The History Channel : America, The Story of Us

The History Channel is running a Series right now called :  America: The Story of US.

http://www.history.com/shows/america-the-story-of-us/episodes

I have to say, I have learned more about history from this, than I learned in school!

This is a must see.  It's on demand on comcast...the first two episodes are falling off the listing on 5-31 but you can view them on the website.  It is much more comfortable to watch in the living room.
If you have a dvr check your listings and record them to watch! They do keep re-airing them but not sure how long it will last on the tv.

Croque Monsieur and Madame, so not "complicated"

The other night, my teenage boys had some friends over, platonic female friends...they wanted to watch an on demand pay movie..."It's Complicated"  Sure, go ahead..wondering what that is about, sounded familiar.  10 mins later, they get a text and all leave...paid movie just going to go to waste, as usual. lol.  So I looked it up to see what it was about...and my husband and I sat eating our salmon with roasted veggies dinner in front of the tv...we laughed, what a great movie (the kids never would have liked it, but had it not been for them, I never would have watched it.)
She made a cute french meal in the movie that looks delish and she said that she made it when she was low on funds.  It was a sort of grilled ham and cheese with cheese on top too, served with a salad.  Croque Monsieur.  I had to have one..its going to be my new thing to make myself when I want a quick meal. (let me tell ya, her pronunciation and the spelling of it were hard to put together to look up lol.
For the record, a Croque Madam is with egg on it.
Recipe follows movie trailer.










Pan down for another few versions...some are more "Complicated"  than others. But all seem pretty easy and fast to make.

Croque Monsieur Sandwich Recipe

Grilled cheese sandwiches can be temperamental. Get them too hot and you can scorch the bread. Not hot enough and the cheese doesn't fully melt.

Using clarified butter helps, because you can get the pan hotter. But even heating is as important as the temperature itself. So unless you have a griddle on your rangetop, it's best to cook one sandwich at a time, in a single pan.

Therefore, this recipe makes one sandwich. If you want to double the recipe and make two sandwiches at once, use two separate pans.

For this recipe you'll also need a small amount of béchamel, a basic white sauce.

Prep Time: 4 minutes

Cook Time: 5 minutes

Total Time: 9 minutes

Ingredients:

• 2 slices white bread
• 1 Tbsp clarified butter (or unsalted butter), soft
• 2 tsp Dijon mustard
• ¼ cup grated Gruyère cheese (Jarlsberg or Monterey Jack may be substituted. See variations below.)
• 2 Tbsp béchamel sauce
• 2 oz. sliced ham (1 slice)

Preparation:

1. Trim the crusts off of the bread, making the slices as square as possible.
   
2. Spread both slices of bread with butter, then flip them over and spread them lightly with Dijon mustard.
   
3. In a bowl, combine the cheese and béchamel sauce and mix until the cheese is fully coated.
   
4. Spoon the cheese mixture onto the bread, half on each slice, and spread it evenly. Lay the sliced ham atop one of the sandwich halves, then press both halves together. You should now have a sandwich that is buttered on the outside, with a slice of ham between two layers of the cheese mixture.
   
5. Spray a bit of cooking spray onto the surface of a nonstick pan. Heat the pan over a medium heat until the oil is hot and glistening but not quite smoking.
   
6. Place the sandwich into the pan and cook for about 2 minutes, or until the bottom of the bread is a nice shade of golden-brown.
   
7. Use a nonstick spatula to flip the sandwich over. Lower the heat a bit and cover the pan. Cook for another minute or two, or until the second slice of bread is also golden brown and the cheese inside the sandwich is fully melted.
   
8. Slice diagonally and serve right away.

Variations:

• Muenster, Gouda, Fontina and Comté are good to use instead or in combination with the Gruyère.
• Substitute sliced cooked chicken breast for ham.
• Instead of white bread, use sourdough. Leave crusts on.
• Top finished sandwich with a fried egg to make a Croque Madame, possibly named because the egg resembles a ladies' hat.

source: http://culinaryarts.about.com/od/sandwiches/r/croquemonsieur.htm

Here is Nigella's version of it, in a one dish meal.
Croque Monsieur Bake
  And another version I found..
**************************************************************************

Croque Monsieur

{recipe via Epicurious}

2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
1 cup whole milk
Pinch of ground nutmeg
1 bay leaf
4 slices firm white sandwich bread
4 ounces thinly sliced Black Forest ham
4 ounces sliced Gruyère cheese
1 tablespoon melted butter
1/4 cup grated Gruyère cheese
2 teaspoons chopped fresh chives

