Yesterday, we lost a great director/screenwriter/essayist/journalist. A woman of many titles, Nora Ephron died yesterday at the age of 71.
I have many friends who have cultivated, sophisticated tastes in films. They prefer French, Spanish, Swedish directors, they seek out films about war or existentialism or immigration or LGBT issues. They frequently watch foreign language films. If a character can choose to live at the end, but then die anyway, they are pleased.
I do not have this taste. I grew up on romantic comedies, and several of the ones that I watched over and over again were Nora Ephron films. As teenagers, my sister and I would make a big bowl of popcorn, over which we drizzled melted butter and so much salt, and we got a big stack of Oreos, and we watched movies. It didn’t matter if we had watched them dozens of times and could recite them forwards and backwards, we watched them again. Among our favorites were Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and When Harry Met Sally. Stuffing handfuls of popcorn into our mouths, or slowly taking apart Oreos, we stared, transfixed, at the screen as Meg Ryan fell in love and out of love and in love and out of love, again and again.
And along the way, I learned things from these movies, from Nora Ephron. Without realizing it, I was learning about being human, being a woman, being in love, and alive, and complicated. And so, here’s a list of a few things that I learned from Nora Ephron. Continue reading »
When I went to the market last week to pick up my CSA, I was instructed to take 6 adorable little cucumbers – pickling cucumbers. About 3-5 inches long and dark green, these lovely little veggies presented me with a very obvious, very mystifying agenda: I must make pickles.
As I’ve already said in my post about making strawberry jam, in my imagination, making pickles (or, to go broader, the act of pickling) is a steamy, fussy, dangerous endeavor. But surely, just as jam can be made through refrigeration, so too could pickles. Right?
What would happen to us if girls only ever read “girl books”?
I stopped on my way out of the market to take a picture of a ridiculous shelving label on top of a row of Baby-sitters Club books (my market has a small used book store attached to it). I loved those books when I was little. They tapped into that part of me that desperately loved babies and wanted so badly to be old enough to babysit. Much like with Sex and the City and other ensemble shows, it was always fun to figure out which babysitter I identified with. I’ll say, nowadays, Mary Anne, because I still tend to be a little more on the quiet side, and maybe a little bit Dawn. I always remember her as being into gardening and nature things, which I translate into adult terms of saying she’d definitely be a girl who buys fresh, local produce (or grows her own), cooks, etc. Or maybe she would have gone into the Peace Corps or something, which isn’t something I would do. That’s the beautiful part about those girls: they’re frozen in time, and that means we can imagine the most amazing futures for them.
The sign, then, on the shelf sort of bugged me in a way that surprised me. It labels a shelf that contains both the Baby-sitters Club books and also Boxcar Children. While my brother definitely wouldn’t have read Baby-sitters Club books, he was just as into the Boxcar Children as I was. He even bought a Boxcar Children Cookbook at one of the Scholastic Book Fairs when we were little. These books weren’t shelved correctly.
I was thinking yesterday morning about a dish my step-father made for us once. He cooked chicken pieces in a cast-iron skillet with tons of garlic. I mean, whole cloves scattered all around the skillet, under and on top of the chicken. I don’t remember much about the meal, but I remember the chicken almost sang with flavor, and the little cloves of garlic, perfectly cooked, were soft and almost sweet, suddenly entirely edible in a new way (for me).
And since I was thinking about this dish, I wanted it. I started doing Google searches for cast-iron chicken with garlic. The most popular result of that search was a recipe called “Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic.” The description definitely matches my step-dad’s recipe, though I don’t know that it’s what he made. Myself, I ended up making a slightly different variation, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic is incredibly popular among chefs. Indeed, when I searched for it, I found recipes by James Beard, Nigella Lawson, Ina Garten, Alton Brown, smitten kitchen, and more. But no history. Thank goodness for Nigella; her recipe on the Food Network website includes a lovely introduction to the dish, both its traditional way of being prepared, and her own recipe for it.
Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic is a classic French dish, and as such, was originally conceived by people who raised their own chickens for cooking. These days, if you follow what Nigella refers to as the “contemporary shopping model,” which I do, it’s best to choose more flavorful cuts of the chicken rather than just buying up a whole chicken cut to pieces (she recommends thighs; I went with leg quarters).
