Moms Cooking

The title is not a punctuation error. In honor of Mother’s Day, we present cooking videos featuring Moms and Grandmas:

Mom’s Cooking (myLifetime.com) – Jerri Heard shows daughter Jamilla Lisbon how to make cheese grits  and eggs (7;22). 60 episodes of Mom’s Cooking are available online.

Cooking with Grandma Alvina (CHOW) –   Alvina Mangrai teaches granddaughter Alyssa how to make her Burmese treats:  prawn curry and coconut rice (6:21).

Feed Me Bubbe (Chalutz Productions)–  Bayla Sher teaches shows grandson Avrom how Kosher cooking (“Bubbe” is Yiddish for “Grandma”).  Bubbe Bayla moved to Arizona from Worchester MA.  Watch this interview, then nosh on the 28 episodes.  Recipes are divided into kosher categories: dairy, meat, and parve (fish or vegetables).

My Mom’s Easy Chicken and Dumplings – Evelyn McRaney shows her son how to make a classic Southern dish (8:34).

Cooking With Mom: Mul Kimchee (IEATNY) -- Korean pickled veggies in a juffy (2:40). 

Flu Flight Fear!

AirTran Flight 85 from Cancun radioed BWI airport last night. Two passengers were nauseous and feverish. Sick people returning from Mexico!

The flight landed and was met by emergency personnel, who whisked the men into isolation pending medical examination.

It was not Swine flu.

Diagnosis: drunk.

Our hypothesis: booze prevents Swine Flu.

Prescription: Ethanol (C2H5OH). Consult an adult beverage professional for details.

To your health! ¡Salud! A Votre Sante!  Lechyd da! Na zdrav! Egé szé gé re! Alla Salute!

 

Disclaimer:This blog post is not intended to substitute for the advice of qualified physicians, sommeliers, pharmacists, cocktail waitresses, or licensed health-care and hospitality professionals. Intoxicating beverages may have warning information and instructions on the packaging, which you should carefully read and follow. Contact your health care provider if you suspect you have a medical problem, and inform your host about spoiled fermented fluids or badly-mixed cocktails. The use of intoxicating beverages may not have been evaluated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and their use is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or health condition.

Use of the term “hypothesis” does not apply to actual American healthcare practice, which is firmly anecdotal and non-scientific. U.S. medical and pharmaceutical decision making presupposes that pain and disease are primarily profit centers (official motto: “Everybody dies; above all, do no harm to stockholders”).

 Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.comComments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

GOP Catches the Flu

H1N1, the virus popularly called “Swine Flu,” is all anyone can talk about. Anyone but Republicans.

When the economic stimulus package was first before Congress, explains John Nichols in The Nation, the bill included $900 million for flu pandemic preparedness and additional funding for the Centers for Disease Control. Karl Rove attacked these items as waste in the Wall Street Journal, and Senator Susan Collins (R, ME) bragged about killing the health provisions in Congress. Critics stripped all medical and research provisions from the proposal, leaving only $50 million to improve IT services at HHS. State and local public health officials were concerned.

“Everybody …  is concerned about a pandemic flu,” Collins said at the time. “But does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill? No, we should not.”

The argument that anti-pandemic measures have no economic ramifications was a bad diagnosis.  The new flu has caused panic on Wall Street as well as Main Street, with more to come. Emergency measures are costing Mexico City’s economy at least $57 million a day and direct costs are unknown. Expect similar local losses across the USA. 

Collins has pulled her flu fulminations off her web site and issued a defensive denial.

 

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

 

Economics Quote of the Day

“Wall Street is no longer, in any real sense, part of the private sector. It’s a ward of the state, every bit as dependent on government aid as recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a k a ‘welfare.’ “

“In 2008, overpaid bankers taking big risks with other people’s money brought the world economy to its knees. The last thing we need is to give them a chance to do it all over again. “

 – Paul Krugman, professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, in the New York Times.

 

Image (Corporate Socialism, after B. Lebedev) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

 

Street Light User Fee

District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty has proposed imposing a street light “user fee” on residents and businesses in Washington DC. Funds raised would help defray costs of street light maintenance and operation, and would be collected through surcharges on electric utility bills. If enacted, the measure would cost average DC households about $51 a year.

The rationale for a “user fee” is that it isn’t a tax imposed on everyone; a user fee is only paid by those using a specific service, and is proportional to the rate of use. Mayor Fenty’s measure, however,  does not exempt blind Washingtonians from this “user fee,” and they are not consumers of street light services.

Suburban Stalkers

The Washington Post has finally recognized a threat NotionsCapital pointed out two years ago: the sinister Suburban Deer Menace.  Hordes of hungry horned and hoofed ungulates stalk suburbs in silence, grazing on gardens, wrecking cars, even knocking celebrities off bicycles.

In the wild, deer density is about 20 per square mile. In suburban parks they may number 400 per square mile. Can nothing stop the ominous onslaught of Odocoileus virginianus, the White-Tailed Deer?

Fear not. Recipes for relief are at hand; none are hard to swallow. Chew on this:

Broiled Venison Steak

Hungarian Venison Stew 

Shoulder of Venison

Noisettes de Chevreuil Saint Hubert

Rack of Venison Stuffed with Pecans, Currants, Sausage, and Pears

Venison Stew

Wild Ohio Cookbook – Venison Recipes

 

Some might find this solution hard to digest, but suburban lawmakers are motivated.

 

Note: For a less flavorful strategy, look here. 

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Arbor Day in DC

It’s National Arbor Day. While the official tree of the District of Columbia is the Scarlet Oak (Quercus coccinea), the Potomac area beaver community urges you to plant more of those tasty Yoshino Cherry trees (Prunus x yedoensis) near streams and rivers. The kits really love them.

Audio Irony

Congresswoman Jane Harman (D, CA-36) just learned that Federal invesigators secretly recorded her telephone conversations. 

Rep. Harman chairs the Intelligence Subcommittee of the House Committee on Homeland Security, which oversees such wiretapping.

But there’s more.

The Congresswoman is married to Dr. Sidney Harman, founder of a corporation that manufactures some of the finest audio recording equipment in the world.

 

 

Image by Mike Licht. “Harman International” and the associated logo are trademarks of that corporation, used to prevent brand confusion (the VU meter is not a Harman product). NotionsCapital received no consideration for this placement, not even a pair of earbuds. 

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Earth Day 2009

Today is Earth Day 2009. On this 39th annual commemoration of ecological concern, we may be about to reduce one major source of air pollution and global warming: cow flatulence.

Factory breeding of beef cattle and vast dairy herds produce tons of atmospheric methane or CH₄ (not Carbon Dioxide or CO₂, as claimed by master chemist and House Minority Leader John Boehner). Methane is a major “greenhouse gas” that contributes to global warming.

Funny? Yes. A joke? No.

Narco-Terrorists and the NRA

American gun hobbyists and arms merchants quibble over exactly how many firearms used by Mexican drug gangs come from the U.S. — 90 percent? 70 percent? –  but one thing is certain: the 10,000 people killed in Mexican drug cartel violence since January 2008 are 100 percent dead.

The number of assault weapons seized in Mexico has been increasing, and most of the firearms were bought in the U.S. and smuggled across the border. The practice is likely to continue unless we get consistent laws and effective enforcement in the United States.