake is that, even at its best*, it's very unlike what Americans want from their desserts. The vast majority of popular desserts are (relatively) light in texture/crumb (from mousse to sponge cake to American-style chocolate cake, from angel food cake to lemon meringue pie).
This is clearly a Man in the High Castle tie-in, 'cause boy does it not describe the America in this timeline.
Cauliflower simply roasted with olive oil, salt, and pepper is also good though. Or mashed/pureed with a bit of butter. Doesn't need the enhancements, just makes it more interesting.
I love cauliflower tout court, à poil, etc.!
If JRoth is representative of American opinion, that nation truly deserves the hellfire. Weird fruit bits are what make it awesome!
126: Buck makes fruitcake in industrial quantities and mails it out to family and favored business contacts. I help, but only with the enrobing in fondant and decoration. It's really good fruitcake, though.
My in-laws just said "you have to spray it, before you lay it," meaning the grill, with Pam, before chicken. I chose to bite back singing it to the tune of "you gotta lick it, before you kick it," so instead I'll dump that nugget here.
Fruitcake gets encased in fondant?
Traditionally it was thought that fruitcake could only be made by people enrobed in fondant. Harold McGee ended up proving that it's not actually necessary, but it's a nice ritual anyway.
Are there necessary and sufficient conditions for fruitcake? Is fruitcake completely determined?
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This story is amazing, both for the initial error and the fact that the Secretary of State seems so blase about it after the fact.
[Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp]'s office sent what it called "personal identifying information" to 12 organizations, including state political parties, news media organizations and Georgia GunOwner Magazine. The information was sent to the organizations Oct. 13, but officials may not have realized they goofed until 35 days later when they were served with the lawsuit.
That's when several organizations, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, were contacted by investigators from Kemp's office and asked to return the data discs containing the information. While the AJC and others -- including the Georgia GOP and the Democratic Party of Georgia -- have since complied with the request, at least one organization -- the Libertarian Party -- had not as of Wednesday afternoon.
"I am out at my daughter's shooting competition," the Libertarian Party's Doug Craig said in a text when asked whether he would return the disc. "Going to tomorrow ... maybe."
I've never eaten fruitcake. Luckily, there are some traditional Danish desserts that are equally disgusting.
My mother has been known to make fruitcake in industrial quantities and mails it to everyone in her address book. She makes it about 3 months in advance, and then leaves it to soak in rum in the basement (in a tuperware). Once she accidentally left some fruitcake for a year, I don't remember what happened to that. Her cake is very dense and rum-flavored and less on the sweet side. As a kid I hated it but now I really like it. Sometimes instead of fruitcake she sends out cardamom bread, which requires less advance planning.
111
I've never eaten at Hitler Fried Chicken, but I had a friend who took a picture outside of the place. I don't think he ate there either.
Fruitcake is instantaneously moved along the edibility spectrum on encountering christmas pud made with tallow.
on encountering christmas pud
Holidays chez dq are substantially more laid-back than I would have expected!
141: It's a really old kind of cake so it doesn't have an aggressive amount of sugar compared to a lot of cakes*, and is a lot denser**. But it makes up for that with lots of candied fruit and dried fruit (rehydrated by being boiled with the spices in whatever liquid is being used). When it initially comes out of the oven it's usually dry enough that it's not especially palatable, but once you let it steep in rum/brandy for a few weeks (or more) it gets moister and the flavors all start to come together (because, well, soaking things in alcohol...). I'm guessing there are loads of different recipes out there, but I think this would have to be true of them generally. And actually while I've mostly had my family's recipe the few times I've tried other ones (generally bought in stores? I can't remember) they've tasted pretty similar.
*Still a bunch, I mean, but something like the way carrot cake would taste if it didn't have carrots in it.
**It's best served in relatively thin slices, like that northern european rye bread that's basically just a brick and tastes amazing. It's not much llighter than that either.
Every year I sort of think, "this will be the year I make a black cake", but somehow it never is. Alas!
Speaking of "christmas pud" made with tallow, this article about mince pie (with beef and grape jelly!) does manage to make it sounds actually worth trying, amazingly enough.
If LB wanted to help me with my fruitcake curiosity by sending me one of Buck's, I would assuredly send her some jam in return. Just a thought!
My grandmother gave out small boxes of fruitcake as wedding favors. Her mother made it and soaked it so thoroughly (and sealed it so well) that when my mother and aunt came across leftovers as children, they ate all the little boxes they found with no ill effects. Mom loved her Christmas fruitcake from my grandmother. I couldn't get past the gummy fruit bits.
The Washington Post had a series last year trying to rehab fruitcake. None sounded good enough to try at home.
