Wednesday, December 08, 2004

noodles

The English word pasta generally refers to noodles and other food products made from a flour and water paste, often including also egg and salt. Less frequently, the term macaroni is used for the same products.
Pasta can also denote dishes in which pasta products are the primary ingredient, served with sauce or seasonings. The word comes from Italian pasta which means basically "paste", and by extension "dough", "pasta", or "pastry" as in "small cake". As recently as 1918 the English word "paste" was used instead of or alongside the Italian pasta

Today the word "pasta" is reserved for Italian-style noodles in English-speaking countries, while the word "noodle" has a more general meaning.
Dried Italian-style pasta is made from durum wheat flour, which gives it a light yellow color. Asian-stype noodles as well as most fresh noodles are made from regular (non-durum) wheat flour. Some pasta varieties, such as Pizzoccheri, are made from buckwheat flour.
Gnocchi are often listed among pasta dishes, although they are quite different in ingredients (mainly mashed potatoes) and mode of preparation

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Thursday, November 25, 2004

convenient thanksgiving dinner

Convenience foods have become so entrenched and available in North America that entire feasts can be prepared from them. Thanksgiving, the quintessential American "banquet" meal, something that home cooks tend to aspire to, a holiday which is only celebrated officially in the U.S. (4th Thursday in November), Argentina (same as Brazil's since the 1990s), Canada (second Monday in October), Japan (Kinro-Kansha-no-hi November 23), Liberia, and Korea (Ch'usok), can be duplicated entirely with prepared foods for about the same cost as two large pizzas. One should note that Thanksgiving is celebrated differently in the Americas than in Asia.
The implications to the American-Macro culture is astounding and indicates an even greater reliance of the culture on convenience foods and is hard for many to take. Even more astounding is that in many urban areas some families will rely completely on fast food?in 2003 at least one national fast food chain was selling deep fried whole turkey in November, or use even easier to prepare convenience foods such as TV dinners for Thanksgiving dinners.
Modern U.S. young adults, especially college students who for various reasons can not travel home for the holiday, typically are not familiar with cooking their own food as a result of fast food restaurants and convenience foods. Young adults, separated by distance from their extended families, in the US may be tempted into purchasing expensive precooked Thanksgiving dinners or going to restaurants such as Denny's on Thanksgiving, both further signs of dependence on the food processing and restaurant industries. Convenience foods created the situation and can be used to correct this to some extent by creating the image of a home-cooked meal, which normally would take hours to prepare. Inexpensive frozen pre-cooked whole turkey breasts became widely available in the late 1990s allowing a Thanksgiving dinner consisting completely of convenience food.
As of 2003, the cost of such a dinner (for 6-8 people) is about $20, less money than it takes to feed the same amount of people pizza. Likewise if the same number of people would go to a Denny's restaurant on Thanksgiving it would cost more than preparing this.

Nuclear energy

Nuclear energy is energy released from the nucleus of an atom. It follows the conversion of its mass to energy consistent with Albert Einstein's formula E=mc² in which E = Energy, m = Mass and c = the Constant Speed of Light. However, the mass-energy equivalence does not explain how the reaction occurs, but rather nuclear forces do.
Nuclear energy is released by one of three nuclear reactions:
Fission, the breaking of the binding forces of an atom's nucleus. Fusion, the fusing together of atomic particles. Decay, the natural process of a nucleus breaking down into a more stable form. It is also a slower type of fission. Nuclear energy was first discovered accidentally by French physicist Henri Becquerel in 1896 when he found photographic plates stored near aluminium compounds behaved as though they had been exposed to light in a manner similar to X-Rays, which had recently been discovered. florida discounted dental care Architectural Outdoor Lighting san fransisco shuttletours wiley x

Saturday morning tradition

It has long been a Saturday morning tradition with me to go down the list of high school football scores in the morning paper to find the most interesting scores and matchups. For example, the Kenedy-Nixon game always takes me back to 1960. (I leave a little room for creative spelling.) And, of course, there is the Jim Ned vs. Bangs annual classic for just about as much excitement as a Friday night could ever produce. A couple of weeks ago, Troup H.S. administered a sound shellacking to Arp H.S. On October 1, Ben Bolt was put in his place by Charlotte in a date at Ben Bolt Field. But last week gave me my new all time favorite: Wortham 56, Dallas I Am That I Am 0. It's a charter school, either Jewish or Christian I would suppose. I have no idea what the I Am That I Am mascot is. So what do you suppose? The I Am That I Am Deities? But It should be singular since, by their reckoning, there is only One. Or maybe the Bulldogs? I would go with the Whirlwinds. But another question continues to nag: what unending fate awaits a group of high school boys who so totally dominates the football team of the Omnipotent? It just doesn't seem right They should ever lose.