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gstqaobc · 3 years

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Our dear Queen: never alone THE MONARCHIST LEAGUE OF CANADA 🍁🇨🇦

FOR TOMORROW, OUR QUEEN'S ACTUAL BIRTHDAY,,,We invite members to respond by return email by completing one of the following sentences in no more than 25 words of which we will publish an assortment of the most interesting tomorrow. You never know what might happen if yours is judged best. NB: this challenge is not the place to express condolences to The Queen or refer to her recent loss, which we each will do in our own way, with a full heart and no interest in publicity or reward. 1) I find The Queen's most endearing trait to be... 2) If I could ask HM one question, it would be... 3) If I were asked to give one piece of loyal advice to our Sovereign, I would say... LEAGUE POETRY COMPETITION ON THE NINETY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY OF THE QUEEN THREE WINNING POEMSWe were surprised and delighted by the number of entries in this first poetry competition of the League. But then, given its subject, perhaps we should not have been taken aback. The sentiments were universally heartfelt and the loyalty clear. We are therefore awarding three prizes. Two were written in English and one in French: naturally, we are not translating them! The first is a subtle evocation of The Queen’s sense of duty and her love of horses - the poet’s reference to giving up riding was of course an allusion to HM’s ceasing to ride at Trooping the Colour - she enjoys riding as relaxation to this day! The second is true to the spirit of Holst’s stirring melody, known to many as “I Vow to Thee, My Country.” And the third, the winner, explores HM’s Realms whimsically with a touch of gravity by means of their national foods. The poems could not be more different - which is as it should be. Our thanks to all who entered the competition! SECOND PRIZE TIED by Tom MacGregor, Ottawa ON QUEEN ELIZABETH’S 95th BIRTHDAY On her ninety-fifth birthday, I think of the Statue on Parliament Hill Of her confidently seated On a horse named Centennial Given to her by The Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The small woman unveiled it In 1991 after she had given up riding. Still, she carried on More than 60 years as Queen And 95 of service. FIRST PRIZE by an anonymous member who is donating the value of the prize to supply a food treat to the homeless today in honour of The Queen’s birthday QUEEN OF THE SIXTEEN REALMS On the 95th birthday of Elizabeth II PROLOGUE Elizabeth, to your Realms grandmother, sister, friend and Queen: How can we embrace you, and today let you know That we would your sorrow share, wish you could lean On our sixteen hearts, like the drums, beating slow. We look back as you must on Philip’s decades: Your strength and stay during storm and fair days. We gaze also to our future wish: grief ‘midst memories fades To joy of life full-lived, walked on the fields of praise. So follows our birthday wish, from Realms richly diverse, Who now tune their heart-strings to the happier times Which will follow, dear Ma’am, as sure as sunrise: A great truth of life, which we need not more rehearse, But, rather, assure you: north, west, east, southern climes Gather round to uphold you, dear Queen - loving and wise! ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Elizabeth, our Queen and friend, the nations’ joy and pride, Her 95th today is hailed through Realms both far and wide; And since all share in most fond wish to serve special birthday treat - These lines some local fare suggest - loyal banquet so replete! In ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA, small islands to be sure, But big in heart and loyalty - FUNGIE ‘tis special allure: Polenta-based and spicy hot, with pepperpot ‘tis served, A treat for their beloved Queen, one surely well deserved! Down Under, AUSTRALIAN mates present their VEGEMITE: This brewers’ yeast extract not yet the world’s delight! But served on toast throughout the land, a tribute singular - quite - Antipodean Queen finds on Aussie plate a most distinct delight. THE BAHAMAS offers special dish: folk there pluck CONCH from sea: And dressed with lime and vegetables - ‘tis rich in Vitamin C! Bahamian Sovereign will enjoy devouring “Queen Conch” recipe, Dressed with fruit, offered with love and Island loyalty BARBADOS, amidst disloyal dance, bakes up its famed RUM CAKE On which Monarch’s pain at such dalliance might well her sweet tooth slake; Since toothsome confection is topped up with frequent rum infusion: EIIR hopes (though’d never say) “Drink deep: to republican confusion!” BELIZE proffers its BOIL UP, reminiscent of the pie in rhyme: No blackbirds for its Queen today, but fish, eggs, veggies: good time! Tis topped with broth and dough, then baked - a treat fit for a princess, The Central American domain diverse could offer her no less! CANADA may indeed be home to most loyal Maple Throne: Thus on this day POUTINE shall stand in prominence, alone: Like the Dominion, flavours many, with toppings beyond measure - As each in own way toasts our Queen, the True North’s splendid treasure! GRENADA’s OIL DOWN, savoury-sweet, a one pot dish of stew, With coconut leaching flavours out to make each casserole new To taste - and variegated ever for all this island nation. Which prospers under Reign of she whose birthday brings elation! Next in our roll of Realms, JAMAICA, island, of many peoples, blest To keep cool ‘neath tropical sun with ACKEE AND SALTFISH zest: Its spices mirror nation’s mix, from planters to Bobsled team; And dread-locked Rasta men, who share deepest love of Queen. PAVLOVA is NEW ZEALAND’s gift to the arts culinary, Its Kiwi, cream, meringue mix cherished by settlers as by Maori; Whether Hobbits share such taste, brave Frodo first and foremost, We know not - but all in the island realm drink to EIIR a toast! If MUMU you were offered while exploring PAPUA NEW GUINEA shore, Polyglot island lines hot coals with leaves - adds meats, fruit, veg and more, To make a stew from ground oven of savour nonpareil, Thus honouring their Queen and friend with two Hemispheres’ “hooray.” SAINT KITTS AND NEVIS to birthday brings STEWED SALTFISH, which they blend With coconut dumplings and plantains for feasting without end, As no close they ever sight in good Queen’s service to tiniest sovereign state In Hemisphere - large they be in duty, love - thus this day they fete! SAINT LUCIA pairs fish and fig, GREEN FIG AND SALTED COD! Antilles population takes a week to give the nod To stew that melds, as island does two seas, Atlantic and Caribbean, And mix a Bounty cocktail to raise their glass to Queen! A BREADFRUIT ROASTED in iron pot, add fried jackfish for great repast, Is SAINT VINCENT & THE GRENADINES’ entrée, not easily surpassed: Its thirty-two islands celebrate their Monarch’s special day, Sing “...Land, so Beautiful” to big drum, calypso, steel pan and reggae! Now Taro roots make sticky POI, SOLOMON ISLANDS’ favorite food, The wise old King lends his name to 900-strong island brood; Thus Melanesian Queen presides, with Governor-General elected: Their birthday bouquet beauteous, as from 200 orchid strains selected! TUVALU brings to feast PULAKA, swamp taro cooked for hours: Raising ocean discourages cultivation - ‘tis time for Commonwealth powers To use their world wide fellowship to save this crop essential: Their Queen fears global warming looms, Polynesian threat potential. The UNITED KINGDOM is Elizabeth’s home, of sixteen Realms The Queen: No longer a colonial power, but from Empire’s legacy yet seen: Its “national dish” CHICKEN TIKKA MASALA now claims pride of place, Transcending old-style differences of climate, Raj and race! ~! ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ EPILOGUESo, all hail, dear Queen, gracious Lady: your true realms lie deep within, Not geographic, to be sure, but values kingly. gracious, human; Constant Commonwealth care for its nations great and small, Reflects deep-reciprocal, hailed to your heart, one voice echoed by all! So here’s to Elizabeth - long may she reign, long live our monarch so great! Here’s to her courage in fair weather or foul, duty done, chosen not - happy fate! Here’s to the faith ever kept, beyond clamour of sectarian creeds; Here’s to the hope she brings all, so nourishing humankind’s needs; Here’s to her ninety-fifth birthday, her years’ gift to us, thus today we proclaim:God willing, all your Realms do their duty And each subject in turn do the same!

GSTQAOBC 🇨🇦🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿

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the-yellowturtle · 4 years

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Title: By The Way (I Tried to Say Not to Eat That)

Rating: G

Summary: Zuko really, really likes spicy food.

Note: This is for @zkdrabbledecember‘s Day 27: Don’t Worry :)

Check out the AO3 Link for the A/N

For as long as history has been recorded, the Fire Nation archipelago has been known for its spicy cuisine. Believed to be good for chi flow, Fire Nation people till this day will consume chili peppers by the bucketload. Many think that spice is the most invigorating of the flavors, and thus it is not uncommon to find a bowl of plain chili peppers on the table for every meal. Even if someone does not partake in the peppers, the rest of the food will certainly give them their fair share of spice.

It is undeniable that a high tolerance for spice is a source of national pride in the Fire Nation. However, despite their pride in being able to handle spice, there is one place that even Fire Nation citizens will request a mild dish: Ember Island.

The average Fire Nation citizen likes to claim that they do not fear spicy food. In Ember Island, they say that they fear non-spicy food. If the aroma of a dish fails to make your eyes water, then the dish is bland. Wielding the locally cultivated Sishen Pepper, the Ember Islanders never fail in weeding out who is not a local.

This is the place that Princess Ursa called her hometown, and it is this Ember Island heritage that undoubtedly gave birth to Zuko’s own insatiable appetite for spicy food.

___

Let it be said that Zuko never started to breed his own peppers with malicious intentions. He was well aware that his spice tolerance far succeeded that of the average Fire Nation citizen, let alone the foreign dignitaries that frequented the palace halls. He would willingly and gracefully suffer through the bland food that his guests preferred if it meant protecting world peace.

No, Zuko’s interest in growing peppers began a year or so after becoming Fire Lord. As one might expect, governing a country after a hundred years of war was a daunting task. An exhausting and stress-inducing task. It was during long nights in his study that Zuko discovered one way to cope with his new position: Sishen Peppers. Lots of Sishen Peppers.

Zuko had always loved to eat them with his mother as a boy, and now as Fire Lord he found himself snacking on them at every opportunity. The spiciness of the pepper never failed to reinvigorate him, and made it much easier to focus on the work that still had to be done. Besides daily firebending training, meditation and writing to his friends, eating peppers was one of the few ways that Zuko managed to curb his stress levels.

The thing was, though, being Fire Lord was extremely stressful. And if you ate spicy peppers enough, you would eventually become immune to the spiciness of said peppers. This was the predicament that Zuko found himself in shortly after taking the throne.

The solution? Breed peppers that were even spicier.

With words of encouragement from Uncle Iroh, Zuko slowly began to invest himself in the world of crossbreeding pepper plants. It’s a rocky start, but after a few years Zuko managed at last to produce a tiny, bright red pepper covered in blisters that he was proud to call his own. It was a pepper so spicy that even the Ember Island Representative had balked at Zuko’s offer of having a second bite.

Except for Zuko, the turtleducks were the only other beings willing to partake in the new breed of pepper. Turtleducks being incapable of tasting spice probably had something to do with this. Nonetheless, he decided to name the variety of pepper after his favorite animal.

In hindsight, calling it the Turtleduck Pepper was probably not the best choice.

___

As the Southern Water Tribe Ambassador to the Fire Nation, Katara was very familiar with the spicy cuisine of the country. Although she initially possessed the spice tolerance of an average Fire Nation toddler, her palette had come a long way. After a few years of spending her summers in the country, she could now easily enjoy the offerings of Caldera City. To her immense pleasure, even her fellow Southerners —her embassy coworkers and their families— began to use the local flavors in their own cuisine. It was heartwarming to see that chilipaprika seal jerky and ginlic chili stewed sea prunes had become beloved by Water Tribe and Fire Nation people alike.

Yes, Katara had developed an appreciation for spicy food. However, she was nowhere near the level of her boyfriend, Zuko. Unfortunately, she was greatly reminded of this fact one day when they were feeding the turtleducks in his private garden.

Katara blames herself. She really does. If she hadn’t been so caught up in staring at Zuko’s gorgeous smile, then she wouldn’t have gotten herself into this situation. However, Katara was only human and Zuko always looked so content when he was feeding the turtleducks and he always had the gentlest smile on his face and he just looked so beautiful and her brain just kind of disconnected from reality as she realized once again just how much in love with him she was and—

Instead of taking a bite of one of the blue bell peppers Zuko had personally cultivated for her, Katara took a bite of one of the Turtleduck Peppers.

The effects were pretty instantaneous. Katara knew she wasn’t dying, but between the coughing, the runny nose, the wet eyes, and the intense burning in her mouth; it sure felt like it.

