Half Baked Quotes

You should date a girl who reads. Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

I need to get to that tea party and wake up the guests." Jeb looks at me. "And how are you supposed to do that? Give a magical kiss to the half-baked hatmaker?

Every single person is a fool, insane, a failure, or a bad person to at least ten people.

Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

We are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” -

A half-baked idea is okay as long as it's in the oven.

There's nothing more frightening than a half-baked do-gooder who knows nothing of the world but takes it upon himself to tell the world what's good for it.

Not every person wants the prettiest, smartest, talented or spiritually uplifting person to build a life with. Sometimes we just want that special someone that makes sense, puts up with us, has patience, comes without drama, gives us focus and is willing to run with our half-baked ideas.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger.

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep--all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

I'm going to give you a sentence, a full sentence with a noun and a verb and a possible agitate. I don't like all these judges running around with their half baked sentences, thats how you get salmonella poisoning.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

Wake & Bake. More like Wash & Bake. Half a bowl of cereal and a shot of bourbon later, I'm there, my friendly haze having finally arrived. I'm ready for work.

What did you have in you? - some childish notions, a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.

It's not that you have lost touch with these people. You haven't. It's just that they have kept in such close touch with each other. When scrolling through your cell phone, you generally let their numbers be highlighted for a second, hovering, and then move along to people you have spoken to within the last month. It's not that you're a bad friend to these people. It's just that you're not a great one. They know the names of each other's coworkers and the blow-by-blow nature of each other's dramas; they go camping in the Berkshires together and have such sentences in their conversational arsenal as "you left your lip gloss in my bathroom." You have no such sentences. Your connection to your friends is half-baked and you are starting to forget their siblings' names, never mind their coworkers. But you're still in the play even if you're no longer a main character.

Is he right, about my creating excitement where I can? Even being melodramatic? You went on a half-baked vengeance quest against Paul using a totally untested experimental device, I think. He might possibly have a point.

Like everything else I'd seen at Xymos, it was jerry-built, half-baked, concocted in a hurry to solve present problems and never a thought to the future.

He can read and write, but he doesn't get what he's read. He's half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I'll tell you that. And we entrust our glourious parliamentary democracy

That's the way with civilized men. When they can't explain something by their half-baked science, they refuse to believe it.

War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation.

The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. The tough-minded individual is astute and discerning. He has a strong austere quality that makes for firmness of purpose and solidness of commitment. Who doubts that this toughness is one of man's greatest needs? Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.

A wife! No one else could love a man who had been trampled on by iron feet. She would wash his feet after he had been spat on; she would comb his tangled hair; she would look into his embittered eyes. The more lacerated his soul, the more revolting and contemptible he became to the world, the more she would love him. She would run after a truck; she would wait in queues on Kuznetsky Most, or even by the camp boundary fence, desperate to hand over a few sweets or an onion; she would bake shortbread for him on an oil stove; she would give years of her life just to be able to see him for half an hour... Not every woman you sleep with can be called a wife.

Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love, but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms from those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half our hunger.

Who did the council fight?" "It split in two and fought itself." "That's suicide!" "No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation." "I refuse to believe men kill each other just to make their enemies rich." "How can men recognize their real enemies when their family, schools and work teach them to struggle with each other and to believe law and decency come from the teachers?" "My son won't be taught that," said Lanark firmly. "You have a son?" "Not yet.

In Martin Seligman's words, 'Psychology is half-baked, literally half-baked. We have baked the part about mental illness. We have baked the part about repair and damage. But the other side is unbaked. The side of strengths, the side of what we are good at, the side…of what makes life worth living.

And not wretched sausages half full of bread and soya bean either, but real meaty, spicy ones, fat and piping hot and burst and just the tiniest bit burnt. And great mugs of frothy chocolate, and roast potatoes and roast chestnuts, and baked apples with raisins stuck in where the cores had been, and then ices just to freshen you up after all the hot things.

Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, 'I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so-and-so,' or, 'I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.' Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science--and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes--something of a different kind--this is not a scientific question. If there is 'Something Behind,' then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, 'Why is there a universe?' 'Why does it go on as it does?' 'Has it any meaning?' would remain just as they were?

Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another. By covering our bases financially, we escape the pressure to publish half-baked books, sell shoddy art, or launch untested businesses.

Writing's much more romantic when its pen and ink and paper. It's... More timeless. and worthwhile. Think about it. There are so many words gushing out into the universe these days. All digitally. All in Comic Sans or Times New Roman. Silly Websites. Stupid news stories digitally uploaded to a 24-hour channel. Where's all this writing going? Who's keeping a note of it all? Who's in charge of deciding what's worthwhile and what isn't? But back then... Back then, if someone wanted to write something they had to buy paper. Buy it! And ink. And a pen. And they couldn't waste too many sheets cos it was expensive. So when people wrote, they wrote because it was worthwhile... not just because they had some half-baked idea and they wanted to pointlessly prove their existence by sharing it on some bloody social networking site.

Half-baked ideas that might seem too big even for the naïfs at TED Conferences—that Woodstock of the intellectual effete—sit rather comfortably on Silicon Valley’s business plans.

I don’t like going into this with a half-baked plan.” “It’s not half-baked,” I said. “It’s mostly baked. Just a little soft in the middle.” Actually, that was bravado.

If you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger. -Kahlil Gibran

Rarely do we find [people] who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions.

She gave her a long embrace, like pie baking in the warmth of an oven.

Bread baked without love is a bitter bread that feeds but half a man's hunger,"—those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.

In those years, I felt myself to be incomplete—a gray blur, a body in motion, forever galloping toward completion—half a girl, half-caste, half-mast, and half-baked, not quite ready for consumption.

Our minds are mischievously clever. Time and again, they pull us back to the past and yank us forward into the future. Our perception of the world—and the story we tell ourselves about who we are—is completely colored by half-baked memories and imagined projections. But in truth this is all illusion... The only objective truth is the present moment—the now.

He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness; for his entire life he has had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which ceaselessly glows within him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius that heaven bestowed upon him.

As to this half-baked pother about my always feeling inferior in the presence of college graduates, that fear is groundless too. I am not nonplussed in the presence of anybody, and I am seldom at a loss with anyone I am interested in.

Claire is smarter than I am. I’m not saying that out of some half-baked feminist sentiment or in order to endear women to me. You’ll never hear me claim that ‘women in general’ are smarter than men. Or more sensitive, more intuitive, or that they are more ‘in touch with life’, or any of the other horseshit that, when all is said and done, so-called ‘sensitive’ men try to peddle more often than women themselves.

