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Posted by request. I started falling asleep a couple of paragraphs in, but maybe some of you’ll find it interesting. I did peek at the end and came across a term “demogreens,” which was mildly amusing.
Then somebody named John Walsh wrote was was supposed to be a counterpoint at Counterpunch, advocating a radical new idea. Run Nader in 2008!
Oh boy!
The Dems and Zios are scared shitless that the Greens (with their ballot lines) will get a candidate like Nader (with his stature) in ’08 and administer a coup de grace to the Dems.
Yeah, this time maybe he’ll get two percent of the vote!
My kids wanted crepes this morning. I’m on breakfast duty most Sundays, so I navigated through my wife’s extensive cookbook stacks for a recipe. I started with Julia Childs, but she wanted me to refrigerate the batter for an hour and the kids were hungry and bound to get cranky in that time. So I went to the New York Times recipe bible, which is kind of like the Joy of Cooking only I tend to prefer the recipes. I did glance at the J.O.C. recipe, which was the same in both editions in my wife’s possession (she refuses to give up the old edition and would prefer to keep around even more if she had the space. I guess that’s why she gets the blue ribbons).
One constant in all the recipes I consulted was the call for clarified butter, which entails melting the butter and letting the “whey” settle, using only the liquid. Out of the haze of my television-addled memory came an episode of Northern Exposure where Joshua follows some recipe without clarifying the butter, and the palate of psycho-chef Adam (played by Adam Arkin) discerned his omission.
On the other hand, the NYT recipe for waffles requires that I separate the eggs and whip the whites into a foam, “folding” the whites into the batter without “damaging” it. I finally decided to experiment and nobody noticed the difference between the whipped-whites-folded-in waffles and those in which I just dumped the eggs in as is. No more white-whipping and folding.
But with every recipe calling for clarified butter, I decided not to take the chance. So maybe someone out there can tell me definitively, would the flavor of the crepes be compromised if I cooked them in unclarified butter?
And, can I do anything with the “whey?”
Update: I experimented this morning with the left-over batter. The crepes cooked with whole butter came out kind of rubbery whereas the clarified butter gave them that browning with a slightly crunchy membrane. Definitely worth the clarification.
E.O Wilson pontificates.
Ant expert Edward O. Wilson, in Washington for National Pollinator Week, is warning extinctions in the insect world could threaten life as we know it.
Speaking at the Kaiser Family Foundation, Wilson said if humans vanished, only three species of insect would join them in extinction. Close relatives of body and head lice would continue to live on our primate cousins.
But mass insect extinction could mean no more nematodes and other worms moving soil around, and bees and other pollinators aiding plant reproduction. Agricultural yields would drop, bringing starvation, war and an “ecological dark age.”
I read somewhere that a thousand years ago the human race represented about 5 percent of the world’s mass in mammal flesh. Now we’re something like 95 percent. But I believe we’re still a small percentage of the total animal flesh mass, largely due to insects, the varieties of which exceed all other classes of animals put together.
The picture comes from here. It’s not limited to insects however. Other classes of arthropods are are on there too. But I’m too tired to dig something else up.
By the way, it is not true that a bee can’t fly. A bee can fly.
Maybe Darryl, Francine, Anna or another local musician can put Heraldo’s lyrics to music and recording.
No reference to Nabakov (I’ve always wondered how many Police fans knew what he was talking about), but well worth a read.
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