Fausta’s Blog

Yes, it’s that time of year again.
Since I don’t tolerate food with sugar added, here’s the sum total of my baking:

Apple and pecan pie:
The day before: marinade 1/2 cup of raisins in a glass dish and add enough bourbon to cover the raisins. Cover the dish and set aside overnight (no need to refrigerate).

The day you’re serving the pie:
Heat oven to 400F.

In a very large bowl, mix:
8 large apples, peeled and cored, and cut into large (1/4″ thick) pieces
(You might want to caramelize the apples slightly, by sauteing in butter and a dash of freshly-grated nutmeg)
the raisins marinated in bourbon
1 tbs cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 cup pecan pieces. You can also use chopped walnuts.
Mix all ingredients until well coated.

Line a deep pie dish with one Pillsbury pie crust (or you can make your own crust).

Pour the apples, raisins and pecans into the pie plate. Cut 1/4 lb (one bar) of refrigerated butter into chunks and dot the apples with the butter. Please use butter. Cover the apples with the other pie crust, seal the edges and perforate the top with a fork.

Bake at 400F for 45 minutes.

Serve warm with Vermont cheddar cheese, or with Edy’s No Sugar Added vanilla ice cream. I prefer the cheddar.

Note: While I add no sugar, if you use sweet apples the pie will be sweet. Bear that in mind if you must watch your blood sugars.
Additionally, this is not a low calorie dessert.

UPDATE, Thursday 26 November
Today’s pie:

In contrast with his predecessor, whose food bills exceeded $700/day on average between 1988 and 1995, Sarko’s now saying adieu to the free lunch:

Sarkozy Takes Free Lunch Off Elysee Menu to Cut ‘Royal’ Costs

For the first time since French presidents moved into the mansion off Paris’s Champs Elysees in 1874, senior staff members have to pay for midday meals — 8 euros ($10.56) for a three- course repast delivered by white-jacketed waiters.

It’s part of an effort by the debt-laden government to rein in the president’s expenses. The Elysee has produced its first budget as the 54-year-old leader trims overhead. Sarkozy, who has sparked strikes for plans to reduce the civil service, says he hopes to set an example for a more frugal era of government.

Cheaper champagne, too:

Journalists on Sarkozy’s flights are now served a complimentary glass of Piper Heidseck champagne, which retails at 30 euros a bottle, instead of the 156 euro per bottle Laurent Perrier Grand Siecle.

If he included bloggers, we’d be happy with a bottle of Michelob Light.

(language warning) Ace notices how Obama really loves his pizza:

Notice how it’s a UK newspaper reporting on it,
Obamas fly in chef 860 miles… just to make pizza

When you’re the president of the United States, only the best pizza will do – even if that means flying a chef 860 miles.

Chris Sommers, 33, jetted into Washington from St Louis, Missouri, on Thursday with a suitcase of dough, cheese and pans to to prepare food for the Obamas and their staff.

This is lah-dee-dah pizza. They don’t serve pizza pie, they serve pizza π.

Ordering fresh-frozen won’t do, either.

Ace aces it,

So I don’t want to see you lecturing the CEO’s of bailout companies about using private jets to petition the government, when your guy is jetting dudes across the country to make him a few slices of ‘Za.

As Larwyn asked, who’s paying for this?

UPDATE
Welcome, Jawa readers! Please visit often.

Yesterday I posted that Chavez had nationalized the Venezuelan-based assets of U.S.-based food giant Cargill and threatened to do the same with the Caracas-based food maker Polar, in addition to setting quotas for food staples which are to be sold at government-imposed prices.

Back in 2007 there were food shortages

According to a poll of 1,300 people conducted by private firm Datanalisis, 73 percent admitted having difficultied finding sugar; 52 percent had problems finding beef, and more than 45 percent could not find powdered milk and chicken.

Clearly price controls and government intervention didn’t work in easing the food shortages, but as I have mentioned before, the issue is consolidating power.

