Good Wednesday morning.
Today is an important day in culinary history – in MY culinary history, anyway. Also, I realize I’m writing a lot about food lately, and I’m not sure why that is, but I’m leaning into it.
Anyway, today is National Cheese Toast Day, which is NOT to be confused with Grilled Cheese Day (April 12, in case you were curious). Cheese toast is not grilled cheese; it is exactly what it sounds like – melted cheese on bread, open faced, and without any grilling or adornments, though I guess if you insist on a bit of butter to help hold things together I will not quibble with you.
I would opt for cheese toast over grilled cheese most days. Don’t get me wrong, I like greasy grilled things, but I feel like all that butter or oil or mayo (yes, mayo on the outside of the bread is the secret to the best grilled cheese, I’ve found) gets in the way of the true full cheese experience.
I like a slice of a nice, hearty loaf of bread – wheat or sourdough or maybe rye, in a pinch – not sliced sandwich bread, preferably, though I would do that, too, if nothing else was around.
Top that with a hunk of really sharp cheddar, or, oddly, this amazing vegan cashew cheese I ordered on a whim online recently…(sitting in front of the computer all day is truly dangerous)….the only issue with it is that it doesn’t keep and moldy cashew cheese is vile, unlike moldy traditional cheese, which I would just trim and eat anyway.
So throw the whole thing under the broiler until the cheese is golden brown, then try to wait a decent interval so you don’t burn the roof of your mouth, though I never succeed in this and always pay the price for it later.
This is the world’s best late-night snack, or quickie lunch, or even dinner replacement, if you eat it with a bowl of soup or a green salad. Perfection.
Wow. I just wrote several hundred words about cheese toast, and it’s only Wednesday.
Today marks the beginning of National Hispanic Heritage Month, which actually spans two months, running from the middle of September to the middle of October.
The Google Doodle is celebrating by honoring Panamanian American nurse and educator Dr. Ildaura Murillo-Rohde, who specialized in psychiatric nursing and was also an academic and organizational administrator.
Murillo-Rohde founded the National Association of Hispanic Nurses in 1975 and served as a World Health Organization consultant to Guatemala.
Murillo-Rohde has some New York connections. She obtained obtain a BA in Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and was the first Latina nurse to receive a PhD from NYU.
She later was a professor, and then dean of Nursing, at SUNY, in Brooklyn and was dean and professor emeritus of SUNY’s School of Nursing. In 1991, then NYC Mayor David Dinkins appointed Murillo-Rohdeto a commission that examined the quality of care at city hospitals.
Prince Harry is turning 37 today.
We’re in for some scattered thunderstorms this morning, followed by clouds in the afternoon. Some of those storms could be severe, so be on the alert. Temperatures will be in the mid-70s.
In the headlines…
California Gov. Gavin Newsom emphatically defeated a recall aimed at kicking him out of office early, a contest the Democrat framed as part of a national battle for his party’s values in the face of the pandemic and continued threats from “Trumpism.”
With 62 percent of ballots counted — and more than two-thirds of them saying “no” to the recall — Newsom addressed his supporters in Sacramento.
“‘No’ is not the only thing that was expressed tonight,” Newsom said. “I want to focus on what we said ‘yes’ to as a state: We said yes to science, we said yes to vaccines, we said yes to ending this pandemic.”
The vote spoke to the power liberal voters wield in California: No Republican has held statewide office in more than a decade. But it also reflected the state’s recent progress against the coronavirus pandemic.
President Joe Biden tried to advance his domestic spending plans by touring a renewable energy lab in Colorado to highlight how his clean-energy proposals would help combat climate change and create good-paying jobs along the way.
Biden warned the U.S. had only a decade left to confront a global climate crisis, using his second day touring a wildfire-ravaged West to try to rally the public, and Congress, to support measures his administration hopes will reduce the burning of fossil fuels.
The share of people living in poverty in the United States fell to a record low last year as an enormous government relief effort helped offset the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression.
Historic levels of government assistance tied to the Covid-19 pandemic helped keep millions of Americans out of poverty last year, but weren’t enough to prevent incomes from showing their first significant decline in nearly a decade.
Amazon said it plans to add 125,000 employees in the U.S. and has lifted its average starting wage as it continues to rapidly expand its vast warehouse operations in a tight labor market.
A recent run-up in consumer prices cooled slightly in August, signaling that although inflation is higher than normal, the White House and Federal Reserve may be beginning to see the slowdown in price gains they have been hoping for.
