BluegrassBulletin.com

Best Steak Dinner

In the past few years a number of high end steak houses have cropped up around the region. In Northern Kentucky Jeff Ruby has made a name for himself with broiled beef.  Of course Ruth's Chris, Morton's of Chicago and a few others have developed a national reputation.  But in my book, the best steak I've had in 30 years can only be found in Dayton Ohio, at the Pine Club.

Yes, some of the rising stars boast a devoted clientele, but at the Pine Club they've been making some of the best meals in America for over 65 years.  And with practice comes perfection.

Their Bone In Rib-eye literally could not be cooked any better. It is finished with just the right char on the outside to keep all that great moist flavor circulating around inside until you release it with your knife and fork.

Their baked potatoes are great but their loaded baked potato is topped with the kind of smoked bacon that makes you think it was cooked outside over an open fire by culinary experts in cowboy hats.

The selection of cuts of meat puts other steak houses to shame as does the Pine Club's low light atmosphere that draws you closer to those with whom you are sharing your dining experience.  Dark wood lit by little more than electric candles gives The Pine Club just the kind of antique manliness that tells you as soon as you walk in that these guys understand steaks.

Don't ask for desert, they don't serve it, and don't whip out a credit card, they won't take it.  You can pay cash, or, if you need to they will happily open a house account for you on the spot if you only have plastic money on you.

Be sure to leave enough room to eat a full meal when you arrive because there's nothing skimpy about portions and the basket of salted rye crescents which arrive first simply can't be avoided.

If you are looking for a reason to make a short drive (45 minutes from Cincinnati) to Dayton Ohio to attend a play at the new and exquisite Shuster Center to see top named talent when they come to town (funny lady Kathleen Madigan will be there February 3d) then be sure to set aside some time and treat yourself to the best steak dinner in the midwest at the historic Pine Club.

You can't afford to miss that treat.

New Warning About BPA In Plastic Food/Water Containers

The researchers measured BPA in 244 Cincinnati-area mothers' urine twice during pregnancy and at childbirth. The women evaluated their children at age 3 using standard behavior questionnaires.

Nearly all women had measurable BPA levels, like most Americans. But increasingly high urine levels during pregnancy were linked with increasingly worse behavior in their daughters. Boys' behavior did not seem to be affected.

The researchers said if BPA can cause behavior changes that could pose academic and social problems for girls already at risk for those difficulties.

"These subtle shifts can actually have very dramatic implications at the population level," said Joe Braun, the lead author and a research fellow at Harvard's School of Public Health.

For every 10-fold increase in mothers' BPA levels, girls scored at least six points worse on the questionnaires.

The study was released online Monday in Pediatrics.

BPA has many uses, and is found in some plastic bottles and coatings in metal food cans. It was widely used in plastic baby bottles and sippy cups but industry phased out that use.

Braun said it's possible that exposure to BPA during pregnancy interferes with fetal brain development, a theory suggested in other studies, and that could explain the behavior differences in his study. Why boys' behavior wasn't affected isn't clear. But BPA is thought to mimic the effects of estrogen, a female hormone. [YahooNews]

Are You Eating Meat Glue?

Until a friend sent me this video I was not aware of this issue.  It seems that the use of a coagulant from pigs blood has widespread use in the meat industry to take scraps and form them into what appears to be a solid piece of meat.  Just trying to keep you informed.  Look at the label and watch this video.

Forget Political Commentary, Here's Something You Can Actually Use

For those of us who love to cook, peeling garlic is not one of our favorite pursuits.  But today I ran across this little video which teaches how to peel an entire head of garlic in 10 seconds.  I haven't tried it yet, but you can be sure I will. Here it is, watch:

 

Honey, I Have A Headache

Honey bees have been disappearing.  This is an alarming development.  The significant decrease in bee populations threatens our food supply.  A recent article suggests that the cause of this problem might be due to fraud within the EPA.

A leaked EPA memo is being cited by scientists as smoking gun evidence of likely cause of the massive die-off of honeybees. The culprits, these researchers claim, are Bayer CropScience and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The memo details how Bayer performed facially inadequate testing on the pesticide clothianidin and then EPA accepted the results to release the pesticide without adequate proof that it would not harm the bee population. The EPA gave conditional approval in 2003 and let Bayer sell the product.

