From the Washington Post: Donald Trump is holding a casting call.  He's seeking 'the look.'
​Got facial hair?  Inconvenient melanin?  Are you an unattractive woman?  You probably won't get cast in Donald Trump's D.C. reality show.

From the Root: Woman reports white man choked her son; Fort Worth, Texas police assault, arrest her instead
​Nobody died, but this video needs to be seen widely.  Warning: it's hard to watch, between the white police officer stonewalling the mother of the victim, the same man ultimately tasing her and throwing her to the ground and arresting her teenaged daughter as well, and the girl shooting the video (another family member, I believe) communicating her fear and outrage by screaming nonstop abuse.  All because the mother tried to report a white neighbor for physically disciplining/assaulting her little boy in her absence.

It is a crazy time.  Anyone else having trouble concentrating on basic tasks?  For instance, my urogynecologist told me I should do Kegel exercises while I brush my teeth, and my dental hygienist told me I really should be brushing my teeth for 3 minutes at a time because I have plaque, and trying to do both these things at once (Kegel exercises plus dental thoroughness) was already a strain on my limited powers of concentration even before Trump got elected.  Now you can just forget about any of these things getting done right, because with my mouth full of toothpaste I am thinking about the electoral college and casual racism and Syria.  Wait, I forgot to squeeze!  

You'd think that, with all these things on our collective minds, it would make it easier to write, but instead it makes it harder.  The sheer volume of thought and emotion and alarming information slamming in from the public sphere, in conjunction with whatever we've got going on privately, is a lot to sift through.  I am watching friends tune in and out again.  In, because there is the illusion that maybe vigilance will keep us safe.  Out, because they are swiftly overwhelmed by what feels sometimes like a cloud of flying shrapnel.  It is unclear what we can do to save ourselves when the answer seems to be, always, "everything."

​So intimidating; thankfully there are tens of millions of us.

Meanwhile, while apparently not one of those tens of millions are looking, somebody sneaks into the public park and cuts down the old-growth cedar tree you loved.

On Monday night, I went to a thing.  It was called "Breaking Bread Together," or rather we called it that, having just invented it.  Basically, it was an activist potluck.  Because it was held in somebody's living room, it was limited to a group of 18 people-- the first 18 to show enthusiasm, not the most important 18 people in my very activist town, although there was a city councilman there in regular-guy mode.  We brought soup and bread and vegetables and cookies and cakes.  Two different people brought roasted cauliflower with pomegranate seeds.  There weren't enough dishes to have both a bowl and a plate, or both a fork and a spoon, so I filled my little soup bowl repeatedly with different things and ate brussels sprouts and roasted cauliflower hungrily with my spoon.  We sat on chairs or on the floor, in a wide circle around this guy's living room coffee table, and formally introduced ourselves one at a time, and talked about what was important to us and how we were feeling that night, Dec. 19, the day the electors voted for Donald Trump as President of the United States.  We also tried to put together some kind of loose viral model for a series of similar dinners to be held by all of us, and others we would invite and recruit, all over our community.​

A few more links for you.

Why the African-American History Museum's Cafe Will Serve Son-of-a-Gun Stew and Other Unexpected Dishes
So many people want to visit Washington D.C.'s new African-American History Museum that it is difficult to gain access, particularly on weekends.  I can't wait to go, once the crowds calm down.  Much initial buzz centered around their unique Sweet Home Cafe (it was supposed to be called the North Star Cafe, but unfortunately this would have violated a trademark), serving dishes representing African-American culinary history and distinct regional cuisines.

Sweet Lies: How the Sugar Industry Tricked Us Into Worrying About Fat
The title says it all, really.  "Today, as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, [Cristin] Kearns is publishing research based on the documents that her casual Googling led to: a trove of confidential documents, correspondence, and other materials that detail the relationship between the sugar industry and medical researchers in the 1960s and ’70s that UCSF has taken to calling the 'Sugar Papers.'”  Read if you care about the long-term influence of sugar industry groups on medical and dietary guidelines.

