HP! Long May She Wave!

There's going to be a little 1972 NFL draft party at my house this weekend, and I wish you all could come.

The 1972 NFL draft took place Feb. 1 and 2 in New York, and so, starting tonight, I plan to pull out cards for the draftees from my year-by-year Topps collections and sort them into their teams. I actually don't much plan to write about this activity at the HP because I'm still enjoying a little rest, relaxation and regrouping after the Super Bowl VI deep dive. I'm enjoying thinking about some things I hope to write about at the HP in the next several months, and here are some of those things:

-- The XI Olympic Winter Games are Feb. 3-13, 1972, in Sapporo, Japan.

-- The XXIII Olympic Winter Games are Feb. 9-25, 2018, in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

-- The 2018 Ohio Valley Conference men's basketball tournament is Feb. 28-March 3 in Evansville, Indiana.

-- The 2018 Conference USA men's basketball tournament is to be played March 7-10 in Frisco, Texas.

-- The 2018 St. Elizabeth Healthcare/KHSAA Girls’ Sweet 16® State Basketball Tournament is scheduled for March 7-11 in Highland Heights.

-- The 2018 Southeastern Conference men's basketball tournament is March 7-11 in St. Louis (?!?).

-- "Selection Sunday" for the 2018 NCAA men's basketball tournament is March 11, and the tournament is scheduled to start March 13.

-- The 2018 Whitaker Bank/KHSAA Boys’ Sweet Sixteen® State Basketball Tournament is scheduled to take place March 14-18 in Lexington.

-- The 1972 NBA playoffs begin March 28.

-- The 1972 ABA playoffs begin March 31.

-- The 2018 major golf tournaments are April 5-8 (Masters), June 14-17 (U.S. Open), July 19-22 (British Open) and Aug. 9-12 (PGA Championship).

-- The 1972 baseball regular season starts April 15.

-- The 2018 NBA Finals (possibly pairing the Washington Wizards against the New Orleans Pelicans) start May 31.

-- The NFL 2018 Hall of Fame Game takes place Aug. 2.

-- The XX Olympic Summer Games will be Aug. 26-Sept. 11, 1972, in Munich, West Germany.

-- The 1972-73 TV season begins in September.

-- The NFL 1972 regular season starts Sept. 17.

-- Christmas 1972 and Christmas 2018 both take place on Dec. 25.

Finally, I just want to say that this "mayoneggs" recipe from the February 1972 Good Housekeeping looks very intriguing. I think I might try to write more about food, books and music this year.

And, as always, I look forward to posting pictures of the tree in front of my house and following Kentucky news, and I look forward to reading and commenting on whatever else pops up on the site. I love the HP. It's one of the great joys of my life. Thanks, Go Heath, for founding it, and thanks, Matthew, for maintaining it, and thanks, family, for supporting me in playing in this clubhouse so often.

Oh, Kentucky

Oh, how I love this road:

And, oh, how I love this terrain:

This, though, is unnerving.

Jenny Smith in Madisonville's Messenger delivers a thought-provoking and heart-wrenching feature on a 94-year-old local woman from Brooklyn whose family was poor enough in the Depression that her father came to her when she was 7 and asked her to give up a bracelet her godmother had given her, to be sold for money to buy food for the family. Man, that's rough.

Sam Neace with chilling news in The Hazard Herald: No. 1 on the Centers for Disease Control’s list of U.S. counties most vulnerable to soon developing an HIV and Hepatitis C epidemic is Kentucky’s Wolfe County. No. 3 is Breathitt County. No. 4 is Perry, and No. 5 is Clay. “Out of the top 220 counties on the CDC’s list, 54 of them are located in Kentucky,” he reports.

Who lobbied Real Legislature hardest this past session?

Proud that this enormous Confederate monument is coming down at the University of Louisville. Long overdue. pic.twitter.com/Q2tfMqhi5P

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) May 1, 2016

A member of the Brass Lantern dynasty took top honors in the Kentucky Monthly recipes contest, or his "Bison with Bourbon Bacon Butter and Pickled Onions."

"MovingKentuckyForward.com" is for sale.

You going to the prom?

Rest in peace, Ed Davender, whom Jerry Tipton of the Lexington Herald-Leader describes as "arguably the most under-appreciated star player in University of Kentucky basketball history."