The EPA memo dated November 2, 2010 says that the EPA accepted the flawed research and only told the company to complete further safety testing by a certain deadline. The company did not complete the research for years and instead fought to get extensions on its conditional permit. The final testing was reportedly flawed — performed in another country with bees that were located on a small patch of treated crops surrounded by thousands of acres on untreated crops. The EPA quickly embraced the defective study and gave full registration to clothianidin in 2007 during the Bush Administration. Yet, even in the Obama Administration in November, 2010, the EPA did not act when the company filed for another extension. [Jonathan Turley Blog]

You Tell Me: Coincidence Or Purposeful

Are these "dots" connectable?  You tell me.

• Purposeful flooding? Army Corps of Engineers adopts unique "enviornmentalist" plan for 2011 to make Missouri River drainage "more green". [American Thinker]
• Missouri River flooding bursts levees. [Huffington Post]
• Corp of Engineers more focused on "protocols" in their manual, than on preventing flooding. [Great Plains Examiner]
• Soros Sponsored UN plan called "Agenda 21" provides a mechanism for "sustainable development", which over time takes away private land ownership in a move toward one world government. [The Blaze]
• June 6, 2011: Army Corp of Engineers writes letter to landowners, offering to purchase flooded land. [Kansas City Fox 4]
• June 9, 2011: Barack Obama signs executive order creating massive federal agency overseeing rural farmland for the purpose of "sustainable development". [uncoverage]
• George Soros buying up farmland and food production facilities in midwest. [farmlandgrab.org]

You've got to stay on your toes folks.  This ain't Kansas anymore.

 

Drink Diet Soda, Get Fatter

Okay, so you've just ordered a large pizza, pepperoni, sausage and extra cheese, oh, and a diet soda of course.  Well guess what?  You aren't doing yourself any favors.

That's the word from authors of two new studies, presented Sunday at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Diego.

"Data from this and other prospective studies suggest that the promotion of diet sodas as healthy alternatives may be ill-advised" Dr. Helen Hazuda, professor of medicine at University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, said in a written statement. "They may be free of calories, but not of consequences.

Consequences like weight gain.

For one study, researchers at the center followed 474 diet soda drinkers, 65 to 74 years of age, for almost 10 years. They found that diet soda drinkers' waists grew 70 percent more than non-drinkers. Specifically, drinking two or more diet sodas a day busted belt sizes five times more than people who avoided the stuff entirely.

And as waist size grows, so do health risks - including diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic conditions. [CBS]

Redneck Turtle Burgers

Here's an idea for your 4th of July cookout: REDNECK TURTLE BURGERS

Handmade ground beef patties, topped with sharp cheddar cheese, wrapped in a bacon weave, (use the cheese to keep the bacon shell on) Next step, add hotdogs pieces as the heads and legs with slits for toes and shape a tail. If ya really wanna get artistic you can carve a hotdog head with eyes and a mouth slit!

Next Step: Place gently on your grill and cover with an aluminum foil dome and only turn once or if it's a rainin' you can place yer turtles on an oven rack, covered loosely with foil dome and baked for 20-30 minutes at 400 degrees.

A little crispy, not too crunchy!
Just how a turtle should be, right?

The Dangers Lurking In Your Food

For our grandparents bacteria growth on stored foods was a big problem, from botulism in canned foods, to meat hanging in the smokehouse.  In our generation concern shifted to food additives, preservatives, sugars and fats.  Now a bigger problem may be lurking deep inside the food itself.  Genetic modification.

This report is out today:

You may not want to eat genetically engineered foods. Chances are, you are eating them anyway.

Genetically modified plants grown from seeds engineered in labs now provide much of the food we eat. Most corn, soybean and cotton crops grown in the United States have been genetically modified to resist pesticides or insects, and corn and soy are common food ingredients.