“Katara! Agni! Are you okay?!” Zuko screeched while taking out a handkerchief to dab at her face. “What happened?!”

“The— The peppers! The Turtleduck Peppers!” Katara managed to croak out between coughs, and pointed to the half-eaten culprit on the ground.

Zuko muttered a few curses before handing her some hippo cow milk. “Drink that, it will make you feel better,” he explained as he rubbed up and down her back.

It took chugging down about another two bottles of the milk before Katara could feel her tongue again.

“Do you feel better now? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left the Turtleduck Peppers near y—”

“Zuko,” Katara interrupted, “Don’t worry, I feel a lot better now! And it’s not your fault. I should have been paying more attention instead of staring at you— instead of staring at the turtleducks!”

Zuko froze for a moment before getting a sly look on his face. “You were staring at me?”

“Yes,” Katara admitted with a grumble, dabbing at her wet eyes. “Of course I was looking at you. I love watching you do the things you’re passionate about. You just get this look on your face, and… La! It just reminds me of how much I love you.”

His response was to cup her cheeks and press a quick kiss to her lips, “I love you, too.”

“I know,” she smiled.

#zutara #zutara fanfiction #zutara drabble #mine

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trueishcolours · 5 years

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Six Seeds

She was a princess of Gweek, one of the spice kingdoms that crowded along the narrow strip of land between the desert and the sea. The kingdoms throve on the spice trade that supplied all the cooks and apothecaries and witches of the world, and whenever one of them throve more than the rest, its neighbours tried their best to snatch its fruits for themselves. So they lived in a state of mingled prosperity and warfare, and their semi-piratical merchant fleets kept them proof from attack over the sea.

She was a princess of Gweek, and her name and title was Kore. It meant that she was a maiden, and the maiden: the eldest woman of marriageable age in the royal house. When she married she would take another name.

And marry she certainly would, for in the spice kingdoms marriage went hand in hand with war. The only way to secure a kingdom against invasion – for a generation, maybe, or half that – was through a marriage alliance with a strong neighbour.

Gweek’s chief export was hot red chillies, and Kore was an expert in their growing. One evening, she was sitting on her veranda overlooking the palace courtyard, working on a small chilli plant in a tub. She was teaching it about fire so that it would learn how to make its fruits hot, and the plant, like most of its kind, was squirming its roots petulantly into the wet, dark earth of its pot and taking little interest. As she raised an arm to invoke the sun and give the topic some relevance, a servant hurried forward to announce a visitor, whom her father wished her to entertain.

‘He is a suitor, of kingly bearing,’ the servant said, ‘and your father is well-disposed towards him. He asks you to talk a while with the man, and decide how you like him.’

Kore was astonished. A marriage proposal should have been the occasion for much inquiring, bargaining and sending of gifts, with her own opinion sought along the way. For a suitor to be all but chosen as soon as he was announced was unheard of. When the servant ushered the guest forward, however, she thought she had an answer. The guest did not look kingly, and when invited to sit he chose a chair in the shadow of the courtyard wall. He looked like a middling hedgerow wizard; the sort who, with boldness, might befuddle a king and obtain an introduction to his daughter.

But I’ll wager I can resist whatever spell he’s weaving,’ Kore thought, for he doesn’t know that I’m a witch myself. I’ll talk to him and see how the trick is done.

‘Good evening,’ she said aloud.

‘Ah,’ the stranger said, in the voice of one who sees a beloved face at the end of a long journey. ‘There you are, my intended. May I be seated?’

‘You are most welcome to join me,’ Kore said tartly. ‘I should like to get a good look at you. But you are mistaken to call me your intended.’

‘Really?’ the man said. ‘When I left your father he seemed quite determined to give me your hand.’

‘When you left my father he was quite bewitched.’

‘That may be so.’

‘Move into the light,’ Kore commanded. ‘I cannot make out your face clearly.’

‘There are few who choose to see me clearly, if they can avoid it,’ the man said. ‘Princess, I have a gift for you. Chilies grown in my own country, of quite surpassing heat and fragrance. One small fruit is enough to season a dish all through, and only the strongest constitutions can consume one raw.’

‘Your kingdom must be close to mine, then, to have soil suited for the same crop?’

‘My kingdom is very close to yours, yes,’ he said gravely.

‘My people too pride ourselves on the piquancy of our fruit,’ she said, ‘and engage in contests to see who can grow the hottest, and who can bear to eat them. I am reckoned a good grower, and a good taster too.’

‘I would be honoured if you would taste what my people can grow,’ the stranger said.

‘I’ll wager I can do so without flinching,’ Kore replied, ‘and moreover that the fruits of my plant here are hotter than yours. I hope you don’t think me rude, sir, but if I’m to marry you, I want to at least be sure that you know your trade.’

There is no kingdom along the shore whose spices are too strong for me, she thought, and perhaps a mouthful of chili will get him to drop that glamour of his and let me see his face.

From a packet in his pocket the stranger took a single, dried chili, blood red. Kore placed a bronze dish on the table, and the man crushed the chili into it, so that the seeds sprinkled out of the hollow inside.

‘The seeds are the hottest part,’ he said. ‘I advise you, Princess, to begin with just one.’

Kore plucked a fresh chili from her plant. It whispered the slow, drenching heat of the sun to her fingers as she cut it open and scraped out the seeds.

‘Together, then?’ the stranger asked. They each pressed their finger down on a seed and placed it in their mouth.

The burning started as one little spot where the seed touched her tongue. It spread as she bit down. A good hot chili, well-bred. Its aftertaste was like bitter smoke.

She looked to see how the stranger was reacting, but tears had blurred her vision.

‘A fine specimen,’ he said. ‘Your own?’

‘I brought them up, yes.’

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘why people go to such lengths to cultivate a plant that it hurts to eat.’

‘For excitement,’ Kore answered at once. ‘Of all the animals, humankind are the only ones with energy to spare. That is why we have magic and agriculture and ascendancy over all things. And when life does not provide outlets for our energies, we make our own.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps it is because pain is inevitable and you wish to experience it at a time of your choosing. What think you of my crop?’

‘It is bitterer than we breed for here. The flavour reminds me of something, but I don’t know what. I shall have another seed and get the taste again.’

She took another seed and so did he.

‘Nothing is inevitable,’ she said once she had chewed. She felt the sweat spring up on her neck and brow.

‘Really?’ he said. ‘I have often heard people say that some things are. Taxes, for example.’

‘Ask any town where the people have thrown off their ruler and set up for themselves and you’ll find that that’s not true.’

‘And what of the fates of people?’ he asked. ‘It is inevitable that the farmer’s son shall sow and reap, that the tradesperson’s daughter shall keep shop, that the king’s daughter shall marry for alliance – ’

‘And that this king’s daughter shall marry you, no doubt,’ Kore scoffed. The pain of the chili had kindled her temper, the way pain always did. So had the nerve of the stranger, and the way he spoke his nonsense so solemnly, as if it were fact. She wanted to glare at him, but his glamour still hadn’t faltered, and that infuriated her further.

She dabbed up another seed.

‘Princess, the spice has already brought you to tears,’ the stranger said.

‘I can eat my subjects’ spices,’ said Kore, ‘and no other kingdom grows hotter.’ She pushed the dish towards him. ‘Eat. I will certainly never marry a man who cannot match me at the table.’

He took a seed. It satisfied her to see him obey her.

‘Away down the south coast, I hear,’ she said, ‘maidens choose their own husbands, and the law prevents anybody who tries to interfere. Nothing is inevitable.’

‘Would you like to live thus?’ the stranger asked.

‘Of course, if I could,’ Kore said. ‘Who would prefer to have their life arranged for them, if they could marry for love?’

‘Then why do you yourself not tell your father that you will settle for nothing less?’

The spice caught in Kore’s throat as he asked his question. She had to pause and swallow hard before she could answer.

‘Because I know that my father – provided he is not bewitched – will ask me to do what is needful for the kingdom.’

‘Just so,’ the stranger said. ‘There is delight in freedom, but comfort in knowing that one has done one’s duty.’ His voice reminded her of the plant’s roots twisting through wet, dark earth. It breathed coolness over her heated skin.

‘Do you think that you are surprising me with whatever spell you have put on this chili, wizard?’ she demanded. ‘I am familiar with the growing of spices, and I can handle their heat, and all the magic that they can work besides. Another seed will give me a better feel for what you have done.’

‘I shall match you, Princess,’ he said, and for a fourth time they ate.

‘The people of the southern coast are happy,’ Kore said, ‘because each of them can choose the spouse most likely to increase their happiness.’

‘And yet I have heard that some of them are not happy,’ he said, ‘and their unhappiness is all the greater because they feel that they have made it for themselves.’

‘Better to be imprisoned by others than to choose your cell yourself?’ Kore said.

‘Better to accept that our lives cannot always be of our own choosing, and let go the blame together with the freedom. Is a woman to blame if her life turns out ill? If she believes that the choices were her own, she must also lay claim to the consequences. To try and seize all blessings in life by your own power, Princess, is to make yourself responsible for any misfortune that might come instead.’

‘So we should accept our fate and do our duty, wizard?’ Kore said. ‘There may be some truth in what you say. I should certainly be afraid to choose poorly, if I had to choose my spouse myself. But I have noticed that men are quick to council women about fate and duty, and not so quick to submit to those powers themselves.’

‘A fair rebuke,’ the stranger said. ‘Perhaps I need a wife to teach me better.’

The burning was fading from Kore’s tongue, and her mouth felt dull without it, so she reached for another seed. She had given up on disentangling the flavour; it reminded her of no other variety she had tasted. But she felt proud that the heat troubled her not at all; that she found it only agreeable.

The sun had fallen behind the high wall of the courtyard as they talked. Her visitor was shadowed once again.

‘Why will you not let me look at you?’ she asked.

‘I am before you, if only you would see,’ he replied.

‘You speak in riddles, wizard,’ Kore said.

‘And yet that does not displease you.’

‘True,’ she said, surprised to feel that her ire had faded. ‘I seem to have sweated all the anger out of me. Your charm must be working. But I think my fruit is too hot for you.’

‘I will match you,’ he repeated, taking his fifth seed.

‘You will not best me,’ she said, ‘but I admire the attempt. Tell me of this kingdom you think you will sweep me away to.’

‘You would not find it beautiful, perhaps,’ he said, ‘but for weary travellers it is. The moon is high there, the stars are sharp, the soil black and rich.’

‘Full of dead things,’ Kore said, feeling the worms sliding in the pot.

‘Full of the richness of decay. In my kingdom there is no choice; there are no questions; there is no worry or ill fortune or bad council. In my kingdom every person lives according to their fate, and all are at peace.’

‘It sounds like a nightmare.’ She reached for a seed to drive away the chill. He copied her motion as smoothly as a reflection. ‘No choice.’

‘Everyone may choose the path they take, but nobody may choose their final end.’

‘It’s not true.’ Her voice wavered. ‘It’s not true that everybody has a fate.’

‘Can you think of none?’ he asked softly. The answer came to her unbidden as she met his eyes at last.

‘Death,’ she whispered.

‘I am he,’ he said.

She saw his face at last: fine-boned, spare and empty, bright white in the gloaming. It was beautiful, if scaffolding can be beautiful. And she recognised the taste of the chili. Its bitterness was the smoke of a pyre.

‘I thank you,’ he said, ‘for tasting my fruit and for sharing yours.’

‘I will not go with you!’ she gasped. He did not reply as he got to his feet.

‘I will not!’ she shouted. He turned and walked away across the courtyard.

An enchanter, a gardener, a god? Trailing unanswered questions behind him! When she blinked, the after-image of his face hung before her eyes. She dashed across the courtyard and caught his elbow, arresting him right in the gateway.

‘What spell have you cast on me with your seeds?’ she demanded.

‘There was no magic in the seeds,’ he said.

‘I will go with you because you have enchanted me,’ she choked. Then he spoke, and every word had the force of a catapulted stone.

‘You will go with me, Kore of Gweek, because I am powerful, which you desire; because I need you, which you desire; and because my kingdom is peaceful, which you will come to desire. You will have power over everything, and only Death will have power over you. And your bride-name shall be Persephone.’

‘You say that there was no magic in your seeds,’ Persephone replied, ‘but there was magic in mine. And so I say, six seeds I ate and six months shall I spend in your kingdom, and you matched me and shall spend six months in mine. Death shall not have total dominion over life, but shall destroy only at the proper time, and what you take in autumn you shall give back in spring.’

