Pistachio Ice Cream and an Ice Cream Birthday Cake, How Emotions are Made

It is getting to be late August and summer 2025 is fading away. The one summery thing I wanted to do this year before the season ended was to make ice cream at home. My kids love ice cream and my parents love ice cream too. While the grandparents were visiting, my daughter made a ritual of eating a small serving of ice cream with them every night at 9 pm. It was their special time together. We went through so much ice cream this summer- all of it store-bought. 

Meanwhile, my ice cream maker has been sitting on a shelf untouched for years. I also own a great ice cream recipe book that I've flipped through but never used- Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer. It was published in 2011 and given to me by a dear friend before we left St. Louis the following year. It has clung to my kitchen bookshelf through many rounds of cookbook decluttering. Last weekend, I cracked open the book and looked for a recipe to try, for real this time.

Jeni's is a famous ice cream store that started in Ohio and now has branches all over, including one close to our house. It is very good ice cream, and the last time I ate a lavender ice cream there that I still dream about. 

The two things that stand out about Jeni's ice cream- the texture and the flavors. Unlike most ice creams, it is made without eggs. Instead, the custard is thickened with a bit of cream cheese and a thickener like cornstarch, making the ice cream smooth and creamy without being overly airy. Jeni's is known for its wacky flavors. There are very few standard flavor recipes in the cookbook. Instead what she shares are elevated versions of classic flavors, and a plethora of ice cream recipes with unusual ingredients such as peanut, celery, goat cheese, earl grey tea, sweet corn...

I knew just the recipe I wanted, though, the roasted pistachio ice cream. Pistachio is my very favorite ice cream/ gelato flavor, and it is quite difficult to find good versions of this flavor. Often, what you get is a lot of green food coloring and a strong taste of almond extract. I was diligent in following Jeni's recipe very closely- it looked like exactly what I was looking for in this flavor. There's nothing difficult about the recipe, but there are a number of steps and some require precise timing. The ingredients are all common ones that can be found in practically any supermarket. If you want to glance at the recipe, it has been posted on some blogs, like here and here. 

First, the flavor mixture. I used store-bought roasted pistachios and ground them to a smooth paste in the food processor. This takes quite a bit longer than you would think, and I added a couple of drops of oil to help it along at some point. The pistachio paste is mixed into softened cream cheese and a touch of salt. 

Second, make a ice water bath by filling a large bowl with some ice and water.

Third, the custard made by boiling together milk, cream, sugar and a bit of light corn syrup, thickening the custard with cornstarch. 

The custard is whisked into the pistachio mixture. Then, I placed the bowl into the ice bath to cool a bath (I preferred this method to the one in the book, which recommended pouring the custard into a ziploc bag to cool), followed by refrigerating for a few hours to get it very cold. 

Finally, I added the cold ice cream mixture to the ice cream maker bowl (with a few drops of almond extract for flavor) and spun it into soft serve, then transferred to a container to freeze solid. 

I was overjoyed with the results, to say the least. This is the best ice cream I've made in my life and probably the best pistachio ice cream I've ever eaten. It is a beautiful, doable recipe that any home cook can use with excellent results. Like I said before, it is not an airy ice cream but with a dense texture, like kulfi or gelato. It has almost a savory quality and is not cloying in its sweetness. 

Another surprise (given the modest quantity of ingredients) was that a batch of ice cream is quite generous and makes 10-12 servings, as this is a rich ice cream and very satisfying in small quantities. 

I served the ice cream when we had friends for dinner. None of them are particular fans of pistachio ice cream, but every single person, child and adult, ended up loving it. I know I will make this again and again. 

It would be fun to add cardamom or saffron or rose water instead of almond extract to switch up the flavors and really take it down the kulfi route. There are a couple of other recipes I want to try from this book, especially the salted caramel ice cream (V's favorite flavor) and the roasted strawberry one (too bad berry season is over). 

Other ice cream (or adjacent) recipe on OHS- I had completely forgotten about these until I did a search for this post: Pistachio kulfi, Cardamom rose kulfi, Fig walnut kulfi, No-cook strawberry ice cream, Tender coconut ice cream. 

* * * 

My son celebrated his ninth birthday over summer, and in the weeks before, we considered a few ideas for his homemade birthday cake. He had decided on a candy cake, the kind where you bake a round chocolate cake, surround it with a border of individual kit kat bar sticks, and load it with M&Ms. You will see this all over Pinterest and such. To me, it honestly sounds awful and over-sweet with all that candy, but on par with what a nine year old would love, and I agreed to it.

But at the last minute,- and much to my relief, I will confess- he changed his mind and requested an ice cream cake instead, with three specific flavors- vanilla ice cream, mango sorbet and raspberry sorbet. I bought all of these at the store and used a tube cake pan as the mold to assemble the cake, softening one flavor at a time and layering them in. 

When it was time to serve the cake, I pulled it out of the mold and topped the cake with a few flourishes of whipped cream and some maraschino cherries. The combination of flavors worked beautifully and all in all, this was an easy and tasty birthday cake, much enjoyed by all. 

* * * 

Here are some recent recommendations from my bedtime reading--

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck (published in 2011) is an amusing and very readable novella that touches on themes of horror and existentialism. It is inspired by the famous 1941 story “The Library of Babel” by Borges. This story describes an infinite library made up of hexagonal rooms, each containing shelves of books that are filled with every possible combination of letters, punctuation, and spaces. Thus it contains every book ever written or that could be written, but these books are randomly hidden among infinite nonsense in the library of Babel. 

The premise of A Short Stay in Hell is that a man dies and is sent to hell, and hell is basically the library of Babel. The book describes the narrator's existence in this hell, an infinite library filled with unreadable books, and how he copes. Written in simple language and without any overt gruesome themes, this novel nevertheless filled me with existential dread. If you're looking for a short and off-beat read, I highly recommend this book. 

The library had a book display of bestsellers from the 1990s. This is where I picked up this short but powerful book- Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (published in 1996), a non-fiction account of a famous missing person mystery. Krakauer is a gifted author of narrative non-fiction. His other book, Into Thin Air, is one of the only books that I've ever stayed up half the night to finish. (I love reading but I love sleep more; however, this book was an irresistible page-turner for me.) 

Anyway, Into the Wild tells the story of a young man who rejected the norms of affluent society in which he grew up, and was endlessly enamored by the idea of living in the wilderness. He decided to spend a summer living off the land in Alaska, an adventure that had fatal consequences for him. The book does a deep dive into the life of this person's life, and also narrates stories of the lives of other people like him, who were irresistibly drawn to undertake adventures in inhospitable wild locations. The author feels a special kinship with his subject as he himself was a young man with a strained relationship with his father and a penchant for crazy (in his case, mountaineering) adventures. This sort of book is surreal for me (whose adventures extend only as far as challenging recipes) and a glimpse into a different world. I highly recommend this book if you want to immerse yourself into a fascinating story. 

