MasterChef Finalists 2011

In the war of the TV Chef’s, what are we truly hoping to see – Gordon Ramsay’s next explosion, or Nigella’s latest recipe? What about the Chef competitions, which formats do you prefer?

Would you rather watch a troop of up-and-comings be berated, sworn at and basically reduced to slathering heaps of deflated dreams; what about watching anxious, nervous and over-awed groups of cooks be encouraged, moulded and basically inspired into becoming more than they ever thought possible?

Obviously, you can discern my bias on this particular subject, but it’s not without some reason – I hope.

Okay, the most important question here is, which type of system would produce the most talented and gifted chef’s? If we compare the skills of the most recent winner from Hell’s Kitchen (starring Gordon Ramsay) to those of the winner from the last MasterChef -UK (starring John Torode & Greg Wallace), the MasterChef winner would come out on top, easily.

Don’t get me wrong, Paul Niedermann is obviously a consummate professional and it is a major achievement to survive such an intense, boot-camp like environment, but aren’t we really hoping to see flashes of pure genius?

While Hell’s Kitchen definitely makes for a dramatic contest; put side-by-side, the three finalists from MasterChef come across as the most talented new chefs I have seen to ever come out of this type of program. Not to mention the fact that Tim Anderson, the winner of MasterChef 2011, is a creative genius in the kitchen and you simply can’t doubt which format is producing the best results. So, in a contest to discover the greatest talent, MasterChef wins hands down.

On an side note, Gordon Ramsay is set to help host the new MasterChef (USA) and I am really looking forward to seeing him in a more supportive, less affected role – he really is a talent, but I could do without the screaming.

Speaking of talent, have you heard … recent efforts at drum & bass? Enjoy…

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When was the last time you were able to just go out in your garden and relax? You know what I mean, sit there with a cold drink and a book, a BBQ and have friends over, or just playing around with your kids. Whenever it was, I can almost guarantee you weren’t alone. At any given time your backyard is alive with some of the most interesting creatures you can imagine. In fact, if you have youngish children you can turn a visit to the garden into a wonderful nature safari. Not only will it be fun, but it can be an excellent learning and bonding experience for the whole family.

Just one of the many varieties of animals that can be found in your garden would be birds. While birds might seem common place, and of course they are, the different types that are likely to visit your backyard can really add a lot of colour, character and sound. In our case, humour as well – we have two cats that are regularly teased by the local magpies and it can be quite a funny show. Of course you can increase the number and types of birds that visit by incorporating appropriate feeders and bird boxes. In addition to just watching the birds, you can make it a bit more educational by having a bird book and allowing your children to document the birds they see, to include markings, behaviour and bird songs.

To make bird watching a more of an educational experience, you may want to acquire a few supplies: a bird book for your area, a notebook and a camera. While notebooks and cameras are optional, they are great ways of documenting the birds that visit you. Of course the last item, the bird book, is pretty much an essential. Most book stores (and libraries); carry a good selection, ranging in prices, including those specifically for children, making it easy to find one covering the birds of your region.

While birds can be fascinating creatures, especially as you learn more about their different characteristics, they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a backyard safari. The huge assortment, and complex nature, of mini-beasts (aka bugs and insects) that pay you a regular visit can be staggering. I know that many of you may not like to contemplate the smaller visitors you get, but if not for them we wouldn’t have the lovely flowers or birds. Add to that, the fact that children tend to find them mesmerising.

One of the nice things about studying mini-beasts is that most of them can be held in a small container for a short time, allowing you to study them up-close and personally. It is extremely easy to put together a small habitat for your mini-beasts to live in while under your scrutiny. A container (preferably clear), some appropriate twigs, leaves and maybe some dirt and abracadabra, you have yourself a working enclosure. Just make sure you return the little beasties to their homes when you’ve finished. Of course, you may wish to get hold of a book on bugs and insects as well – if only to help you identify what you’re look at.

Most children are aware of the fact that bugs and birds are living animals, and obvious targets for your exploration, but many don’t realise that plants and flowers are also a thriving, living part of the garden ecosystem. For this reason, you may want to include this in your backyard safari – after all, learning about lions becomes much more interesting after you learn how they work with the vegetation around them. Depending upon the type of backyard you have, you should be able to find number of different plants and flowers. It could be very fun for you and your children to compare the different types, what creatures interact with them, and what their over-all role is in the ecosystem. There are tons of books available on the subject, and sometimes it can just be fun to try and figure out exactly what is that pretty plant you can see from the kitchen window.

