Grains Of Salt Quotes

I didn't say you were a bad person. I just don't like being a foregone conclusion for sole reason of having a vagina." I focused on the grains of salt on the table until I heard a choking noise from Travis's direction. His eyes widened and he quivered with howling laughter. "Oh my God! You're killing me! That's it. We have to be friends. I won't take no for an answer.

a wise woman puts a grain of sugar in everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.

Carter looked awful—I mean even worse than usual. Honestly, the boy had never been in a proper school, and he dressed like a junior professor, with his khaki trousers and a button-down brown shirt and loafers. He’s not bad looking, I suppose. He’s reasonably tall and fit and his hair isn’t hopeless. He’s got Dad’s eyes, and my mates Liz and Emma have even told me from his picture that he’s hot, which I must take with a grain of salt because (a) he’s my brother, and (b) my mates are a bit crazed. When it came to clothes, Carter wouldn’t have known hot if it bit him on the bum.

So what’s your story, Pidge? Are you a man-hater in general, or do you just hate me?” “I think it’s just you,” I grumbled. He laughed once, amused at my mood. “I can’t figure you out. You’re the first girl that’s ever been disgusted with me before sex. You don’t get all flustered when you talk to me, and you don’t try to get my attention.” “It’s not a ploy. I just don’t like you.” “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t like me.” My frown involuntarily smoothed and I sighed. “I didn’t say you’re a bad person. I just don’t like being a foregone conclusion for the sole reason of having a vagina.” I focused on the grains of salt on the table until I heard a choking noise from Travis’ direction. His eyes widened and he quivered with howling laughter. “Oh my God! You’re killing me! That’s it. We have to be friends. I won’t take no for an answer.

That’s when you have to remember that image in the mirror and not let success get to you. It is important that you not believe your own publicity. Be grateful for whatever praise you receive, but take it with a grain of salt.

Because lascivious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he now had little belief in their sincerity when he heard them from Emma; they should be taken with a grain of salt, he thought, because the most exaggerated speeches usually hid the weakest feelings - as though the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest phrases, since no one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions, or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that's why you're not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.

The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long life seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. ..

Unless you heard it yourself, take with a grain of salt what a person says another person said about you.

If a star were a grain of salt, you could fit all the stars visible to the naked eye on a teaspoon, but all the stars in the universe would fill a ball more than eight miles wide.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes, it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips, The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific faculties (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety, and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? I am no longer a young man; even if I chose to discard my celibacy I would surely have lost my stamina, re-erecting in half-hours where once it was minutes. And yet if youth were restored to me fully, and I engaged again in what was once my greatest delight – to be fellated at stool by nymphet with mouth still blood-heavy from the necessary precautions – what then? What if my supply of anodontic premenstruals were never-ending, what then? Surely, in time, I should sicken of it. “Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads on a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Do you think Messalina, in that competition of hers with a courtesan, knew pleasure as much on the first occasion as the last? Impossible. “Yet consider. “Consider pain. “Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death, we are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always.

Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'.

Dissention, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that's why you are not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, but you are not.

... to live against one's grain, that is degeneration by definition.

I am the impurity that makes the zinc react, I am the grain of salt or mustard.

They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough—two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid broth.

…   not my own opinion, but my wife’s: Yesterday, when weary with writing, I was called to supper, and a salad I had asked for was set before me. ‘It seems then,’ I said, ‘if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of water, vinegar, oil and slices of eggs had been flying about in the air for all eternity, it might at last happen by chance that there would come a salad.’ ‘Yes,’ responded my lovely, ‘but not so nice as this one of mine.

I too am a poet who has found some favour with the Muse. I too have written songs. I too have heard the shepherds call me bard. But I take it from them with a grain of salt: I have the feeling that I cannot yet compare with Varius or Cinna, but cackle like a goose among melodious swans.

THE ELFIN KNIGHT Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme Remember me to one who lives there She must be a true love of mine Tell her she'll sleep in a goose-feather bed Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme Tell her I sear she'll have nothing to dread She must be a true love of mine Tell her tomorrow her answer make known Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme What e'er she may say I'll not leave her alone She must be a true love of mine Her answer came in a week and a day Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme I'm sorry good sir, I must answer thee nay I'll not be a true love of thine From the sting of my curse she can never be free Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme Unless she unravels my riddlings three She will be a true love of mine Tell her to make me a magical shirt Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme Without any seam or needlework Else she'll be a true love of mine Tell her to find me an acre of land Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme Between the salt water and the sea strand Else she'll be a true love of mine Tell her to plow it with just a goat's horn Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme And sow it all over with one grain of corn Else she'll be a true love of mine And her daughters forever possessions of mine

He tried to lift his chin, though it was difficult when Cinder's glare was making him feel about as important as a grain of salt.

Please take the status quo with a grain of salt and be brave enough to make your own way.

SCARBOROUGH FAIR, or, THE LOVER'S PROMISE (Lucy:) Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme Remember me to one who lives there Always he'll be a true love of mine Tell him I've made him a magical shirt Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme Without any seam or needlework Always he'll be a true love of mine (Zach:) Tell her she's found me an acre of land Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme Between the salt water and the sea strand That makes her a true love of mine Tell her she's plowed it with just a goat's horn Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme She's sowed it all over with one grain of corn Yes, she is a true love of mine And her daughter forever a daughter of mine (Together:) Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme Remember us to all who live there Ours will be true love for all time

To love mankind for the sake of God-that has been the most nobel and far-fetched feeling yet achieved by human beings. The idea that without some sanctifying ulterior motive, a love of mankind is just one more brutish stupidity, that the predisposition to such a love must first find its weight, its refinement, its grain of salt and pinch of ambergris in another even higher predisposition-whoever first felt and 'witnessed' this, and however much his tongue may have stuttered in attempting to express such a delicate idea: may he remain forever venerable and holy in our sight as the man who as yet has flown the highest and erred the most beautifully!

Witness, how she weeps until she dissolves and then wakes up to rebuild herself one salt grain at a time the next morning.

Everything is temporary, almost like a passing fase, some of laughter Some of pain. What we would do, If we had the chance to explore What we had taken for Granted the very day before, Some would say I'm selfish, To hold a little sadness in my eyes, But they don't feel the sorrow When I can't do, all that helps me feel alive. I can express my emotions, but I can't run wild and free, My mind and soul would handle it but hell upon my hip, ankle and knees, This disorder came about, as a friendship said its last goodbyes, Soooo this is what I got given for all the years I stood by? I finally stand still to question it, life it is in fact? What the fuck is the purpose of it all if you get stabbed in the back? And after the anger fills the air, the regret takes it places, I never wanted to be that girl, Horrid, sad and faded... So I took with a grain of salt, my new found reality, I am not of my pain, the disability doesnt define me. I find away to adjust, also with the absence of my friend, I trust the choices I make, allow my heart to mend. I pick up the pieces I retrain my leg, I find where I left off And I start all over again, You see what happens... When a warrior gets tested; They grow from the ashes Powerful and invested. So I thank all this heartache, As I put it to a rest, I move forward with my life And I'll build a damn good nest.

Lines written for a thirtieth wedding anniversary Somewhere up in the eaves it began: high in the roof – in a sort of vault between the slates and the gutter – a small leak. Through it, rain which came from the east, in from the lights and foghorns of the coast – water with a ghost of ocean salt in it – spilled down on the path below. Over and over and over years stone began to alter, its grain searched out, worn in: granite rounding down, giving way taking into its own inertia that information water brought, of ships, wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour. It happened under our lives: the rain, the stone. We hardly noticed. Now this is the day to think of it, to wonder: all those years, all those years together – the stars in a frozen arc overhead, the quick noise of a thaw in the air, the blue stare of the hills – through it all this constancy: what wears, what endures.

The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.

a spiritual grain of salt—especially if that advice is grounded in anything other than Bible truth.

My general ratios for measuring salt are simple: 1 percent salt by weight for meats, vegetables, and grains, and 2 percent salinity for water for blanching vegetables and pasta.

Yes, I have sunk a good deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing—that is degeneration. Or to live against one's grain, that is degeneration by definition.

You’re not going to throw this away, are you?” she says, and she’ll be talking about the grains of rice in the bottom of the salt shaker. “No, Mrs. Peacock, by all means, you take them. They’ll come in handy when your son gets out of prison and marries your niece.

It was like carrying a rabbit’s foot or throwing salt over your shoulder if you happened to spill any; these things were part of the grain and texture of life, and better to do them than not, just in case God’s ways were more mysterious than we Christians could grasp.

tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.

Nature devours us. Icy winds and rain and salt and snow erode us, decompose us, reduce us to molecules, carbon compounds; the covalent bonds between the carbon and hydrogen atoms break. Our atoms mingle with the brown grains of sand on the only small strip of beach on White Island.

Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'. I trust this passing reflection will not lead anyone to doubt the truth of any part of this story! When I come to describe my life with Clement Makin credulity will be strained but will I hope not fail!

Carlyle thought little of these Essays. "Wretched lives" is his best word for them when he is bilious and the world is all gloom; but when in another place he confesses that he was seldom happier than when writing them, we may take his condemnation as he did his bile, "with a drop of oil and a grain of salt.

There was a woman who, whatever she did,could not be...her eyes moistened in sympathy with the ocean of blue mist. And she tried once more to show that she was and opened her mouth to talk, but the words stopped in her throat, walled up. And out of her mouth grains of salt began flowing, piling up all around her body.

I love letting my soul soar on a summer breeze, or getting entranced by the rhythm of the sea. It carries you off on its currents until you’re completely lost and then drops you back on the shores of reality with salt on your cheeks and grains of dreams running through your fingers like sand. It’s almost an occasional necessity – I guess because when you get completely, fantastically, dizzyingly lost you’re temporarily suspended between what has been and what could be. In those first moments when you come back up for air, or when you float back down to the ground, you’re living in the land of possibility, where you understand that reality can stretch just as far as you’re willing to dream.

I’ll take that with a grain of salt since your promises hold no weight for me.” “Then let me show you that they do.

Well,” he said, turning back to the window. “This is my own personal theory, so take it with a grain of salt—as humans love to say.

If he was wood, he was a flail, and I was grain on the threshing floor. I was a thousand grains, my thoughts blown like chaff. All that was left was the taste of salt.

Take all the fuming and fretting of the media with a grain of salt. Much of today’s news isn’t really new. Most of it has happened before and before that.

I take what Jennifer Lee reported (in her 1991 memoir) with a grain of salt.

EARLY IN THE MORNING While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced for breakfast, before the birds, my mother glides an ivory comb through her hair, heavy and black as calligrapher’s ink. She sits at the foot of the bed. My father watches, listens for the music of comb against hair. My mother combs, pulls her hair back tight, rolls it around two fingers, pins it in a bun to the back of her head. For half a hundred years she has done this. My father likes to see it like this. He says it is kempt. But I know it is because of the way my mother’s hair falls when he pulls the pins out. Easily, like the curtains when they untie them in the evening.

In this universe where I knew now we were not the center, where I was as insignificant and unremarkable as a grain of salt seen from a tower, God still allowed me to take my next breath.

You  shall season all your grain offerings with salt. You shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering;  ewith all your offerings you shall offer salt.

She took out avocados, tomatoes, a Bermuda onion, and a container of cottage cheese. She searched the pantry for cumin, cilantro, garlic. She had two secret ingredients: cottage cheese that gave the guacamole a creamy taste and Hawaiian sea salt. Becky had introduced her to pink Hawaiian sea salt. The grains were like delicate crystals, and Becky used to eat them from the palm of her hand.

All Carolina folk are crazy for mayonnaise, mayonnaise is as ambrosia to them, the food of their tarheeled gods. Mayonnaise comforts them, causes the vowels to slide more musically along their slow tongues, appeasing their grease-conditioned taste buds while transporting those buds to a place higher than lard could ever hope to fly. Yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher's rant, falsely innocent as a magician's handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, restyling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again, granting them the capacity to delight the gullet if not the heart. Fried oysters, leftover roast, peanut butter: rare are the rations that fail to become instantly more scintillating from contact with this inanimate seductress, this goopy glory-monger, this alchemist in a jar. The mystery of mayonnaise-and others besides Dickie Goldwire have surely puzzled over this_is how egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar (wine's angry brother), salt, sugar (earth's primal grain-energy), lemon juice, water, and, naturally, a pinch of the ol' calcium disodium EDTA could be combined in such a way as to produce a condiment so versatile, satisfying, and outright majestic that mustard, ketchup, and their ilk must bow down before it (though, a at two bucks a jar, mayonnaise certainly doesn't put on airs)or else slink away in disgrace. Who but the French could have wrought this gastronomic miracle? Mayonnaise is France's gift to the New World's muddled palate, a boon that combines humanity's ancient instinctive craving for the cellular warmth of pure fat with the modern, romantic fondness for complex flavors: mayo (as the lazy call it) may appear mild and prosaic, but behind its creamy veil it fairly seethes with tangy disposition. Cholesterol aside, it projects the luster that we astro-orphans have identified with well-being ever since we fell from the stars.

The single flake that settled and melted over my glove just now was as close to a pristine six-armed snow crystal as one is likely to find. The one that settles next to it is partly crumbled, but the remaining four branches retain their delicate shape. These soft, deteriorating dendrites are the first to melt away. The tiny white center, the part that resembles a grain of salt, lingers for a breath before dissolving.

Keep your finger on the pulse of society, take controversies with a grain of salt, lick your finger and then lift it to the wind; always know what is going on, my friend, so this world can never steer you wrong again.

There was a period-- or at least you hoped there was-- with every painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip like silt.

contains on average some one hundred billion stars. If a star were a grain of salt, you could fit all the stars visible to the naked eye on a teaspoon, but all the stars in the universe would fill a ball more than eight miles wide.

What do we say any more to conjure the salt of our earth? So much comes and is gone that should be crystal and kept, and amicable weathers that bring up the grain of things, their tang of season and store, are all the packing we’ll get.

It occurred to me then that maybe Wil Hines didn't have blood in his veins like everyone else. Maybe he was made of Florida things: grains of bleached sand, sea foam, and salt. Wind and sun. Maybe he was made of the things he loved best.

You’re trying to help them… that’s a good thing. But you can’t always count on seeing their gratitude,” he said wanting to comfort her before he added a grain of salt. “You know what Tolstoy said… if you are unhappy with your life, you can change it in two ways… either improve the conditions you live in or improve your inner spiritual state. The first isn’t always possible but the second is… In the end, Alex, people need to go directly to the source of Grace for themselves.

