Elegant Survival

Greetings!

Because I find it so much quicker and easier to use the editing device at Elegant Survival News, I shall be posting blog-items there instead of here at M-J's Mini-Blog. The rest of the content here at Elegant Survival is permanent.

I hope to gain your readership there, friends. Thank you for continuing to visit Elegant Survival, together with its adjunct blog and cooking pages.

All the Best,

M-J de Mesterton

Vinsobres 2005 was featured on Elegant Survival in 2006. Subsequent years have also had very good reviews.  Perrin & Fils

We love Le Grand Sport by Seiko!

My husband's review says it all....

In loving memory of my mother, Lorraine, whose birthday is Sunday, I made a strawberry sorbet this evening.

M-J's Elegant Strawberry Sorbet

Place two cups of frozen strawberries in a glass measuring cup. Microwave them for one minute. Transfer berries to a food-processor and grind until smooth, adding sugar or Splenda to your taste.

See Elegant Cuisine or The Elegant Cook for M-J de Mesterton's recipe for Swedish-style rye-flax bread.

Toast rounds made with whole-grain bread, topped with malt vinegar mayonnaise and Worcestershire-flavoured hamburger patties make a low-carbohydrate, low glycemic-index canapé or luncheon dish. Flatten slices of whole-grain bread with a rolling pin. Cut out round pieces from their middles--I use a water chestnut can. Brush the rounds of bread with melted butter and bake until lightly toasted. Following my recipe for mayonnaise, use malt vinegar for the acid component. Mix ground beef with Worcestershire sauce and freshly ground black pepper. Flatten the meat mixture and cut out round pieces the same size as the toast rounds. Fry or grill the burgers until they do not emit pink juice (this is a neat cocktail burger that everyone can eat, not a recipe for steak tartare). Set the hamburger patties to drain on a plate. Spread  mayonnaise on the circular pieces of toast. Assemble the burgers just before serving them. Do not top the burgers with more toast. Classic canapés have toast as a base. These elegant, simple low-carb burgers are easy to eat by hand or with a knife and fork. Men love them!

Photo and Recipe Copyright M-J de Mesterton 2010

An Important Message from the Nutritional Health Alliance

on the destructive, dubious changes coming in America...reiterating what I have promoted here at Elegant Survival since 2006.

If you wear only classic clothing, it is bound to come back into fashion. This jacket, designed by M-J and Jacques de Mesterton, then executed flawlessly by Bookster U.K., has already been somewhat mimicked (not duplicated) by Dior for autumn 2010. M-J wears her Harris Tweed burnt orange equestrian jacket with Gun Club Check breeks, also made to measure by Bookster U.K.

See "Survival Tools" for my new list of medical emergency supplies.

http://www.stylelist.com/2010/04/30/top-denim-trends-for-spring-2010/

Yes, follow the crowd! Make your legs look really short, and your torso appear freakishly long--and don't forget to let the clothing industry fool you into thinking that rotting denim is beautiful. Fashion dictators have levelled the playing field, so don't worry, be confident--everyone else looks just as ridiculous!

As promised, here is another quote from then-octogenarian Hillard Green in 1972:

"Lotsa people don't even know how t'cook anymore. They just go t'th' store and get it fixed already. These girls nowadays go off t'school and learn about everything but what's really important. Get home and still can't even cook a meal. If your woman can't cook whenever you get married, let me know and I'll come cook fer ye!"

"That's the way I learn. Experiment and experiment. Try different ways. Never learned it by readin'--just by doin'. That's th' way we all learn, ain't it?"

The Foxfire Book, Page372

Doubleday, 1972

Tomorrow: Hillard Green's quote on what happened to money.

April 26th-28th:

These are favourable days for sowing grains, hay and fodder-crops, and for planting flower-beds.

The 26th and the 27th of April are especially good for planting tomatoes, beans, corn, melons, squash, and other above-ground crops.

The 28th of April is propitious for planting root-crops such as potatoes, beets, celeriac and carrots.

The 29th-30th of April are also favourable days for planting root-crops like beets, carrots, radishes, Turnips, peanuts, cabbage, and  horseradish. These two days are also propitious for planting cauliflower, lettuce, kale, celery, and all leafy vegetables.

~~M-J

For a likeness of Hillard Green, who was an octogenarian circa 1970, see this PDF file from Foxfire. He is pictured at the right of the page. In the last chapter of the original Foxfire Book, published by Doubleday in 1972, Hillard Green, who lived alone in the Appalachian Mountains of Georgia, is interviewed by students and makes some startlingly prescient statements:

P. 371, while putting up tomatoes:

"Everyone ought t'learn hot to do such as this. One a'these days, times might get back hard again, and then what will they do? Nobody not knowin' how to do nothin'. Might have t'live off th'land again, one day. We never had nothin' for the winter only what we put up. What we put up was what we had. Goin' t'be a lot of hungry people someday."