So we’ll see more price controls and nationalization. Noticias 24 (article in Spanish) today reports that Tras tomar el arroz, ahora van por la harina, el aceite y el ‘papel toilette’ After taking over the rice, now they’re going for the flour, the cooking oil and the toilet paper.

All for the sake of “protecting the people”, in Chavez’s own words.

I’ll be talking about this in today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern. See you there! (This is the Van Dyck portrait I mentioned in the podcast)

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Hamburgers are the Hummers of food in global warming

When it comes to global warming, hamburgers are the Hummers of food, scientists say.

Simply switching from steak to salad could cut as much carbon as leaving the car at home a couple days a week.

That’s because beef is such an incredibly inefficient food to produce and cows release so much harmful methane into the atmosphere, said Nathan Pelletier of Dalhousie University in Canada.

Well folks, let me lay it on line:

I am allergic to soy. I found out after suffering from a chronic stomach ache that lasted three months. You don’t really want to know what that was like. As a result, I have to avoid every thing that contains soy, including lotions, shampoos and cosmetics, but particularly tofu, miso and soybeans.

Adding to that, I am severely hypoglycemic. What that means is that I have very low tolerance for carbohydrates, which in turn means I must get most of my calories from proteins and fats. I tried living on salads and lost so much weight my doctor was worried.

And what foods contain proteins and fats?

Meat, fish, poultry.

Which means I’ll gladly remain at the top of the food chain, thank you.

Now that we established that, I’ll let you have my fries.

(If you must ask, my cholesterol is excellent, thank you.)

Linking to this post
Doug Ross

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My latest post, On Your Marks, Get Set, Diet Bet! is up at LadyBlog. Please read it and leave a comment – and especially if you have an answer to my question.

I don’t watch Oprah but Maria sent an interesting article, so I turned on the TV just now and briefly watched the Oprah Show.

A teenager was crying hysterically, tears streaming down his face, screaming. It was embarrassing to watch, actually painful to see such public and humiliating display. I can not imagine why a parent would agree to have their child’s emotional pain out for all the world to see. I don’t care what the reason is; such trauma should be dealt with in private, showing enough respect and compassion to one’s own child to spare him/her the humiliation of been displayed like that.

Apparently the show is about obese families. The scene looked like penitents publicly confessing their sins seeking absolution. The Church of Oprah lives.

Which brings me to the article Maria sent, by Maureen Callahan, THE OPRAH SYNDROME
BLOATED, DEPRESSED — AS O GOES, SO GOES THE NATION

In one of her top-rated shows this season, Oprah Winfrey used her Jan. 5 episode to publicly confess, in a gauzy, soft-palette setting, her mortification and shame at hitting 200 (maybe more?) pounds.

“I am embarrassed,” she said. “All the money and all the fame and all the attention and the glamorous life and the success doesn’t mean one thing if you can’t control your own being.” Twenty-two years on, Oprah Winfrey – America’s most prominent secular spiritual leader, who has stated that her life’s work is to help all Americans “live your best life” and has deployed an army of self-help gurus to that effect – continues to publicly grapple with her weight and, it seems, her despair.

Why can’t America’s self-help queen help herself?

“That’s a great question,” says Micki McGee, sociology professor and author of “Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life.” “Ultimately, the key threads of self-help culture are hard work and control of the self. If she can’t control herself, she must engage in the narrative of shame and humiliation.

Shame and humiliation, not just for herself but for her guests. It’s bad enough that she’s into this narrative but inexcusable that minors are put through it.

I sincerely don’t understand what people see in Oprah that they follow her every word. I also don’t see the appeal of a magazine who has the same person on every cover month after month, year after year. Maybe the void left by people who don’t believe in faith has to be filled by faith in Oprahthink. Who knows. Certainly there’s a self-help industry out there.