Persephone saw that the god of death could not turn his hollow eyes away from her. She knew that she had bargained well.

‘Tell me, Hades,’ she said boldly, ‘what the God of Death wants with a wife.’

‘A counterbalance and a co-regent,’ he said. ‘Death does not delight in marriage.’

‘Life does,’ Persephone answered.

Then she learned that a death’s head could look bashful.

Standing underneath the palace gate, on the threshold between this world and the next, Hades and Persephone met in a kiss that seared with ice and fire.

#original stories #mythology #hades and persephone #nyc midnight short story competition #I'm through to the second round!#word limit: 2500 #word count: 2490 #writing time: 7 days #if you enjoyed please reblog!#monstrous blogs

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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‘It Was a Losing Fight to Write Anything That Wasn’t “Ethnic”’

White food writers are often allowed to be generalists, while BIPOC creators are limited to their personal histories, their cultures, and the foods their grandmothers made

In this age of the cook-turned-influencer, Bon Appétit’s video content found astonishing success by capitalizing on the colorful world of the quirky characters featured in its test kitchen. In many cases, the employees’ personalities were turned into their personal brands. This strategy, actively pursued by now-former editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport, piggybacked off an evolving relationship between audiences and celebrity chefs like Alison Roman, whose “authentic” lazy-girl cooking hacks jolted her into almost instant fame. Branding oneself as the creator of a viral dish (“the stew,” “the pasta”) or crafting an identity around a quirk or personality trait, all but eliminates the need for bona fide experts, allowing the internet-friendly celebrity chef to take their place.

But as the casual viewer noticed — and as stories about Bon Appétit’s corporate culture have revealed in recent weeks — it is almost always only white food writers, chefs, and recipe developers who get to adopt personas that go beyond their ethnicity. For every Brad Leone, who gets to be goofy and charming, for every Claire Saffitz, who becomes a sensation for being hyper-competitive and neurotically orderly, you have a Priya Krishna or a Rick Martinez, whose ethnicity, and the “expertise” in a certain cuisine that comes with it, is often framed as their most useful contribution to the team.

Martinez, former senior food editor and current BA contributor, was branded the “resident taco maestro” in the pages of the magazine, yet, as he recounted to Business Insider, then-deputy editor Andrew Knowlton asked if he was “a one-trick pony” for focusing on Mexican cuisine. Argentinian test kitchen manager Gaby Melian’s only solo video on YouTube is of her making her family’s empanada recipe. Fan favorite Sohla El-Waylly, who managed to veer out into more generalist territory with beloved recipes for dumplings, cinnamon buns, and even a carbonara dessert, started her career at BA talking about her riff on a family biryani recipe on the Bon Appétit Foodcast podcast and made an “updated” version of a Bengali snack, piyaju, for her first solo video. Even after expanding out of her “niche” and producing some of the channel’s most creative recipes, El-Waylly’s expertise was considered external to her identity, and — as she revealed in an Instagram story on June 8 — she was compensated as such. Other BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) at BA, including contributing editor Priya Krishna and research director Joseph Hernandez, also spoke out against BA’s pay disparities and its pervasive racist culture that, as Business Insider wrote, “does not provide nonwhite employees the same opportunities on the brand’s video side that white employees enjoy.”

The feeling of being slotted into a niche is all too familiar for Martinez. “There’s this idea in food media that it’s somehow easier to cook the food of your culture because you grew up with it or that it’s a part of you,” Martinez tells me. “It completely discounts the skills that it takes to build a recipe for an American audience. To recreate or even create an homage to the original dish requires a lot of creativity, skill, and work.”

The recent changes at BA — Rapoport’s resignation, white BA staffers’ refusal to put out content until their BIPOC colleagues are paid fairly — are a start. Yet the simultaneous compartmentalizing and marginalization of BIPOC in food media goes far beyond one organization or one editor-in-chief. Allowing BIPOC to have more agency within the food media system will require reimagining the relationship white America has both to “other cuisines” and to the people who grew up on them.

There’s this perception in food media, which publications like Bon Appétit subscribe to and perpetuate, that all that nonwhite writers really want is to have their cultures represented “authentically.” But the premise of authenticity is rooted in a white gaze that selectively acquires aspects of nonwhite cultures to package as just exotic enough to remain accessible. In late June, the New York Times published a story about “Thai fruit” that frames common fruit in Thailand as foreign and difficult to understand. The week before, tofu was labeled “white, chewy, and bland” in a since-deleted tweet by Bloomberg Asia. And who can forget the infamous Bon Appétit pho fiasco, which called the Vietnamese dish “the new ramen” and enlisted a white chef to give a “PSA: This Is How You Should Be Eating Pho”? Stories like these serve as reminders that foods outside of whiteness are at odds with an imagined “American” readership, for whom these foods remain distant and other.

“Our white colleagues think that we are speaking out about representation or appropriation because we want to be seen as experts on the subject,” says travel and food writer Dan Q. Dao. “[But] what we are [really] fighting is a long battle for inclusivity and equity in our workplaces.”

“I’m often asked to add a cultural slant even when one does not exist.”

Those workplaces, it should be noted, are overwhelmingly white. In June, Leah Bhabha noted in a Grubstreet piece, citing a 2019 Diversity Baseline study, that 76 percent of all publishing industry professionals are white. “In my own experience, as a biracial Indian writer, I’ve never had more than one coworker of color on my team,” she wrote, “and frequently it’s just been me.” The social media age — and the branding pressures inherent within — exacerbates that experience. Social media allows for real-time feedback that makes creators accountable to an audience that often acts as ad hoc sensitivity readers for people writing about their own cultural backgrounds. Writer and chef Samin Nosrat recently tweeted her frustrations with that pressure: “Instead of criticizing the systems that refuse to allow for greater diversity and inclusion, desis, Iranians, whoever, just pile on individual cooks for our perceived failure to represent their ideal versions of their entire cuisines. (Or even more frustratingly, for failing to cook something *exactly* like maman did it back home. I am not your maman!)”

But as media writer Allegra Hobbs pointed out in October 2019, “in the age of Twitter and Instagram, an online presence, which is necessarily public and necessarily consumable, seems all but mandatory for a writer who reaches (or hopes to reach) a certain level of renown.” In curating this online presence, writers and other creators are often pushed to flatten themselves into an easily legible extension of their identity.

Like many, food writer and chef Lesley Téllez has struggled with the expectations that come with being Mexican in food media. “There’s more pressure on BIPOC to find a niche that makes us stand out,” she says. “Over and over, the faces who look like us are people who specialize in food from their particular countries or backgrounds. It sends an overt message that stepping out as a generalist is hard, and that you will not be hired as such. I have definitely felt pressure to keep non-Mexican-cooking stuff off of my social media, and my old blog.”

For all the claims organizations in food media have made of diversifying their rosters and cleaning up the more egregious offenses in their treatment of nonwhite writers, there is still an association between nonwhite writers and their ethnicity, which is treated as tantamount to other aspects of their identities. BIPOC in food media are routinely not considered for assignments about things that don’t directly relate to their ethnicity or race. “I became a food writer 20 years ago when it was not really a profession,” says Ramin Ganeshram. “Yet, despite my qualifications as a reporter, editor, and chef, it was a losing fight to write anything that wasn’t ‘ethnic.’... I was discouraged and prevented from writing about generalized food technique or profiles, despite French culinary training.”

These assignments are often handed off to white writers, who are seen as “generalists” with the ability to stick their hands into any cuisine and turn it into something palatable (or, more importantly, into pageviews). Ganeshram says, “I was directly told regarding a job I didn’t receive at a New England-based national cooking magazine that they thought of me as more of an ‘ethnic’ writer.”

Instead, BIPOC get stuck with work directly related to their ethnicities. “I’m often asked to add a cultural slant even when one does not exist,” says food writer Su-Jit Lin, “or frame things from a point of greater expertise than I actually have. It’s assumed I’m fully indoctrinated into the culture and more Chinese than American (not true — my lane is actually Southern, Italian, and kind of Irish food).” Even when chefs push back against this compartmentalization, they are turned into caricatured ambassadors for their backgrounds. Chef (and Eater contributor) Jenny Dorsey wrote on Twitter that even though she demonstrated a dish on video that had nothing to do with her heritage, the result was ultimately titled “Jenny Dorsey talks about how her Chinese-American heritage influences her cooking.”

Often, the addition of a “cultural slant” to stories leads to one of the more egregious ways that nonwhite food is pigeonholed and othered — through what writer Isabel Quintero calls a lust for “Abuelita longing.” The term speaks to the way immigrant and diasporic writers (both within and outside food media) are frequently expected to add a dash of trauma or ancestral belonging to anything they write. As a Trinidadian-Iranian chef, Ganeshram finds this association particularly limiting. “When I’ve tried to write stories about my Iranian heritage, not being a recent Iranian immigrant or the child of a post-revolution immigrant has been an issue,” she says. “The editors I dealt with only wanted a refugee/escaping the Islamic Republic story. They decided what constituted an ‘authentic’ Iranian story, and that story was based in strife and hardship only.” These markers of authenticity can only come from the wholesome domesticity presumed of the ethnic other.

The extreme whiteness of the food industry, and of food media, places undue pressure on nonwhite writers and chefs. As food writer and founder of Whetstone Magazine, Stephen Satterfield wrote for Chefsfeed in 2017: “In mostly-white communities, you become an ambassador for your race. The stakes are high, and you try hard not to screw it up for the ones behind you…. Black chefs know this well: we must validate our presence, where others exist unquestioned. And what does it mean to be a black food writer? It means that you’ll never just be a food writer, you’ll be a black food writer.”

In other words, being designated as “ethnic” chefs put far too many BIPOC working in food media in a bind. Either they work against being pigeonholed by pitching stories that mark them as generalists, but lose out on assignments as a consequence, or they double down and tell stories of their culture and cuisine, but risk being limited both career- and compensation-wise.

Martinez was aware of this predicament while signing on to write a regional Mexican cookbook. “Writing a love letter to Mexico is so important in these times, but I had to seriously consider whether it would be a career-limiting move,” he says. He chose to write the book, but others, like Caroline Shin, food journalist and founder of the Cooking with Granny video and workshop series, have had to push against the expectation that anything they publish will be about their ethnic cuisine. “Last year, literary agents told me that I couldn’t sell diversity,” she says. “[I]f I wanted a cookbook, I should focus on my Korean culture.” While Shin chose to start her own program as what she calls an “‘I’ll show you’ to white-dominated institutions,” it raises the question of whether BIPOC in food media can taste mainstream success without operating as spokespeople for their ethnic cuisines.

But if you continue to pigeonhole and tokenize your BIPOC employees, seeing them primarily as products of trauma or perpetuating their marginalization by refusing them fair pay and workplace equity, then your calls to diversify the workplace mean very little, if anything at all.

Mallika Khanna is a graduate student in media who writes about film and digital culture, diaspora and immigrant experiences and the environment through a feminist, anti-capitalist lens. Nicole Medina is a Philly based illustrator who loves capturing adventure through her art using bold colors and patterns.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/39Jaxcc https://ift.tt/3ffOn2G

White food writers are often allowed to be generalists, while BIPOC creators are limited to their personal histories, their cultures, and the foods their grandmothers made

“I’m often asked to add a cultural slant even when one does not exist.”

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celebritylive · 5 years

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Camille Grammer wasn’t asked to return for the next season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills — and she’s placing the blame on fellow costar Kyle Richards.

On Thursday, Grammer, who was a friend of the Housewives last season, revealed in a series of since-deleted tweets that she wasn’t asked back for the upcoming tenth season and claimed that the decision was due to Kyle, as it was “her show”.

“I wasn’t asked back. It’s fine,” Grammer, 50, tweeted in response to a follower who asked if she would be returning to the series. “I did my time on the show. And it’s Kyles show.”

When fans expressed their disbelief over the decision, Grammer double-downed on her claims about Kyle, 50, and said that the producers left the fate of her time on the show in her former costar’s hands.

RELATED: Kyle Richards Slams Lisa Vanderpump and Camille Grammer After Explosive RHOBH Reunion

“It was was up to Kyle. I’m really fine,” Grammer wrote. “After the reunion, I didn’t want to come back. It was an awful experience.”

Bravo had no comment on the matter when contacted by PEOPLE.

