Bowling With Family Quotes

You can be a natural athlete with terrible work habits, and that ends up wasting your gifts.

I stood up to go shake hands with him and I don’t remember anything else. What I do recall is the crowd yelling and me crying, while everything seemed to be moving in slow motion.

My mother—with all the embarrassment and hurt that she caused me in my youth—ended up giving me the drive and the fire I needed to be more and to do more.

Ms. McMartin had no close family. Her nearest relative was a distant cousin who had recently died in Shanghai, after a severe allergic reaction to a bowl of turtle and arsenic soup.

Janey was planning a short engagement, she'd simpered, and so, of course, the inevitable collection for the wedding present would soon follow. Of all the compulsory financial contributions, that is the one that irks me most. Two people wander around John Lewis picking out lovely items for themselves, and then they make other people pay for them. It's bare-faced effrontery. They choose things like plates, bowls and cutlery—I mean, what are they doing at the moment: shoveling food from packets into their mouths with their bare hands? I simply fail to see how the act of legally formalizing a human relationship necessitates friends, family and coworkers upgrading the contents of their kitchen for them.

Do you always eat with so many of your Guard, Majesty?” “Usually.” “Are security concerns so great?” “Not at all. I prefer to eat with my Guard.” “Perhaps when you begin a family, that will change.” Kelsea narrowed her eyes as Milla began to ladle soup into her bowl. “My Guard are my family.

Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.

Maybe I'm deceiving myself. Perhaps I don't know him as well as I'd like to imagine. What does a person so willing to utterly remake himself hold inside his heart? Can I trust such a man? What motivates him? In an instant she knew, and she felt a bit of relief. Love. Love was what drove him.

My family suffered. My hair turned up in every corner, every drawer, every meal. Even in the rice puddings Tessie made, covering each little bowl with wax paper before putting it away in the fridge--even into these prophylactically secure desserts my hair found its way! Jet black hairs wound themselves around bars of soap. They lay pressed like flower stems between the pages of books. They turned up in eyeglass cases, birthday cards, once--I swear--inside an egg Tessie had just cracked. The next-door neighbor's cat coughed up a hairball one day and the hair was not the cat's.

And the child, Francie Nolan, was of all the Rommelys and all the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely's mysticism, her tale-telling, her great belief in everything and her compassion for the weak ones. She had a lot of her grandfather Rommely's cruel will. She had some of her Aunt Evy's talent for mimicking, some of Ruthie Nolan's possessiveness. She had Aunt Sissy's love for life and her love for children. She had Johnny's sentimentality without his good looks. She had all of Katie's soft ways and only half of the invisible steel of Katie. She was made up of all these good and these bad things. She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Kitie's secret, desparing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only- the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life- the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

Eddie Carbone had never expected to have a destiny. A man works, raises his family, goes bowling, eats, gets old, and then he dies. Now, as the weeks passed, there was a future, there was a trouble that would not go away.

Take one man, one foolish woman, put them together in a bowl and stir.

I’m wishing that I had a regular family where the mom cooks lasagna and throws bagged salad into a big dented wooden bowl.

Rachell believed passionately in the value of beauty. If she was pressed for time she considered the filling of her bowl with flowers more important for her family's welfare than the making of a cake for tea. On this point her family entirely disagreed with her.

Am I alone in this mother-food connection or does being with your mom trigger the sudden and voracious need for large amounts of mac & cheese, rice pudding, and the scraps along the side of a bowl of cookie dough?

Mom has reorganized the kitchen so that the one room that was everyone's room is foreign to me. My visits are punctuated with me whipping around, angrily demanding, "Where are the forks, WHY DID YOU MOVE THE FORKS?" and she has to calmly open the drawer on the other side of the kitchen as if she moved it just to ruin my life. I just found out where she puts the bowls and their new location feels like such a personal attack that I can barely talk about it without raising my blood pressure.

Breakfast! My favorite meal- and you can be so creative. I think of bowls of sparkling berries and fresh cream, baskets of Popovers and freshly squeezed orange juice, thick country bacon, hot maple syrup, panckes and French toast - even the nutty flavor of Irish oatmeal with brown sugar and cream. Breaksfast is the place I splurge with calories, then I spend the rest of the day getting them off! I love to use my prettiest table settings - crocheted placemats with lace-edged napkins and old hammered silver. And whether you are inside in front of a fire, candles burning brightly on a wintery day - or outside on a patio enjoying the morning sun - whether you are having a group of friends and family, a quiet little brunch for two, or an even quieter little brunch just for yourself, breakfast can set the mood and pace of the whole day. And Sunday is my day. Sometimes I think we get caught up in the hectic happenings of the weeks and months and we forget to take time out to relax. So one Sunday morning I decided to do things differently - now it's gotten to be a sort of ritual! This is what I do: at around 8:30 am I pull myself from my warm cocoon, fluff up the pillows and blankets and put some classical music on the stereo. Then I'm off to the kitchen, where I very calmly (so as not to wake myself up too much!) prepare my breakfast, seomthing extra nice - last week I had fresh pineapple slices wrapped in bacon and broiled, a warm croissant, hot chocolate with marshmallows and orange juice. I put it all on a tray with a cloth napkin, my book-of-the-moment and the "Travel" section of the Boston Globe and take it back to bed with me. There I spend the next two hours reading, eating and dreaming while the snowflakes swirl through the treetops outside my bedroom window. The inspiring music of Back or Vivaldi adds an exquisite elegance to the otherwise unruly scene, and I am in heaven. I found time to get in touch with myself and my life and i think this just might be a necessity! Please try it for yourself, and someone you love.

That bowl was special because of the blue. It exactly matched your eyes.

I don't need the bowls to give me peace anymore," Ian said. "I have you. And Jamie, and Belle. If all the Ming bowls in the world were smashed, I'd still have you." [...] "You broke the bowl, and it is gone. But you are here, and whole. Nothing else matters.

The reason why women think men should spend a lot of money on an engagement ring is because women are the ones who get to clean up all the poop (stains and toilet bowl swirls included) that is provided by every family member living in the house until they die.

They choose things like plates, bowls and cutlery—I mean, what are they doing at the moment: shoveling food from packets into their mouths with their bare hands? I simply fail to see how the act of legally formalizing a human relationship necessitates friends, family and coworkers upgrading the contents of their kitchen for them.

A lot of his songs, when they started out, sounded like old music. They arrived on his doorstep, wandering orphans, the lost children of large and venerable musical families. They came to him in the form of Tin Pan Alley sing-alongs, honky-tonk blues, Dust Bowl plaints, lost Chuck Berry riffs. Jude dressed them in black and taught them to scream.

I love salmon. Of all my fishy friends, I love salmon the best. Or trout. Or tuna. Or smelts. Oh heck. I love them ALL! But I have such fond memories of salmon. See, my dad was a fisherman. I mean a fanatic fisherman. Fishing was probably what he liked to do most (along with gardening and riding horses and camping in the Sierra and bowling and… ) But honestly, folks, fishing was probably the winner for leisure-time activities.

But the kitchen will not come into its own again until it ceases to be a status symbol and becomes again a workshop. It may be pastel. It may be ginghamed as to curtains and shining with copper like a picture in a woman's magazine. But you and I will know it chiefly by its fragrances and its clutter. At the back of the stove will sit a soup kettle, gently bubbling, one into which every day are popped leftover bones and vegetables to make stock for sauces or soup for the family. Carrots and leeks will sprawl on counters, greens in a basket. There will be something sweet-smelling twirling in a bowl and something savory baking in the oven. Cabinet doors will gape ajar and colored surfaces are likely to be littered with salt and pepper and flour and herbs and cheesecloth and pot holders and long-handled forks. It won't be neat. It won't even look efficient. but when you enter it you will feel the pulse of life throbbing from every corner. The heart of the home will have begun once again to beat.

Can we delay bloodshed for at least a few days? I didn't cross a cursed lake in a giant wooden bowl so I could be beheaded for treason before I had a chance to sample some royal cuisine." "That's not the punishment for treason," Ali murmured. "What's the punishment for treason then?" "Being trampled to death by a karkadann." Lubayd paled and this time, Ali knew it wasn't due to seasickness. "Oh," he choked out. "Don't you come from an inventive family?

When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of the curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him he heard less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not.

The ads have also helped manufacture a sense of panic about time, depicting families so rushed and harried in the morning that there is no time to make breakfast, not even to pour some milk over a bowl of cereal. No, the only hope is to munch on a cereal bar (iced with synthetic “milk” frosting) in the bus or car. (Tell me: Why can’t these hassled families set their alarm clocks, like, ten minutes earlier?!)

Such heaped up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughty doughnut, the tender oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple pies, and peach pies, and pumpkin pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy, pretty much as I have enumerated them, with the motherly teapot sending up its clouds of vapor from the midst-- Heaven bless the mark!

I was used to watching this on a comfy couch with bowls of popcorn and family commentary.

Lilly Marshall's girl?" Julie cut in. "Yes,and presently-your daughter-in-law." The older woman should have been bowled over, but Julie St. John did no more than set down her fork to ask in a somewhat aggrieved tone, "Which one married you?" "Your eldest. It was a brief ceremony performed at sea just last week." A big smile formed on her mother-in-law's face, shocking Rebecca. "I must say, girl, you have succeeded where all others have failed.I commend you!

All our family acquaintances have followed the same path: their youth spent trying to make the most of their intelligence, squeezing their studies like a lemon to make sure they'd secure a spot among the elite, then the rest of their lives wondering with a flabbergasted look on their faces why all that hopefulness has led to such a vain existence. People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd. That might deprive you of a few good moments in your childhood but it would save you a considerable amount of time as an adult - not to mention the fact that you be spared at least one traumatic experience, i.e. the goldfish bowl.

Another of them died last night. His body was in the bazaar this morning. It lay, with a collecting bowl at its feet, on the charpoy that is reserved for those who die without money or family to bury them. He looked desiccated and his skin had the sheen and color of the dates we eat to break our fast. There are new bodies on that charpoy every week.

He is also, like all members of the Wright family, not amazing at modulating his voice. To a stranger, my mother shouting “Have you tried these grapes that taste like cotton candy? Oh, you’ll love them! Here, let me wash some off for you! Oh, let me wash a bowl first. Oh, no, all our bowls are in the fridge with Saran Wrap covering our leftovers—here, just grab a fistful instead!” might be mildly overwhelming, but when my father’s brow crinkles and he blasts out a question like “Did you vote in the last mayoral election?” it’s easy to feel like you’ve just been shoved into an interrogation room with an enforcer the FBI pays under the table.

Almost every family has their own Christmas traditions (if, indeed, they celebrate Christmas) and we certainly had several. First, the house was thoroughly cleaned and decorated with wreaths and paper chains and, of course, the Christmas tree with all its sparkling lights and ornaments. The cardboard nativity scene had to be carefully assembled and placed on the mantle. And there was the advent wreath with its little windows to be opened each morning. And then there were the Christmas cookies. About a week before the holiday, Mom would bake several batches of the cookies and I invited all my friends to come and help decorate them. It was an “all-afternoon” event. We gathered around our big round dining table with bowls of colored icing and assorted additions—red hot candies, coconut flakes, sugar “glitter,” chocolate chips, and any other little bits we could think of. Then, the decorating began!

You should own stuff, but make sure they are indispensable stuff. A family of three can simplify to the point of owning just three beds, two couches, three dressers, one table, few chairs, one desk, eight plates, eight glasses, eight bowls and some toys and books for the kids.

I do not write every day. I write to the questions and issues before me. I write to deadlines. I write out of my passions. And I write to make peace with my own contradictory nature. For me, writing is a spiritual practice. A small bowl of water sits on my desk, a reminder that even if nothing is happening on the page, something is happening in the room--evaporation. And I always light a candle when I begin to write, a reminder that I have now entered another realm, call it the realm of the Spirit. I am mindful that when one writes, one leaves this world and enters another. My books are collages made from journals, research, and personal experience. I love the images rendered in journal entries, the immediacy that is captured on the page, the handwritten notes. I love the depth of ideas and perspective that research brings to a story, be it biological or anthropological studies or the insights brought to the page by the scholarly work of art historians. When I go into a library, I feel like I am a sleuth looking to solve a mystery. I am completely inspired by the pursuit of knowledge through various references. I read newpapers voraciously. I love what newspapers say about contemporary culture. And then you go back to your own perceptions, your own words, and weigh them against all you have brought together. I am interested in the kaleidoscope of ideas, how you bring many strands of thought into a book and weave them together as one piece of coherent fabric, while at the same time trying to create beautiful language in the service of the story. This is the blood work of the writer. Writing is also about a life engaged. And so, for me, community work, working in the schools or with grassroots conservation organizations is another critical component of my life as a writer. I cannot separate the writing life from a spiritual life, from a life as a teacher or activist or my life intertwined with family and the responsibilities we carry within our own homes. Writing is daring to feel what nurtures and breaks our hearts. Bearing witness is its own form of advocacy. It is a dance with pain and beauty.

When may did so, he found every cup and saucer, plate, vase, and bowl standing arranged across the floor like pieces in a scaled-up chess game. "The Whitstable family tree," Bryant explained, entering and setting down his tea tray. "It's the only way I could get it sorted out in my head. I had to see them properly laid out, who was descended from whom." He pointed to a milk jug. "Daisy Whitstable is bottom left-hand corner, by the fireguard. Next to her is the egg cup, brother Tarquin... Now, pass me Marion and Alfred Whitstable over there." "What's their significance?" "We need them to drink out of.

When we are all in a culture together, we share a secret with each other, and this is true of every civilization down through time. Not even their art, not even their laws, their artifacts, their literature, their philosophies, their wars, their stone bowls can ever reveal that civilization's secret. Even today, with all we've built that will outlast us, we will not leave behind the secret that binds us. In this way, we are like any family at the core of which there is a secret that, even if someone asked, one one in that family -not even the snitchy, untrustworthy types - could ever reveal. In this way, we are all like a family together in the present, and no future civilization will every know our secret - the secret of our existence together - just as we do not know the secrets that have lived and died with the past.

the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that American families pay 26 percent more for milk than they would pay if they paid real prices, i.e. the prices set by a free market. Whoever’s interest is being looked after, it isn’t the interest of the guy on a tight budget staring down a dry bowl of Count Chocula.

One thing I like about the 1950s is that kids were hip without any sense of irony about it.  They were dressing in fifties cool-cat clothing with complete sincerity.  Nobody wanted to be“retro”back then. With the Depression still fresh in everybody’s mind, did anyone in the 1950s dress up as the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath, and go to Dust Bowl-themed parties because they thought it was cool?  Probably not.  In the past, the past was something you wanted to forget about rather than romanticize.  I really miss those days. 

To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: Uncommon Prostitues I have nothing to say about prostitues (other than you'd make a terrible prostitute,the profession is much too unclean), I only wanted to type that. Isn't it odd we both have to spend Christmas with our fathers? Speaking of unpleasant matters,have you spoken with Bridge yet? I'm taking the bus to the hospital now.I expect a full breakdown of your Christmas dinner when I return. So far today,I've had a bowl of muesli. How does Mum eat that rubbish? I feel as if I've been gnawing on lumber. To: Etienne St. Clair From: Anna Oliphant Subject: Christmas Dinner MUESLY? It's Christmas,and you're eating CEREAL?? I'm mentally sending you a plate from my house. The turkey is in the oven,the gravy's on the stovetop,and the mashed potatoes and casseroles are being prepared as I type this. Wait. I bet you eat bread pudding and mince pies or something,don't you? Well, I'm mentally sending you bread pudding. Whatever that is. No, I haven't talked to Bridgette.Mom keeps bugging me to answer her calls,but winter break sucks enough already. (WHY is my dad here? SERIOUSLY. MAKE HIM LEAVE. He's wearing this giant white cable-knit sweater,and he looks like a pompous snowman,and he keeps rearranging the stuff on our kitchen cabinets. Mom is about to kill him. WHICH IS WHY SHE SHOULDN'T INVITE HIM OVER FOR HOLIDAYS). Anyway.I'd rather not add to the drama. P.S. I hope your mom is doing better. I'm so sorry you have to spend today in a hospital. I really do wish I could send you both a plate of turkey. To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: Re: Christmas Dinner YOU feel sorry for ME? I am not the one who has never tasted bread pudding. The hospital was the same. I won't bore you with the details. Though I had to wait an hour to catch the bus back,and it started raining.Now that I'm at the flat, my father has left for the hospital. We're each making stellar work of pretending the other doesn't exist. P.S. Mum says to tell you "Merry Christmas." So Merry Christmas from my mum, but Happy Christmas from me. To: Etienne St. Clair From: Anna Oliphant Subject: SAVE ME Worst.Dinner.Ever.It took less than five minutes for things to explode. My dad tried to force Seany to eat the green bean casserole, and when he wouldn't, Dad accused Mom of not feeding my brother enough vegetables. So she threw down her fork,and said that Dad had no right to tell her how to raise her children. And then he brought out the "I'm their father" crap, and she brought out the "You abandoned them" crap,and meanwhile, the WHOLE TIME my half-dead Nanna is shouting, "WHERE'S THE SALT! I CAN'T TASTE THE CASSEROLE! PASS THE SALT!" And then Granddad complained that Mom's turkey was "a wee dry," and she lost it. I mean,Mom just started screaming. And it freaked Seany out,and he ran to his room crying, and when I checked on him, he was UNWRAPPING A CANDY CANE!! I have no idea where it came from. He knows he can't eat Red Dye #40! So I grabbed it from him,and he cried harder, and Mom ran in and yelled at ME, like I'd given him the stupid thing. Not, "Thank you for saving my only son's life,Anna." And then Dad came in and the fighting resumed,and they didn't even notice that Seany was still sobbing. So I took him outside and fed him cookies,and now he's running aruond in circles,and my grandparents are still at the table, as if we're all going to sit back down and finish our meal. WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY FAMILY? And now Dad is knocking on my door. Great. Can this stupid holiday get any worse??

You mix a can of cranberry sauce with a can of mandarin oranges and eat it out of a cereal bowl while your family questions your life choices.

Eh!” Clemenza yelled. He pulled a moist handkerchief from his rumpled jacket and mopped his forehead. “What’s with all the oranges? Everywhere I look, there’s bowls of oranges.

So . . . ,” she says, following him to the chalkboard. “You got a Visiting. An actual Visiting—Natasha Grimm-Pitch was here.” Baz glances back over his shoulder. “You sound impressed, Bunce.” “I am,” Penelope says. “Your mother was a hero. She developed a spell for gnomeatic fever. And she was the youngest headmaster in Watford history.” Baz is looking at Penny like they’ve never met. “And,” Penny goes on, “she defended your father in three duels before he accepted her proposal.” “That sounds barbaric,” I say. “It was traditional,” Baz says. “It was brilliant,” Penny says. “I’ve read the minutes.” “Where?” Baz asks her. “We have them in our library at home,” she says. “My dad loves marriage rites. Any sort of family magic, actually. He and my mother are bound together in five dimensions.” “That’s lovely,” Baz says, and I’m terrified because I think he means it. “I’m going to make time stop when I propose to Micah,” she says. “The little American? With the thick glasses?” “Not so little anymore.” “Interesting.” Baz rubs his chin. “My mother hung the moon.” “She was a legend,” Penelope beams. “I thought your parents hated the Pitches,” I say. They both look at me like I’ve just stuck my hand in the soup bowl. “That’s politics,” Penelope says. “We’re talking about magic.” “Obviously,” I say. “What was I thinking.” “Obviously,” Baz says. “You weren’t.” “What’s happening right now?” I say. “What are we even doing?” Penelope folds her arms and squints at the chalkboard. “We,” she declares, “are finding out who killed Natasha Grimm-Pitch.” “The legend,” Baz says. Penelope gives him a soft look, the kind she usually saves for me. “So she can rest in peace.

We need to give children ways to help themselves feel good,” she tells me. “Parents can start with simple messages throughout the morning that children can repeat—messages such as: It’s so easy to get dressed. I love getting dressed. Breakfast is always a fun time. We’re all so glad to see each other. We love eating breakfast together. Breakfast makes my body feel good. “Parents can even go around the table and have each family member share one thing they love about themselves. Or they can put affirmations in a bowl and choose one for the whole family to focus on during the day. This can become a morning ritual for couples, families, roommates, and so on. Each person can even decide on one experience they’d like to have that day and create an affirmation for

In my dreams, I was back in Hades’ garden. The Lord of the Dead paced up and down, holding his ears while Nico followed him, waving his arms. ‘You have to!’ Nico insisted. Demeter and Persephone sat behind them at the breakfast table. Both of the goddesses looked bored. Demeter poured shredded wheat into four huge bowls. Persephone was magically changing the flower arrangement on the table, turning the blossoms from red to yellow to polka-dotted. ‘I don’t have to do anything!’ Hades’ eyes blazed. ‘I’m a god!’ ‘Father,’ Nico said, ‘if Olympus falls, your own palace’s safety doesn’t matter. You’ll fade, too.’ ‘I am not an Olympian!’ he growled. ‘My family has made that quite clear.’ ‘You are,’ Nico said. ‘Whether you like it or not.’ ‘You saw what they did to your mother,’ Hades said. ‘Zeus killed her. And you would have me help them? They deserve what they get!

So, it wasn’t until I was living in Mexico that I first started enjoying chocolate mousse. See, there was this restaurant called La Lorraine that became a favorite of ours when John and I were living in Mexico City in 1964–65. The restaurant was in a beautiful old colonial period house with a large courtyard, red tile floors, and a big black and white portrait of Charles de Gaulle on the wall. The proprietor was a hefty French woman with grey hair swept up in a bun. She always welcomed us warmly and called us mes enfants, “my children.” Her restaurant was very popular with the folks from the German and French embassies located nearby. She wasn’t too keen on the locals. I think she took to us because I practiced my French on her and you know how the French are about their language! At the end of each evening (yeah, we often closed the joint) madame was usually seated at the table next to the kitchen counting up the evening’s receipts. Across from her at the table sat a large French poodle, wearing a napkin bib and enjoying a bowl of onion soup. Ah, those were the days… Oh, and her mousse au chocolate was to DIE for!

It wasn’t fancy, or anything. But I could really imagine myself living here. I could imagine all of us here, starting a new academic year, coming home and slumping on the sofa next to each other, chatting in the kitchen in the mornings over bowls of cereal, crowding into the biggest bedroom for movie nights, falling asleep in each other’s beds when we were too tired to move. I could imagine all of it. A future. A small future, and not a forever future, but a future, nonetheless.