I'm a real phony, one of those half-baked hot-house plants we're growing nowadays, instead of the honest-to-God two-fisted women we should be...

Bread baked without love is a bitter bread that feeds but half a man's hunger.

bristling with half-baked knowledge from the books we had read.

I wouldn't eat too many of those [half-baked ideas] if I were you. They may look good, but you can get terribly sick of them." -Tock

A dose of chlorine won’t hurt them” Lady Satan opines, quite incorrectly, as she fills an entire room of baddies with the deadly stuff.

She taught him to read and bake saffron buns and pour coffee without the pot dribbling, and when her hands started to shake the boy taught himself to pour half cups so she wouldn’t spill any, because she was always ashamed when she did and he never let her feel ashamed in front of him.

You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth. For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life's procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite. When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison? Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born, And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life, And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret. But if you in your pain call birth an affliction and the support of the flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written. You have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary. And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge, And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge, And all knowledge is vain save when there is work, And all work is empty save when there is love; And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God. And what is it to work with love? It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth. It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house. It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit. It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit, And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching. Often have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, "He who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is nobler than he who ploughs the soil. And he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man, is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet." But I say, not in sleep but in the overwakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass; And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving. Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

When I was born it was Simon who they'd put once more into his arms, the dream of a child he could mold in his own image. It certainly wasn't me, a half-baked attempt at life, a rough sketch showing no familiar traits whatsoever.

And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The old aboriginal myth; the truth, there.

We have made mistakes. We haven’t always used our power wisely. We have abused it sometimes and we’ve been arrogant. But, as often as not, we recognized those wrongs, debated them openly, and tried to do better. And the good we have done for humanity surpasses the damage caused by our errors. We have sought to make the world more stable and secure, not just our own society. We have advanced norms and rules of international relations that have benefited all. We have stood up to tyrants for mistreating their people even when they didn’t threaten us, not always, but often. We don’t steal other people’s wealth. We don’t take their land. We don’t build walls to freedom and opportunity. We tear them down. To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is unpatriotic. American nationalism isn’t the same as in other countries. It isn’t nativist or imperial or xenophobic, or it shouldn’t be. Those attachments belong with other tired dogmas that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history. We live in a land made from ideals, not blood and soil. We are custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad.

Women in the public eye didn’t get the luxury of showing emotions; it branded them as temperamental, difficult to work with. Some men claimed to like it when women were angry—when they got emotional, even—but what they really liked was emotional impotence: half-baked emotions, not fully-formed, that expended themselves before they became inconvenient, most frequently after sex.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distills a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Dr. Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: 'There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer.' This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn't be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn't in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said 'Years'.

Pseudoscience often relies on a witches' brew of scientific terms (e.g. "wavelength," "energy fields," "vibrations") half-baked into simplistic metaphors that do not correspond with testable reality. In some cases, pseudoscience simply relies on language that is deliberately vague and poorly defined to deceive. While outright lunacy is almost always easy to spot, the most dangerous of pseudoscientific meanderings are those filled with scientific terminology that, even for experts, can initially be daunting and impressive. Upon dissection, however, the terminology is invariably found to be misused, or used in a context far from accepted understanding. However convincing and artful, however much we may even wish the conclusions to be true, monuments built in such shifting sands cannot withstand the inevitable tests of time.

The only acceptable hobby, throughout all stages of life, is cookery. As a child: adorable baked items. Twenties: much appreciated spag bol and fry-ups. Thirties and forties: lovely stuff with butternut squash and chorizo from the Guardian food section. Fifties and sixties: beef wellington from the Sunday Telegraph magazine. Seventies and eighties: back to the adorable baked items. Perfect. The only teeny tiny downside of this hobby is that I HATE COOKING. Don't get me wrong; I absolutely adore the eating of the food. It's just the awful boring, frightening putting together of it that makes me want to shove my own fists in my mouth. It's a lovely idea: follow the recipe and you'll end up with something exactly like the pretty picture in the book, only even more delicious. But the reality's rather different. Within fifteen minutes of embarking on a dish I generally find myself in tears in the middle of what appears to be a bombsite, looking like a mentally unstable art teacher in a butter-splattered apron, wondering a) just how I am supposed to get hold of a thimble and a half of FairTrade hazelnut oil (why is there always the one impossible-to-find recipe ingredient? Sesame paste, anyone?) and b) just how I managed to get flour through two closed doors onto the living-room curtains, when I don't recall having used any flour and oh-this-is-terrible-let's-just-go-out-and-get-a-Wagamama's-and-to-hell-with-the-cost, dammit.

As in many other cities, money no longer had any value in Istanbul. At the time I returned from the East, bakeries that once sold large one-hundred drachma loaves of bread for one silver coin now baked loaves half the size for the same price, and they no longer tasted the way they did during my childhood.

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb. At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another. By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.

Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.

His eyes light up upon seeing the cookies. “Did you make them?” “My sister did. They’re just the break-and-bake kind.” “Those are my favorite.” “No they’re not,” Victoria says. “Hey, how about you head upstairs and start getting ready for bed?” “It’s seven o’clock.” “How about you head upstairs and just … stay there?” They look at each other for a long moment and seem to be having some kind of nonverbal sibling communication. Finally Victoria sighs and steps away from the door. “I get half of those cookies.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

No one is simply a painter anymore. They are all archaeologists, psychologists and partisans of a particular culture or theory. They enjoy our erudition and our philosophy and like us they are full, perhaps to excess, with a treasure-trove of half-baked and rather unremarkable ideas. They like form- not for what it is but because of what it might represent. They are the children of generation tormented by their learning, a thousand miles away from the Old Masters who never read, instead being content to provide a feast for the eye.

The history of prescriptions about English ... is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance. But it is also a history of attempts to make sense of the world and its bazaar of competing ideas and interests.

Eudora Honeysett is invisible, and she doesn’t care one jot. She has lived her life as best she can. She is ready for the next step, the final destination, or whatever half-baked euphemism people insist on using these days. Death. The end. She’s rather looking forward to it. It may be a black hole or, if she’s lucky, she’ll be reunited with all the people she’s ever loved.

PROSCIUTTO- AND SAGE-WRAPPED DATES (Serves 6)   INGREDIENTS 24 fresh sage leaves 12 dates, halved, pits removed 1 pack prosciutto, each slice sliced lengthways down the middle 2 Tablespoons maple syrup   Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place a sage leaf on each date half, wrap with prosciutto, place flat side down on a baking sheet. Bake 10 minutes. Brush with maple syrup and serve.