Melt 2 tablespoons butter in small saucepan over medium heat. Add flour and stir 1 minute. Gradually whisk in milk. Add nutmeg and bay leaf. Increase heat to medium-high and boil until sauce thickens, whisking constantly, about 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.
Preheat broiler. Place 2 bread slices on work surface. Top each with half of ham and sliced Gruyère. Top with remaining bread. Heat heavy large skillet over low heat. Brush sandwiches with 1 tablespoon melted butter. Add to skillet and cook until deep golden brown, about 2 minutes per side. Transfer to small baking sheet. Spoon sauce, then grated cheese over sandwiches. Broil until cheese begins to brown, about 2 minutes.

 *************************************************************************

 Croque Madame
Okay, not this is the same, with a fried egg on top.  Serving this with baby greens is awesome, if you never had the runny egg yolk on baby greens, you must try it!!!
You can so carefully add an egg to the top of the Croque Monsieur and broil it until cooked to your liking..depending on the size of the bread, or even cut a small hole in it for putting the egg.  Serve it over the baby greens. YUM
You can also serve this at breakfast with home-fries or french fries at lunch, but with all of the cheese and egg, butter etc, the lettuce is a wiser and healthier choice. 

Now I need to get an ice cream maker and try to create that Lavender Honey Ice Cream she makes...sounds great..had lavender ice cream once with lavender chocolate cake...first bite was odd, but had to have a second and third bite..it really was good.

Some of you who have a baking stone, can make these in the oven, all at once. I like my Pampered Chef stone, avail on my website, but you can find them pretty reasonably priced on Amazon.



My need to gripe....And since Pampered Chef will not allow me to advertise the site that I pay them to have on my blog or anywhere, guess they lose out on the sales.  (as much as I love their products, I am very bitter to them)
If you wish to find my site, go to pamperedchef dot biz backslash margaritastewart  lol.  hehe. If they'd like to take my site away for putting my site on here that way, then so be it...and tootloo PC. Tying our hands on selling the products really ticks me off.

Glowing Duct Tape (A chemistry experiment)

Duck Tape Triboluminescence

Glow in the Dark Duck Tape Experiment

By Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D., About.com Guide

You can use duck tape to see an example of triboluminescence, the glow given off when some materials are subjected to mechanical stress or friction. The duck tape (or duct tape) triboluminescence project is extremely easy and only take a few seconds to try. It doesn't matter whether you call the tape duck tape or duct tape, but your results seem to depend partially on the brand you use: Henkel™ works well. What You Do
Tear off two strips of tape. Stick the pieces together with the sticky sides facing each other, leaving enough tape so that you can pull the strips apart. Turn out the lights. Give your eyes a minute or two to adjust to the dark. Pull the strips of tape apart.
What Happened
Did you see the blue line where the tape separated? This is triboluminescence, which is a type of luminescence triggered by mechanical energy or electrical energy from an action such as friction. You can get the same effect from other types of tape as well. A good one to try is transparent Scotch™ tape. If you have a hard time separating strips of tape with their sticky sides together, you can see the triboluminescent glow simply by pulling the tape (quickly) off of the roll, thought the light will not be quite as bright.

 Source:

http://chemistry.about.com/od/glowinthedarkprojects/a/duck-tape-triboluminescence.htm?nl=1

Identify Snakes, Turtles, Salamanders etc in PA

Here is a great site I found while trying to identify a huge red salamander we saw at my moms house.

http://www.paherps.com/

The Cons and Pros of Food Processing

 I saw this on food monki today and had to laugh.  I eat a diet that is meatless on weekdays...does this count at meatless? lol.  

As a joke, my husband brought it home once and I made it for my kids....go figure, they loved it...it was the last time I made it though lol.

 

The Cons and Pros of Food Processing

source:

http://www.fooducate.com/blog/2010/03/31/the-cons-and-pros-of-food-processing/

Here is an interesting finding from a recent market study. 1500 consumers across all demographics in the US were surveyed by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) and Artemis Strategy Group. The news:

43% of consumers have a negative attitude towards processed foods.

But what exactly is processed food?
And is a processed food bad for you by default?