* * *

A few posts ago, I summarized a book called Being You. This book mentioned another book on new theories of how the brain creates emotions- How emotions are made: the secret life of the brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett (published in 2017). I knew I had to look for it. 

So many times- especially during busy periods like this summer when I was pulled in different directions- I feel like emotions get the best of me. Too much of the damn day is spent being pushed around by emotional upsets- mine and everyone else's. I am a prime candidate for learning more about emotions and getting some pointers for better emotional regulation. 

The book is a very interesting one, written by a psychologist and with a neuroscience approach. I don't know enough about the field to review the book critically, but the author presented several intriguing ideas and I'll try to summarize them here. The book centers around a emerging theory of emotions that is different from the classical view:

• There is a classical, time-honored view of emotions as universal, built-in reflexes that come on quickly and automatically. 
• However, there is abundant evidence that in fact emotions are not built in, that they vary from culture to culture, and that our brains create them.
• This is the "theory of constructed emotion". Emotions are real, but not in the way molecules and neurons are real. They are real in the same way that money is real- hardly an illusion, but a product of human agreement. 
  

How the brain works: Brain activity is not reactive, lying dormant until stimulated. Intrinsic brain activity continues from birth until death. Intrinsic brain activity is millions and millions of nonstop predictions. (Intrinsic networks are considered one of neuroscience’s great discoveries of the past decade.)

The brain is entombed in a dark box and can only make predictions based on scraps of information plus past experiences. Prediction is such a fundamental activity of the human brain that some scientists consider it the brain’s primary mode of operation. The brain is always predicting and its most important mission is predicting your body’s energy needs so you can stay alive and well. The author calls this the body budget.

Your body budgeting regions make predictions to estimate the resources to keep you alive and flourishing, using past experiences as a guide.

• You spend resources to move, run your organs
• You replenish resources by eating, drinking, sleeping
• You reduce your body’s spending by relaxing

Withdrawals from the body budget don’t require actual physical movement. If you see a family member or co-worker walking towards you and you believe they judge everything you say or do, your brain predicts that your body needs energy and makes a budget withdrawal, releasing cortisol and flooding glucose into your bloodstream. Any event that significantly impacts your body budget becomes personally meaningful to you. 

Where do feelings come from? There is an ongoing process inside us called interoception- the brain’s representation of everything going on inside us, such as noticing thirst, feeling hunger or fullness, or sensing a racing heartbeat. We experience interoception as a general sense of feeling called affect. In everyday use, the word “affect” (verb) means “to influence”, like, “The weather affects my mood”. But in psychology, the term affect (noun, pronounced AH-fect) has a very specific meaning. 

Affect (simpler than emotion) is the general sense of feeling that we experience throughout the day, made up of two features

• Valence: how pleasant or unpleasant you feel- sun on your skin, taste of food, discomfort of a stomachache
• Arousal: how calm or agitated you feel- jittery/excited or weary/low-energy

Affect is a fundamental feature of consciousness, like brightness or loudness. Affect is a simple summary of your budgetary state. Why we experience interoception as affect is a great mystery of science. 

Anyway, usually we experience interoception only in general terms of affect- pleasure, displeasure, arousal, calmness. Sometimes, however, we experience moments of intense interoceptive sensations as emotions. 

How do sensations turn into emotions? The brain’s job is to predict sensory signals before they arrive, fill in missing details, find regularities when possible, so that you can experience a world of objects, people, music, and events, and not the blooming, buzzing confusion that is really out there- to achieve this amazing feat, the brain employs concepts. When your brain needs a concept, it constructs one on the fly, mixing and matching from a population of instances from your past experience, to best fit your goals in a particular situation, and herein lies a key to how emotions are made. 

At one time (say, waiting for an old friend at the airport), you can experience a host of emotions (happiness about seeing them, nervousness about whether you will still feel connected, anxiety about driving back in the dark), your brain weighs all sensations and makes predictions using concepts, and the most probable prediction becomes your perception. Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are our constructions of the world. 

The two main ingredients that the author suggests for improving emotional regulation are related to body budget and concepts.

• If you maintain a balanced body budget, you feel better in general. This is difficult to do because everything is modern culture is designed to mess up the body budget. The main things are obvious and well-known lifestyle factors: eat healthfully, exercise regularly and vigorously (yoga is especially good), get enough sleep, spend time in nature, perform mental excursions (books and movies), engage in hobbies, practice giving and gratitude
• If you develop a rich set of concepts, you’ll have a toolbox for a meaningful life. Become more emotionally intelligent- collect experiences and perspectives, improve your emotional granularity (words and categories for emotions), keep track of positive experiences and focus on those, write about your experiences.

With your kids, be a tour guide. Talk about what causes emotions and what are the consequences to others. Your detailed explanations help your children build a well-developed conceptual system for emotion. In general, children with richer conceptual systems for emotion are poised for greater academic success.

Other tips from the author:

• Recategorize your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions as physical sensations. 
• Cultivate and experience awe to get some distance from the self- develop an awe-inspired concept of being enveloped within nature and feeling like a tiny speck to take comfort in your insignificance. 
• When you feel bad, treat yourself like you have a virus rather than assuming that your unpleasant feelings mean something personal.

Perceiving emotion intelligently in people around you: Let go of assumptions that emotions have classic fingerprints that you can detect. You cannot know how others feel, they are just guesses. If you want someone to know what you’re feeling, you need to transmit clear cues for the other person to predict effectively and for synchrony to occur. 

The author speculates about the link between emotions and illness, both physical and mental. One interesting connection she makes- Anxiety sufferers, for whatever reason, have weakened connections between several key hubs in the interoceptive network, including the amygdala, which likely translate into an anxious brain that is clumsy at crafting predictions to match the immediate circumstances, and that fails to learn effectively from experience. You might predict threats needlessly, or create uncertainty by predicting imprecisely or not at all. Very intriguing. 

Overall, this is a very interesting book and I am glad I read it. It did give me some important insights into improving emotional regulation and why it gets so difficult during stressful times.

If you make ice cream at home, do you have a favorite recipe? What have you been reading this week? How do you cope with emotional regulation ;)? 

Adventures in Paratha-Making, Comfort TV, Meditations for Mortals

It is mid-August and summer break- camps, pool-time, excessive popsicle consumption- is now over. The highlight of the past week was the start of the new school year. The kids are adjusting the their carpool schedules, new routines, new teachers in 4th grade (upper elementary) and 8th grade (last year of middle school). 

Another highlight of the week was that V and I went line dancing! It was a fundraiser for a local org, and my friend who is on the board talked me into buying tickets. I had no clue what line dancing was (other than it is a country thing) and now I know. An enthusiastic dance instructor taught us three different dances; there was a DJ and everything. It was great fun and I'd definitely do it again. 

