ST. PATRICK’S DAY CARB-LOADING RECIPES

The Gillen Coat of Arms is the knife and fork, so in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I must share some family recipes that celebrate the day.

My grandmother Mary (known as “Nanny” and beloved by her nine grandchildren) was born in Ireland, and came to the U.S. when she was 16.

Here are two of her recipes I make in her honor every year:

Irish Soda Bread

Ingredients:

4 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
1 cup raisins
1/2 cup currants or golden raisins
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 cup butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine dry ingredients and raisins. Cut in butter. Beat eggs, add them to mixture, then add milk. Place in loaf-shaped pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour.

Nanny’s Irish Apple Cake

Ingredients:

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter plus 1 tbsp butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg, beaten
4 Granny Smith apples, cored, peeled, and diced (2 cups)
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup all-purpose flour

Preheat oven to 350°F. Generously grease an 8-inch round cake pan.

NOTE: The trick to a great apple cake or pie is to brown the apples in butter first.

Heat 1 tbsp butter in frying pan. Gently brown the apples.

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the egg, browned apples, nuts, and vanilla and stir well. Sift in dry ingredients and mix well.

Pour batter into the prepared pan and bake until cake is lightly browned and a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean, about 45 minutes. Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then un-mold and serve hot or cold with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. Serves 10 to 12.

Enjoy! Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you all!

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WCAG 2.1: 312 checkpoints covering A, AA and AAA W3 accessibility guidelines
Section 508: 15 US federal guidelines covered by 59 accessibility checkpoints

Find out more about Mary Gillen’s Accessibility Testing & Remediation Services: Websites, PDFs, Office Docs & Videos

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In February 2019, WebAIM conducted an evaluation of the home pages for the top 1,000,000 web sites using the WAVE stand-alone API (with additional tools to collect site technology parameters). While this research focuses only on automatically detectable issues, the results paint a rather dismal picture of the current state of web accessibility.

Some results from the analysis:

• 97.8% of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures
• Low contrast text, below the WCAG 2 AA thresholds, was the most common accessibility issue detected.
• 33.6% of all images (12.3 per page on average) had missing alternative text (not counting alt=””).
• Skipped headings were present on 362,659 home pages (36.3% of all pages). 148,573 home pages (14.9%) had no headings present at all.
• 24.4% of pages had links with ambiguous link text, such as “click here”, “more”, “continue”, etc.
• Only 9.6% of home pages had a “skip” link present. However, 14.3% of these pages had skip links that were broken

Read the rest of The WebAIM Million Analysis

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WEBSITE ACCESSIBILITY TESTING & REMEDIATION SERVICES: Mary Gillen is an experienced Website Accessibility Compliance Auditor and Remediator. She can test your website to determine if it meets accessibility standards:

WCAG 2.1: 312 checkpoints covering A, AA and AAA W3 accessibility guidelines
Section 508: 15 US federal guidelines covered by 59 accessibility checkpoints

Find out more about Mary Gillen’s Accessibility Testing & Remediation Services: Websites, PDFs, Office Docs & Videos

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