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NZ Herald
3 days ago
- General
- NZ Herald
Advice: Why is my family avoiding me after I cut off contact with my father?
Q: My husband has a well-paid job at an elite university. We send our two kids to the day care there. The combined cost is more than my annual salary. Over drinks with acquaintances, one of them raised the issue of day care costs. Someone said they were 'sooo expensive,' and another compared them to college tuitions. So, I finally said the number we pay. But when I saw the shock on their faces, I instantly regretted it. I didn't tell them to show off. I just thought it was more real to say what day care actually costs. Thoughts? - Mum A: I know you didn't mean any harm. And in fact, if you had simply reported the cost of the university-affiliated day care – from an article in a newspaper, for instance – there may have been some head-shaking at the unfairness of our economic system, but it might not have felt so personal. What you did, inadvertently, was place yourself on one side of a dividing line: those who can afford, say, US$20,000 per child for day care and those who can't. Money is extremely efficient in creating lines like these – which is not an argument for avoiding the subject, only for raising it after consideration. Limited bandwidth for texting Q: We are in the middle of a medical emergency. Our young adult daughter needs an organ transplant immediately. Between travelling to be with her, consulting with doctors and planning her move before the transplant, we are at our limit. Everyone in our inner circle knows the story. Still, many of them send us texts about their news and travels. I am not one to ghost, but I can't summon the strength to answer anything other than 'How is she?' or 'How are you holding up?' Am I wrong not to respond to these texts? - Friend A: Of course not! You are the best judge of your emotional capacity – and right now, you seem to have reached it looking after your daughter and the needs of your family. Who knows why your friends are sending newsy texts? Maybe they think they will be a welcome distraction. Don't give it another thought for now. There will be time to circle back to them later. Take care of yourself and your daughter. The camera was candid, but I'm not smiling Q: A kind man I know posted candid photographs on his Facebook page from an event I attended recently. One photo of me is so awful it shocked me. The angle is poor, and I look like a hideous toad. I wish I could get the word out about candid shots and their power to hurt. If I tell him how bad his photograph makes me feel, maybe he will learn something. Should I? - Subject Judging photographs – like any art form – is a subjective business. You can't know how I will feel about a picture of me and vice versa. If you want the kind man to take down his photograph of you, ask him to. (I bet he will.) But I see no reason to tell him how horrible it made you feel. In this age of social media, it seems unrealistic to think that attendees of public events have approval rights over documentary photographs. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Philip Galanes ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
New York Times
27-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
How to Make Fish, the French Way
Learn how to cook sole meunière, the dish that made Julia Child fall in love with French food. Make sole meunière, a delicate dish, finished with brown butter, part of your cooking repertoire. Francesco Tonelli for The New York Times Published March 27, 2025 Updated March 27, 2025 [This article was originally published on Feb. 14, 2017.] Here is the dish that made Julia Child fall in love with French cuisine: delicate fish fillets, lightly sautéed and covered with browned butter. She declared her first bite 'a morsel of perfection.' Once you have had sole meunière, you will see why. This guide is part of The New Essentials of French Cooking, the 10 definitive dishes every modern cook should master. The French excel at exquisitely wrought and technically challenging fish dishes, like bouillabaisse and lobster Thermidor. However, they are just as enamored of simpler recipes that focus on preserving the pristine beauty of their seafood. Sole meunière is a perfect example. To prepare it, sole, a succulent, flat white fish, is pan-fried in butter until crisp-edged and tender, then served with brown butter pan sauce, a sprinkling of parsley and a wedge of lemon. (The term meunière means in the style of the miller's wife, and refers to the flour in which the fish is dredged before frying.) Except for the browning of the butter, the ingredients are kept in their most elemental form. Yet together they create a dish of incomparable harmony and depth. In its most traditional presentation, sole meunière is made with the whole fish, then filleted tableside. You can still find it served that way at old-school French restaurants all over the world. But for the most part, home cooks use sole fillets, which makes the process faster and easier — and only slightly less flavorful and juicy than when the fish is cooked on the bone. Unlike a lot of classic French cuisine, sole meunière requires almost no advance preparation and very little time at the stove. It is one of the quickest ways to get to dinner, and you probably already have flour, salt, pepper, butter and lemon on hand. All you need is a beautiful piece of fish. That fish does not have be Dover sole, especially given that in recent years, its sustainability has become an issue (not to mention the fact that it is very expensive). Other flat, white, flaky fish will cook up nearly as well, and will taste delightful when pan-fried and smothered in brown butter. After all, there are very few things that wouldn't. A succulent fillet of white fish, pan-fried in clarified butter and served with a butter sauce. By Meg Felling With over 100 cataloged preparations, sole is one of the most esteemed fish in French cuisine, and sole meunière is the signature dish. It is the plainness of the recipe that makes it seem at once universal and utterly French. Almost all coastal cultures have some version of lightly fried fish, but only in France is it covered in brown butter. 