What you need to know:
Food processing is a set of methods and techniques used to transform raw food ingredients into consumable food. Food processing can be as simple as cutting up some vegetables to prepare a salad, or as complex as manufacturing a Twinkie in multiple processing facility.
From the early days of food processing, the primary goal was to extend the life of a foodstuff, by acting as a preservative. This helped balance humans’ need to eat daily with nature’s trend to provide crops only during certain times of the year. To this day, extending shelf life is one of the most important reasons food manufacturers add so many weird sounding ingredients to products.
One of the first forms of food processing, dating back to BC, was the salting of meats as a means of preservation. Sugar was introduced much later as a preservative for fruit, and thus the jam was born. Keeping food cold, either underground, or by using ice, was an effective, if primitive method of preservation until the ascent of ice boxes and recently electrical refrigeration.
In the early 19th century a new technology was introduced to vacuum bottles of food for French troops. It would lead to the use of tin cans a decade later and thus the canning industry was born.
Pasteurization, another French invention from the mid 19th century, greatly improved the safety of milk and milk products, as well as increasing their shelf life. (Let’s not get into the raw milk debate in this post).
It was only in the industrialized 20th century, and more prominently after World War II, that a third and crucial factor became the driving force behind food processing – convenience. With legions of moms joining the work force, there was less time to toil in the kitchen, and a demand for quick, easy to prepare foods skyrocketed.
Additional benefits of food processing include lower prices to consumers due to the economies of scale of mass manufacturing, increased availability of a wide variety of foods, and a consistency in taste, texture, and mouth feel.
With so many advantages to food processing, one may ask why is almost every other American so bearish on processed foods?
Here are a few reasons:
The further a food product is from its natural form, the less it retains its healthful nutritional properties. Vitamins evaporate, minerals are leached, and fiber is long forgotten.
True, the decrease in nutrients has led to enrichment and fortification, but these add only a small number of nutrients back to a product, where hundreds of others are lost in translation from the original orange to the orange drink in a plastic bottle.
Increasing shelf life requires the use of preservatives, whether natural ones such as salt, or artificial chemicals that have more specific functions (mold inhibitors, bacteria killers, antioxidants, antimicrobial chemicals, etc…).  Some of these preservatives have adverse side affects on some or all human populations.
In order to make food more palatable and attractive, additives are used. Food colorings are a huge category of additives. The color of a food is an important psychological consideration. But in many cases, the color of the processed product is not as bold as expected by the consumer. Take strawberry yogurts. Almost all manufacturers add some sort of coloring, whether a natural red color such as beet juice, a natural but quirky bug juice, or artificial Red #40. Despite studies that have shown correlation between food colorings and cognitive problems in children, the food industry uses them because they are cheaper than natural sources.
And since cost has become a driving factor in consumer consideration, food companies are constantly on the lookout for cheaper manufacturing techniques and cheaper source ingredients. Anything that can be made in a lab is cheaper than a naturally sourced ingredient. Substituting quality ingredients with cheaper or inferior standbys is the only way to keep prices down. Don’t even ask what parts of animal carcasses go into your baloney.
Farm subsidies in the US have made corn and soy products very cheap. Guess what – soy oil and high fructose corn syrup are found in many processed items. They add the fat and sweet components that make so many junk foods tasty to us. Salt is natural and cheap, but excessive consumption causes hypertension and other health problems.
We haven’t talked about processing that takes place before the “ingredients” are harvested (GMO crops, hormones and antibiotics to for livestock, etc..), but these too are affecting the food we eat, in ways that science has yet to get a full grasp of.
What to do at the supermarket:
You know our position – the more you can do to prepare your food from scratch, the better service you’re providing to your family. Buying fresh or frozen produce and whipping up a soup, a salad, or a pasta sauce is not rocket science and does not require hours of kitchen work.
But hey, we’re pragmatists too. Try to find the balance that best works for you. But the nest time you complain about not having enough time to cook, consider how much time you spend watching TV and on Facebook.

Balance an Egg on the Equinox

Link to site I found this on above

Saturday, March 20, 2010 is the vernal equinox, which marks the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. Are you familiar with the urban legend that it's easier to balance an egg on end on the equinox than on other days of the year?

Test it and see!

This vernal equinox one of the two times during the year when the sun crosses the celestial equator and the spin axis of the Earth points 90 degrees away from the sun. Why should this affect your ability to balance an egg on end? The premise is that aligning the gravitational pull of the Sun with that from the center of the Earth should somehow make it easier to balance any object.

Test the Hypothesis Yourself

Take a carton of eggs and try balancing the eggs on end today. Can you stand any of them up (without resorting to tricks like putting salt under the eggs)? Can you stand eggs on their small ends as well as their large ends? Keep track of your results and repeat the process on the equinox. Do you note any differences? A simple hypothesis to test is: Eggs can only be balanced on-end on the equinox. If you can balance an egg today, you've disproven the hypothesis. It's that easy!

