After taking over a year off from reading (don’t ask, 2011 was a very difficult year) I am back to reading! I have never read any of Patricia’s books but from the looks of her novels it looks like I will be reading them all!

My current read:

The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith presents five of Highsmith’s classic short story collections in a single masterful volume. Compelling, twisted, and fiercely intelligent, this landmark collection showcases Highsmith’s mastery of the short story form.

In a cruel twist of irony, Texas-born Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) is being recognized only after her death for her inestimable genius in her native land. With the savage humor of Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Poe, she brought a distinctly contemporary acuteness to her prolific body of noir fiction. Including over 60 short stories written throughout her career, collected together for the first time, The Selected Stories reveals the stunning versatility and terrifying power of Highsmith’s work.

These stories highlight the remarkable range of Highsmith’s powers her unique ability to quickly, almost imperceptibly, draw out the mystery and strangeness of her subject, which appears achingly ordinary to our naked eye. Whether writing about jaded wives or household pets, Highsmith continually upsets our expectations and presents a world frighteningly familiar to our own, where danger lurks around every turn. Stories from The Animal-Lovers Book of Beastly Murders portray, with incisive humor, the murderously competitive desires of our most trusted companions. In this viciously satirical reprise of Kafka, cats, dogs, and cockroaches are no longer necessary aspects of a happy home but actually have the power to destroy it. In the short sketches that make up the Little Tales of Misogyny, Highsmith rediscovers predictable female characters “The Dancer,” “The Female Novelist,” “The Prude” and, through scathing humor, invests them with uniquely destructive powers. As a writer, Highsmith was all too well aware of the stolid patriarchal conventions that ruled her day her publisher rejected her second book out of hand because of its homosexual content. She is not a polemicist, but, as stories like “Oona the Jolly Cave Woman” and “The Mobile Bed-Object” reveal, her bizarre, haunting fiction continually betrays the inadequacy of our conventional understanding of female character. Highsmith eventually moved away from these coolly satiric, darkly comic exercises, and in her later collections, The Black House, Slowly, Slowly in the Wind, and Mermaids on the Golf Course, she uses the warm familiarities of middle-class life the manicured lawns, the cozy uptown apartments, the local pubs as the backbone for her chilling portrayals. “The Black House,” for instance, explores the small-town male camaraderie and the destructive secret it masks: in this world, the fact that everyone knows your name is more likely a curse than a blessing. In the title story of the final collection presented here, “Mermaids on a Golf-Course,” a man’s extraordinary brush with death endows his everyday desires with fantastically devastating consequences. In her later work, Highsmith adds a dimension of penetrating psychological insight, evoked most vividly in stories like “A Curious Suicide” and “The Stuff of Madness,” where the precarious line between fantasy and reality is blurred and we experience the terrifying possibility of slipping between them. Great writers view the world askew, and in their art they reflect our world back to us, slightly distorted.

The Selected Stories reveals Highsmith’s deft and exacting style, her incisive satirical intelligence, and her faultless eye for depicting the inner tremblings of human character. Her world remains all the more frightening because we recognize it as our own.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

For your Easter enjoyment!

Ideas for Easter Baking

Free Easter Decoration Printouts

85 Favorite Easter Recipes

And last but not least (you better put aside a LOT of time for this one!)….

Easter on Pinterest!

At our house hubs is doing his bbq/smoking some kind of pork with cole slaw topping. Potato salad, deviled eggs and crock pot beans are also on the menu. I have not quite decided what desert is going to be yet!

Warning for Family: Camera’s and video recorders will be ready! heh heh

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Yea!!

Thanks to the outrage of the public one of the major producers of lean finely textured beef (pink slime) is halting production. This doesn’t necessarily mean that at some point in the future it will resume production but I hope we (the public) can keep the spot light on and keep pressure on all retail purchasers of ground beef so we don’t end up eating this crap. Pink Slime may be 100% beef but it’s made from trimmings…..discards….stuff that goes in dog food and is a by-product of food production.
(Note-bold highlighting is mine)

‘Pink Slime’ Maker Suspends Some Plant Operations
By BETSY BLANEY Associated Press
LUBBOCK, Texas March 26, 2012 (AP)

The maker of “pink slime” suspended operations Monday at all but one plant where the beef ingredient is made, acknowledging recent public uproar over the product has cost the company business.

Craig Letch, director of food quality and assurance for Beef Products Inc., declined to discuss financial details but said business has taken a “substantial” hit since social media exploded with worry over the ammonia-treated filler and an online petition seeking its ouster from schools drew hundreds of thousands of supporters. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided school districts may stop using it, and some retail chains have pulled products containing it from their shelves.

Federal regulators say the product, which has been used for years and is known in the industry as “lean, finely textured beef,” meets food safety standards. But critics call the product an unappetizing example of industrialized food production.