Discovering a note in the mending basket, Phoebe plucked it out and unfolded it. She instantly recognized West's handwriting. Unemployed Feline Seeking Household Position To Whom It May Concern, I hereby offer my services as an experienced mouser and personal companion. References from a reputable family to be provided upon request. Willing to accept room and board in lieu of pay. Indoor lodgings preferred. Your servant, Galoshes the Cat Glancing up from the note, Phoebe found her parents' questioning gazes on her. "Job application," she explained sourly. "From the cat." "How charming," Seraphina exclaimed, reading over her shoulder. "'Personal companion,' my foot," Phoebe muttered. "This is a semi-feral animal who has lived in outbuildings and fed on vermin." "I wonder," Seraphina said thoughtfully. "If she were truly feral, she wouldn't want any contact with humans. With time and patience, she might become domesticated." Phoebe rolled her eyes. "It seems we'll find out." The boys returned from the dining car with a bowl of water and a tray of refreshments. Galoshes descended to the floor long enough to devour a boiled egg, an anchovy canapé, and a spoonful of black caviar from a silver dish on ice. Licking her lips and purring, the cat jumped back into Phoebe's lap and curled up with a sigh. "I'd say she's adjusting quite well," Seraphina commented with a grin, and elbowed Phoebe gently. "One never knows who might rise above their disreputable past.

After that, his faith could never be something passive, a pleasant outing to a friendly church service. Faith became everything, because heaven held one of his own. He was passionate about making sure his family all wound up together in heaven. But here on earth, winning another Super Bowl ring was important too.

Margherita was not allowed to play in the 'portego,' for one never knew when a customer would come, and the room must always be clean and tidy and respectable. It was only ever used by the family on special occasions, and so Margherita's eyes widened when she saw that her mother had spread the table with a spotless white cloth and the best pewter bowls and mugs. A small bunch of 'margherita' daisies was in a fat blue jug, and three sweet oranges sat in an earthenware bowl. Coarse brown bread stood ready on a wooden board, next to a bowl of soft white cheese floating in golden oil and thyme sprigs. Soup made with fish and clams and fennel and scattered with sprigs of fresh parsley steamed in a big clay pot.

I will say this about the upper echelon in France: they know how to spend money. From what I saw living in America, wealth is dedicated to elevating the individual experience. If you’re a well-off child, you get a car, or a horse. You go to summer camps that cost as much as college. And everything is monogrammed, personalized, and stamped, to make it that much easier for other people to recognize your net worth. …The French bourgeois don’t pine for yachts or garages with multiple cars. They don’t build homes with bowling alleys or spend their weekends trying to meet the quarterly food and beverage limit at their country clubs: they put their savings into a vacation home that all their family can enjoy, and usually it’s in France. They buy nice food, they serve nice wine, and they wear the same cashmere sweaters over and over for years. I think the wealthy French feel comfortable with their money because they do not fear it. It’s the fearful who put money into houses with even bedrooms and fifteen baths. It’s the fearful who drive around in yellow Hummers during high-gas-price months becasue if they’re going to lose their money tomorrow, at least other people will know that they are rich today. The French, as with almost all things, privilege privacy and subtlety and they don’t feel comfortable with excess. This is why one of their favorite admonishments is tu t’es laisse aller. You’ve lost control of yourself. You’ve let yourself go.

Old Du,” he said, “what would people think if you started a fight with a blind man? We all live in the same village. We win some arguments and we lose others, but it’s always a matter of someone’s bowl smashing into someone else’s plate, and that’s how it goes. Up there on Changbai Mountain, it’s no easy matter to run into a fellow villager, so you feel as if you’re with family!

In the back of the fridge I checked out some stewed apples destined to fester. I examined them closely and reckoned they had only a day to go, even by my standards. I spooned the apples into tiny bowls, tossed in some dried fruit and sprinkled them with crumble topping. Delicious, they said that night, scraping the bowls so clean they hardly needed to go in the dishwasher. The fools.

In a medium mixing bowl, combine all the ingredients except the meatballs and pour into a labeled 1-gallon freezer bag. Tape this bag to the meatball package and freeze.   To serve, thaw the ingredients of both bags. Pour the soup ingredients into a large saucepan. Bring to boil, reduce the heat, and simmer 30 minutes. Add the meatballs and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

She was more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk. She was all of these things and if something more that did not come from the Rommleys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only-the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life-the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. she was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only - the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

When we are all in a culture together, we share a secret with each other, and this is true of every civilization down through time. Not even their art, not even their laws, their artifacts, their literature, their philosophies, their wars, their stone bowls can ever reveal that civilization's secret. Even today, with all we've built that will outlast us, we will not leave behind the secret that binds us. In this way, we are like any family at the core of which there is a secret that, even if someone asked, one one in that family -- not even the snitchy, untrustworthy types -- could ever reveal. In this way, we are all like a family together in the present, and no future civilization will every know our secret - the secret of our existence together -- just as we do not know the secrets that have lived and died with the past.

Lizzie was leaving for Ever After High, and Shuffle was going with her, like it or not. Good-bye, family. Good-bye, hedgerow. Good-bye, tea cakes, sugar hearts, and Cheshire chocolates! Shuffle's dream about that fateful day faded away and was replaced by the image of a big bowl of Farmer-in-the-Dell brand granola. Granola was so boring! But ever since coming to Ever After High, Lizzie had insisted that Shuffle eat healthy snacks.

Descending the stairs from her room, I was tempted to go outside and find out if the shivering gut-wrench I’d felt as I came in really meant what I thought it did. But I stayed in the warmth of the house. I felt like I knew something about myself that I hadn’t before, a bit of knowledge so new that if I became a wolf now, I might lose it and not remember it whenever I became Cole again. I wandered down the main stairs, mindful that her father was somewhere in the house’s depths while Isabel stayed up in her tower alone. What would it be like, growing up in a house that looked like this? If I breathed too hard it would knock some decorative bowl off the wall or cause the perfectly arranged dried flowers to weep petals. Sure, my family had been affluent growing up—successful mad scientists generally are—but it never looked like this. Our lives had looked…lived in.

They wanted you to grow up into some helpless combination of old person and infant. They wanted you to have a house and a family and a refrigerator and a TV, and not know how any of it worked. They wanted you to spend your life working on something that was never concrete, never anything you could see or hold in your hands, and if you didn't do that they wanted to put you in jail. Cutting down forests, poisoning the earth - it was a country driven by stupid, blind impulse. It was a country where nobody knew where their food came from or where their garbage went, they just flushed the bowl, kept eating it and throwing it away, building bombs and computers, cars and TVs, sending people off to Vietnam so they could set it on fire. It was a country that had turned against everyone he knew, cast them out like garbage, and all they could do was smile to themselves at all they'd learned and wait patiently for the fires to start here at home.

Two people wander around John Lewis picking out lovely items for themselves, and then they make other people pay for them. It’s bare-faced effrontery. They choose things like plates, bowls and cutlery—I mean, what are they doing at the moment: shoveling food from packets into their mouths with their bare hands? I simply fail to see how the act of legally formalizing a human relationship necessitates friends, family and coworkers upgrading the contents of their kitchen for them.

It wasn’t fancy, or anything. But I could really imagine myself living here. I could imagine all of us here, starting a new academic year, coming home and slumping on the sofa next to each other, chatting in the kitchen in the mornings over bowls of cereal, crowding into the biggest bedroom for movie nights, falling asleep in each other’s beds when we were too tired to move. I could imagine all of it. A future. A small future, and not a forever future, but a future, nonetheless.

Darcy’s hand suddenly rammed angrily into a bowl of fruit and grasped an innocent, unsuspecting orange. “Enough. The woman is demented. Our marriage is simply something to which she must become adjusted. She insulted Elizabeth and her family, and in so doing, she insulted me.” With an expression as black as pitch, Darcy commenced to vivisecting the orange. By the time he finished with said orange, it was completely dead, thoroughly dead, with no semblance remaining of its prior orange existence.

National Park. This I must keep reminding myself. Our parks serve a great purpose, not just for preservation, but also as a funnel. The Designated Route. Mobs of tourists, RVs, buses, and family station wagons out on summer vacation need a place to go. Our national parks serve this purpose, complete with entrance fees, advance reservation campgrounds, snack bars, game rooms, bowling alleys, roped-off viewpoints, paved trails, lodges, and reserved backcountry campsites. Permit required. For a fee.

Imagine you live on a planet where the dominant species is far more intellectually sophisticated than human beings but often keeps humans as companion animals. They are called the Gorns. They communicate with each other via a complex combination of telepathy, eye movements & high-pitched squeaks, all completely unintelligible & unlearnable by humans, whose brains are prepared for verbal language acquisition only. Humans sometimes learn the meaning of individual sounds by repeated association with things of relevance to them. The Gorns & humans bond strongly but there are many Gorn rules that humans must try to assimilate with limited information & usually high stakes. You are one of the lucky humans who lives with the Gorns in their dwelling. Many other humans are chained to small cabanas in the yard or kept in outdoor pens of varying size. They are so socially starved they cannot control their emotions when a Gorn goes near them. The Gorns agree that they could never be House-Humans. The dwelling you share with your Gorn family is filled with water-filled porcelain bowls.Every time you try to urinate in one,nearby Gorn attack you. You learn to only use the toilet when there are no Gorns present. Sometimes they come home & stuff your head down the toilet for no apparent reason. You hate this & start sucking up to the Gorns when they come home to try & stave this off but they view this as evidence of your guilt. You are also punished for watching videos, reading books, talking to other human beings, eating pizza or cheesecake, & writing letters. These are all considered behavior problems by the Gorns. To avoid going crazy, once again you wait until they are not around to try doing anything you wish to do. While they are around, you sit quietly, staring straight ahead. Because they witness this good behavior you are so obviously capable of, they attribute to “spite” the video watching & other transgressions that occur when you are alone. Obviously you resent being left alone, they figure. You are walked several times a day and left crossword puzzle books to do. You have never used them because you hate crosswords; the Gorns think you’re ignoring them out of revenge. Worst of all, you like them. They are, after all, often nice to you. But when you smile at them, they punish you, likewise for shaking hands. If you apologize they punish you again. You have not seen another human since you were a small child. When you see one you are curious, excited & afraid. You really don’t know how to act. So, the Gorn you live with keeps you away from other humans. Your social skills never develop. Finally, you are brought to “training” school. A large part of the training consists of having your air briefly cut off by a metal chain around your neck. They are sure you understand every squeak & telepathic communication they make because sometimes you get it right. You are guessing & hate the training. You feel pretty stressed out a lot of the time. One day, you see a Gorn approaching with the training collar in hand. You have PMS, a sore neck & you just don’t feel up to the baffling coercion about to ensue. You tell them in your sternest voice to please leave you alone & go away. The Gorns are shocked by this unprovoked aggressive behavior. They thought you had a good temperament. They put you in one of their vehicles & take you for a drive. You watch the attractive planetary landscape going by & wonder where you are going. You are led into a building filled with the smell of human sweat & excrement. Humans are everywhere in small cages. Some are nervous, some depressed, most watch the goings on on from their prisons. Your Gorns, with whom you have lived your entire life, hand you over to strangers who drag you to a small room. You are terrified & yell for your Gorn family to help you. They turn & walk away.You are held down & given a lethal injection. It is, after all, the humane way to do it.

Light-touch government works more efficiently in the presence of social capital. Police close more cases when citizens monitor neighborhood comings and goings. Child welfare departments do a better job of “family preservation” when neighbors and relatives provide social support to troubled parents. Public schools teach better when parents volunteer in classrooms and ensure that kids do their homework. When community involvement is lacking, the burdens on government employees—bureaucrats, social workers, teachers, and so forth—are that much greater and success that much more elusive.

That was the first time in my life that anyone had rejected me so completely.' Tsukuru said. 'And the ones who did it were the people I trusted the most, my four best friends in the world. I was so close to them that they had been like an extension of my own body. Searching for the reason, or correcting a misunderstanding, was beyond me. I was simply, and utterly, in shock. So much so that I thought I might never recover. It felt like something inside me snapped.' The bartender brought over the glass of wine and replenished the bowl of nuts. Once he'd left, Sara turned to Tsukuru. 'I've never experienced that myself, but I think I can imagine how stunned you must have been. I understand that you couldn't recover from it quickly. But still, after time had passed and the shock had worn off, wasn't there something you could have done? I mean, it was so unfair. Why didn't you challenge it? I don't see how you could stand it.' Tsukuru shook his head slightly. 'The next morning I made up some excuse to tell my family and took the bullet train back to Tokyo. I couldn't stand being in Nagoya for one more day. All I could think of was getting away from there.' 'If it had been me, I would have stayed there and not left until I got to the bottom of it,' Sara said. 'I wasn't strong enough for that.' Tsukuru said. 'You didn't want to find out the truth?' Tsukuru stared at his hands on the tabletop, careful choosing his words. 'I think I was afraid of pursuing it, of whatever facts might come of light. Of actually coming face-to-face with them. Whatever the truth was, I didn't think it would save me. I'm not sure why, but I was certain of it.' 'And you're certain of it now?' 'I don't know,' Tsukuru said. 'But I was then.' 'So you went back to Tokyo, stayed holed up in your apartment, closed your eyes, and covered up your ears.' 'You could say that, yes.

1 cup of ordinary white flour a pinch of salt 2 eggs 2½ cups of milk and water (1½ cups of milk and 1 cup of water mixed) 1 tablespoon of either vegetable oil or melted butter (You’ll also need some granulated sugar and a couple of lemons to put on the pancakes, along with other things like jams and possibly even maple syrup because you’re American.) Put the flour and salt in a mixing bowl. Crack the eggs in and whisk/fork the egg into the flour. Slowly add the milk/water mixture, stirring as you go, until there are no lumps and you have a liquid the consistency of a not-too-thick cream. Then put the mixture in the fridge overnight. Grease or butter or oil a nonstick frying pan. Heat it until it’s really hot (375 degrees according to one website, but basically, it has to be hot for the pancake to become a pancake. And these are crepes, French style, not thick American round pancakes). Stir the mixture you just took from the fridge thoroughly because the flour will all be at the bottom. Get an even consistency. Then ladle some mixture into the pan, thinly covering the bottom of the pan. When the underside of the pancake is golden, flip it (or, if you are brave, toss it). Cook another 30 seconds on the other side. For reasons I do not quite understand (although pan heat is probably the reason), the first one is always a bit disappointing. Often it’s a burnt, sludgy, weird thing, always, in my family, eaten by the cook (which was me). Just keep going, and the rest will be fine. Sprinkle sugar in the middle. And then squeeze some lemon juice on, preferably from a lemon. Then wrap it like a cigar and feed it to a child. (You can experiment with other things in the middle, like Nutella or jam or even maple syrup—but remember that these pancakes are not syrup-absorbent like American-style pancakes.) This is a very peculiar interview, Joe. Let me know how the pancakes come out.

What I want to happen to religion in the future is this: I want it to be like bowling. It's a hobby, something some people will enjoy, that has some virtues to it, that will have its own institutions and its traditions and its own television programming, and that families will enjoy together. It's not something I want to ban or that should affect hiring and firing decisions, or that interferes with public policy. It will be perfectly harmless as long as we don't elect our politicians on the basis of their bowling score, or go to war with people who play nine-pin instead of ten-pin, or use folklore about backspin to make decrees about how biology works

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons. They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, So it is impossible to tell how many there are. My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep. Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage—— My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. I am a nun now, I have never been so pure. I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. Before they came the air was calm enough, Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. They concentrate my attention, that was happy Playing and resting without committing itself. The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health. --"Tulips", written 18 March 1961

...I drag the kids to the farmers' market and fill out the week's cheap supermarket haul with a few vivid bunches of organic produce...Once home, I set out fresh flowers and put the fruit in a jadeite bowl. A jam jar of garden growth even adorns the chartreuse kids' table...I found some used toddler-sized chairs to go around it...It sits right in front of the tall bookcases...When the kids are eating or coloring there, with the cluster or mismatched picture frames hanging just to their left, my son with his mop of sandy hair, my daughter just growing out of babyhood...they look like they could be in a Scandinavian design magazine. I think to myself that maybe motherhood is just this, creating these frames, the little vistas you can take in that look like pictures from magazines, like any number of images that could be filed under familial happiness. They reflect back to you that you're doing it - doing something - right. In my case, these scenes are like a momentary vacation from the actual circumstances of my current life. Children, clean and clad in brightly striped clothing, snacking on slices of organic plum. My son drawing happy gel pen houses, the flourishing clump of smiley-faced flowers beneath a yellow flat sun. To counter the creeping worry that I am a no-good person, I must collect a lot of these images, postage-stamp moments I can gaze upon and think, I can't be fucking up that bad. Can I?

To be at table means that one has removed oneself from business and motion and made a commitment to spend some time over one's meal. One commits oneself not only to time but also to an implicit plan of eating: We sit to eat and not just to feed, and to do so both according to a plan and with others. A decision to have a sit-down meal must precede its preparation, and the preparation is in turn guided by the particular plan that is the menu. Further, to be at table means, whether we know it or not, to make a commitment to form and formality. We agree, tacitly to be sure, to a code of conduct that does not apply when we privately raid the refrigerator or eat on the run or in our cards, or even when we munch sandwiches in front of the television with our buddies who have gathered to watch the Super Bowl. There we eat (or, more accurately, feed) side by side, as at a trough; in contrast, at table we all face not our food but one another. Thus we silently acknowledge our mutual commitment to share not only some food but also commensurate forms of commensal behavior. To be sure, the forms will vary depending on the occasion; the guests, a banquet table at a testimonial dinner, and a picnic table in the park have different degrees and (in part) different kinds of formality, as do also the family breakfast and the family dinner. But in all cases there are forms that operate, regulate, and inform our behavior and that signify our peculiarly human way of meeting necessity.

How specialized do restaurants get in Japan? Every weekday at lunchtime, people queue up on a side street just south of Ningyōchō Station, in an old Tokyo neighborhood. They're waiting to get into Tamahide, a restaurant that (at lunchtime) serves one dish, oyakodon. Written with the characters for "parent" and "child," oyakodon is a runny chicken omelet (get it?) served over rice. There are very few ingredients to this dish: chicken, egg, and rice, soy sauce, mirin, and sugar. There is no vegetarian version, no low-carb salad version, no side dishes other than a tiny dish of pickles perched atop the lid of your bowl. If you're not in the mood for diced chicken meat, however, you can order the dish with chicken liver or ground chicken.

Now, back to Sapporo-ya. The place is deep enough below street level that the windows let in no natural light; harsh fluorescent lamps made everyone look ill. The walls are greenish-yellow. If you are directing a modern adaptation of The Divine Comedy, shoot the purgatory scenes here. The waitress set down my hiyashi chūka goma dare (sesame sauce). It was in every way the opposite of its surroundings: colorful, artfully presented, sweated over. The tangle of yellow noodles was served in a shallow blue-and-white bowl and topped with daikon, pickled ginger, roast pork, bamboo shoots, tomato, shredded nori, cucumber, bean sprouts, half a hard-boiled egg, and Japanese mustard. It was almost too pretty to ruin by tossing it together with chopsticks.

1: Everyone Knows It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk—who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty—confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college. Twice a week she also cleaned the rural post office, a small gray clapboard shack that looked as if it might have sheltered an Okie family from the winds of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s and that, sitting alone and forlorn across from the gas station and the general store, flies its American flag at the junction of the two roads that mark the commercial center of this mountainside town.

She was more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommleys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only-the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life-the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

Comparing marriage to football is no insult. I come from the South where football is sacred. I would never belittle marriage by saying it is like soccer, bowling, or playing bridge, never. Those images would never work, only football is passionate enough to be compared to marriage. In other sports, players walk onto the field, in football they run onto the field, in high school ripping through some paper, in college (for those who are fortunate enough) they touch the rock and run down the hill onto the field in the middle of the band. In other sports, fans cheer, in football they scream. In other sports, players ‘high five’, in football they chest, smash shoulder pads, and pat your rear. Football is a passionate sport, and marriage is about passion. In football, two teams send players onto the field to determine which athletes will win and which will lose, in marriage two families send their representatives forward to see which family will survive and which family will be lost into oblivion with their traditions, patterns, and values lost and forgotten. Preparing for this struggle for survival, the bride and groom are each set up. Each has been led to believe that their family’s patterns are all ‘normal,’ and anyone who differs is dense, naïve, or stupid because, no matter what the issue, the way their family has always done it is the ‘right’ way. For the premarital bride and groom in their twenties, as soon as they say, “I do,” these ‘right’ ways of doing things are about to collide like two three hundred and fifty pound linemen at the hiking of the ball. From “I do” forward, if not before, every decision, every action, every goal will be like the line of scrimmage. Where will the family patterns collide? In the kitchen. Here the new couple will be faced with the difficult decision of “Where do the cereal bowls go?” Likely, one family’s is high, and the others is low. Where will they go now? In the bathroom. The bathroom is a battleground unmatched in the potential conflicts. Will the toilet paper roll over the top or underneath? Will the acceptable residing position for the lid be up or down? And, of course, what about the toothpaste? Squeeze it from the middle or the end? But the skirmishes don’t stop in the rooms of the house, they are not only locational they are seasonal. The classic battles come home for the holidays. Thanksgiving. Which family will they spend the noon meal with and which family, if close enough, will have to wait until the nighttime meal, or just dessert if at all? Christmas. Whose home will they visit first, if at all? How much money will they spend on gifts for his family? for hers? Then comes for many couples an even bigger challenge – children of their own! At the wedding, many couples take two candles and light just one often extinguishing their candle as a sign of devotion. The image is Biblical. The Bible is quoted a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. What few prepare them for is the upcoming struggle, the conflict over the unanswered question: the two shall become one, but which one? Two families, two patterns, two ways of doing things, which family’s patterns will survive to play another day, in another generation, and which will be lost forever? Let the games begin.

