On the Horizon: Battle Lines are Drawn

As a person I believe we all should be respectful of one another. I know my beliefs do not align with everyone else’s, and that is alright. I have friends who have different religious backgrounds or political affiliations than I do. But we realize we have differing opinions, we can appreciate and respect others’ opinions, without fear of retaliation and that is what makes our country great.

What I have an issue with is when people with differing opinions have no respect for others or their views. What is worse is when those people or groups slander others, and their facts are skewed, made up or are simply false due to lack of knowledge. As a journalist we are constantly under pressure to fact check to get the story right. I feel if someone is going to “report” on something they should be held to the same standard.

The attack on Oklahoma hog producers by the Humane Society of the United States is a perfect example of this. They conducted one of their “undercover” missions to gather footage and information and claimed Seaboard, and other large hog operations, were conducting inhumane production practices. Their target was the use of gestation crates. In their gruesome video, HSUS claimed the sows are kept in the crates their whole lives. They went on to say that crates threaten the lives of the hogs.

Any person who has been around the livestock industry, especially hogs, will know how false these accusations are. The crates are used to protect sows from fighting. If you have been around sows you know they will fight for blood. Additionally, sows that farrow outside of crates are more likely to step on and lay on their pigs, resulting in severe injuries and death of piglets. To me that is much more inhumane.

The bottom line is if you do not know about production agriculture it is time to stop telling those who have been doing it all of their lives the “right way” to do things. Producers are tasked with the enormous responsibility with feeding and clothing the world. That responsibility will not be accomplished if everyone keeps sticking their nose in and offering their “expertise” when they are not aware of the whole situation. Are there bad apples in agriculture? Absolutely! But let’s not punish those who are doing it right.

In this week’s video blog we take a look at how the urban-rural divide affects production agriculture and what is being done to help bridge that gap.

~ Andy Barth

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Taco Mountain: They Came, They Assembled, They Conquered

"Burachos" Pork Filling for Taco Mountain

Back in the day when my children were pre-teens, “Grandma” found a recipe in the newspaper called “Taco Mountain.”  Grandma is Mick’s mom, Ruth Roberts.  And Ruth Roberts has done one thing very well since I’ve known her now for 28 years –  she feeds large groups of people and doesn’t really get anxious about the prospect.  At all.

Case in point: A tradition at the Roberts’ home on the 4th of July is to barbeque a large portion of meat and have lots of people over to enjoy the day together.  I’m not talking ten or twenty pounds of meat, folks…I’m talking one hundred, 150 or even close to 200 pounds of meat.  But that’s another story for another day.  Back to Taco Mountain…

Basically this “recipe” is simply instructions to make a large amount of ingredients we in the South or Midwest generally see together on a plate when having tacos, and then let everyone just build their own.  Hers called for shredded lettuce, seasoned taco meat, rice, chopped tomatoes, etc.

Some families have “build your own nachos” bar, or something else very similar.  But since the time of the first serving of Taco Mountain at Grandma’s house in Jenks, Oklahoma, our own family also adopted the tradition.  And, since our normal Sunday evening dinner was going to include extra guests last night, “Taco Mountain” became the evening choice for service.

Our Taco Mountain has morphed, evolved and changed quite a bit since our first time at Grandmas.  And YOUR Taco Mountain could look completely different than ours.  But in case you’ve not tried this particular approach to serving guests before, I’ll share OUR approach to give you a starting point.  Who KNOWS where your own creativity will lead you!?

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Taco Mountain, al la the Mick and Kelly Roberts Family Approach

  • Make seasoned ground or shredded beef.  We use local organic beef, and I simply use McCormick low-sodium taco seasoning.  I usually double the recipe and use two packets for large crowds.
  • You can also include chicken or pork.  Last night I made the pork I created for a recipe contest called “Tacos Burachos.”  I love that recipe.  Here is the link if you’d like to check it out. I love the tang from the tequila and lime mixed with the smoke of the chipotle tomatoes.
  • Homemade guacamole:  Continue reading Taco Mountain: They Came, They Assembled, They Conquered

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Explore the You

Have you ever gone exploring?     ex  plore /ik’splor/ v.  travel in or through an area in order learn about or familiarize oneself with it.

Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier He had his gun, 'ol Betsy'

I have explored the winding banks of the Washita River and Cache Creek; I have wandered down meandering cow paths and crawled through a thousand barbed-wire fences on my way to nowhere. Daniel Boone had “Tick-Licker” and Davy Crockett carried “`ol Betsy”— I carried Ole Stickie.  You won’t find a lot of tigers or lions or bears around Apache, Oklahoma anymore. I killed `em all. I supposed I had hunted them to extinction by the time I was 11 or 12 years old. I did a lot of exploring by then.

