Aaron's Last Wish 43 - Bank 253 and Hillbilly Days in Pikeville

Great how the blue grass music/dancing begins this episode of Aaron's Last Wish then the closeup on the stressed out server and the remarkable change wrought, thanks to the spirit of the late Aaron Collins and his brother Seth Collins, closing with the music/dancing: very uplifting for anyone with a real heart. Watch and smile and spread Aaron's legacy. You don't need $500 for your generous tip or gesture, just do what you can to spread good will. For more information, see the Facebook Page and/or read Tina Rae Collin's Aaron Collins Did That and/or AaronCollins.org.

Fluffy Egg Dumplings

When in the mood for noodly carbs I will make a half batch of these on top of vegetable bouillon and deliberately undercook them. I will even re-heat the leftovers in the microwave. Cook them as directed and they are beautifully fluffy.

1-1/2 C flour
2 t baking powder
3/4 t salt

1 egg well beaten
2 T salad oil
1 C milk

Whisk or sift flour with baking powder and salt in medium bowl.

In small bowl, beat egg then add oil and milk. Pour all at once into flour mixture and mix only until moistened.

Drop batter by rounded tablespoons onto gently bowling stew or bouillon. Cook uncovered for 10 minutes, then cover tightly for 10 minutes.

Possible additives to flour: 1/2 t curry OR 1/2 t sage, OR 2 T chopped parsley or chives, OR 1 t caraway seeds.

07/06/13 UPDATE: I added some fresh rosemary and some corn just off the cob. Yum.

(For recipes like these, I keep my old stained McCall's Cookbook.)

Chris Hedges: The Absurdity of American Empire

Chris Hedges, co-author with Joe Sacco of Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt was interviewed by Laura Flanders of GritTV. Wake up, America! We are living in days of inverted corporate totalitarianism: Resist. Right now the sacrifice is high in West Virginia but the corporations' fracking and drilling is poisoning our water, killing our fish, destroying all of US.

BBC Reading List: Wow!

With thanks to Kyra who blogged this BBC book list. It is a good reading to-do. BBC thinks most people have only read 6. (I've read or partly read 39.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
4 Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling 
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams  
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy  
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen 
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne 
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert  
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov  
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold Lame
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas  
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens  
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce 
76 The Inferno - Dante  
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White 
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams  
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Yummy CSA Food

Yummy CSA Food
Originally uploaded by Kate Anne

Breakfast included delicious CSA cantaloupe. Marion Nestle would approve. I am currently reading her book What to EAT: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating. CSA = Community Supported Agriculture -- see SunnysideCSA.com.

To Read: Righteous Porkchop

I've just been listening to a great Ring of Fire podcast segment featuring an interview by Bobby Kennedy Jr. of vegetarian attorney activist Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Righteous Porkchop, Finding a Life -- and Good Food -- Beyond Factory Farms. Did you know a chicken is not an animal, and therefore not entitled to laws about animal cruelty? Egg laying hens are cramped 6-9 hens per cage, live a gruesome life and when they are spent at 1 year of age they are vacuumed into a chopper while they are totally alive -- there is no attempt to make this painless or fearless.

Niman is now married to a humane cattle rancher where animals are treated relatively well. (Okay, I'm a vegetarian so I use the term relative) The disappearance of the family farmer by these large soulless corporate system should be a concern of all of us since our food supply is suffering as a result. There are hopeful signs of it shifting -- including CSAs and green markets -- but there is much to be done. Read the book or at least check out the podcast.

Sam Seder, David Sirota

Sam Seder, David Sirota
Originally uploaded by Kate Anne

Sam Seder and David Sirota- at an event at Red Sky in Manhattan sponsored by Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century. David autographed copies of his book, The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington.






Sam and David, pre-interview

Kate Anne and Kat-in-Manhattan

Kate Anne and Kat
Originally uploaded by Kate Anne

At the David Sirota-Sam Seder event at Red Sky in Manhattan sponsored by Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century. We both bought copies of David's new book, The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington - Photo taken by DFNYC's Josh.





[Edited version until Lucille gives the okay.]
Sederistas and Seder
From left to right, Mysterious Lucille, Sam, Kate Anne, and Kat-in-Manhattan. Photo taken by Sam fan Jessica.

One more birthday celebration

Gail and Kate Anne
Originally uploaded by Kate Anne

Gail and Kate Anne: find time for some personal peace and fun. Accentuating the positive creates a positive vibration which helps heal the world. [Read Dr. Wayne Dyer's Being in Balance and join us in being the answer.] Gail took me to Teodora Restaurant at 141 E. 57th in New York City -- try their salmon!

Iran, BAM 6.6 and Friends

Iran, BAM 6.6 and Friends
Originally uploaded by Kate Anne

Out for activism and a moving film on Iran, BAM 6.6 -- and talking afterwards were Helga Halaki and Gayle Cronin. The film was part of an evening sponsored by Fellowship of Reconciliation and it documents the beauty and compassion of Iran through the eyes of a Jewish American woman and others affected by the severe Bam earthquake several years ago. The unspoken theme, given today's political climate, is how devastating an attack on Iran would be to the Iranian people and their ancient culture. Get the film and see it. We bought it to show friends. And I also picked up a must-read book by the evening's speaker, Fatemeh Keshavarz, which she autographed: Jasmine and Stars -- Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran. Quite a lot to talk about. More to do. [Some pictures from the evening will be posted on Flickr.]

Live with Love Rather than Force

You might quiet the whole world for a second
if you pray.

And if you love, if you
really love,

our guns will
wilt.
-- St. John of the Cross, as quoted in Wayne Dyer's Change Your Thoughts -- Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao. (I have been reading Wayne's interpretation of the Tao Te Ching daily -- available through Hay House. Consider it.)