5236 rue St. Urbain The baby girl was a quick learner, having synthesized a full range of traits of both of her parents, the charming and the devious. Of all the toddlers in the neighbourhood, she was the first to learn to read and also the first to tear out the pages. Within months she mastered the grilling of the steaks and soon thereafter presented reasons to not grill the steaks. She was the first to promote a new visceral style of physical comedy as a means of reinvigorate the social potential of satire, and the first to declare the movement over. She appreciated the qualities of movement and speed, but also understood the necessity of slowness and leisure. She quickly learned the importance of ladders. She invented games with numerous chess-boards, matches and glasses of unfinished wine. Her parents, being both responsible and duplicitous people, came up with a plan to protect themselves, their apartment and belongings, while also providing an environment to encourage the open development of their daughter's obvious talents. They scheduled time off work, put on their pajamas and let the routines of the apartment go. They put their most cherished books right at her eye-level and gave her a chrome lighter. They blended the contents of the fridge and poured it into bowls they left on the floor. They took to napping in the living room, waking only to wipe their noses on the picture books and look blankly at the costumed characters on the TV shows. They made a fuss for their daughter's attention and cried when she wandered off; they bit or punched each other when she out of the room, and accused the other when she came in, looking frustrated. They made a mess of their pants when she drank too much, and let her figure out the fire extinguisher when their cigarettes set the blankets smoldering. They made her laugh with cute songs and then put clothes pins on the cat's tail. Eventually things found their rhythm. More than once the three of them found their faces waxened with tears, unable to decide if they had been crying, laughing, or if it had all been a reflex, like drooling. They took turns in the bath. Parents and children--it is odd when you trigger instinctive behaviour in either of them--like survival, like nurture. It's alright to test their capabilities, but they can hurt themselves if they go too far. It can be helpful to imagine them all gorging on their favourite food until their bellies ache. Fall came and the family went to school together.

He walked right past me.” Sophie turned before the harpsichord, skirts swishing, and paced back to Val’s side. “He barely looked at me, Valentine. Am I not even worth a glance?” She veered off and marched over to the great harp. “Maggie offered to poison his drink. What has the blessed punch bowl got that I haven’t got? What is that?” “Your cloak. Some fresh air will settle you down, Soph.” “I don’t want to settle down !” He held her gaze, thinking his wife would be proud of him. Only a brave—or perhaps very foolish man—tried to console a woman with a heart in the process of breaking. “I rather think you do want to settle down, preferably with Sindal and a brace of offspring.” Her head came up, and Valentine was grateful he’d be leaving in a couple days. Much more of this drama, and he’d be swearing off family holidays for the next decade. “I

When Camilla and her husband joined Prince Charles on a holiday in Turkey shortly before his polo accident, she didn’t complain just as she bore, through gritted teeth, Camilla’s regular invitations to Balmoral and Sandringham. When Charles flew to Italy last year on a sketching holiday, Diana’s friends noted that Camilla was staying at another villa a short drive away. On her return Mrs Parker-Bowles made it quite clear that any suggestion of impropriety was absurd. Her protestations of innocence brought a tight smile from the Princess. That changed to scarcely controlled anger during their summer holiday on board a Greek tycoon’s yacht. She quietly simmered as she heard her husband holding forth to dinner-party guests about the virtues of mistresses. Her mood was scarcely helped when, later that evening, she heard him chatting on the telephone to Camilla. They meet socially on occasion but, there is no love lost between these two women locked into an eternal triangle of rivalry. Diana calls her rival “the rotweiller” while Camilla refers to the Princess as that “ridiculous creature”. At social engagements they are at pains to avoid each other. Diana has developed a technique in public of locating Camilla as quickly as possible and then, depending on her mood, she watches Charles when he looks in her direction or simply evades her gaze. “It is a morbid game,” says a friend. Days before the Salisbury Cathedral spire appeal concert Diana knew that Camilla was going. She vented her frustration in conversations with friends so that on the day of the event the Princess was able to watch the eye contact between her husband and Camilla with quiet amusement. Last December all those years of pent-up emotion came flooding out at a memorial service for Leonora Knatchbull, the six-year-old daughter of Lord and Lady Romsey, who tragically died of cancer. As Diana left the service, held at St James’s Palace, she was photographed in tears. She was weeping in sorrow but also in anger. Diana was upset that Camilla Parker Bowles who had only known the Romseys for a short time was also present at such an intimate family service. It was a point she made vigorously to her husband as they travelled back to Kensington Palace in their chauffeur-driven limousine. When they arrived at Kensington Palace the Princess felt so distressed that she ignored the staff Christmas party, which was then in full swing, and went to her sitting-room to recover her composure. Diplomatically, Peter Westmacott, the Wales’s deputy private secretary, sent her avuncular detective Ken Wharfe to help calm her.

BACKYARD GARDEN SALAD In wartime, patriotic families cultivated “Victory Gardens” to promote self-sufficiency and help the war effort. 4 cups mixed greens 1/4 cup fresh sprigs of dill 1/4 cup fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves 4 large basil leaves, rolled up and thinly sliced crosswise 1 large lemon, halved 1/4 cup fruity olive oil pinch of salt fresh ground black pepper to taste 1 cup toasted walnuts 3/4 cup crumbled feta cheese 1 cup fresh edible flowers; choose from bachelor’s buttons, borage, calendulas, carnations, herb flowers (basil, chives, rosemary, thyme), nasturtiums, violas, including pansies and Johnny-jump-ups, stock Toss salad greens and herbs in a large bowl. Squeeze lemon juice (without the seeds) over the greens and season with olive oil, salt and pepper. Toss again. Add walnuts and feta and toss well. Divide salad and pansies among four serving plates and serve. (Source: Adapted from California Bountiful)

Sweet potato. Mashed yams covered in beef jerky. French bread. Butter. A warm bowl of couscous. It's like she's trying to feed an army. "I'm not very hungry," I say. "It's not like you to refuse breakfast," she says with a wink. And my heart stops, because Mom winks just like Grandma used to. "And you barely ate last night. You need sustenance." I join her at the counter, trying not to think about how without a third stool at the center to balance our family out, the counter feels much wider than it is. Our breakfast begins quietly, just the hum of the fridge in the background. I add butter to my yams, and the spoonful melts in my mouth, warming me up from inside out. I scoop up the little cuts of beef jerky individually, leftover from last night, chewing on them with my eyes closed. I let the salty flavor spread over my taste buds to wake them up one by one. I then pull my bowl of milk couscous closer, breathing in the cinnamon-fragrant steam.

There was a time when my life seemed so painful to me that reading about the lives of other women writers was one of the few things that could help. I was unhappy, and ashamed of it; I was baffled by my life. For several years in my early thirties, I would sit in my armchair reading books about these other lives. Sometimes when I came to the end, I would sit down and read the book through from the beginning again. I remember an incredible intensity about all this, and also a kind of furtiveness—as if I were afraid that someone might look through the window and find me out. Even now, I feel I should pretend that I was reading only these women's fiction or their poetry—their lives as they chose to present them, alchemized as art. But that would be a lie. It was the private messages I really liked—the journals and letters, and autobiographies and biographies whenever they seemed to be telling the truth. I felt very lonely then, self-absorbed, shut off. I needed all this murmured chorus, this continuum of true-life stories, to pull me through. They were like mothers and sisters to me, these literary women, many of them already dead; more than my own family, they seemed to stretch out a hand. I had come to New York when I was young, as so many come, in order to invent myself. And, like many modern people—modern women, especially—I had catapulted out of my context; in important ways, the life of my mother, in her English village, was not much help. I remember reading in those dark years a review by John Updike in which he smoothly compared the lives of Jean Rhys and Colette. The first was in the end a failure, the second a triumph, he said. I took it personally, felt a stab in the heart. And poor Jane Bowles, said someone else, in the Times—you'd have to admit that hers was a desperate life. The successes gave me hope, of course, yet it was the desperate bits I liked best. I was looking for directions, gathering clues...

Anyone who has lived for a long time with a lover, and then suddenly does not, will understand what I mean by those crusted bowls, by those solo whiskeys, by the promise of solitude behind a closed door. That to be tethered, so intimately, for so long, and then to find yourself free, is both misery and miracle—a sudden and unlikely dream that brings both darkest despair and the euphoria of liberation. They’ll understand the daily fixations on the ideas of togetherness and separateness; the idea that humans, or at least most of us, pair off and couple up and try as best as we can to stay with one mate for the rest of our lives, fueled in equal parts by love and connection and expectation, and at the root of it, the blind hope that we will never be alone again. And this, we’re told, is what we should want most—a partner, children, family—those bound by sacrament or by state or by blood, who will, we believe with everything we have in our fragile human hearts, never leave us.

But without Emily, Greg would feel—paradoxically for such a social creature—alone. Before they met, most of Greg’s girlfriends were extroverts. He says he enjoyed those relationships, but never got to know his girlfriends well, because they were always “plotting how to be with groups of people.” He speaks of Emily with a kind of awe, as if she has access to a deeper state of being. He also describes her as “the anchor” around which his world revolves. Emily, for her part, treasures Greg’s ebullient nature; he makes her feel happy and alive. She has always been attracted to extroverts, who she says “do all the work of making conversation. For them, it’s not work at all.” The trouble is that for most of the five years they’ve been together, Greg and Emily have been having one version or another of the same fight. Greg, a music promoter with a large circle of friends, wants to host dinner parties every Friday—casual, animated get-togethers with heaping bowls of pasta and flowing bottles of wine. He’s been giving Friday-night dinners since he was a senior in college, and they’ve become a highlight of his week and a treasured piece of his identity. Emily has come to dread these weekly events. A hardworking staff attorney for an art museum and a very private person, the last thing she wants to do when she gets home from work is entertain. Her idea of a perfect start to the weekend is a quiet evening at the movies, just her and Greg. It seems an irreconcilable difference: Greg wants fifty-two dinner parties a year, Emily wants zero. Greg says that Emily should make more of an effort. He accuses her of being antisocial. “I am social,” she says. “I love you, I love my family, I love my close friends. I just don’t love dinner parties. People don’t really relate at those parties—they just socialize. You’re lucky because I devote all my energy to you. You spread yours around to everyone.” But Emily soon backs off, partly because she hates fighting, but also because she doubts herself. Maybe I am antisocial, she

Our neighborhood ramen place was called Aoba. That's a joke. There were actually more than fifty ramen places with in walking distance of our apartment. But this one was our favorite. Aoba makes a wonderful and unusual ramen with a mixture of pork and fish broth. The noodles are firm and chewy, and the pork tender and almost smoky, like ham. I also liked how they gave us a small bowl for sharing with Iris without our even asking. What I really appreciated about this place, however, were two aspects of ramen that I haven't mentioned yet: the eggs and the dipping noodles. After these two, I will stop, but there's so much more to ramen. Would someone please write an English-language book about ramen? Real ramen, not how to cook with Top Ramen noodles? Thanks. (I did find a Japanese-language book called State-of-the-Art Technology of Pork Bone Ramen on Amazon. Wish-listed!) One of the most popular ramen toppings is a soft-boiled egg. Long before sous vide cookery, ramen cooks were slow-cooking eggs to a precise doneness. Eggs for ramen (ajitsuke tamago) are generally marinated in a soy sauce mixture after cooking so the whites turn a little brown and the eggs turn a little sweet and salty. I like it best when an egg is plunked whole into the broth so I can bisect it with my chopsticks and reveal the intensely orange, barely runny yolk. A cool egg moistened with rich broth is alchemy. Forget the noodles; I want a ramen egg with a little broth for breakfast. Finding hot and cold in the same mouthful is another hallmark of Japanese summer food, and many ramen restaurants, including Aoba, feature it in the form of tsukemen, dipping noodles. Tsukemen is deconstructed ramen, a bowl of cold cooked noodles and a smaller bowl of hot, ultra-rich broth and toppings. The goal is to lift a tangle of noodles with your chopsticks and dip them in the bowl of broth on the way to your mouth. This is a crazy way to eat noodles and, unless you've been inculcated with the principles of noodle-slurping physics from birth, a great way to ruin your clothes.

He lived in a hut on a bleak hillside, and was despised. Nobody knew his name, or how old he was, or where he even came from. If he’d ever had family in the neighborhood, they were either long gone or kept quiet about their link to the outcast. When people met him on the roads or in the fields, they turned aside, some saying a prayer, others mouthing a charm passed down from an older tradition. Children sometimes taunted him, the braver ones even threw stones, but only till an adult came and drove them away. Everyone knew it was bad luck to lay eyes on the nameless man, to spend even the briefest time within sight of him. The Sin-Eater was one of many boogeymen invoked by weary parents to keep fractious children quiet. He just happened to be real. He had only one function, and when he was needed, the people of the district did not need to seek him out. Some uncanny instinct told the Sin-Eater when he could enter a home where a wake was being held. It was his role to eat a simple meal from a wooden bowl placed on the chest of the corpse, and to take upon himself all the sins of any dead

By the way, there's one more benefit to freezing eggs... that I neglected to tell you earlier. Y'see... by freezing them, the robust flavor of the yolks gets even richer!" "The flavor of the yolk... changes?!" "When you freeze a chicken egg, its proteins condense into a jelly... which gives it a tender and creamy consistency when you cook it. The flavor of the yolk in particular becomes deep and rich! Basically, freezing the egg is the biggest reason this tempura rice bowl is as delicious as it is! Plus, I made sure to pour on plenty of Yukihira Family Restaurant's special savory and salty house sauce! It's soy sauce and mirin added to bonito stock. I made sure this batch was extra rich! There's no way it wouldn't par perfectly with the rice and egg! The thing is, luxury-brand eggs all tend to have strong flavors from the get-go. Using them would make the entire rice bowl taste heavy and cloying." "Wait. Is that why...?!" "Yep! Since the sauce I use is thick and heavy, and freezing eggs makes their flavor richer... ... a blander egg is the best choice!" "Oh! He had a legitimate reason for using those cheap eggs!" "That's Soma for you!

I cooked with so many of the greats: Tom Colicchio, Eric Ripert, Wylie Dufresne, Grant Achatz. Rick Bayless taught me not one but two amazing mole sauces, the whole time bemoaning that he never seemed to know what to cook for his teenage daughter. Jose Andres made me a classic Spanish tortilla, shocking me with the sheer volume of viridian olive oil he put into that simple dish of potatoes, onions, and eggs. Graham Elliot Bowles and I made gourmet Jell-O shots together, and ate leftover cheddar risotto with Cheez-Its crumbled on top right out of the pan. Lucky for me, Maria still includes me in special evenings like this, usually giving me the option of joining the guests at table, or helping in the kitchen. I always choose the kitchen, because passing up the opportunity to see these chefs in action is something only an idiot would do. Susan Spicer flew up from New Orleans shortly after the BP oil spill to do an extraordinary menu of all Gulf seafood for a ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner Maria hosted to help the families of Gulf fishermen. Local geniuses Gil Langlois and Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard joined forces with Gale Gand for a seven-course dinner none of us will ever forget, due in no small part to Gil's hoisin oxtail with smoked Gouda mac 'n' cheese, Stephanie's roasted cauliflower with pine nuts and light-as-air chickpea fritters, and Gale's honey panna cotta with rhubarb compote and insane little chocolate cookies. Stephanie and I bonded over hair products, since we have the same thick brown curls with a tendency to frizz, and the general dumbness of boys, and ended up giggling over glasses of bourbon till nearly two in the morning. She is even more awesome, funny, sweet, and genuine in person than she was on her rock-star winning season on Bravo. Plus, her food is spectacular all day. I sort of wish she would go into food television and steal me from Patrick. Allen Sternweiler did a game menu with all local proteins he had hunted himself, including a pheasant breast over caramelized brussels sprouts and mushrooms that melted in your mouth (despite the occasional bit of buckshot). Michelle Bernstein came up from Miami and taught me her white gazpacho, which I have since made a gajillion times, as it is probably one of the world's perfect foods.

The conversation lightened during the midday banquet the king hosted for our delegation. It was a lavish affair, like something out of a fairy tale, the fifty-foot table laden with whole roasted lambs and heaps of saffron rice and all manner of traditional and Western delicacies. Of the sixty or so people eating, my scheduling director, Alyssa Mastromonaco, and senior advisor Valerie Jarrett were two of the three women present. Alyssa seemed cheery enough as she chatted with Saudi officials across the table, although she appeared to have some trouble keeping the headscarf she was wearing from falling into the soup bowl. The king asked about my family, and I described how Michelle and the girls were adjusting to life in the White House. He explained that he had twelve wives himself—news reports put the number closer to thirty—along with forty children and dozens more grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, Your Majesty,” I said, “but how do you keep up with twelve wives?” “Very badly,” he said, shaking his head wearily. “One of them is always jealous of the others. It’s more complicated than Middle East politics.

Standing on the pavement was a big fat man whom Dixon recognized as his barber. Dixon felt a deep respect for this man because of his impressive exterior, his rumbling bass voice, and his unsurpassable stock of information about the Royal Family. At that moment two rather pretty girls stopped at a pillar-box a few yards away. The barber, his hands clasped behind his back, turned and stared at them. An unmistakable expression of furtive lust came over his face; then, like a courtly shyopwalker, he moved slowly towards the two girls. Welch now accelerated again and Dixon, a good deal shaken hurriedly switched his attention to the other side of the road, where a cricket match was being played and the bowler was just running up to bowl. The batsman, another big fat man, swiped at the ball, missed it, and was violently hit by it in the stomach. Dixon had time to see him double up and the wicket-keeper begin to run forward before a tall hedge hid the scene. Uncertain whether this pair of vignettes was designed to illustrate the swiftness of divine retribution or its tendency to mistake its target, Dixon was quite sure that he felt in some way overwhelmed...

Other than chicken and rice, you'll find Tokyo restaurants specializing in fried pork cutlets, curry rice, ramen, udon, soba, gyōza, beef tongue, tempura, takoyaki, yakitori, Korean-style grilled beef, sushi, okonomiyaki, mixed rice dishes, fried chicken, and dozens of other dishes. Furthermore, even if you know something about Japanese food, it's common to come across a restaurant whose menu or plastic food display indicates that it specializes in a particular food you've never seen before and can't quite decipher. Out of this tradition of single-purpose restaurants, Japan has created homegrown fast-food chains. McDonald's and KFC exist in Tokyo but are outnumbered by Japanese chains like Yoshinoya (beef-and-rice bowl), CoCo Ichiban (curry rice), Hanamaru Udon, Gindaco (takoyaki), Lotteria (burgers), Tenya (tempura), Freshness Burger, Ringer Hut (Nagasaki-style noodles), and Mister Donut (pizza) (just kidding). Since the Japanese are generally slim and healthy and I don't know how to read a Japanese newspaper, it was unclear to me whether Japan's fast-food chains are blamed for every social ill, but it seems like it would be hard to pin a high suicide rate on Mister Donut.

...the letters begin to cross vast spaces in slow sailing ships and everything becomes still more protracted and verbose, and there seems no end to the space and the leisure of those early nineteenth century days, and faiths are lost and the life of Hedley Vicars revives them; aunts catch cold but recover; cousins marry; there is the Irish famine and the Indian Mutiny, and both sisters remain, to their great, but silent grief, for in those days there were things that women hid like pearls in their breasts, without children to come after them. Louisa, dumped down in Ireland with Lord Waterford at the hunt all day, was often very lonely; but she stuck to her post, visited the poor, spoke words of comfort (‘I am sorry indeed to hear of Anthony Thompson's loss of mind, or rather of memory; if, however, he can understand sufficiently to trust solely in our Saviour, he has enough’) and sketched and sketched. Thousands of notebooks were filled with pen and ink drawings of an evening, and then the carpenter stretched sheets for her and she designed frescoes for schoolrooms, had live sheep into her bedroom, draped gamekeepers in blankets, painted Holy Families in abundance, until the great Watts exclaimed that here was Titian's peer and Raphael's master! At that Lady Waterford laughed (she had a generous, benignant sense of humour); and said that she was nothing but a sketcher; had scarcely had a lesson in her life—witness her angel's wings, scandalously unfinished. Moreover, there was her father's house for ever falling into the sea; she must shore it up; must entertain her friends; must fill her days with all sorts of charities, till her Lord came home from hunting, and then, at midnight often, she would sketch him with his knightly face half hidden in a bowl of soup, sitting with her notebook under a lamp beside him. Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and she would wave to him and think, each time, what if this should be the last? And so it was one morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran down-stairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, Mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where she had grasped it in her agony.

And yeah, put out as I can be with Mama 'bout a lotta things, I gotta admit she gets all the credit for getting me interested in cooking when I was just knee-high to a grasshopper. Gladys never seemed to give a damn about it when we were kids, which I guess is why she and that family of hers nourish themselves today mainly on KFC and Whoppers and junk like that. But me, I couldn't keep my eyes off Mama when she'd fix a mess of short ribs, or cut out perfect rounds of buttermilk biscuit dough with a juice glass, or spread a thick, real shiny caramel icing over her 1-2-3-4 cakes. And I can remember like it was yesterday (must have been about 4 years old at the time) when she first let me help her bake cookies, especially the same jelly treats I still make today and could eat by the dozen if I didn't now have better control. "Honey, start opening those jars on the counter," she said while she creamed butter and sugar with her Sunbeam electric hand mixer in the same wide, chipped bowl she used to make for biscuit dough. Strawberry, peach, and mint- the flavors never varied for Mama's jelly treats, and just the idea of making these cookies with anything but jelly and jam she'd put up herself the year before would have been inconceivable to Mama.