One part of her introduction really struck me. In describing her own recipe, Nigella says:
It is not quite the classic version (not that there is only one: food is as variable as the people who cook it), but it sticks to the basic principles.
Food is as variable as the people who cook it. I like that. Continue reading »
This week, the Virginia Arts Festival will put on the Virginia Chocolate Festival, which brings together local vendors, chefs, and bartenders for a veritable chocolate expo on Saturday, complete with demonstrations, exhibits, samplings, and sales. I have tickets, and I am psyched.
My girlfriend asked me the other night what my favorite chocolate was. I didn’t even have to think: Hershey’s.
Chocolate is practically protein | jackandfriends.com
We all have little obsessions that sort of claim us in our adolescence; mine was chocolate. Most teenagers become obsessed with things I deem a little more normal: musicians, activities, clothing. I was obsessed with chocolate. Chocolate was my grunge music, my hacky sack, my Daria.
It’s hard to pinpoint the beginning of my obsession. That’s like asking you to remember the first time you ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Chocolate isn’t something most people come to later in life. We’re raised on it, in a sense. Perhaps it stemmed from my mom making peanut butter balls, covered in semisweet chocolate. Perhaps it had to do with stirring Nestle’s Quik into my milk (making it a far superior beverage). Maybe I can credit Halloween or Easter or Christmas, all holidays that are accompanied by candy.
I’m not sure when it started. But in retrospect, I can identify the moment when we might begin to call it an obsession.
I was fourteen years old in Mrs. Kitchens’s English class. I had recently decided that instead of being an elementary school teacher (my career goal up to that point), I was going to become a pastry chef. I was taking home economics, and I liked it, and I liked to eat, so what was left to do but set my compass to Pastry Town and get on with it?
For our final project in English, Mrs. Kitchens assigned for us to do a research paper. We didn’t have to create an argument or anything; we just had to research a subject we were passionate about and write a paper on it and do a presentation.
My research subject: Milton Hershey, founder of Hershey’s Chocolate. I liked Milton. He was too clumsy to work in the letter press printing business he was apprenticed to, so he left, bounced around the country for a few years, before he came home to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to establish a caramel company. Caramels quickly gave way to chocolate, and the rest is history.
I gave out Hershey’s bars as part of my presentation, and I think it was the best work I did all year in that class. Reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: snooze. Hershey’s chocolate: suddenly, I’m engaged.
I used to hoard candy in my room, kept chocolate chip cookie dough under my bed (a 5lb tub that I bought at a marching band fundraiser – I’m lucky I didn’t end up with salmonella). In any drawer in my bedroom, you could have found candy bars, sour gummy worms, and the occasional bag of Dorito’s. I hid these items for two reasons: 1) we weren’t supposed to eat in our rooms for fear of drawing insects; 2) my parents seemed concerned about my avid consumption of candy, candy, and more candy. I’m sure they thought of the very practical concerns, like diabetes and cavities.
I remember walking down the aisle at Target one day with a bag of gummy worms in hand, seeing my mother approaching from the other direction, and tossing said bag of gummy worms down the aisle to my right with little care for whether I might hit an innocent bystander with projectile candy. I didn’t want to be caught buying more cavity-making candy.
I bought chocolate decorations – a Hershey’s throw blanket, a Hershey’s pillow, antique Hershey’s signs that still decorate my old bedroom at my mom’s house, and Hershey’s apparel.
I had a favorite way to consume Hershey’s bars. Back when they still had paper wrappers, I would place the candy bar under my leg for about ten minutes, letting it melt to a slightly fudgey consistency so that it was soft and tore rather than broke. Try it. Amazing.
I was raised Southern Baptist, which I mention because I did a 40-day fast that was not Lent. We, as a church, fasted for forty days. I thought about what I could give up. TV? Email? My sister suggested chocolate. The suggestion made me feel uncomfortable and sad and deprived, which meant it was perfect.
Like Noah in the ark, for forty days and forty nights, I abstained from chocolate. I would sometimes dream that I had eaten chocolate, or drank some delicious coffee beverage that had chocolate in it without my knowledge. That I had eaten a Peep without plucking off the two tiny chocolate dots for the eyes. I would wake with a feeling of epic guilt until I realized it was only a dream and I had not, in fact, betrayed my holy vow not to consume my obsession for forty days, a period of time that, might I add, fell during Girl Scout cookie season. I’m just saying.
