Radish's Homemade Butterscotch Pudding for Election Day Celebratory Dipping

2/3 cup brown sugar, packed
2 tablespoons corn starch
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 cups milk
2 egg yolks, slightly beaten
2 tablespoons butter*, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix sugar, cornstarch, and salt in 2-quart saucepan. Stir in milk gradually. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens and boils. Boil and stir 1 minute. Stir at least half of the hot mixture gradually into egg yolks (this is the tricky part--stir constantly, to keep bits of cooked egg from forming). Blend into hot mixture in saucepan. Boil and stir 1 minute. Remove from heat; stir in butter and vanilla. Pour into dish. ALLOW TO COOL SLIGHTLY before dipping anything your spouse may want to use later, IYKWIMAITYD. Refrigerate leftovers.

* You can use margarine, but it will taste like crap.

Would you like condescension with that?

A group that promotes "community" vegetable gardens on vacant lots along North Ave. is going to ask the Board of Zoning Appeals tonight to bar a fried-chicken franchise from moving into a vacant restaurant at 17th and North.

I read this as "fascist--possibly racist--assholes would rather a building remain empty than let a business move in, hire people from the neighborhood, and start paying city taxes."

I'm guessing this group is not comprised of conservatives, or even those rare liberals who realize that low-income adults (of color) aren't children.

Oh, look. Nannies for grown-ups.

The DNC thinks its members shouldn't be allowed to choose tasty, familiar foods. Is this an admission that DNC members are too stupid to be trusted to make decisions?

In promoting healthy eating habits, the Democratic guidelines say every meal should be nutritious and include “at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, purple/blue and white.”

Looks like a bag of M&Ms is a perfect meal!

I don't know if I want to be the guy with the bar/fast-food joint across the street from the convention. On one hand, people are gonna be sneaking out for snacks. On the other, too many smelly hippies trying to use the bathroom without paying.

What I really want to know: Is there going to be a smoking area for the Big O! to get a hit of nicotine before his big speech?!?! Smoking! That's a form of aggravated assault!! *snort*


RELATED: A commenter at Tim Blair calls these guys "the four doofuses of the Apocolypse." Note the wrongly-installed helmets.

Useless historical fact of the day.

You can learn a whole lot of useless stuff by hitting the "Random article" button on Wikipedia.

By the start of the 20th century, eight out of ten Americans could not buy yellow margarine, and those that could had to pay a hefty tax on it. Bootleg colored margarine became common

Bootleg. Margarine. I guess it's not silly when you realize I'll be bootlegging lightbulbs in the not-distant future...

And look at all the people trying to regulate people's consumption of margarine and shortening in the 21st century.

Post-war, the margarine lobby gained power and, little by little, the main margarine restrictions were lifted, the last state to do so being Wisconsin in 1967.

The ISU library has six boxes of material--records, newspaper clippings, etc--about the 1943 "Oleomargarine Controversy" in which a professor resigned after dairy farmers tried to get the U to rescind a pamphlet recommending margarine be used in wartime. I miss academic libraries; if I didn't have to earn a living I'd hang out in academic libraries all day and eventually write books.

Good grief, J-S.

What an awful article.

Prince Fielder is a vegetarian.

That 6-foot, 260-pound build is powered by wheatgrass, soy and tofu nowadays. No meat. Not even fish.

It wasn't always this way. Fielder used to enjoy a stacked burger or a juicy steak as much as any carnivore, but a few weeks ago he received a book from his wife, Chanel, that changed his outlook on what he puts in his massive frame. The book described how certain animals are treated and slaughtered for food.

The youngest player to hit 50 home runs in a season was grossed out, so much so that he made his last meaty meal a salmon filet before quitting the animal game on Feb. 3. He has even dabbled in a vegan lifestyle but admits that might be pushing things a little.

I've got a bratwurst with Secret Stadium Sauce that says he's back on animal protein by the end of April. Soy estrogens and professional baseball aren't going to mix in a good way, and someone in the clubhouse should point that out before he loses too much brain mass.

(Now I know why Tony Dungy tells his players to "watch out for women you know too well"...)

The article is just irresponsible. Guy stopped eating meat two weeks ago, and you're glorifying his new "lifestyle"? Two weeks is nothing, ask anyone who's quit smoking six or seven times. And how many growing boys are going to read/hear "Prince Fielder eats nothing but soy!" and beg their parents to screw up their bodies just like him? Prince is big enough we won't notice gynecomastia, 10-year-old boys not so much.

Is there going to be another front-page article when someone spots his wife buying chicken again? Of course not.

Just...annoying. I didn't notice any front-page articles when Ryan Braun donated his Rookie-of-the-Year bonus to Habitat for Humanity (and helped build...), but PETA propaganda, that's worthy.

Recommended reading

I am newly in love with The Health Institute of Nutrition, in the same way I love the People's Cube but never fell for Scrappleface.

Starch is a carbohydrate, a word which comes to us from Greek. Note the presence of the word “hydra” in the middle there. In Greek myth, the hydra was a dragon-like serpent with multiple heads who could not be killed. This is all you have to know about carbohydrates.

I'll have do to a "stuff I read" box on the sidebar one of these days.