Cold Care Capsules One of my favorite recipes for keeping a cold at bay or getting over one more quickly, these Cold Care Capsules are easy to make but pack a big punch. Take the half hour or so that’s required to make a batch, and keep it on hand for the cold season. You can find gelatin or vegetable capsules at most herb shops and natural foods stores, and some pharmacies. 1 part echinacea root powder 1 part goldenseal root powder (organically cultivated) ½ part marsh mallow root powder ¼–½ part cayenne powder (depending on your heattoler ance level) “OO” gelatin or vegetable capsules To make the capsules: Mix the powders together in a small bowl. Scoop the powder into each end of a capsule, packing tight, and recap. It takes only a few minutes to cap 50 to 75 capsules, a winter’s worth for most families. Store in a glass jar with a tight-fitting lid. To use: At the first sign of a cold or flu coming on, take 2 capsules every 2 to 3 hours until the symptoms subside, or up to 9 capsules a day. This is a high dose and should not be continued for longer than 2 to 3 days, at which time you should decrease the dose to 2 capsules three times a day (the normal adult dose for most herbal capsules; see pages 46–47 for further information on appropriate

From the Waverley Kitchen Journal Fig and Pepper Bread Mary’s Note: Sometimes the two most improbable things make the best combination. Ingredients: 2 cups whole grain spelt flour 2 ½ cups unbleached all purpose flour 1 ½ cups coarsely chopped figs 2 tsp coarse black pepper 2 tsp sea salt 2 tbsp olive oil 1 dry yeast packet 1 ½ cups of warm water Whisk flour, salt, pepper, and yeast until blended, by hand or with whisk attachment of mixer. Add olive oil and warm water. Knead for 10 minutes, or use dough hook attachment of mixer for 5 minutes, until dough is smooth and springy. Oil a large bowl, place dough inside, and cover bowl with a damp hand towel. Let sit in a warm place for approximately 1 hour, or until dough has doubled in size. Softly knead in the chopped figs and evenly distribute throughout the dough (lightly flouring your hands can make handling the dough easier), shape into an oval, then place on a baking sheet. Snip three shallow lines into top of the dough with scissors, then lightly dust the dough with flour. Let rise, uncovered, until dough swells a little more—10–15 mins, or longer if the kitchen isn’t warm. Place tray in 350° oven for 40–45 mins until crust is slightly brown and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the underside. Cool on a wire rack.

crispy baked wontons Brianna Shade | BEAVERTON, OREGON These quick, versatile wontons are great for a crunchy afternoon snack or paired with a bowl of soothing soup on a cold day. I usually make a large batch, freeze half on a floured cookie sheet, then store them in an air-tight container for a fast bite. 1/2 pound ground pork 1/2 pound extra-lean ground turkey 1 small onion, chopped 1 can (8 ounces) sliced water chestnuts, drained and chopped 1/3 cup reduced-sodium soy sauce 1/4 cup egg substitute 1-1/2 teaspoons ground ginger 1 package (12 ounces) wonton wrappers Cooking spray Sweet-and-sour sauce, optional In a large skillet, cook the pork, turkey and onion over medium heat until meat is no longer pink; drain. Transfer to a large bowl. Stir in the water chestnuts, soy sauce, egg substitute and ginger. Position a wonton wrapper with one point toward you. (Keep remaining wrappers covered with a damp paper towel until ready to use.) Place 2 heaping teaspoons of filling in the center of wrapper. Fold bottom corner over filling; fold sides toward center over filling. Roll toward the remaining point. Moisten top corner with water; press to seal. Repeat with remaining wrappers and filling. Place on baking sheets coated with cooking spray; lightly coat wontons with additional cooking spray. Bake at 400° for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown, turning once. Serve warm with sweet-and-sour sauce if desired.

Joanne Sanders, a broad woman in her forties, posed with friends, family, and Snowball in photographs displayed on the mantel of the fake fireplace. She had shoulder-length brown hair and bangs teased high above her brow. I could picture her behind ten inches of bulletproof glass sneering at me with gloss-encased lips for filling out my deposit slip incorrectly. I fed Snowball half a cup of kibble and a spoonful of wet food as my envelope of information directed. She ate it quickly while making funny little squeaking noises. Once she had licked her bowl to a bright sheen, we headed out for my first walk as a dog-walker. I steered us off of East End Avenue and onto the esplanade that runs along the river. The water reflected the sun in bright silver glints. I smelled oil and brine. We reached Carl Schurz Park and turned into the dog run for small dogs. The gate leading into the run reached only to my knees, as did the rest of the fence designed to keep small dogs in and big ones out. A sign on the gate read, "Dogs over 25 pounds not permitted." Ten dogs under 25 pounds, and one who was probably a little over, played together in the pen. Their owners, in groups of three or four, sat on worn wooden benches and talked about dogs. Snowball ran to join a poodle growling at a puppy. They intimidated it behind its owner's calves. Then the poodle, a miniature gray curly thing with long ears, mounted Snowball. I turned to the river and watched a giant barge inch by.

In the white bowl, the paper caught fire, burning like a desperate flower, blooming and dying at the same time. Its scents came on tendrils of smoke, wrapping themselves around me. We missed you. I inhaled, and Victoria's kitchen disappeared around me. It was early morning in the cabin, winter; I could smell the woodstove working to keep the frost at bay. My father had fed the sourdough starter, and the tang of it played off the warm scent of coffee grounds. I could smell my own warmth in the air, rising from the blankets I'd tossed aside. I remembered that morning. It was the first time I ever saw the machine. I must have been three, maybe four years old. I'd woken up and seen my father, standing in the middle of the room, a box in his hands, bright and shiny and magical. I remembered racing across the floor, my bare feet tingling from the chill. What is it, Papa? It's wonderful. I want to know. And he'd put the shiny box aside and lifted me up high and said, You are the most wonderful thing in the world, little lark. The last of the paper crumbled to ash. I stood there, trying to remember what had happened next- but I couldn't. Did my father show me the machine, or did we go outside and chop wood? You'd think I'd remember, but I didn't. What I remembered was how it felt to be held in his arms. To be loved that way, before everything else happened. And in that moment, I felt whole. "Oh," I heard Victoria say, and when I turned to her, her eyes were filled with tears.

In Tokyo, ramen is a playground for the culinary imagination. As long as the dish contains thin wheat noodles, it's ramen. In fact, there's a literal ramen playground called Tokyo Ramen Street in the basement of Tokyo Station, with eight top-rated ramen shops sharing one corridor. We stopped by one evening after a day of riding around on the Shinkansen. After drooling over the photos at establishments such as Junk Garage, which serves oily, brothless noodles hidden under a towering slag heap of toppings, we settled on Ramen Honda based on its short line and the fact that its ramen seemed to be topped with a massive pile of scallions. However, anything in Tokyo that appears to be topped with scallions is actually topped with something much better. You'll meet this delectable dopplegänger soon, and in mass quantities. The Internet is littered with dozens if not hundreds of exclamation point-bedecked ramen blogs (Rameniac, GO RAMEN!, Ramen Adventures, Ramenate!) in English, Japanese, and probably Serbian, Hindi, and Xhosa. In Tokyo, you'll find hot and cold ramen; Thai green curry ramen; diet ramen and ramen with pork broth so thick you could sculpt with it; Italian-inspired tomato ramen; and Hokkaido-style miso ramen. You'll find ramen chains and fiercely individual holes-in-the-wall. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is having a meet-cute with her first bowl of ramen. As she fills up on pork and noodles and seaweed and bamboo shoots, she thinks, we were meant to be together, and she is embarrassed at her atavistic reaction to a simple bowl of soup.

She melted the butter in the pan. She warmed the egg yolks by immersing them in a bowl of hot water and mixing them with vinegar, then pouring in the shining golden butter little by little. She moved the whisk ceaselessly, making the contents of the bowl whirl round and round. Having observed Chizu's troubles up close, and learned how to avoid them, she succeeded in producing the fine egg-colored foam relatively quickly. Her whole hand, from the wrist down, was dancing on a waltz. The tigers in the book, whose desires had kept them spinning round and round until they transformed into butter, had ended up in the stomachs of Little Babaji's family. Even after their deaths, Kajii's victims continued to be exposed to and consumed by the curious gaze of the general public. Rika had stopped believing that any blame lay with the victims themselves. Being sucked into the vortex of Kajii's ominous power, like she herself had been, was something that could happen to anybody. Thinking this, she went on single-mindedly whisking the butter. Through her adventures with the quatre-quarts on Valentine's Day, she'd learned that waiting on the far side of all of this seemingly endless whisking was not stasis or evaporation, but emulsification. If she couldn't tear her eyes away from Kajii, if she couldn't stop herself from spinning round and round, then maybe all that was left to do was to grip on to Kajii with all her might, so as to ensure she wasn't shaken off. 'Done!' Rika said to herself and lifted up the whisk. The sauce of warm, bright yellow that came dripping off the whisk was smooth as cashmere.

Everyone around you is just doing their best to make it through today. Because tomorrow will come, and you have to repeat the same day over and over again.  As a kid, you go into the grocery store, and it feels like a never-ending castle filled with different rooms. You feel like every time you enter, there’s always something new to discover. But as an adult, you’ll start to get mad when they change the aisles around because now you can't find the damn oranges!  I never imagined that I would one day be employed in the magical grocery store my family and I went to every Saturday. I never imagined that the place I swore I’d never end up, would soon become the place where I was stuck. Emotionally and physically. As I watch customers trickle in and out, I create stories for each of them. The guy holding flowers and staring at his watch is probably late for a date. The young woman reading the get well soon greeting cards might have had someone close to her get hurt—or maybe they're sick.  All the stories I create for these people make me happy. They’re out in the world. They’re living whereas I’m only existing. I have nobody to share my oranges with. I have nobody to blow out candles in front of. I’m directionless and alone. This big magical place I once thought of is now holding me hostage. I had love once. I had people around me once. I had someone to grocery shop with on the weekends and laugh with when our groceries dropped through the bag. I once had someone to argue with over who was allowed to push the cart. I once had someone who would peel my oranges for me when we got home. Now, my oranges sit and rot in the bowl on my small kitchen table. I have to throw them away most of the time. Yet, I still buy them because it reminds me of something I once had. Is that all life is?

Quickly she shredded the cabbage on the chopping block and tossed it along with the onion and tomatoes in a blue Pyrex bowl. Then she slid the lamb chops, encrusted with fresh rosemary, into the oven. While the lamb baked, she brushed her hair in the washroom and pinned it back again. Then she zipped on a silk floral dress she'd purchased in Bristol and retrieved her grandmother's rhinestone necklace, one of the few family heirlooms her mother packed for her, to clasp around her neck. At the foot of the bed was the antique trunk she'd brought from her childhood home in Balham more than a decade ago. Opening the trunk, she removed her wedding album along with her treasured copy of 'The Secret Garden' and the tubes of watercolors her father had sent with her and her brother. Her father hoped she would spend time painting on the coast, but Maggie hadn't inherited his talent or passion for art. Sometimes she wondered if Edmund would have become an artist. Carefully she took out her newest treasures- pieces of crystal she and Walter hd received as wedding presents, protected by pages and pages of her husband's newspaper. She unwrapped the crystal and two silver candlesticks, then set them on the white-cloaked dining table. She arranged the candlesticks alongside a small silver bowl filled with mint jelly and a basket with sliced whole-meal bread from the bakery. After placing white, tapered candles into the candlesticks, she lit them and stepped back to admire her handiwork. Satisfied, she blew them out. Once she heard Walter at the door, she'd quickly relight the candles. When the timer chimed, she removed the lamb chops and turned off the oven, placing the pan on her stovetop and covering it with foil. She'd learned a lot about housekeeping in the past decade, and now she was determined to learn how to be the best wife to Walter. And a doting mother to their children. If only she could avoid the whispers from her aunt's friends.

I see a direct connection between the Fuenta Magna Bowl and Ogma, I believe the former is an authentic yet misplaced artifact that has its origins in the Middle East as the Irish/Celtic mythology as well. Ogma -being the god/originator of speech and language- carries the syllable of 'Og' in his name (according to a renowned authority on Irish Mythology, James Swagger) which signals some process of initiation through which other members could join into this culture. His family connections were confused (according to, The Dictionary Of Mythology) but it is said that he was the brother of Dagda and Lugh; and Dagda owned a magical cauldron known as Undry, which was always full and used to satisfy his enormous appetite. The [Tales depict Dagda as a figure of immense power, armed with a magic club to kill nine men with one blow]. This symbolism shows another remarkable link, however, to ancient Egypt with the Nine Bows representing its enemies. With Richard Cassaro's work, we now know the significance of the Godself icon which we see on the Fuenta Magna Bowl; and yet my observation and surprise here lies in the fact that the Godself icon could simply refer to Dagda being a figure of immense power, but what is more astounding is when I found that the Latin word caldaria (whence 'cauldron' was taken) means a 'cooking pot'. This is indeed amazing, but that's not all! This Latin word has its etymological roots in the Semitic languages, where the Old Babylonian word 'kid' meaning 'to cut/soften/dissolve' got preserved into Arabic with the same meaning as well and even a new word got derived therefrom: 'kidr'; which literally means a 'cooking pot'. It also happens to refer to one of God's names (in Islam) with the meaning of: Almighty. Moreover, the word 'Undry' could be looked at as if it were composed of two syllables: Un and Dry, with 'Un' signaling a continuous action in present and 'Dry' meaning 'to generate' and 'pour out' in the Semitic language.

Fish at breakfast is sometimes himono (semi-dried fish, intensely flavored and chewy, the Japanese equivalent of a breakfast of kippered herring or smoked salmon) and sometimes a small fillet of rich, well-salted broiled fish. Japanese cooks are expert at cutting and preparing fish with nothing but salt and high heat to produce deep flavor and a variety of textures: a little crispy over here, melting and juicy there. Some of this is technique and some is the result of a turbo-charged supply chain that scoops small, flavorful fish out of the ocean and deposits them on breakfast tables with only the briefest pause at Tsukiji fish market and a salt cure in the kitchen. By now, I've finished my fish and am drinking miso soup. Where you find a bowl of rice, miso shiru is likely lurking somewhere nearby. It is most often just like the soup you've had at the beginning of a sushi meal in the West, with wakame seaweed and bits of tofu, but Iris and I were always excited when our soup bowls were filled with the shells of tiny shijimi clams. Clams and miso are one of those predestined culinary combos- what clams and chorizo are to Spain, clams and miso are to Japan. Shijimi clams are fingernail-sized, and they are eaten for the briny essence they release into the broth, not for what Mario Batali has called "the little bit of snot" in the shell. Miso-clam broth is among the most complex soup bases you'll ever taste, but it comes together in minutes, not the hours of simmering and skimming involved in making European stocks. As Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat explain in their book Japanese Hot Pots, this is because so many fermented Japanese ingredients are, in a sense, already "cooked" through beneficial bacterial and fungal actions. Japanese food has a reputation for crossing the line from subtlety into blandness, but a good miso-clam soup is an umami bomb that begins with dashi made from kombu (kelp) and katsuobushi (bonito flakes) or niboshi (a school of tiny dried sardines), adds rich miso pressed through a strainer for smoothness, and is then enriched with the salty clam essence.

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it. Although my novel focuses on fictional characters, Elsa Martinelli is representative of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who went west in the 1930s in search of a better life. Many of them, like the pioneers who went west one hundred years before them, brought nothing more than a will to survive and a hope for a better future. Their strength and courage were remarkable. In writing this story, I tried to present the history as truthfully as possible. The strike that takes place in the novel is fictional, but it is based on strikes that took place in California in the thirties. The town of Welty is fictional as well. Primarily where I diverged from the historical record was in the timeline of events. There are instances in which I chose to manipulate dates to better fit my fictional narrative. I apologize in advance to historians and scholars of the era. For more information about the Dust Bowl years or the migrant experience in California, please go to my website KristinHannah.com for a suggested reading list.

Sidney, is that what you girls go for these days?” Kathleen asked, pointing toward her oldest son. “All this scruffy whatnot?” Well, nothing like putting her on the spot here. Personally, Sidney thought that the dark hint of scruff along Vaughn’s angular jaw looked fine. Better than fine, actually. She would, however, rather be trapped for the next thirty-six hours in a car with the crazy pregnant lady before admitting that in front of him. “I generally prefer clean-shaven men.” She shrugged—sorry—when Vaughn gave her the side-eye as he began setting the table. “See? If you don’t believe me, at least listen to her,” Kathleen said, while peeling a carrot over a bowl at the island. “If you want to find a woman of quality, you can’t be running around looking like you just rolled out of bed.” “I’ll keep that in mind. But for now, the ‘scruffy whatnot’ stays. I need it for an undercover role,” Vaughn said. Surprised to hear that, Sidney looked over as she dumped the tomatoes into a large salad bowl filled with lettuce. “You’re working undercover now?” “Well, I’m not in the other identity right this second,” Vaughn said. “I’m kind of guessing my mother would be able to ID me.” Thank you, yes, she got that. “I meant, how does that work?” Sidney asked him. “You just walk around like normal, being yourself, when you’re not . . . the other you?” “That’s exactly how it works. At least, when we’re talking about a case that involves only part-time undercover work.” “But what if I were to run into the other you somewhere? Say . . . at a coffee shop.” A little inside reference there. “If I called you ‘Vaughn’ without realizing that you were working, wouldn’t that blow your cover?” “First of all, like all agents who regularly do undercover work, I tell my friends and family not to approach me if they happen to run into me somewhere—for that very reason. Second of all, in this case, the ‘other me’ doesn’t hang out at coffee shops.” “Where does the other you hang out?” Sidney asked. Not to contribute to his already healthy ego, but this was pretty interesting stuff. “In dark, sketchy alleys doing dark, sketchy things,” Vaughn said as he set the table with salad bowls. “So the other you is a bad guy, then.” Sidney paused, realizing something. “Is what you’re doing dangerous?” “The joke around my office is that the agents on the white-collar crime squad never do anything dangerous.” Sidney noticed that wasn’t an actual answer to her question

CUPPA’S ‘TO DIE FOR’ CINNAMON ROLLS Did the description of Cuppa’s amazing cinnamon rolls make your mouth water? Every time I described them in this book I thought about my family’s favorite recipe for cinnamon rolls, and I’ve included it here for you. I think Tory and Meg would approve. All measurements/temperatures are in US units. Makes 12 wonderfully large rolls Dough: 2 packages active dry yeast 1 cup warm water 2/3 cup plus 1 teaspoon granulated sugar, divided 1 cup warmed milk (I microwave this and then stir to be sure there are no hot spots) 2/3 cup softened butter 2 teaspoons salt 2 eggs, beaten 7 to 8 cups all-purpose flour Filling of Deliciousness: 1 cup melted butter, divided (that’s 2 sticks) 1-3/4 cups dark brown sugar, divided 3 Tablespoons ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg (fresh, if possible) 1 to 2 cups chopped pecans (optional) 1-1/2 cups dark raisins (optional) Frosting: 1/2 cup melted butter 3 cups powdered sugar 1 and a half teaspoons real vanilla 5 to 8 Tablespoons hot water   DIRECTIONS: To make dough combine yeast, warm water and 1 teaspoon sugar in a cup and stir. Set aside. In a large bowl mix warmed milk, remaining 2/3 cup sugar, butter, salt, and eggs. Stir well and add yeast mixture. Add half the flour and beat until smooth. Stir in enough of the remaining flour to make a slightly stiff dough. It’s okay for the dough to be sticky. Turn out onto a well-floured board and knead for 5 to 10 minutes. Place in a well-buttered glass bowl. Cover loosely and let rise in a warm draft-free place until doubled in bulk, about 1 to 1-1/2 hours. When doubled, punch down dough and let it rest for 5 minutes. Roll out onto floured surface into a 15 x 20-inch rectangle. Filling: Spread dough with ½ cup melted butter. Mix together 1/-1/2 cups brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Sprinkle over buttered dough. Sprinkle with pecans and raisins, if you want. Sometimes I go really crazy and add a cup of finely-chopped apples, too. Roll up jellyroll-fashion and pinch the edges together to seal. Cut into 12 slices. Coat bottom of a 13”’x 9” and a square 8” pan with the last ½ cup of melted butter, and sprinkle remaining ¼ cup of sugar mixture on top. Place slices close together in pans. Let rise in warm, draft-free place until doubled in bulk (about 45 minutes). Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until nicely browned. Let cool slightly and spread with frosting. Share with others, and be prepared to get marriage proposals ;) Frosting: Mix melted butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla. Add hot water a tablespoon at a time, mixing after each, until frosting is of desired consistency. Spread or drizzle over slightly-cooled rolls.

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

As the sun set, I ate a hospital meal and watched TV. Every few minutes, I glanced at the girl on the bed and tried to see Raven. I struggled to remember her smile and laugh. With her face so swollen, she didn’t seem like my love. I worried I’d lost her because I brought Caleb to Ellsberg. Eventually, the nurse showed me how to turn the chair into a pull out bed. I thanked her, but the thing was too damn small for me to fit on. Besides, I didn’t want to sleep until Raven woke up. Finally, I gave into my weird little urge to kiss the sleeping beauty. I needed to know she was okay. Know she wanted me to stay because she still loved me. I felt nervous until her swollen lips twitched into a smile after my kiss. “Tell me a story,” she mumbled while gripping my shirt with her good hand and tugging me into the bed with her. I adjusted our bodies just enough for me to rest next to her. While the position wasn’t comfortable, I finally relaxed at knowing my woman wanted me close. Caressing her battered face with my fingers, I loved how she smiled for me. Even in pain and after a hellish day, she soothed my fears. “Once upon a time,” I said and she smiled again, “there was a lonely fool who wasted one day after another of his life. One day, he met the most fascinating chick and she quickly wrapped the fool around her finger. She loved him in the best way and saved him from himself. He loved her too and only wanted for her to be happy and safe.” Hesitating, I frowned at the sight of her suffering. As if knowing what I was thinking, she reached up and ran a finger of my lips. “More.” “After the evil… let’s call them gnomes because I hate those ugly little fuckers. So, once the gnomes were destroyed, the fool and his lovely savior bought a big house for all the beautiful blond babies they would have together.” As Raven smiled at this idea, my uneasiness faded. “Their kids all had names with a V in them to honor their hot parents.” Raven laughed then moaned at the gesture. Still, she kept smiling for me. “The fool, his beautiful woman, and their army of glorious babies played videogames, bowled, and roller skated. They were always happy and never sad in a town with their friends and family. They all lived happily ever after.” Raven swollen lips smiled enough to show her missing tooth. Even though she was essentially blind with her battered eyes, she knew I’d seen her mouth and covered it with her hand. “You’re beautiful, darling. Nothing will ever change that.” Raven grunted, unconvinced. “There’s more to love about you than your beauty.” Another grunt followed by a hint of a pout. “Sugar, if I got all banged up and my stunning good looks were damaged, you’d still love me, right?” Raven laughed, but said nothing, so I answered for her. “Of course, you would. My amazing personality and giant brain would keep you horny even if my hot body wasn’t at its best.” Laughing harder now, Raven leaned against me. “I liked your story.” “Unlike most fairytales, this one is coming true.