Recipes: Auntie Anne's Pretzels & More

The best part is, after your spouse and family or other roommates have made their pretzels with sensible portions of sugar or salt, you can then turn around and use all of the remaining sugar and salt on the pretzel you make for yourself.

Recipes: Canned-biscuit donuts

Oh, Kentucky

Peppers, kohlrabi, broccoli, Swiss chard, herbs, peaches, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, Roma beans, yellow squash, zucchini, beets, cabbage, raspberries, blackberries, green onions, eggplant, rhubarb, acorn Squash and patty-pan squash are out among Kentucky's farmers' markets. My wife and daughter on Sunday evening made some cupcakes that somehow replaced eggs with yellow squash. They have dark-chocolate chips and a sugar-and-milk glaze, and the consistency is similar to that of a very moist Mexican cornbread. (I'm counting this as a recipe.) They're outstanding. I've eaten seven in their first 36 hours in the house.

Kelly and Turner appear to be migrating significantly further north this summer. I'm not sure what this means. I find the whole bird-migration deal a little confusing. Do they make two loops south during the year--once to avoid harsher winter conditions and once to have their babies?

Geocaching was the main event of one of three surprise parties in three consecutive years at which I was honestly surprised.

The devil is going down to Rough River State Park.

Here she comes again, the Andrew Carnegie of country music.

My guess is that one of the primary reasons that some schools excel in a sport and others don't is because the ones that excel make it mean something.

I wonder who Glover Cary is/was.

The man behind reportedly one of Lucille Ball's favorite shoes.

Recipe: Snapper with Grilled Mango Salsa

After having lived for the past six months in a place that was not conducive to cooking it is nice to actually have a kitchen again and be able to cook meals.  My number one source for recipes is MyRecipes.com, which has all the recipes from a family of magazines including Cooking Light and Southern Living. 

This particular recipe comes from Cooking Light.  We have been talking about incorporating more fish into our diet, and I tend to love fish with some sort of topping, especially something like a mango salsa, so I jumped on this recipe when I saw it. 

The salsa is very easy to make and very tasty, an excellent mango salsa that would be good on its own.  It also did a very good job of complementing the fish.  The entire dish was light and flavorful and it is definitely a dish I would make again. 

Because it's grilled this is best on a nice summer evening.  The salsa will cool you down.  It would be fun to add a bit more spice to either it or the fish.

Based on the MyRecipes.com rating method I give this one 3 out of 5 stars for a Good, Solid Recipe rating. 

Recipes: Autumn Soup

About five years ago, I purchased the 1971 Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library at a yard sale. I think I paid $5. I doubt that I have all of the hundreds of cards that came with the original product, but most of them are here, and the green, plastic box that holds everything is still in excellent condition. I like cooking. I don't do it any too often, but I do enjoy cooking--and, when it happens, it's frequently a recipe on one of these cards that I work up. So, it was an outstanding yard-sale pickup.

Monday afternoon last week, the girl and I were playing around the house, and she spied the Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library in the kitchen. We got it down, dumped out all of the cards in the living room and played various sorting and throwing games in the floor. Along the way, the photograph for Autumn Soup caught my eye.

I love that big tomato sitting in the middle of the brown soup.

So I whipped up a version of the soup on Tuesday. We're vegetarians, so I didn't use the ground beef. I put in more onion and potatoes than the recipe called for (a couple of white onions, three red-skin potatoes). Also, I added ginger, a bit of butter and a couple of cubes of beefish vegetarian bouillon. Plus, I used a 28-ounce can of stewed whole tomatoes (instead of fresh), and I heated until transluscent all of the onion, ginger and celery in olive oil in the bottom of my soup pan before adding anything else. Other than that, I pretty much followed Betty Crocker's plan of attack.

Turned out great. The big tomatoes were the stars of the show. Rachel toasted some bread and lathered it with some sort of cheese spread. All three of us have subsequently enjoyed the leftovers.

I would definitely eat Autumn Soup again, but I doubt I'll make it again only because I think it's more fun to make things I've never made before. Next up in the Betty Crocker queue is some sort of battered meats, and I'm also intrigued by a Chef Boyardee sauce-and-boiled eggs recipe that I saw in an old Saturday Evening Post the other day.