Our youngest turned nine last month (I'll share his birthday cake next week) and V and I are giddy with new-found freedom because he's officially old enough to occasionally stay home with his big sister and play video games while we go out in the evening. It feels like a new phase of life. 

* * * 

I consider myself a fairly proficient Indian cook, but with one glaring gap- I am unskilled at making any of the Indian flatbreads like rotis, chapatis, naans, parathas, phulkas. Considering how iconic and central these breads are to most Indian cuisines (one's livelihood is literally called "rozi roti"), this is quite irregular! 

I wrote about my attempts in this post but 18 years later, roti-making remains elusive. To the consternation of several blog readers, I put rotis in the "buy it" pile in this post. I pleaded a lack of time when I used whole wheat tortillas to make kati rolls. You can see this has been an ongoing issue. A few tries over the years resulted in unpleasantly chewy rotis, and it just did not inspire me to keep trying. Lack of success leading to lack of attempts- vicious circle and all that. 

Last month, my sister (an expert roti maker) visited us for four days, and when we found ourselves with a free evening, she selflessly offered to spend the time making a couple dozen aloo parathas to stock my freezer. 

The parathas were great and we enjoyed them over several meals, and now I have a good bit of atta (fine whole wheat flour) left over from that episode. Time to give roti-making another go to use this flour up. I vaguely remembered reading that you can make very soft rotis by using boiling hot water to make the dough. And I also now own a stand mixer which is very convenient for kneading dough. Those were the two new things I tried.

This is the recipe I used, following the instructions quite closely but with much less oil in the dough. The dough came together quickly in the stand mixer (although I was unsure how to tell when it is kneaded enough- is there a trick?), and after resting the dough, I divided it into 12 balls and started rolling them out. 

Because I'm not good at rolling out perfect (or even imperfect) circles, I made a triangle paratha which I feel is a more forgiving shape. I lightly roasted the parathas on a cast iron griddle on my electric stove. They were incredibly soft and tasty. This feels different from all my previous attempts. I am sold on the boiling water dough. (There's some neat chemistry behind how hot water reacts with gluten in flour to make the resulting dough less chewy.)

We froze the extra parathas. At subsequent meals, we just pulled out a frozen paratha, sprinkled it with water on both sides (important to get a bit of a steaming effect) and put it into the air fryer at 350F for just 2 minutes. It puffed up and reheated beautifully, and was soft and flaky and fresh. I couldn't be happier with the results. I'm in disbelief, as a matter of fact. This is definitely the best flatbread I've produced in a long time. The question is, will I get these results consistently? Stay tuned, and please keep me and my rolling pin in your thoughts. I will report back. 

* * *

Our neighborhood poem-of-the-week disseminator sent around a poem recently that I loved. It is called Prayer for Uninteresting Times by Brian Bilston (read it here.) It was written during the pandemic but boy, does it resonate today. 

A line in this short poem invokes the comfort of "a re-run of Murder, She Wrote". And I am definitely the kind of person whose idea of a perfect evening involves an adult beverage and a quiet evening of watching that exact show. (You can watch Murder, She Wrote free on the Tubi app). 

This is just one (but I must say, a particular favorite) of many cozy mystery shows I've enjoyed over the years. Other notable mentions: Midsomer Murders, Father Brown, Death in Paradise, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.

Another one was Rosemary & Thyme- two women, Rosemary Boxer and Laura Thyme, meet as strangers, each reeling from a shattering life event, and quickly become friends and co-owners of a gardening and landscape design business. In episode after episode, they travel around as visiting gardeners, transforming picturesque gardens and solving murders. This show first aired during 2003-2006 and I remember watching it on PBS then or shortly thereafter, but I haven't seen it again for decades. Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon it on the free Tubi channel (it is also on the free Roku channel). It has been a joy rewatching this show. 

The other recent great comfort show discovery was The Great British Sewing Bee. This one is also free to watch here on the Roku channel. While my mother was visiting, she and my son and I happily watched many episodes together. This show is like Project Runway in the sense that it is a garment sewing competition with contestants eliminated in each round, but different in the sense that it is much more focused on home sewers and practical garments, and not on fashion designers and couture garments. It is like the Great British Bake-off in the sense that there are three rounds and different themes for each episode (round 1, you follow a pattern; round 2, you alter a garment; round 3, you design and sew a garment for a model), and in the grace and camaraderie of the participants, but different in the sense that you won't get a mad craving for sugary baked goods while watching it. 

I did get a mad desire to start sewing my own garments. I am starting very small. I've owned a sewing machine for years but have never progressed beyond simple projects. The Great British Sewing Bee is sparking dreams of doing more. So far, all I have done is tidied up my sewing space and altered two T-shirts that were too long. (Thanks to the great little video from a Tik-Toker who showed a neat trick to hemming T-shirts beautifully with a home machine.) 

Over the years, I have amassed a small collection of cotton block-printed fabrics and would love to sew simple little tops or skirts with them as a start. But garment sewing is intimidating. If you have any tips or resources to share, I'd love to hear them! 

* * *

While browsing in the library new books section, I found the recently published Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. I like the author's work (he is a recovering productivity guru who now lectures about living in the moment), so I borrowed it and breezed through it. The book comprises a series of 28 chapters (designed to be read as a daily contemplation for 4 weeks, and not the way I binge-read it), about Burkeman's philosophy of imperfectionism or, in the author's words--

This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out...

This book is relatable and fun and inspiring. The one confusing chapter for me was on looking for the life task. "A life task will be something you can do only by effort and with difficulty, the kind of endeavor that enlarges you rather than makes you feel immediately happy". I guess in my heart of hearts I feel like I have some kind of life task that I haven't identified yet, and this chapter is not helping me find it (LOL).

The book mentions something called "scruffy hospitality" and I realized that I practice this already! It means inviting friends into your home just as it is, without necessarily cleaning it any more than usual or cooking anything special; just letting them visit you and partake in whatever you happen to be making that day. 

Here's a taste of some other things from this book:

• We have limited time and limited control over that time. Once you stop struggling you get to relax and “play in the ruins”.
• We would prefer a sense of control, as captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, but in fact, to be human is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time.
• Insecure overachievers feel like they begin each day with a productivity debt which they have to pay off over the course of a day to justify their existence on the planet.
• Worry at its core is the activity of a mind attempting to picture every bridge that might be possibly crossed in future, then trying to figure out how to cross it. But most bridges we worry about never end up needing to be crossed at all.
• The trick to finishing things when the prospect seems overwhelming is to think of them as a series of small deliverables.
• If you want to get good at something, you should do it a lot, preferably more days than not.
• The point isn’t to spend your life serving rules. The point is for rules to serve life.
• We unconsciously assume that at some point we will make it to the phase of life when we won’t have an endless list of things to deal with. But life is an unending series of complications, so it doesn’t make any sense to be surprised by the arrival of the next one. Aspire not to a life without problems, but to a life of ever more interesting and absorbing ones.
• Be the kind of person who gets on with things, regardless of how inspired or fired up you happen to feel.
• Other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them, and you have to allow people their problems.
• People-pleasing isn’t even an especially effective way of pleasing other people.
• A commitment to clearing the decks leads inexorably to a life spent unendingly clearing the decks.
• You don’t matter much, yet you matter as much as anyone ever did. 

