Longevity Recipes

AdahPotatah2024 · January 9

Classiccelebrityrecipes.blogspot.com

AdahPotatah2024 · January 11

Ed Asner
Balsamic-Roasted New Potatoes
Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 pounds small new potatoes, washed, patted dry and quartered; or, if using larger potatoes, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced shallots
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon minced rosemary
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Place baking rack in lower third of oven.
Heat olive oil in 12 inch skillet over medium-high heat. Add potatoes, garlic and shallots. Toss in skillet until well mixed. Add thyme, rosemary and nutmeg. Toss well. When potatoes are hot, transfer to baking pan and spread in single layer. (This part of the recipe can be made several hours ahead of time.)
Place pan in preheated oven on lower rack.
Roast potatoes until golden and just tender, about 25 minutes, turning once midway.
Add vinegar. Toss well. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Return to oven until sizzling, about 7 minutes.
Serve immediately.
Attribution
Source: The Jewish Celebrity Cookbook

AdahPotatah2024 · January 11

https://youtu.be/_D_DUtn1YvY?si=knll8DRy3oTHzcII

mtaratoot · January 11

AdahPotatah2024 wrote: »

Ed Asner
Balsamic-Roasted New Potatoes
Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 pounds small new potatoes, washed, patted dry and quartered; or, if using larger potatoes, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced shallots
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon minced rosemary
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Place baking rack in lower third of oven.
Heat olive oil in 12 inch skillet over medium-high heat. Add potatoes, garlic and shallots. Toss in skillet until well mixed. Add thyme, rosemary and nutmeg. Toss well. When potatoes are hot, transfer to baking pan and spread in single layer. (This part of the recipe can be made several hours ahead of time.)
Place pan in preheated oven on lower rack.
Roast potatoes until golden and just tender, about 25 minutes, turning once midway.
Add vinegar. Toss well. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Return to oven until sizzling, about 7 minutes.
Serve immediately.
Attribution
Source: The Jewish Celebrity Cookbook

I really like the idea of all the sauteed shallots and garlic added to the potatoes. I found a great way to roast potatoes in the last couple years. It's pretty traditional. You could still saute the onions and add them; I'm not sure if it would make the potatoes better or not. I get some water boiling with a little baking soda and very briefly boil either small potatoes or large chunks of larger potatoes. I drain and then toss with oil and seasonings and then roast. The baking soda water creates a layer of "mashed potatoes" on the outer surface of the potatoes. They can soak up the oil better, and it makes them roast up really nice. I'm thinking if you saute the onions and then use THAT oil to toss the potatoes... might be good. I wouldn't saute the garlic; I'd let it cook in the oven. I wouldn't add vinegar. I might try than next time I make this kind of roasted spuds.

AdahPotatah2024 · January 12

mtaratoot wrote: »

AdahPotatah2024 wrote: »

Ed Asner
Balsamic-Roasted New Potatoes
Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 pounds small new potatoes, washed, patted dry and quartered; or, if using larger potatoes, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced shallots
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon minced rosemary
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Place baking rack in lower third of oven.
Heat olive oil in 12 inch skillet over medium-high heat. Add potatoes, garlic and shallots. Toss in skillet until well mixed. Add thyme, rosemary and nutmeg. Toss well. When potatoes are hot, transfer to baking pan and spread in single layer. (This part of the recipe can be made several hours ahead of time.)
Place pan in preheated oven on lower rack.
Roast potatoes until golden and just tender, about 25 minutes, turning once midway.
Add vinegar. Toss well. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Return to oven until sizzling, about 7 minutes.
Serve immediately.
Attribution
Source: The Jewish Celebrity Cookbook

I really like the idea of all the sauteed shallots and garlic added to the potatoes. I found a great way to roast potatoes in the last couple years. It's pretty traditional. You could still saute the onions and add them; I'm not sure if it would make the potatoes better or not. I get some water boiling with a little baking soda and very briefly boil either small potatoes or large chunks of larger potatoes. I drain and then toss with oil and seasonings and then roast. The baking soda water creates a layer of "mashed potatoes" on the outer surface of the potatoes. They can soak up the oil better, and it makes them roast up really nice. I'm thinking if you saute the onions and then use THAT oil to toss the potatoes... might be good. I wouldn't saute the garlic; I'd let it cook in the oven. I wouldn't add vinegar. I might try than next time I make this kind of roasted spuds.

