Morgan Insider November 2024

Thanksgiving recipe for turkey

compiled by Evelyn Self

Lots of people in America celebrate Thanksgiving so if you are looking for a new recipe to use for your turkey/chicken then you might want to read this article.

Click HERE for the recipe from the Tastes Better from Scratch website.

Turkey

• One 12 to 20-pound turkey/chicken.
• One onion peeled and quartered.
• One lemon quartered.
• One apple (whatever kind) quartered.
• .75 ounce container of fresh rosemary.
• .75 ounce container of fresh thyme.
• .75 ounce container of fresh sage.

Herb butter

• One cup of unsalted butter (softened).
• One teaspoon of salt.
• One-half teaspoon of ground black pepper.
• 6 to 8 cloves of minced garlic.
• Fresh chopped herbs.

Instructions

If the turkey/chicken is frozen, thaw in the fridge for 24 hours per five pounds.

Remove turkey/chicken from the fridge one hour before roasting.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees f.

Use the extra herbs from the butter as stuffing for the turkey.

Remove the turkey or chicken from the package and remove the neck and giblets inside the cavities. Dab it dry with paper towels

Season the inside cavities with quartered onion, lemon, and apple (leftover herbs as well).

Loosen the skin around the breast and smooth out a few tablespoons of herb butter underneath the turkey or chicken.

Tuck the wings underneath the turkey's body and set it in a roasting pan before roasting.

Microwave herb butter for 30 seconds to soften and use it to brush all over the turkey.

Roast at 325 degrees f. For 13 to 15 min per pound.

Remove the turkey/chicken from the oven after it reaches 160 degrees and tent it in foil. Then, let it rest on the counter. The foil will let the turkey cook a little bit extra.

After a while, check on the turkey/chicken to see if it is golden brown.

Allow turkey to rest for 20 to 30 min before carving and serving.

Would You Rather?

Ashley Hill

Would you rather questions are a great way to kick off conversations and get to know someone better. They force you to choose between two fun scenarios, which can lead to surprising discussions. Plus, they’re a simple way to break the ice in any setting.

1. Have feet for hands OR Have hands for feet
2. Have an annoying high voice OR A really deep voice
3. Hairy legs for ten years OR Have a mustache forever
4. Be famous OR Be rich
5. Travel everywhere for free OR Eat everywhere for free
6. Have a third nipple OR Have an extra toe
7. Continue with your life OR Restart it
8. Speak all languages OR Speak to animals
9. Know when you die OR How you die
10. Only eat pizza for a year OR Only eat mac and cheese for a year

A Simple and Easy Guide to Decluttering

Gaia Somaini

Our house used to be (and kind of still is) full of items that we don’t use or need. My mom is claustrophobic, so at some point, she told us, “Soon enough, we will have to move out, and stuff will live in this house instead of us.” And with that, we began to declutter.

According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, “declutter” means “to remove clutter from a room, area, etc.” The dictionary’s definition of “clutter” is “a crowded or confused mass or collection.”

Do you want a mass of stuff on your bedroom floor or a kitchen counter so full of random things that you can’t even slice a tomato? I can imagine that many people don’t.

Clutter can have a detrimental impact on your mental health.

According to mithoc.org, “The studied downsides of living in a disorganized or cluttered environment include memory impediment, poor eating habits, an increased chance of developing mood disorders, and decreased impulse control.”

Decluttering can help your productivity.

“Nearly every mental health downside that comes from disorganization and clutter can be improved by getting organized. ‘You'll feel less exhaustion, enhance your productivity at the office, and greatly improve the quality of your life if you can learn how to declutter and become organized,’” Psychology professor Joseph Ferrari said in an article at mithoc.org.

As I decluttered my desk, I realized it wasn’t that hard to get rid of stuff I didn’t use. I created a list of small steps to easily declutter any space.

4 Steps to a Decluttered Space

Step 1- Get rid of trash (wrappings, paper, boxes, etc.)

Step 2- Get rid of things that you don’t use or need

Step 3- Clean the surface

Step 4- Re-arrange (if needed) with only the items that you need

Trust me, you’ll feel much better after decluttering because you will have lots more space.

Have fun!

Dill Pickle Snack Mix

Ashley Hill

Everyone loves This new, fun twist on the Ranch Snack Mix. It's the perfect snack recipe for something quick and easy that doesn’t require refrigeration or prep work.

Ingredients:

• 10-12oz mini saltines or oyster crackers - any bite-sized plain, salty cracker
• 12oz cheddar crackers - Cheez-Its or goldfish work great
• 12oz pretzels -
• 2 packets of ranch seasoning
• ⅔ cup neutral oil (canola oil, grapeseed oil, vegetable oil)
• 4tbsp pickle juice
• 2 tbsp Trader Joe's seasoning “In a Pickle” OR a mix of 1.5 tbsp dried dill, 1 tsp garlic powder, and onion powder. (I used the homemade mix)
• 1 tbsp dried dill

Directions:

Combine all mini saltines, cheddar crackers, and pretzels, and mix well. Evenly distribute the mix into a 2-gallon-sized ziploc bag. (You can also do this in bowls)

Again, evenly distribute the oil, pickle juice, half the ranch packet, and pickle seasoning across the two bags, close the bags, and mix until evenly combined.