Do you practice scruffy hospitality or are you a more polished host? Do you have roti-making or garment-sewing tips for me? What have you been reading and cooking? 

Tomato Dal and Eggplant Slices, and Short Books

Hello again, after a month-long break! I hope everyone is having a good summer (or winter as the case may be.) 

Over here, the last nine weeks have been a whirlwind. V was working abroad for five whole weeks, the longest stretch he's ever been away from home. And right as he got back, my parents visited our home for four weeks. There has been lots of cooking and baking, outings here and there, plenty of social visits with family and friends, and consequently very little time for blogging. 

We made many special meals during the time my parents were here, but this was one stood out as being literally soul-fulfilling in the way only comfort meals can be. It is a summer special meal, with fresh tomatoes and fresh eggplant. 

First, the tomato dal- always a winner, but what made it even more special was that I used semi-ripened heirloom tomatoes from my friend's backyard. (She kindly allowed me to sneak into her backyard and pick them, along with some peppers, when she was away for a week on vacation.) 

I used the South Indian Green Tomato Dal | Thakkali Masiyal recipe from one of my favorite blogs, Vaishali of Holy Cow Vegan. The other star of the recipe, apart from the tomatoes, is the sambar powder. I am very lucky to have a stash of sambar powder made by V's aunt who runs a small catering business and sells homemade spices in her small town in Tamil Nadu. It is the best I've ever tasted. MTR is a good widely-available commercial brand of sambar powder. Let me break this recipe down. 

Southern Indian Tomato Dal

• Soak 1 cup yellow lentils (moong dal) for 1-2 hours.
• Soaking is not necessary for lentils but I do it anyway for faster cooking and out of habit
• Cook them in an Instant Pot or on the stove top until very tender/ mushy. Set aside.
• Takes 3-4 mins on HIGH pressure in the Instant Pot
• Heat 1-2 tsp. oil in a pot. 
• Any neutral oil such as vegetable or canola will do
• A little bit of oil is great for tempering and sautéing; hot oil helps to bloom the flavors of spices
• When hot, temper the oil with mustard seeds, asafetida, urad dal, and fenugreek seeds.
• Mustard seeds and asafetida add savory flavor and aroma
• Urad dal adds a bit of texture to the dal
• Fenugreek seeds add a hint of bitterness that adds to the complexity of flavor
• Add a sprig of fresh curry leaves, sauté for a few seconds, then add 3-4 chopped green tomatoes and salt to taste.
• Curry leaves give Southern Indian food its distinctive flavor
• If you don't like fishing whole curry leaves out of your food, julienne them before adding
• Green tomatoes add tang to the dal but red tomatoes or semi-ripe ones are fine too
• Stir and mix, then cover and cook until the tomatoes are soft.
• Add 1-2 heaped tablespoons sambar powder, and the cooked dal plus water as desired. 
• Sambar powder is adding loads of flavor and doing the heavy lifting here. Use the best kind you can find
• Bring to a boil and simmer for a few minutes.
• The dal will get more flavorful if you let it sit for a couple of hours before serving
• Garnish with fresh minced cilantro.
• Cilantro gives a fresh herbal finish

Beautiful chopped tomatoes

As a side with the tomato dal, I made some eggplant slices or kaap as we say in Marathi. Slices of fresh globe eggplant are sprinkled with salt, chili powder and turmeric and set aside for 15-20 mins, then dredged in rice flour on both sides. Typically, I'd pan-fry these but this time (and you know how eggplant soaks up oil like a sponge), but this time I air-fried them with great success with just a spray of oil on each side! 

Eggplant slices being marinated

* * *

New Recipe Report: I often mention my list of recipes that I'd like to make sometime in my life, a list that is now far longer than my life expectancy by any measure. One that kept popping up in recent months as something I want to make is this recipe for Neapolitan cookies. When my parents visit, they enjoy snacking on cookies to go along with their numerous cups of chai, and I thought it was a good opportunity to go ahead and try the recipe.

Neapolitan ice cream is a popular ice cream variety, with three flavors in one- usually vanilla, strawberry and chocolate. This flavor is thought to be popularized by immigrants from Naples. The cookies are a take on this flavor combo, with three flavors nestled side by side into one cookie. Interestingly, the strawberry flavor comes from pulverized freeze-dried strawberries (with a bit of added food color to make it really pink).

I followed the recipe quite closely, but used a trick from one of the comments to roll out ropes of each flavor and lay them side by side and then slice off cookies, instead of assembling each cookie individually from three little dough balls. 

The cookies were pretty good and fun to make, but I wasn't as wowed as I expected. They are bigger and softer than I prefer. I might try this again with some other flavors, like pistachio, rose and saffron, which is my dream dessert flavor trio. 

* * *

Book Report: No matter how busy life gets, I keep reading as and when I can. I find it essential to my well-being. I'll sneak in some reading time during the day if and when I can, but my dedicated daily reading time is right before bedtime, a little oasis of time and space that I look forward to. 

I work energetically to finish all chores and obligations of the day by eight in the evening. Around 8 pm, no matter what is going on in the household, I'll say my good-nights, excuse myself, and escape to the  bedroom. In peace and solitude, I read in bed for 30 minutes or more before crashing out. (Paper books and magazines only; the phone and laptop stay outside the bedroom.) 

Good sleep is a luxury and not always something we have full control over. If you've had a child who is/was a poor sleeper (I have), you will never ever take sound sleep for granted. Currently, the biggest variable for my sleep seems to be the hormonal vagaries of perimenopause, and I sleep poorly some nights in spite of my best efforts. It makes me even more determined to try and go to bed at the same time every night and practice sleep hygiene as the experts prescribe. 

During busy times, short books are a good choice as I can breeze through them even with a shorter than usual pre-bedtime reading session. Here are a few that I read in the last month or two that I highly recommend:

Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales by P. D. James. Ironic title, huh? P. D. James writes great literary mystery novels, and these short stories are great. They are very diverse in tone, ranging from horrifying to comical. Not a bad story in this bunch and there's one that literally shook me. 

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. This is more of a long short story than an actual novel. It is an evocative story, well worth reading. The author has a keen sense of the inner lives of humans. 

Robot Dreams by Sara Varon. I chose this one for task #23 of the Book Riot Read Harder challenge: Read a wordless comic. This comic book has no dialog but there is much emotion and drama conveyed through pictures. It is a delightful and heart-tugging tale of an ill-fated friendship. 

