• This matter concerns the President’s action to remove Hampton Dellinger from his position as Special Counsel for the Office of Special Counsel. Dellinger challenged his without-cause removal in the District Court for the District of Columbia. See 5 U. S. C. §1211(b). On February 12, 2025, the District Court entered a temporary restraining order (TRO) providing that Dellinger should remain in office until the court ruled on his motion for a preliminary injunction. The District Court has scheduled a hearing on that motion for February 26, the day that the TRO expires. See Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 65(b)(2).
    —Bessent v. Dellinger, 2025 604 U.S.

    Dellinger was fired. He went to the District Court the same day and demanded that he be reinstated, claiming the President didn’t have the authority to fire him. He did this at the end of the day on Friday. The judge in the case issued the TRO the same day.

    The government appealed to the Circuit court, which kicked it back down because the case was in an interlocutory state. I.e., there wasn’t a final judgment in the case. If this status were to continue, this district court would have the ability to block the president’s authority to fire for the course of the case.

    For rogue inferior courts and people like Dellinger, this is a win. All they need to do is drag out the case for as long as they can. Stopping The People’s agenda.

    The TRO will expire on the 26th. The District Court will be hearing arguments for a Preliminary Injunction on the 26th. We can expect the District Court to issue their order on the 26th.

    Given the activist tendencies of this judge, he is likely to grant the Preliminary Injunction.

    If the Preliminary Injunction is issued, the President’s ability to fire anybody will be on hold until this case is fully resolved.

    Any other challenges to being fired will be filed in DC District Court. They will all be assigned to this judge. This judge will then put them under the same PI until final judgment.

    In light of the foregoing, the application to vacate the order of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia presented to THE CHIEF JUSTICE and by him referred to the Court is held in abeyance until February 26, when the TRO is set to expire.
    —id.
    An abeyance is a temporary suspension of activity while awaiting the resolution of some other proceeding without which the activity in abeyance cannot continue.

    In the case of a plea in abeyance, the defendant enters a conditional plea of guilty which is then held in abeyance subject to a set of conditions. If the defendant fulfills these conditions, the charges are dropped. If the defendant fails to complete the conditions, the guilty plea is entered. For example, a defendant may be required to undergo a drug addiction treatment program or have a guilty plea entered.

    Appeals can also be held in abeyance, usually to await the outcome of another court case which concerns similar issues.
    —abeyance, LII / Legal Information Institute, (last visited Feb. 23, 2025)

    The Court has said that they will not issue an opinion until there is a Preliminary Injunction. This is still a live issue before the Supreme Court.

    The two most liberal justices, Sotomayor and Jackson, would just have denied the vacatur.

    Justice and Gorsuch would have issued an opinion, rather than waiting for the PI.

    I won’t quote Gorsuch, but I love how his dissent is “When the plain text of the Constitution is implicated, it is the plaintiff’s burden to prove a tradition firmly based on this Nation’s historical regulations”. Gorsuch then cites numerous cases from the founding through until now which show a tradition of the courts not having the authority to reinstate fired federal employees.

    When fired federal employees have sued for relief, they have been granted back pay, but never have they been reinstated.

    I will quote the slap down of the rogue inferior district court:

    The district court grappled with none of these complications before ordering Mr. Dellinger’s reinstatement. And if there are answers to the questions its remedial order raises, they appear nowhere in that court’s decision. Accordingly, I would vacate the district court’s order and remand with instructions to consider the “boundaries of traditional equitable relief.” Grupo Mexicano, 527 U. S., at 322.
    —Bessent v. Dellinger, 2025 604 U.S.
            

  • That would be me.

    Everything finally came together with the new system. Then I went and messed it all up.

    The motherboard has a weak Ethernet. It is a 10/100 Ethernet, which is NOT a problem for a management interface. When I upgrade the box to have full redundancy, it will get a dual port fiber card.

    What it does mean is that my Wi-Fi to it via a USB dongle is faster than if I were to plug it in.

    Once the box was in position, I connected via Wi-Fi and finished configuration. I tested all the connectivity, and it all just worked.

    At that point, I told it to join the cluster. It did with pleasure, and brought the cluster to a stop.

