MISCELLANEOUS
Reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking finally. She really is an excellent writer, and has turned a tragic point in her life into a beautiful book about loss, grief, and a loving marriage.
Saw Eve and the Fire Horse at Talk Cinema -- liked it very much.
FOOD
"Crusty Macaroni and Cheese": What's wrong with the New York Times' weirdly popular recipe.
from Slate.com
For some reason, a recipe for "Crusty Macaroni and Cheese" has been lingering atop the New York Times Web site's list of most-e-mailed articles. The recipe ran on Jan. 4; as of this writing, some nine days later, it's perched in fourth place on the list of the month's top forwards. Has it been a slow news cycle? (Samuel Alito—shown up by cheddar.) Have I underestimated the cultural cachet of the word "crusty"? Or has the nation just settled into its annual post-holiday hibernation, when thoughts turn to stews, casseroles, and Super Bowl fare?
Whatever the explanation, something about the recipe looked off to me. It accompanied an article in which Julia Moskin, whose food reporting I greatly admire, detailed her search for the ideal macaroni and cheese: "Nothing more than tender elbows of pasta suspended in pure molten cheddar, with a chewy, golden-brown crust of cheese on top." A noble goal, certainly. (Kraft was probably trying to evoke something similar when it renamed the dish "cheese and macaroni" in the 1980s.) But Moskin's recipe has odd proportions: a whopping 24 ounces of cheese to a pound of pasta, with just a drizzling of milk to moisten the casserole.
Moskin offers up the tantalizing possibility that delicious macaroni and cheese can be made without white sauce, or béchamel, the butter/flour/milk goop that binds pasta and cheddar together in a traditional mac and cheese. For backup, she quotes a cranky John Thorne, the iconoclastic food writer, who calls white sauce "a noxious paste of flour-thickened milk" that diminishes "this dish flavored with a tiny grating of cheese."
And herein lies the secret to the recipe's popularity. Novice cooks setting out to make this seemingly simple dish may be disheartened by recipes that begin, "Make a roux." "Crusty Macaroni and Cheese" posits that you can simply skip that step. Could macaroni and cheese be as simple as that? Macaroni, plus cheese, baked?
I tried both of the recipes that accompanied Moskin's article. Neither "Crusty Macaroni and Cheese" nor "Creamy Macaroni and Cheese" (the less popular companion recipe) requires white sauce. The creamy one substitutes a cup of cottage cheese—a reasonable approach; various cooks, one of Moskin's sources notes, use ricotta, crème fraiche, eggs, or evaporated milk instead of white sauce. It turned out well enough.
Meanwhile, old Crusty had a measly two-thirds of a cup of milk to moisten it. It just didn't seem right. So I made it, twice.
"Crusty" is no exaggeration; the two cups of cheese used to top the casserole shrink-wrapped itself around the uppermost elbows. Eaten piping hot it was a little chewy and a little crispy; after the dish had cooled just a hair, the top layer had firmed to a leathery shield. The noodles below sweated fat, which collected unappealingly at the bottom of my earthenware dish. On my first attempt, I took the high road and used the all-cheddar option presented in the recipe. Bits of cheese clung clumpily to the elbows. Cheese that's not processed—and especially cheddar—needs help to achieve an ideal state of ooziness. And without the moderation of something creamy—ricotta, crème fraiche, or I think, ideally, white sauce—that much cooked cheddar loses some nuance and tastes a bit caustic. When, on the second go-round, I used a mixture of American cheese and cheddar, the texture was smoother, but the dish tasted unpleasantly unctuous: more fatty than cheesy.
So while I share Moskin's pro-cheese stance, I remain unconvinced that cheese can stand alone, with only a modicum of milk at its side. For my casseroles, I'll stick with my not-so-noxious paste of flour-thickened milk. With a scratch of nutmeg and a little cayenne, not to mention all that cheese, it's pretty yummy, really.
HOMEWORK TRENDS
STUDY BUDDY
from The New Yorker
Whatever side you’re on in the homework wars (more vs. less, phonics vs. “whole language”), a case can be made that study habits formed in grade school establish patterns for negotiating life as an adult. The kid whose mom builds his diorama may expect a rent-check stipend later; the girl who spends Friday night finishing her science project will likely resist the temptations of happy hour with her co-workers.
