Vegan Whiskey Sour

The pace of new cocktails at my house has slowed down considerably from the peak in the summer of 2020, but it is still pretty great. We had a Korean inspired dinner with crisped chickpeas, and used the left over liquid to substitute for an egg white in this drink. Delish! (Makes 3 drinks ) 3 T aquafaba (drained chickpea liquid); shake vigorously 30 seconds. Add ice and: Bourbon 5 oz Simple syrup 4 oz Lemon juice 5 oz Reshake and strain into cocktail glasses

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Martin Wolf

One review I read called this bleak yet oddly comforting, and I have to agree with that mixed emotion. To me, an avowed avoider of all things related to economics, politics, and money, this is the sequel to Thomas Picketty's Capital In The Twenty First Century. In other words: 1) I know nothing about this subject and 2) these are books that make cogent and understandable presentations of what the problem is with the flow of money and power today. The book's review of recent history is sobering. Governments of all sorts have become less accountable to the public. Authoritarian states have grown more oppressive; some strong democracies have wobbled; weaker ones have crumbled. And the opportunism of strongmen is far from the only cause. Data published in 2020 show that, among the roughly 1.9bn residents of democracies, less than a quarter live in countries where most voters are satisfied with that system of government. This loss of faith—and the accompanying retreat from democracy—are rooted in decades of economic failure. On its face, that seems a very reasonable argument. Since the early 1980s, income and wealth inequality have risen dramatically in many countries; in America, for instance, the share of pre-tax income earned by the top 1% has nearly doubled by some counts, from about 10% to 19%. In rich economies growth in productivity and in the inflation-adjusted incomes of the typical household has been disappointing. Deindustrialization has left many working-class cities permanently depressed. We have seen all of this in the United States, where we are hurdling toward La Belle Epoque, with the rich getting much richer and the middle class sliding downward into near poverty. The glimmers of hope are that when women's rights were stripped away from them in the Dodd decision, essentially making them unequal citizens who no longer have autonomy over their own bodies, the ground shifted. Despite a dismal economy, Democrats out performed Republicans in the 2022 election, and the trend is continuing in early 2023. Vote, keep voting, urge others to vote and support voters world wide.

Sesame Cookies

I started baking out of the Cookie Bible, by Rose Levy Beranbaum with my long term baking companion (she has all the talent, I just follow directions, more or less), and these were quite good, not too sweet, and pretty. ¼ cup firmly packed (54 grams) light brown sugar, preferably Muscovado 2 tablespoons (25 grams) granulated sugar 4 tablespoons (57 grams) unsalted butter (½ stick), softened ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon (143 grams) tahini, preferably Soom brand, at room temperature ½ lightly beaten large egg (25 grams) ¼ teaspoon (1.25 ml) pure vanilla extract ½ cup plus 1½ tablespoons (71 grams) bleached all-purpose flour ½ teaspoon (2.7 grams) baking soda A pinch of fine sea salt ¼ cup (42 grams) hulled sesame seeds, for coating Make the dough: In a food processor, process sugars for several minutes, until very fine. With the motor running, add butter one tablespoon at a time and process until smooth and creamy. Scrape down sides of bowl as needed. Add tahini and process until smooth and creamy. In a small bowl, whisk together beaten egg and vanilla extract. Add egg mixture to food processor and process until incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda and salt. Add flour mixture to food processor and pulse just until incorporated. Scrape dough into a bowl. Cover and refrigerate for a minimum of 1 hour and up to overnight, to firm for shaping. When ready to bake, set an oven rack in middle position. Set oven to 375 degrees. Roll the dough into balls: Place sesame seeds in a small bowl or ramekin. Measure out 10 pieces of dough, 1 level tablespoon (18 grams) each. Roll each piece of dough between the palms of your hands to form a 1-inch ball, then roll ball in sesame seeds to coat. Place balls 1½ inches apart on a cookie sheet. Bake for 6 minutes. Rotate cookie sheet a half turn. Continue baking until cookies lightly brown and centers, when lightly pressed, have barely any give, 6-9 minutes.

One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank

I found this in an unusual way--I am not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal, though I know that it is a much esteemed paper, just not my cup of tea. This year, the third year in a row that I have been reading at an accelerated rate, I decided to read their Best Books of 2022 and this (and several other unusual choices) was on it. It is a memoir written not by the person herself, but rather someone who met her and became fascinated by her story. The book is about Stella Levi, a 99-year-old Jewish woman living in New York City. He met her by chance when he rushed in late to attend a lecture, and the elegant older woman in the chair next to him struck up a conversation. The following Saturday, he found himself in Levi’s Greenwich Village apartment, the first of 100 Saturdays that he would spend with her over the following six years. Stella lived in Juderia, the main Jewish quarter on the island of Rhodes, where Levi was born in 1923, and where he ancestors had lived since 1492 when they were exiled from Spain during the Inquisition. She was a teenager when the Holocaust reached the Juderia in the last months of World War II and scattered Levi’s parents, family, friends and community. She ended up in Auschwitz, and her stories about what it took to survive, how easy it was to die, and what she learned are at once fascinating and horrifying, but also different than other WWII memoirs that I have read. It is the story of that time and place, but it is also much more: a story of friendship, survival, reinvention and courage.

Tea Time

I bought this ceramic tea set at an estate sale for a price so reasonable that I wasn't concerned if the kids were to break it, and it turns out the magic of pouring imaginary tea is a constant across generations. As far back as the 1500s, the Dutch were making Delft earthenware (a soft, easily chipped ware). Then, in 1602, the Dutch East India Company was founded, bringing Chinese tea—and porcelain, to European shores. With tea being pretty much an instant hit, the first tea sets designed for children came out of Germany as early as 1687. Finally, a mathematician and alchemist team hit upon the formula for porcelain, and the Meissen factory opened near Dresden in 1710 (Malone 1976). Unsurprisingly, much of their ware imitated Chinese motifs. The one that I purchased came from Colonial Williamsburg and so has those rather than more traditional themes, but is just as popular in my home as in American homes 300 yearas ago.

