Inhumane Conditions In The Slaughterhouse Since 1993?? They Told Us California Cows Were Happy Cows!!

With this week-end’s meat recall, 143 million pounds of beef, the largest recall in history, comes an even more disturbing possibility. A video has surfaced that shows inhumane conditions may have occurred since 1993. That’s 15 years!! Did the government do anything to safeguard that consumers eat healthy food? Did the greedy big business slaughterhouse have the least thought about the public school children who would eat tainted meat? Are California cows happy cows as the advertising slogan claims? You decide.

Check out Tad Cronn’s article and look at the video he posted.

Fast, Easy Valentine Hearts For Breakfast or Anytime

This Valentine’s Day falls on a weekday so a special breakfast for your family might seem impossible, but not if you follow these quick and easy tips. Armed with my heart shaped cookie cutters of varying sizes I can show my heartfelt sentiments with morning canapes which are some of the easiest and fastest things you can possibly make.

These ideas can also be easily adapted into sandwiches for the lunch boxes (children LOVE them) or appetizers for your romantic dinner for two or even include all your children to celebrate your family’s love.

Here’s just a sampling of the variations you can make in little more time than it takes for your toaster to pop up.

Cut your favorite brand of store-bought waffles, English muffins or sliced bread with your heart-shaped cookie cutters. Toast, and add your favorite savory or sweet toppings. If your topping is not spreadable, use your cookie cutters again!

• Sweet:
• Jelly/Jam especially red ones to keep with the Valentine theme such as strawberry, cherry, or plum;
• Sugar and cinnamon;
• Lemon curd;
• Peanut butter or peanut butter and jelly;
• Butter;
• Apple sauce or apple butter;
• Cream cheese;
• Whipped cream and red sugar sprinkles;
• Nuttela (chocolate and hazelnut spread);
• Or to be totally decadent, an ice cream Sunday with a heart waffle or two on the side.

• Savory:
• Pate or braunschweiger;
• Canadian bacon;
• Ham;
• Shredded or sliced cheese; (shredded will melt faster in your toaster over)
• Minced sun-dried tomatoes;
• Turkey;
• Pastrami or any other deli meats;
• Egg (such as scrambled or over easy, etc.)
• Roasted bell peppers (they come right out of a jar these days);
• Herb cheese spread such as Rondele or Alouette;
• Lox (smoked salmon);
• Marinated mushrooms;
• Marinated artichoke hearts.

I’m sure I missed lots of great toppings, so let us know your great ideas too.

And for the scraps left over from those heart cutouts, some very lucky dogs will love you, or you can save them for your next turkey stuffing.

Adopt The Tradition of the Feast Of The Magi And The French Galette Des Rois Recipe

French families have an Epiphany tradition to celebrate the Magi each January 6. Even non-religious families celebrate because they have such fond childhood memories and the galette, a covered almond tart or pie, is so good that they just can’t leave it only to the Christians.

I think you should adopt it too because your children will love the game (adults enjoy it too) and all your taste buds will rejoice. The recipe is easy and fast too if you don’t have a French bakery near you.

You’ll have to “draw a king.” After a fancy holiday dinner, everyone eats the Galette Des Rois (Mages). Inside the covered pie is a “feve” or a small ceramic figure or even just a fava bean or button. The figures are traditionally of the Baby Jesus, but can be of any of the nativity pieces, of a champagne bottle, a lucky clover, a horseshoe or anything symbolizing good luck for the New Year.

The mother or hostess cuts and serves the pie pieces while the youngest child gets under the table or simply closes his eyes to tell the server to whom each piece should go to without being able to peek at the little hidden figure.

When someone finds the figure, they are crowned King or Queen and everyone toasts to them with Champagne or non-alcoholic sparkling apple cider, and none will prevent you from drinking soda or milk if you prefer. Each time the King drinks everyone says “The King drinks!”

Then that person discretely places the figure in the glass of someone of the opposite sex so that the King has a Queen or vice versa. Everyone waits for the Queen to find her figure in her glass and when she drinks, everyone says “The Queen drinks!” The King and Queen wear their crowns all evening.

When children are participating, the mother strategically makes sure that one of the children gets the treasured figure. Should a parent accidentally become King, that parent should make a child the Queen (or King or Prince), NOT his spouse.

The game is rigged, but the gullible children have no idea and believe that each year they are just the luckiest kids in the whole wide world and it makes them quite happy and excited. It also boosts their self-esteem in a safe manner. You could crown all the children or even everyone present too.

