Books and other diversions (The "spring" edition of linkapalooza)

Do you live near Boston? I am thrilled, embarrassed, and fretful to report that my friend Suzy Becker, author of the brilliant One Good Egg and the brilliant and bestselling All I Need to Know I Learned from My Cat (now in its godzillian printing), and her friend Nancy Aronie, and I are going to be in “conversation” together in May. Less important than the actual going is the buying of the tickets and the communicating to the Concord Museum folks that you’re my people, buying tickets because of me, and Suzy and Nancy aren’t the only people selling tickets.

On Writing, Life, and the Origin of Chicken Fingers

Thursday, May 15, 2014, 7PM - 9PM

Authors Nancy Aronie, Suzy Becker, and Catherine Newman invite you to join them for an evening of casual conversation. These nationally acclaimed authors will read from their own works (and each others’), share their thoughts on all manner of things, and answer questions – “theirs, yours, and some real doozies from this year’s MCAS.”  Wine and cheese at 7:00 p.m., program begins at 7:15; book signing to follow. $10 Concord Museum Members, $15 Non-members. Ticket price includes wine and cheese. Tickets may be purchased online or by calling (978) 369-9763, ext. 216. 

Phew. Other things.

I have a piece in the current issue of Brain, Child, and it’s about a hibernaculum [shudder]. (That's just a link to the "teaser," i.e. a photo of me in pasties.)

Do you remember how I mentioned Colorku at the holidays?

Well. I am reporting back that it is completely excellent. All four of us love it, and the level of challenge-feeling ranges from a kind of brain-churning competence to something like a tangled, numbing conviction that that there is something wrong with your mental processing apparatus. We work on it alone, or in pairs or clumps, and it is deeply engaging and fun and companionable. I cannot recommend it enough. Plus, the pieces are painted wood, and there is something very beautiful about them. The pastel ones remind me of Dutch mints 

to the point that I have to actively stop myself from putting one in my mouth.

 

Also from the holidays: my parents gave me (okay, I may have specifically asked for it) the Roz Chast collection Theories of Everything, and I cannot say how much pleasure we’ve gotten out it. Okay, maybe I can try to say. No. I can’t. Only this: every single day after school, Ben and I lie on the couch and read it together, and every single cartoon makes us laugh. Her memoir is coming out soon, and I preordered it, which is a strong indicator of my feelings, given my propensity to loiter around hoping that someone will send me a review copy of everything. (You can read what looks like an excerpt here.)

Another book recommendation, this one from Birdy: Wonder by R.J. Palacio. She devoured it in a nearly unprecedented way. When I asked her to describe it for you, she said, “Like a review or like a blurb?” Hello, child of a writer. Here’s what she gave me: "August Pullman tries to make it through 5th grade with friends, foes, and surprises. It's an amazing book that you just don't feel like putting down." This is so literally true that Birdy had to stay home from school one day last week to finish it. Hello, child of a reader. Not that her description doesn’t totally capture the plot, but, well, it kind of doesn’t totally, so here’s this from Amazon: “August Pullman was born with a facial deformity that, up until now, has prevented him from going to a mainstream school. Starting 5th grade at Beecher Prep, he wants nothing more than to be treated as an ordinary kid—but his new classmates can’t get past Auggie’s extraordinary face.” Do you have any book recs for Birdy? She has also recently read and loved two of my own tween favorites: Bridge to Terabithia and The Brothers Lionheart. (Not that there were tweens back in the dark ages, when we were wringing out our menstrual rags in a bucket.)

 

I myself read and loved Valerie’s Martin’s latest, The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, which is a historical novel about nineteenth-century ghost ship, communication with the dead, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The ship itself is, weirdly, kind of the missing center of the book, not by accident, and it makes for an engagingly disjointed read, if that makes sense. If you’ve never read anything by her before, Trespass is my favorite and is a nearly perfect novel, IMHO. (I wanted to write IHOP.)

Frank Cottrell Boyce. He was not exactly driven to writing by homeliness, if you know what I mean.

Finally, on a friend’s recommendation we have now listened to more or less everything on tape by Frank Cottrell Boyce, and we have loved every single book: Cosmic, Millions, Framed, and the short but wonderful The Unforgotten Coat. He is English and funny and deeply kind, and the books are all different, but they’re all about the kinds of awesome, quirky kids who obsessively memorize details of saints’ lives, say, or note in a huge journal every car that passes. Some of our own recent car trips, even long ones, have passed in a blur of pleasure. 

Please, share anything relevant (or irrelevant!). We are, as you know, always looking to read, listen to, and play new things. xo

Whole-Grain Cornbread

As you may know, we eat a lot of beans. A. Lot. Of. Beans. as the young people say these days. Sometimes it’s rice and beans! And sometimes it’s just beans! Perfectly cooked pintos, say. (Don’t make me get all pressure cooker on you again.) It’s always exciting. I put out chopped raw onions, a little cruet of olive oil, some feta, fresh herbs, hot sauce, flaky sea salt—and everyone gets to top their own beans. Could there be a more delightful dinner? (Don’t answer that.)

