Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. You will need 3 firm Bosc pears, peeled, halved, cored (about 1 pound). Arrange the pears cut side up in an over safe bowl, with 2 tbls. of olive oil, 2 cloves of garlic, chopped, and 1/2 cup of chopped shallots. Sprinkle salt and pepper and a tbls. of honey over the goods. Add 1-2 cups of goat cheese over your pears.

Bake for a good 30-35 minutes, tossing the pears occasionally in the juices, until they are crisp-tender and beginning to brown.

Pair this with toasted pita or a warm baguette and drizzle with honey.

recipe via WorstCookEver.com

This dish is perfect for dressing up a salad or starting a meal. A lot of recipes call for bacon and bread crumbs, but this a lighter take on roasted onions, with simple fresh and local ingredients. The onions are the star of this dish and you can feel free to stuff them with whatever you’d like, butternut squash for instance could be a great alternative.

I prefer using large red onions, they add great color but any onion will do (sweet onions are delicious roasted with honey). For two onions, you’ll need two tomatoes, 1 cup of fresh mozzarella, half cup of basil and a clove of garlic.

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Let’s face it, most people don’t have that kind of time or the resources to find red curry paste. Often, the best recipes are the simplest. With the combination of fresh and local ingredients, you can have a healthy meal in seconds… sans the truffle oil.

The following recipe tastes like summer: sliced tomatoes drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, with fresh chopped garlic. It’s a caprese salad in its simplest form, you don’t even need mozzarella. Have an herb garden? Toss in fresh basil.

2 ripe tomatoes thinly sliced
2 cloves of garlic finely chopped
Tbls. of extra virgin olive oil
Tbls. of aged balsamic vinegar
salt & vinegar to taste
*basil (optional)

9 “Green” New Years Resolutions You Can Actually Do!  - by Nicole67

Does going green seem like a monumental task? No worries, Nicole, shares easy ways to adopt a more eco-friendly lifestyle in the new year that won’t cramp your lifestyle. Who knows, maybe these baby steps will give you the confidence to tackle greater green challenges.

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The central province of Henan has already adopted the measures, which include stunning the animals before killing them, and herding pigs with plastic prods instead of electric ones.

“Since the quality of meat from China has drawn international attention, the Chinese government has conducted special treatment on this issue,” the report quoted an official from the Administrative Office of Livestock Slaughtering as saying.

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Six bullets from the 9 mm handgun slammed into Alexis, one piercing her right eye. Two slugs hit her mother.

Alexis’ mother pulled through. But two weeks later, Alexis lies in critical condition, blind in one eye. And to her classmates and many people in this city so depressingly familiar with violence, the little girl is a hero.

“She was trying to save me,” her mother, Seliethia Parker, 30, said.

“My baby is just an angel to her mother. I thought as the mother, I’d be saving my child. I never thought my daughter would be saving me.”

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Under the program to be announced on Tuesday, city officials would calculate the carbon cost of their travels and contribute to one of several city programs aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions — or forego the travel altogether.

“What we are trying to do by this is to set high standards to show carbon offset programs that work,” Gavin Newsom told Reuters, adding he was wary of offsets with little accountability that promise action in distant lands.

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The memorandum of understanding, signed in Budapest, covers the basic framework for the Japanese government to buy intergovernmental surpluses, or AAUs, from Hungary under the Green Investment Scheme (GIS).

Under the Kyoto Protocol, governments are able to sell AAUs to other countries that fall short of their emissions targets.

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Role of a lifetime

“I’m living my ideal role. I love being a mom and a wife. In terms of my career, I’d love to do a period piece.”

Tom Cruise, airplane pilot

“Trust. I don’t give it a thought. He knows what he’s doing. When he decides to do something, he does it. It’s great. [She giggles.] It’s hot.”

Danilo Latin dismissed the weather quirks with a wave of his calloused hand. “It is normal, the conditions and the catch vary from day to day, season to season.”

The veteran fisherman is more worried by what is going to happen to a protected fishing zone, known locally as ZERP, which Zagreb wants to enforce on its side of the Adriatic from January 1.

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‘Are you crazy?’ and he said, ‘It’s just a bit of fun,’” the homeowner said.Other adults in the neighborhood aren’t laughing.“We try as hard as we can to keep our kids on the straight and narrow, and then to find out it was a parent actually doing this, it makes you wonder,” said Jennifer Schuchmann, one of the residents allegedly victimized by Hayes’ group.CBS 46 went to Hayes’ home Monday night, but he refused to come to the door. Police said Hayes refuses to give up the names of his young accomplices.more

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Illinois at Urbana discovered the opportunistic, changing dietary preferences of California’s Argentine ants—the first time researchers have documented what these invasive ants actually eat—by studying a population of ants for eight years in the foothills southeast of San Diego. An advance copy of their paper is being published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences.

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Half of those polled said they would make a “green” New Year’s resolution, according to the survey by GfK Roper and commissioned by marketing consultancy Tiller LLC.

Two-thirds of Americans plan to cut their use of household chemicals, while 42 percent said they would take reusable fabric bags to the supermarket to reduce the use of plastic bags.

“When it comes to life choices, green is clearly a primary color. Americans are viewing the environmental impact of their actions with increased responsibility and deliberation,” said Rob Densen, chief executive of Tiller.

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Unearthing new species of mammals in the 21st century is considered very rare. The discoveries by a team of American and Indonesian scientists are being studied further to confirm their status.

The animals were found in the Foja mountains rainforest in eastern Papua province in a June expedition, said U.S.-based Conservation International, which organized the trip along with the Indonesian Institute of Science.

“The giant rat is about five times the size of a typical city rat,” said Kristofer Helgen, a scientist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. “With no fear of humans, it apparently came into the camp several times during the trip.”

The possum was described as “one of the world’s smallest marsupials.”

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His once brown, even complexion is now mottled with pale patches around his eyes and mouth, along his nose and on his ears; his arms, shoulders and chest are speckled and blotched.

“I’m a black man turning white on television and people can see it,” says Thomas, an anchor and entertainment reporter for the local Fox Broadcasting Company affiliate. “If you’ve watched me over the years, you’ve seen my hands completely change from brown to white.”

Thomas has vitiligo, a disorder in which pigment-making cells are destroyed. White patches appear on different parts of the body, tissues in the mouth and nose, and the retina.

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“For the global South, especially Africa, environmental issues are not a luxury,” the environmental activist said in an article in Kenya’s Business Daily newspaper on the final day of climate change talks in Bali.

“Arresting the world’s warming and protecting and restoring our natural systems are issues of life and death for much of the world’s population.”

The first African woman and ‘green’ activist to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Maathai said the industrialized world needed to work with southern hemisphere nations to stop the devastation linked to global warming.

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Huckabee was the choice of 24 percent of South Carolina Republicans in the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll taken December 9-12, up from 3 percent when a similar poll was conducted in July.

Huckabee campaigned this weekend in the state, which holds its Republican primary on January 19, and voters placed him first when asked to name the most believable candidate.

Actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson came in second with 17 percent.

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A spokesman said on Friday expedition leader and veteran Polar explorer Pen Hadow had postponed the trip until February 2009 to expand the range of scientists and sponsors involved.

“It will only take a few months to organize this. But that means having to delay for a year because there is only one Arctic season in which you can do this,” the group spokesman told Reuters. “So, reluctantly Pen took this decision.”

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