Socially Distant Cuisine

Stir-fried Sweet Potatoes with Browned Butter and Sage (Bittman, NYT) Chocolate (15) Little Layer Cake (New York Times) Egg Salad Sandwich (101 Cookbooks, plus capers, April 2007) Kale and Potato Spanish Tortilla (Gourmet, February 2003) Spanish-style Shrimp with Garlic (NYT, May 2009) Two-bean Chili (My own recipe) Simple Cauliflower (101 Cookbooks, May 2009) Huevos Rancheros with Spinach (My recipe) Classic Grilled Cheese and Cream of Tomato Soup (America's Test Kitchen, via Smitten Kitchen, November 2006)

Modification combining several recipes and to make veggie rather than meaty... delicious! Mapo Tofu (Modified from The Washington Post and the Gourmet cookbook) 4 to 6 servings Ingredients: 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 4 chopped scallions (white and light-green parts only) 1 Tbsp minced ginger root 2 cloves of garlic, minced 1/4 cup broadbean paste (I use Lee Kum Kee Chili Bean Sauce) 2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce 1 tablespoon Shaoxing rice wine 1/2 teaspoon sugar 1/2 cup water 12 to 15 ounces (1 package) soft tofu, cut into 1/4-inch cubes cornstarch for thickening, if needed. 1/2 teaspoon crushed Sichuan peppercorns Bring a small pot of water to a simmer, add cubed tofu and simmer for 10 minutes, to firm it up. In a large frying pan over medium-high heat, cook scallions, garlic and ginger 2 minutes. Add broadbean paste and cook 1 minute. Add soy sauce, rice wine and sugar, and stir until dissolved. Add water and simmer until slightly reduced, adding a bit of corn starch for t...

Another great family recipe... currently rising in the oven! 2 cakes compressed yeast (you MUST find the "active" yeast bricks next to the butter in the grocery store. Active dry packets do NOT taste the same) 1 cup milk 1/2 cup sugar 2 eggs 1/2 cup butter 1 tsp salt Crumble yeast cakes in a little bowl. Add 1 tsp sugar and a little of the milk (warmed, but not too hot). Cream butter, sugar and salt. Add well-beaten eggs and yeast mixture. Add half of the sifted flour and remaining milk, and beat well. Mix in the rest of the flour with your hands. Knead gently in bowl until smooth Place in a well-greased bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size. Remove dough from bowl to a floured board, and cut in two. Roll out each piece to 1/4 inch thickness. Cut like a pie into 16 pieces. Roll up each into a croissant shape, beginning at wide end of triangle. Roll tightly, and pull each roll out longer by gently tugging on the ends. Let rise about 1/2...

After looking all over the web, I haven't found this particular recipe, so I decided to share it after a nice evening of baking. It is my grandmother's recipe, and one of my dad's favorite Christmas cookies. They are very best after they've aged a few weeks (up to a month) in an airtight container... the icing gets really nice and hard, and the cookies are awesome dunked in tea or coffee. They're so good, though, it's hard to make them last that long! Pfeffernuesse-- Makes about 4 1/2 dozen 1/3 cup unsalted butter, room temp 2 1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar 4 eggs Zest of one lemon 3 Tbsp fresh lemon juice 1/2 cup finely chopped candied lemon peel 1/2 cup finely chopped candied citron 1/4 cup finely chopped candied orange peel 1/2 tsp almond extract 4 cups sifted flour 1 Tbsp cardamom 1 tsp ground cloves 1 tsp allspice 1 tsp black pepper 1 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp ground aniseed 1 tsp salt 1 tsp baking soda Lemon Icing 1 1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar 4 to 4 1/2 ts...

I have been on a book buying binge recently. Amazon.com's Amazon Prime is a killer, I tell you! And I am not alone... talking about which book his book club should read next, a friend explained his dilemma: Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler describes the "abundance of a bookstore" this way (I put the categories into list format): 1. Books You Haven't Read 2. The Books You Needn't Read 3. The Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading 4. Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written 5. The Books That if You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read but Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered 6. The Books You Mean to Read but There Are Others You Must Read First 7. The Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait Till They Are Remaindered 8. The Books Ditto When They Come Out in Paperback 9. Books You Can Borrow from Somebody 10. Books That Everybody's Read So It's a...

As painful as this particular retreat was for me, it opened my eyes to the extraordinary amount of time my mind spent in monitoring and evaluating my success or failure, and in making reality match my ideal image of myself. With my newfound awareness, I would notice how there seemed to be an endless tape-loop in my mind that evaluated my progress: "Okay, now I've accomplished this, and this, and this. I'm doing alright." This compulsive internal dialogue is quite normal in a culture that rewards achievement, wealth, beauty and success above all things, and especially in a culture that rewards the achievements of the highly individuated, separate "self under its own power." In this milieu, the internal dialogue is actually a form of self-soothing, of reassuring ourselves that we're really okay. When we can stand back from this compulsive internal dialogue just a bit, we can see the intensity of the craving for solidity and security that drives it. .St...

But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder if it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of 'passing emotion' and to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open. .E.M. Forster. Howard's End.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice , pine, hair, woman, you and I . There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places...

"The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him." Ian McEwan. I supplemented the widely sweeping pans of the camera during the film with McEwan's lovely prose, nearly from memory. If you can do that, you should see the movie. If you haven't, you should read the novel.

Coser's analysis of Simmel here is perfectly fitting for so much of first semester of grad school: "Modern man finds himself in a deeply problematical situation: he is surrounded by a multiplicity of cultural elements, which, although they are not meaningless to him, are not fundamentally meaningful either. They oppress the individual because he cannot fully assimilate them. But he cannot reject them because they belong at least potentially to the sphere of his own cultural development." See? It's structural! Occasionally, there are flashes of very deep meaning. Even if they come in the form of secondary sources cross-referenced from undergrad.

Do you wonder where the self resides Is it in your head or between your sides? And who will be the one who will decide Its true location? .Andrew Bird. Darkmatter.

to make the link between what we spoke about in Social Stratification today and this cartoon, but it feels apropos.

There are only two stories. The one about home and the one about leaving home. .Salman Rushdie. Sometimes, I question whether they aren't actually one and the same.

I spent the morning and early afternoon curled in a leather armchair in the back corner of Diesel, reading the novel of the moment and sipping my habitual iced coffee with cream. It is the first weekend that the crowd has included undergrads, and the air reverberated with their early gripes about Virgil and Intro to Electrical Engineering and their hushed gossip. When I rode my bike back home in the mid-afternoon heat, a warm breeze ruffled my skirt and tickled my thighs, yet something felt distinctly different this afternoon from others. It is the feeling of summer's end.

Back from 3 weeks of vacation, with lots of spectacular nature moments: a break I totally needed. Experiencing such dramatic scenery is so refreshing. Centering. Humbling. Back safely in my apartment, in this major metropolitan area, I was chatting with a friend about the experience. As I gushed on and on about how much I love the West, I joked that it was time to return East, where nature isn't so breathtaking, and it's easier to feel important. "We have history," he wryly replied, "and tall buildings, to make you feel meaningless." As I strolled through The Yard on my way to a meeting yesterday morning, these words came back to me. So true.

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...