Maybe I'll make my favorite little Italian fruitcake wodges (panpetato, to be exact) again this year. They always come out looking kind of like overcooked hamburgers, but they are really delicious.
That article about mince pie was pleasing.
panpetato, to be exact
Farting bread?!?!
149: The production may not happen this year (professional tsuris taking up the necessary excess capacity), but if it does, I'll see if I can score you one.
My grandmother used to do the industrial scale fruit cake thing. The succeeding generations have so far failed to take over the responsibility. I might have to get a residence with an oven one of these years.
Ha! Panpepato. Typing is not my strongest suit.
Seriously though, can you imagine what people would have said if les flics on the scene of the recent Paris attacks had started pepper-spraying innocent bystanders after dawdling for 20 minutes? It's just incredible that we aren't more outraged. Shouldn't be surprised, I suppose, given Auschwitz and what not.
Now you're blaming the Jews for racist policing in Minnesota?
Mince with tallow is *excellent*. For some reason the alchemical wonderfulness thing happens with mince, but not (for me) with pud. Opinions on this point vary within our household!
pud
Typo or island slang? The US slang meaning gives quite an interesting cast to your comment.
It escapes me but hey if it amuses you whatever doesn't bother me!
Google tells me it's short for pudding in the UK?
Here it means penis. (The Hammer is my penis.)
A Modest Proposal: We should invite the IDF to come out to the suburbs where the fascist kids live and bulldoze their families' houses.
162: On the pronunciation tip, apparently it used to be pronounced "pood" to rhyme with "food," according to Blow The Candle Out
MY DAD'S JAMAICAN BLACK FRUITCAKE IS EXTRAORDINARILY GOOD. FRUITCAKE HATERS ONLY EAT GROSS FRUITCAKE. AINTNO NUCULAR CHERRIES HAVE TO BE IN THERE. I brook no dissent. up late on Long Island because my brother and I made 6 pies for tomorrow. I will arrange a DC meetup for next week, also, when I get it together.
I've gotta say, I've never heard of "pud" in the meaning "penis" (or, indeed, in any other meaning) until just now.
On the other subthread, my mom makes fruitcakes every Christmas and sends them out to various family members. In this she is carrying on the traditional role of her mother-in-law, who did the same thing. The fruitcakes are pretty good, as fruitcakes go.
Fruitcakes are great. I order the ones from Collins Street Bakery every year; there are people on my list who require them as presents. And too, fruitcake weather.
Twenty years ago, when I went off to university, my mother, worried that I might not be eating properly, sent me one (1) fruitcake per term, securely packed in bubble-wrap. Even though now I am a MAN! way past twenty-one, I got to tell you she still does this. They're jolly nice.
the enrobing in fondant
In the name of the great old ones, no! Marzipan! If the only commercial marzipan you can get it disgustingly sweet, as may well be the case, make your own- it takes about 10 minutes with modern kitchen equipment.
But a Christmas fruit cake should be enrobed in marzipan to prevent drying out (and to prevent the brandy evaporating), and then decorated before serving with a hard icing that nobody over the age of 10 will actually eat. This last may be dispensed with at other times of the year.
You just want to get all the water in California.
168: When are you coming to Boston, al?
If anything, the British fruitcake tradition sounds even worse than ours.
Do keep mocking Britain's culinary traditions while enjoying your green bean casserole.
I remember hearing the word pud in middle school. And to this day public water policy in Washington and California makes me giggle.
I'd be willing to try a fruitcake, strange as they seem, but get that marzipan shit away from me. Nasty.
I like marzipan, but not fruitcake.
I hear pud size is related to watershed size.
I think I'd like to have a surprise funeral. Like carry the urn towards the ossuary or whatever they call those, and everybody jump out and yell "Surprise!" when the sexton opens the door. And then you could have the funeral and the crying and stuff. But first, the surprise!
Funeral potatoes! There'd better be plenty of those.
You could be rigged like a Ferris Bueller dummy/Halloween mummy to sit upright in your coffin when they open the door, rigged by a string.
Man, with friends like these: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34931205
Good job they're on our side, I'll say.
I challenge 132 to name two popular American desserts (other than the aforementioned fudge brownies) that are remotely as dense as fruitcake.
Or, perhaps more effectively, I offer to name 10 popular sweets that are lighter than each fruitcake-like one that Josh puts forth.
I note here that German native AB explicitly prefers German-style cakes for being denser and less sweet than their American counterparts. But sure, I buy 132's completely unsupported snark.
Fudge is pretty American, and pretty much any kind of candy related desert is going to be dense. Ice cream also is.
New York cheesecake. Flourless chocolate cake. Cherry pie. Peach cobbler. Lemon squares.
Weed brownies are, like, sooooooo dense, man. The densest, for sure.
