If you are a parent, Please make sure your children are vaccinated. In this week's issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, (no, I am not joking), the Centers for Disease Control report that there has been a sudden increase in the number of measles cases reported this year. The cumulative number since January 1 stands at 118 . Hospitalization rates were highest among infants and children aged <5 years (52%), but rates also were high among children and adults aged ≥5 years (33%).
This increase is of course due to two things, globalization of the economy, and failure to vaccinate all of our children. Of these 118 cases, 46 were imported, mainly from Europe and Southeast Asia, the rest were home grown. "The largest outbreak occurred among 21 persons in a Minnesota population in which many children were unvaccinated because of parental concerns about the safety of measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. That outbreak resulted in exposure to many persons and infection of at least seven infants too young to receive MMR vaccine (4)."
Measles is not a harmless childhood malady, it is a serious viral infection, highly contagious, and can lead to life threatening complications. It is completely preventable. Why would you take this chance? So I reiterate, vaccinate your children! Everything else is just commentary.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Friday, May 13, 2011
Chicken Fat Chocolate Chunk Cookies
I have been cooking a bit of late. Not much interesting about that say about half of you. ( Yes, I know that I am famous for the phrase 'Ninety per cent of statistics is made up on the spot,' but bare with me.) I am going to recommend you listen to a podcast called Fear of Frying. Fear of Frying is a piece I heard on WBEZ wherein Nina Barrett interviews Ina Pinkney of Chicken Fat Chocolate Chunk Cookie fame.
Ina is apparently the chicken fat doyenne of New York. For those of you lucky enough to have been raised on 'gribenes' I need not say more. Of course I wouldn't eat this stuff on a daily basis, but to have just a taste of gribenes on a rare occasion turns on my nostalgia machinery. For the uninitiated this is like a chicken skin crackling sort of thing, like a kosher pork rind, buried under a dusting of kosher salt, and caramelized onions, (okay, sometimes burned to a crisp onions) and fried, (there! I said it!) in rendered chicken fat. This sounds pretty tasty to some of us if accompanied by liberal doses of Slivovitz. This culinary delight has probably killed more Jews than Hitler. But now we are all taking drugs for hyperlipidemia and hypertension, so maybe once in a while isn't so bad, and we have angioplasty now too, (though only as a last resort).
So I recommend Nina's podcast and encourage you to turn on your own nostalgia machinery and think about all the bad things you ate, that mean so much to the person you have become. After all, you are what you eat. Now a days I am eating stuff like baby bok choy from the farmer's market, grilled on the Char Broil with New Zealand Lamb shoulder and quinoa from Peru with aji molido. But next month when I go to Montreal I will stop in at Dunn's Famous for a medium fat, hold the guilt!
Ina is apparently the chicken fat doyenne of New York. For those of you lucky enough to have been raised on 'gribenes' I need not say more. Of course I wouldn't eat this stuff on a daily basis, but to have just a taste of gribenes on a rare occasion turns on my nostalgia machinery. For the uninitiated this is like a chicken skin crackling sort of thing, like a kosher pork rind, buried under a dusting of kosher salt, and caramelized onions, (okay, sometimes burned to a crisp onions) and fried, (there! I said it!) in rendered chicken fat. This sounds pretty tasty to some of us if accompanied by liberal doses of Slivovitz. This culinary delight has probably killed more Jews than Hitler. But now we are all taking drugs for hyperlipidemia and hypertension, so maybe once in a while isn't so bad, and we have angioplasty now too, (though only as a last resort).
So I recommend Nina's podcast and encourage you to turn on your own nostalgia machinery and think about all the bad things you ate, that mean so much to the person you have become. After all, you are what you eat. Now a days I am eating stuff like baby bok choy from the farmer's market, grilled on the Char Broil with New Zealand Lamb shoulder and quinoa from Peru with aji molido. But next month when I go to Montreal I will stop in at Dunn's Famous for a medium fat, hold the guilt!
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