A knock at the enameled door of the carriage altered them to the presence of a porter and a platform inspector just outside. Sebastian looked up and handed the baby back to Evie. He went to speak to the men. After a minute or two, he came back from the threshold with a basket. Looking both perturbed and amused, he brought it to Phoebe. “This was delivered to the station for you.” “Just now?” Phoebe asked with a nonplussed laugh. “Why, I believe it’s Ernestine’s mending basket! Don’t say the Ravenels went to the trouble of sending someone all the way to Alton to return it?” “It’s not empty,” her father said. As he set the basket in her lap, it quivered and rustled, and a blood-curdling yowl emerged. Astonished, Phoebe fumbled with the latch on the lid and opened it. The black cat sprang out and crawled frantically up her front, clinging to her shoulder with such ferocity that nothing could have detached her claws. “Galoshes!” Justin exclaimed, hurrying over to her. “Gosh-gosh!” Stephen cried in excitement. Phoebe stroked the frantic cat and tried to calm her. “Galoshes, how . . . why are you . . . oh, this is Mr. Ravenel’s doing! I’m going to murder him. You poor little thing.” Justin came to stand beside her, running his hands over the dusty, bedraggled feline. “Are we going to keep her now, Mama?” “I don’t think we have a choice,” Phoebe said distractedly. “Ivo, will you go with Justin to the dining compartment, and fetch her some food and water?” The two boys dashed off immediately. “Why has he done this?” Phoebe fretted. “He probably couldn’t make her stay at the barn, either. But she’s not meant to be a pet. She’s sure to run off as soon as we reach home.” Resuming his seat next to Evie, Sebastian said dryly, “Redbird, I doubt that creature will stray more than an arm’s length from you.” Discovering a note in the mending basket, Phoebe plucked it out and unfolded it. She instantly recognized West’s handwriting. Unemployed Feline Seeking Household Position To Whom It May Concern, I hereby offer my services as an experienced mouser and personal companion. References from a reputable family to be provided upon request. Willing to accept room and board in lieu of pay. Indoor lodgings preferred. Your servant, Galoshes the Cat Glancing up from the note, Phoebe found her parents’ questioning gazes on her. “Job application,” she explained sourly. “From the cat.” “How charming,” Seraphina exclaimed, reading over her shoulder. “‘Personal companion,’ my foot,” Phoebe muttered. “This is a semi-feral animal who has lived in outbuildings and fed on vermin.” “I wonder,” Seraphina said thoughtfully. “If she were truly feral, she wouldn’t want any contact with humans. With time and patience, she might become domesticated.” Phoebe rolled her eyes. “It seems we’ll find out.” The boys returned from the dining car with a bowl of water and a tray of refreshments. Galoshes descended to the floor long enough to devour a boiled egg, an anchovy canapé, and a spoonful of black caviar from a silver dish on ice. Licking her lips and purring, the cat jumped back into Phoebe’s lap and curled up with a sigh.

As I reflect back on all of the years of our family’s life together, what I remember best is not the mountains of dirty dishes and pots and pans and socks left on the floor and piles of laundry. I reflect instead on precious times shared with Clay, the kids, and those we welcomed into our home—snuggling on the couch together, nursing babies and rocking them to sleep, sharing movies and huge bowls of popcorn, comforting children after a nightmare, and all those heartfelt kisses and cards that said “I love you!

Answers to open-ended questions. When you invite someone to tell you about his family or her job, you will receive additional free information that you can use to further the conversation. Suppose you ask me, Debra, how is it that you worked in product planning for AT&T? and I say, I was in R&D in Buffalo, New York, where I’m from, and I hated it. I hated being an engineer—they don’t even make pocket protectors for women! So I asked to be transferred anywhere. They brought me to Denver to work in product planning. I offered lots of free information: I’m from Buffalo, I was in R&D (research and development), and I hated being an engineer. You can choose any of that free information to find out more about what interests you the most. You could facilitate the conversation by asking any one of a dozen questions, including: •Are the winters in Buffalo really as bad as they say? •Why didn’t you like being an engineer? •Would it have made a difference in your career if there had been pocket protectors for women? •What is it like to do R&D for a corporation like AT&T? •Was it tough living with a perennial Super Bowl loser? •Where did you study engineering?

When Freddy, at fourteen, dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes on his then-seven-year-old brother’s head, it wounded Donald’s pride so deeply that he’d still be bothered by it when Maryanne brought it up in her toast at the White House birthday dinner in 2017. The incident wasn’t a big deal—or it shouldn’t have been. Donald had been tormenting Robert, again, and nobody could get him to stop. Even at seven, he felt no need to listen to his mother, who, having failed to heal the rift between them after her illness, he treated with contempt. Finally, Robert’s crying and Donald’s needling became too much, and in a moment of improvised expedience that would become family legend, Freddy picked up the first thing at hand that wouldn’t cause any real damage: the bowl of mashed potatoes.

Maman’s Cheese Soufflé YIELD: 4 SERVINGS WHEN MY MOTHER got married, she was seventeen and my father was twenty-two. She did not know how to cook, except for a few simple dishes that she had learned from her mother. Yet she was willing and fearless. My father liked cheese soufflé, so my mother graciously obliged. She had never made a soufflé before, but a friend told her that it consisted of a white sauce (béchamel), grated cheese, and eggs—a cinch! To the béchamel, that staple of the French home cook, she added her grated Swiss cheese and then cracked and added one egg after another to the mixture, stirred it well, poured it into a gratin dish, and baked it in the oven. Voilà! No one had told her that the eggs should be separated, with the yolks added to the base sauce and the whites whipped to a firm consistency and then gently folded into the mixture. Ignorance is bliss, and in this case it was indeed: the soufflé rose to a golden height and became a family favorite. This is a great recipe; it can be assembled hours or even a day ahead, and although it is slightly less airy than a standard soufflé, it is delicious. 6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter, plus more to butter a 6-cup gratin dish 6 tablespoons all-purpose flour 2 cups cold whole milk ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 5 extra-large eggs 2½ cups grated Swiss cheese, preferably Gruyère (about 6 ounces) 3 tablespoons minced fresh chives Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter a 6-cup gratin dish, and set it aside. Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the flour, and mix it in well with a whisk. Cook for 10 seconds, add the milk in one stroke, and mix it in with a whisk. Keep stirring with the whisk until the mixture thickens and comes to a strong boil, which will take about 2 minutes. It should be thick and smooth. Remove from the heat, and stir in the salt and pepper. Allow about 10 minutes for the white sauce to cool. Meanwhile, break the eggs into a bowl, and beat well with a fork. Add the eggs, the cheese, and the chives to the cooled sauce, and mix well to combine. Pour into the buttered gratin dish and cook immediately, or set aside until ready to cook. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until the soufflé is puffy and well browned on top. Although it will stay inflated for quite a while, it is best served immediately.

Pissenlit (DANDELION SALAD) YIELD: 4 SERVINGS PISSENLIT, as the common dandelion is often called in France, is considered a great early-spring treat in our family. Gloria loves to pick the greens at the end of March and the beginning of April, especially the small white specimens hidden in the fallen leaves behind our guesthouse. This family tradition started for me with my father and my two brothers, and now my wife and daughter, Claudine, are great lovers of pissenlit salad. The leaves should be picked before the flowers start forming, while they are small, white, and tender. There is no comparison between the tender wild dandelion greens you pick yourself and the ones that are found in markets. With a small paring knife, cut about an inch below the ground to get the dandelion plant in one piece. Cut the leaves away from the root, and discard any that are damaged or darkened. Our version always includes pieces of pancetta as well as croutons, boiled eggs with soft yolks, and a dressing made of garlic, anchovies, and olive oil. 4 large eggs 5 ounces pancetta, cut into pieces about 1 inch long, ½ inch wide, and ½ inch thick (about 2 dozen) 2 cups water 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 2 teaspoons chopped garlic 4 anchovy fillets in oil, finely chopped 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper A piece of baguette (about 3 ounces), cut into sixteen ¼-inch slices About 8 ounces (8 cups packed) dandelion greens, washed two or three times and spun dry Lower the eggs carefully into boiling water, and boil them at a simmer for 7 minutes. Pour out the water, shake the pan to crack the shells, then fill the pan with ice, and let the eggs cool in the pan for at least 15 minutes. Peel the eggs under cold running water, and cut them into quarters. Meanwhile, put the pancetta pieces in a saucepan, and cover them with the water. Bring the water to a boil, and boil gently for 10 minutes. Drain, then put the pancetta in a saucepan with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil. Cook gently for 5 minutes, or until crisp and lightly browned. Transfer the pancetta along with the rendered fat to a salad bowl, and add the garlic, anchovies, vinegar, salt, pepper, and 4 tablespoons of the olive oil. Mix well. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Spread the remaining 1 tablespoon oil on a cookie sheet, press the slices of bread into the oil, and then turn them over, so they are oiled on the second side. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, until nicely browned. At serving time, add the greens to the salad bowl, and toss them with the dressing. Divide among four plates, and top with the bread and quartered eggs. Serve.

Gloria’s Pork Ribs and Red Beans YIELD: 4 SERVINGS BEFORE I MARRIED Gloria, I knew nothing about Caribbean cooking—Puerto Rican or Cuban. She introduced me to many dishes that through the years we have transformed into our own family recipes. When Roland, my brother, came to visit, one of the first dishes that Gloria would prepare for him was pork shoulder ribs with red beans, which she usually serves with rice and onion pilaf. This dish is great when made ahead, and any leftovers can be served with fried eggs for breakfast, a type of huevos rancheros. With the bones removed, it can be puréed into a sturdy, flavorful soup in a food processor. Although dried beans are typically presoaked in water before cooking, this is not necessary if the beans are started in cool water. 2 tablespoons good olive oil 4 shoulder pork chops with the bones or country ribs (about 1½ pounds) 1 pound dried red kidney beans 2 cups fresh diced tomato flesh or 1 can (14¾ ounces) whole Italian tomatoes, with juice 3 cups sliced onions 1½ tablespoons chopped garlic 1 jalapeño pepper (or more or less, depending on your tolerance for “hotness”), finely chopped, with or without the seeds (about 1 tablespoon) 2 bay leaves 1 teaspoon herbes de Provence (available in many supermarkets) or Italian seasoning 6 cups cold water 1½ teaspoons salt 1 small bunch cilantro Cooked rice, for serving (optional) Tabasco hot pepper sauce (optional) Heat the oil in a large saucepan (I like enameled cast iron), add the pork chops or ribs, and sauté gently, turning once, for 15 to 20 minutes or until they are browned on both sides. Meanwhile, sort through the beans and discard any broken or damaged ones and any foreign matter. Rinse the beans in a sieve under cold water. When the chops or ribs are browned, remove them from the heat, and add the tomatoes and their juice, onions, garlic, jala-peño, bay leaves, herbs, and water. Stir in the beans and salt, and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, pull the leaves from the cilantro stems. Chop the stems finely (you should have about ¼ cup), and add them to the beans. Reserve the leaves (you should have about 1 cup loosely packed) for use as a garnish. When the bean mixture is boiling, reduce the heat to low, and boil very gently, covered, for 2 to 2½ hours, or until the beans and pork are very tender. Divide among soup bowls, sprinkle the cilantro leaves on top, and serve with rice, if desired. Pass the Tabasco sauce for those who want added hotness.

Gnocchi à la Romaine (ROMAN GNOCCHI) YIELD: 4 SERVINGS ATHOUGH MOST PEOPLE associate gnocchi with the Italian kitchen, gnocchi à la parisienne (little dumplings made with choux paste) and gnocchi à la romaine, made from semoule des blé dur, called semolina in Italian, were standards on the menu of Le Plaza Athénée. I still love semolina gnocchi and make them a few times a year for family and friends. They make a great starter to a meal and are just as good as an accompaniment with poultry or veal. 2 cups whole milk ¾ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper Dash of grated nutmeg ½ cup semolina (granulated hard durum wheat flour) 2 large eggs 1 teaspoon good olive oil ¾ cup grated Comté or Gruyère cheese (2 ounces) ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper ½ cup heavy cream Bring 1¾ cups of the milk to a boil in a medium saucepan with the salt, pepper, and nutmeg. As soon as the milk boils, pour the semolina into it in a steady stream while mixing it in with a whisk. Reduce the heat to low, and cook for 1 to 2 minutes, stirring occasionally with the whisk. The mixture should be very thick and smooth. Meanwhile, break the eggs into a small bowl, add the remaining ¼ cup milk, and beat with a fork until smooth. Add to the semolina in the pan, and mix in well with a whisk. Cook and stir for about 30 seconds, until very thick. Set aside while you line a 9-×-6-inch baking dish with plastic wrap, so the ends overhang the sides of the dish. Pour the mixture into it, and using the plastic wrap liner, press on the dough so that it is about ¾ inch thick. Let cool. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Cut the cold gnocchi dough into 3-inch squares (you will have 6 squares), oil a gratin dish with the teaspoon of oil, and arrange the gnocchi in the dish, leaving a little space between them. Sprinkle the grated cheese, salt, and pepper on top, and bake for about 15 minutes, until lightly browned and hot. Remove from the oven, and move the oven shelf 6 to 8 inches from the heat source. Pour the cream over the gnocchi, and return the dish to the oven. Immediately switch the oven setting to broil, and broil the gnocchi for about 5 minutes, or until nicely browned on top. Serve.

Udita lay silently on her bed with Kairavi clenched to her heart. She looked at the bowl full of honey kept on the side table next to her. Then she looked at the unopened box of ‘pedas’ in her husband’s hands. Finally, she looked at her beautiful angel, her moon baby with a little smile on her dimpled cheek, oblivious to how she silently lay amidst her own family of misanthropes.

Look. Is The Rock a perfect movie? No. But is it a perfect movie? Maybe! Just describing the plot of The Rock is a lush, lip-smacking thrill, like a piece of bacon that is all fatty rind, like a bowl of Lucky Charms that is all marshmallows—so many elements that could each, alone, be too much, here combined into one film that somehow works, one great, baroque cinnamon roll that is all the middle of the cinnamon roll, The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, a duck-billed platypus, a place beyond decadence, foie gras on your burger, everything you want and nothing you don’t and then some more. Nicolas Cage, an unchained freak; Sean Connery, virtuosically hammy; Ed Harris, a haunted prince going down with his ship; antihero vs. antihero vs. antihero vs. the president; and gruesome chemical weapons and a heist and a mutiny and a double mutiny and family drama and Alcatraz and mine carts and fighter jets and flames and a rock, stalwart against the sea. All that, but with none of the septic irony, the relentless self-conscious hedging, that infects so much of our lives these days. The Rock does not take one single moment to look you in the eye and say, yes, we know this is a little silly, we are sorry, please know we are cool—there’s no need! The Rock believes in itself, it commits, it is happy to be fun. Coolness is a deadly neurotoxin. Inject The Rock into your heart.

I LEFT FULING on the fast boat upstream to Chongqing. It was a warm, rainy morning at the end of June—the mist thick on the Yangtze like dirty gray silk. A car from the college drove Adam and me down to the docks. The city rushed past, gray and familiar in the rain. The evening before, we had eaten for the last time at the Students’ Home. They kept the restaurant open late especially for us, because all night we were rushing around saying goodbye to everybody, and it was good to finally sit there and eat our noodles. We kidded the women about the new foreign devils who would come next fall to take our place, and how easily they could be cheated. A few days earlier, Huang Neng, the grandfather, had talked with me about leaving. “You know,” he said, “when you go back to your America, it won’t be like it is here. You won’t be able to walk into a restaurant and say, ‘I want a bowl of chaoshou.’ Nobody will understand you!” “That’s true,” I said. “And we don’t have chaoshou in America.” “You’ll have to order food in your English language,” he said. “You won’t be able to speak our Chinese with the people there.” And he laughed—it was a ludicrous concept, a country with neither Chinese nor chaoshou. After our last meal the family lined up at the door and waved goodbye, standing stiffly and wearing that tight Chinese smile. I imagined that probably I looked the same way—two years of friendship somehow tucked away in a corner of my mouth.

Given the array of correspondents—Abiah Root, Mrs Holland, Sam Bowles, Maria Whitney, Mabel Todd herself and many minor figures—a distorting omission is the correspondence with Susan. Nowhere is she mentioned. It’s a common temptation to editorial power to contrive a bias, sometimes in covert ways. Here the agenda is all too plain.

"I MISS" (From the notebook of Elizabeth Douglas, 1923) I miss my mother's pastry. I miss Aunt Lucy's boiled beef and dumplings. I miss watching my grandfather eating pickled walnuts. I miss Annie's sticky ginger cake. I miss my grandmother's potato scones. I miss my grandfather making rum punch at Christmas. I miss helping my mother to make a trifle and both running our fingers around the mixing bowls.

10. Ladle the soup into serving bowls and garnish each with a handful of the chickpea “croutons.” Serve hot, passing the additional “croutons” on the side.

Return the soup to the heat and stir in the heavy cream, if using. Add the vinegar and 1 to 2 teaspoons salt (as desired) and pepper to taste. Ladle the soup into four to six individual bowls, top each with about 1 teaspoon of the toasted pumpkin seeds, and serve hot.

6. Arrange six ovenproof soup bowls on a rimmed baking sheet. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of the grated cheese on the bottom of each. Fill each bowl three-quarters full with soup. Top with the toasted baguette slices and cover the toast and the soup with about 4 tablespoons of grated cheese per bowl. Place the baking sheet under the broiler and broil until the cheese is bubbling, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from the oven and serve hot.

she should have known that her family would just chug it down, oblivious to not only the authenticity of its taste but the amount of work that went into it. She might as well have bought a gallon of the most Americanized crap available at Costco and poured it into the bowl.

And suddenly for no reason, a remembrance of that three thousand year old coarse pottery bowl mended with bitumen flashed across Victoria's mind. Surely those were the things that mattered—the little everyday things, the family to be cooked for, the four walls that enclosed the home, the one or two cherished possessions. All the thousands of ordinary people on the earth, minding their own business and tilling the earth and making pots and bringing up families and laughing and crying, and getting up in the morning and going to bed at night. They were the people who mattered, not these Angels with wicked faces who wanted to make a new world and who didn't care whom they hurt to do it.

Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

Place the tofu triangles in a shallow bowl. Dissolve 1 teaspoon salt in the boiling or very hot water and pour the water over the tofu. Set aside for 15 minutes.

6. Transfer the vegetable mixture to a large food processor. Add the cooked lentils, chickpeas, oats, parsley, basil, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper and pulse until combined (you want a coarse, not mushy, consistency), scraping down the sides of the bowl several times. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl and add the eggs, bread crumbs, and Parmesan cheese. Mix by hand until fully incorporated. Refrigerate the meatball mixture for 30 minutes.

A dog is tied to a leash that is 5 feet long. There is a bowl of delicious food 30 feet away. The dog still manages to reach the food. How did that happen?

Often the pursuit of thin lasts a lifetime and the goal is never reached. To these people, thin isn’t really about being slender. Thin is being more beautiful than you are. Thin is coming from a wealthier family. Thin is a bigger chest. Thin is a smaller nose. Thin is more followers on Twitter. Thin is a more popular channel on YouTube. Thin is more friends on Facebook. Thin is more famous. Thin is a perfect score on the SAT. Thin is your first choice college. Thin is an iPhone not a rip-off. Thin is having a better singing voice. Thin is being from somewhere better. Thin is being respected. Thin is loving yourself. Thin may be one of these things or all of them or something else entirely. The reason it’s impossible for so many p[people to ever get thin is that what they truly seek is something that can’t be microwaved or ladled into a bowl. In fact, the more obsessed someone is in getting thin, the more certain it becomes that one will never get there.

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget. When Lana was finished, the audience clapped, whistled, and stomped, but I sat silent and stunned as she bowed and gracefully withdrew, so disarmed I could not even applaud.

If she was interested, she wouldn't be going after someone who couldn't speak for himself. A man like that would need more care than she was prepared to give. Besides, didn't he ever look in the mirror? If he was so well off, why was he wearing such a lousy suit?

I pour buttermilk into the crater and work the mixture until it is pasty. Using my fingers, I pull dry flour into the wet ingredients, building on the dough, kneading it, drawing meal from the sides. My fingers make small circles while my hand makes a larger circular motion, working around the bowl.

Jeremy George Lake Charles Corvette Logo The original corvette logo was designed by Robert Bartholomew, interior designer for Chevrolet in 1953. The Corvette logo has changed a lot since the 1953 model launch, but it has always had two flags. When the Corvette was launched in 1953, Chevrolet devised a plan to use the Checkered Flag and the American Flag, two things that marked the Corvette as part of its original emblem. When Chevrolet prepared for its new Corvette Sport in the early 1950s, the task of designing the emblem and logo fell to Chevrolet interior designer Robert Bartholomew. Bartholome created the first version of the Corvette logo before the car itself was introduced in 1953. The original logo consisted of two crossing masts, two flags, a checkered flag and the US flag. Bartholomew had a last minute replacement flag bearing the Chevrolet logo and the Fleur-de-lis, a French symbol which was part of the coat of arms of the Louis Chevrolet family (USA ). Jeremy George Lake Charles The newly revealed emblem was part of a flurry of information released during the eighth-generation Corvette basketball tournament in Bowling Green, Kentucky. To keep fans enthralled until next year, Chevy also unveiled a revamped version of the Corvette Cross Flag logo that appeared on the Vette in 2014. The alleged logo for the eighth Chevrolet Corvette generation was leaked in February, and the models' Facebook page confirmed it was the real deal.

Page 3: My family is part of the Philippines’ tiny but entrepreneurial, economically powerful Chinese minority. Just 1 percent of the population, Chinese Filipinos control as much as 60 percent of the private economy, including the country’s four major airlines and almost all of the country’s banks, hotels, shopping malls, and major conglomerates. ... Since my aunt’s murder, one childhood memory keeps haunting me. I was eight, staying at my family’s splendid hacienda-style house in Manila. It was before dawn, still dark. Wide awake, I decided to get a drink from the kitchen. I must have gone down an extra flight of stairs, because I literally stumbled onto six male bodies. I had found the male servants’ quarters. My family’s houseboys, gardeners, and chauffeurs—I sometimes imagine that Nilo Abique [the chauffeur that murdered her aunt] was among those men—were sleeping on mats on a dirt floor. The place stank of sweat and urine. I was horrified. Later that day I mentioned the incident to my Aunt Leona, who laughed affectionately and explained that the servants—there were perhaps twenty living on the premises, all ethnic Filipinos—were fortunate to be working for our family. If not for their positions, they would be living among rats and open sewers without even a roof over their heads. A Filipino maid then walked in; I remember that she had a bowl of food for my aunt’s Pekingese. My aunt took the bowl but kept talking as if the maid were not there. The Filipinos, she continued—in Chinese, but plainly not caring whether the maid understood or not—were lazy and unintelligent and didn’t really want to do much else. If they didn’t like working for us, they were free to leave any time. After all, my aunt said, they were employees, not slaves.

