Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Happiness is a truly gluten-free chocolate cake that you would swear is a real chocolate cake


 

I saw this on @emmymade.

The recipe belongs to The Pancake Princess. 

I mixed everything in a food processor. I used melted butter, beans I cooked myself, and plain old Hershey's Cocoa. I baked it in a 24cm Pyrex pie plate oiled with avocado oil. Just let it cool right in there. You can haul it that way to a party. The frosting isn't necessary. Sprinkle it with powdered sugar right before serving as you like. Or not. It's plenty sweet just the way it is.

Eat it for breakfast. You will not be hungry all morning, and you will be happy. 

 

thepancakeprincess.com

 

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Happiness is seeing yourself revealed in others


 

Or . . . Why I Struggle To Write Blog Posts For 25 Forms Of Happiness 

 Robert Redford, Screen Idol Turned Director and Activist, Dies at 89

... “I was born with a hard eye,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. “The way I saw things, I would see what was wrong. I could see what could be better. I developed kind of a dark view of life, looking at my own country.” ...

Throughout his career, Mr. Redford pushed and questioned and then questioned and pushed. His tenaciousness served him well as early as 1969, when he was preparing to play the Sundance Kid. The president of 20th Century Fox, Richard D. Zanuck, told Mr. Redford to shave the bandit mustache he had grown for the role. He refused.

“It was authentic,” Mr. Redford told Mr. Callan, his biographer. “I got my way.”

Sunday, September 14, 2025

Happiness is my latest pie, a dilled salmon potato

Dilled Salmon Potato Pie

28 oz cooked salmon, flaked (I used canned, boneless, skinless, Atlantic, drained)
2 lbs Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled, boiled, mashed
2 eggs, beaten 
1/2 stick salted butter
1/4 yellow onion diced
1 T sea salt for the potato water plus 1/2 tsp for seasoning
1 handful fresh dill fronds, chopped
1/2 lemon 
 
1- Set the oven to bake at 425F.
2- Start the water on the boil; peel and quarter the potatoes; boil covered by water salted with 1 T salt, about 20 minutes to fork tender; remove to a bowl and mash with a potato masher, plain, and let cool.
3- Meanwhile, dice the onions; melt the butter in a skillet and gently saute the onions until transparent, and set aside to cool.
4- Drain the salmon and flake it; add salmon to the potatoes, mashing in until thoroughly distributed.
5- Add the butter and sauteed onions to the potatoes and mash. Season with 1/2 tsp salt.
6- Chop the dill and mash it in.
7- Squeeze one half lemon with your hands over the mixture and mash.
8- Add the beaten eggs and mash.
9- Turn out the mixture into a large pie pan, sculpt until level, and bake in the middle of the pre-heated oven 42 minutes until golden brown on the top, because 42 is the answer to everything.
10- Let cool 5-10 minutes, slice and serve on warm plates with a fresh vegetable or a side salad.
 
Makes eight servings.
 
Two slices will stuff you with seven ounces of salmon, which is 40% of the US RDA for protein. You can fiddle with the quantity of salmon down, and the quantity of dill and lemon up, as desired. The last time I made this was with 21 oz of salmon and two slices seemed not quite enough at just over five ounces of salmon, even though it seemed to me that it should have been enough.
 
You could probably make salmon cakes with this, frying them in oil using one less egg and no lemon juice in the mixture to reduce the moisture content, since this is the bones of a Newfoundland cod cake recipe. But at the end of the day, I'd just rather shove it in the oven down here at 42.9704° N latitude.
 
IYKYK. 
 
 
 
 

 
   

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Thursday, July 24, 2025

Board Certified Psychiatric Pharmacist with a PharmD not an MD says gluten might make some people crazy, cites unsubstantiated leaky gut syndrome

Not enough bread can make you crazy, too.

Mobile Alabama bread riot of 1863

 

Why this scientist believes bread is making us sad: If you’re feeling depressed or run down it might be time to avoid gluten

... “I would have been sceptical if you’d told me I’d end up studying this connection,” says Kelly. “My line of thinking was therapy and medications; I didn’t know food and diet could actually be good medicine.” ...

“It’s challenging for someone to be diagnosed with non coeliac gluten sensitivity,” says Kelly.

Gluten was only introduced into our diets about 6,000 years ago. “The idea of breaking it down is really challenging for our bodies and it never breaks down completely,” says Kelly.

When a person with gluten sensitivity eats something with gluten in it – even “healthy” brown pasta or bread – their body produces antibodies to fight against the gluten.

