Once upon a time, a person stood in a kitchen holding a tin bowl full of cauliflower florets. A beeswax-coated cloth, which such person can use instead of plastic wrap, sat stiffly on top of the pile of cauliflower like a mortarboard. The cauliflower was a bit aged, old enough to graduate from the refrigerator … More Tempura

Late one afternoon, shortly after taking a wander around my office and confronting a number of things that are either possible to eat or things that people seem to think other people might eat, if those other people are just desperate or human dumpsters, I had some thoughts.     I thought: I am going … More Scallions

Of the many surprisingly wonderful things that there are, one is a dough blender, one is a cherry pitter, and one is this group of tuba and euphonium players performing “Down in the River to Pray.” I thought tubas were mostly for deflating white supremacists or expressing defeat. But they are not! They are, apparently, … More Dramatic music plays

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

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