Cheese sauce = cheese + milk + mayonnaise.
The mayonnaise gets the cheese to break up and mix into the milk. It stays fairly soft even when cold – in fact, it would make a good spread when cold. Mixed with more milk, it can make a fine base for soup. It also makes broccoli irresistible. Mix with whatever seasonings you like. Dill and basil is good.
Once upon a time I didn’t like dill – but that was because I never knew what it was good for. I knew it was used in making dill pickles, but I didn’t like dill pickles that much.
Then one October my local newspaper happened to print a few local Romanian recipes (Transylvania and all that). These caught my attention – they used an interesting blend of ingredients.
I spaced off this article for a few years until one day, out of wanting something else for dinner, I remembered the news article and decided to look up Romanian recipes online. What I found didn’t disappoint: it taught me a new way to mix vegetables, as well as throwing a new spice into the mix: dill.
The first experiment I tried with a Romanian cooking palette was quite good, involving pork, broccoli, sour cream, celery, and the forementioned guest of honor, dill. And it was good.
Finally, I had discovered a tasty use for dill.
Further discoveries over the years found new uses. The Greeks use their dill alongside spices such as oregano, thyme, and basil. Beef seasoned with these and placed in a wrap with green pepper and yogurt or sour cream is delicious.
My family would make dill-seasoned cheeseballs for Christmas, which I generally found disgusting: among its other ingredients are chopped green olives. Both of these are strongly flavored and in my opinion, don’t work out together at all. Last Christmas I took the dill ball another direction, using Romanian seasonings. The result was an overall better balance of flavor: instead of the olives and dill competing with each other for the attention of the taste buds, the seasonings blended in harmony.
I had spent all these years thinking of dill as a loud, obnoxious seasoning. Boy, was I wrong. Leave it to American culture, I suppose, to take something that can be so elegant and lovely and make it so repulsive and obnoxious.
For the adventurous and/or curious among you, here is this site where I learned how the Romanians cook.
Eight rules I’ve learned, observed, and developed about diet and health over the years.
1: The human body is not built to a factory specification for our convenience. No single diet will ever work for each and every one of us.
2: Diet should not be a quasi-religion. The dogma should never come before your health or the health of others.
3: Almost everyone will benefit from removing as much refined flour and sugar from their diet as possible.
4: If we weren’t eating it before the first agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, we probably don’t need to eat it now.
5: If traditional cultures ate it and thrived on it before being introduced to flour and sugar, it isn’t going to kill us now.
6: Most people still believe in the diet-heart/lipid hypothesis – but then again, we used to believe in bloodletting, which was just as scientific back in the day.
7: Any diet plan that cannot be followed for a lifetime is flawed.
8: Any diet that requires vitamin supplements or some rare and obscure food not eaten before the first agricultural revolution is flawed.
This article laid a few things out nicely…
But none of that makes eating vegetarian the optimal diet for everyone from an individual health perspective, at least not according to those in the trenches. Nor is it true that protein deficiencies among vegetarians who eat well never occur. The reality, according to nutritionists and those in clinical practice, is that some of us don’t assimilate plant-based proteins well, and that protein and other nutritional deficiencies do occur, even in those expertly mixing and balancing their plant-based protein sources.
Nor is the vegetarian food supply anywhere near as green as generally assumed—soy farming is a significant rainforest threat, grains make heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides and a bag of lettuce grown in a dry climate takes several hundred litres of water to produce, while a kilogram of rice might take as much as 5000 litres. None of which means we should stop eating any of those things.
Both of these are inconvenient truths for the idealistic veg*n. Some people just don’t thrive on veg*n diets no matter how hard they try. And one more fun fact about rice that the writer should have mentioned: rice paddies produce methane.
You may hear that vegetarians are free from problems such as cancer. Or are they?
Analyses of five other large studies have found no difference in death rates from cancer between vegetarians and non-vegetarians, and in fact much research has shown higher correlations between high carb intake and cancer mortality than between animal protein and cancer.
And another point that the idealistic veg*ns don’t want you to consider…
The curbing of dietary saturated fat by reducing our meat consumption simply isn’t doing what we’d hoped it would (though it has made the soy industry quite happy). And while many experience vibrant health on vegetarian diets, the contradiction of devoted vegetarians sometimes struggling with clogged arteries, thyroid disease, anemia, fatigue, chronic infections and weight management is something not to be ignored.
Unfortunately, idealistic veg*ns are only too happy to ignore these results and sweep them under the rug. Like it or not, there are overweight veg*ns – and people who put on weight because of their veg*n diets.
Idealistic veg*ns can keep humming with their fingers in their ears until the cows run wild in the streets, but it won’t change the fact that they’re playing a massive game of self-deception.
Check out the rest of the article.
CNN aired this piece of vegan propaganda.
Everyone knows that methane burping cows are like, the only source of meat in the entire world. So we all gotta, like, go vegan to stop the methane. Durrrr.
That is what is known as a false dichotomy: two options are presented when a valid third option exists.
Here, lemme put this into a logic chart:
Premise 2: Cows burp a lot of methane, which is bad for the environment.
Premise 2: Cows are made of meat.
Conclusion: We must stop eating meat.
Heck, not only is it an FD, but it’s also non-sequitur! It does not follow that because cows are made of meat we need to stop eating all meat. Most animals out there put off only tiny amounts of methane in comparison to cows. If it’s the methane you’re worried about, cut out the beef. Just don’t fall for a false dichotomy.
Just for the fun of it, let’s put this logic another way:
Premise 1: Polyester socks and vinyl shoes make my feet stink.