Anyway, fruit cake isn't a dessert, it's a cake: you eat it in the afternoon with a cup of tea. If you want a dense dessert, try Christmas pudding. Traditionally, this is made on the first Sunday in Advent for Christmas Day, although there is a school of thought that you make and store it for the following year.
note here that German native AB explicitly prefers German-style cakes for being denser and less sweet than their American counterparts.
I suspect that JRoth and his bride are thinking explicitly of American birthday-cake-style/cake-mix-style cakes. But the sweet floofiness of these objects does not constitute evidence that Americans are turned off by density in their sweet things, either as an after-dinner item or as an accompaniment to a hot drink. In addition to cheesecake/various extremely dense chocolate things/lemon squares/cobbler/cherry pie, contemplate also pumpkin pie, chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter pie, "cake pops," pralines, and seven-layer bars.
Sugar babies! Sugar daddies! Caramels of all sorts! Salt water taffy! Rice Krispy treats!
It has to be said that my American in-laws don't like fruit cake or Christmas pudding. But they're borderline fussy eaters at the best of times. As has been said, the country which gave the world fudge and brownies can hardly be said to be anti-density. Over-sweetening is a different question.
Rice crispy treats are surely a corner case
Starbursts are dense and have corners.
199: Blume agrees, VSOOBC. Pecan pie!
Today, Midway has Skittles. Dense but no corners.
The only way to get rice crispy treats as dense as a fruitcake would be to use wild rice.
Mmmmm, wild rice.
So in addition to all of the other desserts people have listed, if only there were a quintessentially American dessert that was a counter-example, one so classically American that you could say "as American as $DESSERT"...
194 is right in a lot of ways: fruit cake is especially good when treated that way.
But it still is a desert item that ends up eaten that way, at least in my family. It occupies around the same role as Christmas cookies, where you eat it after dinner but also before dinner and with tea and so on.
Watching The Great British Bake Off has been educational for me. I spend half the time confused because I don't understand baking and half the time confused because I don't understand British terminology. At least by this point I've figured out that "sponge" just means "cake," and that "biscuits" and "cookies" are not, as I had previously thought, interchangeable.
||
NMM2 Gene Amdahl. Another link to history gone.
|>
Speaking of cookies, do chocolate chip cookies exist in Englad? If so, what are they called?
s/b "England." I'm having a lot of trouble typing on the side the surgeon removed all the lymph nodes.
Prawn cocktail biscuits.
Hope you recover swiftly.
206 They're not? Are there biscuits that are not cookies? And cookies that are not biscuits? Can someone draw me a diagram?
208. They do. They're called chocolate chip cookies.
211. In British usage, cookies are soft(ish) and usually bigger, biscuits are crisp(ish) and tend to be smaller. I would guess about 50% overlap on the Venn.
For the record, fruitcake is about 25% denser than water. Peanut brittle, which was my contender, is about twelve percent denser.
Both of those seem like things that would float in water, though...
I haven't handled a lot of fruitcake, but there's no way that peanut brittle floats. Sugar is heavier than water.
P.S.
An unsourced claim on the straight dope message boards says Starburst is 1.28 g/ml.
Why do airports have Starbursts but no mailboxes?
BTW, let's not let JRoth get away with shifting the goalposts: the original claim wasn't "Americans don't like any desserts as dense as fruitcakes", it was "Americans prefer non-dense desserts". I think we can all agree that peanut brittle is denser than sponge cake or lemon meringue pie or chocolate mousse.
Harper's Monthly says that fruitcake has basically the same density as mahogany, which floats.
Americans don't like any desserts as dense and structurally sound as fruitcakes.
I guess that doesn't really work either. Never you mind!
Well, maybe it does. Peanut brittle is, after all, brittle, and I bet Starbursts are not even solids but glasses.
And no one but the most puritanical of parents consider hard candy a dessert.
Getting hit in the nuts by the handle of the falling carryon luggage of the woman boarding in front of you. It can happen to you if you are me.
If fruitcake can float, it's a witch.
I guess the terrorist threat thread is the place to make sure we once again take a moment to enjoy the greatness that is turkey jihad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX5b3BUvZMA
Robot! Thinking of you and hoping you are enjoying learning about the taxonomy o cakes!
Fruitcakes are basically rich beaten butter type cakes with varyingly extravagant proportions of dried and candied fruit and nuts. We make the Dundee cake recipe published in the guardian a few years ago, http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/nov/28/dan-lepard-live-dundee-cake-bakealong
Relatively more cake to fruit and no molasses. I like the candied cherries, they're a cheery color and horrifyingly teeth achingly sweet, just what the season ordered! But most beaten butter cakes don't *rely* on post bake soaking for moisture.
