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15 Foods You Didn’t Know You Could Freeze

Food waste continues to be a serious problem, with an estimated 30 to 40 percent of food intended for human consumption going to landfill. While some of the spoilage occurs in the field and during processing and transportation to supermarkets, the vast majority happens in refrigerators, where too many items end up languishing till they rot, at which point they get tossed in the trash.

Before that happens, learn to use your freezer as effectively as possible. It acts like a giant pause button, preserving foods for later consumption. While it is recommended to eat frozen foods within three months, it doesnt mean they will go bad; they may just require some flavor boosters to taste good. (viaLove Food Hate Waste)

Did you know you can freeze almost anything?This was news to me. I used to think there were clear rules about what should go into the freezer and what should not. It turns out, thats not the case. I am a fan offreezing without plastic, which is why I do not recommend any freezer bags or plastic wrap in the following directions.

Here are some foods that you probably never knew were great for freezing:

Mushrooms:Brush off any dirt, trim the bottoms, and slice thinly. Lay on a baking sheet in single layer, freeze for 2 hours, then transfer to airtight container.

Avocadoes:Cut in half, remove stone, and freeze in airtight container. Or scoop out flesh, mash with a bit of lemon or lime juice, and freeze for nearly-ready guacamole.

Coffee:Dont dump it down the drain! Pour into an ice cube tray until frozen solid, then transfer to an airtight container or glass jar. Thaw out small quantities for baking or to boost iced coffee when the weather warms up.

Wine:Got some leftover dregs in a bottle thats been sitting on the counter too long? Freeze in an ice cube tray, then transfer to a container. Use for cooking.

Eggs:You can freeze eggs as long as you beat them or separate the whites and yolks into separate containers. Read Melissas more detailed directionshere.

Fresh herbs:Some weeks its hard to use up an entire bunch of cilantro or parsley before it starts turning black and slimy. Finely chop and freeze as-is, mixed with olive oil in an ice cube tray, or blended into pesto. The same goes for fresh ginger. If using fresh basil, you must blanch for 1 min before chopping and freezing. The plain, fresh herbs need to be thawed before using, but the olive oil cubes can get tossed in a pan or pot of soup/stew.

Garlic:Peel fresh garlic cloves and freeze whole in an airtight container. Its actually easier to chop (less sticky) when still partially frozen.

Potatoes:Mashed potatoes freeze best, but you can also freeze potatoes that have boiled for 5 minutes, then toss them in a baking pan to roast once removed from the freezer.

Milk:You can freeze cartons, jugs, and the plastic bags in which milk is sold in Canada. Alternatively, pour into an ice cube tray and transfer cubes to a container once solid. Same goes for cream, buttermilk, and yogurt.

Chips:Don’t let a bag of chips go stale. Pop it in the freezer and let defrost for a few minutes before eating.

Organic and/or natural nut butters:If you’ve stocked up because of a sale, store in the freezer if you won’t be eating it within a couple months. You can also freeze opened jars of nut butter.

Cooked pasta and rice:Freeze leftovers in an airtight container, defrost, and reheat with a few tablespoons of water. Alternatively, you can place the frozen pasta in a colander and pour boiling water over to thaw and heat simultaneously. Add sauce and you’re ready to go. It’s also possible to partially cook arborio rice, freeze, and then continue cooking later to make risotto.

Diced onion and celery:Freeze chopped fresh onions and celery in small portions to make easy additions to soups and curries. They will require some extra browning time to get rid of additional moisture.

Written by Katherine Martino. Reposted with permission from TreeHugger.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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15 Foods You Didn’t Know You Could Freeze

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Maybe Quantum Physics Can Explain How An Object Can Be So Hot and Cool at the Same Time

Mother Jones

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Canada (a country to our north) has a prime minister (a sort of president-type person) who is very handsome (sexually appealing). People like (like like) him because he says charming things and is liberal.

So anyway Justin Trudeau was visiting some chalkboard factory or something and a reporter jokingly asked him to explain quantum computing thinking that har har no way could the attractive liberal president type person answer this question but them BAM he did answer it.

This is pretty great and everything but FYI the United States also has a very handsome liberal president-type person and he did this years ago.

Your move, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

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Maybe Quantum Physics Can Explain How An Object Can Be So Hot and Cool at the Same Time

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Obama and Trudeau take a big step on methane

U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hold a joint press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Obama and Trudeau take a big step on methane

By on 10 Mar 2016commentsShare

The remarkable thing about Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Barack Obama standing in front of the White House on Thursday morning was that the two countries were finally on the same side in the fight against climate change. After years of rule under Stephen Harper’s oil-dominated conservative party, Canada is now primed for a comeback as a global climate leader since the Liberal Party took over last fall. Trudeau has embraced the opportunity, joining the U.S. in announcing a series of climate pledges.

The details of the plan are as significant as the symbolism: While both countries promised responsible stewardship of the Arctic, the most notable part is their pledge on methane emissions, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and a growing climate problem.

Canada and the U.S. pledged to cut the oil and gas sector’s methane emissions by up to 45 percent by 2025 from a 2012 baseline. Before this visit, the Environmental Protection Agency had already planned on a similar cut for new or modified gas operations, but it overlooked the biggest offender — existing infrastructure. There are hundreds of thousands of sources that are currently leaking methane, sometimes a small amount during the extraction, processing, and transport of natural gas, but other times a disastrous amount, like in the case of Aliso Canyon’s massive gas leak.

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The EPA will now begin developing regulations for these sources and “move as expeditiously as possible to complete this process,” the White House noted in a fact sheet. Now, Canada is getting on board, putting “in place national regulations in collaboration with provinces/territories, Indigenous Peoples and stakeholders. Environment and Climate Change Canada intends to publish an initial phase of proposed regulations by early 2017.”

This is big. So big, in fact, that a similar 45 percent cut to global oil and gas methane emissions would be the equivalent of shutting down one-third of the world’s coal plants, according to Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate and Energy Program Vice President Mark Brownstein.

The U.S. and Canada are the Nos. 2 and 4 worst methane polluters (Russia is No. 1), accounting for 11 and 3.2 percent of global methane from oil and gas, respectively. Brownstein noted in an email reducing oil and gas methane emissions is “the single most immediate, impactful, and cost effective thing we can do to impact the rate of global warming right now.”

The oil lobby American Petroleum Institute is indignant, of course. API accused Obama of bending to the will of “environmental extremists.” Its point is that the industry already has an economic incentive to reduce methane — after all, it’s gas they could sell consumers that’s escaping into the air — and any regulation would be burdensome. Environmentalists point out that with gas prices so cheap regulatory action is an absolute must: The sector has too little incentive to shrink its methane footprint on its own.

Obama will certainly hear more from the oil and gas industry, including legal challenges, but he paid them little mind today.

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Tax Plan Showdown: Now We Have Bernie Sanders Too

Mother Jones

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And now we are five. The Tax Policy Center has analyzed Bernie Sanders’ tax plan, and we now have data for everyone still running except John Kasich, who hasn’t produced any tax proposals yet. The full reports are here: Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Sanders. Click the links for details. Or just look at the charts below for the nickel summary.

As before, the Republican plans are all the same: a tiny tax cut for the middle class as a sop to distract them from the enormous payday they give to the rich, and a massive hole in the deficit.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton’s plan is fairly modest. It leaves the middle class alone and taxes the rich a little more. Once her domestic proposals are paid for, it’s probably deficit neutral. Bernie Sanders is far more extreme. He’s basically the mirror image of the Republicans: he’d tax the middle class moderately more and soak the hell out of the rich. This would raise a tremendous amount of money, which he’d use to pay for his health care plan and his other domestic proposals. It’s impossible to say for sure how this would affect the deficit, but the evidence suggests that it would blow a pretty big hole since he plans to spend quite a bit more money than he’d raise.

So that’s that. Quite a choice we have this year.

