AP PHOTOS: TV icon Larry Hagman through the years

Larry Hagman, whose masterful portrayal of the charmingly loathsome J.R. Ewing on “Dallas” brought him his greatest stardom, has died at the age of 81. That role on CBS’ long-running nighttime soap opera was a ratings bonanza for the network, particularly the “Who shot J.R.?” story twist.

Years before “Dallas,” Hagman gained TV fame as a nice guy with the fluffy 1965-70 NBC comedy “I Dream of Jeannie.” He played Capt. Tony Nelson, an astronaut whose life is disrupted when he finds a comely genie, portrayed by Barbara Eden, and takes her home to live with him.

He also starred in two short-lived sitcoms, “The Good Life” (NBC, 1971-72) and “Here We Go Again” (ABC, 1973). His film work included well-regarded performances in “The Group,” ”Harry and Tonto” and “Primary Colors.”

Here, in images, are some of Hagman’s memorable moments:

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

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Lining up even earlier for Black Friday becomes a shop priority

In a tradition that seems to take a bigger slice of Thanksgiving every year, hordes of deal-sniffing shoppers descended on Southland stores Thursday, elbowing their way in search of toys, video games and that time-honored Black Friday symbol: cut-rate television sets. As nightfall came, they huddled in long lines, clutching coupons and hatching shopping strategies.

Rebecca Abbott, 42, of Torrance had it down to a science Thursday night. The accountant said she was out the door of the local Toys R Us store in 20 minutes with a shopping cart full of Christmas gifts for her two daughters. 

Her fourth time shopping on Black Friday, Abbott had spent a few hours in Toys R Us the day before scoping out her plan of attack. The first item on her list: a Rockstar Mickey Mouse doll, normally priced at $59.99 but selling for just $19.99.

"You have to have a strategy for this Black Friday madness," she said as she headed for the door. "First-timers will walk around all day looking at deals," Abbott said. "I got in, grabbed my stuff and got out." Her cart was overflowing with large toys — primarily Barbie and Mickey Mouse items. 

PHOTOS: Black Friday shoppers hunt for deals

At a Wal-Mart in Panorama City, just after 8 p.m., "it was really crazy, but you could still walk," said Marya Huaman, 23, as she left the store with her dad, her two infant sons and three bags full of Fisher-Price toys.

"No, you couldn't," scoffed her father, Edward Huaman. "I didn't see anyone fighting, but they will be soon. This is madness."

Last year, Thanksgiving night was marred by a pepper spray "shopping rage" incident at a Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch that injured at least seven people and forced employees to evacuate part of the store. One person was hospitalized.

Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Andy Smith said Thursday that the night appeared to be running smoothly across Los Angeles. "In general, I think things have gone really well," he said. "It sounds like the stores have taken proper precautions and everyone is aware of the hazards of Black Friday."

After retailers last year moved the opening bell for Black Friday sales to midnight, this year there were even more customers eager to get a jump on the traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping season. Wal-Mart, Sears and Toys R Us began rolling out their door busters at 8 p.m. on Turkey Day, followed by Target at 9 p.m. Macy's, Kohl's and Best Buy were set to open at midnight.

A handful of chains such as Kmart and Old Navy also had daytime hours on Thursday. And online merchants were touting bargains all day and night.

About 147 million shoppers are expected this all-important holiday weekend, with more logging in for online specials by Cyber Monday, according to the National Retail Federation. In all, the trade group estimated that holidays sales will rise 4.1% this year, to $586 billion.

"Though the Black Friday tradition is here to stay, there's no question that it has changed in recent years," NRF Chief Executive Matthew Shay said in a statement.

Many shoppers were perfectly content to queue up. At Best Buy electronic stores across the Southland, people waited for hours — and sometimes days — in tents before the midnight opening.

But many workers were angry about spending Turkey Day away from loved ones.

Frustrated retail employees and families have taken to creating online petitions at Change.org to beg companies not to cut into Thanksgiving dinners. More than 20 online petitions have popped up in recent weeks. Lines grew throughout the afternoon and into the evening as anxious shoppers surveyed the competition in line.

Throughout Southern California there were reports of lines wrapped around stores. In Glendale, more than 750 shoppers were lined up outside the Target at the Galleria.

For shoppers who just couldn't wait until Thursday night — much less Black Friday — some retailers opened their doors all day on Thanksgiving.

The sales weren't quite as glorious as the Black Friday specials that stores promise to roll out later. But they were pretty good nonetheless, shoppers said.

