Bluebird

Tuna Redux: Interloper disguised as Casserole

As the Frankenstorm Sandra approaches friends and family east, I sensed an urgent need to batten down with comfort food on a balmy Cali evening. The hub adores a tuna casserole, especially when stirred together with canned soup. Purist moi makes it only with a homemade sauce, even if it's a pain in the sink to make. Cause sometimes it's what I want too, just not like our mothers used to make it. I like this recipe from Gourmet, circa May 2004. It's delish and the hub approves, even though he's prone to crumbling chips on top when I'm not looking.

You can call me names, but I'm a fan of good canned tuna. This one's from Italy, but it's not too pricey. That makes a difference when adding such to a hecka lotta other ingredients. I save the pretty $7 jars for artisan sammies.

Here's my recipe from the issue. Lord, I miss Gourmet. I only regret not shipping 20 years of back issues from Wisconsin. At least I gave them to a charity. BTW: lacking mushrooms as well as Sherry, I subbed a can of water chestnuts and a good glub of French rose. I use what I have on hand to make it happen because tuna casserole should not be so beholden to a recipe.

The luscious white sauce begins its alchemic journey.

Ready for a bread crumb/cheddar cheese topping...no chips allowed tonight, I swear.

Why are all food blogs so pretty? Here's the actual mess, just a part of the clean-up lying in wait to wrinkle my palms from a sudsy soak and scrubbing. As I cook, so do I wash. And I do enjoy it...it gives my cooking session a satisfying sense of ownership, as well as closure.

Here's the link to the actual recipe. Feel free to innovate without being too precious, cause it's casserole, people.

http://www.gourmet.com/recipes/2000s/2004/05/tuna-noodle-casserole

 

Thou shalt now grill...

Memorial Day kicks off summer by it's unilateral command to grill. Here in NoCal, summer comes in fits and starts, landing anywhere from mid-April to late-March. Even so, we grill. 

Being patriotic, we grilled short rib/bacon burgers from Marin Sun Farms. Yum indeed accompanied by fresh white corn and potato salad. 

evidently patriotism runs in our blood...

 

Now for the rhubarb caramel ice cream sundaes for dessert.

 

 

Calico Lobster Spared

Rare Calico Lobster Is Spared From the Menu

By JESS BIDGOOD

Published: May 11, 2012

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Jasper White, a veteran seafood chef and owner of New England’s Summer Shack restaurants, knows his lobster. He estimates that he has bought and sold more than 350,000 pounds of the crustacean annually over his nearly 40-year career.

But last week, when Mr. White’s flagship restaurant in Cambridge was cleaning its 1,200-gallon lobster tank, a singular lobster, dappled in yellow, stopped him in his tracks.

“I saw it across the room and went right over and went, ‘Oh, God, it’s spectacular!’ ” Mr. White said.

Calvin, as he has been christened, is an exceedingly rare calico lobster, named for the yellow-orange spots on his shell caused by the inconsistent distribution of the pigment layers that usually combine to make uncooked lobsters look brown.

“We say that yellow lobsters are about one in 30 million,” said Michael Tlusty, the director of research at the New England Aquarium, which has four calicos of its own, some of which were discovered in an exceptional windfall summer of 2009.

“He’s a lucky lobster because he’s not going to get cooked,” said Mr. White, who donated the lobster to the aquarium — but not before keeping him for the weekend, to show him off.

“I gave him his own special area in the tank,” Mr. White said. “I fed him fresh squid and soft shell crab. He had a wonderful time, I doubt if he’ll ever eat as well.” Currently in quarantine at the New England Aquarium, the lobster heads next to the Biomes Marine Biology Center in North Kingstown, R.I., where he will be displayed for school field trips and other educational purposes.

But getting there will require this distinguished lobster to acquiesce to a rather pedestrian adventure.

“I’m actually going to bring him on the train, in a cooler,” said Mark Hall, the marine biologist who owns the center. “We’re just going to take the commuter rail out of Providence.”

 

H.B. Edward Gorey

The master of the gleefuly macabre would have been 87 today, had he not died in 2000.