Makes 4 to 6 servings 6 tablespoons (90 g) margarine or butter, melted About 11/2 cups (375 ml) buttermilk 11/2 cups (200 g) all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons (10 g) coarse salt 1 teaspoon (5 g) ground black pepper 1 cup (125 g) crushed cornflakes 1/2 teaspoon (2.5 ml) poultry seasoning, or dried thyme and/or sage One 31/2-pound chicken, cut into 8 to 10 pieces (about 1.5 kg) 1 tablespoon (8 g) paprika, for dusting Preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C). Using about 2 tablespoons (30 ml) of the margarine, coat the bottom of a roasting pan or a baking dish large enough to hold the chicken pieces in one layer without touching. Place the buttermilk in a shallow bowl or dish. In another bowl, mix the flour, salt, pepper, cornflakes, and poultry seasoning. Dip each chicken piece into the buttermilk. Shake off the excess and roll in the flour mixture to coat. Place the chicken pieces in the prepared roasting pan, skin side up. Drizzle the rest of the margarine evenly over the chicken. Dust the chicken liberally with paprika. Put the roasting pan on the middle rack of the oven, uncovered. Bake for about 1 hour, until the chicken is golden and cooked through. (Small pieces may be done at 45 minutes, so check.) To confirm, push an instant-read thermometer into a meaty section; it should register at least 165°F (74°C). Serve warm. Leftovers reheat nicely in a toaster oven. CHAPTER 2 The Farm on Coldwater Road

Minnie’s Amazing Fruit Cake Serves 12 Juice of half an orange (about 2 tablespoons) Zest of 1 orange 2 tablespoons brandy (optional) 2¼ cups mixed dried fruit (combination of raisins, currants, and maraschino cherries—any dried fruit you like!) 1½ sticks unsalted butter, softened ½ stick (4 tablespoons) margarine, softened 1 cup packed light brown sugar 4 large free-range eggs, room temperature 1 cup self-rising flour ½ cup ground almonds 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice 1 cup chopped almonds (optional) Combine the orange juice, orange zest, and brandy, if using, in a mixing bowl. Add the dried fruit, cover the bowl, and soak overnight. Line the bottom of a deep 8-inch round cake pan with parchment paper, cut to fit, and lightly butter the bottom of the paper to make it stick, then butter and flour the sides of the cake pan. Preheat the oven to 320F (160C). In a large bowl, beat the butter, margarine, and sugar with an electric mixer at high speed until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at time and beat after each addition until well combined. Sift together the flour, ground almonds, cinnamon, and pumpkin pie spice. Add the flour mixture to the bowl and fold in until just combined. Add the soaked fruit and chopped almonds, if you are including them. Pour the mixture into the prepared cake pan. Bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes, and test with a toothpick or skewer. When it comes out clean, the cake is done. If not, return to the oven for 10 minutes and repeat. You may need to bake for up to 1 hour and 45 minutes, depending on your oven. If the top starts to burn before the middle is done, loosely cover the cake pan with foil. Enjoy the cake with family or friends, sharing your dreams and ambitions for the year ahead. Where would you like to be eating fruit cake this time next year?

sleeping some more, playing, sneezing and snorting, barking at other dogs, and going for walks. I haven’t seen an empty food bowl yet, and I am free to roam the house. I can't remember the last time I was locked up in my crate! Instead, my family and I play with my angry bird, my owl, tennis balls, and any other toy I can find. When I am super excited,

He began to ask, timidly, what Hal thought he could do if he were to run away from his family and try his luck in the world outside. Hal, striving to remember where he had seen olive-skinned Greeks with big black eyes in this beautiful land of the free, could hold out no better prospect than a shoe-shining parlour, or the wiping out of wash-bowls in a hotel-lavatory, handing over the tips to a fat padrone.

We visited Gwangjang Market in one of Seoul's oldest neighborhoods, squeezing past crowds of people threading through its covered alleys, a natural maze spontaneously joined and splintered over a century of accretion. We passed busy ajummas in aprons and rubber kitchen gloves tossing knife-cut noodles in colossal, bubbling pots for kalguksu, grabbing fistfuls of colorful namul from overbrimming bowls for bibimbap, standing over gurgling pools of hot oil, armed with metal spatulas in either hand, flipping the crispy sides of stone-milled soybean pancakes. Metal containers full of jeotgal, salt-fermented seafood banchan, affectionally known as rice thieves, because their intense, salty flavor cries out for starchy, neutral balance; raw, pregnant crabs, floating belly up in soy sauce to show off the unctuous roe protruding out from beneath their shells; millions of minuscule peach-colored krill used for making kimchi or finishing hot soup with rice; and my family's favorite, crimson sacks of pollack roe smothered in gochugaru, myeongnanjeot.

Whipped or ice cream on your dumplings?" she asked them, once the crust browned and the filling bubbled. She sprinkled additional cinnamon sugar on top. Grace and Cade responded as one, "Ice cream." Cade leaned his elbows on the table, cut her a curious look. "I didn't think we had a thing in common." She gave him a repressive look. "Ice cream doesn't make us friends." Amelia scooped vanilla bean into the bowls with the dumplings. Her smile was small, secret, when she served their dessert, and she commented, "Friendships are born of likes and dislikes. Ice cream is binding." Not as far as Grace was concerned. Cade dug into his dessert. Amelia kept the conversation going. "I bet you're more alike than you realize." Why would that matter? Grace thought. She had no interest in this man. A simultaneous "doubtful" surprised them both. Amelia kept after them, Grace noted, pointing out, "You were both born, grew up, and never left Moonbright." "It's a great town," Cade said. "Family and friends are here." "You're here," Grace emphasized. Amelia patted her arm. "I'm very glad you've stayed. Cade, too. You're equally civic-minded." Grace blinked. We are? "The city council initiated Beautify Moonbright this spring, and you both volunteered." We did? Grace was surprised. Cade scratched his stubbled chin, said, "Mondays, I transport trees and mulch from Wholesale Gardens to grassy medians between roadways. Flower beds were planted along the nature trails to the public park." Grace hadn't realized he was part of the community effort. "I help with the planting. Most Wednesdays." Amelia was thoughtful. "You're both active at the senior center." Cade acknowledged, "I've thrown evening horseshoes against the Benson brothers. Lost. Turned around and beat them at cards." "I've never seen you there," Grace puzzled. "I stop by in the afternoons, drop off large-print library books and set up audio cassettes for those unable to read because of poor eyesight." "There's also Build a Future," Amelia went on to say. "Cade recently hauled scaffolding and worked on the roof at the latest home for single parents. Grace painted the bedrooms in record time." "The Sutter House," they said together. Once again. "Like minds," Amelia mused, as she sipped her sparkling water.

Besides cooking, baking, cleaning, and the full-time role of wife and mother, there were cows to milk, gardens to tend, candles and soap to be made, butter to churn. As would be said, “Working butter with wooden paddles in the large wooden bowl, molding it, and cleaning the pails and utensils was as much a part of women’s work as washing dishes.” Butter was a major element of the frontier diet and making good butter was a skill in which women took particular pride. Then there was yarn to spin, wool to weave, clothes to make for large families, clothes to wash, mend, and patch. And just as the man of the house had his ax, plowshare, long rifle, and those other tools necessary for the work to be faced, so, too, did the woman of the house—knives, needles, spoons, paddles, hickory brooms, spinning wheels, and most important, the bulbous, heavy iron pots to be seen in nearly every cabin that were used more for cooking than any other item and led to countless aching backs by the end of the day.

When that happened, Nana said, the collective gasp of Jalil’s family sucked the air out of Herat. His in-laws swore blood would flow. The wives demanded that he throw her out. Nana’s own father, who was a lowly stone carver in the nearby village of Gul Daman, disowned her. Disgraced, he packed his things and boarded a bus to Iran, never to be seen or heard from again. “Sometimes,” Nana said early one morning, as she was feeding the chickens outside the kolba, “I wish my father had had the stomach to sharpen one of his knives and do the honorable thing. It might have been better for me.” She tossed another handful of seeds into the coop, paused, and looked at Mariam. “Better for you too, maybe. It would have spared you the grief of knowing that you are what you are. But he was a coward, my father. He didn’t have the dil, the heart, for it.” Jalil didn’t have the dil either, Nana said, to do the honorable thing. To stand up to his family, to his wives and in-laws, and accept responsibility for what he had done. Instead, behind closed doors, a face-saving deal had quickly been struck. The next day, he had made her gather her few things from the servants’ quarters, where she’d been living, and sent her off. “You know what he told his wives by way of defense? That I forced myself on him. That it was my fault. Didi? You see? This is what it means to be a woman in this world.” Nana put down the bowl of chicken feed. She lifted Mariam’s chin with a finger. “Look at me, Mariam.” Reluctantly, Mariam did. Nana said, “Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

Mrs. Smallweed, following her usual instinct, breaks out with "Fifteen hundred pound. Fifteen hundred pound in a black box, fifteen hundred pound locked up, fifteen hundred pound put away and hid!" Her worthy husband, setting aside his bread and butter, immediately discharges the cushion at her, crushes her against the side of her chair, and falls back in his own, overpowered. His appearance, after visiting Mrs. Smallweed with one of these admonitions, is particularly impressive and not wholly prepossessing, firstly because the exertion generally twists his black skull-cap over one eye and gives him an air of goblin rakishness, secondly because he mutters violent imprecations against Mrs. Smallweed, and thirdly because the contrast between those powerful expressions and his powerless figure is suggestive of a baleful old malignant who would be very wicked if he could. All this, however, is so common in the Smallweed family circle that it produces no impression. The old gentleman is merely shaken and has his internal feathers beaten up, the cushion is restored to its usual place beside him, and the old lady, perhaps with her cap adjusted and perhaps not, is planted in her chair again, ready to be bowled down like a ninepin.

Definition: Family Tree Noun: singular Like the living plant for which it’s named, a Family Tree has deep, tenacious roots and ever-growing branches- both supportive and non-supportive- which bear a wide variety of fruits and nuts.

Mothers cry because they get so little back.' He leaves the spoon in his mug, holds it to one side with a thumb and takes a sip. 'You spend your life giving everything you've got to your family. Everything: your time, your energy, the last banana in the bowl. Then your children drift away, and they don't look back; not often, not even if they're good children.

Slow-Cooker Bean & Spinach Enchiladas   Nutritional info: - Calories 576, Fat 11 g, Protein 28 g, Carbohydrates 60 g. Servings: 4   Ingredients: 15 ½ oz. black beans (rinsed) 10 oz. frozen chopped spinach (thawed & squeezed of excess liquid) 1 cup frozen corn 1/2 tsp. ground cumin Kosher salt & black pepper (to taste) 3½ c. salsa 8 (6”) corn tortillas (warmed) 6 c. head romaine lettuce (chopped) 4 radishes (cut into matchsticks) 1/2 c. grape tomatoes (halved) 1/2 cucumber (halved & sliced) 3 tbsp. fresh lime juice 2 tbsp. olive oil Sliced scallions (for serving)   Directions: First, in a medium bowl, squash half the beans. Then, add in the spinach, corn, cumin, the remaining beans, 1/2 teaspoon of salt & 1/4 teaspoon of pepper; mix well to combine. Next, spread the salsa in the bottom of a 4-6 quart slow cooker. Evenly divide, roll up the bean mixture into the tortillas (about 1/2 cup each) & place the rolls seam-side down in the slow cooker, in a single layer. Top it with the remaining salsa. Now, cover & cook on low for about 2½ to 3 hours or until heated through. Before serving in a large bowl; toss the lettuce, radishes, tomatoes, cucumber, lime juice, oil & 1/2 teaspoon each of salt & pepper. Serve it with the enchiladas & sprinkle with the scallions.

JULEKAKE Julekake means Yule Cake or Christmas Cake. Every Scandinavian family has their favorite version, usually baked by Mor Mor (Grandmother), who is always present, even if she’s passed on. This cake should never be prepared alone. Stand beside someone you love as you cut the citron into chunks and blend it with the flour, cardamom, fruits, butter, eggs, yeast and sugar. The scent of cardamom will fill you with nostalgia as the aroma of baking fills the house. Moist and tender, topped with gjetost (Scandinavian goat cheese) and a pat of butter, this is the holiday treat we wait all year for. Turn on the oven for 10 minutes at 150 degrees F, then shut it off but keep the door closed. This is where you’ll set the dough to rise. Use a big wide mixing bowl to blend together: 5 cups white flour 1 tablespoon cardamom 2 cups candied fruit and citron 11/2 cups raisins In a pan, blend: 2 cups milk, scalded (can be done on the stove or in the microwave) 1 cup sugar, dissolved in the scalded milk 1 cup butter, melted in the scalded milk Cool to lukewarm. Combine a little of the milk with: 1 packet active dry yeast When dissolved, add it to the rest of the milk mixture. Then add everything to the flour mixture to make a soft dough. Add enough flour to create a pliable dough that doesn’t stick to the sides of the bowl. Turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead further. Place in a buttered bowl and turn it over once, so the oiled side is up. Place a dish towel over the top, and set the bowl in the warm oven for a half hour to 45 minutes. Punch down and knead again. This time, separate the dough into two loaves or rounds. Cover with a dish towel again, and let it rise once more for a half hour to 45 minutes. Once risen, bake in a 400 degree oven for 30-40 minutes. Place a piece of foil over the tops after about 25 minutes if it gets too dark. Source: Adapted from Christmas Customs Around the World by Herbert H. Wernecke (1959)

Negotiating Needs From a Group Many of us live much of our lives engaged, in various ways, with all sorts of groups: families, work groups, organizations, churches and social settings. We need to develop skills for negotiating our needs in relation to such groups. Because we were never taught how to powerfully and non-violently assert and negotiate our needs in a group, many of us either become resentful, suppressed sheep, or raging bulls running roughshod over others. We either “bowl over” or “roll over” in relation to others. We “bowl over” others out of the fear that we will not otherwise get what we want. Or we “roll over” out of hopelessness, feeling that we will never be able to get what we need. It can be scary to ask for attention from a group because so often the group members are afraid to express their true feelings about your request. And most of us understand that when true negative feelings are withheld there will be some sort of consequence. In a group the consequence is frequently shunning. (In every case of school shootings of which I am aware, the perpetrator was being shunned by most of the other students.) Here are some tips to help you negotiate in groups: 1. Practice presenting your requests for attention from a group confidently, so others can sense you will not be crushed if there is an objection. 2. If you are scared when you are asking the group for something, be sure to say so. If you do not, it may be perceived as aggressive, because unexpressed fear often gets perceived as aggression. 3. Be sure to give others time and space to check within themselves how they really feel about your request. 4. Be ready to empathize with whatever the objection is. Don’t get hung up on the content of their response. Instead, hear the feelings and needs behind the content. For example: You: “I would like to share a story. Is that okay with everyone?” Group Member: “No.” You: “Is that because you would like reassurance that it would take less than five minutes?” Group Member: “No, it is because we have not made the decision yet about when our next meeting will be.” You: “Thanks for telling me. I would be happy to wait until after that decision is made. Would that work for everyone?” 5. As in the example, after empathizing with the group member’s response be prepared to check back within yourself to see if you have shifted. Have you changed your mind about what you requested? If not, either stay with the dialogue, or allow a solution to emerge that meets both your needs and the group’s needs. Notice that in the example, the solution suggested is synergistic and would meet both your need to tell the story and the group member’s need for the meeting time decision to be made. 6. Be careful not to give in or give up after empathizing with the other’s objection. If you do give “in” or “up” on what you want, you will resent the group for seeming to oppress you, and you will likely withdraw your participation. Or you will start gossiping about those that objected to your request and begin to build a splinter faction group that will weaken and sometimes even destroy the group. It is often the “nice” people who are so scared of conflict that do the gossiping that tears the group apart.

Albert, friend to royalty,” Beatrix said later at the Rutledge Hotel, laughing as she sat on the floor of their suite and examined the new collar. “I hope you don’t get above yourself, and put on airs.” “Not around your family, he won’t,” Christopher said, stripping off his coat and waistcoat, and removing his cravat. He lowered himself to the settee, relishing the coolness of the room. Albert went to drink from his bowl of water, lapping noisily. Beatrix went to Christopher, stretched full length atop him, and braced her arms on his chest. “I was so proud of you today,” she said, smiling down at him. “And perhaps a tiny bit smug that with all the women swooning and sighing over you, I’m the one you went home with.” Arching a brow, Christopher asked, “Only a tiny bit smug?” “Oh, very well. Enormously smug.” She began to play with his hair. “Now that all this medal business is done with, I have something to discuss with you.” Closing his eyes, Christopher enjoyed the sensation of her fingers stroking his scalp. “What is it?” “What would you say to adding a new member to the family?” This was not an unusual question. Since they had established a household at Riverton, Beatrix had increased the size of her menagerie, and was constantly occupied with animal-related charities and concerns. She had also compiled a report for the newly established natural history society in London. For some reason it had not been at all difficult to convince the group of elderly entomologists, ornithologists, and other naturalists to include a pretty young woman in their midst. Especially when it became clear that Beatrix could talk for hours about migration patterns, plant cycles, and other matters relating to animal habitats and behavior. There was even discussion of Beatrix’s joining a board to form a new natural history museum, to provide a lady’s perspective on various aspects of the project. Keeping his eyes closed, Christopher smiled lazily. “Fur, feathers, or scales?” he asked in response to her earlier question. “None of those.” “God. Something exotic. Very well, where will this creature come from? Will we have to go to Australia to collect it? Iceland? Brazil?” A tremor of laughter went through her. “It’s already here, actually. But you won’t be able to view it for, say…eight more months.” Christopher’s eyes flew open. Beatrix was smiling down at him, looking shy and eager and more than a little pleased with herself. “Beatrix.” He turned carefully so that she was underneath him. His hand came to cradle the side of her face. “You’re sure?” She nodded. Overwhelmed, Christopher covered her mouth with his, kissing her fiercely. “My love…precious girl…” “It’s what you wanted, then?” she asked between kisses, already knowing the answer. Christopher looked down at her through a bright sheen of joy that made everything blurred and radiant. “More than I ever dreamed. And certainly more than I deserve.” Beatrix’s arms slid around his neck. “I’ll show you what you deserve,” she informed him, and pulled his head down to hers again.

What the devil are you eating?” Leo, Lord Ramsay, stood in the family parlor at Ramsay House, viewing his dark-haired twins, Edward and Emmaline, who were playing on the carpeted floor. His wife, Catherine, who was helping the babies to build block towers, looked up with a smile. “They’re eating biscuits.” “These?” Leo glanced at a bowl of little brown biscuits that had been placed on a table. “They look revoltingly similar to the ones Beatrix has been feeding the dog.” “That’s because they are.” “They’re…Good God, Cat! What can you be thinking?” Lowering to his haunches, Leo tried to pry a sodden biscuit away from Edward. Leo’s efforts were met with an indignant squall. “Mine!” Edward cried, clutching the biscuit more tightly. “Let him have it,” Catherine protested. “The twins are teething, and the biscuits are very hard. There’s nothing harmful in them.” “How do you know that?” “Beatrix made them.” “Beatrix doesn’t cook. To my knowledge, she can barely butter her bread.” “I don’t cook for people,” Beatrix said cheerfully, coming into the parlor with Albert padding after her. “But I do for dogs.” “Naturally.” Leo took one of the brown lumps from the bowl, examining it closely. “Would you care to reveal the ingredients of these disgusting objects?” “Oats, honey, eggs…they’re very nourishing.” As if to underscore the point, Catherine’s pet ferret, Dodger, streaked up to Leo, took the biscuit from him, and slithered beneath a nearby chair. Catherine laughed low in her throat as she saw Leo’s expression. “They’re made of the same stuff as teething biscuits, my lord.” “Very well,” Leo said darkly. “But if the twins start barking and burying their toys, I’ll know whom to blame.” He lowered to the floor beside his daughter. Emmaline gave him a wet grin and pushed her own sodden biscuit toward his mouth. “Here, Papa.” “No, thank you, darling.” Becoming aware of Albert nosing at his shoulder, Leo turned to pet him. “Is this a dog or a street broom?” “It’s Albert,” Beatrix replied.

There are those along the Main Line who look upon Will Atherson as a violator of his inheritance, an opinion that is largely accounted for by the building that he had caused to be erected to house the Freeholders Bank & Trust Company of which, by right of primogeniture as well as ability, he was president. On a street where every door looks as if it might open at any moment to disgorge some bewigged and gaitered contemporary of Old Ben himself, the Freeholders Building is indeed incongruous to the scene. Designed by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, it was judged by one of the architectural magazines to be an outstanding example of “the best in unfettered contemporary design, free of any taint of traditionalism, radical in concept, daring in execution.” That, in 1940, it most certainly was. The later influx of countless chain shops and supermarkets, all designed in the apparent belief that glass is the only proper building material, has made the Freeholders Building seem less unfettered, daring and radical, but it still raises doubts in certain quarters about Will Atherson. The more generous Old Philadelphians excuse the building as one of the lapses of which even a gentleman may be guilty—there was a “folly” of one sort or another in most of their families—but the other school of thought holds that a gentleman’s folly must, like an affair with a woman, be carried on in privacy and with discretion. Will Atherson’s folly was unpleasantly public. Although none of his old customers went so far as to stop doing business with the bank, most of them still cringed at the necessity of transacting their financial affairs with no more privacy than a fish in a bowl. That sort of thing was accepted in New York, of course, but this was Philadelphia.

Well, I declare!: The tradition of “family style” eating, sitting at a long table and taking your portion from a large communal bowl, started at the first working-class Southern get-togethers.

So Clarke was in her Vauxhall Astra, on her way to the Royal Infirmary. The hospital sat on the southern edge of the city, plenty of space in the car park at this hour. She showed her ID at the Accident and Emergency desk and was shown where to go. She passed cubicle after cubicle, and if the curtains were closed, she popped her head around each. An old woman, her skin almost translucent, gave a beaming smile from her trolley. There were hopeful looks from others, too – patients and family members. A drunk youth, blood still dripping from his head, was being calmed by a couple of male nurses. A middle-aged woman was retching into a cardboard bowl. A teenage girl moaned softly and regularly, knees drawn up to her chest

His family had San Francisco 49ers season tickets, and no sports fan his age could have asked for a better deal. From preschool to senior year, Brady watched his Niners go to five Super Bowls and win them all.