'Pleuronectes Solea, the Sole.' Courtesy of The New York Public Library Little is known about how sole meunière came to be, though we do know that for at least the past century it's been a specialty of Normandy. 'Le Guide Culinaire,' by Auguste Escoffier, which was first published in 1903, lists several variations of the dish, including sole meunière with eggplant, with grapes, with cucumbers and with various kinds of mushrooms. However, it is likely that the dish is much older, since it is so very basic. Sole meunière has long been an extravagance, a costly fixture on the menus of many fine French restaurants. That is because it is traditionally made with Dover sole, a flat fish with delicate and buttery white meat, which separates easily from the bones. It is that combination of simplicity and luxury that makes it compelling. Elaborate adornments are not necessary, as was made clear in an edition of 'Larousse Gastronomique' from the early 20th century: 'Sometimes the serving of fish cooked à la meunière is decorated with slices, or half-slices, of lemon, rounds of radish, cutout pieces of beetroot and sprigs of parsley. This kind of ornament is quite useless and not at all in keeping with the recipe.' Today most French cooks would agree that you need nothing more on top of your buttery sole than a lemon wedge and a hint of parsley. That is the easiest lesson you can learn from French cooking: When you have perfect ingredients, less is more. Use a 12-inch skillet, which should be large enough to fit the length of your fish. A heavy-duty nonstick or well-seasoned cast-iron pan will help keep the fillets from sticking, making them easier to flip and keep whole. But a stainless steel pan is fine if you're careful when flipping. A tapered fish spatula makes flipping delicate fillets a bit easier, but any spatula will work. How to make clarified butter. By Meg Felling Sole meunière is the kind of recipe that moves quickly once you start cooking, so it's best to give it your full attention. Have the ingredients ready before you begin. Use good butter: European-style butter with a high fat content (at least 82 percent) works best here because it contains less moisture than regular butter. If you don't want to clarify your butter, use a combination of oil and regular butter instead. You will end up with a more neutral and less buttery flavor, but the recipe will still work. (If you decide not to clarify, then it is especially important to use that high-fat, European-style butter.) Or you could use ghee, which is basically clarified butter in which the milk solids have been allowed to brown before being removed. It has a lightly caramelized, nutty flavor. Francesco Tonelli for The New York Times Patting the fish dry before dredging helps the flour cling evenly to the fillet, rather than clump in the damp spots. Season the fish itself rather than seasoning the flour. This gives you more precision and control over the seasoning. In a classic sole meunière, white pepper is used partly for aesthetics. If you want to use black pepper, that's fine. Keep an eye on the fish: When it has finishing cooking, it should be opaque, tender and not too firm. Plunge your fork into the thickest part of the fillet. There should be no resistance. That's how you will know it's done. Set your oven to its lowest temperature, and use it to keep the first round of fish warm. This is an easy way to make sure dinner comes to the table at the right temperature. Placing the just-cooked fish on a warm plate before it goes into the oven helps, too. Francesco Tonelli for The New York Times Sole meunière is the most basic of dishes to prepare, which makes it easy to swap the fish or augment the seasonings to suit your taste. You don't need Dover sole to make this dish delectable. Instead, look for local, sustainable, flaky, mild white-fleshed fillets with a mild flavor. Other varieties of sole (including winter sole and lemon sole), halibut and flounder will work well. Or try scrod, cod, hake, trout, salmon, bass, swordfish, sardines or blackfish. Add a pinch or two of minced sturdy herbs like rosemary, thyme or savory, or ground spices such as cumin, coriander, paprika or curry powder, to the brown butter as it's simmering. If you want to make the dish more substantial, add cooked vegetables to the pan with the butter. Diced sautéed cucumber, shallot or onion, wilted spinach, grated zucchini, cubed eggplant or mushrooms would all do nicely. For a slightly more elaborate garnish that won't overwhelm the flavors of the dish, substitute other soft, leafy herbs for the parsley. Basil, tarragon, coriander and chives are good candidates. Other citrus, such as Meyer lemon, lime, grapefruit or sour orange wedges, can stand in for the usual lemon.