Reps for Kyle and Grammer did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

RELATED: Camille Grammer Apologizes to Cast at RHOBH Reunion: ‘I’m Sorry If I’ve Been Cruel’

Earlier this summer, Grammer appeared on the RHOBH reunion where she stormed off the set after she alleged that she was being set up following multiple heated conversations with her costars, including Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave, Dorit Kemsley, Denise Richards, Lisa Rinna, Erika Girardi and of course, Kyle.

Those conversations came as a result of the women expressing how Grammer was being inconsistent in her attitude towards former RHOBH star Lisa Vanderpump.

During the reunion, Grammer tearfully admitted that she felt like the women wanted her to “jump on this hate train with Vanderpump” but later added fuel to the fire by sticking up for the restaurant owner while slamming her costars as “trash” in scathing tweets.

RELATED: Lisa Vanderpump Posts Farewell Tribute to RHOBH After 9 Years: ‘The Pump Has Left the Building’

Over the summer, Kyle also got a few things off her chest about Grammer and her costar’s alleged comments about Vanderpump, 58.

“Camille came into the Reunion guns blazing. I honestly do not know why she was so angry. We, of course, are going to address the stuff she said and did. That’s what the Reunion is about,” Kyle said in a tweet.

“When she constantly contradicts herself I find myself thinking ‘doesn’t she know there are cameras? This is going to be played back!’ Camille, in an attempt to distract from her actions , pretends she thinks we just were mad she said nice things about Lisa,” she continued.

“That way she can get a little support from trolls. By calling us Mean Girls. She uses twitter as a gauge to see what the audience thinks and throws out things she thinks people will support her about. Like I said, some people work hard at the game of life,” she wrote, and added: “Especially when they have been doing it so long. The way Camille treated everyone was mind blowing. Denise looked utterly shocked and hurt. And I don’t know what I did to Camille to warrant that behavior.”

She stated, “The only thing l have said about Camille up until now, is that she plays both sides of the fence and is a people pleaser. Both things that she admits to herself. So yeah, this is not Lifestyles Of The Rich and Famous. This is reality.”

News of Grammer’s departure from the series comes on the same day it was announced that Garcelle Beauvais and Sutton Stracke would be joining the RHOBH cast for season 10.

Beauvais, a Haitian-American actress and former fashion model, will make franchise history as the first black Housewife in a predominately white cast.

“I am excited and proud to be joining the cast of such a wildly popular and beloved show like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” Beauvais told The Daily Dish. “As a working actor who has been in the industry for some time, it’s exhilarating to have the opportunity to delve into a new chapter in the entertainment spectrum. As the first African American Housewife in the Beverly Hills franchise, I am honored and humbled by this awesome opportunity to exemplify the fact that Black Girl Magic lives and thrives in every zip code!”

“I’m excited to share the many ongoing daily surprises, laughs and joys of being a working mother in today’s crazy world. The hustle is R-E-A-L!” Beauvais added. “No games, all heart and a little dash of fashion-filled sass is what you’ll get when you step into my sphere…and I wouldn’t have it any other way!”

Stracke, meanwhile, is a renowned party planner and hostess who, in 2017, was named one of the top 100 party planners by The Salonniere. Additionally, she is opening her fashion store called SUTTON, selling clothing, jewelry and handbags.

“I am thrilled and honored to be joining The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. As a mother to three children who is also deeply committed to my efforts in philanthropy, my life is a balancing act,” Stracke said. “There is a lot going on in the best way possible and I strive to pursue all of my passions to the fullest.”

“I am excited to share my true loves of art and fashion design, and open the doors to my world,” she added. “I am looking forward to this ride and where this journey takes me. Fun times ahead for this Southern Belle in Southern California!”

Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 10 is expected to premiere in 2020.

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#Celebrity

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igiti2019 · 5 years

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Day 5 (5/23)

Great day great day great day great day

Today we woke up early for our first day of work! When I woke up I went to the kitchen to hard boil the eggs I bought at the Kimironko Market. One of them cracked and then another one broke while I was peeling it and became an eggy shelly mess, so I threw those away and put the rest in the fridge and decided I would reap the benefits of my culinary work another day. Then we walked to Java House, the cute cafe with the sun logo, and I got a medium americano to go, since we had no time for breakfast. Outside Java House we got a cab and were on our way to work! When we first arrived at work at 10 we went to the third floor where the employees work and filled into a small meeting room that was available. This was perfect because it was small enough for just us 3, it had outlets and a fan, and with the door closed we were able to talk and collaborate. A few moments after getting settled in, Laura, the head of diversity at Kepler, poked her head in to tell us that if we had any questions or wanted to interview her and get her help on anything to let her know. We love Laura. But we had work to do, so we looked at our first deliverable which was to summarize key points of a data set that included data from 3 different sites of Kepler’s college preparation program called ITEME (“small log bridge” in Kinyarwanda). So we each took one site and spent 2 hours in that room summarizing the data! Finding trends, finding differences in gender, in refugees vs. non-refugees, etc. and then comparing the data across sites. At 12, we orded food from Java House with an app called Jumia, which is just like Rwanda’s Uber Eats. We decided we needed a change of scenery, so we went down to the great hall where all of the students can hang out and work, and we claimed a long table in the corner of the room and waited for our food. My lunch was so. Damn. delicious. I got a small dish of rice, a small dish of steamed vegetables, and a small dish of fried plantains, but of course the serving sizes in Rwanda are huge despite the incredibly cheap prices, so I was only able to finish half of it. The other half I’ve boxed up and will have tomorrow, hopefully with one of my prized hard-boiled market eggs. We didn’t do much work during lunch, just talked. Then after lunch we went back upstairs to the quiet room with everyone’s desk offices as I’m calling them, and for about 1 or 2 hours all silently worked on our data, going more in depth, doing other research, etc. until we finished our independent work and needed to collaborate again so we went back to our beloved available meeting room. We worked on our work plan in there until someone came in and kicked us out because they had it reserved for a meeting, and we returned to the great hall downstairs. We finalized that on a weekly basis we’ll plan to be at the office Monday - Friday, and just be very loose about taking days off to attend conferences or work remotely, which I think is just perfect. We also set rough deadlines for each of our 3 deliverables throughout the summer, including work for the case study that we’re meant to be compiling for the class that sent us here in the first place. After we finalized those two schedules Zodi and Ananya talked about some extra curriculars that they have in common until we called a cab and went home. At home things got a little bit icky, because we were all tired after our first day at work, and some of our different preferences were coming up about wifi and electricity use, work schedules, just different differences that will inevitably arise when people live together. I got upset when Zodi gave me some trouble for being so stringent with saving electricity and wifi, so I just isolated myself for a bit and went to my room to cool off. Cried a bit, took an anxiety med, and shook it off, because an hour later we had dinner with our boss in town. We were already kind of running late because it was taking too long to find a cab so we decided to walk, but then Ananya forgot her anti-malarial pills so we had to go back to the apartment but after that we were able to get a cab and make our way to Chez Lando, a higher end restaurant attached to a hotel. Our boss was there waiting for us (she’s really chill so she wasn’t mad at all), and we all sat down and ordered food. For the first time, we experienced what we had all read about – Rwandan service taking forever! Before coming here, we’d all read that restaurant meals can take up to 2 hours just to be delivered to the table, and that’s just a normal thing in Rwanda, but we weren’t experiencing that anywhere we went, we actually noticed that waiters were extremely pleasant and very attentive to our needs. But tonight the dinner took 90 minutes (Ananya timed it) to arrive. But it was well worth the wait! Ashley (boss lady) and Zodi both got Ugali, which is kind of like the outside of mochi if you can imagine that, but as a big blog, and you pick it up with your fingers and use it to then pick up and act as the starchy background for whatever else you ordered, usually spinach, stew, or meats. I’ve wanted to try it since we got here, but unfortunately Zodi and Ashley’s dishes both had meat. But I’m happy that I saw it! It reminded me to look for it next time we go somewhere that might have it. As for me, I got two plates LOADED with vegetables that made my heart sing. I ordered a plain omelette, a vegetable shishkabob, and potato croquettes (a lot of my meals here consist of me ordering things I can eat off of the sides menu and constructing my own meal and I LOVE it), and of course I got one plate with a huge omelette and tons of fresh veggies on the side (including half an avocado oh my god), and another plate with a gigantic roasted veggie skewer, three huge potato croquettes, and for some reason also boiled peas and carrots. It was so damn good. It all cost $4. So… yeah. I’m pretty sure my eyes were just giant stars when the waitress put it in front of me. It looked like a lot, and I thought I would be able to save some of it to add to my lunch tomorrow, but I surprised myself with how quickly I actually finished it! (Except for one of the potato croquettes I gave to Zodi and the fresh veggies that I couldn’t eat bc they’re raw and potentially have cholera bacteria on them but I did eat the avocado because it has a peel so sue me.) During the 90 minute wait and the meal afterwards, Ashley told us about her time living in India in college, her time doing the Peace Corps in Guatemala, her eventual move to Rwanda, her recent move within Rwanda, and her upcoming move to Ethiopia (uhhh… hello.. Can you say “dream life”?????????) We asked her questions about Kepler, and WE FOUND OUT THAT IT’S ACTUALLY SAFE FOR US TO GO TO KIZIBA REFUGEE CAMP. This is huge for me. We had been worried that the recent Ebola outbreak in DRC would make it unsafe to visit the Kiziba Refugee camp, one of Kepler’s campuses, but Kiziba hasn’t accepted any new refugees from DRC in years! I can’t even explain how much it means to me that I will soon be stepping foot onto what I’ve built all of my work around, all of my goals, all of my projects and classes and research. When Ashley saw my excitetment at the news, she stopped smiling for one of the only times that night, and warned me that, “It’s really… a lot. It’s extremely difficult to be there and see it, especially for you guys who have never seen something like it before. But as soon as you get there, people will be following you and touching you, and the poverty is really extreme.” But I’m so ready. I want to see, I want to experience, I want to understand, and then I want to think, and I want to help. June is Refugee Awareness Month, and June 20 is World Refugee Day, so this timing is pretty serendipitous. We need to send our passports to the government and get government clearance to go, and we always need to tell them when we plan to go so that they expect us. (It’s a 4 hour drive up a mountain, so we couldn’t just pop by anyways.) The Kiziba campus graduation is July 5th, so Ashley said that we could certainly go with Kepler for that, but I’d like to go sooner if possible, even just once. It’s $100 to get a 4-wheel drive car (which is necessary for the journey) to take us there, but that’s only $20 more than a regular car would cost. Kepler employees are there Monday - Friday, too, so we would have people who could show us around and speak English with us. At our dinner we also found out that Sylvia, who had become our new supervisor after Obed was leaving to work at a different Kepler location, was now also leaving for a new job somewhere else. So next week we’ll find out who our new supervisor is! It’s too bad, because Sylvia and Obed seem great, but we’ve also met some very cool employees at Kepler like Laura, Cristine, Teppo, Joell, they all seem great, and Ashley seemed confident that we were being placed with the right person. We were ALSO told that tomorrow the president of Southern New Hampshire University, Kepler’s biggest partner, is coming with a group of about 35 people! Ashley is coordinating the whole thing, so she said that we could go and be flies on the wall, but we can’t talk to her because she will be at maximum stress limits. It’s 8:45-12, so I’m hoping we can go at 8:45 and see as much as possible. After that, we’ll hopefully meet with Sylvia to finalize our work plan and get ideas from her about where to go for data, etc. Then it sounded like Ananya and Zodi didn’t want to do a full work day tomorrow, so I’m not sure what will happen after that. Bruno (landlord) is bringing us a rice cooker tomorrow, so I may go back to Kimironko Market and buy some more eggs (since I’ve already lost 3) and some rice by the kilo. 6 organic eggs for $1.20! Did I already tell y’all that?! Anyways after dinner Zodi and Ananya said they no longer wanted to go happy hour at the Inema Arts Center so I had to text Innocent and tell him we would be there next week. Which was very sad, and I really wish we could’ve gone, it would’ve been nice to celebrate our first day of work with 2 for 1 wine!!!! But also it was late, and we need to get up early especially if we’re going in at 8:45! So we taxied home with the SWEETEST French-speaking old man I have ever met and I love him with all my heart and I wish we could’ve gotten his number and used him as our driver every time. (Most taxi drivers give strangers their numbers so that they’ll just call them instead of calling a random cab) He would even be perfect because since he drove us to our impossible-to-find apartment, he knows where it is! If I ever get in his cab again I’ll get his number… We came inside and I took.. My first… RWANDAN SHOWER. (That’s what I’ll be calling it.) But like full on cold shower with a detached shower head I had to move around me without spraying water, squatting down to wash my hair so I wouldn’t get water everywhere, it was great. Very refreshing of course, but also I always love experiencing those little things that make a country definitely different from my country, even if it’s “less comfortable” or considered “worse”. ANY part of a new culture, good or bad, I love discovering it. Now I’m in my room writing this under my mosquito bed net, which I actually love. It’s like a fort. When I got back to my room after my shower and got changed, I threw my phone, backpack, and water bottle under the net and then climbed in. I just throw anything I need for the night in, and then get in! It’s just like a fort!! I love it. Okay that’s all I have to report on today. We used up over half our wifi that we had bought for 30 days in just 3 days, so I’ll post pictures tomorrow when I have work wifi….