Meanwhile, whiteness twiddles its thumbs with feigned innocence and shallow apologies. Diversity gets treated like a passing trend, a friendly group project in which everyone takes on equal risks and rewards. In the mind of whiteness, half-baked efforts at diversity are enough, because the status quo is fine. It is better than slavery, better than Jim Crow. What more could Black people possibly ask than this - to not be overtly subject to the white will? "Is there more?" white innocence asks before bursting into tears at the possibility that we would date question its sincerity.

Is it anything to do with this?” she said. The thing she took out of her bag was battered and travel-worn as if it had been hurled into prehistoric rivers, baked under the sun that shines so redly on the deserts of Kakrafoon, half buried in the marbled sands that fringe the heady vapored oceans of Santraginus V, frozen on the glaciers of the moon of Jaglan Beta, sat on, kicked around spaceships, scuffed and generally abused, and since its makers had thought that these were exactly the sorts of things that might happen to it, they had thoughtfully encased it in a sturdy plastic cover and written on it, in large friendly letters, the words “Don’t Panic.

Men's sense of being sexually oriented toward women must signal, as it does for most lesbians, an acute interest and investment in women's lives and accomplishments because, within deep heterosexuality, attraction is measly and half-baked if not a synthesis of lust and humanization... to be into women, one must be for women. To be an authentically straight man--and not a pseudoheterosexual who uses women to impress men--one must be a feminist.

That evening I glanced back at the TV as Bella poured half a bottle of the finest brandy into her bowl of cake batter, I waited for tinselly anticipation to land like snowflakes all around me, but I felt nothing. Even when she produced what she described as 'a winter landscape for European cheeses', sprigged with holly and a frosty snow scene, I failed to get my fix. 'Ooh, this is a juicy one,' she said, biting seductively at a maraschino cherry she'd earlier described as 'divinely kitsch'. She swallowed the cherry whole, giggled girlishly and raised a flute of champagne. 'Why have cava when Champagne is sooo much more bubbly? Cheers!' she said, taking a large sip of vintage Krug.

But that’s what happens. Once the human tragedy has been completed, it gets turned over to the journalists to banalize into entertainment. Perhaps it’s because the whole irrational frenzy burst right through our door and no newspaper’s half-baked insinuating detail passed me by that I think of the McCarthy era as inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world’s oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust. Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism as the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the mass audience. McCarthyism as the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking that is now everywhere.

Benny stands there in front of the refrigerator, letting the cool air fall on her toes, and thinks of the last cake her mother ever baked. She knows it’s sitting in the freezer but she can’t bear to look in there right now. Instead, she leans her forehead against the upper door of the fridge. This is your heritage, her mother used to say when they were making black cake, and Benny thought she knew what her mother meant. But she sees now that she didn’t know the half of it.

Paul knew what he was talking about when he called Christians “earthen vessels.” We’re baked clay. We’re privy pots. The advance of the gospel will never occur on account of us. This helps explain why God chose none of the early preachers among the apostles because of his superior intellect, position, or prominence. As I wrote in my book Twelve Ordinary Men, these twelve were so ordinary it defies all human logic: not one teacher, not one priest, not one rabbi, not one scribe, not one Pharisee, not one Sadducee, not even a synagogue ruler—nobody from the elite. Half of them or so were fishermen, and the rest were common laborers. One, Simon the Zealot, was a terrorist, a member of a group who went around with daggers in their cloaks, trying to stab Romans. Then there was Judas, the loser of all losers. What was the Lord doing? He picked people with absolutely no influence. None of the great intellects from Egypt, Greece, Rome, or Israel was among the apostles. During the New Testament time, the greatest scholars were very likely in Egypt. The most distinguished philosophers were in Athens. The powerful were in Rome. The biblical scholars were in Jerusalem. God disdained all of them and picked clay pots instead.

The wild is an integral part of who we are as children. Without pausing to consider what or where or how, we gather herbs and flowers, old apples and rose hips, shiny pebbles and dead spiders, poems, tears and raindrops, putting each treasured thing into the cauldron of our souls. We stir our bucket of mud as if it were, every one, a bucket of chocolate cake to be mixed for the baking. Little witches, hag children, we dance our wildness, not afraid of not knowing. But there comes a time when the kiss of acceptance is delayed until the mud is washed from our knees, the chocolate from our faces. Putting down our wooden spoon with a new uncertainty, setting aside our magical wand, we learn another system of values based on familiarity, on avoiding threat and rejection. We are told it is all in the nature of growing up. But it isn't so. Walking forward and facing the shadows, stumbling on fears like litter in the alleyways of our minds, we can find the confidence again. We can let go of the clutter of our creative stagnation, abandoning the chaos of misplaced and outdated assumptions that have been our protection. Then beyond the half light and shadows, we can slip into the dark and find ourselves in a world where horizons stretch forever. Once more we can acknowledge a reality that is unlimited finding our true self, a wild spirit, free and eager to explore the extent of our potential, free to dance like fireflies, free to be the drum, free to love absolutely with every cell of our being, or lie in the grass watching stars and bats and dreams wander by. We can live inspired, stirring the darkness of the cauldron within our souls, the source, the womb temple of our true creativity, brilliant, untamed

Betty, having returned from the kitchen, had once more seated herself on the carpet. How attractive, Robert Childan thought again. The slender body. Their figures are so superior; not fat, not bulbous. No bra or girdle needed. I must conceal my longing; that at all costs. And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The old aboriginal myth; the truth, there.

The dining table was covered with platters of food: everything and pumpernickel bagels, everything minibagels, everything flagels, bialys, cream cheese, scallion cream cheese, salmon spread, tofu spread, smoked and pickled fish, pitch-black brownies with white chocolate swirls like square universes, blondies, rugelach, out-of-season hamantaschen (strawberry, prune, and poppy seed), and “salads”—Jews apply the word salad to anything that can’t be held in one’s hand: cucumber salad, whitefish and tuna and baked salmon salad, lentil salad, pasta salad, quinoa salad. And there was purple soda, and black coffee, and Diet Coke, and black tea, and enough seltzer to float an aircraft carrier, and Kedem grape juice—a liquid more Jewish than Jewish blood. And there were pickles, a few kinds. Capers don’t belong in any food, but the capers that every spoon had tried to avoid had found their way into foods in which they really didn’t belong, like someone’s half-empty half-decaf. And at the center of the table, impossibly dense kugels bent light and time around them. It was too much food by a factor of ten. But it had to be.

Bread baked without love is a bitter bread that feeds but half a man's hunger,"—those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around. If you are a writer who would secretly prefer to be a lawyer or a doctor, your written words will feed but half the hunger of your readers; if you are a teacher who would rather be a businessman, your instructions will meet but half the need for knowledge of your students; if you are a scientist who hates science, your performance will satisfy but half the needs of your mission.