But if company is coming, I occasionally lose my nerve around the serving of Just Beans in a Bowl! I do. And in those cases, corn bread is the card up my bean-loving sleeve. Corn bread is a crowd pleaser—pleasing crowds of children and grown-ups alike. Plus, it’s basically a thirty-minute round-trip excursion: into the oven by the time the oven preheats, then baked in another 15. 

A warm slab of sweet, grainy cornbread with a melting pat of butter? I mean, come on. Even if dinner is a kind of soup that you don’t like, the corn bread will work its good-natured magic on your meal mood, and you will find yourself saying, “I didn’t think the turnips and the parsnips would taste that good together? But it’s not even terrible.” While cheerful corn crumbs spray from your pleasant expression.

 

This corn bread is yet another example of how, for me, roughing up a white-flour recipe into a whole-grain recipe is win-win. It’s not at all an oh, well, it’s like chewing a cardboard-flavored wedge of particleboard but at least it’s healthy situation. Instead, it’s a nutty, deeply-flavored, tender-crumbed wonder, with a just-shy-of-custardy middle (you could bake this trait out of it, if you like) and a whiff of browned butter. Cheap, easy, wholesome, delicious.

Whole-Grain Cornbread

Serves 8-12

This is a loose adaptation of Joy of Cooking’s Northern Corn Bread recipe. The spelt is me, of course, and, also of course, I am using the maximum recommended allowances of butter and sugar. They call for ½ milk and ½ buttermilk, but I love the flavor you get from using all buttermilk—also the tender, almost custardy crumb of the baked cornbread. Leftovers, toasted and buttered, are sublime.

1 ¼ cups cornmeal (IF you can get freshly ground cornmeal, you will be ruined for life)

¾ cups whole spelt flour THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE (Okay, you could actually use white flour, but why would you?)

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

1/3 cup sugar (feel free to use less)

1 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

1 1/3 cups buttermilk

2 eggs

3 tablespoons butter, melted and slightly cooled

More butter

Heat the oven to 425 and put a 9- or 10-inch cast iron skillet in to heat. (Alternately, grease a 9- by 9-inch baking pan or dish, or the equivalent.)

Whisk together the dry ingredients.

Whisk together the buttermilk and eggs.

Fling a knob of butter (1 tablespoon, let’s say) into the pan that’s heating. If you’re using a greased pan, don’t do anything.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, start folding, then dump in the butter and fold together until the dries just disappear.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, which should be coated with browning, sizzling butter, and bake until it’s browned and seems springy, or at least not squidgy when you press the top (or stick a toothpick into it). Start checking it at 15 minutes, which is when I usually take mine out, even though the recipe says 20-25. Maybe this is because of preheating the pan, which is not in the recipe. A cold pan will doubtless take a bit longer.

Lemony Two-Bean Penne with Butter-Fried Breadcrumbs

Between my shrewy kvetching, Ben's squeaky whatever, and this dreary photograph, I will understand if you don't sprint to the kitchen to make this. But please, take my word for it: you should.

I like to say that picky eating is a state of mind: a rigid pre-emptive contempt for the unfamiliar; a kind of cringing, inflexible certainty that things will not be to your liking; a facial expression that says, “I hate this so much that I actually kind of hate you for putting it on my plate.” Thankfully, there are no picky eaters in my family, because here’s how much tolerance I have for it: [holds up thumb and forefinger pressed together]. That said, there are turning out to be many individual dislikes in my family, and if the kids didn’t manage them with so much grace and humor, I would probably have killed myself by now.

Ben likes eggs but not if they’re hard-boiled, and not quiche or frittata or other egg dishes with “things in them” unless those things are ham or ham. Birdy doesn’t like mushrooms, though she is friendly to the idea of them, likes to see them growing in the woods, and plans to like them at some point. Ben and Michael don’t like polenta, while Birdy and I could happily lie down on the couch and never get up again, so long as there was an Ikea catalogue and a hose spraying polenta into our mouths. Michael loathes other porridges as well: oatmeal, cream of wheat, rice pudding. He also hates tea, goat cheese, olives, and hearts of palm. His dislike of Twizzlers and caramel bull’s-eyes comes up only infrequently and never inconveniences me. Ben despises raw tomatoes so profoundly that he is not sure he could eat a pint of cherry tomatoes even if you paid him fifty dollars. Ben also hates melon as a rule, but is becoming less hostile towards really good cantaloupe. Both children dislike raw celery, but with no real passion. Birdy announced recently that she doesn’t really like soup (WTF?). Ben likes guacamole but not avocado; he likes onions but not scallions; he doesn't like sesame seeds or sesame oil. Birdy dislikes barbecue sauce because the taste reminds her of meat (fair enough). Everybody but me gets the willies from tempeh. The only thing I don’t like, besides organ meats and one kind of cheese I once ate that smelled like ammonia and tasted like the smell of human pee, is under-cooked eggplant. Birdy is also, I should add, a strict vegetarian—to the point where she won’t eat even candy or marshmallows that have gelatin in them. (“So, it has a little horse hoof!” Ben likes to say, shrugging, in a parody of Jewy dismissiveness.)