This last one wasn't a particularly short book, but a book with short and engaging chapters that you can dip into- Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield. I love non-fiction books that deep-dive into niche topics. This book is all about fonts and typefaces (the book taught me that what I typically call a font is more properly called a typeface). I dabble in graphic design for my job, designing posters, infographics, and teaching materials for the project I work on, and I often have to think about fonts. This was a great read- entertaining and informative. It was interesting to read about the history and pop culture around many common fonts (like the ones on highway signs and the default fonts in word processors), and sometimes surprising stories of font designers. It makes you look at the world a little differently. 

Incidentally, the font on this blog is from the Roboto family, a popular sans-serif font, meaning the font does not have the little extending features or serifs at the end of strokes. It is known for its versatile and modern aesthetic and for being highly legible on screens. Hopefully you're finding it legible??...

Magnolias behind my office building-
I stop and smell the flowers every day as I walk in

How was your month of July? Tell me what you've been eating, cooking, reading...

Air Fryer Adventures and a Book about Consciousness

A couple of months ago, we replaced our aging toaster with a multi-use air fryer that takes up roughly the same footprint on the counter. It is the Ninja flip, a model chosen not based on any research but on the enthusiastic recommendation of my Aussie friend. Air fryers have been in vogue for several years now, so I am a late adopter here. 

There's a whole world of air fryer recipes out there but I haven't explored them much yet. We mostly use it for reheating frozen quorn nuggets and other things like quesadillas, and for making delicious toasted sandwiches. On the air fryer mode, bread doesn't brown very much but it gets wonderfully crisp.

Here are a couple things that did use the air fryer. If you have any air fryer recipes you love, do share! I would love to make the most of this appliance. 

DIY frozen pizzas

The first is DIY frozen pizzas. I occasionally stock the freezer with store-bought frozen pizzas to bake for my kids for quick meals or snacks. I wanted to try making a batch myself as a meal prep thing. This Kitchn post was my main recipe inspiration.

1. Making the dough: I made a batch of this recipe. I usually make no-knead pizza dough but it is very sticky and I figured a conventional dough might be easier to roll out in the next step. This was my first time using my stand mixer for pizza dough and it was a bit tricky to know when the dough was ready. I gave it a slow rise overnight in the fridge and the dough turned out beautiful and pliable.
2. Par-baking the dough into pizza bases: I rolled out balls of pizza dough on parchment into little individual-size pizzas, about 6 inches or so, then baked them as directed for just a few minutes until barely cooked. The pizza bases did puff up quite a bit, so it is good to roll them quite thinly in the first place unless you prefer a very thick crust. The baked pizza bases made me very nostalgic, because these pizza bases were sold in India back in the day (they likely still are), and this is how we made pizza at home. You would buy a few pizza bases, cubes of Amul cheese, make some tomato sauce from scratch (although some used ketchup straight-up as pizza sauce), and pan-fry the pizzas until the bases were crispy and golden and the cheese was all melty. Good times! I just remembered that I've written a whole post about this 18 years ago.
3. Assembling the pizzas and freezing them: Assembly is super simple. I spread some jarred pizza sauce on the cooled bases, then topped with shredded mozzarella. Then I arranged the pizzas on plates and put them directly in the freezer to freeze solid. Once frozen so that the toppings are firmly in place, the pizzas can be wrapped in plastic wrap and stacked into a box or bag.
4. Baking frozen pizzas: Simply unwrap a frozen pizza and pop it into the air fryer at about 290C for 8 minutes. (Adjust temp and time as needed). It is something older kids can easily do themselves. 

Rolling out pizza dough

After par-baking

Another recipe I tried that involves the air fryer is the chili soy curls recipe from Vegan Richa. Richa has been a blogger for a long time, her story is inspiring and her recipes and cookbooks are worth seeking out. 

This recipe involved marinating rehydrated soy curls and baking them in the air fryer- already they were tasty and would be wonderful just as an appetizer. 

Baked marinated soy curls

The baked soy curls are added to a tasty Indo-Chinese sauce. This was one of those easy recipes (I made it on a weeknight), full of flavor and it fed me for a few meals over a bit of steamed Jasmine rice. 

Chili soy curls

* * *

I read a fantastic book last month, Being You: a new science of consciousness by the British neuroscientist Anil Seth, published in 2021. It was a thought-provoking and enlightening read.

One time, a friend and I were walking and she mentioned that her school-aged child was asking her deep questions like, "What happens when we die?" She said that she gently told him that no one knows. I said something to the effect that what could happen when we die? What happened before we were born? Absolutely nothing. 

What does this anecdote have to do with the book? The author said something very similar in the prologue- "When the end of consciousness comes, there is nothing- really nothing- to be frightened of". I knew I would like this book and author. I concur with Anil Seth that everything has a logical explanation. Everything. We may not understand everything yet, but we don't have to spin up magical explanations.

Here is a little taste of the book and things I found interesting. 

• Prologue
• General anesthesia is a great illustration of what happens upon loss of consciousness. It is very different from going to sleep. Anesthesia does not work on the mind or brain, it works on your consciousness. You are simply not there. It is a premonition of the total oblivion of death.
• Somehow in our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons is giving rise to a conscious experience.
• For each of us, the conscious experience is all there is. Without it there is no world and no self.
• The real problem of consciousness
• For a conscious creature, there is something that it is like to be that creature. Thomas Nagel wrote a legendary article in 1947 on philosophy of mind “What is it like to be a bat?”
• Consciousness is first and foremost about subjective experience- it is about phenomenology- having language, being intelligent, or exhibiting particular behavior is not what defines consciousness.
• This chapter explains the hard problem of consciousness (why and how can something like consciousness arise from physical structures like neurons?) and the author's preferred "real problem of consciousness"- explaining why a particular pattern of brain activity- or other physical process- maps to a particular kind of conscious experience. 
• We should not necessarily expect scientific explanations to always be intuitively satisfying. Quantum mechanics is notoriously counterintuitive but nevertheless widely accepted as the best explanation of physical reality. 
• Measuring consciousness
• Consciousness seems to depend on how different parts of the brain speak to each other.
• Psychedelic drugs affect the brain’s serotonin system by binding strongly to a receptor. There is a breakdown in the patterns of connectivity that characterize the brain under normal conditions. That gives the signature features of the psychedelic state- dissolution of boundaries between self and the world, intermingling of the senses.
• Perceiving from the inside out (fantastic chapter)
• Everything we see is a construction of our brain, a kind of “controlled hallucination”. The brain is not a computer so much as it is a prediction machine.
• Imagine you are a brain, sealed up inside a skull where it is dark and silent. The only input is electrical signals, and they don’t come with labels attached (“I’m from a cup of coffee”) or even with a label of modality (touch/sound/sight).
• We can never know the world as it is, even something as basic as color exists only in the interaction between a world and a mind.
• Expect yourself
• The self is another perception, another controlled hallucination, though of a very special kind.
• There is no single indivisible self, it is just a bundle of perceptions, which can fall apart by meditation, drugs, brain damage.
• When supernatural or bizarre experiences like out of body experiences and near death experiences are reported, we can take them seriously. They reveal that first-person perspectives are put together in more complex, provisional, and precarious ways than we will ever have direct subjective access to. 
• And so on...I highly recommend this book if you are interested in these topics.

