John Rynne's weblog

I haven’t’ said anything about the ongoing train wreck, but here are two links I think very apt:

A Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon at Salon

and

A fascinating article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled The Real Great Depression. It’s about the depression in the 1870s, which was fueled by a real estate boom and precipitated by a flood of cheap grain from the US (as opposed to cheap gewgaws from China).

Here’s the code

This recipe is adapted from “Apple Dumpling Slices” in the King Arthur Baker’s Companion That’s a great book, incidentally, with recipes for practically everything. The original recipe requires you to make your own pastry. This is the “lazy man’s” version (i.e. with “shop-bought” pastry).

This recipe is for apples, but you can use practically any fruit that you can use in a pie, cobbler, etc. (that is to say, peaches, cherries, nectarines, or a mixture).

Total preparation time is 15-20 minutes. Total cooking time is 40 minutes.

This dessert is a winner every time; it is great alone but it goes really well with vanilla ice cream.

What you will need:

4 large apples (or the equivalent of another fruit or fruit mixture)
2 sheets of puff pastry (or plain pastry). It’s handy if they are rectangular, but round is fine. (The rolls I’m using weigh 250 grams each, i.e. half a kilo of pastry – that’s about 1 lb if you’re using Imperial measures).
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
300 grams sugar (that’s 1.5 cups in American parlance)
750 ml water (3 American cups)
Butter or margarine to grease the dish

1. Put the oven on to preheat at 175-180ºC (350º Fahrenheit)
2. Core, peel and dice your apples. (Peaches, nectarines, etc.: don’t bother peeling — just stone and dice).
   
3. Put the diced fruit in a bowl and add one teaspoon of ground cinnamon. Mix well. (NB: no sugar at this point).
4. Put the butter/margarine in the oven dish and put it in the oven for a few minutes to melt (don’t let it burn).
5. Put the sugar and water in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Simmer until the sugar has fully dissolved and take the pan off the heat.
6. Roll out one sheet of pastry and cut it in half.
7. Spread a row of the fruit cubes along the centre line of a piece of pastry.
8. Fold over to make a filled roll.
   
9. Cut into segments about 3 cm. wide.
   
10. Arrange the slices in the greased oven dish. Repeat steps 7, 8 and 9 until you’re done.
    
11. Pour the sugar syrup over the whole concoction. Yes — ALL the syrup.
12. Put the dish in the oven (CAREFUL: the hot syrup will slosh around).
13. It should be done in 35-40 minutes. The base of the pan will be full of delicious thick syrup with the flavour of the fruit.
14. You can serve hot or cold. Don’t count on there being any leftovers (I’ve never seen any).

A note about the cookbook: it’s BIG (620 pages). There are not many illustrations but the recipes are very easy to follow and have clearly been field-tested. The paper is thick and absorbent, so it will survive the odd splash of batter, syrup, etc. (i.e. it’s made to be used, not just looked at).

Robert Reich gives a concise explanation of why the US economy is in trouble: Americans have run out of ways to maintain their living standards. Check it out at Guernica

Apparently, some NASA people went through their satellite photos of the Earth and picked the most beautiful ones.

Hat tip to The Big Contrarian