And yet. And yet I very rarely experience this family as difficult to feed, and I think it’s because they happily eat around most of the things they don’t love, and also they have a cheerful outlook about food in general. I mention that because after dinner last night, I looked at Ben’s plate—and it was full of green beans. “Tell me you’re saving those for last,” I said, and he smiled sheepishly. “The pasta was so, so delicious. But I’m turning out not to really like green beans. The way they squeak in my teeth.” He shuddered. I was, I should point out, having a bad day: frustrating work interactions, frustrating marital interactions (not the sex kind), frustrating dirty house, frustrating chimney needing to be fixed for $4000. “Do I have to do every single fucking thing?” is a (rhetorical) question I actually uttered out loud at some point yesterday. Seriously. Michael should have been wearing a t-shirt with an arrow that said, “I’m with jerkhole.”

I'm so busy pissing and moaning I forgot to mention that Birdy, my baby, turned 11.

Where was I? Oh. The beans. Did I look like I was about to storm away from the table? I hope not. But if I was, Ben saved me. “I mean,” he added, tipping his peachy, grinning face, his green-bean-filled bowl, towards me, “I was saving them for you, dear Mama.”

 

Don’t let Ben dissuade you from making this. I know it’s a variation on a million bean-and-pasta recipes I’ve published over the years, but it’s easy, it’s wholesome, and it’s got that perfect balance of salty-citrusy-tender-crunchy-herby-rich-funky that I always crave.

Lemony Two-Bean Penne with Butter-Fried Breadcrumbs

Serves 6

If I'd had fresh herbs, I would have used them. If I'd had a mint teabag, I would have used dried mint. Instead I used this beautiful California bay leaf that I stole from Ava's family's holiday wreath. It was outrageously fragrant. Probably everybody secretly hated the flavor but me. [Sighs self-pityingly.] A secret: you could make this without the fresh beans: add another can of beans, or use 3/4 of the pasta.

3 tablespoons butter, divided use

½ cup fresh breadcrumbs (made from crumbling, blendering, or food-processing a slice of whole-wheat bread)

1 pound whole-wheat penne, or a different shape that won't echo the beans (I like Bionaturae)

1/3 cup olive oil

2 cloves garlic, finely minced

1 fragrant bay leaf or ½ teaspoon dried mint (and/or ¼ cup chopped fresh parsley or mint)

1 cup vegetable broth (I like Rapunzel bouillon) or chicken broth

¾ pound green beans or haricots verts, cut at an angle into penne-sized lengths (I’ve been buying the 12-ounce bags from Trader Joe’s and they are so easy and good and cheap.)

1 (15-ounce) can pinto, pink, or white beans, drained

Juice and grated zest of 1 small lemon

½ teaspoon kosher salt (half as much table salt) or more or less to taste

Freshly ground black pepper

½ cup crumbled feta

Bring a large pot of heavily salted water (taste it—if it doesn’t taste like seawater, add more salt) to a boil while you prepare your other ingredients. Like the breadcrumbs! Melt one tablespoon of the butter in a very small pan, and fry the breadcrumbs over medium heat until they are brown and crisp, around 5 minutes. Scrape them into a bowl when they’re done, so they don’t burn in the still-hot pan.

Pop your bowls or plates in a 200-degree oven to warm. Really do this, so the pasta won’t get cold before you even pick up a fork.

Now heat the oil over low heat in a wide pan. Add the garlic, and stir it around a bit until it is fragrant but not coloring. Stir in the bay leaf or dried mint, then add the broth and green beans and turn the heat to medium.

Put your pasta in to boil.

When the green beans are half-tender (you can cover the pan for a while, if they are being slow-pokes), add the canned beans and lemon juice. Taste for salt: the feta will add some, but not enough to compensate if it is radically under-salted. Season robustly with black pepper.

When the pasta is done, reserve a cup of the cooking water, then drain it. Put the pasta back in the pot with the rest of the butter and stir it around. The green beans should be tender by now. Dump the panful of beans and their liquid into the pasta, along with the lemon zest and feta and, if you’re using them, the fresh herbs. Stir it. Add some or all of the cooking liquid and/or some more olive oil if it seems dry. Taste for salt and lemon and herbs and feta, adding more of whatever it needs.

