• 3/4 cup of Speerville™ organic cornmeal
• 1 1/4 cup of milk (Scotsburn™ buttermilk is excellent)
• 1 cup of all-purpose flour (Speerville™ unbleached white flour is excellent)
• 1/3 cup of Just Us™ organic granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon of Magic Baking Powder™
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt
• 1 organic, free-range egg
• 1/4 cup of vegetable or sunflower seed oil

Directions

1. Combine cornmeal and milk. Let sit for 10 minutes.
2. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
3. Beat the egg; add it and oil to milk/cornmeal mixture
4. Add to dry ingredients
5. Pour into greased 10″ pan (a smaller, deeper pan may require more baking time)
6. Bake at 400° for 25 minutes

Follow-up to part 1.

These are excellent suggestions. I constantly see violations of:

5. Tables should be level without anyone asking. Fix it before guests are seated.

12. Do not touch the rim of a water glass. Or any other glass.

17. Do not take an empty plate from one guest while others are still eating the same course. Wait, wait, wait.

20. Never refuse to substitute one vegetable for another.

23. If someone likes a wine, steam the label off the bottle and give it to the guest with the bill. It has the year, the vintner, the importer, etc.

This one goes for coffee, water, etc., not just wine — especially in this day of H1N1 hysteria concern:

30. Never let the wine bottle touch the glass into which you are pouring. No one wants to drink the dust or dirt from the bottle.

Looking forward to the next 50…

(Via @zeldman.)

Potato Fest & Maritime Brunch @ Cape Jourimain Nature Centre

August 23 & 24, 2008

Celebrate the potato with us and learn about many of the varieties we can get locally. What are CSA’s, what is organic agriculture? Have some fun trying out new potato dishes!

Our Brunch on the 24th will focus on the potato and will be a Maritime Brunch with food only from the Maritimes, with most of it grown within 100 miles of the Centre!

For more information call Sabine at 506-538-2336″

(Via ACORN Organic.)

I threw out three expensive water bottles late last year — models which the manufacturer has since replaced with bottles featuring a different plastic — and switched to metal bottles by SIGG.

The thing that annoys me most about this sort of threat — however small it may be — is that manufacturers are automatically given a pass until something is proven, at someone else’s great expense, to be harmful.

Don’t look for this to change soon. And kudos to NBC for showing some of their sponsors’ products in this piece: I’ll bet someone took some heat for that.

A major human food source — the principal source of protein for one-fifth of the human race — is going to collapse in the next generation unless drastic measures are taken. The world’s fishing fleet needs to be reduced by at least two-thirds, bottom-trawling must be banned outright, and widespread fishing moratoriums for endangered species and even for whole areas need to be imposed for periods of five or even ten years.

Unfortunately, the minimum measures needed to prevent ecocide in the oceans would cause major short-term disruption and throw millions out of work, so they probably won’t be taken. It will be much easier politically to ignore what is happening now and let the collapse happen later, on somebody else’s watch.

And governments worry about terrorism.

This story (out of PEI), which was #1 on Reddit today, “No Organic Bee Losses“, proposes some very simple causes for the Bee Colony Collapse issue.