The Italian American Journal

The Resemblance Is Uncanny.... A Harvard student was bewildered on a visit to Vatican City, not because of the beauty or the history, but because a 500-year-old painting by Raphael which shows a man who is an exact doppelganger of Sylvester Stallone.

That's What Friends Are For

Live with Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Dionne Warwick and Stevie Wonder

Angel Food Cake

Angel food cake Charlotte J. Crocker angel no-fool cake Prep: 40 minutes Cook: 30 minutes Makes: 10 servings The Tribune's Renee Enna shared her tortuous odyssey to master angel food cake, a classic dessert she describes as a "devil in disguise." Her hilarious tale of failure upon failure finally leads to this fool-proof recipe. Her result combines the best of versions from Betty Crocker and a woman named Charlotte J., who posted her recipe and tips online, with more guidelines from Enna. 1 cup cake flour 7/8 cup sugar plus 3/4 cup sugar 12 egg whites 1 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla 1/2 teaspoon almond extract 1. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Measure the cake flour and 7/8 cup sugar into a bowl (for 7/8 cup, measure a cup, then remove 2 tablespoons); sift together. Set aside. 2. Combine the egg whites, cream of tartar, salt, vanilla and almond extract into the bowl of an electric mixer; beat on medium speed with electric mixer until soft peaks form. (Do not beat until stiff, no matter what any recipe says!) Slowly add the 3/4 cup sugar, beating on medium-high speed until combined. (Do not overbeat!) 3. Reduce speed to low; slowly mix in the flour-sugar mixture just until incorporated. 4. Gently spoon batter into a 10-inch aluminum tube pan. Gently cut through batter with a butter knife. This breaks up any air bubbles in the batter. (One time around is sufficient. And don't bang the pan on the counter! It's a cake, not a slab of meat.) 5. Bake until top of cake is golden brown and crusty, and top springs back when lightly touched, 30 to 40 minutes. (Do not ever "turn cake around halfway through baking," no matter how trusted the source. Leave it alone, opening the door only when checking for doneness near end of baking.) Remove cake from oven; turn pan upside down. Let stand until completely cool, about 1 1/2 hours. 6. To remove cake from pan, carefully loosen all pan edges including the tube's with a butter knife. Invert onto your serving platter. To frost and fill, halve cake horizontally with a serrated knife, using a gentle sawing motion. Fill center and frost cake with whipped cream frosting.

Another polar freeze this winter in Milwaukee? Not quite By Meg Jones

For every Wisconsinite who ventured outdoors last winter, who shoveled and shivered for months, there's slightly good news. Forecasters are predicting the nastiness quotient to drop a notch this winter. The prediction calls for a colder and snowier winter than normal in Wisconsin — but not as cold and not as snowy as the winter of 2013-'14, when the phrase "polar vortex" suddenly became part of everyone's vocabulary. "It will not be as bad as last winter, but last winter was very extreme," said Jack Boston, senior meteorologist for AccuWeather Global Weather Center. El Niño is caused by prolonged warming in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures. "Generally during a stronger El Niño we have a warmer winter, and with a weaker El Niño it gives us an equal chance for above or below average temperatures and precipitation," said Miller. "There's no strong signal telling us one thing or the other. It's a tough one to predict. I don't envy (the Climate Prediction Center) in that regard." Milwaukee suffered through the 10th coldest winter on record, with an average temperature of 17.2 degrees, which was 7.7 degrees below average. And Milwaukee's snowfall of 54.8 inches between December and February was a whopping 19.7 inches above average, said Sarah Marquardt, a National Weather Service meteorologist based in Sullivan. "Last winter we were dominated by pushes of colder air from Canada," said Marquardt, adding that polar vortex "is just a fancy name for this cold air that originated to our north. It was a cold air mass in Canada that dropped down over us, and the phrase took off." Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel

The Script

Six Degrees of Separation

Macy's to open at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving By Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz

Black Friday is continuing its creep earlier into Thanksgiving Day, with Macy's opening its doors at prime turkey-coma time. Macy's plans to open at 6 p.m. Thanksgiving, two hours earlier than last year, “in response to the significant, sustained customer interest in last year's opening on Thanksgiving, both at Macy's and other retailers,” the department store chain said in a statement Tuesday. For the first time, The Walnut Room inside Macy’s State Street also will open to the Thanksgiving Day crowds, inviting families to have Thanksgiving dinner there starting at 6 p.m., a spokesperson said. The Walnut Room, a rather grand restaurant that dates back to 1907, is a chief draw during the holidays as the home of the store’s 45-foot Great Tree. Macy's, which has 840 stores, had resisted following the trend of opening on Thanksgiving Day until last year, when it opened at 8 p.m. In 2012, it opened at midnight. Store traffic on Thanksgiving Day grew 27 percent last year to 45 million people, or 31.8 percent of holiday shoppers, up from 35 million in 2012, according to a survey commissioned by the National Retail Federation over Black Friday weekend. Black Friday is still the most popular shopping day, with 92 million people, or 65.2 percent of holiday shoppers, according to the National Retail Federation. Chicago Tribune

In my own write: The beauty of fragility By Judy Montagu

The succa is an object lesson in the importance of contrast in human life.

The transience of the material world and one’s place in it is, of course, one of the lessons that a week spent in a flimsy hut open to the sky is meant to drive home. And whether that sojourn sharpens the observant Jew’s belief that the only real permanence is God Himself; or serves to remind the secular Jew that the search for meaning in life necessarily transcends the acquisition of a luxurious home and a pile of possessions, the succa in its simplicity and fragility speaks to all. When you sit in it of an autumn evening and not only hear the wind blow but feel it blowing; when a sudden shower of rain is not something that you casually observe happening on the other side of your living room window but is actual wetness dropping on your head and diluting your soup, then, if you are open to it, you gain an immediate, personal understanding of physical vulnerability that goes beyond the theoretical. But how many of us, beyond a fleeting sense of pity, can say during 51 weeks of the year that we identify in any real way with the fragility that is ever-present in the uncertain lives of these hundreds of thousands of dispossessed individuals and others like them with whom we have no personal contact? For one week in the year, huddled inside our leaky little huts as the evenings suddenly turn cold, there is more chance of our internalizing what being homeless actually means and moving beyond pity for the other to compassion and fellow-feeling. At the same time, that simple little dwelling, giving us a small experience of fragility and uncertainty, can lead us to a new appreciation of the things we take for granted, such as a permanent roof over our heads. In a 2005 piece called “Succot: The beauty of fragility,” Rabbi Daniel Greyber agreed that beauty is linked to vulnerability. “We try so hard to protect ourselves, to protect our children. We build walls. We build strong, comfortable houses with roofs and heat for shelter and quiet. But we cannot be made invulnerable; we cannot keep ourselves safe and truly celebrate the beauty of this world.” Perhaps the succa is telling us that our potential to act and to appreciate is, paradoxically, increased when we recognize our fragility. The Jerusalem Post