Coconut chocolate brownies

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Coconut chocolate brownies

Coconut chocolate brownies

After the school dance, a man set up a ladder and cut down all the stars. Malcolm stood below and caught them as they fell. He walked home with an armful of stars, trailing yellow balloons behind him like wings. I love the morning after any balloon-related event. The balloons seem tired, and if you give them a little tug, they don’t quite make it back to the ceiling. This is my favorite time to take pictures – I like it much better than during the party itself. I love the boys in their pajamas batting balloons back and forth or racing around the house with them. The morning light hanging in the balloons like fire, lighting them with a warm glow from within, making them almost as bright and buoyant as my boys. I took so many photos this weekend, of the boys and their balloons – I took hundreds! I lay on the ground for some, looking up at their laughing faces, and up the strings to the golden balloons. (I had just seen an Ozu movie!) I was so happy with them that I didn’t even look at them right away. I saved them for after work. And when I loaded them onto the computer I could see the tantalizing little thumbnails of the shots vivid with our green walls, strong morning light and radiant boys. But the pictures never loaded. I never got to see them, I lost them all, and all of the photos from the dance. I feel such irrational regret about this loss. They’re just pictures! David and I tell ourselves all the time not to experience our life through a lens. We want to capture every moment and remember every movement, but sometimes we have to just put the camera down and live it. Trust our eyes, trust our memory. I know that. So why do I feel such an odd small pang of nostalgia for these pictures I’ll never see? I suppose it’s like the films I make in my dreams. So perfect and unattainable – so perfect because you can never see it as it really is, because things always look better caught sideways in glimpses, memories, and dreams. Oh, well, there will always be more balloons!!

These brownies have coconut milk in them, which makes them soft and almost pudding-like. They also have flaked coconut and chocolate chips, which makes them delicious! They’re not terribly sweet, and I used very very dark cocoa, which almost has a savory flavor to it, according to my taster. You could use regular cocoa, though, and they’d still be tasty.

Here’s the Beastie Boys with Root Down (Pp balloon mix)

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Roasted potatoes and artichoke hearts

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Roasted potatoes and artichokes

Roasted potatoes and artichokes

I was going to put as my facebook status “don’t you hate it when you’re feeling really down and discouraged, and you hope that something nice might happen to cheer you up, but instead your dog gets sick and it’s Sunday night and you don’t have a car, so you have to ask somebody to drive you to the emergency vet and the visit costs as much as you made in tips all weekend long at your lousy job?” But of course I didn’t! Nobody wants to read depressed and moan-y news like that, unless it has a picture of a cat attached. And I don’t have a cat! People mostly tend to write about stuff they feel good about, on these social media forums, or minor pet peeves, or share inspirational sayings, or post pictures of cats, or the everloving inspirational quotes with pictures of cats. Here at The Ordinary, I try to share some of the times when things don’t go well, when I ruin dinner or Malcolm yells at me that I’m mean, because I’d feel like a liar if I pretended everything was perfect all the time. But I guess I try to be a bit cheerful about it, to find some vague reason to be happy in the end, even if it’s a fairly foolish reason…Dinner turned out horrible and I threw a temper tantrum, but Malcolm gave me a big hug, so who cares? Well, I have been feeling discouraged lately, and Clio did get sick and I was up much of the night with her, and to be honest I was having a really hard time trying to see it in a positive light. But I started thinking about it, as I sat on a bench basking in the mild but well-meaning sunshine and watched the boys play with their friends, and I realized that the very act of writing about it makes me feel more hopeful. Not just because it helps to talk about it or it’s cathartic in some way, but because of the writing itself. It makes me happy to put words together. I feel good when the words sound good, and even when they don’t, which is probably most of the time. And it makes me happy to think about this thing that makes me happy that’s so simple – it doesn’t require complicated equipment or lots of planning. It’s completely free of charge. It might be a self-indulgent waste of time, but who cares! It doesn’t hurt anyone, and nobody can take it away from me. I like to think that everybody could have this…some seemingly trifling activity that doesn’t make you forget your worries so much as it opens a possibility of some endeavor that’s more important than your worries, if you let it be. Maybe you doodle, maybe you strum a guitar, maybe you cook a mean risotto. Any of these things can be shared, can be nourishing to yourself and others. And now, I may have been in a foul mood all day, and may not have gotten much sleep, but Malcolm is asking if I want to make ginger beer with him, so who cares?

These potatoes were a breeze! Easy peasy lemon squeezy, and they’d be good with a squeeze of lemon. I made them after work one day with some leftover canned artichoke hearts. But they turned out so good! Crispy and tender and flavorful. They’re very simple, as they’re presented here, but they seemed a little fancy to me anyway. You could easily add shallots or garlic or olives before you roast, or sprinkle on some cheese towards the end. But they’re nice like this – simple – with salt and lots of pepper.

Here’s Who Cares by Michelle Shocked, which has been in my head a lot lately.

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Sage roasted butter beans and greens with raisins and pine nuts

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roasted butterbeans and greens with raisins and pine nuts

roasted butterbeans and greens with raisins and pine nuts

It was a night under the stars! That’s what the school dance was called, and, funnily enough, as we walked home I’d never seen the stars so bright and clear over our tinsy little metropolis. The stars were cool and distant, after the hot clamor of the dance, but they seemed to be dancing, too. The boys went in different shifts. First the little ones, racing around the transformed all-purpose room (cafeteria tables pushed out of the way, gym mats rolled up, starry black balloons floating everywhere.) Isaac and his friends wiggled through the dancing crowd like small minnows against the current. (How do they all know dance moves when they’re so young?) The older kids stood around in little groups, full of joyful secret drama. Malcolm looked dapper as hell in his suit. But we weren’t allowed to stay and watch the second shift, so I can only report that when Malcolm and I walked home, looking for orion and the big dipper, he had a cool happy glow about him, like the moonlight.

And the music? We had the Harlem Shake twice, of course, and gangnam style and that heyo gallileo song, and lord knows what else. They all sound a bit alike, they’re musically repetitive and lyrically uninspired, and yet they’re irresistible! I’m such a sucker for this kind of music. Roller rink music, prom music, school dance music. So for this week’s Sunday interactive playlist, we’re going to collect songs we remember from dances and roller rinks, or any public youthful dancing occasion. I’m excited about this one! I think we can make quite a collection of happy songs from different eras and different parts of the world. But I need help, because I was super backwards and shy as a child, and didn’t go to many school dances.

sage roasted butter beans and spinach with raisins and pine nuts

sage roasted butter beans and spinach with raisins and pine nuts

I’m excited about this meal, as well. As I’ve said a million times, greens with raisins and pine nuts, simply seasoned with garlic and maybe a little rosemary, is one of my all time favorite flavors. Here I added a little egg to make it comforting and substantial. You can use any greens you like. I used broccoli rabe and spinach, but you could add kale or chard, if you like. And the butter beans! I coated them in a little olive oil and roasted them with sage. Simple, but they turned out delicious. Cripsy, tender, meaty. We ate this with some herbed pearled couscous, and I made croquettes out of the leftovers with the addition of some bread crumbs, eggs and cheese – formed into patties and roasted on an olive-oil coated tray. Also very delicious! I’d show you a picture, but it got lost on my camera somewhere, and disappeared.

So here’s the playlist. I’ll make it collaborative, so feel free to add what you’d like.

And here’s a scene from Freaks and Geeks. I love the impossibly long walk to the dance floor, and the way the song kicks in when they get there. “If somebody making you go to a dance is the worst thing in your life, I’d say you have a pretty good life.”

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Tender buttery rolled-up rolls