Serve in the warmed bowls with breadcrumbs for passing.

You've Been Chopped: Organizing a Kids' Cooking Contest

Final plating: Spinach Salad with Cranberry Croutons, Coriander Vinaigrette, and, inexplicably, Whole Coriander Seeds

I am returning with recipes, I am, I swear. (For scrambled eggs? A glass of beer? Three Finn Crisp crackers with cheddar and yellow mustard on them? I will have to try and make some actual food.) But I keep wanting to tell you this: you have to set up a Chopped contest for your kids. It's a lot like the Iron Chef Lunch that I have written about, but it is less open-ended and more contestish. If you haven't seen the Food Network show Chopped, it works like this: competitors are judged by famous chefs on the dishes they prepare, but they have to use all the ingredients in a specially presented basket. So, you're making an appetizer, only you have to make it with spelt vinegar and fresh tobacco leaves and Froot Loops. You can use other ingredients too, but you have to include the designated ones. Then you cry and tell the judges that your cousin's pet hedgehog is dying and you really need to win so that you can help pay the vet bills. And the judges scowl and tell you that you really didn't capture the essence of the Froot Loops in your raw-tuna carpaccio, which is why (sorry about your little paw, Mr. Curly) they have to "chop" you. If you try this at home, you can skip these last two elements.

However, for a pair of kids or a small group of kids or a large group of kids, playing Chopped is extremely fun, on the one hand, and, on the other, gets all or some of your dinner made. We've now done it loads of times (birthday parties, sleepovers, play dates, summer "camp") and kids get totally psyched, even if they're teenagers and you'd think they'd be too cool to get excited about celery seeds or almond extract. They'll surprise you.

An unretouched photograph of enthusiastic teenagers competing at salad. Bonus Ava sighting!

Here's what you do.

1) Come up with a game plan. For kids with limited or unknown cooking skills, plan for them to make just a salad or dessert (more experienced cooks can do more courses and/or an entree, but make sure you have enough time). Gather or buy the 3 or 4 special ingredients that the cooks will have to use, and make sure that you have others that they'll likely want or need. So, say you're doing a salad: put the weird or fun ingredients in the basket (we've done raw cranberries, dill pickles, bread, coriander seeds, pomegranate molasses, shallots, hearts of palm, dates, turmeric and vanilla extract, among others) and then make sure you have some basic salad stuff (greens, cukes, carrots) on-hand. (We did a dessert one on New Year's Eve with a huge group of kids, and I think they had to use baguette, cocoa powder, navel oranges, and heavy cream. Tofu is a great ingredient for entrees, since it's safe to eat even if it's cooked improperly). I usually put a small amount of each required ingredient in a shopping bag for each team, so they can grab-and-go when the contest starts.

Edited to add a comment from below: "LOVE IT!! Just think that my kids and the kids we know wouldn't be as adventurous as yours. We might need to use Cream cheese, peanut butter, mini chocolate chips and apples in order to get them to produce anything eatable. Thanks for the tip!" Of course! That's a great idea. Rice cakes or toast could be a great base for an easier assembly-type project.

A mortar and pestle is so great to have. Here, cranberries are getting shown what's what.

2) Gather the rest of the supplies. Each team will need a plate for each chef, plus an extra one for the judges to share. I put out cutting boards and knives, dish towels, and the mortar and pestle, but I'm always available to help them find whatever they need.

Shallots getting chopped, before being sauteed and added to a cranberry vinaigrette.

3) Divide the kids into teams. (This is easy if there are only two children.) We usually make sure to have at least one big kid and/or experienced cook on each team. We try to split up the littlest and rowdiest kids.

The littlest AND rowdiest kid, all rolled into one sharp-knife-wielding contestant! But look at that concentrating face. Those cranberries weren't going to cut themselves in half, after all.

4) Explain the ground rules. "You will be making a salad. You will have 30 minutes. You will need to use the ingredients in the basket. You can also use other ingredients, but you must use all the ingredients in the basket. You will need to 'plate' the dish, which means arranging it nicely on a plate. You will be judged on the presentation of your dish, as well as on its flavor and the successful incorporation of required elements. Nobody may cut themselves with a knife or burn themselves at the stove."

It is fine to make a "no heat" rule! There have definitely been some alarums, if you know what I mean. And what I mean is the smoke alarm going off.

5) Present the basket. Now, as you know if you've ever, say, played Candyland, this activity will be only as much fun as the energy you put into it. That means you have to take each ingredient out of the basket with a great deal of dramatic and/or comedic flourish. Think: Will Ferrel playing Liberace unpacking his weird groceries narratingly.

