gmgaston's Open Salon Blog

Bon appetite & Au revoir!

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 06:08:29 -0400

I am off for a couple weeks to visit family & friends, but before I go I wanted to just say that all of you are with me in thoughts & prayers. I leave you with this early foodie Tueday post -

At times when our busy lives seems to be dictating when and what we eat; I suggest this simple inexpensive recipe. Always a crowd pleaser, Chicken Marsala is a delicious, classic chicken dish; lightly coated chicken breasts braised with Marsala wine and mushrooms. It’s an easy recipe, ideal for a quick weeknight entrée or serving to your most important company at an impromptu dinner party. Serve with steamed asparagus, angle hair pasta and a garden fresh salad. Within no time dinner will be on the table.

Chicken Marsala

Ingredients:

¼ cup all-purpose flour for coating

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

½ teaspoon dried oregano

4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves - pounded ¼ inch thick

4 tablespoons butter

4 tablespoons olive oil

1 cup sliced mushrooms

½ cup Marsala wine

¼ cup cooking sherry

In a shallow dish or bowl, mix together the flour, salt, pepper and oregano. Working in batches, coat chicken pieces in flour mixture.

In a large skillet, melt butter in oil over medium heat. Place chicken in the pan, and lightly brown. Turn over chicken pieces, and add mushrooms. Pour in wine and sherry. Cover skillet; simmer chicken 10 minutes, turning once, until no longer pink and juices run clear.

Serves 4

Bon appetite!

Au revoir,

jusqu'à ce que nous rencontrons encore!

Katrina Relief - October 2006

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:08:02 -0400

After reading trig palin’s post: My New Orleans, it was four years ago...... today, I thought I would give my account of Katrina 2005.

One year later, in October 2006, with a group of 11 people from my church - Christ Church on Quaker Hill - in Pawling, NY; I had the privilege of traveling to St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans to aid in the relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina. We would be working with Habitat for Humanity, an organization known for building, not tearing down. Habitat had arrived just weeks after Katrina in October 2005 and set-up in the W. Smith Elementary School to stage their relief efforts and called it Camp Hope. Working with the U.S. government, AmeriCorps, organization; Habitat’s first mission was to help families gut their homes of all debris, so the homes could be inspected for safety and structure soundness.

The facilities at the school were barren at best. Habitat had stripped the entire school down to the cement slab and metal stubs. Imagine walking into your first grade school and walking through the halls with no walls. And imagine going to your classroom with no walls… this is how the interior was; just support and load bearing walls. Some of the windows were there and others broken out. This was Camp Hope…. our home for the weeks we were there.

AmeriCorps was the agency that was in charge of feeding us, providing a cot to sleep on and a very rustic make-shift bathroom, so we could shower. All of the supplies were donated by various corporations – food, water & equipment. While all the work was done by volunteers from around the world as far away as New Zealand & Iceland and in between; some were cooks, some were drivers, some were organizers.

St. Bernard Parish about 20 miles outside of New Orleans was an area that survived Katrina, but when the levees were breached in the Ninth Ward area… a huge surge effect cause levees throughout the canal system to overflow.

St. Bernard was a community of about 79,000 people made up of neighborhoods with mostly ‘ranch style’ single family homes. The way the immediate destruction was explained to me – the water level was up to the ridge of the roof line of every home in Saint Bernard; with the contaminated water standing for over six weeks before receding out of the area.

The method Habitat used to clean up (or gut, as we called it) was teams of 10 to 12 people going out to homes in the area of St. Bernard Parish neighborhood by neighborhood. A bright yellow school bus would pick up the teams – we were Black 6 - and take us out to our assigned home. There we would gut the house completely down to cement slab & wooden studs.

The name Black 6 came from the AmeriCorps representatives assigned to each team, who wore a full black jumpsuit. On a usual work day, 12 to 15 teams were out working. We were team 6, so all our equipment, food/drink packs and sleeping area was marked with that designation. We thought Black 6 had a sexier name sound!

