June DeMott's Brown October Stew

A cousin asked if I had a cookie recipe of her grandmother, my Aunt Betty. I didn’t, but did look through my mother-in-law’s Betty Crocker's picture cook book, c1950, and found her hand written recipe for

Brown October Stew

• 3 lb. beef chunks
• 3 TBS flour
• 2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. pepper
• 14 tsp. ground ginger
• 3 TBS salad oil
• 1 large onion, chopped, 1 cup
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 4 cups mixed vegetable juice
• 1 one-inch stick cinnamon
• 1 medium eggplant cut in large cubes
• 4 medium carrots scraped and quartered
• 4 stalks of celery, cut in 3 in. sticks
• 8 large prunes
• 8 large apricots
• Shake beef cubes in mixture of flour, salt, pepper and ginger in paper bag. Brown quickly in the oil. Stir in onion, garlic, mixed vegetable juice and stick of cinnamon. Arrange eggplant, carrots, celery around the meat. Cover and simmer for one hour. Split and pit the prunes, stuff each with apricot halves, lay on top of the stew; cover and simmer, one hour longer or until the meat is tender.

1968 at our home on Abington Road

Cheeseburger in Paradise by Jimmy Buffett

I used to do something like this when there was no money in the purse, but some food in the cupboard (usually the last 2 or 3 days of the month). Didn't know is had a name.

Ingredients:
1 lb lean ground beef
1 large onion (chopped)
1/2 teaspoon of seasoned salt...
1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder
a dash of Worcestershire sauce
1 cup of shredded cheddar cheese (can use 3/4 cheddar and 1/4 mozzarella)
1 cup of milk
1/2 cup of Original Bisquick mix
2 eggs

Directions:
Heat oven to 400°F.
Spray a 9 inch pie plate with non-stick cooking spray
Cook beef and chopped onion in a skillet over medium about 10 minutes or until beef is brown. Drain excess fat.
Stir in salt, garlic powder and Worcestershire sauce and then spread in pie plate
Next, sprinkle the shredded cheese on top of the beef
In a small bowl, whisk together the milk, eggs and Bisquick. Make sure you try to get as many lumps out as you can. Pour over meat mixture.
Bake in oven for 25 minutes or until a knife comes out clean

Serves 4-5 people

Where that strange environmental data come from

Thirteen hundred gallons of water to produce a quarter-pounder? That's based on an ag extension report given to a high school class 30 years ago, according to this interesting article in the Wall St. Journal Friday. Pardon the pun but it depends on whose ox you want to gore. Carl Bailik provides a number of alternative figures. He says at his blog:

A respected nonprofit focused on water education repeated the number in pamphlets and other material. A scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey saw the pamphlet and used the stat for a USGS water-facts Web site. And once the estimate became a USGS stat, it was amplified and repeated — on other government sites, on PBS.org, on a bottled-water trade group site, in university newspapers and in other publications. It even showed up in the office elevator of Numbers Guy reader Joe Penrose, who saw the stat on the Captivate Network screen as a “fun fact” and emailed me to suggest I look into it.

But whoever you believe, we can live without oil, but we can't live without water, and using up our water to grow crops to burn in our automobiles to satisfy environmentalists who go crazy at the thought of the internal combustion engine and melting glaciers is just silly.