Taco Soup

We loved this soup so much that the first time we made it, we ate it three days in a row. It’s one of those meals that sits in the crockpot on the kitchen counter taunting you all day long.
 
A definite treat for a cool fall or winter day, the soup can be easily modified to your tastes—just add or remove any of the ingredients. Because several family members have difficulty with spicy foods, for instance, we modified the recipe to make it a bit less spicy than Paula Deen’s original recipe. This is how we serve it at our house.

Ingredients

  • 3 lbs ground beef
  • 2 cups diced onions
  • 1 (15 1/2-oz) can pinto beans
  • 1 (15 1/2-oz) can red kidney beans
  • 1 (15 1/2-oz) can black beans
  • 1 (15 1/4-oz) can whole kernel corn, drained
  • 1 (15 1/4-oz) can white corn, drained
  • 1 (14 1/2-oz) can stewed tomatoes
  • 1 (14 1/2-oz) can diced tomatoes
  • 2 (4 1/2-oz) cans green chiles, diced with no seeds
  • 1 (4.6-oz) can black olives, drained and sliced
  • 1 (1 1/4-oz) package taco seasoning mix
  • 1 (1-oz) package ranch salad dressing mix
  • Corn chips
  • Sour cream
  • Grated cheese
  • Chopped green onions

Directions

  1. Brown the ground beef and onions in a skillet. Season with salt and pepper.
  2. Transfer the browned beef and onions to a large slow cooker or a stockpot.
  3. Add the beans, corn, tomatoes, green chiles, black olives, green olives, taco seasoning, and ranch dressing mix.
  4. Cook in a slow cooker on low for 6 to 8 hours or simmer over low heat for about 1 hour in a pot on the stove.
  5. Garnish bowls with corn chips, sour cream, cheese, and green onions. Add tabasco sauce, if desired.

Time Required: 6 hrs

Servings: 10–12

Rating: 5 stars (★★★★★)

March of Time Newsreels in the Classroom

Film Canisters by Mr. T in DCBack in the days before 24-hour news networks, people went to their local movie theaters to see what was going on in the world.

The March of Time, perhaps the most well-known producer of these videos, distributed documentaries that covered everything from American culture and lifestyles, to business and industry, to the nation at war.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of this precursor to breaking news videos on YouTube, the Museum of Modern Art has a special film exhibition, running September 1 through September 10. Turner Classic Movies has posted background information on The March of Time and will show five of the newsreels on September 5th.

Luckily, highlights from the collection of historical videos are also available online from HBO Archives. Note that a free site login is required to view the videos. Additional materials are also available from the March of Time’s Facebook page.

The newsreels and documentaries on the HBO site include historical events, cultural happenings, and biographical profiles. The videos provide a wonderful snapshot of life in America and around the world.

I first wrote about the March of Time collection on Bedford Bits last summer. You can check my blog entry Use Newsreel Videos for Background and Analysis there for specific ideas.

One of my favorite possibilities for class discussion this fall is the Oil and Men video, which offers a profile of Standard Oil of Indiana from 1951. What a great pairing that 30 minute video would make for videos and news stories on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Here are some others you may want to spend some time with:

  • Basic English 1, with text by I. A. Richards, is quite odd, though perhaps not the best “teaching picture.” There’s also a Basic English 2 if you survive the first video.
  • Tobaccoland, USA might pair nicely with an analysis of cigarette advertisements and anti-smoking commercials.
  • Leadbelly is a short biopic on the famous musician, which might be compared to profiles on celebrities shown on TV or in magazines like People.
  • Wit and Humor is a dramatization of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.”

It’s unfortunate that HBO has left the running clock on the videos, but it’s still a handy collection with limitless possibilities for the classroom.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Mr. T in DC]

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6 Reasons Blogrolls Are Dying

Cinnamon Roll by stevendepoloI posted a message to TechRhet this weekend that I thought would yield a fast result. I needed to gather a list of comp/rhet blogs for a project, and I want to make sure I didn’t leave anyone out.

I asked readers to pass along links if they had a great blogroll or knew of some wonderful blogs I should include.

The response? One message. That’s it. One message that pointed to one blog.

So I began searching for the links on my own, visiting friend’s blogs and scooping up links as I went along. I quickly observed that blogrolls are a dying breed.

  1. Fewer people have blogrolls. There was a time when everyone listed every blogger possible in the sidebar. Not the case any more. More than 1/2 of the blogs I visited had no blogroll at all.
     
  2. Blogrolls tend to be an unordered list, which makes their usefulness questionable. Presented with a giant list of blogs, you have nothing to go by but the blog name or the writer’s name. Sorted into categories or with tags, the list would be easier for visitors to use. As they stand on most blogs, they seem to be a simple list of friends and colleagues in most cases.
     
  3. The blogrolls I did find were not well-maintained. The lists were littered with broken links, dead blogs (i.e., the link works but there hasn’t been a new post on the blog in months), and links to old blogs, with pointers to a new home.
     
  4. Gathering a blogroll (and checking its links) is a time-consuming project. There’s a reason these things aren’t maintained. The only way to make use the blog links all work properly is to sit and click on each and every one.
     
  5. Blogrolls are suffering because blogs have more competition these days. Many colleagues are foregoing blogs for shorter status updates. On more than one blog, I found a note that indicated the person was going to update via Facebook or Twitter instead of maintaining the blog.
     
  6. Follower and Friend lists are replacing blogrolls. When you click follow or okay a friend, you create a list of colleagues that is quite similar to a blogroll—and which is infinitely easier to maintain. They take care of themselves. You never have to chase down the URLs or check for deleted accounts.

Ultimately, I collected a list of nearly 70 blogs. Feel free to copy it for your own site or send links to anything I left out. I just won’t promise you that I’ll maintain it for the long term.

 

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by stevendepolo]

@newsfromtengrrl for 2010-08-21

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