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Rolled up rolls

Rolled up rolls

Ezra Jack Keats seems like somebody I’d like to spend some time with. Like Ozu and Tati and Vigo, he seems like somebody that has a lot of answers but wouldn’t feel compelled to tell you about it. So you’d just have to spend some time with them, to listen and learn. He is, of course, the author and illustrator of The Snowy Day, as well as 21 other books. The Snowy Day tells the story of Peter, a little boy who wakes up to find that it has snowed. And then it describes his day – walking through the snow, making foot prints, making tracks with a stick, wanting to join a snowball fight but understanding that he’s too little when he gets knocked down with a snow ball, trying to save a snowball and surprised when it disappears in his pocket in the warmth of his house. It’s a perfect book. The language is simple and haiku-like, the illustrations a jumble of color and movement. The Snowy Day was published in 1962, which also happens to be the year the name of a crayola crayon was changed from “flesh” to “peach.” Peter is black, but that’s never mentioned in the text, and the book is not about that. In our literary history black characters had frequently appeared as caricatures or background figures, but Peter is just a little boy, just Peter, so full of personality and charm, so fully conjured with so few words. Keats has said, “My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along.” The book is about the wonder of walking in a world transformed by snow… “I wanted The Snowy Day to be a chunk of life, the sensory experience in word and picture of what it feels like to hear your own body making sounds in the snow. Crunch…crunch…And the joy of being alive…I wanted to convey the joy of being a little boy alive on a certain kind of day—of being for that moment. The air is cold, you touch the snow, aware of the things to which all children are so open.” Like all of Keats’ books, the problems facing the boy are small and real – not as dramatic as being chased by death eaters, maybe, but all the more compelling for being universal and recognizable and honest. All good books and films about children are not about having children – not cynically appealing to what some focus group has suggested would sell to a certain age group. They’re about being children, about always being a child in certain situations, like when the snow falls. or when you feel inadequate or disappointed, or left out of a crowd. Keats has said that discovering collage made him feel like “…a child playing…I was in a world with no rules.” And it feels exactly like my boys’ lives and their creativity…pulling a bit of something from here, a scrap of something from there, and piecing it all together in their teeming, colorful little brains. It’s a good way to experience the world and connect everything you see and hear and feel…aware of the things to which children are so open. Keats understands.

tender rolled up rolls

tender rolled up rolls

These rolled up buttery rolls turned out really delicious! The perfect thing to eat after coming in from the snow! I wanted them to be really really soft and tender, so I added milk and butter and an egg. And I wanted them to be fun to eat, so I flattened them and then rolled them up. They were fun to eat! We could pull apart each soft layer. We could fill them with greens and beans, or with scrambled eggs the next morning. They’re very versatile, too. I added a bit of pepper in the layers, but you could add herbs or nuts or cheese. Or cinnamon sugar, if you want them to be sweetish. Or chocolate chips, if you want them to be really sweet!

Here are two songs by Elizabeth Cotten, another of those people who seems to have all the answers.

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Black currant and bittersweet chocolate bakewell bars & cardamom ginger chocolate chip cookies

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Bakewell bars

Bakewell bars

Our house was built in 1850, or thereabouts. This June, we’ll have been here a decade. In that time, for every part of the house we’ve repaired or prettied up, another has fallen apart. We’ve got cracking plaster, peeling paint, rickety railings. We’ve got brick dust and spider guests and inexplicably leaky ceilings. Seen from without or within, no two lines of this house are parallel. It’s a mad mess of slants and angles. Originally, it was probably only a few rooms, and parts have been added on over the years, with well-meaning foolishness. The middle of the house is held up by a piece of railway track over a cistern. At one time this was a two-family house, and the boys’ bedroom was a kitchen, as the linoleum tacked over pumpkin pine floors attests. It’s a ridiculous ramble, but I love it. During storms and blizzards, I always think about how crumbling it seems, and then I think about how long it has lasted, how many fierce winds have rattled its bones, with people inside huddled by candlelight, talking and playing games, trying to keep out the storm with the force of their bright cheer. People must have been born in this house, and died here, too. Couples must have fallen in love. Malcolm and Isaac learned to walk here, and dozens of other babies must have done so, too. When David was fixing up the house, before we moved in, he found lots of lovely artifacts. Toys that had been dropped through holes in the floor boards – jacks and doll parts and bits of clothes – just as Malcolm and Isaac drop their toys through today! He found newspapers from 1850, with little bits of news about people in the area – words on brittle brown paper to us now, but fully lived with warmth and emotion at the time. In the time that we’ve been here, we’ve left our mark. There’s a smudgy line at the height of a boy’s hand, that traces their progress through the house – up the stairs and down the hall. Nearly every wall has mad scribbles in crayon or marker. The floors and doors are forever scratched with dog’s claws, first Steenbeck’s and now Clio’s, and a dog’s life is such a time capsule, such a reminder that time is passing. It’s got personality, our house. It’s not perfect, but I love it.