While two types of protein join to make gluten, gliadin and glutenin, it is the former that induces an immune response. This can cause inflammation and contribute to damage in the gut, which leads to the development of “leaky gut”.

The weakened gut wall allows the antibodies to gliadin to leak from the intestine into the general bloodstream. “When it gets across the stomach lining, the body sees it as a foreign substance for some people,” says Kelly.

Consequently inflammation may occur in other parts of the body, including a person’s brain. When the antibodies’ fight gets to the brain, symptoms that develop may include not only foggy thinking, and lack of energy, but also poor emotional control, anxiety, mood changes, hallucinations and/ or seizures, that are often resistant to treatment with medications.

“There’s a specific peptide sequence called 33-mer [found in wheat] that is highly associated with an immune response,” says Deanna. “If you look at the structure of that, it’s very similar to one of the structures of the GRINA receptor, a receptor in the brain. So our bodies potentially can’t tell the difference.”

It is one of Kelly’s theories that in some people their immune system might be attacking some of the tissue in the brain because it looks like gluten.

“We have a paper showing that these antibodies to the receptors to the brain are higher in people who have the antigliadin antibodies.” ... 

Of course, not everyone with psychiatric and neurological issues is gluten sensitive. ...

Friday, July 18, 2025

Gluten-free lasagna


 

 A medical diagnosis of celiac disease is no barrier to making lasagna in my experience. These gluten-free pasta sheets by Chickapea, made from chickpeas and lentils, fit the bill perfectly.

Make your tomato sauce from whole peeled tomatoes and fresh carrot, celery, onion and extra virgin olive oil, and your ragu from ground meat without fillers.

Grate your parmigiano reggiano cheese from wedges, and use fresh mozzarella if that's in your recipe. 

Substitute a seasoned whole milk ricotta sauce with nutmeg for the bĆ©chamel normally made with wheat flour and butter, and you are good to go. I save salted pasta water left over from making other shapes of Chickapea pasta for other dinners to dilute the ricotta.

Your gluten-free family member will thank you for the effort. 

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Happiness is ice in July


 
 Yonder the harvest of cold months laid up,
Gives a fresh coolness to the royal cup;
There ice, like crystal, firm and never lost,
Tempers hot July with December's frost. 
 
-- Edmund Waller 

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

YouTube is awash in cooking channels, one hardly knows where to begin

 But it's nothing new:

Ev'ry one to cookery pretends.

-- William King, The Art of Cookery, 1708 

 


 

 

Friday, June 6, 2025

Don't believe the haters, seed oils are safe, and canola oil is especially good for you

 

The Forgotten History (and Slippery Science) of Canola Oil  
 
... Twilley: In other words, cutting out seed oils is not going to help boost your omega-3 levels. For that, you have to eat more omega-3s. And, outside of oily fish, which are delicious but which most Americans consume very little of — and outside of tofu and chia seeds and flaxseed, which are also pretty underrepresented in the standard Western diet — canola is actually a bit of a omega-3 superstar. ...
 
Darriush Mozaffarian, Tufts University: This is, you know, one of the great Internet myths that’s out there, that seed oils are harmful. Canola oil has been studied in well over a hundred randomized control trials and overwhelmingly been shown to improve every risk factor that has been looked at, and never been shown to be pro inflammatory, which is kind of the theory. We have all the science. Like, we don’t need any more studies on canola oil. This is one of the most well established areas of science there is, is the health effects of plant oils. ...

Saturday, May 31, 2025

Happiness is a cauldron of fat beef


 
 A caldron of fat beef, and stoop of ale,
On the huzzaing mob shall more prevail,
Than if you give them, with the nicest art,
Ragousts of peacocks brains, or filbert tart.
 
-- William King, The Art of Cookery (London, 1708),  p. 107
 

Sunday, May 25, 2025

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Happiness is Hodge, Samuel Johnson's cat


 
Who, by his master when caressed,
warmly his gratitude expressed,
and never failed his thanks to purr,
whene'er he stroked his sable furr.

-- Percival Stockdale, 1778

Sunday, May 11, 2025

The comedy of maternal love is that its seismic intensity is expressed, most of the time, in totally mundane drudgery

 Elizabeth Bruenig for The Atlantic, here:

... My mother used to pick me up from day care in paisley dresses or broomstick skirts with slouchy boots, hair hot-rolled and blown out, with the lived-in scent of faded perfume: full glam for an eight-hour workday with a 45-minute commute on either end and then a second shift at home, cooking any number of demanding meals—fried chicken, smothered pork chops, breakfast for dinner with biscuits and gravy—and then helping me and my brother with our homework and loading up the dishwasher, all before she took her makeup off. I used to sit beside her and talk with her while she took her evening bath, watching while she rinsed her mascara off and finally breathed. ...

