Good Morning Gloucester

My neighbors were so nice to drop by some yellow tulips for easter!   I’m enjoying these beauties as they were basking in the sun on my table and couldn’t resist a quick snapshot of them.  We have the best neighbors!  Pretty soon we will have some popping up outside too!

Home Health Aide Training at Action Inc.

IMAGE ~ MARCH 29, 2016 ~ JOEY C

Gloucester Public Schools Auditorium Update

IMAGE ~ MARCH 29, 2016 ~ JOEY C

Ward 4-1 Meeting with Val Gilman and Joe Orlando March 31st at 7:00PM

IMAGE ~ MARCH 29, 2016 ~ JOEY C

Sometimes the best recipes are created with holiday leftovers! 

Rum Raisin Sweet Bread Pudding!

Having fun in the kitchen this week creating new recipes using Easter Dinner Leftovers! Yesterday a delicious Cream of Roasted Veggie Soup made from a Roasted Veggie medley Kate made, and today Grilled Lamb , Artichoke and Roasted Red Pepper Salad was made with a leftover grilled lamb and artichokes! I encourage you to serve your leftovers in a more exciting fashion this week rather than the usually re-heat and serve it again we all seem to be guilty of more often than not! 

       Rum Raisin Sweet Bread Pudding 

  Ingredients

1 Cup golden raisins

½ cup Malibu Rum

1/2 cup hot water

12 cups Sweet bread torn or cubed into 1-2 inch pieces 

3-4 extra lg eggs 

5-6 egg yolks

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 

2 teaspoon rum flavoring

¾ cup granulated sugar 

½ cup dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon fresh ground cinnamon, plus 1 teaspoon for top before baking

3 ½ cups half & half

1 tablespoon butter 

Step-by-Step
1 Soak raisins in Malibu rum & hot water for 10 minutes, strain liquid; reserve 

2 place bread in large mixing bowl; add soaked & strained raisins 

3 whisk eggs, egg yolks,half & half, brown sugar, granulated sugar, cinnamon, pure vanilla extract, and Rum flavoring together 

4 Butter 12” round round dish 

5 pour egg mixture over bread, using clean hands or large spoon toss well, transfer to prepared baking dish; sprinkle top with 1 teaspoon cinnamon 

6 bake in preheated 350 degree oven 25-30 min

7 serve warm with scoop of Vanilla Ice cream

Note~ I’m not a big fan of super “eggy”Bread Pudding, if you prefer a more eggy version simply add 4 extra large eggs & 6 egg yolks( I used 3 & 5 and I found it to be perfectly pleasing to mytastbuds! ) 

Grilled Lamb Roasted Red Pepper & Artichoke Salad 

Here and There

When I was a kid, I spent my summers

near my grandfather’s farm in Port Benjamin,

in upstate New York. Port Ben wasn’t a port

anymore, not since 1900 when

the train replaced the D & H canal.

Anyway, the Rondout Creek ran near our house

and provided a great place to play, fish,

swim and have adventures that are with me

sharp and clear after more than sixty years.

To get to the creek, we had to cross a

hayfield, which, if recently mowed, was tough

on our bare feet , climb down the creek bank on

a rickety staircase and cross the muddy

bottom land on a wobbly wooden walk.

Here’s the point. While walking Atlantic Street

the other day, as in a foggy dream,

I found that old boardwalk spread over the

flooded soggy salt marsh, no doubt trod by

kids with sixty years of adventures remembered.

© Marty Luster 2011

Encore, first posted December 11, 2011.

US EFFORTS TO “MANAGE” MIDEAST FUTILE, SAYS EXPERT

Time to step back & rethink our engagement

National security expert Stephen Walt will tackle the question of whether the United States should keep trying to manage the rivalries and conflicts in the Middle East at a free Cape Ann Forum at 7 p.m. on Sunday, April 3 at Gloucester City Hall. His talk will be followed by a question-and-answer period moderated by popular journalist and radio commentator Christopher Lydon, the featured speaker at a 2014 forum on the future of global media.

Walt’s answer to the question: An emphatic “no”. He argues that repeated efforts by presidents of both parties to meddle in the Middle East have failed, and it’s time to pull back and reassess, recognizing what we can and cannot realistically achieve.

“The Middle East today is riven by a series of overlapping conflicts along multiple fault lines, driven in good part by protracted government failures and exacerbated by misguided outside meddling,” says Walt. “When things are this bad, the need to rethink the entire U.S. approach to the region is hard to escape.”

Walt, who calls himself a “realist” in foreign policy, has little patience with interventionists on both sides of the aisle, criticizing “liberal hawks” and “neocons” in equal measure.

“The Islamic State wouldn’t exist if the neocons hadn’t led us blindly into Iraq, and Iran would have less reason to contemplate getting nuclear weapons if it hadn’t watched the United States throw its weight around in the region and threaten it directly with regime change,” he says.

But Walt is scathing, too, in his criticism of Democrats who supported the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya only to see the subsequent collapse of that country and the rise of the Islamic State there, and he dismisses U.S. attempts to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians while doubling as Israel’s “strategic ally” as contradictory and bound to fail.

“Instead of acting like a hyperactive juggler dashing between a dozen spinning plates, maybe the best course is to step back even more than we have already,” he says.

But Walt, who situates his thinking within the “realism” tradition of people like George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Lippmann, insists he is not an isolationist: “Realists believe military power is essential to preserving a state’s independence and autonomy, but they recognize it is a crude instrument that often produces unintended consequences.

“Realists believe nationalism and other local identities are powerful and enduring; states are mostly selfish; altruism is rare; trust is hard to come by; and norms and institutions have a limited impact on what powerful states do. In short, realists have a generally pessimistic view of international affairs and are wary of efforts to remake the world according to some ideological blueprint, no matter how appealing it might be in the abstract.”

Stephen Walt, who returns to the Cape Ann Forum for the second time, is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professsor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences. His 2012 Forum on “The Twilight of the American Era” drew more than 100 people and sparked a vigorous discussion.

Walt has been a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has consulted for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He now serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and the Journal of Cold War Studies, and he is co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs.

The outspoken professor wrote The Origins of Alliances (1987), which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award. He is also the author of Revolution and War (1996), Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (2005), and, with co-author John Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (2007), which generated considerable debate for its critical view of the lobby’s influence in Washington.

This will be the 93^rd Cape Ann Forum since the organization was founded after the 2001 terrorist attacks to increase public awareness of international issues and stimulate discussion and debate. The last event of the Forum’s 2015/2016 season features West Point grad and career-officer-turned-security-analyst Andrew Bacevich at 7 p.m. Sunday, May 15, on the challenges the U.S. faces on the global stage in the years ahead: “Why the U.S. keeps losing wars (but fights them anyway).”

For more information, go to the Forum’s website at www.capeannforum.org.