Break your resolutions early party!

I'm sorry, dear LJ readers. I realized last night that I've totally neglected you in favor of Facebook. I posted my party invite there, but not here, on the assumption that pretty much everyone is on Facebook now. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. That said, there's still almost a whole week until the Break Your Resolutions Early Chocolate Fondue Party, so that's plenty of time to clear your schedules, right?

Where: My place
When: Saturday, Jan. 8, from 1:30 until we all fall into sugar comas

What: Chocolate fondue party and tea swap!

New Year's is just around the corner! And what better way to celebrate the new year than with CHOCOLATE! That's right, it's time to break all your weight-loss resolutions early with a chocolate fondue party!

Children and significant others are welcome. If you're going to bring friends, please let me know so I know how much chocolate to buy!

Usual chocolate fondue party rules apply: hosts provide the chocolate, guests provide stuff to dunk in it. Be creative! Remember, this is for posterity.

After we've consumed copious amounts of chocolate, there will be board gaming, storytelling, or whatever else we feel like doing. Party will end whenever everyone falls into sugar-induced comas and stumbles home.

Please note that this party will have a twist! In addition to being a chocolate fondue party, it will also be a tea swap! Bring any teas sitting around in your cupboard that you don't particularly want, and see if it's to anyone else's taste. Don't like chamomile but love peppermint? See if you can take advantage of someone else who's the opposite! Alas, you've got to take home whatever no one else wants, either.

See you all in 2011!

Books of 2011: 1. The Coming Population Crash, by Fred Pearce

This book is all about demographics. What happens as people have fewer children, live longer, move more? David Foot, author of Boom, Bust, and Echo argued that two-thirds of everything can be explained by demographics, and that's what Pearce sets out to prove in The Coming Population Crash.

Pearce starts with a review of demographic thinking, starting with the 18th-century scholar Malthus and working his way forward. Pearce is at his strongest, I think, when he describes how generations of political scientists, economists, and demographers took Malthus to heart and unwittingly engineered Malthusian crises which they described as "inevitable." One poignant example was the Irish famine, wherein rich (British) landowners exported food from the island while their Irish tenants starved, all while arguing that the problem was Irish fertility. A similar rhetoric is happening even now in Kenya. Malthus influenced -- directly or indirectly -- eugenics movements and xenophobic thinking that continue today.

I was also impressed with Pearce's analysis of today's world. Travelling from Italy to Bangladesh to San Paolo, Pearce paints a picture of the world as it is and describes how we got here. All over the globe, with few exceptions, women are having fewer children. Peace points out some of the political ramifications, from the "little emperors" in China to the abandonment of cities in East Germany to the bulging slums in megalopolises around the world.

Where I thought Pearce was weakest was in his final chapters, the ones where he gets to the crux of his subtitle, Our Planet's Surprising Future. Pearce envisions an aging world, but one in which the elderly are more active in political and social affairs, more important in taking care of their families, and more present in the workplace. I think, given the amount of times Pearce described previous demographic trends (the rapid decrease in fertility, for example) as "completely unexpected," he should be the first to admit that a similar "unexpected" trend could creep up on us. There's just no way to predict what the planet's going to be like in 2050, let alone 2100.

That said, I thought this was a well-researched, well-argued book. Certainly, it provides food for thought.

Adventures in cooking: Cholent

I've been puttering around in my comfort zone for a while in the kitchen, so it's about time for another capital-A Adventure: cholent! I used to *love* my grandmother's cholent, and sadly never got the recipe from her, so I'm working from scratch. I'm actually working from two different recipes, one from Second Helpings, Please (a quintessential Montreal Jewish cookbook) and from this recipe, which was the highest-ranked cholent recipe I could find online.

For those who don't know, cholent is a Jewish stew typically eaten as a Sabbath lunch. It's a stew made with meat, beans, potatoes, barley, and whatever else you've got handy. Start it up Friday night, leave it in a warm oven (200 degrees) until noon Saturday, and voila! Lunch!

( Immediately, I need to make hard decisions. And probably get them wrong. )

( The final verdict! )

( Julie's crock pot cholent )