I used to go looking for answers. I used to crave a warning, a map, a how-to manual, the secret code to hold myself together. I sought protection, largely from myself. I wanted permission to allow someone else to love me. But this is new territory. In a way, MS has cured me. I’ve gotten enough advice from doctors to last me a lifetime. If a crystal ball fell in my lap, I would still gaze into it. I would listen to what it had to say. But now I take everything people tell me with a grain of salt. I no longer feel as if there were anyone who knows more than I do.

We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust that we are. Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with?

time. There’s a cosmic correlation that happens around the age of twenty-nine known to astrologers as the Saturn Return. The slow-moving planet Saturn takes twenty-nine and a half years to complete its orbit around the sun and return to the exact same spot in the sky as it was on the day you were born. The Saturn Return is notoriously disruptive—known for upheaval and thrusting things taken for granted into question. Whether or not you believe in those influences (and I take it all with a few grains of salt) it makes sense that whenever you hit that natural cusp between your extended younger years and adulthood, you can expect uncertainty and apprehension with the onrush of big change.

That was when the Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it. Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed in Venice from other areas. As a result, shipping salt to Venice became so profitable that the same merchants could afford to ship other goods at prices that undersold their competitors. Growing fat on the salt subsidy, Venice merchants could afford to send ships to the eastern Mediterranean, where they picked up valuable cargoes of Indian spices and sold them in western Europe at low prices that their non-Venetian competitors could not afford to offer. This meant that the Venetian public was paying extremely high prices for salt, but they did not mind expensive salt if they could dominate the spice trade and be leaders in the grain trade. When grain harvests failed in Italy, the Venetian government would use its salt income to subsidize grain imports from other parts of the Mediterranean and thereby corner the Italian grain market.

Kitchen life is getting steamy. Charles looks up from prepping his mise en place for two seconds, blows me a kiss, and then his hand swipes a bowl of salt and the grains scatter on the counter. "I can't take it anymore," he says, lifting me up onto the prep station. My legs wrap around his waist, as his kiss starts off slow and then turns hungry. Vegetables scatter, cherry tomatoes rolling onto the floor. Dishes break. Not one burner is on, but the kitchen gets hotter. Oh, and hotter. Hello, volcano. His hand latches around my ponytail, tilting my head back. His mouth finds my neck, and he covers it with his kisses, slowly making his way down to my exposed shoulder, his fingers running along my clavicle.

Such is human credulity, the power of the printed word, and of any well-known ‘name’ or ‘show business personality’. Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’.

To love human beings for God's sake ― so far that has been the most noble and most remote feeling that has been attained among men. The fact that without some consecrating intention behind it the love of human beings is one more stupidity and brutishness, that the inclination to this love of humanity must first derive its extent, delicacy, its grains of salt and specks of ambergris from some higher inclination - whatever human being it happened to be who first felt and "experienced" this, no matter how much his tongue may have stumbled as it tried to express such a delicacy, let him remain for all time sanctified among us and worthy of reverence as the man who so far has flown the highest and has lost his way most beautifully!

If you built an iPhone with vacuum tubes instead of transistors, packed together with the same density as they were in UNIVAC, the phone would be about the size of five city blocks when resting on one edge. Conversely, if you built the original UNIVAC out of iPhone-size components, the entire machine would be less than 300 microns tall, small enough to embed inside a single grain of salt.

The master and mistress of the house and the rest of the Blood -even the Crux himself- brought our food, poured the wine, did our bidding. The centerpiece was a roasted stag. crowned with gilded antlers and stuffed with songbirds; they had hunted well. We were forbidden to kill the deer that fattened on our coleworts and stole our grain, and the venison tasted all the better for the salt of revenge.

But I like labels,” she admitted. “They make everything so much clearer.” Her sister Bree always told her she liked things to be wrapped up too neatly, and that part of the point of life was its messiness, its refusal to be wrapped up. Brett always took the advice with a grain of salt—it was probably Bree’s excuse for a messy room, or for breaking up with boys she’d dated without actually telling them.

The ideal human diet looks like this: Consume plant-based foods in forms as close to their natural state as possible (“whole” foods). Eat a variety of vegetables, fruits, raw nuts and seeds, beans and legumes, and whole grains. Avoid heavily processed foods and animal products. Stay away from added salt, oil, and sugar. Aim to get 80 percent of your calories from carbohydrates, 10 percent from fat, and 10 percent from protein.

Another quality of salt is that it remains hidden even though it adds flavor to a dish. People praise a dish by appreciating the quality of its grains or vegetables or spices, but no one says, ‘The salt in this dish was fabulous!’ Like salt, true yogis serve without wanting recognition or praise. They are happy to give credit to others and interested simply in doing their best to give pleasure to the Divine and benefit others.

Don't believe vegetarians who tell you that meat has no flavor, that it comes from the spices or the marinade. The flavor is already there: earth and metal, salt and fat, blood. My favorite meat is chicken. I can eat a whole bird standing up in the kitchen, straight from the oven, burning my bare hands on its flesh. Anyone can roast a chicken, it is a good animal to cook. Lamb, on the other hand, is much harder to get right. You have to lock in the flavor, rubbing it with sea salt like you are exfoliating your own drying skin, tenderly basting it in its own juices, hour after hour. You have to make small slits across the surface of the leg, through which you can insert sprigs of rosemary, or cloves of garlic, or both. These incisions should run against the grain, in the opposite direction to which the muscle fibers lie. You can tell the direction better when the meat is still uncooked, when it is marbled and raw. It is worth running your finger along those fibers, all the way from one end to the other. This doesn't help with anything. It won't change how you cook it. But it is good to come to terms with things as they are. Preparing meat is always an act of physical labor. Whacking rib eye with a rolling pin. Snapping apart an arc of pork crackling. And there is something inescapably candid about it, too. If you've ever spatchcocked a goose- if you've pressed your weight down on its breastbone, felt it flatten and give, its bones rearranging under your hands- you will know what I am talking about. We are all capable of cruelty. Sometimes I imagine the feeling of a sliver of roast beef on my tongue: the pink flesh of my own body cradling the flesh of something else's. It makes sense to me that there is a market for a vegetarian burger that bleeds.

Smoky Candied Bacon Sweet Potatoes prep time: 15 minutes     cook time: 40 minutes     servings: 10-12 The flavors of Fall come together in this dish of spiced roasted sweet potatoes with candied pecans and bacon. ingredients 3 pounds sweet potatoes, peels on and scrubbed 6 ounces bacon, sliced into 1-inch pieces 1/2 cup pecans, roughly chopped 1/3 cup pure Grade B maple syrup 1 teaspoon chili powder 1/2 teaspoon sea salt 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon cayenne powder method Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Cut the sweet potatoes into even cubes then toss them with all of the ingredients in a bowl. Spread in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet lined with parchment paper and roast for 20 minutes. Stir and continue roasting for 15 minutes. Turn the oven to broil and brown the potatoes for an additional 5 minutes. Watch the nuts closely and pull the tray out early if they begin to burn.

Some seem to forget that I’ve worked with those on movies and television. I warn you. Television may be exciting, but always take what you watch or read with a grain of salt. The more extreme these people act, the more money they make. They don’t care about us. You should always do your own research using verified primary sources. Editorials or articles published can be exciting, but they are seldom the truth. This country will eventually be destroyed for the sake of a paycheck.

I been thinking a lot tonight,’ her Dad said. He poured out his beer and sprinkled a few grains of salt on the back of his hand. Then he licked up the salt and took a swallow out of the glass. She was in such a hurry that it was hard to stand still. Her Dad noticed this. He tried to say something—but he had not called to tell her anything special. He only wanted to talk with her for a little while. He started to speak and swallowed. They just looked at each other. The quietness grew out longer and neither of them could say a word. That was when she realized about her Dad. It wasn’t like she was learning a new fact—she had understood it all along in every way except with her brain. Now she just suddenly knew that she knew about her Dad. He was lonesome and he was an old man. Because none of the kids went to him for anything and because he didn’t earn much money he felt like he was cut off from the family. And in his lonesomeness he wanted to be close to one of his kids—and they were all so busy that they didn’t know it. He felt like he wasn’t much real use to anybody.

The gods in Lankhmar (that is, the gods and candidates for divinity who dwell or camp, it may be said, in the Imperishable City, not the gods of Lankhmar—a very different and most secret and dire matter)… the gods in Lankhmar sometimes seem as if they must be as numberless as the grains of sand in the Great Eastern Desert. The vast majority of them began as men, or more strictly the memories of men who led ascetic, vision-haunted lives and died painful, messy deaths. One gets the impression that since the beginning of time an unending horde of their priests and apostles (or even the gods themselves, it makes little difference) have been crippling across that same desert, the Sinking Land, and the Great Salt Marsh to converge on Lankhmar's low, heavy-arched Marsh Gate—meanwhile suffering by the way various inevitable tortures, castrations, bindings and stonings, impalements, crucifixions, quarterings and so forth at the hands of eastern brigands and Mingol unbelievers who, one is tempted to think, were created solely for the purpose of seeing to the running of that cruel gauntlet.

The Constituent Assembly enjoyed a prestige accorded none of its successors, but the populace observed only such decrees as suited it. What did the people want above all else? Tax reform, abolition of indirect levies, institution of controls over the grain trade. Tax collection was suspended; the salt tax, excises, and municipal tolls were suppressed; exchange of grains was either forbidden or continually thwarted. Proclamations and decrees against this had no effect. [...] In their eyes national sovereignty entailed direct democracy, an idea that would remain dear to the sans-culottes.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett calls seeing yourself in this way heterophenomenology. Basically, he suggests when you explain why you feel the way you do, or why you behaved as you did, to take it with a grain of salt, as if you were listening to someone tell you about their night out. When you listen to someone else tell a story, you expect some embellishment and you know they are only telling you how the events seemed to transpire to them. In the same way, you know how reality seems to be unfolding, how it seems to have unfolded in the past, but you should take your own perception with a grain of salt.

The buzz about Google these days is that it's like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China. For Google, it's Facebook. (This is all from tech-gossip blogs, so take it with a grain of salt. They also say a startup called MonkeyMoney is going to be huge next year.) But here's the difference: staring down the inevitable, America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever they want.

The most skilled manipulators are able to mix lies with the truth. This enables them to paint a more credible illusion as the kernels of truth embedded in the illusion gives those around them the impression that what they are saying is actually real. As a result, they may get away with their lies. However, please bear in mind that the devil is in the details. So, if you knit pick long enough, you may find that you are dealing with an impostor. That’s why it’s always a good idea to take everything you hear with a grain of salt. If you choose to take everything you hear at face value, you may become disappointed when you realize that you believed someone who was deliberately trying to fool you.

Increasingly, U.S. submarines preyed upon the dilapidated little trawlers, junks, and sampans that were always found teeming in those waters. Most were innocently laden with noncontraband cargoes such as rice, grain, fish, coffee, sugar, or salt, and manned by Chinese, Thai, or Malayan crews. But they were plying the coastal trade between ports in Japanese-occupied territories, and that was enough to doom them. In a July 1945 patrol off the east coast of Malaya, the submarine Blenny sank sixty-three small craft with her deck guns. In most cases, but not all, skipper William Hazard gave the crews a warning before opening fire, allowing them to evacuate their vessels and take to their rafts and lifeboats.

In other words, I have tried to learn in my writing a monastic lesson I could probably not have learned otherwise: to let go of my idea of myself, to take myself with more than one grain of salt... In religious terms, this is simply a matter of accepting life, and everything in life as a gift, and clinging to none of it, as far as you are able. You give some of it to others, if you can. Yet one should be able to share things with others without bothering too much about how they like it, either, or how they accept it. Assume they will accept it, if they need it. And if they don’t need it, why should they accept it? That is their business. Let me accept what is mine and give them all their share, and go my way.

The sole object of revolution was the abolition of senseless suffering. But it had turned out that the removal of this second kind of suffering was only possible at the price of a temporary enormous increase in the sum total of the first. So the question now ran: Was such an operation justified? Obviously it was, if one spoke in the abstract of “mankind”; but, applied to “man” in the singular, to the cipher 2—4, the real human being of bone and flesh and blood and skin, the principle led to absurdity. As a boy, he had believed that in working for the Party he would find an answer to all questions of this sort. The work had lasted forty years, and right at the start he had forgotten the question for whose sake he had embarked on it. Now the forty years were over, and he returned to the boy’s original perplexity. The Party had taken all he had to give and never supplied him with the answer. And neither did the silent partner, whose magic name he had tapped on the wall of the empty cell. He was deaf to direct questions, however urgent and desperate they might be. And yet there were ways of approach to him. Sometimes he would respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune, or of the folded hands of the Pietà, or of certain scenes of his childhood. As if a tuning-fork had been struck, there would be answering vibrations, and once this had started a state would be produced which the mystics called “ecstasy” and saints “contemplation”; the greatest and soberest of modern psychologists had recognized this state as a fact and called it the “oceanic sense”. And, indeed, one’s personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt. The grain could no longer be localized in time and space. It was a state in which thought lost its direction and started to circle, like the compass needle at the magnetic pole; until finally it cut loose from its axis and travelled freely in space, like a bunch of light in the night; and until it seemed that all thoughts and all sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum lines of the same ray of light, disintegrating in the prisma of consciousness.

...you made art because it was the only thing you’d ever been good at, the only thing, really, you thought about between shorter bursts of thinking about the things everyone thought about: sex and food and sleep and friends and money and fame. But somewhere inside you, whether you were making out with someone in a bar or having dinner with your friends, was always your canvas, its shapes and possibilities floating embryonically behind your pupils. There was a period—or at least you hoped there was—with every painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip like silt.

In their drunken preoccupation with the project at hand and mere locomotion, they did not look behind them. There the night-smog was thicker than ever. A high-circling nighthawk would have seen the stuff converging from all sections of Lankhmar, north, east, south, west—from the Inner Sea, from the Great Salt Marsh, from the many-ditched grain lands, from the River Hlal—in swift-moving black rivers and rivulets, heaping, eddying, swirling, dark and reeking essence of Lankhmar from its branding irons, braziers, bonfires, bonefires, kitchen fires and warmth fires, kilns, forges, breweries, distilleries, junk and garbage fires innumerable, sweating alchemists’ and sorcerers’ dens, crematoriums, charcoal burners’ turfed mounds, all those and many more…converging purposefully on Dim Lane and particularly on the Silver Eel and perhaps especially on the ricketty house behind it, untenanted except for attic. The closer to that center it got, the more substantial the smog became, eddy-strands and swirl-tatters tearing off and clinging to rough stone corners and scraggly-surfaced brick like black cobwebs.