When the city’s public libraries announced, last month, the launch of an allpoints Web site, homeworkNYC.org, for K-12 students, proponents hailed it as a critical blow to the old “dog ate my homework” excuse. Dakota Scott, a freshman at Bard High School Early College, stood before a group of teachers and librarians at the Donnell Library, on West Fifty-third Street, and demonstrated some of the site’s features, performing searches on “insects” and “ancient Egypt.” She did not click on a link for “live homework help,” but, had the demonstration occurred between 2 P.M. and 11 P.M., the link would have connected her, via Tutor.com, to any of twelve hundred tutors around the country sitting on their sofas, or in cafés, and, for all we know, sipping margaritas, while dispensing advice on trigonometry or mitochondria or intransitive verbs.
Or, as it happens, love. On a recent Friday night, Yasmin, a graduate student in animation, sat on a futon in her boyfriend’s studio apartment, in Brooklyn. For roughly ten dollars an hour, she had signed on to counsel students looking to get a jump on the weekend’s assignments. She had her laptop open and was logged in to the Tutor.com server.
On her screen, a window popped up: “A student has requested your help.” The student was apparently in the fourth grade and was logging on from California. A chat session began:
Student: Can you help me with wrighting?
Yasmin: Sure. What is your assignment?
Student: Fiction. . . .
Yasmin: Ok, great. Do you know what you want to write about?
Student: My frind said love hurts but I want it to be about passion.
Yasmin: You want to write a love story?
. . Or should we brainstorm?
A nine-year-old writing a love story on a Friday night? Suddenly, the Internet connection failed and the session was terminated.
Sometimes, Yasmin explained, it’s difficult to tell whether a student is legit. But she thought the fiction-writing kid was for real. “Teachers can get pretty creative with assignments,” she said. “The other day, a student had to make a mix tape for a character in a book.” He was to include liner notes, explaining why each song had been chosen.
One of the songs that the student had picked was “Kokomo,” by the Beach Boys, about Caribbean romance. (“Afternoon delight / Cocktails and moonlit nights / That dreamy look in your eye / Give me a tropical contact high.”) The book he’d read was called “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” “He related it to the character, a guy going somewhere with his mother,” Yasmin said. She wrote to the student, “ ‘Kokomo’ isn’t exactly a song I think of when discussing a person’s relationship with their mom.”
Back on Yasmin’s laptop, a new request came in, from a sixth grader:
Student: I need to learn about William Shackspear
Yasmin: Ok, great. Do you have a specific assignment?
Student: Nooooooooo. . . . .
Yasmin: Have you read any sonnets or plays?
Student: Nooooooooo.
Disconnected.
The aspiring fourth-grade romance novelist signed on again:
Yasmin: You said “love hurts.” Tell me more. How? Why?
Student: Well, I changed it to passion.
Yasmin: Ok, what about passion? Let’s make up some characters?
Student: Do you have any idears?
Yasmin:
Do you want to have one male and one female character? What should their names be?
On a shared “whiteboard,” a virtual chalkboard, the student scrawled the names Jesus and Christine, using his mouse. Yasmin, still credulous, tried to develop the backstory: How did they meet? (“Um”) Where should they meet? (“At a special place. Could you think of any?”) They agreed on Hawaii as the setting:
Yasmin: How will they meet? Do they know any of the same people . . . ?
Student: She was thirsty, so she wanted a drink.
Yasmin: . . . So she goes to a restaurant?
Student: Yep
Yasmin: Is Jesus working there? Is he there having dinner?
Student: Yes. . . .
Yasmin: Christine goes to the restaurant for a drink and meets Jesus . . . how?
Student: He took her order
Yasmin: So he’s the waiter?
Student: Yep
Yasmin: And then what?
Student:
She looked up and saw him.
And, with that, the session, which had lasted nearly half an hour, timed out. Yasmin dutifully typed an entry into her tutor’s log: “We started brainstorming a story about passion.”
Reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking finally. She really is an excellent writer, and has turned a tragic point in her life into a beautiful book about loss, grief, and a loving marriage.
Saw Eve and the Fire Horse at Talk Cinema -- liked it very much.
FOOD
"Crusty Macaroni and Cheese": What's wrong with the New York Times' weirdly popular recipe.
from Slate.com
For some reason, a recipe for "Crusty Macaroni and Cheese" has been lingering atop the New York Times Web site's list of most-e-mailed articles. The recipe ran on Jan. 4; as of this writing, some nine days later, it's perched in fourth place on the list of the month's top forwards. Has it been a slow news cycle? (Samuel Alito—shown up by cheddar.) Have I underestimated the cultural cachet of the word "crusty"? Or has the nation just settled into its annual post-holiday hibernation, when thoughts turn to stews, casseroles, and Super Bowl fare?
Whatever the explanation, something about the recipe looked off to me. It accompanied an article in which Julia Moskin, whose food reporting I greatly admire, detailed her search for the ideal macaroni and cheese: "Nothing more than tender elbows of pasta suspended in pure molten cheddar, with a chewy, golden-brown crust of cheese on top." A noble goal, certainly. (Kraft was probably trying to evoke something similar when it renamed the dish "cheese and macaroni" in the 1980s.) But Moskin's recipe has odd proportions: a whopping 24 ounces of cheese to a pound of pasta, with just a drizzling of milk to moisten the casserole.
Moskin offers up the tantalizing possibility that delicious macaroni and cheese can be made without white sauce, or béchamel, the butter/flour/milk goop that binds pasta and cheddar together in a traditional mac and cheese. For backup, she quotes a cranky John Thorne, the iconoclastic food writer, who calls white sauce "a noxious paste of flour-thickened milk" that diminishes "this dish flavored with a tiny grating of cheese."
And herein lies the secret to the recipe's popularity. Novice cooks setting out to make this seemingly simple dish may be disheartened by recipes that begin, "Make a roux." "Crusty Macaroni and Cheese" posits that you can simply skip that step. Could macaroni and cheese be as simple as that? Macaroni, plus cheese, baked?
I tried both of the recipes that accompanied Moskin's article. Neither "Crusty Macaroni and Cheese" nor "Creamy Macaroni and Cheese" (the less popular companion recipe) requires white sauce. The creamy one substitutes a cup of cottage cheese—a reasonable approach; various cooks, one of Moskin's sources notes, use ricotta, crème fraiche, eggs, or evaporated milk instead of white sauce. It turned out well enough.
Meanwhile, old Crusty had a measly two-thirds of a cup of milk to moisten it. It just didn't seem right. So I made it, twice.
"Crusty" is no exaggeration; the two cups of cheese used to top the casserole shrink-wrapped itself around the uppermost elbows. Eaten piping hot it was a little chewy and a little crispy; after the dish had cooled just a hair, the top layer had firmed to a leathery shield. The noodles below sweated fat, which collected unappealingly at the bottom of my earthenware dish. On my first attempt, I took the high road and used the all-cheddar option presented in the recipe. Bits of cheese clung clumpily to the elbows. Cheese that's not processed—and especially cheddar—needs help to achieve an ideal state of ooziness. And without the moderation of something creamy—ricotta, crème fraiche, or I think, ideally, white sauce—that much cooked cheddar loses some nuance and tastes a bit caustic. When, on the second go-round, I used a mixture of American cheese and cheddar, the texture was smoother, but the dish tasted unpleasantly unctuous: more fatty than cheesy.
So while I share Moskin's pro-cheese stance, I remain unconvinced that cheese can stand alone, with only a modicum of milk at its side. For my casseroles, I'll stick with my not-so-noxious paste of flour-thickened milk. With a scratch of nutmeg and a little cayenne, not to mention all that cheese, it's pretty yummy, really.
HOMEWORK TRENDS
STUDY BUDDY
from The New Yorker
Whatever side you’re on in the homework wars (more vs. less, phonics vs. “whole language”), a case can be made that study habits formed in grade school establish patterns for negotiating life as an adult. The kid whose mom builds his diorama may expect a rent-check stipend later; the girl who spends Friday night finishing her science project will likely resist the temptations of happy hour with her co-workers.
