My amazing sister, Joan Sullivan, says goodbye to Bronx Academy of Letters, the public school she started in the Bronx. She’s now Deputy Mayor of Education for the City of Los Angeles. Watch and see her talents. There is hope for the future of education.
bake bread with my son.
Jasper
Whole-Wheat Bread
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
4 teaspoons salt
1 3/4 cups lukewarm water
2 teaspoons sugar
2 packages active dry yeast
3 cups whole-wheat flour
3 cups white flour
Heat the milk, brown sugar, butter and salt together in a saucepan. Stir constantly and remove from heat when butter melts completely. Cool until lukewarm. Mix the water and sugar. Sprinkle the yeast on top. Stir once and then let stand 7-10 minutes.
Mix in the warm milk. Stir together the whole-wheat and white flours. Make a well in the center of the flour and pour in the yeast mixture. Work the flour into the yeast, a little at a time. Beat well, turn out on a lightly floured board. Knead until smooth and elastic–at least 5 minutes.
A little help from Mark
Place in a greased bowl, cover with a dish towel and let rise until doubled in bulk, over an hour. Turn out on a board and knead again for 1-2 minutes. Divide in half, and shape into loaves. Place in greased bread pans, 9x5x3 inches. Cover and let rise again until center of dough is slightly higher than the edge of the pan, about 45 minutes. Bake at 375 for 40-50 minutes. The top should be brown and the bread should sound hollow when tapped lightly with the fingers. Remove from pans immediately and cool on wire racks.
“We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Conrad wrote that, ‘a work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.’ This is the heart of the matter. No great work is remembered for its plot, that clumsy replication of ‘real life.’ Fiction, like poetry and music, lives in each moment of its being. It exists outside of time, in the hope of inducing an altered state of consciousness, and stands or falls on the quality of echo it can ring against a reader’s sensibility.”
Robert Stone
An Ode
Once again I am reminded of, and thus devastated about, the loss of Gourmet. We’re off to Providence for Thanksgiving. Many McPhees collecting at my cousin’s house to cook an enormous feast. (Twenty-six of us this year.) We arrive each year armed with Gourmet and the intention to cook many of the recipes, replacing the ones that interest us less with recipes from past November issues. I have had more than a few friends ask what we will do without Gourmet. I don’t know, is the answer. The year of the Persian-influenced Thanksgiving (I still make the jeweled rice regularly) we made every single recipe. We even bought the calla lilies used in the illustration to decorate the table. I can’t help feeling that S.I. Newhouse will come to his senses, that he’ll bring Gourmet back. It will come back. It will. In the meantime, we have this year. Off we go, ready to roll our sleeves up and cook: Bacon Smashed Potatoes, and Toasted Cornbread Pudding, and Kale With Panfried Walnuts, and Oyster Casserole, and Braised Turnip Greens With Turnips and Apples, and Brown Sugar Baked Sweet Potatoes And Acorn Squash, Cranberry Celery Relish, and Bourbon Pumpkin Pie, and this is just the beginning. My splendid, gracious cousin, her welcoming family, her parents, my parents (both sets divorced), our stepmothers, in-laws, a few of my many lovely sisters, all the children, even my cat—all of us in the kitchen, inspired by Gourmet: stirring, whipping, melting, rolling, stuffing, carving. Happy Thanksgiving.
MARTHA McPHEE 