In times of uncertainty or likely impending crisis, I often decide to cook. This makes little sense, because usually the crisis is my cooking, so cooking in a crisis is just creating a set of interpenetrating disasters. A little while ago, I was facing down a four-day period of solo parenting, the school-work-transportation-afterschool-food logistics … More The shovel option
Some chefs say that the best tool in the kitchen is your hands. I was thinking of this one evening while striving to dig out some oil-marinated ciliegine from a plastic container with my fingers, my fingers which are roughly as dexterous as a bunch of almost-ripe bananas. I had read that tongs were for … More State of the divide
Is it a Christmas miracle, a solstice miracle, a day-after-Hanukkah miracle or a five days before Kwanzaa begins miracle? No, this is just me passing along a granola recipe that was provided by Jinx Watson, who is herself a miracle. I have two notes on this recipe. ONE! I greatly dislike shredded coconut, as it … More An actual recipe
One night, I was sitting on my son’s bed, “reading” him a book about vehicles, which involved pointing at a skid steer loader and calling it a skid steer loader, and then pointing at an excavator with an orange peel grapple and announcing that it was an excavator with an orange peel grapple. My daughter … More Total Clarity and Unstinting Glamor
One day last winter, I was standing with my son’s classmate’s mother in a Chuck E. Cheese’s as the woman’s daughter screamed from within a plexiglass pod in a SkyTube, which is a play structure not unlike an extra-large set of hamster tubes. Children who enter it are instructed, but only by signage they … More Party Time
Yesterday, for lunch, I ate several humongous grapes and used tortilla chips to dredge small heaps of chicken salad from a container and thought that was pretty good. This evening, I ate food that seems to transcend “food” as a category and makes me understand things that I generally don’t like: taking photos of your … More The scales have fallen
Not long ago, a neighbor said he’d been in the woods of Connecticut and found a hen-of-the-woods mushroom, and he was giving it to us to eat. If you have not seen such a mushroom, it is sort of like a towering floppy pinecone. It looks like this: That is not a small tomato. For … More Stolenbikestolen