San Francisco's torch song still burns brightly

Baghdad by the Bay prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tony Bennett's hallmark ballad, although it was dethroned by a song from the 1936 film 'San Francisco,' belted by Jeannette MacDonald.

Tony Bennett won his first two Grammys for "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." (Larry Busacca / Getty Images / February 11, 2012)

By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times

February 13, 2012, 9:43 p.m.

Reporting from San Francisco -- At the stroke of noon on Tuesday, music will blast out over the shoppers in Union Square and the homeless people in Hallidie Plaza. The San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus will chime in from the City Hall rotunda, along with the big-hatted belters fromBeach Blanket Babylon. Radio stations have been asked to preempt the midday news.

And if Mayor Ed Lee has his way, San Franciscans from Nob Hill to Noe Valley, the Presidio to Potrero Hill, will look up from their computer keyboards, drop what they're doing and burst into song. The same song. The one this storied city's residents love to hate and hate to love: I left my heart in San Francisco. High on a hill, it calls to me ….

It is, more or less, the 50th anniversary of when Tony Bennett first crooned San Francisco's musical Rorschach test in the Venetian Room of the Fairmont Hotel, and the mustachioed mayor with the Busby Berkeley bent is presiding over a civic extravaganza in honor of the 85-year-old legend with the silver hair and golden pipes.

"Thanks to Tony Bennett, people have been experiencing the magic of San Francisco for 50 years no matter where they are in the world," Lee said in a written statement announcing the festivities. "The song reminds us of why we love our city so much and when we are away, it calls us home."

At least two people, however, are all but guaranteed to spurn the noontime chorus: the men who together dethroned the onetime official song of San Francisco, who stopped those little cable cars from climbing halfway to the stars, more than a quarter-century ago.

That's when then-Supervisor Quentin Kopp — who described "I Left My Heart" as "a schmaltzy jingle," the fault of the "hippie-love movement" and unworthy of the city it aimed to honor — introduced a resolution to instead make the theme from the 1936 earthquake movie "San Francisco" the official song of Baghdad by the Bay.

Now that, Kopp said in a recent interview, was a song. Belted out by Jeanette MacDonald just moments before the killer quake struck on the big screen, "it's a bracing, vigorous, strong song" about risk-taking and adventure, optimism and welcome.

But Kopp's distaste for Bennett's ballad was nothing compared to then-San Francisco Chronicle columnist Warren Hinckle's vitriol. During a monthlong imbroglio — played out in the newspapers and at City Hall as the Democratic Partyprepared for its 1984 convention here — Hinckle called the lyrics "infantile drool." The song, he said, was "barely suited for elevator music" and was "as much San Francisco as bathtub chablis."

In the middle of the debate, a Chronicle poll had "San Francisco" beating out "I Left My Heart" by nearly 3 to 1.

The paper's editorial board backed Hinckle and Kopp, arguing that Bennett's tribute to the city was about as exciting as "a visit from an aunt." Particularly, the board posited, when compared to MacDonald's punchy lines:

San Francisco, open your Golden Gate. 

You let no stranger wait outside your door. 

San Francisco, here is your wandering one saying, 'I'll wander no more.'

At first, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein threatened to veto Kopp's measure. Then she suggested, in rhyme, a Solomonic answer: Let the city have not one, but two official songs. "Let's admit it, Quentin: We're both right. So let's unite," she wrote to her adversary. "Who knows, we may not only compromise — but harmonize."

Kopp's response to her overture? No way.

Next, the city's Culture and Recreation Committee took up the matter of the official song. But many of the region's aspiring singers and songwriters mistook the panel's hearing for an audition, lining up and warbling out their own original compositions.

That evening, during a party scheduled in the Beaux-Arts rotunda, thousands cheered renditions of "San Francisco" by the Gay Men's Chorus and a dozen or so others — and booed the UC Hastings College of the Law rugby club, which had the unfortunate job of belting out the underdog.

The 50-cent drinks didn't help matters much.

Eventually a compromise was reached. "San Francisco" did unseat "I Left My Heart" as the city's official song. But Bennett's baby became the official city ballad. (For anyone who is curious, Los Angeles doesn't have a single official song.)

Tuesday's festivities probably will not match the volume of the celebration and rancor of 1984.