Beef Products will suspend operations at plants in Amarillo, Texas; Garden City, Kan.; and Waterloo, Iowa, Letch said. About 200 employees at each of the three plants will get full salary and benefits for 60 days during the suspension. The company’s plant at its Dakota Dunes, S.D., headquarters will continue operations.

The company, meanwhile, will develop a strategy for rebuilding business and addressing what Letch called misconceptions about the beef the company makes.

“We feel like when people can start to understand the truth and reality then our business will come back,” he said. “It’s 100 percent beef.”

The company last week took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal defending its product. It also launched a new website, http://beefisbeef.com , which Letch says will help dispel myths about pink slime — a term coined by a federal microbiologist grossed out by it and now widely used by critics and food activists.

The lower-cost ingredient is made from fatty bits of meat left over from other cuts. The bits are heated and spun to remove most of the fat. The lean mix then is compressed into blocks for use in ground meat. The product is exposed to ammonium hydroxide gas to kill bacteria, such as E. coli and salmonella.

The result is a product that is as much as 97 percent lean beef, Letch said.

“At a time when so many Americans struggle to put a healthy, nutritious meal on their family’s dinner table, the unfounded mischaracterization of Lean Finely Textured Beef as ‘pink slime’ is unconscionable,” Barry Carpenter, chief executive officer of the National Meat Association, said in a Monday statement. “I am sure the public is not aware of how widespread and potentially devastating the consequences of allowing public misperception to trump sound nutritional science are.”

But Marion Nestle, a professor at New York University’s Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health, said there are other considerations.

“If this is acceptable to people, it essentially means it’s OK to eat the kind of stuff we put into pet food,” she said. “Culturally we don’t eat byproducts of human food production. It’s not in our culture. Other cultures do. We don’t.”

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who has campaigned against the filler’s use, praised “people power” for getting it removed from so many products.

“I hope the U.S. government is also listening because it’s partly responsible for lying to the public for allowing this cheap, low-quality meat filler to be used for so long without having to legally state its presence on packaging,” Oliver said in an email statement provided to The Associated Press.

The beef product made headlines last year also after McDonald’s and other major chains discontinued their use of ammonia-treated beef. Other processors make similar “lean beef trimmings” for inclusion in ground beef that are instead treated by citric acid.

There are no precise numbers on how often the ammonia-treated product is used and it does not have to be labeled as an ingredient. Past estimates have ranged as high as 70 percent; one industry official has estimated it is in at least half of the ground meat and burgers in the United States.

Beef Products’ plant in Amarillo produced about 200,000 pounds a day, while the Kansas and Iowa plants each produced about 350,000 pounds a day.

The USDA’s this year is contracted to buy 111.5 million pounds of ground beef for the National School Lunch Program. About 7 million pounds of that is from the company.
**end**

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

We have for YEARS unknowingly eaten pink slime simply because the USDA didn’t think it was necessary to tell us.

I think the public has had enough!

Check this link here to find out if your store carrys hamburger with pink slime.

Does Your Store’s Ground Beef Contain Pink Slime?

I will note that recently (as of today?) Safeway will NO LONGER carry pink slime.

Albertson’s will NO LONGER carry pink slime.

Supervalu stops buying “pink slime” meat

If everyone would voice their concern at their local grocery store’s meat department and let them know they will NOT be buying any hamburger made with pink slime then maybe..just maybe…we can get rid of it altogether. It is ONLY because of consumer concern and compliant that these stores are just now changing their meat offerings.

I am mortified and pissed that this crap has been in our food supply for years without us knowing a thing about it. I just want to throw up.

Makes you wonder what else we are eating and don’t know it.

Fredy Meyer (where we shop) has pink slime free hamburger ONLY in their Private Selection meat.

We had one package of hamburger left in the refrigerator….it wasn’t Private Selection….

The boys had cooked hamburger for dinner.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

http://www.countrymeadowsoaps.com/

By now we have all heard of ‘pink slime’.
But how many of you know exactly what it is?

I’m going to show you but first I have a couple of things to say (from a personal standpoint).

I have always been under the assumption that the USDA was there to protect our food supply/quality.
I have a huge problem eating beef trimmings that originally were not fit for human consumption.
I don’t really have a problem with the beef being treated with a food grade ammonia spray to help retard the growth of bacteria. I understand the concept and have the idea that anything we can safely do to prevent the growth of any type of bacteria is a good thing.
I have an enormous issue that this stuff is being added to our beef hamburger and absolutely NO labeling is required!

First you need to see Jamie Oliver’s video. It is fantastic in the way it shows exactly what beef trimmings are. However I take a huge exception with the bottle of ammonia he pours on the trimmings. This is simply not the way it’s done nor is it done using that type of ammonia.

Pretty gross huh?

Ok now watch the video on why/how the ammnonia is used:

Now if this has been proven safe, and we all assume so because the USDA allows it, I don’t have a problem.

