A man by the name of Pearle (that’s right Pearle) B. Wait, a one-time carpenter and entrepreneur from LeRoy, New York. Wait’s business was buying and manufacturing patent medicines. By 1895 he’d had some success making cough drops, cough syrup and laxatives, and decided to purchase the patent on a gelatin dessert that had been […]
READ ONYes, JELL-O. Not gelatin, but JELL-O. Sure, gelatin may be more, er…”authentic” as the basis of a gelatin dessert, but store-bought JELL-O has distinct advantages when you’re feeling a) lazy and b) silly. First, it’s fast. Just add one cup of boiling water, then one cup of ice water and you’re off to the races. […]
READ ONHow self-serious can you be in the face of a serving of JELL-O? Not very. Which is why you’ll seldom see JELL-O at presedential debates. Try talking about trade barriers and the state of Social Security with one of these things quivering away on the podium. It simply wouldn’t work. For there’s something in JELL-O […]
READ ONEnough about corn, ethanol and politics. This is a food blog for chrissakes, what have I been thinking? In my own defense I have to say it’s been incredibly hot here in Louisville the last ten days, not exactly baking weather. This week calls for more of the same. So what sort of dessert can […]
READ ON…but then why draw out the agony? Suffice to say that the reason corn prices are so high is because of a bill passed last year by Congress mandating that the government purchase seven and a half billion gallons of ethanol by, I think, 2009. That’s a lot, but then there’s new legislation that’s up […]
READ ON…which has nothing to do with baking and pastry or even food. I just thought you needed a picker-upper. Remember Y2K? The doomsday computer bug that never did much of anything? Well it turns out seven years later that in addition to causing the breakdown of a dog licensing computer in Colorado, it also diddled […]
READ ONIt’s little 6-month-old Joan Pastry’s first day in day care today. We just got back from dropping her off. The wife was weepy. I was a rock.
READ ONMy good friend Sally C. (from Iowa no less) wrote in to comment that GMO seed is quite a bit more expensive than conventional seed. That’s very true. About $170 for a bag of Triple Stack seed and $175 per bag of Roundup-ready corn compared to $80 per bag of plain ol’ old fashioned seed […]
READ ONOne of the things I love, when urban intellectuals start thumping the table on the subject of agriculture, is the implication that farmers are a bunch of gun-toting rubes who neither value nor know anything much about the land. That may have been true to a small extent once upon a time, when immigrants and […]
READ ONToday they got a big feature in the Associated Press. I think it’s a good and fairly even-handed story. Of course I’m on the wrong side of the issue to their way of seeing things, but I’m not so hostile to the cause that I can’t help them celebrate such a major achievement. Way to […]
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