Don't eat the eyes! | blog.syracuse.com
On the forty-first day, my sister came to visit me at school with a slice of cookie cake from the Great American Cookie Company, covered in chocolate frosting. I ate it so fast that I got sick. It was glorious.
My dad has photos of me making truffles at his apartment. I got candy molds from my Granny’s shed, and he bought me chocolate, which I painted into the molds with a small paint brush, creating the shell for truffles that would be filled with sickly sweet green or pink sugary filling I bought from the Wilton baking section at Garden Ridge. I liked the ritual of painting with chocolate; it made me feel like a real pastry chef.
When I was sixteen, my brother died in a car accident. My mom took me on a trip that fall, just weeks after 9/11, to Hershey, Pennsylvania. We went to the Hershey Factory Museum (they don’t let you inside the actual factory). We stayed at the Hershey Hotel, where I had always wanted to go. It was a trip that was meant to be an escape after the months of Hell following the accident. And for a few days, my mom and I ate out at restaurants, and went to Amish country, and snacked on a seemingly endless supply of Hershey’s chocolate (the housekeeping staff left Hershey’s kisses on our pillows each night). My mom bought me a Hershey’s t-shirt, which was maroon (I expected it to be brown, but the wrappers were actually a dark shade of maroon, which they later dropped when they went to plastic wrappers instead of paper). I wore that shirt all the time, even in my senior pictures.
Look closely and notice the Hershey's t-shirt.
I have two great loves that will last a life time: Rebe McEntire and chocolate. And in that spirit, I am dedicating my blog, this week, to the latter (though now that I think of it, they’re not mutually exclusive, I could listen to Reba while making chocolatey things).
This semester is the first time I’ve taught ENG 211 (Comp 2, or its equivalent). I previously taught an Advanced Composition class for ECPI, but this is a bit different. At ECPI, I had the students for five weeks. They were training for technical careers, and their concern for my English class was less than zero. I had to pander to them regularly, sometimes even bullying them into doing the assignments and not giving me tons of guff about it. (If there’s one thing I hate getting, it’s guff.)
But this semester, I’ve been able to take my time, to craft a syllabus that has fun assignments (at least I think they’re fun). For the first time, I’ve used blogs, asking students to find articles on the Internet that they think are interesting, and to write a blog post on them. They’re also required to comment on two of their peers’ posts.
In theory, the blog assignment was great. It’s essentially what we, as bloggers, do. We observe the world around us, then write about it, and comment on each other’s observations. One thing I noticed, though, was that most students fell into two categories: the first was the passive admirer. They never question or add anything – they just comment with things like “great article!”
But the worse category was the openly combative student. This student only read blog posts about articles that they disagreed with. Disagreement is not a problem; I encourage it on respectful, thoughtful, academic grounds. These are not the grounds on which my students tend to disagree with each other, and several times, despite my lecturing and cajoling, students attacked one another, placing judgments on their fellow students purely on the grounds of the articles chosen. Articles about Planned Parenthood, political candidates, and factory farming drew in harsh personal criticism. I’ve issued the decree banning all writings about abortion and gay marriage because, first of all, they’re polarized issues that elude advanced academic discourse (what more is there to be said about it?), and because they bring out the absolute worst in my students. No matter what side of the line they fall on, they seem incapable, at this point, of discussing it with kindness and empathy. More than once I’ve had to remind my students, after making acerbic statements about homosexuality, that they don’t know who they’re around and who they might be offending.
I’ll be honest: until earlier this week, I had grown pretty tired and downtrodden. I was tired of babysitting my students, of begging them to be kind to one another, to take themselves and their education seriously, to read the assignment sheet and follow instructions. I began to lump them into the freshman stereotype: persistently tired, apathetic students.
But then I read our new chapter, which we’ll discuss next week, about structures of argument. The chapter starts with the Toulmin model. I worked as a writing tutor in graduate school, but I’ll admit, every time someone told me they were writing a paper using the Toulmin method, I referred them to one of the Rhet/Comp tutors. I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. I mean, look at it!
My eyes crossed. But then I hit up Google, and I found some great resources for applying the Toulmin model to advertisements. My students will do that, then map the model on the board for their classmates, explaining what they learned by using that model.