Rice is sacred to the Japanese people," he says. "We eat it at every meal, yet we never get tired of it." He points out that the word for rice in Japanese, gohan, is the same as the word for meal. When he finally lifts the lid of the first rice cooker, releasing a dramatic gasp of starchy steam, the entire restaurant looks ready to wave their white napkins in exuberant applause. The rice is served with a single anchovy painstakingly smoked over a charcoal fire. Below the rice, a nest of lightly grilled matsutake mushrooms; on top, an orange slice of compressed fish roe. Together, an intense wave of umami to fortify the tender grains of rice. Next comes okoge, the crispy rice from the bottom of the pan, served with crunchy flakes of sea salt and oil made from the outside kernel of the rice, spiked with spicy sansho pepper. For the finale, an island of crisp rice with wild herbs and broth from the cooked rice, a moving rendition of chazuke, Japanese rice-and-tea soup. It's a husk-to-heart exposé on rice, striking in both its simplicity and its soul-warming deliciousness- the standard by which all rice I ever eat will be judged.

Money was created many times in many places. Its development required no technological breakthroughs – it was a purely mental revolution. It involved the creation of a new inter-subjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared imagination. Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services. Money enables people to compare quickly and easily the value of different commodities (such as apples, shoes and divorces), to easily exchange one thing for another, and to store wealth conveniently. There have been many types of money. The most familiar is the coin, which is a standardised piece of imprinted metal. Yet money existed long before the invention of coinage, and cultures have prospered using other things as currency, such as shells, cattle, skins, salt, grain, beads, cloth and promissory notes. Cowry shells were used as money for about 4,000 years all over Africa, South Asia, East Asia and Oceania. Taxes could still be paid in cowry shells in British Uganda in the early twentieth century.

JUMBO GINGERBREAD NUT MUFFINS Once you try these jumbo-size, nut- and oil-rich muffins, you will appreciate how filling they are. They are made with eggs, coconut oil, almonds, and other nuts and seeds, so they are also very healthy. You can also add a schmear of cream cheese or a bit of unsweetened fruit butter for extra flavor. To fill out a lunch, add a chunk of cheese, some fresh berries or sliced fruit, or an avocado. While walnuts and pumpkin seeds are called for in the recipe to add crunch, you can substitute your choice of nut or seed, such as pecans, pistachios, or sunflower seeds. A jumbo muffin pan is used in this recipe, but a smaller muffin pan can be substituted. If a smaller pan is used, reduce baking time by about 5 minutes, though always assess doneness by inserting a wooden pick into the center of a muffin and making sure it comes out clean. If you make the smaller size, pack 2 muffins for lunch. Makes 6 4 cups almond meal/flour 1 cup shredded unsweetened coconut ½ cup chopped walnuts ½ cup pumpkin seeds Sweetener equivalent to ¾ cup sugar 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon 1 tablespoon ground ginger 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg ½ teaspoon ground cloves 1 teaspoon sea salt 3 eggs ½ cup coconut oil, melted 1 teaspoon vanilla extract ½ cup water Preheat the oven to 350°F. Place paper liners in a 6-cup jumbo muffin pan or grease the cups with coconut or other oil. In a large bowl, combine the almond meal/flour, coconut, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, sweetener, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and salt. Mix well. In a medium bowl, whisk the eggs. Stir in the coconut oil, vanilla, and water. Pour the egg mixture into the almond meal mixture and combine thoroughly. Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups. Bake for 30 minutes, or until a wooden pick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean. Per serving (1 muffin): 893 calories, 25 g protein, 26 g carbohydrates, 82 g total fat, 30 g saturated fat, 12 g fiber, 333 mg sodium BRATWURST WITH BELL PEPPERS AND SAUERKRAUT Living in Milwaukee has turned me on to the flavors of German-style bratwurst, but any spicy sausage (such as Italian, chorizo, or andouille) will do just fine in this recipe. The quality of the brat or sausage makes the dish, so choose your favorite. The spices used in various sausages will vary, so I kept the spices and flavors of the sauerkraut mixture light. However, this makes the choice of bratwurst or sausage the crucial component of this dish. You can also add ground coriander, nutmeg, and

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.

but because to work in Ezra’s was to be constantly surrounded and interrupted by dilettantes. There, art was something that was just an accessory to a lifestyle. You painted or sculpted or made crappy installation pieces because it justified a wardrobe of washed-soft T-shirts and dirty jeans and a diet of ironic cheap American beers and ironic expensive hand-rolled American cigarettes. Here, however, you made art because it was the only thing you’d ever been good at, the only thing, really, you thought about between shorter bursts of thinking about the things everyone thought about: sex and food and sleep and friends and money and fame. But somewhere inside you, whether you were making out with someone in a bar or having dinner with your friends, was always your canvas, its shapes and possibilities floating embryonically behind your pupils. There was a period—or at least you hoped there was—with every painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip like silt.

Rye growers face another challenge: the grain is vulnerable to a fungus called ergot (Claviceps purpurea). The spores attack open flowers, pretending to be a grain of pollen, which gives them access to the ovary. Once inside, the fungus takes the place of the embryonic grain along the stalk, sometimes looking so much like grain that it is difficult to spot an infected plant. Until the late nineteenth century, botanists thought the odd dark growths were part of the normal appearance of rye. Although the fungus does not kill the plant, it is toxic to people: it contains a precursor to LSD that survives the process of being brewed into beer or baked into bread. While a psychoactive beer might sound appealing, the reality was quite horrible. Ergot poisoning causes miscarriage, seizures, and psychosis, and it can be deadly. In the Middle Ages, outbreaks called St. Anthony’s fire or dancing mania made entire villages go crazy at once. Because rye was a peasant grain, outbreaks of the illness were more common among the lower class, fueling revolutions and peasant uprisings. Some historians have speculated that the Salem witch trials came about because girls poisoned by ergot had seizures that led townspeople to conclude that they’d been bewitched. Fortunately, it’s easy to treat rye for ergot infestation: a rinse in a salt solution kills the fungus.

You've had hot coffee before, and in the hands of a skilled maker, coffee can be amazing. But the fact is that coffee is one of the hardest things to get right in the world. Even with great beans and a great roast and great equipment, a little too much heat, the wrong grind, or letting things go on too long will produce a cup of bitterness. Coffee's full of different acids, and depending on the grind, temperature, roast, and method, you can "overextract" the acids from the beans, or overheat them and oxidize them, producing that awful taste you get at donut shops and Starbucks. But there is Another Way. If you make coffee in cold water, you only extract the sweetest acids, the highly volatile flavors that hint at chocolate and caramel, the ones that boil away or turn to sourness under imperfect circumstances. Brewing coffee in cold water sounds weird, but in fact, it's just about the easiest way to make a cup (or a jar) of coffee. Just grind coffee -- keep it coarse, with grains about the size of sea salt -- and combine it with twice as much water in an airtight jar. Give it a hard shake and stick it somewhere cool overnight (I used a cooler bag loaded with ice from ice camp and wrapped the whole thing in bubble wrap for insulation). In the morning, strain it through a colander and a paper coffee filter. What you've got now is coffee concentrate, which you can dilute with cold water to taste -- I go about half and half. If you're feeling fancy, serve it over ice.

Between the pleasure of a kiss and of what a man and woman do in bed seems to me only a gradation. A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what's the use debating the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football gamme--or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I'll leave that to the philosophers. But their attitude was that I must be somehow demented or blind (plus a kind of regret, I thought, at the fact that a fairly attractive woman is presumably unavailable to men). [...] The most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone--that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women. It was said or at least implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing--that is degeneration. Or to live against one's grain, that is degeneration by definition.

Significance of madness in the history of morality. — When in spite of that fearful pressure of ‘morality of custom’ under which all the communities of mankind have lived, many millennia before the beginnings of our calendar and also on the whole during the course of it up to the present day (we ourselves dwell in the little world of the exceptions and, so to speak, in the evil zone): — when, I say, in spite of this, new and deviate ideas, evaluations, drives again and again broke out, they did so accompanied by a dreadful attendant: almost everywhere it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea, which broke the spell of a venerated usage and superstition. Do you understand why it had to be madness which did this? Something in voice and bearing as uncanny and incalculable as the demonic moods of the weather and the sea and therefore worthy of a similar awe and observation? something that bore so visibly the sign of total unfreedom as the convulsions and froth of the epileptic, that seemed to mark the madman as the mask and speaking-trumpet of a divinity? Something that awoke in the bearer of a new idea himself reverence for and dread of himself and no longer pangs of conscience and drove him to become the prophet and martyr of his idea? — while it is constantly suggested to us today that, instead of his grain of salt, a grain of spice of madness is joined to genius, all earlier people found it much more likely that wherever there is madness there is also a grain of genius and wisdom — something ‘divine’, as one whispered to oneself. Or rather: as one said aloud forcefully enough. ‘It is through madness that the greatest good things have come to Greece’, Plato said, in concert with all ancient mankind.

Chicken Francese, or lamb chops, or plump spinach gnocchi that she'd roll out by hand and drop into boiling salt water. When her brothers came home for the holidays, she'd spend days in the kitchen, preparing airy latkes and sweet and sour brisket; roast turkey with chestnut stuffing; elaborately iced layer cakes. She'd stay in the kitchen for hours, cooking dish after dish, hoping that all the food would somehow conceal their father's absence; hoping that the meals would take the taste of grief out of their mouths. "After my father died, I think cooking saved me. It was the only thing that made me happy. Everything else felt so out of control. But if I followed a recipe, if I used the right amounts of the right ingredients and did everything I was supposed to do..." She tried to explain it- how repetitive motions of peeling and chopping felt like a meditation, the comfort of knowing that flour and yeast, oil and salt, combined in the correct proportions, would always yield a loaf of bread; the way that making a shopping list could refocus her mind, and how much she enjoyed the smells of fresh rosemary, of roasting chicken or baking cookies, the velvety feel of a ball of dough at the precise moment when it reached its proper elasticity and could be put into an oiled bowl, under a clean cloth, to rise in a warm spot in the kitchen, the same step that her mother's mother's mother would have followed to make the same kind of bread. She liked to watch popovers rising to lofty heights in the oven's heat, blooming out of their tins. She liked the sound of a hearty soup or grain-thickened stew, simmering gently on a low flame, the look of a beautifully set table, with place cards and candles and fine china. All of it pleased her.

The cuisine of Northern Iran, overlooked and underrated, is unlike most Persian food in that it's unfussy and lighthearted as the people from that region. The fertile seaside villages of Mazandaran and Rasht, where Soli grew up before moving to the congested capital, were lush with orchards and rice fields. His father had cultivated citrus trees and the family was raised on the fruits and grains they harvested. Alone in the kitchen, without Zod's supervision, he found himself turning to the wholesome food of his childhood, not only for the comfort the simple compositions offered, but because it was what he knew so well as he set about preparing a homecoming feast for Zod's only son. He pulled two kilos of fava beans from the freezer. Gathered last May, shucked and peeled on a quiet afternoon, they defrosted in a colander for a layered frittata his mother used to make with fistfuls of dill and sprinkled with sea salt. One flat of pale green figs and a bushel of new harvest walnuts were tied to the back of his scooter, along with two crates of pomegranates- half to squeeze for fresh morning juice and the other to split and seed for rice-and-meatball soup. Three fat chickens pecked in the yard, unaware of their destiny as he sharpened his cleaver. Tomorrow they would braise in a rich, tangy stew with sour red plums, their hearts and livers skewered and grilled, then wrapped in sheets of lavash with bouquets of tarragon and mint. Basmati rice soaked in salted water to be steamed with green garlic and mounds of finely chopped parsley and cilantro, then served with a whole roasted, eight kilo white fish stuffed with barberries, pistachios, and lime. On the farthest burner, whole bitter oranges bobbed in blossom syrup, to accompany rice pudding, next to a simmering pot of figs studded with cardamom pods for preserves.

The tofu pocket is soaked with butter, every bite of it drenching the lips... ... sending rich waves gushing through the mouth. Just one taste is enough to seep both tongue and mind in a thick flood of butter! "The tofu pocket is so juicy it's nearly dripping, yet it hasn't drowned the filling at all. The rice is delectably fluffy and delicate, done in true pilaf style, with the grains separate, tender and not remotely sticky. Simmered in fragrant chicken broth, the prawns give it a delightful crunch, while ample salt and pepper boost both its flavor and aroma!" "The whole dish is strongly flavored, but it isn't the least bit heavy or sticky. The deliciousness of every ingredient, wrapped in a cloak of rich butter, wells up with each bite like a gushing, savory spring! How on earth did you manage to create this powerful a flavor?!" "Well, first I sautéed the rice for the pilaf without washing it- one of the major rules of pilafs! If you wash all the starch off the rice, the grains get crumbly and the whole thing can wind up tasting tacky instead of tender. Then I thoroughly rinsed the tofu pockets with hot water to wash off the extra oil so they'd soak up the seasonings better. But the biggest secret to the whole thing... ... was my specially made Mochi White Sauce! Normal white sauce is made with lots of milk, butter and flour, making it really thick and heavy. But I made mine using only soy milk and mochi, so it's still rich and creamy without the slightest hint of greasiness. In addition, I sprinkled a blend of several cheeses on top of everything when I put it in the oven to toast. They added some nice hints of mellow saltiness to the dish without making it too heavy! Basically, I shoved all the tasty things I could think of into my dish... ... pushing the rich, savory flavor as hard as I could until it was just shy of too much... and this is the result!" Some ingredients meld with the butter's richness into mellow deliciousness... ... while others, sautéed in butter, have become beautifully savory and aromatic. Into each of these little inari sushi pockets has gone an immense amount of work across uncountable steps and stages. Undaunted by Mr. Saito's brilliant dish, gleaming with the fierce goodness of seafood... each individual ingredient is loudly and proudly declaring its own unique deliciousness!

Serves 2 Prep time: 10 minutes Cook time: 15 minutes Total time: 25 minutes 1 head cauliflower, cut into florets (about 4 cups) 2 cloves garlic, minced ½ cup coconut cream 2 tablespoons ghee or clarified butter 1 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon black pepper ½ cup chicken broth 1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley This may be the most versatile recipe ever. It’s a lighter substitute for mashed potatoes, and has dozens of variations to match nearly any style of cuisine. Add more chicken broth if you like it extra creamy, or keep the chicken broth to just a tablespoon or so if you prefer it really thick. Try topping with crumbled Whole30-compliant bacon or crispy prosciutto; add a blend of fresh herbs like rosemary, oregano, and thyme; kick it up a notch with 2 tablespoons of grated, peeled fresh horseradish root or 1 teaspoon chili powder; add a dollop of whole grain mustard (perfect alongside pork); or stir in shredded cabbage and kale sautéed in clarified butter or ghee. Bring 2 cups of water to a boil in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the cauliflower florets and garlic and simmer until the florets are fork-tender, about 15 minutes. Drain the cauliflower and transfer to a food processor. Add the coconut cream, ghee, salt, and pepper and pulse until the cauliflower begins to turn smooth in consistency. Add the chicken broth one tablespoon at a time, pulsing to mix, until the desired consistency is achieved. Add the parsley and continue blending until completely smooth. Serve warm. Make It a Meal: This dish goes well with anything. Seriously, anything. But if you made us pick a few favorites, we’d say Braised Beef Brisket, Chicken Meatballs, Halibut with Citrus-Ginger Glaze, and Walnut-Crusted Pork Tenderloin. ✪Mashing You can use a variety of tools for this dish, depending on how you prefer the texture of your mash. If you prefer a silky smooth mash, the food processor is a must. If you like it really chunky, use a hand tool (like a potato masher or large kitchen fork) instead. If you like your mash somewhere in between, try using an immersion blender.

