p. 629, Oranges Glacees

At last I have finished Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking! After considering a simple recipe to try myself, I caved and went for this one. At least it doesn't have the ton of cream and/or butter like all of Julia's other recipes.

Here are the photos to show how I slaved over it this afternoon:

Six large, colorful oranges ready to go!

Making candied orange peel.

This was the killer part - took so long!

Macerating the cooked orange peel in orange liqueur.

Making the sugar syrup.

Glazing the oranges with the hot syrup.

Ta-da!

It did look great, but it wasn't so delicious that I would go through all that again. The book goes back to the library, and I can sleep well tonight.

How Do You Pronounce, "Nicolas Sarkozy?"

Here's a good link from the Resource Shelf, one of my favorite Web sources. The Voice of America (VOA) Pronunciation Guide is a nifty way to hear the real way to say the names of international persons and places in the news.

I tried Nicolas Sarkozy, just to check my high school French. Boy was I off! OK, I'm using the American tv news announcer pronunciation, but still.... I left the "s" on Nicolas - WRONG - and put the accent on the ''koz" in Sarkozy - DOUBLE WRONG.

Try it yourself. Check the Short List link at the bottom of the screen for recent names in the news. Make yourself sound brilliant!

Card Catalog Project

Some time ago, I became aware that library card catalogs were disappearing. When you did find one, you had to pay a pretty price, since people had begun to find interesting uses for them. Take a look at a blog post from PH: Poetic Home for some of the ideas.

So, in my library work, I came across a small one with no legs. I bought it and promptly relegated it to my basement laundry room where it languishes under forgotten sewing projects and stuff to wash/iron someday.


I could use a new coffee table, but what to do for legs? All of a sudden it occurred to me that I could use.......books. I'll just need to find some that look good and can be stacked to the same height, then cemented in place. Anyone have any ideas?

Fooling Around with Wolfram Alpha

Today I ran across Wolfram Alpha, the computational knowledge website. I listened to Mr. Wolfram himself describe the site and what you can do with it. One of the simplest is to type in a first name. You get graphs of how many people in the U.S. were given that name over the last 100 years or so, and another graph of the present age of most of the people with that name. Here's the graph of when people were given my name - a big bump after WWII, then downhill all the way.



I'm going to go back to this again and again for all kinds of other stuff. Try it and see what you think!

Vegetarian Recipe Database

OK, how many vegetarians/vegans do we have in the extended family? There are two here, plus a little vegetarian in first grade. Other than the Man of the House in Scotland, I haven't heard of any others.

Anyway, for everyone who wants to find particular vegetarian recipes, Vegetarian Times has put out a free database of 10.000+ recipes that can be tweaked to find those that have a particular ingredient you want to use.

Use the categories below to limit your keyword search, or just leave out the keywords altogether and just search by checking a category.

Advanced Search Options

+ Category (Egg-Free, Dairy-Free, etc.)
+ Type (Appetizers, Entree, Soups, etc.) Member Rating Appliances
+ Required (Microwave, Slow Cooker, Grill, etc.) Season Holiday/Special
+ Occasion Cuisine (Indian, French, Moroccan, Greek, etc.) Departments
+ (30 Minutes, Veg Lite, Vegan Gourmet, 5 Ingredients, etc.) Course/Meal
+ (Breakfast/Brunch, Side Dish, Stir-Fry, etc.