July 4, 2026 Breakfast - Granola Lunch - Sautéed Smoked Pork chop, Steamed Broccoli, and sautéed Candied Okinawan Purple Sweet Potatoes, Dinner - Clam, Snail, and Smoked Oyster Frittata
Today we finally were able to rest and we cooked two interesting meals as we tried to use the PPIs in our fridge and ingredients we had bought.
I also wanted to get back on a more normal diet after the wine and paella driven celebrations of my birthday.
I awakened for an hour at 3:30 a.m. and watched the beginning of Morning Joe with an interesting interview with Anne Applebaum, who besides her usual insightful critique of the current administration’s departure from democratic checks and balances and that mentioned J. D. Vance’s comment at the 2024 Republican Convention that he is protecting America for his ancestors buried in the hills of Kentucky. Anne mentioned that her ancestors were buried in Galveston. This brought back memories of my ancestors who immigrated to Southern Texas through the port of Galveston and my recollection of Applebaums and Applemans I grew up with in Fort Worth and Texas when there were so few Jews in Texas of my father’s early generation that he and we knew and were related to many of them. My grand father arrived in Fort Worth in 1900, only 50 years after 1849, its founding as a frontier fort to protect from Comanche raids.
That comment sent me to Wikipedia, but it only included her father and mother and their connection to Yale and Washington, D.C. I went back to bed at 5:00 and slept until 8:00.still intrigued. So as I wrote this blog this morning I researched Applebaum’s comment again and found her letter with her reference to her South Texas origin in an open letter that seems apt and is in harmony with my feelings on this July 4th.
Here it is:
“As he reached the end of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2024, J. D. Vance’s tone became more intimate. He began to speak of a cemetery in Kentucky where five generations of his family are buried, and where he hopes he and his children will be buried too. The cemetery matters to him because the bones in that graveyard—some belonging, he said, to people born “around the time of the Civil War”—represent a concrete reality, a homeland, a place that he will defend. “People will not fight for abstractions,” Vance said, “but they will fight for their home.” Not “all men are created equal,” in other words, and not “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” but tombstones. Vance believes that blood and soil, not ideas and principles, are what make him American.
As it happens, I can compete with the vice president in a race to lay claim to old bones. There is a cemetery in Galveston, Texas, where multiple members of my family are buried, too, actually going back more than five generations. I own a photograph of the great-great-grandmother whose tombstone is there; she is wearing a hat and coat, standing on a chilly beach. Her parents are buried nearby—that is, my great-great-great grandparents, who were born well before the Civil War—plus aunts, uncles, and cousins, some of whom might well have arrived on the Gulf Coast before members of Vance’s family got to Appalachia.
But here is where Vance and I differ: I do not think that the presence of my ancestors in a Galveston cemetery makes me American. On the contrary, all of us—me and Vance; Vance’s in-laws, born in India; my great-great-great grandparents, born in Alsace; our respective children and eventual grandchildren—are, were, or will be Americans because we live in the community created by the abstractions that he dismissed in his speech. More important, I am convinced that these abstractions, all of those words vowing to “establish Justice” and “secure the Blessings of Liberty,” are much stronger, much more powerful than the pull of our respective clans and graveyards. Why? Because they can unite and inspire a nation that contains people with origins and ancestors as radically different as those belonging to me and Vance."
I too feel excluded from the America Trump and Vance envision and the better for it. I will gladly stand with Anne Applebaum, and our ancestors who brought their European culture and intellect to early day Texas and whose children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren became the lawyers and intellectuals of today.
For breakfast I ate my usual granola, mango yogurt, and blueberries but instead of milk I added some watermelon balls and juice. .Suzette ate a bowl of watermelon balls, blueberries, and mango yogurt.
Then we drove to the Farmer’s Market and bought three regular croissants and one almond croissant.
When we returned home I rode around the neighborhood on my new recumbant bike. On my way I stopped to talk to Diane, who was returning from walking her dog in Kit Carson Park as I passed her.
When I returned home I watched Morocco beat Canada in World Cup soccer.
Then around 1:00 we prepared lunch. Suzette wanted to cook the Okinawa purple sweet potatoes we bought at Talin. We were not exactly sure how to prepare them but Suzette settled on boiling them, peeling them and slicing them in half and then sautéing them in brown sugar and butter, which candied them. They were delicious with the sautéed smoked pork chops and steamed broccoli she also prepared. So we were back on our more normal diet of a sautéed meat, a steamed green vegetable, with a starch. We opened a 8 or 9 year old bottle of Benton Lane Oregon Pinot Noir rose that complimented the salty pork and candied potato. It had lost most of its fruit flavor but the tannins and Pinot noir flavors had intensified.
I then watched the second World Cup match of the day, Paraguay v. France. It was a very competitive match with lots of fouls and, to my mind a very unsatisfactory win by France on a questionable penalty kick. But France moves on to the Quarter finals as one of the favorites to win the World Cup. As in many sport contests, when the skill of both competitors are evenly matched, luck becomes the deciding factor..
After the second match, with no commitments, we napped for two hours. When we awakened around 6:00 we starting watching some of the festivities around the country and Suzette decided to make a four egg frittata or Spanish tortilla to use the leftover snails, smoked oysters and some of the extra baby clams. We also decided to throw in some of the peas we picked in our garden. I minced a shallot and Suzette minced some garlic that she sautéed in a skillet with the meats.
Suzette sliced several Yukon Gold potatoes and sautéed the thin slices in a large skillet. Then she added the sautéed shallot, garlic, and meats and peas and whisked eggs.
I went to the garden and picked a stalk of each of tarragon, thyme, and savory and destemmed the leaves of each and minced them and added the fresh minced herbs to the eggs.
Suzette also grated about 1 1/2 cups of Swiss Gruyere and added that to the top of the eggs. She then covered the skillet and cooked the fritata until all the ingredients were firmly cooked and the cheese melted.
I then flipped the frittata onto a serving plate and poured out the last of the Benton Lane Rose’ and we ate a delicious dinner.
Of all the coverage, we enjoyed the Nashville Symphony’s playing of the 1812 Overture accompanied by fireworks and real cannon firings.
Then around 9:30 when the delayed Washington Mall activities restarted with a canned speech President Trump recited in his droning monotone, we went to bed after I ate a piece of lemon tiramisu with a chai and Suzette sipped an after dinner cognac.
It was a pleasant day with two good meals using lots of ingredients we had accumulated,
Talking about accumulated, I accumulated 4200 steps in the course of today’s activities, which was well above the average 2750 of steps.
Bon Appetit