Line a large baking sheet with foil and add 1 bag of mix, spreading it evenly. Top with the other half a ranch seasoning packet and about ½ tbsp dried dill. (I sprinkled a little bit of grated parmesan cheese as well.)

Bake at 250F for 15 minutes, mixing at the halfway mark.

Repeat with the second half of the batch & ENJOY!

Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies

Emily Malella

Over the fall season, and mostly Christmas break, my mom and I love to bake cookies. We specifically bake a recipe that wasn’t necessarily made by her, but with a few tip and tricks that make them even better. The recipe was originally from a Crisco recipe, but the few modifications that are added are sure to make these cookies some of the most delicious chocolate chips cookies you’ve ever had.

Ingredients:

• ¾ cups Crisco butter flavor all-vegetable shortening
• 1 ¼ cups firmly packed brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons milk ( I recommend whole milk it will make the cookies taste richer )
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 egg
• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ¾ teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup white chocolate chips ( optional )

Instructions:

First, preheat the oven to 375° fahrenheit

Beat shortening, brown sugar, milk, and vanilla extract in a large bowl with mixer on low until well blended

When blended, crack one egg in a separate dish to insure there aren’t any shells that could ruin the mixture. Once cracked, pour into the original mix

Stir flour, salt and baking soda in a medium bowl. Gradually beat into creamed mixture until just blended

When both mixtures are fully combined, pour in the chocolate and white chocolate chips ( if using them ) into the bowl

(One of the tricks that make our cookies differ from the recipe is that we put the cookies in over night to cool. If you are making them in the morning or midday, be sure to refrigerate them for at least four hours before taking them out for best results. )

Come back the next morning, ( or as early as four hours, ) and hand scoop out small balls of dough, and place three inches apart on a baking sheet.

( For the baking sheet we use tin foil, which I will explain during the cooling process. Be cautious if you have a convection oven, because it’s best to not use tin foil. Instead you can use a non- stick pan or other alternatives. )

Bake for 8 to 10 minutes for a soft, chewy cookie, or 11 to 13 minutes for a crispy cookie.

For cooling process, my mom usually takes each pan, and hovers it to about 4 inches off the counter, and drops it a couple times repetitively for a nice bumpy texture

Cool for 2 minutes, then when totally positive it won’t burn your tongue, eat and enjoy!

Black Holes

Part 2

Bridger Thompson

You slowly wake up, unaware of your surroundings, falling through endless emptiness. As you see a rocky object appear out of nowhere and disintegrate right before you, you realize that you feel sick to your stomach, and everything becomes a blur again.

This is about how it would feel and look after you fall in and out of a black hole (see part 1 in the October issue if you're confused). The only reason you could see anything was that you were a human although we gave you a spacesuit that made you invincible to gravity when you fell out of the hole into the antiverce there was antigravity (gravity pushed instead of pulled, that's why it´s called an antiverce), and since the composition of your body was less dense it took longer to tear you apart.

What happened you ask? Well it all started with the suit we gave you, you could survive going into a black hole because the gravity pushed in, not out, that was all the suit was designed for. No one knows what antigravity would be like, we just know it exists. How do we know it exists? We know it exists because of a famous scientist called Robert Penrose.

Robert Penrose, born in 1931, was one of the most distinguished scientists of his age (you probably haven't heard of him because his era overlapped with Albert Einstein's). One of his biggest accomplishments, and the one relevant to this subject, is his creation of the Penrose diagram (for more information on this subject, watch this Veritasium video).

The Penrose diagram is the current most developed diagram of the space-time layout of a black hole. The main idea of the diagram is that if you somehow managed to get inside a black hole you would find yourself in another dimension. In this strange dimension, gravity pulls apart instead of pushing together and life (probably) wouldn't and couldn't exist. In real life when gravity reigns supreme you can't get into a black hole because of what you know as spaghettification (being turned into human spaghetti) but if you could, you could theoretically transfer universes in a relatively short amount of time. Just one problem: you can't go back out once you go in.

The Penrose diagram pushes space and time together to get an accurate but hard-to-understand diagram of how black holes work. The one thing that you can tell almost instantaneously after looking at it is that you can only go forward. Take a look at a full Penrose diagram, you should find that it has an arrow of time that arrow goes forward, never backward. So in the diagram, you are confined to always moving forward through time.

The only thing that can make you stay still is gravity, the gravity at the horizon is infinite but the horizon is infinitely thin. This makes a strange area on the horizon where the balance is perfect, in this area photons (light) get stuck on the edge and take days to break free. Using this information we can assume that a weird flux (unpredictable) of energy is on the horizon, this energy would add an area where instead of spaghettifing being the first stage, the first stage is when the energy shreds you like a cheese grater, making it impossible to cross.

The phenomena of a black hole are immeasurable, they have inspired physicists for centuries. We hope this series inspired you to take a deeper dive into this subject, because of their immense influence this is not a hard task. A journey into the world of the theoretical. I'm sure you'll find it intriguing.

Sources:

• Veritasium
• Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw