{"id":6285,"date":"2016-07-10T20:41:45","date_gmt":"2016-07-11T01:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=6285"},"modified":"2016-07-11T19:36:59","modified_gmt":"2016-07-12T00:36:59","slug":"cooking-and-punting-with-shallots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=6285","title":{"rendered":"Cooking (and punting) With Shallots"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Before I get to my culinary experience with shallots, let me acknowledge that the past week was an extremely important and tumultuous one for our nation. FBI Director James Comey recommended that charges NOT be filed against former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton because of her exclusive business use of external e-mail servers while serving as Secretary, despite the fact (according to the FBI) that classified information had been received and sent through those servers in a manner that would have easily allowed it to be “hacked” by foreign interests. And then came the very questionable shootings and killings of African-American men by while and Hispanic police officers in Baton Rouge, LA and St. Anthony, MN — followed by the equally shocking assignation of 5 white police officers in Dallas by an African-American gunman intent upon revenge. Various other violence was intentionally done upon police officers throughout the nation in response to these shootings.<\/p>\n

I wish that I had some wise words to offer about all of this. Well, as to Ms. Clinton, that’s not all that hard. Comey cited the notion of “prosecutorial discretion<\/a>” in abstaining from any further action by the FBI and US Dept. of Justice against Ms. Clinton, and I believe this was a legitimate decision. I am somewhat familiar with the workings of a local prosecutor’s office, and the idea that you can’t go after everyone whom you possess potential evidence of guilt against is very real. Justice in America is not completely blind, and never was. The enforcers of our laws only have so much money and so many people available. In the FBI’s case, they would have tied up a big chunk of their resources and US DOJ’s resources for many months and probably years in trying to convict Ms. Clinton for her mis-handling of sensitive national information. <\/p>\n

However, even though the legal standard of “gross negligence” was clearly violated by the former Secretary (Comey used the term “extremely careless” to describe Ms. Clinton’s e-mail behavior, which is logically the same as gross negligence), there was no evidence that she intentionally sought to transfer classified information to unauthorized parties. Further, there was no evidence (I’m assuming) that any harm to national interests actually came of her careless handling of the sensitive information that she was responsible for each day of her tenure as the head of the US State Department. <\/p>\n

So, Ms. Clinton got lucky. No harm, no foul; had she been a lower-level officer who did the same thing, she surely would have been nailed. But this is Hillary Clinton, and the indictment and trial and appeals process would have tied up FBI and DOJ resources just when there are most needed for terrorist incidents and controversial local police actions involving minority citizens (and now retaliation efforts as in Dallas). Not to mention the confusing situation that would be caused relative to the upcoming Presidential election. So, Mr. Comey decided to toss the facts out to the public and let them decide at the ballot box. I am satisfied that Mr. Comey’s use of “prosecutorial discretion” was pragmatic and not politically motivated. That’s about the best you can expect in the real world of criminal justice.<\/p>\n

As to Baton Rouge and St. Anthony and Dallas . . . my head is still spinning from those incidents; I’m not sure right now what to say (or if anything that I could say would have any positive effect). So for now, I’m going to punt, and focus on a positive little experience that I had this weekend in the culinary realm. Not long ago, I was on one of my occasional food-buying jaunts at the wholesalers in South Paterson NJ, and I came across a bin of fresh-looking shallots in Farmers Produce on East Railway Avenue (one of my necessary stops in South Paterson), for 99 cents a pound. Hmmmmm, I’ve seen shallots at the regular supermarkets in Montclair and Bloomfield going for a lot more than that (like $2.50 for 6 ounces, which would be about $6.50 per pound). Thus I never tried any cooking experiments with them. They are supposed to be a refined variant of the basic onion. <\/p>\n

Well, for a buck a pound, I figured it was worth a try. That’s about the same as regular onions at Shop Rite. And just a few days before my South Paterson trip, I was hanging out at my brother’s house watching an episode of “Daryl’s House<\/a>“, which is all about what former Hall and Oates music star Daryl Hall is doing these days. I.e., he has a big house out in the woods somewhere, and he invites other noted musicians old and young to drive out and spend at day with Hall and his back-up band at his home studio, playing a variety of songs (some from the visitor’s repertoire, some from the Hall and Oates line-up). Well, during the typical course of a “Daryl’s House” episode, the musicians will take a break and visit the kitchen (a fully equipped restaurant-style kitchen), to see what Daryl’s personal chef is whipping up for the lunch break. On the episode in question, the chef was using shallots with the main dish. It was quite serendipitous to find them on sale in Paterson just a few days later.<\/p>\n

Tonight I finally dug that bag of shallots out from the back of my refrigerator, and cut up and sauteed two of them in olive oil. I then mixed them into the tomato sauce that I regularly use with pasta (it was rigatoni tonight). And I must say, that sauce was turned into something very, very good. The shallots imparted a mellow and mildly onion-y slant to my usual red sauce; there were strong enough to be noticeable, but they still got along well with the standard sauce elements of peppers, garlic, basil and tomato. <\/p>\n

So I had a nice meal. I’m sorry that those police officers in Dallas and those young men in St. Anthony and Baton Rouge won’t be having any more nice meals. I wish that I could make it all better but I can’t. For tonight, about the best I can do to make the world better is to share a little cooking tip about shallots. As my Buddhist friends might say, eat and live, but do so mindfully. Mind the little pleasures, mind the big injustices. For tonight, that’s about as far as I can get.<\/p>\n

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Before I get to my culinary experience with shallots, let me acknowledge that the past week was an extremely important and tumultuous one for our nation. FBI Director James Comey recommended that charges NOT be filed against former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton because of her exclusive business use of external e-mail […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,25,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6285"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6285"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6290,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6285\/revisions\/6290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}