War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!*
As I write this, we have been at war with Iran for several weeks now. Americans have died, as well as many Iranians and others in the Middle East. The Trump administration has offered a variety of reasons for this war, or excursion, or whatever they are calling it today, but it is still not clear to me why we are doing this and what we hope to accomplish. Regime change seems to be at the heart of things, but we have proven over and over again that we are not successful at doing that. Iraq. Afghanistan. Vietnam.
Seth Meyers summarized it best for me: “The Trump administration has been clear from the beginning that the goal of the war is stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon — or it’s about regime change, or it’s about freedom for the Iranian people, or it’s about destroying their ballistic missile factories, or it’s because Iran posed an imminent threat, or it’s because Israel made us do it, or it’s because this whole time Lindsey Graham has been a trickster god sent here to sow chaos by convincing Trump to go to war.”
There is no exit strategy, and no Congressional input. This president decides things on his own with his feeble, demented brain, and the Republican Congress and all the sycophants he has surrounded himself with just go along with it.
The mid-term elections are still months away, and I am looking forward to change. Major change. Trump is panicking because, as he has said, if Congress swings to the left, he will undoubtedly be impeached again, with very good reasons. One can only hope. Three more years of this president with unchecked power is incredibly alarming.
While this is not a political blog by any means, extraordinary times like these change my focus. I am reading to escape more than ever, but I cannot just bury my head in the sand and pretend everything is going great. It’s not. I can’t bring myself to read much more news beyond the headlines, and those scare the crap out of me.
To complicate things even further, Trump’s war with Iran is taking us on a fast path to a recession, and I have lived through enough of those to dread the days ahead. The fact that my retirement is not far off just adds to my fears.
I pray for peace and prosperity, but can’t count on it.
*Edwin Star recorded and released “War” in March, 1970. The song was an anti-Vietnam-war statement and is the soundtrack of my pacifism.
Book News
So much book news this month!
The New York Times has launched a readers’ advisory tool, of sorts. While their suggestions are okay (but definitely lean towards the more literary), it’s the personalized recommendations that I’m most curious about. I haven’t tried it yet, but if you do, I’d love to hear about your results. Thanks.
What’s it like to write a bestselling book? We followed Lucy Score for a year to find out
‘We’re losing accessibility’: America says goodbye to the mass-market paperback
Audiobooks don’t really count as reading? Think again. — Harvard Gazette
Education scholars say rigor, learning same as paper, stigma an unnecessary hurdle. “There is nothing wrong with audiobooks,” Seiter said. “There is no purity about reading words on a page.”
I concur, but it’s nice to see educators agree as well!
Food News
My own, personal food news! Last month, I was walking through Costco, and they had jars of Pisti Pistachio Cream on sale, so I snagged a jar. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was, but I love pistachio nuts, so I figured it was worth a shot. It’s sort of like a cross between peanut butter and Nutella, but strictly pistachio flavor. The consistency is sticky and goopy, but it is sweeter than just a plain nut butter. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, so I left it on the counter so I would see it and think about it. Eventually, I decided to make a chocolate cake and use it as the filling. Along the lines of the Dubai Chocolate craze, minus the kataifi.
We were having some friends over for dinner, so the perfect opportunity. These are very good friends, who I knew wouldn’t mind being my guinea pigs! The results were spectacular, even better than I hoped.
I made Easy Chocolate Cake from Yossy Arefi at the New York Times Cooking. While this recipe had a cup of coffee in the batter, I knew from making Beatty’s Chocolate cake that it wouldn’t give any coffee or mocha flavor, but just make the chocolate even more chocolaty. I also swapped out about a third of the cocoa powder for black cocoa, the secret ingredient in Oreos that gives any cake or cookie Oreo vibes in the chocolate department, never a bad thing!
Then I started researching ways to incorporate the pistachio cream into a cake filling, and didn’t find anything. There are tons of recipes for Dubai Chocolate cake or pistachio cake, but those recipes use nuts or pistachio paste, a different product. I looked at various peanut butter frosting recipes online, but I didn’t think they’d work because they all had a ton of added sugar, and the pistachio cream was already sweet. Then I looked for recipes for Nutella frosting, but also didn’t find anything that I thought would work without really diluting the pistachio flavor. I finally found a quasi-recipe online that basically whipped the Nutella, then beat in a few tablespoons of cream, and I thought that would probably work. It did! It lightened up the pistachio cream and the sweetness, didn’t really dilute the flavor, and made it easy to spread.
I didn’t want to make the frosting in the NYT cake recipe because it looked like it would be way too much since I wasn’t using it as a filling. So I went to my usual chocolate buttercream recipe from Beatty’s Chocolate Cake, courtesy of the Barefoot Contessa herself, Ina Garten, and just tweaked the frosting a bit. That recipe includes some instant coffee dissolved in a bit of water, but I knew that adding coffee would give it a slight mocha flavor, which I wanted to avoid. So I didn’t use the instant coffee powder and water, and just subbed 2 tsp. of heavy cream so the liquid proportion would still be correct. Baking is science, people!
Finally, I spent a little while zoning out and shelling pistachios while rewatching The West Wing for the millionth time, until I had what looked like about a cup. I just had the regular roasted, salted pistachios from Costco, but I wanted them to retain as much green color as possible, so I didn’t toast them. I chopped them up and sprinkled them on top for a garnish. (My daughter, the photographer/graphic artist, took the pictures of the outside of the cake; I took the one of the inside, a very different level of quality there.)
Good News
Child, 4, arrived alone for heart surgery. His doctor became his mom.
Movers help rescue missing toddler: ‘Such humble dads but they’re heroes’
A crew of movers boxed in the car of a suspect in an Amber Alert case, blocking in the suspect until police arrived.
As always, thanks for reading, and stay safe.
Thanks to The New York Times and The Washington Post for allowing me to “gift” my readers with free access to these articles, a lovely perk for subscribers.
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