I have read a number of self-help books, most of them because friends had just read them and suggested them to me. I read The Secret and found it interesting enough to do some of the things it suggests. Not because, as The Secret claims, “the Universe will find a way to manifest your wishes” but because prioritizing and visualizing your goals will clarify the direction you want your life to take.

However, the best self-help book I ever read was Toughness Training for Life by James Loehr, PhD. Loehr’s thesis is that you should develop health habits every day, in order to overcome difficult times. It’s basically what the Classic philosophers, such as the Stoics, used to teach. He explains what he calls “recovery training” convincingly, and it served me very well when I was recovering from my very severe hypoglycemia years ago.

I really don’t care if Oprah’s fat, thin, in between. Obviously the hours of TV broadcast time she dedicates to the subject must have brought her profits and fame. Which is probably why I don’t have Oprah’s money and influence: I don’t spend the day focusing on food, and if I gain a couple of extra pounds and my clothes feel tight I cut down on butter and spend an extra 30 minutes at the gym until the clothes again fit well.

While I can understand why her guests are so troubled, I don’t understand her angst and feeling of helplessness over her weight. I wouldn’t doubt that it’s sincere, but let’s face it, she’s one of the most influential and rich women in the world. How important can it be whether she’s fat?

Callahan looks for an answer:

“She actually said that it doesn’t matter how much she can accomplish unless she gets control of her body,” says McGee. “You cannot control yourself by controlling your body. She’s diminishing all her other accomplishments by while trying to create a diminutive physical self. It’s tragic.” Maybe. But, consciously or not, it’s shrewd. Her public shame over her gluttony and her renewed commitment to regaining control mirror the sentiments expressed in President Obama’s inauguration speech. His exhortation for Americans to “put away childish things” and to take personal responsibility for their future by acting with restraint and regard speaks to the national desire for a kind of proud austerity. And what could be more austere than denying yourself food?

It all reminds me of the slim and wise Rosalind Russell, who titled her biography Life is a Banquet, from one of her lines in Auntie Mame: “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

Don’t be a sucker.

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Via Maria, Newly released files detail early US spy network

Before Julia Child became known to the world as a leading chef, she admitted at least one failing when applying for a job as a spy: impulsiveness.

Details about Child’s background as a government agent come into the public spotlight Thursday with the National Archives’ release of more than 35,000 top-secret personnel files of World War II-era spies. The CIA held this information for decades.

The 750,000 documents identify the vast spy network managed by the Office of Strategic Services, which later became the CIA. President Franklin Roosevelt created the OSS, the country’s first centralized intelligence operation.

Child’s file shows that in her OSS application, she included a note expressing regret she left an earlier department store job hastily because she did not get along with her boss, said William Cunliffe, an archivist who has worked extensively with the OSS records at the National Archives.

You probably always thought she was a great cook with a falsetto voice, but now you know she was also a spy.

Here she is making two of my favorite foods, steak and chocolate cake, in 1978:

Now excuse me while I finish breakfast.

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… and, there is good news and bad news.

The good news is that, like Jim, I’m 20% white trash:

I am 22% White Trash.

I, my friend, have class. I am so not white trash. . I am more than likely Democrat, and my place is neat, and there is a good chance I may never drink wine from a box.

Take the
White Trash Test
@ FualiDotCom

The bad news is that some moron doctor working for the government categorically states “All U.S. adults could be overweight in 40 years” because… she says so. Teresa, who’s posting at PRS while Jim’s on vacation on a Bermuda cruise, asks When was the last time All US Adults did the same thing?, which is indeed a good question, but that’s not the bad news.

The bad news is that according to the Reuters article, there is such a thing as the federal government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Yet another bureaucracy that once installed will never disappear.

Now excuse me while I go read Steve’s book.

Speaking of Steve, he has a very good post Tisha B’Av Starts Tomorrow.

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Today Steve Graham talks food, delicious, rich food.

The call in number is 646 652-2649, and the chat’s open by 10:45. Join us!

UPDATE
You can listen to the podcast here.
Forget transfats, go for the gusto and use real lard.