JoAnne Garcia walked into Kmart in Burbank in search of a roasting pan in which to cook her turkey. She walked out 90 minutes later, having shelled out $491, including $329 for an RCA 39-inch LCD flat-panel TV.

"The roasting pan was $14.99," Garcia said, laughing at how much she spent as she rolled her cart to the parking lot.

To the 53-year-old aerospace machinist, shopping on Thanksgiving made perfect sense.

Standing near a store display touting "Freak Out Pricing," Garcia explained her theory about shopping while cooking. "You get up, throw your turkey in the oven, and you come back and it's all done."

walter.hamilton@latimes.com

joseph.serna@latimes.com

Contributing to this report were staff writers Wesley Lowery, Marisa Gerber, Nicole Santa Cruz and Andrew Khouri.

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Celestial Finger Painting

This colour-composite image was obtained by FORS1 on ANTU. It displays a sky area near the Chamaeleon I complex of bright nebulae and hot stars in the constellation of the same name, close to the southern celestial pole.This picture was taken a few days before the Paranal Inauguration and the "hand-over" to the astronomers on April 1, 1999.This colour composite photo of the Chamaeleon I area is based on six 1-min exposures obtained with VLT UT1 + FORS1 in the V, R and I bands. The sky field measures 6.8 x 11.2 arcmin2; North is up and East is left.

Image: ESO [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

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The New Old Age Blog: Home Health Care Help by the Hour

Here is a bright idea that ought to spread: You call your home care agency and say you will need your mother’s aide for the normal two hours on Monday and Wednesday, but for just half an hour (to drive her to a doctor’s office) on Tuesday, then 90 minutes on Thursday. And the agency says, “Sure.”

It sounds logical to hire someone to help — with bathing, dressing, errands, meal preparation, medication reminders – for only as many hours as an older adult needs assistance. But it is actually unusual for companies to offer such flexibility.

The majority of agencies require a four-hour minimum. Having to spend $80  — the national average cost for home care is $21 an hour — if you only need $40 worth of help is a big barrier for families trying to keep their elderly relatives living at home longer. A few agencies allow you to hire for fewer than four hours, but at higher rates.

But Mission Healthcare in San Diego, Calif., a three-year-old agency that began with Medicare-certified skilled home nursing and hospice care, expanded to general home care this summer and decided that clients should be able to specify how much help they want – in 15-minute increments — and will pay for.

“We’ll come for as long as they need us to,” said Mark Kimsey, one of Mission’s four directors. “In one hour, a well-trained caregiver can get the client bathed and dressed, prepare three meals and have them organized for the day.” (I have to think that is a speedy caregiver with a not-too-frail client, but still … )

Can Mission, which charges $19 to $20 an hour, actually make money this way? Though overall the agency serves 1,100 clients, its fledgling home care business is still small: 30 aides caring for just 60 clients. The aides can get benefits if they work enough hours, a bonus for them and for consumers (better employees, lower turnover), but an additional cost for the company.

The directors say they are profitable already, and that the approach will succeed because more people will like the flexibility and potential savings, and sign up. It is also true, let’s acknowledge, that a person who can get by with an hour or two a day for now may well need more help eventually, a boost for Mission’s bottom line.

Competitors are no doubt watching to see if this works. I’m curious, too, to see if the policy catches on. “Consumers can change the marketplace if they want to,” Mr. Kimsey said. It would be nice to think that is true.

Would you use this kind of hourly service, if it were available?

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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The Lede Blog: Vignettes of Black Friday

With promotions, discounts and doorbusters already well under way on Thanksgiving Day itself, many big-box retailers are making Black Friday stretch longer than ever. The Lede is checking out the mood of American consumers in occasional vignettes Thursday and Friday as the economically critical holiday shopping season kicks off.

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New California legislators get a warm welcome — from lobbyists

SACRAMENTO — The day after being elected to the state Assembly, several incoming lawmakers were in AT&T's luxury suite at the Sacramento sports arena, watching the Kings with the company's top Capitol executive.

The next day, the California Dental Assn. feted the state's freshman legislators. That was before more than 20 legislators jetted off to Hawaii, China, Brazil, New Zealand and other locales — with some trips paid for in large part by healthcare, energy and communications companies.

"It's the start of lobbyists inculcating them, saying 'Hey guys, line up and receive your gifts,' " said Bob Stern, former chief counsel to the state Fair Political Practices Commission.

It's a new day in Sacramento, with one of the largest-ever freshman classes elected in districts drawn for the first time by an independent, bipartisan commission.