When the game is played only among adults, it is often agreed upon that the King or Queen will host the Feast of the Magi the following year or bring next year’s galette or pie to the party, and everyone looks forward to more good times among good friends or family.

Whether children or adults, the King and the Queen are supposed to have good luck all year long!

You will need 2 crowns. Your children can easily make them out of paper and decorate them by drawing jewels or using stickers or gluing plastic jewels or sequins. It’s an easy and fun craft. Otherwise you can find crowns from the most basic paper to fancy gold plastic or even velvet ones at a party or costume store.

For the figure you can use a bean or a button. Be sure to warn everyone so there is no tragic chocking! If you decide to play each year, you can even buy tiny figures on-line like the ones in the photo or even outside France at some French bakeries. E-Bay also auctions them as they have become collectibles.

Here’s the recipe:

Galette Des Rois
For 4-6 people

• 2 circles of store-bought puff pastry
• 1 1/2 cup of powdered almonds
• 1 1/2 stick of butter (melted)
• 3 eggs
• 1 heaping cup of granulated sugar
• Natural flavoring to taste such as orange flower water, rose water, pure vanilla extract, rum, Amaretto or Grand Marnier

Mix the sugar, butter, 2 eggs, almonds and your chosen flavoring. Evenly spread the mixture on one of the puff pastry circles. Insert your “feve” or a button or bean, and cover with the second circle. Make a pleasant design on the top with the tip of a knife and paint with 1 egg yolk. Bake for about 25 minutes or until golden at 325-350 degrees F. depending on your oven.

It is best served warm. You can also serve at room temperature.

Bon Appetit and Bonne Fete Des Rois!!

Priest Sees Red Over Sacrilegious Red Bull TV Ad

Why is it the world thinks it’s perfectly OK to bash Christianity? In a world where clerks are no longer allowed to wish us a Merry Christmas for fear we might prefer to be wished a Happy Eid, despite the fact we are Christmas shopping, no one in Red Bull’s advertising agency gave a second thought to blaspheming the Holy Nativity, Christ’s birth, the Wise Men or angels.

In another example of Christianity being trampled by atheists and other religions, an advertising campaign for the Red Bull energy drink created an animated television commercial with 4 Wise Men, instead of 3, bringing a can of the drink to the Holy Family while angels tout the company slogan, “Red Bull gives you wings.”

Father Marco Damanti, whose written complaints to the company succeeded in the company promising it would pull the ads from Italian airwaves, told the Corriere dela Sera newspaper, “The image of the sacred family has been represented in a sacrilegious way. Whatever the ironic intentions of Red Bull, the advert pokes fun at the Nativity and at Christian sensitivity.”

Red Bull et al obviously expect us to always turn the other cheek!

Thursday Thirteen #6 — My Interests

I am sharing with you 13 topics which interest me and are important to me. They are in no particular order, because most of these would all tie with each other. These are topics
you see and which will recur on my blog. To see more participants in this carnival or for
details on how to join, visit Thursday Thirteen.

1. Computers/Internet/Blogs/Technology/Science
These sort of overlap in many ways. I’m forward thinking and I’ve been using computers
since before my teen years, back in the days when people were saying it was a waste of
time, and it wouldn’t last. Wait, aren’t a lot of people still saying that? Well 30+
years later, I’m still interested. I remember asking for a calculator as a Christmas gift
when I was in Kindergarten. The people selling them were flabbergasted that a child would want one and thought no child would ever need one. This “pocket” calculator, the smallest on the market at the time, was about the size of a small paperback!

2. Fine Art
I was an art history minor and an art minor. I seriously considered switching it to my
major, and often wonder if I didn’t make a mistake. I draw, paint, photograph, make
ceramics and do a lot of new media paintings — that’s every stroke hand-painted by me, but instead of using paint, I use computers. Museums and galleries recognize new media, but the average person out there still claims the computer makes the paintings. Not so! This would be the equivalent of saying oil paint and brushes are the artists making the artwork. Computers do not make art. Paint and brushes do not make art. The people, the artists make art, regardless of which tools they use.

3. History/Biographies/Autobiographies
As much as I like the future, I also like the past. We can learn from our past and our
past can help us understand our present. I’m very much interested in people and their
lives which is why I like history and also what leads me to the next item.

4. Psychology/Sociology
I’m interested in people and what makes them tick. I’m also interested in science, so
psychology helps me understand the individual and sociology helps me understand the groups and societies we live in. In college my sociology professor had wanted me to switch majors to either sociology (he hoped) or psychology (which he admitted was related and thought I would like too). I ended up with an additional certificate in psychology, but I never switched majors to either psychology or sociology.

