Back when I was tangentially involved with the cashew business (during college vacations), I never quite worked out why we had to wear goggles to extract the nut from its hard shell. The story was that you would go blind if you didn't, but I thought that was silly. It's a nut - how is it going to make you go blind? Anyway, the Oxford Companion to Food answers my question:

"The nut is not easy to extract. The tissue between its two layers of hard shell contains strongly irritant substances, cardol and anacardic acid. This tissue has medical uses, including burning off warts, an indication of its great corrosive power. The usual way of treating the nut is to roast it whole, driving off the irritants and making the shell brittle enough to crack without crushing the contents".

Oh.

One month left in law school has left me short on time. Nonetheless, the eating continues apace in my house. Where else would I get the energy to keep sifting through the endless sheets of paper that make up law school life?

1 - French raviolis: Whenever you make a french beef stew, it's important to remember that any left-overs you don't feel like eating in stew form can be chopped finely, mixed with some other filling if you like, and stuffed into raviolis. Normally, I use those terrific ready-made wontons for ravioli if I'm busy, but this week I made my pasta with some simple flour and egg yolks. I rolled out the dough by hand (too cheap to afford pasta machine), and stuffed it with beef bourguignon and some goat cheese. The ravioli was served with butter and parmesan cheese.

2x: Clam chowder: The other day I noticed that Whole Foods sells Niman Ranch salt pork. That's really good news, especially since I normally make my clam chowder with pancetta. I know most people make chowder with heavy creams and thickener, but I think that's wrong. Just plain old whole milk, with some nice frozen clams (Whole Foods, again), some herbs, onions, and potatoes is fine. Use the salt meat to provide fat for sauteeing, and then add on top when ready to serve.

2x - Spaghetti Carbonara : left-over salt pork = bastardized spaghetti carbonara for me. Sure, it's supposed to be pancetta, but this stuff worked fine. The eggs I had weren't up to scratch either, but if you dress the pasta with enough parmesan and butter, it doesn't matter. Of course, if you add enough parmesan and butter to anything, it usually tastes ok. But I digress.

1x - Fake Flamme-kuchen: So, Flamme-kuchen, or tarte flambee, is an Alsatian pizza, usually made with a buttery but non-leavened dough, and topped with caramelized onions, creme fraiche, and bacon. Things aren't always perfect in life, though, and I only had some left-over puff pastry from my apple tart a week or so ago. So I just mixed some goat cheese with cream and egg, put it on the pastry, and added onions and salt pork. Not quite right, but excellent!

Professor Drezner puts forth the tentative hypothesis that making a national issue out of Terry Schiavo's case may well retard a culture of life rather than increase it. (The idea being that people who don't want to be kept alive while in vegetative states now see how important advance consent is, and are more likely to write out a living will.) Whether this is good or bad thing of course depends on whether one thinks people should be allowed to consent to death here, and whether one thinks that Type I or Type II errors are more tragic, and in what ratio.

That said, it does seem quite likely to me that if one cared primarily about trying to keep people in vegetative states alive, the smarter tactic would be to generally encourage people in the perception that their wishes would be followed after death, but to in fact put up enough procedural tangles and barriers that it is unlikely that a person's wish to have the plug pulled will actually be respected. This would imply that high-salience cases like Schiavo's are bad for that end-goal. I'm not sure I approve of this sort of tactic, or of this goal, but if one did, it seems like this would be the way to go.

This idea, for better or worse, is basically stolen directly from Jeffrey E Stake, Darwin, Donations, and the Illusion of Dead Hand Control, 64 Tul. L. Rev. 705, which suggests that the Rule Against Perpetuities may do similar work by being obscure and hard-to-understand-- satisfying the living by making them think that others will heed them when they go, but in fact doing what we the living want done once they can no longer complain.

I am fascinated to learn that I have acquired my first citation in a law review. John Cornyn, REMARKS FROM THE SENATE: COLLECTION OF SENATOR CORNYN'S ARTICLES ON FEDERAL JUDICIAL SELECTION: STANDARDS FOR THE SUPREME COURT 39 U. Rich. L. Rev. 971.

The reference is to my article on Justice Thomas.