    Did you catch my mistake? Yeah, I left that dongle in.

    At the bottom of the barrel, we have 10base-T. I have some old switches in boxes that might support that. Above that is 100base-T, which is a good management speed. We can move data for upgrades and restores, but not the fastest. Some of my switches and routers do not support 100baseT.

    Above that is where we start to get into “real” speeds. Gigabit Ethernet, or GigE. I’ve now moved to the next step, which is ports supporting 10G over fiber or cable, depending on the module I use. The next step-up would be 25Gbit. I’m not ready for that leap of cost.

    Wi-Fi sits at around 200Mbit/s. Faster than “fast Ethernet” also known as 100base-T, but not at “real” speeds. Additionally, Wi-Fi is shared space, which means that it doesn’t always give that much.

    So what happened? The Ceph(NAS) cluster is configured over an OVN logical network on 10.1.0.0/24. All Ceph nodes live on this network. Clients that consume Ceph services will also attach to this network. No issues.

    When you configure an OVN node, you tell the cluster what IP address to use for tunnels back to the new node. All well and good.

    The 10G network connection goes to the primary router and from there to the rest of the ceph nodes. One of the subnets holds my work server. My work server provides 20Tb to the ceph cluster.

    On that subnet are also the wireless access points.

    So the new node correctly sent packets to all the ceph nodes via the 10G interface, EXCEPT for traffic to my work server. Why? Because the 10G had a 1 hop cost, while the Wi-Fi had a 0 hop cost. By routing standards, the 200Mbit Wi-Fi was the closer, faster, connection than the 1 hop 10G connections.

    When I found the connection problem and recognized the issue, I unplugged the Wi-Fi dongle from the new node and all my issues cleaned up, almost instantly.

            

  • For somebody who makes many grammar errors, who can’t speel worth a damn, and in general suffers dyslexia-driven writing issues, I am obsessed with communication.

    My mentor taught me the “four parts of communication”.

    1. What I say
    2. What you hear
    3. What you say
    4. What I hear

    If there is a mismatch between any of the two steps, then communication has failed. Only I know what I intend to communicate. Only I can do the work to verify, through what you say, and I hear, that I was able to communicate my concept correctly.

    Part of the task of communication is agreeing on the meaning of words and of being able to identify what you are addressing.

    If I use a word with one meaning, and you use the same word with a different meaning, it is unlikely that we are communicating when either of us use that word.

    In the late 70s and early 80s, the feminists were becoming very vocal. They were making claims as to how good they were and how little they needed men for.

    To put some perspective on this, in 1973, Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in a tennis match to prove women were as good as men or better. She was 29, at the top of her game. Bobby Riggs was 55 and most definitely not at the top of his game.

    But, at the time, we couldn’t actually talk about how men were different from women and how some jobs were better suited to men. We couldn’t because to try to discuss the issue would get you slammed as a male chauvinist pig.

    By controlling the language, the progressives were able to stop any dissent or even discussion about the issues from a male perspective.

    It took a new term to come into existence before that discussion could take place. “Politically Correct”.

    Once the term was available to us, we could actually begin the discussions that were needed, on equal footing.

    Affirmative Action is another one of those topics. The phrasing is wonderful. Everybody wants to be affirmative.

    How dare you want to discriminate against blacks by taking away affirmative action.

    We can’t, or couldn’t discuss the harm that was coming from affirmative action because doing so would get you labeled “racist” or worse. The topic was forbidden. Not because it shouldn’t have been discussed, but because it lived in a protected state.

    The new language is “DEI”. We are trying to discuss it. But we are being shouted down as bigots, racists and misogynists.

    Now consider a current topic, plane crashes.

    First, if you look up the NTSB numbers for plane crashes, you will find that more planes crashed in January 2024 than in January 2025. Not what we are talking about.

    One of the questions that came out of the crash in DC was the sex of the pilots.

    Why?

    It was because there are people, myself included, that believe that the pilots of the helicopter were not qualified to be flying that Blackhawk in that airspace at that time.

    Why? Because they caused a fucking midair collision!

    They messed up and killed people. We KNOW that the helicopter was above its max authorized height and had no pilot input to avoid the jet. We KNOW that the jet had nearly full elevators and a 9-degree roll to the left to avoid the helicopter.