This May Be the Most Sweeping Set of Animal Protections Ever Announced
Some good news for once, though I might question the title: they mean in the food industry, of course.  Two major food service companies, who together purchase something like 100 million chickens per year,  have pledged to support several more compassionate practices in their supply chain, including a shift to genetic strains which grow more naturally, more stringent space and housing requirements, and a more humane slaughter method.  These buyers are so large that observers expect the changes to prompt a revolution in the poultry industry overall.

​On a Friday night I cooked Madhur Jaffrey's Stir-Fried Kohlrabi, along with some stir-fried tofu and white rice.  This was a simple meal... perhaps too simple.  Next to the kohlrabi recipe in my cookbook, I wrote "Nothing to write home about.  Crunchy."  This pretty well sums it up.  I cut two enormous kohlrabi into strips, stir-fried them for a few minutes with a really modest amount of chile pepper, garlic,  salt and soy sauce, added some sesame oil and a tiny bit of scallion at the end, and that was it.  Crunchy.  A little salty.  Plain rice.  At least I seasoned the tofu.  I'm not entirely sure why the world needs recipes like this written down.

​The most exciting part of this dish was my quest to actually purchase some kohlrabi.  I had to go to three different stores in order to find any.  I ended up at the New Grand Mart, where I also purchased these really cool ice cream bars, Filipino-style red-bean-and-yam flavor.  They are purple.  I figured "red bean" was just a flavoring or perhaps a puree, but in fact there were whole cooked red beans in the ice cream bar, which tended to fall out and drop on the floor as you ate it.  Very different from anything I've had before.

**

On Sunday, my husband and I were in Adams Morgan buying a secondhand table, when we happened upon a comic book store.  Of course my husband wanted to check it out, so I went upstairs too.  And what do you think happened?  I instantly saw something I wanted to buy.  Me!  In a comic store!  It is a sort of graphic autobiography/cookbook by Robin Ha called Cook Korean!  Brand-new, a really fun concept, and immediately drew me in.  Recommend!

​**
Something radical happened this weekend.  To my surprise, my husband had mentioned a few weeks ago that he'd like to try learning to cook with me.  I'd love for him to be more comfortable in the kitchen, and cooking together can be fun, so I thought maybe there'd be time for it on Saturday or Sunday night.  It was a ragingly hot weekend, and our kitchen lacks air conditioning, so circumstances were not ideal for cooking lessons-- especially after a sweltering afternoon of shopping and furniture-moving-- but we still managed to pull off a minor meal.  Emphasis on the minor.  We investigated our resources, and found a lot of CSA vegetables that needed to be used up, plenty of eggs, a loaf of bread that was starting to go stale before hardly having been touched, and too many mandarin oranges.  My husband chopped tomato and onion; I chopped jalapeno pepper and zucchini.  We sauteed the onion, pepper, and zucchini, added eggs together with tomato and a tiny bit of feta cheese that had been sitting in the fridge a long time.  I scrambled these while my husband made herb bread toast.  We put out butter and oranges.  That was it.  Original plans had involved bacon and home fries also, but I cook both of these in the oven, not having a very good stovetop, and we just couldn't face turning the oven on that night.  That was okay.  We kept it simple, the food was good, and the cookin' was easy.  I think my husband was a little insulted.  He said, "I do know how to scramble eggs."  But I informed him that real culinary students, at least in legend, always start with learning to make the perfect omelette.

FDA Warns Against Eating Cookie Dough, But Not Because of Eggs
This story is a bit old by now, but flour sits on our shelves for a long time.  Apparently E. coli contamination of raw flour is potentially widespread.  It had never occurred to me that this was even possible with dry goods.

Out Here, Up Here
Includes the best kitchen tip ever, from Nikki McClure via Orangette:  soften butter by wedging it in cleavage.
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​There's a Price to Pay for Not Eating America's Ugly Seafood
Americans are only comfortable with certain types of familiar seafood, many of which are imported and/or overfished.  Meanwhile, other local ocean food resources are wasted or sold overseas.  What would buying local look like when it comes to seafood?



Discomfort Food: Using Dinners to Talk About Race, Violence and America
Chef Tunde Wey organizes dinner parties with diverse (but predominantly black) guest lists, to discuss race, social justice, and personal experience. “There was some sort of obscenity to the whole thing, this foodie movement,” he said. “You eat at one of these new restaurants with small plates, and the food tastes good, but it’s not saying anything. What it’s saying is just, ‘Look at me.’ It’s self-referential. That’s where the obscenity comes from: when you can say nothing, surrounded by so much to say.”