black-board-tableIn an attempt to channel the creative efforts of our little artists off the walls and onto a more acceptable surface, David painted an entire table with black chalkboard paint. It’s a massive and handsome table that runs the length of our kitchen. It’s got drawers for paper and crayons and chalk. We can doodle while we dine! It’s been a lot of fun, over the years, watching the boys tell stories with their chalk. And I love the look of the rich, matte, black paint. This year David had the genius idea to apply chalkboard paint to some tins we had leftover from cookies and chocolates. chalkboard-tinThey’re beautiful! They’re crafty! They’re repurposed! And useful! You can write the name of the contents, and erase it when you put something new in. You have to sand the metal first, and then spray an even coat of paint on. I think they’d make nice packaging for a gift of food, because they’d be reusable.

Chalkboard tins

Chalkboard tins

bakewell bars

bakewell bars

In honor of my lovely new cookie tins, I made some cookies. (Who am I kidding, I always make cookies!) I made some bakewell bars, a simpler version of a bakewell tart. They have a shortbread layer, a jam layer, and an almond frangipane layer. I made mine with black currant jam and bittersweet chocolate chips, because I love the tart-sweet combination of the two. But you could use any sort of jam you like, and omit the chocolate chips if you don’t want chocolate. (Who doesn’t want chocolate?) These were quite soft and flavorful. The other cookies are cardamom ginger chocolate chip cookies with just a hint of coconut. I think ginger and cardamom, which are mysterious and have a bit of bite, are very nice with chocolate, which is familiar and has just a hint of bitterness. I only used a small amount of chips and coconut, which made these cookies seem elegant to me!
Cardamom ginger chocolate chip cookies

Cardamom ginger chocolate chip cookies

Here’s Our House, by Madness, of course. What other song could I have chosen?

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Roasted butternut semolina cakes with cauliflower pumpkinseed puree

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Roasted butternut semolina cakes

Roasted butternut semolina cakes

Two brothers sit on a grassy patch below an elevated walkway. Behind each of them, in the far distance, stretches a long bridge that seems to connect the boys to the real, busy world. But they don’t care about that. The boys are in their stocking feet, comfortably eating rice with their fingers, and drinking tea out of the tea kettle lid or their cupped hand. “Messy, isn’t it?” “Yes! Fun, isn’t it!” Minoru and Isamu have run away from home with their teakettle and rice cooker, because their parents won’t buy them a television set. They’ve decided not to speak to anyone until their demands are met. This is, of course, Yasujiro Ozu’s tenderly beautiful film Good Morning. The film tells the story of a small suburban community and the havoc cast upon it by gossip, suspicion, and two small boys on a silence strike. The film was shot in 1959, and it reminded me of Tati’s films of the same period – full of grace, generosity and gentle humor. It’s about ordinary people going about ordinary lives, but it’s completely captivating. The boys decide to stop speaking because grownups talk so much and say nothing worth hearing…it’s all just a lot of meaningless talk. “Good morning, good evening, a fine day, where to? Just a ways, I see, I see.” The brothers can talk to each other, if they show the right sign. And they have a shared language of gestures and expressions that are full of meaning, and beautiful to see. Of course their gestures don’t always translate to the rest of the world, and when the little one, Isamu, tries to ask permission to speak in class, nobody knows what he means. The adults in the film, including the boys’ aunt and their English tutor, are amused by the boys’ assessment of grown-up conversation, but they recognize that there’s some truth in it.The film is full of misunderstandings and half-spoken thoughts and desires. The gossip that travels from small house to small house is a perfect example of meaningless words gone awry and striking out with their own destructive pattern. And yet, the real joy of the film is the moments of understanding between people, and in those moments when we recognize ourselves in the characters, our lives in their lives. They speak Japanese and a bit of English (“I love you!”). They talk in niceties and don’t say what they mean. But we know what they mean, whatever language they speak. Ozu is famous for defying Hollywood’s rules for creating melodrama in a film, not just by his quiet use of still, low-angled shots, but also because he utilized narrative ellipses. He doesn’t show the big events, he shows the spaces between them. In famous “pillow shots,” he gives us beautiful small poems of transition, static, but full of quiet, gentle motion within the frame. In the same way, we understand that what’s important in communication isn’t the words, but the spaces between them, and the meaning that they convey through gesture and expression and a universal understanding of human nature. In the last scene, the boys’ aunt and their English tutor stand at a train station talking foolishly about the shape of a cloud (“Yes, it does look like something…”) But from their barely contained smiles, we know that they know they’re saying so much more to each other. Throughout the film, there’s a running series of fart jokes. The boys eat pumice so that they’ll be able to produce a fart on demand when they push each other on the forehead. One of the housewives repeatedly mistakes her husband’s fart for language. During a callisthenic session, two boys admire the flatulent prowess of an older man, and say he has a lot of practice because he works for the gas company. The boys decide that farting is okay, as a form of communication, and doesn’t constitute a breach of their silence strike. This is more than a spate of fart gags, this is a nod to the things that connect us all…our humor and our humanity.

