Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Yes, but what’s the recipe?

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From Reuters:

Deep-Fried Chocolate Sandwich Sells Like Hotcakes

LONDON (Reuters) – Chocoholics seeking to indulge their passion this Easter will appreciate a British hotel chain’s diet-busting chocolate sandwich, which boasts the added attraction of being dipped in batter and deep-fried.

Ramada Jarvis introduced the delicacy last month and said on Wednesday the calorie-heavy dish had become the fastest selling dessert on its menu.

“We were surprised it has become so popular, although it is very tasty,” said the chain’s director of food and beverages Debbie Walter.

The sandwich is particularly popular in Scotland, traditional birthplace of the mother of all deep-fried desserts, the battered Mars bar.

Mindful that Britain, along with other Western countries, faces an increasing problem of obesity the hotel chain also offers less fattening desserts.

“The chocolate sandwich is not something if you are on a serious calorie-controlled diet, but we do offer alternatives,” said Walter.

Ramada Jarvis has 65 hotels in Britain, but only 36 currently offer the waist-expanding dessert.

Actually, Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating: How to Choose the Best Bread, Cheeses, Olive Oil, Pasta, Chocolate, and Much More (a book I highly recommend, by the way) has a recipe for a grilled chocolate sandwich that is very much like a grilled cheese sandwich. Strangely, I have not tried that recipe out yet. Their recipe for chocolate pudding, however, is to die for. (Although the recipe says it contains 8 servings, take my advice and make it 12 or 16 servings. I couldn’t finish a 1/8 serving, and I’m a card-carrying chocaholic.)

Riverbend on the 1st anniversary

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If you’re not reading Riverbend, do yourself a favor and start. Anyhow, today she talks about life in Baghdad on the first anniversary of the start of Gulf W. War (as we’ve taken to calling it around our house):

And where are we now? Well, our governmental facilities have been burned to the ground by a combination of ‘liberators’ and ‘Free Iraqi Fighters’; 50% of the working population is jobless and hungry; summer is looming close and our electrical situation is a joke; the streets are dirty and overflowing with sewage; our jails are fuller than ever with thousands of innocent people; we’ve seen more explosions, tanks, fighter planes and troops in the last year than almost a decade of war with Iran brought; our homes are being raided and our cars are stopped in the streets for inspectionsÂ… journalists are being killed ‘accidentally’ and the seeds of a civil war are being sown by those who find it most useful; the hospitals overflow with patients but are short on just about everything else- medical supplies, medicine and doctors; and all the while, the oil is flowing.

But we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned that terrorism isn’t actually the act of creating terror. It isn’t the act of killing innocent people and frightening othersÂ… no, you see, that’s called a ‘liberation’. It doesn’t matter what you burn or who you kill- if you wear khaki, ride a tank or Apache or fighter plane and drop missiles and bombs, then you’re not a terrorist- you’re a liberator.

The war on terror is a jokeÂ… Madrid was proof of that last weekÂ… Iraq is proof of that everyday.

I hope someone feels safer, because we certainly don’t.

Garry Wills on The Passion

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I know I should stop talking about a movie I have not seen (and have no intention of seeing), but: Garry Wills has a very thoughtful essay in the New York Review of Books entitled “God in the Hands of Angry Sinners”. His ostensible topic is Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II, a book discussing the secrecy and coverups in the Catholic Church. But while he’s at it, Wills discusses The Passion:

Gibson finally removed (from the subtitles, not the Aramaic sound track) the verse taken from the Gospel of Saint Matthew—”His blood be on us, and on our children” (27.25)— after reflecting: “If I included that in there, they’d be coming after me at my house, they’d come kill me.” The “they” is ominous.

That mood is reflected in the large numbers of people who have praised the movie by attacking its critics. This may be at the root of the “religious” experience so many receive from the film. These people feel persecuted, like Gibson, victimized by a secular world or by unfaithful fellow Christians. The chosen groups Gibson showed the movie to at the outset included members of the Legion of Christ, an ultraconservative group that feels its fellow Catholics have deserted the true faith —the Legion is even included in the movie’s closing credits.

In case it matters: Wills is Catholic.