The neighborhood boys had a favorite place to play called The Canyon. In reality it was only a 200 yard stretch of ditch. It was about fifteen or twenty feet deep and maybe fifteen feet wide. When you’re a kid, a place like that is a canyon.  One end of the canyon became a dumping ground for old cars. The canyon held quite a number of autos that were piled on top of each other, and the pile created a network of passages that little boys could crawl through. I can still remember the smell of the musty, rotting fabric from the car seats. It was dark down in the bottom of this stack of cars, but not too dark.

Explore?

No parent today would ever allow a kid to have that kind of adventure. But hey! We were just doing what we were supposed to be doing, playing outside. (An advantage of growing up in a small town in the 1960’s, we would leave and be gone for hours, sometimes drifting a couple miles from home. Mom didn’t worry, we were in a community.)

The Topic: Go Exploring –  N.T. Wright suggests that we should explore four areas of our inner life in order to more fully understand and experience the Christian life.

1) Our longing for justice;

2) Our quest for spirituality;

3) Our hunger for relationships;

4) Our delight in beauty.

Justice:  I’m certain that we want justice in the world. We want earthly matters to be put-to-right. We would like for things on the playground to “be fair” too. As we study the life of Jesus, we see that so much of His work is pointing out the difference between the values of God’s Kingdom and and the values of worldly authorities (governments and religious leaders). Jesus is in the business of putting things to right. I want to explore more about my role in joining Christ to seek justice and just-ness.

Spiritulality: The goals of secularization seem to be set on quenching the quest for spirituality. Too many weird things happen with people in that quest and too many impractical “isms” are born there. How many ways are there to be spiritual? Jesus offers the way that is both practical and true.

Relationships: How many books have been written about relationships? Religion is that concern with vertical relationship and the horizontal relationship is how we find one another.  It’s always great to allow Jesus to lead us in the How Department of relationships.

Beauty:  My wife loves sunsets. She adores them like no person I have ever known. She is gifted in her ability to see beauty in the things we have going on most each and every day. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If that is true, it is true because Jesus addresses it in His words, “the lamp of the body is the eye, when your eye is good, your whole body will be filled with light.” (Matthew 6:22).

It’s important to study the Bible. Go exploring from time to time. Explore your inner life. Get yourself a coffee or a beverage of your choice. Open your Bible and read the words of Jesus. It is a wonderful adventure.

The most wonderful thing about the Living Word, is that you can seek to understand the Scriptures, and be amazed, because the Scriptures understand you.

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Giving Our Vets a Fighting Chance

Too often you hear stories of our war veterans coming home to simply be forgotten. We welcome them with open -arms when they return, but often times we forget that these heroes may have trouble stepping back into civilian life.
A courageous program at Oklahoma State University, one of the few of its kind, is changing all that. The veteran entrepreneurship program brings disabled veterans from across the country together for eight intense days of training.

In this week’s video blog we meet program participants both new and old and learn how they are changing their businesses and lives for the better.

~Courtenay DeHoff

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Not-So-Newlyweds: Couldn’t See the Mountains for the Snowflakes

Since I write this series of posts called “The Not-So-Newlyweds Adventures,” one might assume I lead an adventurous life. While I am committed to finding/making adventure in the most ordinary of circumstances, lately Luke and I have felt like we are in a rut.

A boredom rut.

We are young and don’t have kids, yet we find ourselves crashing in front of the TV at the end of a day, wishing we had more interesting things going on in our lives.

For a while, we were unfairly blaming Oklahoma for this. Our conversations centered mostly on the weather, lamenting that outside activities can be challenging. In the winter, no one wants to be outside because it’s too cold, and there aren’t any mountains to make it worth our while. In the summer, it’s too hot to walk outside without needing a shower, which tends to usher us quickly back into the nearest air-conditioned haven. And when the temperature is perfect, the wind is what gets you. It will simultaneously destroy your hair and zap your enthusiasm for the outdoors.

Logically, our thought was that we should escape to somewhere inherently more interesting and less bent toward flighty weather patterns. In an effort to act on that goal, we recently took a trip to Boulder, Colorado. We got a little more “adventure” than we asked for, but I think we learned a bit about how to live our normal days.

If you happen to be a weather aficionado, you may have noticed a snowstorm that hit the Denver area the first weekend of February involving record snowfall that Friday. Undaunted by reports of “blizzard-like” conditions in Western Kansas, we took off on Thursday afternoon. We probably should have been, well, daunted by the idea of driving through it, but we had a hotel reservation that couldn’t be cancelled that close to check-in. So, blizzard or not, we packed up the Honda and said a few prayers. The snow started when we got to the Colorado border on I-70 headed west from Kansas. That last leg of the trip took much longer than it should have because of icy, snow-packed roads and limited visibility, but we arrived in Boulder safely and just before midnight. As we fell into bed that night, dreams of majestic mountains greeting us the next morning danced in our heads.

Instead, what we woke up to on Friday looked much like what we went to sleep to on Thursday: Continue reading Not-So-Newlyweds: Couldn’t See the Mountains for the Snowflakes

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Showcasing Red Dirt culture ~ authored and managed by contributors with connections to the great state of Oklahoma.