Grating and roasting butternut squash is my new favorite culinary technique! I use my food processor, which makes it super easy and fast. You might find you have a huge mound of grated squash, but it cooks down. I had mine piled about 2 inches deep on the baking tray to start, but it cooked down to about one cup in the end. Just keep stirring the outside pieces, which brown first, into the center of the tray. I added my grated butternut squash to a batter that was very similar to that for semolina dumplings or Roman gnocchi, which have quite a comforting consistency. I flavored it with sage, rosemary, smoked paprika, and a bit of cinnamon and cayenne. Delicious! To go with these big cakes, I made a puree of cauliflower and pumpkinseeds, with a little roasted garlic and spinach thrown in. It was creamy and smooth with a mild nutty flavor, and was very pretty with the butternut cakes.

Here’s Memphis Minnie with Good Morning.

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Cadbury mini-egg ice cream

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Cadbury mini egg ice cream

Cadbury mini egg ice cream

We bought Malcolm a suit. Why did we buy him a suit? Don’t we know that he won’t wear it very often, take very good care of it, or fit in it for very long? Of course we do! Of course we know all those things! So why did we do it? I’m honestly not sure, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I think, maybe, we bought him a suit because he wanted one. Not that he brattily demanded one, and threw a tantrum, and wouldn’t let us rest until we agreed to buy him one. I don’t think he even expected one – he seemed surprised when I told him we were going shopping for it. The fact that he wanted to wear a suit seemed so sweet, and so cool in a way that’s just like Malcolm and no one else. He has a dance on Friday, and he told me he wanted to wear a suit to the dance. I asked if anyone else was wearing one, and he said, “I don’t care!” To me, that’s the very definition of coolness in a ten-year-old boy. Malcolm doesn’t dress like the average American ten-year-old. He has a real sense of style – not outlandish, but unique – it might be called “stylie ragamuffin.” I love this about Malcolm! I love to think about him thinking about what he’ll wear, because he’s not anxious about getting it right, he’s cheerful about it, and if he wants to wear it, it is right. He’s got style with ease, baby. He’s fond of certain clothes, and he’s happy in them. Of course he didn’t want the kind of suit kids wear to school dances. He wanted the kind of suit the Blues Brothers wear, well, all the time. A mod suit, a hep suit, a timelessly suave suit. It was fun to hear him describe it, fun to watch him pick it out, and try it on, and walk around the house feeling good in it. Like all mothers, I think my own boys are the most beautiful in the world. And the thing about Malcolm is that he could wear anything. He could pull off any look, he could make any clothes look good. Not just because his healthy vegetarian diet has made him strapping and lean, but because he seems so comfortable in his body, so sure of his movements, so free and easy and strong. I worry about the years ahead, the teenage years when people try to make you feel bad about yourself and your clothes and your hair and your choices, and it’s easy to become an insecure basket case. This seems to be starting earlier and earlier these days. Lord, I hope Malcolm can maintain his breezy self-assurance, his imagination, his idiosyncratic taste in music and clothes and food. It’s such a powerful pleasure to watch as his tastes form and grow – to watch him enjoy and identify with things, to watch him become a person, his own person. We’ll send him out into the cold and critical world armed with our love and pride and looking sharp in his natty new suit.Malcolm-suit

It’s cadbury mini egg season! If you recall, last year I baked them into just about everything I made. This year, I decided to crush them up and put them in ice cream. It’s quite simple, really. A lovely vanilla ice cream, with varying sizes of crushed cadbury egg in it. We smashed some with a mortar and pestle, and Malcolm actually grated some with a hand grater. So you have large pieces – most of the egg, really, and smaller crunchy bits of shell. You could probably just put them in a bag and smash them lightly with a hammer!