Here let me tell you a little about Black 6… we were 11 friends from our church who wanted to go down and help in the relief effort. The youngest was 26 and the oldest was 80 – 7 women and 4 men, plus Mike from Habitat & Phil from AmeriCorps. That put our average age at 68½!

I remember that first day getting on the bus with excitement and anxiety - not really knowing what lay ahead. I was shocked by the destruction everywhere you looked. Shopping centers and whole neighbors, churches and gas stations – all empty; much like the old west ghost towns. Our first house was 3605 Dauterive Drive. Every possession that that family had worked for and cared about was now debris, which I moved to a front yard to be carried to a landfill. As I moved through the debris, you could smell the foul stench of rot.

The mission of the team was to make 5 piles in the front yard – one for junk (carpet, drywall), one for metal (any garage doors, appliances, curtain rods), one for old furniture (sofas, chairs, beds, china cabinets), one for toxic materials (paint, bleach, cleaning products) and the last one was possible keepsakes. A course the ‘keepsake’ pile was the smallest, but we were able to salvage a family picture, bible, china cup, a doll… but not much was worth saving. From start to finish, it would usually take us two days to completely gut the house.

After the water receded, the different government agencies when into all the homes, business, schools, churches… all structures to look for any possible dead… human or animal. Here is how they marked a structure after they had inspected it.

Looking at the mark (X) – the top of the X – date inspected, left side of X – any hazardous material, right side of X – mics notes (dead animals) and the bottom of the X – any deaths in house. Luckily where I was working no deaths, but in our travels I did see one mark with 9 deaths. That was down in the Ninth Ward were the breach started.

The craziest thing that happened on the first day and every week day after… the mailman can down the street delivering the mail. No one had lived in this area since Katrina, but Mr. Philpot (the mailman) delivered any mail addressed to that given home. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” - even after a catastrophic storm of total destruction. Unbelievable!

Oh, another thing happened – the temperature even in October was 90 degrees plus and the interior heat while wearing the required dress of long pants, long sleeve shirts, hard-hat, musk, gloves and heavy steel toed boots was over 100 degrees – during a break someone say they heard an ice cream truck… you know the music/bells they make… we all said you must be crazy… but we looked anyway and there driving down Dauterive Drive was an ice cream truck. Let me tell you, that ice cream never tasted better!

This is definitely an experience I will never forget and I hope that a catastrophic disaster like this never occurs again.

Be sure to read marytkelly's Humbled By A Katrina Victim. She tells of an incredible encounter while she was volunteering with The Red Cross in her hometown.

Also, read: Hurricane Katrina: After the Flood (pictures and memories) by mjwycha - awesome photographs!

Dr. King's "I Have a Dream” - forty-six years later

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:08:46 -0400

On August 28, 1963 the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stepped up to the microphones at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom rally and spoke about his dreams for a better country for all its citizens. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the monument to honor Abraham Lincoln; who signed the Executive Order called the Emancipation Proclamation that freed those human beings held in slavery in this country.

Dr. King was a leading figure in the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s. His "I Have a Dream" speech given forty-six years ago today is considered one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory, it powerfully and eloquently expresses King's desire for a future in which blacks and whites can live harmoniously as equals.

Here is a YouTube clip of the entire speech:

Martin Luther King "I have a dream"

Rest in Peace Dr. King

Foodie Tuesday: Fried Green Tomatoes

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:08:31 -0400

Ever since that wonderful film with Jessica Tandy & Kathy Bates called Fried Green Tomatoes, I've been in love with green tomatoes. I recall when I was young being served fried green tomatoes while staying with my Great-Aunt Lillian. She was the best cook I know and her table was always filled with wonderful old Southern Classics.

So, I headed back to the farmer's market last weekend and found some big green tomatoes; dug out her recipe and fixed a plate full of these classic southern treats.

Aunt Lillian’s Fried Green Tomatoes

Ingredients:

3 medium, firm green tomatoes
½ cup all-purpose flour
¼ cup milk
2 beaten eggs
¾ cup fine dry bread crumbs or cornmeal
¼ cup olive oil
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper

Cut unpeeled tomatoes into ½ -inch slices. Sprinkle slices with salt and pepper. Let tomato slices stand for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, place flour, milk, eggs, and bread crumbs in separate shallow dishes.