    So we ask, why were they allowed on that flight?

    One of the first things that came out was that the pilot was female.

    Was the collision because she was female?

    There is nothing in the record, the facts, that indicate that her sexual organs had anything to do with the crash.

    But that is only half of the question. The rest of the question is, “Was she qualified?”

    This raises further questions, “Were the standards lowered to allow more women to ‘qualify’?” and “Were better qualified males passed over to have more female pilots?”

    These are all questions that should be asked.

    We are having trouble asking them because to ask them is to be yelled at for something that was not said.

    What are we being accused of? We are being accused of saying that the crash(es) occurred because they were women.

    The media talking heads make the claim that they have the secret decoder ring that allows them to translate our questions into what we “really” mean. And what we “really” mean is that women are not qualified to be pilots. We DIDN’t say that.

    But it gets worse. That message gets out there. And some on the right are not careful with their words. They might be attempting to ask the same thing we are. But it comes out as “because they were women”.

    As soon as that happens, there are a hundred NPCs to claim that that dogcatcher speaks for every conservative, for every Trump supporter.

    And those on the left believe them. As Ally has pointed out, one of the difficult things for her to accept as being right of center, is that we aren’t in lock step. That we don’t support everybody with an R behind their name or a MAGA hat on their head.

    That duffus over there can have his crazy ideas. I don’t agree with him.

            

  • It’s time to start thinking about gardening. This is not just a pleasant skill that yields tomatoes. It’s a post-apocalyptic skill that is absolutely necessary. Have you ever tried just hunting and gathering? If not, don’t bother; there’s a reason we cultivated plants. Learning to garden now, when we have ample food at the grocery store (because even a lightly stocked grocery store is ample, quite frankly), is imperative. This is not a skill you can learn after the fact. The learning curve is so sharp that it requires early adoption and constant practice.

    There are lots of easy plants to grow in a new garden, and I’ll talk about them next week. This week, I want to talk about planning. First off, it’s the best part of this part of winter (the crappy, cold, damp, windy part). You get to huddle near the fireplace and look through seed catalogs (on or offline, your choice), and dream. Dreams are seeds of the mind, after all. Stage one of growing food is literally dreaming about it.

    Make a rough map of your yard. This is important because there are several issues that you need to address:

    • Where in your yard gets full sun? partial sun? no sun at all?
    • What’s the type of soil you have (sandy, rich, damp, clay, etc)? You may have to amend your soil to grow anything, so you need to know this in advance.
    • What kind of garden do you want to try (raised beds? containers? little pots? big pots? half an acre plowed by hand?), and how can you do it to best utilize the sun you get?
    • What is your Plant Hardiness Zone? Find out on the USDA website. As an example, I’m 5b, which means something. More on that later.
    • How much time do you want to spend on your garden? Remember it’s not just planting. You also have to factor in weeding, watering, fertilizing in some cases, weeding, helping plants with frames or structures, weeding…
    • What will you eat? Don’t bother growing something you know your family won’t eat unless you have a very good reason for doing so. Plant what you’ll eat.

    When you pick out your best spot (with 6+ hours of sunlight a day, if at all possible), you’ll want to sketch it out in a notebook or using a computer program. I can’t draw a straight line to save my life so I use programs online. There are several:

    (more…)

            

  • Four Steps Forward

    Yesterday was supposed to be the end of a long battle with hardware. I had used the tools at hand to modify the case to hold the motherboard correctly. All that remained was to plug it in.

    Yeah, not so much.

    Access to the lower basement is via bulkhead doors. In case you didn’t know, we had about a foot of snow with ice over the top. When I went to access the basement, it was obvious I would have to dig it out first. No big deal.

    Except the snow shovels are plastic, and they don’t bite into the ice covered snow. Plus it was freezing.

    On Thursday, I remembered I had an entrenching tool which would be perfect. Thursday, I also learned that I had a cheap knock-off of an entrenching tool. You are supposed to be able to use an entrenching tool as a pick or hoe. The metal of the pivot plates deformed under pressure.

    I got everything open. I pulled cable, ran the cable to the primary router, hooked up everything. All good.