Here’s The Beastie Boys with The New Style
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Parsnip and juniper berry tart with a walnut crust

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Parsnip tart with a walnut crust

Parsnip tart with a walnut crust

In mid-February, a meteor streaked across the sky in Russia’s Ural mountains, which is news to absolutely nobody at this point. It’s one of those events that is almost too big to worry about – it’s so completely out of our control and (apparently) unpredictable. It’s one of those events that makes you see your day-to-day concerns in a new light. All of those gnawing anxieties, which you lie awake trying not to think about – are they suddenly incredibly important, or completely inconsequential? Typically, I have only a foggy notion of the facts relating to the case. What sticks with me is this video, which I’m sure everybody has seen. It’s a series of shots cobbled together from surveillance cameras mounted on cars and buildings. I find it so beautiful as a film! I find it so moving – the first time I watched, it made me weepy. (If you’re thinking to yourself “Pshaw, that’s no uncommon feat these days!” you are, of course, absolutely correct.) The landscape is austere and wintery, bare trees silhouetted against a pale sky. And the camera’s lens distorts the shot to focus everything on the horizon, the distant space where the sky meets the road, where the colors deepen. On the horizon the light changes in colors of dawn or dusk, which makes the road seem strangely lonely. We get a glimpse into the life of a series of strangers as they see it themselves. We hear what they’re listening to, we see what they’re seeing, we catch a hint of their voices. Each one is different from the other, and so distant from my life, so literally foreign. The scene repeats, starting from the same point in time. The light changes, the music changes, but the movement of the car and the movement of the meteor form a pattern, a rhythm that we follow across the sky. And they couldn’t have known about the meteor! As we watch, we know what it is, we know what happened, but the people in the cars, the people in the apartment buildings and walking by the side of the road, they didn’t know. They didn’t know what it was, where it came from or where it would go – this awesome, frightening, oddly beautiful glow. It moves across the sky, transforming the light like the hours of the day or the seasons of the year, but all in one smooth arc, all at once. The silent shots from buildings, with huge flickering shadows giving way to a burnishing radiance that obscures the scene entirely as it passes over, feel like a dream of a memory – too strange and huge to be real, and yet it is.
Walnut-crusted parsnip tart

Walnut-crusted parsnip tart

Last week I wrote about the fact that I didn’t have juniper berries. That same day, my generous friend Diane left a little jar of juniper berries in my mailbox! I’m so excited. They’re lovely, a little piney, a little citrusy. I decided to use them to flavor this parsnip tart. I kept the tart very simple otherwise, so that I’d be able to detect the juniper flavor. So the only other seasoning is thyme. And the only other ingredients are shallots and garlic, which play more of a starring role in this tart than I usually allow them. I used gjetost cheese, because I had some left from the other week, but you could easily substitute cheddar or mozzarella, or whatever else you like and have on hand. (And if you don’t have juniper berries, the tart would still be tasty. You could substitute a bit of rosemary, if you have some lying around.) This isn’t a light and fluffy tart, it’s dense and flavorful, and very delicious!

Here’s Regina Spektor with On the Radio, in honor of the curiously effective soundtrack of the video.

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Collards with walnuts, corn and smoked gouda

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Collards with corn, walnuts and smoked gouda