It is, after all, Valentine's Day.

City Hall and the Fairmont Hotel will be bathed in red light. Bennett, who won his first two Grammy Awards for "I Left My Heart," will be the guest of honor — fresh from winning his latest two Sunday night in Los Angeles.

However, Bennett won't be serenading the noontime crowd. He's saving that for a $5,000-a-head dinner at the Venetian Room on Tuesday night to benefit the UC San Francisco division of — you guessed it — cardiology.

He will, however, take part in the City Hall singalong. Ready?

The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay

The glory that was Rome is of another day

I've been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan

I'm going home to my city by the Bay...

maria.laganga@latimes.com

 

from epicurious:

Grapefruit, the Etymology and the History

by Regina Schrambling

on 02/08/12 at 03:07 PM

Given the reaction to the case of White V Orange Cheddar, I was tempted to take the easy route today and ask: Which is better, pink grapefruit or white? But 1) I already know the answer (pink, by a grove) and 2) I have an opening for another back-story, one that's been bugging me. Why are grapefruit called grapefruit?

I checked a couple of books in arm's reach but am putting my trust, as always, in Waverley Root and his extraordinary "Food" (someone, somewhere, needs to find the un-truncated version of that manuscript and publish it online; it would go on for weeks). He says the old story is that some European botanist in the 1700s came across a fruit in Jamaica that tasted like grape, but of course that's nonsense, or otherwise wine stores would be more acidic. The other explanation, that this particular citrus grows in grapelike bunches, is also not true. As he says, "If individual fruits sometimes grow very close together, producing in this case a clusterlike effect, it is because the tree bears heavily, ripening up to 30 or 40 fruits on a single branch."

So there you have it. What's more fascinating is that the grapefruit is, as Root puts it, "an infant in a world where most commonly eaten fruits count their ages in millennia." It was only recognized as a species in 1830, and commercial cultivation only began in Florida 60 years after that.

The most everything-old-is-new-again detail in Root's essay, though: Grapefruit was a strange fruit to most Americans until the Great Depression, when it took off because citrus could be had for free with . . . food stamps. And I have to give him the last laugh: "This brought the fruit into families which had previously been so ignorant of it that welfare boards received the same complaint from a number of housewives: They had boiled grapefruit for hours and it still remained tough."

Read More http://www.epicurious.com:80/articlesguides/blogs/editor/2012/02/grapefruit-the-etymology-and-the-history-.html#ixzz1m1dbZtnF

 

Saint Betsy Johnson of Pop Music

 

 

Silos: A New Weapon for Farmers

Storage is helping farmers hold out for better prices

David Frazier/The Image Works

By Shruti Singh and Jeff Wilson

Drive along Route 63 in Iowa or I-74 in Illinois and you’ll see them by the score: shiny grain silos, built of galvanized steel, dotting the fields of these top two corn-growing states.

The nation’s farmers have built up oilseed and grain storage capacity to its highest level in two decades. On-farm storage in silos (also known as bins) climbed to 12.5 billion bushels in December 2010, the most since 1989, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Agriculture Dept. Bin makers GSI Holdings and Brock Grain Systems (controlled by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway) say farmers are adding still more storage. Both companies expect a strong 2012 as a result.

The silos are the farmers’ most potent weapon in a struggle to loosen the grip of the agro-corporations—including Cargill,Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), and Bunge (BG) —which have long acted as middlemen, buying grain and oilseeds from farms to process themselves or to sell at a markup to customers such as ethanol manufacturers, livestock producers, dairy farms, and food companies. Farmers who lacked enough storage had to sell their autumn harvest immediately to the middlemen, who had the upper hand when it came to pricing.

The farmers are gaining more leverage. Grain prices were low a decade ago. In the last quarter of 2011, cash corn prices traded at their highest level. U.S. farm income reached a record $100.9 billion in 2011, the USDA estimated on Nov. 29.