6) Start the timer. Then retire helpfully to some comfortable nearby corner, ideally where you have installed a kitchen couch, like I am always reminding you to do. The kids will need to know where things are, especially if there are kids who aren't your kids. Also, they might want advice about ratios of oil to vinegar, and you can give it to them or not, depending on the ground rules you've laid out. Do be sure to give them time alerts in a dramatic and threatening way. Address them continually and menacingly as "Chefs!"

The final plating.

7) When the time is up, each team should bring one plate over to the judging table. Now you (and the other judges, if there are any) will taste each dish, making encouraging and damning announcements as you see fit, and disagreeing extravagantly about whether whole scallions, say, or minced prunes are or aren't a pleasing addition to a salad. Now you can go in one of two directions: Theatrically announce a tie (which is what I personally wish we could do) or know that you have the kinds of kids on hand who will kill you if you do this, and announce a winner, first shaming all the other teams by recapping the flaws of their pathetic attempts at a winning dish and telling them, with woeful schadenfreude, "I'm sorry. The vinaigrette was nicely tart, and that was a compelling usage of torn salami, but you've been chopped."

8) Now the kids can each pick a plate from another team or their own and eat their amazing creations! Before cleaning up.

Loving Heart T-Shirt (+ freezer paper stencil tutorial)

Is this a nice or disturbing valentine for a child? Now that is an excellent question, which the post below will not be addressing.

Before I forget: my helmet enthusiasm is over at the NYT Motherlode blog, here.

Okay. Now. I am renaming this post "Aorta Be Your Valentine," after my brilliant friend Moira. (The best I could come up with was "Won't you be my atrioventricular valve?") If you want lots of different ideas for Valentine's Day, I mentioned a bunch in my post here. Today I'm going to tell you about one thing, and one thing only, and that's how to make a simple freezer-paper stencil to embellish a t-shirt. I did this project yesterday, start-to-finish, in an hour and a half, and that included both making a second shirt and my run to the shop in town to buy new x-acto knife blades. If your blade isn't sharp? You will end up lying on the floor in tears, cursing Saint Valentine and wishing you had just bought the Hallmark card with the singing potato. Get new blades! They only cost $1.99.

Okay, the tutorial. Or, should I say "cute-orial"? I should not. (Directions are expanded and summarized at the bottom, if you want to skip the pictures.) Start by getting some nice cotton t-shirts from the Salvation Army, and wash and dry them. Now find an image you want to use, one that can easily resolve into a simple outline. Think: stencil. I knew that I wanted to do an anatomical heart, so I did a Google image search for "anatomical heart stencil." I did not find a perfect one, so I widened my search to "anatomical heart," and found this amazing series of cards at this etsy shop. You should just buy one of those, and skip this whole thing! UNLESS YOU ARE GOING TO GET NEW X-ACTO KNIFE BLADES.

Print out the design you want to use, re-sizing as necessary. (Easier said than done! And I couldn't even ask Ben for help!) If your outline is not already very dark, go over it in black pen, as shown here.

Ben would have been able to help me turn this into an outline before I even printed it, thus saving me all that red ink. But I could not ask him for help, because SECRET PROJECT.

Now tape a piece of freezer paper over your image, matte-side up, and use a pencil or a permanent marker to trace the image onto the freezer paper. 

If you are new to cutting stencils, a shape with more straight than curved lines is easier. A nice, romantic rectangle, for example. Or, "Happy Valentine's Day. I think you're square!" (Note: this is not a permanent marker! A fact which I lived to regret mildly.)

Now tape down the freezer paper again, and use your very sharp x-acto knife to cut out the image. This is painstaking but not unpleasant, if you ask me. Which you implicitly did.

I added the little thought bubble to make the design both less gruesome and more visually baffling. Notice that I needed to keep the heart I'd cut out, and then I needed to remember to iron it down inside the bubble, which I did, thank goodness.

Now use your iron set to high to press the freezer paper, shiny-side down, to the shirt. (See the expanded instructions below.) I find this strangely fun. But then again, the iron and I don't get a lot of opportunities to spend time together.

There is no mystery here: as soon as it seems stuck down, it's stuck down.

Now dab acrylic paint onto your design (stuff something in the shirt to prevent bleed-through), until it is all filled in. I use acrylic craft paint (the kind that comes in 2-ounce bottles in a million colors) because it's cheap and I hate heat-setting fabric paint and I have had some bad experiences involving heat-setting improperly. Acrylic paint will just dry and be good to go. But it will feel always feel a little dried-paint-ish, rather than getting nice and soft like fabric paint can. Your call. 

I mixed black and red for the heart, and used a kind of dreamy pearlized white for the thought bubble. I used a bristle brush, but a sponge brush works just fine.