Each ingredient makes its own authentic contribution to the whole, yet each ingredient changes—the salt and the sugar become one—transformed by the four elements of the Universe: fire in the oven, water from the tap, earth in the grain, the air embracing all.

Chicken Salad à la Danny Kaye YIELD: 4 SERVINGS TO MOST AMERICANS, Danny Kaye is remembered as a splendid comedian and actor. I think of him as a friend and one of the finest cooks I have ever known. In every way, Danny was equal to or better than any trained chef. His technique was flawless. The speed at which he worked was on par with what you’d find in a Parisian brigade de cuisine. Danny taught me a great deal, mostly about Chinese cuisine, his specialty. Whenever I traveled to Los Angeles, Danny picked me up at the airport and took me to his house, where we cooked Chinese or French food. His poached chicken was the best I have ever had. His method was to put the chicken in a small stockpot, cover it with tepid water seasoned with salt, peppercorns, and vegetables, and cook it at a gentle boil for only 10 minutes, then set it aside off the heat for 45 minutes. As an added touch, he always stuck a handful of knives, forks, and spoons into the cavity of the chicken, to keep it submerged. The result is so moist, tender, and flavorful that I have used the recipe—minus the flatware—ever since. CHICKEN 1 chicken, about 3½ pounds ½ cup sliced carrot 1 cup sliced onion 1 small leek, washed and left whole 1 rib celery, washed and left whole 1 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon black peppercorns 2 sprigs thyme 2 bay leaves About 7 cups tepid water, or more if needed DRESSING 2 tablespoons Dijon-style mustard 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar 1 teaspoon finely chopped garlic ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper ½ teaspoon Tabasco hot pepper sauce 5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil GARNISHES 1 dozen Boston lettuce leaves, cleaned 2 dozen fresh tarragon leaves FOR THE CHICKEN: Place the chicken breast side down in a tall, narrow pot, so it fits snugly at the bottom. Add the remaining poaching ingredients. The chicken should be submerged, and the water should extend about 1 inch above it. Bring to a gentle boil, cover, and let boil gently for two minutes. Remove the pot from the heat, and set it aside to steep in the hot broth for 45 minutes. Remove the chicken from the pot, and set it aside on a platter to cool for a few minutes. (The stock can be strained and frozen for up to 6 months for use in soup.) Pick the meat from the chicken bones, discarding the skin, bones, and fat. Shred the meat with your fingers, following the grain and pulling it into strips. (The meat tastes better shredded than diced with a knife.) FOR THE DRESSING: Mix together all the dressing ingredients in a bowl large enough to hold the chicken salad. Add the chicken shreds to the dressing and toss well. Arrange the Boston lettuce leaves in a “nest” around the periphery of a platter, and spoon the room-temperature chicken salad into the center. Sprinkle with the tarragon leaves and serve.

We are, each of us, the most magnificent bits of grain, Of salt, of sand, of dirt, and dust. We are purveyors of fortunes in nothingness. We are fine inheritors of rust.

I first imagined each moment separate, inspired, consecutive. I could have cast the film—myself the female lead, you the star. I wore color—magenta. lavender, lime. You were in white, something textured that moved with your body. The music was sensuous, full orchestra scored for harp, piccolo, twelve double basses, a chime. The premiere, well-attended, prices high. Those who didn't like it find little to like in this world. The critics, through careful eyes, decided our performance was fresh, the location on the cliff above the ocean a splendid choice on someone's part, the humor warm. But time extracts. After the blast, the slow boil, the few grains cupped in the palm. The orchestra was really scored for wind and pelican, the dry flick of lizard. The lily, with petals like white tongues, appeared from nowhere, and the gull remained stone-still. as gulls do not do. The costumes were too simple: sun and salt on skin, and the actors kept changing roles, crawling into one another’s lines, saying the wrong words when they spoke at all, finding it hard to think in vertigo, their love clouded with a retinue of men and women, former actors who wanted the parts. The critics made no sense of the film, double-exposed, sprocket holes on either side and a garbled sound track that wove ‘always’ and ‘never’ into one word. The beginning appeared in the last scene, and the climax was a whorl of color, like looking too long at the sun through closed eyelids. One thing someone found to praise: a clear shot of a shining feather lying on a stone in the path.

People know your name, not your story. They've heard what you've done but not what you've been through. So take their opinions of you with a grain of salt. In the end, it's not what others think of you but what you feel about yourself that counts…

There have been many types of money. The most familiar is the coin, which is a standardised piece of imprinted metal. Yet money existed long before the invention of coinage, and cultures have prospered using other things as currency, such as shells, cattle, skins, salt, grain, beads, cloth and promissory notes.

When doing research before choosing your stack, steer away from assumptions and take all benchmarks with a grain of salt. Benchmarks are like political polls; their results always depend on who prepared them. Always assume that there was some agenda behind a benchmark. To gain value from a benchmark, understand what was measured, how was it done, and under what conditions.

I hate you one tiny grain-of-salt sized minuscule of an itty bit less.

White salt, black salt, gray salt—in grains of every size: from near-powder to flakes to great, rough hunks of it. Salts for protection against darker powers. Against demons. Many Vanir built their houses with slabs of salt at the cornerstones. Rumor claimed that the entire base of the Asteri’s crystal palace was a slab of salt. That it had been built atop a natural deposit.

INDIVIDUAL BAKED EGG CASSEROLES Prep Time: 10 minutes / Cook Time: 30 minutes / Serves 2 vegetarian In case you were wondering . . . eggs are back on the Do Eat list! The yolks don’t raise your cholesterol (it’s the butter and bacon that do that!) and in fact, they’re a good source of protein, healthy fats, vitamin D, choline, and antioxidants. Eggs also pair nicely with vegetables, which makes them perfect for any meal. 1 slice whole-grain bread 4 large eggs, beaten 3 tablespoons milk ¼ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon onion powder ¼ teaspoon garlic powder Pinch freshly ground black pepper ¾ cup chopped vegetables (any kind you like—e.g., cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, scallions, spinach, broccoli, etc.) 1.Heat the oven to 375°F and set the rack to the middle position. Oil two 8-ounce ramekins and place them on a baking sheet. 2.Tear the bread into pieces and line each ramekin with ½ of a slice. 3.Mix the eggs, milk, salt, onion powder, garlic powder, pepper, and vegetables in a medium bowl. 4.Pour half of the egg mixture into each ramekin. 5.Bake for 30 minutes, or until the eggs are set.

Just grind coffee—keep it coarse, with grains about the size of sea salt—and combine it with twice as much water in an airtight jar. Give it a hard shake and stick it somewhere cool overnight (I used a cooler bag loaded with ice from ice camp and wrapped the whole thing in bubble wrap for insulation). In the morning, strain it through a colander and a paper coffee filter. What you’ve got now is coffee concentrate, which you can dilute with cold water to taste—I go about half and half. If you’re feeling fancy, serve it over ice.

A moment. Did I mention it? Charles, perhaps finding that he was not much of a success with the lower middle classes, developed in middle life a habit of ennobling the friends who did the decent thing by him. One finds his record full of barons and comtes; the grain of salt is recommended.

Refer to the following chart for liquid-to-grain ratios and remember the rule of thumb, 1 cup of uncooked rice will serve 2 to 3 people. Simply bring your chosen liquid—water, stock, and coconut milk all work well—to a boil, season it generously with salt, and add the rice (or quinoa, which I like to cook the same way). Reduce to a very gentle simmer, cover, and cook until the liquid has all been absorbed and the grains are tender. Let it rest covered for 10 minutes after you turn off the heat. And, apart from risotto—which is an entirely different story—never, ever stir rice while it’s cooking. Just fluff it with a fork before serving.

Red Wine Vinaigrette Makes about 1/2 cup 1 tablespoon finely diced shallot 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil Salt Freshly ground black pepper In a small bowl or jar, let the shallot sit in the vinegar for 15 minutes to macerate (see page 118), then add the olive oil, a generous pinch of salt, and a small pinch of pepper. Stir or shake to combine, then taste with a leaf of lettuce and adjust salt and acid as needed. Cover and refrigerate leftovers for up to 3 days. Ideal for garden lettuces, arugula, chicories, Belgian endive, Little Gem and romaine lettuce, beets, tomatoes, blanched, grilled, or roasted vegetables of any kind, and for Bright Cabbage Slaw, Fattoush, Grain or Bean Salad, Greek Salad, Spring Panzanella.

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.

How to: Dissolve 1½ tablespoons salt in 2 quarts cold water in a large container. Use a deep container (a bowl rather than a wide Dutch oven) to ensure that the beans remain submerged as they hydrate and swell. Add the pound of rinsed beans and soak at room temperature for at least 8 hours or up to 24 hours. Drain and rinse them well before using. BEFORE BRINING The strong pectin molecules in the bean’s skin are tightly bound into a network by calcium and magnesium ions.

Hot-water cornbread was a favorite of African Americans. Clara Butler recalled that her grandmother Betty Sadler Manning made it from homegrown cornmeal, salt, sugar, and melted bacon drippings, plus of course boiling water, and she fried it in bacon fat as well.

Wealthy white southerners, obligated with provisioning their indentured servants and enslaved people, considered corn to be the most appropriate, and often only, source of food for their charges. Enslaved people often had cornbread three times a day, sometimes with fat pork or salt herring on the side. Not only was corn cheaper and easier to grow than wheat, but Europeans thought that it provided more energy for working people.

Yellow onions (2) Dairy Buttermilk, low fat (1 small carton) Cheese, Cheddar, shredded (1 cup) Cheese, feta (¼ cup) Cheese, mozzarella, shredded (½ cup) Cheese, mozzarella, fresh (½ pound) Cheese, Parmesan, grated (¾ cup) Cheese, white Cheddar, shredded (¾ cup) Eggs, large (26) Milk, skim (½ gallon) Tofu, extra firm, 1 (14-ounce) package Yogurt, nonfat fruit-flavored Greek (2 [6-ounce] containers) Yogurt, nonfat plain Greek (1 [32-ounce] tub) Meat, Poultry, and Fish Chicken breast (1½ pounds) Fish, white (cod, haddock, or tilapia) (2 pounds) Pork tenderloin (2 pounds) Tuna, albacore (1 [6.4-ounce] pouch) Turkey, ground (3 pounds) Canned, Bottled, and Dried Goods Beans, black, no salt added (3 [15-ounce] cans) Chickpeas, no salt added (2 [15-ounce] cans) Crackers, whole grain (1 small box) Juice, apple (1 small bottle) Marinara (1 [24-ounce] jar) Olives, kalamata (1 small jar) Purée, sweet potato or pumpkin (1 [15-ounce] can) Red peppers, roasted (1 small jar) Salad dressing (1 small bottle) Soy sauce, low sodium (1 small bottle) Tomatoes, diced, no salt added, fire roasted (1 [10-ounce] can) Frozen Peaches (1½ cups) Vegetables, cooked, any variety (2 bags) Grains

sometimes first he would shout at her, in English it seemed but we couldn’t understand it, and besides we were too scared to listen, we ran from the room at those times. It was so shocking at first; then it became something that could happen, something we were watchful for, so that when he was friendly, or contrite and remorseful, we would take it with a grain of salt, not knowing if he might turn on us in a second. Volatile people, you can’t trust them, that’s the thing; and they know it. So that even if they feel remorse, it does no good, and they know that too. So they get lonely. And they feel the remorse less and less, maybe. They give up. In any case, he left. One day Mother woke us, she was crying as she told us that he wouldn’t be coming back, that we would have to move again. We all sat on the stairs and cried.

A closer look at inflammatory foods in the gut Studies keep showing that the complex carbohydrates you’ll find in whole fruits, veggies, legumes, and whole grains are anything but inflammatory. They’re actually anti-inflammatory. But we rely on our gut microbiome to process them, and if there’s damage to the gut then it’s also impaired in carbohydrate processing, which leads to digestive distress. That’s not inflammation, that’s just sloppy processing. It doesn’t hurt you beyond the acute symptoms. But what does hurt you is the effect that you see from animal product consumption—less SCFA-producing good bacteria, more inflammatory bacteria, increased intestinal permeability, release of bacterial endotoxin, creation of carcinogenic secondary bile salts/polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons/N-nitroso compounds/heterocyclic aromatic amines, and vascular disease-fueling TMAO. Yes, it is easier for our body to digest and process meat. We don’t rely on our microbiome as much for that. So you may not feel any discomfort, but keep in mind what’s happening inside you. Silent but deadly.

Season all your grain offerings with salt to remind you of God’s eternal covenant. Never forget to add salt to your grain offerings.

If we then follow the evidence and the logic, we can assume that the solution is to subtract foods of excess from our daily fare. And, as we subtract meat, fish, fowl, eggs, dairy products, oil, salt, sugar, and refined carbohydrates from our diet, what remains are foods that promote health. Fresh fruits and vegetables, tubers, whole grains, legumes, and nuts and seeds fill the void after the subtraction has taken place. In response, the previously overburdened body begins to regain its health.