Peace!

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oselatra · 6 years

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The magic of curry paste

Or: How lawyer-turned-Thai food evangelist Richard Glasgow learned to stop worrying and cook Thai food.

One of Little Rock's best restaurants serves authentic Thai food made by a white guy from North Louisiana who's spent the majority of his professional career practicing law. There's no sign in front of kBird to announce itself to passersby — not that anyone would pass by an otherwise residential stretch of western Hillcrest in search of a restaurant. The building once housed a general store and several other eateries, but with clapboard siding and a fenced-in backyard, it still looks more like a house than a restaurant. Look closely and you might see an open sign — if it's lunchtime on a weekday or a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday evening — and a painting of a flock of chickens on the front door.

Inside, you'll find mismatched tables and chairs, a parquet floor that, like many of the homes in Hillcrest, tilts noticeably and is held together by duct tape in spots. On one wall, someone has handwritten a Mark Twain quote in marker — "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness" — under a map of Thailand with a hand-drawn rendering of the Malay Peninsula taped to the bottom of it. A handful of people work in an open kitchen — chopping, grinding out curry paste with a giant mortar and pestle, or working the stockpots and woks on the stove. The lanky guy — a flurry of motion — with glasses and tattoo of a large black bird (a Mississippi kite) peeking out from under his T-shirt is Richard Glasgow, the corporate lawyer turned Thai cultural evangelist.

Glasgow treats Thai food with reverence. He's assiduous in his devotion to making it like they do in Thailand. That means always finding the best and correct ingredients — never substituting onions for shallots, brown sugar for palm sugar or ginger for galangal. It means finding flavoring agents like dok ngiew, the dried flower stamens of the red cotton tree. It means pad Thai with Chinese broccoli, longbeans and kabocha squash and no sweet peanut sauce. It means curries with enough layers of flavor to suggest mystical powers.

Some of that deliciousness might owe to the fact that kBird's curry paste gets made every day with all the ingredients mashed together with a mortar and pestle, which takes about an hour and a half. There are no electrical appliances, aside from a fridge and deep freeze, to be found in the restaurant, even though a food processor could knock out the paste in seconds.

Brandon Brown, who owned the late, beloved Hillcrest Artisan Meats and is a longtime friend of Glasgow's, has worked in the kBird kitchen for the past eight months. He said he's spent time working in nice places that made a lot of things by hand over the course of his more than 30 years in the restaurant business, but never to the extent on which Glasgow insists. "Every day I tell him to get a fucking Cuisinart and a spice grinder," Brown said. But Glasgow refuses to take shortcuts. Doing so, "for a white person making Thai food, would be disrespectful," he said. Besides, he says, a food processor slices ingredients into tiny pieces; using a mortar and pestle to pulverize ingredients causes them to bind together to create more flavor. "It's very incrementally better, but better," he said. "Hard fucking work and paying attention" is one of his mottos. (That's a Guy Clark quote about legendary Texas singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt's genius: "Everybody thought it was magic. That's bullshit. It was hard fucking work and paying attention.")

Before he started kBird, which began as a food trailer, Glasgow worked as a lawyer for Dillard's. It was a dark time for him. He bottomed out, to the point that leaving the corporate world to sling Thai food out of a trailer hidden in an alley in Hillcrest seemed perfectly reasonable. That was 2012.

Glasgow said he initially hid for two reasons: 1. As a white guy endeavoring to cook Thai standards like a grandma might in Thailand, he wanted to make sure that people came to him because they'd heard good things about the food, not because they'd seen a sign or seen a social media post. 2. He was scared he'd get overwhelmed and freak out and run away if too many people came. That plan worked out. He turned customers into evangelists themselves. The food truck now gathers cobwebs behind the restaurant, which opened in late 2014 at the corner of Tyler and Woodlawn streets. It's not unusual to drive by kBird a little after 1 p.m. and see a "sold out" sign in the window.

In 2015, Glasgow hosted his first khantoke, a reservation-only dinner featuring more than a dozen Northern Thai dishes that aren't on the menu. Each year since, he's increased the number of khantokes he hosts. In 2016, he hosted six, then nine in 2017 and he plans to do 10 in 2018. Each dinner accommodates 30-40 people. Glasgow takes reservations for three khantokes at a time. In an effort to be as fair as he can in the process, he requires people to make their reservations at 2 p.m. on a designated day. In May, on the day reservations were due for the three khantokes scheduled for the first half of the summer, the nearly 100 spaces were filled by 2:07 p.m. 'How I'm Learning to Stop Worrying and Cook Thai Food'

Glasgow grew up in Ruston and Oak Ridge, La. (he says he claims "dual citizenship"), among a family of farmers and cooks. He got an economics degree from Louisiana State University, spent nearly a decade working for a title company in Washington, D.C., and then got a law degree from Catholic University in D.C. In 2001, he and his wife, Aimée, who he met in D.C. but who is from Monroe (or "Mun-row," as Glasgow says), La., saved up enough money to travel around the world. They spent two months in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia and fell in love with the region.

"It's like a bizarro-world American South," Glasgow said of Thailand. "The same veneer of civilization exists. You wave at everyone; they wave back. You smile at someone; they smile at you. You're constantly rewarded for being nice. You say 'ma'am' and 'sir' and 'please' and 'thank you,' and let older people out in front of you. If you try to speak Thai and you're horrible at it, people will tell you you're great. It's the same small-town kind of stuff, but just a different world. ... You ever been somewhere where you felt like you belonged, but you didn't really belong, but you were treated like you belong? It's like that."

Glasgow sees a deep connection between Thailand and his native Louisiana. He calls it his unified theory. There are distinctive regions in Thailand, just like Louisiana. Northern Thailand is just like North Louisiana, he said. It's full of rednecks, which Glasgow identifies as. "They're pork, pork, pork. They fry in lard and eat pork rinds in sauces." The people in Northeastern Thailand are "ethnically Lao, they speak Lao, but live in Thailand. They eat the hottest food. They're the poorest. They eat bugs, snakes, crickets. They have the most fun and are great partiers. They're the Cajuns." Central Thailand, the broad alluvial plain of the Chao Phraya River, where the Siamese Ayutthaya Kingdom was based for thousands of years, produces two rice crops every year. It's Baton Rouge in Glasgow's telling. Bangkok, the country's capital, sits mostly on former swampland. The Chao Phraya River runs through the city before emptying into the Gulf of Thailand. It's, of course, New Orleans. Southern Thailand on the narrow Kra Isthmus is like Grand Isle, La., the narrow barrier island in South Louisiana.

When the Glasgows started thinking about having kids, they picked Little Rock, a place about which they knew little, because it was closer to home, but not too close. They had a daughter, who's now 11. Her nickname is kBird.

After working for a couple of years in private practice, Glasgow spent five years at Dillard's. That company is "as much to thank for the existence of kBird than just about anybody," Glasgow said. After spending that much time in the business world, the idea of kBird was a thumb of the nose toward the corporate and restaurant establishment and conventional notions on how one starts and runs a restaurant: "You've got to have a bunch of money to open a restaurant. You gotta have a wait staff. You need to advertise. Those are all reasonable things, but," Glasgow said, that route "wouldn't have been me."

Instead, if fine dining is arena rock, a genre associated with bands in the '70s, '80s and '90s that brought big stage shows to large arenas, kBird is punk rock, Glasgow said. In his metaphor, with arena rock (fine dining), "you gotta have a big ol' band and have a loud sound, and it's gotta look good from a long way away." That all costs a lot, and means, among other things, expensive rent and a large staff, which translates into higher prices for the concertgoer or diner. "Punk came as a reaction" to that, Glasgow said. D. Boon from the punk band Minutemen said, "Our band could be your life." "They said, 'Start your own band,' " Glasgow said. "That's what I did. It just wasn't a band; it was a restaurant."

Glasgow describes kBird as "egalitarian — everybody gets the same plate of food. It's reasonably priced. It's a lot of food. Ingredients are way better than what you'd expect they are. Some audience participation is required." That means customers order at the counter that divides the dining room from the open kitchen. Though Glasgow and his staff are humping it, sometimes it takes a bit for your order to come up. The hours — 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. on weekdays and 5 p.m. until 8 p.m. Monday through Wednesday — aren't designed for peak dining-out times; they're what Glasgow can do while still spending time with his family and not working himself to the ground. Though he concedes he's "a control freak," the idea of delegating to others to run the restaurant when he's not there doesn't appeal to him. "I didn't quit a pretty well-paying job to start something out of absolute nothing to bring it where it is to not be here."

The other unique thing about kBird is that it closes for about a month from mid-January to mid-February for Glasgow to travel to Thailand. He's been seven times since 2001. He visits the Naan province in Northern Thailand, where he's made a number of friends over the years. His itinerary is to "not walk fast, talk to little old ladies and laugh," he said. He also cooks a lot and watches people cook. Last year, Glasgow got to be one of the first farang (white people) to stay overnight in a remote Northern Thailand village thanks to a Thai friend who works in tourism. Several years back, during one of his trips, Glasgow went to the market one morning to buy supplies for breakfast. He's somewhat conversant in Thai. When he was paying, he said he told a woman selling groceries at a booth, " 'Today, I'm making rice curry.' She said, 'No pay.' It was like, 'You understand this; you can have it.' That's why I'm so excited and excitable [about Thai food and culture], and also why I'm so very worried about not being respectful. I want to do right by these people. It's not a question of my integrity. These people changed my life. I've learned so much about myself and my life in this adventure." If his life were a movie, in a nod to "Dr. Strangelove," Glasgow joked it might be called "How I'm Learning to Stop Worrying and Make Thai Food."

"All of this is an effort to become integrated into Thai culture, so I'll begin to understand their mindset and somehow it will rub off on me."

On his left arm, Glasgow has the phrase "baaw bpen yang" tattooed in Thai letters. It's a country dialect version of a common Thai phrase, mai bpen rai. "In Thailand, it means everything from 'you're welcome' to 'I forgive you for your actions.' It goes all the way across the board. If you're in an embarrassing situation or you've fucked up, more often than not, the Thai person will look at you and say, 'mai bpen rai.' It means it doesn't matter, what are we going to do about it now? A car wreck? Spilling some lady's stuff? Mai bpen rai. It doesn't matter. I grew up in a house where everything mattered. To have a group of people say, don't worry about it — for me, excited and anxious all the time — when another person tells you that, it means a lot." Glasgow says baaw bpen yang identifies him with the country people of Northern Thailand. "It's the 'it's all good, y'all' version."

That's not to say that philosophy has fully taken root. "Fear and anxiety" have always fueled kBird. Though he concedes that, based on the restaurant's growth, "an objective person would say, 'You're probably going to be able to continue to do business,' " he says he's still "scared to say something like that out loud." Every Monday, he remains a nervous wreck, fretting that no one will darken his door that week.

He knows he could do more business being open even for lunch on Saturday, but that would get in the way of one of the highlights of his week: shopping at Sam's Oriental Store every Saturday morning. The venerable Asian grocery on South University Avenue is teeming with essential items for all sorts of far-flung cultures that make the market, especially on Saturdays, when a new shipment of produce arrives from Dallas, as diverse of a gathering place as you'll find in Little Rock. On a Saturday in early June, Glasgow talked to or stood in line with Hmong, Viet, Korean and Filipino people. An African priest had traveled several hours for fufu powder. The owner of La Bodeguita in Hot Springs was there, making his weekly stop to buy mangoes. Jose, a longtime Salvadoran employee, greeted Glasgow: "Hey, Rich-ee."