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Tax Plan Showdown: Now We Have Bernie Sanders Too

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Hillary Clinton’s Email Scandal Continues to Dribble Away

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest on classified information being sent via email at the State Department:

The State Department has removed from its unclassified electronic archives a dozen sensitive emails sent to the personal accounts of former secretary of state Colin L. Powell and the staff of his successor, Condoleezza Rice, according to a memo released Friday by the agency’s watchdog….None of the messages was marked as classified or secret at the time it was sent, but the department’s inspector general, Steve Linick wrote the emails may have contained “potentially sensitive material” because of the subject matter.

Powell has said he has reviewed the messages and disagrees with a State Department decision to retroactively classify them. “I do not see what makes them classified,” he said.

Hillary Clinton probably sent a lot more emails the Powell, so she ended up with more emails retroactively being classified. Plus the CIA is apparently obsessed with pretending that the US drone program is a deep, dark secret. As usual with Clinton “scandals,” this one is dribbling away to nothing in the light of day, and would undoubtedly dribble a lot faster if any of us could actually see the emails. It’s an election season, so none of this will convince Republicans that there’s nothing of any consequence here, but there’s nothing of any consequence here. It’s just another boneheaded excrescence of the Benghazi pet rock.

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Hillary Clinton’s Email Scandal Continues to Dribble Away

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Here are the countries that are the best — and worst — at protecting the environment

Here are the countries that are the best — and worst — at protecting the environment

By on 4 Mar 2016commentsShare

It’s usually best to avoid listicles. No one needs to know the top 10 popsicle flavors from 1997 or the 25 worst celebrity tweets about peanuts. But a ranking of how well countries are doing to protect the environment? Now that’s a listicle we can get behind here at Grist.

Yale’s 15th annual Environmental Performance Index comparing 180 countries’ performance on “high priority environmental issues in two areas: protection of human health and protection of ecosystems” just came out, and it’s mostly what you’d expect: Countries up top tend to be heavily Nordic; countries at the bottom tend to be heavily unstable.

The top five are Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and Slovenia. Finland already gets two-thirds of its electricity from renewables or nuclear power and plans to get 38 percent of its total energy from renewables by 2020. Iceland gets 85 percent of its energy from renewables and has great air quality. Sweden has great water quality and plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2020. And Denmark has great water quality, as well as high marks for biodiversity.

But Slovenia? The central European nation might seem out of place in the top five, but it’s apparently kind of a boss when it comes to biodiversity. And with the third largest forest-to-land ration in the European Union, it’s doing a bang-up job of forest preservation.

The next five on the list are Spain, Portugal, Estonia, Malta, and France. The U.S. is way down at 26 — right below Canada, which is precisely where we like to be.

The bottom five countries are Afghanistan, Niger, Madagascar, Eritrea, and Somalia for a lot of the reasons you might expect: illegal hunting and poaching, poor air and water quality, deforestation, failure to protect biodiversity, over-fishing.

Check out this write-up by some of the researchers over at Scientific American for more details on the best and worst performing countries. Or go watch this nice little video. Then, I promise, you can go read that listicle about whether or not your relationship is doomed.

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Three Numbers That Explain the Modern Political Ecosystem

Mother Jones

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If you want to understand how politicians manipulate today’s media environment, there are only three numbers you need to know:

Detroit debate viewership (TV plus streaming): 20 million
Daytime cable news viewership: 1-2 million
Print newspaper viewership: 1 million max

The last number is a guesstimate for the number of people who will see Donald Trump’s statement announcing that he’s had a change of heart about ordering the US military to torture prisoners. If anything, it’s generous. A printed statement just isn’t going to make the rounds much. Nor is it going to be a big deal on social media, especially among the Trump demographic.

So here’s what you get:

When Bret Baier asks Trump what would happen if the military refuses his order to torture prisoners, 20 million people hear and see him say, “They won’t refuse….I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”
The next day, 2-3 million people read (or hear a network anchor recite) a bloodless statement that says, “I do, however, understand that the United States is bound by laws and treaties and I will not order our military or other officials to violate those laws and will seek their advice on such matters.”

The arithmetic here is pretty simple. There are at least 17 million people who hear Trump insist that he’s going to torture “these animals over in the Middle East” and never see the retraction. For Trump, this is a double win. His base continues to think he’s a tough guy. Elites breathe a small sigh of relief and figure that maybe this means Trump will calm down and listen to his advisors if he wins the presidency.

