Loren Blackford makes a magnificent appeal for advancing renewable energy sources by means of “grassroots people power.” She makes a great deal of sense. Recommended reading: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2026-1-spring/top/people-power-clean-energy-best-answer-to-trump
From Downton Abbey. When the head of household mentioned that work to improve society through politics is “gloomy,” daughter Cybil replied: “Everything which needs fixing is gloomy. If the garden is in good shape, there is no need to mettle.”
On Binghamton’s PBS channel, just viewed a concert held in the Netherlands. Such an example of a music concert of classical music to contemporary pop music was magnificent! Andre Rieu, violinist and conductor of a HUGE orchestra with bands and chorus in huge numbers, demonstrated how we can have FUN with music, the world over. A part of the concert was in the Dutch language but the majority in the English language. It was awesome.
With a Spanish classical music piece, he included two people in a bull costume (a bull from a bull fight). He programmed Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” He programmed a young woman who sang what is possibly a world premiere of a moving solo which brought tears to the eyes of the audience. There was also a Strauss waltz and many other selections. Also “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and a moving rendition of a Christian hymn. Quite a variety
His finale included a rousing jazz selection and Neil Diamond’s “Caroline” in which the audience participated as much as most audiences do for this selection.
Thank you PBS and WSKG for bringing this concert to media for many to enjoy and forget what the Man-baby, hawks and other idiots are doing to America and to the world.
Tonight, once again, the Lawrence Welk Precious Memories program was broadcast by Binghamton’s PBS channel, WSKG. It brings back precious memories to me. We should be thankful for such programs, in spite of the cuts in revenue by the Man-baby and stupid fascist Republicans in their cuts to PBS.
The hymns sung on this program brought back precious memories of the last days my Grandma Mary (Albro) Cornwell living at our home at 26 Main Street in the valley. Grandma Cornwell had survived a heart attack and was living with us. At age seven, I would sit with my grandmother as she listened to hymns being sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford. “The Rugged Cross.” “Amazing Grace.” Many others.
The one most remembered was the Church in the Wildwood. It was a brown church. But because we attended the white church next door to our home, I always changed the word in the hymn from brown to white. It was simply because it was a wooden church painted white, not brown. That’s all.
Such programs as Lawrence Welk programs may be of interest to only a minority of people in the media market, but we are important. We in the minority pay for sports, religious programs, and, as with Dish Network, porn. We pay for many programs and have to endure the lousy stupid productions and stupid commercials which are nothing but farsical at most. We in this minority can only ask that we be respected for the low cost programming we enjoy more with PBS. Programs like Lawrence Welk and culture – so forth. If you are unable to give us R-E-S-P-E-C-T, then all I can say is that I hope you can fall flat on your faces.
Neither democracy nor capitalism are about serving a simple majority of people. It is about serving all the people.
My criticism is not about whining. It is about stopping the movement to remove from the minority what we in the minority enjoy. After all, without watching any sports, we still pay for those million-dollar salaries of overpaid athletes. We need to have some of that money back in the form of government funding of PBS, NPR, and APM. Precious moments means many things to many people. The first NFL super bowl might be a precious memory to some. Or the Amazing Mets of 1969 might be a precious memory to some. But for many of us, we have precious memories in media programs like Lawrence Welk or Ed Sullivan or Kristen Chenowith or Renee Fleming or. Perry Mason or MASH or .. others. We are paying for a lot of shit on television which apparently is enjoyed by the “in” crowd for which we are not in that “in” crowd. When we say”life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all,” we mean it. It is not “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the large majority in the ‘in’ crowd.”
Consider this. If you say, “nobody listens to Lawrence Welk,” then you are low-life scum because there are many of us who are “nobody.” We can have R-E-S-P-E-C-T for what you enjoy. Now. Have R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the rest of us who are the “nobody” in the world. Otherwise, your words become lies told over and over again to such an extent that it becomes the truth – the truth for those in the “in” crowd who don’t give one damn about those NOT in the “in” crowd. You lack so much confidence that you resort to lying in order to force everyone to believe and enjoy what you do.
