| Cookbooks make great gifts - for yourself, too
Even if you don't find that perfect gift for the cook who has everything, you'll likely come away with something for yourself. Cookbooks deliver the promise of delicious home-cooked meals made with a minimum of effort on your part. They tempt with pictures, provide a good read, and offer the chance to at least imagine what the dinner hour would be like in your house if you had the time to cook every night. Here's a guide to some of the year's personal faves. Now if only there was a way to give that one last present: time to cook! Mary Ann Esposito's "Ciao Italia Slow and Easy" (St. Martin's Press. $27.95) is a quintessential winter cookbook, laden with recipes for hearty stews, pasta casseroles, braises and sturdy puddings. The author, host of the PBS series "Ciao Italia," outlines such fare as beef short ribs with rigatoni, veal shanks with porcini mushrooms, and chicken marengo.
Fishin' Game: Reds and flounders in foggy Geoghagen's Canal!
Pretty dense fog covered the Rigolets marsh Thursday morning when my fishing team and I headed out to do this week's report. But once the first ray of sunshine broke through the broken clouds to burn off some of the hanging mist, the morning fog had little effect on where we found fish and how we caught them. .
VJTI lecturer beaten over Shivaji poem
MUMBAI: It was meant to be a fun occasion for the teaching and non-teaching staff of the Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI). Instead, Friday evening's get-together turned into a shocking affair, with activists of Shiv Sena's labour wing thrashing a lecturer.
Activists of Bharatiya Kamgar Sena assaulted lecturer Sanjay M G for reciting a poem with "objectionable content" against Shivaji during the annual get-together. The lecturer is also an office-bearer of the National Alliance for People's Movements (NAPM). No police case has been registered.
The institute had organised a get-together of all teaching and non-teaching staff members to promote team spirit. Several faculty members and non-teaching staff share light moments during this annual get-together.
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More than any other top group, the Beatles' success was very much a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Their phenomenal cohesion was due in large degree to most of the group having known each other and played together in Liverpool for about five years before they began to have hit records. Guitarist and teenage rebel John Lennon got hooked on rock & roll in the mid-'50s, and formed a band, the Quarrymen, at his high school. Around mid-1957, the Quarrymen were joined by another guitarist, Paul McCartney, nearly two years Lennon's junior. A bit later they were joined by another guitarist, George Harrison, a friend of McCartney. The Quarrymen would change lineups constantly in the late '50s, eventually reducing to the core trio of guitarists, who'd proven themselves to be the best musicians and most personally compatible individuals within the band.
Chefs hail Tuscan kale
Tuscany gets plenty of adoration for its camera-ready landscapes, its free-flowing Chianti, and its trove of Renaissance art. But now we Americans need to thank it for a vegetable, too. In just the past decade or so, the lovable leafy green known as Tuscan kale has ridden the wave of interest in Italian cooking and rooted itself in Bay Area markets and gardens. "It has really taken off," says grower Noah Barnes of Capay Organic, a farm in the Capay Valley (Yolo County) that supplies several local markets and restaurants with Tuscan kale. Sales have climbed every year in the decade that the farm has been growing it, says Barnes, who watches customers eye the curious vegetable at winter farmers' markets. "People are attracted to it right away just by its appearance." But this elongated kale with the crinkly blue-green leaves and pebbly texture remains a mystery to many.
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