That sounds so good! I make roasted potatoes at least once per week. I'm going to try that boiling method. Thanks!

mtaratoot · January 12

The baking soda apparently helps make that little layer of "paste" on the outside. I was amazed how good they are.

Don't use red potatoes. They don't get crispy. Gold potatoes get a little crispy, and they have a nice brown color. Russets get the crispiest, but don't have that beautiful brown hue. You get to choose what to use. If you can find German Butterball, I think they are ideal.

AdahPotatah2024 · January 14

By Maria Popova

“On how one orients himself to the moment,” 48-year-old Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) wrote in reflecting on the art of living in 1939, “depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.” Over the course of his long life, Miller sought ceaselessly to orient himself toward maximal fruitfulness, from his creative discipline to his philosophical reflections to his exuberant irreverence.

More than three decades later, shortly after his eightieth birthday, Miller wrote a beautiful essay on the subject of aging and the key to living a full life. It was published in 1972 in an ultra-limited-edition chapbook titled On Turning Eighty (public library), alongside two other essays. Only 200 copies were printed, numbered and signed by the author.

Miller begins by considering the true measure of youthfulness:

If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on the way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss — under your breath, of course — “*kitten* you, Jack! You don’t own me!” … If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.

He later adds:

I have very few friends or acquaintances my own age or near it. Though I am usually ill at ease in the company of elderly people I have the greatest respect and admiration for two very old men who seem to remain eternally young and creative. I mean [the Catalan cellist and conductor] Pablo Casals and Pablo Picasso, both over ninety now. Such youthful nonagenarians put the young to shame. Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

Miller considers the downside of success — not the private kind, per Thoreau’s timeless definition, but the public kind, rooted in the false deity of prestige:

If you have had a successful career, as presumably I have had, the late years may not be the happiest time of your life. (Unless you’ve learned to swallow your own *kitten*.) Success, from the worldly standpoint, is like the plague for a writer who still has something to say. Now, when he should be enjoying a little leisure, he finds himself more occupied than ever. Now he is the victim of his fans and well wishers, of all those who desire to exploit his name. Now it is a different kind of struggle that one has to wage. The problem now is how to keep free, how to do only what one wants to do.

He goes on to reflect on how success affects people’s quintessence:

One thing seems more and more evident to me now — people’s basic character does not change over the years… Far from improving them, success usually accentuates their faults or short-comings. The brilliant guys at school often turn out to be not so brilliant once they are out in the world. If you disliked or despised certain lads in your class you will dislike them even more when they become financiers, statesmen or five star generals. Life forces us to learn a few lessons, but not necessarily to grow.

Somewhat ironically, Anaïs Nin — Miller’s onetime lover and lifelong friend — once argued beautifully for the exact opposite, the notion that our personalities are fundamentally fluid and ever-growing, something that psychologists have since corroborated.

Miller returns to youth and the young as a kind of rearview mirror for one’s own journey:

You observe your children or your children’s children, making the same absurd mistakes, heart-rending mistakes often, which you made at their age. And there is nothing you can say or do to prevent it. It’s by observing the young, indeed, that you eventually understand the sort of idiot you yourself were once upon a time — and perhaps still are.

Like George Eliot, who so poignantly observed the trajectory of happiness over the course of human life, Miller extols the essential psychoemotional supremacy of old age:

At eighty I believe I am a far more cheerful person than I was at twenty or thirty. I most definitely would not want to be a teenager again. Youth may be glorious, but it is also painful to endure…

I was cursed or blessed with a prolonged adolescence; I arrived at some seeming maturity when I was past thirty. It was only in my forties that I really began to feel young. By then I was ready for it. (Picasso once said: “One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it’s too late.”) By this time I had lost many illusions, but fortunately not my enthusiasm, nor the joy of living, nor my unquenchable curiosity.

