<img src="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/images/le-creuset.jpg" height="170" width="250" alt="Le Creuset 5-1/2-Quart Round French Oven, Cherry Red" />
Yesterday was my birthday so my wife got me a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004SBH4" title="Amazon.com: Kitchen & Housewares: Le Creuset 5-1/2-Quart Round French Oven, Cherry Red">Le Creuset French Oven</a>. I have wanted one since I moved out of my parents house.
The tomatoes and onions are in, so this past weekend I tried out a couple of new tomato sauce recipes.
The first recipe I tried was Giada De Laurentiis’ Simple Tomato Sauce. While quite tasty, and representative of the flavor of a nice basic tomato sauce, the use of carrots in the mirepoix gave the overall sauce a bizarre orange color. However, for me this was not a problem, since my overall goal was to use the sauce as an ingredient in another sauce, the Bechamel Sauce. Giada uses this in her Classic Italian Lasagna. The Bechamel Sauce sauce turned out to be quite tasty. A cream sauce, we served it over linguine with a generous sprinkle of grated Parmesan cheese. It had a wonderful flavor — substantial, but not overpowering. It would make an excellent accompaniment to any delicately flavored dish — like chicken or seafood.
The second recipe I tried was Alton Brown’s (roasted) Tomato Sauce. His original recipe calls for Roma tomatoes, but I used Better Boys, since that was what we grew this year. They produced lovely classic red globes, slightly larger than a baseball. Fortunately for me, in addition to calling out the number of Roma tomatoes he wanted, he also said to halve them and place them cut side up in two 13 by 9-inch pans. So, I just started halving and seeding my Better Boys until I had filled my pans. It turns out that while he called for 20 Romas, I ended up using 12 Better Boys. I always seed my tomatoes for sauce. The recipes never call for this, though this one did. I find my sauce is too watery otherwise. In this recipe, you roast the tomatoes with olive oil, chopped onion, garlic, salt, pepper, oregano, and thyme for two and one half hours. After this, you are supposed to run the lot through a food mill. This separates out the skins and gives the tomato meat a nice texture. I do not have a food mill, so I ended up picking the skins out of the pot with tongs and running the remainder through the low setting on my blender. The appearance of the sauce — the color and consistency — was exactly as I remember the sauce of the Italian women in the neighborhood of northeast Ohio where I grew up. The smell was wonderful and the sample taste promised of great things. Unfortunately, I finished up too late to try it on pasta. I hope to do that tonight.
I went home over lunch and talked my wife into having pasta for dinner, so I’ll be sure to get to try it out tonight.
Well, we tried the sauce. It’s actually quite good. It would be better with some meatballs or some hot Italian sausage simmered in it for a few hours, but overall a very good authentic sauce.
You are viewing the Information Sciences and Technology Building’s construction from west campus via live Web cam.
IST Webmaster (2003, September 17), <i>IST: ISTCam</i>. Retrieved Wednesday, September 17, 2003, from <a href="http://ist.psu.edu/cam/index.cfm" title="IST: ISTCam">ist.psu.edu/cam/index.cfm</a>.
Citation.
The importance of accurate citation cannot be overstated: a paper without proper citations is open to charges of plagiary. It’s not simply a matter of having the minimum of five footnotes in your research paper to keep the teacher happy, and it’s not simply a matter of avoiding honor-code trouble. Careful citation shows your reader that you’ve done your homework, and allows him or her to check up on you. It amounts to laying your intellectual cards on the table.
Cite your source for every direct quotation and every borrowed idea. Two standards are common in English papers: that of the MLA Style Guide and that of The Chicago Manual of Style. Either will do. The MLA style calls for a list of “Works Cited” at the end of a paper in standard bibliographical form, alphabetical by author:
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Edited by Herbert Davis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965.
Citations in the text of the paper would then include the author’s name (with a year or abbreviated title if more than one work is cited) and page number; for instance:
“… the most pernicious race of odious little vermin” (Swift 120).
The Chicago style gives a full citation in a footnote (or endnote) on the first quotation in this form:
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p. 120.
Subsequent citations in the text include the page number in parentheses, with an author’s name only when necessary:
“Girl threading an invisible Needle with invisible Silk” (p. 92).
