I Work With Turkeys

I do not mean to disparage the people I work with, but we really do have turkeys at Emerson. Several years ago, two female wild turkeys were noticed in the woods on Emerson property. The company president thought it would be cool if there were more turkeys, so he had a couple of domesticated male turkeys brought in. The male turkeys didn’t like hanging out in the woods, they were not afraid of people and loved to look at their own reflections in the glass doors of the buildings as they strutted with their feathers puffed up. After about a month of the maintenance people cleaning up the turkey droppings in front of the building entrances, they got rid of the males. The male turkeys apparently at least said “hi” to the wild female turkeys because a few months later there were lots of young turkeys roaming around Emerson property. They stay away from the buildings, but they do not seem to be very afraid of people. They will run away if you get within about 10 feet of them. I think there are currently about 15 to 20 turkeys living off the land at Emerson. I passed close to a few of them while walking to another building for a meeting in the middle of the day and took these photos with my cell phone.
Before anyone thinks I need to bring one of these to Tucson in November, I’m pretty sure Mom will not want turkey droppings on the back seat, and besides, the turkey would go after the bags of rice I was going to bring. I think we ought to stick to a store bought turkey.

What is in between white rice and brown rice?

I noticed that my last four blog entries have been about food. This makes five in a row.

Like many health conscious people, we have tried brown rice before and while it is good occasionally, it is not as pleasant to eat as the premium Japanese white rice. While at Global Foods, I was looking at the various types of rice. We bought Haiga rice (explained below) once before and liked it a lot, but I have not been able to find it lately. Julie liked the Haiga rice too and wanted more. To make white rice, the outer bran and germ are milled away, but apparently, there are different degrees of glory in the milling of rice. This is a photo of the information on the bag of rice I recently bought.
As you may be able to read on the bag, Haiga rice has the bran milled away, but the rice germ is still intact making it healthier than white rice. Since I have not been able to find Haiga rice lately, I thought I should get some brown rice. I discovered that there is yet another category of brown rice that is somewhere between true brown rice and Haiga rice. This particular brand has called it Gen-Ji-Mai rice, where the outer bran is partially polished away just enough to allow the rice to cook more like white rice and have a texture that is more like white rice than brown rice while still retaining most if the vitamins and minerals that are usually lost in the milling process to get white rice.

For comparison purposes, here is a photo of our normal white rice.
And a photo of the Gen-Ji-Mai partially polished brown rice.
This is what it looks like on the plate after it has been cooked.
It still has healthy brownish looking stuff in it, but it tastes really good. We were impressed. You can tell that it has more healthy fiber than white rice, but it is still pleasant to eat. We had some Nishiki true brown rice before, and while it very good for you; this new rice that we found is much more enjoyable to eat. I don’t think we will completely give up the yummy premium white rice as there are times when it is what our taste buds want. But there will be quite a few meals that will have this slightly polished brown rice instead of the traditional white rice.

For those that are interested, we should have space to bring some with us to Neil and Ashley’s house for Thanksgiving.

Gyoza

A few days before Joseph left to go to Utah, we had gyoza for dinner. Of course we needed to have green beans with them. This is what Mom’s plate looked like before we started eating.

We made a lot of gyoza, more than was necessary for three people. After Mom’s plate was filled, this was the plate of the rest of the gyoza.

We made about 45 of them all together. We had 2nds, 3rds and so on. It was really good. We decided that we are getting really good at it, because they were as good as any we have ever eaten.