Collards with corn, walnuts and smoked gouda

Sometimes I’ll get a little speck of light in my vision, like a sunspot. And it will grow, and start to shimmer. It will take the shape of a laurel branch, climbing up the side of one eye. It will be jagged and flashing and electric. I can see around it, but I can’t see through it, and half of my vision will be obscured. Between me and the world is an odd animate light, sparkling and growing. It’s a little rip in the fabric, a small malfunction of the wiring. If this was a science fiction movie, it would be that moment when you’d say, “My god, I’m a robot! How long has this been true? Is anything real? Are my memories my memories? Have I actually felt all that I’ve felt and done all that I’ve done?” And then you’d look in the mirror and part of your skin would be torn off, and wires would be poking out, and sparks would start shooting all over the place! But it’s not a science fiction movie, and so it’s not the moment that I discover that I’m a robot, but that I’m a human, which is equally strange. Maybe more so. The frantic glow fades, eventually, but I always feel discombobulated for some time – sensitive to light, and wary of another episode. It’s hard to shake the strangeness of realizing that you’re a person, a bundle of thoughts and recollections and hopes and worries and tastes, looking out at the world through this strange, warm, vulnerable, incomprehensibly busy body. It feels so odd to discover that what I see – the world around me, my vision – is who I am. My impressions of the world, gathered from all of my senses, are more closely connected to my sense of myself than other people’s impressions of me, and this must be true for everybody! Each person is the world that they create around themselves as they experience life! It’s a weirdly freeing thought! (What is she going on about?) This morning I had the little shimmering light in my eye, but it never grew, it faded without incident. Obviously, it still left me feeling a little blurry, though, or I wouldn’t be rambling on in this ridiculous fashion!

Let’s talk about collards instead. This is all part of my fiendish plan to make collards as popular as kale. Why does kale get all of the attention? Just cause it’s frilly and pretty? Well, collards are delicious, too, despite their dull surface and flat leaves! I do love collards, they’re so nicely substantial. I mixed them, in this instance, with walnuts and corn, for a little crunchy sweetness, and smoked gouda, for a little melty smokiness. I also used pomegranate molasses, which is just enough strange and sweet to lively up this dish! This is a good side dish, but if you ate it with some rice (and beans, even) it would make a good meal.

Here’s the Ink Spots with When the Sun Goes Down (you don’t get sunspots any more!!)

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Raggedy pasta filled with spinach, ricotta, artichoke hearts topped with roasted red pepper pine nut sauce

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Spinach ricotta pasta with roasted red pepper & pine nut sauce

Spinach ricotta pasta with roasted red pepper & pine nut sauce

In a scandalous act of shocking laziness, I’m going to plagiarize myself for today’s post. (I have to get to work soon!) This appeared in the Guardian this week, I wrote it! So I’m just going to repeat myself here, with the original un-edited version. Ready?
Every city has its shantytowns, tenements, projects and favelas; cramped, tightly-knit urban regions in which people are thrown together, joined by poverty and a sense of stagnation. These spaces form a teeming world of their own within the larger macrocosm of the city, connected but self-contained. Life is stacked upon life in a confined area, making the situation rife for story telling; a perfect stage setting of tension and drama. People struggle to survive from day to day, and dream of escape. They form a network of friendship and support, but crowded conditions breed pressure, and the threat of violence is never distant. Privacy is scarce when one person’s front door opens onto another’s and a network of alleys or balconies forms the veins that connect them all. This is brilliant fodder for movies, but it makes for good songs, as well. So this week’s Sunday interactive playlist is on the subject of cramped urban housing.

Here’s a picture that Isaac drew a few weeks ago. He started drawing “city towers,” and then he got caught up drawing these crazy rambling houses that sprawl up the hillside, and connect and expand and have levels and layers and turrets. The oval area in front is an underground space where they meet (and apparently practice math facts!)Isaac's-picture
This pasta is kind of like his labyrinthine spread. It’s handmade pasta for people who don’t have a pasta maker. What you do is this…you make pasta dough (which is fun and easy!) You roll it as thin as you possibly can (which is a bit of work, but also fun!) You cut it into any shape you like – triangles, squares, rectangles. You fill each one with a spoonful of delicious filling, then you wrap it up any way you like – each one a different shape. Some you roll in tubes, some you make in pockets. Some you put seam-side down, some you put seam-side up. You pile them on top of each other or next to each other. (You try not to get too great a concentration of layers of pasta in one place, so it’s not stodgy.) You cover them with a delicious smoky sauce made of pine nuts and roasted red peppers. You sprinkle mozzarella on top. You bake the pasta. It has nice soft pockets of filling, some lovely melty cheese, some crispy parts where the pasta sticks out and crisps up as it bakes. And then you eat it! You could also easily use this filling and this sauce to make lasagna, stuffed shells, manicotti, or any other sort of stuffed baked pasta that you buy at the store. And that’s that!

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