Shopping for the essentials of the Eat Clean diet can be tricky. For some people, just the thought of replacing all their “unclean” food scares them. This overwhelming reaction is normal and is typical among those who are still on the adjustment phase of the program. If you find yourself in this stage, you don’t have to fret. Here are some tips to help you get at ease with the process: Take Your Time You don’t have to rush. Take your time in examining each item in your pantry. Bear in mind that it is not necessary to eliminate all the bad foods. You can just eliminate the worst items first, and then gradually get rid of the others in the next few days or weeks. Once you have already discarded some of the worst food items, you may start making your grocery list. Prepare Your Grocery List Preparing your grocery list is the start of this Clean Eating journey. Allow yourself to make necessary adjustments, especially if you personally feel that it is a major transition and you want to tackle it step by step. It’s okay to miss an item or two. The important thing here is to stick to the basic principle of the program. Below are some of the essential items that you should consider when going shopping for this Eat Clean diet: Grains and Protein ·Brown rice ·Millet ·Black beans ·Pinto beans ·Lentils ·Chickpeas ·Raw almonds ·Raw cashews ·Sunflower seeds ·Walnuts ·Almond butter ·Cannellini beans ·Flax seed Vegetables/Herbs ·Kale ·Lettuces ·Onions ·Garlic ·Cilantro ·Parsley ·Tomatoes ·Broccoli ·Potatoes ·Fennel Condiments/Flavoring ·Extra virgin olive oil ·Coconut oil ·Sesame oil ·Black pepper ·Pink Himalayan salt ·Hot sauce ·Turmeric ·Cayenne ·Gomasio ·Cinnamon ·Red pepper flakes ·Maple syrup ·Tamari ·Stevia ·Dijon mustard ·Apple cider vinegar ·Red wine vinegar Fruits ·Lemons ·Avocado ·Apples ·Bananas ·Melon ·Grapes ·Berries Snacks ·Raw chocolate ·Coconut ice cream ·Tortilla chips ·Popcorn ·Pretzels ·Dairy-free cheese shreds ·Frozen fruits for smoothies ·Bagged frozen veggies ·Organic canned soups Beverages ·Coconut water ·Herbal teas ·Almond or hemp milk Pick the Fresh Ones You will know if the fruit or vegetable is fresh through its appearance and texture.

Immerse yourself in good books. Read one to two hours per week if you can, more if time permits. Become acquainted with the literary classics. Read as much as you can on personal improvement (self help), history, people, business, and finances. Study the great works of the philosophers. Study scriptures and read about religions and anything that adds value to religious beliefs. Invest in yourself! Learn as much as you can and become a student of life. You can learn a great deal from the experiences of others, from their great successes and also from their failures. Everything you read becomes part of you. Carefully choose what you read on a daily basis. Be very careful with what you choose to read. The words you choose to read play an important role in your personal development and overall outlook on life. Be open-minded about what you read and often take what you read with a grain of salt. Much of what we read is written through colored lenses and is the summation of someone else’s thought, habit, education, beliefs, and past and present life experiences.

the macrobiotic and the natural raw food diets are two totally different approaches. The raw food people never cook anything, seldom eat bread or grains, and are very careful not to eat fruits and vegetables at the same meal. And they never use salt. The macrobiotic people cook almost all of their food, have a different system of food combining, and use a lot of salt. Both systems work. Both systems have healed bodies. But neither system is good for everybody’s body.

And yet erewhile, when thou wert in the ear, Even as a (golden) glittering grain, even then The fireflies came to cast on thee their light ^ And aid thy growth, because without their help Thou couldsl not grow nor beautiful become; Therefore thou dost belong unto the race Of witches or of fairies, and because The fireflies do belong unto the sun. . , , Queen of the Fireflies ! hurry apace,-Come to me now as if running a race, Bridle the horse as you hear me now sing! Bridle, O bridle the son of the king ! Come in a hurry and bring him to me! The son of the king will ere long set thee free; ' Theie is an evident association here of [he body of the firefly which much resembles a grain of wheat) wilh the latter. ' The six lines followiDg are oilen heard as 3. nursery rhyme. And because thou for ever art brilliant and fair, Under a glass I will keep thee; while there, With a lens I will study thy secrets concealed, Till all their bright mysteries are fully revealed. Yea, all the wondrous lore perplexed Of this life of our cross and of the next. Thus to all mysteries I shall attain, Yea, even to that at last of the grain; And when this at last I shall truly know. Firefly, freely I'll let thee go! When Earth's dark secrets are known to me. My blessing at last I will give to thee! Here follows the Conjuration of the Salt. Conjuration of the Salt. I do conjure thee, salt, lo! here at noon, Exactly in the middle of a stream I take my place and see the water round, Likewise the sun, and think of nothing else White here besides the water and the sun: For all my soul is turned in truth to them; I do indeed desire no other thought, I yearn to learn the very truth of truths. For I have suffered long with the desire To know my future or my coming fate. If good or evil will prevail in it. Water and sun, be gracious unto me ! Here follows the Conjuration of Cain. AMDU Scongiurasione di Caino. Tuo Caino, tu non possa aver Ne pace e ne bene fino che Dal sole' andaCe non sarai coi piedi Correndo, le mani battendo, E pregarlo per me che mi faccia sapere, II mio destino, se cattiva fosse, Allora me lo faccia cambiare, Se questa grazia mi farete, L' acqua al lo splendor del sol la guardero: E tu Caino colla tua bocca mi diiai II mio destino quale sark: Se questa grazia o Caino non mi farai, Pace e bene non avrai! The

I have no doubt that she is sincerely desirous of seeing all the evils of suffering humanity remedied, and that she thinks this might easily be done, if Government would only undertake it. But, alas! that poor unfortunate personage, like Figaro, knows not to whom to listen, nor where to turn. The hundred thousand mouths of the press and of the platform cry out all at once:-- "Organize labour and workmen. "Do away with egotism. "Repress insolence and the tyranny of capital. "Make experiments upon manure and eggs. "Cover the country with railways. "Irrigate the plains. "Plant the hills. "Make model farms. "Found social workshops. "Colonize Algeria. "Suckle children. "Instruct the youth. "Assist the aged. "Send the inhabitants of towns into the country. "Equalize the profits of all trades. "Lend money without interest to all who wish to borrow." "Emancipate Italy, Poland, and Hungary." "Rear and perfect the saddle-horse." "Encourage the arts, and provide us with musicians and dancers." "Restrict commerce, and at the same time create a merchant navy." "Discover truth, and put a grain of reason into our heads. The mission of Government is to enlighten, to develop, to extend, to fortify, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people." "Do have a little patience, gentlemen," says Government in a beseeching tone. "I will do what I can to satisfy you, but for this I must have resources. I have been preparing plans for five or six taxes, which are quite new, and not at all oppressive. You will see how willingly people will pay them." Then comes a great exclamation:--"No! indeed! where is the merit of doing a thing with resources? Why, it does not deserve the name of a Government! So far from loading us with fresh taxes, we would have you withdraw the old ones. You ought to suppress "The salt tax, "The tax on liquors, "The tax on letters, "Custom-house duties, "Patents." In

This book is a story, and like all stories, it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Almond Flatbread Autophagy activators: SP, SA, SU, PO, VIT Makes 4 servings • Prep time: 5 minutes • Cook time: 25 minutes This flatbread uses high-protein almond flour instead of wheat or other grain-based flour, giving you a bread that won’t cause a spike in your blood sugar. Enjoy it with Tahini. 1 cup almond flour 1 teaspoon sea salt 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 4 tablespoons tea seed oil, plus more for brushing ½ large onion, thinly sliced 1 cup finely chopped kale 2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary 1. Preheat the oven to 450°F. Put a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet in the oven to preheat. 2. In a large bowl, combine the almond flour, salt, and pepper. While whisking, slowly add 1 cup lukewarm water and whisk to eliminate lumps. Stir in 2 tablespoons of the oil. Cover and let sit while the oven heats, or for up to 12 hours. The batter should have the consistency of heavy cream. 3. Carefully remove the hot pan from the oven, pour the remaining 2 tablespoons oil into the pan, and swirl to coat. Add the onion and return the pan to the oven. Bake, stirring once or twice, until the onion is well browned, 6 to 8 minutes. Add the kale and rosemary and stir to combine. 4. Carefully remove the pan from the oven and transfer the onion-kale mixture to the bowl with the batter. Stir to combine, then immediately pour the batter into the pan. 5. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, until the edges look set. Remove from the oven and switch the oven to broil, with a rack a few inches away from the heating element. 6. Brush the top of the bread with 1 to 2 tablespoons oil. Broil just long enough for the bread to brown and blister a little on top. 7. Cut the bread into four wedges, and serve hot or warm with some grass-fed ghee or butter. Nutritional analysis per serving (¼ flatbread): fat 28g, protein 6g, carbohydrate 8g, net carbs 4g

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissention, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed. Fascism does not want them, forbids them…it wants everyone to be the same, and you’re not. —Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

Between culinary school, a year and a half of apprentice stages all over the world in amazing restaurants, ten years as the personal chef of talk show phenom Maria De Costa, and six years as Patrick's culinary slave, I am nothing if not efficient in the kitchen. I grab eggs, butter, chives, a packet of prosciutto, my favorite nonstick skillet. I crack four eggs, whip them quickly with a bit of cold water, and then use my Microplane grater to grate a flurry of butter into them. I heat my pan, add just a tiny bit more butter to coat the bottom, and let it sizzle while I slice two generous slices off the rustic sourdough loaf I have on the counter and drop them in the toaster. I dump the eggs in the pan, stirring constantly over medium-low heat, making sure they cook slowly and stay in fluffy curds. The toast pops, and I put them on a plate, give them a schmear of butter, and lay two whisper-thin slices of prosciutto on top. The eggs are ready, set perfectly; dry but still soft and succulent, and I slide them out of the pan on top of the toast, and quickly mince some chives to confetti on top. A sprinkle of gray fleur de sel sea salt, a quick grinding of grains of paradise, my favorite African pepper, and I hand the plate to Patrick, who rises from the loveseat to receive it, grabs a fork from the rack on my counter, and heads out of my kitchen toward the dining room. Dumpling followed him, tail wagging, like a small furry acolyte.

The red gravy was the starting point- sauce 'tomate' to her mom, the mother sauce. She grabbed a big yellow onion, two ribs of celery, a fat carrot, and a handful of parsley, the 'quattro evangelistas,' the "four saints," of Italian cooking. She diced the onion, celery, and carrot first, then cut a sweet red pepper and parsley even finer, like grains of wet sand, running the knife through them again and again. She picked off five cloves of garlic, smashed, peeled, and gave them a rough dice, so that they'd flavor the sauce but not overwhelm it. Three big glugs of olive oil went into the heated pot, followed by the 'evangelistas,' salt and pepper, and only then by the garlic, so it wouldn't burn. She folded in a dollop of tomato paste. While they simmered, she stripped a handful of dried herbs from the collection she kept hanging- rosemary, basil, thyme, oregano- then rubbed her hands together over the pot and watched the flecks drift down like tiny green snowflakes.

The Big Five extinctions are simply slightly more intense than the sixth- or seventh-largest declines, and you could just as easily discuss the Big Seven or Big Ten, depending on how you sliced up the data. This tally refers only to extinctions since the “Cambrian explosion,” the sudden proliferation of complex animal life 542 million years ago, and it neglects extinction events that happened earlier, during several billion years of evolution dominated by simpler organisms. So, though the changes occurring right now are often referred to as the beginning of a possible “sixth extinction,” take this with a grain of salt. It’s good to focus attention on the dramatic loss of species currently under way and how this fits into the history of extinction events on Earth, but this also reinforces an incomplete picture of Earth’s dynamic history. Post-Alvarez,

I took it all with a grain of salt.

For comparison, tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.

SHRIMP PAELLA Serves 4 Prep time: 10 minutes Cook time: 25 minutes DAIRY-FREE | GLUTEN-FREE | QUICK & EASY Paella is the national dish of Spain. It usually consists of saffron-scented rice cooked with vegetables and topped with a mixture of seafood, sausage, and other meats. This simplified version includes shrimp and peas. A paella pan is the ideal cooking vessel, but a large cast-iron skillet is a fine substitute. 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 medium onion, diced 1 red bell pepper, diced 3 cloves garlic, minced Pinch of saffron (about 8 threads) ¼ teaspoon hot paprika 1 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 3 cups chicken broth, divided 1 cup short-grain white rice 1 pound peeled and deveined large shrimp 1 cup frozen peas, thawed 1. Heat the oil in a wide, heavy skillet set over medium heat. Add the onion and bell pepper and cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables are softened, about 6 minutes. Add the garlic, saffron, paprika, salt, and pepper and stir to mix. Stir in 2½ cups of broth, and the rice. 2. Bring the mixture to a boil, then lower the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the rice is nearly cooked through, about 12 minutes. Scatter the shrimp and peas over the rice and add the remaining ½ cup of broth. Place the lid back on the skillet and cook for about 5 minutes more, until the shrimp are just cooked through. Serve immediately.

Mochi Makes about 2 cups, or 15 balls 2 cups sweet brown rice ¼ tsp sea salt ½ cup toasted chopped nuts or seeds   Soak rice for 6–1 0 hours. Drain and discard soaking water. Rinse. Add fresh water to cover. Bring to a boil. When boiling, lower heat, cover, and simmer for 50 minutes. Remove from heat and allow to rest for 10 minutes.Add salt. Place rice in a heavy-duty electric mixer and knead for 10 minutes or until 90% of the grains are broken open and the mixture is sticky and smooth. Alternately, using a large wooden pestle (or baseball bat), vigorously pound the rice for 20 minutes or until the grains are broken and the rice becomes sticky and smooth. Roll mochi into small balls about the size of a walnut shell. Then roll the balls in the toasted nuts or seeds and serve.

The back-and-forth ancient lull of the tide. The cry of seagulls passing overhead. The smell of salt and fish carried on the warm breeze. With each step along the old wooden planks of the pier, tiny grains of sand that hitchhiked from the beach below are pulverized under our heels. Sand that traveled millions of miles over billions of years across shifting continents and churning oceans, surviving plate tectonics, erosion, and sedimentary deposition is crushed by our new sandals. The cosmos can be cruel.

celeriac and sausage hash prep time: 15 minutes cooking time: 20 minutes yield: 4 servings Celeriac, or celery root, is a fascinating potato substitute and works especially well in breakfast dishes. A hash is a substantial way to start off your day, and you can make it even more substantial by topping each portion with a fried egg. ingredients 1 tablespoon coconut oil or ghee 2 cups celeriac, trimmed of roots, peeled, and cubed ½ pound breakfast sausage, crumbled (see here or store-bought) ¾ cup finely diced carrots ¼ cup minced yellow onion ¾ cup finely diced zucchini ½ cup chopped cremini mushrooms 1 teaspoon chopped fresh parsley 1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary ¼ teaspoon sea salt Cracked black pepper to taste method Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Place the celeriac in the skillet and cook for 5 minutes. Add the sausage, carrots, and onion. Continue cooking for 10 minutes, or until the meat is cooked through and the vegetables have softened. Add the remaining ingredients and cook for 6 to 8 minutes longer, or until the mushrooms and zucchini are tender.   tidbits: To trim and peel a celery root, first slice the bottom off so that there is a flat surface to place on a cutting board. Using a sharp knife, cut the peel and roots off in strips, from top to bottom. If the celeriac is somewhat smooth, a vegetable peeler will also work.  

The classification above is based on a 2011 presentation by MIT grad student David Hernandez for my cosmology class. Because such simplistic taxonomies are strictly impossible, they should be taken with a large grain of salt:

The bile salts secreted by the gallbladder, which are needed for the digestion of fat and, therefore, the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, and K, are made of cholesterol. Having a low cholesterol level in the body would therefore compromise a person’s ability to digest fat.

