Me? Cylon? Fracking Zeus, you may be right! That explains a lot: No baby pictures 11 brothers who all look like me That odd factory in my hometown How perfect I am Speaking of small towns. Ever notice how some of these in our neck of the woods are all quaint and charming and others are just sad and creepy? You know, I really enjoy these TV series, type DVDs. ThereÂs something a bit more gratifying when you have to devote many nights of viewing in order to finish something and see how it all turns out. After I did a bunch of these and then took a break and watched a few regular movies, the movies just seemed lacking or rushed or kind of lame at telling the story they wanted to tell. Maybe all movies need to be 6 hours minimum. I have to do more of these series once I start the DVD thing again. Will do the miniseries. I like my kind.

I got the original recipe here: http://vegan-magic.blogspot.com/2012/06/bean-and-lentil-loaf-low-fat-gluten.html where credit is given to Anne Sheasby's book "High fibre cooking". Here is the version I did tonight, written as for a non-cook as much as possible: Food Processor, scale, large mixing bowl, strainer or slotted spoon, two pots, mixing bowl, measuring cups and spoons, wooden spoon or other cooking spoon, 9" loaf pan (mine is shiny aluminum), prep bowls, cutting board and knife, pastry brush (preferably silicone) Dry Garbanzo beans, about 200 g cooked weight Dry beans (black eyed peas tonight, white or black beans another time), about 200 g cooked weight 400 g cooked weight dried green lentils 1 onion, about the size of a fist, chopped 2 stalks of celery, chopped 1 large or 4 small cloves of garlic, squished and chopped or pressed Oil for sauteing (I use Extra Light Olive Oil) Carrots, about 8 peeled baby or one large 1/2 c. walnut pieces 1/2 c. almond meal 2 TBSP tapioca starch 2 TBSP ground flax seeds 1/2 cup crumbs (better idea than rice) 3-4-ish TBSP Simply Heinz tomato ketchup (if you're picky--any would do), plus more for brushing on later Be generous on the measures with the spices. Not heaping, but a little rondure. :) 1 tsp ground cumin 1 tsp ground coriander 1/2 tsp chili powder 1/2 tsp chipotle powder 1 tsp smoked Spanish paprika 1/2 tsp black pepper, not too fine 1/2 tsp Morton's table salt (I say go for the iodine when cooking because who wants goiter?) 1 very very generous tsp dried basil 1 tsp dried thyme Day before: Rinse and sort beans, well. Put beans in a heavy pot, cover with water, bring briefly to a boil and let cool, then put in fridge overnight. Day of:Pour off some of the bean water until it's only about a third of the way up. Bring to a moving simmer and cook the beans through to tender. Should take about the time it takes for the water to boil off/be absorbed. About 20 minutes. Add back more bean water if needed. Rinse and sort lentils, well. Cook about a cup of lentils to 3-4 cups of water. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 20 minutes until they puff up. Saute onions and celery. When the onions start going transparent, add the garlic. Continue to cook until soft but not carmelized (brown). Put the walnut pieces in the food processor and pulse until small. Add the almond meal and pulse a few more times to mix. Put nut mixture in mixing bowl. Put carrots in food processor and pulse until small but not minced and loosing their water. Add to mixing bowl. Add the crumbs to the mixing bowl. Measure and combine in a prep bowl: seasonings, spices, herbs, flaxseed and tapioca (i.e., the small amounts of dry stuff). Mix well with a fork. Set oven to 350 degrees F. Drain both the beans and lentils. Measure out 400 grams of the lentils and 400 grams of the beans. Put equal portions in the food processor with a portion of the sauteed mixture equal to the proportion of the beans/lentils. That is, if you're putting in a third of the beans and a third of the lentils, use a third of the sauteed vegetables. Turn on the FP and let it run until a paste develops. Scrape down the sides once or twice. It's done when looking from the top (lid off) it seems well blended and doesn't have big pieces of anything showing. About the texture of stiff hummus. Empty into mixing bowl and repeat until done. Mix the contents of the bowl with your wooden spoon until everything is well distributed. Add the ketchup, and mix. Pour the spice mixture all around the bowl so that it's well spread out, and mix bringing the outside edges in, until all the spice mix is well mixed in and distributed. If you think it needs more color, add another squirt of ketchup. Prepare the loaf pan by generously oiling it (or spray oil). Not enough oil for puddles, but so there's lots on the sides and bottom. Don't do this ahead or the oil will all run down. The oil is for making the crust as much as keeping the loaf from sticking. Put the bean mixture in the pan and smooth the top. Try to get the sides not to stick up so they won't burn. Place in the middle of a 350 degree oven on convection/bake if you have it, or else convection or bake. Set the timer for 45 minutes. If the top is at all dry looking, use your pastry brush to cover it with a thin layer of ketchup. Bake a further 10-15 minutes. When it's ready the edges will just be getting dark and will be pulling away from the sides of the pan. Remove from oven and put on a rack. Let it cool and rest for at least 20 minutes. When the pan's edges are cool enough to touch, place your plate over the pan, grab the edges of both and invert. Garnish as you please. A scalloped or serrated knife will probably cut the cleanest, or choose a thin blade. Just don't press down so hard it squishes. Since I wasn't having company, I went for the practical and unmolded my loaf onto the top of a long Ziploc container. That made it easy to just put the container over the loaf for storage in the fridge. Edit: Left off the lentils from the ingredients. This post was edited by plllog on Tue, May 6, 14 at 1:10

