Carve Those Pumpkins 2012

Did You Know? - Tibetan cuisine reflects local climates and customs. Few crops grow at the high altitudes that characterize Tibet, although a few areas in Tibet are low enough to grow such crops as rice, oranges, bananas, and lemon.

The most important crop is barley. Flour milled from roasted barley, called tsampa, is the staple food of Tibet.

Balep is Tibetan bread eaten for breakfast and lunch. Thukpa is mainly consumed for dinner. It consists of noodles of various shapes, vegetables and meat in broth. Tibetan cuisine is traditionally served with bamboo chopsticks, in contrast to other Himalayan cuisines, which are eaten by hand. Small soup bowls are also used, and rich Tibetans fed from bowls of gold and silver.

Meat dishes are likely to be yak, goat, or mutton, often dried, or cooked in a spicy stew with potatoes. Mustard seed is cultivated in Tibet, and therefore features heavily in its cuisine.

Yak yoghurt, butter and cheese are frequently eaten, and well-prepared yoghurt is considered something of a prestige item. As well as consumed in Tibet, varieties of Tibetan dishes are consumed in Ladakh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and by the Tibetan diaspora in India, and various regions of northern Nepal, such as Mustang.

After all the trouble you go to, you get about as much actual "food" out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking 30 or 40 postage stamps.  ~Miss Piggy

Did You Know? - Nobody knows Shakespeare’s true birthday. The closest we can come is the date of his baptism on April the 26th, 1564. By tradition and guesswork, William is assumed to have been born three days earlier on April the 23rd, a date now commonly used to celebrate the famous Bard's birthday.

Shakespeare invented the word "assassination".

There are only two authentic portraits of William today; the widely used engraving of William Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout first published on the title page of the 1623 First Folio and the monument of the great playwright in Stratford's Holy Trinity Church in Stratford.

William married a woman nearly twice his age. Anne Hathaway was 26 years old when William married her at age 18. They married at Temple Grafton, a village approximately five miles (8 km) from Stratford. Anne Hathaway was said to be from Shottery.

Shakespeare and wife had eight children, including daughter Susanna, twins Hamnet, Judith, and Edmund. Susanna received most of the Bard's fortune when he died in 1616, age 52. Hamnet died at age 11, Judith at 77. Susanna dies in 1649, age 66.

There were two Shakespeare families living in Stratford when William was born; the other family did not become famous.

Shakespeare, one of literature’s greatest figures, never attended university.

Of the 154 sonnets or poems, the playwright penned, his first 26 were said to be directed to an aristocratic young man who did not want to marry. Sonnets 127 - 152 talk about a dark woman, the Bard seems to have had mixed feelings for.

Most academics agree that William wrote his first play, Henry VI, Part One around 1589 to 1590 when he would have been roughly 25 years old.

The Bard is believed to have started writing the first of his 154 sonnets in 1593 at age 29. His first sonnet was Venus and Adonis published in the same year.

William lived through the Black Death. This epidemic that killed over 33,000 in London alone in 1603 when Will was 39, later returned in 1608.

The Bard lost a play. The play Cardenio that has been credited to the Bard and which was performed in his life, has been completely lost to time. Today we have no written record of it’s story whatsoever.

The Great Bard suffered breech of copyright. In 1609, many of his sonnets were published without the bard’s permission.

The famous playwright died in 1616 at the age of 52. He wrote on average 1.5 plays a year since he first started in 1589. His last play The Two Noble Kinsmen is reckoned to have been written in 1613 when he was 49 years old.

William never published any of his plays. We read his plays today only because his fellow actors John Hemminges and Henry Condell, posthumously recorded his work as a dedication to their fellow actor in 1623, publishing 36 of William’s plays. This collection known as The First Folio is the source from which all published Shakespeare books are derived and is an important proof that he authored his plays.

William was born to a Stratford tanner named John Shakespeare. His mother Mary was the daughter of a wealthy gentleman-farmer named Robert Arden.

Legend has it that at the tender age of eleven, William watched the pageantry associated with Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Kenilworth Castle near Stratford and later recreated this scene many times in his plays.

Unlike most famous artists of his time, the Bard did not die in poverty. When he died, his will contained several large holdings of land.

Few people realize that aside from writing 37 plays and composing 154 sonnets, William was also an actor who performed many of his own plays as well as those of other playwrights (Ben Jonson).

As an actor performing his own plays, William performed before Queen Elizabeth I and later before James I who was an enthusiastic patron of his work.

Red meat is not bad for you.  Now blue-green meat, that’s bad for you!  ~Tommy Smothers

Did You Know? - Pumpkin seeds have long been valued as a source of the mineral zinc, and the World Health Organization recommends their consumption as a good way of obtaining this nutrient.

If you want to maximize the amount of zinc that you will be getting from your pumpkin seeds, we recommend that you consider purchasing them in unshelled form. Although recent studies have shown there to be little zinc in the shell itself (the shell is also called the seed coat or husk), there is a very thin layer directly beneath the shell called the endosperm envelope, and it is often pressed up very tightly against the shell. Zinc is especially concentrated in this endosperm envelope.

Because it can be tricky to separate the endosperm envelope from the shell, eating the entire pumpkin seed—shell and all—will ensure that all of the zinc-containing portions of the seed will be consumed. Whole roasted, unshelled pumpkin seeds contain about 10 milligrams of zinc per 3.5 ounces, and shelled roasted pumpkin seeds (which are often referred to pumpkin seed kernels) contain about 7-8 milligrams.

So even though the difference is not huge, and even though the seed kernels remain a good source of zinc, you'll be able to increase your zinc intake if you consume the unshelled version.