 
Unsponsored opinion: these Fig & Olive Crackers are like one of the best things I've ever eaten in my life.  And I got them on sale at Whole Foods for $4.99!  (Which seemed like a lot, until I saw that Amazon is selling them for $11.59.)

​My kid is greatly amused at "men's" versions of everyday products, such as bath grenades or Bounce fabric softener for men, so when I saw Men's Pocky at the HMart, I had to buy some.

Some links for you.

​Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental
Jennifer Reese is always recommended reading.  But this personal post is one of her best, exploring marriage, food preferences, individual values, and the distressing phenomenon of the repetitive ephiphany, all with her usual humor and self-awareness.

Whole Foods Nailed for Unsanitary Conditions in Food Prep Plant
Earlier this spring, I tried to research the preparation locations and conditions of Whole Foods prepared foods.  Apparently the information I got was wrong, because 1) indeed, there are regional plants that make ready-to-eat foods for multiple stores, and 2) conditions there are not entirely wholesome.  Read for details of sanitation violations at their Massachusetts plant.

What 2000 Calories Looks Like
​Back to restaurant portion sizes.  The New York Times creates visuals for approximately 2000 calories worth of food (assumed to be one day's allotment) at a number of different restaurant chains, as well as at home.  Take-home message: cook your own.  ...Or (and I hate to even mention this), eat Subway.

The Precarious Reign of the Honeycrisp Apple
Strangely, this article is a sponsored post by Chase Bank.  I am not at all sure what their relationship might be to the topic, and it would interest me to understand it better.  Regardless, this exploration of the past, present and future of the Honeycrisp apple is a fascinating look at how food trends influence agricultural production and retail sales, and can ultimately end up destroying the quality of the very product they aimed to celebrate.

May 19
Breakfast: water with lime, black coffee (sometimes I feel like drinking it black now, it's weird), smoothie containing RiceDream horchata, hemp protein powder, a little maple almond butter, plain Greek yogurt, mango, banana, frozen mango chunks, and romaine lettuce.  I left out the prune juice because I am afraid my husband will get fed up with me.  This smoothie was still very sweet, but at least tasted mostly like fruit in a conventional smoothie fashion.  I kind of miss our old, thick-but-not-very-sweet smoothies.

Lunch: ham and swiss sandwich on rye from Starbucks, plus a small bag of potato chips, at the Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.  I am on my way home to Massachusetts to see my family and attend my friend's book party (see photo at right).  I eat my sandwich outside at a picnic bench, and read.  The whole thing seems far more wholesome than it would have if I'd gotten Burger King and eaten inside with the crowd of other people.  I approve of myself at this time.

Dinner: Ugh, this journey is taking forever: over 4 hours from the Joyce Kilmer, on one side of NYC, to Bridgeport, CT on the other.  In Windsor, CT, only about an hour from my parents' place, I give up and eat a Subway sandwich: a 6-inch "rotisserie chicken" on whole wheat with veggies and mustard.  This was completely bland and flavorless.  I also had a side bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, not flavorless.

Snacks: 3 cups coffee, 1 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half.  2 small chocolate chip sandie-type cookies and 1 weird Kirkland-brand truffle candy, with black tea, at my parents' house after arrival.  I was just planning to have the tea, but my parents requested that I bring out the sweets, and then they were sitting right in front of me.  The candy was sort of gross and at least I won't be tempted to have any more.

May 20
Breakfast: At my mom and stepfather's house.  A leftover chicken thigh from the dinner my parents prepared last night, but which I didn't make it in time to eat; english muffin with butter and blackberry jam; tangelo.  Coffee with half and half.

Lunch: With my dad and his wife, at the Book Mill in Montague.  I had some hot dog or sausage-like item, on a brioche bun with some various homemade condiment-type things, and coleslaw.  The coleslaw looked ordinary, but was not sweet at all.  I didn't realize how much I expect coleslaw to be sweet.  Coffee.  I drank it black because the waitress didn't offer me any cream and, nowadays, I don't seem to mind black coffee.