Take it with a whole shaker of salt, a grain won't be close to enough.

Three people I take their words with a grain of salt: a person in love, a drunk and an insurance agent. They never really mean exactly what they say.

Spicy Cream of Chicken Soup Ingredients: 1 large onion, chopped 2 carrots, chopped 1 1/2 garam masala 5 cups chicken stock 1/4 cup parsley 3 pound chicken, quartered 1/2 cup long grain rice 1 cup half and half cream 1 cup frozen peas Salt and pepper to taste Directions: 1. Add onion, carrots, stock, parsley, garam masala, chicken, and rice to slow cooker and stir. 2. Cover and set slow cooker to low heat for 9 to 10 hours. 3. Remove chicken from stock with a slotted spoon and place on cutting board. 4. Remove meat from bones; dice chicken; dispose of skin and bones. Leave chicken on cutting board for now. 5. Puree vegetables and stock in a food processor until smooth; return to slow cooker. 6. Add cream and peas to slow cooker; return chicken to slow cooker. 7. Add salt and pepper until it reaches desired taste. Also, add more garam masala if desired. 8. Cover and set slow cooker on low for 20 minutes. Serving Suggestions: Add a delicious side of carrot or coconut rice to this spicy and savory soup.

4/20, CANNABIS DAY, APRIL 20 420 FARMERS’ MARKET RISOTTO Recipe from Chef Herb Celebrate the bounty of a new growing season with a dish that’s perfectly in season on April 20. Better known as 4/20, the once unremarkable date has slowly evolved into a new high holiday, set aside by stoners of all stripes to celebrate the herb among like-minded friends. The celebration’s origins are humble in nature: It was simply the time of day when four friends (dubbed “The Waldos”) met to share a joint each day in San Rafael, California. Little did they know that they were beginning a new ceremony that would unite potheads worldwide! Every day at 4:20 p.m., you can light up a joint in solidarity with other pot-lovers in your time zone. It’s a tradition that has caught on, and today, there are huge 4/20 parties and festivals in many cities, including famous gatherings of students in Boulder and Santa Cruz. An Italian rice stew, risotto is dense, rich, and intensely satisfying—perfect cannabis comfort cuisine. This risotto uses the freshest spring ingredients for a variation in texture and bright colors that stimulate the senses. Visit your local farmers’ market around April 20, when the bounty of tender new vegetables is beginning to be harvested after the long, dreary winter. As for tracking down the secret ingredient, you’ll have to find another kind of farmer entirely. STONES 4 4 tablespoons THC olive oil (see recipe) 1 medium leek, white part only, cleaned and finely chopped ½ cup sliced mushrooms 1 small carrot, grated ½ cup sugar snap peas, ends trimmed ½ cup asparagus spears, woody ends removed, cut into 1-inch-long pieces Freshly ground pepper 3½ cups low-sodium chicken broth ¼ cup California dry white wine Olive oil cooking spray 1 cup arborio rice 1 tablespoon minced fresh flat-leaf parsley ¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese Salt 1. In a nonstick skillet, heat 2 tablespoons of the THC olive oil over medium-low heat. Add leek and sauté until wilted, about 5 minutes. Stir in mushrooms and continue to cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Add carrot, sugar snap peas, and asparagus. Continue to cook, stirring, for another minute. Remove from heat, season with pepper, and set aside. 2. In a medium saucepan over high heat, bring broth and wine to a boil. Reduce heat and keep broth mixture at a slow simmer. 3. In a large pot that has been lightly coated with cooking spray, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons THC olive oil over medium heat. Add rice and stir well until all the grains of rice are coated. Pour in ½ cup of the hot broth and stir, using a wooden spoon, until all liquid is absorbed. Continue adding the broth ½ cup at a time, making sure the rice has absorbed the broth before adding more, reserving ¼ cup of broth for the vegetables. 4. Combine ¼ cup of the broth with the reserved vegetables. Once all broth has been added to the risotto and absorbed, add the vegetable mixture and continue to cook over low heat for 2 minutes. Rice should have a very creamy consistency. Remove from heat and stir in parsley, Parmesan, and salt to taste. Stir well to combine.

The transition of food to being an industrial product really has been a fundamental problem,” Willett said. “First, the actual processing has stripped away the nutritional value of the food. Most of the grains have been converted to starches. We have sugar in concentrated form, and many of the fats have been concentrated and then, worst of all, hydrogenated, which creates trans-fatty acids with very adverse effects on health.

Chicken Salad Sandwich - Shred or chop some leftover chicken, and combine it with diced celery, dice apples, cut grapes, a tiny bit of organic or vegan mayo, a squeeze of lemon, salt and pepper to taste. Serve on whole grain (or gluten-free) pita bread, sandwich slices, or bagel.

You are reading the words of a complete schmuck, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.   Wouldn't it be nice if all authors admitted what I just said? The world would surely be a lot less confusing if they did...

In the Indus Valley, the Nile Valley, and Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, barley-wheat cuisine supported small cities by 3000 B.C.E., as millet cuisine supported them in the Yellow River Valley.19 The cuisine of Mesopotamia is the best known of the barley-wheat cuisines, already thousands of years old in 1000 B.C.E. It was prepared in cities and villages on the flat plain, hot and parched much of the year, partly marshy and covered with reeds, the home of fish and waterfowl, featureless except for the channels bringing water to irrigate the fields and the date palms lining the pathways between the fields. The abundance of rich soil and water for growing barley and wheat outweighed the lack of timber, building stone, and other resources. The poor, including foot soldiers, prisoners, construction workers, and servants, survived almost exclusively on barley dishes, receiving roughly made conical pottery bowls containing about two liters (a little over eight cups) of barley grains, porridge, or bread daily. They ate these with a little salt and dried fish. Their diet was so meager that a popular saying went: “When a poor man has died, do not try to revive him. When he had bread, he had no salt; when he had salt, he had no bread.”20

SOLUTION: Add a few grains of salt to your cold cup and nuke it in the microwave for a minute. You’ll notice that your coffee tastes almost as good as when it was freshly brewed.

It seemed like everything we did had to do with food. As soon as breakfast was over, the women got busy cooking the mail meal of the day, which was served at noon. The rest of us went out to collect food. In the fields we gathered corn, then brought it back to the house, where we hung it up until it was needed to grind into cornmeal. “Yow! That’s a lot of salt! Why are you doing that?” “Salt dries out the fish and preserves it--so it will last through the winter.” “This is weird-looking corn--it’s all different colors!” “It’s Indian corn, child. It grows much better here than our English grains. And it will feed us through the winter.

Fluffy Pancakes Makes: 12 pancakes Ingredients: ●           3/4 cup blanched almond flour ●           1/4 cup coconut flour ●           1/4 Tbsp baking soda ●           1/2 tsp cream of tartar ●           1/8 tsp sea salt ●           Palm shortening ●           3 large eggs ●           1/2 cup almond milk or full fat coconut milk ●           1/8 cup coconut oil ●           1/8 cup honey or coconut crystals ●           1/2 tsp vanilla extract   Instructions: Combine together the flours, baking soda, cream of tartar, and sea salt in a bowl. In another bowl, beat the eggs, then whisk in the milk, flour mixture, oil, honey or coconut crystals, and vanilla extract. Blend until smooth. Place a cast iron skillet or griddle over medium flame and grease with palm shortening. Pour 1/4 cup of batter into the hot skillet and cook for a minute on one side, or until bubbles start to form. Turn over and cook for another minute. Cook all pancakes, then serve with honey or grade B maple syrup.

After years of the imposed invisibility of servitude, I am acutely aware when I am being watched, a sensitivity born from absence, a grain of salt on the tongue of a man who has tasted only bitter. As I checked the teapots to see whether they needed to be replenished, I felt a slight pressure. It was the weight of your eyes resting on my lips. I looked up, and I saw you standing next to a mirror reflecting the image of a wiry young man with deeply set, startled eyes. I looked up, and I was seeing myself beside you.

Breakfast Burrito Serves: 2 ½ cup chopped onion 1 cup chopped green bell pepper 1 cup sliced mushrooms 1 cup diced tomatoes 3 cups baby spinach or baby kale 8 ounces (½ block) firm tofu (or 3 eggs whites, see Note) 1 tablespoon nutritional yeast 1 teaspoon MatoZest*, Mrs. Dash, or other no-salt seasoning blend to taste 2 (100% whole grain) flour tortillas Water-sauté onions, peppers, mushrooms, and tomatoes until onion is translucent. Add greens and continue cooking until just wilted. Squeeze out as much water as possible from the tofu, then crumble it over the vegetable mixture and cook until tofu is just starting to turn golden. Stir in nutritional yeast and seasoning. Spread the cooked mixture on the tortillas and roll up to form burritos. Note: This recipe can be made with egg whites instead of or in addition to the tofu. Blend egg whites with ¼ cup nondairy milk, pour over the vegetable tofu mixture, and cook until eggs are done. PER SERVING: CALORIES 370; PROTEIN 26g; CARBOHYDRATE 50g; TOTAL FAT 9.6g; SATURATED FAT 1.5g; SODIUM 234mg; FIBER 12.4g; BETA-CAROTENE 9832mcg; VITAMIN C 199mg; CALCIUM 377mg; IRON 6.7mg; FOLATE 69mcg; MAGNESIUM 67mg; ZINC 1.8mg; SELENIUM 4.4mcg

Feisty Hummus Serves: 4 (yields 1½ cups) 1 cup cooked garbanzo beans or canned, no-salt-added or low-sodium, drained ¼ cup water ¼ cup raw unhulled sesame seeds 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice 1 tablespoon VegiZest* or other no-salt seasoning blend, adjusted to taste 1 teaspoon Bragg Liquid Aminos or low-sodium soy sauce 1 teaspoon horseradish 1 clove raw garlic Blend all ingredients in a high-powered blender until creamy and smooth. Serve with raw and lightly steamed vegetables or as a filling ingredient with a whole grain wrap or pita. PER SERVING: CALORIES 103; PROTEIN 5g; CARBOHYDRATE 12g; TOTAL FAT 4.5g; SATURATED FAT 0.6g; SODIUM 54mg; FIBER 3.6g; BETA-CAROTENE 6mcg; VITAMIN C 3mg; CALCIUM 95mg; IRON 2.2mg; FOLATE 71mcg; MAGNESIUM 45mg; ZINC 1.1mg; SELENIUM 3.9mcg

She’ll fill your ear. She’s never really liked me. Whatever Tom’s problems, she’ll blame me if she can. Same with his brother. Macon was always coming after Tom for something—a loan, advice, good word in the department, you name it. If I hadn’t stepped in, he’d have sucked Tom dry. You can do me a favor: Take anything they say with a grain of salt.” The disgruntled are good. They’ll tell you anything, I thought. Once in the kitchen, Selma hung her fur coat on the back of a chair. I watched while she unloaded the groceries and put items away. I would have helped, but she waved aside the offer, saying it was quicker if she did it herself. The kitchen walls were painted bright yellow, the floor a spatter of seamless white-and-yellow linoleum. A chrome-and-yellow-plastic upholstered dinette set filled an alcove with a bump-out window crowded with . . . I peered closer . . . artificial plants. She indicated a seat across the table from hers as she folded the bag neatly and put it in a rack bulging with other grocery bags. She moved to the refrigerator and opened the door. “What do you take in your coffee? I’ve got hazelnut coffee creamer or a little half-and-half.” She took out a small carton and gave the pouring spout an experimental sniff. She made a face to herself and set the carton in the sink. “Black’s fine.” “You sure?

In the basement of my fears, I memorised every line You wrote in your old perfumed letters. You said you would come back in 3 days, And each time I stood waiting Reciting your letter like a poem, I started to believe that you meant something else, Something more poetic when you said 3 days. I began to see everything in three; God the son, God the father, God the Holy Spirit. For three years I have been waiting Because if I lost my faith in God What would become of faith itself? And so, when she came, I took whatever she said with a grain of salt She promised to erase every memory of you, I did not want to disappoint her with the truth That I still remember you Whenever it rained That was how we met, You swept me with your beauty And showed me a wet letter When the sun shone, We dried it and the letter was never whole again, Maybe I should have taken a cue from it. love makes us blind When we are blind We don’t see disappointments Three days came, Three days met three decades, I was married, I had a child Yet I still had old memories of you, Your perfumed letters Were still ingrained in my mind For me to love you My lover had to die And your husband too had to die. So, we went to the chapel in secret And prayed for the death of people Who had promised to love us. And when they did die We run away On a boat Never to return To love ourselves like the character In the old perfume letters So hard that we couldn’t distinguish reality from poetry

Maintenant arrive la morale et se disséminent les grains de sel : de nos jours, un simple travailleur est la scie. Une entorse à l'honneur de la famille, un stigmate sur son bon renom, alors que le petit poignard aiguisé est un gagnant— dans le même temps il tue et l'on récite des bénédicités à sa louange. [Now comes the moral and sprinkles the grain of salt : to this day, a simple worker is the saw. A fault in the family's honor, on its good name a blight, while the sharp little knife is out successing— he both kills and over him they recite a blessing.] The Slaughtering Knife and the Saw (Le Poignard et la scie), p. 169

Look at the way the rice is shining... it looks like jewels. Each grain of rice retains its original shape... and they're all the same size too. It's stickiness and scent... it's been washed to perfection. Washing the rice just to rinse off the dirt and excess bran without wasting the flavor and scent of the rice is extremely difficult. I made my fortune before the war at the rice market... I still find time to do research on rice. I'm sure I can figure out what this rice is and where it comes from... It's Sasanishiki... but it's not from Miyagi. It's Shonai rice, from Amarume-Yamagata prefecture! Well?! " "That is correct!" "Wow... he guessed the type of rice and where it came from!" "I don't believe it!" "This rice has been dried under sunlight, not by machine--- and you milled it right here, just before washing it, didn't you?" You cook it over an old-fashioned furnace using firewood for fuel... and just before steaming it, you throw a handful of straw into the fire if you want to cook rice like this." "Yes." "Then this miso soup too... Ah... it's real miso made from domestic soy and natural salt. The dashi is made from katsuobushi, an obushi from Makurazaki. And he used the good part in the center. And the tofu is made with domestic soybeans and real brine. Aah... this is so good that it's making me cry!