When the city’s public libraries announced, last month, the launch of an allpoints Web site, homeworkNYC.org, for K-12 students, proponents hailed it as a critical blow to the old “dog ate my homework” excuse. Dakota Scott, a freshman at Bard High School Early College, stood before a group of teachers and librarians at the Donnell Library, on West Fifty-third Street, and demonstrated some of the site’s features, performing searches on “insects” and “ancient Egypt.” She did not click on a link for “live homework help,” but, had the demonstration occurred between 2 P.M. and 11 P.M., the link would have connected her, via Tutor.com, to any of twelve hundred tutors around the country sitting on their sofas, or in cafés, and, for all we know, sipping margaritas, while dispensing advice on trigonometry or mitochondria or intransitive verbs.
Or, as it happens, love. On a recent Friday night, Yasmin, a graduate student in animation, sat on a futon in her boyfriend’s studio apartment, in Brooklyn. For roughly ten dollars an hour, she had signed on to counsel students looking to get a jump on the weekend’s assignments. She had her laptop open and was logged in to the Tutor.com server.
On her screen, a window popped up: “A student has requested your help.” The student was apparently in the fourth grade and was logging on from California. A chat session began:
Student: Can you help me with wrighting?
Yasmin: Sure. What is your assignment?
Student: Fiction. . . .
Yasmin: Ok, great. Do you know what you want to write about?
Student: My frind said love hurts but I want it to be about passion.
Yasmin: You want to write a love story?
. . Or should we brainstorm?
A nine-year-old writing a love story on a Friday night? Suddenly, the Internet connection failed and the session was terminated.
Sometimes, Yasmin explained, it’s difficult to tell whether a student is legit. But she thought the fiction-writing kid was for real. “Teachers can get pretty creative with assignments,” she said. “The other day, a student had to make a mix tape for a character in a book.” He was to include liner notes, explaining why each song had been chosen.
One of the songs that the student had picked was “Kokomo,” by the Beach Boys, about Caribbean romance. (“Afternoon delight / Cocktails and moonlit nights / That dreamy look in your eye / Give me a tropical contact high.”) The book he’d read was called “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” “He related it to the character, a guy going somewhere with his mother,” Yasmin said. She wrote to the student, “ ‘Kokomo’ isn’t exactly a song I think of when discussing a person’s relationship with their mom.”
Back on Yasmin’s laptop, a new request came in, from a sixth grader:
Student: I need to learn about William Shackspear
Yasmin: Ok, great. Do you have a specific assignment?
Student: Nooooooooo. . . . .
Yasmin: Have you read any sonnets or plays?
Student: Nooooooooo.
Disconnected.
The aspiring fourth-grade romance novelist signed on again:
Yasmin: You said “love hurts.” Tell me more. How? Why?
Student: Well, I changed it to passion.
Yasmin: Ok, what about passion? Let’s make up some characters?
Student: Do you have any idears?
Yasmin:
Do you want to have one male and one female character? What should their names be?
On a shared “whiteboard,” a virtual chalkboard, the student scrawled the names Jesus and Christine, using his mouse. Yasmin, still credulous, tried to develop the backstory: How did they meet? (“Um”) Where should they meet? (“At a special place. Could you think of any?”) They agreed on Hawaii as the setting:
Yasmin: How will they meet? Do they know any of the same people . . . ?
Student: She was thirsty, so she wanted a drink.
Yasmin: . . . So she goes to a restaurant?
Student: Yep
Yasmin: Is Jesus working there? Is he there having dinner?
Student: Yes. . . .
Yasmin: Christine goes to the restaurant for a drink and meets Jesus . . . how?
Student: He took her order
Yasmin: So he’s the waiter?
Student: Yep
Yasmin: And then what?
Student:
She looked up and saw him.
And, with that, the session, which had lasted nearly half an hour, timed out. Yasmin dutifully typed an entry into her tutor’s log: “We started brainstorming a story about passion.”
posted by D @ 6:26 AM
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