It is amazing what you can find in your own garden, and while you may not give any thought to the plants, flowers, bugs, or birds that can be found in your backyard, most likely your child will be very impressed with them. If planned properly, you can turn a backyard safari into and an on-going adventure that can see your children through the summer holidays and seasons to come. So, share a fun, but educational experience with your child and get outside and see everything that nature has to offer.

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If you think it’s impossible to eat healthy without spending a fortune, these tips might be just the help you need to eat right while, sticking to your budget.

1. Eliminate junk food
While junk food can often seem good value for money, bulk wise, it could leave you nutritionally bankrupt. Also, doing your shopping on your own can be the easiest way to shop, as children and sometimes spouses are usually the ones requesting junk food. Shopping alone can prevent this, and ensure that you only buy the foods you need – as long as you resolve not to give in to temptation yourself.

2. Water or milk instead of soft drinks
You can still enjoy your favourite drinks at a sporting event or night out, although you should stick with the smallest size when shopping to save money and calories. Children, and even adults, need milk or milk products on a daily basis. Milk will also help you maintain your strength and provides calcium for healthy bones and healthy teeth. If it applies to you, you may also want to consider halving your weekly alcohol intake. You’ll find the money saved and the calories not added to be and extra bonus.

3. Buy fruits in quantity
When they are in season, buy fruits in quantity and freeze any extras. You can buy several pounds this way, and freeze extras to have them when the fruit goes out of season. Wash the fruit well, remove any spoiled pieces, dry thoroughly, and then freeze in plastic zipper bags.

4. Meats and beans
Meats and beans are the best sources for protein. Unfortunately, lean meat is more expensive than meats with a lot of fat. However beans can be a superb bargain, as they give you protein at a great price.

5. Beans as a substitute
You should consider using beans a substitute for meat on frequent occasions. There are several varieties, and you can prepare them in a crock pot so they’re ready and waiting for you when you return home.

Did you know that the USDA recommends eating beans at least 4 times per week? If you experience gas from eating beans you should try washing them, covering them with water, bringing the water to a boil, then draining it off and refilling the pot to cook fully.

6. Eat more fish
If you live in a coastal area, or an area where fish are plentiful, make that an integral part of your diet. You can catch them from the lakes or rivers, saving money in the process. Of course the benefits of frequently eating fish have been well documented, and catching them can be a great family experience.

7. Go for the nut
Peanut butter is great for those on a budget as it’s popular with almost everyone, and has a good level of protein. You can use it for sandwiches instead of some cheap, and not so nutritious, processed beats. It does need to be refrigerated, and bigger jars can last you for weeks.

8. Maintain your water levels
You should fill up with foods that have a high content of water. Watermelon, salads, and even sugar free gelatine are all easy examples. Not only that, but simply having a pint of water if you feel like snacking between meals can really cut the edge off those urges.

9. Fill your tank
You should never go food shopping on an empty stomach as your personal resolve is much more likely to go out the window, leaving you with a basket full of rubbish and a guilty conscience.

10. Make a list
Always make a list before you get to the store, and don’t stray from it. Not only with this make you shopping go much faster, but you’re less likely to be tempted by junk foods if you’re not going down those isles.

Eating healthy is something you can never go wrong with, and you never have to justify. You can eat healthy for relatively little money, making it perfect for those on a budget. Now, you don’t need a lot of money to have the lifestyle and health you’ve always wanted.

Have you looked outside and decided it’s time for a change? Want to landscape your garden and looking for some ideas? Perhaps you’re new to the whole thing and just wondering ‘how to garden’ and why you should bother.

Well, if you’re thinking about starting a garden, the first thing you need to consider is what type of garden you would like. There are many different choices and often it can be hard to pick just one, but hopefully you can narrow it down. But by narrowing it down, you’ll make the gardening experience easier on yourself and the plants. If all your plants are similar, then caring for them will be a doddle and might even be fun. So here are some of the main garden ideas for you to choose from.

If you’re just looking for something to look nice you might want to consider a flower garden. These are usually filled with perennial flowers as they stay healthy year-round. Basically, they’re as hardy as weeds, only pretty and with a lovely fragrance. What will work as a perennial for you will depend on your area and climate as the perennials change from region to region. If you do a quick internet search for your area, you can probably find a list of flowers that will bring your flower garden to life with colour and smells. These usually only require work in the planting stage – after that, the flowers take care of themselves. The only downside to this is that you don’t have any product (produce) to show for it.