THE MODERN HEALTHY LONGEVITY FOOD PYRAMID EXPLAINED The foundation of a modern healthy diet includes a wide variety of colourful vegetables, beans, minimally processed whole grains, nuts, seeds and fruits. These plant-based foods should be consumed every day and form the largest portion of our calories. Extra-virgin cold-pressed olive oil and avocado fruits can be used daily as condiments together with a range of spices, lemon juice and very small amounts of iodised salt.9 Fish, shellfish and molluscs can be consumed two to three times per week. Small portions of cheese and a few eggs can be consumed one to two times per week. Meat and sweets should be eaten only occasionally. Spring water and herbal teas are the best drinks to stay hydrated. All sugary beverages, such as soft

As the drug deaths spiraled upward, a new synthetic opioid appeared on the streets in the autumn of 2016 — carfentanil. A hundred times more potent than fentanyl, a dose of carfentanil as small as a single grain of salt can be fatal.

My wife was of salt. Grains of salt, ready to dissolve. Salt always has a kind of coercion. There's something in its flavor that tastes like distress...

You have to take things with a grain of salt on a small island.

We came to a cave at one point—a place named Tham Kaeng Luang (GrandRapids Cave)—where we spent three nights. It was a comfortable place to stay, very peaceful and quiet. We went for alms in a nearby village, but no one paid much attention to us. For two days we had nothing to eat but rice—not even a grain of salt.

It was in this place where we were on the verge of losing our bodies that bodies became the most important, it was in this place of the great melting that it became important whether you called it pop or soda growing up, or whether your mother cooked with garlic salt or the real chopped cloves, or whether you had actual art on your walls or posed pictures of your family sitting on logs in front of fake backdrops, or whether you had that one Tupperware stained completely orange. You were zoomed in on the grain, you were out in space, it was the brotherhood of man, and in some ways you had never been flung further from each other. You zoomed in and zoomed in on that warm grain until it looked like the coldness of the moon.

My life occupied a small space; it was time that moved: days and weeks and months and seasons and years rolling across me as inevitable as night. Moving any great distance would be like a cut against the grain of time.

I'm mooring my rowboat / at the dock of the island called God. / This dock is made in the shape of a fish / and there are many boats moored / at many different docks. / 'It's okay,' I say to myself / with blisters that broke and healed / and broke and healed -- / saving themselves over and over. / And salt sticking to my face and arms like / a glue-skin pocked with grains of tapioca. / I empty myself from my wooden boat / and onto the flesh of The Island. 'On with it!' He says and thus / we squat on the rocks by the sea / and play - can it be true - / a game of poker. / He calls me. / I win because I hold a royal straight flush. / He wins because He holds five aces, / A wild card had been announced / but I had not heard it / being in such a state of awe / when he took out the cards and dealt. / As he plunks down his five aces / and I am still grinning at my royal flush, / He starts to laugh, / and laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth / and into mine / and such laughter that He doubles right over me / laughing a Rejoice-Chorus at our two triumphs. / Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs / the sea laughs. The Island laughs. / The Absurd laughs. Dearest dealer, / I with my royal straight flush, / love you so for your wild card, / that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha / and lucky love.

A pint of salt on grain of truth, a ton of salt on holy books.

There is something missing now...in me...since I've come out of my coma. There is a hole in me, empty and hungry to be filled." "Well, I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or any of the other psychos. In point of fact, I've been told on more than one occasion that I have a terrible bedside manner, that I am not compassionate, that I am distracted, abrupt, and condescending. So keep that in mind as I proceed, and take my advice with a grain of salt…I should also mention that I am also not a social worker, licensed or unlicensed…but what you describe is what everyone feels — everyone, all the time — according to my limited and anecdotal research. So take my advice: Forget about it. That hole is unfillable. Get on with your life. Go back to work. Get a hobby. Find a nice, achievable woman and settle down.

The Basmati must be soaked in clean, cold water for thirty minutes before cooking. The rice is not added to the bowl of water, but instead the water is poured onto the rice. Each ten minutes, the rice is moved gently in the water with a spoon. After thirty minutes, the rice is drained in a chalow saffi, the utensil known as a colander in English. In fresh cold water the rice is boiled in a pot, allowing the level of the water to exceed the depth of the rice, but not too greatly. Once the water boils, the rice remains submerged for five minutes only, and must be stirred briefly twice in the space of those five minutes. The rice is again drained in the chalow saffi, and once drained, it is rinsed and allowed to stand in the chalow saffi for a short time. At this stage, if the Basmati has been treated without abuse, each grain will stand separate. In a dish or bowl suitable for use in an oven, and better that the dish should be pottery, a small amount of oil and butter is heated. The Basmati is poured onto the melted oil and butter and turned with a spoon while salt is added. The quantity of salt should not destroy the taste of the rice.

Trusting yourself is like working out any other muscle. The more you trust your instincts, the more you learn to take what other people say with a grain of salt. Then it’s always your own decision, even when you listen to others. Even if you make mistakes, it’s still better when you’re being true to yourself.

You know how gossip works. It's like a margarita… it should be taken with several grains of salt.

A jumbo muffin pan is used in this recipe, but a smaller muffin pan can be substituted. If a smaller pan is used, reduce baking time by about 5 minutes, though always assess doneness by inserting a wooden pick into the center of a muffin and making sure it comes out clean. If you make the smaller size, pack 2 muffins for lunch. Makes 6 4 cups almond meal/flour 1 cup shredded unsweetened coconut ½ cup chopped walnuts ½ cup pumpkin seeds Sweetener equivalent to ¾ cup sugar 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon 1 tablespoon ground ginger 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg ½ teaspoon ground cloves 1 teaspoon sea salt 3 eggs ½ cup coconut oil, melted 1 teaspoon vanilla extract ½ cup water Preheat the oven to 350°F. Place paper liners in a 6-cup jumbo muffin pan or grease the cups with coconut or other oil. In a large bowl, combine the almond meal/flour, coconut, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, sweetener, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and salt. Mix well. In a medium bowl, whisk the eggs. Stir in the coconut oil, vanilla, and water. Pour the egg mixture into the almond meal mixture and combine thoroughly. Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups. Bake for 30 minutes, or until a wooden pick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean. Per serving (1 muffin): 893 calories, 25 g protein, 26 g carbohydrates, 82 g total fat, 30 g saturated fat, 12 g fiber, 333 mg sodium

Stuffed zucchini This is a bastardized version of a Turkish original. Serve it cold, just above fridge temperature, with goat’s-milk yogurt. Serves 6 as a starter 1 medium onion, finely chopped 1 tbsp olive oil 2/3 cup short-grain rice 2 tbsp currants 1 tbsp pine nuts 2 tbsp chopped parsley, plus extra to garnish 1/2 tsp dried mint 1/2 tsp ground allspice 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon 1/4 tsp ground cloves 3 tbsp lemon juice 3 medium zucchini 3/4 cup boiling water 11/2 tbsp sugar salt and black pepper Sauté the onion in the oil until softened. Add the rice, currants, pine nuts, parsley, mint, spices and half the lemon juice. Continue cooking on low heat for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Halve the zucchini lengthways along the center and use a spoon to scoop out some of the flesh to make “boats.” Place them in a shallow saucepan that is large enough to accommodate them side by side. Fill them with the rice stuffing. Pour the boiling water, remaining lemon juice, sugar and some salt around the zucchini. The liquid should not come as high as the filling. Simmer, covered, for 30 to 40 minutes, basting the filling occasionally with the cooking juices. The zucchini are ready when the rice is al dente and almost all the juices have evaporated. Allow to cool down completely before refrigerating. Garnish with chopped parsley when serving.

CHOCOLATE BANANA PANCAKES WITH WHOLE GRAIN Ingredients: 1¼ cup whole wheat pastry flour 3 tbsp. cocoa powder 1½ tsp. ground cinnamon 1 tsp. baking soda ½ tsp. salt ¼ cup sugar 2 tbsp. butter, melted, plus more for pan ½ tsp. vanilla extract 1 cup milk 1 medium very ripe banana, mashed (about ½ cup) 1 egg Sliced bananas and chocolate syrup, for serving Directions: Whisk the flour, cocoa, soda, cinnamon, and salt in a bowl and then set it aside. Whisk sugar, 1 tbsp. butter, vanilla, milk, banana, and egg

You can get a rough idea of what a school values by how it presents itself, by how it seeks to attract prospective students. A final way is to query the students themselves to see what they value. You’re only getting a snapshot, so take it with a grain of salt, but ask them about their study habits, what their professors are like, and what support systems are in place to help students succeed academically and professionally. Observe students in a class during a campus visit and try to get a sense of the overall culture. Is academics important, or is the social scene front and center?

Nay,” he said. “Awareness is unbounded, undifferentiated, and is present in all things. It doth not distinguish between ‘I’ and all else, because it dwelleth in everything. Consciousness is a manifestation of awareness that is bounded and particular. It is concentrated in a single place and time, and is limited to a single point of view. Consciousness continually reacheth out toward awareness, to join it, but it cannot without giving up what it is. The grain of salt cannot experience the brine without dissolving.

BEEF AND PORTOBELLO PASTA Portobello mushrooms have a meaty texture that’s perfect for this classic meat-lovers’ dish. SERVES 4 | 1 cup per serving 1 cup dried whole-grain small shell macaroni 1 pound extra-lean ground beef 1 medium portobello mushroom, stem trimmed, cut into ¾-inch cubes (about 1 cup) 1 cup chopped onion 1 medium garlic clove, minced 1 14.5-ounce can no-salt-added diced tomatoes, undrained 1 8-ounce can no-salt-added tomato sauce ½ cup water 1 medium dried bay leaf 1 teaspoon sugar 1 teaspoon dried Italian seasoning, crumbled ½ teaspoon pepper ½ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (optional) Prepare the pasta using the package directions, omitting the salt. Drain well in a colander. Set aside. Meanwhile, in a large nonstick saucepan, cook the beef, mushroom, onion, and garlic over medium-high heat for 8 to 10 minutes, or until the beef is browned on the outside and the mushroom and onion are soft, stirring occasionally to turn and break up the beef. Drain if necessary. Wipe the skillet with paper towels. Return the drained mixture to the skillet. Stir in the remaining ingredients. Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat. Reduce the heat to medium low and cook for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in the pasta. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, or until heated through. Discard the bay leaf before serving the dish. PER SERVING calories 309 total fat 6.5 g saturated 2.5 g trans 0.5 g polyunsaturated 1.0 g monounsaturated 2.5 g cholesterol 62 mg sodium 108 mg carbohydrates 35 g fiber 5 g sugars 8 g protein 31 g calcium 66 mg potassium 855 mg dietary exchanges 1½ starch 3 vegetable 3 lean meat

What is virtue when surrounded by toxic people? What is honesty in the maelstrom of the oppressive? For as sweet as you may be, you might as well be a grain of sugar lost in a spoon of salt.

NOURISHING TRADITIONAL FOODS Proteins: Fresh, pasture-raised meat including beef, lamb, game, chicken, turkey, duck and other fowl; organ meats from pastured animals; seafood of all types from deep sea waters; fresh shellfish in season; fish eggs; fresh eggs from pastured poultry; organic fermented soy products in small amounts. Fats: Fresh butter and cream from pasture-fed cows, preferably raw and cultured; lard and beef, lamb, goose and duck fat from pastured animals; extra virgin olive oil; unrefined flax seed oil in small amounts; coconut oil and palm oil. Dairy: Raw, whole milk and cultured dairy products, such as yoghurt, piima milk, kefir and raw cheese, from traditional breeds of pasture-fed cows and goats. Carbohydrates: Organic whole grain products properly treated for the removal of phytates, such as sourdough and sprouted grain bread and soaked or sprouted cereal grains; soaked and fermented legumes including lentils, beans, and chickpeas; sprouted or soaked seeds and nuts; fresh fruits and vegetables, both raw and cooked; fermented vegetables. Beverages: Filtered, high-mineral water; lacto-fermented drinks made from grain or fruit; meat stocks and vegetable broths. Condiments: Unrefined sea salt; raw vinegar; spices in moderation; fresh herbs; naturally fermented soy sauce and fish sauce.

Truly, if there is any substantial meaning that is allotted to human existence, it must rest on a moral universe, on being a good person; because nothing of value can be extracted from a world which is through and through Not-self.

The Egyptians were the inventors of raised bread. To make leavened bread, a gluten-producing grain, not barley or millet, was necessary, and about 3000 B.C. the Egyptians developed wheat that could be ground and stretched into a dough capable of entrapping carbon dioxide from yeast.

Ready for the diet and lifestyle recommendations of the most comprehensive review of the literature by an unbiased panel of the best-regarded experts in the world? Here goes: 1. Be as lean as possible, within the normal range of body weight. [Aim for the lower end of normal body mass index (BMI). In this book, we have seen that a plant-based diet is the best way to maintain low body weight.] 2. Be physically active as part of everyday life. 3. Limit consumption of energy-dense foods. Avoid sugary foods. [In other words, eat foods low in fat and high in fiber and water content. Foods low in fat and high in fiber are plant foods, not animal proteins.] 4. Eat mostly foods of plant origins. [The personal recommendation within this public health goal is to have at least five servings of fruits and veggies each day, and include pulses and unprocessed cereals with every meal.] 5. Limit intake of red meat and avoid processed meat. [The public health goal within the recommendation is to consume less than 300 grams (2/3 of a pound) per week. Being completely vegetarian does reduce cancer risk, but we can’t rule out the possibility that the difference is due to other aspects of a healthy lifestyle.] 6. Limit alcoholic drinks. 7. Limit consumption of salt. Avoid moldy cereals (grains) or pulses (legumes). 8. Aim to meet nutritional needs through diet alone. [That is, without dietary supplements.]

Performing to friends, and you they exalt, it’s safe to take it with a grain of salt; but if it came from people you know not, you bet your life there is whole truth in that.

Pantry Staples Our pantry is organized to stock a limited and set amount of jars, which contain either a permanent staple or rotational staple. Permanent staples will vary from family to family. Ours include: • Flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, cornstarch, baking powder, yeast, oatmeal, coffee, dry corn, powdered sugar • Jam, butter, peanut butter, honey, mustard, canned tomatoes, pickles, olives, capers • Olive oil, vegetable oil, apple cider vinegar, wine vinegar, tamari, vanilla extract • A selection of spices and herbs Rotational staples represent groups of foods that we used to buy in many different forms. In the past, our legume collection consisted of chickpeas, lentils, peas, red beans, fava beans, pinto beans, etc. Even though stocking many types of food appears to stimulate variety, the contrary is often the case. Similar to wardrobe items, pantry favorites get picked first while nonfavorites get pushed back and forgotten, take up space, and ultimately go bad (i.e., become rancid or bug infested). Today, instead of storing many versions of a staple, we have dedicated one specific jar and adopted a system of rotation. For example, our rotating jar of grain might be filled with rice one week, couscous another. Our rotating collection includes: • Grain • Pasta • Legume • Cereal • Cookie • Nut • Sweet snack • Savory snack • Tea This system has proved not only to maintain variety in our diet and free up storage space; it has also been efficient at keeping foods from going bad.