One thing I find neat about egg-balancing is that a balanced egg will hold its position until a vibration knocks it down. How long can you keep an egg standing?

Under cover School Lunch

I can't wait for Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. A sneak showing of "Food Revolution" will air Sunday, March 21 at 10 p.m., right after a new "Desperate Housewives."

A teacher in Illinois is eating school lunches for a year....here is her blog.

http://www.aolhealth.com/2010/03/11/undercover-school-lunch/?icid=main|htmlws-main-n|dl3|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aolhealth.com%2F2010%2F03%2F11%2Fundercover-school-lunch%2F

She's fed up. An Illinois teacher is eating school lunches for a year in solidarity with students she believes aren't offered healthy options in the cafeteria.

Blogging anonymously at fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com, the instructor has already suffered a few bellyaches in the name of her endeavor. She began eating -- and documenting with her cell phone camera -- the less-than-appetizing school lunches this January and quickly started gaining thousands of readers per day.

The teacher, who refers to herself as Mrs. Q, told AOL Health that even airplane meals taste better than the ones in the school cafeteria and that she is eating them to prove a point. The children at her school come from low socioeconomic brackets, and she estimates that 98 percent of them eat hot lunches, mostly for free or at low cost. The meals, she said in an e-mail, "are overly processed and contain very little 'real' food," such as fresh fruit.

"I am not a nutritionist. That being said, I became concerned about what the kids were eating because on the surface, the food doesn't appear to be very healthy.

"These are the kids who need the good nutrition," she added. "My students don't have good food models at home. These kids depend on the school for so much, including good nutrition. And if they don't get it, they will develop bad habits and increase our health-care costs in the future."

Nearly one fifth of U.S. children are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and research has cautioned that those kids could have shorter life spans because they are too heavy. Moreover, the obesity epidemic is blamed for the increasing numbers of children diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a disease historically seen mostly in adults.

First Lady Michelle Obama recently took on the issue of school meals as part of her new Let's Move campaign to curb childhood obesity. Some 31 million kids get federally funded lunches at school, and 11 million eat breakfast there, according to the Obama administration. With many kids getting about half their daily calories at school, a goal of the campaign is to reduce the amount of sugar, salt and fat in school meals, and to increase whole grains, fruits and vegetables. Under the proposed Child Nutrition Act, the federal government would allot an additional $1 billion a year for 10 years to help schools improve the nutrition of meals. The program currently costs about $15 billion annually, according to the PTA.

Mrs. Q said she is not affiliated with the Let's Move campaign and was keeping her identity a secret out of concern for her job.

"I'm worried about any possible backlash exposing the school lunches might have for me personally and professionally," she told AOL Health, after agreeing to answer questions anonymously. "I want to continue working and I also don't want to get anyone in trouble."

Mrs. Q has laments the short window kids at her school have to eat. She estimates they have 13 minutes at best, five at worst (after taking into account waiting in line, finding a seat and using the bathroom).

She also worried about the safety of the food -- especially after one inedible peanut butter and jelly graham cracker sandwich kept her in the bathroom all night.

"I'm having more stomachaches these days," she said. "It's not every day, but at least once a week I just don't feel very good."

She added that she has a history of irritable bowel syndrome and couldn't be sure the bellyaches were from the school meals.

"I can't place it," she said. "Keep in mind that I eat organic and healthy outside of work so it's not like I'm suffering. What is hard for me to think about are the kids who rely on the school for the best (or only) meal of the day and they get hot dogs, processed meat products, fruit cups with high-fructose corn syrup, etc."

On her wish list: A salad bar, soups, casseroles, and stir fries, which she told AOL Health could be cost efficient if they're made in bulk. She said yogurt and cottage cheese could make for healthy side dishes, and she would nix tater tots in favor of roasted potatoes. She would also eliminate hot dogs, packaged foods and Styrofoam. On the plus side, she said most bread products at the school already appear to be whole wheat.

Mrs. Q appears to teach at an elementary school. While she described the students there as "pretty young" to AOL Health, she told the blog Small Bites that students eating the meals range from 4 to 11 years old. And though she is eating -- and blogging -- in their interest, the project is causing her some anxiety.

"I feel a lot of guilt and turmoil about what I'm doing here," she wrote on February 18. "I'm waiting for the moment I'm called to the principal's office and let go. I do believe it's a matter of 'when' not 'if' they find out and it's curtains for me and then of course the project.

"I want them to know that the project is not about individuals in one school but about a country full of children who need better food models."