Another choice for your garden is to have a vegetable garden. These usually require a little more work and research than a flower garden, but can be much more rewarding. No matter what time of the year it is, you can usually find one vegetable that is still prospering. That way you can have your garden be giving you produce almost every day of the year! When starting a vegetable garden, you should build it with the thought in mind that you will want to add more types of veggies later. This will help you expand, be more versatile and rotate your plantings. Once all your current crops are out of season, you won’t be stuck with almost nowhere to put the new crops. A vegetable garden is ideal for someone who wants some produce, but doesn’t want to devote every waking hour to perfecting their garden (see below.)

A more challenging type of garden to manage is the fruit garden, as it’s much more high-maintenance. When growing fruits, many more pests will be attracted due to the sweetness. You not only have to deal with having just the right kinds of dirt and fertilizer, you have to deal with choosing a pesticide that won’t kill whoever eats the fruits. Your fruit garden will probably not produce year-round unless you have a variety of trees and bushes. With fruit gardening, the soil needs to be just right for the plants to grow, and rotating your crops during a plants off-season could be disastrous to its growth process. However, if you want a lovely sweet bounty and you’re willing to put in lots of work maintaining the garden, then a fruit garden could be a good choice for you.

So, now that we’ve outlined the main garden types that people choose, I hope it will help you decide which way you want to go. Basically, the garden type comes down to what kind of product you want, and how much work you are willing to put into it. If you’re looking for no product with no work, go with a flower garden. If you want lots of delicious product, and you are willing to spend hours in your garden each day, then go for a fruit garden. Just make sure you don’t get into something you can’t handle!

Now you just need to decide what layout is best for you. How do you want your garden to look, feel and smell?

Nichola Christakis looks at what is a relationship, what is social networking, and how we are influencing the lives of people we may not even know. He explores how the large-scale, face-to-face social networks in which we are embedded affect our lives, and what we can do to take advantage of this fact.

We’re all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits — from happiness to obesity — can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don’t even know.

People aren’t merely social animals in the usual sense, for we don’t just live in groups. We live in networks — and we have done so ever since we emerged from the African savannah. Via intricately branching paths tracing out cascading family connections, friendship ties, and work relationships, we are interconnected to hundreds or even thousands of specific people, most of whom we do not know. We affect them and they affect us.

Nicholas Christakis’ work examines the biological, psychological, sociological, and mathematical rules that govern how we form these social networks, and the rules that govern how they shape our lives. His work shows how phenomena as diverse as obesity, smoking, emotions, ideas, germs, and altruism can spread through our social ties, and how genes can partially underlie our creation of social ties to begin with. His work also sheds light on how we might take advantage of an understanding of social networks to make the world a better place.

At Harvard, Christakis is a Professor of Medicine, Health Care Policy, and Sociology, and he directs a diverse research group investigating social networks. His popular undergraduate course (Life and Death in the US) is podcast [available on itunes]. His book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives — How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do, co-authored with James H. Fowler, appeared in 2009, and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. In 2009, he was named by Time magazine to its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and also by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of 100 top global thinkers.

“‘Connected’ is [in the category of] works of brilliant originality that stimulate and enlighten and can sometimes even change the way we understand the world” – NY Times Book Review

Want to know what it feels like how to do karate without taking martial arts classes? Want to add a little excitement to your salad recipes, or punch to your Paris Island? Then you have to check out the Gama-go Karate lettuce chopper.

While it may not help you refine your kata, and it may seem a bit of a gag, why not bring a little laughter into the kitchen with this fully functional chopper. You can find it here: Gama-Go Karate Lettuce Chopper (Amazon.com)
for about $9.95.

Eguchi Aimi, the newest (and cutest?) member of the all-girl Japanese pop group AKB48, was revealed this week to be NOT HUMAN. While being perfectly cute, Eguchi is nothing more that a computer composite of her six band members, and existed only in a virtual world. While being extremely clever, the bizarre publicity stunt was revealed in the video below – showing exactly how the lovely, virtual celebrity was created.

Obviously the fans of the newest band member were disappointed. However, it’s understandable how so many were fooled. Watch the video below and see if you can spot the fake girl – before she’s revealed. Consider it a challenge as I still couldn’t tell, even after I knew.

In a related spin, the band have released an application on their site allowing you to create the fake pop star of your dreams.

Jamie Oliver is transforming the way we feed ourselves, and our children.

Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food, and children’s lack of knowledge about healthy foods.

Jamie Oliver has been drawn to the kitchen since he was a child working in his father’s pub-restaurant. He showed not only a precocious culinary talent but also a passion for creating (and talking about) fresh, honest, delicious food. In the past decade, the shaggy-haired “Naked Chef” of late-’90s BBC2 has built a worldwide media conglomerate of TV shows, books, cookware and magazines, all based on a formula of simple, unpretentious food that invites everyone to get busy in the kitchen. And as much as his cooking is generous, so is his business model — his Fifteen Foundation, for instance, trains young chefs from challenged backgrounds to run four of his restaurants.

