You’ve finished dinner and your favorite show is starting soon. Here’s how to get everything spotless and put away, so you can be on the couch in time for the opening credits.
By Lynn Andriani
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Certain foods are so well-matched, I’m convinced they somehow conspire through the soil in order to coordinate how to perfectly complement each other. Carrots and ginger are that way. The sweet, subtle flavor of carrots is perfectly offset by the creamy heat of ginger, making this an all-star combination for all sorts of foods. From smoothies to slaw, cake, or carrot ginger soup, the duo fits the bill for a match made in food heaven.
In spite of my love for all things vegetable, I figured I wouldn’t care for carrot soup prior to making it. I imagined it would remind me of brown bag lunches from when I was in grade school, which included the same turkey sandwich, banana, and carrot sticks day in and day out. I’ll trade you my carrots for your twinkie – fair? Drat.
But this soup turned out to be nothing of the sort. Instead of reminiscing on the brown-bag-days-of-yore, I reveled in the rich, creamy, flavorful, velvety texture and was thrilled that something so simple and nutritious could taste so amazing.
This soup is incredibly easy to make. Simply sauté the onion, carrots, garlic, and ginger with the spices, toss it all in a blender with the rest of the ingredients and blend until creamy bliss results. The warm ginger and spices bring a little heat and intrigue to the soup, and the coconut milk adds to the creamy flavor and texture, making this soup taste decadent and full of depth.
Coconut milk is a wonderful replacement for cream in many recipes, especially soups. It adds to the health benefit of the soup while contributing unique flavor. Coconut milk and Indian or Thai spices work well in a variety of creamy soups, including butternut squash soup, acorn squash soup, and this Coconut Curry Sweet Potato Soup. For those who are lactose-intolerant or simply try to limit dairy, this vegan soup is perfect!
Re-purpose those pesky carrot sticks in this carrot ginger soup recipe! If you need more to your meal, consider serving it alongside this Brussels Sprout Salad.
Julia is known for her healthy, balanced approach to all kinds of recipes, vegetarian and meat alike, on her blog, The Roasted Root. She shares her commitment to delectable vegetarian dishes as a Vegetarian fanatic, proving that you can make the whole family happy without the need for meat.
The Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage, sponsored by Hawaiian Airlines, is a 47,000-mile circumnavigation of the Earth on two Polynesian double-hulled sailing canoes. These voyaging canoes, Hōkūleʻa and Hikianalia, are travelling to 85 ports in 28 countries to help grow the global movement toward a more sustainable world. The Hawaiian name for this voyage, Mālama Honua, means “To care for our Earth.”
Our crew has been waiting in Hilo, Hawaiʻi for nearly two weeks for the right winds and weather for the journey to Tahiti. I was also in Hilo in 1999 during the preparation for Hōkūleʻa’s departure to the South Pacific and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). At the time I was a new crew member, wide-eyed, trying to get a handle on the seemingly endless list of details that needed to be checked and rechecked before the voyage could be sanctioned for departure.
Now, some 15 years later, on the eve of this historic departure for these canoes and crews, it really is amazing to see how much of the preparation process of has remained the same. Hilo has been the staging point for many voyages to the South Pacific because of the easting that the canoes will need to get as they sail south. Hilo being one of the most eastern points in the Hawaiian chain makes the job that much easier from the start. But, Hilo is a perfect launching point for a slew of other reasons. Hilo’s spirit of hoʻokipa, or giving and offering, has epitomized the sense of community that we intend to take with us around the globe.
Literally thousands of members of our ʻohana waʻa (canoe family) have come to see the canoes. School groups by the busloads have come to share mele (songs) and hoʻokupu (offerings) to the canoes and crew. But if one looks a little closer, they can start to really notice how well this community still understands the sense of aloha. Every day for the past 10 days this community has come out to feed the crew three meals a day. Cars have been dropped off to help with last minute runs to the store. People have come without any expectation of personal gain to give of their time to just help us prepare for this 47,000 mile journey. Just this morning after sunrise, one of the uncles from nearby came to drop off a dozen or so lei, that he personally strung together with flowers from his yard, just to “Aloha” the canoes. He didn’t even ask to come aboard, rather, he left them in the care of one of our watch captains to bless the canoes with the sweet fragrance that reminds us all of Hilo.