Yo momma is so tall… she tripped in Denver and hit her head in New York. Yo momma is so tall… she tripped over a rock and hit her head on the moon. Yo momma is so tall… Shaq looks up to her. Yo momma is so tall… she can see her home from anywhere. Yo momma is so tall… she 69’d bigfoot. Yo momma is so tall… she did a cartwheel and kicked the gates of Heaven. Yo momma is so tall… she has to take a bath in the ocean. Yo momma is so tall… she high-fived God. Yo momma is so poor… Yo momma is so poor… your family ate cereal with a fork to save milk. Yo momma is so poor… the roaches pay the light bill! Yo momma is so poor… I walked in her house and stepped on a cigarette, and your mom said, “Who turned off the lights?” Yo momma is so poor… when her friend came over to use the bathroom she said, “Ok, choose a corner.” Yo momma is so poor… I stepped in her house and I was in the backyard. Yo momma is so poor… she waves around a popsicle stick and calls it air conditioning. Yo momma is so poor… she was in K-Mart with a box of Hefty bags. I said, what ya doing'? She said, “Buying luggage.” Yo momma is so poor… when I ring the doorbell she says, DING! Yo momma is so poor… she can't afford to pay attention! Yo momma is so poor… when I saw her kicking a can down the street, I asked her what she was doing, she said, “Moving.” Yo momma is so stupid… Yo momma is so stupid… she can't pass a blood test. Yo momma is so stupid… she ordered a cheeseburger without the cheese. Yo momma is so stupid… that she burned down the house with a CD burner. Yo momma is so stupid… she got locked in a grocery store and starved. Yo momma is so stupid… when they said that it is chilly outside, she went outside with a bowl and a spoon. Yo momma is so stupid… she got lost in a telephone booth. Yo momma is so stupid… she put lipstick on her forehead to make up her mind. Yo momma is so stupid… she got locked in Furniture World and slept on the floor. Yo momma is so stupid… she sits on the floor and watches the couch. Yo momma is so stupid… she stole free bread. Yo momma is so stupid… she sold her car for gas money. Yo momma is so stupid… she worked at a M&M factory and threw out all the W's. Yo momma is so stupid… she tried to commit suicide by jumping out the basement window. Yo momma is so stupid… she stopped at a stop sign and waited for it to turn green. Yo momma is so stupid… when she asked me what kind of jeans am I wearing I said, “Guess”, and she said, “Levis”. Yo momma is so stupid… it took her 2 hours to watch 60 seconds.

Buttermilk Fried Chicken PREP TIME: 7 MINUTES / COOK TIME: 20 TO 25 MINUTES / SERVES 4 370°F FRY FAMILY FAVORITE Fried chicken is perhaps the most decadent of fried foods. But many people don’t make it at home because oil splatters everywhere when you fry chicken. And it’s just not healthy to eat it too often. The air fryer comes to the rescue with this wonderful adaptation. 6 chicken pieces: drumsticks, breasts, and thighs 1 cup flour 2 teaspoons paprika Pinch salt Freshly ground black pepper ⅓ cup buttermilk 2 eggs 2 tablespoons olive oil 1½ cups bread crumbs 1. Pat the chicken dry. In a shallow bowl, combine the flour, paprika, salt, and pepper. 2. In another bowl, beat the buttermilk with the eggs until smooth. 3. In a third bowl, combine the olive oil and bread crumbs until mixed. 4. Dredge the chicken in the flour, then into the eggs to coat, and finally into the bread crumbs, patting the crumbs firmly onto the chicken skin. 5. Air-fry the chicken for 20 to 25 minutes, turning each piece over halfway during cooking, until the meat registers 165°F on a meat thermometer and the chicken is brown and crisp. Let cool for 5 minutes, then serve. Variation tip: You can marinate the chicken in buttermilk and spices such as cayenne pepper, chili powder, or garlic powder overnight before you cook it. This makes the chicken even more moist and tender and adds flavor. Per serving: Calories: 644; Total Fat: 17g; Saturated Fat: 4g; Cholesterol: 214mg; Sodium: 495mg; Carbohydrates: 55g;

My world is so huge right now—when a Wide Iwish Rose puts her arms around my neck and calls me a silly daddy, my heart almost doesn’t fit in my chest. That Rosie—she isn’t just an idea. She’s more than I could have imagined if my imagination had gone into overdrive.” Franci was quiet for a moment. Then she put a spoonful of ice cream to his lips. “I know,” she said. “You’ve turned yourself into a wonderful silly daddy.” He swallowed the ice cream. “I need you to forgive me for the man I was… If you can.” “I forgave you when I saw you with our daughter. It’s all different now.” “I know I suggested marriage before, but you were onto me. I was just trying to check off the items on my to-do list. It isn’t like that now. I want to marry you because you’re the most important thing in my life. You’re the beat of my heart, Franci—the mother of my child, my best friend and my future. I love you more than anything. I love Rosie as much. I’d lay down my life for either one of you.” “Sean…” she said in a whisper, tears coming to her eyes. “I’m so sorry I had my head up my ass when we were together before—if I could do that whole time over, I’d prove to you that I’m not completely brainless. I love you, baby. You and Rose.” “I know,” she whispered. “We love you, too.” “Will you marry me?” he asked. He grinned. “Bite the dust with me? Spend our lives as husband and wife?” “I will, of course. You’re obviously useless on your own.” “We can plan a wedding or do it quick or wait to decide when I get orders—it’s up to you. Anything you want. But let’s get a license right away so we’re ready, because I need the official contract. I want to be your legal partner as well as your lover and best friend. And let’s get you a ring. Will you consider taking my name, baby? And let me give it to Rosie?” “Uh-huh,” she said, a fat tear rolling down her cheek. “It’s just details, honey—but the important part is right this minute, when we make the decision that we’re a family now.” “We’re a family now,” she said. “Whew,” he said. “I thought you’d probably say yes, but there was a little worry in the back of my mind that maybe I had more to prove. Thank you.” He leaned toward her and covered her lips with his. “Thank you,” he said again. “I love you so much. So let’s get the license and ring this week—what do you think?” She put her bowl on the bedside table. “I think my ice cream is soup, so you should close the door and take my clothes off. What do you think?” He grinned hugely. “I think I’m going to love being married to you.” *

Bok Choy Seitan Pho (Vietnamese Noodle Soup) After sampling pho at a Vietnamese noodle shop in Los Angeles, I was on a mission to create a simple plant-based version of this aromatic, festive noodle dish in my own kitchen. My recipe features seitan, a wonderful plant-based protein found in many natural food stores. My whole family loves the interactive style in which this soup is served. In fact, you can plan a dinner party around this traditional meal. Simply dish up the noodles and bubbling broth into large soup bowls, set out a variety of vegetable toppings, and let your guests serve it up their way. MAKES 4 SERVINGS BROTH 4 cups reduced-sodium vegetable broth ½ medium yellow onion, chopped ½ cup sliced shiitake mushrooms 1 medium carrot, sliced 4 garlic cloves, minced 8 thin slices peeled fresh ginger root 1 tablespoon reduced-sodium soy sauce 1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar 1 tablespoon agave syrup ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper 2 cinnamon sticks 2 star anise pods ½ teaspoon whole coriander 6 sprigs of fresh basil 6 sprigs of fresh cilantro NOODLES One 8-ounce package flat rice noodles TOPPINGS One 8-ounce package seitan (wheat gluten) strips, thinly sliced 2 small bunches of fresh bok choy, sliced thinly 1 cup fresh bean sprouts ½ cup coarsely chopped cilantro ½ cup coarsely chopped basil 1 small lime, cut into wedges 1 small jalapeño pepper, seeded and diced 4 green onions, sliced TO PREPARE THE BROTH: 1. Combine all the broth ingredients in a large pot, cover, and bring to a low boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Strain the broth, discarding the vegetables and seasonings. Return the strained broth to the pot, cover, and keep warm (broth should be bubbling right before serving time). While broth is cooking, prepare noodles and toppings. TO PREPARE THE NOODLES: 1. Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Add the rice noodles, cover, and cook until just tender, about 5 minutes, or according to package directions. Drain the noodles immediately and rinse with cold water. Return the drained noodles to the pot and cover. TO PREPARE THE TOPPINGS: 1. Arrange the toppings on a large platter. 2. To serve the soup, divide the noodles among four very large soup bowls. Either garnish the noodles with desired toppings or let your guests do their own. Ladle boiling broth over the noodles and toppings, and serve immediately. Allow hot broth to wilt vegetables and cool slightly before eating it. PER SERVING (ABOUT 2 OUNCES NOODLES, 2 OUNCES SEITAN, 1 CUP VEGETABLE TOPPINGS, AND 1 CUP BROTH): Calories: 310 • Carbohydrates: 55 g • Fiber: 4 g • Protein: 17 g • Total fat: 2 g • Saturated fat: 0 g • Sodium: 427 mg • Star nutrients: Vitamin A (39% DV), vitamin C (23% DV), iron (11% DV), selenium (13% DV)

What would your word be?" Twiss said. Something to do with baking. Whenever Milly could scrape together enough flour, sugar, and butter, she'd bake a dessert. Often, her parents would stop what they were doing and wander into the kitchen, where Twiss would already be sitting with a napkin tucked into the collar of her shirt. Something about sugar made their family sweeter. "'Sugar,'" Milly said to Twiss, measuring out two cups' worth. She mixed the batter and poured it into a cake pan. After she put the pan in the oven, she gave Twiss the bowl to lick and took the spoon for herself.

Religion wasn't a big deal in our house. I don't think it was a big deal in most Chinese households. We always had photos of ancestors, organs, and incense in bowls, but the family unit was bigger than any religion, or government for that matter. Besides education, there weren't any social issues I remember my parents getting down for.

You look as if you’ve just lost your best friend.” Eve took a place beside Jenny on this observation, which leavened Jenny’s sense of desolation with a spike of resentment. “With all my family around me, how could I possibly be in want of companionship?” Eve watched their mutual siblings stepping through a minuet while their brother Valentine held forth at the piano. “The same way I can long to dance while the minuet plays all around me.” Marriage had settled Eve, and impending motherhood had only honed her already formidable instincts. “You’re admiring your husband, Lady Deene, even when you can’t dance with him.” “He’s promised me a waltz, though Valentine will probably find one to play at the speed of a dirge.” She fell silent for a moment as the dancers one-two-three’d around the space created by the music room and an adjoining parlor. “You would make a wonderful mother, Jenny.” The worst pain was not in the words Eve offered, but the combination of pleading and pity with which she offered them. “Becoming a mother usually contemplates becoming a wife first, and I’ve no wish to wed some man for the sole purpose of bearing his babies.” Not the sole purpose… As the dancers twirled and smiled, it occurred to Jenny that Victor had made her promise not to stop painting, but he hadn’t said anything specific about eschewing motherhood. Had he? Another pause in the conversation, while the music played on. Eve, however, was notably tenacious, so Jenny waited for the next salvo, and Eve did not disappoint. “You look at Bernward the way I look at Deene, the way Maggie looks at Benjamin, the way—” “Louisa looks at Joseph, I suppose.” And Sophie at her baron too, of course. They needn’t start on how the Windham brothers regarded their respective wives. “Louisa’s gaze is a touch more voracious. I was going to say, the way Mama looks at Papa.” Ouch. Ouch, indeed. The duke and duchess turned down the room with the grace of a more elegant age, and yet, their gazes spoke volumes about the sheer pleasure of sharing a dance. Jenny stated the obvious as matter-of-factly as possible. “Their Graces dance beautifully.” Eve’s feet were propped on a hassock. She wiggled her toes in time with the music, the left and right foot partnering each other. “Bernward also dances quite well.” Elijah was dancing with Valentine’s lady, Ellen’s preferred partner being ensconced at the keyboard, as usual. “Bernward is dancing carefully, lest Valentine take exception.” Eve twitched her skirts. “Bernward is dancing with one eye on you, you ninnyhammer, and with the certain knowledge that all three of our brothers are waiting for him to come over here and get you to stand up with him. How many more times do you think you can check on the punch bowl between sets without Bernward taking insult?” Check

Kim Il-sung had promised North Koreans three bowls of rice every day. Rice, especially white rice, was a luxury in North Korea. It was a magnanimous promise that was impossible to fulfill for all but the elite. However, the public distribution system did supply the population with a mixture of grains in amounts that were carefully calibrated in accordance with rank and work. Coal miners doing hard labor were to get 900 grams of grain daily, while factory workers like Mrs. Song got 700 grams. The system also dispensed other staples in the Korean diet, such as soy sauce, cooking oil, and a thick red bean paste called gochujang. On national holidays, such as the Kim family birthdays, there might be pork or dried fish. The best part was the cabbage, distributed in the autumn for making kimchi. The spicy preserved cabbage is the Korean national dish, the only vegetable product in the traditional diet during the long winters and as integral to the culture as rice. The North Korean regime understood you couldn’t keep Koreans happy without kimchi. Each family got 70 kilograms (154 pounds) per adult and 50 kilos (110 pounds) per child,

David was one of nine children, and Sydney was one of four. Their respective siblings produced, between 1910 and 1927, twenty-one children with the surnames Mitford, Farrer, Kearsey, Bowyer, Bowles and Bailey, and many of these first cousins were to play major parts in the lives of the Mitford children as they grew up and visited each other’s homes. But the network of kinsmen who were to people the lives of the Mitford children were rooted further back in the family tree. Both of David’s parents – ‘Bertie’ Mitford (Bertram, 1st Lord Redesdale) and Lady Clementine Ogilvy – came from large families, and he remained close to many of them and to their numerous offspring.* ---- In addressing this question, one of Clementine Churchill’s daughters stated that her mother never learned the identity of her natural father though she knew he was not Henry Hozier.14 Bertie Mitford is the most likely suspect, even though the poet and writer Wilfred Scawen Blunt claimed that Natty confessed to him that her two elder daughters were fathered by Captain George ‘Bay’ Middleton, known by his foxhunting contemporaries as ‘the bravest of the brave’, and to history as the dashing lover of the sporting Empress, Elizabeth of Austria.15 This, however, must be set against the fact that Natty told a close friend, just before the birth of Clementine, that the child she was carrying was ‘Lord Redesdale’s’.

EASY FRUIT PIE   Preheat oven to 375 degrees F., rack in the middle position. Note from Delores: I got this recipe from Jenny Hester, a new nurse at Doc Knight’s hospital. Jenny just told me that her great-grandmother used to make it whenever the family came over for Sunday dinner. Hannah said it’s easy so I might actually try to make it some night for Doc. ¼ cup salted butter (½ stick, 2 ounces, pound) 1 cup whole milk 1 cup white (granulated) sugar 1 cup all-purpose flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) 1 and ½ teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 1 can fruit pie filling (approximately 21 ounces by weight—3 to 3 and ½ cups, the kind that makes an 8-inch pie) Hannah’s 1st Note: This isn’t really a pie, and it isn’t really a cake even though you make it in a cake pan. It’s almost like a cobbler, but not quite. I have the recipe filed under “Dessert”. You can use any canned fruit pie filling you like. I might not bake it for company with blueberry pie filling. It tasted great, but didn’t look all that appetizing. If you love blueberry and want to try it, it might work to cover the top with sweetened whipped cream or Cool Whip before you serve it. I’ve tried this recipe with raspberry and peach . . . so far. I have the feeling that lemon pie filling would be yummy, but I haven’t gotten around to trying it yet. Maybe I’ll try it some night when Mike comes over after work. Even if it doesn’t turn out that well, he’ll eat it. Place the butter in a 9-inch by 13-inch cake pan and put it in the oven to melt. Meanwhile . . . Mix the milk, sugar, flour, baking powder and salt together in a medium-size bowl. This batter will be a little lumpy and that’s okay. Just like brownie batter, don’t over-mix it. Using oven mitts or potholders, remove the pan with the melted butter from the oven. Pour in the batter and tip the pan around to cover the whole bottom. Then set it on a cold stove burner. Spoon the pie filling over the stop of the batter, but DO NOT MIX IN. Just spoon it on as evenly as you can. (The batter will puff up around it in the oven and look gorgeous!) Bake the dessert at 375 degrees F., for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until it turns golden brown and bubbly on top. To serve, cool slightly, dish into bowls, and top with sweetened whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. It really is yummy. Hannah’s 2nd Note: The dessert is best when it’s baked, cooled slightly, and served right away. Alternatively you can bake it earlier, cut pieces to put in microwave-safe bowls, and reheat it in the microwave before you put on the ice cream or sweetened whipped cream. Yield: Easy Fruit Pie will serve 6 if you don’t invite Mike and Norman for dinner. Note from Jenny: I’ve made this by adding ¼ cup cocoa powder and 1 teaspoon of vanilla to the batter. If I do this, I spoon a can of cherry pie filling over the top.

Charlotte’s dirty dishes haunted her dreams that night. She was running down a dark tunnel and close behind her plates, cups, bowls and crumbs made threatening noises.

Harvard professor Robert Putnam’s ground-breaking book Bowling Alone stirred the conscience of America in 2001, when he showed that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, socialize with friends less frequently, and even get together with our families less often. 6 Latchkey kids return to empty homes each day from school, and our electronic culture entertains us without meaningful social interaction. These experiences, among others, contribute to the growing alienation that we sense.

are important sources of emotional, creative and spiritual nourishment for me. It seems there is never enough space at our kitchen table; the children need a surface to draw on, between the flowers and fruit bowls, and sometimes it feels like a game of musical chairs to seat everyone

between the flowers and fruit bowls, and sometimes it feels like a game of musical chairs to seat everyone for meals. It gets noisy too. Cheka giggles all the way through her three helpings of food, while Francis forsakes his meal because he is so busy entertaining her. It is a joy to bake

the children need a surface to draw on, between the flowers and fruit bowls, and sometimes it feels like a game of musical chairs to seat everyone for meals. It gets noisy too. Cheka

I watched the transformation in my father as he picked one winner after another, and I liked what I saw. As he watched the stock climb, he would break into a big, broad smile, until he was literally beaming. He was having a very good time. He was loosening up. He finally felt that he was getting ahead. This was why he had come to America, to make a life for his family. Often I would help him with his decisions. If he was interested in a particular company, I would research it for him, and we would discuss the possibility of buying a few shares. He treated me like an equal, like his partner. Together we learned about buying on margin, about options trading, about puts and calls. Before long I found myself leaping out of bed at the crack of dawn, pouring myself a bowl of cereal, and parking myself in front of the television. I had the morning newspaper to my left and a pad and pencil to my right. The fact is, anyone can do this. It’s just like homework, except it’s the real world. It takes time and effort to get an A, and the same rules apply here, but the difference is that this is worth taking very, very seriously. After all, we’re not talking about grades—we’re talking about serious money.

MOM’S SOUR CREAM COFFEE CAKE This recipe is another classic from my mom’s kitchen. She liked to make this yummy cake to take to someone who needed their spirits lifted or just to have as a treat. It’s an all-time favorite with my family, too, and, when it’s my turn to host fellowship hour at church, it’s always part of my repertoire!   Ingredients for Cake 1 cup sugar ¼ pound butter (softened) 1 cup sour cream 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 eggs 2 cups flour (sifted) 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda Pinch salt   Ingredients for Topping ½ cup chopped walnuts ½ cup sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon   Directions Mix topping ingredients together. Set aside. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease and flour angel-food cake pan. Cream together butter and sugar with electric mixer. Add eggs and sour cream and beat until smooth. Sift together remaining dry ingredients in a separate bowl and blend into mixture. Batter will be thick. Spread half the batter into the angel-food cake pan and sprinkle with half of the sugar, cinnamon, and nut topping. Spread remaining batter on top and sprinkle remaining sugar, cinnamon, and nut mixture. (I gently press down the topping with the back of a spoon.) Bake for 40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Let cool and remove from pan. Enjoy anytime with a hot cup o’ coffee or tea or a big glass of milk!

APPLE CRISP This recipe was always a favorite in our house when I was growing up—and still is for my family. It was passed down from my mom (although she always credited my aunt Pete with its origin). It’s yummy and very easy—especially if you don’t have the time or energy to roll out pie crusts.   Ingredients   5¼ tablespoons butter (melted) 8–9 apples (I use Macs) 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon baking powder Dash of salt ½ teaspoon cinnamon 1 egg   Directions   Melt butter and set aside. Peel, core, and slice apples to almost fill an 11x7 baking dish. Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Sift together all dry ingredients in mixing bowl and break one egg into mixture. Blend with a pastry blender until evenly crumbly and spread on top of apples. Spoon melted butter over topping in rows. Bake for 30-40 minutes or until golden brown. Serve with vanilla ice cream! Yum!!!

Recipe for March Wassail Drinking wassail is an ancient tradition. Dating back to Saxon times, the word itself comes from the greeting “wæs hæl”, roughly translated as “be you healthy”. In the counties of southern England renowned for cider production, drinking wassail originated as a bit of sympathetic magic to protect and encourage the apple trees to bear fruit. While wassail and other punches were very popular during Regency times, by the later part of the 19th-century, they had been largely supplanted by wines and other spirits. The Marches, however, care much more for their own pleasure than for what is fashionable. They serve their wassail the old-fashioned way, out of an enormous wooden bowl mounted in silver with a roasted apple garnish. Their wassail is, as tradition dictates, served quite hot and is deceptively alcoholic. Proceed with caution. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Core a dozen small apples. (You will only need ten for the wassail, but leftover roasted apples are delicious with cream, yogurt, or ice cream.) Loosely spoon brown sugar into each apple place in a casserole dish with a small amount of water. Bake until tender, approximately 45 minutes. Meanwhile, gently warm 2 pints hard cider. (This is not available in the juice aisle of the grocery store. It is wonderfully alcoholic and tastes deeply of apples. You can find bottled varieties at wine and liquor stores, but the very best is fermented by apple farmers for their own use. Find one and befriend him. The Marches get their cider at the source from the Home Farm at Bellmont Abbey.) To the warming cider, add four cinnamon sticks, crushed with a mortar and pestle, and four pinches ground cloves. (In a bind, ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon may be substituted for the sticks.) Grate in fresh ginger and fresh nutmeg to taste. Lord March’s secret ingredient is a cup of his very best port, added just in time to heat through. When the apples are plump and bursting from their skins, remove them from the oven. Put one into a heatproof punch glass and ladle the wassail over. The March family recipe calls for a garnish of a fresh cinnamon stick for each glass. This recipe will serve six Marches or ten ordinary folk.

