Friday, December 13, 2019

Shirtliff Balsamic Glazed Chicken

Tonight's dish is an easy chicken thighs in the oven with a sticky sauce. We present it in honor of our hero Deborah Sampson, Revolutionary War, and LGBT hero. Read about this courageous person after the recipe.



Sticky sweet balsamic chicken thighs served with brown rice and vegetables is a welcome meal for autumn. Whisk up this yummy chicken and break out the wet naps!




Ingredients
4 chicken thighs, bone in, skin on
Sauce:
1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
2½ Tbs soy sauce, low sodium
1/3 cup honey
1/3 cup brown sugar, loosely packed *
2 garlic cloves, minced

Instructions



Preheat oven to 350F. Chop up the garlic. Let the chicken set out for 5 minutes to get to room temperature.
spray a small baking dish.




Mix together the balsamic vinegar, brown sugar, soy sauce, honey, and minced garlic. 

Tip: when pouring any syrupy thing, spray the measuring spoon with cooking spray. You will get the right amount and it will be so much easier to clean off. 

Place chicken in baking dish, skin side down. Make sure the chicken highs are close to each other, with no more than 4” between each piece.




Pour over sauce. Bake 30 minutes. Turn chicken over, spoon sauce over.
Bake 20 minutes or until chicken is cooked through. The internal temperature should be around 175 degrees. By this time the sauce should have thickened. Let it rest out of the oven while you fix the vegetables, then spoon sauce over chicken and serve.



Recipe Notes:
*Sugar measurement - To do this, just scoop up brown sugar and level it off. Don't pack it down into the cup then top with more sugar - if you do that, you will use about 30% more sugar.

Calories 475 each piece. Total fat 18g, Saturated fat 5, Cholesterol 254, sodium 872mg, Carbohydrates 26






Serve this with a brown rice (Lower GLYCAEMIC INDEX. Keeps you fuller for longer) and microwave some stir-fry vegetables while the chicken is resting. 



Nice intimate dinner for Master.

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.
To nourish, support and maintain.
To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,
to nurture, assist, and sustain
..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTMvia @amazon


========================




Deborah Sampson (December 17, 1760 – April 29, 1827), was a Massachusetts woman who disguised herself as a man in order to serve in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. She is one of a small number of women with a documented record of military combat experience in that war. She served 17 months in the army under the name "Robert Shirtliff" of Uxbridge, Massachusetts, was wounded in 1782, and was honorably discharged at West Point, New York, in 1783.

Deborah Sampson was born in 1760, in Plympton, Massachusetts, into a family of modest means. Sampson's mother was the great-granddaughter of William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony. Her father abandoned the family. He fled to Maine and took a common-law wife named Martha.

When her mother was unable to provide for her children, so she placed them in the households of friends and relatives, a common practice in 18th-century New England.

Sampson was placed in various homes When she was sent to live with Widow Mary Prince Thatcher, who was then in her eighties, she learned to read. Widow Thatcher wanted Sampson to read Bible verses to her.

Upon the widow's death, Sampson was sent to live with the Jeremiah Thomas family in Middleborough, where she worked as an indentured servant from 1770 to 1778. Although treated well, she was not sent to school like the Thomas children because Thomas was not a believer in the education of women. Sampson was able to learn from Thomas's sons, who shared their school work with her. When her time as an indentured servant was over at age 18, Sampson made a living by teaching school during the summer sessions in 1779 and 1780. She also worked as a highly skilled weaver. During her time teaching and weaving, she boarded with the families that employed her.

Sampson was also reported to have woodworking and mechanical aptitude. Her skills included basket weaving, and light carpentry such as producing milking stools and winter sleds. She was also experienced with fashioning wooden tools and implements including weather vanes, spools for thread, and quills for weaving. She also produced pie crimpers, which she sold door to door.




Sampson was approximately 5 feet 9 inches tall, compared to the average woman of her day, who was around 5 feet, and even the average man, who was 5 feet 6 inches.

Her biographer, Hermann Mann, who knew her personally for many years, implied that she was not thin. He also reported that her breasts were very small, and that she bound them with a linen cloth to hide them during her years in uniform. Mann wrote that "the features of her face are regular; but not the most beautiful." Sampson's appearance — tall, broad, strong, and not delicately feminine — contributed to her success at pretending to be a man.

Mainstream historians have been unwilling to say Deborah Sampson was anything but heterosexual, Keith Stern, author of Queers in History, begs to differ.

Stern writes: "My interpretation of the early biographical material is that Deborah Sampson was a very masculine young girl, who enjoyed taking on the male role throughout her early life. She was so unwilling to get married that she chose to dress as a man and joined the army, where she found herself very attractive to other women. She reciprocated their attentions passionately, and treasured the memory of her romantic affairs with women.

She participated in a marriage with a young white girl, ostensibly to liberate her from Indians, and she continued the relationship, with passionate attachment, long after it was necessary to obtain the girl’s freedom."