Glasgow's list was long and different from usual because the second khantoke of the year was happening later that day. Among the items on his list that you're probably not going to find at Kroger: galangal (in the ginger family), banana leaves, Chinese broccoli, Kaffir lime leaves, kombucha squash (aka Japanese pumpkin), water spinach, quail eggs and pig's blood. Amid his shopping, Glasgow stopped to show the owner, Sam Choi, a picture on his phone of a maeng da, a giant water bug that's commonly used as a flavoring agent in nam phrik sauces. It's sold around the world packaged in plastic. Choi was sure he could get them.

The khantoke dinners give Glasgow a chance to cook Northern Thai dishes that otherwise would not appear on the menu, aside from a special here and there. For this dinner, Glasgow and Co. started preparing almost a week earlier, boiling and scraping fat off pig skin and dehydrating it to get it ready to be turned into pork rinds and crackling. Sour pork (naem heung) spent days fermenting in the sun; it's tasty and safe enough to eat that Glasgow and a reporter take bites after it's finished fermenting, but hours before the dinner, it gets steamed in banana leaves on the grill to make doubly sure it's ready. Brown doesn't work on weekends, but the other full-time staff, Chris and Jessica Shippey, come in around midday to help with prep. So does Joe Sithong, a friend with a catering background who volunteers his services. His father was Lao, but he died when Sithong was young. "I have all the cravings, but none of the culture," he said. Cooking and eating Thai food "is almost like church," he said. "It's satisfying and makes you feel better about yourself."

He mashed roasted green chili peppers, shallots and garlic in a mortar and pestle to make nahm phrik noom, a popular Northern Thailand dip that pairs with pork rinds and other meats. Meanwhile, Glasgow chopped up 12 pounds of river catfish Sithong picked up from Love's Fish Market on John Barrow Road. "I grew up trotlining," Glasgow said. "I've been knowing about this a lot longer than I've been knowing about Thai food." The fish goes outside into a giant gas cooker filled with oil — "way more than anyone would ever tell you to put in at one time." There's so much water in the fish that has to evaporate, and the frying takes almost an hour.

Five hours later, the feast is prepared and plated and the lucky dozens start filing in with bottles of wine in tow (it's B.Y.O.B; kBird's zoning prevents it from selling alcohol). Glasgow offers some quick greetings in Thai and explains what all the food is before retreating to the kitchen for beer. He'll need one and a half and prodding from Sithong before he can go mingle and answer questions.

The diners consider the feast with big eyes and big smiles. Glasgow encourages everyone to pull out their phones when the full spread is on the table and then it all gets passed family-style. There's the equivalent of about three meal-sized portions per person on the table: Sticky rice, which is steamed in woven baskets, rather than boiled. A vegetable plate with steamed pumpkin, bok choy and chayote squash and fresh cabbage, Chinese broccoli, chives, long bean, cucumber and water spinach. A meat plate with the steamed and fermented pork, the pork rinds and cracklings, fried chicken wings and muu thaawt makhwaen, fried strips of pork loin seasoned with makhwaen seeds from the prickly ash tree. Two chili dips, the green chili dip Sithong made and nahm phrik ong, a pork, tomato and chili combination that Thai folks often eat with vegetables. Two salads — one a smoky grilled eggplant topped with steamed quail eggs and the other fried catfish topped with fried basil and lime leaves. Then there's a bowl of hanglae pork curry with ginger and peanuts and a pork rib curry made with pork blood and dok ngiew, the dried flower stamens of the red cotton tree. A tower of steamed rice with pork and pork blood tastes a lot like rice with boudin rouge, Glasgow tells the crowd in case anyone knows about the Cajun delicacy. For dessert, there's coconut milk custard cooked in a tiny Asian pumpkin and a sticky rice cake topped with palm sugar caramel.

Glasgow has regulars from Thailand. One invited friends from Northern Thailand who live in the U.S. to fly in for a khantoke. Glasgow overheard someone ask her if the food was like what she got at home. "She said, 'Sort of, but with all this stuff, it's like a double birthday!" He took that as a high compliment.

But he's quick to deflect praise for the food. "I didn't make any of this up. This ain't mine. To the extent I can take what people make in Thailand and make it here, I'm good at that. I'm not a chef." If he has a skill, it's as a "food Xerox," he said. "I have a really good taste memory. I'm able to eat something and fix it in my mind and replicate it."

Going from the corporate world to opening and running kBird has been a journey, he said. Does he feel like he's arrived? "No, but I feel like I'm a lot closer than I was. I'm now in a position to get there. There's a lot of self-doubt that takes years to build up. There's an episode of 'The Simpsons,' where at some point Homer does something really great and nice and makes himself look good. And Bart looks at Lisa and goes, 'I've got this really strange feeling.' And she goes, 'Pride?' I'm still at that point. I don't ever want to be there. I don't think you're ever going to be there. That's a metaphysical question. I don't think you're ever going to be there. That's the answer to the Big Question. But you can set yourself up to make yourself happier."

The magic of curry paste

#The magic of curry paste

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You Had Me at Step One: The Recipes We Can't Quit

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You Had Me at Step One: The Recipes We Can't Quit

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[Photograph: Vicky Wasik, J. Kenji López-Alt]

What are your criteria for a Valentine’s Day crush? Exciting and obsession-worthy are good starts. But we look for other traits, too—tender and comforting is nice, and trustworthy, steadfast, and reliable are all musts. Ideally, they’ll also be eye-catching and captivating, they’ll stimulate your senses, and they’ll always, always leave you wanting more. And, of course, variety in texture is of paramount importance—and we’re definitely partial to a balance of sweet and salty, tart and herbal…

Oh, that’s an important distinction. We’re talking about our food crushes here, not human ones.

Romance with a real, beating-heart life form is all well and good, but a beloved recipe will let you have your cake and eat it, too—or your pie, or the eggplant parm of your dreams, whatever the case may be. Below, you’ll find the recipes that, for us, check all the above boxes and more. These are the dishes that we come back to time and again—the meals we gaze at lovingly, take countless pictures of, and can’t stop bragging about. You might say we’re too engrossed in our work, that maybe we should consider stepping out of the kitchen and tending to our relationships with friends and family. To that, we can only reply: These recipes would never say that about us.

Pressure Cooker Chicken With Chickpeas, Chorizo, and Tomatoes

[Photograph: J. Kenji López-Alt]

Whenever someone asks me what I make in my Instant Pot, I tell them about this recipe—it’s the first pressure cooker meal I ever made, and it’s super easy. Why? You simply throw in the ingredients and cook them on high pressure for 15 minutes, and dinner is ready. What’s more, most of the ingredients are things you likely already have in your pantry, like chickpeas, paprika, chicken stock, and diced tomatoes. Just pick up your chicken and chorizo, and you’ll be good to go. I really can’t say enough about how delicious this is—it’s spicy and salty, comforting and filling. It’s hearty, but the dash of sherry vinegar at the end gives it a wonderful brightness. I like to pour in some couscous at the last minute or prepare some rice on the side, then eat the leftovers all week long. —Ariel Kanter, marketing director

Get the recipe for Pressure Cooker Chicken With Chickpeas, Chorizo, and Tomatoes »

The Best Cherry Pie

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

When Stella first joined the Serious Eats team full time, among the first things we asked her to prioritize were classic fruit pies, like apple, cherry, and blueberry. She was not excited. “I don’t really like pie,” I remember her telling me, her slight Southern drawl dragging out the word “like” so as to more delicately deliver the bad news. “No kidding? That’s crazy…but you can make pie, right?” I shot back, the pushy New Yorker in me cutting to the point. “Sure, I can make pie.” I wasn’t too worried. With Stella’s talents, her pies weren’t going to be bad, that much was certain. So when she flew to New York to make and photograph her pies for publication, I looked forward to tasting them. Still, given her warning, I wasn’t expecting to take a bite and then have my eyes bulge from their sockets, a condition that I believe has caused a permanent change to my glasses prescription.

Stella’s pies, and her cherry pie in particular, are the greatest pies I have ever eaten anywhere in my entire life, full stop, period, the end. And I love pie, so that’s saying a lot. The fillings explode with fruit, and she’s dialed in her sugar and starch levels for pitch-perfect texture and flavor. And her crust! It’s the flakiest, the crispiest, the golden-est, the moisture-resistant-iest, the still-perfect-the-next-day-iest (yes, even the bottom crust, after it’s sat below the filling overnight). How a person who claims to not like pie could make the world’s best version, I’ll never know, but I’m eternally grateful. —Daniel Gritzer, managing culinary director

Get the recipe for The Best Cherry Pie »

30-Minute Tuscan White Bean Soup

[Photograph: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I make a batch of this soup at least three times each winter. It’s incredibly easy (as all soups should be, in my opinion), and, in the words of Kenji, it has a great flavor-to-work ratio. The white beans give it the heft I want from a hearty winter soup, and the addition of a Parmesan rind to enrich the broth is a revelation. Pro tip: Take a hint from another one of Kenji’s soups and add some lemon zest to brighten it all up. —Vicky Wasik, visual director

Get the recipe for 30-Minute Tuscan White Bean Soup »

Perfect Prime Rib

[Photograph: J. Kenji López-Alt]

My wife, Vicky, is the baker in the family, so if she were looking over my shoulder as I wrote this, I’m sure she would be extolling the virtues of one of Stella’s recipes, like her angel food cake. But she’s not here, so I’m going to give props to an oldie (and, if it’s dry-aged meat, moldy) Serious Eats recipe: Kenji’s unforgettable prime rib. It’s time-consuming, and the finished product is more than a little unwieldy, but damn, is it delicious. In my estimation, it might be beef’s Platonic ideal. Plus, if you make Kenji’s prime rib for a dinner party, it’ll make one hell of an entrance when you bring it to the table—your guests will be impressed before they take a single bite. Make sure to give the entire article a read, even if it isn’t till after you put the roast in the oven: It’s full of both useful and interesting beef-related tidbits and down-to-earth scientific intel. —Ed Levine, founder

Get the recipe for Perfect Prime Rib With Red Wine Jus »

One-Bowl, Overnight Cinnamon Rolls

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

My ultimate move for proving I’m a strong, independent woman—to my parents, to my friends, to my potential suitors—is pulling out an impressive recipe and executing it flawlessly. The key is for said impressive recipe to be deceptively easy. Enter Stella’s overnight cinnamon rolls. They truly require only one bowl and a stand mixer, and the rest is up to simple science. There’s not much more I can say about this recipe, except that it just works. The Greek yogurt incorporated into the dough gives the buns an almost Cinnabon-like quality—it keeps the dough super light and fluffy and produces the most amazing smell while they bake. It gets people hyped. I firmly believe there is no more special way to start the day than with one of these rolls. They turn an average Saturday into a memorable one. And on an already-special day—like when I made them for my family for Christmas Day—they’re just the icing on the, well, cinnamon bun. —Kristina Bornholtz, social media manager

Get the recipe for One-Bowl, Overnight Cinnamon Rolls »

Chicken Paprikash

[Photograph: J. Kenji López-Alt]

In the depths of winter, when we’re craving something hearty and soul-warming but not overwhelmingly, tiringly rich, and neither a soup nor even a chili will do, my boyfriend and I can always agree on the merits of chicken paprikash. Kenji’s recipe takes more effort, but in just a bit more time than your run-of-the-mill paprikash recipe, it produces a silky, tangy, full-bodied stew punched up with plenty of good paprika, enriched with fish sauce and gelatin-enhanced stock, and brightened with yogurt, citrus, and grassy dill. If I have an extra half hour, a spare burner, and a few clear inches of counter space, I’ll boil up some shreds of homemade herb spaetzle and ladle the paprikash over it. On a leisurely late afternoon, over our two steaming bowls and another episode of some TV show we’ve watched a million times, nothing could be more comforting. —Marissa Chen, office manager

Get the recipe for Chicken Paprikash »

Vegan Garbanzos Con Espinacas y Jengibre (Spanish Chickpea and Spinach Stew With Ginger)

[Photograph: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

There’s a reason Kenji calls this his favorite Serious Eats recipe. Okay—to be fair, I don’t know if he loves it for the same reasons I do, but I can come up with a few possibilities. Like some of my favorite people, it’s special because it doesn’t require a lot of poking or prodding or huge expenditures of effort to be good. It combines a handful of really unassuming and ordinary features—chickpeas, tomatoes, fresh spinach, ginger, paprika, vinegar—but they’re not quite ingredients you expect to see together, or not ingredients you’ve seen assembled in quite this way, and so they become exciting again. It doesn’t ask too much. Canned beans are okay; white wine vinegar works if you don’t have sherry. It plays happily with your vegan friends and converses easily with your health-nut family members. It’s simple enough that you can start it at the end of a long workday and have energy to spare when it’s done. When you sit down at the table with a bowl of it and a side of crusty bread, you’ll let out one of those little sighs that say, I’m at home, and everything’s okay. And that first bite, a mix of smoky from the paprika and earthy from the chickpeas and bright from the vinegar, will remind you that good and nourishing and easygoing, in food as in people, doesn’t have to mean boring. —Miranda Kaplan, editor

