* April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four. - Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894
* Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed. - Mark Twain
* A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool, usually has his suspicions. - Anonymous
* Politicians never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge. - Thomas Reed
* Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. - Chinese Proverb
* Don't approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool from any side. - Jewish Proverb
Hike on over to The Social Poets to enjoy a funny video, funny photos, and - I totally guarantee you haven't seen this fashion outfit - it's the weirdest fashion statement yet. Not even Lady Gaga wore this crazy thing! :)
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From Denny: This recipe comes from the Sephardic Jews' traditional Passover dishes from the culture of Spain and Portugal and is based on Mediterranean cuisine.
Before the years of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century, many Jews were affluent, well educated and held high positions in the Spanish royal court. Once the Spanish Inquisition got geared up they forced two choices upon the Jews: leave the Iberian Peninsula or convert to Catholicism. Those that did not convert settled in the Caribbean Islands, eventually these Sephardic Jews migrated to the American South centuries later.
Most Jews in America are considered Ashkenazic, tracing their roots back to France, Eastern Europe and the Germanic countries.
Passover Chocolate Cake
From: Chef Ann Amernick in “The Jewish Holiday Baker” by Joan Nathan (Schocken Books 1997)
Serves: 10 to 12
Chef Ann Amernick: She created the recipe because people were always asking for a good chocolate Passover dessert. Most Passover chocolate cake recipes call for cocoa and potato starch. Chef Amernick uses real chocolate, giving the cake a denser texture. Strictly observant Jews during Passover would substitute pareve margarine for the butter if the cake is to be served with meat dishes. Chef Amernick prefers real butter to margarine for this cake.
INGREDIENTS:
10 ozs. good imported bittersweet chocolate, broken into pieces 1/2 cup unsalted butter (or pareve margarine) 1/2 cup sugar, divided 5 large eggs, separated 1/3 cup finely ground almonds (done in a food processor) 2 tbls. brandy Confectioners’ sugar Whipped cream, optional Fresh raspberries, optional
DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and grease well a 9-inch springform pan. Line the bottom with baking parchment.
2. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler over barely simmering water. When the chocolate has melted, turn off the heat and leave it over the hot water to cool slowly.
3. Meanwhile in a large mixing bowl of the electric mixer, beat the butter or margarine with 1/4 cup of the sugar until the mixture is fluffy and almost white. Add the egg yolks and beat for 1 minute. Add the almonds and brandy and beat for 2 minutes more.
4. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until light and foamy while gradually adding the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar. Continue beating the whites until they are stiff and shiny.
5. Add cooled melted chocolate to the egg-yolk mixture and mix with a rubber spatula until well combined. Fold one-quarter of the chocolate mixture into the egg whites, then gently fold the egg-white mixture back into the rest of the chocolate mixture, taking care not to deflate the batter.
6. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake on the bottom rack of the oven for 25-30 minutes or until a tester comes out covered with a thick, moist (not wet) and crumbly coating.
7. Allow cake to cool for 30 minutes in pan. Loosen edges with a knife, remove the sides and carefully turn the cake upside down onto a plate. Remove the baking parchment.
8. Dust with confectioners’ sugar. Serve warm, at room temperature or chilled with whipped cream and raspberries on the side, if desired.
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From Denny: Chef Jose Andres of a restaurant in Washington, D.C., shares with us some great ideas of what to do with leftover stale bread. Many times my husband has come home with his latest "grocery prize" of day or two old artisan bread for a great price - only to discover it's so tough it can't be sliced easily. Grating it into fresh bread crumbs is an easy solution. If you are patient you can close it up into a plastic storage bag and place it in the fridge, take it out the next day and see if the crust has softened enough to slice. Usually, it does and all is well at our house once again. :)
Chef Jose Andres offers up some favorite recipes for stale day old bread from his native Spain like Castilian Garlic Soup, a mushroom and ham saute and a dessert by the name of Apple Charlotte. Yum! Since my great-grandmother came from "southern" Spain and was a wonderful cook I just had to see what she might have cooked in her day when she lived in Spain. Check it out what you can do with stale bread for delicious, easy and inexpensive recipes:
Castilian Garlic Soup Bread with oyster mushrooms and Spanish ham Jaleo's Apple Charlotte
Chef Andres: Wherever I go in my travels, I find Spanish people who are proud they know how to make this traditional Castilian dish, no matter which region they come from. My good friend Magin Revillo, the Washington correspondent for Radio Nacional de España (Spanish national radio), makes one of the finest garlic soups I ever tasted — even though he grew up in Barcelona.
