Babylonian New Year stew

This is a 4,000-year-old recipe for a Babylonian stew. It is one of the oldest recipes we know. It is thought it was used for a Spring Festival, which was the Babylonian New Year. He also describes the festival's ceremonies, 

 

Babylonian stew

This video is about three stews that were made from ancient Babylonian tablets that contained the oldest known historical food recipes. From The History Blog's article Babylonian stew which is about the Yale project that recreated these dishes:

The Yale-Harvard team prepared three recipes which were all from one tablet [cuneiform tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection]: two lamb stews — one with beets and one with milk and cakes of grain — and a vegetarian recipe enriched with beer bread.

The variety of ingredients, complex preparation, and cooking staff required to create these meals suggest that they were intended for the royal palace or temple — the haute cuisine of Mesopotamia, says Lassen. Few cooks were able to read cuneiform script, she adds, hence the recipes were most likely recorded to document the current practices of culinary art.
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“Making a stew is a very basic human thing and I think that is one of the reasons that we really went into this project,” says Lassen. “There is something really human about eating and food and tasting things, and that’s what we wanted to explore by recreating these recipes. Maybe not entirely as they as they would have prepared it — maybe our ingredients taste a little bit different — but still approximating something that nobody has tasted for almost 4,000 years.”

Anybody have a good recipe for Honey Glazed Wingnut?

Ted Turner's been thinking. Thinking a lot. This NewsBusters article offers an entertaining view into the mind of Ted when its wheels are churning away.

There is the usual "war is bad, we should stop fighting" stuff. Well yea... the first part is a given, the second part is rather more problematic. In talking about Iraq he says, "I think that they're patriots and that they don't like us because we've invaded their country and occupied it. I think if the Iraqis were in Washington, D.C., we'd be doing the same thing: we'd be bombing them too. Nobody wants to be invaded."

Patriots? I suppose, then again, I imagine the Waffen SS also thought they were being patriotic when they were defending the rubble of Berlin. There might be more to it than just bandying the word patriot about.

But enough of that, such happy claptrap is rather common in some circles. What elevates Turner to the rarefied heights of nuttery few have achieved are his deep thoughts on global warming (no waffling on about climate change for him). Have a look at a bit of it:

"Not doing it will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state -- like Somalia or Sudan -- and living conditions will be intolerable. The droughts will be so bad there'll be no more corn grown."

Yowza! That sounds even worse then Mad Max. No roaring around in souped up dune buggies, with stylish Mohawk hairdos, for our future selves. We won't be looking for gas, we'll be searching for the other red meat. I have dibs on Michael Moore -- he should feed me and my family for a week or two.