Inspired by Pandas

Odd title? Yes, but it makes sense if you check out Panda6.net's most recent posts. Having worked at Papa John's myself, I was inspired by my friend's homemade pizza and decided to take a crack at it myself (with the help of my girlfriend).

I have to admit that we kind of took the easy way out and adapted a yeastless focaccia bread for the crust. If I had more time and/or a bread-maker to prepare the dough for me I probably would have gone with a standard pizza dough but the focaccia worked just fine and was super fast to make. We actually only had to use the first 4 ingredients on the list (replacing the all purpose flour with whole wheat flour) because the rest were geared toward making bread and not rolling out a crust. I did have to roll it out which kind of bummed me out because I wanted to dust off my pizza slapping skills from Papa J's but this dough just doesn't have the same elasticity so I couldn't really throw it around. I also deviated from my formal pizza training by folding over the edge of the crust. My home town pizza place does the folded crust thing and I like the pizza sauce filled crust effect. Topped one half with veggies and the other with chicken and bell pepper while the whole thing got 4 cheeses. I have to say it turned out quite good.

Uncooked		Cooked

Delicious Corn

Let me start off by clearly stating that I love corn. I think corn on the cob is delicious. Nothing quite goes with chili like a good piece of cornbread. Hell, I even like cornmeal mush over Cream of Wheat for a hot breakfast. Corn is one of the Americas greatest culinary gifts to the world (right next to tomatoes and potatoes), and one of the things that makes the dishes I mentioned above so tasty is their expressed need for corn as a key ingredient. Now, with that being said, for the love of god please stop putting corn byproducts in every god damn piece of food produced in the United States. (Please excuse the outburst).

www.nataliedee.com

I really want to know why Corn Syrup and High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) are in the top 5 ingredients in every produced food. Even the whole wheat bread in your average supermarket has both ingredients near the top of the list. To be completely honest, I would a least be a little bit happier with normal sugar in the ingredients because at least cane and beet sugar is additive free and the process for making has been around for hundreds of years and it would diversify our diet options a little. The diversity of diet argument brings me to another aspect of the overuse of corn that I do not like. Most of our livestock is also corn fed. So my beef and chicken is essentially corn too because quite literally animals (including humans) are what they eat. With such a homogeneous diet, at its core, it is no wonder health problems and obesity are running rampant in the U.S.

I hate to agree with hippies because they put a bad face on just about everything I believe in but with this whole organic food movement I think they got it right. I used to think the organic food thing was completely stupid because pretty much everything we consume should be “organic” (I’ve never seen a synthetic cow before) but these days the organic label really means Corn Syrup and HFCS free as far as I can tell.

I could stop this article right now but I’m going to take it a step further into the political realm. With some political will and food standards from the FDA (a painfully stunted agency) the amount of Corn Syrup and HFCS, as well as the amount of corn in livestock feed, could be reduced significantly but out of date farm subsidies keep holding the government back from taking necessary steps to safeguard our nation’s health. Given that it is election season, one clear course of action to reducing the amount of influence corn producers have in modern politics would be to stop holding the Iowa Caucus as the first state in the primary election season. Iowa has had its time in the sun and corn producers have benefited greatly. Lets let some other state bend politicians to endorse their niche commodity. We can have Georgia be the first primary in the nation so that there is a glut of peace products until the next election cycle when the first primary is held in Utah so that they can try to revive prohibition and so on.

To top it off, a lot of our food isn’t competitive in foreign markets like Europe because they have strict food guidelines that won’t allow Corn Syrup and HFCS laden food, but the trade impacts that result from poor U.S. standards are a story for another day.

Voting for Your “Pal”

While listening to the radio and watching TV, I keep hearing people say they want to vote for presidential Candidate A over Candidate B because A reminds these people of themselves. They will say things like, “he’s a normal person just like me,” or “I like him because he is simple and straight forward.” Very little is said, by these people, about the candidate’s values or issue areas. These evaluations are based primarily on personality.

Well, to the idea of voting for someone because they seem like a “normal person,” I have this to say, I don’t want a normal person in the White House. I want an extraordinary person in the White House. I do not want our president to be someone that I could see myself throwing a few beers back with (or doing lines of blow as the case may be). I want our presidential candidate to be so smart and thoughtful that I feel myself compelled to excellence merely by being in his (or her) presence. As much as I love having buddies to drink beers with, I do not need a pal in the president; I need someone with factually based answers to the problems that face America and when they do not have answers they seek out the best and brightest to find solutions.

Of course I want a president who’s political ideology matches my own, and political ideology is a complex thing with too many factors to discuss here but here is a list of things that it is not: dollars spend on a campaign, gender, ethnicity, age, attractiveness, height, and just about any other superficial measure that holds no bearing on the issues that a president must address.