Mini Banana Pancakes, Oven Omelet, Public Libraries, Muscle

I can't remember where I came across mini banana pancakes- it might have been a post I spotted while scrolling on Reddit- but I thought they were adorable and wanted to make them right away. The problem is that roughly 3 times a day, I come across something I want to make right away. Anyway, the idea was shelved until last weekend. I had 2 colleagues stopping by for breakfast, plus a lone banana sitting on the counter, so it seemed opportune. 

Mini banana pancakes are nothing but banana slices dunked in pancake batter, and each slice fished out and cooked on a griddle. You end up with banana encased in a tiny pancake. It is an adorable and yummy bite-sized breakfast food. I highly recommend trying this. There's no recipe needed, really, but here's one on a blog. You can use any pancake batter you liked. I used the Kodiak pancake mix which we keep on hand. 

Another dish I served for breakfast that morning- an oven omelet. This is also a great meal prep breakfast as squares can be stored and warmed up easily.

• Preheat oven to 350F
• Whisk together
• 8 large eggs
• Splash of cream
• Salt, pepper, red pepper flakes (or any spices)
• Finely chopped veggies- onion, red and green bell pepper
• Minced cilantro
• Chopped veggie sausage (optional)
• 1 tbsp flour (optional; makes it more like a crustless quiche)
• Pour into greased 8 x 8 pan and bake for 30-40 mins

* * * 

I've been thinking a lot lately of how much I love public libraries in the US- they just might be my very favorite thing about this country. I'm lucky to have a big, regional one just minutes from my house. Most of the books I read are borrowed from this library, plus they have a calendar of events that hums with workshops and lectures and concerts. The teen section attracts middle schoolers after school as a hangout place and the children's section always has art supplies, story times, author readings...Yesterday, there was a community health fair going on in the corridors when I popped in to pick up a book that I had put on hold. 

There's so much in my library that I don't even take advantage of. For instance, I'd like to use the 3D printer in the library sometime to make cookie cutters in some fun shapes. 

There is a concept of a third space in sociology: the "first space" is home and the "second space" is the workplace; the "third space" is a public space outside of home and work where people can gather, socialize, and connect with their community. The library really is the only indoor "third space" left any more where you can spend time without feeling obliged to spend money. Last time I was there, I saw a woman with a young child in a stroller anxiously asking a librarian how federal funding cuts would affect our library. The response was that they have no idea. I hope that as a community we can come together and protect our precious public libraries no matter what happens. 

A few weeks ago, I saw a flyer advertising a craft supplies swap in one of the library's multipurpose rooms that weekend. It gave me a much-needed incentive to clean out an entire closet and pull out two big boxes of craft and sewing supplies that I didn't need any more. I brought these to the craft swap and found a room full of treasures to choose from. You can see my haul below- a couple of embroidery kits, a beautiful book on sashiko (I've always wanted to try this), watercolor paints and stickers for the kids, a cute fabric piece, a skein of pricey yarn. A clutter-free closet + free goodies = a win win situation! Libraries are famous for these.

My craft swap haul

While browsing through the "new books" racks in this wonderful library of ours, I came across this book published only a month or two ago and checked it out right away- Stronger: The untold story of muscle in our lives by Michael Joseph Gross. 

Muscle and strength training is a topic I'm very interested in, so I truly wanted to love this book. While it's filled with fascinating information and valuable insights, the reading experience was a slog. The writing felt disorganized and repetitive, with chapters that were disjointed and titled in a way that didn’t always reflect their actual content. The book centers on a few individuals and their work, but their stories were scattered throughout rather than presented in a cohesive, compelling way. With tighter editing, this could have been a much stronger read. Still, I came away with a few useful takeaways and moments of inspiration.

There's a lot of Greek history related to muscle development in the early part of this book. I skimmed over most of it, but an interesting tidbit is the tale of Milo, the strongman of Croton, who got stronger by lifting a calf every day. It grew bigger over time and he grew proportionally stronger, an early if apocryphal example of progressive overload.

Some of my other notes (emphasis is mine)--

• On muscle
• Muscle is one of the body’s most plastic tissues, changing its size and properties based on people’s habits of diet and care, work and rest.
• If you can choose only one form of exercise, it should be progressive resistance training.
• To thrive, muscle needs to work hard, it needs rest, and it needs nutritious food, especially food rich in protein.
• On muscle and mind
• For ages, people have been raised on mind-body dualism- brain vs. brawn; in fact mind and muscle are the best of friends.
• “Attentional focus” on moving a load builds more strength, and attentional focus on moving a load may build more size, a quirk of neuromuscular engagement.
• On muscle and age
• In old age, muscle increasingly decides who can live independently and who cannot.
• Your independence, autonomy, agency- your effectiveness in the world- will depend on muscle.
• High-intensity progressive resistance training can strengthen and build muscle even for the oldest people (people in their 90s!), with life-changing effects.
• Strength training is safe even for the oldest people.
• A gentle exercise class for senior citizens is usually no more effective than no exercise at all- it is “placebo exercise”. Most exercise programs in nursing homes are flexibility and stretching based but in fact they don’t add any strength or balance or aerobic capacity.
• Changes in muscle are not maintained for long periods of time in the absence of continued training, for anyone, at any age.
• Almost all of the fears we have and the barriers we set for ourselves as women are in our minds.
• There are tensions between athletics and medicine. Athletics focuses on striving and extreme physical efforts; medicine focuses on steady, balanced health.
• Even as evidence is accumulating, weight training is widely scorned, slighted and dismissed as hedonistic and extreme, tainted by the anabolic steroid abuse of a few. 
• On muscle and health
• Function is largely determined by how much fat and muscle a person has, and where that fat and muscle are located.
• Exercise can interact with traditional medicine, as a standalone treatment, or alternative treatment or adjunctive treatment.
• Research on strength training as an antidepressant: lifting weights affects the brain like a drug. And because exercise has no adverse side effects for most people, it has a more favorable risk-benefit ratio than drugs. 
• Muscle is the biggest sink for glucose disposal in the body, so people who have proportionally less muscle are unable to metabolize glucose as well as people who have more muscle.
• Sensitivity to insulin is directly related to muscle mass and inversely proportional to adiposity.
• It is time that the recommendation of “weight loss” be replaced with “muscle gain and fat loss” as a standard medical recommendation for people with diabetes and anyone who is overweight and obese.

The strongest part of the book is the emphasis on strength training in older people. A few months ago, I gave a 90-minute talk to a group of local seniors on the topic of "Fitness over the lifespan". The information I learned in this book would have enhanced my talk. 

