WARNING!!! This entry is all about food. If you don’t like food, you may want to check back later for something non-food related.

Anyone leave? Didn’t think so. I just finished a homemade brunch I’d been anticipating all week. Yes, I’m odd that way. My mind’s on good food, so here’s some links.

The National Food Safety Database is a wonderful resourse, and an example of tax dollars very well spent. So much stuff to dig through, and not just botchulism warnings. Of special interest to me this morning is the So Easy to Preserve Canning Guide (Jellied Section) (direct from the University of Georgia here in Athens). Homemade jelly and jams are so very easy to make and better tasting than most anything you can find at the store. You don’t even need fresh fruit – frozen works very well. If you’re planning a special brunch (even if it’s a brunch for one, as mine was today), make some jam. You won’t be disappointed.

When I left for college, my parents gave me their copy of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook. It is one of the best material things they have ever given me. I’ve used it so much that the covers fell off a few days ago. It’s the 1965 eleventh edition. Fanny Farmer published the original in 1896, and the last edition completely written by Farmer was published in 1918. Where am I going with all of this? That 1918 edition is entirely on-line, thanks to Bartleby. There’s some great cookbooks out there (and I own a few), but you’ll be hard pressed to find any better than Mrs. Farmer’s.

Next time you make homemade hashbrowns, grate a turnip and beet in there with the potatoes. Of course, they’re better if they’re straight out of your garden, but the produce section of the market can set you up, too. The mix I prefer: five smallish potatoes, two medium turnips, and one medium beet. This year, I’m growing “bullseye” beets (instead of red throughout, there’s rings of red and white). It’s amazing what this adds to the hashbrowns.

Finally, a non-brunch related item. This comes from the Food Network. Emeril, to be specific. He made a dish with collards and mustard greens that looked mighty tastey, and I’ve got plenty of greens in the garden, so I’m going to make it. Maybe for dinner. Here’s the recipe: Smothered Greens with Ham Hock Gravy. While I’m on the subject of the Food Network, is Good Eats a great show, or what?

I bent the mouse trap triggers ever so slightly last night, and woke up this morning with two fewer mice in the house. Sigh. I warned them. They can’t say any different. They are the brown field mouse variety. Perhaps they were chased in by the black snake longer than I am that lives in the old well outside my back door. Wherever they come from, they have to understand that they need to find another place to live. There’s a perfectly useful old barn just across the road that will serve them well.

From today’s Chronicle of Higher Education : The Lessons of a Lost Career -- How one unsung professor played by the rules, worked hard at the same university for 27 years, and died worrying that he couldn’t pay his bills.

Over the years, I’ve been amazed (and, sometimes, disgusted) by the junk that gets sold as candy. When I was little, candy cigarettes, complete with powdered suger smoke, was pretty facinating. Now, the selection boggles. I’m sure you’ve seen the bins of stuff at the checkout lines – gummy rats, bubblegum cellphones, etc. Thanks to the fine folks at stupid.com, you can get all the stupid candy you want online. The selection ranges from inspired (a labelmaker that prints messages on bubblegum strips), to useful (a swiss-army style kit with lollipop), to tasteless (Chocka Ca-Ca: Chocolate fudge in a diaper). If candy’s not your thing, you might enjoy browsing the stupid gift department.

The last World War Two Japanese soldier surrendered in the Philippines in 1980 , ending a stream of holdouts. This is their story.

“When we say,‘It’s the Cheese!’, we’re telling a story 200 years in the making. Californians know that only one cheese – Real California Cheese – can claim “It’s The Cheese.” You gotta have a slogan, I guess, but “It’s the Cheese!”??? I don’t know…

Tony Robinson’s cunning plan -- Baldrick’s on the Labour Party’s National Executive Council. He’s also hosted a BBC archaeology series? I wish I’d seen that. With this election, Tony’s apparantly “chuffed to pieces”. Now where’d I leave my guide to British slang?

A Sweet Gar Named Desire. (Yeah… it made me groan, too.) Chicago has cows. Albuquerque has bronze people. Now New Orleans has fish. I think Athens needs street guitars and drum kits.

ABC News has a good story on NASA’s plans to crash the scientifically valuable Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory back into the earth next week. Should one of the telescope’s two remaining gyroscopes fail, it would crash uncontrollably, and it’s so large it would not completely burn on re-entry. Rather than risk life on the ground, NASA will crash it while they still have control. The story also talks about space junk and the new telescope in New Mexico that can track objects as small as buckshot(!) from the ground. While an astrophysics student in New Mexico, I got to tour the NORAD telescopes in the northern end of the White Sands Missile Range used to catalogue and track space debris. Both MIR and a shuttle were up at the time, and we could see both as if we were looking at a jet liner with nice binoculars. The astonishing part of the evening, though, was when we saw a cylindrical object tumbling end over end as it passed overhead, and were told it was a mere three feet long and an inch or so wide. (ObSimpsonsQuote: “Three cheers for this inanimate carbon rod!”) It’s a pity that we have to use telescopes so good to keep track of our junk.

My house mouse (or a relative) didn’t heed my warnings and ate some of a small piece of leftover poundcake. I set traps the last two nights, but the mouse ate the peanut butter without setting the traps off each night. Tonight, I’ll try to set them ever more gingerly. I tried looking up “How do I set mouse traps so they go off every time” on the various search engines, but couldn’t find anything of use, other than the knowledge that you can do plenty with mousetraps besides catch mice.