The Racial Divide

A tragic thing happened to 20-year old Sharmeka Moffitt in Winnsboro, La. yesterday evening. She was attacked and set on fire in the city park, allegedly by 3 white men. Northwest Louisiana is shaken as everyone looks for answers.

While I know several people from the town of Winnsboro, I do not know Sharmeka, nor anyone else directly involved. However, I’ve seen so many comments that disturb me to the core, and as an outsider looking in, I have some things to say.

First, many people are outraged by the lack of information being confirmed. I’ve seen angry comments because authorizes and media have used the term “allegedly.” Unfortunately, until authorities confirm things as truth, it is an “alleged” occurrence. This simple word doesn’t mean that authorities aren’t taking this case seriously. We must give them time to gather and report FACTS not ALLEGATIONS. Furthermore, media cannot publicize information that hasn’t been confirmed by authorities. Therefore, they must use the term “allegedly” as well. I say this with full understanding that it is a possibility that authorities/media could very well be downplaying the occurrence. However, if you and I aren’t directly involved in the case, then I don’t think we should be so outraged at the use of this term. It’s a common way to approach situations like this.

Furthermore, we have to remember that this is a small town. My guess is, these officers are not in any way used to dealing with situations this severe. As in any situation, we need to give these people a chance to do their job. Plus, we have to understand that they very well may screw up and say/do the wrong thing. I don’t think any amount of training can prepare someone to go from your average Sunday evening, to one this heart wrenching. If I were an officer in this situation, I’d give up and leave town. There’s no way I could handle the pressure of trying to do my job, yet facing such indescribable criticism. We all need to have respect for one another, especially in high stress situations.  This definitely goes for our first responders. Until to have to make very tough decisions in times of duress, I don’t think you can say a darn word about it.

Now, being a white person, I’m seen as a perpetrator here. So, I’m going to address black people and hopefully shed some lights on how “we white people” see things. (Reminder: I have no involvement in the situation at hand, other than being white.)

Black People:
I shouldn’t have to remind you of this, but not all white people are the same. I guarantee you I’ve never even thought of doing something so horrific to a person just because they’re black. Furthermore, I don’t even know a white person who I would think would do something like this. Grouping all of us together in a category with these crazy rednecks, is like me saying all black people steal. It’s just not fair!

Now, the thing that burns me up, is seeing people say “if that would have happened to ‘their’ pearly white asses” or “it’s time to rise up” and “don’t let ‘them’ do this to us again.” Come on! If the thing you’re mad about is racism, you’re breeding that same hate! I don’t get to hate all black people because one black guy robbed my grandma, so I don’t think it’s fair for black people to be taking some sort of stand against me (and my race), because some idiots in a small town did something awful. This isn’t a black vs. white scenario. This is a good vs. evil, love vs. hate scenario. And if any of us want this problem fixed, we’re both going to have to stop grouping people of a color together and breeding racism in both forms.

Racism starts and ends at the heart of the individual. It’s in how we raise our children. How we treat each other. If you want racism to die, then you have to kill it within YOURSELF. Teaching children to hate and judge a person based on their skin color is precisely what keeps this racial divide going.

All in all, we all need to keep our uniformed mouths shut until we know some facts. All too often, we result to accusing and attacking, before we even know the whole story. Let’s let the authorities do their jobs. Let’s build them up and pray that they can find the facts, find who did this, and get information out to all of us who are anxiously awaiting answers.  More importantly, let’s stand together and pray for this poor girl who’s fighting for her life. Surely that’s a cause that we can all stand together on.

I don’t usually post about such controversial/heated things, so I’m going to try to wrap up with some comic relief. Another thing that I saw that agitated me was someone said, “It’s time to go vote!” I almost had to laugh, and certainly felt like I needed to shed some light for this poor person.  Having a white president isn’t going to breed racism any more than a having a black one got rid of it. Again, that’s making a race issue out of something that should have little to no relation to skin color, and doing so in possibly one of the most uneducated ways possible.

