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.