    Having done that, it was just a question of configuring the router and turning on the new box.

    Which failed to bring up the fiber connection.

    After three hours of work, it finally came down to a bad network card. Today I’ll be putting in a new card, and we’ll see if everything “just works”.

    Kash is King

    That is one of the headlines I just read. I am extremely interested in what happens today.

    Judges Over Stepping

    There are now judges threatening the President of the United States with contempt if he doesn’t bend to their unelected will. It appears that they feel that, as a district judge, they have the authority to usurp the powers of the President.

    But Congress!

    So here’s the low down. Congress can pass whatever bills they want. The President can sign or veto those bills, creating laws.

    Those laws are in effect until they are repealed or stopped by court order.

    Consider Congress passing a bill making it illegal to misgender mentally ill people. The previous puppet signed that bill into law.

    This makes it the law of the land that you cannot say what you wish to in regard to that class of mentally ill people.

    Is this law constitutional? No, it is not. Yet, that law can be enforced until it is enjoined. There is another legal term which might be “vacator”.

    The process to remove an unconstitutional law starts with finding somebody with standing to challenge the law. From there, the case works its way through the legal system until someone wins.

    The law in question violates the First Amendment. It will be struck down. How long it takes, what the inferior courts decided, and what games the state plays are all delaying tactics. The law would be struck down.

    Now consider a different bill. One that requires the President to get congressional approval to fire someone in the executive branch. The bill sounds good. It passes both houses and is signed into law by an idiot.

    You and I look at each other and yell, “That’s unconstitutional! Article II! The investment clause!”

    You rush over to the courthouse to file a suit challenging the new law. I don’t because I’m broke. You just committed to a multi-year lawyer bill.

    Once the court takes up the case, the state will step in to defend the law. The very first thing that will happen is that they will point out that you have no standing. The only person who would have standing is the President of the United States.

    This is what was done. Congress has passed several laws infringing on the authority of the President to fire people in the executive branch. Every one of those infringements is unconstitutional.

    Until Trump 1.0, this wasn’t an issue. It wasn’t an issue because the courtesy of the appointed heads of the different departments within the Executive branch submit their resignations to the new president before he takes office.

    In 2017, there were many people that should have been fired who were not. And some fought back against being fired. It made a considerable splash in the media.

    This time, Trump’s team was ready. They are fighting back. These cases are going to the Supreme Court. The only question is when the Court will rule.

    Question of the Week

    Two, actually.

    The first is what types of articles make you click off the site?

    The second is what types of articles make you want to read more or want more of?

            

  • It is difficult for me to make friends. In general, my friends have come from my place of work or from my lady introducing me to people.

    I make the effort when I’m out. I just don’t like people enough to be out and about.

    I’ve been watching the pain that Ally has been going through as she has realized that she is now right of center.

    It hurts her.

    People on the left lives in such a self – created bubble that anything that threatens that bubble is unacceptable.

    One of our acquaintances is full on TDS. At a recent event, they were going on and on about how horrible Trump is. But, they stepped way over the line when they attacked anybody who voted for him or supports him. They announced, proudly, that people who voted for, or support Trump will not be accepted around her.

    The fear that exists and the need to not offend means that nobody who disagreed with her spoke up. This was a friendly gathering. To take up arms (or words) against her would have been unacceptable. Those that don’t have TDS just grit their teeth and stay silent.

    The other day I was talking about an event in congress where a representative intentionally “misgendered” a trans person.

    For me, it was a big middle finger to the “Trans Agenda”.

    I took joy in that gesture. For Ally, my glee was hurtful to her. She still runs on emotion with a strong backdrop of facts and reasoning.

    She was also hurting because this representative had an R after her name. She would rather not support somebody who she thought was being hurtful to somebody. She felt she was being forced to support this representative because she now was a conservative.

    No, she didn’t have to support that person. This isn’t the left.

    The jackals out there are eating their own. Everyone who doesn’t agree with them is evil. Everyone who isn’t in lockstep with them is a fascist. Everyone who isn’t attacking Elon and Trump must be a NAZI.