Heat 2 Tbsp of olive oil in a skillet on medium heat. Dip tomato slices in milk, then flour, then eggs, then bread crumbs. In the skillet, fry half of the coated tomato slices at a time, for 4-6 minutes on each side or until brown. As you cook the rest of the tomatoes, add olive oil as needed.

Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve hot!

So, get yourself some good firm green tomatoes, follow Aunt Lillian’s recipe, rent the movie Fried Green Tomatoes and have yourself a good ole time – Southern style!

Towanda!

Fried Green Tomatoes trailer

George Gershwin: an American Icon

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 08:08:14 -0400

George Gershwin was one of the most significant and popular American composers of all time. He wrote primarily for the Broadway musical theatre, but important as well are his orchestral and piano compositions in which he blended, in varying degrees, the techniques and forms of classical music with the stylistic nuances and techniques of popular music and jazz.

G.Gershwin - Strike Up The Band

Gershwin developed an early interest in music through his exposure to the popular and classical compositions he heard at school and in penny arcades. He began his musical education at age 11, when his family bought a second-hand upright piano, ostensibly so that George's older sibling, Ira, could learn the instrument. When George surprised everyone with his fluid playing of a popular song, which he had taught himself by following the keys on a neighbor's player piano, his parents decided that George would be the family member to receive lessons. He studied piano with the noted instructor Charles Hambitzer, who introduced his young student to the works of the great classical composers. Hambitzer was so impressed with Gershwin's potential that he refused payment for the lessons; as he wrote in a letter to his sister, “I have a new pupil who will make his mark if anybody will. The boy is a genius…”

Gershwin continued to broaden his musical knowledge and compositional technique throughout his career with such disparate mentors as the idiosyncratic American composers Henry Cowell and Wallingford Riegger, the distinguished traditionalist Edward Kilenyi, and Joseph Schillinger, a musical theorist known for his mathematically grounded approach to composition. After dropping out of school at age 15, Gershwin earned an income by making piano rolls for player pianos and by playing in New York nightclubs. His most important job in this period was his stint as a song plugger (probably the youngest in Tin Pan Alley), demonstrating sheet music for the Jerome Remick music-publishing company. In an era when sheet-music sales determined the popularity of a song, song pluggers such as Gershwin worked long hours pounding out tunes on the piano for potential customers. Although Gershwin's burgeoning creativity was hampered by his three-year stint in “plugger's purgatory”, it was nevertheless an experience that greatly improved his dexterity and increased his skills at improvisation and transposing. While still in his teens, Gershwin was known as one of the most talented pianists in the New York area and worked as an accompanist for popular singers and as a rehearsal pianist for Broadway musicals.

G.Gershwin - 'S Wonderful!

His early experiences greatly increased Gershwin's knowledge of jazz and popular music. He enjoyed especially the songs of Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern—referring to Berlin as “America's Franz Schubert” and stating that Kern was “the first composer who made me conscious that most popular music was of inferior quality, and that musical comedy was made of better material”—and he was inspired by their work to compose for the Broadway stage. In 1919 entertainer Al Jolson performed the Gershwin song Swanee in the musical Sinbad; it became an enormous success, selling more than two million recordings and a million copies of sheet music, and making Gershwin an overnight celebrity. Also in 1919, Gershwin composed his first “serious” work, the Lullaby for string quartet. A study in harmony that Gershwin composed as an exercise for Kilenyi, Lullaby's delicate beauty transcends its academic origins.

During the next few years, Gershwin contributed songs to various Broadway shows and revues. From 1920 to 1924 he composed scores for the annual productions of George White's Scandals, the popular variety revue, producing such standards as (I'll Build a) Stairway to Paradise and Somebody Loves Me. For the Scandals production of 1922, Gershwin convinced producer White to incorporate a one-act jazz opera. Legend has it that Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue, perhaps his best-known work, in three weeks' time. Owing to the haste in which it was written, Rhapsody in Blue was somewhat unfinished at its premiere. Gershwin improvised much of the piano solo during the performance, and conductor Whiteman had to rely on a nod from Gershwin to cue the orchestra at the end of the solo. Nevertheless, the piece was a resounding success and brought Gershwin worldwide fame. The revolutionary work incorporated trademarks of the jazz idiom (blue notes, syncopated rhythms, onomatopoeic instrumental effects) into a symphonic context.