I debated on whether to add this since it is long. It was submitted by Marys1000 back in Oct '08. Don't know which forum. But it was a lot of fun to read and you might enjoy it: Here is an article I found very informative in my search for info on pie crusts. She spent a lot of time actually baking with lard, oils, goose fat, and even suet. November 15, 2006 Heaven in a Pie Pan: The Perfect Crust By MELISSA CLARK A FEW years ago, I achieved perfection in a pie crust and it smelled like pig. Not in a muddy, barnyard way, but with a very subtly meaty, nutty aroma. Carefully confected with part butter and part freshly rendered lard, this pie pastry was everything baking-book authors and bloggers wax poetic about: a golden-brown-around-the-edges epiphany richly flavored and just salty enough to contrast with the sweet apple filling, the texture as flaky as a croissant but still crisp. It shattered when you bit it, then melted instantly on the tongue. The only problem with my masterpiece, I told my guests as they licked the crumbs off their plates, was that I was never, ever going to make it again. Because what they didnt see was the outsize effort that went into acquiring and preparing the not-so-secret ingredient: leaf lard, the creamy white fat that surrounds a hogs kidneys. The veritable ne plus ultra of pig fat, its far superior to supermarket lard, which is heavily processed stuff that can have an off taste. But leaf lard is hard to track down (I special-ordered it from a friendly butcher) and a headache once you get it. Step one: pick out any bloody bits and sinews, chop the fat into pieces, and render it slowly in a double boiler for eight hours. At the end of the day, be prepared for a kitchen that smells like breakfast at a highway diner, and a pan full of dangerously molten fat crowned with cracklings. The leaf lard may have made great crust, but, like homemade cassoulet and puff pastry, this was a culinary Everest I felt no need to climb twice. Everest became a lot more manageable when I discovered that rendered leaf lard was available at the Flying Pigs Farm stand at the Union Square and Grand Army Plaza Greenmarkets on Saturday and by mail order. With this convenience at hand, I decided to have a pre-Thanksgiving pie crust baking binge to see whether, with the prep times and mess not being a factor, lard pastry was really the best when tested next to my favorite standby, an all-butter crust. Or was my memory of the lard pie crusts sublimity simply a hallucination caused by long hours of porcine toil? And while the kitchen was a floury mess anyway, why not test a variety of other fats to see how they affected the flakiness and flavor of the final crust? With fat as my variable, I decided to keep all the other ingredients in the crust as straightforward as possible. That ruled out using a mix of flours with different protein levels (like bread flour, cake flour and Wondra). For this pie, I went with all-purpose all the way. But before I started baking, I did some research in the pie crust recipe canon. Most crusts were a combination of shortening and butter, or all butter, so I started there. I first made five crusts: all-butter; all-shortening (I used the trans fat-free kind now on the market); 50-50 butter and shortening; 70 percent butter to 30 percent shortening; and vice versa. Crisp, flaky and sweetly luscious with deep, browned flavor, the all-butter crust was the hands-down favorite. The shortening crust, however, was a bust among tasters. Even when combined with 70 percent butter, all agreed that the unpleasant greasy film the shortening left on the palate was not worth the vague texture improvement. Shortening is much less expensive than butter. Is it popular with bakers because of the cost? Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of "The Pie and Pastry Bible" (Scribner, 1998), gave another explanation. Because shortening is manufactured for stability at extreme temperatures (both hot in the oven and cold in the fridge), it is very easy to work with, she explained in an interview. "Shortening crusts enable you to get fancier decorations that will hold up when you bake," she said. Once she mentioned it, I realized that even the quickly crimped borders on my shortening crusts stayed pert in the oven compared to the butter border, which melted into Gaudí-like undulations. With round one going to butter, I next experimented with oil crusts inspired by the Mediterranean appeal of a pie pastry scented with extra-virgin olive oil holding a caramelized pear-pomegranate filling. I tested several olive oil variations, chilling the oil in the freezer before cutting it into the flour, and trying other desperation measures like adding egg to one, baking powder to another, and some butter to a third. Then I went on to test canola oil, grapeseed oil, coconut oil and ghee. Not one managed to even get close to a minimally acceptable flakiness level. I had better luck using chilled mixed-nut butter (you could use any natural nut butter, such as peanut, hazelnut, cashew, almond and so on). Combined with regular butter, it turned out a marginally flaky, cookie-like crust with a toasted nut flavor that goes particularly well with pumpkin pie. A dozen or so pies down, it was finally time to pull out my hero, the rendered leaf lard. I pitted it against an array of animal fats beef suet (the fat surrounding the kidneys), duck fat and processed supermarket lard just to see what would happen. The processed lard was not available at my Park Slope supermarket, but I scored it in a nearby bodega. I ordered rendered duck fat online, and picked up suet from the butcher, who charged me a token dollar and told me he usually threw it away. Then I baked and baked. The whole house took on a rich pastry scent with undertones of roasted meat and butter, tinged with ginger, nutmeg, thyme and honeyed apples from the fillings. Not wanting to give up the flavor of butter entirely, I tested all the recipes using half butter, half other animal fat, and also at a ratio of 70 percent butter to 30 percent other fat. I also made a few crusts using all high-fat, European-style butter. The crusts were spectacular, each in its own way. The high-fat butter produced a crust that was markedly flakier, more tender and puff-pastry-like than those made with regular butter. It also shrank a bit less when I pre-baked it, and had an irresistible, browned butter flavor. This was the perfect crust for anyone not inclined to include meat products in a dessert. But overall, the favorites were the crusts using 70 percent butter and 30 percent animal fat. Any more animal fat pushed the meatiness factor too far onto the savory side of the pie spectrum, making these better for quiches than for fruit and custard fillings. Of the three animals, pig, cow and duck, the duck fat crust had the lightest flavor and, texturally, struck the best a balance between crisp and flaky. The pie crust revelation, however, was the suet pastry. As easy to work with as the shortening crust, it retained its shape perfectly in the oven, baking up crisp yet marvelously tender and flaky. It was nearly as delectable as the leaf-lard crust, tasting rich and slightly meaty, though not identifiably beefy. Suet is easy to find (most butchers can get it for you) and inexpensive. One caveat: suet is sold unrendered, but, as I discovered by way of my own laziness, you do not need to render it. Simply cut out the pinkish bits, finely dice or grate the chilled white fat, and toss it in with the butter. More refined bakers might blanch at the idea; if youre one of them, go ahead and render to your hearts content. Still, the leaf lard crust was as gorgeous as I remembered. Puffing up in the oven, and crumbling deliciously when you cut it, it took the crown. That very mild hint of bacon was happily still there. Not so with the processed lard pastry, which had an off flavor veering toward barnyard. Now, after my brief moment of pastry satisfaction, Ill move onto the next obsessive round of pie crust testing. Theres a whole roster of fats Ive yet neglected goose fat, marrow, foie gras fat, browned butter, truffle butter ... and if anyone out there has a source for bear fat, Ill try that too.

One of the many problems I had with this movie (Vanity Fair) was how they portrayed Becky Sharpe. In the book she was a complete shrew. In the movie they tried to make her look like she did what she did simply to survive. A few weeks ago I rented some movies and was lucky enough to find a few 'book based' ones. I saw The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and it was BEAUTIFUL! It started Toby Stephens and Tara Fitzgerald (both played in the new Jane Eyre too). I have yet to read the book, so I will not comment further. Did you think this movie was true to the book? I also saw Emma, with Gwenyth Paltrow. SIMPLY GASTLY! I did not launch anything at the screen this time, but I did find at the end of the show that I had been chewing on the corner of a magazine in agony. It was all wrong! The costumes, the dialogue, everything! And who did they get to decorate the scenes? Van Gogh? What was with all the bright colors? The characters were all horrible. The worst was Mr. Knightly. He looked 'Americanized'. A straw hat?!? He could have been one of Tom Sawyer's gang just floatin' along the Mississippi... The Emma movie with Cate Beckinsale is amazing! It actually made me appreciate the book more. I just posted a thread about a new book based movie. It is on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Strange Case of Benjamin Button'. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchette are starring in it. CMK