The Justice Department asked a federal judge late yesterday to issue an order that would prevent Texas from enacting a law that prohibits nearly all abortions, ratcheting up a fight between the Biden administration and the state’s Republican leaders.
“This relief is necessary to protect the constitutional rights of women in Texas and the sovereign interest of the United States in ensuring that its states respect the terms of the national compact,” the department said in an emergency motion.
A group of Senate Democrats unveiled revised elections legislation that aims to ease voters’ access to the polls, a proposal that is expected to unite the party but not draw sufficient Republican support to advance.
COVID-19 deaths and cases in the U.S. have climbed back to levels not seen since last winter, erasing months of progress and potentially bolstering Biden’s argument for his sweeping new vaccination requirements.
Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that COVID-19 could mutate into an even more virulent “monster variant” if the pandemic is not stamped out with mass vaccination.
A new analysis estimates that preventable costs for treating hospitalized, unvaccinated Covid-19 patients reached $5.7 billion over the last three months.
Several branches of the U.S. military set deadlines for service members to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
Army officials said all active-duty units are expected to be fully vaccinated by Dec. 15, and Reserve and National Guard members by June 30. All active-duty Air Force troops have until Nov. 2, and Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve members Dec. 2.
With flu season just around the corner and the delta variant fueling spikes in COVID cases nationwide, Moderna has revealed it is working to create a single shot to help address both concerns.
Alaska’s largest hospital announced that a relentless coronavirus outbreak driven by the highly contagious Delta virus variant has left emergency room patients waiting hours in their vehicles and forced medical teams to ration care.
While tens of millions of Americans continue to decline even a first Covid-19 vaccine, a small but growing number have sought out additional shots even though the FDA has not yet approved them and it remains unclear who precisely needs one and when.
A teacher’s group protesting mandatory vaccinations was seen in New York City marching across the Brooklyn Bridge, with some protesters chanting against Biden.
Staff at New York City charter schools outside city public school buildings will be required to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Another conservative talk radio host, Bob Enyart, who urged listeners to boycott the COVID-19 vaccine has died from the disease caused by exposure to the virus.
“While it is not inherently sinful to take an immorally-developed” vaccine, he wrote on his website last month, Enyart urged people to “boycott” the vaccines “to further increase social tension and put pressure on the child killers.”
Companies are trying to arrange the safe return of workers to big-city offices, but one factor remains beyond their control: the mass-transit commute.
Hospitals in the southern United States are running dangerously low on space in intensive care units, as the Delta variant has led to spikes in coronavirus cases not seen since last year’s deadly winter wave.
The New Orleans Saints have had eight members of the organization test positive for COVID-19, calling into question their status for Sunday’s game against the Carolina Panthers.
Rapper Nicki Minaj faced public backlash after tweeting the day before that a friend of her cousin developed swollen testicles and impotence after getting vaccinated against Covid-19.
A federal judge in New York has issued a temporary restraining order that stops the state from enforcing the COVID-19 vaccine mandate if a health care worker claims a religious exemption.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge David N. Hurd was handed down in a case filed against Gov. Kathy Hochul, health Commissioner Howard Zucker and state Attorney General Letitia James on behalf of 17 medical professionals.
“The vaccine mandate is suspended in operation to the extent that the (DOH) is barred from enforcing any requirement that employers deny religious exemptions from COVID-19 vaccinations or that they revoke any exemptions already granted before the vaccine mandate issued,” Hurd wrote.
The rapid spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus in New York City this summer has slowed in recent weeks, convincing some epidemiologists that the city’s third virus wave has begun to ebb. But others are bracing for an uptick in cases.
A school bus driver shortage is contributing to widespread transportation woes during the first week of NYC public school classes — even as city officials insist staffing levels are normal, a coalition of the city’s largest yellow school bus companies said.
Galway schools will pivot to virtual learning through the end of the week after logging a record number of COVID-19 cases in the first days of school.
A woman in her 50s is the 400th Albany County resident killed by coronavirus since it first appeared here in early 2020.
Public housing residents in NYC died from the coronavirus at a rate nearly twice their share of the city’s population, according to new data released by public health officials.
Many New Yorkers are still split on what they think about Hochul, according to a new Siena poll.
Forty-two percent view her favorably, compared to 17 percent who say they view her unfavorably. More than half of voters say Hochul has a more collaborative approach to leadership than her predecessor.