Now, my charge to each and every person who reads this is to make a point to rid racism in your world. Not in THE world…in YOUR world. It’s time that we all love each other for our differences. If you can’t/won’t make changes in your own life, then don’t expect the world to ever be any different. 

Move Over Paula Dean!

Looks yummy...not!

Ok, so I'm not quite Paula Dean. More like Chef Boyardee...that you heat straight from the can! Either way, here's my post about my first major freezing experience, for those of you who are keeping up.

All of the blogs I researched said not to do your cooking/preparing/freezing on the same day that you shop. I'm sort of short on time, so I broke that rule. Big mistake! I didn't realize the experience had taken so much out of me until I was straight in the middle of putting away my chicken (the last thing on the list). Luckily, Matt was a team player and came to save me, because I was about to throw it all in the trash and walk away! It went much quicker with an extra set of hands.

If you read my shopping post, you remember that I stocked up on hamburger meat that was dated for that day, so I knew I had to cook it quickly. (I'm a stickler for expiration dates, so I was paranoid about acting fast.) We were planning on having tacos that night, so I made 2 lbs into taco meat. We ate some that night and had enough for 2 additional meals to freeze. This worked great because each time we have tacos, we end up throwing away a good bit of meat.  This way, we had enough for a third meal! We haven't tried the frozen taco meat yet, but I'll report back on how it turns out.

After the tacos, I had 8 lbs of ground beef left, so I took to browning! I browned approximately 3 lbs at a time, drained it, and dumped it in a large storage container. After all the meat was browned, I left it to cool on the counter for a bit. (You shouldn't put hot foods straight in to the freezer or fridge.) Once it was cool, I sorted the meat into one pound increments. I panicked at first because once the meat was all mixed together, I didn't know how much a pound was. I don't have a fancy meat scale. No worries though...I have a handy husband. He said a pound of hamburger meat was about 2 cups. (How does he even know all these random things??!) So, I measured out somewhere between 2-2 1/2 cups and poured into freezer bags. Before adding the meat, I wrote on all the bags and included the date so I would know how long it would be in the freezer. I'm a stickler for dates, remember?

All bagged and ready to go!

The most important thing about freezing in freezer bags is to remove every last bit of air that you can. This is what keeps foods from getting freezer burn and ruining.

The next day, I worked on all the other meats. I marinated a few steaks and put in bags of 2. I did the same with pork chops using this recipe. We haven't tried them yet, but they smelled promising! Finally, it was time to do the chicken...dreadful chicken. As I mentioned before, most of our menu this month was chicken. Here's a tip: don't save your biggest task to last. Seriously, if Matt wouldn't have come to help, I would have thrown the last of that stupid chicken in the yard and went to bed.

I had an assortment of breasts and tenderloins. I washed them all and piled onto a cutting board. I used my kitchen shears to trim them up so there would be less to do before cooking. (If you don't have kitchen shears...get some!) After trimming all of the yucky stuff off (technical language), I moved them to a second cutting board where I sorted them by what was needed for each recipe. Even though most of the chicken was frozen plain, I still wrote the recipes on each bag. This will keep us from using chicken that was planned for another meal. It will also be easy to just pull out a bag for whichever recipe we want to make...less thinking involved.

Since this was my first experience, I didn't do quite as much in advance as I could have. I realized when making this Parmesan Chicken, that I could have boiled the chicken before freezing it. Oh well, I'll pay closer attention next time.

So far, it's going well. The only major hiccup is that I'm not in the habit of taking the next day's meal out the night before. Luckily, we have a pretty awesome defrost setting on our new microwave, so we can thaw things that way. But, I plan on getting better at doing it the night before.

All in all, it's been successful. I can't really tell a difference in the frozen meats vs fresh...especially if they thaw naturally. The biggest source of convenience is not having to go to the grocery store each week. I feel so relieved! Plus, we're coming in under our food budget for this month. That's a nice bonus! I'll keep everyone updated about new findings and experiences regarding my stocked freezer. I promise my next post won't be quite so long! There are just too many details for this topic!

