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Thursday, July 30, 2026
Purple Pasta Party
Chop a huge red onion and saute it in olive oil with a bulb of chopped fresh garlic. After the onion is translucent add a pound of frozen cut leaf spinach and glugs of Chianti. Simmer until defrosted.
Meanwhile boil or pressure cook pasta saving some of the sated pasta water. Bowties are great for this
Add the cooked (aldente) pasta (5 minutes in the Instant Pot) and reserve a 1/2 cup salty starchy pasta water. Add cooked pasta to the spinach wine red onion mixture.
Enjoy with hand-grated Asiago or fresh Parmesan.
The pasta turns purple from the red onion spinach and wine!
It's delicious!
A parent who despises himself deep down. This parent can appear to be quite loving of her children, so she can be difficult to spot. But she is unable to tolerate certain aspects of herself, so she projects those traits onto a chosen child, and despises him instead. It is an unconscious coping mechanism that happens outside of the parent’s awareness.
The best and the brightest. This child threatens to outperform or outshine one or both of the parents. Either consciously or unconsciously, the parents sabotage her to hold her back. This way, they won’t lose her and they won’t have to feel badly about themselves in comparison to her.
Sibling rivalry. In this family, there is simply not enough attention or love to go around. One or both of the parents is limited in some way; by mental illness, personality disorder, or substance abuse for example. The siblings must jockey for whatever they can get.
Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN): the child who is the most invisible. In this family, all of the children may get the subtle (or not-so-subtle) message that their feelings don’t matter. But one is better at hiding his own needs, feelings, and self than the others. This child literally disappears from the family’s radar screen and is ignored. He becomes persona non grata. He is the one who matters the least.
The child most prone to depression or anxiety. The child with intense or dark feelings or thoughts which the parents cannot understand may frighten them. At a loss about how to help, they may just keep him at a distance.
The child who has the least in common with the parents. This child sticks out because of his personality, temperament or interests. The parents are baffled by him and inadvertently treat him differently, which spreads to the siblings. source
Far from being self-centered or ill-mannered, saying “no” is one of the most gracious gifts we can give ourselves.
Not long ago, I realized that the single greatest source of stress in my life was my own reluctance to say “no” to myriad invitations. I’ve spent countless hours going places I didn’t want to go, doing things I didn’t want to do. Meetings where my presence wasn’t necessary or useful. Parties and conferences full of people I didn’t know or care to know. Lunches, dinners, and coffees with relative strangers wanting to “pick my brain.” As these sorts of commitments compounded in my life, I found myself stressed, burnt out, and ripe for another mood episode.
In Gloucester, the Chief of Police decided to offer help instead of incarceration to the addicted population in his town. He offered to help—not arrest—anyone who would walk into the police station and ask for help. He and his staff worked hard to find a rehab facility for each person. This initial effort to help grew into the Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative or PAARI.
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Crispy Kimchi Pancake
The absolute best trick to make kimchijeon (Korean kimchi pancake) irresistibly crispy is adding starch (potato or cornstarch) or rice flour to your flour, mixed with ice-cold water (or sparkling water) and frying it thin in plenty of hot oil.
The Crispy Secrets
Starch and Rice Flour: Swap a portion of the all-purpose flour for potato starch, cornstarch, or rice flour to create a hard, crackly crust instead of a soft bread-like texture.
Ice-Cold Liquid: Use ice-cold water or sparkling water for the batter; the cold temperature hitting the hot pan creates an extra-crispy exterior.
Thin Layers: Spread the batter as thin as possible in the skillet; thick batter traps moisture and turns soggy.
High Heat and Oil: Use a generous layer of neutral oil (about 1/8-inch deep) and cook over medium-high to high heat, pressing down gently on the pancake to maximize surface contact with the pan.
Identity enhancement versus REAL travel: modern tourists want to have a set of safe, positive experiences, but they don’t want to be changed fundamentally.
I would say this is true about their lives.
BINGO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Vindictive and selfish parents prioritize their own emotional needs, control, and ego over the well-being of their children. Most agree that these behaviors are often rooted in narcissistic traits, where any independence or perceived slight triggers intense retaliation. Signs of Selfish and Vindictive Behavior are Conditional Love: Affection is given only when you obey or meet their expectations, and vanishes when you disappoint them. Malicious Retaliation: Using silent treatment, guilt trips, financial cut-offs, or turning family members against you when you set boundaries. Blame Shifting: Refusing to take accountability, making you feel responsible for their negative emotions or life problems. The Scapegoat Dynamic: Singling one child out as "bad" or flawed to deflect from the parent's own insecurities and failures. The Impact on Adult Children is Constant Guilt: Feeling selfish or anxious whenever you prioritize your own happiness or needs. People-Pleasing: Developing an over-apologetic reflex and struggling to set firm personal boundaries. Hypervigilance: Constantly scanning environments for conflict or hidden criticism because safety was never reliable.
Stanley Kunitz Writer's Almanac
(1905). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father took his own life in a public park before Kunitz was born, and his mother, Yetta, erased all traces of Stanley’s father from the house, and refused to speak about him. She opened up a dry-goods store and sewed clothes in the back room, working overtime to pay off the debts that her husband had left behind, even though legally she was not obligated to pay them.
One thing his mother did not destroy were the books his father had left behind, books by Tolstoy and Dickens. One of Kunitz’s favorite books was the dictionary. He said: “I used to sit in that green Morris chair and open the heavy dictionary on my lap, and find a new word every day. It was a big word, a word like eleemosynary or phantasmagoria — some word that, on the tongue, sounded great to me, and I would go out into the fields and I would shout those words, because it was so important that they sounded so great to me. And then eventually I began incorporating them into verses, into poems. But certainly my thought in the beginning was that there was so much joy playing with language that I couldn’t consider living without it.”
His first job as a boy was riding his horse down the streets of Worcester and lighting the gas lamps at night. He became a reporter for the Worcester Telegram, went to Harvard, and stayed for his master’s degree. He wanted to pursue his Ph.D., but the head of the English department at Harvard told him that Anglo-Saxon students would resent being taught by a Jew.
So he moved to a big farm in Connecticut, and worked as a reporter and farmer. He sold fresh herbs to markets in Hartford. Kunitz was drafted into World War II, and when he came back, he was offered a teaching position at Bennington College. In 1949, the college tried to expel one of his students — Groucho Marx’s daughter Miriam — right before her graduation because she had violated a curfew. Kunitz helped organize a protest of the decision, and the president of Bennington showed up at his house and told him to stop immediately. Kunitz took the plant that he was potting and threw it in the president’s face, then quit.
He published a second book, but it was barely noticed. He was so unknown that his third book, Selected Poems (1958), was rejected by eight publishers — three of them refused to even read it. When it was finally published, it won the Pulitzer Prize. When someone asked W.H. Auden why nobody knew about Stanley Kunitz, Auden said: “It’s strange, but give him time. A hundred years or so. He’s a patient man.”
It was more than 10 years before he published his next book, The Testing Tree (1971), and slowly but surely, people began to take notice. He was appointed the poet laureate when he was 95 years old. He died at the age of 100.
He said: “It is out of the dailiness of life that one is driven into the deepest recesses of the self.”
One of the privileges of living high on the hog is that you appreciate what a beautifully complicated experience eating can be. You realize that it’s not just food that sustains, but the experience you have eating it. Daniel Wallace
Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels and directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater.
“For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in
which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to
walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they
overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they
followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all
these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things
that you can't come to know by hearsay...”
―
The Razor’s Edge