INGREDIENTS
• 6 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced • 3 tablespoons Spanish extra-virgin olive oil • 2 tablespoons white wine • 1/2 tablespoon pimentón (Spanish sweet paprika) • 6 ounces rustic white bread, crust removed, torn into small pieces • 1 quart chicken stock (see page 000) • 2 large eggs • Salt to taste • 1 tablespoon chopped flat parsley
DIRECTIONS
In a medium saucepan over medium heat, sauté the garlic in the olive oil until golden brown, about 1 minute. Add the white wine and continue cooking until the alcohol evaporates, about 30 seconds. Add the pimentón and sauté for 1 minute.
Add the bread and pour in the stock. Stir together and bring to a boil. Once it reaches a boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer for 10 minutes.
Add the eggs and stir with a spatula to fold them into the soup. The eggs will form long strands, almost like noodles. Simmer for 2 more minutes and add salt to taste. Sprinkle with parsley and serve. TIPS
You can make this soup with water if you like. It's the traditional way but I find that chicken stock makes for a richer and tastier soup. Instead of adding the whisked eggs, you can poach a whole egg per person: just break the eggs into a barely simmering soup and leave them for 2 or 3 minutes without disturbing.
Bread with oyster mushrooms and Spanish ham
From: Chef Jose Andres
4 servings
Chef Andres: There are many different versions of migas, a dish that has sustained many a Spanish family when food was scarce. I often talk about recipes made of humble ingredients that can feed an entire family, and this is a perfect example. It shows what can be done when leftovers are the only option. Over the years many of these survival dishes have become beloved delicacies. I love this one for its simplicity and intense flavor.
INGREDIENTS
• 1 medium banana pepper • 4 tablespoons Spanish extra-virgin olive oil • 1 tablespoon minced shallots • 2 cups oyster mushrooms or saffron milk cap mushrooms (available in autumn) • 2 fresh thyme sprigs • 1 ounce thinly sliced jamón serrano • 1/4 cup seedless red grapes, halved • 1 12-inch day-old baguette, thinly sliced (about 4 cups) • Sea salt to taste
DIRECTIONS
Preheat the broiler. Roast the pepper under the broiler, turning it as it browns. Transfer the pepper to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and steam for 10 minutes. When cool enough to handle, peel the pepper, discard the skin and remove the seeds. Slice the pepper into ½-inch strips and set aside.
Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add the shallots and cook until translucent, about 1 minute. Add the mushrooms and the thyme and cook, stirring, for 3 minutes. Add the jamón and peppers and cook for 1 minute. Lay the bread slices on top of the mixture and drizzle with the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil.
Stir the bread into the mixture and fry in the pan until it gets brown and slightly crunchy. Toss in the grapes and cook until heated through. Season to taste with salt.
Use day-old bread for this dish. You will get a better crunch.
Jaleo's Apple Charlotte
From: Chef Jose Andres
Makes 12
INGREDIENTS
• 7 apples (Fuji or another good baking apple), peeled, cored and sliced thin • 1 cup sugar • 4 tablespoons of butter • 2 tablespoons of Rhum • 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract • 2 beaten egg yolks • For the crust • Butter • Half a loaf of brioche bread, cut half into 1/4" cubes and the rest into slices as 1/4" thick
DIRECTIONS
In a large saucepan over medium heat, cook the apples with sugar until soft. Lower the heat and cover. Simmer until apples are soft saucy consistency. Add butter, rum and vanilla. Continue to cook for another 30 minutes. Remove mixture from heat and cool. Once cool, mix in the beaten egg yolks. Reserve
Clarify the butter. Toast the bread cubes in the clarified until golden and crisp. Reserve.
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. In each ramekin, place crisped squares on the bottom. Dip the brioche slices in the clarified butter and line the sides of the ramekins. Fill with the apple mixture. Place the ramekins in a baking pan. Fill the pan with hot water until it reaches halfway up the side of the ramekins. Bake for 35 minutes turning the pan once during baking to ensure even browning.
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From Denny: This funny polar bear says it all: Whew! Time to take it easy after a long harsh winter!
If you are a blogger like me with the Blogger platform at blogspot.com, and you haven't already heard about it since it came out a couple of weeks ago, you might want to check out this new feature from Blogger: Blogger in Draft. I spent the entire weekend playing around with the possibilities and decided to change over to this new dashboard and template offerings.
Blogger has come out with some outstanding new templates and the ability to widen margins of all your columns to imitate the old stretch template or create your own ideas of what appeals to you. Be as creative as you like! Read that as embedding videos and cartoons will now work better. Before, if you had a background from somewhere else - like I was doing - you had to reduce the width of your template down to the Minima template offered by Blogger. Then you could not run the cartoons at all as they were chopped off on the right side.
You now have many choices of how to arrange your columns just like a newspaper. There is a good variety of stunning backgrounds from which to choose - and believe me I've been choosing all this weekend for 12 blogs! :) I would like to see them expand their background choices in various colors and genre but what they have offered so far is plenty for most bloggers.