    In a short skit I watched the other day, the person says they are leaving the Democrat party. They say how they are still the same person, but that the Democrat party no longer represents them. That they will still be friends with their former friends. That this doesn’t change anything between them, that they had been friends since kindergarten, they will be friends long into the future.

    The “democrat” responds with, “The last time I looked, I’m not friends with Nazi’s”.

            

  • It’s tough, being new to the Right. I have a lot of Left habits that need to go. I was in the process of getting rid of many of them anyhow, because they no longer served me, but it’s becoming important.

    The Left fights everything with emotion. Don’t agree with a legal standing? Cry at it. Have a problem with a cop or a sheriff? Scream and flail your arms. Care to protest oil drilling, farming methods you disagree with, or a politician’s third wife? Lay on the road and have a tantrum.  They revel in their emotions, and I struggle with it. A lot of why I moved “right of left” was because of this behavior.

    The Right tends to make claims that they’re entirely fact driven. It’s not true. A good portion of the Right seems to want to base their facts on a book written by human beings (however inspired) over a thousand years, translated (badly) many times in the interim, and tend to cherry pick the parts they want to use. While I consider the Bible to be an inspirational writing, likely inspired by the Divine, I have enough theological training to know that it wasn’t written by God (or Goddess, or whatever). It’s a great book to use as a moral compass. It has a great outline of moral and ethical laws that apply to a person individually, and specifically to the Jewish (and later the Christian) people. But it isn’t fact. It *contains* facts in some places, but it is not, itself, fact.

    That said, the Right does a much better job of putting together coherent factual arguments. They are much less likely to let emotions interfere with their stance. I don’t expect to see someone on the Right break down in cringe-worthy tears because they’re being questioned about something.

    I struggle with emotions. I am an emotional person. I grew up in a household where I was forced to sublimate any emotions I had. As a child who was being verbally and emotionally abused, I quickly learned to stifle any emotional response. When I left the house of horrors I grew up in, I decided I would never squelch my emotions again, and so I set myself up to emotionally vomit on everyone around me. While it was important that I learn to emote in a healthy fashion, that was NOT the right way to go about it.

    So when I’m talking with someone on the Right about things, and I know that I have a good argument, I sometimes lose track of the words I need. The emotions I feel are overwhelming, and I react rather than act. I have the ability to create logical arguments, but if I care about the outcome, my emotions tend to get in the way. This is an ongoing personal issue that I’ve been working on for years.

    (more…)

            

  • We’ve talked about the process of litigation in a civil suit.

    A complaint is filed. In the complaint, the plaintiffs state what they are challenging, why they believe the law supports them, what harm they are suffering, and what relief they seek.

    The facts in this case are that on Friday, February 7, 2025, Trump “fired” Dellinger. Dellinger was “Special Counsel”. Being a legal eagle, Dellinger filed suit in federal district court to stop Trump from firing him. Before the government could even respond to the filing, the court held a hearing.

    The court issued an “administrative stay” on Trump’s action. This is a made up term. A Court can issue injunctions, a TRO is a type of injunction, and they can issue judgments. They can also stay injunctions and judgments. They can’t “stay” things outside the court system.

    So “administrative stay” is actually a TRO but using language to hide the fact.

    The court’s order required the government to “recognize Dellinger as Special Counsel” and to let him back into the office. It also required the acting Special Counsel to be removed from the position.

    That TRO ran through February 13th.

    The pending TRO motion raises its share of difficulties. For one thing, it would be difficult for Dellinger to show a likelihood of success in light of Collins v. Yellen, 594 U.S. 220 (2021), and Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, 591 U.S. 197 (2020), which held that Article II of the Constitution prevents Congress from restricting the President’s ability to remove officers who serve as the sole heads of agencies that wield significant executive power. For another, it would be difficult for Dellinger to show irreparable injury during whatever modest amount of time may be necessary to adjudicate an expedited motion for preliminary injunction, either to himself or to an agency that would otherwise have a presidentially designated acting head. The entry of a TRO, no less than the entry of a preliminary injunction, would require showings of both a likelihood of success on the merits and interim irreparable injury. See, e.g., 11A C. Wright, A. Miller & E. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 2951 n.45 (3d ed.) (collecting cases). And the district court, in the order before us today, did not address likelihood of success and made only a tentative finding of possible irreparable injury.

