lasagna for the holidays

cheese lasagna, meatballs, garlic
bread and side salad

Not particularly "real food," but I figured I'd document how I make Christmas lasagna.

My family of origin is half Italian, so we always had manicotti and stuffed shells for Christmas.  When I grew up and had a kid, I decided to do something similar.  We always had leftover turkey in the freezer still, so no sense doing another anyway.

But being a lazy sort, I decided ricotta in pasta would be much simpler with lasagna noodles than stuffing manicotti shells.  So that is what I was aiming at with my lasagna; it's not traditional with bolognese sauce and ragu.  I made a pot of meatballs and sweet Italian sausage on the side.  I was going for a cheesy ricotta thing here.

Cynthia Anne - RIP

by Jackie Patti

As noted in my last post, I kind of fell off the blogosphere due to my daughter's death. I'm coming back first with a post about her, then on to other topics.

For those of you who knew her, her Facebook page is located at Cynthia Anne; some friends and family are posting anecdotes and pictures.

I've been posting to Facebook every couple weeks or so about her. Likely, a few folks have found me depressing and stopped following me. But several have said they have found my postings useful, so I decided to gather them here so they'd not be lost.

This post is quite long. It will get longer as I continue to deal with her death. I don't want the blog to become a grief blog, but do want to keep this all somewhere. So if you want to follow along, you'll need to bookmark this page or friend me on Facebook.

why I don't buy chocolate from Nestle or Hershey

by Jackie Patti

As a general rule, I'm not much of a food nazi beyond nagging my loved ones to eat their vegetables. Similarly, I've only participated in about 4 boycotts in my entire life as I understand that corporations exist to make profit and thus don't expect ethical behavior from them.

But I've made an exception in the case of chocolate: Nestlé values it's profits over the lives of poverty-stricken infants, which is just too much for me to accept. For years, my alternative was Hershey, until I discovered their chocolate was produced by child slave labor. I realize both of these statements are inflammatory as heck, but I will support them in this post.

I will also provide information on the alternatives I have found, cause let's get real, we can't live without chocolate! But we can live without supporting the killing of the third world's infants and the trafficking of it's children.

January 2014 link love

by Jackie Patti

Weather was the main news this month. Hubby claims the words "polar vortex" didn't exist before this month. If anyone runs across an earlier usage, let me know!

All I know for sure is everyone nearly froze their nipples off this month. Here in central PA, the cold has continued, with very few days hitting above freezing. I have no hope of pulling a leek out of my garden! And my chickens, now five months old, haven't free-ranged in weeks. (By the way, the roosters LOOK like roosters now, though no crowing has yet occurred. Keeping fingers crossed for eggs soon!)

The cold was EVERYWHERE; early in the month, a Nor'easter killed 13 folks in the eastern US; mid-month the Kỳ Sơn district in Vietnam had it's first recorded snowfall EVAH; and at the end of the month the Carolinas through Texas were bracing for ridiculous cold and snowfall, perhaps we can call this a Sou'easter.

The cold wasn't quite everywhere; Australia had a record-breaking heatwave; it would've hit 110 if they used sensible degrees, but due to metric it was only 44.

Other notable events in January 2014:

No soup for you!

by Jackie Patti

You remember the Seinfeld episode...

The Soup Nazi terrorized New Yorkers, denying them his luscious soup unless they followed his soup ordering protocol EXACTLY.

"No soup for you!" he bellowed, "NEXT!"

Through a bizarre set of circumstances involving an armoire, Elaine wound up with copies of all the Soup Nazi's recipes, thus ending his monopoly and saving the people from his tyranny.

Today, I am playing the part of Elaine, bringing soup to the masses!

December 2013 links

by Jackie Patti

Before we get to the links, I'd like to remind you that the following occurred in December 2013:

• Nelson Mandela died on Dec 5th; the official state memorial service was held on Dec 10th and his funeral on Dec 15th.
• Queen Elizabeth pardoned Alan Turing posthumously. Turing invented computer science before there were computers and his code-breaking was pivotal in the defeat of Hitler, saving thousands of Allied lives. In 1952, the British government prosecuted him for being gay, stripped him of his security clearance and chemically castrated him, leading to his suicide. He is forgiven 101 years later, but the other 50,000 men convicted under the same statute are not yet.
• Bad month for trains: a train derailed in Bangladesh killing 3; a train in the Bronx derailed killing 4; a train in India caught fire, killing 23.
• China landed a probe on the moon, becoming the third nation to do so. It's robotic rover is walking about and sending back pictures. Go China!

building a Lubuntu box

This falls into the "anything else that strikes me as interesting to write about" category; most of my readers will not be interested.

It's about my experiences converting from XP to Lubuntu 12.04, which process took a circuitous route via spending a month of configuring Ubuntu 12.04 with the Unity-2D desktop. After all possible tweaks to speed up Ubunut/Unity, I gave it up as a bad job and decided to instead install Lubuntu, a lightweight version of Ubuntu.

My reason for switching to Ubuntu in the first place is that my XP netbook is dying a slow death and buying anything else with XP seemed a waste of time and energy given that support goes away next April. Much of the software I used was not supported when I went to XP, and I assume I'd lose most of the rest if I went to a Windows 7.

And then a friend donated an old laptop to me (thanks Pete!) so I figured since I was going to have to learn all new software anyway, it was time to switch.

November 2013 links

I'm thinking of this post as a time capsule, so trying to add an introduction that reminds you what was going on in the world at the time.

In November, both Somalia and Sardinia got hit with cyclones, but their disasters were dwarfed by the typhoon that devastated the Philippines.

Hawaii passed legislation against new GMO crops and legalized gay marriage. I somehow doubt those two topics are related, presumably GMOs cannot marry.

The 50th anniversary of JFK's death occurred. Apparently, people older than me all remember where they were when they first heard of it, but I was a year old, so don't remember squat. For people my age, I think the moments seared into our memories are John Lennon's death, the Challenger disaster, 911 and the Columbia disaster. I will also never forget the day my daughter was born and the day I met my husband in person (we met online first), but likely the rest of you don't share memories of the poignancy of THOSE dates with me. ;)

In November 2013, the first day of Hanukkah occurred on Thanksgiving. Apparently, this hardly ever happens and was a big hairy deal. Some news media tried to make a meme of calling it "Thanksgivukkah," but it never really caught on. Apparently, it will not occur again for another 80,000 years; maybe they'll have a better name for it by then.

In contrast, the exact moment you are reading this has NEVER happened before and will NEVER happen again, so THIS moment is much more unique than that! And here you are in this unique moment spending it with me.

I have some very kewl stuff to share with you...