~★~♥~♥~★~ El Morno! ♥~★~★~♥ ~
June 10, 2012

★~ Today’s Quote:  Iced tea is too pure and natural a creation not to have been invented as soon as tea, ice, and hot weather crossed paths.  ~John Egerton

★~ Herb and Spice Day:

Spice up your life! Remember I’m the blogger who does not cook, so I cannot really talk about herbs and spices much, beyond salt, pepper, cinnamon and mint but I’m happy to report my pot of mint that, I thought I had killed, is alive, well and  flourishing.  It was very unsettling to believe I  killed the one plant that everyone say’s is impossible to kill.  Speaking of mint it’s  wonderful in ice tea, and today just happens to be Ice Tea Day!

★~ Ice Tea Day:

I love ice tea. I drink it all summer long and have from the time I was a dumb little kid. I brew Keurig 12 and 1/2 at home, and add mint and lots and lots of sugar.  Here are a couple of my ice tea pet peeves. Nothing annoys me more than ordering ice tea out, finally opening enough packets of plain, ordinary sugar to bring it to just the right sweetness and then, the moment my back is turned, a well-intentioned but evil waiter tops off my ice tea glass and screws up my tea to sugar ratio. What annoys me even more are people that comment on how much sugar I add to my tea. I actually hide empty white sugar packets and hope nobody notices. I do not like artificial sweeteners, and it takes a lot of white sugar to get my tea just right. I have no idea why people feel the need to comment on my ice tea habits, to quote wise El Morno friend and fellow blogger Debbie “Nobody else has your taste buds, so they just don’t have a say!”

★~  Black Cow Day:

Moooove over National Iced Tea Day, today is also National Black Cow Day! While celebrating the 4-legged, bovine-variety is fine-and-dandy, today really celebrates the refreshing beverage made with ice cream and soda.

Black Cows have been served up since the late 1890s. While some credit Robert M. Green as the actual “inventor” of the delicious drink, Cripple Creek Brewing owner, Frank J. Wisner, is often credited as the father of the Black Cow.  Legend has it while peering out the window at the snow-capped peak of Cow Mountain,   Wisner combined a scoop of creamy vanilla ice cream with Myers Avenue Red root beer.  And later, instead of using root beer, he used cola and the Black Cow Mountain drink was born.  Children shortened the name to Black Cow and the rest, as they say, is history.

Cheers! Happy Ice Tea Day.

★~ Today in History:

♥~ 1902 – A kindly gent named Americus F. Callahan patented (U.S. No. 701,839) what he called the outlook or see-through envelope. The rest, of course, is accounts payable history…

♥~ 1943 – The Ball Point Pen was patented — again — by Laszlo Josef Biro of Budapest, Hungary. Biro (painter, writer, sculptor, medical student, hypnotist, inventor), and his brother George, had patented the Biro pen in 1938. In 1940, as war engulfed Europe, the Biro brothers emigrated to Argentina, where a fresh patent was applied for on this day.

♥~ 1972 – Sammy Davis Jr. earned his place at the top of the popular music charts for the first time, after years in the entertainment business. His number one song, The Candy Man, stayed at the top for three consecutive weeks.

♥~ 1976 – Paul McCartney and Wings set a record for an indoor concert crowd as 67,100 fans gathered at the Kingdome in Seattle, WA to hear the former Beatle and his new group.

♥~ 1988 – An American clergyman claimed the TV cartoon character “Mighty Mouse” had been shown snorting cocaine. CBS producers denied the claim and said he was only sniffing flowers.

★~Born Today:

♥ ~ 1881-  Leo Tolstoy Author,  Tolstoy two greatest novels, were War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877)

♥~ 1895 – Hattie McDaniel Academy Award-winning actress: Gone with the Wind [1939]: 1st African-American to win Oscar; Judge Priest, The Little Colonel, Showboat, Saratoga, Since You Went Away; died Oct 26, 1952

♥~ 1915 – Saul Bellow Nobel Prize-winning writer: The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Dangling Man, The Victim, Henderson the Rain King; died Apr 5, 2005

♥~ 1922 – Judy Garland (Frances Ethel Gumm) singer: Over the Rainbow, The Trolley Song, You Made Me Love You, The Man that Got Away; actress: The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, A Star is Born, Easter Parade, The Harvey Girls, Judgment at Nuremberg; mother of Liza Minnelli and Lorna & Joey Luft; died June 22, 1969

♥~ 1928 – Maurice Sendak author, illustrator: Chicken Soup with Rice, Where the Wild Things Are

♥~ 1965 – Elizabeth Hurley, Model, actress: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Christabel, Orchid House, Passenger 57

★~ Did You Know:

♥~ The difference between a herb and a spice: Herbs hail from the leafy part of the plant; spices are seeds, fruits, roots or bark

♥~ Pepper, be it white, black, or green, contains an alkaloid of pyridine called piperine. Piperine acts as an irritant if it gets into the nose. It stimulates (or irritates) the nerve endings inside the mucous membrane. This stimulation will cause you to sneeze.

♥~ Cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum) is a tree belonging to the Lauraceae family. The bark of the tree is what is used as a spice.

♥~ The most expensive spice is Saffron The female reproductive organ of a flower saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) are the dried filaments known as Saffron. More than 75,000 of these stigmas must be hand picked to produce one pound of Saffron threads.

♥~ Salt  the most popular seasoning in the world is not a spice.  Salt is a mineral.

♥~ Pepper is a spice-and comes from the small dried fruits of a tropical vine

♥~ Turmeric, a bright orange spice commonly used in curries contains an antioxidant called curcumin. Recently a connection between curcumin  might play an important rile in pain relief; mimicking prescribed painkillers. It might play and especially important role in anti-inflammatory relief.

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I could not sleep last night so I posted Venus Transit: How will it affect your creative transformation.  Some people count sheep and other’s write blog posts or play on Facebook. I do a little of both.

Off to enjoy brunch with my dear boy and sweet Mother. It’s suppose to be hot in Chicago today so we’ll spend time in places with air conditioning they’re not afraid to use. Shopping malls, restaurants, little shops, movie theaters.

Now tell me about your favorite spices and how long you keep them for…my most expensive spice is Saffron and I usually have multiples of the spices, I use most often, because I forget to look  at what I have or don’t have, on those rare occasions I head to the grocery store with a recipe in hand.