    This is exactly right. The Winter factors order the courts to first look at the likelihood of success on the merits. The inferior courts are required to do so. If the district court judge and called this a “TRO” he would have had to use the Winter factors.

    By using a made up term for TRO, the judge attempted to avoid the clear instructions of the Supreme Court on how to decide if an injunction should be issued.

    To put this in perspective, Winter factors are to court cases what the four rules of gun safety are to gun culture. If somebody doesn’t fallow the four rules, they are at best ignorant, at worse willfully dangerous to themselves and others.

    For the court to ignore Winter factors falls into the same category as pointing a loaded pistol at your junk and seeing how fast you can take up the slack in your trigger.

    Katsas, the Circuit Judge writing above, says that the Winter factors were not used. The District judge did a shit job. Then went on to say that this case was not ripe to be heard. That Trump needed to wait until a TRO or a preliminary injunction was issued.

    This is bogus.

    Any time a Constitutional protected right or authority is delayed, irreparable harm has been done. A right delayed is a right denied.

    The district judge has gone rogue.

    The Trump administration was having none of this. They reached out to the Supreme Court, via their emergency docket, 24A790 to vacate the district court’s order.

    So what authority did The People grant the President?

    The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. Article II, § 1, U.S. Constitution.

    The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

    He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
    — Article II, § 2, U.S. Constitution

    He is the boss of the executive branch. There doesn’t seem to be much limiting him. The limits are for Treaties, appointments of Ambassadors, public Ministers and Consuls, Supreme Court justices, and all other Officers of the United States.

    Dellinger is an officer of the United States.

    The Constitution does not explicitly lay out that the President can fire anybody. On the other hand, it has long been recognized that the authority to hire comes with the authority to fire.

    What is the argument of Dellinger as to why SCOTUS should not vacate the order? That it would be granting an exception to the general rule that TRO’s can’t be appealed.

    Amazing, the state seems to appeal any TRO that goes against them. But now TRO’s can’t be appealed?

    Dellinger has not shown he has been harmed, much less irreparably harmed. It is unlikely that he will succeed on the merits of his case. Yet, he wants to let an inferior court stop the President while the case winds its way through the halls of (in)justice.

            

  • I purchased my first motorcycle when I was in the 7th grade. It was a dirt bike, a Yamaha MX80.

    I feel in love with riding. The only issue I had was that there was no gas station on base. To get gas for my bike I would have had to walk a mile and a half from the gate to the gas station and then walk that same mile and a half back to the gate to get back on my bike.

    Or I could have ridden my bicycle to the station and back.

    The other option was that I could ride to the closest point to the gas station. There was a hole in the fence.

    So I would do that. I would take the gas tank off the bike, carry it through the hole, across the road and fill it.

    It cost $0.25 to put a gallon of gas in the tank.

    When we moved, it was a little easier to get gas. I could ride the bike across one road to get gas.

    I sold that bike when gas went over a dollar per gallon. I couldn’t afford it.

    About this time, Jimmy Carter managed to fuck over the economy to the point where there was a perceived shortage of gas.

    This caused the price of gas to go up. It leads to gas shortages and other things.

    The congress responded with exactly the wrong answer. The put a nationwide speed limit in place.

    They decided that the maximum legal speed should be 55MPH.

    Now, if you have ever lived on the East Coast, you know that the difference between 55MPH and 65MPH really doesn’t mean much. Traffic is bad. If you are lucky, you might shave 5 minutes off a two-hour trip.

    On the other hand, in the Midwest and west, the difference between 55MPH and 65 or 70 MPH can make a huge difference. The distances being traveled and the ability to maintain those speeds make it a significant difference.

    This song and the movie based on it are part of the culture of rebellion that was happening as The People pushed back against the 55MPH mandate.

    In this video, you can see that the gigantic crime The Rubber Duck committed was driving 63MPH in a 55MPH zone.

    We, The People, are pushing back. Thank goodness.

            

  • Chicken and dumplings are a staple in my house. They’re something in between a soup and a stew, and I usually get silly and call it Stoup. They’re incredibly easy to make, though it takes a bit of effort until you’ve learned the method. It’s filling, delicious, and you’ll get requests.