In early 1782, Sampson wore men's clothes and joined an Army unit in Middleborough, Massachusetts, under the name Timothy Thayer. She was been recognized by a local resident at the time she signed her enlistment papers and had to resign.

Her deception uncovered, she repaid the portion of the enlistment bonus that she had not spent, but was not subjected to further punishment by the Army. The Baptist church to which she belonged learned of her actions and its members refused to associate with her unless she apologized and asked forgiveness.




In May 1782, Sampson enlisted again, this time in Uxbridge, Massachusetts under the name "Robert Shirtliff" She joined the Light Infantry Company of the 4th Massachusetts Regiment, under the command of Captain George Webb (1740–1825). Light Infantry Companies were elite troops, specially picked because they were taller and stronger than average. Because she joined an elite unit, Sampson's disguise was more likely to succeed, since no one was likely to look for a woman among soldiers who were specially chosen for their above average size and superior physical ability.

Sampson fought in several skirmishes. During her first battle, on July 3, 1782 outside Tarrytown, New York, she took two musket balls in her thigh and sustained a cut on her forehead. She begged her fellow soldiers to let her die and not take her to a doctor (out of fear she'd be discovered), but a soldier put her on his horse and took her to a hospital. The doctors treated her head wound, but she left the hospital before they could attend to her leg. Fearful that her identity would be discovered, she removed one of the balls herself with a penknife and sewing needle, but the other one was too deep for her to reach. She carried one of the musket balls for the rest of her life.

On April 1, 1783, she was reassigned to new duties, and spent seven months serving as a waiter to General John Paterson. During that summer, Sampson became ill in Philadelphia and was cared for by Doctor Barnabas Binney. He removed her clothes to treat her and discovered the cloth she used to bind her breasts. Without revealing his discovery to army authorities, he took her to his house, where his wife, daughters, and a nurse took care of her.

Following the war being over, November 3 1783 was set as the date for soldiers to muster out. When Dr. Binney asked Sampson to deliver a note to General Paterson, she correctly assumed that it would reveal her gender. In other cases, women who pretended to be men to serve in the army were reprimanded, but Paterson gave her a discharge, a note with some words of advice, and enough money to travel home. She was honorably discharged at West Point, New York, on October 25, 1783, after a year and a half of service.



In January 1792, Sampson petitioned the Massachusetts State Legislature for pay which the army had withheld from her because she was a woman. The legislature granted her petition and Governor John Hancock signed it. The legislature awarded her 34 pounds plus interest back to her discharge in 1783.
In 1802, Sampson began giving lectures about her wartime service. She wisely began by extolling the virtues of traditional gender roles for women, but toward the end of her presentation she left the stage, returned dressed in her army uniform, and then performed a complicated and physically taxing military drill and ceremony routine.
She performed both to earn money and to justify her enlistment, but even with these speaking engagements, she was not making enough money to pay her expenses. She frequently had to borrow money from her friend Paul Revere.

Revere wrote letters to government officials on her behalf, requesting that she be awarded a pension for her military service and her wounds. A military pension had never been requested for a woman. Revere wrote: "I have been induced to enquire her situation, and character, since she quit the male habit, and soldiers uniform; for the more decent apparel of her own gender...humanity and justice obliges me to say, that every person with whom I have conversed about her, and it is not a few, speak of her as a woman with handsome talents and good morals." 



On March 11, 1805, Congress approved the request and placed Sampson on the Massachusetts Invalid Pension Roll at the rate of four dollars a month.

In 1809, she sent another petition to Congress, asking that her pension be modified to start from her discharge in 1783. Had her petition been approved, she would have been awarded back pay of $960 — approximately $13,800 in today's money ($48 a year for 20 years). Her petition was denied, but when it came before Congress again in 1816 an award of $76.80 a year (about $1,100) was approved. With this amount, she was able to repay all her loans and make improvements to her farm.
Sampson died of yellow fever at the age of 66 on April 29, 1827, and was buried at Rock Ridge Cemetery in Sharon, Massachusetts.

The town of Sharon now memorializes Sampson with a statue in front of the public library, the Deborah Sampson Park, and the "Deborah Sampson Gannett House,"

In 1906, the town of Plympton, Massachusetts, with the Deborah Sampson Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, placed a boulder on the town green, with a bronze plaque inscribed to Sampson's memory.

During World War II, the Liberty Ship S.S. Deborah Gannett (2620) was named in her honor. It was laid down March 10, 1944, launched April 10, 1944.

As of 2000, the town flag of Plympton incorporates Sampson as the Official Heroine of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Sampson's life was full of examples of her courage and compulsion to sacrifice, or at least risk, her own safety and well-being so that others might live and flourish.

As to her sexuality, no one alive can say. Yet she was undeniably a cross-dresser, so she is to be included as a hero.



No comments:

Post a Comment