One of the great leaders of America was Daniel Webster. That great bulging brow of his and those blazing eyes used to hold the Senate spellbound as he stood there and talked to them not with silly quips or funny remarks. The Senate in those days was not composed of half-baked comedians but of strong, noble statesmen who carried the weight of the nation on their shoulders. Someone said, “Mr. Webster, what do you consider the most serious thought that has ever entered your mind?” He said, “The most solemn thought that has ever entered my mind is the accountability to my Maker.

The length of time that the thought is held has also much to do with its accomplishment, for the thought-vibrations have to be active for a certain time to bring about a certain result. A certain length of time is required for the baking of a cake; if it is hurried the cake will be uncooked; with too great a heat it will burn. If the operator of the mental vibrations lacks patience then the power of thought will be wasted, even if it were half-way to its destiny, or still nearer to a successful issue. If too great a power of thought is given to the accomplishment of a certain thing it destroys while preparing it.

Like a dingy London bird among the birds at roost in these pleasant fields, where the sheep are all made into parchment, the goats into wigs, and the pasture into chaff, the lawyer, smoke-dried and faded, dwelling among mankind but not consorting with them, aged without experience of genial youth, and so long used to make his cramped nest in holes and corners of human nature that he has forgotten its broader and better range, comes sauntering home. In the oven made by the hot pavements and hot buildings, he has baked himself dryer than usual; and he has in his thirsty mind his mellowed port-wine half a century old.

Hey.’ Annabeth slid next to me on the bench. ‘Happy birthday.’ She was holding a huge misshapen cupcake with blue icing. I stared at her. ‘What?’ ‘It’s August eighteenth,’ she said. ‘Your birthday, right?’ I was stunned. It hadn’t even occurred to me, but she was right. I had turned sixteen this morning – the same morning I’d made the choice to give Luke the knife. The prophecy had come true right on schedule, and I hadn’t even thought about the fact that it was my birthday. ‘Make a wish,’ she said. ‘Did you bake this yourself?’ I asked. ‘Tyson helped.’ ‘That explains why it looks like a chocolate brick,’ I said. ‘With extra-blue cement.’ Annabeth laughed. I thought for a second then blew out the candle. We cut it in half and shared, eating with our fingers. Annabeth sat next to me and we watched the ocean. Crickets and monsters were making noise in the woods, but otherwise it was quiet. ‘You saved the world,’ she said. ‘We saved the world.’ ‘And Rachel is the new Oracle, which means she won’t be dating anybody.’ ‘You don’t sound disappointed,’ I noticed. Annabeth shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t care.’ ‘Uh-huh.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘You got something to say to me, Seaweed Brain?’ ‘You’d probably kick my butt.’ ‘You know I’d kick your butt.’ I brushed the cake off my hands. ‘When I was at the River Styx, turning invulnerable … Nico said I had to concentrate on one thing that kept me anchored to the world, that made me want to stay mortal.’ Annabeth kept her eyes on the horizon. ‘Yeah?’ ‘Then up on Olympus,’ I said, ‘when they wanted to make me a god and stuff, I kept thinking –’ ‘Oh, you so wanted to.’ ‘Well, maybe a little. But I didn’t, because I thought – I didn’t want things to stay the same for eternity, because things could always get better. And I was thinking …’ My throat felt really dry. ‘Anyone in particular?’ Annabeth asked, her voice soft. I looked over and saw that she was trying not to smile. ‘You’re laughing at me,’ I complained. ‘I am not!’ ‘You are so not making this easy.’ Then she laughed for real, and she put her hands around my neck. ‘I am never, ever going to make things easy for you, Seaweed Brain. Get used to it.’ When she kissed me, I had the feeling my brain was melting right through my body.

Once—and this would have been in the mid 1950s—Weisberg took the train to New York to attend, on a whim,the Science Fiction Writers Convention, where she met a young writer by the name of Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke took a shine to Weisberg, and next time he was in Chicago he called her up. “He was at a pay phone,” Weisberg recalls. “He said, is there anyone in Chicago I should meet. I told him to come over to my house.” Weisberg has a low, raspy voice, baked hard by half a century of nicotine, and she pauses between sentences to give herself the opportunity for a quick puff. Even when she’s not smoking, she pauses anyway, as if to keep in practice for those moments when she is. “I called Bob Hughes. Bob Hughes was one of the people who wrote for my paper.” Pause. “I said, do you know anyone in Chicago interested in talking to Arthur Clarke. He said, yeah, Isaac Asimov is in town. And this guy Robert, Robert—Robert Heinlein. So they all came over and sat in my study.” Pause. “Then they called over to me and they said, Lois...I can’t remember the word they used. They had some word for me. It was something about how I was the kind of person who brings people together.

FOR THE CAKE: Beat together eight soup spoons butter with one cup sugar until fluffy. Mix in two eggs and three soup spoons juice from an orange. In a small bowl, blend one and two-thirds cups flour, a teaspoon baking powder, and half a teaspoon salt. Add dry to wet mixture along with one cup buttermilk. Blend well. Stir in one cup raisins, half a cup chopped walnuts, and one soup spoon finely grated orange peel. Pour the mixture into a buttered pan and bake forty-five to fifty minutes. Cool before icing.   FOR THE ICING: Stir two soup spoons juice of orange and two cups powdered sugar together until the sugar dissolves completely and the icing is smooth. The icing should be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. If it is too thick, add more liquid; if too thin, add a little sugar.

People in this world, on this planet, all of these people are lonely. To varying degrees, human beings are lonely. Many are not; but too many are. And they are too frequently lonely, too. They fill their minds with things called dreams, plans, conclusions, outlooks, new stuff, self-imagery, self-esteem, illusions, fabrications; all of these things are noisy. They fill their minds up with all the things that are noisy enough to drown out the silence of their loneliness. And they think they're going somewhere because they gauge direction and success based upon the measurements of the distance covered over the platforms of the things they fill their minds with. The noise they fill their minds with. In reality, they're not going anywhere. They are sitting right there alone in that empty room of their minds where their hearts ache (or are numb), yet the walls are covered in noisy things, the corners filled with noisy things! It's a horror story, really. The people of this world are living inside a horror story and it is taking place within their minds. And you wonder why this world is unkind? You wonder why this world is violent, is unfulfilled, is half-baked? THIS is the reason why.