5. Cross-stitching/Crafts
My grandmother taught me how to cross-stitch and I spent numerous hours watching her even before she taught me how to do it. I find it very relaxing and as I like art and to create, cross-stitching and other crafts are just related to that.

6. Reading/Writing/Journalism/News/Books
These are all intertwined. As a professional journalist, writing and reading are just my
life. I just could not live without reading. I have to learn at all times and reading is
the best way for me to do that. I have been wanting to write since early childhood. I
have attempted not to write for a living, but life was just too miserable without a pen in
my hand or a keyboard at my fingertips. I’m a published journalist, but I would love to be a published author using either my journalistic skills to write non-fiction or even writing a
novel. I’m one of the crazy participants in National Novel Writing Month. Any publishers
out there interested in my writing voice?

7. Religion/God
I believe in God and shout it from the rooftops, but won’t attempt to convert atheists as
belief needs to come from inside your heart and soul. I worked for my parish for several
years and wanted to work there until retirement, but an evil man came into our midst,
getting rid of staff and clergy, swiftly putting a financially viable parish in the red,
and destroying the work of the last 40+ years. Some will turn away from God because of
him, but the destruction he brings is not of God. Destruction can never be of God.

8. Education
I love to learn, my husband and I have both taught, and since we have a son, education is very important to us. He went to private schools for several years and while that was fine, we found something better through an excellent public school system with an independent study program. Forget all the stereotypes of homeschooling and of public school. That’s not what it is. It’s more a combination of when people had private tutors teach their children, the one-room schools and parents nurturing their own children. The program is what it is thanks to our son’s wonderful teachers, especially the founder, Resa Steindel Brown. If you want a glimpse at what it’s all about, read her fantastic book, The Call to Brilliance: A True Story to Inspire Parents and Educators. You can also read about his science teacher in my blog posts here and here.

9. Family
Family and extended family is extremely important to me. It is where we receive and give love and support. Here on Earth, not counting God in Heaven, it is the one most important thing and it just doesn’t get more basic than that.

10. Movies/Plays
I don’t watch much TV, but I love a good movie or play. While it can’t replace a good
book, it’s still a story, whether real or fictional, and I love to be entertained. I
prefer comedies, especially for movies, because I don’t know about your life, but my life
is enough of a drama as it is. I just don’t need other people’s too, especially the made-
up ones. I really like adventures too, because this way I can escape to some fabulous
world and live vicariously. I would like science fiction, but most don’t meet my quality
standards unfortunately.

11. Hiking/Walking/Swimming
I enjoy being in nature and these are the most fun forms of exercise for me. These are not boring to me. I enjoy the scenery. Running would be too fast and strenuous to enjoy the
scenery. These are also quiet and since I despise noise, anything with bouncing balls,
whistling referees or echoing gymnasiums just would not work for me.

12. Cooking/Gourmet Food/Reading Cookbooks
Yes, I read cookbooks. I actually read cookbooks more than I eat or cook. As a teen my
mom would tell me that I read cookbooks instead of eating. I also love to cook when I
don’t have a full-time job. If I’m working, then cooking is no longer a pleasure and
something that I do for the family that I love. It becomes a chore and a race to put
anything on a plate in front of starving eyes in less than half an hour from the time I run
through the front door. But when I am not working, I will use all my knowledge from
reading all these cookbooks and all my creativity and use cooking as another art-form. I
also like real food. I am against eating engineered chemicals, dyes, artificial products.
I like wild salmon, trout and other fish, I like real butter on all my foods and especially
my popcorn. And you really don’t want me to get started on cloned meat, or cloned
anything, because I’m really against that!

13.Travel
I don’t travel enough. I would love to travel 365 days a year, but that’s simply not
possible. I put roots down with a family and a house. Once upon a time I contemplated
becoming a foreign correspondent, a travel writer and even a pilot or a stewardess, just so
that I could travel, but I will just have to be satisfied with having been to Germany,
France, Switzerland, Italy, England, Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii, Arizona,
Nevada, Georgia, … Oops, that sounds like another Thursday Thirteen! 😉

Just click on Mister Linky to add your Thursday 13 link and see the other participants who linked here. And please don’t forget to post a comment. Thanks!

• Don’t know what NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo are? Read all about it here and here.

• Want to know why I’m participating in both? Click here.

Starbucks Throws Children and Parents Into the Street

Starbucks strikes again. I keep hearing in the community, in the news, and on the Internet that Starbucks does not like children, and at least based on the experience we had a few days ago, I can say it’s absolutely true.

