Socially Distant Cuisine

Omelettes are such fun to make when you toss them off, as shown here. A fresh green salad, a glass of white wine, and an omelette make a lunch worth waiting the 30 seconds it takes to make one, and I say fie to those oenophilic spoilsports who insist that wine goes with neither eggs nor salads. Wine is essential with anything! Particularly omelettes for lunch. .Julia Child. How to Cook.

The Minimalist Meals in 10 Minutes or Less .

Today was my first full day in Massachusetts. I spent the morning getting lost again and again by car, while trying to run some errands. But as a result I made peace with the U-turn and bought a box of Jello Pudding Pops with French on it, so it was not all in vain. After the agitation of driving in circles all morning, this evening, I decided to go for a long walk, and just be. No iPod. No real place to go. I had a scoop of Coconut Butterfinger ice cream at Christina's, and looked in the windows of the billion furniture stores on Mass Ave, and ended up on a bench by the river to finish Philip Roth's Everyman and watch the sunset. As rowers sculled by and the water sparkled in the fading light, I read the following: "Why do you laugh sometimes at what I say," she asked him the second time he took her out to dinner, "why do you laugh when I'm being perfectly serious?" "Because you charm me so and you're so unaware of your charm." ...

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say The breath goes now, and some say, No: So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move, 'Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity our love. Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, Men reckon what it did and meant, But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent. Dull sublunary lovers' love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. But we by a love so much refined That our selves know not what it is, Inter-assur'd of the mind, Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss. Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are...

I've been hitting the collected nonfiction of Joan Didion pretty hard recently... good stuff: With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan Baker took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident." Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character , a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its...