“While still largely unknown to a wide swath of New Yorkers, Governor Hochul begins her tenure with a lot of good will from voters,” Siena College spokesman Steve Greenberg said in a statement.
Disgraced ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo can keep the $5.1 million he made selling his memoir about the coronavirus crisis, the state’s ethics agency narrowly decided when a brand-new member appointed by Hochul sided with her predecessor.
State Attorney General Letitia James is calling for changes to the referral process for investigations after her office determined she could not probe an alleged leak to Cuomo from the state’s troubled ethics and lobbying regulator.
Amid a flurry of machinations within state government, New York’s ethics commission, JCOPE, voted overwhelmingly to seek a criminal investigation into the 2019 leak of confidential information to Cuomo.
GOP gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino called Hochul “Cuomo version 2.0” in a NY Post op-ed.
The firms that built Mario M. Cuomo Bridge are urging Hochul to resolve a nearly $1 billion-dollar dispute they had with her predecessor or risk having New York lose out on major contracting deals for good.
New York today will release its first draft of its redistricting map, which is unveiled every 10 years after the Census to show potential new district lines for the Assembly, State Senate, and House of Representatives.
Democratic lawmakers in New York and D.C. are already laying the groundwork to reject the proposed maps, plotting to use their supermajorities in Albany to draw new district boundaries for the next decade that might eliminate as many as five GOP-held seats.
Democrats’ legislative supermajorities could redraw district lines as they please once they vote more than once to reject any final maps proposed by the commission.
“Hamilton,” “The Lion King,” “Wicked” and “Chicago” all reopened for vaccinated and masked audiences as theater tries to come back after the long pandemic shutdown. “Lackawanna Blues” had its first preview.
Curtis Sliwa, the long-shot GOP candidate for City Hall, slung some arrows at his Democratic opponent, Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams, in an attempt to enliven the mayoral race with seven weeks until the general election.
Sliwa criticized some of Adams’ economic recovery plans, including a proposal to tax the city’s wealthy to help subsidize transit costs.
Adams is running for mayor as the outsider’s insider.
Cuomo’s resignation last month left the fate of several of his pet projects up in the air. At least one — his proposed extension of Manhattan’s High Line — is going ahead.
The reputed octogenarian boss of the Colombo crime family and his top two aides were busted yesterday morning on racketeering and extortion charges over their menacing move to seize control of a local labor union, court documents charge.
NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio finally signaled he’ll be taking measures to address the life-threatening conditions that have persisted on Rikers Island for months, but correction officers and reform advocates are attacking the plan as too little, too late.
A Queens grand jury declined to indict a former NYPD cop caught on camera appearing to choke a man until he passed out — the first criminal case brought against a police officer after the state made chokeholds illegal.
City officials debuted a long-awaited bike lane on the 138-year-old Brooklyn Bridge that replaces one lane of traffic on its Manhattan-bound roadway.
After the city promised a program to transform the shadowy world of basement apartments, its initiative has largely foundered. De Blasio slashed the budget during the pandemic, and only eight homes are participating.
One million New Yorkers, or about 14 percent of the population, still have no broadband internet, and low-income residents are far more likely to lack the service, according to a report from state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office.
A PEF official told a state Senate committee that years of staffing and budget cuts at the state Office for People With Developmental Disabilities have created critical shortfalls in the ability to provide quality and accessible services for at-risk New Yorkers.
The Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Science (ACPHS) has opened the first-ever Center for Biopharmaceutical Education and Training (CBET) in the state.
Rensselaer County Executive Steve McLaughlin spent 12 hours Sunday blocked from using Twitter, perhaps his favorite platform for commenting on politics, after posting a tweet that insulted a CNN journalist.
There is no resolution currently under consideration by Schenectady lawmakers that would either “defund” or fund police operations, yet the issue is causing significant debate.
A conservative group is asking the Office of Congressional Ethics to launch an investigation of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for accepting free tickets to Monday’s Met Gala, where she wore a custom gown that said “Tax the Rich.”
Norm Macdonald, the longtime “Saturday Night Live” funnyman known best as the host of “Weekend Update,” died at the age of 61 after succumbing to a nine-year battle with cancer that he kept a secret.
Apple has updated its software for iPhones to address a critical vulnerability that independent researchers say has been exploited by notorious surveillance software to spy on a Saudi activist.
Apple also unveiled four new iPhones, a new Apple Watch and new iPads during a virtual media event held from California.
