Rosemary cake.....

This makes lovely cake to serve with tea or coffee.  I eat it just plain, with nothing spread on it.    This is yet another recipe from Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace."  I get the rosemary from my wee garden on the porch.  

8 eggs; 1-1/2 cup raw sugar (i used plain sugar); 1-2/3 cup olive oil; 4 T finely chopped fresh rosemary; 3 cups flour; 2 T baking powder; 1 t kosher salt. 

Heat the oven to 325 degrees.  Coat a bundt pan first with butter, then with flour, tapping out the excess flour.
Beat the eggs for 30 seconds. Slowly add the sugar and continue beating until the mixture is very foamy and pale. Still mixing, slowly drizzle in the olive oil.  Using a spatula, fold in the rosemary.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt.  Keeping the mixer on low speed, gradually add the dry ingredients to the egg mixture.  Pour the batter into the bundt pan.
Bake for 45 to 50 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through (I forgot to do this, didn't seem to hurt anything).  The cake is done when it looks golden brown and springs back when touched.  You can pretty much tell.  Or you can insert a straw or skewer into the center and it comes out clean.  Allow the cake to cool briefly in the pan and then tip it out onto a rack to continue cooling.
This is delicious on its own, or accompanied by freshly whipped cream or mascarpone.  

Feliz Lunes-y!

Here's a good Monday recipe: Pasta with sardines!!  I think I'm going to make this for breakfast. There's enough to last all day/week.  It's from my newest favorite cooking book (not the same as a cookbook): An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler.  It's on page 185 of the paperback.  In Amazon, Alice Waters is listed as an author after Adler.  Adler has cooked at Chez Panisse, and Waters wrote the foreword for this book.

2 tablespoons olive oil; salt; 1/2 onion, sliced; 1 bunch parsley, leaves picked & roughly chopped; 1 clove garlic, sliced; 1 can good olive-oil-packed sardines; 1 cup toasted breadcrumbs; 1 pound spaghetti; optional: dried chile flakes. 

Heat the o.o. in a deep pan big enough to hold the pasta once it's cooked. Once the oil is warm, add the onion and garlic and cook until it's soft...5 to 10 min. Add the sardines and their o.o. and let them fry in the pan, breaking them up with your spoon. Turn the heat off once the sardines have broken down. Cook the pasta in well-salted water. While the pasta is cooking, chop the parsley. Remove a glass of pasta water from the pot just before you remove the pasta. When the pasta is almost done, turn the heat on under the pan of sardines. Remove the pasta with tongs and drop it directly into the pan. Add 1/4 cup of pasta water and mix the sardines & onions through the pasta. Add more water by the splash if it all seems dry and rigid. When the noodles & sauce seem well combined, add half the breadcrumbs and parsley and mix them through. Serve the pasta in a big bowl, topped with the remaining breadcrumbs and parsley. A few shakes of dried chile are good here, too.

Bon appetit! 

Please don't think your vote won't make a difference!....

Digby has a wonderful post today by David Atkins: "In case there was any doubt which party is the party of plutocracy."  Please read it all by going to the link at the beginning of this paragraph, but I especially like the last two paragraphs:

As long as these people are willing to spend billions of dollars stealing elections and can get away with doing so under cover of total darkness, they don't really care how many people march in the streets. The little people mean nothing to them. And even if worst comes to worst, it still won't matter to them. After all, it's not as if the villains will be anywhere in the remote vicinity of the revolution even if it were to ever come, which it won't. They'll already be safely in the arms of Dubai, Nassau, or any other welcoming city whose country has low taxes and little will to extradite. Armed revolutions usually accomplish little except the slaughter of the innocent.

The alternative, of course, is to vote and fight like hell within the confines of the democratic system. Even if the choices aren't necessarily between good and evil, non-participation in the process is inexcusable when it's so abundantly clear which side is the far greater evil.

 

The Road to Recovery by Joared....

Joanne, author of Along The Way has a wonderful post, "The Road to Recovery" that she wrote at BlogHer.  It's a serious, lengthy piece of writing about how to put the country back together again, and I'm not going to reproduce all of it here.  I do like the last part, though.  To wit:

I do not want to live in a plutocracy (a nation run by the extremely wealthy), or a theocracy (a nation dictated to by any religious group), or any such combination thereof, much less a faux republic/democracy.

Let's move forward toward the gradual rejuvenation of this nation in a manner dedicated to re-building our middle class.....

... creating jobs that are not limited to just the service industry as being good enough,

... insisting our government take action to rebuild our nation's infrastructure,

... re-assessing the allocation of government funds that do not penalize the least among us,

... expecting all, including the most wealthy among us, to pay their fair percentage of taxes,

... determine government budget cuts in many unnecessary subsidized areas,

... institute budget cuts the military/Pentagon has even specified as being appropriate,

... reassess the allocation of all foreign aid within the context of today's world government alignments, 

... revolutionize drug purchasing practices with pharmaceutical companies for Medicare/Medicaid/insurers, 

... demand accountability for the financial industries giants and corporations through the regulation with which they do not self-police and our officials have been negligent in enforcing.

Let's do more than just yell out the window... "we're mad as hell and not going to take it any more!"

Darlene's Hodgepodge on the ACA

The true skinny on the ACA!!  Read it and rejoice!  Thanks, Darlene!

Darlene's Hodgepodge

Higgs Boson as explained by my friends

What would I do without my smart friends? Yesterday at lunch, Linda (PHD) and I were chatting about the God particle in the news. When I got home, she had already emailed me this cartoon:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57465895/higgs-boson-explained-by-cartoon
    Of course, this cartoon left me behind at about the half-way mark..."speaking too fast," etc.  Ha. So I in turn sent it to Stu (PHD) (in his words, "a grumpy, overeducated, facetious, multilingual ex-pat Scot, blatantly opinionated, old (1944-vintage), amateur cryptologist, computer consultant, atheist, flying instructor, bulldog-lover, Beetle-driver, textbook-writer, long-distance biker, geocacher and blogger living in the foothills south of the northern German plains), who replied: 

I just love the way he [the cartoonist] draws some Feynman diagrams (quantum transitions) but doesn't explain what they are nor how to interpret them because he is assuming that everyone in his audience knows that already, implying everyone has at least a B.Sc. in (quantum) physics ;-) 

I wonder what % of the general public can read a Feynman diagram? It has to be below 1%....
(If he's talking about the general public over here, I'd say he's probably overestimating! That's certainly true in my house.) Stu also explained the name Boson:

The name Boson is derived from the surname of the Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose, a contemporary of the German physicist Albert Einstein.  Nothing to do with the bosun in Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark, although I have pulled people's legs using that ;-)

The fifth state of matter (after solid, liquid, gas, plasma) is called the "Bose-Einstein Condensate" after both of them. 
    As for the "God" particle name, Cathy (PHD) told me yesterday that she read that while Higgs and others were hunting for the elusive particle, the Nobel laureate Leon Lederman wrote a book originally titled That goddamn particle because nobody could find it!  When Higgs finally did find it, the book's editor changed the book's name to the God Particle without the writer's permission, setting off many discussions not only in academe but also in religion.  

D.C. Fireworks Grand Finale, July 4, 2012

Copyright © Thomas Tyler

Last night, Tom Tyler, a friend of my daughter Sally from U of Iowa days, took this wonderful photo of the D.C. fireworks grand finale.  He was in Lady Bird Johnson Park, which is on the Virginia side of the Potomac.  I love the people sitting along the shore and the boats in the river, all watching the display.  I think this is one of my very favorite D.C. photos, fireworks or not. Thanks, Tom, for letting Xtreme English's visitors share your view.