What I say is about how to maintain a civilized democratic capitalist society with balance, not a barbaric one like that of the Roman Empire where they got their jollies from watching gladiators kill one another or Christians being killed by lions in an arena or… All as a spectacle in their lives. Barbarism is sick. The entire set of ideas in which our Almighty God wanted us to follow was to love one another. Period. No if, ands, or buts about it.
For me and many others, we learned that principle from the example and Gospel of Jesus Christ. But other religions do teach love for one another. Those precious memories come from family and the religious organization which taught me such principles. Sadly, such teaching has been eliminated today and that needs to be changed. We don’t need to become “churchy” people again. We need to come together to encourage one another to have a love for a deist or god of the universe because that deist or god loves the human race made in the image of such a deist for the purpose of having a civilized human race which loves one another. We can do this in different ways and do not have to fall back on the methods used in the past. By coming together we teach one another and the younger ones the importance of love for one another.
On Create TV (PBS Binghamton broadcast channel 46, WSKG), there is a program about travel around the world. The purpose of the program is to learn about how people live in various places foreign to us and what other cultures are about. It is titled Steppin Out. The host is a Cuban-American guy who grew up in Miami named Joseph Rosendo. We can learn quite a bit.
Rosendo ends every show with the following quote from Mark Twain: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
I am now Steppin Out. The topic is white folk here refusing to become familiar with black folk.
Sadly, I think this Twain quote needs to be repeated over and over again for white folk here in Tioga County. The following is the reason why I say this.
Too many times, I have heard some put down black folk in a derogatory manner. They call black folk in a derogatory manner, “Nigger.” Whether it is local black folk or President Barack Obama, the derogatory addressing of black folk has been used in Upstate New York and by more Upstate New York people in Florida than white folk from other areas (like Ohio or Boston), we have heard such lousy words. Even a good friend from Crane School of Music, a Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia fraternity brother, who grew up in the Seneca Lake region, used such language, to my great surprise and resulting disgust. I guess I was foolish to ever ignore whether he would have done that in college.
It goes further than just a derogatory word. How about a statement degrading the practice of having Black History Month each February? (Sometimes in the same sentence, to degrade having Women’s History Month each March). One of my replies to such statements is to consider the number of times each year we celebrate White History Month each year? The summer Friday night NV Depot concerts. White culture history on display. White music played and rarely any black culture music from Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Duke Ellington, Count Basey, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Little Richard, Chuck Berry. We hear white country music and other genres of white music. I don’t say this to complain about the choices. I say this to challenge anyone who puts down the February Black History Month Celebration, for it was at such celebrations at the college where I was professor and helped schedule lifelong learning events, where we heard the Billy Holiday song about “fruit hanging from trees” and learned about Jim Crow lynching which hung the “fruit,” or innocent black folk, from trees in Dixie. Even at such a Friday night concert, we departed when there was a song about “white” Dixie and the Dixiecrats and the crowd stood. We only stand for the unity represented by the “Star Spangled Banner,” as much as we don’t like “bombs bursting in air…” We also stand for the “Pledge of Allegiance” where we repeat words like “for liberty and justice FOR ALL…” This is not an opinion, it is the correct ATTITUDE. It is not politics. It is the correct ATTITUDE.
Our Newark Valley Historical Society does a wonderful job in promoting history of this valley in Tioga County of Upstate New York. It maintains the Bement-Billings Farmstead. Who were the owners of the 19th Century Farmstead? They certainly were not black folk. So each year, we have the Apple Fest. We celebrate white culture and its history every year, whether at the Apple Fest in October or all year long when the museum and grounds are open to the public.
Even Johnny Appleseed (real name John Chapman, 1774-1845) was a white man.
I find it disgusting for those who portray “victimhood” upon white people as a result of “Black History Month.”
As for the history part, should we shut up about a WHITE ancestor to Ezra Cornell (and my own white ancestor), Thomas Cornell, Jr., when he was WRONGLY executed in Rhode Island in the late 1600s? Yet, a lousy evil man we call DeSatan of Florida tries to stop the history of black folk who have faced the same thing. Shall we re-write the Cornwell / Cornell history? Go to hell if you think we should because such people I only hope they rot in hell and their hatred goes with them.