Asharq Al-Awsat
26-03-2025
- Politics
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Is Russia an Adversary or a Future Partner?
When the nation's intelligence chiefs go before Congress on Tuesday to provide their first public "Worldwide Threat Assessment" of President Trump's second term, they'll face an extraordinary choice. Do they stick with their long-running conclusion about President Vladimir Putin of Russia, that his goal is to crush the Ukrainian government and "undermine the United States and the West?" Or do they cast Putin in the terms Trump and his top negotiator with Russia are describing him with these days: as a trustworthy future business partner who simply wants to end a nasty war, get control of parts of Ukraine that are rightly his and resume a regular relationship with the United States? The vexing choice has become all the more stark in recent days since Steve Witkoff, one of Trump's oldest friends from the real estate world and his chosen envoy to the Mideast and Russia, has begun picking up many of Putin's favorite talking points. Witkoff wrote off European fears that Russia could violate whatever ceasefire is agreed upon and a peacekeeping force must be assembled to deter Moscow. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, the pro-MAGA podcaster, Witkoff said the peacekeeping idea was "a combination of a posture and a pose" by America's closest NATO allies. It is a view, he said, that was born of a "sort of notion of we've all got to be like Winston Churchill, the Russians are going to march across Europe." He continued, "I think that's preposterous." Just over three years after Russian troops poured into Kyiv and tried to take out the government, Witkoff argued that Putin didn't really want to take over all of Ukraine. "Why would they want to absorb Ukraine?" he asked Carlson. "For what purpose, exactly? They don't need to absorb Ukraine." All Russia seeks, he argues, is "stability there." Of all the head-spinning reversals in Washington these days, perhaps it is the Trump administration's view of Russia and its seeming willingness to believe Putin that leave allies, intelligence officials and diplomats most disoriented. Until Trump took office, it was the consensus view of the United States and its allies that they had been hopelessly naïve about Russia's true ambitions for far too long — that they had failed to listen carefully to Putin when he first argued, in 2007, that there were parts of Russia that needed to be restored to the motherland. Then he invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea and sent the military — out of uniform — to conduct a guerrilla war in the Donbas. Still, sanctions were slow to be applied, and Europe was far too slow to rearm — a point Trump himself makes when he presses the Europeans for more funds to defend themselves. Now, Trump refuses to acknowledge the obvious, that Russia invaded Ukraine. He has been openly contradicted by several European leaders, who say that even if the United States plans to seek a normalization of relations with Russia, they do not. "I don't trust Putin," the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, told The New York Times last week. But for the American intelligence agencies, whose views are supposed to be rooted in a rigorous analysis of covertly collected and open-source analysis, there is no indication so far that any of their views about Putin and his ambitions have changed. So, it will be up to the new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, to walk the fine line of describing Russia as a current adversary and future partner. *The New York Times