And the lobbying campaign to shape their minds has begun.

The intent of the redistricting — as well as a rule change that allows lawmakers to serve up to 12 years in either legislative house — was to make the Capitol more accountable. In theory, the changes would reduce the influence of lobbyists and give lawmakers more time to gain expertise and independence.

But old traditions die hard.

Following the example of veteran legislative leaders, including Assembly Speaker John Pérez (D-Los Angeles), more than a dozen Democratic freshmen headed off to AT&T's suite at the Sleep Train Arena.

Lawmakers are not allowed to take more than $420 in gifts per year, and they are supposed to report what they receive. But sidestepping the rules is hardly a challenge.

The freshmen who joined Pérez didn't have to report the value of their tickets because the gathering was hosted by the state Democratic Party.

Jose Medina, a newly elected assemblyman from Riverside, said the event was totally appropriate. Spending time with lobbyists is "part of my job,'' he said.

"At the end of the day, I'll make my decision based on what is best for the people I represent," he said.

Jim Frazier, a freshman assemblyman from Oakley, called the evening "a great opportunity to start meeting the people who worked so hard to represent their districts."

Other freshman Democrats in the suite included Ken Cooley of Rancho Cordova, Marc Levine of San Rafael, Phil Ting of San Francisco, Kevin Mullin of South San Francisco, Rudy Salas of Bakersfield, Bill Quirk of Hayward and Reggie Jones-Sawyer of Los Angeles.

Jones-Sawyer was one of 15 legislators who flew a few days later to Maui for a five-day conference at the Fairmont Kea Lani organized by the California Independent Voter Project.

The group, which paid some of the legislators' travel expenses, has been funded over the years by tobacco giant Altria Group Inc., Southern California Edison, Eli Lilly & Co., Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the California Beer & Beverage Distributors, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Assn., Chevron Corp. and the state prison guards union.

In between rounds of golf and poolside lounging, the sponsors talked with lawmakers.

"I was learning about the issues," said Jones-Sawyer, the only freshman on the trip. "There were some things I didn't know — such as how businesses really need help to flourish here in California."

Phillip Ung, an advocate with California Common Cause, said he found the explanations bewildering.

"They have obviously convinced themselves that the people's business is best solved poolside with mai tais in hand," he said. "Congress banned this type of travel years ago."

Other lawmakers went to China, Australia, New Zealand or Brazil this month, in some cases paid for by special interests.

Those in Brazil were sponsored by the California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy, which is bankrolled by Chevron, PG&E, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and Southern California Edison, among others.

The sponsors sent representatives to accompany Assemblyman Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), who is chairman of the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee, as well as Sens. Anthony Cannella (R-Ceres), Mimi Walters (R-Laguna Niguel), Bill Emmerson (R-Hemet) and Michael Rubio (D-East Bakersfield).

The group paid for airfare, hotels, meals and ground transportation, said P.J. Johnston, a spokesman for the nonprofit foundation.

The lawmakers were there to meet with government and business leaders in Brazil to discuss reducing pollution, setting low-carbon fuel standards, transportation projects and other issues, Johnston said.

"Brazil provides real-world insight into issues California's decision-makers are grappling with, putting them in a larger perspective and offering lessons learned from a country with a rich history of challenges and successes in these areas," he said.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Times staff writer Anthony York contributed to this report.

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Before the iPad, There Was the Honeywell Kitchen Computer

In the winter of 1969, the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog offered to computerize your kitchen.

Cooking up a gourmet holiday meal will be a snap, the department store promised. Push a few buttons, and — presto! — a shiny orange-red, white, and black machine will compute the perfect five-course meal. No more silly culinary errors. The days of your wife slaving away in her Chanel apron will vanish into memory, and all those blinking lights will add to your holiday cheer.

All you needed was space for this 100-pound machine. And about $10,000. And a teletype. And a paper tape reader. And some serious engineering skills.

Needless to say, Neiman Marcus’ male-topian fantasy never materialized. The department store didn’t sell a single Honeywell Kitchen Computer, and it may never have intended to. The ad was no more than a publicity stunt, just like the stores ads for your very own Noah’s Ark and His-and-Hers airplanes in Christmas catalogs past.

The computer did exist. It was based on one of the Series 16 minicomputers from Honeywell, an early computer maker that would later help power the Arpanet, the forerunner to the modern internet. It’s just that this machine didn’t quite live up to the image of the modern computer that so often turned up in the popular imagination in the late ’60s and ’70s. It’s a bit like the talking Honeywell that turned up two years earlier in the Michael Caine spy flick The Billion Dollar Brain.