Our son’s teacher had prearranged with the local Starbucks manager in Oak Park, Calif., to have a small group of 6-10 homeschoolers accompanied by parents to journal for one hour. The thought was to have comfortable seating, pleasant music and, since the weather is getting chilly, perhaps even a cup of hot cocoa all while the children and parents wrote in their journals.

It seemed it would be a better experience than sitting in a school district classroom, which seems particularly uninviting to all of us who are so used to the pleasures and comfort of homeschooling.

We would have gained a clean, well-lighted place to write, and in exchange Starbucks would have gained some free community outreach in an affluent area which is extremely family oriented, all the while gaining some extra business at a time of day the manager had claimed was always slow.

Well, that was not to be.

Despite the prearrangement and the fact that several parents were already purchasing drinks and snacks, the manager asked the teacher to leave even before several of us had the chance to arrive, claiming there were too many patrons there that morning despite the seats still available both inside and on the patio.

Now, I ask you, since almost every single one of us had made a purchase, were we not patrons?

Mind you, we were not a group of screaming preschoolers or scary teen gang members. The three children who had already arrived were polite and quiet elementary school children who were accompanied by both a school district teacher, and one parent each.

Starbucks did not refuse to serve us. No, they gladly took our money. Starbucks refused to allow paying customers to sit down and sent children out into the cold!

When the teacher went to Starbucks to prearrange this, the manager had the choice to simply say no, or that she didn’t feel comfortable doing that, or that it was sometimes a busy time of day so it might not be comfortable for us, or any polite customer service excuse she wanted to give. But instead, she chose to tell the teacher yes, that it was a slow time of day and that it was “fine,” only to rudely go back on her word.

That’s not how to win repeat business or create community goodwill, Starbucks. That’s not only the perfect recipe for losing business today, but also for losing business tomorrow when those children become adults.

As you can see by this blog post, it’s also the perfect way to earn bad press for all the World Wide Web to read.

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• Don’t know what NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo are? Read all about it here and here.

• Want to know why I’m participating in both? Click here.

WFMW — Trading Card Storage

Pokemon, Redemption, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, baseball cards, etc.; Kids have lots of trading cards these days. I found a great storage solution by using a clean, rectangular, 3 lbs. cardboard container of Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

The box is sturdy and just the right size for filing the cards upright with just enough wiggle room for easy access yet not too much room so they won’t get damaged.

Let your children decorate the lid with stickers or a collage. They will be proud of their craft and it won’t look like a tacky cream cheese box. Soon other moms will ask you where you found this perfect box and they too will do the same for their children because everything on the market is either for small decks or the larger containers already come filled with cards.

It works for our family and our school friends.

For more tips, visit Shannon at Rocks in My Dryer for a list of this week’s participants.

If you’ve missed my previous tips, just click below.

Freezer Solution

Large desk calendar inside guest closet

Child’s haircut without tears

Homemade bread stuffing

plastic colander bath toy drainer/holder

reuse plastic grocery bags in the car

How to increase Web site traffic?

16 Blog/Web site tips

Toy storage

The Votes Are In For Organic Meat

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Follow up on Blog Action Day post from Oct. 15. To make more sense of this post please click Blog Action Day — Environment and Organic Foods.

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Organic meat tastes better. The verdict is in. Our family votes thumbs up for the taste of organic meat. The woman we met at the store who recommended organic meat was absolutely right. Though we vote thumbs down for the inflated price tag. Yet, I must say that just as with organic fruits and vegetables, I noticed that my family felt satisfied far quicker than with non-organic foods.

While I was concerned that we wouldn’t have enough to eat with this special birthday meal, as portions were smaller than we are used to, we ended up with left overs. I have noticed this before with fruits and vegetables. While the organics taste far better and some might think we would eat more, we in fact eat less. I am guessing because the nutrition value is higher.

So this interesting finding makes me wonder if it would follow that as we eat less yet have better and more nutrition, we would also lose weight?

We have seen our country as a whole gain more and more weight since the ’70s. At the same time our quality of food has degraded more and more with each passing decade.

Not only have our foods been pumped full with more and more chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics, but also many additives like artificial and engineered flavorings and corn syrup. Actually, corn syrup is known to make us gain weight, eat more and crave additional corn syrup, but I will leave the side effects and evils of corn syrup for another post (stay tuned).

In the meantime, eat healthy and be well!