Even though you have to do this very carefully, so as not to smear wet paint everywhere, peel the freezer paper off while the paint is still wet. This is not consistent with many freezer-paper stencil instructions, I know, if you are a connoisseur of freezer-paper stencil instructions. But I find that if I let the paint dry, then the stencil will end up lifting some of it off at the edges. Now let the paint dry, and done.

Annoyingly, you will need to cut a new stencil to make a second shirt.

Freezer Paper Stencil How-To
This is easy, thrilling, and slightly addictive.

Materials and Gadgetry

Plastic-coated freezer paper (sold with the other food wraps; don’t try this with regular waxed paper)

Masking Tape

Acrylic craft paint (or fabric paint, though then you’ll have to heat-set it)

Pencil or permanent marker, x-acto knife, cutting surface, iron, paint brush, cotton t-shirt

Instructions

1. Begin by drawing or tracing your design onto the non-shiny side of a piece of freezer paper. Use a permanent marker so the ink won't later bleed when it comes into contact with the paint.
2. Tape the freezer paper to a cutting board, and use the x-acto knife to cut out the shape to leave the open stencil behind. This takes patience but is not difficult; if anything tears or gets cut away by accident, patch it with masking tape. If there are little pieces you'll need later, such as the heart I cut out of the thought bubble, be sure to save them.
3. Position the stencil on the t-shirt shiny side down, and, with the iron set to high, press straight down for a few seconds until the stencil sticks. Lift the iron and press back down as needed, rather than sweeping the iron back and forth. Don't iron down all the outside parts of the stencil, as this will only make it more difficult to remove later.
4. Stuff a piece of cardboard or paper into the t-shirt to prevent paint bleed-through. Now use the brush to fill in your design, dabbing paint from the outer edges inward, and using an up-and-down motion rather than a back-and-forth one (you want to keep paint from leaking under the edges of the stencil).
5. Peel off and discard the stencil (it’s not reusable) and allow the paint to dry before wearing.

Clean Truffles

Are you following Sochi YogurtGate? No? American athletes have lost access to their rightful yogurt, and an international diplomatic crisis has ensued. The proper paperwork was not filled out, it seems, and while the undelivered yogurt languishes in a storage facility, the heavens rain down a plague of locusts. Also the Obama administration has asked for special dispensation from the Russian agency Rosselkhoznadzor, which is the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance. (Western Mass. locals: is this the Russian-government branch of Dave’s Soda and Pet City?) Those American athletes really need their yogurt really badly! Because they can’t just live on the chicken fingers and plain buttered spaghetti they’re ordering off the children’s menu. You can hardly blame the Russians for rolling their eyes. (“We khev yogurt. Flavor borscht. Very nice, very healthy.”) The cold war is alive and well.

But oooh, we love the Olympics. Every two years we get cable TV for two weeks, and we all stay up every night, binge-watching. But how can the Olympics parents take it? I went to Birdy’s LEGO Robotics championship in December and had a pride-induced stroke just watching a bunch of geeky kids program their dorkmobiles.

Be my raw-foods valentine.

Anyhoo. (Transition alert.) Speaking of healthy snacks! Clean Truffles are simply a version of these raw energy bars, with a flavor profile a little more like Misery Bars. But they’re bite-sized. Because I’m a firm believer in portion psychology. Haul me up a "snack-size" portion in the dipper of a back hoe, and I will eat the whole thing with a shovel; likewise, show me one through the eyepiece of a microscope, and I will pop it in my mouth and rub my belly, satisfied. These truffles are, for me, the happy medium. A little burst of protein, with a nice, low glycemic index so you don’t get any of the spiking blood sugar. Plus, they're ridiculously tasty: fudgy and rich, with a little tart cherry relief from the date-y sweetness. It’s not the Patriotic American Greek Yogurt of Democracy. But it makes a pretty perfect snack for regular schoolkids.

Clean Truffles

Makes 15-20

You can vary the nuts and/or the fruit here (I have some combo ideas here), just keep the proportions more or less the same. Also, you could roll them in chopped nuts or more cocoa powder or nothing at all. If you choose the latter, then call them “Naked Raw Truffles” and see what happens.

3/4 cup raw almonds

1/3 cup dried unsweetened coconut

2 tablespoons cocoa powder

3/4 cup pitted dates

1/2 cup dried cherries

1/4 teaspoon almond extract

pinch of salt

1 tablespoon coconut oil, or as necessary (optional)

More dried coconut for rolling

In a food processor fitted with the steel blade, grind the almonds with the coconut and cocoa powder until it’s all nice and finely ground, then tip it into a bowl. Now grind the dates and cherries until they turns into small clumps, then add the nut mixture back in with the extract and salt and process again until a small handful of the mixture holds together when you squeeze it. If this never happens, then add in a few more dates and/or the optional tablespoon of coconut oil; conversely, if the mixture seems too damp, add more almonds and/or dried coconut.