The Neiman Marcus ad was “a brilliant idea” and “wonderful publicity,” says Gardner Hendrie, who served as program manager for the Honeywell machine at the heart of the Kitchen Computer and is now a trustee of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. “But I thought the packaging was probably a waste of time and wouldn’t sell.”

The Honeywell Kitchen Computer was really a 16-bit business machine called the H316 minicomputer. The H316 was available as a table-top machine or a machine you could mount on a rack, but Kitchen Computer was based on a version that was shoehorned into a futuristic, Jetsons-like pedestal. People did actually buy this machine, but not very many people.

“I don’t think it was a very popular style. Ninety-five percent of people wanted to build it into a [larger] system…. They were sticking them in racks,” says Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum, which is home to the only Kitchen Computer in existence. “The people buying these are engineers. They don’t care what it looks like.”

What they cared about were machines that could manage industrial, military, aerospace, research, and scientific projects — not sleek ines and a built-in writing desk. They wanted a minicomputer that could connect to a teletype and a paper tape reader.

An engineer would type a program in human-readable form, and the teletype would spit out the program on paper tape, translating the code into a series of punched holes and spaces. The paper tape reader could then read the holes and spaces as ones and zeros. The paper tape was “like a floppy disk, circa 1960. It’s a personal means of data storage,” Spicer says.

Without a teletype, a programmer would need to enter software into the Honeywell using the 16 buttons on the front panel, each of which corresponds to a bit. A pressed button represented a one, and un-pushed button signaled a zero. “The chances that you would get a program right doing it one bit at a time like that were so low,” Spicer said. “The first peripheral people bought for [the Honeywell] was a teletype so they could speak to it.”

Now try to imagine all that in late 1960s kitchen. A full H316 system wouldn’t have fit in most kitchens, says design historian Paul Atkinson of Britain’s Sheffield Halam University. Plus, it would have looked entirely out of place. The thought that an average person, like a housewife, could have used it to streamline chores like cooking or bookkeeping was ridiculous, even if she aced the two-week programming course included in the $10,600 price tag.

If the lady of the house wanted to build her family’s dinner around broccoli, she’d have to code in the green veggie as 0001101000. The kitchen computer would then suggest foods to pair with broccoli from its database by “speaking” its recommendations as a series of flashing lights. Think of a primitive version of KITT, without the sexy voice.

“What that means is you have to be able to decode the lights in your brain,” says Spicer of the Computer History Museum. Or at least remember the pattern and look up what it meant. At that rate, dinner might be ready next week. “The reason this is such a joke, a gag item, was that there was no real human-readable I/O [input/output] for it.”

It may not have worked in a practical sense, but at least it got people thinking about computers as consumer products. The concept of kitchen and home computers had already been circulating in popular culture by the time Neiman Marcus’ kitchen computer graced its Christmas catalog. In The Jetsons, which aired in the early 1960s, humans lived in a tech-happy world alongside robots and computers. In 1966, Westinghouse Corporation engineer Jim Sutherland built the Electronic Computing Home Operator (ECHO IV) to automate storing recipes, controlling home temperature, keeping track of household inventory, and conserving energy.

A year later, Philco-Ford Corporation released A.D. 1999, a short film that portrayed what life would be like at the end of the century. A scene in the kitchen of the future shows a family teleconferencing while mom plans dinner with the help of a flat-screen computer that knows how many calories dad is allowed to have. And after seeing the Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer, Gordon Bell of Digital Equipment Corporation, a leading company in the minicomputer industry, sent out a congeries on the computer-in-the-home market in which he called the trend “inevitable.” And he was right.

The dedicated kitchen computer never quite happened. Since the Honeywell, there have been several attempts to revive the idea, like Electrolux’s Screenfridge and the HP Touch Smart, but none have really caught on. “In a way, the technology is in search of a problem,” said Spicer. “There is just this persistent meme of having computers in the kitchen, and somehow that’s going to create more leisure time.”

That said, this holiday season, so many of you will cook our meals with the help of iPads and laptops and smartphones, as you told us just last week. They’re smaller than the Honeywell. They’re cheaper. They don’t require a teletype. They’re not attached to your fridge. And you can take them outside the kitchen and use them for so many other things. Sometimes the future isn’t what a catalog tells us it will be. Sometimes, it’s better.

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Ex-’Price is Right’ model gets $8.5M in damages

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The producers of “The Price is Right” owe a former model on the show more than $ 7.7 million in punitive damages for discriminating against her after a pregnancy, a jury determined Wednesday.

