All In on Asparagus
Happy Asparagus Month — known sometimes, to people who aren't me, as 'May.'
The month officially kicked off this past weekend, when I laid eyes on the first purple-tipped local bunches at the farmers' market. Despite the fact that currently I'm dining out for all my dinners (and many of my lunches) as an interim restaurant critic, I still carried home a wheelbarrow's worth of the grassy green stalks. I've been enjoying them for breakfast, seared in butter and topped with fried eggs, which is also how I like to have them for dinner. Sometimes I can fit a few in as a midmorning snack. I take my work-asparagus balance very seriously.
Asparagus with eggs is one classic pairing, and asparagus and pasta is another that I can't get enough of. Ali Slagle's lemony orzo with asparagus and garlic bread crumbs has legions of fans devoted to its tangy, crunchy, savory goodness, and it takes only 20 minutes to make. Does it live up to its hype? With five stars and over 11,000 ratings, signs point to yes. It's just science, people.
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Grilled asparagus with burrata and furikake: More asparagus sorcery from Ali, this time paired with scallions and grilled until charred. Serve it as a show-stealing side dish (maybe with grilled chicken or fish), or with lentils or grains for a satisfying meal.
Miso-honey chicken and asparagus: You knew there'd be sheet pans in this asparagus party somewhere. In this easy meal from Yossy Arefi, asparagus and marinated chicken thighs are broiled until speckly brown, and then topped with a miso-honey sauce liberally seasoned with garlic, chile and ginger.
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Atlantic
16 hours ago
- Atlantic
Six Books That Prove Abstinence Can Be Abundance
To the uninitiated, the words abstinence and divestment may connote a sense of deprivation or sacrifice. When applied to a person, they bring to mind someone who has given up, for example, salt, sugar, alcohol, smoking, or sex—and has thereby consigned themselves to a dry, joyless fate. Not so, in my experience. In my new book, The Dry Season, I recount how, in my mid-30s, after 20 years of nonstop committed relationships, I decided to spend some time being intentionally celibate. I knew I needed to take stock of and change my romantic patterns, and ended up going a year not only without sex, but without all the attendant activities, including dating and flirting. The great surprise of that period wasn't how it changed my outlook on love and sex, but how enjoyable it was. For 20 years I had been relentlessly falling in and out of love, and withdrawing from those obsessions meant devoting my recouped attention to other passions: friends, family, activism, art. I read more books and went dancing more often that year than during any other in my life. Even mundane experiences came into more vivid focus: I was taken by the tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets, along with the sweet freedom of solitude. I had always looked for the sublime in lovers, but in their absence I found it everywhere. Writing a book on the abundance of that year got me thinking about all the other kinds of reneging I've experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights. As a young addict, I thought that my artistic practice relied on drugs and alcohol, only to find that my work bloomed in recovery. Similarly, when I gave up obsessive control of my eating habits, I began to truly relish food again. Rather than grimly depriving us, purposeful refusal can open us to all the bounty we have been forgoing. This realignment applies not only to attachments that rise to the level of addiction, but also to idle penchants or habits that we seek repetitively for comfort. The six books below describe other forms of abundance found, counterintuitively, through abstinence. Fasting for Ramadan, by Kazim Ali This lucid memoir originated from a journal that Ali kept while fasting during one Ramadan, and it retains the intimacy of that private beginning while evolving into a resonant meditation on hunger and worship. In the opening he writes, 'One feels, at the end of a day of fasting, like a tree branch or a bone bleached in the sun.' Readers will find sensual pleasure in his sumptuous writing about hunger, its passing, and what swells to fill that space; his tremendous poetic gifts capture that richness. 'I will miss the feeling of emptiness that foodlessness offers me,' he admits later. 'I will miss the weird focus that comes from removing consideration of this huge thing from my mental space.' In anticipation of swearing off something, we typically focus on what we give up or will lack. But the experience so often reveals the things we've been neglecting. As Ali depicts so beautifully, 'holiness is everywhere,' and sacrifice can sharpen our attunement to it. , by Pema Chödrön Probably no other book on Earth has given me more comfort over the years than this one. Chödrön is a kind of patron saint to Buddhists in the United States, and for good reason. Her warm explanations of Buddhist principles make clear their application to everyday struggles. This book is her most direct explication of the First Noble Truth—that life is suffering—and it locates the freedom of living in that truth. She instructs readers to cultivate compassion and curiosity, and to stop running from fear. This final invocation, against choosing comfort over distress, is the most challenging kind of abstinence for many of us, myself certainly included. She asks us to feel the needle of fear without slipping away with a fantasy, a snack, a book, or a lover. I once read a definition of compulsion that described it as 'an action meant to relieve a mental obsession.' As an addict, much of my life has been governed by such actions. But as Chödrön explains, when we pause before the deed 'and don't act out, don't repress, don't blame it on anyone else, and also don't blame it on ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer. We also encounter our heart.' Notes and Methods, by Hilma af Klint This book contains the first English translation of the writings of af Klint, a Swedish painter and mystic. Born in 1862, she was trained in