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Friday, May 2, 2025

Decades worth of research concludes that happiness is the good mood you get from social interaction

How Nearly a Century of Happiness Research Led to One Big Finding: Decades of wellness studies have identified a formula for happiness, but you won’t figure it out alone

Which is fine if you're an extrovert.

But in former times happiness at its root was simply thought of as good fortune, or as escaping misfortune and accidents, which seems to me a more inclusive definition.

25% of a given population, after all, is composed of introverts, who feel drained by social interaction, not enriched. But they are just as happy to have escaped being hit by a car as any one else.

The field of psychology still seems biased toward the extroverts. 

 


 


 

Monday, April 7, 2025

Happiness is Benny Bell's McCarthy and McGinnis

 


McCarthy is dead, McGinnis don't know it McGinnis is dead, McCarthy don't know it They both lay dead on the very same bed But neither one knows that the other is dead.

Before he died, this fellow McCarthy One Saturday night got drunk at a party He took a swing at Officer King The next day he carried his head in a sling.

McCarthy was always good to his wife He had to be so, or I pity his life Although she was only half his size She'd jump on a table and scratch out his eyes.

On Saint Patrick's Day he was there A shine on his shoes and oil on his hair He wore a green jacket and really looked swell With a genuine shamrock in his lapel.

One day he was taking his wife to a dance A dog took a chance and snapped at his pants McCarthy got angry and started to sneer Then lifted the mongrel and bit off its ear.

He drank like a fish, he ate like a savage His favourite dish was corned beef and cabbage He fought like a tiger, he hit like a mule And boy could he knock off a good game of pool.

McCarthy and Mister McGinnis next door Could never agree, they were always at war Said he to McGinnis, "The day when you die I'll buy everybody a strawberry pie."

Said Mister McGinnis to Mister McCarthy "You may be tough, and healthy and hearty But if you don't shut up and behave You'll soon be asleep in a seven foot grave."

One stormy night, they met in the hall To settle their argument once and for all Now one used a shovel and one used a rock And both were in heaven at seven o'clock.

So McCarthy is dead but McGinnis don't know it McGinnis is dead and McCarthy don't know it They both lay dead on the very same bed But neither one knows that the other is dead.




Sunday, March 30, 2025

Trump tariffs make even middling Italian-sourced extra virgin olive oil out of reach for average Americans

 I ran out of this olive oil a few weeks ago. I had shepherded my three liter can over the winter to make it last. I paid $40 for it, now it's $55.

Fuhgeddaboutit.

 


 

Saturday, March 1, 2025

Happiness is a succinct visualization of the enduring attraction of liberalism

 A liberal suddenly becomes a conservative after getting mugged on the street. Why is there no law and order, he wonders. We need to hire more cops.

But the mugged conservative gets arrested for his own mugging by mistake, and becomes a libertarian in self defense, wondering how the law could be so incompetent as to deprive the victim of his freedom!

Then, however, the arrested libertarian loses his job because his employer finds out about the arrest, and so he becomes a liberal again because of his boss' ignorant prejudice.

But wait, there's more!

At this point the liberal hits on a novel solution. I'll start my own business, he says, that'll show 'em! I'll be the master of my own destiny!

But once faced with all the insane regulations and restraints on his business activities, the liberal, longing to be free of them, becomes a libertarian again.

He's very successful despite all the problems, and eventually marries and has a bunch of kids, who promptly turn him into a conservative again because he wants children who will behave themselves.

Unfortunately they don't, getting into one scrape after another. The medical bills start rolling in and the conservative realizes he needs help paying them or he's not going to turn a profit!

He decides to ask the government to help him with all of those bills. It's unfair, he tells himself, when he has to pay them all by himself when he pays more in taxes than most people do, at which point the conservative has become a liberal again.

 


Monday, February 24, 2025

Happiness is Roberta Flack, may she rest in peace

 “I always say that ‘love is a song’ — meaning that music reaches beyond age, race, nationality and religion to touch our hearts”.

Quoted here



Tuesday, February 18, 2025

And I woke up humming this for some reason today

 Happy landings on a chocolate bar!

(don't let the sickos in the comments ruin it for you)


 

Friday, January 17, 2025

Monday, January 6, 2025