[Granville-Hough] 19 Sep 2009 - Chufas

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:05:21 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Chufas - 19 Sep 2009
 

Chufas.  The Tommy Sullivan kids grew up in the Saratoga and Merry Hell 
area, and I wonder if they grew chufas, an Indian/Spanish word for a 
kind of swamp grass which grew nuts among its roots.  The chufas plant 
was propagated by these nuts, which were completely edible.  They tasted 
something beween a pine nut and a chinquapin.  They were very hard to 
get completely free of the grit among the roots of the parent plant, so 
that you would frequently crunch on some grit as you chewed the nut.  We 
got some chufas and continued to see them come up, year after year.  Our 
hogs soon learned to smell and hunt them.  Hooray for chufas! Long may 
they survive!!!!
    P. S.  According to Google, the chufa is probably an Egyptian plant 
brought by the Moors to Spain.  It is still quite popular in Valencia, 
where it is made into a drink called tiger-nut chufa horchata.  It is 
really nutritious and well-known in the Valencia province.  Mexico also 
has a version which may include other ingredients.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    How Diesel Fuel Disappears.  A great deal of fuss has recently been 
made over the bombing of two fuel trucks filled with diesel fuel which 
the Taliban had hijacked and taken to a place where they could quickly 
sell the fuel.  The big fuss was over the killing of the Afghan 
customers for the fuel, lined up, I suppose with containers to fill, or 
with trucks to load. 
    This reminds me of a similar situation in South Korea in 1947.  One 
did not have to be long in Seoul to realize that our diesel fuel came by 
tanker truck from Inchon, the harbor some 25 miles away.  And we who had 
been exposed to pipelines asked the question: "Why not build an 
underground pipeline down to Inchon and save all those trucks and men 
driving them?  Well, in fact, this had already been done before we got 
there.  The pipeline had been built and the daily usage for Seoul had 
been pumped in at Inchon.  But no diesel fuel arrived in Seoul.  This 
continued for several days until a search team had been sent out to find 
the leaks in the line.   It was surprisingly easy to find those leaks.  
At every ditch or other crossing where the pipe was exposed, a South 
Korean entrepreneur had tapped a hole, "his hole,"  where he could 
collect the fuel and sell it to other South Koreans eager or desperate 
to get  it.
     Let's suppose we bombed one of these tap-holes. We would probably 
have killed one South Korean entrepreneur controlling the tap-hole and 
40 Korean men, women, and children standing in line to buy the fuel. 
    What is the solution?  Don't start a war on the other side of the 
world where you can't even define your strategic goal!  If some 
irresponsible warhawks got us involved involuntarily, cut our losses and 
get out.  The consequencies be damned.  We should have handled Osama bin 
Laden as a criminal case, and not idolized him as a leader of the Muslim 
World.  As for the current problem, we could resettle all the Afghans 
who want to leave that country into Alaska to support Sarah Palin 
cheaper than what it will cost to continue this war.  Grampa.