painting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, in Stockholm, where she was among the first generation of women admitted. She painted naturalistic portraits and detailed studies until, in her mid-40s, she dove dramatically into abstraction. A student of Goethe's color theory and a member of Rudolf Steiner's Theosophical Society, she eschewed traditional painting methods in order to pursue what she encountered through séances and mediumship: an invisible life force undergirding everything. Years before Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian created their nonrepresentative canvases, af Klint assembled a massive body of abstract work marked by esoteric spiritual codes, diagrams, and symbols. Before she died in 1944, she indicated that she did not want her paintings revealed to the public for at least two decades, claiming that the world was not ready for them—and, true to her prediction, her work found a rapturous audience when it was shown in the 21st century. Notes and Methods includes a glossary of her meanings along with reproductions of her sketches and paintings. It provides a guide to the thoughts behind the great artist's works. It is also, more implicitly, an ode to the freedom found in relinquishing the need for recognition in one's lifetime. The Art of Sleeping Alone, by Sophie Fontanel This memoir describes the period of time that its author, a glamorous French fashion-magazine editor, spent voluntarily celibate in her late 20s. At the start, she imagines a life turned 'soft and fluffy'; she claims, 'I was through with being had.' Fontanel goes on to elegantly describe the gratification of aloneness, and offers keen social observations about the mistaken assumptions of others, foremost among them the idea that a woman needs a partner to find happiness. 'I don't know if love makes us blind,' she ponders, 'but I do believe that solitude allows us to see inside people's minds'—that is, it hones a person's ability to accurately perceive others, and oneself. 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'For a long time,' she writes, 'when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we really are.' Every book about abstinence is also, inevitably, a book about indulgence—and what lies at its bottom, eventually demanding that we go without. As Knapp puts it, 'In some ways the dynamic is this simple: alcohol makes everything better until it makes everything worse.' Her book details the glory and devastation that precedes the liberation of quitting, including the way that our excesses can subtly (or violently) affect our intimate relationships. Knapp's lushly written story illustrates the insidious way that romanticizing a dependency of any kind distorts its true impact on our lives. Writings, by Agnes Martin I had long loved Martin's famous, minimalist mid-century grid paintings, but for a long time I didn't know much about their creator. 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She chose the path she wanted, one that structured and directed the insurmountable forces intrinsic in her and alchemized them into great art.
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
She became a ‘hotshot' wilderness firefighter to write about being on the front lines
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It was $16.33 an hour when I was in the crew. And most firefighters that I worked with didn't have other jobs. They would take unemployment until the next fire season rolled around. You would just scrape by. During the first month of the season, everyone would be flat broke, eating cans of tuna. The joke is that you get paid in sunsets. But we all love being out there. The camaraderie is so intense and so beautiful. Hamilton Cain reviews National Book Award winner Susan Choi's new novel, 'Flashlight,' a mystery wrapped inside a fraught family drama. 'With Franzen-esque fastidiousness,' Cain writes, 'Choi unpacks each character's backstory, exposing vanities and delusions in a cool, caustic voice, a 21st century Emile Zola.' Jessica Ferri chats with Melissa Febos about her new memoir, 'The Dry Season,' about the year she went celibate and discovered herself anew. 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New York Times
5 days ago
- New York Times
Dressing Up for a Day of Black Joy
Early last Saturday morning, about 15 festively dressed Black New Yorkers gathered outside the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum on 204th Street in Upper Manhattan. Women were wearing colorful prints and head wraps, and men had on loosely fitting white shirts and white or khaki pants. Accompanied by the beat of a drum and the clang of a cowbell, they began chanting to the tune of 'Frère Jacques': 'Pinkster Stroll, Pinkster Stroll, here we go, here we go, ancestors smiling, ancestors smiling, we answered the call, we answered the call.' Then the group set off on a seven-mile walk south, which ended at the New York Historical museum along 77th Street on the Upper West Side. The march was reminiscent of a sight New Yorkers might have witnessed some 200 years ago as people celebrated Pinkster, considered to be the oldest African American holiday. Cheyney McKnight, who organized the recent Pinkster Stroll, likened historical celebrations of Pinkster to family reunions. They typically involved participants traveling together on foot or by boat to a location where, for several days, they would eat, dance, sing and crown a Pinkster King. 'It was very joyful,' she said. 'Very exciting.' Pinkster, a Christian holiday celebrating the Pentecost, was originally brought to New York by the Dutch people who colonized the area. Its name, derived from a Dutch word, is also associated with that of the pink pinxter flower, which blooms in New York and across North America every spring. Many of the Africans that were enslaved and brought to New York were also Christian (most came from Congo or Angola). Over time, they began celebrating Pinkster in their own way and, by the late 1700s, it had largely become an African American holiday. It was also the rare occasion when both enslaved and free Black people living in and outside New York City, Albany and other places could gather together. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
