Julia Child -- Remix

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook, and I thought I would pass it along.  This remix was made by PBS to commemorate Julia Child's 100th birthday (8/15/12).  She passed away in 2004, but her zest for life and cooking lives on!

There are several famous chefs to be seen here:  Wolfgang Puck, Jacques Pepin, Graham Kerr, and Emeril Lagasse are a few I spotted.  Who do you recognize?

P.S.  Hot chocolate truffles?!  I gotta try those!

The Chicken Man

A family tradition at our house this summer has been to watch the entire series of Breaking Bad.

My Man started watching the show on AMC network a couple of years ago, and slowly but surely, we are all now hooked.  Season 5 is the last season of Breaking Bad, and new episodes are on Sunday nights on AMC.


Breaking Bad is filled with twisted people and twisted plots.  The main character is Walter White, initially an unassuming high school Chemistry teacher with a disabled, teenage son and a pregnant wife.

 

He eventually develops cancer and decides to provide for his soon-to-be-fatherless family by "cooking" crystal methamphetamine.  Walter feels like he doesn't have anything to lose.

The title of the series comes from the American Southwest slang phrase "to break bad," meaning to challenge conventions, to defy authority and to skirt the edges of the law. The series is set in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (Source: Wikipedia)

The distributor of Walter's product is/was Gustavo (Gus) Fring, aka The Chicken Man.

This seemingly mild-mannered Latino owned a chain of restaurants called Los Pollos Hermanos  (The Chicken Brothers) which was actually a front for the largest crystal methamphetamine operation in the Southwest.  He was a well-respected businessman and philanthropist to most of the community, but to Walter and his assistant, Jesse, Gus was a sort of mob boss who you didn't want to cross.  Or else.


Today, My Man is The Chicken Man.  With the amount of chicken he bought today, I think we could open our own Los Pollos Hermanos!  He found a fantastic deal on whole chickens (33 cents a pound!) and went a little wild, purchasing a dozen of them.  Really?!    When he was twisting "arms" and breaking bones of a different type, I shot a video which will hopefully give you insight into how to cut up a whole chicken.  This was one of the first kitchen skills my mom taught me before I left home, but since My Man is the prep cook now, I hadn't done it in awhile.  He refreshed my memory today, so I cut up two and he handled the other ten.

Bubbling Over

Look what I got in the mail this week!

I won my first blog gift: a $25 gift card from Layla at The Lettered Cottage!  If you haven't been to her blog, it is filled with whimsical cottage decor ideas and practical how-to's.  She is a very talented designer with a rock star husband (literally), and they are both so cute, full of energy and good humor.  And they have some pretty awesome pets, too.

In case you're not familiar with it, Lush is a Canadian company that specializes in handmade bath and body goodies.  They have the MOST amazing-smelling products, and they use mostly all natural, organic ingredients. They have both standalone stores and licensed stores in places like Macy's as well as a mail-order catalog.  I love their company "creed," too:

We believe in making effective products from fresh, organic* fruit and vegetables, the finest essential oils and safe synthetics.

We invent our own products and fragrances. We make them fresh by hand using little or no preservative or packaging, using only vegetarian ingredients, and tell you when they were made.

We believe in buying ingredients only from companies that do not commission tests on animals and in testing our products on humans.

We believe in happy people making happy soap, putting our faces on our products and making our mums proud.

We believe in long candlelit baths, sharing showers, massage, filling the world with perfume and in the right to make mistakes, lose everything and start again.

We believe our products are good value, that we should make a profit and that the customer is always right.

* We also believe words like fresh and organic have honest meaning beyond marketing.