What started as a mere dream to take our vessels around the world has come to full fruition, thanks in no small part to this sense of aloha, kuelana (responsibility) and sincere belief that the expansive ʻohana waʻa has in the mission of the canoes. From large corporations that are based on the East Coast to the woman who set up her own tent and massage table at Palekai to massage the sore muscles of a worn crew, they are all part of a this community, the ʻohana waʻa. It just so happens that this community is bound by the values that come from these vessels rather than the geographical space that they occupy. And for me, as a crew member, as a media maker and as a father, my great hope is that Hōkūleʻa and Hikianalia will travel the globe connecting a community that helps us all to recognize that we are all not that different if we look at our values and what makes us want to move forward together, as citizens of Island Earth.
Hōkūleʻa, Hawaiʻi’s storied traditional voyaging canoe, sets sail to Hilo, Hawaiʻi. (Hōkūleʻa Image ® Polynesian Voyaging Society. Photo © ʻŌiwi TV)
Would Winston Churchill have sent troops in to stop Vladimir Putin’s grab for the Crimea? Those still calling for military action love to draw parallels with Churchill’s early and unyielding opposition to Hitler during the run-up to World War II. They are, however, citing the wrong Churchillian chapter (and verse).
Look not at 1938 but at 1919. Churchill’s words and deeds regarding Russia in its post-Revolutionary chaos after World War One are the key. As Secretary of State for War in the war’s immediate aftermath, Churchill desperately wanted Great Britain to stop “Bolshevism” militarily by supporting the anti-Bolshevik forces battling what was essentially the newly-Bolshevized Russian army. Did he support military intervention? Yes, but with powerful reservations. Might he have sent in British troops today? Never. Would he have rallied Europe and America to jointly send troops? Conceivably. As a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, however, he might well have embraced economic sanctions as the most powerful weapon he could wield against Putin. After all, Churchill’s greatest non-military priority in 1919 was to dissuade the British government from officially recognizing the Communist regime and beginning to trade with it. (In this, he failed. Britain resumed commerce with Russia in May 1920).
What Churchill never would have done would be to mistake Vladimir Putin invading the Crimea for Adolph Hitler invading the Sudetenland. Churchill understood power and the difference between a grasping despot and an epically-fortified dictator poised to take over the world.
Churchill stood up to Communism long before he stood up to Nazism. And with good reason, though with far greater nuance. In a letter that he drafted to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in February 1919 (but did not ultimately send), Churchill’s prognostication for Russia’s future resonates with our own moment to a disconcerting degree:
Russia will certainly rise again, perhaps very swiftly, as a great united empire determined to maintain the integrity of her dominions and to recover everything that has been taken away from her. While this process is going on, Europe will be in a perpetual state of ferment. The belt of little States we are now calling into being will be quaking with terror and no doubt misconducting themselves in every possible way.
Britain, “ought to…try and keep alive the Russian forces which were attempting to make headway against the Bolsheviks,” Churchill proclaimed at a War Cabinet meeting on February 12. Lloyd George, however, resisted (and even belittled) Churchill’s advocacy. While leaving in place the 14,000-or so British troops already on the ground in Russia (a remnant from the Great War), Lloyd George refused to send reinforcements, or further armaments, or even very much in the way of orders.
This was not Winston Churchill’s style. More than anything, Churchill wanted a coherent plan laid out for Great Britain in Russia. “It seems to me most urgent for us to frame and declare our policy,” he had written to Lloyd George in a letter that was sent on January 27.
Evacuate at once at all costs’ is a policy; it is not a very pleasant one from the point of view of history. ‘Reinforce and put the job through’ is a policy; but unhappily we have not the power. …Therefore, we must confine ourselves to modest limits. At present we are extending our commitments, curtailing our contributions, and not even maintaining our own men.
In fact, Churchill believed the Western Powers, as one, should declare war on the Bolsheviks. For this, however, he found virtually no support anywhere. Absent such a declaration of war, Churchill accepted that evacuating the remaining British forces and leaving Russia to its fate was inescapable. But Churchill knew that fate could be influenced. He demanded a strategic design for Britain’s withdrawl, with a substantial investment of arms and money left behind to bolster the anti-Bolsheviks, after British troops were gone.
Churchill wrote to Lloyd George on March 14:
You and President Wilson have, I fear, definitely closed your minds on this subject and appear resolved to let Russian affairs take their course…You are the masters and you may, of course, be right…It is my duty, however, to warn you of the profound misgiving with which I watch the steady degeneration of so many resources and powers which, vigorously used, might entirely have altered the course of events…We shall nevertheless be drawn, in spite of all your intentions, into the clutches of the Russian problem…and we shall then bewail the loss of much that is now slipping through our fingers unheeded.