And therein lies Miller’s spiritual center — the life-force that stoked his ageless inner engine:

Perhaps it is curiosity — about anything and everything — that made me the writer I am. It has never left me…

With this attribute goes another which I prize above everything else, and that is the sense of wonder. No matter how restricted my world may become I cannot imagine it leaving me void of wonder. In a sense I suppose it might be called my religion. I do not ask how it came about, this creation in which we swim, but only to enjoy and appreciate it.

Two years later, Miller would come to articulate this with even more exquisite clarity in contemplating the meaning of life, but here he contradicts Henry James’s assertion that seriousness preserves one’s youth and turns to his other saving grace — the capacity for light-heartedness as an antidote to life’s often stifling solemnity:

Perhaps the most comforting thing about growing old gracefully is the increasing ability not to take things too seriously. One of the big differences between a genuine sage and a preacher is gaiety. When the sage laughs it is a belly laugh; when the preacher laughs, which is all too seldom, it is on the wrong side of the face.

Equally important, Miller argues, is countering the human compulsion for self-righteousness. In a sentiment Malcolm Gladwell would come to complement nearly half a century later in advocating for the importance of changing one’s mind regularly, Miller writes:

With advancing age my ideals, which I usually deny possessing, have definitely altered. My ideal is to be free of ideals, free of principles, free of isms and ideologies. I want to take to the ocean of life like a fish takes to the sea…

I no longer try to convert people to my view of things, nor to heal them. Neither do I feel superior because they appear to be lacking in intelligence.

Miller goes on to consider the brute ways in which we often behave out of self-righteousness and deformed idealism:

One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless… I have accepted the fact, hard as it may be, that human beings are inclined to behave in ways that would make animals blush. The ironic, the tragic thing is that we often behave in ignoble fashion from what we consider the highest motives. The animal makes no excuse for killing his prey; the human animal, on the other hand, can invoke God’s blessing when massacring his fellow men. He forgets that God is not on his side but at his side.

But despite observing these lamentable human tendencies, Miller remains an optimist at heart. He concludes by returning to the vital merriment at the root of his life-force:

My motto has always been: “Always merry and bright.” Perhaps that is why I never tire of quoting Rabelais: “For all your ills I give you laughter.” As I look back on my life, which has been full of tragic moments, I see it more as a comedy than a tragedy. One of those comedies in which while laughing your guts out you feel your inner heart breaking. What better comedy could there be? The man who takes himself seriously is doomed…

There is nothing wrong with life itself. It is the ocean in which we swim and we either adapt to it or sink to the bottom. But it is in our power as human beings not to pollute the waters of life, not to destroy the spirit which animates us.

The most difficult thing for a creative individual is to refrain from the effort to make the world to his liking and to accept his fellow man for what he is, whether good, bad or indifferent.

*** Henry Miller lived til 88 years old, but that is pretty good for a smoking, sexaholic man! So even though he didn't live to a hundred, he did achieve longevity in another way as his book, "On Turning 80" all of 34 pages is selling for around 6-700 dollars nowadays!

AdahPotatah2024 · January 18

Glynis John's Chicken Paprika recipe
Ingredients (serves 4):
4 chicken joints
seasoned flour
vegetable oil
1 onion, sliced
1/4 lb mushrooms, diced
1/2 lb carrots, sliced 1/3 inch thick
1 lb potatoes, sliced
paprika
salt and pepper
little single cream
1 pint milk

- Skin and wash the chicken joints, dry, and sprinkle with seasoned flour.
- Heat the oil in a frying pan, add the onion and the chicken joints.
- Simmer, turning the joints, until the onions are light gold.
- Take a casserole [dish] and place in it a layer of chicken joints and onion, followed by a layer of mushrooms and carrots, then a layer of sliced potatoes. (These vegetables can be varied according to personal taste.)

- Sprinkle with paprika, salt and pepper to taste.
- Make a slightly thickened white sauce by adding a little cream to the milk, and pour over the contents.
- Put a lid on the casserole, and place in a cool oven (300 degrees F, gas 2) for about 2 1/2 hours.

http://widescreenworld.blogspot.com/2019/10/murder-she-wrote-cookalong-glynis-johns.html
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