Terry Jones, who grows corn and soybeans on 7,000 acres in Iowa, is building grain silos with the extra money that higher corn prices and selling some land put in his pocket. The third-generation farmer now owns more than 3.5 million bushels of storage capacity, including 400,000 bushels’ worth that he started building last year and will finish in 2012. Some years, corn can rise by as much as $1 a bushel between the end of the harvest and the following summer, says Jones. He’s also developed contacts with livestock producers and ethanol mills that call him directly when their corn supplies run short. “I like it when they call me because we know we are going to get a good price,” he says.

“The increase in on-farm storage plus stronger farmer balance sheets has shifted power toward the farmer,” says David Nelson, a global commodity strategist in Chicago for Rabobank International. In Decatur, Ill.—ADM’s hometown and a U.S. corn processing center—buyers paid an average premium of 18.2¢ a bushel above the Chicago futures price to take delivery of corn in October. That’s the highest October price in at least four years, data compiled by Bloomberg show. A year earlier, buyers were paying a 2.8¢ discount below futures. The processors “are having to bid up corn to get corn out of someone’s hand,” says Tim Lenz, who farms 2,600 acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat in Strasburg, Ill. Lenz is holding about 60 percent of his corn crop in his bins, up from 40 percent a decade ago, when he first added storage. Grain storage is “not going to allow them to get cheap corn at the glut of harvest,” he says.

Cargill has built more silos for its own use and helps construct bins for farmers who contract to sell the company their grain. Gary Schmalshof says he sold corn to Cargill for $7.40 a bushel in September, up from $6 a year earlier. “They were afraid that corn would go into the bins, and they couldn’t access it,” says the Illinois farmer, who last month was storing 70 percent of his 550,000-bushel harvest in his bins. Rising grain costs and tighter supplies curbed profits in late 2011 for ADM, whose shares dropped 4.9 percent last year. The S&P Consumer Staples Index, of which ADM is a member, rose more than 10 percent.

Neither ADM nor Cargill would comment on how more silos affect grain prices. Bunge Chief Executive Officer Alberto Weisser cautions that using silos to wait for the best price is a hard game to win consistently. “It’s a tricky decision for farmers to own storage,” he says. “It only makes sense for very large farmers.”

For now, the farmers are savoring the power those silos bring. “I like the control,” says Steve Ruh, a farmer in Sugar Grove, Ill., who built storage in 2009 and more again this year. “This allows me to market 12 months out of the year instead of half that time.”

 

The bottom line: U.S. farmers are tapping record income to build more storage silos, lessen the power of middlemen, and help them time the market.

 

Cupcakes Are OK; Cupcakes In A Jar Won't Fly Past Security, Says TSA

Categories: Travel

11:31 am

January 10, 2012

by EYDER PERALTA

The Transportation Security Administration clarified its cupcake policy in a blog post. Cupcakegate — as the agency has termed it — was prompted in December, when TSA officers told Rebecca Hains, who was flying out of Las Vegas, she could not carry cupcakes in her carry-on luggage. The TSA said the icing on the two cupcakes was a security risk.

At the time Hains told MSNBC she thought it "was terrible logic."

Yesterday, the TSA defended its action in a 500-word post written by the TSA's Bob Burns, who drew a red line between a normal cupcake and a cupcake in a jar like the one Hains tried to pass through security.

The TSA issued this picture for comparison:

TSA

 

And said:

"I wanted to make it clear that this wasn't your everyday, run-of-the-mill cupcake. If you're not familiar with it, we have a policy directly related to the UK liquid bomb plot of 2006 called 3-1-1 that limits the amount of liquids, gels and aerosols you can bring in your carry-on luggage. Icing falls under the "gel" category. As you can see from the picture, unlike a thin layer of icing that resides on the top of most cupcakes, this cupcake had a thick layer of icing inside a jar.

"In general, cakes and pies are allowed in carry-on luggage, however, the officer in this case used their discretion on whether or not to allow the newfangled modern take on a cupcake per 3-1-1 guidelines. They chose not to let it go."

Burns goes on to say that the days of terrorists taking the three-sticks-of-dynamite route are over.

"When you think about it, do you think an explosive would be concealed in an ominous item that would draw attention, or something as simple as a cute cupcake jar?" Burns writes. The bottom line, Burns says, is that if you bring a cake, pie or cupcake expect some extra attention from TSA officials.

 

H.B. Max Roach

January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007