Now read this article:
USDA To Give Schools More Ground Beef Choices After Outcry Over ‘Pink Slime’

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has weighed in on the use of so-called pink slime in beef served in the government’s free and reduced-price school lunch program.

Today the agency confirmed that it believes the beef product — known in the industry as Lean Finely Textured Beef — is safe. Nonetheless, it announced that owing to “customer demand” it will give school food administrators that receive meat through the program the option of ordering beef without it in the next school year.

The defatted beef trimmings that are processed into what critics call pink slime also end up in much of the ground beef sold in supermarkets. But it’s impossible for consumers to know that, since USDA doesn’t require meat companies to state on the label whether ground beef includes trimmings.

USDA said today that all food purchased for the National School Lunch Program undergoes safety testing, including the Lean Finely Textured Beef. One way the industry says it kills harmful bacteria is by spraying ammonia gas on the meat long before it is served.

USDA’s decision comes two months after McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell said they would stop using Lean Finely Textured Beef in their ground beef dishes. In the past few weeks, thousands of people added their names to petitions asking the government to stop buying this product.

For the 2011-2012 school year, the government has already purchased 7 million pounds of trimmings from the company Beef Products Inc. for school lunches. USDA allows up to 15 percent of a finished food item, like a hamburger or taco, to be made with the Lean Fine Textured Beef.

One school food administrator, Ann Cooper in Boulder, Colo., says she is having trouble finding alternatives to ground beef made with trimmings from her suppliers in Denver. “It’s become so ubiquitous,” she says. Some estimate that up to 70 percent of ground meat in U.S. contains Lean Finely Textured Beef.
***end**

The ONLY way we can combat this is to DEMAND our hamburger be labeled that it contains ‘lean finely textured beef’. Then we have a choice whether to purchase it or not. My choice would be…..NOT!

We have three pounds of beef hamburger in our refrigerator this week and once it’s gone (yes we will eat it as we already paid for it, I’m just hoping I won’t gag) I’m going to advocate to my husband that we refrain from buying beef hamburger from the local grocery store. We will instead purchase ground chicken or turkey instead.

I honestly feel cheated and taken advantage of. In order to increase profits somebody came up with this and it has been legal that we, the buying and eating general public (this means YOU), were never informed. There is NOTHING on any label on any package of beef hamburger that will tell you it contains lean finely textured beef….and even if it did….would you have known what that meant? I wouldn’t.

It is up to us to demand labeling changes so we know what we are eating.

It that too much to ask?

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

http://www.countrymeadowsoaps.com/

Enjoy!

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Sharing my newest Favs:
#1

#2

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

It happens whether you want it to or not…
You can to it gracefully…
Or you can do it like the stars and get multiple cosmetic surgeries….
So many that you end up looking…..’Plastic’ and in some cases….odd.

I am by no means old.
My granddaughters (ages 13 & 14) get a kick out of their friends who don’t know me and think I am their mom…
So it’s not like I’m old and wrinkly.

However,
I am just a smidgen past 49 so I guess it’s time I take a hard look in the mirror and see what I can do to prolong my youthful look…..without looking ‘plastic’.

I’ve never been one to be interested in all those fancy, dancy anti-aging specific expensive products. But last night I was looking through my new Cooking Light magazine and a Loreal ad caught my attention.

Age Perfect for Mature Skin

I was interested in the Hydra-Nutrition Golden Eye Balm and the Hydra-Nutrition Golden Balm Face, Neck & Chest Moisturizer.

So this morning I had to go to our local Walgreens and I thought I would check to see if they carried Loreal. They do and they did have these two products. Price on each was $19.99 however if you purchased one you got one half off…..so the woman in me said ‘score’! I bought both and saved $10.00!

The Golden Eye balm comes in a jar that is .5 oz and the moisturizer comes in a 1.7 oz jar. That’s a pretty steep price for so little product however the ingredient list is extensive in both.

I’m going to give these two a try (and hide them from the granddaughters!!!)(daughters even!) for several months and see if I notice any difference. I’m hoping a little goes a long way but I’m willing to spend the money if the products actually deliver what they claim.

Time will tell.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Are you interested in food safety?

Yes??

Well then…

Let me turn you on to one of the newest blogs I’m following:

Barf Blog

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Today it snowed all day and we accumulated quite a bit for here…around 3″ – 4″…

Now those of you who get snow all the time might not think this is a big deal…

But you have to remember….

IT DOESN’T SNOW HERE!

Or at least not very often or for very long…

IT RAINS!

Tomorrow could very well be a doozy….

It is predicted that a major snow storm will arrive over night and we could  get up to a foot.

Of course as always I’m not quite buying it til I see it…

But I have my camera and my Flip at the ready…

Along side my hot chocolate and Baileys!

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

http://www.countrymeadowsoaps.com/