THE most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s most prominent liberal scholars has joined the chorus. Robert Putnam is a former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of “Bowling Alone” (2000), an influential work that lamented the decline of social capital in America. In his new book, “Our Kids”, he describes the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children. Anyone who has read “Coming Apart” by Charles Murray will be familiar with the trend, but Mr Putnam adds striking detail and some excellent graphs (pictured). This is a thoughtful and

While I was doing my fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry, my family and I lived in Hawaii. When my son was seven years old, I took him to a marine life educational and entertainment park for the day. We went to the killer whale show, the dolphin show, and finally the penguin show. The penguin’s name was Fat Freddie. He did amazing things: He jumped off a twenty-foot diving board; he bowled with his nose; he counted with his flippers; he even jumped through a hoop of fire. I had my arm around my son, enjoying the show, when the trainer asked Freddie to get something. Freddie went and got it, and he brought it right back. I thought, “Whoa, I ask this kid to get something for me, and he wants to have a discussion with me for twenty minutes, and then he doesn’t want to do it!” I knew my son was smarter than this penguin. I went up to the trainer afterward and asked, “How did you get Freddie to do all these really neat things?” The trainer looked at my son, and then she looked at me and said, “Unlike parents, whenever Freddie does anything like what I want him to do, I notice him! I give him a hug, and I give him a fish.” The light went on in my head. Whenever my son did what I wanted him to do, I paid little attention to him, because I was a busy guy, like my own father. However, when he didn’t do what I wanted him to do, I gave him a lot of attention because I didn’t want to raise a bad kid! I was inadvertently teaching him to be a little monster in order to get my attention. Since that day, I have tried hard to notice my son’s good acts and fair attempts (although I don’t toss him a fish, since he doesn’t care for them) and to downplay his mistakes. We’re both better people for it. I collect penguins as a way to remind myself to notice the good things about the people in my life a lot more than the bad things. This has been so helpful for me as well as for many of my patients. It is often necessary to have something that reminds us of this prescription. It’s not natural for most of us to notice what we like about our life or what we like about others, especially if we unconsciously use turmoil to stimulate our prefrontal cortex. Focusing on the negative aspects of others or of your own life makes you more vulnerable to depression and can damage your relationships.

18-oz. jar blackberry jam 18-oz. jar raspberry jam 1-1/2 oz. container dry mustard 5-oz. jar prepared horseradish 1/4 t. cayenne pepper 1 T. pepper 12-oz. container whipped cream cheese toasted bread slices or buttery crackers Combine all ingredients except cream cheese and bread or crackers in a medium bowl. Stir well and set aside 30 minutes. When ready to serve, spoon cream cheese onto a serving plate; spoon jam mixture over cream cheese. Serve with toasted bread slices or buttery crackers. Sauce may be refrigerated for up to 3 months. Makes 12 to 16 servings.

Can you come as soon as you’re done with work? At the house. Your mom threw a bowl at my mom. “I

Angry tears stung her eyes. Tension built and boiled inside her. Her cheeks grew hot with suppressed anger, her movements became jerky and abrupt. She shoved an errant strand of hair out of her face, stormed to the washstand — And collided with her husband. He had been coming toward her with a piece of wet linen and a bowl half-filled with water. As he and Juliet bounced off each other, some of the water spilled onto the carpet, the rest down the front of his waistcoat. Ignoring it, Gareth held out the damp rag like a truce offering. "Here." "What's that for?" "She needs washing, doesn't she?" "What do you know about babies?" "Come now, Juliet. I am not entirely lacking in common sense." "I wonder," she muttered, spitefully. He summoned a polite though confused smile — and that only stoked Juliet's temper all the more. She did not want him to be such a gentleman, damn it!  She wanted a good, out-and-out row with him. She wanted to tell him just what she thought of him, of his reckless spending, of his carefree attitude toward serious matters. Oh, why hadn't she married someone like Charles — someone capable, competent, and mature? "What is wrong, Juliet?" "Everything!" she fumed. She plunged the linen in the bowl of water and began swabbing Charlotte's bottom. "I think Perry was right. We should go straight back to your brother, the duke." "You should not listen to Perry." "Why not? He's got more sense than you and the rest of your friends combined. We haven't even been married a day, and already it's obvious that you're hopelessly out of your element. You have no idea what to do with a wife and daughter. You have no idea where to go, how to support us — nothing. Yet you had to come charging after us, the noble rescuer who just had to save the day. I'll bet you didn't give any thought at all to what to do with us afterward, did you? Oh!  Do you always act before thinking? Do you?" He looked at her for a moment, brows raised, stunned by the force of her attack. Then he said dryly, "My dear, if you'll recall, that particular character defect saved your life. Not to mention the lives of the other people on that stagecoach." "So it did, but it's not going to feed us or find us a place to live!"  She lifted Charlotte's bottom, pinned a clean napkin around the baby's hips, and soaped and rinsed her hands. "I still cannot believe how much money you tossed away on a marriage license, no, a bribe, this morning, nor how annoyed you still seem to be that we didn't waste God-knows-how-much on a hotel tonight. You seem to have no concept of money's value, and at the rate you're going, we're going to have to throw ourselves on the mercy of the local parish or go begging in the street just to put food in our bellies!" "Don't be ridiculous. That would never happen." "Why wouldn't it?" "Juliet, my brother is the Duke of Blackheath. My family is one of the oldest and richest in all of England. We are not going to starve, I can assure you." "What do you plan to do, then, work for a living? Get those pampered, lily-white hands of yours dirty and calloused?

I adore macaroni and cheese. Whenever I see it on a menu at a restaurant, I have to order it. I’ve had (and consequently made) fried mac and cheese balls, lobster mac and cheese, truffle mac and cheese, quattro formaggi mac and cheese, and Kraft mac and cheese. Now, don’t get me wrong—all of the fancy macaroni and cheese dishes have been delectable and enjoyable, but at home, I like a simple, delicious mac and cheese. So here’s my recipe. This dish is best when served during a game or movie night with family and friends. Serves 8 to 10 8 ounces (225 g) elbow macaroni 1½ cups Velveeta cheese (about 7 ounces/190g), cut into ½-inch cubes 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon all-purpose flour 1½ teaspoons kosher salt 1½ teaspoons dry mustard ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg ⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper ⅔ cup (165 ml) sour cream 2 large eggs, lightly beaten 1½ cups (360 ml) half-and-half 1½ cups (360 ml) heavy cream ⅓ cup (55 g) grated onion 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce 2 cups grated sharp Cheddar cheese (about 8 ounces/230g) • Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease a 9-by-13-inch (23-by-33-cm) baking dish. Bring a 4-quart (3.8-L) saucepan of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook it halfway through, about 3 minutes. Drain the pasta and transfer it to the baking dish. Stir in the cubed Velveeta. • Combine the flour, salt, mustard, black pepper, nutmeg, and cayenne in a large mixing bowl. Add the sour cream and eggs and whisk until smooth. Whisk in the half-and-half, cream, onion, Worcestershire sauce, and a sprinkle of black pepper. Pour the egg mixture over the pasta mixture in the prepared baking dish and stir to combine. Sprinkle the Cheddar cheese evenly over the surface. Bake until the pasta mixture is set around the edges but still a bit loose in the center, about 30 minutes. Let it cool for 10 minutes before serving.

I really love being able to make a big pot of hearty soup for dinner. It’s a time-saver and the cleanup is always easier. This corn chowder is one of my family’s favorites. The East and West Coasts have their seafood chowders, but we prairie folk raise a lot of corn. No prairie cookbook would be complete without a corn chowder recipe. Serves 4 8 ears fresh corn, shucked 8 slices bacon, chopped ¼ cup (½ stick/55 g) unsalted butter 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped 2 ribs celery, finely chopped 1 yellow onion, finely chopped 1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh thyme 1 fresh or dried bay leaf 6 cups (1.4 L) milk 3 new potatoes (about 1½ pounds/680 g), peeled and cut into ½-inch (12-mm) cubes Salt and freshly ground black pepper ¼ cup (7 g) thinly sliced fresh basil or 4 sprigs thyme, for serving • Working over a large shallow bowl, slice the corn kernels off the cobs, scraping the cobs with the knife to extract the flavorful juices. Halve 5 of the bare corncobs crosswise, discarding the rest. Set the corn and cobs aside. • Cook the bacon in a large pot over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until crisp, about 12 minutes. Reserve 3 tablespoons of the bacon for garnish, leaving the remaining bacon in the pot. Add the butter, garlic, celery, onion, thyme, and bay leaf. Cover the pot and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion softens, about 6 minutes. Add the reserved corn kernels and cobs, the milk, and potatoes. Cover, bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are tender, about 25 minutes. • Skim any foam from the surface of the soup. Discard the cobs and bay leaf. Transfer 1½ cups (360 ml) of the soup to a blender and puree. Stir the puree back into the chowder to thicken it. Season with salt and pepper and serve garnished with the basil or thyme and the reserved bacon.

In one set of experiments, for example, researchers affiliated with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism trained mice to press levers in response to certain cues until the behavior became a habit. The mice were always rewarded with food. Then, the scientists poisoned the food so that it made the animals violently ill, or electrified the floor, so that when the mice walked toward their reward they received a shock. The mice knew the food and cage were dangerous—when they were offered the poisoned pellets in a bowl or saw the electrified floor panels, they stayed away. When they saw their old cues, however, they unthinkingly pressed the lever and ate the food, or they walked across the floor, even as they vomited or jumped from the electricity. The habit was so ingrained the mice couldn’t stop themselves.1.23 It’s not hard to find an analog in the human world. Consider fast food, for instance. It makes sense—when the kids are starving and you’re driving home after a long day—to stop, just this once, at McDonald’s or Burger King. The meals are inexpensive. It tastes so good. After all, one dose of processed meat, salty fries, and sugary soda poses a relatively small health risk, right? It’s not like you do it all the time. But habits emerge without our permission. Studies indicate that families usually don’t intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week—as the cues and rewards create a habit—until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries. When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25 However, even these habits are delicate. When a fast food restaurant closes down, the families that previously ate there will often start having dinner at home, rather than seek out an alternative location. Even small shifts can end the pattern. But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops as they grow, we are blind to our ability to control them. By learning to observe the cues and rewards, though, we can change the routines.

Miss Leighton."  He smiled grimly.  "You may be your family's slave, but you are not mine." "I'm not a slave." "No?" "Slaves labor but don't get paid.  Slaves are often mistreated.  Slaves have no time to themselves, exist to serve the needs of others, and are not appreciated." "Yes.  My point exactly." Amy cheeks burned with embarrassment.  Though she was tempted to challenge the remark, and angrily at that, she didn't want him asking questions she had no wish to answer.  Better that he didn't know the truth about her — then, at least, he'd continue to be kind to her, to talk to her, to treat her as though she was something precious and special. Besides, he was bound to find out about her shameful beginnings, anyhow.  Ophelia and Mildred would make sure of it.  Quietly, she went about getting him his hot water. "Miss Leighton?" "Yes?" "Have I offended you?" "No."  And then:  "But I'm not a slave, I have a nice home here, and I have nothing to complain about, so please don't make my business your own, Captain.  Now here's your hot water, soap, and a towel, and when you're finished, I'll see you eat whether you want to or not." His elegant brows rose in surprise and amusement.  "I beg your pardon?" Good heavens!  Had she really been so rude?  "I said, I'd like to see you eat something," she mumbled, embarrassed. "My dear Miss Leighton.  I daresay I liked it better when you were snapping at me!" "I wasn't snapping . . . was I?" His lips curved in a smile; a real one this time, and one so rich and warm and wonderful that it made the sun shine like July in Amy's heart, warming her from head to toe.  "You were," he said mildly, "and I must confess I much prefer your temper over your meekness.  Snap at me all you want.  And snap at your sisters, too.  If you'd only turn some of that mettle on them, perhaps they'd treat you with the respect you deserve." She went quiet.  Too quiet. "Miss Leighton?" he asked, plunging his hands into the bowl of water and then searching around for the soap.  "Now have I offended you?" "No . . . but they will never treat me with respect, because . . . well, because I don't deserve any." "What an absurd thing to say!  Why the devil do you think that?" "Can we please change the subject?" He sighed, found the soap, and bending his head toward the bowl of water, lathered his face, ears, neck and nape.  "Very well, then.  If that's what you want, I shall endeavor to keep my curiosity, and my protests, to myself.

Are we going to do the best we can by tolerating this unwanted enemy or do we make a stand of defiance?” The

There were dozens of theories about what it was, that dome. Every scientist in the world, it seemed, had made a pilgrimage to the site. Tests had been conducted, measurements taken. They had tried drilling through it. Under it. Had flown over it. Had dug beneath it. Had approached it by submarine. Nothing worked. Every species of doomsayer from Luddite to End Times nut had had his say. It was a judgment. On America’s technological obsession, on America’s moral failure. This. That. Something else. Then the twins had popped out. Just like that. First Emma. Then, a few minutes later, Anna. Alive and well at the exact moment of their fifteenth birthday. They told tales of life inside the bowl. What they called the FAYZ. Connie Temple’s heart had swelled with pride for what she had learned of her son, Sam. And crashed into despair with tales of her other son, her unacknowledged child, Caine. Then, nothing. No other kids arrived for a while. Black despair settled over the families as they realized that it would be only these two. Months passed. Many lost faith. How could kids survive alone? But then, the Prophetess had reached into their dreams. One night Connie Temple had a lurid, incredible dream. She’d never had such a detailed dream. It was terrifying. The power of it took her breath away. There was a girl in that dream. This girl spoke to her in the dream. It’s a dream, the girl said. Yes, just a dream, Connie had answered. Not just a dream. Never say “just” a dream, the girl had corrected. A dream is a window to another reality. Who are you? Connie had asked. My name is Orsay. I know your son. Connie had been about to say, Which one? But some instinct stopped her. The girl did not look dangerous. She looked hungry. Do you have a message for Sam? the girl asked. Yes, Connie said. Tell him to let them go. Let them go. Let them go off into the red sunset.

Two million Americans were living as nomads. They were not long-time drifters, most of them, according to reporters who had spent some time on the trains. They were family men, farmers and factory hands, merchants, some professionals among them, writers and bank clerks and storeowners—all broke, people who could not stand to see their kids in rags, hungry.

Suddenly, he was ravenous. Ramona ladled the soup into two bowls and passed one to him. He drank it. Spiced just right. He took a second swallow. Even better. “Good,” he said. She rolled her eyes. “Of course it’s good. Everything here is good. They’re serving our family recipes.” “In that case, I should have said passable.” “Clearly, you don’t value your life.

Thank you, but the South is a state of mind rather than a place. Much of it is good, but much of it dark, thanks to our replication of original sin in the form of the Middle Passage. John Calvin and Cornelius Jansen spat in the punch bowl as well.

Growing up it seemed like all Iranians naturally knew which foods fell into which category, and meals were subconsciously, or at times consciously, due to illness or the weather, designed around this hot and cold concept. Out of respect to the scientists and doctors in our family I will say that none of this is based on hard science, but even the doctors in the family agree that if it brings comfort (like a warm bowl of. . . soup), then that is all the more reason to embrace it.

Cathy, was out of her depth, taking care of two children under the age of two and heavily pregnant with a third child. Dorothy shared what food she could with the needy family, often taking a bowl of mashed potatoes, or a few scones, next door. Cathy couldn’t keep the house clean and had no idea how to cook.

I'm a bartender. How can I stop when surrounded by smoke and smokers at every turn?" I recall attempts where I hoped smoking friends would be supportive in not smoking around me, and not leave their packs lying around to tempt me. While most tried, it usually wasn't long before they forgot. I recall thinking them insensitive and uncaring. I recall grinding disappointment and intense brain chatter, that more than once seized upon frustrated support expectations as this addict's excuse for relapse. Instead of expecting them to change their world for me, the smart move would have been for me to want to extinguish my brain's subconscious feeding cues related to being around them and their addiction. The smart move would have been to take back my world, or as much of it as I wanted. As I sit here typing in this room, around me are a number of packs of cigarettes: Camel, Salem, Marlboro Lights and Virginia Slims. I use them during presentations and have had cigarettes within arms reach for years. Don't misconstrue this. It is not a smart move for someone struggling in early recovery to keep cigarettes on hand. But if a family member or best friend smokes or uses tobacco, or our place of employment sells tobacco or allows smoking around us, we have no choice but to work toward extinguishing tobacco product, smoke and smoker cues almost immediately. And we can do it! Millions of comfortable ex-users handle and sell tobacco products as part of their job. You may find this difficult to believe, but I've never craved or wanted to smoke any of the cigarettes that surround me, even when holding packs or handling individual cigarettes during presentations. Worldwide, millions of ex-smokers successfully navigated recovery while working in smoke filled nightclubs, restaurants, bowling alleys, casinos, convenience stores and other businesses historically linked to smoking. And millions broke free while their spouse, partner or best friend smoked like a chimney. Instead of fighting or hiding from the world, take it back. Why allow our circumstances to wear us down? Small steps, just one moment at a time, embrace challenge. Extinguish use cues and claim your prize once you do, another slice of a nicotine-free life. Recovery is about taking back life. Why fear it? Instead, savor and relish reclaiming it. Maybe I'll have a crave tomorrow. But it's been so many years (since 2001) that I'm not sure I'd recognize it. Why fear our circumstances when we can embrace them? They cannot

Most nights we sat together at the kitchen table, a bowl of wobbly pink in the space between us, spooning it into our mouths as we tallied up the day’s intake. I always beat her. The game, for me, was easy. When she dropped out, I continued. I felt victorious. I felt I had somehow won proof of whatever it was that would spare me her fate, imperfect and discarded by my father, a man, whose gaze defined us both.

The Party adopted unwritten rules to ensure that no one outstayed their welcome, limiting top leaders to two five-year terms and setting a retirement age. Even misdemeanours were handled in line with an unofficial code: members of the politburo might be purged for corruption, but the most senior figures of all – the Politburo Standing Committee – were untouchable, as were their families. You survived and thrived by cultivating patrons and your wider networks. The Party became safer, stabler, calmer and duller. For years, it worked. China prospered. People who might have eaten meat once a year dropped unctuous pork into their bowls each week. People who might never have left their county journeyed to Shanghai, Bangkok or Paris for shopping and sightseeing. They got their hair permed, wore bright sweaters and Nikes, tried red wine and McDonald’s, took up hobbies. It was attractive enough for foreigners to speak of the ‘Beijing model’. But there was a price. Corruption was endemic. To get your child into a decent school, or pass your driving test, or push through a business deal, or dodge prosecution, took cash: a few thousand yuan to a teacher, tens of millions to a senior leader. In cities such as Chongqing, gangs flourished, sheltered by officials they had bought off. Inequality was soaring. The more the economy grew and mutated, the more static politics seemed.

Throwing even more fuel on this fire was Alibaba’s record-breaking 2014 debut on the New York Stock Exchange. A group of Taobao sellers rang the opening bell for Alibaba’s initial public offering on September 19, just nine days after Premier Li’s speech. When the dust settled on a furious round of trading, Alibaba had claimed the title of the largest IPO in history, and Jack Ma was crowned the richest man in China. But it was about more than just the money. Ma had become a national hero, but a very relatable one. Blessed with a goofy charisma, he seems like the boy next door. He didn’t attend an elite university and never learned how to code. He loves to tell crowds that when KFC set up shop in his hometown, he was the only one out of twenty-five applicants to be rejected for a job there. China’s other early internet giants often held Ph.D.s or had Silicon Valley experience in the United States. But Ma’s ascent to rock-star status gave a new meaning to “mass entrepreneurship”—in other words, this was something that anyone from the Chinese masses had a shot at. The government endorsement and Ma’s example of internet entrepreneurship were particularly effective at winning over some of the toughest customers: Chinese mothers. In the traditional Chinese mentality, entrepreneurship was still something for people who couldn’t land a real job. The “iron rice bowl” of lifetime employment in a government job remained the ultimate ambition for older generations who had lived through famines. In fact, when I had started Sinovation Ventures in 2009, many young people wanted to join the startups we funded but felt they couldn’t do so because of the steadfast opposition of their parents or spouses. To win these families over, I tried everything I could think of, including taking the parents out to nice dinners, writing them long letters by hand, and even running financial projections of how a startup could pay off. Eventually we were able to build strong teams at Sinovation, but every new recruit in those days was an uphill battle. By 2015, these people were beating down our door—in one case, literally breaking Sinovation’s front door—for the chance to work with us. That group included scrappy high school dropouts, brilliant graduates of top universities, former Facebook engineers, and more than a few people in questionable mental states. While I was out of town, the Sinovation headquarters received a visit from one would-be entrepreneur who refused to leave until I met with him. When the staff told him that I wouldn’t be returning any time soon, the man lay on the ground and stripped naked, pledging to lie right there until Kai-Fu Lee listened to his idea.

traditional Norse blessing. Facing in each direction as he speaks, he forbids all evil from entering our lives from this point forward. After invoking the gods, our ancestors, and everyone gathered here today as our witnesses, he lights a symbolic candle to purify us so that we may enter our marriage with unadulterated love. Dipping an evergreen sprig into a bowl of holy water, he anoints Ella and me, offering his blessings before binding our hands together with the rite of the white ribbon. We recite a prayer to Frigga, the goddess of marriage, followed by our vows promising to love, honor, and cherish each other. The rings we exchange were personally chosen by Ella. A moonstone set into oxidized silver for her, and a brushed silver Tungsten band for me. As the final rite of passage into married life, the Gothi pours a goblet of mead wine and brings our free hands together around the stem, encouraging each of us to drink. Once we do, he declares us bound for eternity as husband and wife. He removes the goblet, and I bring my hand to Ella’s face, sealing our marriage with a kiss. Around us, bells begin to ring, a salute from the witnesses. But Ella and I only have eyes for each other as we seal our commitment to one another. When the Gothi opens the circle again with one last symbolic prayer, we exit to our new life amongst our family and friends. Celebrations are in order, and the chef has prepared a feast of traditional foods.

we had the goldfish and they went around and around in the bowl on the table near the purple drapes across our front picture window and my mother, poor fish, always smiling, wanting to appear happy, she always told me, "be happy, Henry," and she was right: it's better to be happy if you can be but my father beat her two or three times a week while raging through his 6 foot two frame because he couldn't defeat what was attacking him. my mother, poor fish, poor goldfish, poor nothing fish, wanting to be happy, being beaten two or three times a week and telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile! why don't you smile? and then, she always did to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw upon the earth, like hell and hell and hell and hell, and nothing else one day all the goldfish died, all five of them, they floated on top of the water, on their sides, the eye on each top side still open, and when my father got home he threw them to the cat there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother smiled