Today's Additions

• I found a few more files on my computer from our Southern Comfort Cooking Club Class, the recipes for cornbread casserole, broccoli cornbread, and lemon squares which have been added to the site.
• Link of the Week: Geni: Everyone's Related http://geni.com
• The sub-index pages of the OORS Google Group now appear more uniform.
  

Link of the Week

Geni: Everyone's Related

Whether you're a serious genealogist or simply looking for ways to strengthen the connections with your family, Geni is a great place to start. A social networking site with a twist, Geni's construct is family connections, and only your family can see your family tree. More than just a family history site, its purpose is to put people in contact with one another.

The screen-capture above shows a bit of my family tree page, zoomed out to conceal the names, with a navigation bar at the bottom giving a wide-angle view. You can see the chart even goes off both ends of that. (The white square left of center represents me, while the top blue square represents my 3rd great-grandfather, William Nuttall.

Geni has lots of features, like places to compile contact lists, photo albums to share and in which to tag family members, email birthday reminders, etc. My favorite is the tie-in. When I started this, I added my parents' family, including the in-laws, but then my sisters-in-law added their own connections. If I click on their name, their family tree is altogether different, showing connections to their in-laws, and so on. It creates a fabulous web of connection and an awareness history of not only yourself, but those who touch you.

Back to William Nuttall: if you could explore his connections (which you can't unless you're related to him), you would see that one of his sons was my 2nd great-grandfather, while another was the 1st great-grandfather of our very own Ginger. I'm not certain if my mother or hers filled in the branches, but I know Ginger filled in her own family and her husband's, etc., and so forth, and so it goes and goes and goes.

Best of all, if some other descendant of his multitudinous children started on Geni entirely unaware of my existence, when they entered William Nuttall, Geni would notify them of more of William's descendants claiming him as the guy who crossed The Pond and then the plains to worship as he pleased and dedicate his life to service of the Lord. We could then tie in our family with theirs if it suited us.

It's also a great resource for doing your family history. My father stumbled upon one of his second or third cousins, they connected their own information with ours, and together we clarified some of the confusion inherent in trying to keep track of the progeny of a man living more than a hundred years ago, with four wives, half named Olga and the other half Katrina

Preach My Gospel

LDSBlogs.com

• As a forum of discussion, with posts from many different contributors, this site is an ideal reference for positive information about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and yet independent of it. Share this with those investigating the Gospel who want to hear the voice of 'normal' people. Like FAIRlds.org, LDSBlogs.com is not owned or affiliated with the Church, expresses the views only of the contributors and not necessarily those of its sponsor, The More Good Foundation, also unaffiliated with the Church. However, LDSBlogs.net is, well, a blog and based on opinion by its very nature, whereas FAIRlds.org addresses the issues from a more scholarly angle.
• The More Good Foundation also sponsors several other web pages and applications, including the LDS application on Facebook, Mormon Testimonies, and LDSFind.com, a Mormon search engine.
• Their Share The Gospel Online offers several excellent suggestions as to how you can follow Elder Ballard's counsel.
  

Today's Additions

Google Group Updates:

• The Gardening Club news on the home page has been updated to clarify the date and time of the feed store field trip. This will be on Friday, July 11th at 10:30 am. This conflicts with the Sewing Club's scheduled service project, but we'll try to make sure people who want to do both will be able to.
  
• New Feature: Recipe of the Day: This post may not be every day, but there are plenty of good, basic recipes floating around that itch to be disseminated. Remember, we're compiling a cookbook as we go, so send me yours! You can even submit tips or variations to what we've posted in the comment section. An index of these blog recipes is included on the Cooking Club Recipe page.
• I've also added the corn casserole recipe we had in March with the gumbo, but lots of you have brought dishes to the demonstrations for which we don't have the recipes (Verlayn's cheese dip recipe, for example). If you would email them to me so we can include them on the Google site, that would be terrific.
• I posted the new "Preach My Gospel" page which can be found following Home>Just Cool Stuff>Great Links>Preach My Gospel.
  

Okay. I can see how the "of the Day" clause of my little projects can become very dangerous for me. It's too easy to get sucked into the machine looking for good stuff and allowing the day to slip past without you. So, I'm going to discipline myself and make it 'of the Week' instead. It will work like this:

Sunday: Preach My Gospel
Monday: Weekly Update
Tuesday: Recipe of the Week
Wednesday: BYE (actually, Steadfast Faith in Christ: a Missionary Journal day)
Thursday: Link of the Week
Friday: Blog of the Week

Of course, I wouldn't mind at all of anyone got the urge to help contribute and thus increase the frequency/volume of the columns, but I have to pretend to discipline myself just a bit.

New Feature: Recipe of the Day

Eggplant Parmesan

from Claudia Del Papa

Ingredients:

1 eggplant
4 beaten eggs
salt an pepper to taste
about 2 cups flour
about 3 cups bread crumbs (Italian style)
about 1 cup fresh shredded Parmesan cheese
8- 10 oz mozzarella cheese, sliced
1 jar spaghetti sauce (Bertolli tomato & basil)

extra: bow-tie pasta prepared per directions

1. Peal the eggplant and cut into thin slices, about 1/4 in.
2. In a bowl beat the eggs, salt and pepper to taste.
3. In a plate pour the flour.
4. In another plate pour the bread crumbs.
5. In this order put these things: left - plate of flour, middle - bowl with eggs , right - plate of bread crumbs.
6. Flour each side of the slice eggplant, pour it in the egg bowl and
   last bread crumbs, both sides. Repeat with each eggplant slice.
7. Bake in a cookie sheet, at 375 degrees, for about 8 minutes, and then turn over
   and cook the other side for few more minutes, lightly basting each side with cooking spray (Pam) for crispness.
   
8. Pour tomato sauce over each slice of eggplant, (about 3 tablespoons), some Parmesan cheese, and a couple of slices of mozzarella cheese.
9. Bake few more minutes until the mozzarella melts.
10. In a plate, put some cook pasta, with some sauce, Parmesan cheese
    and the eggplant on top.

Yummy! my kids love this recipe, and is delicious and easy to make. Try it! I like to bake it instead of frying the eggplant, like restaurants do, as that is mushy and not healthy at all! :)

Enjoy it!

Claudia Del Papa