Blog Action Day — Environment and Organic Foods

The environment is at the forefront of the news these days, but today the issue was right in front of me at my local grocery store, and the opportunity for an instant consumer poll arose.

As I was looking at my choices in the meat and fish cases, I noticed a woman reaching into the new organic meat section. Having wondered about it myself, I asked her if she had tried it already.

Well, her face lit up and a giant smile emerged. “Yes, it is soooo good,” she said closing her eyes to savor the memory. She told me she was surprised at how much of a difference “organic” made. She had bought organic meat originally as more of a whim than anything else. She now uses it for all her special dishes and said even just a spaghetti dinner is brought to a whole new level. It is well worth the extra money, she advised, especially when considering the health benefits.

Double the money to be exact. The beef had a much more intense color, much darker. I thought it was just like the difference between farmed salmon that is pale despite the artificially added coloring, and wild salmon that is a dark reddish orange.

The label stated, “raised without antibiotics or added growth hormones, in pastures free of chemical fertilizers and fed only certified organic feed.”

And as I thought, “Shouldn’t it always be like that?” I recalled the cattle we see for miles as we go up the state on Highway 5. Those poor beasts do not have a pasture. They are sitting — sardine style — in mud, and the stench is sickeningly powerful even when the cattle have long gone out of sight.

We can’t tell what they are fed when we drive by at highway speeds, but if these cattlemen “care” enough to make their cattle sit in mud and breathe in highway pollution, I can imagine they also care enough to feed them all sorts of hormones, chemicals and perhaps even the best recipe for mad cows.

I’ll be cooking the organic beef tonight for a special birthday dinner and I’ll let you know what we all thought tomorrow.

In the meantime, please let me know what you think of organic meats and foods in general and if you’ve tried organic, how do you think it compared.

Personally, I can’t wait for the prices to get lower as more people start using organic meat and it stops being some exotic product. Good, natural, organic foods should be the norm, not the exception. Where has the pride of our cowboys and cowgirls gone? Isn’t that what America was made of? Our cowboys and our farmers made our country what it is. So why the negative, greedy trend of late?

We need to be conscious of the total disregard for healthy foods by growers and manufacturers across the board unless they think they can “make a buck.” We need to stand up and demand that we not be fed hormones, chemicals, pesticides, cloned meats, engineered flavorings, engineered trouts to turn them into salmons, etc., etc., etc.; the list of Frankenstein science experiments that turn up on our table without our direct approval is too long and much too frightening.

For my related posts, please click on the following:

Salmon + salmon = trout

Popcorn lung

You can’t trust anybody

Farmer’s Market

Blog Action Day is October 15, when bloggers around the web unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. All bloggers post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topics. The aim is to get everyone talking toward a better future.

For more information about Blog Action Day or to participate next year, please go to their website at blogactionday.com. And beside their acronim, B.A.D., it is a good thing.

You Can’t Trust Anybody These Days!

As I turned on the TV news today, I was bombarded with recall after recall. On the headlines: infant cold and cough medicine with even the big names like Tylenol, more pot pies, more toys including Mattel again, baby strollers, carriers, etc. with Winnie the Pooh and made in Korea, lipsticks including name brands like L’Oreal and Dior with the prestige of Paris, but actually subcontracted just like Mattel, and the list went on too.

So what’s happening here? Are the government agencies more stringent than they have been in the past and these recalls would have been under the radar until now? Have companies gone insane and they are trying to kill consumers, the very hand that feeds them? Have some evil forces or the 9/11 Terrorists infiltrated even our formerly most trusted name brands in an attempt to kill even our youngest and our psyches? Are Communist countries like China behind it all?

None of it makes sense, but one thing is sure, the enemy, whoever it may be, is lurking behind every product these days.

Forget name brand loyalty. Forget Tylenol, Mattel, Dior. Spending more won’t be a guarantee of getting a decent product, let alone quality.

Forget saving money at the local dollar store or discount outlet. You’ll surely be putting your life at stake with just about every product there being made in China.

As my grandmother used to say, “we don’t know what to eat and drink anymore.” And what was true then, is mind boggling now. And now add “we don’t know what to breathe anymore” too, because even the smell of popcorn is killing us. (See my related blog post.)

It’s no solution for those of us living in cities, but if things don’t get better soon, at this rate, I foresee having to grow our own food, make our own toys, revert back to milk paint, feed our pets people food — actually with our own dog having been killed by the last pet food recall, we’re ALREADY doing that!

It’s a scary world out there. Self-sufficiency is starting to look good not just to wackos, but to the rest of us too. Horse and buggy here we come!