Dinner: With my (ex-) stepmother, at her house in Conway.  That makes five parents in one day.  We did not eat dinner until 10:30 at night because we were talking so much (as well as snacking: see below).  Dinner was: a sheet pan concoction with chicken thighs, sliced fennel, winter squash and grapes (!), sprinkled with what seemed to be brown sugar mixed with spices, perhaps cumin.  Potatoes boiled with vinegar and then fried with salt.  Salad with lettuce, arugula, and grape tomatoes, and balsamic dressing.  Two glasses of red wine, the second of which was a local red made right here in Hadley, MA.  It was pretty good, but sadly I don't remember the name of it.

Snacks: Decaf coffee with half and half from the Black Sheep in Amherst, on my way from Mom's house to Dad's, when I stopped in town to buy coffee beans, wine, and chocolate for my stepmother.  Several slices of baguette with triple creme cheese, and several bing cherries, at my stepmother's house before dinner.  One square of Ghiradelli mango dark chocolate with the last of my wine before bed.

​May 21
Breakfast: Late in the morning, with my stepmother.  She makes a big fruit salad and cooks scrambled eggs with goat cheese, tomato and basil, toasts some toast.  It's a perfect breakfast.  Coffee with soy creamer-- my favorite Black Sheep blend that I bought.  The coffee is perfect too.

I don't exactly have lunch, but instead nosh at my best friend's book party (see below).

Dinner: After the book party, when most of the guests have gone home, my friend and I drive to Greenfield to pick up lots of gourmet pizzas for her parents, brother, husband, kids and me to eat at the "afterparty."  I have a slice of rosemary potato pizza, a slice with roast meats and pickles, and a slice that just has a big pile of raw arugula on top.  The pickle pizza was the best.  Also a little bit of Greek-ish salad, and a glass of red wine.

Snacks: morning coffee with soy creamer.  A square of mango dark chocolate when getting hungry for a late breakfast.  Party snacks: a couple of crackers with guacamole, a couple of crackers with cheese, a paper cup of lemonade, a piece of amazing strawberry-and-lemon curd cake, plus another mini-slice of the same cake, and one of chocolate cake.   I wish I'd known about these cakes, I would totally have bought my wedding cake from them five years back.  A decaf Americano from the Starbucks in the middle of Amherst, on my way home (to my parents' house) from the afterparty.  For some unknown reason the barista refused to charge me for it, no matter how much I protested.

May 22
Breakfast: I've been told we are having bagels for breakfast, but 8:30 rolls around and no one else is awake yet, let alone ready to drive into town and pick up the fresh bagels.  So I have a nectarine that appears to badly need eating, and an English muffin with butter and fig jam.  The bagels can count as lunch. 

Lunch (though it probably takes place about 10:30): one and a half bagels, with cream cheese and smoked salmon.  Coffee with half and half.  The outing into town, with my stepfather, to pick up the bagels at Bruegger's and smoked salmon at the Big Y, was pleasant.  I made the mistake of asking for a salt bagel for myself, which was so salty I could barely eat it.

Party/Dinner (with my friend's family, same as yesterday): snacks including several crackers with cheese or guacamole, several vegetable sticks with guacamole or hummus, a small glass of lemonade and another small glass of lemonade mixed with sparkling water.  Dinner (at perhaps 4:30 pm?) consisting of hamburger with tomato and onion, potato chips, and fruit salad.  Half a glass of pink-ish sparkling wine after dinner, left over from the book party.  Large piece of chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting after that (to celebrate the birthdays of my friend's husband and son).  I am full.

Snacks: cup of coffee with half and half, and unadorned cup of tea (I'm not sure what kind, as many of my parents' tea bags are unmarked) before finally caving in and eating my English muffin in the morning.  Cup of decaf coffee with half and half at the Black Sheep, picked up on the way from my parents' house to the party.  2 sips of red wine in the evening with my stepfather: the wine is raisin-colored, a little vinegary, and tastes unpleasant.  I ask how long it has been open and my stepfather says not very long, a week or two, and my mom says no, no! It was already open in the cupboard when I got it out!  Nevertheless, they both act impatient, like I am imagining things, when I say the wine has gone off.  It has a price sticker on it: it was $6.99 to begin with.  My stepfather stubbornly drinks his glass of wine and my own.  I switch to an airplane mini-bottle of cognac that has reportedly been in the cupboard 20 years.  The cognac is still good.
 