Which is all fine. But in my head, I could hear their groans and complaints already. This is hard. I can’t read it. What’s a warrant again? I understand; it made my eyes cross.
But then I kept reading. And I found Carl Rogers. And things began to make sense for me.
Psychologist Carl Rogers noticed that often, when people argue, they use the “I’m right, you’re wrong” style of argument. Even in a well-crafted argument, there was a winner and a loser, and no one ever wants to be the loser. Often, this style of argument came from an inability or unwillingness to consider the other side of the issue. Rogers said people needed “to learn and change.” This doesn’t mean that you have to roll over and die and give up arguing your point; it just means that you have to do it in such a way that doesn’t shut down discussion, belittle your opponent, or leave both sides at an impass. It has to be handled with kindness and empathy. Argument should not just turn into a pissing match of who can be nastier or quicker with the insults; it should be civilized, like in Ancient Rome. We should wear togas and orate and approach argument as a gentlemen’s (or gentlewomen’s) endeavor, not a cage fight.
So naturally, this brings me to zombies. As I hit up the Google again for ideas on teaching Rogerian argument, I found an excerpt of a Rogerian essay about zombies (I believe students can purchase that essay, or at least download it, so really, I’m just getting ahead of the plagiarism curve). I adapted the essay’s approach and created a story about zombies and the impending Zombie Apocalypse. After an introductory discussion of Rogerian argument, its properties, costs, and benefits, we begin the following activity:
Zombie Story for Rogerian Activity
It pains me to tell you this, but the Zombie Apocalypse is upon us. At this very moment, droves of flesh-eating, brain-chomping zombies are multiplying all over the country.
The Zombie Apocalypse Safe House: just one way to avoid the inevitable, unless the power of Rogerian argument can be harnessed.
You may not be aware of this, but zombies are nothing new. Zombies have been conjured by Chilean voodoo priestesses for years; these priestesses, in an effort to increase crop production and trade in Chile, devised the method of making farm-hands of the recently dead by bringing them back to a form of half-life, physically present but brainless. This practice became so prevalent that families would guard the graves of their recently deceased relatives until they could be sure the body had begun to decay (since this particular brand of voodoo should not, under any circumstances, be performed on decomposing bodies).
In this, the age of the Internet, the secret of this voodoo magic has leaked out via a viral YouTube video, and risk-taking ne’er-do-wells have begun creating zombies from cemeteries around America. Because these risk-takers are merely dabbling and are not connected to the true magic of voodoo, something has gone terribly wrong. They have not taken measures to ensure that the bodies are pre-decomposition. Remember when I said that the magic should not be used, under any circumstances, on bodies that have already begun to decay? Yeah. When zombies are created from already decomposing flesh, we get mutant zombies. We get not the peaceful, hard-working zombies of our neighbors to the South, but are rather the zombies of sci-fi and fantasy, the ones hungry for brains and human flesh. And I’m sorry to tell you, they are on the loose and multiplying.
Zombies!
There is a silver lining. These new zombies may be blood-thirsty killing machines, but they also have the power of reasoning. They have the ability to experience empathy; we know this because they truly seem sorry to bite perfectly healthy live humans in an effort to get flesh, especially humans they knew when they were alive. They can’t help it. They’re just hungry.
As such, they have decided to give us a chance to create an argument, to convince them to stop their killing spree and to co-exist with us, peacefully.
Student Assignment: Rogerian Activity
Your challenge is to create a Rogerian argument to deliver to the zombies. Keep in mind that these zombies have the upper hand: they’re lethal. We need to bring them to a middle ground where both parties can exist peacefully (remember that telling them we’ll kill them all is not likely to bring them over to your side); we also need to figure out their feeding situation, as their hunger seems to be the biggest problem. Remember, these could be your relatives, your friends, even your teachers (or at least they used to be).
In groups, come up with a Rogerian argument. Remember that your tone, your ability to empathize, and your critical thinking skills are paramount to stop what could quite certainly become the treacherous and oft-joked about Zombie Apocalypse. Good luck.
Students will present their arguments to the class in the form of a 2-3 minute Rogerian monologue. The students in the audience should imagine that they are, in fact, zombies receiving the humans’ Rogerian argument. They should be ready to critique each argument, deciding whether the group has presented an effective argument for coexistence, or whether, in fact, the response is merely “Braaaaains.”