Either style is acceptable, but be consistent. For full details see the MLA Style Guide or the Chicago Manual of Style. (Other disciplines, mind you, have their own style guides; psychologists use APA style, and scientists have their own as well. You’ll do well to learn the most common standard for your major.)
All citations should appear under the name of the main author, but should include the names of editors, translators, and so on (writers of introductions aren’t necessary). Include the city, publisher, and year of publication. For works of prose, give a page number or a range of pages; for works of poetry, give a line number or range of lines.
Jack Lynch (2001, August 3), <i>Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style — C</i>. Retrieved Tuesday, September 16, 2003, from <a href="http://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/c.html#citation" title="Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style — C">www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/ ~jlynch/ Writing/ c.html#citation</a>.
Block Quotations.
Short quotations — say, no more than three or four lines — usually appear in the text surrounded by quotation marks, “like this.” Longer direct quotations, though — and sometimes shorter quotations of poetry — should be set off as block quotations or extracts, thus:
Notice that the quotation is indented on both sides: most word processors make that easy. Notice, too, that you don’t use quotation marks around a block quotation: the indention (not “indentation”) is enough to indicate it’s a quotation. Some house styles prefer block quotations to be single-spaced, others like them double-spaced; that’s not something to fret about unless you’re writing for publication.
Always be sure to include proper citations in block quotations; the usual route is to put the citation in parentheses after the closing punctuation in the quotation itself.
Jack Lynch (2001, August 3), <i>Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style — B</i>. Retrieved Tuesday, September 16, 2003, from <a href="http://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/b.html#block" title="Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style — B">www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/ ~jlynch/ Writing/ b.html#block</a>.
If you have read my <a href="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/bio.html" title="Biographical Information">bio</a>, you already know that one of my favorite shows is <a href="http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/show_ea" title="Food Network: Good Eats">Good Eats</a>. If you like it too, you might also be interested in knowing that Alton Brown, who hosts the show, has his own <a href="http://www.altonbrown.com/index.html" title="Alton Brown.com">Web site</a>. If you visit, you will learn
Did you know that Woodsy Owl and Smokey Bear were actually created by an <a href="http://www.symbols.gov/woodsy/pages/policy/woodsy-smokey-act.htm" title="Woodsy Owl - Smokey Bear Act">act of Congress</a>?
Neither did I.
Question: What’s the best way to put a resume together? Should I include an objective, that always seemed kind of lame. Is it smart to put references right on there, or say they’re available upon request? Please help Non-Expert, you’re my only hope. —Nina
Answer: In this epoch of economic downturn, it’s vital that your résumé stands out. It is, after all, the first thing a potential employer will ever know about you — and, insofar as they will never contact you, also the last. So it’s essential to write one that shines.
The secret is to strike a balance between accurate portrayals of your relevant experience and flat-out lies. As most employers place great weight on honesty, it may take four or five fabrications to balance out a single, truthful fact.
Matthew Baldwin (2003, August 22), <i>The Non-Expert: Defenestrate Your Résumé!</i>. Retrieved Monday, September 15, 2003, from <a href="http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/editorial/the_nonexpert_defenestrate_your_rsum.php" title="">www.themorningnews.org/ archives/ editorial/ the_nonexpert_defenestrate_your_rsum.php</a>.
The history of silly putty is quite amusing. In 1943 James Wright, an engineer, was attempting to create a synthetic rubber. He was unable to achieve the properties he was looking for and put his creation (later to be called silly putty) on the shelf as a failure. A few years later, a salesman for the Dow Corning Corporation was using the putty to entertain some customers. One of his customers became intrigued with the putty and saw that it had potential as a new toy. In 1957, after being endorsed on the “Howdy Doody Show”, silly putty became a toy fad. Recently new uses such as a grip strengthener and as an art medium have been developed. Silly putt even went into space on the Apollo 8 mission.
University of Minnesota Chemistry Outreach Program (TBD), <i>Silly putty</i>. Retrieved Monday, September 15, 2003, from <a href="http://www.chem.umn.edu/outreach/Sillyputty.html" title="Silly putty">www.chem.umn.edu/outreach/Sillyputty.html</a>.