Sadly, the white people’s area up here in the valley of Tioga County, NY, has some really lousy looking homes which are kept in bad shape. Why? It is a lousy solution to just tear them down. Europe has buildings dated centuries before the buildings here, but are still able to keep them in decent shape and looking good. What is done here? Nothing as they sit there in a dilapidated and disgusting shape. Are white people not proud enough to make things look better? They were when I grew up here in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. What has happened?
In comparison, I recall a white supremacist driving a shuttle to the airport in Florida. We drove through a very attractive looking neighborhood. The shuttle driver began to explain how the neighborhood was a neighborhood of black people. He comments “how lousy the neighborhood looks.” I spoke up and explained how I fail to see how lousy it looks because the houses are well kept, the lawns looked so very good, and the entire area was very attractive.
As I think about that dumb lainbrained shuttle driver and his comments, I think about white neighborhoods here in the valley of Tioga County and how lousy and disgusting the buildings and lawns look. I can also compare the village of this valley which had a business district destroyed by fire in 1981 and how it looks so lousy in this “white” area with everything empty and nothing re-built. Even fires in places like Toronto when it contained a much smaller population were re-built. But not in this “white” community here where it looks dismal compared to the neighborhood of black folk a white supremacist shuttle driver made noises of complaints.
For those who know how to do Steppin Out, such hatred of other cultures is an attitude, not politics, opinions or anything else. And I might add that I would wager that Joseph Rosendo (host of Steppin Out) would be opposed to the Man-baby’s use of troops in Cuba.
Mark Twain, who lived some of his life in Elmira, NY, said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” War, weapons of mass destruction, and troops are fatal to innocent people and children. Mark Twain is to be respected, with his moral and ethical attitude.
In another post, there is a recipe for using leftover foods from a recipe. It contained a recipe for a quiche with cheese cracker crumbs used as a pie crust. (See https://tiogaherald.com/category/cooking/). My own experience is to consider vegan or vegetarian alternatives. Thinking about such alternatives, here is what I offer as alternatives for the cooking mentioned in this link.
Cheese crackers: not familiar with vegan “cheese” crackers. If there is such a product, then it can be used. Otherwise, one might need to bake their own cheese crackers. If one searches Amazon.com, one finds plant-based, dairy-free “cheeze” crackers from Simple Mills or Real Food from the Ground Up brands.
Eggs: I have found a product called Just Egg – Eggs from Plants – to be a great alternative. Otherwise, there are recipes using flax to create a vegan alternative to eggs. Recipe using nutritional yeast to produce scrambled “eggs.”
Cheese: Daiya, Madly Hadley or brands. Often the word “cheeze” is used to identify such products.
Ground meat: Impossible or Beyond “meats” and sausages.
There are also good programs from PBS / Create TV which discuss vegetarian / vegan ideas and alternative cooking. For example: The Jazzy Vegetarian. Conscious Living, Christina Cooks (Christina Pirello, America’s Healthy Cooking Teacher).
When preparing eggplant parmesan for only two people (see recipe in another posting in Tioga Herald), I had leftovers I did not wish to toss in the garbage. The skins were boiled and simmered in water for about four hours. I strained the water to get rid of the skins and saved the liquid as a veggie broth to be refrigerated (perhaps frozen) and used later.
I also had leftover Cheez It cracker crumbs. How did I use these crumbs without tossing in the garbage? (1) I made cracker crumb dumplings with flour, water, and ricotta cheese. Need to look into an actual recipe for this because mine did not turn out well. Too dry.
I also used the Cheez It cracker crumbs to make a pie crust for quiche. This turned out a wonderful quiche. The crust had a neat cheese flavor which enhanced the flavor of the cheeses in the egg quiche filling.
The crust:
Mix the ingredients together and press the mixture into bottom and side of a pie dish. Fill with quiche filling. Back for one hour at 400 degrees F.
Quiche egg filling:
This recipe made two quiches, but I had cracker-crumb pie crust enough for one quiche. The second quiche was a crustless quiche.
Enjoy! Ooooooh so good!
My mother made a great zucchini parmesan. When I tried the recipe for the sauce in an eggplant parmesan, I sued Mom’s recipe. I followed the combined instructions from The Kitchen on Food Network and America’s Test Kitchen. Together with Mom’s recipe for the sauce, plus a few added extras, the result was a good one.