The exact numbers can vary, but the basic math plays out the same way all the time. Politicians have learned that they can lie without consequence. They tell the lie on television, where lots of people see it, and then count on virtually nobody seeing the earnest fact checks the next day.

Among younger voters, you probably have to factor in social media as well. But you also have to factor in the well-known evidence that fact checks rarely change anyone’s mind. Welcome to 21st century America.

UPDATE: There’s another piece of this that’s worth mentioning. Trump’s retraction was given to the Wall Street Journal, so naturally they’re playing it big on their front page. But I just checked USA Today, Fox, MSNBC, the LA Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and none of them have so much as mentioned this on their home pages. This is not a coincidence. They hate having to acknowledge a competitor, and that causes them to downplay the news.

The one exception is CNN, which has plastered it at the top of their home page and mentioned it repeatedly on air. I don’t quite know why they’re the exception.

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Three Numbers That Explain the Modern Political Ecosystem

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California’s Bullet Train Just Gets Better and Better

Mother Jones

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California’s bullet train gets more appealing with every new business plan:

California will need to double down on support of the bullet train by digging deeper into the state’s wallet and accepting a three-year delay in completing the project’s initial leg, a new business plan for the 220-mph system shows.

….The new plan calls for completion of the entire system by 2029, one year later than under the old business plan. Once the initial system starts showing a profit, the business plan asserts, private investors would jump in with an estimated $21 billion, based on financial calculations.

….The 99-page plan and its backup technical documents again raise questions about service and speed. A sample operating schedule does not show any nonstop trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The fastest travel time between the cities would be 3 hours and 14 minutes, not the 2 hours and 40 minutes many people expect.

Yes, I’m sure private investors will be panting to invest, just like they’ve invested so much in iffy high-speed rail construction elsewhere in the world. They’ll be especially eager in another few years, when this project will undoubtedly be forecast to open around 2040 or so, and estimates of LA-SF travel time will be four hours. Who could say no?

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California’s Bullet Train Just Gets Better and Better

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New York lost billions with fossil fuel investments

New York lost billions with fossil fuel investments

By on 1 Mar 2016 4:27 pmcommentsShare

Investing in fossil fuels is becoming a liability — not only for the planet, but for the portfolio, too.

The industry garnered a staggering $5 billion loss for the New York State Common Retirement Fund (NYS-CRF) over three years, according to an analyst estimate from the investment research firm Corporate Knights. The state’s $189.4 billion pension fund, the third largest in the country, covers 1.1 million members across the state. The loss equates to $4,500 per person.

In order to measure what sort of impact fossil fuel holdings was having on the New York State Common Retirement Fund’s equity portfolio, Corporate Knights took the 100 biggest companies that the fund has shares in. Of those, the biggest fossil fuel companies, including coal utilities, were removed. Using data about the performance of the top 100 public coal companies provided by Fossil Free Indexes, the fund was then analyzed for how it would fare without these fossil fuel stocks, versus how it fared with them.

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“Our findings…indicate that the Fund would have made an extra $5.3 billion over the past three years had it shifted its investments out of fossil fuel stocks into companies providing climate solutions,” Toby Heaps, CEO and co-founder of Corporate Knights, told Grist.

Corporate Knights, a Toronto-based financial information company, has analyzed the fossil fuel holdings of several large funds in the past, in an effort to promote a message of “clean capitalism,” a market system in which social, economic and ecological costs are incorporated into prices of goods and services. It publishes both information on corporate responsibility, like the annual list of the “Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada,” as well as analyses of corporate sustainability performance, like the annual “North American Sustainable Cities Scorecard.”

Divesting in fossil fuels has been a hot-button issue for years, with pressure on major universities to scrub their portfolios. Right now, it’s unclear exactly what outcome divesting will have. One study, funded by the oil and gas industry, found that universities could lose millions if they cut their cut oil, gas and coal holdings. Harvard, it reported, would lose up to $108 million per year if it divested from fossil fuel companies. But a slew of other studies have contradicted that finding, suggesting that divesting in fossil fuels can save big money. One analysis by the investment firm Trillium Asset Management directly contradicted the industry-funded findings for Harvard, reporting that the university lost an estimated $21 million dollars over three years by ignoring calls to divest. One 2013 analysis commissioned by the Associated Press found that university endowments would have been better off had they divested a decade previous. Last October, after beginning to divest from all fossil fuels a year earlier, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund announced that its $850 million portfolio was not harmed by the decision.