I think the take-home message of this book, and of everything we now know about strength training (which is a LOT) is that it is not something just for those other people (the gym bros, the body builders, the people who look like they lift weights), it is for me and you. Yes, YOU!! If you're confused about how to start lifting weights, I can help.

* * *

A small neighboring town is home to a wonderful barn sanctuary. It is home to 250-300 animals- cats, dogs, farm animals (sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, pigs, cattle, llamas...), birds (turkeys, peacocks, chickens, even an emu) all live together peacefully. They are strays, rescued from terrible living conditions, injured or abandoned, but now living out their best lives in a beautiful and safe place. 

The sanctuary hosted its 15th anniversary party with a fundraiser and it was the highlight of my weekend. Dozens of animals were roaming free and mingling with guests as we petted the animals, played lawn games, drank lemonade, and ate vegan hot dogs and popcorn. Here are pics of some of the cuties we saw.

Zen goat

Rotund piggy

Turkeys- huge and beautiful and chatty

Pizza Beans, Cookie Bonanza, Memorizing Poetry

This post has been sitting in the drafts for a few weeks while I was waiting to cook "something new". But we've been contentedly eating quick meals from our usual rotation and I haven't had the bandwidth to try new recipes or play around in the kitchen. 

Yesterday, in using up some dried cannellini beans, I tried out something small but new to me, pizza beans. You don't really even need a recipe for this. I simply cooked soaked cannellini beans in the instant pot, drained them and mixed in marinara sauce and pizza seasoning, then ladled them into a baking dish, topped with a little mozzarella cheese and baked/broiled until bubbly. They're so easy and good- something different from the usual bean recipes I make. (and kid-friendly, although only one of my kids ate them). I served the pizza beans with some roasted broccolini. 

* * * A Cookie Bonanza * * *

First up, printed design cookies. My Aussie friend and my son and I had ourselves a mini baking session on a Sunday morning last month. We had a farewell lunch at work later that week and I thought I'd bring some cookies in to share. A fun trend that I'm seeing in the baking world is called printed design sugar cookies. 

The idea is that you lay out little colorful cutouts on a plain dough base, roll it all out to uniform thickness to make a printed cookie dough sheet, then stamp out cookies and bake them. Have you seen these on blogs and social media recently? Here's a cute how-to post of a floral print, and another post on printed cookies from King Arthur Flour. If you want an edible craft project, this one is for you. 

I used my favorite cookie dough. We left most of it plain for the base, and broke off some pieces and added food coloring. We used play-doh tools (sanitized and washed!) to stamp out shapes and make patterns. I chose to make a bright flower pattern in keeping with the season. Then I placed a parchment sheet on top, rolled it gently to flatten the shapes into the base, then cut out cookies with a drinking glass!

It was such a great little project, and I can imagine being able to customize all kinds of cookie designs for people (initials) or occasions. 

Second, baking from the bookmarks. I have so many cookie recipes saved in my to-make files, it is well beyond my life expectancy to try them all. A recipe I had bookmarked recently is Scandinavian almond bars. I love that this recipe came from the blogger's student who brought it to school as a assignment! These were very easy to make but it was quite tricky to tell when the cookie slabs were done baking. It is like biscotti without the second bake. Everyone loved the taste of these cookies. 

Third, my newly acquired cookie press. I saw my friend and former co-worker at the aforementioned work lunch and she gave me a very sweet, very late holiday present- an OXO cookie press with 18 design disks! My son and I couldn't wait to try it out. I used the butter cookie recipe in the product leaflet. This was my first time using a cookie press, and at the beginning, it didn't work at all. The cookie shape would squeeze out but wouldn't release. After some frustrating minutes, I realized that the steel design disks are not the same on both sides. There is a subtle difference, with the design on one side being sharper than the other. When I made sure to place the disk with the sharp side touching the dough, the cookies released beautifully. (Nowhere is this mentioned in the product directions, by the way.) We tried three designs this time- two flowers and a teddy bear! 

                                                      * * * A math book * * *

I've been binge reading so many great books. I'll mention just one in this post, that I picked up from the library's "new books" shelf- Math for English Majors by Ben Orlin. The subtitle of the book is "a human take on the universal language". Orlin argues that just like any language, math has nouns (things; numbers), verbs (actions; calculations), grammar (algebra). 

The book is informative and funny and charming. I'm an averagely mathy person. I don't "get it" the way I get biology, for example. I'm constantly on the remedial math train, is what I am saying. Orlin uses fun little line drawings and creative examples to illustrate ideas and explain what it is all about. 

One of my favorite chapters was on Large Magnitudes, with examples on how to overcome "number numbness" and get concrete. He explains orders of magnitude (1, 10, 100...1 million...10 billion) in terms of people, dollars, years. For instance, the difference between a million and a billion can be hard to intuitively understand; they are both big numbers. But they are vastly different from each other. 1 million seconds is 12 days while 1 billion seconds is ~32 years. 1 million calories can feed a person for 16 months, 1 billion calories can feed a person for 1300 years. 

I loved this book so much that I bought a copy to give my nephew for his birthday. If you have middle/high school aged kids or if you'd like a little dose of entertaining math yourself, I highly recommend this book.

* * * A couple of fun challenges * * *

The last week of April, I spent a few minutes each day memorizing a poem, of all things! One of my besties from high school texted me with a link to this poetry challenge on NYT, and I was happy to play along. It reminded me of when this friend and I memorized poems in middle and high school. (We had an amazing and very strict English teacher. I credit her with a lot of my love for the language. And thanks to her determined drilling, I can tell you all about the figures of speech to this very day.) 

The poem itself is about an all-nighter on the Staten Island Ferry, which coincidentally I rode only a few weeks ago. This poetry challenge was well-designed- with little games to test your memorization, and short articles diving into the meaning of the poem. We so rarely memorize anything any more, making this a refreshing challenge. This is what life needs more of, enjoyment of beautiful language, human connection, culture. As the articles said, 

"Memorizing a poem is like taking a work of art that you love and letting it live and bloom inside of you." 

"It can be a way of holding onto something beautiful, a morsel of verbal pleasure you can take out whenever you want." 

"It’s a flower in the windowbox of your mind."

Another time, I did a 10 minute challenge (gift article)- looking at the famous painting, "The Starry Night" by van Gogh, for 10 whole minutes and taking in every detail and letting yourself soak in the experience. Fantastic! So very different from the second or ten we spend looking at things. It makes me want to take an afternoon and go to the art museum and stare at paintings and sculptures.

Other delightful moments from the past few weeks: an early morning walk in the botanical gardens on my birthday... 

Trees and sunshine= perfect birthday

Taking time to smell the roses

...and a day hike with a dear friend. We got out of town for a day, drove to Amicalola State Park, hiked up to the top of the falls, climbing 604 steps in the process, ate lunch at the restaurant at the top, hiked 45 minutes on trails at the top (towards the start of the Appalachian Trial), then walked down. A perfect day with perfect weather! 

