Your gateway to endless inspiration
Ingredients - Blog Posts
Chocolate Mousse - Simple Chocolate Mousse Once you prepare this simple chocolate mousse with just three ingredients and the help of a microwave, you'll never use another recipe!
Spicy Tequila Mango Chicken - Meat and Poultry Tenderized chicken is marinated in a garlicky hot sauce and simmered with sweet mangos in this uniquely flavored mango chicken recipe that delivers a kick with each bite.
Easy Ham Croquettes - Appetizers and Snacks These crunchy ham croquettes combine tangy mustard flavor with salty ham flavor to create a creamy appetizer that you won't be able to get enough of.
Easy, Excellent Baked Flounder - Fish
Ingredients the series (2020-2021)
Mexican Whole Wheat Flour Tortillas - Bread Mexican tortillas perfect for fajitas, quesadillas, Mexican pizzas, burritos, nachos. They freeze well. Just stuff them with anything you may have on hand! I learned this from watching my mom in Mexico.
Red Wine Vinaigrette You can make a traditional red wine vinaigrette in a matter of minutes from scratch using ingredients you probably already have in your pantry.
Soups, Stews and Chili - Creamed Broccoli and Mushroom Soup This is a delicious and easy recipe that's great on cold winter days. I always use fresh ingredients when possible but you can use frozen or canned items if you wish.
Graham Cracker Crust This incredibly simple recipe can be made in just a few minutes and calls for only 3 ingredients to make a homemade graham cracker crust for baked or no-bake pies.
OMG! Quinoa Patties - Squash These adaptable quinoa-based vegetarian patties can be eaten for breakfast, as a grab-and-go snack, or as a vegetarian burger.
Soups, Stews and Chili - Vegetable Soup - Stuffed Pepper Soup I
Jerky - Air Fryer Oven Beef Jerky A few simple ingredients and some perseverance are all that are required to prepare a sizable quantity of homemade beef jerky in an air fryer.
Meat and Poultry - Meghann's Chicken Scallopini Chicken breasts are pounded thin for quick cooking. Top with a rich and creamy onion sauce, and they're a dish your whole family will love.
Potato - Lithuanian Kugela
Main Dishes - Hot Dogs and Corn Dogs - Baked Hot Dog Sandwiches This tasty baked hot dog sandwich recipe combines chopped hot dogs with classic toppings and stuffs them into buns.
The Special Ingredients…of Earth!
With its blue skies, puffy white clouds, warm beaches and abundant life, planet Earth is a pretty special place. A quick survey of the solar system reveals nothing else like it. But how special is Earth, really?
One way to find out is to look for other worlds like ours elsewhere in the galaxy. Astronomers using our Kepler Space Telescope and other observatories have been doing just that!
In recent years they’ve been finding other planets increasingly similar to Earth, but still none that appear as hospitable as our home world. For those researchers, the search goes on.
Another group of researchers have taken on an entirely different approach. Instead of looking for Earth-like planets, they’ve been looking for Earth-like ingredients. Consider the following:
Our planet is rich in elements such as carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur…the stuff of rocks, air, oceans and life. Are these elements widespread elsewhere in the universe?
To find out, a team of astronomers led by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with our participation, used Suzaku. This Japanese X-ray satellite was used to survey a cluster of galaxies located in the direction of the constellation Virgo.
The Virgo cluster is a massive swarm of more than 2,000 galaxies, many similar in appearance to our own Milky Way, located about 54 million light years away. The space between the member galaxies is filled with a diffuse gas, so hot that it glows in X-rays. Instruments onboard Suzaku were able to look at that gas and determine which elements it’s made of.
Reporting their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, they reported findings of iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur throughout the Virgo galaxy cluster. The elemental ratios are constant throughout the entire volume of the cluster, and roughly consistent with the composition of the sun and most of the stars in our own galaxy.
When the Universe was born in the Big Bang 13.8 billon years ago, elements heavier than carbon were rare. These elements are present today, mainly because of supernova explosions.
Massive stars cook elements such as, carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur in their hot cores and then spew them far and wide when the stars explode.
According to the observations of Suzaku, the ingredients for making sun-like stars and Earth-like planets have been scattered far and wide by these explosions. Indeed, they appear to be widespread in the cosmos. The elements so important to life on Earth are available on average and in similar relative proportions throughout the bulk of the universe. In other words, the chemical requirements for life are common.
Earth is still special, but according to Suzaku, there might be other special places too. Suzaku recently completed its highly successful mission.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com