Team Gray!

XM Radio’s Laugh USA is funny for the whole family. It plays several different comedians’ stand-up routines. The thing about the radio, though, obviously, is you can’t see the comedians. That would be ok if they only told audio jokes. But they’re telling visual jokes too, and Laugh USA chops the routines into little bits, so you sometimes  miss the context of the jokes. The more you listen, the more you may be able to piece together the whole joke, but not always. Now you can find some Laugh USA comedians on Netflix Instant Queue!

For the stand-up fan, Comedy Central Presents is almost too good to be true. We’re talking hundreds of comedians in this single title. And it’s available instantly for streaming, too? That alone is worth the download.

So I’m trolling through the massive list of comedians, and I find one of my favorites from Laugh USA—

Kathleen Madigan. Sample joke: "There’s always someone on Donohue saying, ‘wanna know why there’s floodin’ in the Midwest? I’ll tell you why there’s floodin’ in the Midwest, Phil. It says right in the Bible. God doesn’t like riverboat gambling!’ Right, Lady, like God couldn’t hide the dice. . ."

A bonus to watching Kathleen on the Comedy Central Special is that you get to see her perform some of those routines from Laugh USA. She’s shorter than I imagined. And her face is much more expressive. Her voice brims over with sarcasm as it is, but when you see her accompany her little chuckles with her smirks, it makes the jokes that much funnier.

You can watch Kathleen Madigan on Comedy Central Presents on Netflix Instant Queue, or you can download it from Amazon Video on Demand.

XM Radio’s Laugh USA is funny for the whole family. It plays several different comedians’ stand-up routines. The thing about the radio, though, obviously, is you can’t see the comedians. That would be ok if they only told audio jokes. But they’re telling visual jokes too, and Laugh USA chops the routines into little bits, so you sometimes  miss the context of the jokes. The more you listen, the more you may be able to piece together the whole joke, but not always. Now you can find some Laugh USA comedians on Netflix Instant Queue! I found Jim Gaffigan, Frank Caliendo, and John Pinette.

Now you can watch Brian Regan, easily one of the funniest comedians on Laugh USA. Turns out, he does a lot of stuff on Comedy Central as well. Go figure. Now those of us without cable can get in on the laughs.

Brian Regan grew up in a family of 7 kids. His jokes about growing up are my favorites. Sample joke: “It all went wrong the day they announced the spelling bee. Up until then I was an idiot but nobody else knew. All right kids, up against the wall. It’s time for public humiliation. Spell a word wrong, sit down in front of your friends. Great for little egos, huh? Hey, look at me! I’m a moron. I wasn’t even close!”

On the radio, Regan contrasts his idiot voice from his normal, narrating voice. On TV, the idiot voice has a face to go with it. He riffs on things from signs he reads, like how you would take so much more care driving around a truck with a sign that says, "Caution, Show Horses," than you would around a truck that said, "Just Dumb Donkeys." He takes it to the absurd by making donkey noises. Not to leave the horses alone, he comes back and wonders if horses really say ‘neigh.’ What about dogs saying "bow-wow?" "Don’t you hear the bow-wow?"

It’s hard to take quotes from this Comedy Central special; you have to see the whole show to appreciate it. Download Brian Regan today from Netflix Instant Queue.

You can watch Brian Regan: Standing Up on Amazon Video on Demand, or Netflix Instant Queue. If you like what you saw, stick around either place and download another show.

Don’t have Netflix? Click here.

Remember when potatoes were vegetables? Before they became the carb devil?

Remember non white food diets? Where if food was white, it was bad for you, and if you managed to stay away from it, you would magically drop the pounds.

I had my reservations about this eating plan, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then I started the South Beach diet and discovered the wonderful cauliflower. The cauliflower is a most perfect white vegetable. You can even doctor it up to taste like the potato’s tangy cousin.

First, you can try the faux mashed potatoes. (Your kids won’t like that name, btw. But they won’t like any name that has to do with cauliflower…)

You boil the cauliflower forever, and, reserving some of the liquid, mash them up with non dairy creamer and a little bit of butter. Add just a little bit of the liquid you cooked it in, and a chicken bouillon cube or two if you’re so inclined. It really is a good mashed potato substitute.

Especially if you’ve been off potatoes for a while.

But the dish I tried the other night? Made me say, potato who? It was au gratin cauliflower. I cut up the cauliflower as thin as I could, although it wanted to just crumble to bits, which was ok, too. I layered cauliflower with evaporated milk, a few slices of butter, and a little brown rice flower. I topped each layer with grated cheddar and parmesan cheese, and baked it until everything was soft and gooey. I nearly hurt myself on this one.

A few days later, I found myself in the store looking for zucchini for Sunday feast. I know…it’s December! So when I found no zucchini, I glanced over at the winter squashes. My daughter and I weren’t sure whether acorn squash was a hit, or whether it was butternut. We remembered we didn’t much care for spaghetti squash. I wandered over to the rutabaga. I don’t know what those taste like, but it reminded me of turnips, which reminded me of this wonderful recipe from the Moosewood cookbook .

I brought home the turnips, and my older daughter couldn’t wait for Sunday. She’d remembered that we’d used leftover pasty filling for a spread on bread.

I think turnips taste better raw than cooked. They are spicy like radishes when raw, but become bitter when cooked. The onions and the cheese in the pasties will somewhat mask the bitterness, not to mention the pie crust. They also mellow over time, and are tastier on the third day than the second or first.

I never understood why a big oblong purple vegetable was called eggplant. The white ones make a little more sense. But nightmare flashbacks to eggplant parmesan and some ‘Greek’ dish my mother liked scare me away from trying white eggplant.

What white vegetables do you prefer?