~~Hillard Green

More Hillard Green Quotes to Come, here at Elegant Survival

September 10, 2009 at 7:08 am, by M-J de Mesterton

Save Our Corn

To produce one gallon of ethanol, fifty gallons of water must be used. How exactly is this “helping the planet”, especially since auto-emissions from ethanol are equal to those of regular gasoline (petrol)? And the ethanol craze has caused the price of corn (maize) to go sky-high. Derivatives of corn permeate the food-supply, thus its high price trickles over to innumerable food products. Corn is the food staple of poor nations in the western hemisphere. Eschewing gas and oil in favor of ethanol has devastating consequences for nations dependent on corn, not to mention those addicted to Cheetos!~~M-J, January 2009

Do Environmentalists Hate Poor People?

Corn (maize), traditionally a popular foodstuff in the Americas, is now used to produce a motor fuel called ethanol. Ethanol is created by converting corn’s starches into a combustible liquid that can be mixed with gasoline, or burned straight, if the vehicle in question has had the modifications needed to do so.The environmentalists’ propaganda claims that ethanol is good for the earth because it will reduce American dependence on foreign oil. However, there are mixed data about perceived energy gains, and evidence of detrimental environmental impact from the use of ethanol. In 2006, University of Minnesota researchers found that ethanol returns only 25 percent more energy than it takes to produce it. Detractors emphasise that the study did not calculate all the variables that go into the ethanol-making process–to wit, the power it takes to run irrigation equipment used to water the corn crops, the power consumed in making the necessary fertilizers, the cost of farm equipment used to harvest it, and of the fuel required to power those machines. Scientific studies have found that burning ethanol will produce smog–namely, ozone pollution. Everyone wants to get into the ethanol act: auto-makers, who want their colossal S.U.V.s and trucks to seem like they consume less fuel (they don’t), and the oil industry (it sells oil to producers of ethanol). Ethanol production in the United States rose from 1.6 billion gallons in 2000 to 5 billion gallons in 2006. This new endeavour is diverting at least 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop away from the food industry. Thus, a tortilla crisis burgeons in Mexico, where masa and corn-flour prices have gone up at least 25 percent in price, in a country with a large population of very poor citizens.

The proposed “tortilla tax” in southwestern states presents an ironic dilemma: how is it more socially and environmentally responsible to starve the poor to run one’s S.U.V? Soybean prices are expected to hit their second-highest ever, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports, thanks to the diversion of soybean oil to use as an alternative, “bio-diesel” fuel. The amount of soybeans used for processing biofuel rather than for food has jumped from 2 percent to 12 percent, and is expected to go much higher. So far, Americans have not seemed to notice what is happening to the price of soybean and corn-based comestibles. Just wait till they see the price of beer bubbling up because of the agricultural focus on corn and soybeans, which results in farming fewer barley and hops. The environmentalism cult has already ruined the abundant farming tradition in California’s Central Valley, because of their deference to a minnow that no one had previously heard of–they are “protecting” the miniature, non-food fish while forcing farms to go fallow. These false philanthropists pressured and threatened California leaders to prohibit use of river-water for crops. They don’t want America’s farms to be fertile enough to produce food, but still believe that their “cause” makes the morally superior. Well, how benevolent are they, really, when they cause people to starve because of the lack of produce from western America’s best farming region, not to mention making hundreds of farming families go out of business? How is that good for either people or the economy? A large portion of the enviro-cult is composed of trust-fund babies who couldn’t care less about the realities of average people’s lives; they are a new class of oppressors, just like the ones they claim to abhor. They need to look in the mirror and analyse just how devoid of brotherly love they are, when they sacrifice their fellow human-beings for the sake of “Gaia”. The prices of food will be astronomical as a result of their thug-like behaviour, as I have been saying for many months since learning of the California travesty. Coupled with the new focus on “bio-fuels’, which are a waste of water, oil and other types of energy, the misanthropic environmental cult is going to be controlling your food costs to a degree that even a superpower cannot support. This wouldn’t have happened if certain American leaders hadn’t given into the demands of environmental thugs. Will the U.S. continue to shoot itself in the foot until they are dependent on foreign oil and foreign food as well? Caving in to domestic terrorists will turn freedom’s paradise into a deprived, depraved Hell. ~~Copyright M-J de Mesterton, 2009

Blue Diamond Growers of Sacramento, California  See my photo and information here.

Gardening with M-J

Cucumber as Pest-Repellent in the Garden and Home

The health-promoting, diuretic, eye-freshening cucumber holds a drastically different meaning for certain garden and household pests.

Raccoons and skunks don't like cucumbers, in fact they are repelled by them, therefore planting cukes at the outer edge of your vegetable garden is a wise plan. There you are also easily able to provide cucumbers with a surface on which to climb, such as a fence or trellis.

Cucumber skins placed about the kitchen will naturally repel cockroaches. These hard-shelled bugs are a perennial problem in New York City and Paris, where even the most posh apartments are afflicted with roaches. Las cucarachas detest the bitter compound called trans-2-nonenal that is inherent in cucumbers.

~~Copyright M-J de Mesterton 2010

Gardening Tips for the 21st of April

This is a good day to plant tomatoes, beans, peppers, corn, cotton, and other above-ground crops. These are also fine days on which to plant seedbeds and start flower gardens.

According to the Old Farmers' Almanac, April 20th and 21st are propitious days on which to

bake, cut firewood, cut hair to increase growth, mow grass to increase growth, dig post-holes, wax floors, and to get married.

Photo Copyright M-J de Mesterton 2007