Now, Oliver is using his fame and charm to bring attention to the changes that Brits and Americans need to make in their lifestyles and diet. Campaigns such as Jamie’s School Dinner, Ministry of Food and Food Revolution USA combine Oliver’s culinary tools, cookbooks and television, with serious activism and community organizing — to create change on both the individual and governmental level.

Join Jamie’s Food Revolution: Sign the petition >>

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court rejected one of the largest class-action suits in history. The group of women who sued Wal-Mart ten years ago on the grounds that women are regularly paid less, and given fewer opportunities than their male counterparts, were told that a sex discrimination charge could not be brought as they were too spread out geographically and their job classifications too diverse to warrant bringing suit as a group.

Okay, I know it’s been a few good years since I went to law school, but isn’t’ it called discrimination when you have a large group of women receiving differential treatment compared to their male, and equally talented, colleagues? Maybe I’m just not interpreting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 correctly – it’s possible…

In a note from the case:

It is impossible therefore to view the Dukes decision–and the conflicting opinions it generated from two of the most senior justices on the Court–without sensing the impact of the continuing gender gulf in America. It exists still on the Court, it inhabits still the nooks and crannies of the law, and there is little doubt, even short of a class-action trial, that it’s a part of the atmosphere at Walmart (“senior management often refer to female associates as ‘Little Janie Qs,’” Justice Ginsburg noted among the allegations). Maybe that is the legacy of this Dukes case; it doesn’t tell us how far we’ve come in addressing gender bias in the law, it tells us how much further we have to go.

Michelle Goldberg, of The Daily Beast, focusing primarily on the actual charges of sex discrimination in the suit, argued that the decision was a loss not just for the women of Wal-Mart, but for women everywhere. “Monday’s ruling didn’t really deal with the underlying evidence of pervasive discrimination at Walmart, which has been well documented both statistically and anecdotally,” she wrote. “Women make up more than 70 percent of Walmart’s employees but only a third of its salaried managers, though women at the company have lower turnover rates and higher performance ratings than men.” In the end, Goldberg saw the decision as a continuation of the court’s poor civil-rights record.

This was in keeping with the conservative majority’s extremely narrow approach to civil-rights law. “One of the constants of this court, they don’t believe that discrimination exists unless you have direct and obvious proof,” said Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. “They don’t believe in proof by statistics or proof by corporate culture. They are extremely demanding of plaintiffs for proof, and it’s very hard to find that kind of proof.”

The New York Times, in its editorial Wal-Mart Wins. Workers Lose., discussed the issues of class action and sex discrimination go together in a suit like this.

Without a class action, it will be very difficult for most of the women potentially affected to pursue individual claims. The average wages lost per year for a member of the rejected Wal-Mart class are around $1,100 — too little to give lawyers an incentive to represent such an individual. For the plaintiffs, for groups seeking back pay in class actions, and for class actions in general, it was a bad day in court.

What’s your opinion? Will this affect you or yours directly? Do you work for a large corporation and should you be worried? Comment and let us know…

I was forwarded a poignant email, and I’m sure many of you have seen it before, but it’s good enough to pass on so I wanted to share it with you.

Enjoy…

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In the line at the store, the young cashier told the older woman that she should bring her own reusable grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment…….

The woman apoloqized and explained,
“We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.”

The clerk responded, “That’s what’s caused our problems today.
Your generation wasn’t green and did not care enough to save our environment.”

He was right, that generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.

Back then, they  returned their milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled,so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.

But they didn’t have the green thing back in that customer’s day.

In her day, they walked up stairs, because they didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. They walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time they had to go two blocks.

But she was right. They didn’t have the green thing in her day.

Back then, they washed the baby’s diapers because they didn’t have the throw-away kind. They dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts – wind and solar power really did dry the clothes.
Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.

But that old lady is right, they didn’t have the green thing back in her day.

Back then, they had one TV, or radio, in the  house – not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief, not a screen the size of the state of Montana .

In the kitchen, blended and stirred by hand because they didn’t have electric machines to do everything for you. When they packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, they used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, they didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. They used a push mower that ran on human power.
They exercised by working so they didn’t need to go to a health club
to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she’s right, they didn’t have the green thing back then.

They drank from a fountain when they were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time they had a drink of water.

They refilled their writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen,
and they replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

“But they didn’t have the green thing back then.”

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. They had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And they didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out  in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint. But isn’t it sad that the current generation laments how wasteful the old folks were just because they didn’t have the green thing back then?