I was always eh, kinda want to like consider myself kind of a pioneer of the palette, a restaurateur if you will. I've wined, dined, sipped and supped in some of the most demonstrably beamer epitomable bistros in the Los Angles metropolitan region. Yeah, I've had strange looking patty melts at Norms. I've had dangerous veal cutlets at the Copper Penny. Well what you get is a breaded salsbury steak in a shake-n-bake and topped with a provocative sauce of Velveeta and uh, half-n-half. Smothered with Campbell's tomato soup. See I have kinda of a uh...well I order my veal cutlet, Christ it left the plate and it walked down to the end of the counter. Waitress, ? she's wearing those rhinestone glasses with the little pearl thing clipped on the sweater. My veal cutlet come down, tried to beat the shit out of my cup of coffee. Coffee just wasn't strong enough to defend itself.

Adam Smith, with his half-baked idea about a hidden hand that works the cotton looms, decides to use that as his central metaphor for unrestrained Free Market capitalism. You don’t need to regulate the banks or the financiers when there’s an invisible five-fingered regulator who’s a bit like God to make sure that the money-looms don’t snare or tangle. That’s the monetarist mystic idol-shit, the voodoo economics Ronald Regan put his faith in, and that middle-class dunce Margaret Thatcher when they cheerily deregulated most of the financial institutions. And that’s why the Boroughs exists, Adam Smith’s idea. That’s why the last fuck knows how many generations of this family are a toilet queue without a pot to piss in, and that’s why everyone we know is broke. It’s all there in the current underneath that bridge down Tanner Street. That was the first one, the first dark, satanic mill.

It has now been many months, at the present writing, since I have had a nourishing meal, but I shall soon have one—a modest, private affair, all to myself. I have selected a few dishes, and made out a little bill of fare, which will go home in the steamer that precedes me, and be hot when I arrive—as follows: Radishes. Baked apples, with cream Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs. American coffee, with real cream. American butter. Fried chicken, Southern style. Porter-house steak. Saratoga potatoes. Broiled chicken, American style. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Hot wheat-bread, Southern style. Hot buckwheat cakes. American toast. Clear maple syrup. Virginia bacon, broiled. Blue points, on the half shell. Cherry-stone clams. San Francisco mussels, steamed. Oyster soup. Clam Soup. Philadelphia Terapin soup. Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style. Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad. Baltimore perch. Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas. Lake trout, from Tahoe. Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans. Black bass from the Mississippi. American roast beef. Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style. Cranberry sauce. Celery. Roast wild turkey. Woodcock. Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore. Prairie liens, from Illinois. Missouri partridges, broiled. 'Possum. Coon. Boston bacon and beans. Bacon and greens, Southern style. Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips. Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus. Butter beans. Sweet potatoes. Lettuce. Succotash. String beans. Mashed potatoes. Catsup. Boiled potatoes, in their skins. New potatoes, minus the skins. Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot. Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes. Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper. Green corn, on the ear. Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style. Hot hoe-cake, Southern style. Hot egg-bread, Southern style. Hot light-bread, Southern style. Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk. Apple dumplings, with real cream. Apple pie. Apple fritters. Apple puffs, Southern style. Peach cobbler, Southern style Peach pie. American mince pie. Pumpkin pie. Squash pie. All sorts of American pastry. Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way. Ice-water—not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

I hadn't told him the news yet, but in that same preternatural way he was always aware of what I was feeling or thinking, he could smell my lies a mile away. He was just giving me time to come to him. To tell him I'd be baking his bun for the next seven and a half months. ''I'm okay." Dex's chuckle filled my ears as he wrapped his arms around my chest from behind, his chin resting on the top of my head. "Just okay?" He was taunting me, I knew it. This man never did anything without a reason. And this reason had him resembling a mama bear. A really aggressive, possessive mama bear. Which said something because Dex was normally that way. I couldn't even sit around Mayhem without him or Sonny within ten feet. I leaned my head back against his chest and laughed. "Yeah, just okay." He made a humming noise deep in his throat. "Ritz," he drawled in that low voice that reached the darkest parts of my organs. "You're killin' me, honey." Oh boy. Did I want to officially break the news on the side of the road with chunks of puke possibly still on my face? Nah. So I went with the truth. "I have it all planned out in my head. I already ordered the cutest little toy motorcycle to tell you, so don't ruin it." A loud laugh burst out of his chest, so strong it rocked my body alongside his. I friggin' loved this guy. Every single time he laughed, I swear it multiplied. At this rate, I loved him more than my own life cubed, and then cubed again. "All right," he murmured between these low chuckles once he'd calmed down a bit. His fingers trailed over the skin of the back of my hand until he stopped at my ring finger and squeezed the slender bone. "I can be patient." That earned him a laugh from me. Patience? Dex? Even after more than three years, that would still never be a term I'd use to describe him. And it probably never would. He'd started to lose his shit during our layover when Trip had called for instructions on how to set the alarm at the new bar. "Dex, Ris, and Baby Locke, you done?" Sonny yelled, peeping out from over the top of the car door. "Are you friggin' kidding me?" I yelled back. Did everyone know? That slow, seductive smile crawled over his features. Brilliant and more affectionate than it was possible for me to handle, it sucked the breath out of me. When he palmed my cheeks and kissed each of my cheeks and nose and forehead, slowly like he was savoring the pecks and the contact, I ate it all up. Like always, and just like I always would. And he answered the way I knew he would every single time I asked him from them on, the way that told me he would never let me down. That he was an immovable object. That he'd always be there for me to battle the demons we could see and the invisible ones we couldn't. "Fuckin' love you, Iris," he breathed against my ear, an arm slinking around my lower back to press us together. "More than anything.

And then she set to work, washing fresh blueberries that sat on the counter, before grabbing a big colander. Sam headed into the backyard, whose lawn backed acres of woods. Blackberries and raspberries grew wild and thick in the brambles that sat at the edge of the woods. Sam carefully navigated her way through the thorny vines, her thin running shirt catching and snagging on a thorn. "Darn it," she mumbled. Blackberries are red when they're green, she could hear her grandfather telling her when they used to pick the fruit. But today, a brilliant summer day, the blackberries were deep purple, almost black, and each one resembled a mini beehive. Sam plucked and popped a fresh blackberry, already warm from the sun, into her mouth, savoring the natural sweetness, and picked until her colander was half full before easing her way through the woods to find a raspberry bush thick with fruit. She navigated her way out of the brambles and headed back to the kitchen, where she preheated the oven and began to wash the blackberries and raspberries. Sam pulled cold, unsalted butter from the fridge and began to cube it, some flour and sugar from the cupboard, a large bowl, and then she located her grandmother's old pastry blender. Sam made the crust and then rolled it into a ball, lightly flouring it and wrapping it in plastic before placing it in the refrigerator. Then she started in on the filling, mixing the berries, sugar, flour, and fresh orange juice.

