24 Festive Tasks: International Human Rights Day

 Square Seven

 

 

Book: Read a book featuring a strong female character (or characters), by an author from any minority group, a story about a minority overcoming their oppressors, or revolving around the rights of others either being defended or abused, a book set in New York City, or a book originally written in a language other than English and / or your mother tongue or by anyone not Anglo-Saxon.

 

Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr. (read byDion Graham)

 

Task 1: Nominate a (fictional) character from one of the books you read this year for a Nobel Prize – regardless which one – or for a similarly important prize (e.g., the Fields Medal for mathematics) and write a brief laudation explaining your nomination.

Task 2: Cook a dish from a culture other than your own or something involving apples (NYC = Big Apple) or oranges (for the Netherlands, seat of the International Court of Justice & International Criminal Court).

The family recipe for roasting a turkey involves filling the cavity with onions and oranges rather than bread stuffing, so this is an easy task.  The hard part these days is finding an orange with a flavorful peel. Navel oranges are easy to find in the supermarket but I really would prefer what used to be called 'juice oranges' and is what my mother used. This year I found Valencia oranges and they seemed to have worked.  When I was done cooking the bird, the juice from the oranges went into the gravy (along with the pan drippings) and the onions went into the stock pot along with the rest of the carcass and a some carrots to make  turkey stock.  For someone who only makes turkey every few years, this year's venture into turkey roasting didn't go so badly.