    Ingredients for the stoup:

    • 6 to 8 oz of uncooked chicken per person
    • enough water to cover the chicken
    • salt, pepper, oregano, thyme, and rubbed sage to taste
    • 1 medium carrot, diced small
    • 1 small onion, diced small
    • 1 large rib of celery, diced small
    • a teaspoon or so of butter, margarine, or olive oil
    • white wine to deglaze the pan

    Ingredients for the dumplings:

    • 3 cups all-purpose flour
    • 1.5 teaspoons salt
    • 1 cup milk
    • 1 egg

    The chicken for this recipe can be done in two different ways. First, you can use bone-in chicken pieces and make it like “pulled chicken,” meaning you cook it, then remove it from the water and shred it up until it’s the size of bits you like. Second, you can use boneless, skinless chicken breast or thighs, in which case you’re going to cube your chicken into bite size pieces. Regardless of which method you choose to use, you should sprinkle the chicken with salt and pepper, then brown it in a cast iron pan (separate from the one you’ll be making the broth in). Make sure to brown all sides, but remember it doesn’t need to be cooked through. The full cooking happens in the water.

    While you’re browning your chicken in batches, add enough water to a pot that it will cover your chicken when it’s added. It’s okay if you don’t get quite enough in the pot; you can add more after. You just want to get enough in there that you can start heating it up to a boil. As you finish browning chicken parts, put them into the water. Make sure there’s enough water to cover all the chicken completely, but not much more, and then lower it from a boil to a simmer. Add in your spices, about a teaspoon of each for now. You can add more later if needed.

    As your chicken is simmering, dice up your carrot, onion, and celery. Add a bit of fat to the pan you cooked the chicken in, and saute your vegetables until the onions are soft and beginning to clarify. Add a tablespoon or so of a dry white wine to the pan, and stir and scrape well with a wooden spoon. All of the stuff you scrape off the bottom of the pan is “fond” and it’s what makes your stoup delicious. Add the veggies and fond to your chicken and broth.

    Make your dumplings. Add the four and salt into a medium bowl. In a separate bowl or measuring cup, whisk together your milk and egg. Add the liquid to the flour, and mix until it forms a dough. This should be a soft and relatively smooth dough, with very elastic qualities. It may be a bit sticky or tacky, but it shouldn’t stick to the counter when you’re kneading.

    Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface until it’s smooth and elastic. Keeping the counter lightly floured at each stage, you should then roll out your dough so it’s as thick as you like your dumplings to be. If you like your dumplings to be fat and fluffy, you’ll want to roll them out to about a half inch thick. If you want them more like noodles (my preference), roll them to under a quarter inch, basically as smooth and thin as you can manage without the dough sticking to the counter. Cut your dumplings into strips, squares, diamonds, or really any shape you like. you can use a dough cutter, or a knife, or even a rolling pizza cutter. Use a bread scraper to lift the noodles off the counter, dust them well with more flour, and let them rest and dry a bit while the rest of the food is readied.

    When your chicken is thoroughly cooked (about an hour, or longer if you like), pull any boned parts out of the broth. Shred, if you like, and return the chicken to the broth. Bring the broth to a low but steady boil, and begin adding the dumplings to it a little at a time. I usually add about a handful of dumplings, then stir and let them begin to cook. This keeps them from sticking to one another. The flour on the outside of the dumplings will help thicken the gravy in your stoup, too. Cook the dumplings until they’re tender. This can take anywhere from five minutes to 20 minutes, depending on how thick they were rolled and how dry they were when you started. They should be solid throughout, with no doughy interior. Thin ones will taste like fresh noodles (which is essentially what they are).

    If you find that your gravy isn’t thick enough, add a little water or cold broth to a tablespoon of cornstarch, stir until well combined, and then add a bit at a time to the simmering stoup. Repeat until you reach the consistency you prefer. Add in any spices you like, and if you want a fancier look, top each bowl with a sprinkle of fresh minced parsley.

    Serve your chicken and dumplings over a pile of mashed potatoes, rice, or on their own in a bowl with a spoon.