I call this our Thursday special. We have it regularly." This was a lie. In all the years not one single dish resembled another. Was this one from the deep green sea? Had that one been shot from blue summer air? Was it a swimming food or a flying food, had it pumped blood or chlorophyll, had it walked or leaned after the sun? No one knew. No one asked. No one cared. The most people did was stand in the kitchen door and peer at the baking-powder explosions, enjoy the clangs and rattles and bangs like a factory gone wild where Grandma stared half blindly about, letting her fingers find their way among canisters and bowls. Was she conscious of her talent? Hardly. If asked about her cooking, Grandma would look down at her hands which some glorious instinct sent on journeys to be gloved in flour, or to plumb disencumbered turkeys, wrist-deep in search of their animal souls. Her gray eyes blinked from spectacles warped by forty years of oven blasts and blinded with strewings of pepper and sage, so she sometimes flung cornstarch over steaks, amazingly tender, succulent steaks! And sometimes dropped apricots into meat loaves, cross-pollinated meats, herbs, fruits, vegetables with no prejudice, no tolerance for recipe or formula, save that at the final moment of delivery, mouths watered, blood thundered in response. Her hands then, like the hands of Great-grandma before her, were Grandma's mystery, delight, and life. She looked at them in astonishment, but let them live their life the way they must absolutely lead it.

Then, suddenly, a shadowy flash came to me. Tiffany, taking an order, arguing with a girl. Shockingly, not me. Another flash, of Detective Toscano walking into Yummy’s minutes ago. Tiffany nervously kneading a coaster between her fingers. The coaster I held in my hands right now. Tiffany was scared. Why was she scared of the cop? “Hey! Space shot! You want your Coke or not?” I tried to ignore Tiffany’s screeching and hold on to the vision, but it blurred and disappeared. I grabbed my new glass from her outstretched hand. “I heard you got into an argument last night,” I said. Tiffany paled, which I never thought possible since her skin was so fake-and-bake tan. She nervously twirled a lock of her bleach blond hair around her finger. “Where did you hear that?” “Doesn’t matter where I heard it.” I took a chance and added, “But it was pretty juicy gossip, considering who she was.” Tiffany’s pale face turned to green and I involuntarily took a step back ,half expecting an Exorcist-style stream of vomit to shoot out of her gaping mouth. Instead, she narrowed her eyes and leaned closer. “Get away from me,” she growled. And then it became clear. My flash of her argument. Her fear of the detective. She’d argued with the girl who was murdered last night. And she did not want Detective Toscano to find out about it. I stepped away from the bar, giddy with my new knowledge. I had the upper hand on Tiffany Desposito. I could torture her with this. Drag it out. Hold it over her head for days, even weeks. “It’s too bad you’re not with Justin anymore,” she said to my back. “He’s a cutie. And such a good kisser.” And that was my limit. I spun around and dumped my brand-new Coke over her head. She shrieked and flailed her hands as the liquid streamed over her face and down between her giant boobs. She peeled her sticky hair off her eyes and snarled, “I’ll get you for this.” I merely smiled, then sauntered over to the two Toscanos, who had apparently been watching this whole display with entertained grins on their faces. “You’re the new detective?” I asked the elder Toscano. He nodded. Either his mouth was too full with French fries or he was too scared of me to speak at the moment. “Tiffany Desposito, the wet and sticky waitress over there? She had a fight with the girl who was murdered. Last night, at this restaurant. You should question her right away. I wouldn’t even give her a chance to go home and shower first. I think she’s a flight risk.” I strolled back to my booth, sat down, and tore into my pancakes, happy as a kid on Christmas. Nate and Perry stared at me in silence for a few moments. Then Perry said, “Maybe you should have let me go over.” Nate shook his head. “Nah. She did just fine.

PORK AND BEANS BREAD Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. 15-ounce can of pork and beans (I used Van Camp’s) 4 eggs, beaten (just whip them up in a glass with a fork) 1 cup vegetable oil (not canola, not olive—use vegetable oil) 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 cups white (granulated) sugar 1 teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 1 and ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon 1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts (measure after chopping—I used pecans) 3 cups all-purpose flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) Prepare your pans. Spray two 9-inch by 5-inch by 3-inch-deep loaf pans with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray.   Don’t drain the pork and beans. Pour them into a food processor or a blender, juice and all, and process them until they’re pureed smooth with no lumps.   Place the beaten eggs in a large mixing bowl. Stir in the pureed pork and beans and mix them in well.   Add the vegetable oil and the vanilla extract. Mix well.   Add the sugar and mix it in. Then mix in the baking soda, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. Stir until everything is incorporated.   Stir in the chopped nuts.   Add the flour in one-cup increments, stirring after each addition.   Spoon half of the batter into one loaf pan and the other half of the batter into the second loaf pan.   Bake at 350 degrees F. for 50 to 60 minutes. Test the bread with a long food pick inserted in the center. If it comes out sticky, the bread needs to bake a bit more. If it comes out dry, remove the pans from the oven and place them on a wire rack to cool for 20 minutes.   Run the sharp blade of a knife around inside of all four sides of the pan to loosen the bread, and then tip it out onto the wire rack.   Cool the bread completely, and then wrap it in plastic wrap. At this point the bread can be frozen in a freezer bag for up to 3 months.   Hannah and Lisa’s Note: If you don’t tell anyone the name of this bread, they probably won’t ever guess it’s made with pork and beans.

BONNIE BROWNIE COOKIE BARS Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position.   4 one-ounce squares semi-sweet chocolate (or 3/4 cup chocolate chips) 3/4 cup butter (one and a half sticks) 1½ cups white (granulated) sugar 3 beaten eggs (just whip them up in a glass with a fork) 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) 1/2 cup chopped cashews 1/2 cup chopped butterscotch chips 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (I used Ghirardelli)   Prepare a 9-inch by 13-inch cake pan by lining it with a piece of foil large enough to flap over the sides. Spray the foil-lined pan with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray.   Microwave the chocolate squares and butter in a microwave-safe mixing bowl on HIGH for 1 minute. Stir. (Since chocolate frequently maintains its shape even when melted, you have to stir to make sure.) If it’s not melted, microwave for an additional 20 seconds and stir again. Repeat if necessary.   Stir the sugar into the chocolate mixture. Feel the bowl. If it’s not so hot it’ll cook the eggs, add them now, stirring thoroughly. Mix in the vanilla extract.   Mix in the flour, and stir just until it’s moistened.   Put the cashews, butterscotch chips, and chocolate chips in the bowl of a food processor, and chop them together with the steel blade. (If you don’t have a food processor, you don’t have to buy one for this recipe—just chop everything up as well as you can with a sharp knife.)   Mix in the chopped ingredients, give a final stir by hand, and spread the batter out in your prepared pan. Smooth the top with a rubber spatula.   Bake at 350 degrees F. for 30 minutes.   Cool the Bonnie Brownie Cookie Bars in the pan on a metal rack. When they’re thoroughly cool, grasp the edges of the foil and lift the brownies out of the pan. Place them facedown on a cutting board, peel the foil off the back, and cut them into brownie-sized pieces.   Place the squares on a plate and dust lightly with powdered sugar if you wish.   Hannah’s Note: If you’re a chocoholic, or if you’re making these for Mother, frost them with Neverfail Fudge Frosting before you cut them.