Get the recipe for Vegan Garbanzos Con Espinacas y Jengibre »

Sunny Lemon Bars

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

I’m what you might call a reluctant baker—I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, my oven is tiny and unreliable, and even after completing culinary school, I continue to find cakes and breads deeply intimidating. Collectively, these factors have led me to worship Stella’s lemon bars. The buttery and rich shortbread-style crust takes just a few pulses with a food processor to make, and the custard is bright, vividly yellow, and tart enough to keep the sweetness from becoming cloying, a distracting feature in other lemon bars I’ve encountered. They require very little time in the oven, which means I don’t need to stress about them coming out under- or overdone. And, provided you have a good instant-read thermometer, they’re virtually impossible to mess up. The only thing that would frustrate me is the mountain of lemon carcasses left over, but Stella has a solution for those, too: Macerating them in sugar for several hours yields a sweet, lemony syrup, which you can mix right into some whipping cream to top the whole thing off. —Niki Achitoff-Gray, executive managing editor

Get the recipe for Sunny Lemon Bars »

Foolproof Pan Pizza

[Photograph: J. Kenji López-Alt]

Most Friday nights when I was growing up, you could find the Cline family at Pizza Hut. The four of us would pile into our wood-paneled station wagon and drive across town to the second-closest Pizza Hut (the nearest location lacked a license to sell beer). My brother and I would spend our time bouncing between the table, the cocktail-style Galaga/Ms. Pac-Man machine, and the jukebox, but eventually we’d settle down for some of Pizza Hut’s pan pizza.

I haven’t been to a Pizza Hut in years, but I make Kenji’s Foolproof Pan Pizza every few months. It’s more or less the perfect re-creation (of my memories) of Pizza Hut’s pan pizza—and it’s really hard to screw up. —Paul Cline, developer

Get the recipe for Foolproof Pan Pizza »

Light and Fluffy Buttermilk Pancakes

[Photograph: J. Kenji López-Alt]

You know that feeling when someone you’ve cooked for graciously asks for the recipe, even though you both know that they’ll never try it at home—perhaps because it’s too hard, it requires special ingredients, or it calls for a six-hour-long rest in the refrigerator? Well, I’m a firm believer in the idea that you can change someone’s life with a short stack of great pancakes, and maybe some decent maple syrup. That’s why I love Kenji’s buttermilk pancake recipe. If you’re into food science, you can read all about glutenin and gliadin, the pair behind the magic of gluten, in his full article. But let’s say you’re not, and that it’s breakfast time, and you want to feed your family. For a little extra time and prep work (whipping egg whites, folding said whites), you can serve up some pancakes that are way better than the boxed stuff.

When someone asks for this pancake recipe, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll try it for themselves. Today it’s pancakes; tomorrow it’s prime rib (or, you know, waffles). —Sal Vaglica, equipment editor

Get the recipe for Light and Fluffy Buttermilk Pancakes »

Double-Chocolate Cream Pie

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

For special occasions, I pretty much always make Stella’s double-chocolate cream pie. I wouldn’t call this an easy recipe, but Stella’s directions are clear and simple to follow. Go step by step, from the buttery crust to the Swiss meringue, and you won’t fail. This pie is a showstopper for a lot of reasons—the deep chocolate custard (made from dark chocolate and Dutch cocoa powder) is so rich, and the burnished meringue on top looks really professional. The first time I pulled it out of the oven, I couldn’t believe what I had achieved. If you’re looking to impress someone, especially someone who loves chocolate, this is the way to their heart. And mine—please make this for me. —Ariel Kanter, marketing director

Get the recipe for Double-Chocolate Cream Pie »

15-Minute Creamy Tomato Soup

[Photograph: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Once the temperature dips below 50°F, I go hard on soup. It’s warm, it’s filling, it’s usually pretty cheap, and the leftovers only improve with time. Plus, you can dip stuff like bread and grilled cheese sandwiches into it. ‘Nuff said. This year’s gray skies and cold snaps have had me reaching for easy comfort food, and Kenji’s 15-minute vegan tomato soup couldn’t be easier or more comforting. “15-minute” jumped out at me first, but it was the simple ingredient list that sealed the deal—I had practically everything I needed to get started. After just 15 minutes, I savored the tangy sweetness known to all good tomato soups, and none of the richness that cream usually brings to the game. So I felt just fine having two bowls of it (so much for leftovers). —Natalie Holt, video producer

Get the recipe for 15-Minute Creamy Tomato Soup »

Salisbury Steak

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

There are a lot of exceptional recipes on Serious Eats that I turn to again and again: Kenji’s perfect risotto, Stella’s cheddar biscuits, Daniel’s clams casino, and, more recently, Sohla’s cheesy bread.

But if I had to pick one recipe I love above all others, it would be Daniel’s Salisbury steak, since it embodies everything I love about our approach to recipe development. It isn’t expensive or fancy; it doesn’t really require any special ingredients (aside from liquid smoke, which is optional anyway); it isn’t particularly time-consuming or hard to make; and it is extremely good. I didn’t grow up eating this stuff at lunch counters or cafeterias or out of TV dinner trays, so there isn’t even any element of nostalgia for me—it’s just supremely tasty. And how could it not be? It’s basically a good meatball in patty form, topped with a rich mushroom sauce.

After making it more times than I care to count, I’ve realized that the recipe is also a prime example of the importance of technique, and of how paying attention to the little details can make a good dish great. Sure, you can choose not to mince the onions that go into the patties, and you can choose not to diligently slide the patties around in the pan so that their surfaces are nicely browned all around; it’s true that you can skimp on properly browning the mushrooms, or overshoot the final cooking temperature, or skip the smidgen of cider vinegar at the end. The Salisbury steak you eat will still be pretty tasty. But if you do cut the onions into a proper mince and check the meat mixture for seasoning, if you properly brown the meat and the mushrooms, and if you taste the final sauce and add vinegar bit by bit at the very end, what arrives at the table is the kind of meal only an accomplished cook could produce—and that accomplished cook is you. —Sho Spaeth, features editor

Get the recipe for Salisbury Steak »

Italian-Style Eggplant Parmesan

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

I used to live my life believing that eggplant Parmesan was an abomination. I never understood why anyone would take the time to painstakingly put slices of eggplant through a careful three-stage breading procedure, only to drench them in tomato sauce and transform the once-crisp rounds into a soggy scourge on society. Daniel was working on the video for his Italian-style eggplant Parmesan when I first started at Serious Eats, and I knew I was home when I noticed there wasn’t a crumb in sight. Instead of using a heavy breading, this recipe starts with tender slices of eggplant at the peak of their season and fries them stark naked, like the day God made them. The eggplant slices swell with grassy olive oil, becoming creamy and rich, before they’re layered with mozzarella and a triple-threat tomato sauce. After eating half a pan of the stuff at the test kitchen, I went home and made a batch for dinner the very same night. This recipe continues to make frequent appearances in my kitchen, and has permanently changed my stance on eggplant Parmesan, while simultaneously quadrupling my olive oil consumption—because you gotta get in those macros, bro! —Sohla El-Waylly, assistant culinary editor

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Pressure Cooker Beef Barley Soup

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

Even before the pressure cooker variation came along, Daniel’s stovetop beef barley soup was my favorite recipe of 2016, and on regular rotation at home. I always feel so virtuous putting that many grains and vegetables into a dish, and the tender, melt-in-your-mouth chunks of beef make the dish rich and hearty enough to justify popping a bottle of red wine. It was always a Saturday-afternoon thing, a recipe I could have going in the background while I puttered around the house with other chores. But the pressure cooker version changed all that, slashing the recipe’s timeline in half and making it fast enough to throw together on a weeknight, too. —Stella Parks, pastry wizard

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Charred Salsa Verde

[Photograph: J. Kenji López-Alt]

I discovered this recipe pretty late—just a few weeks ago—but it has very quickly become my go-to salsa recipe. If you can find tomatillos, the salsa is unbelievably easy to make: big, rough chops on the veggies; a quick stint under the broiler; a whir in the blender; and that’s it. Smoky, sweet, charred, peppery, and as fiery as you want to make it, the flavors are deliciously complex. And it only gets better when you’ve made it a few times and have gotten a feel for how much heat you want. (I may or may not have burned off all the taste buds on a loved one’s tongue the first time.) Try it with Kenji’s sous vide carnitas! —Tim Aikens, front-end developer

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BraveTart’s Quick and Easy Chocolate Chip Cookies

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

Everyone knows that freshly baked cookies are always better than the store-bought packages. We also know how disappointing it can be to try a recipe from a random search and end up with a sad, bready-tasting batch. However, since trying out Stella’s chocolate chip cookies, I’ve bookmarked the recipe, and baking them has become a weekly tradition. The recipe works perfectly well with mass-produced chocolate chips. My recommendation, though it’s going to take some self-control, is to bake only as much as you’ll devour within 24 hours, then freeze the remaining dough for another indulgent time. Be sure to read the full article, too—I love the historical nugget in which Stella explains how chocolate chips first came to supermarkets. —Vivian Kong, designer

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movietvtechgeeks · 7 years

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Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/rip-liz-smith-tasteful-gossip-columnist-dies-94/

RIP Liz Smith: a tasteful gossip columnist dies at 94

Not many people could claim that gossip columnist Liz Smith did them wrong as she was one of the few that made sure to get the facts right and tried hard to not intentionally hurt those she wrote about. She was like a wonderful godmother to me when I came to New York City and anytime I had a charity event, she would be the first to contribute one of a kind items like a pair of Elizabeth Taylor's shoes studded with Swarovski crystals along with getting the word out in her daily New York Post column. She loved helping a good cause, and many people felt her generosity knowing she wouldn't turn it into a gossip piece. Liz Smith was one of the most prominent gossip columnists in the country for decades, and sadly, she has died in New York from natural causes. She was 94. Literary agent Joni Evans confirmed the news to media outlets on Sunday. The famously Texas-born, Southern Baptist with the blonde bob began penning a column under her own name at the New York Daily News in 1976. Three years later, during a newspaper strike in New York City, her editors at the Daily News asked her to appear in daily segments on WNBC’s Live at Five newscast; she remained with the program for 11 years, earning an Emmy in 1985. This exposure on television enhanced her status — she became a popular staple on the Manhattan social scene, which served to provide more material for her column, by this point in syndication in more than 70 newspapers. At one point Smith was hired by Fox to develop a talkshow that Roger Ailes would produce. She moved from the Daily News to Newsday in 1991, remaining for four years, then signed with the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post. Once part of News Corp., she naturally made appearances on the Fox News Channel. Smith remained with the Post until she was let go in 2009; she continued writing her column, the syndication of which also continued, and the column appeared for a while in Daily Variety after the death of the paper’s own legendary gossip columnist, Army Archerd, in 2009. Smith told The New York Times in 2014 that her love of movies began when she was 6 or 7 and that she never wanted to do anything else. Asked about why we retain our fascination with celebrities, Smith replied: “Remember ‘Camelot’? The song: ‘I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight?’ We make stars into something exquisite, and we want to know what they’re doing and thinking because our lives are desperately boring.” Smith was full of stories about the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Carol Burnett, Bette Midler and her sometime-friend Barbara Walters, but she professed, to the Times in 2014, not to pay any attention to Gawker, TMZ or any of the other celebrity gossip-oriented websites that have proliferated over the last decade. “I never know whether the stories are true,” she declared. Despite her professed disdain for online developments, Smith came to write a blog for the Huffington Post. She was also one of the founding members, along with Lesley Stahl, Mary Wells Lawrence, and Joni Evans, of the website, which is intended to allow women to talk culture, politics and gossip. Asked by the Times whether she ever paid for stories — a sensitive subject for at least some gossip columnists — Smith replied: “I could have. But that would have been against my principles. The only thing I ever negotiated for money was covering Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding to Larry Fortensky at Neverland Ranch. They said, ‘No press.’ And I said, ‘I’ll give all the money to AIDS charities.’ So they let me come, and boy, that was an experience.” Mary Elizabeth Smith was born in Fort Worth, Texas. In 1949 Smith graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin — where she wrote for the Daily Texan, and all her papers are ensconced at the university’s Dolph Brisco Center. She soon relocated to New York, where she worked as a typist, proofreader, and reporter before working as a news producer for Mike Wallace at CBS Radio. She spent five years as a news producer for NBC-TV, and she also worked for Allan Funt on “Candid Camera.” Smith started out writing the anonymous Cholly Knickerbocker gossip column in the 1950s for the Hearst papers. After ending her work on that column in the early 1960s, she went to work for Helen Gurley Brown as the entertainment editor for the U.S. version of Cosmopolitan magazine, later also working as entertainment editor of Sports Illustrated. Smith raised millions of dollars for charities, including $6 million for Literacy Partners, millions for AIDS charity AmFAR, as well as money for the New York Landmarks Conservancy. She appeared on a variety of documentaries about celebrities including 2007’s “A Tribute to Peter Bart: Newhouse Mirror Award,” centering on the former editor-in-chief of Variety; Smith also played herself on TV series including “The Nanny,” “Murphy Brown” and “The Roseanne Show.” Her tome “The Mother Book” was published in 1978, followed by her New York Times bestselling memoir “Natural Blonde” in 2000 and 2005’s “Dishing: Great Dish – And Dishes – From America’s Most Beloved Gossip Columnist.” Smith was married and divorced twice to George Beeman from 1945-47, and to Fred Lister from 1957-62, but acknowledged her bisexuality in a roundabout way in her memoirs, dubbing it “gender neutrality.” She was less circumspect in a 2000 interview with Judy Wieder, editor-in-chief of the Advocate, declaring that while it was not in her nature to be a role model in the LGBT movement, “I think that my relationships with women were always much more emotionally satisfying and comfortable (than with men). And a lot of my relationships with men were more flirtatious and adversarial. I just never felt I was wife material. I always felt that I was a great girlfriend.”