Premise 2: Polyester and vinyl are forms of plastic.
Conclusion: I must stop using anything made of plastic.
Doesn’t make so much sense now, does it?
Update: No, cows aren’t the only source of dairy, either. There are also goats, sheep, and camels. They wouldn’t work out to support the kind of dairy industry we have with cows, but they do exist and do provide an alternative – and superior product – to cow’s milk. More expensive? Yes. But we still don’t have to give up meat and dairy entirely.
Our favorite armchair warriors without a clue have been making attempts to stop the practice of mulesing in Australia.
Mulesing, I’m afraid, is not a pretty sight – something akin to having one’s butt scalped.
While this practice may seem shocking and barbaric at first, it’s an important precaution to protect the sheep against a condition known as flystrike. Merino sheep, the sheep raised in Australia for wool, have folds of loose skin on their hind ends – the perfect place for blowflies to lay their eggs. When the maggots hatch, they feed upon the flesh of the sheep, a condition which will be fatal unless treated in time. If a flystricken sheep does not receive treatment, it will die a slow death of blood poisoning.
Mulesing, the practice of removing this skin, takes care of the problem once and for all. Once the loose skin is removed, the sheep is set for life. A little pain and discomfort now prevents a lot of agony and even a horrible death later. There are also products out there that minimize pain and aid healing, and any good farmer knows that a happy animal is a productive animal.
The farmers are taking action: there is now a petition you can sign to tell PeTA to back off and get their nose out of what they don’t properly understand. PeTA claims that mulesing is cruel and unnecessary – but take a look at a look at what flystrike does. (Not for the squeamish!) Mulesing is nowhere near that horrible – especially since it only needs done once, and flystrike can occur again and again, causing unnecessary pain and stress to the sheep.
In order to combat the idiocy, a petition has been made to tell PeTA to back off and shut up. You can read the article here and sign the petition here. After you sign the petition it will ask for a donation to the petition’s host website, but this is optional and does not affect whether or not your signature appears.
Every now and then someone posits that animals are waaaaaay smarter than we think they are. You often see statements like this:
“Just because we built the atom bomb doesn’t make us smarter.”
“Maybe they don’t have machinery because they don’t want to harm the environment.”
“Maybe they don’t want to complete the experiment.”
“Animals might have morals.”
“You can’t disprove it!”
Most people who take such positions have very little personal experience with animals except for cartoons and the occasional pet.
Claim 1: Animals aren’t building machines because they “know better.”
How could they know better? We only “know better” because we have the experience that taught us. We went through years of trial-and-error to learn what we know. In fact, most of what we know could have only been learned through our advanced technology. If it weren’t for our machinery that let us examine ice cores and other such things, we would have never known about global warming, and that it was more than just a natural phenomenon.
On the other hand, animals have never had any way to gain this knowledge, nor do they have the means or time to pass such complicated knowledge to their offspring.
You and I spent years learning what we know about the world. In the time that it takes us to graduate from school, most species will have gone through several generations. Animals also don’t have time to waste on such things: while you’re reading about plate tectonics in the comfort of your air-conditioned home, most animals are scrounging for their next meal. Thus, they have never had the time or luxury of learning about such things you begin with. You might as well ask a bushman about the chemical makeup of ice cores.
Claim 2: Animals may appear less intelligent because they don’t want to exhibit certain behaviors that would indicate intelligence.
Oh, where to begin. First of all, one rule of natural selection is to “use it or lose it.” Animals that live in areas with no light have lost the use of their eyes. Ground birds have only rudimentary wings, and some species, such as the kiwi, have lost theirs entirely. If animals spent generations deliberately acting stupid, it would only be a matter of time before their “hidden intelligence” vanished for real.
Secondly, nothing deliberately acts stupid when it comes to meeting basic needs or when one’s life is on the line. This is completely counterproductive to survival. Even if animals were doing this, natural selection would stand in favor of the animals who were bright enough not to “play dumb” in the first place. And yes, there would be “rebels” if they were indeed that smart: for an entire species to be in an agreement about “playing dumb,” a virtual hive-mind in would have to be in control of every single one. Yet animals constantly behave in manners that show that they are individuals and think as such.
Claim 3: We can’t tell for sure whether or not animals have morals.
Morals are generally based on opinion, and as such, change quite rapidly. Take a single group of rats. Separate into two. Give them identical conditions. Put them through various “natural” hardships such as starvation, weather extremes, etc. Observe for several generations. Note that several generations later, both groups are still behaving and reacting the same way.
Take a look at dogs. For everything we’ve done to them, their basic behavior is basically the same. Some dogs are more suited for certain tasks and exhibit certain behaviors more than others, but only because we’ve bred them so the instincts they need for those tasks are present in specific breeds and has nothing to do with doggish “morals.”
No morals here; just hard-wired instinct still at work.
This does not mean that animals are not necessarily smarter than we think. Research is always finding cases that show that animals are a little smarter than we realized. Chimpanzees use spears. Crows make hooks. Bonobos can learn to make stone blades that are just as sophisticated as the earliest human blades.
Bottom line: are some animals smarter than we think? Sure. Are they shaking their heads in wonder as we kill each other over petty disputes and fatten ourselves up on junk food? No. They’re not that smart, and even if they were, they’d be doing the same thing themselves. As it is, horses will already gorge themselves to death on oats and many, many wild animals use violence in order to establish territory and dominance.
The kind of thinking I’m addressing is a close relative of the noble savage myth, a myth also created in ignorance, by people who had never even met the primitive tribes they were exalting. Check it out sometime.
Now repeat the mantra: Bambi and Charlotte’s Web are not documentaries.