GRAHAM CRACKER CAKE Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. ½ cup salted butter, softened (1 stick, 4 ounces, ¼ pound) ¾ cup white (granulated) sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 large eggs 2 teaspoons baking powder ¼ teaspoon salt 2 and ¼ cups graham cracker crumbs 1 cup whole milk 1 cup chopped nuts (measure after chopping—I used walnuts)   8 and ¾ ounce can crushed pineapple WITH juice ¼ cup white (granulated) sugar Hannah’s Note: You can either crush your own graham cracker crumbs by placing graham crackers in a bag and rolling the bag with a rolling pin, crushing them in the food processor by using the steel blade, or you can buy ready-made graham cracker crumbs at the store. Spray a 9-inch square baking pan with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray and sprinkle the inside with flour. Shake out excess flour. You may also use Pam spray for baking, which contains a coating of flour. Both will work well. In an electric mixer, cream the butter and the sugar, adding the sugar gradually with the mixer on MEDIUM speed. Add the vanilla extract and mix it in thoroughly. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, incorporating the first egg before you add the second. Add the baking powder and the salt, beating until they’re thoroughly mixed. Mix in half of the graham cracker crumbs with half of the milk. Beat well. Mix in the other half of the graham cracker crumbs with the remaining half of the milk. Remove the bowl from the mixer and fold in the chopped nuts by hand. Pour the Graham Cracker Cake batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top with a rubber spatula. Bake your cake at 350 degrees F. for 30 minutes. Take your cake out of the oven, turn off the oven, and place the cake on a wire rack to await its topping. In a saucepan on the stovetop, combine the contents of the can of crushed pineapple and juice with the white sugar. Cook the pineapple mixture over MEDIUM HIGH heat, stirring constantly until it boils. Turn the burner down to LOW and cook the pineapple mixture for an additional 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Pour the hot pineapple sauce over the hot cake. Cool in the pan. Serve the Graham Cracker Cake with sweetened whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

per hour. Handbrake knew that he could keep up with the best of them. Ambassadors might look old-fashioned and slow, but the latest models had Japanese engines. But he soon learned to keep it under seventy. Time and again, as his competitors raced up behind him and made their impatience known by the use of their horns and flashing high beams, he grudgingly gave way, pulling into the slow lane among the trucks, tractors and bullock carts. Soon, the lush mustard and sugarcane fields of Haryana gave way to the scrub and desert of Rajasthan. Four hours later, they reached the rocky hills surrounding the Pink City, passing in the shadow of the Amber Fort with its soaring ramparts and towering gatehouse. The road led past the Jal Mahal palace, beached on a sandy lake bed, into Jaipur’s ancient quarter. It was almost noon and the bazaars along the city’s crenellated walls were stirring into life. Beneath faded, dusty awnings, cobblers crouched, sewing sequins and gold thread onto leather slippers with curled-up toes. Spice merchants sat surrounded by heaps of lal mirch, haldi and ground jeera, their colours as clean and sharp as new watercolor paints. Sweets sellers lit the gas under blackened woks of oil and prepared sticky jalebis. Lassi vendors chipped away at great blocks of ice delivered by camel cart. In front of a few of the shops, small boys, who by law should have been at school, swept the pavements, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust. One dragged a doormat into the road where the wheels of passing vehicles ran over it, doing the job of carpet beaters. Handbrake honked his way through the light traffic as they neared the Ajmeri Gate, watching the faces that passed by his window: skinny bicycle rickshaw drivers, straining against the weight of fat aunties; wild-eyed Rajasthani men with long handlebar moustaches and sun-baked faces almost as bright as their turbans; sinewy peasant women wearing gold nose rings and red glass bangles on their arms; a couple of pink-faced goras straining under their backpacks; a naked sadhu, his body half covered in ash like a caveman. Handbrake turned into the old British Civil Lines, where the roads were wide and straight and the houses and gardens were set well apart. Ajay Kasliwal’s residence was number

TICKLED PINK LEMONADE COOKIES   Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. Hannah’s 1st Note: This recipe is from Lisa’s Aunt Nancy. It’s a real favorite down at The Cookie Jar because the cookies are different, delicious, and very pretty. ½ cup salted, softened butter (1 stick, 4 ounces, ¼ pound) (do not substitute) ½ cup white (granulated) sugar ½ teaspoon baking powder ¼ teaspoon baking soda 1 large egg, beaten cup frozen pink or regular lemonade concentrate, thawed 3 drops of liquid red food coloring (I used ½ teaspoon of Betty Crocker food color gel) 1 and ¾ cups all-purpose flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the softened butter with the sugar until the resulting mixture is light and fluffy. Mix in the baking powder and baking soda. Beat until they’re well-combined. Mix in the beaten egg and the lemonade concentrate. Add 3 drops of red food coloring (or ½ teaspoon of the food color gel, if you used that). Add the flour, a half-cup or so at a time, beating after each addition. (You don’t have to be exact—just don’t put in all the flour at once.) If the resulting cookie dough is too sticky to work with, refrigerate it for an hour or so. (Don’t forget to turn off your oven if you do this. You’ll have to preheat it again once you’re ready to bake.) Drop the cookies by teaspoonful, 2 inches apart, on an UNGREASED cookie sheet. Bake the Tickled Pink Lemonade Cookies at 350 degrees F. for 10 to 12 minutes or until the edges are golden brown. (Mine took 11 minutes.) Let the cookies cool on the cookie sheet for 2 minutes. Then use a metal spatula to remove them to a wire rack to cool completely. FROSTING FOR PINK LEMONADE COOKIES   2 Tablespoons salted butter, softened 2 cups powdered sugar (no need to sift unless it’s got big lumps) 2 teaspoons frozen pink or regular lemonade concentrate, thawed 3 to 4 teaspoons milk (water will also work for a less creamy frosting) 2 drops red food coloring (or enough red food color gel to turn the frosting pink) Beat the butter and the powdered sugar together. Mix in the lemonade concentrate. Beat in the milk, a bit at a time, until the frosting is almost thin enough to spread, but not quite. Mix in the 2 drops of red food coloring. Stir until the color is uniform. If your frosting is too thin, add a bit more powdered sugar. If your frosting is too thick, add a bit more milk or water.

