Recipes

Your Post Apocalyptic Cinnamon Coffee Cake Recipe

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Well, after all fifty state capitols being assaulted last week as predicted by the FBI and an extremely excited media, along with an inauguration that was marred by violent, huge mobs of country overthrowers and coup starters, I’m in the mood for some coffee cake.

When my grandmother died many years ago and we were doing her death cleaning, I wanted just a few things – the collection of antique beer steins, the stand mixer and the box of recipes. I was fortunately granted all of the above. Today’s recipe is one that grandma got from one Clara Jensen according to the index card, a person I don’t necessarily remember. This coffee cake turned out really good, but in general, most coffee cake, to me at least, has a ceiling as far as quality and taste goes. It is very easy to make and of course you can alter to your taste but this is pretty solid.

2 cups flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup brown sugar

Sift all of these dry ingredients together. Mix that with:

2/3 cup room temperature shortening
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
Put in a 9×13.

Topping:
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
nuts (optional)

Sprinkle topping on top of dough.

Bake at 350 for 25-30 mins. I went 28 and it turned out just fine.

Enjoy!

President Trump: Hire Mike Lotus

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Mr. President,

As you form your administration, I have one recommendation for you: hire my friend Mike Lotus.

Who is Mike Lotus?

Mike Lotus is a fierce and passionate servant of Jesus Christ, patriot, and father. He loves his God, these United States of America, and his wife and five children.

Though these loves are the center of his world, they might not strike you as things that should single him out as someone worthy of your attention. Great to have, you might say, but why should I care? Many of the fellow citizens of our America, the greatest nation of history, love and serve their God, love and serve this nation, and love and serve their spouse and children. Many of those, in the wise (and weary) words of my own beloved mother, herself a mother of six, have been crazy (and devoted) enough to have given this republic five citizens as Michael and Jean Lotus have.

My, you New Yorkers are a tough lot. Let me mention a few of the many things that should persuade you to hire Mike Lotus.

In his day-time job, he is Michael J. Lotus, attorney at law, practicing in Chicago, Illinois. He is an experienced warrior of law, fighting for the same overlooked Midwesterners whose love of country allowed you to pierce Mrs. Clinton’s formidable blue wall and win the presidency over the near universal scorn of those that have led this great nation into shame.

On top of the demands of his law practice and his large and busy family, Mike has also somehow found enough time to be a fearless advocate for the conservative cause and loyal volunteer for the Illinois Republican Party. This can be a lonely and thankless job, especially in the harsh blue wilderness of Mrs. Clinton’s birthplace and President Obama’s chosen hometown. Yet he continues to go out, watch the local polls, and fight the good fight for the GOP in a town run by Democrats so dedicated to civil rights that they believe that no-shows, the dead, and the fictional deserve the equal right to vote in our nation’s elections. In a town where the dead rose en mass for JFK in 1960, Lotus-scale exorcisms are too small on their own to stop legions of the dearly departed pressed into voting one more time for the city machine. But you become a determined and experienced exorcist in the face of such chronic outrages and, in the demon-haunted swamp you are descending into, you need all the great exorcists you can get.

Mike is a fighter in the arena of ideas. With his good friend James C. Bennett, he wrote America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century—Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come. In America 3.0, Mike and Jim lay out one road toward making America great again. While they differ in some details from your emerging plan to keep America great into this new millennium and beyond, in the larger thrust and spirit of their program they are in accord with the direction you want to take this country: up. It never hurts to have men of practical affairs who can double as men of practical ideas on your side. In Mike (and Jim), you’d hire a man who hits these two and other marks. Consider it a multitude-to-one deal, something well within your art.

Mike and I differ on a few points of policy. For example, I’m a mercantilist and a protectionist and he’s a staunch advocate of free trade. We’ve had some energetic debates on this and other topics. Yet Mike has always been a good sport even when, as I too frequently do, I get lost in rhetorical excess. When the tide, as it sometimes but rarely does, goes against him, he salutes and does his duty like a good soldier and carries on with your ideas as if they were his own. It is a rare quality in these days where comprehensive indoctrination is often mistaken for thorough education and a brave and uncanny ability to regurgitate the views of the entrenched and powerful on demand is conflated with intelligence and insight that Mike can mix independence of mind and loyalty without leaving either shortchanged.

You can’t fake authenticity, as your opponent in the recent presidential election so readily demonstrated.

Hire Mike Lotus. You won’t be disappointed.

Godspeed,

Lynn C. Rees
Murray, Utah, USA
December 11, 2016

Greek Idylls – Part Two

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“Miso kilo, parakhalo,” which means “Half a kilo, please” was the single most useful phrase I learned. Every neighborhood in Athens had its own farmer’s market on a certain day of the week: in Sourmena, it was on Saturday, in Glyphada on Thursday, but in Ano Glyphada, where we lived in a second-floor apartment set in Kyria Venetia’s garden of citrus and olive trees, our market was on Tuesday mornings. Very early in the day, around 5AM, a two-block stretch of road would blocked off, and the venders would set up their small tables, covered with faded canvas awnings, all along the sidewalks, each offering their own produce specialty: piles of seasonal fruit and vegetables, eggs, mounds of lemons and fresh-cut herbs.

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Greek Idylls – Part One

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My then pre-K aged daughter Blondie and I lived in Athens from March 1983 to September 1985. It was a follow-on assignment to Hellenikon Air Base (now closed) to a year that I spent at Sondrestrom, Greenland, forty miles north of the Arctic Circle. All during that year of separation, I had promised her that we would go to Athens together, and live in a house on a hill, with lemon and olive trees all around and a view of the sea, and we would be happy.
We did, and we were, and these are the things I learned and remember.

Athens is a large and mostly modern city, 7/8th of it built up since 1945, with smog to rival Los Angeles and sheer noise to equal New York. All the neat old historic buildings are buried among the modern construction like one of those party favor balls made of crepe, which you unwind to find various little toys hidden in the layers. The park in the heart of the city is the Zappeion garden, lush and green, with a pond of ducks and a tiny children’s’ library. The Zappeion is full of cats, at which we used to marvel, as they were all so fat and tame. One afternoon when my daughter and I were walking back to catch our bus to the suburbs, we kept noticing the cats slinking out of the bushes by the dozen, looking expectantly at us. A young couple came into the gardens by one of the gates from Vassilias Amelia Avenue, staggering under the weight of three or four plastic shopping bags in each hand, and the cats gathered purposefully. The young couple set down the bags, took out can openers and began opening cans of cat food. They did this every other day, or so: the young man was English and worked nearby. He and his girlfriend came to feed the cats every day or so, having taken it over from an elderly Greek lady some years before, and the local ASPCA chapter (composed mostly of other expat English) worked to trap and neuter as many as possible.

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Finally!

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A truly important article from the NY Times:

That’s why, I’m sorry to say, if you want a truly great, hot, crisp doughnut, chances are you’re going to have to make it yourself. Like anything involving deep-frying, D.I.Y. doughnuts are a bit of a project, but they’re less work than you might think. And once you’ve mastered the basic recipe — this one is for fluffy yeasted doughnuts, as opposed to the denser cake variety — you can geek out to your heart’s content on the glazes, toppings and fillings.

Happily the NYT article actually links to some recipes.

My aunt has a great recipe for sufganiyot, which are a sort of jam-filled Israeli yeast donut that’s traditionally made for Hannukah, at least by my aunt. I ought to ask her for it.