The Agriculture Department has approved three more genetically engineered crops in the past month, and the Food and Drug Administration could approve fast-growing genetically modified salmon for human consumption this year. [Yahoo News]

What are the dangers?  They come in two varieties.  First, genetically modified food is "owned", that is the patents are owned which means no one can grow them, harvest them or use them without paying someone, which also means that the owner can limit or direct who gets food.  That means that "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" may no longer be God's gift to man.  Dominion may now be controlled by men with agendas.

The second danger comes from the food itself.

More than 30% of all herbicides sprayed anywhere contain glyphosate—the world’s bestselling weed killer. It was patented by Monsanto for use in their Roundup brand, which became more popular when they introduced “Roundup Ready” crops starting in 1996. These genetically modified (GM) plants, which now include soy, corn, cotton, canola, and sugar beets, have inserted genetic material from viruses and bacteria that allows the crops to withstand applications of normally deadly Roundup.

The herbicide doesn’t destroy plants directly. It rather cooks up a unique perfect storm of conditions that revs up disease-causing organisms in the soil, and at the same time wipes out plant defenses against those diseases.

Some of the fungi promoted by glyphosate produce dangerous toxins that can end up in food and feed. Sudden Death Syndrome, for example, is caused by the Fusarium fungus. USDA scientist Robert Kremer found a 500% increase in Fusarium root infection of Roundup Ready soybeans when glyphosate is applied

According to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, toxins from Fusarium on various types of food crops have been associated with disease outbreaks throughout history. They’ve “been linked to the plague epidemics” of medieval Europe, “large-scale human toxicosis in Eastern Europe,” oesophageal cancer in southern Africa and parts of China, joint diseases in Asia and southern Africa, and a blood disorder in Russia. Fusarium toxins have also been shown to cause animal diseases and induce infertility.

The same nutrients that glyphosate chelates and deprives plants are also vital for human and animal health. These include iron, zinc, copper, manganese, magnesium, calcium, boron, and others. Deficiencies of these elements in our diets, alone or in combination, are known to interfere with vital enzyme systems and cause a long list of disorders and diseases.

Alzheimer’s, for example, is linked with reduced copper and magnesium. Don Huber points out that this disease has jumped 9000% since 1990. [Institute For Responsible Technology]

There is still a force which rests in YOUR hands, more powerful than the emerging power of industrialized food production.  We still control the consumption end of the market place, and we still have choices.

But it will be up to each of us to examine carefully the products we buy at the grocery, the food we order in restaurants and the seeds we buy for our gardens.  If we refuse to buy genetically modified foods, thus destroying the market for them, production will have to shift back to safer natural foods.

In the meantime expect the corporate agricultural businesses to exert extreme pressure on us by making food prices for anything except their GM brands extremely high.  It might be painful, but so is war, and so is Alzheimer's, and so would be the despondency of living in a nation so broke that it cannot afford Alzheimer's treatment for non-productive citizens, whose death date may rest in the hands of a government committee.

State Rep. Addia Wuchner Just Doesn't Get It

Addia Wuchner has pre-filed a handful of "feel good" "attention grabbing" legislation designed to get her some headlines as she considers a run for higher office.  And to all the people out there who just love Addia, any criticism of her will cause them to circle their wagons and further insulate her from reality.

In her comments supporting her decision to inject state government and bureaucratic regulation into the lives of our citizens by regulating food intake and exercise, she said “Some people ask me if the state has any business getting involved in this area,” Wuchner said. “I say yes – we can’t afford not to.”

Sorry Addia, you just don't get it.  Shake the cobwebs out and think. 

This year Kentuckians stunned the world by making it very clear we want smaller government, fewer regulations, lower taxes and for you guys in the legislature to leave us alone.  If you think government can't afford "not to" involve itself in greater detail in peoples lives, then you are out of step with the people.

Your bills aren't even born of original thoughts. You are singing Michelle Obama's tune, Michael Bloomberg's tune and taking your flock of supporters further down the road to the nanny state which real conservatives are fighting to prevent.

And now that you've thrown in with the opposition, where will you turn for support?  To those who think you're too cute to fail, or to the misguided RINO's who will come to your side, joined in a chorus of support by seditious liberals?

You can't say I didn't try to warn you.