Archive for December, 2010

Recipe Favorites – Scalloped Potatoes

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

Initiation – My cousin, Hugh Moran, an executive chef for Budhakan in Philadelphia, made a version of this while he was the executive chef for Cheetah Learning’s office in Windsor, CT.  I make this when I have a big crowd for dinner.

Planning

Ingredients

  • 5 pounds fingerling potatoes
  • 3 large cloves of garlic
  • 1 pound swiss cheese
  • 1 large onion
  • 1 quart heavy whipping cream
  • 1/2 cup cultured butter
  • Salt to taste
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • Pepper to taste
Execution
1. Thinly slice potatoes, garlic, and onions – use a food processor or a mandolin to speed this up.
2. Grate the cheese (use the food processor to speed this up).
3.  Use 1 tbs of the butter to grease a large backing dish – at least 12 x 15 inches (you get get the aluminum large ones in most grocery stores).
4. Layer the ingredients in four layers – potatoes, onions, cheese, cream, butter then start again with another layer of potatoes, etc.  Sprinkle the layers with salt, pepper and a dash of nutmeg.
5. Cover with tinfoil
6. Cook in a 375 oven for 90 minutes.

Monitor and Control

After 90 minutes, check.  If the potatoes are soft, it is ready.  If not, put it in the oven for longer and recheck every 15 minutes.
This is NOT for people on low fat, low salt, low carb, low calorie diets.  It is very decadent and very good.

Closeout

This makes GREAT leftovers.

Recipe Favorites – Grilled Eggplant

Sunday, December 26th, 2010

Initiation – I use this blog as my own personal log – and I find myself coming here frequently to check on my own recipe favorites.   AND people who participate in my culinary experiments always ask me for the recipes.  I’m sharing some of my classics.

Grilled Eggplant

This one is absolutely amazing.  I modified it a bit from a cook book called Italian kitchen based on my several decades long experience grilling eggplant.

Planning

Ingredients:

  • 2 Large eggplants or 8 smaller eggplants
  • 1 lemon
  • 1 cup extra virgin olive oil (divided into 2 1/2 cup portions)
  • 2 tbs balsamic vinegar
  • 1 tsp sugar
  • 1/4 cup coarsely chopped mint
  • salt and pepper
Execution

Selecting and Preparing the Eggplant – You can use large eggplant and slice it about 1/2 inch thick or use the more narrow ones and quarter it.  This recipe calls for two large eggplants or you can use 8 small ones and quarter them.

Sweating the Eggplant –  At french cooking school, we were told that if you get eggplant fresh from your garden there is no need to salt it prior to using it to remove the bitterness.  Seeing that I would only get eggplant from my garden for several weeks of the year, my practice is to start any recipe requiring eggplant, to “sweat” the eggplant FIRST.   To sweat the eggplant, after you slice or quarter it, sprinkle it with a little salt.  You will see it start to sweat.   Dab off the sweat with a paper towel. Flip it over and salt the other side.   Again, dab off the sweat with a paper towel.   It’s now ready to use.

Marinating the Eggplant

Brush the eggplant with olive oil – use a good brand.  It makes a huge difference.   Let sit for about a half hour.

Dressing

I make my dressings at least an hour before use because it give the ingredients time to blend.   For this dressing, you need 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, the grated peel and juice of one lemon, 2 tbs balsamic vinegar, 1 tsp sugar, 1/4 cup coarsely chopped mint,  dash of pepper and salt.

Grill

Put the eggplant on the grill and cook until it is soft and translucent.

Eat

Cover the grilled eggplant with the dressing.  Serve immediately.

Monitor and Control

This is an eat it as it comes off the grill item.  This very rarely makes it into the kitchen.

Closeout

Make sure to make the dressing ahead of time before you put the eggplant on the grill.

Traditional Higher Education – Is It Really Worth It?

Friday, December 10th, 2010
Traditional Higher Education – Raising the Price by a Factor of 3 Has Some Young People wondering if it’s Really Worth it.
For Immediate Release

London England, December 10, 2010

While students are rioting in the streets and protesting the government hike on college tuition rates by a factor of three, young entrepreneur, Bernhard Peters , sits in his Chiswick flat and wonders why people even bother with traditional education anymore.  Considering that in the US, 1/3 of new graduates find themselves unemployed months and years after they complete four to five years of grueling, and often irrelevant education, does it really make that much sense to go this route?

Peters recently joined Cheetah Learning , a US based company with licensees worldwide, as their CFO in training. He jumped on board after seeing his fiancé’s cousin earn his Certified Associates in Project Management (CAPM) from Cheetah.  This cousin just wasn’t that intrigued by what he was doing in college.  Tiring of the endless stream of boring college classes for which he saw no value, he left. To placate his parents, he enrolled in Cheetah Learning’s online Project Management Fundamentals Certificate program. In six short weeks, he earned a globally recognized certification in project management. In another six weeks, his company promoted him to run a new product line and he converted his entry level $30,000 a year job to a $65,000 a year position. In his first year as a CAPM, he helped grow a brand new product line from nothing to over $400,000 in sales!

