4th of July pics!
Happy Birthday, America.
For the last two years, my entire family — wife, two boys and my mom — have gone with friends to see the fireworks in Great Falls, Virginia.
No, they aren’t as amazing as the ones on the National Mall but they are pretty damn close! I snapped a bunch of pics as the sky lit up. They’re below! Hope you had a great 4th!
Pictures look great...grazie, Cristo
RE: Gastronomic connection to the holiday.
Growing up as an Irish-German NYC suburbanite...the go-to holiday food of my youth was: pork hot dogs (my German roots + we kids could run around with the dog/bun in hand), baked pork & beans, potato salad (gotsta have the Irish connection), and sweet corn on the cob.
After the age of 18 (legal age of drinking for early Boomers in New York State), copious amounts of beer was included.
My Manhattan-born parents sloshed sauerkraut on their dogs (took me until my late teens to acquire the taste). I applied mustard, catsup, relish and/or chopped onions.
I find it amusing that today that some New Yorkers think catsup as an abomination on a hot dog. Me thinks they're secretly Second Cityites or from somewhere else
My German-immigrant grandparents from the Upper Rhine River (either French who spoke German or Germans who spoke French), lived on Manhattan's Lower East Side, cheek and jowl next to the then Chinatown district, the ethnicity that invented the tomato-based "kôe-chiap" a sweet and sour concoction. Their homeland also like that combo in pickles and peppers.
In our household, catsup was available for hot dogs, hamburgers, scrambled eggs, french fries/home fries, Chinese egg rolls, and various sandwiches.
[BTW - unlike German/Scottish Trump, who eats top quality well-done steaks slopped with catsup -- our German/Irish family ate our occasional steaks rare/medium rare slathered with butter.]
One last point --- the "Sabrette Hot Dog Carts" found at hundreds of Manhattan street corners when I was a kid had bottles of catsup. So if the condiment is such an abomination, why is it ubiquitous at so many NYC locations??
Cristo,
After I attended college in a predominantly Italian urban neighborhood, my go-to hot-dog type sandwich became one with "sweet and hot sausages (perhaps sliced meatballs), roasted red and green peppers, with a dollop of red sauce, on a fresh or lightly toasted bun."
As the Hoosierland boy, John Mellencamp, would sing, "Ain't That America?"
Thanks for the pictures! We tend to enjoy them on tv as our days of crowd fighting and bugs/bug spray, are over for the fireworks. Our son was not a big fan and would rather have stayed at whatever bbq we were at. It will be his turn when he becomes a parent, suck it up and deal with it. LOL.