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree

This book, winner of the Booker International Prize, is about an 80 year old woman with depression. She is small, so small she might disappear, drift away, go up in smoke. She leaves her house and crosses with her daughter into Pakistan. She travels to Lahore, where she lived as a girl, and then to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where she goes looking for her ex-husband, Anwar. The invisibility of women in modern India is one of many themes in this book that is both rambling and poetic. There are multiple scenes of men who are full of themselves and the many ways that women have to ignore them. There are cultural commentaries on modern India and the partition, many of which I am sure I missed, because there is so much allegory and I do not know enough to follow the subtext. Sometimes even the text goes over my head. Here is the thing--Tomb of Sand is not for everyone. I am not even sure it is for me, although I enjoyed reading it. The reason if my put some readers off is it abandons many of the narrative conventions of time, space, even character. It requires attention, a willingness to be immersed in a pseudo-magical world for long periods of time, and an openness to digression.

The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, JMW Turner

Yesterday was JMW Turner's 248th birthday, and he (for me) is still the master of depicting light. This one is the portrayal of an actual event, and he painted two versions, one of which is at the Cleveland Museumof Art. Fire consumed London’s famous Houses of Parliament on the night of October 16, 1834, and people gathered along the banks of the river Thames to gaze in awe at the horrifying spectacle. Initially, a low tide made it difficult to pump water to land and hampered steamers towing firefighting equipment along the river. The blaze burned uncontrollably for hours. J. M. W. Turner records the struggle as the boats in the lower-right corner head toward the flames. Although Turner based the painting on an actual event, he magnified the height of the flames, using the disaster as the starting point to express man’s helplessness when confronted with the destructive powers of nature. Brilliant swathes of color and variable atmospheric effects border on abstraction.

The Myth of Closure by Pauline Boss

The subtitle of this is Ambiguous Loss in the Time of Pandemic, which is really just a recent framework around which to look at and contextualize grief and loss. This was the Ethics Book Club book of the month at my workplace this month, and since it was available without even a wait at my local library, I read it. As stated above, this book is and isn't centered on the pandemic, even though that is in the title. It is true that The years of 2020 and 2021 have been times of great loss. COVID-19 death tolls exceed 5 million worldwide, climate change threatens our ways of life, and political unrest and racial injustice are daily in the headlines. These are ambiguous losses, which the author describes as a loss that remains unclear, without official verification or immediate resolution, and for which resolution may never be achieved. The book guides us through six principles for developing the resilience to live with and thrive despite these ambiguous losses. She makes it clear that these are not steps to be achieved sequentially, but to be used as needed as we navigate these times. Finding meaning and discovering new hope are key, supported by adjusting mastery, reconstructing identity, normalizing ambivalence, and revising attachment. Finding meaning in our loss makes tragedy easier to bear. Adjusting mastery allows us to control what we can control. We may need to reconstruct our identity, changing how we define ourselves. We learn to accept that ambivalence and conflicting emotions and feelings are normal and move forward despite this. We revise our attachment to the way things were and accept change to find a new steady state. Ultimately, we learn to hope for something new and move forward rather than living in a state of suspended animation. It is a useful framework to think about coping with loss that is different from the more widely known stages of grief described by Kubler-Ross.

Earth Beautiful

This is a view I have seen dozens of times--it is on the road between our house in the Tetons and town, and yet every single time I pass it, I am struck by it's beauty, it's simplicity, and it's link between the present and the past in the American West. Today is Earth Day, created in 1970 as a day for environmental education, stemming directing from the publicationin 1962 of Rachel Carson's SIlent Spring, an indictment on man's assault on the earth, using DDT as the index poison. Here is a paragraph from that thin volume: "Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is dropped into a still pond? Who has placed in one pan of the scales the leaves that might have been eaten by the beetles and in the other the pitiful heaps of many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of the birds that fell before the unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poisons? Who has decided—who has the right to decide— for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight?"

Chloe and the Kaishao Boys by Mae Coyiuto

I enjoyed this YA book about Chloe, a Filipino-Chinese girl who is turning 18, about to graduate from high school, and is getting ready to go to university after she gets into USC's animation program off the wait list. Part of turning 18 in the Philippines is having a debut (pronounced deh-BOO), which is a big celebration for a Filipino girl’s 18th birthday similar to a quinceañera. On top of all that, she’s also struggling with communication problems with her mom (who lives in America) and her dad, her burgeoning feelings for her best friend’s older brother, and a massive case of imposter syndrome regarding her skills and talent in animation. This is all layered onto Chloe's Filipino-Chinese community. Like most countries in Southeast Asia, there has always been a thriving Chinese community in the Philippines. In fact, Binondo, Chloe's neighborhood in Manila, is the oldest Chinatown in the world. And like most Chinese communities that exist in Southeast Asian countries, the blend between ethnicity and nationality can sometimes be challenging to navigate. They are Filipino, but there are also aspects to being Chinese that the community has retained. The prime example in this novel is the kaishao, a Hokkien word meaning “to introduce”. But there’s also the fact that a lot of Filipino-Chinese families also expect their children to speak Hokkien or Mandarin. There’s also what is called the “Great Wall”, a.k.a. Filipino-Chinese families who refuse to let their children date non-Chinese. All that and more is found in this fun coming of age novel.