May 23
Breakfast: coffee with half and half, half a poppyseed bagel with cream cheese and jam, pineapple.  I am feeling overfed and am eating breakfast late, so saving room to eat lunch sooner rather than later.  Everybody here eats very early, it seems.

Lunch: I am assigned to eat a Trader Joe's vegan tikka masala frozen meal that my stepfather wants to get rid of.  It is fine.  It would have better if the chunks of vegetable protein had been chicken, which was apparently also my stepfather's opinion.  I throw a handful of salad greens in the bowl too, so that I will be eating some extra vegetable.

Dinner: at approximately 4:40 pm, my Mom suggests we start getting ready to go out for supper.  "Mom, it's 4:30," I say.  She argues that, by the time we are finished getting ready and drive to the restaurant, it will actually be "more like 5:30" before we eat.  I bargain for 6:00 and she agrees.  We go to the Ginger Garden, my favorite Chinese restaurant in Amherst.  Our server, I must mention, is perfect.  He should train all the servers of the world.  Unfortunately, we order things that I turn out not to like all that much.  A scallion pancake to share-- as soon as it arrives, I realize I've ordered it for takeout before, and found it tough and leathery.  This time, it is at least hot, and therefore a bit better, but I would not get it again.  I also order some thick noodles with pork, which are bland but not bad.  My mom gets a dish with some kind of soft, braised white fish and lots of mushrooms, in a sauce that she likes and declares gingery but I think tastes like nothing at all.  She doesn't care for some of the mushrooms that she thinks are "too tough," so I eat some of those.  My stepfather goes a different direction and orders some very spicy breaded shrimp served on a bed of very spicy minced vegetables.  I find that mixing some of these spicy vegetables into the bland, vaguely sweet pork noodles yields the best results, so I mainly stick with that.  Again: great restaurant, risky ordering.  Uneven results to be expected.  Black tea, fortune cookie.

Snacks: cup of mystery tea with almond milk.  After dinner, we stopped at a new local donut shop called Glazed, an enticing downtown storefront that had been gently calling to me for the entire length of my visit.  When I finally confessed this to my parents, it turned out they felt the same, so we picked up three donuts to eat for dessert at home.  My choice was a chai glazed donut.  It was okay.  It might well have been better first thing in the morning instead of at 8 pm, after having sat around all day.  On the other hand, their case was still quite well stocked at 8 pm-- were they going to throw all those donuts away?  Or just keep on selling them the next day?  How does that work when you are a local joint that charges 2 bucks per donut instead of a cheap mass-producing chain outlet?  I hope they make it, but looking at their prime retail location, expensive-for-what-it-is-but-still-inexpensive product, and minimal clientele (at the time I was there), I am not convinced.
 
May 24
Driving home day.

Breakfast (at parents' house, before leaving): slice of rye toast with butter; a plum; caramel-flavored Liberte yogurt.  Coffee, with half and half.  Apparently, after reading this post about how much I love caramel Liberte yogurt, my mom assigned my stepfather to buy 4 of them for my visit.  I only managed to eat this one.  I do like caramel Liberte, but I don't actually eat that much yogurt.  However, this is one of the weird ways in which parents show their love.  My mom stopped offering me any "bars" because I made fun of her here and she read it.  It's kind of disappointing.  I don't want the bars, but I also don't want her to change. 

