Cha Hue – Hue Style Vietnamese Ham

Guest Post from Ravenous Couple
Vietnamese hams, or chả is ubiquitous part of Vietnamese cuisine. But like many Vietnamese dishes, the people of each region add special touches to a dish and call it their own. And it’s no different with chả Huế, a relative unknown compared with chả lụa. This ham originates from Huế, the ancestral capital of Vietnam and is often eaten as a snack and as a meat topping to the classic bún bò Huế soup. In fact, we’re always a tad disappointed when we don’t get a nugget of chả Huế in our soup. Why so? Well, to the generically mild pork paste giò sống, a generous amount of minced garlic and cracked pepper corns are added, transforming a typically mild chả into one with a delicious kick.





You can make your own pork paste or buy them premade in the frozen or refrigerated section of your Vietnamese market. Individually wrapped and steamed in banana leaves, these make for great gifts when visiting friends or relatives, especially with the Lunar new year, Tet, right around the corner. Here’s a short video on how to roll chả Huế.



Chả Huế

Yield: 10
Ingredients:

• 1 lb raw pork paste (giò sống)
• 1 tbs of coarsely cracked white or black peppercorns
• 1 head of garlic finely minced
• 1/2 tbs sugar
• 1/2 ts fish sauce
• ~10-12 sheets of 4 x 6 inch banana leaves and thin 6x 1/4 inch banana leaf strips to tie

Directions:

Prepare your steamer. Combine all the ingredients into a mixing bowl until well incorporated. You can pinch off 1/2 ts and microwave it for about 30s and season to taste. Add more garlic and/or peppercorns if you like it more spicy.

Place about 1 heaping tbs of mixture onto one end of the banana leaf. Fold over the side edges and roll the pork mixture. Seal with the banana strip by giving it several twists and tuck the loose ends under. See video above.

Steam for 10 minutes, or until thoroughly cooked. Enjoyed immediately or at room temperature.

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No Action Will Get You Nowhere

Guest Post from Susie:

 

Sometimes you learn things in elevators. Especially when you get into an elevator and expect the elevator to read your mind.

Yesterday when I was out on the town in Vegas shopping at the outlet stores, my sister and I got into an elevator. We waited patiently for the elevator to move and it wasn’t until my sister chuckled and asked whether or not I had actually pressed the floor button that I realized we hadn’t moved.

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How To Give Yourself A Break

Guest Post from Karen

 

 

Most people would use their extra time thinking on how they can improve their health or checking on what is a good diet to start. But for most people with several health problems, sometimes giving yourself a break from all the chaos and problems hurling around your head is the best start. Meditation by emptying your mind from things and thoughts that are unnecessary will help you understand your current health condition better. You will be able to make a good assessment of what your body really needs because you are more in control of what you think and feel. If you meditate and work on what you think first, you will be able to have the discipline to do other things.

That is why for people who are asking what is a good diet, a good diet is a health plan that targets your overall health needs – the body, mind, and soul. Your health strategies must provide solution to your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs. Overall wellness through holistic exercise programs is something that we should look into. Examples of holistic exercises are Tai Chi, Yoga, Karate, and Aikido. With these types of exercises, you can achieve a higher level of fitness because part of its program is some meditative exercises.

Nevertheless, different people have different ideas about what is a good diet. For some, a good diet program involve strictly eating vegetables and fruits. For some dieters, they still believe that eating meat at the right portion sizes is still an important part of their diet. Health experts recommend to maintain balanced diet in order to get the best nutrients from the different vitamin and mineral sources. The food groups have their own benefits and advantages when taken in at the right proportion. As you go through your weight loss program, make sure you have a good understanding about balanced diet and adequate nutrition.

But most of all, avoid smoking and drinking too much alcohol. Drink plenty of water and choose natural fruit juices that are freshly squeezed or extracted. Avoid putting too much sugar or alcohol in your beverages and make sure to eat on time.

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Solution to the IRS Mess: Eliminate the Corporate Income Tax

Guess post from Matthew J. Franck about Corporate Income Tax

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While everyone is quite rightly outraged by the abuses of the IRS in singling out conservative group for audits, intrusive inquiries, and endless delays on approval of their tax-exempt status, it has occurred to me that there is one simple solution to the problem that would not require nearly as much reform of the politically corrupt agency.

Get rid of the corporate income tax.

As David Rivkin and Lee Casey explained at the Wall Street Journal the other day:

The IRS crackdown on tax-exemption approvals for conservative groups was directed at nonprofit social-welfare groups, often called 501(c)(4)s after the Internal Revenue Code section granting them tax-exempt status. Such groups do not have to disclose their donors and are exempt from most taxation, although donations to them generally aren’t tax deductible.

Social-welfare organizations are permitted to engage in a range of political activities promoting their causes or beliefs, so long as these activities aren’t their “primary purpose.” This has been generally understood to mean that they must spend less than 50% of their total resources on political activities.

The IRS had little interest in 501(c)(4) political activities until the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform. That law barred dedicated political-advocacy groups from soliciting and spending soft money—funds that aren’t subject to tight federal campaign-contribution limits and are used for issue advocacy and party-building. . . .

Yet McCain-Feingold had the unintended effect of making 501(c)(4) political activities far more important than they had been, since the law’s ban on soft money doesn’t apply to such groups. . . .

So the entire hang-up in the IRS bureaucracy was whether groups claiming 501(c)(4) status could deservedly claim that designation. Did they devote the majority of their resources to non-political (educational or social) activities? How to determine which activities were political? And so on, and so on. The law is a veritable invitation to bureaucratic abuse, if one is inclined to succumb to such temptations.

But the point of claiming the status is so that your incorporated 501(c)(4) “social welfare organization” doesn’t have to pay corporate income taxes on the money it raises. If there were no corporate income tax in the first place, the issue simply wouldn’t arise.

It would, of course, be a nice bonus that eliminating the corporate income tax (which many economists believe is a deeply stupid form of taxation anyway) would give a nice boost to the economy. As one also learned in the Journal this week, America’s high corporate tax rate leads to all sorts of nonsense that intelligent lawyers and accountants have to cope with as creatively as they can. If we suddenly had the world’s lowest corporate rate–zero–in the world’s largest economy, imagine the effects.

So just get rid of it. No more corporate income tax, no more worries about which corporations have to pay it, and no more proctologic exams from the IRS about what degree of “politics” people are engaged in under the corporate form.

The only question that would remain is whose donors get the charitable tax deduction now allowed under section 501(c)(3). I would extend it to any nonprofit–even to the two great political parties–and eliminate the “Johnson amendment” barring 501(c)(3) entities from engaging in lobbying and electoral politics. That’s of dubious constitutionality anyway, especially as applied to the question of “pulpit politics” in churches.

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