Powder

Rocco's Real Life Recipes: Fast Flavor for Every Day By Rocco DiSpirito Talk With Your Mouth Full: The Hearty Boys Cookbook By Dan Smith and Steve McDonagh Stewart, Chabori & Chang / $27.50 / 2007 Both Rocco DiSpirito's and Rachael Ray's books leave the impression of having been tossed off to keep the franchise going. Dan Smith and Steve McDonagh are not as well-known, but they seem to have put much more effort into their book. They're celebrities, too, albeit of a different order - they're Chicago caterers who won a Food Network reality show and now have their own show, Party Line With the Hearty Boys.

INDIANOLA, Iowa -- Retired dairy worker and Teamsters official Ed Sparks remembers the days here in Iowa when a race for president meant more than just campaign workers knocking on his door looking for support. Representatives from his national union and others often could be seen trudging up and down the snowy sidewalks of small towns and cities in an all-out effort to get out the vote. But this year, with only a few days to go until the Iowa caucuses Jan. 3, Sparks has noticed that that presence has precipitously declined.

With a welcome dose of common sense, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that federal sentencing guidelines are advisory, not mandatory, and that a judge is still free to exercise discretion, depending on the circumstances of the case. The court's reiteration of the principle that judges should use their judgment is particularly appropriate in drug cases, where mandatory minimum sentences are often unnecessarily harsh and disparate punishments involving crack and powder cocaine are especially glaring.

My wife received a bottle of Mexican vanilla from a friend. It smells more like baby powder than vanilla. Any idea what this is? Baking experts recognize real Mexican vanilla as some of the best in the world But there is also synthetic vanilla made in Mexico. And there have been cases of synthetic vanilla doctored with a substance called coumarin, which can be toxic and is linked to kidney and liver damage. Good vanilla should be labeled "coumarin free." There are ways to spot the synthetics.

A Bowie State student who survived for a week pinned upside down in his wrecked car used a pocket knife to cut himself free from his seat belt, dipped his shoe into a stream to drink and ate a fish he found, his mother said yesterday. "Thank goodness he had the knife, or else he would have been stuck," Peggy McCormick said of her son, Julian. "He's in fair condition, in a lot of pain, but he's getting better. ... He's truly blessed." Julian McCormick escaped Saturday from his Honda Civic, which had crashed into a ravine in Beltsville on Sept.

Have a blast without the sand BEACH NEWS AH, BEACH SEASON. A TIME FOR SLIPPING ON that new suit, lounging in the sun and cavorting in the surf. Now if somebody could please do something about all that sand. If that's your sentiment, Deborah Anastos might be your somebody. Her creation is called Sand Witch, and it's a silky, food-based powder beachgoers can rub on to stay sand-free. Anastos, 44, said she first got her idea more than a decade ago, after a friend mentioned using baby powder at the beach.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court agreed for the first time yesterday to reconsider the long prison terms meted out to the mostly black defendants who are convicted of selling crack cocaine. At least 25,000 defendants per year are sent to federal prison on crack-cocaine charges, and their prison terms are usually 50 percent longer than drug dealers who sell powder cocaine. This disparity, with its racial overtones, has been controversial for two decades since Congress ramped up the "war on drugs" in response to a crack-cocaine epidemic that was sweeping many cities.

The murderous rampage of Cho Seung-Hui was barely over when the country shifted into its usual post-tragedy mode of second-guessing and finger-pointing. Here was a favorite topic of the howling masses on cable and radio talk shows yesterday: Cho Seung-Hui was a weirdo. He hardly spoke to his roommates at Virginia Tech. He didn't make eye contact with anyone. He wore sunglasses all the time. He seemed angry and depressed. He wrote creepy things about death in his English class. So how come no one flagged this guy as a problem before he gunned down 32 people?

Production of our favorite spaghetti-sauce ingredient, Spatini, was ceased in January by its maker, Lawry's. It's been difficult to find a replacement. Better yet would be an ingredients list for me to try to make the mix at home. Spatini is the brand name of a packet of seasonings that you add to either a tomato paste and water, unseasoned tomato sauce or canned tomatoes to make spaghetti sauce. I found a list of Spatini's ingredients on foodfacts.com: sugar, salt, dehydrated onion, potato starch, spices, natural flavors (including dairy)

I've been searching for Dutch-process cocoa. In the supermarkets, I just see Nestle and Hershey's cocoa, neither of which says "Dutch" or "processed with alkali." Chocolate liquor has two principal components - cocoa solids and cocoa butter - and in 1828, a Dutchman named Coenraad Van Houten invented a method for separating the two. The newly independent cocoa solids also could be pulverized to make a fine powder with lots of chocolate flavor but little fat: cocoa powder. Van Houten also invented a process by which cocoa powder, which is naturally quite acidic, was treated with an alkaline to neutralize the flavor and deepen the color.