Sponges are a hole family of egg foam based cakes that runs a huge gamut from genoise (melted butter - usually clarified - folded in) to pana di spagna (so italian cake designed to be dry when fresh to better soak up lots of cream and custardy good stuff). All play on the soaked side of the street. Lots of sponges do not have butter in them to give a moist texture, rather you add the moisture afterwards. Genoise is of course the frenchy exception with both butter and a soak.
Christmas pud is immeasurably better after a minimum 1 year aging and LOTS of whiskey. It's also in it's own complete category of food substance. I think it is the darkest tasting thing I've ever eaten. A friend once said in horror "imagine coming from somewhere with winters so bad that tastes good."
Jihad is the chairman of the National Turkey Foundation.
Thanks! While the pain is kind of a drag, it's the surgical drains that are the worst. I suspect my dad and my husband are starting to get on one another's nerves, too, but I'm trying to not care about it.
I'm really good at not caring about other people's feelings, if you want tips.
Just had a long conversation with a Citadel graduate who wasn't very big on Muslims or unions. I convinced him that non-Arab Muslims are fine. I'm calling that a win.
Somebody, probably not the same guy, played Reba's "Fancy". Which I haven't heard in like fifteen years.
I'm going to play "Elvira". Because fuck taste.
Nevermind. It's Dolly Parton time.
I had no idea she was ever so good.
Now Johnny Cash. Who I knew was so good. Possibly because of sexism.
I have just received a Bettys' fruitcake in its tin. it is startlingly heavy, as if the tin was made of lead.
240: you haven't irritated any Russians recently, have you?
But a Christmas fruit cake should be enrobed in marzipan to prevent drying out (and to prevent the brandy evaporating), and then decorated before serving with a hard icing that nobody over the age of 10 will actually eat. This last may be dispensed with at other times of the year.
My mother makes great Christmas cakes, usually 3 or 4, one of which is for herself/whoever is in residence over Christmas (includes me) and one for my married brother & family. I often do the icing for those two which means home made marzipan for both, roll out fondant for bro, sis in law & kids (it's what they want) and proper royal icing for the home cake. Last year my nieces "helped" with making coloured fondant leaves, berries etc and had a great time so I suppose I will have to schedule something similar again.
The other cakes are given away uniced.
Instead of giving them away, there should be a fruitcake version of bros-icing-bros.
Wait, Reba called Johnny Cash an Arab fruitcake? That seems uncalled for.
She probably just wanted a date.
I think they're drupes, technically.
Barry's sense of humour seems to have been affected by his currant location.
178
Do keep mocking Britain's culinary traditions while enjoying your green bean casserole.
I haven't mocked Britain's culinary traditions AFAIR (#notallamericans), but what's wrong with green bean casserole? If you don't like or are allergic to any of the component parts of it then of course you won't like the whole thing... but the main parts of it are crunchy fried onions and green beans. Green beans are a fairly inoffensive vegetable and I'm pretty sure liking fried stuff is nearly universal. The traditional recipe uses Cream of Mushroom soup because it was invented by the Campbell marketing department and I don't affirmatively like that stuff, but you can make it with raw mushrooms, or another creamy base entirely.
178: We only eat Indian food, just like you.
I was always leery of cream of mushroom soup until I read an article where someone pointed out that cream of mushroom soup is just canned bechamel with mushrooms in it, and then it made sense why it was in all those recipes*, and why it isn't actually a bad or weird thing. It actually isn't bad as a base for a casserole at all. (Hey, lasagna in its most traditional forms uses bechamel right? You could make a mushroom lasagna with cream of mushroom soup!)
I think the objection to green bean casserole has to do with the kind of green beans involved, though, because usually it means canned green beans which are absolutely foul. Made with normal cooked green beans it really is good. I suspect that it doesn't hurt that, if my experience is trustworthy, a lot of the people from that generation who made things like green bean casserole did it because they were terrible at/didn't care about cooking, and as a result ended up with the kind of "it's on the back of the can" cooking that the '50s are so famous for.
*Yes, because of Campbell's. But they picked some recipes rather than others, and mainly they picked the ones, or the kind of ones, that already existed and were made with bechamel.
If green beans are considered inoffensive, the soup companies have won.
249: Well, to be honest I was just joshing, but to play it straight, I was thinking of the archetypal version made with canned green beans, French's fried onions, and canned mushroom soup, rather than any fresh ingredients.
|| I'm sitting in a mostly empty Arab cafe sipping my coffee and reading a novel in peace and quiet after a truly harrowing day at wotk when the waiter comes over and turns on the TV right next to me and horrible commercials come blaring out. I asked him to mute it but he turns it down instead to just above the threshold of hearing which is even worse. |>