SHOPPING LIST PANTRY •Balsamic vinegar •Bay leaves •Black beans, low-sodium (1 [15-ounce] can) •Black pepper, freshly ground •Broth, low-sodium vegetable (4 cups) •Brown sugar •Canola oil •Capers •Cayenne pepper •Chili powder •Cornstarch •Crackers, whole-grain •Cumin, ground •Lentils (1 [15-ounce] can) •Olive oil •Paprika •Quinoa •Rice, long-grain brown •Salsa •Salt •Soy sauce, low-sodium FRESH PRODUCE •Basil (1 bunch) •Cucumbers, Kirby or Persian (4) •Garlic (3 cloves) •Ginger (2-inch piece) •Lemons (2) •Mushrooms, brown cremini or baby bella (10 ounces) •Onions, yellow (2) •Parsley (1 bunch) •Peppers, red bell (4) •Scallions (1 bunch) •Tomatoes, plum (1 pound) PROTEIN •Beef, top sirloin (1 pound) •Chicken, skinless, boneless breast (6 ounces) •Eggs, large (5) •Salmon, smoked (5 ounces) DAIRY •Cheese, Monterey Jack or Cheddar (5 ounces)

All startup advice is only useful in context, and I am a firm believer that the only good generic startup advice is that there is no good generic startup advice. So take what is written here with a grain of salt—it is very much one person’s experiences,

I slice fresh garlic, rub it into the meat with olive oil, then insert the thin wafers into tiny slits I cut along the grain. After rinsing my hands, I hold them to my face, inhale the garlic perfume still on my skin. I could easily wipe it away on the faucet, a spoon, any piece of stainless steel, but I've never understood why people find it offensive. It's the smell of anticipation, the promise of a wonderful meal in the offing. Opening the spice cabinet, I breathe in the fragrance of all those jars I left behind: saffron threads, cardamom pods, star anise, Tahitian vanilla. I almost weep at the sight of my Fleur de Sel. No one ever gets my obsession with sea salt, especially expensive sea salt. They don't understand that it brightens the flavor of food, wakes it up, like a condiment. Regular table salt just makes food salty.

I'm Lady Codell-Fitch, and like so many of us, I wish to offer congratulations on your betrothal." "Yes, congratulations." "Congratulations!" "Amazing betrothal!" The felicitations were insincere and accompanied by many an ogling stare, but Eleanor pretended, as Madeline would, to be pleased. Taking Mr. Knight's arm, she pressed it. "He is quite handsome." She found herself daring to defy them all with an up-tilted chin. "I wish you all could be so lucky." The lushly garbed and overly perfumed people were obviously taken aback. They must have expected her to align herself with them, the English nobility, and with a wink and a sigh show how very much she hated this match. But she didn't even have to wonder how Madeline would react to this situation, for in this instance the two cousins thought as one. Neither of them would allow Mr. Knight to suffer the slights of society. They might not wish for this marriage, but the de Lacy pride wouldn't allow them to let anyone else know. Close by her ear, Mr. Knight said quietly, "A pretty pretense, yet lest you imagine I'm impressed, let me assure you I remember this morning when you tried to escape. Tonight you defied me in the matter of your hair and your clothing, and lied to me to get your way. I take your words with a grain of salt." He chuckled deeply.

Oranges of Hiroshima - CORPUS CHRISTI - Goodbye shores of peach blossoms and swallows. Goodbye to the godzila of my lips drifting from your lips. Goodbye to the galaxies that expand towards the interior of a grain of sand. Goodbye to the sea of your smiles in the salt of my thorns. Goodbye son of man! Goodbye shores of peach blossoms and swallows.

During his first month in office, Trump excluded some prominent reporters from a press briefing. Almost immediately, the government of Cambodia threatened to kick a contingent of American journalists out of its country. Spokesmen in Phnom Penh said they perceived a “clear message” from Trump that “news broadcast by those media outlets does not reflect the truth,” adding that “Freedom of expression . . . must respect the state’s power.” Cambodia’s was the first of many governments—others include those of Hungary, Libya, Poland, Russia, Somalia, and Thailand—to insist that negative stories about them are false for no reason except that the press cannot be trusted. According to the People’s Daily, the house organ of the Chinese Communist Party: “If the president of the United States claims that his nation’s media outlets are a stain on America, then negative stories about China should be taken with a grain of salt, since it is likely that the bias and political agenda are distorting the real picture.” The ability of a free and independent press to hold political leaders accountable is what makes open government possible—it is the heartbeat of democracy. Trump is intent on stilling, or slowing down, that heartbeat. This is a gift to dictators, and coming from a chief executive of the United States, cause for shame.

Winterfest is as much a celebration of the darkest part of the year as a festival of the returning light. For the first three days of Winterfest, we pay homage to the darkness. The tales told and puppet shows presented are those that tell of resting times and happy endings. The foods are salt fish and smoked flesh, harvested roots and fruit from last summer. Then, on the midday of the festival, there is a hunt. New blood is shed to celebrate the breaking point of the year, and new meat is brought fresh to the table, to be eaten with grain harvested from the year before. The next three days are days that look toward the coming summer. The looms are threaded with gayer thread, and the weavers take over an end of the Great Hall to vie among themselves for the brightest patterns and lightest weave. The tales told are ones that tell of beginnings of things, and of how things came to be.

Today, with an increased ingestion of anti-thyroid foods (processed foods, soy, vegetable oils, grains, legumes, and nuts) and the avoidance of pro-thyroid foods (saturated fats, sugars, salt, and animal proteins), I believe that number could be far higher—although lab testing may tell us differently. (See the section titled “Current Thyroid Lab Testing” later in this chapter.)

The miso store entailed much sampling. Although all miso consists of crushed boiled soybeans, salt, and a fermenting agent called koji, the types differ based on whether rice, wheat, or barley is added to the mix. The flavor and color of each style can also change, depending upon the amounts of soybeans, type of koji (made from either beans or grains, inoculated with the mold Aspergillus), and salt that are added, as well as how long the miso ages. Brick-red miso, for example, comes in both sweet and salty varieties and is made with either barley or a mixture of barley and rice. Because it tastes somewhat coarse, it usually seasons hearty dishes, such as brothy seafood stews. Similar in flavor is the chocolate-brown miso. Mainly composed of soybeans, it has a bold earthy tang best enjoyed in robust dishes, such as potatoes simmered with miso. Shiro miso, or "white miso," is a Kyoto specialty. Smooth, golden, and quite mellow, it is said to have evolved to suit the tastes of the effete aristocracy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is used extensively in Kyoto cooking, including tea kaiseki, and often comes seasoned with herbs, citrus, and mustard. Because of its delicate nature, it tends to be used as a sauce, mainly to dress vegetables and grilled foods. A saltier version appears most often in American markets.

I realized boiling is called for only when cooking vegetables, grains, and pasta; reducing sauces; and hard-cooking eggs. I could bring everything else—and I mean everything—to a boil and then swiftly reduce it to a simmer to cook through, whether I was cooking over a live fire, on the stove, or in an oven. Since simmering water is gentler than boiling water, it won’t jostle delicate foods so much that they fall apart or agitate tougher foods so much that they overcook on the surface before cooking through completely. Beans. Braises. Paella. Jasmine Rice. Chicken Vindaloo. Pozole. Quinoa. Stews. Risotto. Chili. Béchamel sauce. Potato gratin. Tomato sauce. Chicken stock. Polenta. Oatmeal. Thai curry. It didn’t matter—this applied to everything cooked in liquid.

Take the guesswork and measuring out of cooking whole grains such as barley, rice, farro, and quinoa by boiling them as you would pasta, until they are completely tender. Drain and serve as a side dish, or spread them out to let them cool, then drizzle with olive oil and add them to soups, grain salads, or store them in the freezer for up to two months for future use.

I would get an Irish victim advocate. Her hair bounced around her face, blazing in a fireball of red glory while highlighting the doubt in her eyes as she tried to soothe me. I took it with a grain of salt, smiled, and accepted the one of many hugs that generally came my way after a debriefing.

That’s frustratingly common. “I’ve evaluated thousands of quartz samples from all over the world,” said John Schlanz, chief minerals processing engineer at the Minerals Research Laboratory in Asheville, about an hour from Spruce Pine. “Near all of them have contaminate locked in the quartz grains that you can’t get out.” Some Spruce Pine quartz is flawed in this way. Those grains, the washouts from the Delta Force of the quartz selection process, are used for high-end beach sand and golf course bunkers—most famously the salt-white traps of Augusta National Golf Club,16 site of the iconic Masters Tournament. A golf course in the oil-drunk United Arab Emirates imported 4,000 tons of this sand in 2008 to make sure its sand traps were world-class, too.

Which leaves many towns in southern Florida no choice but to dig their sand from inland quarries and haul it to the coast one roaring, diesel-spewing truck at a time. Tourists and locals hate the noise and traffic, and county officials hate the extra cost, which can be easily double that of dredged sand. But it does have some advantages. The inland mines, with their elaborate sorting and washing machines, can deliver sand of a precise spec—the exact size, shape, and color county officials deem appropriate for the beach. Beach town residents and tourists alike are very particular about the color and consistency of their beaches. The sugary white-sand beach has become the global standard of perfection, and any resort falling short of it loses points. (That’s nothing compared to the fussiness of Olympic beach volleyball players. To make sure their bare feet come into contact only with grains of just the right size and shape, sand was brought in from Hainan Island for the 2008 Beijing Games, and from a quarry in Belgium for the 2004 Athens Games.)15 “You pump sand from the ocean floor, you don’t know what you’re getting,” said Eastman. That’s not exactly true; sea sand is examined closely to make sure it is suitable for a given beach before the regulatory agencies will allow it to be dredged for nourishment. But land-mined sand can be sorted, sifted, and cleaned to a uniform standard. The grains that Eastman was emplacing were all about the size of a salt grain, all the same silver gray, unadulterated with stones or shell fragments. Their color was approved using the Munsell color order system, a visual index of hues created in 1915. The sand is tested at the mine, at every 3,000 tons, and every 500 yards on the beach after it’s in place to make sure it’s up to spec. The waves will gradually mix in shells and other organic matter, so in a few months it won’t look as obviously artificial as it does now.

calories and no fat. 1 ounce dried wild mushrooms 1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil ½ cup minced onion 1 cup diced button mushrooms 1 teaspoon fresh thyme 1 cup short-grain white rice 2 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth ⅛ teaspoon sea salt Freshly ground black pepper 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese 2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley, for garnish ½ lemon, cut into wedges, for garnish 1. Soak the dried mushrooms in 1 cup of very hot water while you prepare the other ingredients. 2. While the mushrooms are soaking, grease the inside of the slow cooker with the olive oil. Add the onion, button mushrooms, thyme, rice, and broth. Season with the salt and pepper and stir everything to mix well. 3. Remove the soaked mushrooms from the hot water, roughly chop them, and add them to the slow cooker. 4. Cover and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours, until the rice is tender and all the liquid is absorbed. Just before serving, stir in the Parmesan cheese and garnish each serving with the fresh parsley and a lemon wedge.

Fideos secos, also known as sopa seca or Mexican “dry soup,” is typically made with thin spaghetti cooked in a guajillo pepper and tomato sauce, topped with avocado, queso fresco, and sometimes chicharrón (fried pork rinds). This grain-free version replaces the pasta with carrots—and I have to say, they just might be the tastiest carrots I’ve ever eaten (and this is coming from a girl who doesn’t really like carrots). Spiralized carrots are great as a pasta swap in dishes like this where you want a noodle with a good bite. Zucchini tends to get watery if cooked too long, but the carrots stay firm, creating a very pasta-like experience. 1 large (13-ounce) carrot (at least 2 inches thick) 2 dried guajillo chiles,* stemmed, split open, and seeded 4 teaspoons olive oil ⅓ cup chopped onion 3 garlic cloves 2 medium tomatoes, quartered 1 teaspoon adobo sauce (from a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce) ½ teaspoon ground cumin ¾ teaspoon kosher salt 4 ounces thinly sliced avocado (from 1 small Hass) 2 ounces (scant ½ cup) crumbled queso fresco 1 tablespoon chopped fresh cilantro *Read the label to be sure this product is gluten-free. Using the widest noodle blade of your spiralizer, spiralize the carrot, then cut the “noodles” into 6-inch lengths. Set aside on a plate. Soak the guajillo chiles in a bowl of ½ cup hot water until softened, about 30 minutes. Transfer the chiles and soaking liquid to a blender. Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add 1 teaspoon of the oil, the onion, and garlic and cook, stirring, until the onion is golden brown, 3 to 4 minutes. Transfer the mixture to the blender. Add the tomatoes, adobo sauce, cumin, and ¼ teaspoon of the salt to the blender and blend well. In the same skillet, heat the remaining 3 teaspoons oil over medium-high heat. Add the carrot noodles and the remaining ½ teaspoon salt. Cook, stirring, until softened, about 5 minutes. Pour the sauce from the blender over the carrots, increase the heat to high, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens, about 5 minutes. To serve, divide the carrot noodles between 2 bowls. Top each with half the avocado, queso fresco, and cilantro.

At one time, people also preserved meat by soaking it in a brine solution or by covering it with whole grains of salt (which were known as “corn,” hence the origin of “corned beef”).

The seamen lowered a jar and brought up in it water that was not salt; it was Nile water and tasted of the mud of Egypt. No wine ever tasted so delectable to me as this muddy water, hauled up so far from land. Kaptah said, “Water is always water, even in the Nile. Have patience, lord, until we find an honest tavern where the beer is clear and foaming, so that a man need not suck it through a straw to avoid the husks of grain. Then and then only shall I know that I am home.” His godless talk jarred on me, and I said, “Once a slave always a slave, even when he is robed in fine wool. Have patience, Kaptah, until I find a flexible cane—such a one as can be cut only in the reed swamps of the Nile—and then, indeed, you shall know that you are home.” He was not offended, but his eyes filled with tears, his chin quivered, and he bowed before me, stretching forth his hands at knee level. “Truly, lord, you have the gift of hitting upon the right word at the right moment, for I had already forgotten how sweet is the caress of a slender cane on the legs and backside. Ah, my lord Sinuhe, it is an experience that I wish that you also might share. Better than water or beer, better than incense, better than wild duck among the reeds—more eloquently than these does it speak of life in Egypt, where each fills his proper place and nothing changes. Do not wonder if in my emotion I weep, for only now do I feel that I am coming home after seeing much that is alien and perplexing and contemptible. O blessed cane that sets each in his proper place and resolves all problems, there is none like you!

Read biography as history and as the cause of history; take all autobiographies with a grain of salt; and never forget that you must not argue with a book until you fully understand what it is saying.