The recipe called for breadcrumbs. I have often used cracker crumbs to replace dredging mixtures calling for breadcrumbs. For this recipe, I replaced the dredging mixture with Cheez It cheese cracker crumbs. With other recipes, I have also used saltine crackers and Ritz crackers; used chocolate crackers or cookies to make a “pie” crust for cheesecake. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, Mom always made a broccoli casserole. For the topping, we crushed Cheez It crackers in a plastic bag. I still do it this way, but a food processor could also be used.
ATK and Food Network recommended a method to remove the bitter flavor from eggplant. Their recipes called for more than just one eggplant. Cooking for two people, I used only one medium eggplant. (Even one eggplant is too much for two people). The result was to peel the skin off the eggplant, slice into half-inch slices, salt the slices on both sides and leave the eggplant in the salt for an hour. After sitting for an hour, wipe the salt from the slices, placing three plies of paper towels on both sides and squeezing the liquids out of the slices. This also makes for a more firm eggplant after baking.
Once the eggplant was ready to cook, I coated them in a mixture of crumbled Cheez It crackers. The cracker crumbs were mixed with garlic powder, onion powder, dried thyme, salt and pepper. With the crackers for dredging, I also used two other “dredging” mixtures. (1) 1 egg mixed with 2 tablespoons almond milk (dairy milk could also be used) and (2) 1 cup all-purpose flour and 2 tablespoons corn starch.
Note: since I was using only one medium eggplant, the amounts for dredging were adjusted.
Dredging the eggplant slices in this order: (1) flour mixture, (2) egg mixture, and (3) cracker crumb mixture. Fried in half-inch of peanut oil (or any oil with high flash point). (Note: our son gave us an air fryer for Christmas; since we had already purchased a gallon of peanut oil, we still had to use the remainder of the oil; otherwise, I would have used the air fryer).
Because I am a diabetic, I often add more protein to a recipe. Eggplants have very little protein. I cooked 1 pound of bulk sausage (ground beef, turkey, chicken, or lamb could be used; we had sausage, so used it;I do the same with the zucchini parmesan following my mother’s recipe).
Additional proteins were from the cheeses: ricotta, sliced mozzarella, and grated gruyere. (Note: I use gruyere to replace parmesan or pecorino romano because it has less salt; I check salt / sodium levels). Also available to me was a bag of boiled eggs marinated in beet juice. Since this is called “egg”-plant parmesan, I thought it might be neat to add real eggs as protein.
Mom’s recipe for the sauce is simple and easy to remember.
In addition to this sauce, I also added Rao’s marinara sauce.
To put it all together, the following steps were taken:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
After frying the coated eggplant slices, the ingredients are put together in a casserole dish:
Bake in oven for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until bubbling and toppings begin to darken.
Enjoy! Ooooooh so good!
Tioga Herald 
Alibaba.com? Za’atar recipe blocked by whom?
Who is blocking my access on the Internet to Alibaba.com? Go f *** yourself. A recipe for za’atar spice is NOT related to a terrorist event, no matter what the name of alibaba means. The spice may come from Islamic nations, but so what, you SOB lainbrains. Go to hell such leaders in the USA and open up our culture to learn from others, not shut down others and shut down one another. Go f*** ICE and the secret police because you are barbaric and against civilized society. F*** MAGA Maggots because you are dumb stupid lainbrained jerks for whom I have no respect. I have no respect for any of this crap, including f***ing Texas Governor Abbott who needs to be removed from political office for not living by the U.S. Constitution. We did not need to take down a leader in Iran. We needed to take down Putin. We needed to take down the top three political offices in America – the fascists. We need to take out Gov. Abbott of Texas and Gov. DeSatan of Florida. Take out the bastards and dump them all into the ocean with Musk. Or put them on a spaceship to Mars with a one-way ticket. They put Napoleon on an island but it is too easy for these asswipes today to get out. Put all the asswipe ICE and MAGA folk on a one-way trip to Mars and let them figure out how they can survive, as they destroy human beings in a CIVILIZED society from doing the best they can to survive.
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