Galveston?” he asked in that amazing voice, still surprising me by keeping our conversation going. “Yeah. Staying at a beach house and everything. Totally slumming it and having a miserable time, you know?” I gave him a real smile that time. Rip just raised his brows. “I promised her I would go visit, and she promised she would come up too... What’s that face for?” I surprised myself by laughing. “I don’t believe it either. I’ll get lucky if she comes once. I’m not that delusional.” I didn’t imagine the way his cheek twitched again, just a little, just enough to keep the smile on my face. “I’m stuck making my own lunches from now on. I have nobody to watch scary movies with who’s more dramatic than I am screaming at the scary parts. And my house is empty,” I told him, going on a roll. “Your lunches?” was what he picked up on. I wasn’t sure how much he’d had to drink that he was asking me so many questions, but I wasn’t going to complain. “I can’t cook to save my life, boss. I thought everyone knew. Baking is the only thing I can handle.” “You serious?” he asked in a surprised tone. I nodded. “For real?” “Yeah,” I confirmed. “I can’t even make rice in an Instant Pot. It’s either way too dry or it’s mush.” Oh. “An Instant Pot is—” “I know what it is,” he cut me off. It was my turn to make a face, but mine was an impressed one. He knew what an Instant Pot was but not a rom-com. Okay. “Sorry.” He didn’t react to me trying to tease him, instead he asked, “You can’t even make rice in that?” “Nope.” “You know there’s instructions online.” Was he messing with me now? I couldn’t help but watch him a little. How much had he drunk already? “Yeah, I know.” “And you still screw it up?” I blinked, soaking up Chatty Cathy over here like a plant that hadn’t seen the sun in too long. “I wouldn’t say I screw it up. It’s more like… you either need to chew a little more or a little less.” It was his turn to blink. “It’s a surprise. I like to keep people on their toes.” If I hadn’t been guessing that he’d had a couple drinks before, what he did next would have confirmed it. His left cheek twitched. Then his right one did too, and in the single blink of an eye, Lucas Ripley was smiling at me. Straight white teeth. That not-thin but not-full mouth dark pink and pulled up at the edges. He even had a dimple. Rip had a freaking dimple. And I wanted to touch it to make sure it was real. I couldn’t help but think it was just about the cutest thing I had ever seen, even though I had zero business thinking anything along those lines. But I was smart enough to know that I couldn’t say a single word to mention it; otherwise, it might never come out again. What I did trust myself to do was gulp down half of my Sprite before saying, “You can make rice, I’m guessing?” If he wanted to talk, we could talk. I was good at talking. “Uh-huh,” he replied, sounding almost cocky about it. All I could get myself to do in response was grin at him, and for another five seconds, his dimple—and his smile—responded to me.

TIO TITO’S SUBLIME LIME BAR COOKIES Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. ½ cup finely-chopped coconut (measure after chopping—pack it down when you measure it) 1 cup cold salted butter (2 sticks, 8 ounces, ½ pound) ½ cup powdered (confectioners) sugar (no need to sift unless it’s got big lumps) 2 cups all-purpose flour (pack it down when you measure it)   4 beaten eggs (just whip them up with a fork) 2 cups white (granulated) sugar cup lime juice (freshly squeezed is best) cup vodka (I used Tito’s Handmade Vodka) ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking powder ½ cup all-purpose flour (pack it down when you measure it) Powdered (confectioners) sugar to sprinkle on top Coconut Crust: To get your half-cup of finely-chopped coconut, you will need to put approximately ¾ cup of shredded coconut in the bowl of a food processor. (The coconut will pack down more when it’s finely-chopped so you’ll need more of the stuff out of the package to get the half-cup you need for this recipe.) Chop the shredded coconut up finely with the steel blade. Pour it out into a bowl and measure out ½ cup, packing it down when you measure it. Return the half-cup of finely chopped coconut to the food processor. (You can also do this by spreading out the shredded coconut on a cutting board and chopping it finely by hand.) Cut each stick of butter into eight pieces and arrange them in the bowl of the food processor on top of the chopped coconut. Sprinkle the powdered sugar and the flour on top of that. Zoop it all up with an on-and-off motion of the steel blade until it resembles coarse cornmeal. Prepare a 9-inch by 13-inch rectangular cake pan by spraying it with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray. Alternatively, for even easier removal, line the cake pan with heavy-duty foil and spray that with Pam. (Then all you have to do is lift the bar cookies out when they’re cool, peel off the foil, and cut them up into pieces.) Sprinkle the crust mixture into the prepared cake pan and spread it out with your fingers. Pat it down with a large spatula or with the palms of your impeccably clean hands. Hannah’s 1st Note: If your butter is a bit too soft, you may end up with a mass that balls up and clings to the food processor bowl. That’s okay. Just scoop it up and spread it out in the bottom of your prepared pan. (You can also do this in a bowl with a fork or a pie crust blender if you prefer.) Hannah’s 2nd Note: Don’t wash your food processor quite yet. You’ll need it to make the lime layer. (The same applies to your bowl and fork if you make the crust by hand.) Bake your coconut crust at 350 degrees F. for 15 minutes. While your crust is baking, prepare the lime layer. Lime Layer: Combine the eggs with the white sugar. (You can use your food processor and the steel blade to do this, or you can do it by hand in a bowl.) Add the lime juice, vodka, salt, and baking powder. Mix thoroughly. Add the flour and mix until everything is incorporated. (This mixture will be runny—it’s supposed to be.) When your crust has baked for 15 minutes, remove the pan from the oven and set it on a cold stovetop burner or a wire rack. Don’t shut off the oven! Just leave it on at 350 degrees F. Pour the lime layer mixture on top of the crust you just baked. Use potholders to pick up the pan and return it to the oven. Bake your Sublime Lime Bar Cookies for an additional 30 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and cool your lime bars in the pan on a cold stovetop burner or a wire rack. When the pan has cooled to room temperature, cover it with foil and refrigerate it until you’re ready to serve. Cut the bars into brownie-sized pieces, place them on a pretty platter, and sprinkle them lightly with powdered sugar. Yum! Hannah’s 3rd Note: If you would prefer not to use alcohol in these bar cookies, simply substitute whole milk for the vodka. This recipe works both ways and I can honestly tell you that I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like my Sublime Lime Bar Cookies!