Now pull tablespoon-sized clumps of the mixture out of the bowl and roll them into balls. Then roll them in the coconut. This process more like building a sand castle than like, say, breading scallops. You will need to pick up the truffle inside a handful of coconut and really kind of roll and squeeze it to get the coconut to stick. Unless your truffles are supremely moist, and then maybe it will be more like breading scallops after all. (Mmmm. Scallops.)

Store the truffles airtight in the refrigerator.

Chicken Wing Magic

Wing magic. With harissa.

Up until about a year ago, I was mentally insane. Because I thought—and often said—that it wasn’t possible, or worthwhile, to make good chicken wings at home. “That’s why God invented sports bars!” I announced, on my way to ours, to order buffalo wings, “extra extra crispy with an extra side of celery.” Which I still love to do. But I was very, very wrong about the possibilities of my own oven. I have now spent a year mastering the at-home wing and, finally, they are even better than the ones at the sports bar. Sacre bleu! But true.

These are the roasted wings, with nothing on them yet. (Right?)

There are two secrets, and here they are: salt and time—plenty of both. Basically, you salt the wings heavily and let them sit in the fridge for a couple of hours—ideally overnight or, less ideally, for the 20 minutes it takes your oven to preheat. I usually strike a middle ground in the 4-6 hour range. Then you put the wings in the oven and you leave them there to roast for a full hour, turning them halfway through—but only because you are bored and excited than because they actually need turning. Then you either eat them as is, because they are perfect, or you sauce them in any number of classic or high-end wing-saucing styles. That’s it.

Are your proud of me for acknowledging the Super Bowl, even just obliquely?

What happens is this: the salt seasons the meat to the bone, and the long heat renders all of the fat so that a) there is not a speck of flab on the finished wing and b) the wings end up frying in their own melted fat, turning perfectly, magically crisp. It’s a magical kind of one-two—like how, when there’s a Monday holiday, not only do you get the day off, BUT ALSO the week is only four days long. Let me clarify, though: if you prefer wings that you’d more likely describe as “juicy,” where you are happily gnawing flaccid meat laced through with rubbery veins, these are not your wings. But if you like wings where the deeply golden meat pulls clean off the bones in crisp-chewy shreds, then this is your method, trust me.

BBQ. These are too sweet for me, but they are crowd-pleasers, especially when it comes to the younger set.

Although our friend Zaim maturely preferred the harissa ones.

But you need to take it seriously. Because if you do things to the wings before cooking them—marinate or glaze them, say, or do some other fancy thing because you don’t trust me here that simple is best—then that thing you did will get in the way of the fat melting, and the wings will never crisp properly and/or they will burn.

Ben and our friend Sahar. Unstill Life with Chicken Wings.

Okay? And you know I’m very live-and-let-live about everything, especially (with the possible exception of pizza toast) when it comes to recipes. You want to swap in pecans for walnuts, sub out cardamom for mace, use the sagging cabbage you already have instead of buying cauliflower? Great! But here: salt and time. The rest can come after. After, you can do whatever you like to the wings, and you’ll have created a versatile and delicious kind of a crunchy-perfect blank canvas for your favorite seasoning. I favor spicy: classic buffalo or harissa (see below) but the world is your wing.

Chicken Wing Magic

This recipe can be easily multiplied. I usually double it to feed 6 serious wing-eaters with a couple unserious children thrown in the mix.

3 pounds chicken wings

3 teaspoons kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

Line a large rimmed pan with parchment paper (or the wings will stick). Arrange the chicken wings on the pan and salt them, first on one side and then on the other. Use all the salt. Cover the wings and refrigerate them for 4-6 hours (or, more ideally, overnight, or less ideally, for less time). Look at the gross picture down below to see about how spaced out the wings should be; if they're too crowded, they'll do more steaming than frying, so you should spread them onto a second pan.

Take the chicken out of the fridge and start heating your oven to 375. Put the chicken in the oven and roast for an hour until the wings are deeply golden, very crisp and frying in puddles of their own fat. I use small wings, but if yours are larger, they may take 30-45 minutes longer. If they are not browning for some reason, turn your oven up 25 degrees. I flip the wings halfway through the baking, but I think it’s just because I want to interact with them. That’s it. Then you'll sauce and serve, without putting them back in the oven.

And then:

Some saucing options. I find that something like ½ cup of whatever will sauce 3 pounds of wings without drowning them—but by all means scale it up, if that’s your thing. Methodwise, what you want to do is put the hot wings in a large lightweight bowl with the sauce of your choosing, so that you can flip them around restaurant style, coating the wings lightly but thoroughly. All of these are good.