Peters, part of the “boomerang generation,” was sold on Cheetah’s innovative approach and wanted to be part of this fun and fast moving company. After leaving the standard “new hire, right-out-of-college” job as an auditor for a large accounting firm when his fiancée made a career move to London, he found it hard to get another professional position with an exciting career path.  Knowing the CEO of Cheetah due to their shared interests in gourmet cooking, she offered him the position as CFO in training, which he immediately recognized as a fantastic fit.  The entrepreneurial nature and opportunities presented by Cheetah Learning were an exhilarating breath of fresh air!

So there are very viable alternatives in the market place to attain education that really does get you ahead – and FAST! They aren’t your traditional routes, but then we aren’t living in a very traditional world anymore, are we?

Links for Additional Information

www.cheetahlearning.com/rich

About Cheetah Learning

Over 50,000 people have gone through Cheetah Learning’s classroom and online Project Management programs around the world over the past decade. Cheetah Learning was founded in 1999 by entrepreneur Michelle LaBrosse, PMP. LaBrosse was recognized by the Project Management Institute as one of the most influential woman in Project Management worldwide. In 2008, the Project Management Institute named Cheetah Learning the Professional Development Provider of the year (a highly prestigious award in a filed of over 1600 Registered Education Providers in Project Management).

For More Information Contact

Cheetah Learning

Rita Soto

503 N. Division Street

Carson City, NV 89703

888-659-2013

Rita.soto@cheetahlearning.com

Energy of Emotions

Saturday, December 4th, 2010

energyoremotions

Energy of Emotions – Power V. Force – Pages 68 – 69
Outside View Life View Level Emotion Process Drive Scale Energy of thought & emotion in vs., Benefit Out
Self Is Enlightment Ineffable Pure Consciousness Salvation of Humanity 800 1,000,000
All-Being Perfect Peace Bliss Illumination Good of all Mankind 700 100,000
One Complete Joy Calm Confidence Transfiguration Your Success is My Success 600 10,000
Loving Benign Love Reverence Revelation We can all be happy 500 1,000
Wise Meaningful Reason Understanding Abstraction We’re all capable of learning 400 100
Merciful Harmonious Acceptance Forgiveness Transcedence Others are inherently good 350 50
Inspiring Hopeful Willingness Optimism Intention Life is good. 300 10
Enabling Satisfactory Neutrality Trust Release The universe helps me survive 250 5
Permitting Feasible Courage Affirmation Empowerment I survive even if other’s don’t, won’t or can’t 200 0
Indifferent Demanding Pride Scorn Inflation I only survive if I help others survive 175 0.1
Vengeful Antagonistic Anger Hate Aggression I only survive if I can control you 150 0.01
Denying Disppointing Desire Craving Enslavement I only survive if you give me what I want 125 0.001
Punitive Frightening Fear Anxiety Withdrawl I only survive if you don’t survive 100 0.0001
Disdainful Tragic Grief Regret Despondency You don’t survive so I won’t survive 75 0.00001
Condeming Hopeless Apathy Despair Abdication Why does anyone want to survive 50 0.000001
Vindictive Evil Guilt Blame Destruction None of us need to survive 25 0.0000001
Despising Miserable Shame Humiliation Elimination Just get me out of here for good 0 0.00000001

The book Power vs. Force by David Hawkins, published in 1995 is about the energy of emotions.   Hawkins measured the energetic response of various emotional states and plotted them on a logarithmic scale.   The last columns from drive over to the right are columns I created based on my understanding of his work (I welcome debate as this as I am just exploring these ideas but find it a very good behavioral model).   The drive column is in what drives people to experience specific emotional states.   The zero value in the row starting with the term permitting is significant.  Any state of being above that line – for any energy you put to living in the respective state, provides you with a return shown in last column (based on his logarithmic scale for the energy of emotions).  My company Cheetah Learning operates at the drive level – Your Success is My Success.  By living at this level, we get a 10,000 times return on energy invested.   Anyone who knows my lifestyle and the lifestyle that we’ve created for the entire Cheetah team is probably nodding in agreement on this statement.

The issue is that most of us have been conditioned through our up bringing and the current state of our society to live below the line.  This means that by living in the emotional states below this line, the energy we put into our existence actually depletes us – we get less energy out than we put in.  For example, lets say that you are living at the vengeful level.  If the energy you put into that emotion was equivalent to $1.  For every $1 you put into that emotional state, you would get 1 cent return.   Sounds almost as bad as investing with Bernie Madoff.
We all get to deal with others who live below the line from time to time.    While we can empathize with their reality, we do not have to accept their reality as our own and live in their energy depleting states.  And we can sometimes get dragged below the line as well by our own conditioned responses to situations.   I’ve attached a model we’ve been teaching in our new courses called Conversational Akido that helps change conditioned responses so it’s far easier to live above the line as a matter of habit.   Also, by consistently living above the line – we can more easily bring people up to our level rather than going down to their level. When you set up embedded systems in your life at home and at work, it is easy to consistently live a much more energized existence above the line.
For those folks doing the Influencing strategies course with me I thought this would be insightful – as the work he is sharing in the book is at the highest level.