Simply Fancy

We have a weekly veg box delivered to our door. Lately we’ve been getting lots of rainbow carrots. Saturday we had them roasted, with a tossed salad and pork chops. 

Roasted Carrots

2 bunches carrots, peeled

1 red onion, peeled and cut into 8 wedges

3 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

3 tablespoons chopped fresh mint

Zest of 1 lemon (You can juice the lemon right after zesting it, then cover and refrigerate juice until you need it for something else.)

Preheat the oven to 400°F. In a small bowl, whisk together oil, vinegar, cumin, salt and pepper. Place carrots and onions in a medium baking dish. Pour the oil/vinegar mixture over vegetables and toss gently. Roast until the carrots and onions are tender and browning at the edges, 30 to 35 minutes. Garnish with mint and lemon zest; serve immediately.

Garden Block

I couldn’t remember if I posted this before or not. It was part of a conference talk from last October by Elder D. Todd Christofferson. “The story is told of a man who simply would not work. He wanted to be taken care of in every need. To his way of thinking, the Church or the government (or both) owed him a living. He had nothing to eat but refused to work to care for himself. Out of desperation and disgust, those who had tried to help him decided that since he would not lift a finger to sustain himself they might as well just take him to the cemetery and let him pass on. On the way to the cemetery one man said, ‘We can’t do this. I have some corn I’ll give him.’ They explained this to the man, and he asked, ‘Have the husks been removed?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘Drive on.’

Bluebonnet Basket

Jordan High’s Young Democrats Club recently held a bake sale to raise money and to raise awareness for gender equality. Male customers were charged $1 per cookie while females paid 77 cents to reflect the 77 cents women in the workforce earn on average compared to a man’s dollar.  The trouble is most of those kids believe the statistics mean women earn less than men FOR THE SAME WORK, which is generally not the case. One big reason women tend to earn less than men is women choose careers for reasons other than income. Most of us WANT to grow up to be teachers, nurses, social workers, and counselors, even when we know technicians, engineers and mathematicians receive much fatter paychecks. Untold millions have been spent over the past few decades to convince girls to study in male-dominated fields without much success. The basic fact is men and women are DIFFERENT. And we should be.    

Duck Pond

I’m in a whining mood today, and you’re my next victim. My dishwasher died two weeks ago, while it was supposed to be cleaning dishes from Sunday dinner. It quietly leaked hot water under the new laminate flooring, which makes this a double tragedy. Since then we’ve had an appliance repairman in (twice), and I suppose the dishwasher is finally fixed. But it can’t be remounted until the floor is redone, so I can’t actually USE it. I’ve spent more time on the phone trying to find someone who will let me pay them to fix the floor than it took to install the floor in the first place. No takers. A first-world problem, I know. For two weeks I’ve washed every dish in the sink by hand. And the floor hurts as much to walk on as it does to look at. My kitchen used to be my refuge. Now I need a refuge from my kitchen.

Road to Ohio

Randy Olsen is a college student and a data scientist best known for calculating the most efficient way to find Waldo. Using his Where’s Waldo algorithm, he’s mapped out the best way to see 50 American tourist destinations – one for each of the 48 contiguous states plus Washington, D.C. and an extra spot for California. Because, well, it’s California. In theory you could start anywhere along the route, heading in either direction. 13,699 miles and 224 hours of driving later you would have seen them all. I found his list fascinating. I’ve seen several of the highlights, including Bryce Canyon, Craters of the Moon, Yellowstone, Hoover Dam, the U.S.S. Constitution, the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, the White House and the Gateway Arch. A number of them are still on my bucket list: the Alamo, Graceland, the French Quarter in New Orleans, Cape Canaveral, and Mount Rushmore.

Golden Star

“My father, Kirk Douglas, born Issur Danielovitch, is Jewish. My mother, Diana, is not. I had no formal religious upbringing from either of them, and the two kids I have with Catherine Zeta-Jones are like me, growing up with one parent who is Jewish and one who is not. Several years ago my son Dylan developed a deep connection to Judaism, and when he started going to Hebrew school and studying for his bar mitzvah, I began to reconnect with the religion of my father. Anti-Semitism, I've seen, is like a disease that goes dormant, flaring up with the next political trigger. Europe is now home to 25 million to 30 million Muslims, twice the world's entire Jewish population. Within any religious community that large, there will always be an extremist fringe, people who are radicalized and driven with hatred, while rejecting what all religions need to preach — respect, tolerance and love.” – Michael Douglas