A few post-Thanksgiving odds and ends.
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It’s Michael Dukakis turkey soup time!
Some explanation for those who don’t know or have forgotten:
The former governor of Massachusetts and Presidential candidate is an evangelist for stock and soup made from leftover turkey carcasses — he’s one of those “everybody throws out the best part!” merchants.
Dukakis’ penchant for soup entered the mass consciousness (and the Mass. consciousness) in 2015, when the Boston Globe published his recipe for turkey soup, along with his open invitation for anyone in the Boston area to swing by his house and drop off carcasses they weren’t going to use. According to subsequent articles, he received deliveries of 28 picked-over fowl — filling his freezer and those of his neighbors — along with one that later arrived in the mail and that he threw out.
(In more recent years, it seems to have become a mini-tradition for Boston media outlets to run a “please don’t bring Michael Dukakis your turkey carcass this year” story. Exhibit One here; Exhibit Two here.)
As the Duke himself has said, there is nothing secret or magic about turkey stock. Simmer a carcass for a couple of hours with some aromatics, and you have a stash of stock that can be filed away in the freezer, defrosted anytime, and turned into a quick dinner using whatever stray add-ins you can find in the pantry or at the bottom of the crisper drawer.
We don’t do this at my house every year. But somebody brought it up this year … and in these inflationary times, I feel especially frugal.
So I threw the old bird into a pot with two bay leaves, some sliced-up onion and carrot, a little celery, and a few peppercorns. Later tonight, after it simmers and cools, I’ll discard the solids, portion out the broth, and put it up in the freezer for whatever the winter brings.
Waste not, want not.
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I have been enjoying a quiet and lovely Thanksgiving, with both kids at home (though one is about to ship out again as I type this). Couldn’t ask for better. I hope my readers are enjoying the same, or something like it.
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I was researching one of my baseball stories a little while ago when I came across this Sports Illustrated story from April 1972 with a berserk, breathtaking first paragraph — one Hunter S. Thompson would have applauded.
The rest of it’s pretty good too, but the intro just puts you there.
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Got “published” recently in one of those weird ways that I do.
The alumni magazine at my alma mater, Boston University, threw out a request, or a challenge, or an invitation, for alums to write a poem about gratitude. They got 80 poems or so in return.
They put ’em all on the website, but they only had room for about a dozen in the fall quarterly issue of the print magazine. Mine made the cut.
(That might have owed more to its brevity than anything else.)
Anybody wanting to know what I had to say about gratitude can find my poem, and 79 others, on the Bostonia website.
I told my wife that I should submit an entry to the alumni achievements section of Bostonia that says, “Kurt Blumenau, COM/CAS ’95, got published in the fall 2022 issue of Bostonia.” Seems like one of those jokes that would fail to amuse the person on the receiving end, though.
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Been researching the Nuns’ Days they used to have at Fenway Park in the 1960s and there will probably be writing on that subject at some point (not here; maybe here.)
Is it baseball season yet?
Neck Pickup 