What am I still looking for from Blogger? To the folks at Blogger: I'm looking for more seasonal choices that have a sophisticated look, peaceful or spiritual, as opposed to just fun or downright cheesy. Backgrounds tailored to writing, poetry, art and literature other than the standard stack of books would be great - like beautiful calligraphy pens and parchment papers, stylized handwriting or fonts offered on the background and for the blog. You might want to consider backgrounds of America's cities like New Orleans and others for those of us with regional food blogs.
I'd also like to see the ability to post headlines and 200 word summary excerpts of up to 10 posts per page so people could easily choose what they want to read much like Wordpress already offers. Scrolling at the top of the page or at the header of the most recent posts would be cool like you see at newspaper sites online. Dreamer, that's me! So far, Blogger is on a roll so keep up the good work, guys! Oh, and if you could ever get that Google Connect or Followers Gadget to work with Google AdSense ads on the same page it would be much appreciated too.
On to the posts of the week and a few extra recipe posts from the past two weeks in case you missed anything good! :) Finally got caught up over at my science blog this weekend with some interesting stories so be sure to check out their offerings. Please bookmark this post to catch up on all the interesting news, great recipes and beautiful photography in our world! :) Enjoy...
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From Denny: Cartoonists had a field day when the Health Care Reform bill passed, most of them in favor. They even did a special section on the issue of health care and past Presidents. While most of us in America and outside America, especially rightfully so very self-righteous Canada who rolls their eyes at this excuse for national health care, well, we all are under-whelmed at what was finally passed. Everyone in America is holding our collective breath to see how this actually plays out.
Read that as "So, who gets screwed first?" Hopefully, it's the stingy rich who have screwed over the middle class from two stolen Presidential elections, Big Banks screwing over homeowners on their mortgages and charging outrageous high interest rates on their credit cards, a rigged stock market and collusion among oil and gas companies to continue to price gouge the public at the gas pump.
I would hope the Obama administration does not take its eye off the ball here and continues to pass legislation or issue Presidential directives or whatever it takes to fine tune the American health care system. Right now all this bill has accomplished is to hold it together with some semblance of order by using crazy glue. Not including the public option was a serious error. Congress will need to revisit that idea within a few years as the Baby Boomer generation starts aging rapidly.
There is no excuse to see young families living in shelters or past war veterans living under bridges because the cost of living has risen more rapidly and continually in relation to what jobs are paying - primarily from greedy insurance companies escalating car, home, business and health insurance premiums.
Just this week cartoonists have began to hammer the religious sex scandals, especially Pope Benedict. It's interesting to see Karma come back to roost on the Church's former Enforcer of the Faith. Read that as "the worm has turned." His harshness from past decades and a cavalier attitude toward the abused has brought abuse to roost up close and personal. The people who continue to enable abuse in any organization need to be arrested, tried and jailed as much as the actual abusers in my book. There is no excuse why a child anywhere in the world does not have the right to reasonably expect safety from murderers and sexual deviants during their growing up years.
China continues to demand internet search engines like Google censor their searches. Read that as that government does not want their citizens to finally figure out just how much they are being lied to. Pssst! Guess what, China, I think they already know. No one is that stupid or naive.
Oh, yeah, and Karl Rove's rich handlers paid him to write yet another Book of Lies about the Bush years, hoping to avoid future prosecution for high crimes and misdemeanors. Speaking of misdemeanors, remember those Republicans who committed a felony by bugging the federal office of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu in my home state? Well, the fix is in with all those Republican conservative judges Bush and Cheney put in place and the deal was made to knock the felony down to a misdemeanor for the son of a federal judge. Our government at work, our corrupt government left in place by corrupt Republicans. And they still own the Supreme Court with their favorite puppets Chief Justice Roberts (the biggest suck-up I've ever seen. Oh, excuse me, the GOP calls it "ambitious.") and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito.
And, in the news every week now, because the media so loves their exaggerated villains and wingnuts to get people to tune in and watch or read the news, is that weirdo Tea Party. I've provided a link to a news story over at Dennys Global Politics at the end of this post for you to see the latest weirdness coming from that sector.
You will enjoy these cartoons as they are outstanding this week, enjoy!
*** ALSO be sure to check out the latest weird news about the Tea Party over at Dennys Global Politics. It's the last story in the post. You will also enjoy the funny short video of the comics reviewing the news of the week:
*** THANKS for visiting, feel welcome to drop a comment or opinion, enjoy bookmarking this post on your favorite social site, a big shout out to awesome current subscribers – and if you are new to this blog, please subscribe in a reader or by email updates!
From Denny: Check out the latest Cheeky Quote Day over at The Social Poets! Here are a few of the funny quotes:
