PicoBlog

Welcome to To Vegetables, With Love, a celebration of a vegetable life, less ordinary. My book Tenderheart is available from Books are Magic, Kitchen, Arts and Letters, Book Larder, Bold Fork Books and also here or here. This week, wrote about brand endorsements as the only way to make money in food media. It was a timely article because, behind the scenes, it is a conundrum that many food writers like myself are constantly faced with.

I grew up in a part of the country where Broccoli Salad was a common sight at family gatherings. It was a toothsome number - roughly chopped broccoli florets and stalk, studded with little goodies like raisins, bacon, some kind of nut, red onion. The building blocks were great but the whole foundation would get drenched in mayo (as we Southerners are often wont to do) and render the whole thing a sloppy mess.

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work. Yesterday I made the mistake of opening up Twitter. I could stop right there, as you can surely imagine the many dumb things I saw.

Although the book Broken April, set in 20th Century Albania seems far removed from 21st Century America, the themes—how the past controls the present and the human need for justice and significance—touch each of us.  Broken April, published in 1978 by award-winning Albanian author Ismail Kadare, plunges the reader into a foreign world—the Albanian high plateau—shrouded in the cold, grey mist of a lingering winter. In the first scene we encounter 26 year old Gjorg Berisha waiting, rifle in hand, for the precise moment to take a shot.

The other week I started writing about the feelings that came with my most recent stress fracture. As with any injury, my mind replayed all the reasons, all the decisions, everything that I could have, would have, should have done. I tried to stay off the merry-go-round of self-flagellation, with limited success.  It’s a big injury - the most limiting I’ve ever had. Because of where it is on the femur (the lesser trochanter), I have a risk of displacement, so pretty much all forms of movement and/or cross-training are off the table.

One of the best breweries in New York will soon have a presence in the Finger Lakes. Brooklyn-based Wild East Brewing, known for its slow and patient approach to both lagers and mixed fermentation creations, signed a lease to open a taproom in the former YMCA/Post Office complex along North Main Street in Canandaigua. It marks another time where a downstate brewery is embracing the growth potential of the Rochester area.

This week, we interviewed Brooks Eisenbise, who writes H.A.G.S., a publication that examines yearbooks and what they say about history, culture, and adolescent identity. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. H.A.G.S. explores yearbooks and yearbook signatures to learn more about identity, American culture, and adolescence through the ages.  It probably started with my mother’s high school yearbooks – I would read all of the signatures and try to imagine the kind of teenage girl she used to be and the kind of teenager I would become.

Switch, PC, Steam Deck, iOS, Android $4.99 Endless Brotato is a roguelite shoot ‘em up where you fight off waves of aliens in a small arena. Aiming and attacking is automatic, so all you do is move. This makes it similar to Vampire Survivors, a game so popular it’s inspired easily a thousand more since it launched a couple of years ago. (If you’ve played Vampire Survivors you can skip this next explanation.

This week, according to the Sun Sentinel, a Broward County jury recommended that Peter Avsenew be sentenced to death on two counts of first-degree murder, of which he was convicted for crimes that occurred in 2010. It was the first death sentence recommended by a Broward County jury under Florida’s 2023 capital sentencing statute. Two prior cases have been tried in Broward County under the new statute—(1) YNW Melly’s case, which resulted in a mistrial, and (2) Clarck Paul’s case, which resulted in a recommendation for life without parole (LWOP).