I want to thank everyone for caring enough to read (especially these long ones). I've had fun sharing my experiences, and it's so encouraging to have those of you who are wanting to keep up.

I hope to share our bathroom face lift next...it's a good one!

Note:

If you're interested in where I got most of my info, check out this site. This is where I decided I should try something like this. I literally read through every link on the page. Great info!

http://lifeasmom.com/2010/09/how-to-do-freezer-cooking.html

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Filling the Fridge

I made my first shopping trip for a month long supply of groceries, and it was a huge success!

We were spending an average of $115-150/week on groceries. (That's $500+ a month.) Last week, I spent $219 for the entire month, giving us 29 meals! This doesn't include small meals like sandwiches, etc. I am so proud of myself! (My saving came just in time because we got a $350 bill from the dentist. Ugh!) What's even more exciting is that my goal was to spend under $400, and I was praying to not go over $600. When the clerk said $219, I almost jumped up and down!

Here's how I did it:
I'll start by saying I didn't go coupon crazy or anything like that. I applaud people who can get groceries for next to nothing, but I simply don't have that time or patience. I did load a few coupons to my Brookshires Loyalty Card for things I was already buying, but they only saved me a few dollars. (You should definitely get the app for your phone if you're a Brookshires shopper.)

Preparing for the shopping trip took waaaay longer than I imagined. I went through 10 different cookbooks, searched online, and created a list of meals we'd like to have this month. This took quite a bit of time. It's surprisingly hard to think about what you'd like to eat for the next 30 days!

I typed up all the recipes in a new "Petrus Family Recipes" file. (I'm still in shock that Matt & I are "The Petrus Family"...weird!) This seemed a little redundant, but I decided it would be best to have all of the recipes in one location, rather than having to dig around for them. This way, we can add and take away, creating a file of our favorites.

Then, I went through each recipe and made a list of all the ingredients I needed. I shopped our pantry to see what I already had, and made a list using tally marks for the rest. I stole this idea from a blog I read, and it worked great. (I'll do better at remembering where I saw things and giving people proper credit...I'm new to this blogging thing.) Basically, you just write down the things you need and put tally marks next to them as you come across more of that item in another recipe. Genius! I ended up rewriting my list to be sure it was nice and neat. I also put it in order of departments, which made it much easier when I was at the store.

Next, I looked at the Brookshires sale paper. (Probably should have done this first.) I love Brookshires because it's always nice, clean, and fully stocked. I don't have time to shop around, so we'll be saving on whatever they're putting on sale. (I just won't drive across town to save .50 on flour.) This week was a great week for my first big trip...so much great stuff was on sale! I adjusted my menu a tad to include some sale items and headed out! All in all, I probably spent 8 hours preparing...maybe a little more. I expect it to go faster as I get more experience.

The big sales at Brookshires really played in to my huge savings. Chicken was buy one, get one for a penny. Most of my menu was new chicken dishes, so this worked perfectly! There were several other things I needed that were on this promotion too, so we lucked out!

I'm also so very proud of my ground beef purchase, so much so that I have to blog about it! I needed 10 pounds of ground beef, and the bulk packages weren't really that good of a deal. As I'm picking out my chicken, the meat market lady puts out some big packages of hamburger meat that caught my eye. They had been marked to half price for quick sale because they went out of date that day. This was perfect because I was planning to brown and freeze all the hamburger meat when I got home anyway! I ended up paying $20 for ground beef that I was going to have to pay $40 for. As silly as it sounds, I couldn't wait for Matt to get off work so I could tell him about my steal. Between this and the buy one, get one for a penny sales, we really saved some money this month!

All in all, I'm pretty proud of my shopping trip. Doing my homework and preparing ahead of time, really made a huge difference. So far, I've only noticed a few small things that I forgot. Not too bad for my first time! I'm really hoping that having a month worth of groceries in the house and a clear plan will save us some valuable time and money. Guess we will see!

For those interested, I'll post about my cooking/freezing adventure very soon. There's lot going on in the Petrus household!

Please let me know your thoughts. I'd love to hear them!