Cooking mit Kinder II

Been thinking about cooking, or our lack thereof, lately, and will write more on this in the next couple of days.

But in the meantime, here's a piece in the Time's Well about President Obama's new chef and his thoughts on school lunches.

The old public service commercial used to ask, "It's ten o'clock: do you know where your kids are right now?" Today the question should be, "It's twelve o'clock: do you know what your kids are eating right now?"






Pappy's homemade chicken soup, converted into Z's chicken soup purée.

The Ballad of Big Mike

If you watched the Ole Miss / Texas Tech match-up in the Cotton Bowl, you might have caught a quick interview with Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy. A few years ago, they took a kid off the streets named Mike Oher.

Mike had obvious but undeveloped physical gifts. He weighed over 300 pounds as a teenager, and yet was faster than many on the track team. But he had never played organized sports of any sort. That was mostly because he spent his first nine academic years attending eleven different public schools. And the routine was the same: he would fail every class the first semester, and then his teacher would pass him during the spring term so that they wouldn't have to deal with him again the next year.

When he enrolled into high school, he had a measured IQ of 80 and a GPA of 0.6. Note the word measured. While he had trouble with any sort of formal assessment, he obviously had street smarts, having survived on his own for 14 years.

But several key people took an interest in him. A step-father of sorts made it his mission to enroll him into a prestigious private high school. (His biological father had been shot and killed and dumped off a bridge when Mike was a little kid, and his bio-mother was addicted to crack cocaine.) The football coach and school president had decided to accept Mike, even if he never played a single down for the school team. And maybe most importantly, the Tuoys decided to take him into their home.

You can read the whole story here, in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, or check out Michael Lewis' book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.

So where is Mike now?

He just finished his final season at Ole Miss, and he will surely be a first round draft pick. All because of folks like the Tuohys.

High Plains Notes

Windy day today. Can't complain about the temps (low 50s) but the wind we get around here starts in the Yukon, heads downhill the whole way, and doesn't hit anything to slow it down until it knocks over my garbage cans and sometimes the Weber. In Korea we called this wind the Hawk. It didn't matter what the temperature was or the relative humidity or the barometric pressure or anything — when the Hawk came roaring down off the mountains, you were going to get cold, cold down to the bone, down to the marrow.

I've heard from more than one person who noted that when their east coast friends and relatives visit, the tumble weed garners more attention than the mountains. After a while, you take the mountains for granted, I guess, but you hit a 4 foot diameter tumbleweed at 75 mph, and then watch it disappear in a puff of smoke, and for some reason that gets folks' attention.

Programming note: If Z. will let me have a couple of minutes off tonight, I really want to catch Bettye LaVette on the Kennedy Center Honors tonight. All reports are that she stole the show.