Leonard Bernstein plays G. Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue

For the remainder of his career, Gershwin devoted himself to both popular songs and orchestral compositions. His Broadway shows from the 1920s and '30s featured numerous songs that became standards: Fascinating Rhythm, Oh, Lady Be Good, Sweet and Low-Down, Do, Do, Do, Someone to Watch over Me, Strike Up the Band, The Man I Love, 'S Wonderful, I've Got a Crush on You, Bidin' My Time, Embraceable You, But Not for Me, Of Thee I Sing, and Isn't It a Pity. He also composed several songs for Hollywood films, such as Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, They All Laughed, They Can't Take That Away from Me, A Foggy Day, Nice Work if You Can Get It, Love Walked In, and Love Is Here to Stay. His lyricist for nearly all of these tunes was his older brother, Ira, whose glib, witty lyrics—often punctuated with slang, puns, and wordplay—received nearly as much acclaim as George's compositions. The Gershwin brothers comprised a somewhat unique songwriting partnership in that George's melodies usually came first—a reverse of the process employed by most composing teams.

Gershwin's piano score for I Got Rhythm was part of a larger project begun in 1931, George Gershwin's Songbook. A collection of Gershwin's personal favorites among his many hit tunes, it featured the composer's own adaptations designed “for the above-average pianist.”

An American in Paris (1928), Gershwin's second-most famous orchestral composition, was inspired by the composer's trips to Paris throughout the 1920s. His stated intention with the work was to “portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere”; for this purpose, Gershwin incorporated such touches of verisimilitude as real French taxi horns. It is this piece that perhaps best represents Gershwin's employment of both jazz and classical forms.

G.Gershwin – An American in Paris

An American in Paris seemed more like a ballet than symphony and, indeed, the piece gained its most lasting fame 23 years after its premiere, when it was used by Gene Kelly for the closing ballet sequence of the classic, eponymous film musical in 1951.

George Gershwin’s most enduring and respected Broadway work, Porgy and Bess, was lukewarmly received upon its premiere in 1935. Gershwin's American Folk Opera was inspired by the DuBose Heyward novel Porgy (1925) and featured a libretto and lyrics by Ira and the husband-wife team of DuBose and Dorothy Heyward. In preparation for the show, Gershwin spent time in the rural South, studying firsthand the music and lifestyle of impoverished African Americans. Theatre critics received the premiere production enthusiastically, but highbrow music critics were derisive, distressed that “lowly” popular music should be incorporated into an opera structure. Black audiences throughout the years have criticized the work for its condescending depiction of stereotyped characters and for Gershwin's inauthentic appropriation of black musical forms. Nevertheless, Gershwin's music—including such standards as Summertime, It Ain't Necessarily So, Bess, You Is My Woman Now, and I Got Plenty O' Nuttin' —transcended early criticism to attain a revered niche in the musical world, largely because it successfully amalgamates various musical cultures to evoke something uniquely American and wholly Gershwin. Many now consider the score from Porgy and Bess to be Gershwin's greatest masterpiece.

Gershwin's music remains a subject of debate among prominent international conductors, composers, and music scholars, some of whom find his works for orchestra to be naively structured, little more than catchy melodies strung together by the barest of musical links. In 1954, Leonard Bernstein summed up the feelings of many classical musicians, saying, “The themes are terrific—inspired, God-given. I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky. But if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.”

Gershwin died July 11, 1937 in Hollywood, California at the young age of 39 years old. Some critics may say there are indeed weak spots, but who cares about them when there is greatness to live on through his music.

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa sings "Summertime" - "Porgy and Bess"

ps: The YouTube video above of Rhapsody in Blue has a very special, rarely seen Leonard Bernstein conducting & playing the piano of this great Gershwin piece.