Lunch: at a Starbucks in Fort Lee, New Jersey, a heavily Korean enclave just outside of New York City.  In fact, I stopped at this particular strip mall partly because it had one of my beloved H-Marts.  Many of the signs were in Korean, and many of the customers were speaking Korean.  A group of Korean teenagers were playing guitars outside on the sidewalk and singing songs about Jesus to raise money for their "mission."  At the Starbucks, I ate some kind of panini (turkey and avocado, perhaps? I can't remember) and chips, and drank another cup of coffee with half and half, and finished the book I was reading.  Incidentally, I don't think I was meant to be in Fort Lee, NJ at all.  My dad gave me directions for an alternate route to Maryland that he said was more pleasant and bypassed New York City.  I believe the bypassing New York part would have worked better if the directions he'd written down had been accurate, but he mixed up (I think) the Palisades Parkway with the Sawmill Parkway, and the route I took ("I'll just trust Dad," I said to myself, like that has ever been a good idea) ended up being rather unusual.  It was still more pleasant (and, bizarrely, not any more time-consuming) than taking I-95 the whole way, though.  So, in a sense, Dad was right.  And next time I can adjust the route so that all the roads he wrote down (except the Palisades Parkway) actually intersect, and it will be a good route.  Dad has always been more of a fiction guy than a fact guy.

Dinner: leftover vegetarian chili that my husband cooked the night before for himself and kid, warmed up after I arrive home from my trip and he arrives home from work shortly thereafter.  Shredded cheddar cheese on top.  I am very grateful that he made it.  He does not cook much and doesn't have a lot of confidence in his skills, but honestly a) the chili is pretty good, and b) I wouldn't mind whether it were good or not.  There is a value to somebody serving you dinner regardless of quality. 

Snacks: decaf coffee with half and half, and a chocolate croissant, from the Black Sheep on my way out of town in the morning.  I didn't intend to get the chocolate croissant but, at the last minute, I caved.  It was so flaky and messy that I had to sit down and eat it and read for a few minutes, because there was no way I could eat it in the car.  It was delicious, but I didn't really want it.  Random fail.  Or tradition (I pretty much have one croissant at the Black Sheep every time I come home).  Second random fail: when I stopped in the afternoon for a decaf americano at another Starbucks (in a Camden, NJ rest stop), I bought a package of their madeleines, which for some reason I find irresistible.  Tomorrow I will get back to normal, I swear.  Enough with the donuts for dessert.  After I have sworn this, the minute I arrive home my kid gives me a big cookie.  They baked it themselves while I was gone and saved it for me, so how I could I say no?

Oh and this evening after dinner we picked up our first CSA farm box of the year, from this guy's farm.  This is a new farm to us, and it is exciting.  Our box contained lettuce, spinach, oregano, strawberries, various kinds of young onions with scapes, and asparagus.  It is not a ton, but usually these things get a slow start for the first couple of weeks, and I am happy to start earlier and get some real spring vegetables (and fruit!) like these.

These are just a few links to articles that have stuck in my mind over the past few weeks.

What's for Breakfast?  How About Some Monsanto Weed Killer?
​Measurable levels of glyphosate (aka Roundup) show up in almost half of breakfast foods-- including organic breakfast foods-- tested in this study.  The cage-free organic eggs they tested exceeded federal limits for this chemical.

US Government to Crack Down on Imported Olive Oil Fraud
I guess I missed the memo.  Apparently regulators have been aware for some years that cheaper, nutritionally inferior, or adulterated oils are being passed off and bottled as extra-virgin olive oil by foreign producers, often under the influence of the Italian mafia.

Chobani Could Make Some of Its Workers Millionaires
I had mistakenly assumed that Chobani was just another brand name under the big umbrella of one of the handful of big food companies, like Kraft or General Mills.  Not so.  Chobani was founded only 11 years ago by Hamdi Ulukaya, a former sheep dairy farmer from Turkey, who moved to NYC in 1994 to study, and ended up buying an old Kraft yogurt plant with an SBA loan.  And his yogurt is taking over the world.  I feel a little better now about buying it so regularly.

If You Are What You Eat, America is Allrecipes
Worth reading just for this: "...at a time when readers of aspirational food websites are used to images of impossibly perfect dishes—each microgreen artfully placed by some tweezer-wielding stylist—Allrecipes offers amateur snaps of amateur meals. The site is awash with close-ups of sludgy-looking soups; photos of stuffed peppers that look like they’ve been captured in the harsh, unforgiving light of a public washroom; and shot after shot documenting the myriad ways that melted cheese can congeal."

I think of that "public washroom" remark every time I post flash photography on this site.
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