Amicalola Falls, a 729-foot waterfall
that is the highest in Georgia

The view at lunch

A Family Trip to NYC

NYC is one of my favorite places in the world. V and I lived there for several years in the early aughts and grew up there, in a manner of speaking. Those years ended up shaping much of our world-view. Neither of us has been back recently but we have wanted to show our kids the city we love so much. The world feels unstable these days, and I thought we shouldn't wait any longer and travel there over spring break. 

We spent a few days in NYC last week- Wednesday afternoon through Sunday afternoon. The weather did not cooperate whatsoever; it was pretty chilly and drizzly almost the whole time we were there. It was no spring break, that's for sure! If the weather had been nicer, our visit would have looked quite different, but here's what we ended up doing--

• Arrival day- We checked in at a hotel on the Upper West Side- a great residential neighborhood. Walked around the neighborhood soaking in the atmosphere and ate dosas for dinner! 
• Day 1
• AM: This was the one morning of dry weather and we made the best of it. We took the subway down to the Staten Island Ferry (which happens to be free, and provides fantastic views of lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty), then walked to the 9/11 Memorial (V and I were both in the city when 9/11 happened and our kids were curious about what that was like) and the Oculus shopping center across the street for a quick lunch. Then we walked partially across the Brooklyn Bridge and back to the subway uptown for some rest in the hotel, stopping for gelato on the way.
• PM: We took the subway to Rockefeller Center and stopped by the iconic toy store FAO Schwartz. It was absolute wall to wall crowds and mayhem and we got out pretty quick. After stopping in the Nintendo store next door, we walked to Times Square for a few minutes at that dizzying intersection. Then back uptown for a relaxed dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant with incredible dips, fresh-baked bread, and falafel.

Artist rendition (by my 8 yr old) +
view of Lady Liberty from the ferry

View of downtown Manhattan from the ferry

• Day 2
• AM
• Breakfast was classic bagels with a schmear. We walked a couple of blocks from the hotel to explore Central Park- visiting Belvedere Castle and surrounding parts of the park. 
• Then we crossed the street to the Natural History Museum and spent hours there, including watching a wonderful show at Hayden Planetarium. The kids enjoyed the marine life hall with the life-size blue whale replica and the dinosaur exhibits. 
• We headed to a nearby Mexican restaurant for lunch and then back to the hotel to rest, stopping at a bakery on the way for some choux pastry.
• PM: We took the subway to Roosevelt Island, walked around there for more views of Manhattan, then took the amazing Roosevelt Avenue aerial tramway back to the Upper East Side, and walked over to have dinner and drinks at a friend's apartment. 

Avenue perspective, from the tramway

• Day 3
• AM: We had a lazy morning followed by brunch with an old friend- it was a happy reunion after not having seen him for decades. 
• PM: We took the subway down to SoHo. The kids wanted to visit the SlooMoo Institute- a slime play experience. I stopped at Pearl River Mart, the iconic Asian emporium. Big sis wanted to shop for clothing, so we hit up a bunch of stores like Cotton On, Uniqlo, and a few others. Stores were jammed with lines for trial rooms. Dinner was some takeout that we took back to the hotel suite- Asian and pizza from the neighborhood.
• Departure day: We walked over to Zabar's Cafe and market for breakfast, then strolled through Riverside Park, spotted a Banksy piece on the walk back, grabbed one last piece of pizza for lunch, and then checked out and off to La Guardia airport. 

Things we wanted to do but didn't: walking the High Line, watching a live show...and a hundred other things. 

Traveling with kids comes with its compromises- instead of seeking out special restaurants (I had a list, y'all), we grabbed food wherever it was most convenient; we did kid-friendly things like slime museums and what-not instead of going to other (you know, world class) museums and art galleries; we built in plenty of down time for the kids to just chill and play video games in the hotel room. 

We walked a LOT- like 20,000 steps each day, and that's honestly my favorite thing about NYC- walking around, people-watching, ducking into stores and food shops. Grabbing a slice of pizza here and there whenever you feel like it. The city hasn't changed a whole lot in 20 years! 

It was pretty hilarious to see my small-town kids reacting to big city things. My daughter smiled at every person on the street because that's just Southern small-town etiquette, and then turned to us and said, sadly, "No one's smahling back". Her other observation: "Everyone is dressed like Europeans." At our friend's apartment building, the uniformed doorman ushered us in, and my son asked, "Do all buildings have bodyguards and do they fight people?" 

Some of the things we ate-

Choux pastry

Mango gelato shaped like a rose

Neighborhood pizza!

Overly seasoned mushroom pizza

Steamed rice noodle rolls- something new to me!

* * * 

What I'm reading

Just before this trip, I happened to read a book that is set in New York City in the 1980s- Is There No Place On Earth For Me? by Susan Sheehan. Published in 1982 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction the following year, it is a masterclass in empathetic, immersive journalism. This book is a classic investigation of schizophrenia. Sheehan follows a young woman named Sylvia Frumkin (pseudonym) who suffers from chronic schizophrenia and navigates the mental health system. I was amazed to learn how many programs existed at that time in NYC, arguably more than what most patients get all over the world—hospitals, transitional housing, daycare centers, even sheltered workshops. 

What’s heartbreaking is how little they helped. Treatment was rarely consistent. Doctors didn’t always read her chart, medications weren’t titrated properly (antipsychotic medications don't have standard doses and have to be worked by for each patient), and some so-called therapies, like insulin coma treatment (horrendous pseudoscience) and vitamin megadosing, did more harm than good. Today, it is known that antipsychotics are needed to be taken lifelong to manage severe mental illness (schizophrenia can be managed but not cured) but Sylvia's doctors kept trying to wean her off the drugs, resulting in predictable relapses. To top it all, Sylvia had a form of schizophrenia that was particular resistant to treatment. 

One line that stayed with me comes after a wonderful Christmas party that the patients are treated to, but can't seem to enjoy: “Wherever I go, I take myself with me, and that always spoils it.” Another, when Sylvia contemplates her mentally well sister who enjoys an independent life and career: “When you know all of those things exist for other people but not for you, sometimes it’s very hard to endure the not having.” 

Since the 80s, many mental health institutions have been shut down, but not adequately replaced by community and out-patient care. Just yesterday, I read one more devastating piece in the New Yorker on the lives (and untimely, harrowing deaths) of people with mental illness. 

* * *

I'll end this post with a link to a delightful article I read recently in the NYT, about a cake picnic in San Francisco. The premise is pretty simple- you show up to the picnic venue with a cake. No cake, no entry. Cakes are laid out, admired, then sliced, shared, and devoured. What fun! I would love to organize a copycat cake picnic myself. 

A Moment of Fitness is on break this week. If you have a fitness-related question, post it in a comment and I'll try to answer it in a future post!