Churchill’s take on the Ukraine, specifically, is fascinating and echoes instructively. “Profiting by the fact that German troops were rapidly withdrawn after the Armistice, and no other ordered force took their place, [the Bolshevik armies] advanced rapidly and overran the whole of the Ukraine,” Churchill told the House of Commons in a speech on March 26. (How familiar this sounds.) The Ukraine, Churchill added bemusedly, “has not yet fully experienced the joy of Bolshevik rule and therefore the people are to some extent under the first influence of the disease.” Yet, even as he advocated waging war on Bolshevism, Churchill remained painfully prudent about the delicacy of attacking any part of Russia, particularly the Ukraine, warning the West against any “rash interference or meddling, which would enable the Bolsheviks to rally to themselves perhaps even a patriotic movement.”
“The Bolsheviks destroy wherever they exist,” he concluded, before the assembled MPs. “By rolling forward into fertile areas, like the vampire which sucks the blood from his victims, they gain the means of prolonging their own baleful existence.”
The point is that Churchill, while possessing a terrible clarity about the carnage that a Bolshevik Russia would ultimately wreak, understood the trickiness of attempting to seize unpleasant events in Russia and bend them to the West’s will. “It would not be right for us to send out armies…” he acknowledged in a speech in London on April 11, 1919. “If Russia is to be saved, it must be by Russian manhood, but all our hearts are with these men…in their splendid struggle to restore the honour of muted Russia, to rebuild on a modern and democratic basis the freedom, prosperity, and happiness of its trusted and good-hearted people.”
Ninety-five years later the world again (or, perhaps, still) watches and waits. For almost a century, “Russian manhood” has not had a particularly good time of it restoring the honour of “muted Russia.” With Churchill’s help they might have had their best chance in 1919. With Churchill’s wisdom we might yet help them now.
Books by Barry Singer:
Gigabyte has showed off a new graphics card to its range, the GeForce GTX TITAN Z 12GB. Powered by a pair of GK110 GPUs, this dual GPU graphics card is equipped with 2x 2880 CUDA Cores, 2x 384-bit memory interface, a core clock of 706MHz (876MHz Boost Clock) and a 12GB of GDDR5 memory set @ 7000MHz, and features dual-link DVI-I, dual-link DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX TITAN Z 12GB will retail for around $3,000. [Product Page]
Mouse Computer has once again expanded its NAS server line-up by launching the MousePro-SV220SW2R1S. Designed for SMB / SOHO users, the device is equipped with a 3.0GHz Intel Pentium G3220 processor, an Intel C222 chipset, a 4GB DDR3 RAM, a 300GB SSD, a 1TB HDD, 2x USB 2.0 ports, 2x USB 3.0 ports, 1x eSATA port, 2x Gigabit LAN ports, a 350W 80PLUS BRONZE power supply and runs on Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Workgroup Edition OS. The Computer MousePro-SV220SW2R1S is available now for 127,800 Yen (about $1,257). [Mouse Computer]
ADATA has announced a new line of SATA 6.0 Gbps SSDs, the Premier Pro SP910. Coming in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB sizes, these slim 2.5-inch SSDs (7mm thick) are equipped with MLC NAND Flash memory chips, a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, a Marvell 88SS9187 controller, built-in advanced ECC technology, a MTBF of 1.5 million hours and can deliver read/write speeds of up to 540/160 MB/s (128GB), 540/320 MB/s (256GB), 560/460 MB/s (512GB & 1TB), respectively. Prices unannounced yet. [Product Page]
Dospara has come out with another gaming PC namely the GALLERIA TITAN Z WZX. Powered by a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-4790 processor, this high-end system is packed with an Intel Z97 Express Chipset, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Z 12GB graphics card, a 16GB DDR3 RAM, a 240GB SSD (Intel SSD 530 Series), a 3TB hard drive, a Blu-ray drive, a 1000W 80PLUS PLATINUM power supply and runs on Windows 7 Professional 64-bit OS. The GALLERIA TITAN Z WZX is available now for 559,980 Yen (about $5,511). [Product Page]
iiyama is proud to bring you their latest gaming monitor, the ProLite GB2773HS-2. Adopting a TN panel, this new 27-inch flicker-free LED-backlight monitor provides 1920 x 1080 Full HD resolution, 144Hz refresh rate, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 300 cd/m2 brightness and 1ms (GTG) response time. It also comes with two built-in 2.5W stereo speakers and has DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. The ProLite GB2773HS-2 is available now for 43,800 Yen (about $430). [Product Page]
Yep, we totally understand you kid. Sometimes when the sun is beating down too hard and the day of fun has gone on a little too long and you’re oddly comfortable in an uncomfortable position, you just fade away without a care in the world. It is a hammock’s rest. It is ice melting in an umbrella drink. It is this kid driving in circles in his toy car because he’s passed out.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