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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White food writers are often allowed to be generalists, while BIPOC creators are limited to their personal histories, their cultures, and the foods their grandmothers made In this age of the cook-turned-influencer, Bon Appétit’s video content found astonishing success by capitalizing on the colorful world of the quirky characters featured in its test kitchen. In many cases, the employees’ personalities were turned into their personal brands. This strategy, actively pursued by now-former editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport, piggybacked off an evolving relationship between audiences and celebrity chefs like Alison Roman, whose “authentic” lazy-girl cooking hacks jolted her into almost instant fame. Branding oneself as the creator of a viral dish (“the stew,” “the pasta”) or crafting an identity around a quirk or personality trait, all but eliminates the need for bona fide experts, allowing the internet-friendly celebrity chef to take their place. But as the casual viewer noticed — and as stories about Bon Appétit’s corporate culture have revealed in recent weeks — it is almost always only white food writers, chefs, and recipe developers who get to adopt personas that go beyond their ethnicity. For every Brad Leone, who gets to be goofy and charming, for every Claire Saffitz, who becomes a sensation for being hyper-competitive and neurotically orderly, you have a Priya Krishna or a Rick Martinez, whose ethnicity, and the “expertise” in a certain cuisine that comes with it, is often framed as their most useful contribution to the team. Martinez, former senior food editor and current BA contributor, was branded the “resident taco maestro” in the pages of the magazine, yet, as he recounted to Business Insider, then-deputy editor Andrew Knowlton asked if he was “a one-trick pony” for focusing on Mexican cuisine. Argentinian test kitchen manager Gaby Melian’s only solo video on YouTube is of her making her family’s empanada recipe. Fan favorite Sohla El-Waylly, who managed to veer out into more generalist territory with beloved recipes for dumplings, cinnamon buns, and even a carbonara dessert, started her career at BA talking about her riff on a family biryani recipe on the Bon Appétit Foodcast podcast and made an “updated” version of a Bengali snack, piyaju, for her first solo video. Even after expanding out of her “niche” and producing some of the channel’s most creative recipes, El-Waylly’s expertise was considered external to her identity, and — as she revealed in an Instagram story on June 8 — she was compensated as such. Other BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) at BA, including contributing editor Priya Krishna and research director Joseph Hernandez, also spoke out against BA’s pay disparities and its pervasive racist culture that, as Business Insider wrote, “does not provide nonwhite employees the same opportunities on the brand’s video side that white employees enjoy.” The feeling of being slotted into a niche is all too familiar for Martinez. “There’s this idea in food media that it’s somehow easier to cook the food of your culture because you grew up with it or that it’s a part of you,” Martinez tells me. “It completely discounts the skills that it takes to build a recipe for an American audience. To recreate or even create an homage to the original dish requires a lot of creativity, skill, and work.” The recent changes at BA — Rapoport’s resignation, white BA staffers’ refusal to put out content until their BIPOC colleagues are paid fairly — are a start. Yet the simultaneous compartmentalizing and marginalization of BIPOC in food media goes far beyond one organization or one editor-in-chief. Allowing BIPOC to have more agency within the food media system will require reimagining the relationship white America has both to “other cuisines” and to the people who grew up on them. There’s this perception in food media, which publications like Bon Appétit subscribe to and perpetuate, that all that nonwhite writers really want is to have their cultures represented “authentically.” But the premise of authenticity is rooted in a white gaze that selectively acquires aspects of nonwhite cultures to package as just exotic enough to remain accessible. In late June, the New York Times published a story about “Thai fruit” that frames common fruit in Thailand as foreign and difficult to understand. The week before, tofu was labeled “white, chewy, and bland” in a since-deleted tweet by Bloomberg Asia. And who can forget the infamous Bon Appétit pho fiasco, which called the Vietnamese dish “the new ramen” and enlisted a white chef to give a “PSA: This Is How You Should Be Eating Pho”? Stories like these serve as reminders that foods outside of whiteness are at odds with an imagined “American” readership, for whom these foods remain distant and other. “Our white colleagues think that we are speaking out about representation or appropriation because we want to be seen as experts on the subject,” says travel and food writer Dan Q. Dao. “[But] what we are [really] fighting is a long battle for inclusivity and equity in our workplaces.” “I’m often asked to add a cultural slant even when one does not exist.” Those workplaces, it should be noted, are overwhelmingly white. In June, Leah Bhabha noted in a Grubstreet piece, citing a 2019 Diversity Baseline study, that 76 percent of all publishing industry professionals are white. “In my own experience, as a biracial Indian writer, I’ve never had more than one coworker of color on my team,” she wrote, “and frequently it’s just been me.” The social media age — and the branding pressures inherent within — exacerbates that experience. Social media allows for real-time feedback that makes creators accountable to an audience that often acts as ad hoc sensitivity readers for people writing about their own cultural backgrounds. Writer and chef Samin Nosrat recently tweeted her frustrations with that pressure: “Instead of criticizing the systems that refuse to allow for greater diversity and inclusion, desis, Iranians, whoever, just pile on individual cooks for our perceived failure to represent their ideal versions of their entire cuisines. (Or even more frustratingly, for failing to cook something *exactly* like maman did it back home. I am not your maman!)” But as media writer Allegra Hobbs pointed out in October 2019, “in the age of Twitter and Instagram, an online presence, which is necessarily public and necessarily consumable, seems all but mandatory for a writer who reaches (or hopes to reach) a certain level of renown.” In curating this online presence, writers and other creators are often pushed to flatten themselves into an easily legible extension of their identity. Like many, food writer and chef Lesley Téllez has struggled with the expectations that come with being Mexican in food media. “There’s more pressure on BIPOC to find a niche that makes us stand out,” she says. “Over and over, the faces who look like us are people who specialize in food from their particular countries or backgrounds. It sends an overt message that stepping out as a generalist is hard, and that you will not be hired as such. I have definitely felt pressure to keep non-Mexican-cooking stuff off of my social media, and my old blog.” For all the claims organizations in food media have made of diversifying their rosters and cleaning up the more egregious offenses in their treatment of nonwhite writers, there is still an association between nonwhite writers and their ethnicity, which is treated as tantamount to other aspects of their identities. BIPOC in food media are routinely not considered for assignments about things that don’t directly relate to their ethnicity or race. “I became a food writer 20 years ago when it was not really a profession,” says Ramin Ganeshram. “Yet, despite my qualifications as a reporter, editor, and chef, it was a losing fight to write anything that wasn’t ‘ethnic.’... I was discouraged and prevented from writing about generalized food technique or profiles, despite French culinary training.” These assignments are often handed off to white writers, who are seen as “generalists” with the ability to stick their hands into any cuisine and turn it into something palatable (or, more importantly, into pageviews). Ganeshram says, “I was directly told regarding a job I didn’t receive at a New England-based national cooking magazine that they thought of me as more of an ‘ethnic’ writer.” Instead, BIPOC get stuck with work directly related to their ethnicities. “I’m often asked to add a cultural slant even when one does not exist,” says food writer Su-Jit Lin, “or frame things from a point of greater expertise than I actually have. It’s assumed I’m fully indoctrinated into the culture and more Chinese than American (not true — my lane is actually Southern, Italian, and kind of Irish food).” Even when chefs push back against this compartmentalization, they are turned into caricatured ambassadors for their backgrounds. Chef (and Eater contributor) Jenny Dorsey wrote on Twitter that even though she demonstrated a dish on video that had nothing to do with her heritage, the result was ultimately titled “Jenny Dorsey talks about how her Chinese-American heritage influences her cooking.” Often, the addition of a “cultural slant” to stories leads to one of the more egregious ways that nonwhite food is pigeonholed and othered — through what writer Isabel Quintero calls a lust for “Abuelita longing.” The term speaks to the way immigrant and diasporic writers (both within and outside food media) are frequently expected to add a dash of trauma or ancestral belonging to anything they write. As a Trinidadian-Iranian chef, Ganeshram finds this association particularly limiting. “When I’ve tried to write stories about my Iranian heritage, not being a recent Iranian immigrant or the child of a post-revolution immigrant has been an issue,” she says. “The editors I dealt with only wanted a refugee/escaping the Islamic Republic story. They decided what constituted an ‘authentic’ Iranian story, and that story was based in strife and hardship only.” These markers of authenticity can only come from the wholesome domesticity presumed of the ethnic other. The extreme whiteness of the food industry, and of food media, places undue pressure on nonwhite writers and chefs. As food writer and founder of Whetstone Magazine, Stephen Satterfield wrote for Chefsfeed in 2017: “In mostly-white communities, you become an ambassador for your race. The stakes are high, and you try hard not to screw it up for the ones behind you…. Black chefs know this well: we must validate our presence, where others exist unquestioned. And what does it mean to be a black food writer? It means that you’ll never just be a food writer, you’ll be a black food writer.” In other words, being designated as “ethnic” chefs put far too many BIPOC working in food media in a bind. Either they work against being pigeonholed by pitching stories that mark them as generalists, but lose out on assignments as a consequence, or they double down and tell stories of their culture and cuisine, but risk being limited both career- and compensation-wise. Martinez was aware of this predicament while signing on to write a regional Mexican cookbook. “Writing a love letter to Mexico is so important in these times, but I had to seriously consider whether it would be a career-limiting move,” he says. He chose to write the book, but others, like Caroline Shin, food journalist and founder of the Cooking with Granny video and workshop series, have had to push against the expectation that anything they publish will be about their ethnic cuisine. “Last year, literary agents told me that I couldn’t sell diversity,” she says. “[I]f I wanted a cookbook, I should focus on my Korean culture.” While Shin chose to start her own program as what she calls an “‘I’ll show you’ to white-dominated institutions,” it raises the question of whether BIPOC in food media can taste mainstream success without operating as spokespeople for their ethnic cuisines. But if you continue to pigeonhole and tokenize your BIPOC employees, seeing them primarily as products of trauma or perpetuating their marginalization by refusing them fair pay and workplace equity, then your calls to diversify the workplace mean very little, if anything at all. Mallika Khanna is a graduate student in media who writes about film and digital culture, diaspora and immigrant experiences and the environment through a feminist, anti-capitalist lens. Nicole Medina is a Philly based illustrator who loves capturing adventure through her art using bold colors and patterns. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/39Jaxcc

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/07/it-was-losing-fight-to-write-anything.html

#EasyFoodNetwork #ComfortFoodRecipes #EasyRecipes #GoodFood #BestComfortFoodRecipes #TastyFoodv

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