• Classic Buffalo. ¼ cup of butter and ¼ cup of Frank’s Original Red Hot, melted together. Serve with blue cheese dressing and celery sticks, if you like. (Edited to add: I now melt the butter in a tiny pot and whisk in 1/2 teaspoon of flour and then the Frank's. It makes a creamier, clingier sauce.)
• BBQ. ½ cup of bottled barbecue sauce. (I know!)
• Harissa. ¼ cup of harissa mixed with the juice of ½ a lemon. Top with cilantro leaves.
• Miso-Citrus. 2 tablespoons of white miso stirred together first with 1 tablespoon of hot water and then with the juice and grated zest of ½ a tangerine or orange. Top with slivered scallions.
• Lime-Butter. ¼ cup melted butter, mixed with the juice and grated zest of 1 lime, 1 clove of minced garlic, a handful of chopped cilantro, salt to taste, and 1 (optional) teaspoon of sugar or honey.
• Chimichurri. ½ cup of finely chopped parsley mixed with ¼ cup each white vinegar and olive oil, 1 clove of minced garlic, 1 tablespoon of chopped capers, salt to taste, and an optional whiff of anchovies or fish sauce.
• The Ginger Vinaigrette from here.

(I stuck these two gross pictures down here.)

And The Good Mother Myth winner is. . .

Janna! Please send me your address. Thank you all for playing.

Please stay tuned for chicken wings, coming soon.

xo

Four Things and a (regular) Give-Away!

Thing One:

Thanks to reader Susan’s request, I have added a couple older recipes to the blog:

Soy-glazed Tofu, Dad’s Spaghetti Sauce, and Perfect Oatmeal Cookies (now with MORE SPELT). I really am trying to move them all over here, but I am slow, and requests like that are a kick in the pants. In a good way. Please do ask.

Ben's word hole, in action.

Thing Two:

Thanks to reader Jody, whose family owns the Anomia World-Conquering Empire of Fantastic Games, we are in possession of a new game, and we are loving it so much. It’s called Duple, and it’s basically like Anomia crossed with a really great word game, like Boggle, and a really terrible neurological disorder, like amnesia. Or, from the company's description: “Players flip letter cards in turn until the symbols on two players' cards match. Matching players face-off by being the first to shout a word which contains the letters on both cards. Sound easy? Think again. Correct answers must be at least 5 letters long and conform to ever-changing categories.” So, for example, when the category was “verb,” and the letters on the table were f and u, Ben yelled frustrate, while my mind was still turning over a verb that was more obvious but neither long enough nor not an obscenity. “Wow,” Ben said. “That really shot out my word hole!” Indeed. Sadly, my own personal word hole is producing only a demented trickle.

Whale Rider. This face. You will die a thousand deaths.

Thing Three:

We have a hard time finding movies that suit Birdy’s level of—what?—gravity, maybe. It’s not that she doesn’t love comedy—Portlandia, say, or anything Demetri Martin—but where Ben will watch Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock until dawn breaks over the mountaintop, Birdy finds much of it too cynical and really prefers a more meaningful story she can mull over. To that end, let me recommend the wildly inspiring Mad Hot Ballroom and the beautiful and difficult Whale Rider, both films from a few years back. (Do remember, as I did not, to tell your kids that there is not actually a lot of whale riding in Whale Rider. My kids were mistakenly picturing a kind of Maori remake of Free Willy.) We also honored the legacy of Martin Luther King by watching the first segment of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, his four-part documentary about Hurricane Katrina, which has provoked many conversations about both magnificent heroism and persistent racism. This is a very difficult movie (there are dead bodies in it, for example, and a great number of people who are frightened, angry, or injured) and you might want to screen it first if you’re thinking about watching with your children. Finally, the older PBS reality series Rough Science (which we borrowed from the library) is a delight in every way: like Naked and Afraid, but with happy, smiling, cooperative, creative English geniuses. (Please share your own recommendations in the comments, won’t you?)

And, finally, Thing Four:

I just finished reading The Good Mother Myth, edited by Avital Norman Nathman, which is a staggering work of heartbreaking . . . wait. Except that it is. It’s an anthology of essays about being a parent through the lowest of lows, the rottenest of our own behavior, the most crushing defeats and prejudices. And yet, beautifully, it is an optimistic collection. In the way of good anthologies, each piece offers a different flavor of perfect imperfection, and you can kind of pick around, which is fun. Sometimes, as I stuck my hand into the book’s gorp, I grabbed a random, welcome fistful of nuts and raisins, and sometimes I picked out all the cashews. (Full disclosure: I am friends with many of the contributors, so those were my own personal cashews.) When I went to a local reading of the book last weekend, every single piece, read aloud, gave me actual goose bumps. Seal, the book’s publisher, has graciously offered to give a copy of the book away here, so please let’s do the usual: simply express your desire to win in the comments. This one I’ll do randomly, I promise.

Stay warm, dear mamas. And papas. And other people, who I love.

xo