The judgment came one day after the panel determined the game show’s producers discriminated against Brandi Cochran. They awarded her nearly $ 777,000 in actual damages.

Cochran, 41, said she was rejected when she tried to return to work in early 2010 after taking maternity leave. The jury agreed and determined that FremantleMedia North America and The Price is Right Productions owed her more than $ 8.5 million in all.

“I’m humbled. I’m shocked,” Cochran said after the jury announced its verdict. “I’m happy that justice was served today not only for women in the entertainment industry, but women in the workplace.”

FremantleMedia said it was standing by its previous statement, which said it expected to be “fully vindicated” after an appeal.

“We believe the verdict in this case was the result of a flawed process in which the court, among other things, refused to allow the jury to hear and consider that 40 percent of our models have been pregnant,” and further “important” evidence, FremantleMedia said.

In their defense, producers said they were satisfied with the five models working on the show at the time Cochran sought to return.

Several other former models have sued the series and its longtime host, Bob Barker, who retired in 2007.

Most of the cases involving “Barker’s Beauties” — the nickname given the gown-wearing women who presented prizes to contestants — ended with out-of-court settlements.

Comedian-actor Drew Carey followed Barker as the show’s host.

___

Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP .

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Recipes for Health: Apple Pear Strudel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

This strudel is made with phyllo dough. When I tested it the first time, I found that I had enough filling for two strudels. Rather than cut the amount of filling, I increased the number of strudels to 2, as this is a dessert you can assemble and keep, unbaked, in the freezer.

Filling for 2 strudels:

1/2 pound mixed dried fruit, like raisins, currants, chopped dried figs, chopped dried apricots, dried cranberries

1 1/2 pounds apples (3 large) (I recommend Braeburns), peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons unsalted butter for cooking the apples

1/4 cup (50 grams) brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (30 grams) chopped or slivered almonds

3/4 pound (1 large or 2 small) ripe but firm pears, peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

For each strudel:

8 sheets phyllo dough

7/8 cup (100 grams) almond powder, divided

1 1/2 ounces butter, melted, for brushing the phyllo

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment.

2. Place the dried fruit in a bowl and pour on hot or boiling water to cover. Let sit 5 minutes, and drain. Toss the apples with the lemon juice.

3. Heat a large, heavy frying pan over high heat and add 2 tablespoons butter. Wait until it becomes light brown and carefully add the apples and the sugar. Do not add the apples until the pan and the butter are hot enough, or they won’t sear properly and retain their juice. But be careful when you add them so that the hot butter doesn’t splatter. When the apples are brown on one side, add the vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and almonds, flip the apples and continue to sauté until golden brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the pears and dried fruit, then scrape out onto one of the lined sheet pans and allow to cool completely. Divide into two equal portions (easiest to do this if you weigh it).

4. Place 8 sheets of phyllo dough on your work surface. Cover with a dish towel and place another, damp dish towel on top of the first towel. Place a sheet of parchment on your work surface horizontally, with the long edge close to you. Lay a sheet of phyllo dough on the parchment. Brush lightly with butter and top with the next sheet. Continue to layer all eight sheets, brushing each one with butter before topping with the next one.

5. Brush the top sheet of phyllo dough with butter. Sprinkle on half of the almond powder (50 grams). With the other half, create a line 3 inches from the base of the dough, leaving a 2 1/2-inch margin on the sides. Top this line with one portion of the fruit mixture. Fold the bottom edge of the phyllo up over the filling, then fold the ends over and roll up like a burrito. Using the parchment paper to help you, lift the strudel and place it on the other parchment-lined baking sheet. Brush with butter and make 3 or 4 slits on the diagonal along the length of the strudel. Repeat with the other sheets of phyllo to make a second strudel. If you are freezing one of them, double-wrap tightly in plastic.

6. Place the strudel in the oven and bake 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, brush again with butter, rotate the pan and return to the oven. Continue to bake for another 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes. Serve warm or room temperature.

Yield: 2 strudels, each serving 8

Advance preparation: The fruit filling will keep for a couple of days in the refrigerator. The strudel can be baked a few hours before serving it. Recrisp in a medium oven for 10 minutes. It can also be frozen before baking, double-wrapped in plastic. Transfer directly from the freezer to the oven and add 10 minutes to the baking time.

Nutritional information per serving: 259 calories; 13 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 3 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 15 milligrams cholesterol; 34 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 91 milligrams sodium; 4 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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