According to one 2015 analysis by MSCI, the world’s leading stock market index company, investors who cut out holdings in fossil fuel companies outperformed those that had stakes in coal, oil and gas over the past five years. The analysis attributed fossil fuel holdings’ poor performance to both the fall in the oil price, as well as investors considering oil and coal to be risky investments in the long run.

The New York pension fund’s investments in fossil fuels have been questioned lately, both by climate advocates and by investors. Last week, Thomas DiNapoli, the New York State Comptroller who manages the pension fund, joined four other Exxon shareholders to demand that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission force the company to address how climate change mitigation policies would impact its bottom line. New York’s retirement system invests directly about $1 billion in Exxon, the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company. Exxon quickly challenged that resolution — but it seems that today, the Comptroller got his answer.

“The era of fossil fuels is coming to an end, and this report demonstrates very clearly why divestment is not only environmentally sound, but financially responsible,” New York State Senator Liz Krueger, co-sponsor of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Act, said in a statement. “By staying invested in fossil fuels over the last three years our state pension fund missed out on over $5 billion in potential returns. Investment in fossil fuels is a sinking ship, and it’s high time we headed for the lifeboats.”

Corporate Knights, working with other climate action groups, has found similar trends for other large shareholders that refuse to divest in fossil fuels. Last November, it launched “The Clean Capitalist Decarbonizer,” a tool to analyze the performance of 14 major funds, including Harvard’s endowment, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the pension plans of Canada and the Netherlands. Put together, these 14 funds would have been $23 billion better off had they divested from fossil fuels just three years earlier, in 2012.

For those looking to not make the same mistakes the state of New York and others have, there are easy ways to divest—but you may have to read the fine print to make sure there are no oil smears left on your money. Like many universities and corporations that have already pulled their stakes out of the grip of Big Oil, it’s an measurable way to contribute to the climate movement. What’s more, it may save you a whole lot of money.

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Ted Cruz Attacks Sean Penn—and Here’s Penn’s Response

Mother Jones

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At an addiction policy forum in Hooksett, New Hampshire, on Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz, the winner of the Republican Iowa caucuses, turned his talk about the awful consequences of addiction into a rant against…illegal immigration. And, of course, the media and Hollywood. After describing how addiction has affected his family—his half sister died of a drug overdose in 2011—Cruz quickly pivoted to discuss the flood of “undocumented Democrats” (Freudian slip?) coming across the border from Mexico and the need to build a wall to keep them out. He suggested the wall was also needed to protect the United States from drug cartels. Then he turned to the entertainment industry and one member in particular:

El Chapo. You know, Sean Penn seems to think he is a sexy and attractive character. I so appreciate Hollywood for glorifying vicious homicidal killers. What a cute and chic thing to celebrate. Someone who murders and destroys lives for a living. El Chapo’s organization brings vast quantities of drugs into this country, vast quantities of heroin.

Of course, this was a reference to Sean Penn’s recent Rolling Stone article, in which Penn conducted an interview with the fugitive drug cartel chieftain in a secret jungle location. The piece did not celebrate El Chapo—but Cruz was looking to blame all the usual suspects for the drug epidemic in New England: the media, Democrats, and a big-name actor.

Asked to respond to Cruz’s effort to link him to the addiction plague in the Granite State, Penn, in an email, told Mother Jones:

Ted Cruz is a generically funny and dangerously adept thought-smith. Clearly, he watches too much television and neglected to read my article before criticizing. It’s understood. He’s busy trading genius and raising aspirations with Mr. Trump. Blame Canada.

Penn’s last sentence is a reference to this.

We’ve asked the Cruz campaign if it would like to respond—and whether the senator is a fan of South Park.

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Ted Cruz Attacks Sean Penn—and Here’s Penn’s Response

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