Feeding the poor? Let’s see your permit.

How hard can it get to feed the poor? Pretty hard.

Bobby and Amanda Herring spent more than a year providing food to homeless people in downtown Houston every day. They fed them, left behind no trash and doled out warm meals peacefully without a single crime being committed, Bobby Herring said.
That ended two weeks ago when the city shut down their “Feed a Friend” effort for lack of a permit. And city officials say the couple most likely will not be able to obtain one.
“We don’t really know what they want, we just think that they don’t want us down there feeding people,” said Bobby Herring, a Christian rapper who goes by the stage name Tre9.

And Kathy Barton, Houston’s spokeswoman for the Houston HHS department said this:

The regulations are all the more essential in the case of the homeless… because “poor people are the most vulnerable to foodborne illness and also are the least likely to have access to health care.”

Pretty outrageous that private citizens are forced to stop doing charitable work because the government assumes the worst if you don’t have the magic permit.
The silver lining here is that the Houston city council is talking about adjusting the statute so that people like the Herrings are exempt.

Cross-cultural food experiment

Fellow investigators,
I have engaged in a daring experiment, eating a food which is reported to be luscious but has an off-putting, almost disgusting name, which is: clotted cream. I presume any of you who have lived in England may have met this stuff, hm?
What got me interested was hearing a couple of ex-pat Brits raving about how wonderful it was the other day, during a morning radio show from DC. (It was a podcast, of course, as I am not up at such a time of day.)
According to them, the most typical use of clotted cream — I looked it up on Wikipedia to get some idea of what it is — is apparently on scones with strawberry jam, a dish called Cream Tea, so I set out today to get the ingredients.
A leading Internet seller of the stuff is located in Westford, MA, so I went to their shop and picked up a jar, and some jam. Nice enough. The same shop offers scone mix, but as I’m a lazy person (cf. Perl programmer), I passed it up in the hope of finding some already made.
A Panera Bread shop did have some scones, but not plain ones, just frosted ones with various fruits. It didn’t seem appealing to add jam and a shmear on top of that.
Anyway, to the actual test:
The cream jar’s label claimed that it was the ideal topping for berries, so I had some on raspberries, and was a bit disappointed. The stuff has a consistency like whipped butter, and putting something that heavy on raspberries wasn’t a good match. It just wasn’t easy to apply product A to fruit B. Besides, the non-sweet flavor of the cream was not that interesting a companion for sweet raspberries just passing their peak.
On the other hand, I had some on a Panera plain bagel, with jam, and found it just delightful there. Context is everything.
Continuing the quest for knowledge (of food), I am, yours fraternally,

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Country food

In this video from Texas, Chicken Fried Bacon sounds appealing, but you’d better take a low-dose aspirin before eating it, to help ward off any instant heart attacks.

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43-year-old fruitcake

No, that’s not my age. I’m referring to this story about a rum-laced cake that survived in an attic from 1962 to now, and looks about the same as it did then!
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WAUKESHA, Wis. (AP) — Lance Nesta did what many people do when receiving a fruitcake – he set it aside, only to rediscover it more than 40 years later in his mother’s attic. Nesta couldn’t resist taking a peek at the cake, still in its original tin and wrapped in paper.
“I was amazed that it hadn’t changed at all,” he said.
Nesta’s two aunts sent him the fruitcake in November 1962 while he was stationed in Alaska with the Army.

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Whose side are you on, whose side are you on?

Here’s the real divide in America: Starbucks nuts (left-wing, West Coast, urban women) vs. Dunkin Donuts addicts (right-wing, East Coast, rural men).
(I admit it: I’m one of those Independent wussies who wants to pick and choose. I’ll be paying in Purgatory for my lack of moral courage.)

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